Thursday, February 18, 2010

Staying focused with your weight loss program

Your mind has more to do with your weight loss efforts than you may realize! Your mind is a powerful resource for achieving not only your weight loss goal but your lifetime goals, including better health, happiness and well-being.
Loosing weight with mind power
The thoughts you feed your mind are almost as important as, the food you feed your mouth! Your weight loss program should include a behavior modification materials to give you some of the mental and emotional support you need to acquire winning attitudes, knowledge, and mental strategies that will catapult you to your health, fitness and ultimate results that you desire.
You can be your own worst enemy or your own best friend. By establishing new habits, incorporating positive mind-talk and affirmations, you can reshape your mind as you reshape your body! Long-term weight loss doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes time and patience. Once you make the commitment to change your eating and exercise habits you have a responsibility to yourself to follow through on your goals. Here’s some advice that you may find helpful.
1. Buddy up
Many people who are successful at long-term weight loss will tell you they have a buddy to exercise with. Knowing that your buddy is counting on you to exercise with him or her is often enough to keep you motivated. So how about a ‘diet’ buddy? Who can enlist to go on this diet with you? It’s amazing how much easier it is to change your eating habits when you have a buddy to encourage you, give you ideas and help keep you on travel!
2. Breaking the plateaus
A ‘plateau’ is a period of leveling off or a holding pattern that people can experience when on a weight loss program.
3. Why plateau happens
Your body doesn’t like change. It wants to maintain your current weight. If you change your diet by drastically reducing kilojoules intake or the ratios of micro nutrients, your body perceives a threat to your survival and goes into a ‘starvation mode’ by slowing down your metabolism and conserving kilojoules. Everyone is different, so this can happen at anytime while on a weight loss program. For many, it never happens, for others, it happens almost immediately.
4. How to deal with plateaus
First and foremost, be patient. Even though you may experience a period of time where weight loss is not optimum, you must consider your weight loss program a lifelong commitment. Follow the plan as directed and try not to skip any meals. If you take too few kilojoules, it’s an open invitation to your body to slow down it’s metabolism.
Another way to keep your metabolism in high gear is through exercise. Exercise stimulates metabolism and prevents your body from going into starvation mode. Study after study demonstrate that weight loss is maximized when you exercise in conjunction with your diet.
Making course corrections
No one is infallible. While you’re on your weight loss program, expect to have a few lapses of food choice judgment. Make the best of the food available by eating less of the inappropriate foods and more of the appropriate list whenever possible. When setbacks happen, don’t miss a beat. Just return to the program with your very next meal. Before you know it, you’ll be slimmer and feeling fine.
Sports nutrition: The energy to win
Our cells are like microscopic energy making machines. And just like machines, they need to be properly maintained to remain in good working order. When your cells don’t receive the correct nutrition ‘fuel’ they become sluggish and inefficient-and so do you! Athletes and active sports-people are even more aware of this feeling than the average person. By putting additional physical demands on their body, sports people have increase nutritional requirements. Like so many of us, don’t pay enough attention to their diets-and that can have serious consequences for their performance and long term well-being!
Every athlete, irrespective of their sport, is continuously in one of three states of activity namely:
1 Training
2 Competition
3 Recovery
Depending on the nature of the sport, the cycle in which the athlete moves through these various stages can vary dramatically. Some athletes train for months, leading up to a single event, while others move back and front between training and competition on a daily or weekly basis.
Whether training or competing however, the process of recovery follows each instance of exertion and taxis the body’s innate ability to repair itself. All three stages, and recovery in particular, pose increased nutritional demands on the individual in order to carry out these functions effectively. The nutritional needs of sports people reflect the physiological stress resulting from high-level exercise, both in training and competition, as well as their unusual lifestyles. These factors are extreme at all levels of sports participation and are important considerations for a number of committed recreational athletes.
There are nutritional strategies that can help sports people train more effectively and recover more efficiently.
Special nutritional supplementation employed before, during and after competition may help reduce the onset or the effects of fatigue, and thus optimize performance. Training largely determines nutritional needs of most sports people, since it is the predominant influence on energy expenditure as well as lifestyle

No comments:

Post a Comment