Keeping the weight off during lockdown

If you’re a gym or slimming club regular, two months of lockdown has probably been tough. With – until recently – only one hour of exercise outside allowed, in order to stay trim and healthy you’ve probably needed to think outside of the box.

If you have found it a struggle, and you’re continuing to find it a struggle, take a look at our checklist. With help from our friends at Marsden Weighing Scales, we’ve compiled five tips to help get you through to… Well, whenever life starts returning to normal.

You can find more tips on keeping the weight off during lockdown at www.manvfat.com/blog.

Structure your days
It’s hard enough spending all day every day at home – but if you’ve been furloughed, you are likely spending your days thinking of different ways to stave off boredom. One thing that can help is structure.

The night before, plan what you want to do the following day. Try to schedule your exercise for the same time each day, and set time aside for exercise indoors, too – such as the examples in this blog post.

Make the most of outdoors exercise
Never have we felt more grateful to be able to go outside and run, walk or cycle. Now, the UK Government is allowing unlimited exercise, so make the most of this.

Try and go out at the same time each day, and use the time wisely. Running, for example, burns nearly double the calories of walking, 

If you’re not a regular runner, or you don’t run at all, try to build up your running stamina but doing a but more each day. It’s surprising how quickly you can improve over a relatively short space of time, and running a little further each day.

Boost your metabolism
Increasing the speed of your metabolism can do much more good than you may expect, and it’s not that difficult to do.

If you have a slow metabolism, your body digests food and burns calories slower. To speed up your metabolism, ensure you’re sleeping for at least eight hours every night – and when you’re awake, eat more protein and drink more water. 

The NHS also has some useful exercise tips for speeding up your metabolism.

Balance
In order to succeed at this, you need to make sure you’re not too hard on yourself. Your days should be all about balance.

You may find that during lockdown you’ve found yourself reaching for snacks more than usual. But as pointed out in this article, allowing yourself treats isn’t the end of the world. Just make sure you balance them out with more exercise and stricter eating on other days.

If you are too strict, you’ll likely find that trying to be ‘good’ is too tough and you’ll find yourself failing – and probably reaching for the treats for comfort.

Monitor yourself
This is probably the simplest part here – and if you do (did) visit the gym or a slimming group regularly, it should come as second nature. Make sure you weigh yourself regularly.

Also, if you’re used to weighing yourself regularly – or were – you’ll likely have an idea of the weight you want or need to be.

Whether you weigh yourself daily or weekly – and this blog post may help you decide – ensure that you step on your scale regularly, and at the same time each day or week.

Make sure you have a suitable – and reliable – weighing scale. For extra help, such as when you’re aiming to increase your metabolism, consider weighing scales which provide more than just a weight – for example, body composition scales.

For example, a body composition scale will provide you with a Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) reading: a low BMR indicates a slow metabolism, and a high reading a fast one. This blog post explains why understanding BMR is useful for weightloss.

Further reading
* Get some stay-at-home work-out inspiration from MAN v FAT’s list of effective exercises.

* Find out how to stay in touch with your MAN v FAT teammates at this time

* What foods can keep you on track with your mental health? Take a look!

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