By Aaron Boike, ACE Certified Personal Trainer and Health Coach, B.S. Kinesiology
While exercise is a great tool to help you burn calories and tilt the scales (pun intended) in your direction for weight loss, it is nearly impossible to sustain weight loss with exercise alone. In fact, there is good research showing that when it comes to weight loss, there are greater predictors of success than activity level. As a health coach and a trainer, I often find myself working with clients on finding exercise routines that promote balance, and are sustainable for the long term. However, our focus doesn’t end with exercise alone. Here are a few things that I emphasize outside of the gym when it comes to weight loss.
- Reduce Stress
We’ve all heard it before, stress promotes weight gain. This commonly known fact is all too frequently forgotten; though, when it comes to putting together a workout plan for ourselves. When I look at stress with clients, we think about and write down all of the life stressors that they are dealing with that add to their total stress load. This frequently includes things like, work, family/kids, finances, lack of sleep etc. We then take an honest assessment of how much stress we should be adding through intense workouts. For many this means reducing high intensity workouts down to one per week or none at all. Instead, we focus on low intensity aerobic work in between sessions, which actually relieves stress and improves overall feelings of wellness. Including meditation as a daily practice can be a powerful way to combat stress, as a wealth of research shows conclusively that mindful meditation reduces stress, anxiety and depression, and even inflammation and pain. Another effective technique is to reduce excess digital stimulation. Excess digital stimulation adds to stress and anxiety, so establishing set times away from phone, computer, and tv screens can help you reduce your overall stress load. Lastly, time management techniques like calendars and to-do lists help to get the noise out of your head, and on-to paper. This can be an effective technique to reduce anxiety, which adds to an individuals stress load.
2. Eat within a 12-hour Window (or less)
This is a simple and effective technique that research suggests is a powerful weight loss tool. Eating within a 12 hour window, or “Fasting” for 12 hours each day, works by helping your body become more sensitive to insulin, meaning your body needs to release less of it throughout the day. When insulin levels are kept at bay, your body learns to burn fat for fuel rather than just carbohydrates and blood sugar. This results in you feeling like you have higher energy and fewer mid day crashes. Research on mice has shown that when fed an identical diet, the mice that eat within a 12-hour window each day lose weight faster, and show improvements in immunity and inflammation response, as well. This suggests that this technique may work even in the absence of any major dietary changes.
3. Get More Sleep
Lack of sleep is another major factor that needs to be addressed to see long term weight loss. While 7-9 hours is generally the range recommended for healthy adults, the amount of sleep needed is different for everyone, and tends to be greater in the winter months. Respecting your bodies need for rest reduces stress hormones, namely, cortisol, and replenishes the hormones that help you feel full and satiated from food. Easy ways to get more quality sleep include, reducing TV/screen time at night, drinking less caffeine overall and no caffeine after 2pm (Assuming a 10pm bedtime), improving your sleeping conditions to low light prior to bedtime, and as dark as possible during sleep, and simply planning for an earlier bedtime, with a proper period to wind down an hour prior to sleeping with a relaxing activity like reading, knitting, or meditating.
Sources:
Corliss, Julie, Harvard Health Letter, https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mindfulness-meditation-may-ease-anxiety-mental-stress-201401086967, Accessed 1/2/18
Chaix, A., Zarrinpar, A., Miu, P., & Panda, S. (2014). Time-Restricted Feeding Is a Preventative and Therapeutic Intervention against Diverse Nutritional Challenges. Cell Metabolism, 20(6), 991-1005. doi:10.1016/j.cmet.2014.11.001