How to Get Fit Healthy and Lose Weight

How to Become a Fit and Healthy Person

Everyone wants to keep their body fit and healthy. It doesn’t matter if this is the first, tenth, or the fiftieth time you’ve tried to get fit, healthy and lose weight. What is important is to start a routine that suites your needs and abilities. So if this is not your first attempt it is important to reflect back at the previous times you planned to become a fit and healthy person and understand what prevented you from achieving that goal.

Maybe you started working out in the evenings and within a few weeks daily activities were causing you to miss your exercise routines (this time switch to morning workouts). Or perhaps you were not seeing the results you wanted got discouraged and started looking for excuses for why you cannot exercise(change happens slowly).

Determining why you were not staying on track with your fitness goals is important to figure out so you can avoid making the same mistakes this time and finally keep your body fit and healthy for the long run.

If you’re looking for a magic drink or supplement you have come to the wrong place. We don’t believe any single one thing will make you a fit and healthy person but will most likely require several changes to different parts of your life (exercise, diet, sleep, less partying etc...).

Well supplements are great to help you meet your calorie / nutrient requirements, remember supplements are to help you meet your nutrient requirements so adding supplements and eating crap like junk food and sodas is not going to be much benefit really look into your nutrition and how you eat and how you can eat better.

If your goal is to get fit, healthy and lose weight there is 3 things that you will have to setup to help ensure that you have the highest chances of being successful

• Education: know HOW to get in shape
• Inspiration: know WHY you’re getting in shape
• Support: having others help you along the way to get in shape

We can help you with the first in this article right now. We will be implementing a support forum within the next few months but online support can only take you so far. Having friends and family to support you is more valuable than any website support forum. Ducking a website is really easy you just don’t go to the site or open emails from it. But having family and friends as your workout buddy is a lot harder to ignore. If your friend is outside waiting for you to go to the gym it’s going to be a lot harder to ignore. Sure you can try pretend you’re not home but trying get out of the workout might require more effort that just going and doing the workout.

You should schedule four or five workouts per week. Remember that consistency is key to your success don't skip a gym session. You can alternate cardio work such as running, biking or swimming with strength exercises including lunges, sit-ups and free-weight work.

If you don't like the gym, try hiking, dance classes, tennis or brisk walking. No matter the type, each workout should challenge your body and expect to be tired and sweaty by the end.

To Get Fit and Healthy you should focus on

• Nutrition

• Eat healthy
• Eat less sugar
• Cheat 1 day a week

• Endurance

• High Intensity Interval Training
• Steady State Cardio

• Strength

• Weight Training (Lifting weights)
• Resistance Band
• Body weight

• Flexibility

• Yoga
• Static stretching

Nutrition

The first step is to CALCULATE THE AMMOUNT OF DAILY CALORIES YOU REQUIRE to meet your fitness goals. Click here to use our calorie calculator and in seconds know how many calories you need for your goal.

The second step is to log everything you eat or drink and see how many calories you’re consuming a day. Many people think they know how many calories they eat until they spend the day logging all of their foods. Sign in or Sign up and use are calorie counter for free to track all of your food.

Are food list is growing every day and you can help increase our food database by easily adding new foods.

Remember if you don’t know how many calories you should be eating or how many you are eating you will be fighting a losing battle until you do.

The most straightforward change is cutting out junk foods, processed foods and sweets, including juices, soda (These are useless calories and need to be removed) and other sugary beverages. Replace them with unsweetened iced tea, club soda and water. Switching to water will not only help your fitness but could help preventing future cavities that all those sugary sweets can cause.

Food purchases should be mainly produce and protein: vegetables, fruits, poultry, seafood and so forth. Healthy fats such as coconut milk, avocados and olive oil round out a shopping cart that supports weight-loss efforts.

Cook meals in double or triple batches to have healthy leftovers for lunches later in the week. Watch the amount of healthy fats you eat though since 1 gram of healthy fat is equal 9 calories where 1 gram of protein or carbohydrates is only 4 calories.

Believe it or not, 80% of your success when it comes to getting healthy will depend on your diet. Remember that you CAN'T OUT_TRAIN A BAD DIET. I cannot stress the importance of this enough until your serious about what you’re eating you will only make minimal gains.

Make sure your drinking water throughout the day to stay hydrated. Not drinking enough H2O could spark hunger pains, which could really just be thirst. Also having 1 to 2 cups of water 10 minutes before you eat can also help ensure you eat smaller portions and feel just as full.

You should be spreading your food out over three meals and two snacks to help keep your metabolism burning at a constant rate.

When planning meals and cooking, look at the labels for the content of carbohydrates, proteins and fats. You should aim for around:

• 45% Carbohydrates: preferably natural and non-starchy… no genetically enhanced products (e.g. pasta, bread, white rice)
• 30% Protein: preferably low fat cuts of meat and fish, nuts, soy beans and pulses are also great sources of protein
• 25% Fats: again nuts and seeds are great sources, as well as avocado and oily fish.

Flexibility:

Flexibility exercises are extremely helpful and can prevent you from injuring yourself from your endurance and strengthening routines. Before starting your endurance and or strength routines it is good to spend anywhere from 5-25 minutes performing flexibility exercises this will help loosen any tight muscles and you will be ready to perform your routine with less chance of straining your muscles.

Focus on your most important joints, such as the hips and shoulders, and large muscle groups such as the hamstrings, quads, chest and lats. For best results incorporate stretching into your routine from the very beginning.

So to get fit and healthy what type of exercises do you think will work best ENDURANCE or STRENGTH?

The answer is BOTH! By using both these forms of exercises you will see the best results.

Endurance:

If you’re extremely overweight you may want to start with steady state cardio for the first few weeks or an active activity you enjoy and can continually do. This will allow your body to get some conditioning. For steady state cardio the best method is find an active activity or sport that makes you happy, and do it all of the time (running, jogging, basketball and dancing). But it needs to be an active activity playing baseball and standing in the field isn’t going to cut it.

After a couple of weeks with steady state cardio you should switch to a HIIT routine. Not sure how to start a HIIT program? Just go to HIIT HOW TO and read up. HIIT will produce better results in the shortest amount of time possible. High intensity interval training is so easy to do all you really need is running shoes and you can start a HIIT routine program. You should also be focusing on progressive overload with your endurance training. To add progressive overload all you need to do is make your exercises more challenging over time. This can be done by decreasing rest time, exercising longer, or make your movement more challenging (for example start with a burpee then move to burpee push up, then burpee pushup jump squat).

STRENGTH:

Weight Lifting:

Your main focus when weight lifting should be on compound movements (bench press, squatting, deadlift, rowing). Compound movements use the largest amount of our muscle mass burning a larger amount of calories in the same amount of time. A big benefit to lifting heavy is the amount of calories burned. This goes for you women to, you need to lift heavy (heavy is what is heavy for you it doesn’t matter if that 20, 50 or 100 lbs. as long as its heavy for you).

I know I know, you’re nervous of being one of those bodybuilder woman with arms larger than 90% of the male population. But don’t worry a woman is not going to build mass like a man since their testosterone is so low, so if you’re not juicing (steroids, HGH etc.) you are going to look like a fit woman with a beautiful FEMALE frame. The benefits of lifting heavy is that when you leave the gym you will still be burning a higher amount of calories for 24 to 36 hours after your workout. And nothing builds better legs and butt than heavy squats.

Your weight lifting routine should also include PROGRESIVE OVERLOAD (not sure how to use PROGRESIVE OVERLOAD read up here about it). You don’t need to spend hours either 30 - 45 minutes of weight lifting is enough to stimulate your muscle and rev up your metabolism when using compound exercises. But remember intensity is key so get in do your exercises and keep your rest periods to a minimum.

Strength Without Weights:

If you don’t have or can’t afford a gym membership you should pick up some exercise bands of varying strengths to help with your strengthening routine. Body weight exercises are also great to create a fit physique and can be done at home. Especially as we age making sure were able to move our body actively becomes more and more important.

These are also great ways to help people who are nervous of being seen in the gym (having a 75 lbs. bench when your friends are lifting 200 lbs. can be pretty embarrassing for a guy) to condition up and get ready for the gym.

Relaxing and Sleep

When the body is relaxing it is able to repair, after efforts of exercise, it will also relax the mind enabling you to mentally focus. Being mentally focused is almost as important as the exercise itself. To achieve any life goals you must believe in yourself.

When exercising it is best to get 8 hours of sleep a night to give our muscles enough time to repair and lower level of cortisol. High levels of cortisol will limit the amount of fat you are able to burn off.

Thats All

Getting fit, healthy and losing weight are completely possible by making smart choices about the foods you eat and staying physically active each day. But the changes you make to lose weight and get into better physical shape need to be continued thought life. Well getting into good shape is not very hard continually maintaining the improvement you make need to be carried on so make sure you find a physical activity you really enjoy. Remember getting fit doesn’t have to be a chore when you make it about doing things you enjoy it can be quit fun.