Getting fit takes two things – exercise, and diet. No matter how much you exercise, if you have a bad diet, you won’t achieve the results you’re looking for. But, that’s pretty much common knowledge. What do you do when you’ve been exercising right and eating healthy, and you’re looking (and feeling) better, but you just can’t get over that last plateau? Maybe you need to take a look at your diet, and make sure you’re not sabotaging your results with these diet and exercise tips!
Tip #1 – Get over the mental weight hurdle. Loosing fat means you loose weight. But, if you’re working out, you should be gaining muscle. The great thing about replacing fat with muscle is – muscle takes up less room than fat. So, if you stay at the same weight, and replace 10 pounds of fat with 10 pounds of muscle, you should look leaner. When you start to plateau, you may not be adding muscle at the rate you were when you started your exercise program. So – the goal should be to make sure you maintain the muscle you’ve gained while loosing fat. And, if your weight doesn’t change, make sure you’re feeding your muscles with protein – as your body burns more calories processing protein than it does carbs or fat.
Tip #2 – Create a food plan. Basically – spreadsheet out what you’re body needs for calories. Then plan your caloric intake to ensure that you ingest less calories than you burn. Here’s a guide to help you figure this out. You’ll want to figure out how many calories you need per meal over the day, and the ratio of protein, carbs, and fat. You may want to start with the protein / carb / fat ratio of 40% / 40% / 20% to start. And, try breaking this into 5 or 6 small meals over the course of the day. This can help your body keep from thinking it’s going to starve, and avoid packing away those calories eaten as fat.
Tip #3 – If you’re not doing any weight training – you need to add that to your workouts. Simple rule. More muscle means more calories burned. And the best way to add muscle is strength training. For women – keep in mind that all strength training means for you is you’ll get sculpted and firmer – you won’t get muscle bound. But if you think about it – if you add 5% more muscle – that’s not much in terms of size. In fact, you may look leaner due to muscle replacing fat, and as we mentioned above, muscle takes up much less room than fat. But adding 5% of your weight in muscle, means you’ll increase your metabolism to keep that fat burning machine operating at full throttle!
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