Getting fed up with not fitting in your old clothes? We’ve got you covered. Here’s how Anja got back into her bikinis in her forties.
In today’s blog, we chat with Trinity member Anja, who works full time in a stressful job alongside raising her 5 year old daughter.
Before she joined us, she was in her early 40s. The weight was piling on, and none of the diets she’d tried in the past seemed to be working any more. Anja felt like she was becoming old before her time, in her own words, but was skeptical that she could do anything about it and that, maybe, this was just part of getting older…
However, since joining Trinity, Anja’s turned that all around. She’s lost around a stone, but her body shape has changed way beyond that! She’s now feeling far stronger for her daughter, far more confident with her husband, and she even wore a bikini on a recent beach holiday without worrying about how she looked!
In our recent podcast episode, Anja shares the candid truth about how she achieved all that, despite a number of challenges and setbacks along the way. Her story is really inspiring, and you can listen to it via podcast here.
Below, we detail how customers like Anja can get back into their bikinis again! You can read this in more detail here.
Start by cutting out hormone-disrupting foods
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!
To find out more about how Trinity can help you see the results you deserve, simply click here.