How to achieve a summer bod in 30 days
By Gavin Channell
Once things start to heat up, you want to be the hottest thing at the pool, the beach, or even on Instagram. After a long school year of a poor diet sponsored by ramen and natty light, you’re now faced with a beer belly to shed, which has been built up by carb after carb. Fortunate enough, there is a way to shed off that excess poundage through proper diet and exercise. There are tons of diets out there for depending on your end goal, but for the sake of shedding off excess poundage rapidly, we’re going to focus on the keto diet.
The Ketogenic (Keto) diet consist of a low carbohydrate and high fat diet. By depriving your body of carbohydrates, your body enters the ketosis metabolic state, which uses stored fat to burn for extra energy. Since most energy is acquired through carbs, the body must find another energy source, which is all that excess fat. Some carbohydrates are easily identifiable, such as bread and pasta, however carbs can be found in healthy foods as well such as many fruits and some select vegetables like carrots, corn, and sweet potatoes. If parting with carbs is undoable for you, then it would be ideal to consume your carbs close to your workouts to burn them off faster, and in addition fuel your workout even more. It’s important to remember to consume good carbs if you’re going to consume any, for example whole grains would be more beneficial than refined grains. Whole grains are composed of the entire grain, which have bran, germ, and endosperm, all very beneficial to your overall health by holding more vitamins and nutrients.
Your diet is going to be the key factor in your ability to achieve your goal, since what you put in your body is what your body is going to make of it. You simply can’t expect to build muscle without protein just as you can’t expect to make any further strides to your goal by consuming empty calories (foods high in calories and low in nutrients). However, your workouts are going to be a huge factor as well. If your main goal is to just lose weight and the love handles, cardio needs to be your main focus. Personally, a stair climber machine will be the most benefit cardio wise as it also gives you a solid leg workout, emphasizing your quadriceps as you’re stepping upwards, while burning a good number of calories. There is no true time to how long you need to spend doing cardio, the more you push yourself, the more results you’ll get. If your goal is to have some muscle definition while shedding off excess poundage, HITT (high intensity interval training) sessions would deliver the most benefit. Tabata’s are a great example of HITT training, where your workout consists of 20 seconds of work and 10 seconds of rest. Some Tabata workouts include wall balls, ball slams, rope pulls, sled pushes, squats, and even pushups.
No one will be able to reach their dream body in a short 30 days, but it’s 100% possible to look better than the day you started. Once you realize that the only thing standing between your dream body is you, then you can start to push yourself even more. To quote James Clear from Atomic Habits, “Men do what they must, the weak do what they want.”
