The majority of New Year’s resolutions focus on losing weight, but there’s an easy method to start your fitness objectives before Christmas.
The holiday season has a significant impact on our weight calculations since many of us overeat in the last week of the year even though we are already carrying additional weight with the intention of losing it all in the coming year.
The wiser course of action is to begin your weight loss journey a few months prior to the holiday season, allowing you to indulge in one or two cheat days throughout the festivities.
What aspect of this tactic works best? Your fitness goals will be completed when the new year begins, and that success will give you the assurance you need to attack all of your other objectives with focus and the assurance that comes with success.
The remainder of this article examines a few straightforward actions you can take to lose weight over the course of two months gradually, safely, and successfully. This is a much better strategy than attempting to force yourself to lose a lot of weight quickly.
The built-in reward that will make it worthwhile is the holiday season.
Consequently, let’s begin with a brief overview. What are you doing less of?
Prior to getting started, it’s critical to realize that while there are some universally applicable fundamentals, everyone differs in terms of how well they perform particular tasks.
Consider where you stand in relation to the subsequent metrics.
Rest and Recovery
Are you getting enough wholesome slumber? You should increase this to at least seven hours a day if it is routinely less than six. All of your other efforts (calorie restriction, exercise) will be in vain if you lose sleep. Purchasing a sleep monitor, such as the Fitbit Charge 5, that allows you to track your sleep fairly accurately is a good idea.
In the same way, if your job is stressful, schedule a few five-minute mindfulness breaks throughout the day to help you decompress.
If you already train hard, consider learning how to control your breathing during your post-workout cooldown (you warm up before working out, right?) to maximize recovery.
Eating Patterns
How much you eat is the single most crucial factor after recovery (sleep, stress, and exercise).
Regardless of the type of diet you choose to follow, whether it be Paleo, OMAD (one meal a day), intermittent fasting, keto, low-carb, flexible macros, or anything else, you must become proficient in two areas:
Consistency
For the next two months, adhere to the protocol with 90% accuracy. For instance, if you are practicing intermittent fasting, I would like you to practice IF at a 16:8 protocol for the first week before switching to an 18:6 protocol the following week.
I would ask you to start experimenting with a once-weekly 24-hour fast, along with a cheat meal, to strengthen your resolve while also allowing for occasional rewards and chances to rev up your metabolism.
In other words, start off easy, establish discipline, and gradually add complexity.
Meal Choices
Speaking of simplicity, replacing choice with contentment is the key to weight loss. Eliminating your ability to choose what you eat is the best method to lose weight for good. Choose a few nutritious meals (per meal time) from the foods you enjoy eating and simply eat them every single week. Choose foods you could eat three or four times a week rather than having to choose between options you don’t like.
This year, a few repeatable meals could mean the difference between achieving your goals and succumbing to analysis paralysis.
Energy Deficiency
Maintaining a calorie deficit will be the guiding premise in all of this.
I typically advise beginning a progressive two-month program with a tiny deficit – perhaps 250 calories per day at most – to allow your body to easily keep to it in the beginning. Although a larger deficit is feasible (and we’ll get to it eventually), starting small will encourage discipline-building.
Depending on whether you are seeing results or not after the first few weeks, you can increase the deficit to 500 calories per day. However, the most important thing is to stay consistent over the course of the two-month period.
How to Prepare
You might easily lose half a pound to a pound and a half per week by adhering to the above-mentioned principles. Weight loss may begin slowly and then pick up speed later on, or it may start slowly and then accelerate.
It is important to remain consistent in your efforts to reach your goal; if you do, you will soon be able to take advantage of the holiday season and arrive at or surpass your fitness goals by the start of the new year.
That’s a great way to kick off the new year.
