Tips for weight loss you may not have heard before.

Train like you mean it!

If you are short on time your workouts need to be efficient so you get the best bang for your buck.

Walking on the treadmill gasbagging with the person next to you isn’t going to cut it and neither is half-heartedly pushing a few weights around every now and then.

Whenever you workout you can keep it short and sweet but you want to sweat buckets and push your body harder than the last time. Have a structured training plan and work the plan.

This will not only get you amazing results but will make you feel alive and on top of the world.

Create the mental space for exercise.

We all know we need to create the physical space for our exercise by scheduling our exercise time if we are going to fit this into our busy weeks; however we often overlook creating the mental space. This is really important if we are going to make the time to exercise consistently.

Creating the mental space means that you put on hold all the pressing things you need to deal with till you finish your workout. During your workout focus completely on working out, no magazines, no chatting to the person next to you but instead getting into the zone to be able to push yourself to gain the most from each and every workout.

Say no to one size fits all.

If you have a gym membership and the gym has given you a program chances are you are doing the same workout 200 other people are also doing and not tailored to your specific goals.

Look in magazines and online for workouts for fast and efficient workouts that fit your particular goals or pay a personal trainer outside of the gym to write you a program that has your specific goals in mind so you can be sure you are doing the best program for your fitness or weight loss goals.

Practice perseverance and focus on progress, not perfection.

The all or nothing approach is the number one results killer when it comes to achieving health and fitness goals and is often a trap for busy women. This is the same as the “I’ll start again on Monday” approach.

Every week you set yourself the goal to “do this week” perfectly and by Tuesday the wheels have fallen off and you decide to ditch this week and start again Monday - when you can do it perfectly. The only problem is the perfect week is as rare as a needle in a haystack. Life is messy and “stuff” continually conspires to throw us off track. Once you can acknowledge that there is never going to be a “perfect” week you can get on with the business of doing it anyway.  Some weeks will be great, others not so great and some downright awful but so long as you keep moving in the right direction, keep picking yourself up and moving forwards you are making progress; far more progress than the all or nothing approach yields.

Make it a rule to eat what you need before you eat what you want.

Eating clean and healthily is often the most challenging aspect of transforming your body. Cravings grab hold or you get caught out without healthy food on hand and once you give in it is usually a downward spiral from there.

Make your new rule to eat what you need before you eat what you want. For example it is getting close to lunch and you have a tuna and lettuce sandwich and some grapes on the menu but you REALLY want some cake even though you have a goal to fit back into those size 8 jeans – in that moment the goal is meaningless and all you can think about is the cake!

Follow your new rule and eat your tuna and lettuce sandwich and then your grapes and chances are you won’t want the cake and you will also have had time to re-engage with your goal as you munch away on your healthy lunch.

Plan B

As mentioned earlier life is messy and no matter how well you have planned your week life has a nice way of messing things up for you. For example you had planned to go to the gym in your lunch break but you got caught in a meeting and only had long enough to eat a sandwich at your desk so what do you do now? With no plan B you would probably head home after work and moan about missing out on your session because in your head you only had one opportunity to workout today – at lunch time – because at night you are just too tired.

However if you have already planned to go after work if you get caught at lunch time your mind is already open to the option of working out on your way home.

Being flexible and having the ability to adjust your plan as you go greatly increases your chances of ticking all the boxes on your exercise come the end of the week.

Ditch the scales, eat well and exercise and the weight will take care of itself.

When your idea of success or failure hinges on what the scales say you are going to be in for a bumpy ride because the scales are mean and don’t accurately reflect what is really going on for us.

You can be having an awesome month, eating well, exercising hard, your clothes feel looser, your energy levels are high and you think “ I bet I’ve lost loads of kg’s” so you jump on the scales only to see they haven’t budged. You know intellectually that things have changed, your clothes are looser for goodness sake but still the fact the scales haven’t moved sends you into a tail spin because we have been conditioned to believe results equals weight loss on the scales when in fact this is often far from the truth.

When you begin an exercise program, especially one that includes weight training (as it should) the early stages of your program is when you are laying down the most amount of muscle so an increase in muscle is going to play havoc with the scales. If your clothes are looser and your scales say the same thing this is actually a good thing because it means you are dropping bodyfat whilst you are gaining muscle which will increase your metabolism as well as give your body lovely tone and shape.

The truth of it is if you just focus on eating as you should and exercising hard things can only go one way; you will not get more unfit or more overweight by training hard and eating well.

Keep it simple.

When we are flat out juggling a million things the last thing we need is a complicated process for losing weight and getting in shape. Simple is good.

Many companies would like you to believe that losing weight and getting fit and healthy is a mysterious and confusing phenomenon that only they have the answer for when in fact being fit and healthy and at your ideal weight is simple and easy and does not need to cost anything at all.

You do not need shakes or to exercise in any magical heart rate zone to get fit and lose weight, you do not need to take fat burning tablets or buy pre-packaged food.

For your diet Google the food pyramid and it is all right there; this is what you need to base your diet on. You will see that sugars and sweets and fats should make up the smallest portion of your diet NOT the largest – not rocket science but good old fashioned sense.

Make sure you take note of portion sizes but create your weekly meal plans around the food pyramid and know you are getting all the nutrients your body needs to thrive.

You need to exercise 5-6 times a week and you need to train hard so find something you enjoy, enlist a friend, sign up for taekwondo classes, join a running group, do a boot camp, sign up for a fun run and raise money for charity – whatever activity excites you and makes you feel alive and fully commit to it.

Good Diet – Train Hard – Rest & Recovery 3 simple things that will get you where you need to go without a degree in rocket science.