Mental Health
Linking Stress with Fitness Targets
Everyone has thoughts about upgrading themselves and improving their fitness, health and even indirectly their confidence levels. It is however far too easy to lose motivation, especially if you are expecting drastic and short term results. Its a hard truth but changing your body shape, fitness, diet and lifestyle is something that takes time. Realistically 'diets' can help you loose weight, if you start eating less but continue to be as active as before your body will loose weight and depending on the extremeness of the diet it can do so quite quickly.
Diet
BUT there are a few BIG problems with this firstly any crash diet is likely to see you losing the wrong type of weight. If you suddenly cut out all the fat from your diet your body will start burning your body fat in its place right? Well sadly NO this is not really true. If you starve your body of fat it is more likely to hold onto the body fat you already have as its supply has been cut of, put simply it rations! You may well loose weight but it is likely to be muscle wastage (this is called atrophy) and is especially true if you have quite a lot of muscle to start with.
The other big problem is even if you loose weight as soon as you stop the diet you will put it straight back on again! what you really need to do is change your lifestyle and diet (as in your life diet not a diet period) if you eat badly it is almost impossible to just change just like that, the key is to start small and make little changes that are realistic and you can stick to. For example start by cutting crisps out of your daily diet or replacing them with a baked alternative, once you have got used to this change make another one say eat 3 average sized meals + 2 - 3 snacks per day as opposed to gorging yourself on 3 massive platefuls! This will keep your metabolic rate up and means your body will be burning calories more consistently.
Other than diet the main factors which can effect you reaching your targets are lack of sleep and stress!
Stress and Worry
Stress is an unavoidable fact of life, if your lucky it will be infrequent but its likely it could be a daily inevitability if your job involved pressure and stress. When you are stressed you body releases a hormone called cortisol and reduces the amount of testosterone that your body produces which is a terrible combination which will stop you from putting on muscle or making cardiovascular fitness advancements. This is similar too, and can be linked with, lack of sleep.