How I got rid of 18 extra pounds, gained good physical shape and learned how to maintain it

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Tailoring your workout and diet to your daily lifestyle is more likely to help you reach your goal.

It is believed that losing weight can only be done with the help of strict diets and strenuous physical activity. People resolutely start a new life, demonstrate miracles of motivation, make titanic efforts, but after a while they return to their previous state. Each new attempt ends in failure. Instead of biceps, only guilt grows.

How do you make it work? First of all, change the approach:

• Give up diets and hard training.
• Don't listen to advice from professional athletes and fitness bloggers.
• No spontaneity: starting a new life requires preparation.

The state of the body really depends on the quality of nutrition and physical activity. Food should be complete and contain all the substances necessary for life. Diet is not good nutrition. If you starve, deprive yourself of fats or carbohydrates, then sooner or later you will break loose. No amount of willpower will help.

The advice of athletes and fitness bloggers is useless for the average person. Their whole life revolves around training and proper nutrition: they do not have to adjust to the office schedule. Therefore, you need to proceed from your own living conditions.

There is no need to start a new life "right now", as the gurus of personal growth teach. Start on Monday. But by Monday you should have the necessary resources and a clear plan of action.

Proper nutrition

90% of success is proper nutrition. Let's start with him.

There are two options for how to get started.

Option 1

The first two weeks you live as usual, but you start keeping a food diary. Record in detail each meal: how much and what is eaten. We cut off the drying at a colleague's - they wrote it down. We ate a chocolate bar on the way home - in the diary. We ate so much that it became embarrassing - do not deceive ourselves, we write. The diary will clearly show you the difference between the real amount of food and your idea of it.

Amazing discoveries await you: you thought you were eating in moderation, but in fact you are eating a lot of food in a day.

The diary seems like a minor innovation. But in two weeks, he will rebuild your thinking and prepare you for change. However, you can do without a diary.

Option 2

Determine the day to start a new life. For example, December 3, 2018, Monday. By this day, you should have:

• Clear understanding:

  • how you will eat;
  • what you will eat.
• Ready meals for the whole day, divided into portions.
• Meal plan for Tuesday and Wednesday.

How will you eat

Plan to have five or six meals a day. Eat in small portions, with a break of 2, 5-3 hours. This will keep you from starving and overeating. Light hunger appears only before the next meal. Carry food with you in containers. In a new life, a full-fledged diet, ritual and habit are important.

If your working day is from 10:00 to 19:00, then meals during the day will be something like this:

• 9:00 - breakfast at home;
• 12:00 - first snack at work;
• 15:00 - second snack at work;
• 18:00 - third snack at work;
• 21:00 - dinner at home.

As you can see, there are three meals during working hours. This means that you need three small containers or one large one, divided into compartments.

Things to do before Monday:

1. Purchase products.
2. Buy food containers if not available.
3. Prepare food to take with you to work.
4. Divide it into containers.
5. Figure out how you will carry the containers and where to store them in the office.

Fractional meals also have one beneficial side effect: they trigger a natural satiety control mechanism. Without counting calories and weighing your portions, you will learn to feel like you've eaten enough. True, this does not work with fast food and cakes.

What will you eat

Completely eliminate alcohol, pastries, bread and any baked goods in general. Cola, fast food and convenience foods will also have to say goodbye. The less processed the food, the better. For example, eat steamed or grilled meat instead of sausage. As carbohydrates - cereals, durum wheat pasta, fruits. In general, as they say in the West, whole food.

Also, try to get rid of flavor enhancers, add less ordinary salt.

At first, the food will seem bland, but after a couple of weeks, the taste buds will get used to it, and you will begin to distinguish unfamiliar shades of taste.

Sometimes it is not possible to maintain pauses between meals. For example, you went to a meeting at someone else's office and stayed late. The container with food remained at work, but I want to eat right now. For such cases, always carry a fruit and nut bar with you, preferably without sugar. He will save you from overeating in the nearest cafe. If you still overeat, you do not need to blame yourself, quit and start all over again. Just keep living in the new regime.

Physical exercise

Sport, in the minds of ignorant people, is overcoming oneself, pain and hardship. No pain, no gain: to lose weight, you have to run. Be sure to start in November, at six in the morning with a cold wind and ice. And run three kilometers at once, and return home tired and frozen. It is not surprising that motivation with this approach is enough for a maximum of three days.

In fact, a 10-minute charge in the morning and evening is enough to get you started. Exercises are the simplest, most basic.

Be sure to do squats. This is the foundation of your fitness. If you can do push-ups at least once, do push-ups, are able to pull up - pull up.

The main thing:

• get special clothes for classes;
• start smoothly;
• remember that even a 10-minute workout is a workout, not spontaneous limb swinging on the way to the kitchen.

Sample workout program

1. Change into uniform.

2. Do a joint warm-up. Start with smooth rotations with your hands, then with your elbows and shoulders. Knees especially carefully, make sure that they do not hurt. If pain occurs, it is better to see a doctor right away. The warm-up usually takes 2-3 minutes. As soon as you feel yourself warmed up, move on to exercise.

3. The first exercise is squats.

• 1st approach, warm-up - 5 times. A minute of rest.
• 2nd approach, the main one - 10 times. A minute of rest.
• 3rd approach, hitch - 5 times. Two minutes of rest.

4. The second exercise is push-ups. We proceed from the fact that you can do push-ups only once. It is better to start with a lighter version of the exercise: push-ups from your knees or put your hands on a dais. This will work the muscles you want without a full load.

• 1st approach, warm-up - 3 easy push-ups. A minute of rest.
• 2nd approach, the main one - 1 regular push-up. A minute of rest.
• 3rd approach, hitch - 3 easy push-ups.

5. The workout is over. Walk around to catch your breath, shake your arms and legs to relieve stress, and take a shower.

Even if you feel like you can do more, take it easy for the first two weeks. At the start, the main thing is to develop a habit and accustom the body to stress.

After a while, you will feel that you need to increase the load. Try adding repetitions to your set. If it doesn't work, increase the number of approaches. Increase the load as the need arises.

In the evening, the workout can be repeated, only replace push-ups with pull-ups.

results

The first noticeable results will appear in a month and a half.

• You will lose weight. Usually in the first couple of months it takes about 10 kg.
• You will become stronger. Coordination of movements will improve.
• The state of health will improve.
• Insomnia will go away.
• Weather dependence will weaken or completely disappear.
• Save significant amounts of money. Try an experiment. For the first month, eat as usual, write down everything you eat, and record expenses. From the second month, switch to a new meal and continue to record expenses. The amounts are halved, or even more. Alcohol, sweets, business lunches and convenience foods are more expensive than cereals and chicken breasts.
• Improve your planning and self-organization skills.
• There will be more drive and pleasure.
• The overall quality of life will improve. You will feel younger and healthier.

The main thing is to keep a big goal in mind, move towards it in small steps every day, and everything will work out.