As an overweight, your diet and exercise plan should be different from others. Why? Because you have different needs.
The more weight a person carries, the more calories he needs for survival. Same goes for exercise: the more weight you carry, the more difficult it will be to exercise. You will get tired more easily, and that’s normal. What you need to do is start easy on nutrition and exercise, and slowly work from there.
One diet fits all sizes?
NO! If you are over 100kg, you cannot suddenly eat what a 50kg person eats and expect to have success.
First, you need to see where you are now, and start making small changes.
So if you are overweight and consume for example 4000 calories in a day, and decide to go on a 1000 cal/day diet from one day to the other, you will simply not be able to make it.
If you try however to cut 500 calories per day, which should not affect your routine that much, then you should expect to lose about 1kg/week.
So if you think 500 calories less every day, which could be a sandwich for example, in your mind it is a lot more acceptable and achievable, than cutting back 3000 calories like in the first example, which in your mind it will be a lot more difficult to accept, therefore give up very quickly.
Now you might be thinking, ‘I don’t know how to count calories, and I don’t want to waste my time trying to count everything I eat’. That is fine, what you can do to start with, is simply eat a little less from everything you consume in a day. That should work, at least at the beginning.
Should I cut back on all my favorite high fat and sugar foods at once?
Although this should be the ‘right’ thing to do, however it is not realistic.
I often hear people say that sugar is more addictive than drugs. So trying to cut back from it from one day to the other will be somewhere from too difficult to impossible.
High fat food and sweets simply taste better, and that is why the body craves for them. In order to lose weight, you must set small, realistic goals. And keep in mind that all that weight did not pile within one day, it took a lot of time. So you cannot expect to lose it in one day. It will also take a lot of time and consistency to lose it.
So be patient, take one day at a time and make the best you can, without getting stressed if you indulge to your favorite sweet from time to time.
If you are considering adding any diet supplements in your diet to assist you with your weight loss goals, I have searched and created a review about Maximum Slim products. You can view the post here:
Another thing you need to consider, is to take your mind off from the word ‘diet’. If you are thinking all the time that you are on a diet, then your mind will want to go ‘illegal’, break the rules and start eating food you shouldn’t. You will also think ‘when will my diet end so I can eat again all my favorite ‘illegal’ foods?
Instead, think of your diet as your normal daily nutrition, which includes a little bit of everything- yes even the things you shouldn’t eat. It is a nutrition plan you should be able to follow for life.
So it all goes back to psychology. When you say to a child: ‘don’t touch this’ what will the child do? Yes you know the answer. It’s the same with diet. If you say to yourself: ‘don’t eat that chocolate’, you will go back and forth until you finally eat it- all of it. But if you say to yourself: ‘you can have a small piece of that chocolate every 4 days’, you will most probably be able to do it.
I feel so overwhelmed just by the thought of exercise. Where should I start?
If your daily routine so far included laying on the couch, eating chips and all kinds of unhealthy food while watching your favorite TV show, then getting in to the exercise ‘mindset’ might be a bit overwhelming, or even frightening.
So you made your mind to start making healthier food choices, but what about exercise? Even walking from one room to another makes you breathe faster, due to all that extra weight you carry. How should you start exercise as a complete beginner and overweight?
The first thing you need to do is improve your endurance, so you won’t get tired so easily. Yes it will help as you slowly start loosing weight, because you will have less weight to carry around, but you still need to include some aerobic type of exercise in your daily routine.
The easiest thing you can do is walking. I know that sometimes even something so simple might be too difficult for some people, and that’s OK. But you need to start somewhere. Just go outside your house and walk around your neighborhood, or at the nearest park if you prefer. Set the timer in your mobile and see how long can you go the first time.
Let’s say for example, on day one you walked for 10 minutes, and couldn’t go any further. The next day, set your goal for 11 minutes, and the next day for 12 minutes and so on. Before you know it, you will be doing 30 minutes or more.
If someone told you on day one that in two weeks you could walk for 30-40 minutes, you would say they are crazy. But setting small achievable goals every day, will take you where you want to go.
Once you master walking, which will help you burn those calories and increase your endurance, you can slowly add small weights to your program. You can even use 2 small water bottles if you don’t have any weights at home. You can find easy exercises to do with small weights in another post of mine, or just search online, there are thousands of exercises to follow.
Building muscle, will first make your muscles look smaller and leaner, not bigger, as many women often ask, and it is the reason they are afraid to exercise with weights, and second, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn during the day, because muscle uses more energy.
If I exercise more, can I eat more?
Yes and no. Sometimes I have a person who comes to the gym and asks: how many calories was that chocolate (for example) I just ate? I will walk on the treadmill until it shows that I lost that amount of calories.
It is not always that simple. If you exercise regularly, and in your mind you think you can eat anything you want, whenever, and in any quantity, then think again.
Let me show you what I mean with an example. Let’s say you eat a high calorie meal of 800 calories, thinking you are going to walk later and burn those calories. An hour of walking burns approximately 300-400 calories. This means you need to walk about 2-3 hours to burn the calories of a meal that took you about 10-15 minutes to eat.
What I mean by that, is that it is much easier and quick to eat calories than to burn them through exercise. So even if you exercise regularly you still need to be careful on the food quantity and quality you eat.
The end result…
As an overweight person you need to make small and easy changes in your nutrition and exercise.
Take small achievable steps and work your way up. Do not set goals that you will give up on the next day.
The plan you will follow should be for life, not a short period of time, so make the journey fun and enjoyable.
Let yourself indulge to your favorite food or sweet from time to time, but always with moderation.
And I want to finish with this: after exercise, your body continues to burn calories faster, even when you are resting on your couch watching TV, compared to a person who does not exercise at all.
So what better motivation than this? Get up and go!