Weightlifting is here to stay

As you can read in my weightloss story, my main exercise is weightlifting. It’s getting really popular lately for women, especially for losing weight. You can find a lot about why it’s good for you, I’ll try to explain some of those things in this post, but mostly I’ll talk you about my experiences (the good and the bad) and how it affected my weightloss journey. I will dedicate another post about ‘weightlifting 101’, because all those theories and stories are nice, but how the hell do you start?

Let me start by saying: Find a type of exercise that you like or might like and stick to it! Don’t force yourself into something you hate, because you will quit after some time, which is not a good thing for your lifestyle and mindset! Lifting weights is great, but if you don’t control what you put in your mouth, it won’t give you the results you want!

My weightlifting

So why did I start lifting? A couple of years ago, I tried to lose weight and tried weekly ‘bootcamp’ as exercise. I was very obese at that time, about 265 lbs/120 kg. It was very hard in the beginning, with the running, the jumping and everything in between. I had a blast though, the people were really motivating and I really got better fast. After 2-3 months I could go like the rest of them, and decided to start going twice a week. That was the biggest mistake I ever made, it was too much for my still obese body and I developed a severe hip injury that left me not even being able to walk normally for some weeks/months. Needless to say, I got very demotivated, stopped exercising completely and also stopped eating healthy (ok, I know, that’s so stupid). I gained the 20 kg I lost at that time, and it wasn’t till march 2014 that I wanted (and needed) a change. I looked stuff up, I did a lot of research on the internet and found out that lifting weights would be something for me. I already had a gym membership (I almost never went, whoops), it’s a nice gym and my parents and sister also go there. I talked my mom into going (she also wanted to lose some) and there we went. I had made a schedule for us to work on, we started going twice a week. I was very uncomfortable there, feeling looked at being so big and being with my mom, but we stuck to it! We started going 3 times a week (total body workout) and a trainer from the gym helped us to make our schedule even better. Currently, my mom is out with 2 broken feet (I know, it’s very bad and she’ll need surgery for at least 1 of her feet, it didn’t come from lifting though!). I’m still lifting and loving it every day! Lifting makes me feel strong, it makes me lose weight steadily (it’s still a straight line, look at the graph here on the right). What are the bad sides: if you don’t take it seriously and don’t do it correctly, it can cause injuries!

Why lifting?

There are a lot of reasons why a woman should lift. There are numerous articles about this with a lot of in-depth explanation. I’m going to try to make it simple for you:

1. Lifting heavy weights will transform your body into a fat burning machine and makes your body look hot!

That’s it 🙂 lol! Ok, maybe a bit too simple, I’ll add a little more of an explanation. Lifting will increase your muscles, bigger muscles burn more energy. When you do this during your weightloss journey, there will be no muscle loss (which WILL happen if you only do cardio). Lifting weights during your journey leaves you with a body that burns more, so you can also eat more, how about that? Many girls say: I’ll do cardio to lose weight and than I’ll do some toning…. Oh, that one really bothers me. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do cardio, I’m saying you should definitely add lifting. Don’t be scared to become like a man. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but those women train very hard for many many years and really to have those real man-like muscles you need steroid or testosterone injections as women naturally will not become that big.

You don’t get muscles with doing only cardio… Really? Really! You can read a very simple summation of what lifting does over here: (Picture is also from their website, it shows the difference between marathon runners on the left and sprinters on the right).

I’ll post a ‘weightlifting 101’ very soon, because if you’re like me, it can be really hard to start!