Remember, Abs are made in the Kitchen

How are your New Year’s Fitness goals going? Everyone has seen memes like the one below…

The number 1 New Year’s resolution that people make, is to lose weight. However, over 90% of people fail to keep their New Years resolution and most people have given up already. But, Why? Why is it that people struggle to make the progress they want and end up giving up on their New Year’s fitness resolutions? So many people work their arses off in the gym for weeks on end without getting the body they feel their hardwork deserves. Could it be their diet…

DON’T give up on your fitness goals yet! 

Ever heard the saying you ‘can’t out train a bad diet’. Exercise actually plays a minimal part in reducing body fat. If you want to get rid of excess fat you need to eat a healthy balanced diet and create a calorie deficit. You can train as hard as Michael Phelps (he has to consume 6000+ calories some days) but if you eat more calories than you burn you will store the excess as fat.

Don’t get me wrong, exercise IS important and does play a role in getting that dream body we desire! It will help us burn some extra calories and it will certainly help us to develop muscle mass so that once we have got rid of that excess fat there’s some bulging muscles to show!

It is also far more important than that.

Exercise can:

• Improve your mental health (see my post The ‘Happy Pill’ named exercise)
  • including reducing anxiety and stress
• You meet new people, make friends, and develop social skills
• Improve your Brain function
• Increase your life expectancy
• Increase bone and joint strength
• Improve your mobility
• Reduce  your risk of diabetes
• Strengthen your Heart
• Lower your blood pressure

The list is endless!

 

This DOES NOT mean..

If you severely restrict your calories OR think you can eat what you want as long as you maintain a calorie deficit you will shed excess fat – THIS IS VERY UNLIKELY TO WORK and It certainly wont make you healthy! 

I am not going to go into too much detail regarding dietary intake (what you should and shouldn’t eat or what to eat to shed fat) as that is a much more complex and a much longer blog post. However there are a few tips in my post My CrossFit Journey: End of Month 1 (Progress) and If you keep following my blog I do plan to break it down in the future.

If you want to achieve a calorie deficit and do it healthily then here is a great video that explains a bit more about this.

This youtube video will also help you to understand why exercise is not the main contributor to fat loss and how important your diet is.

In the meantime here is a few simple ways you can achieve your fitness goals and stick to your New Years resolution:

• Have a read of Aesthetic of Functional? – review your goals and may be set a performance target as well i.e. perform a pull up, complete 10k, apply to enter the marathon etc
• Keep hitting the gym/doing exercise – (at least 3 x a week) it will do wonders for your mental and physical health
• Start being a little bit more aware of what you are eating
  • Try to eat whole foods
  • Avoid sugar and alcohol or at least begin reducing your intake of this
• Make yourself accountable to your targets – write them down, put them in a blog, share it with others. You will then feel obliged to do it!
• Make small changes at a time. Big wholesale changes to diet and exercise are harder to maintain.