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Showing posts with label ShariFitness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ShariFitness. Show all posts
Friday, April 30, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
Another New Year's Resolution
Another year has come and gone and another New Year is before us. Hundreds of thousands of people are feeling the effects of another holiday season of too much over indulgence and too little exercise. Hundreds of thousands of people are yet again, making another New Year’s Resolution to lose weight.
If you are one of the many who is yet again, making weight loss your New Year’s Resolution, ask yourself why you find yourself with the same goal at the start of every year. Why will this year be different from all the others?
Don’t think of it as a New Year’s Resolution. That phrase in itself has a negative connotation and doesn’t sound long term. New Year’s Resolutions have a built in bad reputation for failure. Their life spans are short, goals never quite reached. I would suggest that you look at it from a different perspective. Don’t call it a New Year’s Resolution. It’s a proposal to YOURSELF, a life long commitment to YOU,
Everyone starts off motivated with good intentions of weight loss success, but they fall off the path somewhere. Why? What are the excuses that stopped you in the past? Have you really taken the time to sit down with a pen and paper and write down why your previous efforts didn’t succeed? If you were to do that, you would get a good understanding of where your efforts got derailed and ask yourself what you could do differently this time around to prevent that from happening again.
Establishing good habits take time. They don’t happen overnight. The things you do habitually require no thought and they are actions you perform consistently day after day. The same concept applies towards exercising on a consistent basis and improving your nutrition.
My diet and exercise habits didn’t develop overnight and it wasn’t easy in the beginning. It was a conscious effort. My nutritional habits are second nature to me now. It requires no effort for me to avoid foods that aren’t nutrient rich.
When it comes to exercise, a lot of people will come up with excuses as to why they don’t. The number one excuse most people have is that they don’t have time. I had the opportunity to interview Tom Venuto on my FitTalk Show and when we discussed the “I don’t have the time” excuse, Tom’s response to that was, "you have all the time in the world. You have the same time everyone else has. Twenty four hours in a day. The same amount of time as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Warren Buffet and The President." What you haven't done is taken the time to sit down and prioritize your life - put health as a high priority.”
If time is an issue for you, one of the best ways to maximize your time and your efforts is to walk into the gym with a “game plan”. There are thousands of workout programs out there and fitness professionals such as myself who can create a game plan for you. When you walk into the gym knowing exactly what it is you need to do, i.e., what exercises, how many sets, how many reps, your workouts will be more focused and you won’t be wasting time trying to think about what to do next. Your workouts will have a purpose. Having a “game plan” will help keep you motivated to complete the workout you walked into the gym with.
Most programs are 3 months, 12 weeks, 90 days. Once you have chosen a program, (book, e-book, fitness professional or an on line service such as the one I provide), commit yourself to the length of the program. Set aside an appointment with yourself at the same time 3-4 days per week. By doing this, you are creating a habit. If you can stick to a 90 day program, you are on your way towards making exercise part of your lifestyle.
If you want to get a great e-book, I highly recommend Tom Venuto’s Burn The Fat program. I provide a personalized on-line services much like my in person client’s get.
The next component is your nutrition. I never refer to it as a “diet”. Following a “diet” is never long term, or a lifestyle. “Diets” tend to be quick fixes and most people have difficulty sticking to a “diet”. What you want to do is think of yourself as making better food choices and it can be a gradual process so you don’t feel like you’re depriving yourself or going through withdrawals that some foods can cause once you suddenly omit them from your diet.
In order to make better food choices, you need to be aware of your current food choices. This suggestion is nothing new; however, it’s tried and true. Keep a food journal. Make an effort for 1 week to write down everything you eat and drink. This will make you more aware of what you eat.
When you find yourself snacking, be aware if you’re snacking in front of the TV, computer, etc. Rather than bring a bag or container with you to your desk, living room, etc., put a single serving in a bowl and eat only the serving in the bowl. Better yet, substitute the snack for a better choice such an apple with a handful of nuts.
If you are a soda drinker, and you notice that you are having at least 1 can of soda a day, rather than quit soda cold turkey, try cutting back on the amount of sodas you drink per week. That’s one simple change that can help make a difference. Over time, you will be able to give up soda. (Regular and diet are both bad for you).
When you look at foods, ask yourself if the choice you’re making has any nutritional value. Are the foods you eating have ingredients you can’t pronounce or is it in its natural state (i.e., fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, chicken, etc.). Just like your workouts, if you stick with making better, nutritional food choices for 90 days, you will develop new habits that will get you closer to your weight loss goals. Another tip, if you prepare your meals in advance and carry them with you, it will help you avoid eating foods that aren’t in line with your goals.
Finally, you want to build muscle and burn fat. Like anything else, it’s a process. There is no quick fix. No magic pill. If there was, obesity wouldn’t be an issue. Also, the results you get are what you put into it as a lifestyle. Just as being fit and healthy is a lifestyle choice, being unfit and overweight is a lifestyle choice too.
Here’s to a lifetime of good health through better nutrition and an active, fit, body.
Recommended resources
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Good Health Starts in The Supermarket
It’s no secret that Health is one of the hottest topics right now and that the obesity rate amongst not only adults, but children continues to sky rocket. More often than not, when you see an obese child, the parent tends to be obese as well.
Improving your health and preventing health issues with our children starts in the supermarket. Have you taken a good look at the items in your shopping cart before you check out? On a recent trip to my local supermarket, I noticed an overweight young woman with her overweight children. I couldn’t help but take a look to see what was in her shopping cart. Sadly, what was in there were items that had no nutritional value at all what so ever. No water, fruit, vegetables, lean proteins, milk, eggs. There were lots of sugary, high calories sodas, maple syrup, crackers loaded with sodium and unhealthy fats. Pure junk. This is the typical shopping cart I see all the time.
I asked this young mother if I could take a picture of her shopping cart. She proudly said “Yes,” as my shopping cart was next to hers. While I was taking pictures of her cart, not once did it ever cross this woman’s mind to see what was in my shopping cart.
Improving your health and preventing health issues with our children starts in the supermarket. Have you taken a good look at the items in your shopping cart before you check out? On a recent trip to my local supermarket, I noticed an overweight young woman with her overweight children. I couldn’t help but take a look to see what was in her shopping cart. Sadly, what was in there were items that had no nutritional value at all what so ever. No water, fruit, vegetables, lean proteins, milk, eggs. There were lots of sugary, high calories sodas, maple syrup, crackers loaded with sodium and unhealthy fats. Pure junk. This is the typical shopping cart I see all the time.
I asked this young mother if I could take a picture of her shopping cart. She proudly said “Yes,” as my shopping cart was next to hers. While I was taking pictures of her cart, not once did it ever cross this woman’s mind to see what was in my shopping cart.
This is a photo of my shopping cart. As you can see from the photos, there is quite a nutritional gap between my cart and hers. My cart contains fresh fruits, vegetables, low fat milk, water, eggs, yogurt and even a healthy snack. Although my shopping cart is a great example of what a shopping cart should look like, the sad truth is that rarely do I see another cart in the supermarket that looks like mine.
If you take notice of the average grocery cart when you are in the supermarket, you will see many carts piled high with soda, white bread, frozen dinners, chips, ice cream, processed cheese, sugary breakfast cereals, cookies, etc. Most of the items in the average shopping cart have no nutritional value. Most people don’t think about the items they are putting in their cart. I don’t think that young mother looks at her children thinking to herself that her children are overweight and perhaps she should feed them foods that aren’t quite so sugary and full of fat.
It is us, each individual who needs to reform our own personal health. The next time you’re in the supermarket buying groceries, be aware of the choices you’re making. Your choices not only affect you, but they affect your children as well. Take responsibility and read the labels. If an item has more than 12 grams of sugar per serving, put it back on the shelf. If the item contains High Fructose Corn Syrup, put it back on the shelf. If you cannot pronounce the majority of the ingredients in a product, put it back on the shelf.
If you take notice of the average grocery cart when you are in the supermarket, you will see many carts piled high with soda, white bread, frozen dinners, chips, ice cream, processed cheese, sugary breakfast cereals, cookies, etc. Most of the items in the average shopping cart have no nutritional value. Most people don’t think about the items they are putting in their cart. I don’t think that young mother looks at her children thinking to herself that her children are overweight and perhaps she should feed them foods that aren’t quite so sugary and full of fat.
It is us, each individual who needs to reform our own personal health. The next time you’re in the supermarket buying groceries, be aware of the choices you’re making. Your choices not only affect you, but they affect your children as well. Take responsibility and read the labels. If an item has more than 12 grams of sugar per serving, put it back on the shelf. If the item contains High Fructose Corn Syrup, put it back on the shelf. If you cannot pronounce the majority of the ingredients in a product, put it back on the shelf.
It is possible to find healthy snacks that the whole family will enjoy. I discovered this snack in my local Kroger supermarket and have recommended this product to my clients as a healtheir alternative to potato chips and corn chips. 
Before you go to the checkout counter, take a look at what’s in your cart and ask yourself if the foods in your cart are nutrient rich, quality calories. Hopefully your answer is yes. If not, it's not too late to do a Shopping Cart Extreme Makeover before you leave the store.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
The Fitness Industry Rebuttal to Time Magazine Article
An irresponsible article was recently published by Time Magazine, which drove the top fitness experts into a fury. I was enraged when I first read the article and went on a “Rant” on my Facebook Fan Page and Twitter. How shameful that a respected and well known publication would put out something so misleading, particularly when we are well aware of the alarming obesity statictics. Thankfully, there are health advocates such as myself doing our best to help dispel the myths and misconceptions that are fed to us about health, fitness and wellness through the media. The Time Magazine article is called Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin and I suggest you read it.
What the article is basically saying is that if you exercise, you will not lose weight because exercise makes us hungry afterwards and tend to eat more and eat junk food after exercise.
This is TIME Magazine! Are you kidding me!?
As a fitness professional, I encourage people to exercise. I also advise people that the should eat AFTER they exercise, however, as a responsible fitness professional and many of my very well respected peers in the industry, advise people that they should have either a whey protein shake with a piece of fruit or a lean source of protein with a carbohydrate. It’s basic common sense that if you go to your local burger chain drive through, or eat donuts after your work out, you WILL gain weight. Exercise and diet go together. Weight management is most successful when careful attention is given to both physical activity and proper nutrition. The article said nothing about all the benefits of exercise and referred to exercise as “punishing .”
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) put out a statement in response to this article Experts Debunk Myth about Exercise, Weight Loss.
The other day, I received an e-mail from one of the most highly respected fitness professionals in the industry, and best selling author, Tom Venuto about why Time Magazine Owes the Fitness Industry an Apology.
I’m going to share with you excerpts from the email I received from Tom:
The truth about exercise, appetite and weight loss
John Cloud, a writer for Time magazine, says that he gets hungry after exercise, so he often eats more on the days he works out than on the days he doesn’t. Therefore, he proposes that exercise won’t make you thin and might actually prevent you from losing weight.
You don’t say? You mean that you don’t lose weight if you put the calories you just burned right back in by stuffing your face with muffins and doughnuts! Who’d have thunk?
It’s tough not to pick on a “fitness journalist” who thinks that exercise turns fat into muscle. But sarcasm aside for a moment, exercise can increase hunger in some cases. Hunger is a normal regulatory response of the body to maintain energy balance and weight homeostasis anytime you’re in a calorie deficit and losing body mass, whether that is achieved through exercise or dietary restriction.
That doesn’t mean exercise is ineffective for weight loss, it means you need DIETARY RESTRAINT to lose weight! Dietary restraint means that if you want to lose weight, sometimes you have to feel hungry and NOT EAT! (even while stressed, emotional, tempted, etc.)
This takes work, and part of that work is to practice the self-discipline to not eat every time you feel the urge and to pursue the self-education to understand the realities of the energy balance equation.
You’ll have to provide the self-discipline, but let me see if I can help with the education part (pay attention, Time magazine!)
Not exercising = not smart
The International Journal of Obesity recently published a review of the effects of exercise on appetite regulation. Dr. Martins of the Obesity research group in Norway explained that in our obesogenic environment today, NOT exercising is likely to lead to weight gain:
“It has been systematically shown that the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle inevitably produces a state of positive energy balance, as the physiological system is unable, at least in the short to medium term, to compensate by decreasing energy intake.”
Translation: if you sit on your butt, and you live in a Western society in this technologically-advanced, convenience-based world, surrounded by eating cues and temptation, it is hard NOT to gain weight, especially for people with a genetic predisposition to obesity.
The bottom line from Tom:
The effectiveness of exercise for weight loss was never really in question. The real issue is compliance to a calorie deficit.
Exercise IS effective for weight loss – significantly so – especially when you combine weight training and cardio training with an effective nutrition plan, as recommended for years in my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program.
The health benefits of exercise are indisputable. Not to mention that training makes you look good naked. No amount of dieting will ever make you stronger, fitter and more muscular. Only training can do that. Dieting without exercising turns you into a skinny fat person. You may look thin in clothes, but when you take off the shirt, you will still look soft and flabby.
But no matter how much you exercise, you can’t lose weight if you eat yourself into a calorie surplus. Just because you start an exercise program doesn’t mean you have free license to abandon all restraint and freely indulge in eating anything you want.
I recently did a tribute to Jack LaLanne and what he taught back in the 1950’s and 60’s still holds true today. When it comes to health, fitness and wellness, utilize common sense. When you come across information such as the Time Magazine article, if it sounds questionable, chances are it is.
If you are not familiar with Tom Venuto and his best selling book, Burn the Fat, I highly recommend it. I learned a lot from it during my transformation.
Wishing you all exceptional, health, fitness, wellness and happiness,
ShariFitness
What the article is basically saying is that if you exercise, you will not lose weight because exercise makes us hungry afterwards and tend to eat more and eat junk food after exercise.
This is TIME Magazine! Are you kidding me!?
As a fitness professional, I encourage people to exercise. I also advise people that the should eat AFTER they exercise, however, as a responsible fitness professional and many of my very well respected peers in the industry, advise people that they should have either a whey protein shake with a piece of fruit or a lean source of protein with a carbohydrate. It’s basic common sense that if you go to your local burger chain drive through, or eat donuts after your work out, you WILL gain weight. Exercise and diet go together. Weight management is most successful when careful attention is given to both physical activity and proper nutrition. The article said nothing about all the benefits of exercise and referred to exercise as “punishing .”
The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) put out a statement in response to this article Experts Debunk Myth about Exercise, Weight Loss.
The other day, I received an e-mail from one of the most highly respected fitness professionals in the industry, and best selling author, Tom Venuto about why Time Magazine Owes the Fitness Industry an Apology.
I’m going to share with you excerpts from the email I received from Tom:
The truth about exercise, appetite and weight loss
John Cloud, a writer for Time magazine, says that he gets hungry after exercise, so he often eats more on the days he works out than on the days he doesn’t. Therefore, he proposes that exercise won’t make you thin and might actually prevent you from losing weight.
You don’t say? You mean that you don’t lose weight if you put the calories you just burned right back in by stuffing your face with muffins and doughnuts! Who’d have thunk?
It’s tough not to pick on a “fitness journalist” who thinks that exercise turns fat into muscle. But sarcasm aside for a moment, exercise can increase hunger in some cases. Hunger is a normal regulatory response of the body to maintain energy balance and weight homeostasis anytime you’re in a calorie deficit and losing body mass, whether that is achieved through exercise or dietary restriction.
That doesn’t mean exercise is ineffective for weight loss, it means you need DIETARY RESTRAINT to lose weight! Dietary restraint means that if you want to lose weight, sometimes you have to feel hungry and NOT EAT! (even while stressed, emotional, tempted, etc.)
This takes work, and part of that work is to practice the self-discipline to not eat every time you feel the urge and to pursue the self-education to understand the realities of the energy balance equation.
You’ll have to provide the self-discipline, but let me see if I can help with the education part (pay attention, Time magazine!)
Not exercising = not smart
The International Journal of Obesity recently published a review of the effects of exercise on appetite regulation. Dr. Martins of the Obesity research group in Norway explained that in our obesogenic environment today, NOT exercising is likely to lead to weight gain:
“It has been systematically shown that the adoption of a sedentary lifestyle inevitably produces a state of positive energy balance, as the physiological system is unable, at least in the short to medium term, to compensate by decreasing energy intake.”
Translation: if you sit on your butt, and you live in a Western society in this technologically-advanced, convenience-based world, surrounded by eating cues and temptation, it is hard NOT to gain weight, especially for people with a genetic predisposition to obesity.
The bottom line from Tom:
The effectiveness of exercise for weight loss was never really in question. The real issue is compliance to a calorie deficit.
Exercise IS effective for weight loss – significantly so – especially when you combine weight training and cardio training with an effective nutrition plan, as recommended for years in my Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program.
The health benefits of exercise are indisputable. Not to mention that training makes you look good naked. No amount of dieting will ever make you stronger, fitter and more muscular. Only training can do that. Dieting without exercising turns you into a skinny fat person. You may look thin in clothes, but when you take off the shirt, you will still look soft and flabby.
But no matter how much you exercise, you can’t lose weight if you eat yourself into a calorie surplus. Just because you start an exercise program doesn’t mean you have free license to abandon all restraint and freely indulge in eating anything you want.
I recently did a tribute to Jack LaLanne and what he taught back in the 1950’s and 60’s still holds true today. When it comes to health, fitness and wellness, utilize common sense. When you come across information such as the Time Magazine article, if it sounds questionable, chances are it is.
If you are not familiar with Tom Venuto and his best selling book, Burn the Fat, I highly recommend it. I learned a lot from it during my transformation.
Wishing you all exceptional, health, fitness, wellness and happiness,
ShariFitness
Jack LaLanne - The Godfather of Fitness
Jack LaLanne, also known as “the godfather of fitness,” was enormously popular from the 1950s to the 1980s, when his TV program “The Jack LaLanne Show” aired (the first-ever devoted to exercise). I ended up spending my evening going through mostly vintage video clips of his show and some recent Talk Show TV appearances which I will share with you in this newletter. Everything he talked about back in the 1950's and 1960's is the same basic fundamental information on health, fitness, wellness and self growth that I find myself writing about on a daily basis via my blogs, Tweets and Facebook updates. Jack LaLanne once said, “People don’t die of old age, they die of neglect.” He also said, “Exercise is King, nutrition is Queen, put them together and you’ve got a kingdom.”
Jack LaLanne - The Fountain of Youth
Jack LaLanne will be celebrating his 95th birthday September 26th. His mind is still razor sharp and he looks like a 50 year old. He is a living testament to something I've been saying for a while. Fitness is the Fountain of Youth. If you take care of your temple, your precious human body, it will take care of you and it will show on the outside. It's as simple as that. The fountain of youth will not be found in a pill, or the latest cream, lotion or potion.
I'm going to share with you some of the videos of Jack LaLanne I had been watching this evening. Enjoy them, learn from them, and be inspired :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qKgIHXWTTo - This is a clip of Jack at the age of 94 making an appearance on a Fox News Morning Show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJVEPB_l8FU - Vintage Jack LaLanne talking about Sugarholics.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eB4cQO4sjo - Vintage Jack talking about his 10 Point Plan to Health, Fitness, Wellness and Personal Growth.
If you want to learn more about Jack LaLanne or see some of his TV Shows in their entirety, visit his website: http://www.jacklalanne.com/jack.html There's some really cool stuff on there.
Yours in Health, Fitness and Wellness,
ShariFitness
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