The holiday season plays a big role in our weight calculations,A Smarter Way To Achieve Your Fitness Goals Articles with many of us – often already packing extra weight – overeating in the final week of the year before resolving to lose all the excess weight in the new year.
The smarter decision is to start your weight loss journey a couple of months before the holiday season – allowing you to take in a cheat day or two over the holidays.
The best part of this strategy? You will start the new year with your fitness goals already achieved, and that locked-in success will give you the confidence to tackle all your other goals with focus and the certainty that comes from achieving success.
In the rest of this article, we look at a few simple steps you can take to gradually, safely and successfully lose weight over a period of two months. This is a much better approach than trying to force yourself to lose a lot of weight over a small period of time.
And the holiday season is the built-in reward that will make it worthwhile.
So let’s start with a quick review – what are you doing less of?
Before you start, it’s important to understand that while there are some basic principles that apply across the board, everyone is unique in terms of how well they are doing certain things.
You need to evaluate where you are on the following metrics.
Sleep & Recovery
Are you getting enough good-quality sleep? If it is consistently less than six hours a day, you need to push this to a minimum of seven hours. Losing sleep will put all your other efforts (calorie restriction, exercise) to waste. It’s a good idea to invest in a sleep monitor like the Fitbit Charge 5 that helps you track your sleep relatively accurately.
The same applies to stress reduction – if your work is stressful, work in a aod 9604 couple of five-minute de-stress breaks during your day to practice mindfulness.
If you are already training hard, look at how to master your breathing in your post-workout cooldown (you are warming up before and cooling down after working out, yes?) to optimise recovery.
Eating Habits
The single most important factor after recovery (sleep, stress, training) is how much you eat (and what you eat).
Whatever diet you want to follow –paleo, OMAD (one meal a day), intermittent fasting, keto, low-carb, flexible macros or anything else – you will need to master two things:
Consistency
Follow the protocol to 90% accuracy for the duration of the next two months. For example, if you are practicing intermittent fasting, I would want you to spend the first week practicing IF at a 16:8 protocol before switching to 18:6 in the second week.
From the third week onwards, I would ask you to experiment with a 24 hour fast once a week with a weekly cheat meal thrown in to build on the discipline as well as allow for periodic rewards and opportunities to jolt the metabolism.