How To Get Your Body In Great Shape For The Summer

If you’re trying to get your body in great shape, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. There’s so much advice online, and most of it is contradictory; do you eat lots of small snacks throughout the day or intermittent fast? Are cheat days helpful or harmful? Why does every workout plan claim to be the ultimate way to lose weight and get healthy? Marketing doesn’t make filtering through the vast sea of health information any easier. With that in mind, the following aims to explore several essential elements of getting to and maintaining a healthy weight. The focus here is to point out the aspects of weight gain and weight loss that people don’t often talk about.

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Study Your Bad Decision Triggers

Humans are complex creatures. We have a physical form, emotional system, spiritual system, mental system, and a whole subconscious system that may or may not be in charge of way more than we realize. In the words of professionals who offer liposuction procedures in Toronto, even those who are seeking medical intervention for their physique need to be able to stay within 5-10 pounds of their post-surgery weight for optimal results. A big component of that is learning to identify what sort of events, feelings, conversations, interactions, and patterns lead to unwise health choices.

It’s a good idea to keep a journal where you document your mood, major events that happened, what you ate, how long you slept, and what exercise you did on a given day. Very quickly, you’ll begin to notice patterns that can help you take steps towards health and wise health choices. More than likely, you’ll notice that stress, alcohol, and exhaustion (emotional or physical) are big components in whether or not you’re able to make the healthier choice.

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Get Hormone-Aware

A huge component of the weight gain that people are struggling with today is hormonally related. There are a few big steps you can take to help improve your hormonal health:

Cut out conventional meat and dairy products. They are packed with hormones designed to get the animals to fatten up faster; what do you think these hormones do once they’re in your body?

Cut out any products with fragrance in them. This causes intense inflammation in the body putting your whole system under stress. Stress is a hormone; too much of it makes keeping your hormones balanced.

Stop eating or drinking out of plastic. Plastic should not touch your food. No, BPA-free plastic isn’t safe; it’s simply plastic that is missing one of many horrifically toxic chemicals. Microplastics are estrogen-mimicking compounds. 

Drink only filtered water. Tap water is filled with a ton of contaminants like chlorine that your body treats as toxins. The toxin load causes stress on your body; stress is a hormone that can throw the whole system off if it’s chronically present. Furthermore, most city water has pharmaceutical drugs in it as people take these drugs and then excrete them into the water system, and municipal water treatment processes don’t yet filter them out. SSRIs can leave you feeling emotionally empty and therefore unmotivated to eat well or exercise, and birth control can throw your hormones way off their ideal levels.

Consider non-hormonal birth control. If you take hormonal birth control (the pill, an IUD), your hormones are strongly altered (your body believes that it is pregnant). You might want to speak to your healthcare provider about non-hormonal options.

Go organic when you can.

These tips might seem a little daunting given how culturally accepted they are, but they’re vital if you want to balance your hormones. Hormones are connected to weight gain, appetite, energy levels, mood, sleep, and ability to handle stress. They have a huge impact on your physique.

Prioritize Rest

While this might, at first, not seem like an integral part of getting in shape, it is. During sleep, your body heals itself. It repairs muscles that have been torn throughout the day, and it balances your hormones (which, as stated above, are vital for your weight and appetite). The best time to sleep is between 10 pm and 4 am as these hours are when your circadian rhythm wants you to sleep; you can, of course, sleep for longer than this, but you want to be sure you’re sleeping between these hours no matter whether you go to bed at 8 pm or get up at 6 am. To get the best results to avoid any kind of bright light or unnatural light from screens from 8 pm until morning; this is part of good sleep hygiene. You might need to put black tape over any small or blinking lights on devices in your bedroom or unplug them entirely. These little lights add up and reduce your sleep quality.

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Get Sunlight Throughout The Day

Similar to the above point, this doesn’t seem like a vital aspect of getting in shape, but it can have a positive effect on your circadian rhythm, which, again, is critical for sleep which is, in turn, essential for hormonal balance. You want to get outside and in the sun as soon as you can in the morning. This might mean having your breakfast on the porch. It might mean taking a quick stroll with the dog to start your day. Then, later on, when the sun is highest in the sky, aim for fifteen minutes of sunlight exposure to your skin. Of course, dress weather appropriately and respect customs in your culture regarding what is polite to wear; simply maximize your skin’s exposure to sunlight. You can do this on your lunch break at work or by stepping outside for a few minutes while working at home. These two instances of sun exposure will get your hormones running along the right track.

Exercise Joyfully

Figure out what types of movement feel good to you and do them. Dancing around your kitchen as you cook dinner counts. Gardening counts. Walking along the seashore counts. Wrestling with your kids or dog counts. Don’t fret too much about specific workout routines; just get moving as much as you can. If you enjoy the movement, you’re far more likely to keep doing it. If you have a job that requires sitting, set a vibration alarm on your phone every hour or half hour and stand up and stretch just to keep your blood flowing.

The above information should have outlined a few key steps involved in bringing about the physique you want. While each of these tips individually can have a positive impact, they really compound when they’re used in tandem.