How To Lose Weight Fast For Vacation

You have your bags packed, an e-ticket in your in-box and a TSA-approved bottle of SPF 30 in your handbag, but you also have a few extra pounds you’d rather not carry on. The extra baggage may surprise you if you watch what you eat and exercise regularly. Whatever your current exercise routine, if you want to see different results, you must do something different in the gym and in the kitchen. Quite simply, the same lackluster routine will give you the same lackluster results. Fortunately, whether you have just a few days or a few weeks, you can shake up your existing program to shed pounds and inches and reveal a rocking body on your vacation.

Step 1

Cut calories. A reduced-calorie diet is the fastest path to shedding pounds. Think about it this way: If you work out at an intense pace for an hour, you can expect to burn about 500 calories. Slashing 500 calories from your diet requires far less time and effort. Consume a diet with 30 percent of calories from protein to keep you feeling full while following a lower-calorie plan. Researchers from two university hospitals in the Northwest found that study participants consumed 500 fewer calories per day when they ate a diet with 30 percent of total calories from protein, 50 percent from carbohydrates and 20 percent from fat.

Step 2

Increase your intensity at the gym. A study published in the March 24, 2010, “Journal of the American Medical Association” found that 60 minutes a day of walking was insufficient for weight loss among overweight women. If you’ve been relying on a daily walk--or an equally light-to-moderate workout--to shed pounds, increase your intensity to see immediate results. If running or taking an indoor cycling class sounds worse than skipping your vacation altogether, simply add high-intensity intervals to your walks. You can do anything for 30 seconds, so sprint, then recover at the moderate pace for two minutes. After only seven hour-long workouts with this type of interval training, you can increase your fat metabolism by as much as 36 percent, according to a study published in the Dec. 7, 2006, issue of the “Journal of Applied Physiology.”

Step 3

Change your routine. The National Academy of Sports Medicine, which trains personal trainers, recommends changing the acute variables in your training program daily. In addition to doing different exercises every day, alter the resistance you use, repetitions and tempo. If program design sounds daunting, consider taking a new class at your gym. If you’re a dedicated weight lifter, try a kick-boxing class. Spicing up your routine will kick your body into high gear and get you in beach body shape fast.