What is it about time management and weight loss?
Modern life these days is hectic. It can be so hard to juggle our home life and external life and still manage to pay enough attention to our health and well-being. Often other features start to take priority and our own needs are pushed to the back of the queue. It’s such a common complaint to hear that “there just aren’t enough hours in the day!”
When you think about it, your weight and health should always be high priority. Maintaining a healthy weight and lifestyle is time consuming though; it does take effort. Unfortunately, it takes a lot less effort to put on weight and for it to continue to creep upwards often taking us unawares.
Managing your time, is really all about managing your priorities. Giving thoughtful consideration to the different areas of your life and pre-planning your days. This will allow you to get back those elusive extra hours in the day that seem to have disappeared in the past.
At Motivation we are well aware that weight loss needs to be managed in order to be effective and to allow for long-term sustainable results. Planning is crucial for effective time management and weight loss. By incorporating your weight loss strategy into your daily routine, your chances of success increase enormously as these changes begin to become habits.
The most effective way to save time, is to first figure out what you’re spending your time doing. Keep a record of what you do each day for 2 or 3 days. This way you can fill your time with more productive activities when you rework your schedule. Once you compose your daily plan, you can waste less precious time procrastinating about what has to be done. It will be there in black and white.
Put the time aside to plan daily menus and pre-prepare meals which can be refrigerated or frozen for later use. By first drawing up menus, your shopping list will be organised and specific, which will allow you to manage your food stores and minimise any risk of slipping into old habits. This way, the correct foods will always be readily available at meal and snack times.
It is important to factor in your daily of allowance of 20 to 30 minutes of exercise to your routine. If you mark it down at a particular time each day in your diary, depending what the rest of that day looks like, you are more inclined to follow through. Make it a priority!
Park a little further away from your daily destinations, whether it be work or somewhere else. Or, if your destination is within walking distance, walk there. It can sometimes take longer to drive from place to place by the time you factor in finding a parking space and tackling traffic. Always push yourself to walk as fast as you can and take every opportunity available to walk and move around.
What about the bike? In many urban centres, with the introduction of dedicated cycling lanes, cycling is now a much safer option.
Water has been shown to have numerous benefits for weight loss. Keep a bottle handy at all times and sip away during the day. A glass of cool water in the morning gives the metabolism a good jump-start for the day. It is a commonly held belief that we should drink 6-8 glasses of water each day and although this changes between individuals, depending on factors such as weight, level of activity and environmental factors such as climate; it is a sensible guideline to follow. In addition, drinking water before a meal can help you feel full sooner and the fluid will also aid your digestion. It’s also important to remember that the more we exercise, the more water our bodies require.
It might seem a little irrelevant to this time management and weight loss topic but in fact allowing for sufficient sleep each night is crucial to successful weight loss and overall lifestyle improvement. Without enough sleep our capacity to lose weight decreases. Tiredness leads to less energy for exercising and higher cravings for high-fat, high-carb foods. Ideally, we should avoid eating, drinking and exercising for the two hours before bedtime. These two hours should be seen as a wind-down period, relaxing the body in preparation for sleep.
So, to sum up, planning ahead and managing your time more effectively will help to remove some of the stress related to weight loss, and don’t undervalue the fact that it can be very stressful. On the other hand, don’t underestimate the power of how being prepared allows you to feel a sense of accomplishment before you’ve even embarked on your efforts and through your continued success.
