For women especially, thighs are a common problem area for the accumulation of fat. Often through pregnancy, upper legs accumulate lots of fat and it can be hard to lose baby weight from the thighs after giving birth, or as we age or as we become more sedentary. Fortunately, when you aim to lose weight, there are several healthy weight loss remedies you can use to shed that fat. While doing specific exercises has been shown to not target the fat around a specific area, through a combination of cardio exercises, proper diet, and strength/weight training you can lose baby weight generally and lose fat from your thighs.
How to Lose Fat from the Thighs with Exercise
In order to get your body turning the calories you eat into energy rather than storing them as extra fat, you will need to do regular cardio/aerobic workouts. Three to five hours a week of cardio exercise is the recommended amount of time necessary to lose baby weight. This time can be achieved in numerous short sessions. Workouts only need to be long enough to work up a sweat. Being one of the healthy weight loss remedies, cardio exercise not only will both tone and slim down your upper legs, but also help you to feel good. Just doing leg presses or squats alone will only create well-developed thighs hidden beneath a layer of fat. Solid aerobic/cardio workouts will get your heart pumping blood around the body, and kicking your metabolism into overdrive. The faster is your metabolism , the quicker you will lose the baby weight and trim the fat from those thighs.
Great cardio exercises that don’t need you enrolling in a gym include exercises such as stair-climbing, walking, jogging, and dancing. Also, by walking or jogging on the bottom of a swimming pool, you can take the weight off of your joints. Or to increase the difficulty of your workout, you can walk or jog through sand. You can also try skipping, with at least 1000 skips everyday a great way to get lean. If you incorporate these healthy weight loss remedies regularly into your day, you will be well on your way to losing the fat on your thighs.
How to Lose Fat from the Thighs with Diet
Cardio exercise is only one part of the weight loss story. Diet is another. But rather than just dieting, healthy remedies to lose baby weight and fat, and not just from the thighs, involve changing the way you eat. When you constantly eat foods which are heavy in saturated fats, sugars, and sodium, your body will retain fluid and fat. For energy, the first thing your body burns is stored carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen). After that it will burn muscle tissue, and only then will the body grudgingly dip into the fat stores. This is the reason that most weight loss diets don’t work, especially the starvation type diets. It now is well documented that when the body is starved of food supply, the survival mechanism kicks in, and this causes the body to store fat. So a starvation diet may lead to weight loss, but unfortunately, not much loss of fat, and as soon as you do actually eat something, the body then immediately stores it as fat to replace any that was used. This definitely is not what you want if you are trying to lose baby weight and trim those thighs.
One of the best healthy remedies to lose baby weight is to eat small, frequent meals in order to keep your metabolism working steadily all the day. Your aim should be to eat five or six small meals a day, or three moderately sized main meals with healthy snacks in between. During waking hours, you should never go longer than about three hours without a meal or a snack. And never eat before bedtime. Time between going to bed and your last meal should be at least two hours, as the body likes to store food as fat while you sleep if you eat too soon before bed.
For each meal, try to eat some lean protein and vegetables, and eat slowly. For in-between snacks, fill up on low-fat dairy products, nuts, and high fibre fruits or vegetables, and wherever possible, try to eat raw foods. Adopting healthy weight loss remedies means avoiding “white” carbohydrates if you can, such as white bread, white rice, potatoes and the like, unless you will be eating them within one and a half hours of finishing a resistance training workout that was at least 20 minutes in length. If you are planning a workout, for quick energy, you can always eat good carbohydratess, like whole grain pasta. Also remember that if you are eating out, most restaurants can supply you with a salad or vegetables in place of the chips/french fries or potatoes, if you ask. These are natural weight loss remedies you can easily use when you aim to lose baby weight.
Importantly, it is not healthy to cut out high fat foods altogether. While dietary fat, if consumed in excess, can be stored, you must eat some fat to prevent the body from storing every bit of fat it does get. Also, some dietary fat is necessary for carrying the fat soluble vitamins A, D, E and K and certain antioxidants. One of the healthy remedies to lose baby weight is to try and stick to eating good fats. These include the fats comprised of medium chain triglycerides, such as coconut oil (virgin, organic is best). The medium chain triglycerides found in coconut oil (and in butter for that matter), as well as being slightly lower in calories, are also more rapidly metabolised, providing fast energy release before the body can store them as fat. Other good fats are found in foods like oily fish, such as salmon, tuna and mackerel, also in nuts and olive oil (again, virgin, organic is best). The American Heart Association recommends that no more than about seven percent of total daily calories should come from saturated fat sources, with total daily intake of fat no more than 25% of total calories consumed per day.
Good hydration is also one of the healthy weight loss remedies . Throughout the day, you need to drink plenty of water, on average at least 64 ounces or six to eight glasses daily. This helps to keep your metabolism as fast as possible. Avoid sweetened drinks and sodas or soft drinks, as you will be consuming lots of empty calories which will be counter- productive in your efforts to lose baby weight and trim the fat on your thighs.
How to Lose Fat from the Thighs with Strength Training
Another one of the healthy remedies to lose baby weight and fat from the thighs is to add some strength building exercises to your workouts. Strength (also known as resistance) training exercises work your muscles by applying resistance against which the muscles need to exert a force. By using weights three times a week, with 10-15 repetitions per set and two to three sets per body part, you will make great strides in losing body fat and reshaping those thighs. Doing regular strength training exercises will increase your lean (non-fat) body mass and raise your metabolic rate, thus helping with weight management. It is interesting to know that while a kilogram of fat uses up about five to seven calories a day at rest, in contrast, a kilogram of muscle will burn 50 to 100 calories a day at rest .
Of course, there is no need to go to the gym either to do light strength training. You can purchase hand and ankle weights quite cheaply, or you can get creative and use home devised weights, such as filled soup or food cans, which are very effective. The aim is to use a resistant force that will cause the target muscles to fatigue after 8-15 repetitions of an exercise. Strength training should not be done every day though. Best results are achieved when you do your strength training every other day and rest your muscles in between training sessions.
Leg presses, leg curls, and lunges, the latter done while carrying hand weights are some specific strength-building exercises which help tone the thighs. Leg lifts and wall sits can also make your thighs slimmer and stronger. There are also many yoga poses which can help to lose baby weight and fat on your thighs. You can also purchase or borrow an exercise DVD to help you perform the exercises if you want guidance or support and prefer not to visit a gym.
Whichever strength training exercise you choose, you will know that you have done enough repetitions when the target muscles feels weak and trembly. The incorporation of the healthy weight loss remedies of strength training, good diet and regular cardio exercise into your daily routine, will soon see you lose baby weight and excess fat from your thighs. Your aim to lose weight will be maximised and the results will speak for themselves.