A Smarter Way To Achieve Your Health and Fitness

Get a fine results of your Health am Fitness

The holiday season plays a big role in our weight calculations, 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

Eating Habits

The single most important factor after recovery (sleep, stress, training) is how much you eat (and what you eat).

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.

Meal Selection

Speaking of simplicity, the secret to losing weight is replacing choice with satisfaction. The surest way to lose weight is remove the decision-making process in what you eat.

Caloric Deficit

And in all of this, the underlying principle will be maintaining a caloric deficit.

For a gradual two-month program I usually recommend starting off with a slight deficit – maybe 250 calories/day at most – to allow your body to easily stick to it in the beginning. A higher deficit is possible (and we will move to it later on) but starting small will help you build discipline.

Exercise

If you are already exercising, that’s great – we can look at ways to improve on it.

If you are sedentary, adding 15-30 minutes of movement daily, coupled with the caloric deficit prescribed above, will give you a great boost in helping your weight loss journey.

What To Expect

Following the principles listed above, you could easily lose half a pound to a full pound per week. Weight loss may be quicker early on before tapering off, or it may be slow in the beginning and then accelerate later on.

What matters is that you are consistent in working towards your goal – and pretty soon you’ll be able to enjoy the holidays and end up in the new year much closer to, or having hit, your fitness goals.

That’s an excellent way to start a new year.