Can I do sports at home?

Of course sports can also be done at home. Strength training in particular is well suited for sports within your own four walls. The advantage of this is that exercises at home can quickly be inserted as a break and you can also save the costs of a fitness studio and travel time.

On the Internet you can now find many helpful videos for exercises at home. Useful are often small dumbbells, which can be added for exercises and thus make the muscle building more effective. Endurance sports can be difficult to do at home, unless you invest in a home trainer.

How quickly can success be expected?

Often people who want to lose weight find the initial phase very frustrating, because in their eyes there are no effects, i.e. the scales show an unchanged value. At the beginning, it is important to remain patient and not give up too quickly. Sport not only reduces fat, but also builds up muscles, which of course also carry a proportion of the body weight, so that if you only look at the weight displayed on the scales, the effects initially neutralize each other.

Sometimes even at the beginning the weight increases due to the increasing muscle mass. The positive thing about muscle build-up is that muscles consume a relatively large amount of energy and thus improve the weight loss process. At the beginning of the “Diet through Sport” the body relies a lot on quickly utilizable energy through carbohydrates. Only after about thirty minutes of exercise does the body gain about 80 percent of its energy from fat. In the course of losing weight through sport, the body learns to switch to fat as an energy supplier, but at an ever faster rate, so that more fat is burnt in the course of the process than in the initial phase.

Change of diet

If you want to lose a few excess kilos, you should not only take advantage of sports, but also focus on your lifestyle, i.e. your diet, and think about it. Meals should be taken regularly and snacks should be avoided. If the body gets food over and over again, it is not dependent on using fat reserves as an energy source.

Especially ready-made products contain many unnecessary calories, so you should trust your own kitchen. As far as quark, butter, milk or cream is concerned when cooking, you can buy many low-fat products. Alternatively, you can also use soy milk, for example.

Sweetened drinks, especially lemonades, are also sugar/calorie traps that should be avoided completely. It is good to get the metabolism/digestion going through your diet: Dietary fibres, which are mainly found in fruit and cereal products, are particularly suitable for this purpose. If you follow these comparatively unrestrictive measures, some unnecessary calories are already lost.

The “low carb” diet, which is currently very fashionable, is a low-carbohydrate diet. Carbohydrates are sugars, which are the most important and fastest energy suppliers of our body. The operating principle of low carb nutrition is to supply the body with less energy-rich carbohydrates, so that the body has to rely more on fats as energy suppliers, so that the fat reserves are attacked and weight is reduced.

The reduced intake of carbohydrates also reduces the body’s insulin secretion. Insulin lowers the blood sugar level, enables carbohydrates (glucose) to be absorbed and thus utilised by the body’s cells and ensures that fat is built up. It is precisely this fat-building (anabolic) effect of insulin that is to be counteracted by the low carb diet.

What kind of food is consumed with a low carb diet? The carbohydrates to be avoided are replaced by fats and proteins in the diet. The diet then consists mainly of vegetables, fish and meat, and dairy products.

Carbohydrates normally make up about 50% of the diet. How drastically one reduces the carbohydrate content in the end is an individual decision. The maximum form is the so-called ketogenic diet, in which the carbohydrate content is reduced to almost zero.

The yo-yo effect usually occurs when a lot of weight is lost over too short a period. The diet is then usually drastically reduced and various diet powders are often used. The calorie intake/energy intake is drastically reduced, so that the body changes and its basal metabolic rate is throttled.

In the future, the body will therefore also manage with less energy. The successes will be achieved relatively quickly as a result. However, since this form of diet is usually accompanied by a severe loss of quality of life, it is only carried out until the desired kilos have been lost.

Afterwards, the diet is returned to normal, and often resumed as before the diet. However, the body is now prepared to burn little energy, because it is also provided with little energy. If the body is now supplied with a lot of calories/a lot of energy again, it will still use up little energy in the beginning and the rest of the calories will be in the form of fat, as an emergency reserve, so to speak.

The body is still programmed to store all excess calories as reserves to be prepared for even worse times. This leads to the notorious yo-yo effect. It is therefore important to find a form of nutrition that reduces calorie intake, but which you can also be comfortable with in the long term and which does not lead to a too drastic reduction in energy intake. Accordingly, starvation does not represent a long-term form of weight loss, as the body then goes down to a low flame and, with a normalised diet, starts to accumulate fat again. The best way to shape your diet is to combine it with sport, so that you can also treat yourself to a few “culinary delights” in between.