Getting Started - Your New Year's Resolution Fitness Journey
How often have you heard someone saying they are getting on a new diet or fitness program to lose some weight?
How often have you also seen those same people or anyone else quit a couple of days or a week into it?
It's not so much about losing the motivation but making sure its sustainable or adjustable as compared to what you have been doing or were doing previously so that you don't quit.
What does that mean?
Basically, you want your new diet or fitness program to be something that is manageable and an adjustment from your current existing lifestyle that doesn't have a steep adjustment curve. The steeper the adjustment curve, the higher the rate of dropping out or quitting.
For example-
Maybe you 2-3 cups of coffee/tea a day with milk and sugar. Instead of jumping directly into a black coffee/tea, you start having it with less sugar and less milk. This small change alone could save you around 20-40 calories per cup of coffee/tea, x2-3/day, that's a reduction of almost 100 calories while still having your favourite drink! As you go along doing this you may get comfortable to try it either without milk or sugar. Another option you could try out would be to use a low-no calorie sweetener like splenda/stevia instead of sugar.
How do you get started with the journey? Which program? Which diet?
There are tons of programs out there that could help you get started, but which one do you follow? As mentioned above, the most important aspect for you to be able to stick to your journey would be something that doesn't require you to do a 360 flip to your current lifestyle. Maybe you currently can only head to the gym 2-3 times a week and for the rest of the week you only have time for a quick 20-30 minute workout to be done at home, you can find such programs online that incorporate both factors in or you could find a gym based one, a home workout program and combine them both.
In regards to your diet, the same rule applies, start making smaller changes to what you currently are doing in your day to day life, less sugar, less oil, less rice, these small changes will add up significantly over the week and over time. Once you are comfortable with these changes you could start looking into a more specific type or eating plan that fits your lifestyle.
"But I can't afford a gym membership at the moment & eating healthy is expensive."
I agree! Gym memberships these days could get a little pricey especially if you're on a budget. In Singapore, an average monthly gym membership could be around $75-100 a month. If this is the case for you, you could start out with using one time/per entry basis for your gym sessions, so if you were doing gym sessions 2x a week that would be around $32-40 a month which isn't that bad. And if you can't even afford that, the best option would be starting with just your bodyweight, there are a ton of exercise variations and things that could help you achieve results with just your own bodyweight. I am confident that someone can get decent results by training with just their own bodyweight.
Once again I agree. Eating healthy *OUT* can get really expensive. $10 salads, $15 fancy healthier options like quinoa or superfoods (that actually aren't all that healthy in most cases due to the dressings and oils that they tend to use to flavour these dishes, which add a ton of calories that ends up being even more damaging that beneficial). Here are some examples of the "healthier" options not being better or actually more damaging.
It's not as expensive or hard as people make it look to be cooking at home. In fact, it is a lot cheaper if you were cooking at home and bringing your lunch with you to work. You don't even have to make it as tasteless (you don't need to be eating boiled chicken breast all day and week), add your favourite seasoning, some sauce (not salad dressings as these usually contain a ton of fat. something lighter like ketchup or even barbecue sauce). This makes it much easier to be consistent and know where to make changes further down the road into your journey once you hit a plateau.
These would be some really basic steps you could start using to help you get started with your fitness journey.