Lose Weight & Maintain
By Efren Martinez
The holidays are over and so are all of the wonderful memories of 2014, including those delicious delectable delights. Or are they? It’s February, and for many Americans we are now being continuously reminded of how much we indulged at the end of the year just by looking at our waistline. The food temptation cards were stacked against us, and during the winter our fitness concerns may have dropped off with so much going on during the holidays. It’s OK. I too scaled back my fitness to less than half to spend and appreciate more time with my family during The Holy Season. I made sure I was able to maintain a healthy weight throughout the holidays and into February 2015. Friends, maintaining your weight throughout the year is easy, and has less to do with your traditional pushups, sit-ups, or even pull-ups, and more to do with what I like to call “Push-Backs”.
Push-backs are easy to do and don’t take any type of physical strength or endurance to get them done. Just do them like this: every time an excessive amount of food or second helping is pushed in front of you, push it back. Shazam! You’ve just completed your first push-back. Do this several times a day and you’ve saved hundreds of calories from your daily intake. At the end of the week, you’ll have shaved off thousands of unnecessary calories. What also helped me maintain my healthy weight while exercising less during the winter was pinching calories off of each meal. Here’s an example: every morning I eat the same breakfast during the triathlon season which is 2 eggs on a wheat muffin with honey. During the holidays I cut back over two hundred calories from this meal simply by eating only half of the English muffin, 1 egg white and instead of covering it with honey, I put a little red onion on it. Delicious! This is just a small example of how I pinched calories off my meals in the winter. Honestly, it’s all about maintaining. Friends, regardless if you’re into fitness to compete or to have that bikini bottom, I’m sure our Heavenly Father would prefer if we spent more time practicing discipline through control and moderation with our food and drink instead of spending long hours working out trying to burn off those guilt-filled calories we just ate at the local fast-food drive-through. Please remember this is 2015 and 70-80% of maintaining and/or losing weight is calorie intake through nutrition and the other 20-30% of it is fitness. Push-back those unusable and unwanted calories that are placed in front of you throughout the day, and pinch out those unnecessary calories at each meal, or even your latte. Doing so will help you as it did me to maintain a healthy weight with less fitness. For most of us you might even lose a great deal of weight depending on how much fitness you incorporate in this ideology. Eat clean, eat healthy, and eat smart portion sizes daily.
