Hey y'all how's your Sunday treating you? Watching football??? Vegging on the couch while your team scores that amazing play (or gets the stuffing kicked out of them)? Either way I hope you are having a great day. So I was talking with a friend last night and she has decided she wants to get into shape, she's put on about 40 pounds since having her children and realizes it is only gonna get worse if she doesn't decide to do something about it now and she wanted some advice on starting. Should she get a trainer? What diet should she follow? How much should she work out? Stuff like that, stuff I wondered about before I started exercising.
Something I think I need to make very clear, is I am a broke college student. I work several jobs, pay for school and books and car payments and insurance all on my own, so I don't have funds available for bad ass trainers and expensive pre-planed meals and I for sure do not have tens of thousands of dollars for a radical weight loss surgery. So I taught myself all on my own.
Now before you start any weight loss program you should see your doctor, find out if you are healthy enough to actively loss weight, if you have any limitations the doctor will tell you and you can work around them.
So you want to loss weight, you've decided enough is enough I am gonna get active and get healthy! Awesome! Where do you start? I started slowly, I was lucky I had access to a gym on campus and I started going three times a week for about 30 min to an hour each time. I would do 30 - 45 minuets of cardio and then do so resistance work to start conditioning my muscles. But lets say you do not have access to a gym and you can't afford one. Well here are some easy tips to get you moving toward you work out goal.
1. Do not start a diet yet! Now I know I will take a lot of flack for this, but I think it's true. I was exercising for about two months before I changed my diet. I believe in "a the little bit at a time" approach and I also believe that getting physically active is more important than a diet. So lets change one thing at a time, lets get you moving first.
2. Start small, do not start going for an all out run five days a week. Firstly you run the chance of hurting yourself if you go from bam non-active to trying to train like an Olympic runner and also you will frustrate yourself when you can't complete something. Try walking, go to the high school in your area and walk around the track for 30 minuets. I recommend exercising in the morning, now if this means getting up at 5am to go for a walk before your kids get up do it. Working out in the morning puts your body in a burning mode all day long. So REALLY try to exercise in the morning, eat some oatmeal and go for a walk. IF you absolutely can't then do it in the evening, just do it and stick with it.
3. Give your self mini-goals. So my overall goal is to lose 210 pounds by July 2012 (when I turn 30!) but through out my journey i have had lots of mini goals. For example in the beginning I could only run 3 miles in an hour on the elliptical, i would give my self two weeks and in two weeks i would push my self to run 3.15, then 3.3. Stuff like that, very realistic, obtainable goals. And then i would reward myself in some small way, my reward to myself when I reached 4 miles in an hour was new work out clothes. Yours could be going to see that silly movie you're dying to see, don't go see it UNTIL you reach your goal however.
4. Once you've been working out for awhile (one or two months) start to work on your diet. Again START SLOW, I started by eliminating fast food restaurants one by one. Then I started eliminating excess fat from my diet (switched to 2% milk and low fat cheese) then tackled kicking out high fat proteins from my diet and figuring out recipes that included vegetarian proteins.
5. Now you're set, you're motivated, you're eating right, weight is dropping off like bees on a hive? Right? Well maybe it was and now it's slowed down a little? Now you have to work on keeping your workouts fresh, play with muscle confusion. Working out is not a place where you can be a creature of habit. Don't just run, run and do push ups, go swimming, go walking one day instead of running, keep adding weight to your resistance work out, do some yoga (this is all examples of stuff I do by the way). You have to keep your body guessing and working in different ways to burn existing fat.
If you can do those five things (and you can, because I did and there is absolutely nothing special or different about me and you) then I promise you will be on your way to a healthy life style.
Do you need a trainer? Nope do some research, get started on your own, get motivated ON YOUR OWN, you can do it. Do you need a dietitian? Nope do some research, the Internet is a great place to learn and if you learn how to do it on your own then it is much easier to follow. Now I'm not saying that trainers and dietitians aren't great resources, they are, and if you can afford it DO IT! I would have loved to have someone there in the gym telling me exactly how to work out, I may have lost even more weight in the beginning, but I could not afford one. If you can't afford one don't think you can't do it on your own, YOU CAN, it may be a little harder and a little slower, but really losing weight and get healthy all starts and ends with you. So go strong no matter what!
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