Fed up of seeing no results? Here is the best approach to drop 2 dress sizes by summer for women over forty.
At Trinity, we’ve speak to more and more women in their 40s and 50s who are looking to get on top of their fitness goals this year. And understandably – who doesn’t want to drop a couple of dress sizes by summer? However, for many of the women we speak to, it seems like no matter what they try, they can’t seem to get the scales moving.
It’s incredibly common for women over forty to continue trying everything which worked in their 20s and 30s, but then they end up seeing ZERO results now they’re over forty. They want to try the best approach to drop 2 dress sizes by summer, however it’s like their body is fighting against them, and year after year their weight is creeping up.
Despite this, we’ve helped 1000s of women to remove the barriers that were blocking them from seeing results. We help them to quickly and easily turn it all around. They learn how to lose the excess weight, regain their confidence and get back to feeling amazing in all of their clothes (all in just a few short months)!
If you’re wondering how this was possible, you’re in luck. In our most recent podcast episode, we tell you the best approach to drop 2 dress sizes by summer – step by step! All without having to sacrifice your career, give up time with your family, ban wine and chocolate or step foot in a gym!
Start by resetting your brain-food connection
Trying to eat better when your brain is hooked on sugary foods or alcohol never works. As this will disrupt your hormones, it actually makes the problem worse! However, in our experience, it’s almost impossible to just wean yourself off gradually.
We recommend you go cold turkey to reset your cravings. Like a computer running slowly and crashing often, you have to restart it to get it to work properly again. This is one of the best approaches to drop 2 dress sizes by summer.
To do this, you need to cut out certain foods. These foods are ones which people struggle to eat in moderation, and you should do this for 1-2 weeks to reset your cravings and get into better habits with food and drink. We recommend cutting out:
- Wheat
- Alcohol
- Dairy
- Sugar
This is a practice we do this inside our Fit Over 40 programme using a process called the Diet Makeover! You can find out more here.
Exercise in a way that keeps stress levels low
If you do no exercise or movement, this means you have to starve yourself to see results – which is incredibly unsustainable. A sedentary lifestyle is very common with working from home, as many clients stay sedentary at a desk all day. Equally, the opposite also doesn’t work. Too much intense exercise, combined with a stressful job or lifestyle, causes chronically high stress hormone levels which leads to seeing no results.
Instead, we recommend you to do exercise which keeps stress hormone levels low, but delivers BIG results e.g. LIST training (low-impact strength training) and upping your step count. These activities build muscle and tones your body, burns fat, and keeps stress levels healthy.
We do this inside our Fit Over 40 programme with just 3 LIST sessions a week – for 30-45 mins. Our clients typically lose 1-2 stone over a 12 week period, making it the best approach to drop 2 dress sizes by summer!
Eat the right amount for you
This might sound boring (and obvious) but this is the reason that ALL diets work! You can’t escape the basic science of weight loss.
Calories are measure of how much energy is in food and drink. You must consume the right amount of calories consistently, over the whole week, in order to lose weight. This means not too much and not too little…
A lot of diets will hide this from you using points systems or other rules to effectively achieve the same thing. However, they make it seem like they’re doing something special! For example, keto/low carb simply cut out a whole food group, which then cuts a load of calories out your diet. Equally, point systems are tracking calories, but less accurately.
A lot of diets are also too extreme and cut calories too much. In this case, the body interprets this as starving and increases internal stress levels. You can get away with these approaches in your 20s or 30s, but this can put the brakes on weight loss for women over forty.
The Goldilocks Principle: You need to eat the right amount for you. Not too much, not too little, just right. This number is unique to everyone, taking into account their height, weight, body fat percentage, age, hormonal situation, dieting history and more.
However, it’s not just about calories, especially for women over 40. If you eat the wrong sources of calories, you can miss out on a number of other critical nutritional elements you need to keep your hunger hormones in check to avoid cravings and overeating.
We regulate this using a process called Hormonally Balanced Eating (HBE) inside our Fit Over 40 programme, which means our clients are able to lose 1-2 stone every 12 weeks, without having to starve themselves or give up their favourite foods!
Proactively manage stress levels
It’s impossible to get rid of all the stress coming in. With work pressures, back-to-back meetings, family responsibilities, looking after ill family members and the house… it can sometimes get too much.
If this isn’t managed, it can turn to disrupting stress hormones, which leads to:
- Drinking wine on the sofa, finishing work that didn’t get done
- Eating a whole sharing bag of chocolate every night
- Mindlessly munching through an entire bag of crisps and biscuits
It’s like a bath with the taps always on (the water represents stress) but the plug is in. You need to take the plug out to avoid it overflowing.
There’s a few different ways to do this. We go through these ways 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 and avoids stress levels becoming too high – and self-sabotaging as a result.
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 forty, it’s a new challenge that can be hard to figure out. We don’t know how it is for you, but in our experience there are two things which can help. Firstly, being part of a group of like-minded women on the same mission, so you don’t have to struggle alone. And secondly, having someone to help you, guide you and keep you accountable to getting the results you want… and take all the stress and uncertainty out of the process!
And that’s exactly what our clients get when they join Fit Over 40. Equally, this is why do our clients typically lose between 1-2 stone every 12 weeks, and some lose even more!
Find out more about how we can help by clicking here!
