Time to Finally Say Goodbye to the Holidays

It has been over a month and many of us still have leftover holiday treats in our possession. These can be cookies, chocolates, or specialty hot beverage mixes. As delicious as these foods are, the majority of them are loaded with calories from sugars and saturated fats. I propose that you take today and throw away (or donate) the leftover goodies you have stockpiled. As good as they taste, they're not helping you get in shape after the holiday gluttony.

Think of it this way, let's say you made a New Year's Resolution to lose 15 lbs and tighten up the abs. For the last 3 weeks, you've been jogging 5 days a week burning on average 300 calories per half hour session. You've also been keeping up with an excellent program of ab exercises to tighten up your abdominal muscles. By this math, you should have burned at least 4500 calories which is around a pound and a half of weight loss (This also assumes you have not made any drastic changes from your normal diet). You get on the scale but it reads the same as when you started. What gives? It's all the snacking of junk food that you received over the holidays that is literally weighing you down. This can be particularly frustrating for those doing their best to make the lifestyle changes needed to live healthier but fail to see the motivation a drop in body weight can provide.

These tasty morsels of sugary goodness are mainly comprised of calories from large amounts of the sugar sucrose which tend to be the worst kind of sugar you can consume. When the body needs energy, it will utilize these carbohydrates (sucrose sugars) first because they are the easiest to break down directly into energy. In an ideal situation, to lose weight you would consume less easy to access carbohydrates and force the body to consume the fat reserves it has built up for energy. This will lead to weight loss and eventually, you will be in complete control of your body weight. Stop letting your efforts go to waste, put an end to the sugary foods and starting seeing the results you're looking for.