Are you looking to get in shape before your next holiday? Here are four steps to follow for you to lose a stone before summer as a woman over forty!

We’ve worked with so many women over forty who have been struggling to lose weight for years. They weren’t seeing any movement on the scales, no matter what they tried.

For many of these ladies, this was starting to have a big impact on their confidence and self esteem, making it difficult for them to enjoy life to the fullest.

At Trinity, we helped these women to remove the barriers that were blocking them from seeing results. We helped them to quickly and easily turn it all around, lose the excess weight, regain their confidence AND get back to feeling amazing in all of their clothes!

With summer fast approaching, it’s the perfect time to make your own amazing transformation before your next holiday. In our recent podcast episode, we lay out, step by step, how to lose over a stone before summer. Here are our tips.

You can do all this without having to sacrifice your career, give up time with your family, ban wine and chocolate OR step foot in a gym.

Start by cutting out hormone-disrupting foods

This is a brilliant place to start.

Your body and hormones change as you enter your 40s and 50s, even years before clinical menopause. This means certain foods, and extreme dieting approaches, actually make these hormonal changes worse, NOT better. This makes it harder to lose weight and easier to gain it – due to something we call the Weight Gain Triangle.

The following hormone disrupting foods can impact your weight loss efforts, and they are what we call the WADS foods:

  • Wheat
  • Alcohol
  • Dairy
  • Sugar

In our experience, it’s almost impossible to just wean yourself off these foods gradually, especially when your brain is hooked on these foods to deal with stress.

Instead, you must go cold turkey for 1-2 weeks to reset your cravings, optimise your hormones and kickstart your weight loss.

Just like a computer running slowly and crashing often, you’ve got to restart it to get it to work properly again!

We recommend you cut out these four key hormone-disrupting foods for 1-2 weeks to optimise your hormones. This way, you can kickstart your weight loss, reset your cravings and get into better habits with food and drink.

After reintroducing these food groups, we recommend continuing to avoid them for about 80% of the time – so these shouldn’t be staples, but you can enjoy them 1-2 times a week.

We do this inside our Fit Over 40 program using a process called the Diet Makeover. You can find out more about this here.

Exercise in a way that keeps stress levels low

A good rule to follow is this: if a diet plan means you have to starve yourself to see results, it’s unsustainable. And equally, the opposite also doesn’t work. Too much intense exercise in your diet plan, combined with a stressful job/lifestyle, can cause chronically high cortisol levels. This leads to seeing no results.

These negative exercise approaches include the following:

  • HIIT
  • Spinning
  • Gym classes
  • Long runs

Instead of following a plan which includes these exercises, we recommend you to do exercise that keeps stress hormone levels LOW but which deliver BIG results.

For our clients, we find LIST training (low-impact strength training) and upping step count to be the best exercise methods. This builds muscle, tones your body, burns fat and keeps stress levels healthy.

We do this inside our Fit Over 40 program with just 3 LIST sessions a week, and our clients typically lose 1-2 stone over a 12 week period. You can find out more here!

Proactively manage stress levels

Stress is a balancing act; you need to not have too much, while still dealing with the usual daily stressors of life. Yet, you can’t get rid of all the stress coming in. For example, work pressures, back-to-back meetings, and family responsibilities, can sometimes get out of hand.

If this isn’t managed, it can turn into having disrupted stress hormones. And then it can become more difficult to see movement on the scales.

This can lead to making poor food choices, such as drinking wine on the sofa back on the laptop finishing work that didn’t get done. Or, eating a whole sharing bag of chocolate every night!

It’s like a bath with the taps always on but the plug is in, you need to take the plug out to avoid it overflowing.

There’s lots of different ways to manage your stress levels. We do this inside our Fit Over 40 program using a process called the Stress Shield, which is a daily mindset routine that takes 7-8 minutes a day. It helps to avoid stress levels becoming too high.

Stop struggling alone

If you knew how to get results on your own, you’d have already got them.

Just like it can be more difficult to stay motivated when you’re working from home on your own, it can be really difficult to stay motivated to exercise and eat well when you’re doing it all by yourself – ESPECIALLY if you don’t know what you’re doing!

And when you’re over 40, it’s a new challenge that can be hard to figure out. For example, your hormones are different, so it requires a different approach. Or perhaps your lifestyle is busier and more stressful than ever.

In our experience coaching thousands of women over forty, you can get help in two ways.

Firstly, by being part of a group of like-minded women in a similar situation and on the same mission, so you don’t have to struggle alone.

Secondly, having an expert – with experience getting results with 1000s of women over 40 – to help you. They can guide you and keep you accountable to getting the results you want… and take all the stress and uncertainty out of the process!

These factors are exactly what our clients get when they join Fit Over 40! And, this is why our clients typically lose between 1-2 stone every 12 weeks, and some lose even more!

To find out more about how Trinity can help you see the results you deserve, simply click here.