Have you ever given any thought to what your specific weight loss goals are? It may sound obvious, but before you can work towards your weight loss or wellness goals, you need to know what they are! However, whether you’ve had a think about this or not, when setting your goals you want to do so with your wellbeing in mind, and so should make sure you focus on sleep, nutrition and exercise.
Firstly, sleep may seem like a waste of precious time in this fast-paced and hectic world, but in fact studies have shown that lack of sleep slows down your metabolism and increases your levels of stress. This causes your body to release cortisol, something which is ultimately stored as fat in your abdomen, as well as overeating to make up for the lack of energy you’ve had from the night before. Therefore, if you want to lose weight, one of your goals should be to get seven to nine hours of restful sleep every night.
When it comes to nutritional goals, try planning to have six to eight small meals throughout the day, rather than three large ones. When you eat little and often, you keep your body burning energy in digesting food throughout the day. With your carbohydrate intake, cutting them completely is not the way forward. Instead, keep your carb consumption to 50% daily, and try to eat them earlier in the day as they take longer digest. Eating carbs late at night, on the other hand, will turn whatever you eat into sugar for your body to use as energy, but since you will not be burning much energy throughout the night, it will simply get stored as fat, so try making ‘no carbs after 6pm’ another goal.
Finally, exercise goals are also important but perhaps more difficult to stick to. You don’t have to go to the gym two hours a day, seven days a week, but you should set manageable goals that you can actually achieve. Starting your day with 15 minutes of push ups, squats or an abdominal workout is a great way to get that extra energy to start off your day feeling great, and you don’t have it hanging over your head throughout the day. Also in this category, add ‘drink roughly eight glasses of water a day’ to your list of goals, as it is important to stay hydrated when exercising, but drinking water also helps with weight loss immensely as water flushes out bad toxins in your body, curbs your appetite and increases your metabolic rate by up to 30%.
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