Achieve your health and fitness resolutions
How to stick to those goals for the new year
By Heather Camlot
So, you helped yourself to seconds of turkey, and mashed potatoes, and gravy, and cheesecake a few times too many this holiday season. That’s the past. What matters now is returning to a healthy diet and fitness regimen to help shed those extra pounds and make you feel better than ever before.
Form your food objectives
Gina Sunderland, a dietitian at St. Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg, Man., recommends following the minimum number of servings in Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating and setting two small, yet specific, goals for the next two months.
Beginning Jan. 1, for example, you may choose to eat servings from all the food groups; for February, you’ll select foods with five grams of fat or less per serving. Write a grocery list, plan your meals for the week, cook and freeze big batches of healthy dinners, and keep a food journal. All help you to achieve your goals.
Stop stepping on the scale
Weighing yourself every day is not beneficial. “People are trying hard, they’re exercising, they’re eating properly; then they weigh themselves and it hasn’t changed,” explains Sunderland. “But the reality is we may be converting that fat into muscle, which weighs more.”
Furthermore, she says, you shouldn’t lose more than one to one-and-a-half pounds per week. “We gain weight over a period of time and we have to lose it over a period of time; otherwise, you start yo-yoing.”
Establish a moderate fitness routine
Reintroducing your body to exercise also takes time. “Many people, in their over-eagerness to work off the plum pudding, jump right back into it at a very hard intensity and usually hurt themselves,” says Lorne Goldenberg, owner and director of conditioning at Strength Tek Fitness & Wellness Athletic Conditioning Center in Ottawa, Ont. “Once this happens, they have to take more time off and soon forget altogether about their program.” So if you were lifting weights before the holidays, for instance, start the new year off with fewer sets and less weight.
Plan a training program
Goldenberg also suggests planning a one- to two-month training program specific to your needs with a certified personal trainer or a strength coach and keeping a journal to track your gains. “If you periodically use a personal trainer to develop programs, he or she can use the log as a means of evaluating progress and use this information to develop an appropriate program to take you to the next level.”
For example, to monitor your cardio workout, you’ll want to jot down in your journal the type of activity, distance covered, time or duration, heart rate at the midpoint and end of training, and perceived rate of exertion.
Monitor your goals on paper
To track fitness and food intake, download our template in Word or Excel. If you prefer to hit the pavement, try our running template as well. “Recordkeeping is really important,” says Sunderland. “It puts you in touch with the real picture — where your shortcomings are and where you are overdoing it.” Sunderland suggests writing down food consumption over two weekdays and one weekend day and, instead of counting calories, compare the numbers to Canada’s Food Guide.
Find help on the web
If you need help planning your regimen, Goldenberg recommends eDiets for recipe ideas, exercise information and daily tips. Sunderland points to Nutrition Data for nutritional food analyses, FoodFit for a personalized food planner and Dietitians of Canada for its interactive platform. The latter has a dietitian answer questions.
Message boards and online support groups can be beneficial, but Goldenberg believes that your health and wellness should be your prime motivation to get fit.
“Commit yourself to four weeks of exercise and proper diet, and you will start to see results,” says Goldenberg. “This will spur you on to make it a regular part of your everyday lifestyle.”
