Setting fitness goals are important, they give us a target to work towards and every step forward gives us a brilliant sense of accomplishment when we achieve them.
If you set yourself unrealistic and unachievable goals, when you find yourself not on track it can make you feel down and could cause injury if you strain your body too much to maintain progress. That’s why we’re going to look at how to make realistic, achievable goals to help you on your fitness journey.
SMART Targets
SMART targets are a great way to set your targets, it stands for Specific, Measureable, Assignable, Realistic & Time-bound. An example of this is if I was a male who weighed 15st exactly, my target would be: I want to Lose two stone by consistently losing 0.14st per week for 14 weeks.
This goal sets the SMART targets guidelines because it is specific in the amount of weight loss you would want to lose, it is measurable because that would equate to 0.14st/2lbs/0.9kg per week. It is assignable because you are the one who is doing the weight loss, and realistic & time-bound, because it is the recommended that 0.14st is the amount of healthy weight loss per week and losing 0.14st every week, equates to 2 stone over 14 weeks.
Tips & Tricks
Whilst calories out vs. calories out is the most simple, effective & recommended way to lose, gain or maintain weight – there are a few things you can do to your diet to get more and less in your calorie intake.
Sugary Drinks
Whilst Jamie Oliver’s sugar-tax levy that was introduced in 2018 saw a lot of soft drink brand reformulate their drinks to make them less sugary to avoid the tax, it has also been shown that is has had the effect on people that fizzy drinks are now healthy – which is untrue.
100ml of Pepsi is 41kcal, which means if you enjoy a 500ml bottle with your tea every night (because diets do need to be balanced and you shouldn’t get rid of everything that gives you pleasure), that means it’s an extra 204kcal per day, which equates to around 10% of your daily calories goal.
The best fluid to have with food is water, as it contains no calories whatsoever, however, if you love fizzy pop that much, all the major soft drinks have low calorie and zero-cal options.
Food
When losing weight, you ultimately need to watch what you need. A lot of people underestimate how many calories are in certain foods, so you need to be careful to read the nutritional information on the packaging.
Even when you read the packaging, labels can be deceitful, make sure you read how many calories are in their recommended serving size. Some brands label their serving size so small, for example, 1/2 of a Chicken Kiev, so they do not look that bad in terms of their nutritional information – so always be on the lookout for that.
Eathis.com compiled a list of some of the foods that are higher in calories than you think, here’s just a few we think are important to know, check their article for the full list.
- Certain Smoothies: While smoothies can be extremely beneficial, don’t fall into the trap of thinking all smoothies are healthy. Whilst they may have good benefits for your body, some of them can be almost 1000kcal, 50% of the daily recommended calorie intake.
- Salad Dressing: When you first think of the best ways to lose weight, eating salads is one of the first things that come to mind. Whilst it’s true that they are very low calories, the salad dressing contains a lot of calories which all add up. We’ve also written an article about the impact sauces & condiments can have on your diet.
- Avocadoes: There are plenty of benefits of eating Avocados, they’re healthy for your heart and full of potassium. However, a full Avocado can contain up to 400 kcal, which would be 1/4 of your daily recommend daily goal. We recommend everything in moderation, especially with Avocados. Not only are they tasty, but they also fend off hunger, boost our nutrient absorption and lower our cholesterol.
Calories Burned During Exercise
When you exercise, you obviously burn calories. You can lose weight by reducing the number of calories you consume per day, but that is also coupled a lot of the time with exercise.
Using Bupa’s online calorie calculator, we figured out that our 15 stone male would lose, 598kcal if he were to undergo 30 minutes of vigorous weightlifting and running at 6 miles an hour for 20 minutes. It has been shown that 1 pound of belly fat is equal to 3,500kcal, so if you lost 0.14st per week from food, you could lose another 0.07st from exercise on top of that – but that is heavily not recommended. If our 15 stone male was to lose an extra 598kcal a day, that would his body would be missing 28% of its daily fuel source.
Jillianmichaels.com says that “It is absolutely 100 per cent essential to eat enough calories! If you don’t, it will destroy your metabolism. It’s like telling your body that you’re starving. If your body thinks it’s starving, your metabolism will shut down.
Not eating enough calories will also force the body to cannibalize muscle and hold on to fat. The body considers muscle to be expendable during periods of starvation, and it considers fat to be necessary to insulate your organs for survival.”
Whilst the above quote is only in the extreme circumstances, you could start to feel very mild side effects of not consuming enough calories of what’s listed above.
Therefore, it’s essential to get your body back up to the recommended calorie level for that day. Protein shakes are especially good because they also give you the proteins to repair your muscles as well as the calories to fuel your body, check out our range here.
Times To Eat
Intermittent fasting has been shown to be a good way to reduce weight loss. If your body can cope with that, great. But there is no definitive time to eat. You should be having every meal, in a balanced way. Skipping breakfast, dinner or tea can lead to overeating later on. Having meals at regular intervals throughout the day makes it less likely to overeat when you get home.
Helpful Apps
The app that we would recommend for using, is Under Armour’s ‘myfitnesspal’ it is the one-stop app for tracking your calorie intake, updating your goals and providing you with data such as which food groups you eat too much of or not enough of. We also compiled another article full of the best apps for your fitness journey, check it out here.
