Fixated on scales
As a woman and a personal trainer, every week I have weight loss conversations with clients or other women I see at the children’s sport/activites.
We as women obsess over weight issues and scales, and it’s becoming more of an issue with our good old social media. We can’t get away from abs or booty selfies, we have an uplifting “quote of the day” we have squat and ab challenges to sign up to and we have everyone telling us every way to lose that “extra belly fat”, by eating or not eating certain foods.
It can help others to get themselves motivated, but I believe it’s really only 5 per cent that will and the others will get as far as thinking about it, then not continue any further.
People attach so many dreams of happiness to weight loss that they are willing to spend a lot of money for the slightest chance of success. You can set a challenge for someone to start on a certain day, but if they are not in the head space to start that day, they will not succeed. Same goes for the weight loss meal plans, they’ll eat in between the meals allocated to them.
So many people set an unrealistic expectation about the amount of weight they would like to lose in a certain time frame. We live the ‘instant world’ now, where we want everything instantly and that includes being skinny by the end of the week. I have many people tell me that when they were in their 20’s they didn’t have to eat for a few days to drop a dress size for a function they had coming up, when you get older and your metabolism slows down they realise you have to stop eating for a month to get into that dress – which is not realistic at all. And the not eating at all is the problem.
People need to understand that if they are looking and needing to lose weight, it needs to be a slow process of 0.5 – 1 kg per week to ensure this weight loss can be achieved and maintained. A healthy eating regime along with exercise and emotional support will give you the best success.
Effective weight loss needs a plan, a realistic plan – you need to consume less energy than you currently consume, without being too severe to create more health problems. Set your lifestyle to help the change – have supportive people around you, take away temptations and start to rid those excuses that always pop up. Nutritional understanding – learn about nutrition and the calories in food, find out about better choices. Eat smaller portions – change your size of meals, overweight people need to eat smaller meals and also consume your larger meal at the start or middle of the day, have less at the end of a day. Replace fats with complex carbohydrates and fibre – base your meals on leans proteins such as meat, chicken and fish with grains, vegetables, legumes and fruits, these foods provide us with a sense of fullness. Limit concentrated sweets and alcohol – these are empty calories with no important nutrients in them. Drink lots of water each day – it helps fill you between meals and dilutes the metabolic wastes generated from the breakdown of fat. Exercise regularly – you need to keep moving.
We are fixated on the scales, however we need to focus more on the body fat. We need to make sure we have a healthy fat level in the body. If we do not eat correctly and starve ourselves they body will lose muscle first as it’ll store the fat in the body, as this is what we need to survive. If you plan out your meals with healthy fats, protein and carbohydrates all included, your body will process these correctly and break down the bad fats in your body and rid them with the help of the water you drink daily. You will find after a few weeks, your body will lose body fat which is what is most important. So where your scales may not show a big difference, but taking body measurements will show a different result. I measure my clients so as they can see the progress and then they are not fixated on the scales.
My tip is – be kind to yourself, work to a realistic time frame, remember it took time to put the weight on- it’ll take time to get it off. Read up on nutrition and we are all different so our metabolism and genetics are different, so you need to work with what’s best for you!
Good luck with your new healthy lifestyle with your supportive crew around you x
