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Not Losing the Weight You Want? – Consider These Six Things

March 27, 2012 By

Losing weight can be invigorating… and frustrating, maddening, overwhelming, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could choose a diet plan that would allow you to lose 2 pounds a week (or 5 pounds, or insert your number here ____) every week until you reached your goal?

But if you have ever been on a diet, you know that’s not how it works. Some weeks your effort reflects the number of pounds lost. Some weeks you work your butt of and lose nothing. Some weeks (all be it rare) you slack a little and lose a pound or two.

Calories IN vs. calories OUT is definitely important, but there are other things that creep into the equation.

Here are 6 things to keep an eye on to make sure your effort reflects your outcome.

Eating too few carbohydrates
It’s true that we need to be careful when it comes to carbohydrate intake to maximize fat loss, but we still want to make sure we are getting enough carbs. Did you know that fat molecules will not enter the fat burning cycle unless they have a little glucose (carb) molecule to take them there. It’s easy to get excited when you reduce your carbs and instantly lose weight, but often this is more of a factor of storing less water than fat loss.

Eating the wrong type of carbohydrates
You might be eating the right amount of carbohydrates, but the type of carbs you eat has a big effect on weight loss. There is a buzz around high glycemic index (GI) foods and low GI foods, and the reason is that the type of carbs you eat will directly affect your weight loss. To keep it simple, low GI foods are good, high GI foods are bad.

Good carbohydrates are complex carbohydrates that take the body longer to break down. These carbohydrates typically are high in fiber, which takes the body longer to break down and helps stabilize blood sugar levels. The best sources of good carbohydrates include fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, whole grains and beans. All of these foods provide the body with energy, vitamins, fiber, minerals and phytonutrients. In addition to fresh fruit and veggies, good carbohydrates include whole grain cereals, whole wheat breads and pastas, and brown rice.

Bad carbohydrates are foods that are easily digestible and provide the body with limited nutrients and vitamins. Because these foods are so quickly digested, your body will experience a quick spike in energy followed by a crash. Examples of bad carbs include soft drinks, cakes, cookies, chips, white bread, white rice, alcohol.

Eating too little fiber
When we are eating for weight loss and we restrict our carb intake, it also changes our intake of fiber. Fiber might be the single most important secret to weight loss, and it is an essential factor for maintaining health. It helps you feel fuller and therefore eat less. It also binds with acids in the body and helps carry out excess fat, and it speeds the transit time of the food we eat, keeping the intestines in good order.

Getting too little sleep
When we are constantly sleep deprived the body secretes a hormone called ghrelin. Higher ghrelin levels have been shown to reduce energy, stimulate hunger and food intake, and promote retention of fat. Do you ever notice that some days you feel hungry all day, even though you are eating your regular diet. Think back to your sleep patterns, and you may realize that you haven’t gotten as much sleep lately.

Eating too little fat
Low fat diets have been really popular, but too little fat may actually make it harder for us to lose weight. Essential fats (aka good fats) help burn fat by helping to transport oxygen, vitamins, nutrients, and hormones to the body’s tissues.

Good fats include foods like non-hydrogenated oils (olive, canola, sunflower, peanut, sesame), avocados, olives, raw nuts (almonds, peanuts, walnuts, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, pecans, cashews), fatty fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring, trout, sardines), and tofu.

Bad fats include things like high-fat cuts of meat (beef, lamb, pork or chicken with the skin) whole-fat dairy products (milk and cream), butter, ice cream, commercially-baked pastries, cookies, doughnuts, muffins, cakes, pizza dough, packaged snack foods (crackers, microwave popcorn, chips), margarine or vegetable shortening, any fried foods (French fries, fried chicken, chicken nuggets, breaded fish), and candy bars.

Drinking too little water
Dehydration happens more than you think. If you want to have steady fat loss and high energy, it’s necessary to keep your body and liver hydrated every day. Our liver converts the fat soluble toxic chemicals (that we consume, breathe in, and absorb through our skin), into water soluble chemicals that are flushed out by the kidneys through urine. With limited water supply, the kidneys cannot completely flush out metabolic and foreign waste and weight loss can be more difficult.

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Cooling Down After Cardio – Is It Necessary?

August 20, 2011 By

When you are done with your cardio, and the shower or couch is calling, sometimes the thought of spending any extra time to cool down ranks right up there with organizing the desk drawer. Is it really that important to cool down after cardio?

Well, yes, because the purpose of the cool down is to redirect the blood flow and drop the body temperature back to normal before rushing off to meet the challenges of the day. It also settles down the heart beat quicker than without a cool down to feel better faster.

During a cardio activity, the blood is pumping vigorously through the muscles as they contract, and more blood ends up going to the extremities. When the heart is pumping fast, and there is a sudden stop, there’s a chance that the blood will start to pool in your legs and feet. Can we say head rush! This can lead to a drop in blood pressure, which may cause dizziness, nausea, and even fainting.

Cooling down allows the muscles to contract at a steady pace, which keeps the blood flowing back up to the heart instead of hanging out in the extremities, alleviating the chance of passing out in front of that hottie on the next machine over.

It’s time to chill, as cooling down is the easiest part of a cardio workout, so enjoy it. Ease out of the workout just like easing into it during a warm-up —taking it slow for five to ten minutes (or when breathing and heart rate return to normal), depending on the intensity of the activity.

Not only will cooling down get the body back to feelin groovy, but it punctuates a good workout kind of like a victory (slow) dance.

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Motivation Tips To Keep You Moving

May 31, 2011 By

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What motivates you?

What makes you want to succeed? It is different for everyone, but once you find what pushes you to be your best, you need to use it every day, so it will get you through those difficult days when you want to skip a workout or cheat when you shouldn’t.

Here are the things that motivate me.  Some days it is all of them, and some days it may be just one.

1. Visualization

There are many tricks for visualizing your success. When I was training for my body building competition, I would visualize myself on stage going through all my poses. Then I would visualize myself taking the first place trophy!

Some need to actually see it in a photo, so they cut out a picture of someone they admire or want to look like. You can even take your head off of one photo and paste it to the body of someone whose physique you want. Just make sure that if you are a Tyra Banks, you don’t visualize looking like a Kelly Ripa.

2. Competition

Many people have that competitive spirit.  I definitely do. This can work to your benefit no matter what kind of exercise program you follow.

Beating someone or achieving victory is a great feeling even if you don’t think of yourself as super competitive. On the flip side, losing and seeing others “win” drives people too.

Another way to compete is to compete against yourself. Whatever you did last week, you can try to beat this week.  This can come in the form of a faster mile, adding 5 pounds to your bench press, doing an extra push up, staying on the treadmill for an additional 10 minutes, etc.

3. Role Models

Most athletes, whether basketball players, tennis players, or bodybuilders have a person that they look up to and want to emulate.

So if there is anyone out there that has done what you want to do, they can inspire you and motivate you to achieve your goals. It doesn’t have to be someone famous, either. Maybe your mom or neighbor has achieved something that you want to achieve.

4. Positive vs. Negative

Both types of re-enforcement can motivate, and it is just a matter of what works for you. A big generalization, but men often do okay with negative re-enforcement, where as women are more drawn to positive re-enforcement.

When we were living in South Korea, we took a Tae Kwon Do class with two other women teachers.  Koreans take their Tae Kwon Do very seriously, and our “teacher” was very serious.  He didn’t speak any English, and we barely spoke Korean, but we could tell by his tone and his facial expressions of disappointment that we were not doing things right.  Almost every class had one of us girls crying by the time we left.  My husband never even flinched.  He didn’t even understand what we were talking about when we tried to describe how the “teacher” made us feel.

If you are one of those people that needs to be comfortable and positive to achieve your best, then make sure you are surrounded by coaches and people who offer that type of encouragement.

On the flip side if you respond better to proving the haters wrong, or showing your coach you are not a weak piece of poo (or whatever), then you know the type of coach or training partner to look for. You are not wrong for either tactic pushing you.

Whether it is any of these strategies or something else completely, as long as it is something that motivates you and makes you more confident in your abilities, then use it to your advantage to reach all of your goals.

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Getting Healthy Takes Time – 3 Steps to Help You Make The Most of Your Time

May 17, 2011 By

The other day I was watching a segment on TV about face creams.  The spokeswoman was talking about the products and how each of them treated the different signs of aging.  For one product, she said that the most important ingredient was patience, because it might take time, up to a few months, to see any results.

Getting fit and healthy is the same, and one of the most important ingredients is patience. It takes time to see results. 

Ironically, people end up wasting a lot of time because they don’t manage their time wisely. They spend too much time doing one thing, not enough time doing important things or wasting time doing anything and everything but the right thing. When people feel as though their effort does not match their results, they give up. 
 

Here are 3 simple steps to help you make the most of your time.
 
Take more time to eat less. Eating right takes time. The whole process starts with grocery shopping. If you don’t shop well, you can’t expect to eat well. You have to prepare the food and do whatever it takes to make sure you have healthy food with you at all times. Packing lunches and snacks are a vital part of avoiding temptation. Paying closer attention to calories and portion sizes will also require some time but the payoff is tremendous.  
 
Take less time to exercise more.  Many people invest a lot of time in what they would call exercise, but it  is really just increased activity. Although activity is good for your health, it’s not as effective for weight loss. Many people are just going through the motions and wasting a lot of time doing minimal effort. I see people doing 60 minutes of cardio casually reading a magazine.  What a waste of 30 minutes.  If  they would do 30 minutes of intense (where it is tough to speak a sentence let alone read a magazine) cardio, the effect would be more dramatic, and they would see results quicker.   Really burn some calories by turning  up your cardio effort. If you do weights, train at a higher intensity with less rest in between. You don’t have to spend three hours at the gym everyday. Commit to one powerful half hour three to five days a week and make every minute count! The more quality time you invest, the greater the reward.
 
Take the time to make sure you are not wasting time. This is a biggie. People spend a lot of time and energy on things that don’t work. Fad diets, weight loss gimmicks, books and fitness magazines often lead you to believe weight loss can be easy. It’s our human nature to try the easy way first. In the end, we just waste a lot of time trying to avoid the inevitable. Other people struggle because they completely go it alone with no guidance at all. A person who is basically guessing their way through their fitness program is doomed. Don’t waste your time floundering around aimlessly. Invest a little time initially to get good information from a trainer, a doctor, a well respected web site, or even me. Diet and fitness work. If you take time to understand why and how it works, you’ll see results in plenty of time.

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The Best Way to Exercise – Watch your Results Soar

May 4, 2011 By

Google ‘health and fitness tips’ and you will find 155,000,000 results. Talk to five health and fitness professionals and get six different opinions. Clearly there is enough information to go around.

However, with all this information, what are we supposed to believe? Have you ever started a workout routine only to read a week later that you are doing it all wrong? It can be frustrating and overwhelming.  One of my favorites is the debate as to whether you should do cardio before or after weight training.  I’m still not sure, so I alternate before and after.  I figure at least I have a 50/50 chance of getting it right.

Fortunately, there are actually a few tips that most everyone will agree on, and one of them is my favorite.

It has changed the way I work out, and my fitness results have soared!

On the surface, this may not seem like an earth shattering, OMG Kristi you are a genius type of tip, but it really is.

The tip is INTENSITY.

Whatever your exercise routine, do it with intensity. Maximum intensity.

For all of you who just said “duh”, this is really one of those tips that is easier said than done and takes some practice.

I have been weight training consistently (and fanatically) for 12 years, and not until this past year did I really understand Maximum Intensity.

I got some advice from a college football coach. He put together a three-week plan that included an all over body workout three days a week for three weeks. No cardio.

My first reaction was serious anxiety. How could I work out so little and not either lose muscle mass or gain fat or both?  However, in his plan, he said something that made me want to try it.  He told me that I had nine workouts, and I must make the most out of every rep, every set, every workout, because there are only nine. So work out at your max intensity and make it count.

My second reaction was excitement about this challenge to make it count.  It was on!  I always thought I worked out really hard until I started focusing all my attention on this make it count stuff.  Immediately, I was doing more weight and more reps than I had ever done, and I saw my muscle tone change (something I hadn’t seen in a while).

An added benefit: my workouts are much shorter now. If I really focus on the exercise and the intensity, instead of the kid’s next field trip, or what I am making for dinner, I can get a better workout doing fewer exercises and fewer sets.

4 Tips for Maximum Intensity

  1. Stop thinking about your list of 46 things you have to do today
  2. Only think about the exercise you are doing right now
  3. Make sure your last rep is as good of form as your first rep
  4. Ask yourself if you can do one more rep or one more minute, then one more, then one more

If you are going to make the effort to exercise, make it intense.

Make it count.

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Exercise for Free – The Two Best Body Weight Exercises

April 26, 2011 By

A friend of mine asked me “if you did not ave any access to weights and only got to choose two exercises what would they be?” As a weight-training fanatic, my first thought was anxiety, but as I ran through the options, there were two clear-cut winners.

1. SQUATS – I have a love hate relationship with squats. I love them because they are so effective.  I hate them because if you do them correctly with a lot of intensity, they can make your legs feel like they are on fire. I think that is called a ‘good burn’.

You don’t need a barbell, stacked with weights, bending across your back to benefit from this great lower-body exercise. The squat works your hamstrings, your glutes, and your quadriceps.
 
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and with your hands either on your hips or stretched out directly in front of you. Lower yourself slowly until your thighs are parallel to the floor, like you are sitting in a chair, hold in that position for a second, and then rise quickly back to the starting position. To get the correct form, put a chair behind you and lower into the sitting position just barely touching the chair, then raise back up.

 2. PUSH-UPS –  Push-ups are one of the best upper-body exercises you can do, even if an entire gym full of weights were available. Push-ups work your entire upper body muscles.

Use proper form and technique, which includes keeping you hands just slightly farther than shoulder-width apart. If standard push-ups are too difficult for you at this point, try modified push-ups (knees on the ground).

If you are looking to start a resistance-training program but aren’t quite ready to join a gym? No problem because your own body weight is free. And, doing these two body weight exercises will certainly get your muscles moving.

These are exercises you can do during commercials, first thing in the morning, even in your office during a break. Challenge yourself to up your count each time; by trying to do one more than you did the last time. There are also so many variations to make the squat and push-up more challenging.  Are you ready? Email me for ideas on adding intensity to both. Musclemommy@fitchicktricks.com

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The Great Carbohydrate Debate!

April 23, 2011 By

carbohydrates

To eat carbs or not to eat carbs?  Many Americans still seem confused about whether they should eat carbohydrates or not.  Years ago, some popular diet plans suggested that carbohydrates make us fat.  The reality is our bodies need carbohydrates for energy.

So why all the controversy over carbohydrates?  It may stem from the type of carbohydrates that most Americans choose.  When you think of the typical American diet (and the foods your kids beg for) which comes to mind?

Frosted flakes for steel cut oats?

Apple juice or a fresh apple?

White rice or brown rice?

A candy bar or some trail mix with dried fruit?

The American diet is filled with refined sugars and simple carbohydrates that absorb into the bloodstream quickly, resulting in sugar “highs” and “lows” throughout the day.  These types of foods are typically high in calories and low in nutrition and are associated with unhealthy weight.

Complex carbohydrates, on the other hand, are associated with a great number of health benefits.  They are high in fiber which helps with digestion and slowing absorption into the bloodstream.  Fiber also helps us to feel fuller faster, and stay satisfied longer, which can help maintain a healthy weight.

In other words, you no longer need to fear carbohydrates, but you do need to choose the right ones. Avoid baked goods made with white flour, processed cereals, fruit juices, table sugar, soft drinks, and candy.  Instead choose from a variety of healthier carbs including whole grains, whole grain breads and cereals, fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, and low fat Greek yogurt.

Enjoy!!

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Good Morning Butt – Tighten your Gluteus Maximus

April 13, 2011 By

I really like exercises that work a couple of different areas really well.  I also like exercises that I can offer to you that you can do at home or in the gym.

And when I saw the sketch of this girl’s butt, I definitely wanted to share this one.  Who doesn’t want a butt like that?  I know I do!

So, among the exercises that strengthen lower back muscles and work to tighten and build your “gluteus maximus” (as my daughter would say, and then laugh) is the exercise called ‘Good Morning’. It provides wonderful results on a regular basis.

Why on earth is it called Good Morning?  You can snopes this, but I heard that it was called that because the action of it looks like a bow of respect used in some cultures to say hello, good morning, etc.

Good Mornings can be done with two dumbbells, or a barbell, or just your body weight.

Hold the weight at your shoulders in the initial position. Then you bow slowly with your back straight and knees bent a bit. You should bow down as far as possible without stretching your back below parallel and then return to the starting position, using hips to provide necessary balance.

The basic rule of Good Mornings is keeping your spine straight, without any curvature or rounding. To do this you should keep your chin up and work with your hips as well as lower back muscles on returning to the starting position.

If you want an extra challenge, keep your legs perfectly straight, and that will add an extra blast to your hamstrings.

(If you use a barbell, make sure it rests across your shoulders and not on your neck)

One exercise you can do anywhere… to work your lower back, glutes, and hamstrings… now that is working smarter!

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3 Steps to Maximize Your Workouts

April 1, 2011 By

I love weight training. I have been doing it for over 15 years, and I am always learning new ways to maximize my workouts and my results. Just walk into a bookstore or browse online and you’ll find all sorts of information on how to get the benefits of weight training, but there are a few steps you should follow no matter what your goals.

Before I tell you about the best ways to maximize your workouts, I want to mention a common myth about weight training and women. Some women are hesitant to add weight training to their exercise routine because they are scared of looking too bulky.  The truth is that due to the fact that women DO NOT and CANNOT naturally produce as much testosterone (one of the main hormones responsible for increasing muscle size) as males do, it is impossible for a woman to gain huge amounts of muscle mass UNLESS anabolic steroids are used in conjunction with an extremely aggressive weight training program and bulking diet.

Women who weight train without the use of steroids get the firm and fit cellulite-free looking body that they’re looking for, provided that they follow a good nutrition program and cardiovascular workout as well.

Now that we have that out of the way, here are three steps to get the most out of your workouts.

Step # 1: Make your workouts short. Weight training routines should never last more than one hour. I usually shoot for around 30 minutes. Remember, you’re placing stress on the muscles as you lift weights. An hour is the maximum time to exercise without causing too much stress and possible injuries. Also, from a mental perspective, who wants to workout for more than an hour? If I knew I would be at the gym for more than an hour, I would start making excuses not to go.

Step # 2: Make your workout intense. This may be the most important thing you can do to get results faster. During weight training sessions one of your goals should be to really challenge your body, so it adapts by building new muscle cells and burning body fat. If you are going to take the time to lift weights, really make it worth your while. If you are lifting 2 pound dumbbells and doing 20 reps and not feeling fatigued or tired, you are not working hard enough.

Step #3: Consistently change your weight training routines. Regardless of whether you are trying to burn fat, boost your metabolism, get more tone, or become a body builder, change is a must. To reach your goals more efficiently and work smarter, you must constantly challenge your body. Your body can adapt quickly to repetitive routines week after week. Adding more weight, changing the routine, or changing the number of repetitions are all excellent ways to keep change in your weight training workouts. If you are not a big “change” person, you can even just reverse the order of your exercises.

So whatever your goals, if you are taking the time to exercise, make it count!

Work smarter and reach your goals faster by short, intense, and diverse workouts.

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