FOUR SIMPLE, EASY, EFFECTIVE & HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS STRATEGIES

 

1. Proper sleep, proper hours: without proper sleep in terms of the hours, as well as the time of day, it is very hard to lose weight as your body is always on hyper alert producing too many of the stress hormones and not enough of the hormones that promote healthy weight, recovery, and muscle building. The best hours are between 10 pm and 5 am--get as many sleep hours within that zone as possible. Short naps of around 20-40 minutes during the day are fine, too, but not too close to bedtime as that may reset your internal "clock" and keep you up. The worst thing you can do is expose yourself to blue light from screens around your bed time or worse in your bedroom--additionally, the room should be dark with no light and electronic devices unplugged around you. Great, too, if you can get sunlight in your face in the morning when you wake up.

2. Probiotics: an often overlooked aspect of weight loss is digestion, and probiotics will make your digestive system more efficient and make you less prone to binge eating or junk food cravings. Simple, plain, whole milk yogurt a few cups a day--around or with meals even--add local in-season fruit like strawberries or blueberries in the summer months to make a great "dessert" in lieu of sugary desserts like ice cream or cookies.

3. Core exercises like Pilates, Yoga, or other similar workouts: working the core as in Pilates will promote fitness in the most important regions of your body regarding health and wellness, your core areas. Forget the marathons, all you need is 20-30 minutes a day on a mat. This is low impact, safe and effective--you'll see the inches melt off your midsection in no time. Get some exercise bands or ankle weights as you will eventually work up to adding more resistance. there are so many free videos available, you don't even need to pay for a gym membership. You can also add walking whenever possible in your normal, daily routine.

4. Intermittent Fasting: this concept is kind of a trendy, hipster key word search these days, but it has been around since our hunter-gatherer days--when people ate only when they could secure food--they might eat a lot on one day and then not again for three days-simply stated, you are just fasting for certain periods of time, usually hours, and this changes your metabolism and eliminates blood-sugar dips and cravings, too. You stretch out the times in between meals--say, eat a 6 pm dinner and then try to go until 9 am the next morning for a 15 hour stretch--you try to put these stretches together without overly stressing your body.