Trying to lose weight for my sister's wedding

First of, I have to say I love this site and love reading the forums and seeing all the motivational support that is offered here :)

Well just like many people I am trying to lose weight...I am 25, 5'3 and weigh 125pounds. What I hate the most about myself is the extra belly fat that I have gained over the past few months. My sister is getting married mid november, I know I won;t be able to lose 10 pounds in a healthy way by that time. But would love any suggestions people have to lose weight (especially tips for losing belly fat).

I joined the gym today, because my aerobics routine was just not cutting it for me!! I was on the treadmill for 1hour today and burned 300 calories...I know the first thing about losing weight is having a good diet. So I am trying to cut out sugars and other bad things out of my diet.

What else can I do besides running on the treadmill?

Looking forward to some helpful tips :)

Work on your diet.  Control your portions.  That's going to have the biggest impact on your weight loss.  If you don't control your portions and diet, you may not lose any weight even though you work out like a fiend.

After that, find some form of exercise that you like and will keep doing.  Strength training, running, exercise bike or spinning, swimming...   Whatever you'll do regularly.

And your fat will come off whereever you body wants it to come off.  Not much you can do about that.

Clint

Clint is totally right, you can't control where it comes off first; frustrating, I know!

If some of what you're fighting isn't belly fat, but bloating, then you might be able to help slightly by keeping a very close watch on your sodium intake, making sure you drink plenty of water and consume lots of whole grains and fiber daily. If you don't eat a lot of fiber right now though, be careful and ease yourself into it; otherwise you're in for a huge tummyache!

BUT, if it is just fat, you really can't do much about it except control your portions and maybe try to mix in some exercise. Remember, there's no way that entire 10 pounds is only located on your stomach - the faster you stop caring about WHERE it comes off, and just focus on GETTING it off, the sooner you'll see any results and that in itself will make you feel great.

I'm gladyou are being realistic about your goal date...you most likely will not lose 10 by then, but it doesn't mean you can't keep trying after the wedding so you feel great this time next year, right?

For now:

Cut back on sodium and foods that cause bloating
running is an excellent activity for belly fat...I have lost so much since I started and my legs haven't looked this good in years.

Aside from strict eating habits, what you need is more high intensity style training to focus on helping you shred the bodyfat you want to lose. There are few ways to do this.

Look into these things :

- Circuit Training : With traditional weight training, you perform a set of a particular exercise and take 90 seconds to 3 minutes rest between each set depending on the exercise and the amount of weight used. Circuit training is different because you do a series of exercises back to back with no rest. Then after you have made it through the circuit, you take a 60 second break. This is one round. Do 4-6 rounds overall. You can also do this with body-weight exercises as well.

- High Intensity Interval Training - A style of cardio that targets bodyfat much better and gets your metabolism elevated for up to 24 hours after you are done. It mixes short bursts going as hard as you can (15-20 seconds) with slower recovery periods (40-60 seconds) for 15 minutes. You can do this on any piece of cardio equipment or with body-weight exercises.

I recommend :

- Burpees : One of the best overall conditioning exercises you can do. A good HIIT routine is to do as many as you can in 30 seconds and take a 30 second break. Keep repeating this until you have done 100 overall. This should take 10-15 minutes.

- Mountain Climbers : Another great intense body-weight cardio exercise.

Depending on what you eat, you may carry more weight in your belly (basically just extra undigested food). Try something like South Beach Phase 1 for a week or so and you may find that the extra undigested food goes away and you will FEEL thinner, even though you haven't really lost that much fat. That's how it worked for me anyway.