If you’re reading this, chances are, you’ve seen your share of struggles when it comes to weight loss. Perhaps you’ve taken a new job that requires a lot more time in the car, meaning less time to hit the stair master at the gym. Or maybe it’s that the job has become so stressful that you’ve resorted to indulging in some nightly Haagen-Dazs, and suddenly the scale has crept up 30 pounds.
So you think picking up the phone and booking 10 sessions of personal training will help give you a head start to dropping the weight. And while good physical activity will certainly help promote your weight loss – working out alone won’t help you reach your weight loss goals. In fact, exercise is just a part of the equation – not the be-all, end-all solution to getting rid of the unwanted weight that’s steadily climbed.
When you sign up for personal training sessions, you typically see your trainer one to two days a week for a 30 to 60 minute session each time. Even during the most intense training sessions, you may burn a maximum 500 calories.
Whether you do it once or twice a week, it won’t do much good if you don’t stay accountable the other five or six days. It also won’t do you much good if you aren’t maintaining some sort of daily eating regimen.
The body isn’t as efficient at burning calories as we’d like to believe. If it was, we all could eat three Big Macs in a single sitting, pop in an exercise tape or run a few miles, and poof! Problem solved! But that is not the case, unless you’ve got the metabolism and caloric expenditure of a 12-year old male soccer player.
Instead, you’ve got to do your “homework.” This means you’ve got to eat clean, healthy foods seven days a week, providing the right types of fuel for your body while facilitating fat loss. It means saying “no” to chocolate cake at one of your girlfriend’s birthdays and passing on that Margarita at happy hour.
It means learning to walk past the fridge knowing there’s a fresh bowl of leftover pasta from the family dinner you just cooked. It means putting on your sneakers and hitting the pavement on days when you have no one to push you.
Most of all, it means holding yourself accountable, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even during your weakest moments. That’s when you grow as a person. That’s when you truly thrive in your weight loss journey.