Sticking to New Years Fitness Goals: BowlFit Fitness Tip of the Week

bowlfit-logoThis is the time of year everyone makes New Years resolutions to choose a smart diet choice, hit the gym, lose weight, eat healthy, the list goes on. While I love the enthusiasm over making changes in pursuit of a healthy lifestyle, I’ve also noticed like many others how many people fall off track within just a few short months- or even weeks! I think there are a few reasons why this happens and I want to give everyone some tips to avoid the fall-out.

1) The goals aren’t realistic. Too often people go “all in” and say they’re goal is to go to the gym 5x/week, lose 50lbs, eat healthy every meal every day, etc. Great goals but the problem is the people making them may have been doing the total opposite for a long time. It’s like going from 0-100 way too fast. Going form working out 0 days a week or maybe one, to 5 days a week is going to be a huge change that may lead to discouragement when you can’t keep up with your plan. Especially when it comes to weight loss, you need to set smaller more realistic goals and understand the big goals are long term.

2) People expect results too soon. In particular, people want weight to fall off as quick as possible. In reality, the healthy way to lose weight and keep it off is a steady 1-2lbs per week.

3) People don’t strength train enough. To lose weight and keep it off and to truly improve your overall health, you must increase muscle mass in order to increase metabolism. Not increasing muscle mass and relying on “cardio” exercises will make it hard to lose weight and keep it off. Lean mass is what makes your body physiologically more efficient.

Your best chance at success is to take smaller steps to get to your end goal. Slowly increase frequency of days at the gym, ease into healthy eating and don’t expect yourself to go cold turkey on foods you love- you’ll end up driving yourself crazy and having an unhealthy relationship with food. Remember to keep your life balanced and once you find you can jump the smaller hurdles you’ll feel more confident and ready to jump the big hurdles!

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