Wedding Weight Loss Tips – Lose Your Thighs
When it comes to losing weight for your wedding day, your thighs may be the last thing you think about. The following wedding weight loss tips will help trim your thighs fast.
A long bridal gown can hide thighs that have accumulated excess fat over the years. However, thighs are still an area where you can easily burn fat and at the same time get rid of excess fat on other parts of your body. Fat can easily accumulate on our thighs if our day-to-day jobs are not that active, and can be a real honeymoon dampener if you are planning a getaway to somewhere hot where you can don a swimsuit.
Looking great for your wedding can mean more than just looking great in a bridal gown. If you want to look great before during AND after your wedding then dealing to over-sized thighs should definitely be on the agenda!
OK lets get down to some strategies that will deal to thighs! Burning fat on the thighs and elsewhere comes down to a combo of diet, cardio workouts, and strength conditioning.
Using Exercise to eliminate oversized thighs
The key to trimming your upper thighs is cardio exercise. No amount of leg presses is going to help reduce size – all you will get from leg presses is awesome muscle hidden beneath a layer of fat. So prepare for regular cardio workouts.
Why is cardio so important in your wedding weight loss plan? The great thing about cardio workouts are that they are fantastic for increasing our heart rate and for increasing the blood flow – this in turn really ramps up our metabolism. As your metabolism becomes faster you will find that your body is more quickly able to convert the calories you consume each day into energy – rather than converting excess calories into stored fat.
In order to lose weight you really need to be doing 4-6 hours of cardio per week, and obviously the more you can do the better.
Additionally, if you can do cardio workouts that also emphasize the legs muscles, you will get toned muscles as well. Some such cardio workouts include spinning bike classes, cardio-martial art classes (kick-boxing, boxing), elliptical cross trainers, stair climbing machines, as well as the regulars of jogging and walking.
For the really adventurous, you could try Bikram Yoga classes. Bikram Yoga is hot yoga – 26 postures performed in a heated room over 90 minutes. These classes I can attest will really get your heart rate up, help remove excess fluid from your system, tone your muscles AND help get your mind in the right place for your coming wedding. All yoga is good but Bikram yoga in particular I can recommend highly as part of a wedding weight loss program.
How to Lose Thighs through improved Diet
Although Cardio is super important for reducing thigh size, changes to your diet can have an equally important affect as well. Diets that are high in saturated fats, sodium and sugar are number 1 causes of excess fat on our bodies. So eliminating or reducing these three no-no food types is essential for getting the size of our thighs down. Look for sugar substitutes, reduce the amount of high sugar sodas you are drinking – a switch to soda water with a dash of lemon cordial is going to help a lot.
The next thing to look at is portion control. Take a smaller plate for your meals and in this way you can reduce your portion size down to 75% of normal consumption. Practice the concept of “80% Full” – this is a Japanese dietary control concept that says stop eating when you are 80% full. The reason being that your stomach takes a while to send messages to your brain that you have satisfied your hunger. So even though you stop eating when you are 80% full, within 20 minutes you will feel content as your stomach catches up with the amount of food you just consumed. Try it – this works! Smaller meals means less calories consumed but you should not feel hungry because we are consuming way more food than we actually need in the first place.
Make sure that each meal has lean protein included – chicken breast with no skin is good – along with vegetables. In between meals if you need a snack, roasted almonds (no salt) are great, together with low-fat dairy and fruit such as bananas. Fruits will also give you natural sugars and can help wean you off of sugar in coffee or desserts.
Make sure you have some good quality carbs in your diet like wholegrain pasta, if you are planning on doing a cardio workout that day.
Water, water, water – keep hydrated and this will aid in keeping your kidneys functioning properly, removing toxins from your system as you exercise, AND keeping your metabolism working as fast as it needs to.
Strength Training Helps Reduce Thighs
Why do we need strength training to reduce the size of our thighs? Strength training helps muscle development – not big bulky muscles, but lean toned muscle tissue. The great thing about muscle is that it burns calories really fast, even when you are resting after a workout or sleeping in bed, your muscles are still burning calories. They are your best friend – and because muscle is denser than fat they take up less room and look a lot more toned than fat does. So replacing fat with muscle is an essential goal in your wedding weight loss plan.
Other than gym type exercises – leg curls, lunges with light weights – you will find that yoga provides a great workout for leg strength conditioning.
Strength building exercises should be interspersed with cardio workouts on alternate days. You don’t want to spend every workout focussing on leg strength alone.
Remember to incorporate these three components – Cardio, Diet, and Strength Conditioning – into your Wedding weight Loss program, and you will be well on the way to trimmer, leaner, great looking legs.