What Is Your Inch Loss Story
Without beating ourselves down and blaming our bodies for not responding to changes made in lifestyle and food habits, let’s delve on the most common plausible culprits and remedial action associated with gaining inches
1. Eating Out
It is one of the biggest causes of unexpected weight gain. After all, who doesn’t enjoy a change in cuisine every other day?
Try and restrict the eating out to once or maximum twice a week. When you do dine out, order a healthy, protein-packed dish first and then add on the rest of the items. Further, it always helps to let the person serving you know about your fit preferences so that he can tweak the dish accordingly (replace butter with olive oil, sauté’ instead of pan / deep fry).
2. Emotional Eating
It is a tough habit to let go. If you look back, it would be difficult to enumerate the numerous times that a moment of weakness has got the best of you. The empty packet of chips or chocolate wrappers staring innocently from across the room instantly fills one with regret!
Keep the enemy away! This trick is super useful. This way, the next time you open the fridge rummaging around looking for your comfort food – you’ll most likely pick up the Greek yoghurt instead.
3. Sedentary Lifestyle
Do not fool yourself by finding excuses and skip workouts. The workout ball is most definitely in your court. Make it a priority, and it’ll follow through.
Spending time with yourself helps you to understand your body better and secretes some happiness hormones, so push yourself for it.
4. Eating relentlessly after working out
Pat yourself on the back after every workout – ‘Totally, you are a rockstar!’ But this is not a licence for you to hog mindlessly.
Make sure you are not eating more than the calories you burn. Many times after a workout, people tend to celebrate and eat more which is counter productive to all the efforts made to stay fit.
5. Engaging in extremely intensive exercise or overtraining
How can overtraining trigger weight gain? Well, for starters, overtraining (cardio /weight training) leads to the rise of stress hormone (Cortisol) to very high levels which result in muscle breakdown, abdominal obesity and fat retention by the body.
Get enough recovery days between very intensive workouts, adequate sleep so that your body gets ‘de-stressed.’
6. Following myths about balanced, quantified nutrition (yo-yo dieting)
This has happened to several ‘healthy eaters, ‘ and the trending words impact them. Heard of these one-liners: ‘Carbs make you gain weight’, ‘Keto diet is so effective in losing weight’ and so on. If you think so, read on: –
It’s quite simple, but only if we choose to simplify it. It all boils down to the total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) taking place within our bodies. Thus, to be able to lose weight – you need to be in a calorie deficit (implying you burn more calories than you consume) or consume Slightly lower calories than your TDEE. Now one can choose various techniques such as Keto Diet, Paleo Diet, Intermittent Fasting, LCD (Low Carb diet) – the the intent is the same, i.e. being in a calorie deficit.
7. Weekend bingeing
Picture this, you have done marvelously well from Monday to Friday, and you’re starting to feel less bloated, more energetic, and you’ve got your game on. Come weekend – you begin to feel sorry for yourself because this is tough stuff and you over pamper your taste buds giving a miss to exercise and Monday morning the weighting scale gives you a rude shock.
We can thus safely say that to be able to achieve visible transformative results over weeks, one needs to fully commit themselves and not lose sight of the goal, including on weekends. Overindulging in food, alcoholic or sugar-laden drinks even two days in a row will set you back, week after week, resulting in lack of progress about your weight loss goals.
This Story was first published in the print version of SUBURB July 2019 issue.