Pandemic Weight has thrown out our skinny jeans and graduated us to sweats! While we were stressing the loss of our jobs, businesses, our lowered incomes and the ever dwindling bank accounts, we were joyfully stress eating. It didn’t help that the food was right there…at home! The compounded effects of overeating has effectively forced us into a frenzy to lose our pandemic weight.
Here’s how to kick start your weight loss process:
Recognize The Challenge
Understand that solving a challenge takes intentional effort and a well thought out plan to start the process of weight loss. We don’t just think of an idea and it materializes, no, we must convert our ideas into actionable steps with dates.
Plan Your Meals And Plan When To Eat
Journal what you’ll eat and when. Talk to a nutritionist or do some research on foods that aid weight loss. For me, I rarely eat bread and flour. I substitute bread with avocado, flour with almond flour.
It’s a lot easier once you begin and of course that’s the operative action word. Gals, everything is hard when its stuck in the recesses of our mind and anything is easier once you start and stick to a routine.
You can download one of the many meal planner apps on the market. Some free meal planning apps are:
Spoonacular (love this name!!)
Alway keep in mind that the information you seek is totally Googleable! The plan you seek is literally at your finger tips.
Warm Up To The Idea Of Being A Cook
One of the positives of the pandemic is that we now cook!! Hey, you’re probably not a top chef and that’s ok. Cooking is a skill and skills can be learned. Just like any other skill, practice makes perfect!
Cooking and losing weight are congruent with each other. You’re able to control the quality of ingredients and the amounts placed into your meals.
It’s undeniable that foods prepared in restaurants today contain copious amounts of sodium. Science Direct posted a journal that found restaurants use six times more sodium than we typically use at home.
Restaurants use sodium to enhance the taste of meals and extend shelf life. Here’s the kicker; high quantities of salt are even used in desserts and pastries!
Sodium is highly addictive and the amount of food being consumed increases quite a bit with too much sodium.
Start An Exercise Program
According to Healthline, the average weight gain during the Covid pandemic has been 3-15 pounds. Now more than ever, you don’t need to go to gyms to workout. You can shed pounds in the privacy and convenience of your home.
You can do YouTube or buy online subscriptions to a program or workout with a trainer. It’s as easy as it’ll ever get, so take advantage!
The crux of being healthy isn’t good food or good exercise by themselves. Shedding the pounds and keeping them off will come to fruition when you merge good eating habits with healthy bouts of exercise.
Meditate Your Way To Weight Loss
Stress has been the main culprit of packing on the pounds. There’s stress eating, lack of sleep stress, job stress, business stress, homeschooling stress and the list goes on.
If you can reduce stress then perhaps you can regulate your eating and if you do this, then you’ll be on the road to your ideal weight.
We wear endless amount of hats and it becomes daunting to function. Meditation is great for settling the mind and quieting the noise. Meditation can be the go to for renewing and resetting the mind.
Your skinny jeans are calling!! Start today and be accountable to the plan you set out to accomplish!
I’d love to hear one weight gain struggle you’ve experienced during the Covid Pandemic in the comments section below.
