Lets talk about a myth about gym workouts today. A big majority of people believe that if you workout 2-3 times a week, then you will lose weight.
What do you think? Would you agree?
Well, if your answer is ‘yes’ then don’t worry, we believed that too at one point. In fact we used to think that as long as we’re going to gym 2-3 times a week, we don’t need to worry about what we’re eating at all 🙈
Now here’s why you probably won’t be losing any weight even if you go to gym 2-3 times a week:
When it comes to weight loss your energy expenditure (the calories you burn) needs to be more than your calorie intake (from the foods you eat). Weight loss happens in a state of calorie deficit.
Typically in a gym session you may burn anywhere from 250-400 calories. And so in 2-3 gym sessions you would burn 750 – 1200 calories.
Now if you are consuming anywhere from 1600 – 2000 calories per day from the foods you eat, then your weekly gym workouts basically burned less than one day’s worth of calories that you are consuming. Rest of the calories will need to get burned in your daily activity.
This is why it can become almost impossible for you to lose any considerable amount of weight by just going to gym a few times a week and being sedentary for the rest of the time.
So when it comes to weight loss, you need to create a balance between: Food, Daily Movement and Workout Sessions.
Now lets dig deeper into each one of these:
foods
When it comes to food, what really helps is to track your calories every day for at least a week so you get a sense of how many you are confusing daily on average.
To create a calorie deficit, make sure to follow these simple steps:
1. Track your calories:
An easy way to do this is to get a free calorie counter app like MyFitnessPal and start entering everything you eat into it. These apps usually have a search engine that allows you to enter your food and it tells you how many calories are in that food. This will help you track your eating habits too and see where you can make changes.
For women the base line calories need to be minimum 1200 and for men its 1500 per day.
2. Eat a balanced diet
When it comes to your food, make sure you get all your macronutrients including carbs, fats and protein.
Carbohydrates – when it comes to carbs, have low glycemic and high fibre carbs such as oats, brown/red rice, chickpea flour, sorghum, etc.
Fats – have good fats (ghee, grass fed butter, coconut oil, flaxseed oil).
Protein – include good sources of protein with each meal (veg: pulses, beans, chickpeas, black pea, paneer; Non-veg: organic eggs, lean meat, salmon, chicken).
3. watch your portion sizes
Get a smaller plate to help you watch your food intake. If we see a plate that is full with food, it makes us think that we’ve eaten enough. It doesn’t matter that the plate is small.
What you don’t want to do is skip meals. Instead just eat smaller meals spread throughout the day. What we eat is just as important as how much we eat, so watch those portion sizes.
Daily Movement
You have probably heard that ‘Sitting is the new smoking’. Especially now with all of us dealing with lockdowns, we have been sitting a lot more than we usually would have.
Most of us have been sitting in front of our laptops for our work every day for hours on end and it is creating health issues for us such as low metabolism, weight gain, low energy and high anxiety.
All the more reason to start finding creative ways to move your body every day. One thing that we have found really effective is getting a Step Counter. This can be an app on your phone or a pedometer.
And when you start tracking your steps, you get motivated to do more steps. Typically you want to try and do 10,000 steps a day to really start seeing amazing results in your health and wellness. But if that’s way over the number of steps you usually do, then just get started with 5000 and then keep increasing them each week.
Before you know it, you will be a lot more active, feeling energetic and burning a lot more calories per day. And burning more calories equals faster weight loss remember.
Workout sessions
When doing your workout sessions make sure to include strength training for at least 2 sessions per week. Strength training helps you put on muscle mass. Which will make you feel strong in your posture, increase your metabolism, hormone regulation, bone density, mental health and of course weight loss.
The more muscle you have in your body, the faster your body burns calories. So even though doing gym workouts won’t help you lose weight on its own, but it is still an important part of your weight loss equation.
The ultimate goal of weight loss should always be health. When your body is healthy, weight loss becomes a side effect.
OVER TO YOU
What are your 2 favourite tips that you can apply right away?
What’s one thing that you learnt in this article that you didn’t know before?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Lots of love
Deep xo
Ps. We love hearing from you! If You have any questions or want us to talk about any particular topic, please comment below or email us at glamourandpurpose@gmail.com
About Simar & Deep
Simar and Deep are sisters, Co-Founders of Glamour And Purpose, NASM Certified Personal Trainers, Health Coaches and Business Mentors.
Their goal is to help you incorporate simple and practical strategies for a healthy, radiant and successful lifestyle, without having to make unrealistic or daunting changes.
Their flagship BodyLove Program helps people create a healthy lifestyle by incorporating simple changes in their lifestyle.