Whether you are trying to beat the bulge or make some sense out of the myriad of information about diets – we asked a female fitness personal trainer from Abu Dhabi to shed some light on this sometimes confusing topic.
However reducing your intake of carbs is highly advisable, as more times than often the overeating of carbs in one of the main culprits of unwanted weight gain.
The advice I give my clients is ‘eat for your day’ take on a small amount of carbs at the start of your day when you know you’re going to have the whole day’s activities to burn them off. When you get home from work in the evening to sit down and relax, this is when you want to avoid eating carbs with your meals.
Unfortunately weight loss doesn’t work that way, and the belly is a particular stubborn place the get rid of unwanted fat. ‘Abs are built in the kitchen’ whether you want a six pack or just to drop a jean size, at least 80 percent of your end result is going to be affected by what you eat. Large compound exercises that use lots of muscles such as squats and deadlifts, combined with intermittent cardio like HIIT (high intensity interval training) will give you the best results.
People often make the mistake when they first start a get fit kick to go out and do every class they possibly can fit into a week. When your body isn’t used to exercising regularly you can face ‘burnout’ pretty quickly. Once the body becomes fatigued your motivation levels will drop and so will your results – it’s important you train regularly enough to improve, but still allow for recovery time.
However as you get fitter your body will become more efficient at recovering and in turn you will be able to train more frequently maximising long term results.
It’s more than likely you will lose weight quickest in your first one to two months of training, after this point it will slow down, but this isn’t because you’re doing anything wrong it’s perfectly normal. The best way to keep seeing results is to vary the type of exercises you do, as the body can gets used to doing the same routine.
Another important point to remember is that you will gain some muscle mass from training, and muscle weighs more than fat, this will also make it seem like your fat loss has slowed down rapidly if you only measure your results on the scales. I always tell my personal training clients to look at their shape, feel how clothes fit them differently, and measure inches not KG’s!