Present day work environments and schedules are not usually very sympathetic or flexible towards those trying to follow a healthy lifestyle or on a diet. Shift work, overtime, deadlines, family responsibilities and commuting can all wreck your fitness regime if you let them. While some compromises may be necessary the secret is to stay in control of the situation as much as possible. Here are six suggestions to help maintain your weight loss program while also keeping your job.

Control your eating environment. Don’t let others dictate your food choices and don’t be afraid to turn down offers of unhealthy snack foods or drinks at meetings or office parties. Don’t be intimidated by other people’s views on your dieting. If necessary, explain what you’re doing and why. Be positive and assertive.  Choose who you hang out with. Try to find like-minded co-workers to help give support to your health regime.

Plan your meals in advance and don’t forget breakfast. If you’re serious about your weight loss program as well as getting to work on time prepare your meals in advance the evening before so you don’t have to rush in the morning.

A healthy breakfast boosts metabolism, burns fat and prevents muscle wastage as well as lessening any cravings for snacks between meals. If there are no healthy eating options available in or near your work place, pack a lunch box to take with you.

Protein is important to aid in the slower release of carbohydrates that otherwise would lead to an afternoon energy slump or craving crisis. A blend of different proteins spread over the day is a good alternative if you’re unable to get a solid mid-day meal.

Seven to eight hours sleep every night if necessary maybe a natural sedative such as valerian to help you relax.

Be prepared. Keep some healthy snack bars and protein powder on hand to prevent skipping meals if working late. Or pick up some cottage cheese and rice cakes before an evening shift.

Feast or famine:

Erratic eating habits are one of the basic problems for those trying to lose weight. Your body likes regularity, so, if you’re having trouble organising your weight loss program what you need is an eating schedule that allows sufficient time for the body to digest the food that you have planned and prepared for each meal. This requires discipline: without it you won’t make much progress losing weight.

When to eat?

Your calorie intake needs to be spread out over the day. Late night meals or snacking is one of the biggest sins for effective weight loss. At night the body’s metabolism naturally slows down making digestion that much harder. Remember, the biggest meal needs the longest time to digest. The extended Mediterranean lunch was extended for good reason. Breakfast – breaking the fast – is another time when the body needs an input of energy, and should therefore be one of your main meals rather than just a cup of coffee and a doughnut grabbed on the way to work. If you must have something later in the evening make it light – no more than 100-200 calories.

Planning

Planning meals will help keep track of how many calories you’re consuming and make dieting easier. Allow 3-4 hours between meals and have a schedule. Make each meal a consciously planned activity where you sit down and relax to eat. This is the essence of a healthy lifestyle as well as a weight loss program. If you can’t remember what you’ve been eating during the day how can you control your weight?

Protein

The body uses protein to digest food, and your total calorie intake will therefore be lower overall for the same amount of food if you eat more protein relative to carbohydrates and fat.

Fat

You also need fat as well as protein in your diet and there’s both good and bad fat. Body fat usually results from an inadequate diet based on carbohydrates and unhealthy fats such as those associated with junk and snack foods. Good fat comes from nuts, olive oil, avocado and fatty fish and maintains health as well as filling you out so you won’t feel like snacking later.

‘Fat’ is a word rich in negative connotations as well as health and emotional implications. So let’s just stick with the facts, and truth is, like it or not, women are simply biologically more prone to retaining body fat than men. However, there are other issues involved in women’s responses to body fat that determine how they perceive their bodies including ever increasing commercial propaganda as well as sexist cultural pressures.

Nevertheless, no matter how you look at fat, as far as it physically affects women there are some simple givens: namely women tend to retain fat primarily to feed a pregnancy and you and your ancestor’s native environment may determine where on your body you tend to retain fat. In hotter countries such as Africa and the Mediterranean women tend to store fat in their buttocks, hips and upper thighs, whereas in South Asian countries it tends to focus around the belly area. This is nature’s way of thermo regulating and dispersing the body’s heat, just as in cooler climates it tends to a more even bodily distribution to insulate against cold winters.

Another important point about fat is that it’s not all bad. All healthy people have reserves of fat for energy, insulation and to protect our internal organs. We all need some fat. The question is how much. Cellulite is one aspect of fat that women tend to be vulnerable to. Fat is composed of cells called ‘adipocytes,’ which store energy for release back to the body when energy is needed. Basically they’re accumulations of fat that congregate between muscles and skin. When they enlarge due to over eating they cause dimply impressions on the skin. However, if you don’t consume enough calories by over dieting the body goes into starvation mode and stores the calories in the adipocyte pockets making it harder to lose fat in areas such as hips and thighs rather than non-problematic areas like breasts. This produces a vicious cycle, that only healthy eating and regular exercise can get you out of.

What we all need, men and women alike, is to educate ourselves not only on how our bodies function, but also what we can do to safely achieve an optimally healthy body.

Related articles-

11 ways to improve your weight loss regime

Spot reduction

1. Eating more protein (30% of your total caloric intake) and eating smaller meals more often helps avoid muscle breakdown (catabolism) while exercising.
2. Choose foods high in volume (bulk). Green leafy vegies such as cabbage, spinach and broccoli are high in antioxidants and low in calories. Starchy foods such as sweet potatoes, brown rice and quinoa are best after exercising.
3. Keep a weekly meal plan and stick to it. Monitor your progress and follow your goals. This helps reduce unplanned snacking.
4. Drink more water while rehydrating to help burn off calories. Also there’s nothing wrong with a cup of coffee or a protein shake before a workout as an energy boost.
5. Green tea is another excellent drink to help weight loss due to its caffeine content and is also high in antioxidants.
6. Include fish oil in your diet to help build muscle and burn fat and take a good multi vitamin daily to avoid mineral and vitamin deficiencies when calories are low.
7. Exercise is not only in the gym. Burn more calories and lose body fat faster by walking rather than driving, especially over shorter distances. Also try to move around more if you have a sedentary office job. Don’t just sit in the same position all day.
8. Use a variety of exercises in the gym. Lifting weights combined with more compound movements such as leg extensions and squats will help burn more calories and focus on areas where fat tends to gravitate.
9. If your fat loss has stalled try progressively increasing your cardio workout duration up to 60 minutes or more. Your body will adapt.
10. Include some high intensity interval training in your exercise routine by doing interval sprints for two or three 30 minute sessions.
11. Finally, set clear attainable goals and stick to them. Having a mentor or personal trainer will help get it right and save you a lot of time and frustration.

No matter how long you’ve neglected your body, it’s never too late to shape up and get rid of excess fat. However, as everyone has differing body types, simply losing weight on the scales isn’t the only criteria: how you look and how you feel are the best indicators of progress.

Step by step: Smaller and varied reductions in caloric intake produce better results. By varying your calorie intake by eating a variety of healthy foods avoids your body going into ‘starvation’ mode where the metabolic rate slows to compensate. This makes it difficult to reduce fat. Eating more calories on alternate days will keep your metabolic level high, thus burning off more fat.

Benefits of weight training: More than most workouts, weight training increases muscle mass and also prolongs the calories you burn for up to 39 hours afterwards. Even if all you want is to lose body fat, working with weights will ensure the weight you lose is not muscle.

Good fats are healthy fats: These include the polyunsaturated kind as in those from fish and nuts, olive oil and egg yolks.

More protein less carbs: As your body burns more calories by eating protein than from fats or carbohydrates, increasing the amount of protein in your diet will help reduce fat while improving your muscle mass. Reducing intake of carbohydrates and focusing on healthy sources such as oatmeal and vegetables, will also help. So too will avoiding eating late at night so your metabolism has time to digest before it slows down during sleep.

Small is beautiful: Similarly, smaller meals more often are better than larger meals with larger spaces between when your body may move into ‘starvation’ mode where it burns off muscle rather than fat.

Most importantly is not to just accept the status quo: you can have the body you want.

1. Tell people you are trying to lose weight- by telling people you will work harder to lose weight as you won’t want them to think you have failed.
2. Take before and after photos- before and after photos are a great way to keep track of your results because you can often easily forget what you were like at the beginning and you can start thinking you haven’t made much progress.
3. Set exact goals- by saying you want to be exactly 15lbs less and you want to weigh 215 pounds is an exact goal, just saying you want to lose weight doesn’t allow you to measure it properly and you can easily drift off your goal.
4. Get 8 hours sleep- sleep helps alleviate stress and stops the build up of cortisol the stress hormone which can lead to excess weight.
5. Walk more- walking regularly helps keep the calories burning as you stay active through out the day.
6. Cut out sugar- sugar is no good for you, it makes you fat, spikes your insulin levels giving you brief spells of happiness and then you come crashing down again.
7. Keep your original clothes- keeping your original clothes is a great way of reminding your self how much weight you have lost.

Related articles-

35 weight loss tips

Reduce cellulite tips

1. Eat every 2-4 hours- keeping the body fed regularly ensures that it doesn’t go into starvation mode storing what you eat as fat.  Eating regularly will not only give you more energy as the body uses what you eat predominantly as energy but will stop it being stored as fat.
2. Drink water regularly through out the day- drinking water regularly ensures the body is flushed through with water constantly washing away fatty toxins.
3. Don’t buy high sugar foods- keep away from high sugar foods like chocolate bars and sweets as these will obviously make you fat and spike your blood sugar levels right off the scale something you don’t want to be doing when trying to lose weight as this will lead to your body to storing more fat.
4. Stop drinking alcohol- one of the best ways to lose body fat is to eliminate alcohol completely from your diet, this is quite an extreme step for most people but I personally have found in the past when I have gone 6 months without alcohol I have been in my best shape.

Related articles-

Fat loss myths

Fat burning tips

MMA is now a huge TV broadcasted sport, and many young men today want to get a body like the MMA fighters they are seeing on TV, but how do they achieve these bodies?  MMA fighters are generally muscular and lean.  They do a combination of weight training and cardiovascular training.  MMA fighters would train with both heavy weights for strength and building thick muscles as well as high rep with lighter weights for muscular endurance.  Cardiovascular wise they tend to train specific to their sport with lots of sparring and also take a cross fit like approach with exercises ranging from sprints with weighted vests on, climbing ropes with weighted vests on followed back to back with burpees, press ups and pulls ups.  If you want a body like an MMA fighter you are going to have to workout really hard.  Unlike a WWF wrestler for example, they need to be lean and fast as they actually have to partake in one of the hardest, toughest sports around, but similar to WWF it is a big spectator sport so having big muscles can really impress the crowd.

Diet wise these guys are on high protein diets with a reasonable amount of Carbs for energy up until they are trying to make a fight weight where they usually follow a bodybuilders dieting plan to cut down, but often they follow extreme measures like saunas for long periods of time to lose body water, this is actually quite dangerous and not a good way to lose weight as it is too fast and you can suffer muscle wasting, light headedness and general fatigue, this wouldn’t be done by bodybuilders pre competition.

Related articles-

Video of how MMA fighters train

Get a body like a boxer

Get a body like a wrestler

Cortisol is a corticosteroid hormone aka “Stress Hormone” produced in the adrenal gland, it is involved in response to stress and anxiety.  Cortisol increases blood sugar levels, increases blood pressure and reduces immune system responses.  This is one hormone that we really need to control.  In most peoples modern lives they suffer from cortisol being too high as we live in high stress environments, a great way of reducing cortisol is through exercising and taking a supplement such as Holy Basil.  It is important to have stress relieving times during the day such as having a bath, having a massage or working out for example.  When Cortisol builds up it causes us to put on weight so if you are trying to lose weight you may want to have a think about your stress levels as this may be responsible for your excess weight.

If you are suffering from stress or anxiety and it is really affecting your health and well being you may find it helpful to talk to the OCD Centre they are experts in stress and anxiety disorders.  The OCD Centre has been treating many celebrities, businessmen and people in high stress environments for years and can make a considerable difference to helping you with stress and anxiety management.

Related articles-

7 Stress Busters