Hi Madhavi, glad to hear from you again! Congratulations on your new weight: 122-125 lbs range is just about perfect recommended weight for your height! The bad news that comes with it is that since you are already in good shape further fat loss will become more difficult that what you experienced earlier. This happens to everybody -- the better shape you are in, the harder it is to keep improving it. You'd need to be even stricter about the diet and more disciplined and intense with your exercise. It's also going to be virtually impossible to keep losing fat (in other words, to "tone up") without losing more weight, so you need to ask yourself how low you are willing to let your weight drop. In any case, as I said, you'd need to work harder if you want to keep lowering your body fat even more. You would probably benefit quite a bit from having access to a gym as opposed to just doing dumbbell exercises at home. If gym is out of the question then you'll need to make sure your dumbbells are heavy enough for more intense exercise -- between 8 and 12 repetitions per set before you reach muscular failure (in other words, before you simply can't do another rep without a rest). The program I gave you earlier can still work -- just make sure you're using weights heavy enough to exhaust you in 8-12 reps per set for most exercises. You should also consider starting to run instead of walking and/or doing HIIT (I think I told you about HIIT before -- if not, search for it on my site or just ask me in your blog). So basically it'll just come down to pushing yourself harder than before and being even more careful in what you eat. It will also require some weight loss, so you'll need to decide whether that's going to be acceptable for you. Without weight loss the more intense exercise program may help a bit with fat loss but most likely not very significantly. Hope that helps, just post back here with any questions or with your training/nutrition program details if you want some specific advice. Good luck! |
