It's common knowledge that maintaining a healthy weight and level of fitness improves overall health, reduces the risk of disease and enables people to look and feel better. Losing weight is an uphill battle and a consistent challenge for most people, but following a few helpful guidelines and tips makes it easier to achieve noticeable results over time. Namely, it's important to diversify workouts, move ahead at a gradual pace and focus on the healthiest foods.
Find Variety
Doing the exact same exercises and eating the same foods each day or each week can quickly grow boring and may lead to a loss in motivation or stagnancy in results. To that end, it's important to vary diet and exercises regularly to stay interested in an overall weight loss plan. Try not to repeat the same exercise session more than once per week, and aim to eat different foods each week, as well. Through a variety of exercises, aim to exceed the American College of Sports Medicine's minimum guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 60 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week.
Complete Your Routine
The Cleveland Clinic notes that a complete fitness routine should have three elements: flexibility, strength training and aerobic activity. Each part serves a purpose: flexibility exercises warm up muscles and prevent injury, aerobics burns calories and strength training builds muscle, which burns more calories at a resting heart rate than body fat. Using each element in an exercise routine can also help ito mprove problem areas on the body. For example, to eliminate excess belly fat, the Mayo Clinic recommends using a combination of crunches, abdominal and core exercises with aerobics.
Go Slowly
It's tempting to focus on vigorous, intense exercise because it often burns the most calories and can deliver the quickest results. Similarly, diets that drastically reduce caloric intake will have rapid results, even if they're not healthy and well-rounded plans. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention points out that people who lost weight at a gradual pace of one to two pounds per week were more likely to keep the weight off over time than those who lost it more quickly. It's easier to achieve consistency with a plan that is tailored and paced well, so don't rush through exercises or make too many adjustments in your diet at one time. Instead, choose small changes, adjust to each one and add more as time goes on.
Eat Well
One reliable and effective method of following a healthy diet is to use the United States Department of Agriculture's food pyramid as a guide. The pyramid includes five major food groups: fruits, vegetables, low fat and nonfat dairy products, lean proteins and grains, especially whole grains. Additionally, it's helpful to focus on eating fresh, whole and unprocessed or minimally processed foods, as they generally contain the fewest calories and the most vitamins, minerals and nutrients.
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