Congratulations, it’s you’re big day soon!
It’s the day you’ve always dreamed of since you were a little girl (or recently began thinking about after much persuasion if you’re a man) an you want it to be perfect. Who wouldn’t want that fairytale wedding?
But you’re here because you like so many others want to be able to fit into the dress of your dreams on the day right?
We can hear you already "I NEED to lose weight for my wedding in X months!", well...
Good news you’re in the right place, we don’t know too much about wedding planning, decorations or even cakes for that matter but what we do know is how to easily and painlessly get you into the dress! Losing weight is kind of our thing you see…
We don’t want to bore you with facts, figures and long words, we know what you want so lets not beat around the bush, you want to know what we would do if you came to us as a client as said “I want to lose X lbs by this date.”
So here are our top 10 things to ensure you lose weight for your wedding!
10: Get a good understanding of nutrition
Yes, it may be boring, you may not really care what the difference between carbohydrates and fats are but it really is essential to understand what you are putting in your body before you can choose the right things. If your car needed fuel you would want to know what kind of fuel it takes before you fill it up right? Of course, you don’t want to damage it! The same principle applies to your body. For an in depth overview of all the basic elements of nutrition please see the Nutrition section of our website.
9: Don’t try and make up for holes in your diet by overdoing the cardio
In theory, if think of your body as an equation that needs balancing, the calories in need to be high enough to keep you alive and functioning but not so high that you store the excess as fats, you could be forgiven for thinking that to keep a maintenance level of calories you could cary on eating too many and simply burn the excess off with hours of long gruelling cardio. To a point this is correct, but is it sustainable, can you really do a couple of hours of cardio a day for a long period of time without losing the will? More to the point, do you really want to when you don’t need to? Simply eating the correct amount eliminates the need to do all the extra work and the results are just as dramatic.
8: Work out your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) to give you something to aim for
So you need to know how many calories you should be eating to achieve your desired loss or gain. This is where TDEE comes in, this measurements takes into account the amount of calories your body would burn if you lay completely still all day (basal metabolic rate), as well as the amount of carloies (roughly) you burn with your regularly daily activities such as walking etc. The resulting number in theory is how many calories you need to eat to remain exactly the same weight. All you need to do then is subtract or add calories to this amount to begin losing or gaining. 500kcals is a common amount to start with because a pounds of fat contains roughly 3500kcals, dividing this by 7 gives you 500kcals. Therefor a deficit of 500kcals a day would give you roughly 1 pound of fat loss per week.
If you want to find out what your TDEE is the use our TDEE calculator!
7: Don’t skip meals!
Great, you’re thinking, at last something that’s not hard work, I can eat all day long!
Hold your horses and put the fork down! Yes it is better to eat throughout the day, however this does not mean you can just eat 10 full meals instead of 3 full meals, the total of the calories consumed should be the same. It is simply spreading the total amount move evenly throughout the day.
The reasoning behind this is that when you eat a big meal, then wait 5 hours and eat another big meals, then wait another 5 hours and eat another big meal, your blood glucose levels are on a rollercoaster. The go shooting up when you eat and come crashing down when you go without eating for long periods of time. There are many more factors at play here but this is one major issue that can seriously impede weight loss for people like you. If you can balance out your blood glucose levels, your body won’t be wondering if/when the next meal is coming and won’t try and ruin your efforts by trying to cling on to every bit of surplus energy it can.
6: Buddy up with somebody
This shouldn’t be a problems for you brides to be, you have bridesmaids who probably all want to lose that bit of weight with you so they look good too. Having a partner or at least somebody to keep you on track is a really powerful thing. There will be times when your will power will let you down. Thos elf you who are thinking it won’t… it will, everybody’s does sometimes, but this doesn’t matter. What matters is that you don’t let one tiny mistake snow ball into completely falling off the wagon. Simply carry on with your diet as you were, and allow yourself this one mistake. A friend or mentor will be able to ensure you do this and help to keep you on track as well as remind you of your goals.
Also you can do the same for them. Never underestimate the power of working together to achieve a common goal.
5: Make it a competition
Anybody who has ever achieved anything of worth did so because they had a burning desire to do what they do. You will never see somebody who got in great shape by accident. What you will see though is a lot of dedicated of driven people who have devoted a decent amount of time to get where they are. Right now though, you’re busy, you’ve got a wedding to plan! It’s going to be difficult to keep motivated on your weight loss journey. In that case you need to make it interesting and one thing that every single person alive finds motivating is competition. Before you begin losing weight, measure and weigh yourself and you buddy. Write these measurements down and keep them safe. If you’re feeling brave why not take a picture of each other and stash them too (you’ll thank us in a few short weeks time.)
Each week repeat the process and see who has managed to lose the most weight this week, this is a great way of pushing each other the bit harder in a light hearted and friendly way.
4: Get some sleep!
This may be something that you’re thinking well DUH! I sleep every night, have done since I was born, how is this going to help me? Well it’s not enough to just hit the sack for a few hours a night after watching some late night TV and be up early to go to work. You need to be thinking about the quality and quantity of sleep you get. The old adage of getting 8 hours of sleep a night is still a great target to aim for. Anything less than that and you are going to be doing yourself an injustice. As far as quality of sleep in concerned, you may have never considered this. Ideally you need to be in a quiet, dark environment with a good flow of fresh air. If it’s summer time why not crack open the window, you’ll be amazed at how refreshed you will feel in the morning.
3: Stay away from fast food and ready meals
Sounds obvious but so many people these days favour convince over anything else that just popping down to the local fast food joint seems like the only option when you’ve had a busy day. Well if you are thinking about your TDEE as mentioned above, you should be aiming to eat food which are not dense in calories and cause you problems to stay within you limits. Can you tell us how many calories are in a Donor kebab and Chips? No? We have no idea either, and i bet the guy who cooked them doesn’t either. All we know for sure is, it’s highly processed and dripping with fat. It’s fairly safe to assume it’s rather high on the calorie scale.
It doesn’t take that long to rustle up something simple and nutritious really, it’s just about making the effort. Nobody is saying all you should eat should come directly from the ground to your plate but using your common sense should tell you when something isn’t really good for you.
2: If your are going to do additional cardio then HIIT it hard!
No that’s not a typo, HIIT stands for ‘high intensity interval training’ as apposed to steady state cardio (jogging, rowing etc) HIIT will have you doing an exercise at 100% effort, as fast as you can, but only for short period of time. You can get an incredibly effective workout done an dover with in half an hour if you wanted to, rather than a couple of hours if you were doing steady state cardio. An example would be doing circuits of sprinting for 30 seconds and resting for 30-90 seconds then repeating the process 5-10 times depends on how much you can handle.
Other than the obvious time saving benefits of HITT, it also may allow you to continue burning calories after you have finished your workout and will have the extra benefits of strength and speed gains.
1: Track EVERYTHING!
Why would you not want to track everything? You really should be logging everything you eat and do each day else how are you going to be able to look back on it later and determine what is working for you and what isn’t? When it comes to logging your food intake you need look no further than one of the major websites out there that are dedicated to letting you do just that. You could try out myfitnesspal.com or fitday.com either of which are a good choice. If you have never used anything like this before it’s very simple, you just search for foods that you are eating either by name or by scanning a barcode, once selected the nutritional information for that food will be added to your daily log, this log will total up all the macros (protein, carbohydrates, fat) and calories over as many days as you use it, and will give you a much clearer idea of what you are actually consuming. This sort of tool will make it so much easier to work out your daily plan and keep you in check from over indulging. You may take things one step further and consider getting yourself something like a fitbit or some sort of activity tracker to keep tracks of your daily movements and activities. This will in turn allow you to better estimate your TDEE.
If you follow these 10 steps, you will absolutely find that not only do you begin to understand what is happening to your body at any one time but also why. You will soon get to grips with how much food you actually need rather than how much you have just got used to eating. Ultimately you will see your weight go down at a nice steady rate.
This is exactly what we want, if you lose it too quickly guess what? It will probably come back just as quick. As long as you allow yourself enough time before your big day you should have no problem at all getting into that dress and your wedding will be everything you ever wanted.
If you have a wedding weight loss related story be it a success or a failure please let us know about it by sending us an email, we may even feature your story on our blog!
Good luck and make the most of it!
Images courtesy of Pixabay.com