The most effective ways to shift the winter weight quickly

The new year’s festivities are fading away over the horizon, and 2017 is getting into it’s stride. So far so good. But what if you’re still carrying around the extra weight from the festive season, or still packing on extra winter weight as we speak?

Hey, it happens, but don’t lose heart. Here are some simple and effective tips for shedding the winter weight fast.

Begin training for a summer race

Training towards a goal or challenge is one of the best ways of motivating yourself to get up and moving, consistently.

A summer race is the perfect challenge to begin working towards, specifically a shorter race like a 5k or a 10k.

If you’ve always been meaning to get into a regular running or cycling routine, check out which races are being held this summer. Commit to taking part in one, and use some of our other guides to develop a training program for yourself.

Whichever program you design, you’ll be training several days a week and will need to monitor your eating habits. Fat loss will follow, naturally.

Once you’ve picked your race, tell your friends and family that you’ll be doing it come summer. If you ever find your motivation flagging, just think of how much you don’t want to let everyone down by dropping out.

Audit your new years’ resolutions

This is pretty much the exact point in the year that new year’s resolutions get side-tracked and go off the rails.

The initial burst of enthusiasm likely got left behind somewhere in January, and by now it all seems a bit like work.

You find yourself skipping workouts, or cheating on your diet more and more.

Take an evening to sit down and audit your fitness-based new year's resolutions. Update them if you need, remind yourself of why you set them in the first place, draw up a plan of action to get back on track, and then do it.

Maintaining good fitness and a healthy weight isn’t about sudden bursts of inspiration as much as it’s about always checking up on yourself and getting back on track when you begin to falter.

Life gets in the way of everyone’s training sometimes. Dust yourself off, re-evaluate, and start again.

It’s never too late for a new diet

Maybe you didn’t set any specific new years’ resolutions for your fitness or diet. No problem. Just do it now.

The most effective diet strategies for weight loss are the ones you can make a part of your life, and stick to effortlessly, through habit.

There are good reasons to try an intense diet (like the ketogenic diet) for rapid-speed fat loss, but it’s no good shedding the weight just to fall back into negative eating habits right afterwards.

Start small, today, and tweak your existing diet practices so that you have something healthy and sustainable to stick to.

We’d recommend starting off by getting a food scale and tracking your daily calorie intake using a tool like My Fitness Pal, cutting processed foods from your diet, and dramatically reducing your sugar intake.

Take the dive and just pick up where you left off

One of the most frustrating things about being away from the gym for a while, or getting side-tracked from your diet, is knowing how much progress you may have lost in the meantime. This could be in terms of gaining back the hard-lost pounds, or losing your cardiovascular conditioning or strength.

The key is in not overthinking it and just picking up where you left off as if nothing happened. When it comes to fitness, you’ll have to take a few steps back to prevent injury, but you may be surprised how quickly you begin to gain back what you’ve lost (or lose the weight you’ve gained) once you finally force yourself to get back into it.