Disclaimer:
The information in this site is not a substitute for advice from your medical practitioner. Consult your GP before you start any exercise programme, especially if you are over 40 or have not exercised for some time.

Disclaimer:
The information in this site is not a substitute for advice from your medical practitioner. Consult your GP before you start any exercise programme, especially if you are over 40, pregnant or recently postnatal, or have not exercised for some time.

Four Small Changes

• Drink another 500ml of water a day – now you will be up to 2 litres per day, and your body will have learned to love it. You will find that you experience thirst as thirst and not as hunger.
• Start doing some resistance training exercises (see the reasons below).
• If you work in an office, walk over to talk to people instead of always sending emails.
• Work out roughly how many carbohydrate kilocalories you need per day and gradually increase your intake if it isn’t high enough.

How Many Carbs Do You Need?

Low carbohydrate diets are very fashionable and you will certainly lose weight if you follow one. However, your body (and your brain) needs a certain amount of carbohydrate in order to function effectively, and WHO guidelines recommend that you get 55-60% of your daily kilocalories from carbohydrates. So if you need 2000 kilocalories a day, you will want around 1,100 of those to come from carbohydrates.

There are roughly 4 kcals per gram of carbohydrate, so if you divide those 1,100 kcals by 4 you will get 275 grams. Remember that this is the weight of carbohydrates in the food, not the total weight of the food. Check those nutrition labels!

Resistance Training and Fat Burning

Think about your shape instead of your scales for a moment – what makes you look better, fat or muscle? What feels better?

Muscle burns more calories than fat. So, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn. If you train correctly you can add 1.5 kilos of muscle in eight weeks, which could increase your BMR by up to 15%. The more muscle you have, the harder you can work, which means you can do more aerobic exercise and burn even more calories.

If you want to lose weight, by which we mean body fat, adding resistance training to your exercise routine will speed up the process and make you stronger and sleeker into the bargain.

If you’re underweight, it’s muscle you need to add to your slender frame if you want to look good and be healthy.

Putting on muscle is a win-win situation – it helps you burn more calories whether you’re actively using the muscle that minute or not.

You don’t even need to go to the gym to do your resistance training – ask about our Homebodies Workout. You don’t even need to be at home – ask about our Mobile Muscles programme.

PS Ladies – you won’t get arms like Arnie, women just don’t have enough testosterone to get that big. If you want to firm up without bulking up, that’s easy to arrange – for either sex.

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