I know it was not a sabbatical but the lockdown was a time where many of us explored different lifestyles. Some of us got creative with our home workouts and diet whilst some tested how far we could go with our continuous Neflix binge and lack of exercise. I have to say I am guilty of not moving around much during lockown. So with that in mind, I thought I’d get a guest post on losing the lockdown pounds for us Nepali folks or for people who are used to eating Nepali food. Over to Pratik 🙂
Hi everyone, my name’s Pratik and I own the YouTube channel Everest Aesthetics. I try and share fitness information specifically for Nepali people around the world to help you get lean and shredded! To be honest, it’s much easier than you think. In this post I’ll go through some ways you can get lean while you’re stuck at home during this quarantine period. Keep in mind that steps 1 and 3 are probably the most important!
- Watching your calories (More Daal, Less Rice!)
The most important thing about getting lean is your diet, and more importantly, the number of calories that you consume. Just to summarise, everyone in the world can eat a certain number of calories to stay the same weight and this is called your maintenance calories and that scales based on your weight. As an example, someone who is 100kg will have higher maintenance calories than someone who is 60kg as they need to eat more to maintain their weight. If you eat less than those maintenance calories, you lose weight… It’s really that simple! If you’re wondering what your maintenance calories are, check out this website here and enter in your details and set your Activity Level to “Sedentary”. Even if you exercise regularly, please keep it as “Sedentary” as this is the most accurate (as activity level is subjective).
Once you’ve got that number, all you have to do is track your calories and make sure that you are eating around 10% below that amount. You can use the app MyFitnessPal to track your foods (also includes Nepali food).
I go through all of this in my video as well as going through the calories for some staple traditional Nepali food in my video below.
2. At Home Workouts
Yes, it really sucks that you don’t have access to a gym at the moment, but don’t worry! You can still get an awesome workout while you’re at home. Trust me, I’ve done this workout while I’ve been overseas on vacation and it’s kept most of my muscle mass. When I came back into the gym, it was considerably easier for me to lift the weights I usually did.
All you’re going to need is a backpack and a little bit of space. All you need to do is fill that backpack up with whatever you can to make it relatively heavy. After that, we can get started with our workout which will be a full body workout training the legs, chest, back, shoulders and arms. Here’s a breakdown of the exercises you should do.
If you want demonstrations of each of these exercises and how to do them check out my video here.
3. Walking Outside or Doing Any Sort Of Activity
If you are someone who doesn’t feel like doing a rigorous workout, you can also burn calories by simply just walking more or doing more activity. Every day I am doing some sort of low level activity to burn an additional 100-200 calories. Burning calories allows for two things being to either a) eat more food or b) to burn more fat. Both of which being options that we want. Walking, house work or doing your gardening are all examples of low level activity that helps to burn more calories.
These activities increase a function in your body called non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), which in less fancy terms essentially just means that you will burn more fat doing more low level activity. Who knew that when your parents told you to do more chores they were actually trying to get you lean!? If you want to learn more, check out this study by James A Levine that states the following:
“These somewhat unplanned and unstructured low level physical activities are associated with energy expenditure in excess of the resting metabolic rate (RMR)”
This basically means that the maintenance calories that we talked about earlier increases when you do more low level activity exercises.
There you have it! Three easy steps to help you get lean while you’re at home. All these steps are more than enough to help you get lean while you’re at home and you absolutely don’t need access to a gym to be able to do it. Learn more fitness related content on my YouTube!
