How to Come up with a Complementary Diet & Exercise Routine

If you are trying to get in better shape this winter then you need to address the need to come up with a plan, it’s not going to happen by itself. 

So do you concentrate on diet, making sure you eat well and put the correct things into your body, or do you look more to exercise, staying active and getting in shape? Well, it’s not one or the other, you need to concentrate on both in partnership to complement each other and get the best results. 

The points covered in the following article will show that it is important not only to know the hints and tips of what to do practically but also how to make sure you get, and stay, motivated to sustain these changes until you hit your targets and beyond. There is no point in going to all the bother and effort and then not following through and letting yourself down over the longer term. It’s often said that you need to change your lifestyle, as in change your diet, not go on a diet. This is also true for exercise and, as we will see the two are inexplicably linked.

Think About What You Want to Achieve

Why you are doing this and what you want to achieve can drastically change and if you are not aware of this then you could put in a lot of effort to your regime to get the wrong results. The problem is that many of us actually don’t know what we want to achieve but if we think a little more about it then you can be honest with yourself and get the results you want. Something that is quite often said is that we are doing it to be healthy, however, what we mean is we want to look good.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with this approach, and it’s also true that getting in shape to look good can also have general health benefits, so long as it’s done healthily. One thing to avoid if this is your intended result is to be aware that you avoid eating disorders in your quest to achieve good looks. Exercising intensively while severely cutting your calorific intake can be   dangerous. 

How to Get a Good Balance

OK, so we’ve talked about what to avoid, but how do we do it well? Evaluate your current level of fitness and weight so that we can assess where to start, as we do need to be realistic as if we try to change too radically, all at once, we will fail over the long term, research has shown this to be true time and time again. Eating well is probably the first step in getting this right and much easier to change than starting an exercise routine as we are not completely changing our lives, as we all eat anyway we are just adjusting how we do it. Consider not even changing everything, maybe just buying better quality, so if you love chicken wings then make sure you don’t get poor quality, fried goods.

Now for the exercise regime, this is in addition to diet, which is how the majority of weight loss can be achieved, if that’s your aim. Try to come up with a plan to ease into this for you, even get a  personal trainer at the gym to evaluate your current level of fitness and come with a week by week plan to increase your activity level. It’s important to keep track of how you are doing as well and there are various fitness watches and phone apps that can help you with this.

These are packed with great features and can allow you to pick the right balance of diet and exercise that suits you, and the calories in vs the calories out is only one measure of success in this. Once you get into the nuts and bolts of the apps you will see that you can monitor your levels of essential nutrients and see if you are exceeding daily limits on things such as fat, saturated fat, salt which are all important and also see if you are getting enough of other good things like protein, calcium, and fiber.

The key is, as we have touched on already is making these changes for the long term and not just for a select limited period as this is a sure way of losing all of your hard-fought gains and slide back into your old habits and therefore your old lack of fitness and general weight and physique.

We talked earlier about apps that can track your fitness and also your diet and one of the great features of such pieces of software is that once you reach your target weight you can change it from weight-loss mode to maintain mode (and even weight gain mode if you have the opposite problem of being under-weight) this allows to get to the correct balance of diet and exercise to ensure that the weight does slowly creep back up. It’s neglecting the maintenance part of the regime that is the most common way of failure in becoming a fit and healthy individual.

If you can’t accept that you are not going to be able to eat tons of fatty snacks every day or have take-out several times each week then you are never going to progress.

Get the Motivation and Psychology Right

So given what we’ve just been saying we need to look at how we are motivated and what makes us do well when we are doing well and what allows us to fail when we fall short. Let’s face it if we didn’t have these struggles then we wouldn’t be discussing this issue, you wouldn’t be reading this article and I wouldn’t be writing it. Now we’ve already looked at motivation in the sense of why we want to make these changes but knowing why we want to do it doesn’t automatically give us the tools to be able to do it.

Have you ever wondered why modern athletes commonly use sports psychology and athletes from the past didn’t tend to do so? Well, it’s to get an edge and be more successful, and this is exactly why we need to utilize psychology and get the best mindset for losing weight and being fit and healthy. There is an increase in individuals who go to therapists and psychologists for weight loss therapy and there’s no reason why not! Any help you can get can only give you an advantage so use any tool you can gain access to and a therapist can offer a range of help and referrals to all sorts of therapeutic approaches. It’s even common to look at hypnosis to aid in altering or changing our mental attitude to food and this ties in with the notion we spoke of not dieting or exercising well for a period and then slipping back into old habits.

It’s all about changing permanently for long-term and measurable success. This makes you feel good as well and helping your general health, increases life expectancy and quality of life while you are here.