Whatever holiday or festive season you celebrate, or even if it's vacation leave, too much eating and drinking and too little exercise can cause you to lose fitness and put on weight. Here is a list of tips you can apply to help maintain fitness and keep those pounds off.
Fat Loss and Fitness Tips
- Limit portions or limit meals, or both. You need to prevent overeating and over-drinking one way or another. The snack meals at morning and afternoon can pile on the calories. Control these, or compensate the next day or meal and cut back or even fast for that meal. Have several alcohol-free days each week.
- Exercise or train five days each week, and make sure you move seven days each week. An hour of brisk walking expends about 300 calories. That's pretty much a big fancy slice of cheesecake equivalent, so you need to be active, very active during any period where you are tempted to overeat fancy foods. If you're on holidays, stay active: incidental, non-exercise activity is important. We all like to read and relax on holidays, but you have the time to get moving, even if it's recreational.
- Cut back on fat, refined carbohydrates and sugars, and alcohol. This is easier said than done when you want to enjoy yourself, but excesses of these three food categories are mostly where the excess calories and body fat come from. Reduce intake of fried foods, fatty cuts of meat, cheeses, fatty processed and packaged foods, pastries, sweets, cakes, pop and soft drinks, beer, spirits and wine and similar foods. Cutting back does not mean eating none of these; you are entitled to enjoy the festivities -- but be selective.
- Try to do 2-3 workouts each week of at least 600 calories of energy expended. You can reach this by jogging for about 50 minutes (at around 6 miles/hour pace), even in two different sessions. Or, you can do a weights session of 9 exercises of 3 sets of 12 repetitions, and do a 20 minute jog the same day to give you approximately the same energy expenditure.
- Compensate, compensate, compensate! This is a trick all successful weight losers and maintainers use. It means that if you know you've eaten to excess one meal or day or week, or not kept up with your activity program on a daily or weekly basis, then the next period, you 'compensate.' This means eating light for the next meal or day, or exercising harder or more regularly the next day or week. The idea of compensation is simply to keep energy input (food) and energy output (activity and exercise) in balance so you don't put on the pounds. This requires the ability, first of all, to understand that you have overeaten or under-exercised, and then to have the will to adjust in the next period. It may sound simple, but too few actually implement it. It allows you to enjoy some of the foods and relaxation you like without getting the whole metabolism out of balance. Compensate.
- Play a lot; move a lot. Play with the kids, the grandkids, the nephews and nieces. Any type of activity that is not formal exercise is important because it helps keep your metabolism higher so you burn more calories during day-to-day activities.
See more questions and answers about weight training and fat burning for additional tips about how weight training and exercise in general affects fat loss.
