It’s back. It’s the time when people in Irvine, CA start working on their New Year’s goals they set at the stroke of midnight on December 31st. They may be struggling to keep them in the first few weeks or even decide to give up. Frequently, the reason is that they aren’t realistic and are trying to change too much too quickly. If you’re 100 pounds overweight, don’t expect to lose it in a month. Instead, focus on losing two pounds a week. You can celebrate next New Year’s Eve at your ideal weight. Even if you exercised six hours a day and starved yourself, you couldn’t lose that much weight in a month.
Make sure your goal is healthy.
Being realistic also means making beneficial goals and healthily achieving them. Exercises that build muscles cause microtears in the muscles. The magic occurs during recovery. The scar tissue makes them larger and stronger. Intense powerlifting three hours a day, every day, doesn’t give your muscles a chance to heal. Instead, it continues to tear down the muscle and causes you to lose strength rather than gain it. Starvation diets may help you lose weight, but you can’t starve yourself forever and be healthy. Your body goes into starvation mode and slows your metabolism. That makes it even harder to shed those pounds.
Realistic goals can be broken down into smaller goals that are quicker to achieve.
Part of goal setting and achieving those goals requires constant motivation. If your goal is to lose 40 or more pounds, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and lose motivation. You can feel the rush of success if you break your goal down into smaller ones. Break your goal down to losing two pounds a week. Then determine how long that will take you to achieve. If you want to lose 30 pounds, your mini goal will be losing two pounds a week for 15 weeks.
Remember that you can’t change some things.
No matter how dedicated to exercise and diet, if you’re big-boned, you’ll never look tiny. If you’re tall, you’ll never be petite. You can’t change your bone structure. If you’re overweight, you can lose weight, but you’ll always be big-boned or small-framed. Working out to build muscles won’t make you taller. Always focus on the things you can change and accept those things you can’t.
- It takes a deficit of 3500 calories to lose a pound. You can lose a pound a week by reducing your calories consumed by 500 or increasing the calories burned daily.
- If you have a goal of exercising regularly, take it easy initially, especially if you’ve lived a sedentary lifestyle. Learn the proper form and prepare your body by increasing intensity slowly before you start pushing yourself.
- Track your goal. Write the goals down, break them into smaller ones with deadlines, and track those goals daily. If your goal is muscle building, take your measurements and track the weight you lift or the number of repetitions.
- The best motivation to stick with a goal is realistic expectations. If you continuously fail, you’ll quit trying. Even if you don’t reach a goal in one week, the real failure is to quit.
For more information, contact us today at Next Level Fitness