How Can I Lose Weight as a Busy Parent?

Putting weight on after having kids is normal. Keeping that weight on and being a bit overweight is also quite common. At some point, you are going to want to figure out how you can lose that weight. You may ask yourself how you’ll be able to do it. You’re already super busy between work and kids, so trying to find time to work out is going to be difficult. However, if you want to lose weight, you should be looking at your diet first.

Gaining weight happens because you eat more calories than you burn in a day. That means that you are eating more food than your body is using. In order to lose weight, you need to either eat less food (calories) or else you need to burn more calories to make up for what you’re eating. It’s almost always easier to fix your diet than to find time for working out when your time is already limited.

The reason to work on your diet is because it’s much easier to eat less calories than it is to burn more calories. As an example, running for 30 minutes is going to burn about 300 calories. While that may seem like a lot of calories, that is less calories than is in a basic latte from Starbucks. Additionally, you’ll likely be much hungrier after running for 30 minutes, so you’ll want to eat even more. If you’re not already eating healthy, adding hard exercise to your day isn’t going to make it easy to lose weight. On the other hand, looking at the foods you eat in a day, you can probably find an easy way to cut out 200-300 calories pretty easily.

Don’t get us wrong - if you have time for exercise, then you should absolutely be doing it. Even just adding a 30 minute walk to your day will make a large difference in how you feel and your overall health. However, if time is really a problem for you, then you need to look at your diet first. It will be worth it.

How do you start on changing your diet? The first step is to understand what you’re eating every single day. You need to track everything that you eat. Myfitnesspal is a very popular way to do this, but there are other similar apps that work as well. We can’t stress enough that you need to make sure you’re tracking absolutely everything that you eat and drink. Make sure to include all of your non-water drinks in your calories. Add any condiments that you eat. Make sure to note oil and butter that you may add to any foods you’re eating. Everything needs to be tracked, and you should do this for at least three days.

As you’re tracking your calories, you should also weigh yourself every day as well. You’re not trying to see the number go down just yet. Instead, you just want to get a baseline for how your weight fluctuates depending on how many calories you are eating. Weigh yourself at the same time every day - if you weigh yourself in the morning one day and the night the next day, your numbers will be skewed as your weight fluctuates a lot throughout the day.

Now that you know how many calories you’re eating every day, you need to start figuring out how you can cut those calories down. If you’re eating 2500 calories a day, try to cut that number down to 2200 calories a day. Keep it at that number for 7 - 10 days and measure your weight each day. At the end of the period, take your average weight to understand if your weight has gone down or up over that time frame. If your weight has gone down, then keep eating at the calorie number until you get to the weight that you want. If your weight is going up, or if you’ve plateaued, then you need to cut your calories further. This is the only way to accurately determine how many calories you should be eating to lose weight and maintain your weight. Calculators online can give you a basic idea of your calorie number, but every person is different for how many calories they should eat.

You may be wondering how you can cut calories from your diet. Remove any drinks that are loaded with calories. If you drink soda, move to diet soda. Remove juice and coffee that is loaded with sugar and cream (drink your coffee black). If you already don’t drink your calories, look at your other meals. Are you eating a lot of sugary meals? Do you eat cereal with your kids for breakfast? Switch your breakfasts out to simple and tasty breakfast options. Are you going out for lunch everyday? Make lunches for the week at home. Rather than stopping for fast food for dinner, try a simple dinner. You don’t have to do all of these things at once. You will likely be able to lower your calories fairly easily with just one of these strategies.

Losing weight is more about your diet than it is about working out. If you want to lose weight, look at your diet and make the changes to help you lose any extra pounds that you want and get yourself in better shape for your future.