What is it that makes some people successful while others keep chasing it wondering why achieving the things they want in life are always beyond their reach?
It's not talent.
It's not genius.
Give up?
It's diligence.
People that are successful focus on tasks and do them with "diligence".
Here's the Wikipedia definition.
"Diligence is a zealous and careful nature in one's actions and work. Decisive work ethic. Budgeting one's time; monitoring one's own activities to guard against laziness. Putting forth full concentration in one's work."
If you have obstacles, you might never even get in the game. Here's a common challenge I have heard consistently over the years and it's this:
"But Larry, I don't have the time."
There are some people that literally don't have the time, but most people are simply wasting time. In essence, they value other things. Let me ask you a simple question. Do you ever watch TV at night? Millions do, and why not, there are some very good shows on television. But it could be costing you big time. (And if it's not TV, it could be the internet, video games, etc.)
But isn't watching TV really a reward for all the hard work you do all day? You really do deserve to kick back, grab the remote (if it's available) and lose yourself in a good movie, catch up on your soaps, a sporting event, a cooking show, or learn "What Not To Wear"!
Look, I'm not against TV. But, I am against TV if you watch it for two hours a night and you tell me you have no free time. Even one hour a night is a is costing you, as you could be exercising.
"But Larry, I'm also too tired at night to workout".
I feel for you, I really do. I know it's hard being you. Many of you have challenging careers, take care of kids, take care of parents, own a business, run a home, coach a team, and the list goes on and on. I understand completely, but I'll tell you this.
SO WHAT? That's right, so what?
Everybody has challenges that make them tired at the end of the day. But here's something you may not realize. Everybody has everything in their lives that they value most from the clothes they wear to the cars they drive. If it's a "high value" item, good, or service, you've got it. By "high value" I don't mean high-priced. I mean on a scale of one to ten, the things you value are closer to ten. So if working out at night is not for you, then make sure you go to bed earlier so you can get up earlier, AND WORKOUT!
Yes, this change will be hard and you won't like it, but do it anyway because the benefits outweigh the discomfort. In time, you'll be glad you toughed it out as you'll have more energy and you'll lose weight. And once you make getting up early and exercising a habit, you'll be hard pressed to let it go.
People that are fit may not be wealthy and yet they may make sacrifices to belong to a gym, hire a personal trainer, or come to boot camp.
Why is that?
Because they value their health and they care about the way they look. Well, the way they look naked anyway. (However, some of us do need to watch "What Not To Wear") Quite simply, exercise and nutrition is a higher value priority in some peoples lives.
Now I realize I might be ruffling a few feathers here, but some of you need to know this. If you are struggling with your weight, month after month, year after year, the problem is most likely in the choices you make which is driven by the way you think about the choices you make. A good place to begin is to change the way you think about exercise and nutrition.
"But Larry, I don't like to exercise."
I understand. Exercise is hard work and since you were born a princess, you really should be excused from performing hard work. After all, isn't that what skilled labor is for? Perhap you could hire someone to lift your weights, perform your cardio, and eat correctly for you! (did you catch the sarcasm?)
Before I go on let's make sure you do not have any health related issues. Sometimes people struggle for years and never realize they have an underactive thyroid for example. You might want to consider seeing a medical doctor.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let's assume you are healthy, and you are still struggling for much too long. Nutrition is so often the missing link. Every time you eat something ask yourself this question. Am I bored, upset, just hungry, or am I eating to boost my metabolism and improve my health? Eating is an opportunity to do something healthy, or not. If you are eating extra food for "extra" reasons, you are most likely eating too many calories.
A little planning can go a long way.
When you go to bed at night, do you think about the next day and factor in your exercise routine? Do you have a contingency plan? How do you feel about yourself if you miss a workout? How do you feel about planning your meals? Does it all seem too overwhelming? How often do you find yourself skipping breakfast? How often do you find yourself picking up dinner at Quiznos or Panera Bread? Ouch, I bet I hit a nerve there.
Well, once again you are right on the money. This actually is very challenging.
The fact of the matter, the crux of the biscuit, the very bottom line is this... People that are successful at anything are successful because they are willing to do what other people won't do. They want the end result bad enough that they are willing to change their lives (drum roll please) AND STILL BE UNCOMFORTABLE. (see make sacrifices)
They will skip watching TV (or watch a lot less)
They plan their meals, meetings, work, play, etc.
They exercise daily and factor it in to the day.
They want something bad enough and make sacrifices and stop making excuses.
They write down what they want to achieve.
They educate themselves about whatever it is they want to achieve.
AND THEY LOVE BOOT CAMP! - Sorry, I couldn't resist :-)
No, I can't sugar coat this for you. This is simple, but it's not easy. Most people that travel down the road of health and fitness wander aimlessly. I am just a guide with a map. "Come follow me, I'll show you the way."
I absolutely love it when someone comes along and just gets it. They know that they want to be lean and fit, so they hire me as their coach. They follow the plan they lose fat in record time. Sure it makes me look good as a fitness professional, but truth be told, they deserve all the credit and they are the one's who look great!
Successful people:
Know what they want.
Take action.
Follow through with diligence.
Don't quit.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Let's start at the beginning. In order to improve your body composition, you need to exercise and eat right. Unfortunately that's just too much of an over simplification. Exercise and eating right means something different to everybody. So I'll do my best to make this easy for you.
I've got two options for boot camp that are both also great deals. You get more value than you pay for. But if you actually follow my plan and incorporate some of these success formula traits at the same time, the results could be worth 1000 times your financial investment.
What you "Value Most" will always determine your decision.
I came to value health and helping people so much that I changed my life and my career to do what makes me happy. Try to imagine what motivated me. I'll tell you this, it wasn't inspiration, it was desperation, massive doses of it too. There were literally dozens of reasons why I needed to change my life. It didn't happen over night. It's been a seven year journey since I had the first thought when I connected with my passion for fitness.
Decide what you want to change in your life and go for it.
Don't worry about getting it perfect, just get it going!
Showing posts with label building muscle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label building muscle. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, January 15, 2007
Less is More When Eating Food
One of the most important keys to losing body fat, building muscle, and feeling energetic throughout the day is controlling your body's metabolism. Metabolism is a highly technical process and requires
a lot of education to understand all of the processes and systems involved. I like Phil Kaplan's definition where he defines metabolism very simply as "the speed at which the body burns through food".
The end result is that the nutrients in the food we eat will be either absorbed and become part of the body, absorbed and be used for energy, or be eliminated through waste.
It's not that difficult to positively influence your body's metabolism. Making a few minor changes can have a great impact. One of the key components is to eat protein with every meal. Other components are to eat foods that have a thermogenic effect on the body. In short, many whole foods make the body work harder to digest them completely. This process uses a lot of energy (calories). By eating certain foods in combination, we can increase the thermogenic effect on the body even further.
Ultimately we want to build and maintain lean muscle. The more muscle, the more calories you'll burn at rest. If you can get your body to efficiently use most of the protein you eat every day, you'll have a better chance of "packing-on" more muscle over time. It's also important to eat protein from quality sources.
The human body's "survival mode mechanism" (what it does to avoid dying in the event there's a long period of time without food) is to hold onto some body fat and keep it as a safety reserve at all times. If you begin to eat to "support" metabolism, you will then begin to successfully influence the efficiency of your metabolism. In so doing your body will start getting conditioned to hold onto less body fat which in essence is "stored energy". If you feed your body correctly, over time it will adapt
to the frequency of meals coming in (nutrition) and literally release stored fat. It's as if it realizes that it doesn't need the stored fat any more.
Depending on how you eat, your body will either speed up its metabolism or slow it down to conserve the energy it has left . If your body isn't supplied with a steady stream of nutrients that it can easily convert into energy, it will start slowing itself down. As such, your body will give you less energy to work with. But what happens is that the body borrows from one area to give to another. For example, if you perform too much aerobic exercise, there's a high probability that the body will break down lean muscle to use for energy.
Why would the body break down it's own vital lean mass?
If the body "perceives" that there is less nutrition coming in, or a high demand of energy going out as in "over aerobicising", the body can begin to cannibalize it's own lean mass so that it has less mass to maintain. This makes perfect sense when you understand that muscle is "metabolically active tissue". It is literally the physical place where fat is burned. So if there is less muscle to maintain, there are fewer calories needed.
Eating smaller, more frequent meals is a great way to control your metabolism. The idea of smaller, more frequent meals is a sound nutritional strategy that can help you build muscle, lose body fat, and keep your energy levels high. Consuming five or six smaller meals spread evenly throughout the day (that totals 2,000 calories, let's say), is much more efficient than eating only two meals equaling the same amount.
I often use the analogy of a campfire to help people understand how the body uses energy. If you've ever been camping, you've probably had a camp fire to cook with or keep warm. If not, picture a ring of rocks with a fire made of wood from the forest in the middle of the rocks. We've got small twigs called "kindling" which literally means "to start a fire", slightly larger pieces called "tinder", and finally logs called "fuel".
To start a fire we start with kindling. Kindling is small twigs, crumpled dry leaves, dry grass, or anything that will ignite easily. This is analagous to starting our day with breakfast. It really doesn't matter what meal you are eating, it is always best to eat small amounts. A fire that burns for a time develops a hot bed of coals. Think of this coal bed as muscle. If you have enough coals the fire can handle a large log and burn it up. So if you have a fair amount of muscle and energy expending activity, your body can handle a large meal by using the energy from the meal efficiently.
The camp fire needs a large bed of coals and a little air to handle the "fuel". Our general problem is that we have too little muscle and eat too many big meals that our metabolisms can't handle. If a camp fire isn't hot enough to burn a big log thrown on it, the fire will dwindle and the log will remain partially burned. A similar thing happens with food.
The worst part is the body will digest most of the food and store more of it as fat than we want it to. This is simply because the body didn't need the food as energy because the body's energy stores are full and the body's energy demands are low.
Back to the camp fire for a minute. By feeding the camp fire with smaller pieces of wood (tinder) on a hot (and growing) bed of coals, the fire consumes the wood effortlessly. The energy in the wood
combined with oxygen ignite the fire's intensity. Our bodies can work this way too. By eating smaller meals, we don't tax our systems and our bodies literally begin to "burn through food" like Phil Kaplan says. This is how we eat to "support metabolism".
The Proof
A study conducted at St. Michael's Hospital in Ontario, Canada, observed two groups of individuals. One was subjected to a common three-meals-a-day diet while another was asked to consume over a dozen small ones throughout the day. At the end of the study, the "nibblers" showed considerably lower levels of low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the bad kind of cholesterol that sticks to the arteries).
Another study conducted at the University of Limburg in the Netherlands revealed that individuals who consume mini-meals had more stable carbohydrate and fat oxidization levels, while "gorgers" didn't, making them more prone to weight gain.
A study from Johannesburg, South Africa, demonstrated that frequent meals reduced appetite by 27%. Scandinavian researchers reported the competitive boxers who tried to lose weight by reducing their calorie intake. But it was mostly lean body mass loss in those who had their ration in two square meals compared with those who had 6 meals a day.
The Benefits
As stated above, eating smaller meals more frequently stabilizes nutrient oxidization levels, making the body more efficient at burning food, so anybody who wants to lose weight should adopt this eating principle. Eating smaller meals is also believed to lower blood cholesterol.
Furthermore, "nibbling or grazing" throughout the day prevents long stretches of starvation. Going from noon to 6:00pm without eating usually ends with one overeating at supper. This is a very bad eating habit seeing as our metabolism can only handle a certain amount of calories, carbs, fat, and protein in one sitting.
When you eat less carbohydrates at one time, you have more glucose and insulin control. Since diabetes is the fastest growing disease in the U.S., as well as the rest of the world, small meals make more sense for carbohydrate control.
It certainly seems wise to eat more small meals if you want to lose weight and improve your health.
Yours in health and fitness,
Larry Wasserman
a lot of education to understand all of the processes and systems involved. I like Phil Kaplan's definition where he defines metabolism very simply as "the speed at which the body burns through food".
The end result is that the nutrients in the food we eat will be either absorbed and become part of the body, absorbed and be used for energy, or be eliminated through waste.
It's not that difficult to positively influence your body's metabolism. Making a few minor changes can have a great impact. One of the key components is to eat protein with every meal. Other components are to eat foods that have a thermogenic effect on the body. In short, many whole foods make the body work harder to digest them completely. This process uses a lot of energy (calories). By eating certain foods in combination, we can increase the thermogenic effect on the body even further.
Ultimately we want to build and maintain lean muscle. The more muscle, the more calories you'll burn at rest. If you can get your body to efficiently use most of the protein you eat every day, you'll have a better chance of "packing-on" more muscle over time. It's also important to eat protein from quality sources.
The human body's "survival mode mechanism" (what it does to avoid dying in the event there's a long period of time without food) is to hold onto some body fat and keep it as a safety reserve at all times. If you begin to eat to "support" metabolism, you will then begin to successfully influence the efficiency of your metabolism. In so doing your body will start getting conditioned to hold onto less body fat which in essence is "stored energy". If you feed your body correctly, over time it will adapt
to the frequency of meals coming in (nutrition) and literally release stored fat. It's as if it realizes that it doesn't need the stored fat any more.
Depending on how you eat, your body will either speed up its metabolism or slow it down to conserve the energy it has left . If your body isn't supplied with a steady stream of nutrients that it can easily convert into energy, it will start slowing itself down. As such, your body will give you less energy to work with. But what happens is that the body borrows from one area to give to another. For example, if you perform too much aerobic exercise, there's a high probability that the body will break down lean muscle to use for energy.
Why would the body break down it's own vital lean mass?
If the body "perceives" that there is less nutrition coming in, or a high demand of energy going out as in "over aerobicising", the body can begin to cannibalize it's own lean mass so that it has less mass to maintain. This makes perfect sense when you understand that muscle is "metabolically active tissue". It is literally the physical place where fat is burned. So if there is less muscle to maintain, there are fewer calories needed.
Eating smaller, more frequent meals is a great way to control your metabolism. The idea of smaller, more frequent meals is a sound nutritional strategy that can help you build muscle, lose body fat, and keep your energy levels high. Consuming five or six smaller meals spread evenly throughout the day (that totals 2,000 calories, let's say), is much more efficient than eating only two meals equaling the same amount.
I often use the analogy of a campfire to help people understand how the body uses energy. If you've ever been camping, you've probably had a camp fire to cook with or keep warm. If not, picture a ring of rocks with a fire made of wood from the forest in the middle of the rocks. We've got small twigs called "kindling" which literally means "to start a fire", slightly larger pieces called "tinder", and finally logs called "fuel".
To start a fire we start with kindling. Kindling is small twigs, crumpled dry leaves, dry grass, or anything that will ignite easily. This is analagous to starting our day with breakfast. It really doesn't matter what meal you are eating, it is always best to eat small amounts. A fire that burns for a time develops a hot bed of coals. Think of this coal bed as muscle. If you have enough coals the fire can handle a large log and burn it up. So if you have a fair amount of muscle and energy expending activity, your body can handle a large meal by using the energy from the meal efficiently.
The camp fire needs a large bed of coals and a little air to handle the "fuel". Our general problem is that we have too little muscle and eat too many big meals that our metabolisms can't handle. If a camp fire isn't hot enough to burn a big log thrown on it, the fire will dwindle and the log will remain partially burned. A similar thing happens with food.
The worst part is the body will digest most of the food and store more of it as fat than we want it to. This is simply because the body didn't need the food as energy because the body's energy stores are full and the body's energy demands are low.
Back to the camp fire for a minute. By feeding the camp fire with smaller pieces of wood (tinder) on a hot (and growing) bed of coals, the fire consumes the wood effortlessly. The energy in the wood
combined with oxygen ignite the fire's intensity. Our bodies can work this way too. By eating smaller meals, we don't tax our systems and our bodies literally begin to "burn through food" like Phil Kaplan says. This is how we eat to "support metabolism".
The Proof
A study conducted at St. Michael's Hospital in Ontario, Canada, observed two groups of individuals. One was subjected to a common three-meals-a-day diet while another was asked to consume over a dozen small ones throughout the day. At the end of the study, the "nibblers" showed considerably lower levels of low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the bad kind of cholesterol that sticks to the arteries).
Another study conducted at the University of Limburg in the Netherlands revealed that individuals who consume mini-meals had more stable carbohydrate and fat oxidization levels, while "gorgers" didn't, making them more prone to weight gain.
A study from Johannesburg, South Africa, demonstrated that frequent meals reduced appetite by 27%. Scandinavian researchers reported the competitive boxers who tried to lose weight by reducing their calorie intake. But it was mostly lean body mass loss in those who had their ration in two square meals compared with those who had 6 meals a day.
The Benefits
As stated above, eating smaller meals more frequently stabilizes nutrient oxidization levels, making the body more efficient at burning food, so anybody who wants to lose weight should adopt this eating principle. Eating smaller meals is also believed to lower blood cholesterol.
Furthermore, "nibbling or grazing" throughout the day prevents long stretches of starvation. Going from noon to 6:00pm without eating usually ends with one overeating at supper. This is a very bad eating habit seeing as our metabolism can only handle a certain amount of calories, carbs, fat, and protein in one sitting.
When you eat less carbohydrates at one time, you have more glucose and insulin control. Since diabetes is the fastest growing disease in the U.S., as well as the rest of the world, small meals make more sense for carbohydrate control.
It certainly seems wise to eat more small meals if you want to lose weight and improve your health.
Yours in health and fitness,
Larry Wasserman
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