Hey there! Lets talk about calories, strength training, and living your best life!
Restriction
Severely restricting your calories can decrease your metabolism and cause you to lose muscle mass. This makes it more difficult to maintain your weight loss in the long term. 😧
Regularly eating fewer calories than your body requires can cause fatigue and make it more challenging for you to meet your daily nutrient needs. 😴
Restricting calories may disturb hormone levels, which may result in weaker bones and an increased risk of fractures. 💪🏻
Calorie restriction, especially when combined with strenuous physical activity, may lower your immune defenses. 😷
Fueling Your Body
Your body uses the calories you get from food to fuel your basal metabolic rate (BMR), digestion, and physical activity. When the number of calories you consume matches the number of calories you burn, your weight will remain stable. 🙌🏻
How many calories you need per day depends on whether you want to maintain, lose, or gain weight, as well as various other factors, such as your gender, age, height, current weight, activity level, and metabolic health.
Reducing calories does not mean starving yourself. A few simple dietary and lifestyle changes, including exercising, properly hydrating, and increasing your protein intake, can help you lose weight and feel satisfied. 🥰
Strength Training
Let’s dig into how weight training can help you lose body fat. At its most simple, weight training = increased lean muscle mass = higher metabolic rate = more calories burned.
While you’ll most likely burn more calories during cardiovascular exercise, weight training will keep that slow burn going all day long, leading to a larger and more sustained calorie awww burn over the course of the day. (Handy if you’re trying to stay within a calorie deficit.)
How does weight training burn fat?
“Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, so the more you gain, the more calories you’ll burn – and the more likely you are to keep fat off,” says exercise physiologist Dr Leigh Breen.
Weight training can be especially important in helping women lose stubborn body fat (e.g. if you’re trying to get rid of back fat or lose belly fat) with a University of Alabama study showing greater belly fat loss in women who lifted weights as compared to those who just performed cardiovascular exercise.
Living Your Best Life
The goal is to be living your best life right? You should not be in a calorie deficit all year long. When you are living at maintenance you will notice how much more energy you have, how your sleep is better, and enjoying outings with less stress. Now this does not mean going crazy and eating whatever you want, because you still need to fuel your body the right way. Just remember, when you eat like crap you will feel like crap. But eating out with my girlfriends with out constantly worrying about this affecting my “diet” is worth living at maintenance. 🖤
Have a Game Plan
Whether you’re going to a party or just handing out home, have a game plan. Tracking your treats ahead of time can help you make your game plan and setting some rules for yourself can help you stick to it.
If you know there will be tempting treats at the office, set some rules for how you will handle your day. That may mean packing your own macro-friendly foods for the day and leaving room for one treat, or it may mean avoiding the break room completely. If you have the flexibility to enjoy some office treats, make a plan for how many you will have and try to bring your own alternative treats to share as well.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO REMEMBER IS TO NOT BEAT YOURSELF UP IF THINGS DON’T GO AS PLANNED. WE WILL HAVE MANY IMPERFECT DAYS, AND THE BEST THING TO DO IS TO SHAKE IT OFF, DRINK SOME WATER, AND MAKE THE NEXT DAY BETTER. DO NOT RESTRICT YOUR CALORIES AS PUNISHMENT!
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