Weight Loss Tips: Get Beach Ready

Being beach ready means you have to be completely confident in your own skin, that you’ve done everything in your power to look smoking hot.

The question therein lies, have you done everything possible to look your best this beach season or can you fine tune it even more?

Losing weight can be hard especially when you are faced with so much conflicting advice but if you break it down and follow these easy tips then you are going to be that much closer to achieve these goals and have a confident beach-bod this summer.

Weight Loss Tips: The Protein Kick

When you don’t eat enough protein in your diet what you end up with is a number of negative consequences.Your body will automatically have increased cravings, mood and memory issues, muscle loss and weight gain.

Protein is excellent in aiding with building muscle, which is good news because muscle burns up to 50 calories more than fat. So this means even when you’re not working out you are still getting the benefits from your workout.

Protein also activates appetite controlling hormones which prevents you from overeating – a devastating habit when your goal is to lose weight.

A proper serving should be about the size of a deck of cards, at least 3 times a day. Natural sources of foods that contain high amounts of protein are: fish, nuts, seeds, poultry, quinoa and legumes. You can get myentire list by going here – High Protein Diet Shopping List.

The easiest way to make sure you have adequate protein in your diet is by having a yummy protein smoothie. My favorite is the chocolate milk flavour of Gaspari Nutrition Myofusion, but if you are looking for a vegetarian source then try Vega Complete Whole Food Health Optimizer.

Weight Loss Tips: Fiber is Your Friend

Eating adequate amounts of fiber has numerous health benefits for your whole body. With regards to weight loss it is an excellent contender because it gives you that feeling of satisfaction after you have eaten. This helps a ton because you do not eat as much since you feel fuller sooner.

The reason fiber works so well is because with lots of water it forms mucilage in your body which cleans out bad cholesterol (LDL) and other harmful toxins.

It is therefore vital to make sure when you are increasing your fiber intake, that you make sure to drink plenty of liquids preferably water (since it has no calories) to avoid any gastrointestinal discomfort.

Another beneficial aspect of fiber is that is slows down the metabolism of sugar in the bloodstream, thus allowing you to have consistent energy throughout the day, rather than short spikes of energy followed by crashes.

Natural sources of insoluble and soluble fiber include; flax seed (ground to obtain omegas), whole grains (quinoa, amaranth, steel cut oats), fruits (pears, apples, watermelon.) and vegetables (broccoli, green beans, peas etc).

Since getting adequate amounts of fiber is so hard in our diets I would recommend you buy some natural psyllium husk and add it into your protein smoothies. Here is a really good one – Psyllium Husk Powder.

If you want to know more about fiber and how it can help you with weight loss then make sure to check out my article – High Fiber Diets – The Real Truth.

Weight Loss Tips: Count Your Sheep

If you don’t know it by now, sleep is especially important to anyone who’s objective is weight loss. When we lack an adequate amount of sleep our body’s defense mechanisms are seriously compromised.

To add to this, when you don’t sleep enough or have interrupted sleeps your brain functioning is also seriously affected preventing you from making wise choices about food and exercise.

The problem is that subconsciously, you tend to reach for comforting foods such as sugars and carbohydrates to give energy and feel better. Unfortunately, these are only temporary fixes leaving you more tired and exhausted than you were initially.

So adequate sleep is a very important step in weight loss because you don’t want something that is relatively simple to prevent from sabotaging your waist line. A couple fantastic non-addictive sleep aids include Muscle Pharm Bullet Proof and Shut-Eye

Weight Loss Tips: The Mental Game

A large part of taking on a challenge beings with mind prep, it is the biggest battle. If you can picture yourself achieving your goal you will be much more likely to stick with it.

You need to realize that weight loss is not simply working out and eating right, your mental game also has to 100% there and all that is troubling you in your life needs to be sorted out too.

A lot of the time the reason you gain weight is simply because of negative mind-space and emotional overeating is a clear example of this.

Take some time and evaluate your emotional relationship with food. Are you one who turns to comfort foods when you are stressed out? Just make sure to acknowledge that you are not perfect and some days you may cheat a little but that is no reason to get down on yourself.

It took you time to get to this place with bad eating habits, negative emotions and lack of exercise, so it will take your body and mind awhile to get out of them.

There is no magic pill for weight loss it has to be part of your everyday lifestyle. The foods you eat, the workouts you do and most importantly a healthy mind.

Just remember to keep your weight loss goals realistic, if you have a big boned body structure you are never going to be that tiny size zero, unless you take unhealthy measures which initially may work but in the end lead to devastating consequences.

Weight Loss Tips: Circuit Training

45-60 minutes of training is ideal. Most of us are very busy though and do not have that undivided time to work out. So if that does not work for you, you can always separate it into two 30 minute sessions.

Circuit training is a great way to reduce the amount of time you are exercising because it puts exercises back to back one after another with little to no rest. It gets your heart racing and your body burning maximum calories.

By pushing yourself with resistance weight training in a circuit style you also increase your lean muscle mass ratio which means that you are burning extra calories even when you are checking your e-mails or sleeping!

If you are looking for ideas of these type of exercise plans then check out some of these workout plans – Total Body Workout, or Total Body Workout in 30 minutes.