Top Fitness and Dieting Tips for the Bride (or Husband) to Be

Everyone wants to look their best on their wedding day.

However, we all know that there is a ton of planning and stress involved so it’s not always easy to take the right steps towards looking your best when you’re trying to balance all of that. Rather than relying on fad diets or last minute workouts, your best bet is to install some principles that will help you reach your goals and manage the stress of the whole occasion so you can look and feel your best. The best thing to find is an easy diet plans to follow.

Our goal with this article is to help you realize your goals with minimal stress, in a safe and healthy manner. One thing that happens all too often is people wanting to reach goals without leaving themselves enough time to really do so. This again leads to increased stress and people taking unhealthy measures to reach their weight loss goals. This can all be avoided by starting early, or by instituting a healthy lifestyle for your everyday life. So relax, plan ahead and use these simple steps to improving your tone, cutting fat and reducing stress in the process.

Fad Dieting, Counting Calories & Other Things You Don’t Have Time for

Let’s face it, planning a wedding and getting ready to take this huge step in life causes a lot of stress. The stress hormone cortisol causes many of us to eat more and actually make the task of getting in our best shape for the big day more difficult. So instead of driving yourself insane and feeling sick from nearly starving yourself, setting some basic rules around dieting will help and be a lot easier to stick to. When it comes to counting calories, my suggestion is to save this for another time. Counting calories is a very difficult task to incorporate into your day in a regular time of life. When you add in the busy days of wedding planning, it’s not realistic to think you have time to clock every single thing you eat. So don’t. Instead, put guidelines around what you eat, and go for small portions. Let’s cover some of the basics that can make much more than a basic impact:

– Ice cold water
o Tall glass, first thing in the morning.
o This will jump start your metabolism.
– Balanced eating
o Each meal should consist of a balance of protein from lean meats or eggs, carbs from vegetables and fruit, and healthy fats (omega 3) like avocado, olive oil.
o Remember that fruit is also heavy in sugar; berries are your best bet for the highest anti oxidant content.
– 5 small meals (or 3 meals, 2 snacks).
o This will shrink the size of your actual stomach and keep your metabolism burning throughout the day.
o Start your day with a high protein breakfast (eggs are your best bet). This improves brain function and provides your body with lasting energy stores.
– No food within 3 hours of bed.
o Going to bed with a full stomach will make you wake up foggy and is not good for your metabolism. Your body slows down digestion while sleeping.

Tips for the Bride Starch and Refined Sugars Leave You Looking Unrefined

A consistent balanced diet consisting of meals that contain some protein, healthy fat and carbohydrates from vegetables and fruit will make things quite simple for you. If you want to cut some fat and tone up, these two simple deletions from your diet can make things a lot easier. There are a lot of desserts and cookies and cakes around wedding festivities, and you should feel free to enjoy these things when the time is right, but if you don’t limit yourself, you’ll have a really difficult time reaching your fitness goals for your wedding day. I once met a man who lost nearly three hundred pounds and brought his health back from the brink of disaster, when I asked him what he had done for dieting and exercising, his response was that he had not exercised at all, and had only made two changes to his diet: NO refined sugar, NO starchy carbohydrates. This means cut the white bread and pasta and skip the sugary desserts. Another diet killer around celebrations is alcohol; while everyone these days associates beer with weight gain, don’t be confused, hard alcohol and wine have plenty of sugar to soften your waistline.

It’s not possible for some people to completely eliminate sugar and starch from their diet, but there is a very direct correlation to losing weight when restricting these items. Even cutting down on the number of sugars you put in your coffee can have serious benefits. Keep in mind too that these “foods” are extremely toxic to your body and will add to your potentially already elevated stress levels. In addition, if you’re going to be exercising, your recovery time should address the need to reduce the natural inflammation caused by exercise and regular stress. Fish oil is a great supplement to help with this, which has also shown to improve cell health and aid in fat loss.

Snacks

When you’re running around like crazy trying to pull everything together, it can be easy to suddenly find yourself starving. When we hit the point of feeling extremely hungry, discipline goes out the window. The solution? Be prepared. A healthy snack is like a healthy meal, but downsized; it should contain a balance of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats. The simplest solution is to keep protein rich meal bars around, mixed nuts and berries or shakes on hand at all times. A little planning ahead can keep you out of the chip aisle at the gas station when you’re low on time and energy.

High Intensity Interval Training

Recent studies have come to suggest that high-intensity interval training, combining aerobic and anaerobic workouts are the most effective means of burning fat while developing strength. Despite years of common practice by many athletes, steady cardio workouts do not pull their weight the way that variable intensity intervals do. The idea is to mix periods of sprint-level intensity, with walking or light jogging periods of exercise to train both the aerobic and anaerobic energy response in your body. This can be performed with walking, swimming, bicycling—or even mixing weight training with jogging.

Have you checked out our article on High Intensity Interval Training?

Body Weight Exercises

Workout for beginners at home can kill a few birds with one stone. First off, frequently brides to be want to tone up without gaining too much size in their muscles for their big day. Bodyweight exercises are a great way to develop strength and tone, without adding bulk. Body weight exercises like squats, burpees and pushups can all be performed in the comfort of your home. Try adding a body weight workout first thing in the morning to wake your body up and get your metabolism pumping. This will allow you to better approach every other aspect of your day and save you time from skipping the trip to the gym.

Have you checked out our article on Body Weight Exercises?

Yoga

Ready to get rid of wedding stress and develop a healthy body? Try yoga. Vinyasa or flow yoga will elongate the muscles and promote organ health, improve digestion and reduce stress. There’s good reason that yoga has been practiced for over 5,000 years. Yoga is also an excellent suggestion for those who need to save some time and workout at home. There are thousands of useful youtube sessions that you can follow in your spare time. If you’re looking to turn up the difficulty level, try a yoga sculpt class that incorporates weights into a constant motion focused yoga class. If you’re new to this sort of training, clear the rest of your day for the first few visits. You will be exhausted, but you will feel incredible.

Conclusion

There is no quick fix for toning up and losing fat. However, if you give yourself ample time and follow these steps, there’s no reason you can’t be looking your best for your big day. If you plan your time wisely, you can even perform many of these tactics from home. In addition, removing toxic foods from your diet and managing your hunger will reduce your stress, cut fat and enable you to tackle all the many steps of planning and executing a wedding. Try to find the easiest diet plan to follow.Though it’s easy to lose discipline when our daily routines are thrown into flux, these simple steps can do a great deal to keep you feeling good, looking good and allow you to focus on what’s important: enjoying your wedding to the very fullest.

-Terry Asher