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How To Lose Weight: Beginners Guide
Most exercise programs are highly detailed and involve a great deal of dedication and will power to implement and stick to. As a result, most people are put off or if they do start a program, very few follow it through. The purpose of this document is to give you a plain and simple guide to losing weight. It is designed for any person who wants to tone up; anyone can follow this program.
So you are looking to lose some weight - perhaps this will help.
Most exercise programs are highly detailed and involve a great deal of dedication and will power to implement and stick to. As a result, most people are put off or if they do start a program, very few follow it through. The purpose of this document is to give you a plain and simple guide to losing weight. It is designed for any person who wants to tone up; anyone can follow this program.
The principles of weight loss for any body are the same.
a. Exercise: Get your heart rate up for a reasonable period of time
b. Food – ensure you have a calorie deficit (you burn more than you eat)
c. Food – control sugar levels in your body
These are the 3 main principles for ANYONE.
To lose the weight, you need to take control of two areas:
1) Food
2) Exercise
1) Food
The food you eat is more than 50% of the battle. If you are slogging your guts out on the roads / treadmills / exercise bikes and you are dining out at McDonalds 3 times a week, you are making things much harder for yourself. To reiterate, if you do not have less calories entering your body than you are burning, there is NO WAY that you can lose weight, no matter how many hard you pound the treadmill.
First thing you need to do is fix your diet. You can fine tune a diet down to the tiniest detail, but this is hard to implement and you will be less likely to follow it. The idea of this is to give you a simple diet to follow in the hope that this will be much easier to stick to.
The Diet:
Breakfast – Oats and semi-skimmed milk (use yogurt as sugar) OR wholemeal toast.
Morning Snack – Fruit or nuts or yogurt.
Lunch – Sensible sandwich (meat and salad is good) – avoid common fatty fillings such as cheese, bacon, mayonnaise etc.
Afternoon Snack - Fruit or nuts or yogurt.
Evening meal – Meat or Fish and plenty of salad OR vegetables (avoid simple carbs like white rice, bread, pasta or potatoes).
Some Dietary Principles
— Try to eat 5-6 times a day as this will help keep your metabolism fast throughout the day.
— Drink plenty of water throughout the day (at least 2 litres, preferably 3).
— Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables (surround yourself with as much fruit as you can)
— Breakfast should be the biggest meal of the day. This is because the calories taken on at breakfast are burned throughout the day for energy. You MUST eat breakfast every single day, otherwise your body enters into ‘starvation mode’ and stores more fat from subsequent meals.
— Avoid the temptation to eat late at night… have your last meal no later than 3 hours before you go to bed). If you get hungry in the evenings before bed, drink a protein shake. Similar to the previous principle, if you eat a huge meal before bed, you are not using the calories you are taking on and they are more likely to be stored as fat. Have some discipline!!!
— Once a week, have a blow-out where you eat what you want – this is important to keep you on track for the rest of the week.
— Get disciplined with your food. Do you want to lose weight or not? Every time you cheat on your diet, you are making it harder for yourself to get into shape.
2) Exercise
It is impossible for us to give you a set Cardio program that will suit your personal cardio needs because everybody is different. The most important thing is that you are doing cardio consistently over prolongued periods of time. Here is a suggestion to get you started.
The treadmill burns more calories than any other cardio equipment, so we suggest you use this.
Use the apparatus for 20 minutes at a 1/4 of the top speed. When finished, rate your level of fatigue out of 10. 1 is resting and 10 is absolute exhaustion.
Your target is to leave the equipment feeling like an 8 (very tired). Increase or decrease the speed of the treadmill until you finish 20 minutes feeling very tired (8). Aim to do this three times a week.
As you become more comfortable, you can increase the amount of time spent on the treadmill. Your aim is to improve your speed and/or time every week and always leave the equipment feeling very tired (8 out of 10).
Do not aim to spend more than 45 minutes on you particular piece of cardio equipment. When you are able to use the machine for 45 minutes straight, make sure that each session you try and increase the speed.
You may also consider Exercise Bike, Rowing, Eliptical Trainer as alternative cardio machines
Overtime, you will become more advanced / comfortable with Cardiovascular exercise. At this point, you could look to add in more advanced exercise such as circuit training classes or High Intensity Interval Training.
We would strongly advise you to start a Personal Development Journal (PDJ) to help focus and motivate you to stick to your goals. Upon starting your PDJ, our experts will help tweak and tailor this programme to fit your needs. Just as importantly we will be with you every step of the way to help keep you motivated on your weight loss goal.