By Guest Blogger Diana S.
A toned body for the summer: a guide to calories, diet and working out.
To get a toned body for the summer, fast weight loss will not be of much use. Losing a lot of weight quickly means losing not only fat, but water weight and even lean tissue. Your goal should be summer body, which is sculpted and firm. In other words, to tone your body for the summer, you need to start now.
Useful apps
Yoga lovers will love Pocket Yoga ($2.99) featuring 150 illustrated poses along with voice and visual instruction. Easy Abs (free) contains 27 exercises with an audio description and video demonstrations you can do with your own soundtrack. Runtastic Squats ($0.99), ideal for shaping legs and glutes counts your squats and records the results. Arm Workouts ($1.99) has 20 exercises for arms, an audio coach, workout reminders and incentive medals.
Butt Lift Workout HD (free) features workouts divided into three groups depending on difficulty as well as voice instruction and videos.
Start counting calories
Before you start counting calories, you need to know what your goal weight is. To find that out, calculate a BMI. A healthy BMI is within the range of 18.5 to 24.9. If you have a BMI of 25, or more, you need to pay more attention to calories and working out. If you are within the healthy range, you can also workout, but getting a toned body will be much easier for you.
Four, or five exercise sessions a week together with calorie intake require a 1200 calories-a-day eating plan. A typical recommendation is a weight loss of 0.45 kg, or 1 kg a week. 0.45 kg of fat contains 3500 calories. To lose 0.45 kg of fat a week, you need to burn 500 more calories than you eat each day (3500/7 = 500).
Start preparing your own meals
Firstly, you need to understand a difference between nutrient-dense and calorie-dense foods. Nutrient-dense foods contain nutrients, such as vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, essential fatty acids and fibre, but they have few calories. All whole foods are nutrient-dense foods. They are subjected to little, or no processing and are eaten in a natural state. These are lean meat, poultry, fish, eggs, fresh fruit and vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds and whole grains. On the other hand, calorie-dense foods, including any processed foods, such as chips, ice-cream, burgers, hot dogs, pizza, cakes, pastries and sweets contain a lot of unhealthy saturated fats, salt and sugar. They are devoid of nutrients. Preparing your own food includes counting how much calories every meal has and making sure you are having balanced meals containing unsaturated fats, carbohydrates and proteins.
Working out
You will need another calculator, this time for calculating how many calories you burn doing different exercises. Combined with calorie intake, you now know which type of exercises you can do and for how long to do them in order to lose the abovementioned 3500 calories a week.
Generally speaking, you should aim at both cardio and weight lifting exercises. You can do cardio, including treadmill, cycling, running and swimming for 45 minutes/an hour once a week, or two times a week in 35-minute intervals. If you are an eco-conscious cyclist enthusiast, consider Eurocycles, a leading Australian retailer of electric bikes, e-bike parts as well as bike and e-bike accessories.
Weight lifting exercises
• Squat and shoulder press (butt, thighs and arms) – 8 to 12 reps
• Pull combo (butt, thighs and abs) – entire sequence 8 to 12 times
• Crossover lunge (calves, hamstrings and butt) – 8 to 12 reps
• Inchworm (abs, chest and arms) – 8 to 12 reps
• Standing lift (obliques, back and shoulders) – 8 to 12 reps
• Side plank (abs, obliques, butt, hips and thighs) – holding for 15 to 30 seconds
• Biceps curl (biceps, shoulders and back) – 12 to 15 reps
• Kickback (triceps and back) – 12 to 15 reps.
Keep a diary where you will write down calorie intake per day, an exercise program per day and how many calories you burn per day.
Tia, and TipsfromTia.com is trying to keep you looking good and
feeling good, from the inside out. If you’ve got a problem or a tip email me! Be sure to Like and share on Facebook or Follow on Twitter or Instagram.