:BodyFitnessInfo.com BLOG

Most of the time on this blog I like to talk about the things that you personally can be doing to better your life and health. But the problem is that if all we do is rely on ourselves and ourselves alone, we don’t have as high a probability of making it. There are so many other factors that play into our surroundings that need to be considered if we’re going to be successful.

Today let’s talk about your social network and how they support you. We’ve all been told since we were kids that we needed to hang out with the right crowd. The same goes when it comes to your health and wellness. If you’re always hanging out with lazy, overweight, exercise avoiding people you’re likely to be one yourself. On the other hand, if you spend most of your time around healthy, exercise loving, moving forward people you’re also likely to become one of those as well.

Does this mean that you need to drop your friends and get a new group of people to hang out with. Not necessarily! What you need to do first is some probing into whether or not they will support you in your new habits. If you approach them and say “hey guys, I’m starting a new workout program and would appreciate your support by blah blah blah (fill in the blahs)” and they give you support or if some of them think that it’s such a great idea that they want to join you, then you know you have a positive support group. On the other hand, if they make fun of your new idea and try to pull you back down, you’re definitely in the wrong crowd. But does this mean you can’t be friends with these people? NO! It just means that you need to prioritize your time so that you are spending most of your time with those people that will encourage you.

Now what do you do when a negative social network lives with you (spouse or significant other). Honestly, I think that in this situation you have to be a lot stronger personally and hopefully eventually they’ll come around to support you. But don’t expect much until you prove that you’re serious.

In either situation you have to be determined enough to realize that in the end it does all depend on you. Your friend are not going to drag you to the gym. In the end you have to be responsible and take the blame. A positive social network can help, but don’t rely on them to get you through. Use them as a means of support for what you have already decided to do.

No Comments

After adding the weekly nutrition tip yesterday about emotional or mood eating, I felt that it would be good to provide a little bit more information about this topic since it’s one that I feel a lot of us don’t pay much attention to. Sadly, our moods sometimes control us when we let them. And it’s very very hard to not let them control us!

So what makes the difference between someone who can control their mood-influenced eating habits and someone who can’t? In a recent article on his blog BurnTheFatBlog.com, Tom Venuto talked about this same topic. He approaches it from the angle of the difference between someone that keeps their weight off long-term and someone that relapses. The main difference was that the people who maintained their weight loss were able to confront the problem that they had with emotional eating and through careful planning and tracking they were able to overcome this problem.

Here’s a direct quote from Tom’s article that summarizes the difference between the maintainers and the relapsers:

Maintainers, on the other hand, were vigilant and conscious of EVERYthing:

- They were conscious of the quantity and type of food they ate
- They were conscious about the amount of activity that they needed personally to maintain their weight
- They consciously worked to “keep in shape” after they reached their initial goal
- They were conscious that they felt uncomfortable in their clothes after they gained even a little weight such as a few pounds after a vacation
- They intentionally wore close-fitting clothes to keep themselves aware of their bodies, which prompted them to exercise more eat less if their clothes felt tighter.

So what can you learn from this? First of all, it’s possible to beat the emotional eating habits! You just have to be willing to make the lifestyle changes that have to be made for these changes to take effect. The question you have to ask yourself is: are you willing to make those necessary changes? If you are, then you’ve taken the first step to becoming a weight loss (or even muscle gain) maintainer rather than a relapser.

2 Comments

We talk a lot on this blog about setting goals and then working hard to achieve those goals. One feature of a good goal is that it needs to be measurable and something that you can track as time goes on. That’s why its not enough to just say “I want to lose some weight” or “I want to be bigger”. These are nice ideas, but they are not really goals until you know exactly what it is you are shooting for. For example, and actual goal would be something like “I will lose 10 pounds by [date].” This goal has a specific, measurable result and is also due by a certain date.

So what are some of the key things that you should be tracking to know if you’re making progress? Some of this depends on your goals, but here is a list of things you should consider measuring on a regular basis to see how you’re doing. You should also use some specifics for these measurements as the basis of your goals as well.

Important Measurements
- Neck
- Chect
- Biceps (Relaxed & Flexed)
- Forearms
- Wrists
- Waist
- Thighs
- Calves
- Shoulders
- Weight
- Body Fat Percentage

If you will just keep track of these measurements and base your goals around them, you’ll have a good foundation for setting and tracking great, measurable goals.

3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but the weather where I live had been FANTASTIC the last few days. If you’re having nice weather as well, you should try getting outside and having some sort of an outdoor workout from time to time. There are a lot of things that you can do outside.

Outdoor Cardio Exercises

There are a lot of things you can do outside for cardio, and most people know about these already. Try going for a jog, biking, rollerblading, playing some outdoor sports like basketball, football, etc. Any of these activities are great ways to get a good cardio workout outside.

Other Outdoor Exercises

Next time you’re at the park with your kids, maybe head over to the jungle gym and do some pullups. You can also do some great pushup variations using different playground equipment as well. Try pushing you kid on the swing, doing a few squats in between pushes. Or squats with your kid sitting on your shoulders. Get creative a have some fun. Naturally, be careful not to injure yourself.

Getting out and doing some exercises in the sun is a great way to first get some sun, and second have a good and productive time while doing it. You’ll still get a better workout overall in the gym, but for variety do what you can to get outside and enjoy the sun from time to time.

No Comments

When it comes to reaching goals for health and fitness, too many people that have good intentions are way to lax in what they actually do. They give themselves too many reasons or ‘excuses’ about why they do or do not do something that would be beneficial to their health. And the result? They never seem to reach their goals. Arguably, all of us have probably done this from time to time. Or is that just another excuse for us not to do something?

So how do we overcome this problem with human nature to make excuses and get in our own way of reaching our goals? A lot of it comes from doing some mental reprogramming as to what is really important and what we can actually achieve. Thus the question for the title of this blog “How serious are you?” Have you taken the time to reprogram the way you think so that your health and fitness are actually a priority in your life rather than an after thought? If not, now is a great time to start.

One way to get yourself on track and really start to make some progress would be to treat your fitness plan (whether it be to lose weight or gain muscle) as you would your job or your business. What happens if you don’t go to work or don’t work your business on a particular day? You either get fired or you don’t make the kind of money that you would hope to. Same thing with your health. If you don’t show up for your workout on a particular day, you basically got one step towards being fired which in this case could be equated with slipping back into complacency. But who wants to be complacent with where they are? Instead, look at your life and your fitness program as a continual step forward. Keep setting goals, keep taking them seriously, and keep moving forward.

No Comments

Here’s a sad, but also well known truth: Americans watch a lot of TV. Here are some interesting statistics from TVTurnoff.org:

- The average American home has the TV on for 8 hours a day
- The average American watches 4 hours and 35 minutes of television each day
- The average American household is 2.55 people, but the average home also has 2.73 televisions

These statistics tell us that as a people we are spending a ton of time in front of the TV. We aren’t suggesting that you all turn off your TV for good (although that might not be a bad thing), but rather suggesting that you at least make some good use of this time. Either during the show you’re watching or at least during the boring commercials, get down and do some pushups. During a standard commercial break you could probably get in at least 20-40 pushups depending on your level. Then maybe during another break do some crunches or other body weight exercise. The idea here is that if you’re going to sit around a watch TV, at least do something productive and helpful for your fitness/weight loss goals.

Here is a short list of exercises that you can easily do at home that require little or no equipment that you could do while watching TV:

- Pushups
- Wall Squats
- One-Leg Squats
- Quick Jog Around the House
- Chair Dips
- Angled Calf Raises
- Anything with Bands or Free Weights you have at home

Get creative! You could even come up with little mini workouts you can do, or even have a competition between you and other people watching the show. See who can do the most pushups before the show comes back on. That way not only are you getting in some good exercise, but you’re also have a good time with those around you and motivating each other to achieve your best.

6 Comments

Memorial Day is here, which means that we’re almost half way through the year. So, how are you doing on your goals? We talked back in March about how every quarter its a good idea to look back and see how you’re doing on your overall goals. Well, the end of June is the end of the second quarter of this year, so its time to start ramping up your efforts to be on track by the time you reach this important bench mark.

In preparation for the half-year goal checkup, first we’d recommend you pull out your goals again to make sure you’re on track. Hopefully you don’t have to dust them off too much :-). If so, don’t worry about it, just start moving forward on your goals. Reset them if necessary so that you can start to get ready for third quarter (July - September).

Memorial Day is also a great time to consider competing in some type of event like a 5k, marathon, triathlon, etc. There should be plenty of these activities going on in your state this summer, why not try and find one that you can start to prepare for so that you really have a deadline that is more pressing? A lot of people find that having a deadline like this really helps them to meet their goals even better because its an actual event rather than just a date on the calendar that they’re working towards.

Find out what works for you, but make sure that you keep moving forward and keep moving towards your ultimate goal.

No Comments

Just last night I watching a season finale of “The Biggest Loser”. I’m pretty sure it was an old episode, but I have to say that after seeing a few episodes of this show I feel that it is probably the most positive and actually helpful “reality” shows on TV. So many of the other ones are just junk, but this one actually can have a positive effect on the people watching the show from home.

One thing I wish they would do on this show is give the viewers more details about what they are actually doing with the participants as far as training and diet rather than focusing on the emotional side of things. Granted, I’m sure they do this for ratings, but I think that if they gave more details it would actually help more people get off their butts and have at least a starting point on what they could do to start losing weight. Now on the flip side of that, I understand that they are probably following a more customized routine or workout for those individual people and so there are many reasons not to share all of the specifics of what each individual person is doing. The least they could do is try to teach the viewers what to do on a basic level so that the show could really affect more people in the country.

Anyway, this is just my commentary on “The Biggest Loser” after watching a few episodes. I still think they’re doing a great job and I wish more of these so-called reality shows were actually in some way beneficial to the viewers beyond just entertainment value. Kudos to the creators and everyone involved with that show!

Dan Patterson
BodyFitnessInfo.com Editor

2 Comments

How consistent are you in your workouts? Do you have a plan each time you go to the gym or do you just go and do whatever feels good?

Deep down everyone knows that its best to have at least some type of a plan. But how many of us actually do it? Many books out there such as Body-for-LIFE recommend that you should never go to the gym without having a plan. This is very good advice because it keeps you focused on what you should be doing. And let’s face it, if you really are reaching to achieve what we call lifetime fitness, then you have to take it seriously and plan what you’re going to do each and every workout. This is consistency.

Another level of consistency is planning out how often you are going to workout and then sticking with it. If you schedule changes from time to time, don’t just go with the flow and gradually adjust things accordingly. Instead, do it ahead of time and make sure that you are always planning what time you’re going to exercise based on your schedule. In a perfect world we would all be able to have the perfect schedule, but that sadly isn’t the case. Plan your time the way you need to so that you can make things happen. This is consistency.

To be successful in anything, you have to be persistent and consistent. Health and fitness is no different. Set your goals, make your plan, and go out there and do it!

No Comments

Anybody in the business world right now is setting their sites on how they did in the first quarter and looking forward to the second quarter. Have you ever considered doing the same thing for your health and fitness goals? We all talk about New Year’s resolutions, but do you ever check up on them? Setting quarterly (3 month) goals is a great way to keep up on how you’re doing and if you’re coming close to reaching your yearly (New Year’s resolution) goals.

No Comments