Keeping Fit: Losing Weight in your 30’s

Have you woken up one day to find that suddenly your jeans don’t fit like they used to? Thinking those dreaded words: losing weight. Your eating habits didn’t change (much) and you still (sort of) exercise but somehow you’ve gotten a little rounder around the wedges. If you’re past 30 and this hasn’t happened to you yet, you’re one of the lucky ones! But that day will come for all of us. It’s usually around the big 3-0 mark – give or take a few years – that our metabolic rate slows down and staying trim becomes a lot harder.

If you have started to fill out and you’re happy the way you are, good for you! But if you don’t want to carry that extra weight read on for tips on how to lose weight in your 30’s. It’s a different ballgame from shedding pounds in your teens and 20’s, and a day of fasting might no longer be enough to get back into shape.

Count your calories

Weight loss is about how many calories you take in compared to how many you burn. When you consume fewer calories than you use, you lose weight.  People always say “exercise more” if you want to lose weight but research shows that eating less works better than exercising (as most people tend to splurge out on big meals after working out.)

And the first step to losing weight through mindful eating is to track what you eat. You may think you know how many calories are in that biscuit and exactly how many biscuits you’ve eaten but most of us underestimate exactly how calorific something is.

Calorie counters such as My Fitness Pal (which is free) are amazing for helping to keep track. If they’re not your thing, try a food diary.

When you start recording EVERY SINGLE BITE that passes your lips you’ll realise why you weren’t losing weight before! Are you more visual? No problem: start an Instagram account just for tracking your weight – you can make it private – and upload photos of everything you eat. If you let things slip here and there, don’t beat yourself up, tomorrow is another day. (I write this after polishing off 800 calories worth of meatballs….)

Get moving

That said, exercise is still very good for you and carries a lot of health benefits apart from weight loss. So walk instead of taking the bus, or take the stairs instead of the elevator. Find an exercise you love, add it to your weekly schedule, combine it with recording what you eat and before you know it, the weight will be dropping off.

Weigh/ measure yourself regularly

There’s some debate about whether weight is the best thing to measure – ideally you should focus more on the inches than the kilograms. Regardless of which measurement you prefer, make sure you monitor it regularly. Seeing the scale go down by even 0.1kg will help to keep you motivated.

Last but not least, don’t take it too seriously. Losing weight is a marathon not a sprint and you’ll have good days as well as bad. As long as you hang in there, you’ll succeed.

Elle Linton B: www.keepitsimpElle.com  Tw: X_eLle_S

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