Losing weight comes with lots of health and lifestyle benefits. From decreasing your risks of diabetes to improving your mobility and giving you much self-confidence, losing weight could be the only thing, you need to improve your quality of life.
It isn’t a piece of cake for anyone, though. Depending on your condition, you may have to cut off some of the things you loved to do so that you can be healthy.
How do I Choose a Weight Loss Program?
According to boutique gym studio Elevate 360, when choosing the best weight loss program, you will have to get a customized program that matches your needs. Usually, if you’re working with a personal trainer, they will take your body measurements and consult with you to see if you have any health conditions that may impact your progress before recommending a program they believe would be ideal for you.
Ideally, you will need to discuss with the PT how you can exercise safely, especially if you have a medical or physical concern. You may also need to let your personal trainer know about your weight loss efforts.
Depending on your condition, they may only advise you to tweak or change your program if that would be necessary. Alternatively, they may recommend that you begin with functional training exercises that would make it easy for you to engage in more intense exercises that can help you burn more calories and even build muscles if you’d fancy bulking up.
Every condition is different; therefore, you can expect your weight loss program to be different from the program of your friend who could also be struggling with a condition that looks like yours. Here’s a primer on some of the things your personal trainer may need to consider when choosing a weight loss program for you.
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Your Individual Preferences
It doesn’t really matter whether you’d like a weight-loss program that would make you work on your own or with support from other weight loss enthusiasts. A certified personal trainer will work with your preferences to create a weight loss program that ensures that you either work on your own or direct you to relevant weight loss support groups that would help your efforts.
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Personal Considerations
As we had hinted earlier, the weight loss expert who will be helping you with your program would also need to look into other factors that may be stumbling blocks to your weight loss success. For instance, they may need to ensure that the diets they’d recommend for your weight loss program aren’t impacted by factors like allergies or ethnic and cultural requirements.
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The Diets you’ve been trying
Chances are there you’re mostly considering the best weight loss program for you after trying a few that had been recommended by friends or those that you found online but didn’t leave the positive impacts you hoped for. If that’s the case, your weight loss expert who will be designing your program will need to consider the diets you had been trying and, most importantly, see if you had trouble following the diets and determine why the diets didn’t work. They’d also want to know how you felt physically after trying the diets.
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The budget you’ve set for your Weight Loss Program
Now, depending on your weight loss goals or individual preferences, your personal trainer may recommend that you use a few supplements, special meals, or special tools to help you lose weight. Even though these tools, special meals, and workout equipment may be helpful, the cost must be able to fit into your budget.
If for any reason, the costs don’t fit in or are stretching your budget extensively, you may need to consult with the weight loss expert to recommend an alternative program or see how the program may be tweaked to match your budget (if that’s possible). Besides your personal trainer designing the best weight loss program for you, it is also imperative that you ensure that the recommended program for achieving your fitness goals is safe.
It should not be a program that you will heavily struggle to adjust to using. This is important considering that the biggest percentage of weight loss programs demand an extensive commitment period as you make healthy lifestyle changes on factors like your behavior, eating, and exercising.
Ideally, you will need to be ready to modify your behavior to enjoy any success that would come with the recommended weight loss program. Therefore, when choosing your weight loss plan, you will need to ensure that it is;
- Balanced: A balanced weight loss program, in this case, should ensure that you get enough calories and nutrients. This is essential because even though you’re trying to lose weight, you don’t need to cut off all calories out of your diet, as that would predispose you to nutritional problems. The diet should also not have excessive supplements and vitamins.
- Likable: In being likable, the diet must include some of the foods you enjoy eating. Ideally, the plan should not be over-restrictive as that would only increase your risks of elapsing to your old unhealthy behavior. By not being over-restrictive, the weight loss program should also be flexible, meaning that it should incorporate a wide variety of foods instead of forbidding some of them completely. Importantly, it should allow room for occasional but reasonable indulgence if you’d fancy that but limit on high-sugar sweets and alcohol as they contain calories that do not come with enough nutrients you may need.
- Active: You probably, already expected this. The weight loss program should also include physical activity. Regular exercises with fewer caloric intakes can make it easier for you to quickly hit your weight loss goals. Besides, you also enjoy other benefits like contouring of muscle mass loss, something that would happen as you lose weight.
Over to You
Weight loss programs are helpful but they don’t guarantee similar results for all people. It is therefore important that you work with an experienced personal trainer or weight loss expert to help you come up with a customized one.
