Great-Workout Blog

A recent study highlights the fact that it is very important to decide what your fitness/weight loss goals are. The study found that, while Weight Watchers is a great program for losing weight, it might not be the best for general fitness.

So, although losing weight can be a great goal in itself, “weight loss” does not automatically equate to “good health”.

The University of Missouri recently conducted the study, which compared two groups of participants. One group participated in a Weight Watchers program for 12 weeks, while the other group took to the gym.

While the Weight Watchers group lost more weight - averaging 5 percent of their body weight - most of the weight lost was lean tissue. This means that they didn’t actually lose much body fat. Lean tissue is not something we should be trying to lose, as it can help keep our metabolism high. A high metabolism in itself can help keep our weight (and body fat) down.

In contrast with the Weight Watchers group, the gym group lost less weight, but they did lose a lot of intraabdominal fat. Intraabdominal surrounds the vital organs and can lead to cardiovascular diseases.

But the study did find that Weight Watchers is a great program for support. Most of the Weight Watchers participants remained in the program for the duration, while many of the gym participants quit.

So, if your goal is to lose weight and maintain good health, remember to eat well and exercise well.

The part of a fitness plan that most people have trouble with is the diet. Even if people find that exercise comes naturally to them, they often have trouble limiting the foods they love if they happen to be very high in calories or fat. So finding the willpower and the desire to eat healthily is a crucial component to making your fitness plan a success. If you have trouble weaning off of unhealthy foods, try these strategies to reduce cravings.

Get More Sleep

If your busy life is causing you to stay up late at night and wake up early every day that is probably the root of your food cravings. Regular sleep is a very important part of hormone regulation. Specifically, your body will produce a lot less of the hormone leptin. This chemical is responsible for helping you feel full, and for helping food make you feel satisfied. So if you have been having a lot more trouble resisting fattening foods, you might try getting to bed earlier. Even an hour of extra sleep can make a huge difference in you leptin. It is also important to improve the quality of your sleep by trying to fall asleep at approximately the same time every night.

Eat the Right Kinds of Carbs

The most common kinds of cravings are for sugary carbs, things like donuts, cupcakes and cookies. Really, this might be your body telling you that it needs the kind of energy that only carbohydrates can provide. If you focus on eating healthy carbohydrates, such as the kind that come from fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, you may just find that your cravings for sweets will go away.

Move Your Body More

One of the most powerful appetite suppressants known to man is exercise. If you are contemplating ordering a pizza for dinner instead of making something healthy at home, you might want to just go for a quick stroll around the block. Even light exercise can activate the production of the hormone dopamine, which increases your sense of well-being and makes you more emotionally equipped to make smart choices about what you eat.

Let Yourself Cave in Occasionally

Though diet is important, it is actually important that you don’t feel constantly deprived. In fact, if you do feel deprived all of the time, you are more likely to binge on bad food. So it is actually a good idea to assign one meal every week as your “cheat meal.” This gives you permission to eat any kind of food that you will like. These occasional indulgences won’t do that much damage to your diet, but they will let off enough steam to let you focus on eating properly for the rest of the week.

Find Healthy Ways to Manage Stress

A lot of people eat as a way of dealing with stress. It is important to find other ways to find release for stress. Make sure that you always set aside some time during the day to engage in activities you enjoy. Finding balance in your life it vital to finding success in your fitness.

Expert fitness trainer Christopher William McCombs runs an intense Fitness Boot Camp in Irvine California. He is radically different in his approach to losing fat. He is also a Personal Trainer Marketing expert and helps fitness trainers all over the county to increase their business.

There is no doubt that a smart fitness plan includes time set aside each week for exercise. By ensuring that you have a window of time where you concentrate on only working out, you not only get into the habit of exercise, but you ensure that you will be able to make the most progress towards your fitness goals. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that you shouldn’t also work to include a bit of exercise into the other parts of your life. Even by getting in a little more walking into parts of your day, you actually help burn off a surprisingly large number of calories if you do it often enough.

Here are a few easy ways to get more walking into your everyday life.

Wear a Step-Counting Device

A pedometer is just a small device that you can strap onto your belt and informs you of how much you walk during the day. It works by actually measuring bumps. Every time there is a jostle or a shake, it assumes that you have taken one step. Believe it or not, studies show that people who wear a pedometer on average do a whole lot more walking than people who don’t. It seems that when you actually have something telling you how much you are walking, you are generally inclined to do a whole lot more of it.

What’s great about pedometers is that there is actually a huge range of them to suit your needs. Sometimes banks even give away cheap pedometers as part of customer appreciation or a promotion.

Walk More at the Grocery Store

When most people go to the grocery store or the mall, they usually try to park and close as they can to the entrance to avoid having to walk a long distance from the store to the car. However, it can be much easier to simply park further away and use going to the store as an opportunity to get more walking in. And really, trying to get spot up close usually doesn’t save you any time anyway because you typically have to wait until someone else leaves their spot. By parking further away, you don’t spend any more time at the grocery store than you usually do, but you are able to burn more calories.

Find Social Activities that Involve Walking

Socializing with friends doesn’t always have to mean sitting around at a restaurant or watching a movie. You could go for a walk in the park or even at the mall. Going to the mall is an especially attractive option if you ever discover that the weather is too nasty for a nice outdoor stroll. If you are worried that being around so much stuff that you can buy might tempt you into running up your credit card, you might consider just keeping your wallet in your car.

It is important to remember not to separate fitness from your everyday life. How fit you become is determined by the decisions you make, whether inside the gym or out.

Christopher William McCombs is a personal trainer in Signal Hill California. Chris teaches a radically different approach to losing fat to local OC residents and he makes the workouts fun. Chris is also a Fitness Trainer Marketing expert and helps fitness trainers all over the globe to triple their income while cutting their work hours in half.

It’s simply a matter of fact that it is way easier to consume calories than it is to burn them off. So matter how often you work out, or how intensely you work out, it probably won’t help your fitness level much if you primarily eat junk.

But the transition to eating healthy can sometimes be a challenging one. Like all habits, eating bad foods is a tough one to break.

If you have been finding it a tad tough to make the leap into a healthy diet, use these tips to make the change a little bit more smooth.

Eliminate Liquid Calories

“Liquid calories,” that is, calories that come from stuff like milk, alcohol, juice, and soda can ruin on your diet for a number of reasons. Firstly, they can add a bunch of calories to your daily intake without ever thinking about it. If you instinctively grab a coke from the refrigerator when you are thirsty, you are adding one hundred forty calories and forty grams of sugar to your diet very rapidly.

Secondly, liquid calories hurt your diet because they don’t help satiety. Meaning, even though you are getting all of these calories, you don’t feel any more full, so you are more likely to turn to solid foods after drinking liquid calories, which can increase the number of calories you eat in a day even more.

Have Foods that are Both Healthy and Convenient

If you are ever in a rush and are just looking for a “quick bite to eat,” chances are you will reach for something that is high in starchy carbs, sugar, or saturated fat. The reason unhealthy foods creep into the diets of even people who really want to eat well is that these bad foods are just so convenient. No matter where you go, there is bound to be a fast food restaurant willing to give you high calorie food in a matter of minutes after buying it.

Help making eating healthier by stocking your cupboard with foods that are not only healthy, but also very easy to make. For example, you might have a premade fruit salad that you just pull out of your refrigerator when ever you want a snack, or have a selection of healthy canned soups that you can just heat and eat.

Make Things Flexible

The biggest mistake that over ambitious people make while designing their workout is making it just too strict. Just because you will probably lose weight and gain muscle by eating nothing but tuna and oatmeal, that doesn’t mean that you should design your diet like that, because it just isn’t sustainable. After just a few days, you will probably start craving variety and revert back to your old eating ways.

Most dieters designate one meal a week that is their “cheat meal,” that is, a meal where they can eat whatever they please.

Deal with Stress Directly

It is important to deal with the emotional side of dieting head on. In times of stress, especially when you are deviating from what you might typically eat, you are much more likely to start binging on foods in order to feel better. In order to keep from falling into this trap, you should find other ways to deal with this stress. Always set some time aside for yourself every day to do something that you truly enjoy. This will help reduce your stress level sand help you find dieting easier.

Expert fitness trainer Christopher William McCombs runs a Fitness Boot Camp in Irvine California. He is radically different in his approach to losing fat. He is also a Personal Trainer Marketing expert and helps fitness trainers all over the county to increase their business.