I am overweight and my BMI is 27. I want to get in shape and lose belly fat. I used to train regularly when I was in college. After starting an office job, I gained around 10 kg due to a sedentary routine. I now want to return to a healthy lifestyle. Is it realistically possible to see visible fitness improvements within one month?
Why have you chosen one month? That seems arbitrary to me.
When you say âvisible fitness improvements" ⌠what does that mean? If itâs shorthand for âWill I look like a model on a Rapha ad?â ⌠you (and I) wish!
A month? Expect to get some good brain chemicals swirling around and to feel a sense of achievement at having done some good work. If youâve not done much exercise recently, youâll definitely be fitter after a month.
Do it!
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I started exercising two months ago, but I havenât seen the results I was hoping for. Iâve lost a few kilograms, but Iâm still not in the kind of shape Iâd call âathleticâ yet.
It sounds like itâs going great. You just need to keep at it. If you want to make a long-term change to how you look and feel there are no short cuts. Itâs just a matter of showing up and doing the work consistently for a couple of years, unless youâre blessed with excellent genetics in which case ⌠maybe a bit less than a year.
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Losing a few kilos in a couple of months is fantastic, and hopefully gives you the motivation to keep going. Iâd guess it took you much longer than a couple of months to gain 10kg, so losing it isnât a short term fix. Plenty of fad diets/regimes may deliver (or promise to deliver) some quick results, but they wonât be sustainable or the results enduring. 0.5kg a week is a reasonable goal for most people.
It might help your motivation to be consistent if you find some other metric besides weight to judge yourself by - as youâre here on a training platform forum, I assume youâre open to exercise of some form as part of your plan. Pick something like distance or time walking/cycling/running/swimming, or number of activities per week, strength training goals - whatever works for you - and make that your short term goal alongside any diet changes you make.
Your fitness/weight is an outcome - focus your day-to-day on the process instead and let the outcome take care of itself.
Your goal should be lifestyle changes that result in what youâre looking for long term. This is usually the result of diet and exercise.
The best way to do it is to find the diet and exercise program that you can essentially maintain forever. One of the biggest problems people have is making huge changes that arenât maintainable, expecting to look like a perfect specimen of fitness within a month (or a few). From there, they feel like they put in so much work but arenât where they want to be, so itâs just not possible.
Need chocolate to survive? Make sure your diet allows for a little (reasonable) sweets. You might have to sacrifice in another area. Hate cycling? Try running, or an elliptical, or rower.
The best program is the one you will maintain but will also eventually meet your goals. Diets suck, and often the very act of exercise does as well. I do my best by realizing that the moments of suffering are worth what the results deliver, physically AND mentally. Nothing would tear me up more all day knowing I skipped a workout I had planned in the morning, or didnât give full effort. Itâs 5:06 a.m. as I type this, about to start a 90 minute ride before I make it to work by 8. I know if I donât get my workout in Iâd regret it all day, and my anxiety will be much higher in general.
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One thing to keep in mind is that fitness and weight loss are too different objectives. And at some point can be opposing each other. If starting from an unfit and overweight perspective, itâs not too hard to see improvements in both in 30 days, but I have found that if I go too hard on either, the other suffers. For example, itâs hard to build fitness when in a huge calorie deficit and on the other side, if you go too hard on the fitness side sometimes the fueling and muscle gains will make the weight loss slower at first.
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Weâre all different, but whatâs worked for me in the past was prioritizing weight loss first, then after some significant progress start gradually ramping up training. I found it hard to stick to calorie restrictions when doing hard rides and workouts, and doing hard rides and workouts tough/impossible without adequate fueling.
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