A Beginner's Guide to Healthy Living
A Beginner’s Guide to Healthy Living by fitchris25
Congratulations on making the decision to change your life for the better! As you begin your journey to health and fitness, there are a few things you should remember.
This is not a race. You are not in competition with anyone else. Allow your body to work at its own pace. Ignore all of the weight loss ads you see that claim you can “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days!” You can’t. It won’t happen. What you need to do is be patient and adopt a new lifestyle which will enable you to lose weight healthily and keep it off!
Food is fuel. Many people who join the fitness community with the goal of losing weight have struggled with disordered eating in the past. Whether you’ve been formally diagnosed with an eating disorder or not, you MUST understand that the key to losing weight is not eating less. The key to losing weight is eating DIFFERENTLY.
You will get off track. Things do not always go according to plan, and that’s okay. Life happens. The ONLY thing that matters is that you always start again and continue to move forward.
Find your motivation. I receive at least one message every day from someone asking me to motivate them to get back on track. This is not something that I can do. Motivation ultimately comes from within yourself. Joining a community like this one is great motivation. Sometimes all you need to do is click through a few before and after pictures and you’re all fired up! But it all starts and ends with YOU. Identify why you want to make a change. What goals have you set for yourself? Are they realistic? How are you going to reach those goals? What new things will you be able to do once those goals are met? All of those questions are things you should ask yourself when you’re losing motivation during your journey.
Everything in moderation. Balance is the key. You should NEVER feel guilty about eating something. Food and guilt do not go together. If you didn’t eat according to your goals one day, that’s okay. You can do better the next day. There will ALWAYS be another chance. You can eat ANYTHING you want in balance with your healthy choices. It doesn’t matter what it is. You do not need to eat healthy 100% of the time in order to lose weight. Use the 80/20 rule: 80% of your diet should be clean/healthy, 20% can be whatever you want. Some people opt for a “cheat day”, but I hate calling it that because you aren’t cheating on anything! I tend to spread my treats throughout the entire week, having a donut one day, a piece of pizza another, etc. Spreading it all out keeps me from overindulging at of a sudden because I’m craving something and feel deprived.
The scale is not the only way to measure your progress. Take progress pictures (once a month or so) to compare and take measurements of different parts of your body. No change on the scale doesn’t mean you haven’t made progress. The number on the scale is meaningless, it describes your body’s relationship with gravity, nothing more. What if you had your dream body and the scale said you weighed 400 pounds? It wouldn’t matter, right? What you really care about is how you look and feel, the number on the scale is arbitrary. There’s no reason to weigh yourself more than once a week. Your weight fluctuates by the hour depending on what you eat and retained fluid and whether or not you need to go to the bathroom. Don’t tie your emotions to the scale. If needed, throw it out. There are better ways to measure your progress.
Here are the keys to getting healthy and losing weight:
The food you put into your body is the most important part of weight loss. YOU CANNOT OUT-EXERCISE A POOR DIET. If you are just beginning and are overwhelmed by this entire thing, changing the way that you eat is where you should start. You can lose weight simply by changing the way that you eat (that’s right, no sweat involved!) That being said, the most effective weight loss with come through a combination of a healthy diet and exercise, but more about that later.
Remember that you are not “on a diet”. Diets are temporary changes to your eating that are not sustainable, and usually result in you gaining any weight you lost after discontinuing said diet.
This is a lifestyle change. Not a diet. You are going to learn how to eat differently and improve your health for the rest of your life, not just for the next few months.
WHAT TO EAT: While clicking through fitblr blogs, you might encounter the term “clean eating”. This term can have a variety of meanings depending on the person using it. The idea of clean eating is to eliminate all processed foods from your diet. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “ALL processed foods? But bread is processed? And cheese? And milk?” For some people, they would avoid those foods or make them themselves (which is expensive and time consuming). What most people mean by clean eating is ridding your diet of packaged/boxed/manufactured foods. For example, those Lean Cuisine microwave dinners you might have seen at the grocery store? Processed and full of extra preservatives and things that you don’t need. Instead, make your own comparable meal with baked chicken breast, brown rice, and a heaping serving of mixed veggies! Another example is boxed macaroni and cheese. Instead of eating white, enriched pasta with “cheese” made from a powder, cook some whole wheat pasta and add in your own milk and cheese (bought in bulk is the best) to make a sauce. And pizza? Well, we all know pizza is delicious! But you can easily make your own healthier alternative to frozen pizza by buying/baking whole wheat flat bread and adding your own toppings!
The idea is to eat things made from whole ingredients, not food products made from those ingredients. Fresh, in-season fruit is usually the cheapest, and frozen fruit works really well to make smoothies cold and icy! Stay away from canned fruit that sits in syrup. If you have to buy canned fruit, look for a brand that is water-packed. Fresh or frozen vegetables are great, and again, try to stay away from canned. Try sweet potatoes instead of white, and discover the magic of spinach salads instead of boring iceburg lettuce! Make your grains whole: whole wheat bread (check to make sure it’s actually whole wheat, not just a blend of white and whole wheat flour….going with something that is “whole grain” is usually the safest way to avoid this), brown rice, whole wheat pasta, etc. Get your protein from whole, lean sources like chicken breast, beans, turkey breast, eggs, Greek yogurt, etc.
It’s okay if you eat SOME processed foods. If you put flavored creamer in your coffee every morning or use ketchup, it won’t hurt you. Balance is the key.
Click here to view my grocery list!
Click here to see what I eat!
HOW MUCH TO EAT: PLEASE recognize that your body is using energy constantly to keep itself running! The bare minimum your body needs to stay up and running is measured by your BMR, your Basel Metabolic Rate. You should NEVER eat less than your BMR (calculated without an activity multiplier.) The other term you should know is TDEE, Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Your TDEE tells you how much energy your body is using at a given activity level. Your base BMR and your sedentary TDEE should be pretty close, within 100-200 calories or so. From these numbers, you can get an idea of how much you should be eating to lose weight. For fat loss, the goal is to create a healthy deficit of 500-1000 calories a day depending on your goals. I already have two pages about this on my blog, so I’ll link them here. This page explains the concepts of BMR and TDEE and will help you figure out how much you should be aiming to eat. This page explains the concept of “net calories” and how to use them if you wish. I personally hate dealing in terms of net calories, looking at your total burn compared to your total intake for the day is much easier and straightforward.
You may want to look for an app to use for tracking your intake! There are a number of good ones, but my favorite is MyFitnessPal! If you have/start an account, you can add me (fitchris25) and take a look at what I’m eating! MyFitnessPal’s default settings are kind of tricky to understand at first if you don’t know that the goal it is giving you is a NET calorie goal. This misunderstanding causes a lot of people to get frustrated and end up undereating, which is very unhealthy. I made this page about how to use MyFitnessPal correctly, so check that out and make sure you understand it!
Please note: If you have struggled with disordered eating in the past and counting calories is triggering for you, DO NOT DO IT. Counting calories is NOT necessary for weight loss. Eating intuitively can work just as well. Learning to have a good relationship with food is the most important thing here. Do what you know is healthy for you!
Increasing your activity level is also an important part of effective weight loss. You don’t need to be burning hundreds and hundreds of calories at the gym, ANY increase in your activity will help you! Try to purposefully increase your activity 3-5 days a week. That can include taking a walk around your neighborhood, doing a workout video, taking a bike ride, running, hula-hooping, jumping rope for 15-20 minutes, swimming, doing Zumba lifting weights, ANYTHING THAT GETS YOU MOVING! Do something that you ENJOY! There’s no use doing an exercise that you hate and dread doing.
Cardio is great, but don’t forget the strength training! While you cannot effectively build muscle mass while aiming for fat loss (the first requires a calorie surplus/eating as much as you’ve burned, the second does not), incorporating strength training into your workouts a few times a week will help you maintain the muscle mass you already have while you lose fat. Bodybuilding.com is a great resource for strength training. Find exercises that use the tools you already have – you can even make your own homemade weights using empty milk jugs filled with water, sand, or rice!
Please remember how important it is to give your body a chance to REST! You should have AT LEAST one rest day every week. Give your body time to refuel and recharge. Rest days prevent overtraining and associated injuries and will give you a chance to relax, regroup, and get ready for the next week!
It can be a little tricky to figure out how much you’ve burned during a workout. There are numerous online calculators you can use, and apps like MyFitnessPal and LoseIt! have exercise databases that can help you. You could also consider buying yourself a heart rate monitor (HRM). They can be a little expensive, but they are absolutely worth it. I have had my Polar ft4 for over a year and a half now, and I love it. HRMs track your heart rate during a workout and give you an estimated burn based on YOU, not some generic calorie burn calculator. I would absolutely recommend getting an HRM over any other fitness gadget. Do your research and find one that works for you!
Calculating you TDEE is a relatively accurate way to know how much your body is burning during your day-to-day life, but some people like to get a daily activity tracking device that gives them more information! Examples of these tracking devices are FitBits, Jawbones, and Nike Fuel Bands. I personally have a Jawbone UP24 and I love it. My Jawbone tracks my daily activity in steps and can give me an idea of how much I burned while I went about my day. Having an individualized tracker like this makes it easy to see my total burn and decide how much I need to be eating according to my activity that day. Note that these daily activity tracking devices do not take into account your heart rate. If you are walking for exercise, they should work fine, but using them to track other activity like running or using the elliptical for cardio won’t give you an accurate count because it can’t account for the intensity of your exercise. I take off my Jawbone and use my HRM for my workouts, adding that burn to the daily burn from my Jawbone.
Again, those gadgets are not necessary. You will still make progress and lose weight without them. The numbers aren’t the most important part. All that matters is how you look and feel.
In order to make a big change like this, you have to BELIEVE in yourself! You are an amazing person. You are doing big things with your life, and getting healthy is one of them! If there are people in your life who don’t support what you’re doing, either eliminate them from your life or find a way to ignore them. What you’re doing is right for YOU. Other people may look down on you because they’re jealous and wish they had the motivation to do exactly what you’re doing. Don’t let them get to you. This is your body, and you get to decide what happens to it.
If you get tired if what you’re doing, MIX IT UP! There’s no “right” way to get healthy! But DON’T give up! This takes time, and the worst thing you can do is commit for 1-2 months and then quit RIGHT before your body starts to really make progress.
This fitness community is the reason I’ve made it to where I am now. There are good and bad parts, just like anything. But the people I’ve met here have encouraged me to keep going even when the only thing I wanted to do was give up. I lost weight, gained it all back, and now I’m working on losing it all, plus some, all over again. This is a process. You won’t always be happy. You won’t always be making progress like you’d like to. But you CAN do it. Decide that you’re going to succeed and you will.
Simple, right? Haha, if only. It’s going to be hard. You’ll want to give up sometimes. BUT YOU CAN DO IT!
My ask box is always open, please don’t be afraid to talk to me about anything, fitness-related or not. My blog is a chronicle of my journey, and I did A LOT of things wrong before I figured out the healthy way to lose weight. I want to help people avoid doing the things that set me back and kept me from being the happy, healthy person that I am today! We’re in this together. You are NEVER alone.
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