The Best Workout Plan to Help You Lose Fat

Since having my son, A, I have made the decision to gradually incorporate healthy habits to take better care of myself and set an example to A that anything is possible and to prioritize health. I began incorporating healthier eating and exercise habits but struggled to lose even a pound, even though I felt much healthier. I had eventually accepted that my weight may never change, but was still determined to increase my healthy habits regardless of whether I lost weight or not. Then, on Christmas Eve, my brother, W, gifted me a smart scale because we had began training for a marathon. To my disappointment, I found when I stepped on the scale that I still had not managed to lose a single pound, even though I had been running multiple miles ever week for the past four months. However, I did learn that I my fat percentage was in the obese range. That is when I decided that I would do whatever it was that I needed to lose the weight and make it back into the healthy range. I have since lost sixteen pounds. I will emphasize that it definitely takes dieting aspects in combination with exercise to be able to achieve weight loss, at least in my experience. I have found that consistency in incorporating exercise into my everyday life has been very important to weight loss, rather than a bigger exercise activity once a week. Below is the workout plan that I have been using to lose fat.

Walk

I try to walk for at least one hour a day for at least three days a week. I try to incorporate walking into as many regularly occurring activities as possible. For example, when I am at work, I walk laps around the room for the entire shift outside of times that I am doing something that would not be appropriate for me to be walking. By doing this, I probably get a at least a few hours of walking each day for four days a week. On days that A has preschool, I make sure we walk to school, and if I am not working I also walk him home from school. His preschool is about a forty minute walk from our house and he has school twice a week currently, so that means I get about an hour and twenty minutes to two hours and forty minutes of walking for each day that he has school. On days that A does not have school and I don't have work, I try to take him on a multi-mile walk each day. This usually comes to about two days each week and I get anywhere from an hour to three hours of walking each day for those two days.

Burpees

I try to do at least thirty seconds worth of burpees each day. I put on some music and then start a timer with Alexa for thirty seconds. On days when A is really energetic and enthusiastic about burning some energy, I may do a task for some time and then take a break for use to workout to a song and do some burpees. Sometimes he likes to try to do the same thing that I am doing and other times he creates his own workout. I like to set workouts to a certain amount of time and especially a smaller portion of time because then it makes it easier to work into my day and somewhat realistic. For example, if I decided I was going to do fifty burpees each day, I may lose confidence and motivation when I felt tired after ten. However, if I do it for thirty seconds, I can easily justify to myself taking thirty seconds out of my day to exercise. It also makes it easier for me to notice my progress because maybe I was very slow in completing my burpees in my first thirty seconds but after having been doing burpees for some time, thirty seconds does not seem so long. When I do a thirty second workout like this, it is easier for me to make the decision to incorporate a few more thirty second workouts into my day. Whereas if I had decided to do a thirty minute workout each day, I may convince myself that I am too busy to do it some days and may skip exercising at all for several days at a time.

Jumping Jacks With Dumbbells

I've decided that I am sick of being physically weak so I have incorporated dumbbells into this workout. Jumping jacks are something that most people have done at some point in their life. Again, I try to do this one for about thirty seconds each day and maybe a few more times throughout the day if A is up for it. I use ten pound dumbbells but realistically I think even two pound dumbbells would be fine and maybe more realistic to start. When I first started doing these, I was very slow and was just determined to get the actions down rather than speed. I have gradually gotten faster at this, an example of what I mean by building progress within those thirty seconds rather than trying to outdo my count. This exercise and the burpees are a great way to get your heartrate up.

What workouts do you use to lose fat?

• Walking
• Burpees
• Jumping jacks with dumbbells
• Other

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