The one thing that can ruin your health and weight loss goals

Whenever somebody has a goal of losing some weight, improving their health, getting fitter or increasing their energy, the most common things most people do is try to change either their diet or the amount of exercise they do.  Doing so is an excellent first step; nutrition and exercise are super important when it comes to improving any aspect of our health and body.

Regarding nutrition, most will try to eat healthier foods, cut calories, or maybe reduce a macronutrient such as carbohydrates or fat in an attempt to kick start weight loss. A lot of people feel better when they reduce things like gluten, alcohol, dairy and sugar too.

Training wise, depending on the person’s preferences things like high-intensity interval training, weights, yoga, running or pilates are usually common options when folk are looking to get more active and increase the amount of energy they burn.

These are great steps for anyone to take who wants to look and feel better.  Most people would benefit from eating better quality foods and exercising more!

One thing that the majority of people overlook when it comes to health and weight loss is stress.  Stress is not really taken that seriously regarding one’s health and weight loss goals, yet it affects everything in our lives.

We all have different kinds of stresses in our lives, and we are all unique in terms of how much stress we experience on a day to day basis.  We can have nutritional stress, that comes from eating junk food and drinking alcohol.  There’s psychological stress that can come from work, kids, deadlines, financial pressure and general anxiety.  And there are also other stressors to our bodies such as dehydration, lack of sleep and our lifestyles in general.

It doesn’t really matter where theses stressors are coming from, they all trigger the same response in our bodies. Our sympathetic nervous system is dominant, and many things happen that can be detrimental to our health.

These include high blood pressure, elevated blood sugars, poor gut health, loss of muscle tissue, a decrease in metabolism, sore joints and constant fatigue.  A lot of people overlook the amount of stress that is in their lives and are unaware of the havoc it is causing within their bodies.

This is the main reason why many are left frustrated and fed up when they try to eat healthily and exercise more, but don’t see the results they’d expect from their efforts.  And if getting results was only down to training more and eating better, then we’d see a lot fewer people struggling to see progress!

When you reduce the stressors in your life, food and exercise works better for you and delivers faster results.  At Inspirit, we remove a lot of the stressors that people have to deal with in day to day life.  Our guests sleep better, get adequate sunshine, high-quality foods, they focus on health-boosting activities, such as yoga, walking and deep breathing.  In turn, this improves our client’s digestion and eradicates things like water retention and bloating.

Weight loss happens pretty fast when we address the stressors and find ways to reduce them. So before you go on a crazy diet or attempt taking on a vigorous training plan in an attempt to get results, ask yourself if there are areas in your life that are causing you stress, that you can work on and look to reduce.

Something as simple as improving your sleep, drinking more water, walking more or focusing on your breathing for 5 minutes a day will have a dramatic, positive effect on the way that you look and feel.  And when you start to manage the various stressors in your life, the diet you follow and the training program you do will work infinitely better for you.