Trim your Tummy – Boost Your Metabolism
Pregnancy is a life changing experience in and of itself for a woman. But life after pregnancy also comes with the expectation to lose weight after giving birth within a few months or the first year. This expectation is to be taken with a grain of salt because it twists the reason to lose weight, which is to not to get thin but to get healthy.
The biological “trump card” to lose weight after giving birth for the long-term is being able to boost your resting metabolism. To do so requires some committed input and effort on your part. This effort and input can be boiled down to simply living a healthy lifestyle. Living a healthy lifestyle will gradually be less of an effort and more of a natural part of your existence for you and your family.
Eat to Live
We all know that we have to eat right and the “spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. You try to instill healthy eating habits in your family but alas, you are a busy Mom and it’s so easy to cave into the conveniences of frozen dinners, fast food take-outs and deliveries. But this time it’s about you and you need to lose your tummy and recover your pre-pregnancy body.
Foods high in protein such as lean meats, fish, poultry; low-fat dairy products, beans and legumes should be a stable part of your diet. Foods high in fiber constitute generally most fruits, vegetables and whole grain foods such as bran, bulgur, and oats. They are to be purchased and prepared in the most natural way possible so that you will receive the most nutritional and fat burning benefits.
Maximize your Effort will maximize your Fat Loss
Be thankful for interval training. It is the answer to how you can trim your tummy with a 15-minute workout. In order to harvest the fat burning benefits of this type of training, you must be able to give each exercise your maximum effort. Essentially, your workouts should begin with a brief warm up followed by a series of short burst of exercise at high intensity followed by short interval of rest. This “fast-slow-fast-slow” method keeps your heart rate elevated and your metabolism humming to increase and sustain your metabolism above its resting rate.
Strength Training builds lean muscles
Most women tend to shy away from the very thing that can give them that lean, toned look that they want, and that is strength training. We forget that the toned bodies we see passing us by on beach are lean muscles. Thus, losing pregnancy weight requires adding some resistance interval training to your workout, which will strengthen your muscles to become lean.
You can trim your tummy and the rest of your body so that you look toned in a bikini with a few free weights and an exercise ball. The advantage of resistance training is that you can complete a workout within 30 minutes at home. Also because muscle burns fat and you are building back your lost muscle tissue, you will be able to increase your resting metabolic rate and burn more calories to lose the fat.
Keep on Moving
One would think that all the running around that a Mom does would make her lose pregnancy weight fast, but this is not the case. Try to expand your physical fitness to include your family by encouraging them to participate in more physical activities. Take a power walk with the baby in the mornings or go play some basketball with your son or daughter or you could take a family bike ride on a Saturday afternoon. The possibilities are endless and the time spent with loved ones priceless.
A healthy lifestyle will keep the weight off but it will take time to break the unhealthy habits to make the transition to healthy ones. Helping your metabolism in its efficiency to burn calories by eating and exercising right will help you to lose the pregnancy weight and gain the accompanying health benefits for your body. You will evolve into a natural beauty instead of a talk show makeover.
