Belly Fat Loser

Been trying to get no fat around the ole' midsection for years now, with no luck? Well get off the same old cardio workout, and try this one. It has nothing to do with cardio, whcih may be just the change you've been looking for. That, and great results on less than 3 hours a week!

Every once in a while a new workout comes along that gets me really fired up. I was turned on to this new muscle building workout workout by a personal trainer friend of mine. It promises to pack on new muscle and help you lose fat. “So what?” you may be asking. After all, many workouts do that. What is so special about this one?

Here’s what’s so special; 3 hrs. No, not a 3 hour workout, but only 3 hours a week! Unless you are there to scope out prospects for this weekend instead of training, you should be in and out of the gym that fast. That’s right, if you can find a measly 3 extra hours a week, you pack pounds of new lean muscle on your frame, while losing that fat you’ve been dragging around for years now. You’ll be lookin’  gooood! If you can spare that extra ½ hour to make it happen, read on…..

What Makes it Work?
This workout is a testament to the power of compound movements. Compound movements involve more than one joint at a time, so they harness  the power of more muscle groups simultaneously. That helps you for two reasons; it burns more calories while you’re exercising, and it works more muscle groups in less time, which is just the ticket for the time constrained  individual (and who isn’t these days).

What are the 3 Keys to Success for this Workout?
As with many of the workouts I love and admire, it’s all about intensity. High intensity train cuts right to the chase, and kicks the middle man to the curb. Your muscles get more stimulus in less time, and more of the fibers are activated, so growth is all but assured. For those of you that don’t envision spending the next 5 years struggling for results, put away the cell phone, stop texting in the gym, ramp up the intensity, and watch your body change for the better.

The other key that makes this workout work for you, rather than the other way around, is using good form (naturally) and explosive power on the contraction (lifting) phase, while using slower movement on the lowering phase of the exercises. That principle has been used by successful trainers, athletes and bodybuilders for years, so it’s really nothing new, but it practiced by far too few regular folks. It’s all too bad, because the results of such a lifting strategy speak for themselves.

The third important key to success is taking advantage of the progressive overload principle. That is the only thing that makes your muscles grow both larger and stronger; adapting to change. You have to force them to constantly do more work and lift heavier weights. Try and add at least a little more weight every workout.

If you have never lifted before, you may want to use the same weights for a few workouts in a row until your muscles get used to things. After that, it’s business as usual, and you’ll want to start adding the weight every time.

So, what is this new, magic workout that will pack on tons of new muscle while stripping off all your unwanted body fat in just days? I don’t know, but when you find it, make sure and drop me a quick email and let me know.

This workout will give you fantastic results if you concentrate on doing it correctly, and stick with it for at least a few weeks. Once you pass that point, you’ll be so excited that your results will motivate you to keep going. Your friends will wonder how the heck you got a hold of Clemens’ personal pharmacist and what he gave you. Of course, there’ll be nothing of the kind going on; just good old fashioned hard work, but in a new way.

The workout (finally!):

So, lets cut to the chase. Just what is this new workout, and  how can you get started? Well, you can actually do this at home with just a dumbbell series or set of adjustable dumbbells, a dip station, and a pull-up bar, but you’ll probably want to start at a gym that has one of those machines that lets you dips and pull ups with less than your body weight, until you are strong enough to do them without the machine’s help.

One last note; make sure you give your body the nutrition and rest you need to make this whole thing work. There’s no sense in committing yourself to something like this, only to shoot yourself in the foot by with insufficient rest and poor nutrition.

This workout employs a 2 on, 2 off cycle. That means you’ll workout 2 days on, and then take two days off. It’s pretty important that you follow that timing. Too short an interval and the lack of recovery time will lead to over training. Too long and you’ll cheat yourself out of the growth you are working for.

Day 1

Warm up first with 5 minutes on a bike and a few quick sets of weighted arm swings.  Wait 60 – 90 seconds between each set. You should finish the entire workout in ½ hour or less each day.

dumbbell flat bench press
1 set X 12 reps
1 set x 10 reps
2 sets x 6 – 8 reps

steep incline dumbbell  bench press
1 set X 12 reps
1 set x 10 reps
2 sets x 6 – 8 reps

Dips
4 sets

Day 2
Dumbbell dead lifts
1 set X 12 reps
1 set x 10 reps
2 sets x 6 – 8 reps

Power cleans
1 set X 12 reps
1 set x 10 reps
2 sets x 6 – 8 reps

Pull Ups
4 sets
Day 3 – no resistance training
Day 4 – no resistance training

That’s it! Now go forth and hit the gym! Man or woman, this really works great for everyone. Gals, don’t worry about getting that bulging muscle look, for 98% of you, it doesn’t work that way without a bit of chemical help. Guys, you may see results like that, though. Think Marky Mark in the early ’90′s. Use this workout to help you finally get where you’ve been wanting to go for years now, but never had the time. Let me know how it works.

Here's what those little guys look like growing in the wild. They are fantastically nutritious, but don't fall for the hype that may immitate the acai berry hubub that happened last year. It's only a food, after all.

Acerola cherry (Malpighia Glabra L. ) has recently been touted for that buzzword of health, antioxidants, but the acerola cherry is not new, having been enjoyed by people in North, Central, and South America for centuries. In fact, it grows natively in the U.S., Mexico, and Central America, and is beginning to be cultivated especially for it’s nutritional potency.

It has been grown in California by farmers since at least the 1960′s. It’s also called Barbados Cherry, West Indian Cherry, Cereza, Cerisier, and Semeruco, so if you’re not familiar with it under the Acerola Cherry moniker, you may know it as one of those.

Doubtlessly, you’ll  soon begin to see acerola cherry advertised as the latest superfood, despite the fact that it’s been hanging around for years now. You know the drill. Just send your credit card information for a “free” trial, NOT! Actually though, it will only take a few appearances of some “doctor/trainer to the stars” hawking it’s virtues on the talk show circuit to make that scenario a reality. People will start producing different preparations of the stuff and there you go.

What’s SO Great About Acerola Cherry , Anyway?
Acerola cherry does have much to recommend it, though. It is extremely high in antioxidants, for example, ranking above 11 other common fruits tested in a 2006 Brazilian study. That study found that Acerola cherry had approximately 7.5 times the antioxidant potency on the TEAC scale than the highly touted acai berry that was all the rage this time last year. In addition, it is loaded with vitamin C (itself a strong antioxidant), with almost 30 times the vitamin C of an equivalent serving of orange juice, but has only half the calories and 1/3 the carbs of OJ. Sorry Florida!

Remember, Vitamin C is one of the nutrients that your body can not make for itself, so you must constantly replenish it. It is water soluble, so it is flushed out constantly.

One of the most popular ways to use preparations of Acerola cherry  for health, fitness, and weight loss purposes is to blend it in a smoothie, and you know I’m a big fan of smoothies, too. It’s a great way to get a ton of nutrients in one convenient package. One hint for you smoothie makers out there; used crushed ice to make them. They’ll be faster to blend, and much smoother and more consistent. It will supercharge your smoothie with vitamin C and other antioxidants and help speed up your fat burning efforts.

It’s main contribution to helping your fat burning efforts is through the boost your immune system and recovery efforts after high intensity training sessions. So far, it doesn’t have any documented fat burning effects per se that I could find, although a recent 8-week double-blind, placebo-controlled, depletion-repletion trial with submaximal exercise testing study conducted at Arizona State University did discover that people that are deficient in vitamin C burn 25% less fat per equivalent activity than those that are not.

The cherry is loaded with highly anti-inflamatory anthocyanins . That doesn’t mean they never say anything you’d find on Fox News, but it does mean that they help your body heal from injury and fight pain and swelling. If you’re working out hard, you’ll definitely benefit from that.

Where Can I Get Acerola Cherry?
You can get it in tablet/powder form at many health food and nutrition stores, normally as some sort of vitamin C supplement. You can also find freeze dried berry preparations that use only pure forms of the berry. Many times you can find stashes of it at farmer’s markets in southern California and Texas. Here’s a novel idea; plant an Acerola Cherry tree in your yard and harvest the fruit yourself, if you live in a relatively warmer climate that never gets colder than 29F, such as Arizona, S. Cal, Florida, or south Texas. Try the California Rare Fruit Grower’s Ass’n for seeds and more info, but you’ll have to become a member before they’ll send you anything. http://www.crfg.org/seedbank.html

Here is a reasonably priced supplement from Amazon.com Click Here, in case your local Whole Foods Market or farmer’s market doesn’t have any of the fresh stuff (the way to go).

NutsOnline has pure powdered form of the fruit available too,
Click Here.

It may be common sense, but a lifestyle change means out woith the bad food and in with the good. Are any of these foods in the "Good for you" category? Actually corn might be, in small amounts. The problem is that very few Americans and Canadians eat it in small amounts, especially when you include the high fructose corn sweetener found in so many foods today.

One of the questions I’m asked more frequently than almost any other is about finding a weight loss diet plan that will help people lose weight really fast. Of course, what they actually mean is losing fat, but it’s what you mean, not what you say, right?

Even if they asked the right question, do they really want to go on a diet? After all, when examining long term results, the “go on a diet” route has been proven to fail more often than not, and most people want to lose weight and keep it off, not drop 50 pounds and gain back 60 (sound familiar?). That being said, what is the long term weight loss solution if it isn’t going on a diet?

Ask most experts on this subject and they will tell you that if you want long term weight loss success, you need to undergo a lifestyle change, not just jump on the latest weight loss diet trend. While there is no question that some of those flavor of the month diets can work, the reality is that if you can go on something, like a diet, you can also go off of it. That would defeat the whole purpose, hence the lifestyle change route.

Lifestyle change sounds so much more difficult than merely going on a diet, it’s no wonder some people hear that and just give up, thinking “There’s no way I can change my entire life.” Ah, but you can, and it is actually much easier to undergo a lifestyle change than to try and stick to a diet for the next 25 years.

What is a Diet, Anyway, and Why in the Heck Would I Want to go on One?
It does bring up an interesting question, though. What is the difference between a weight loss diet and a lifestyle change, anyway? When you’re trying to cut calories at every turn, constantly weighting your food (there is actually a time and place for doing that, however), changing from regular sugar-laden pop to diet soda, substituting protein bars for regular meals, and cruising the supermarket for “low fat” or other so-called diet fare, that is going on a diet.

The other diet route is heading to Amazon, buying one of the many popular diet books they’re happy to sell you, and trying to more or less do what it tells you for the next couple of years. (If you are going to do that, Click here for the best selling diet plans on Amazon.) Been there, done that, and it never seemed to work out very well in the long term. That is why a lifestyle change works better. It is a permanent change in one or more aspects of your life. In this case, a switch to a eat healthy, physically active lifestyle.

Don’t laugh, but the first time I underwent a lifestyle change was in college, when I permanently switched to light beer. I must have been drinking too much then, because in about 6 months I had dropped over 10 lbs.

That’s not really the kind of lifestyle change I’m talking about, though. If you want to lose fat and keep it off forever, you have to look at the behaviors that caused you to gain the weight in the first place and do a bit of behavior modification. Again, it sounds more difficult than it really is, especially considering it doesn’t take too much to make a meaningful difference in your body fat levels.

The first thing to do is pretty much the same as with any other endeavor you want to succeed at. You evaluate the situation. Look at what you eat now, and when you eat it. Check your physical activity level. Is there any?? It is obvious that if you want to make a change, you have to, well, make a change. Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is not a great strategy, so it’s time to find a new one that will get you to your goal. More importantly, it is time to find one that will get you there and you will actually want, and be able to stay with.

After you’ve taken stock of your situation, it is time to formulate a plan for fat loss success. Like starting a business, your chances of success go way up if you have a plan. It doesn’t have to be a set in stone plan that you never deviate from, and in fact, as you go on, and discover more about how your body really works, you’ll probably be making many changes to your initial plan.

The one thing too many people forget is that if the plan doesn’t work for them, they may as well just throw it in the trash before they ever get started, because they’ll never stay with it. That’s one of the problems with the “one size fits all” diet plans you get out of some of the popular books. Everybody is different. People have different likes and dislikes, their metabolisms are different, no two people have exactly the same body type, and people have different personalities and mindsets.

That all adds up to the importance of crafting a different lifestyle plan for each individual, because that is what everyone is, an individual. If you want to lose weight faster, and you should, because recent  research has proven that faster initial weight loss is more often permanent weight loss, your plan should include what you eat, when you eat it, and how you are getting your physical activity.

Not that I didn’t say “exercise”, but physical activity. The hard truth is that no matter how effective it is, and the right kind is very effective, there are some people that just aren’t going to exercise in the classical sense. They may say they want to, but it just isn’t in their makeup. That’s why it is a huge help to find other ways to increase your activity levels as you go about your daily life.

There is no skirting the fact that increased activity levels go a long way to burning extra calories while you are doing it, and increasing your metabolism so you burn extra calories all day long. Burning extra calories all day long is one of the “secrets” to effective weight loss. It all means that finding something that passes for increased physical activity will multiply the effects of any dietary changes you make, and is part of the whole lifestyle change aspect of weight loss.

Clean your refrigerator of all that pre-packaged garbage that has heretofore passed for food, possibly over howls of protest from the rest of your family, and refill it with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Lifestyle change diet tip -
Here is a great tip: Change your bread for some of the bread made without flour. Such bread has lower glycemic index than traditional breads, even whole grain varieties. Remember that keeping the glycemic index of your carbs low is critical to keeping your blood sugar levels consistent, so pointing your food choices in that area will help tremendously.

It begins at the market. Once you shop only for healthier foods, and keep such fare in your house, it will be much easier to eat only healthy foods. It takes a much shorter commitment to buy only healthy foods for that ½ hour you are in the supermarket than it does to avoid them if they are in your house. For more on easy ways to eat better, see my post Easy Healthy Eating Guide.

In short, a change to the healthy lifestyle will help you lose weight fast, but even more importantly, will help you keep it off forever.

Can tasty, orange Juven make your muscles bigger? Well, UAB is studying that very subject as you read this. You can bet that if it does, someone will market it for that purpose, instead of the wound healing it is used for currently; after doubling the price first, of course!

Juven, an over the counter supplement produced by big pharma company Abbott Laboratories, is being studied by the University of Alabama at Birmingham to see if it can possibly help senior citizens gain muscle mass. One would expect that if it can help old folks pack some lean meat on their bones, it could do the same for younger people as well.

Juven is an amino acid mixture that has been used to help wound healing. Juven is composed of the amino acids arginine and glutamine, combined with a metabolite of the amino acid leucine. Barbara Gower, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences and co-lead investigator of the study, indicated that she is investigating the possibility that  easier absorbtion properties of the the supplement form of  the aminos will help older people regain some muscle mass, vs getting the same nutrition in their diet through food sources.

There is no mention in UAB’s press release on the study of any sort of training program that study participants are undergoing. It would only make sense however for them to be using a resistance training program. The could even use something like exercise bands or machines with comparatively low resistance and medium-high repetitions.

Who is paying for the research? The National Institute of Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the UAB Center for Aging. Abbott Nutrition provided the supplement sans charge.

If it is successful, you can be sure that it will be the next big thing to hit your local GNC, and bodybuilders and dieters everywhere will have to try some for themselves. Why, you ask? Well, because every time there is a study like this, some supplement company seizes on the research for their marketing campaign, and you can bet Juven will be no different. If Abbott has no interest in the multi-gazillion nutritional supplement market, someone else will come up with a formula just different enough to be called some other name, and you can bet they will market it to the bodybuilders and dieters.

You know how 2008 Mr. Olympia got those huge muscles. That's right, by lifting weights! It is the proven way to pack on muscle mass. Here is why it happens and how you can maximize the effect in minimum time (Sorry, no 'roids allowed)

One of the most common fitness related questions is why do muscles get bigger when you lift weights? It  comes somewhere directly after “How do I lose weight?” and “How do I make my muscles bigger?” There is a simple, 3 word answer to why your muscles grow when you lift; adaptive muscle hypertrophy. It sounds like med school gobldygook, but it really just means that your individual muscle cells grow larger. In this case they grow as a response to your lifting heavier and heavier weights.

Your body is a wonderful machine. Not only can it come back from a variety of punishments, but it often comes back stronger than before. When you lift heavy weights, you are causing muscle damage. It’s true. If you saw my post about muscle soreness a few weeks ago, you’ll remember that when you beat the crap out of your muscles during an intense training session, you actually cause small tears in your muscle fibers.  Sounds painful, and it is. The technical name for all this carnage is microtrauma.

Well, the body doesn’t like to be in pain or to face things that it can’t overcome, so it looks for a way to avoid the problem in the future. In this case, it tries to get stronger spo that you won’t be able to inflict such damage on it in the future. Alas, that just means adding another 5lbs on each side of the bar, but your physiology doesn’t know that. It just adapts to handle the punishment that you’ve thrown at it so far.

How do your muscles actually grow due to all this?
What makes each muscle cell get bigger is really two different mechanisms, sarcoplasmic and myofibrillar hypertrophy. That just means respectively that your muscles fill with more fluid, and increase the amount of proteins, most importantly myosin II molecules, in the muscle fibers.

How can I maximize muscle hypertrophy so my muscles grow bigger?
While everyone may not want to look like a bodybuilder, and in fact, most probably would rather not be subjected to the stares that accompany 21” arms, many guys would like to pack on some extra muscle mass. As an added bonus, that extra muscle will help you stay lean, because your metabolism will be elevated and your daily calorie burn will be greater. In a way it’s good that most people would not want to grow as large as competitive bodybuilders, because no matter how hard or how long they train, most people can never get that large, even if they did have the desire to.

What is the best way to grow a bit larger and pack on enough extra muscle that you look better and leaner? You have to train to maximize muscle hypretrophy. Muscle hypertrophy is an adaptive response to progressive overload, os it only makes sense to mechanically load your muscles to achieve that. Progressive overload simply means that you gradually add more and more weight, so that your muscles must continually adapt to the added stimulus.

There are few keys to maximizing muscle hypertrophy.

Training frequency – New research indicates that with proper nutrition and rest,(very important, both), training frequency can be greater than had been previously believed. In fact, training an individual body part as little as every two days may give maximum results. This is due to the discovery that although muscles may be sore and still recovering, they can still adapt to stimulus. That leads to a new way to think about growing your muscles and the best way to make that happen.

The key is to do fewer sets for each body part, but do them more often. So, instead of doing 6 sets of leg presses  and 6 sets of squats to failure once a week, do 2 sets of each to failure, 3 times per week. You are doing exactly the same workload, but just spreading it out over three different training sessions instead of doing it all at once.

Training Intensity – Strength increases due to progressive overload are primarily die to two mechanisms, , muscle hypertrophy and neuromusclular effects that lead to more efficient recruitment of muscles to do the work. Consistent increases in training intensity from added weight are essential to continued muscle hypertrophy. In other words, if you stop gaining, you stop growing.

Diet – No, not going on a diet, but the foods and supplements you eat are vital to making your muscles grow ever bigger. You need plenty of everything if you want to maximize growth, but don’t try and get it all in in one sitting. For one thing, your body can’t metabolize more than about 20 – 30 grams of protein at a time. You need about 1 – 1.5 grams of protein per pound of lean body mass if you want to grow to your fullest potential. I know that sounds like one of those spam emails you get a hundred of every day, but it’s true.

See my post last week on the best time to eat carbs and when to eat protein to maximize muscle growth. I take a look at the latest research, which reveals the nutrition timing secrets to really packing on the muscle mass.

Sleep – New studies come in seemingly every week revealing the importance of sleep to virtually all aspects of health. For the purposes of what I talk about here the ones that matter are fat loss and muscle gain. You will be better positioned to achieve the opposite if you skimp on your good quality sleep. Just one of many reasons to get enough rest centers around your body’s production of human growth hormone (HGH).

REM sleep is when you body releases most of it’s HGH, a hormone strongly connected to your inevitable decline, as it slowly disappears from your body. Keeping HGH levels at Santana  Moss like levels as you age will go a long way to helping you maintain or increase muscle mass and sport a fat free midsection as you age past 30.

These are some of the most important aspects of getting those muscles to grow and keep growing. Remember, get those muscles bigger and your waistline will get smaller, and that’s a winning combination!

Is it true that you can eat this kind of stuff and still lose fat, if you just eat that the right time? Well, not exactly (sorry!) but when you eat what does make a huge difference if you're trying to lose fat and build muscle.

The Best Time to Eat Carbs to Lose Fat and Gain Muscle
While going on one of the many low carb diets  and cutting out most of your high glycemic index carbs is one of the most effective ways to lose fat, you will invariably have to eat some carbs, so the natural questions is “When to eat them?”. Nearly everyone has heard that you shouldn’t eat carbs late at night, don’t eat carbs after 6pm or some variation thereof.

Is that true? Should you not eat any high glycemic index carbs later in the day? Should you eat any carbs at all, glycemic index be damned, after your mid day snack? I’ll take a look at these questions and more, such as timing your protein intake for maximum muscle gains and fat loss.

Remember too that eating more often throughout the day is essential to either losing fat or gaining lean muscle. I’ve mentioned this in numerous posts before, but it still bears repeating. Eat 5 or 6 meals a day, spread between your first meal and about 7pm, depending on your schedule. If you’re training hard, you should also have a small snack of about 60% high quality protein, 20%low glycemic index complex carbohydrates, and 15% “good” fat before bedtime. This last snack before bedtime is a good idea only if you are doing very high intensity resistance training.

You should eat your carbohydrates at two times throughout the day; your first meal of the day and about an hour after an intense training session. You can also have a carbohydrate / protein supplement immediately before an intense lifting session, as we’ll discover in a minute.

If you are eating carbs as part of your first meal, and also doing any sort of cardio training in the morning, make sure you eat your meal after your cardio session. The reason this is so powerful is that your body has used up most or all of the carbohydrates stored from the previous day. That means it will turn to your fat stores for energy, which is the goal, after all. After your cardio session, if you are doing one, you can indulge, but make sure your meal also includes good fats and high quality protein sources, not just carbs.

Why, you may ask, is it important to eat carbs an hour after your training session, but not before? That has to do with the way your body metabolizes things. After you have depleted the glycogen in your muscles for energy, you will burn stored fat. Your metabolism is elevated due to your intense training session, so the body will be burning calories at an extra fast rate. To make sure it is burning calories from your stored fat, let it not get to any carbs for the first hour. After that, it is important you replenish the glycogen stores before the 2 hour window is closed, hence the one hour before any carbs timing.

A n additional reason to shun simple carbs late in the evening come from a Swiss study in 2003. That research found that eating a meal rich in carbs late in the evening caused elevated body temperatures in the study participants. Why does this matter? Because the rise in body temperature could be an indicator of less effective sleep, and proper rest is vital for both fat loss and muscle gains.

When Should I Eat Protein? – Protein Timing for Maximum Muscle Gains
When you consume your protein has always been a matter of some conjecture. I have heard for years that you just have to have a protein shake immediately after exercise, especially hard core resistance training,  to help your muscles recover from the whipping you’ve just given them. That sure sounds logical, but is it the most effective time to eat

If you're going to get maximum results, a high quality whey protein supplement is going to be onf your best friends.

protein for maximum muscle development?

According to a study performed at the University of Texas Medical Center, when you eat protein definitely has an impact on protein synthesis, or how well your body uses the stuff to rebuild your muscles after you tear them down with an intense workout.

According to the study consuming protein immediately before, not after, intense resistance training has a greater effect on protein synthesis. It is a powerful revelation really. The study authors concluded that “the total response to the consumption of EAC immediately before exercise was greater than the response when EAC was consumed immediately after exercise. Furthermore, it appears that the change from a catabolic state in the muscle to an anabolic state was primarily due to an increase in muscle protein synthesis. “

Think about that for a second. The difference between a catabolic and an anabolic state in the muscles is primarily determined by when you have your protein supplementation! That’s great stuff, because you can make that one, small change and totally transform your training results.

The study also noted that protein synthesis at rest was at a lower rate as when the protein was given after intense exercise. The study noted that exercise definitely seems to have a positive effect on protein synthesis. Given that, and the results noted above, it looks like you should definitely have some sort of protein supplement immediately before an intense lifting session.

One more interesting item noted in the study is that it makes no difference weather the protein is give intravenously or taken orally, so all you guys out there mainlining protein can stop now and take it the old fashioned way! The study used a mixture of protein and carbohydrate, which has been demonstrated to increase the effectiveness of the supplements.

A 2001 study by Esmark et al revealed that there was a significant difference between older male participants in a resistance training program who had a protein supplement immediately after as compared to 2  hours after their workout. The group who ate the protein supplement immediately after their workout showed increases in muscle size, while those who consumed the supplement 2 hours after exercise had no such improvement during the time of the study.

Still more evidence backing up the need to supplement immediately before or after a workout comes from a Cribb and Hayes study performed in 2006. That study found that young, resistance trained men who had a protein / carbohydrate supplement with 40 grams of whey protein isolate immediately before and after their high intensity training sessions demonstrated significantly greater gains in both muscle size and strength compared to those who had the same supplement in the morning and evening.

Free Form Amino Acids vs Whole Protein Supplements
This has nothing to do with nutritional timing, but the results of a 2006 study performed at the University of Tokyo discovered that athletes showed significantly better performance when they used a mixture of amino acids that included the branched-chain amino acids, arginine and glutamine, than when they used a placebo.

A 2007–8 study performed at the University of South Carolina, entitled Effect of carbohydrate-protein supplement timing on acute exercise-induced muscle damage did have some timing implications, however. Using the same type of carb / protein mix as in the study above, the researchers found that whole protein had no effect on muscle soreness or subsequent strength measurements in volunteers weather the supplement was administered immediately before or after the exercise session. The experiment was for a single exercise session though, so the long term implications of such supplementation are not clear from this experiment.

What is interesting is that the researchers noted the results form the Tokyo study above, and other studies. They concluded that there is a strong possibility that free form amino acid supplementation may be more effective than whole protein supplementation for athletes.

What should You Eat, and When Should You Eat It?
Well, that is the question, isn’t it? According to what I’ve noticed after 20 years of training, the experience of others, and the wealth of scientific studies recently, it seems that there is one big rule to remember: Eat a protein / carb supplement immediately before your weight training sessions, because it definitely makes a huge difference, even compared to eating the same supplement a few hours later or earlier. Here is a sample of when to eat carbohydrates and protein throughout the day.

Wake up
Cardio training
1 hour after cardio training – Eat your 1st meal – consisting of complex carbohydrates, protein and fat. This first meal should have the most carbs of any meal throughout the day, but also some high quality protein and a fat source such as olive oil, fish oil, or flax seed meal.

2 hours later – small snack – this should have a good balance of all three nutrient categories

2 – 3 hours later – lunch -  again, a good balance of all three nutrient categories
Now is when your workout timing comes into play. If you’re going to have a workout session about 2 or three hours after lunch, have your protein / carb supplement immediately before your workout as your snack. If not, have your snack and then take your supplement immediately before your workout. Remember, minds greateer than mine have discovered, through  some pretty mind boggling research, that eating the supplement before your training session gives the best results. If you can’t take it then , have your supplement immediately after your training session.

5 – 7 pm dinner – this meal is the reverse of breakfast, with more protein than carbohydrates.

If you are not doing high intensity resistance training (and why not?  it is the best way to lose that stubborn fat) that should be your last meal of the day. If you are, have a high protein snack with a bit of low glycemic index, complex carbohydrates and some fat.

Well, you never knew that when you ate what made such a difference, did you? Some researchers have even gone so far as to suggest that when you eat things has as much of an impact as what you eat, but I personally think the jury is still out on that one.

Typically, sore muscles mean you had a great workout. If you've trainined for a while, you've had a case of them. What we were told for years caused them was found to be wrong. Here is what causes sore muscles and what you can do about them.

If you workout or play sports long enough, you’re bound to have a bad case of sore muscles at some point. You’ll really get nailed with a case of delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) if you’ve taken a week or two away from exercising or playing a sport and jumped back into it again, full force. As the name suggests you won’t really feel it until about 8-12 hours after you’ve punished your muscles.

You know you’ll be sore, yet you do it anyway; what gives? If you’ve ever wondered about what actually causes sore muscles, and more to the point,  what you can do to help yourself get over a bad case so you can stop feeling like crap every time you move, listen up.

First, the good news. Some muscle soreness is good. It means that you’re actually getting something out of your workouts. If you aren’t pushing yourself hard enough that you get sore once in a while, you’re probably sandbagging a bit. If this means you, start pushing for that few extra reps, one more set of tennis, or an extra degree of incline on the treadmill. When you feel that sore feeling all over your body the next day, you’ll know you’re working hard enough.

What Causes Sore Muscles?
Basically, muscle soreness means you blasted your muscles into submission. The feeling is caused because you actually damaged them slightly, but don’t worry! That’s just what they need to come back stronger the next time. Scientists have actually done tests (in Australia, way back in 2007) and determined that sore muscles are caused by damage to your muscle’s z-band filaments. These filaments actually bind muscle fibers together when they slide over each other as you use your muscles. Every time you push extra hard to lift weights, run, or throw, and use your muscles more than they are used to, you’re causing a mini catastrophe inside.

Help for Muscle Soreness
Now that you know what that feeling means, what can you do about it? Many of the old standby remedies for sore muscles simply don’t work, because they were developed primarily on the notion that sore muscles were caused by lactic acid build up due to exercise. While lactic acid certainly builds up in your muscles during hard exercise sessions, it is not the reason your muscle are sore, so getting rid of it will not help your problem. Stands to reason, right?

There is only one real “cure” for sore muscles, and that is to give them sufficient recovery time to heal. The bonus for you is that as they heal, they also get bigger and stronger. It’s called adaptive response. Your body adapts to stress by trying to be ready for whatever you’ll face the next time.

You can use heat to help increase blood flow and decrease recovery time. Increased blood flow to your muscles will bring them the vital nutrients and oxygen they need to recover.

Make sure you are eating enough high quality protein and drinking plenty of water. This will ensure you muscles have the proper nutrients to begin the rebuilding process. Adequate hydration is essential to not only recovery, but good performance and health in general.

Low intensity exercise can help decrease recovery time. While it may seem counterintuitive to exercise to help cure an exercise induced problem, this can work well. That is because exercising increases blood flow to your muscles. Just be sure you use low intensity exercise, such as slow swimming, or mild cardio.

Another popular and sometimes effective, but always enjoyable cure for sore muscles is a massage. Again, this helps stimulate blood flow to the affected area so your muscles get the added nutrients they need to heal quickly.

What Doesn’t Work to Get Rid of Sore Muscles
One of the most common treatments you’ll see recommended for sore muscles is stretching, on the theory that stretching helps rid your muscles of excess lactic acid that builds up during exercise. Again, because lactic acid is not why your muscles feel sore, stretching won’t help alleviate the symptoms, although a comprehensive stretching routine is fantastic for helping to gain strength, increase flexibility, and prevent injury, so it is highly recommended by most fitness experts.

Another thing that will not help to cure or prevent sore muscles is to do the customary “cool down” period after you finish exercising. Although this can help get rid of excess lactic acid, since lactic acid is not the cause of DOMS, the cooling down period will not help prevent it. A warm up period before you exercise, especially if you have not dome the specific movement in a while, can help decrease the severity of any post exercise sore muscles on some occasions though.

Remember, while some muscle soreness can be a sign that you are hitting it hard enough to actually benefit from your exercise routine, severe pain, especially in your joints can be a sign that you went too far, and really screwed something up. If you are sore for more than a week, or have intense, stabbing  pain when making certain movements. A visit to your local health care provider may be warranted. If you’ve been training for some time, you’ll probably know the difference between a good case of sore muscles, and some thing more serious.

Happy training, and here’s to helping lose that belly fat!

Last year everyone was turning to these trendy little berries to help them lose weight. Then came the FTC crackdown on all the shady operators and many of the acai berry suplements went bye-bye. Now there are actual products being sold for weight loss, and narry a berry in sight. What is in these new products, and do they actually work? Read on.....

Weight loss is the focus of our national attention, at least when we’re not thinking about the economy or those globs of black goo floating about the Gulf. Even the first lady Michelle Obama has been concentrating on childhood obesity of late. The problem for many is that losing weight takes time; in many cases too much time. We are an instant gratification society and want something that works right now, weather that is weight loss, learning a new language, or getting us the inside track at a better job. Making something as difficult as weight loss a bit easier wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

That being said, many people naturally tend to turn to supplements to help them lose weight. Weather they turn to natural supplements is a different question entirely. People want a weigh loss supplement that works, and is safe. According to market research firm Packaged Facts, the nutritional supplement industry is a roughly $5 billion industry in the U.S. alone. That’s a lot of weight loss pills passing over the counters every year at your local GNC and Vitamin Shoppe stores. Furthermore, in 2009 Marketdata Inc. reports that Americans spent a staggering $58 billion on trying to lose weight.

If that much money is being spent it means only two things. Too many Americans have a weight problem, and they are not afraid to spend money to make it go away. The problem is that too much of that money is being spent on product that don’t work, and many people actually do lose the weight, only to gain it all back again.

People want a weight loss supplement that works and they are willing to pay for one, provided it really does do the job, and won’t cause more health problems than it solves. Be aware that some weight loss supplements have proven to be extremely effective, but were not healthy.

In fact, they caused so many serious health problems that they were pulled off the market by the FDA. The most famous of these are probably ephedra. Ephedra was in many popular weight loss supplements and fat burners, such as Muscle Tech’s Hydroxycut, Twin Lab’s Diet Fuel, and Met-Rx’s Thermocore, not to mention countless others. Many of these have been reformulated so they don’t contain the banned ingredients any longer, and are available once again.

Make no mistake though, changing nothing and taking a little pill every day is not going to make the weight magically go “Poof!” like so much spit on a July Phoenix sidewalk. You’ll have to actually do or change something (exercise or your diet), but those little supplement nuggets can give you a bit of a push to make things easier.

Here are some of the leading weight loss supplements that the market has voted as being worth taking. Please note that I have not personally tested any of these supplements, and all accounts of their efficacy are from third parties. Remember, just because the market has voted with their dollars does not mean the product will work for you. They may well do so, or the sales could be primarily due to some slick marketing techniques. That would never happen, would it? In any case, here are some of the leading weight loss supplements.

Liporexall can help some people lose weight, it is powerful, but it's not magic, eh...

Liporexall -

Liporexall is one of the most popular weight loss supplements to hit the market in some time. It’s claims are, to put it bluntly, a bit over the top. To wit they claim to be able to “block 28.3% of fat calories, build 700% more lean muscle, and increase weight loss by 900%. “ WOW! That’s some good stuff, Maynard! That could mean so many things. Did one person taking the stuff lose 9lbs, while someone not taking it lose only one? Who knows.

Liporexall has gotten much press recently due to it’s heart wrenching story about it’s inventor, an overweight (naturally) woman who works for a respected patent attorney, and the product’s 11 herbs and spices….. err, patented ingredients. . This gal was sick to death of being overweight and decided to do something about it. Unfortunately everything she tried ultimately failed. That’s when her boss lit a fire under her to go out there and develop something on her own by sifting through patent documents to discover ingredients that worked.

How Was Liporexall Really Invented?
Sounds plausible, right? Well, the Myth Busters are not on the case this time, but there do seem to be come problems with this account of Liporexall’s birth. First of all, if the ingredients were patented, she could not use them to make a commercial product without paying some sort of royalty to the patent holder, unless said holder was feeling extremely charitable.  Liporexall purports to have 11 (9 of which are for fat loss) such ingredients, which could turn into a legal, financial, and logistical nightmare for some poor woman working out of her basement. That doesn’t mean that the product fails to contain the products as advertised, but it probably means that a much larger (and better financed) entity was responsible for it’s creation. Ah, the wonders of creative marketing…..

The second is with her boss’s understanding of patents as they apply to a product’s efficacy. You can patent just about anything you want to, but nothing says the object of your patent has to perform as advertised. It only says that no one may make an identical product without paying you for it (or not ,if you do not want to sell the rights or receive royalties for it).

Just because this woman combined 11 patented ingredients together into a weight loss supplement does in no way mean that the product will perform as advertised. Of course it very well may, but the mere presence of such ingredients offers no guarantee. After all, are the products present in the proper combination and in sufficient quantities to cause you to lose weight? Have other people lost weight taking this supplement? Well,  Liporexall spouts on and on about the 11 patented ingredients, and the studies that support them, but few people ever take the time to look behind the curtain, and lift the veil of secrecy on any of this stuff.

Does the product contain this stuff?
Well without doing an actual chemical analysis, who can say for sure, but one could say the same thing about just about any product out there, right? Well, if we just take their ingredients list at face value, sure, they do actually contain all the ingredients. However, look at the quantities that Liporexall contains and compare that to the quantities of the same ingredients used in the studies that proved their effectiveness.

A bit of simple math can help us arrive at the answer. A standard Liporexall capsule contains 460mg of product. Is that enough to help you lose weight? That is an average of slightly more than 41mg per ingredient, per capsule, not including any fillers, moderators or any other ingredients that may or may not be present.

What is In Liproexall?
One of the most effective ingredients in Liporexall is Conjugated Linoleic Acid, more often called by it’s abbreviation, CLA. I’ve posted about this stuff before, and it really has been clinically proven to reduce body fat levels and help you lose weight. The problem is that the amount used in the clinical study was a wee bit more than 41mg. Actually, it was more than 460mg. The study, conducted by Leah D Whigham, Abigail C Watras and Dale A Schoeller at the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health used 3200mg doses.

That is not to say that you couldn’t achieve some success with smaller doses, but there have been 18 double blind studies done recently on the efficacy of CLA on  fat loss. 3,200 mg was the median amount used in the 18 studies. Even so, the amount of weight loss  for participants taking doses of CLA vs. a placebo in the study amounted to only .3kg per week. For those of us in the U.S., that’s about 2.6 pounds per month of fat lost due to taking CLA supplements.

Some of the 11 other ingredients used in Liporexall are a supercharged version of caffeine called Infinergy, 7-Keto®, Super Citrimax, ForsLean®, Advantgra-Z, PinnoThin™ , Phase 2® , NeOpuntia®, and ChromeMate®. As noted, if there were equal amounts of each ingredient in there, you’d get about 41mg per capsule. The problem arises because in most of the compounds that do have clinical weight loss studies to back them up, the quantities used in the study were far greater than 41mg. As for the others, well, I guess you take you chances. Speaking of chances, there is the chance that there is some synergistic effect exhibited with Liproexall, where the sum of the combination is greater than it’s individual component parts.

Are Liporexall’s descriptions full of crap?
The other problem is that some of the descriptions Liporexall uses for the weight loss compounds are pretty fanciful, if not completely different from any others I have ever seen. For example, here is their take on  ChromeMate®:
“(ChromeMate) helps regulate the amount of sugar in the blood. This helps limit the amount of sugar that you consume letting you eat the foods you love, while skimming the fattening agents out of them for you. This ultimately helps you lose more weight.”

What chromium picolinate (the actual ingredient in ChromeMate®) does is help regulate insulin efficiency. Chromate helps the transport of blood glucose across cell membranes, where it can do it’s work. No studies on chromium picolinate, and there have been many, indicate any propensity of the stuff to “skim out fattening agents” for you. What is a fattening agent anyway? Most foods in sufficient quantities are fattening agents, aren’t they? In any case, studies regarding the efficacy of CP for weight loss have been inconclusive at best.

There are some studies showing a positive correlation between taking chromium picolinate and weight loss. Other studies, however show no such link. For example, a 1995 double blind study by Trent and Thieding-Cancel compared weight loss in obese subjects taking chromium picolinate supplements against a similar group taking a placebo. The study found no evidence to support the claim that chromium picolinate had a positive effect on weight loss. Another study, this one in 1996 by Lukaski et al, examined weight training and chromium picolinate. In that study the researchers found that there was again, no evidence to support the claim that chromium picolinate helped reduce body fat and increase muscle mass.

What about Super Citrimax®, the super fat burning ingredient with the fancy graphic plastered on the front of their website? Well, that has been proven very effective at doing exactly what they say it does; burn fat from your body. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled human clinical trial was conducted using Super CitriMax®, and the results were as you see them on Liporexall’s website,  pretty darn awesome!

So, what’s the rub? Again, the study used quantities far in excess of what you’ll find in Liporexall. Remember, each Liporexall capsule only contains 460mg of total, combined ingredients. The aforementioned study used 4,666mg of Super Citrimax®daily, divided into three equal doses. One third of 4,666mg is about 1,555mg, or more than 3 times the total amount of ingredients you’ll find in each capsule. Furthermore, the study found that 1,500mg (before each of the 3 primary meals) to be the optimum dose for burning fat and promoting weight loss.

It uses a double barreled approach, both decreasing appetite and increasing fat synthesis, which probably accounts for much of it’s effectiveness. However in the study, participants were on strictly controlled 2,000 calories daily diets, so the appetite suppressing qualities of the compound were not being used to their fullest for many participants.

All of the above being said,  many people really seem to stand by Liporexall. There are a ton of positive reviews out there on it from people who have lost substantial amounts of weight while using it. In addition, people keep on buying the stuff month after month, so they are either completely crazy, or they must be getting some positive results from it. The problem with the reviews is that, as with so much on the Internet, you can not tell if it all of the people are real, if they really obtained the results they claim, or what methodologies they used to lose the weight.

Apidexin

Apidexin is another weight loss supplement that has proved to be very popular recently. There are many glowing accounts of successful weight loss efforts using Apidexin, both on their own website (where you’d expect to find them) and on many other sites and forums.

Apidexin also contains a number of special patented or patent pending ingredients, although in this case, there are only 8, not nine of them. They claim a low, 2% of customers take them up on their no questions asked money back guarantee. If that is true, it speaks volumes about the effectiveness of their product, since at about $100 per month (retail, you can certainly find it cheaper), it is certainly not cheap, and you’d think if it did not work, people would be rushing to get their money back.

Shared Ingredients among Weight Loss Supplements?
The 8 ingredients bear a strong similarity to those of Liporexall. For example, Apidexin contains Infinergy the caffiene-malic acid bond DiCaffeine Malate, which is one of the ingredients in Liporexall. You’ll also find ForsLean®, which is another of the ingredients found in Liporexall. ForsLean® is derived from the root of a member of the lavender family, Coleus forskohlii, and is patented due to it’s ability to promote lean muscle growth. Does it work to reduce fat also?

Well, I’ve never taken it, but a team of researchers at Baylor University in Texas actually did a study (published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, back in 2005) in which overweight women received either a placebo or two doses of ForsLean® each day. Here is some of what they discovered.

“The results suggest that CF does not appear to promote weight loss but may help mitigate weight gain in overweight females with apparently no clinically significant side effects,” The researchers did note however, that the test subjects decreased their food intake while taking the ForsLean® compound., which could lead to weight loss. The scientists were of the opinion that while ForsLean® may not be a powerful compound for losing weight, it did show some promise in helping to keep weight off after losing it.

Another ingredient in Apidexin is Razberi-K (4-(4-hydroxyphenyl) butan-2-one ), which is derived from, amazingly enough, the raspberry plant. Who would have guessed?  It is actually a ketone found only in that specific plant. Razberi-K is claimed to have strong fat loss enhancing properties. It promotes  HSL (hormone-sensitive lipase) trans-location to within the fat cell which helps fat metabolism by breaking down fat molecules into fatty acids. Like some of the other ingredients, it has been studied, although not to death. In 2005 a Japanese study by Morimoto et al entitled “Anti Obese Action by Rasberry Ketone” demonstrated  that “RK prevents and improves obesity and fatty liver” It’s secret appears to be partially explained by the fact that it is very similar to capsicum, a pepper derived substance found to help burn fat through increased thermogenisis.

Other ingredients found in Apidexin include Japanese Wakame seaweed , Guggul EZ 100, and Thermodiamine.

There are some very positive reviews on Amazon. But on the whole, results seem to mixed, if skewed a bit toward the positive. Click here to read Amazon customer reviews on Apidexin.

Are there weight loss supplements that actually work? Undoubtedly! Do they work for everyone? Probably not. Can they get expensive? Sure, especially if you take them for a long period of time. In addition, some people have reported side effects from taking these such supplements. Is it worth it? If you’ve tried everything else, and nothing has seemed to work to help you lose weight, it may not be a bad idea as a last resort. Try losing weight the conventional way first, because if you lose it with these supplements, chances are you’ll just gain it back when you stop taking them.

Have a great Independence Day weekend!

Can not getting enough shut eye each night help make you fat? Some high powered researchers may have found the answer to that very question.

People often lose sleep over being fat, but does lack of sleep actually contribute to gaining weight or an inability to lose fat? One thing’s for sure; in today’s busy life more people are sleep deprived than ever. Between meetings, travel, shuttling the kids around to this event and that, and going the extra mile for your accounts so you can keep up your income in this tough economy, just about everyone could use an extra couple hours of sleep every night. Would those extra hours of sleep help you lose weight, and if you don’t get them will it make you fat?

Sleep – Belly Fat Study
According to recent research it can do just that. A recent study conducted at Wake Forest University by Kristen G. Hairston, M.D., M.P.H, concluded that lack of sleep can cause dangerous fat build up around your internal organs. The study, published in the March 2010 edition of the journal Sleep notes several interesting findings.

They concluded that it is worse for people under 40 to get less than 5 hours of sleep each night than it is for people above that age. In fact, the increase in visceral fat, also known as belly fat, observed by the research team was not only prevalent in people under 40 years old that got less than 5 hours of sleep each night, it was also observed, to a lesser degree, in people that got over 8 hours of sleep per night. What about those of you over 40? Sleep however much you want. The team recorded no correlation between sleep duration and belly fat in those over 40 years of age!

The most common groups to be affected by the increases in belly fat associated with sleep were Hispanic men and African-American women. Those groups are also more likely to be affected by metabolic conditions such as obesity, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. When asked why certain groups or people under 40 appeared to be at rtsik for sleep deprivation related fat gain, Dr. Hairston  gave the oldest scientific answer in the book “ We don’t really know yet …”

So, when you’re young, tend to stay out late, and get less sleep, or if you have young  kids (likewise) lack of sleep will make you gain belly fat, but older individuals don’t really have to worry about it. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.

More Studies Link Sleep Deprivation to Fatness
But wait, there’s more… In a 2004 study, researcher Eve Van Cauter from the University of Chicago discovered that not only are they linked, but in her opinion sleep might be vital to weight control. Her study indicated that one key to the overeating rage in America today is the fact that Americans do not get enough quality sleep. The condition causes a rise in hormones that increase appetite, while simultaneously decreasing hormone levels that make you feel full. These two hormones are ghrelin and leptin. I did a post on why leptin can make you fat last year. Sounds like a recipe for overeating to me.

What did the University of Chicago study find?

- Leptin levels were 18% lower and ghrelin levels were 28% higher after  participants slept 4 hours vs. 10 hours.

- Study participants who had the largest hormonal changes indicated they felt the most hungry and craved simple carbohydrate-rich foods. Those foods are known to make you gain extra fat.

Decreasing leptin is the goal of not only enough sleep, but also the diets that have you eat all knids of junk food one day a week. That has been shown to decrease leptin levels, See my post on why leptin can make you fat for more on how to eat junk food every Sunday and lose weight.

It doesn’t stop there. A few years ago, a team at Stanford University, a prestigious institution of higher learning if there ever was one, also concluded that sleep is very important to maintaining healthy weight. That study was conducted by Dr. Emmanuel Mingot who is well known for his sleep research, and previously conducted breakthrough research on narcolepsy.

More Reasons No Sleep Can Make You The Dreaded Skinny – Fat
The effects of sleep on growth hormone production and muscle recovery are also well documented. You produce most of your HGH when you are in deep sleep, and your muscles only recover from hard training sessions and grow when you are sleeping. Both of these things have a large impact on keeping lean and dropping excess fat.

It appears that sleep, something all too many of us don’t get enough of, is essential to losing weight and dropping belly fat levels. So, set your alarm a half hour later and go to bed an hour earlier.

Tis catfish tastes great and is a healthy part of a balanced diet. Before you eat it, please check to see where it spent it's youth. It's more important than you might think!

Many health experts extol the benefits of eating fish. I eat it all the time. After all, fish is a fantastic source of complete protein and is loaded with the Omega-3 fatty acids that we’re always being told are great for our cardio-vascular systems. Studies and anecdotal evidence has even show that Omega-3s can help you burn fat much more efficiently.

NO Omega-3s?

Did you know that some fish actually contains very little of the healthy Omega-3 acids that you’re eating it for? What’s more, some of it might actually be  dangerous to eat! It is easier to understand when you know how fish get so rich in the Omega-3 fatty acids in the first place.

Like many other people, I thought that they naturally produced the stuff. That’s not actually what happens, though. They get most of the Omega-3s through their diet. That’s right, they eat a diet rich in plants containing Omega-3, or enjoy dining on other sea creatures that have eaten the plants.

The problem arises when you remove fish from their natural habitats. Were you aware that much of the fish you eat has never seen the open ocean? They’ve never known the joy of chasing other fish for dinner or the terror of having a larger fish snapping at their tails. Instead, they hang out at the fish farm in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, eating soy and corn pellets, instead of the diet they were made to eat. They are also plumped up with vitamins so they grow faster, and are ready to market sooner.

Now you see why they lack the healthy Omega-3s. It’s not found in corn and soy pellets! But wait! There’s More!

Deadly Fish on Your Table?

Not only can this fish be less healthy than wild caught (which have their own issues, such as high levels of mercury and other contaminants) according to some experts, some of it is actually downright bad for you. According to a recent ABC news report, all manner of stuff you’d rather not be in your fish is, well, it’s in your fish. We’re talking veterinary medicines, carcinogenic pesticides, and other less than savory ingredients, such as raw sewage. Ready to puke yet?

Check the label before you put that package of swordfish, talapia, shrimp, or catfish in your shopping cart, check to see where it was hanging out before it ended up wrapped in cellophane in the seafood department. If it is form out of town, realize that the US FDA checks only 1% of out imported seafood for safety, and that’s on a good day!

Remember the string of hazardous Chinese food products we’ve endured? Are you really ready to trust your family’s health to some more of their “food”. I don’t think I am.

You don't have to work out like this guy in order to lose weight. In fact, you can still live a relatively normal life and drop plenty of lbs.

Weight loss can seem like an impossible mountain to climb. There are so many complex diets and exercise routines out there that truly make weight loss an incredibly difficult task to master. While it is true that some habits will need to be changed, your entire life does not have to completely turn upside down in order to lose the extra pounds. Weight loss does not have to rule your life. Simple, moderate changes can be enough to make all the difference you need while still living a normal life.

Many people feel that a normal life entails getting to go out and have drinks with friends, enjoy restaurants and not spend several hours a day at a gym. If you feel that way, you’re not alone. You would be absolutely correct if you believe that it is not normal to bypass social drinking and meals at restaurants. It is also not normal to spend several hours a day at the gym. That is an example of the extreme.

Of course, if you do have extreme habits of excessively eating or getting absolutely no exercise at all, these habits should be altered to a more normal lifestyle as well. It is normal to get at least 20 minutes of physical activity every day. Going for a walk, climbing stairs, a workout routine in front of the TV or a quick jaunt to the gym is normal. It is also normal to stop eating when your stomach tells you it’s full.

So how do you lose weight and still live a normal life? Throw out the fad diets, the excessive amounts of junk food and pay a little more attention to your daily activities. Everyone can make 20 extra minutes to break a sweat. Whether it’s getting up 20 minutes earlier than you normally would or staying up 20 minutes later, it can be done. Everyone can cut back on the junk food. This doesn’t mean to rule out junk food altogether but instead, come up with a healthy balance. Allow yourself a cheat day and make sure you’re getting your daily vitamin and mineral needs taken care of. Supplements are essential to ensuring you’re getting adequate amounts of Omega-3’s and other necessary forms of nutrition. Salmon oil, for example, is a simple and effective option for supplementing nutrition into your diet.

People are often surprised at what a huge difference it can make to add a minimal amount of exercise and make slight changes to eating patterns. Getting adequate amounts of sleep (6 to 8 hours) and working out along with eating five small meals a day is something that anyone can do while still living a ‘normal’ lifestyle. Take a chance on these small but significant tweaks in your lifestyle and you will be amazed at the results.

NOTE: The preceding was a guest post by Eric Rea.

You can quit smoking and not be forced to gain weight. It's true, but you have to plan for success.

Many smokers fear that if they quit smoking they will inevitably gain weight. While it is true that smoking often helps people stay skinny or keep from gaining any more weight, it is not true that if you quit smoking you will automatically gain weight.

Smoking is one of the most unhealthy things you can put your body through. You’ve heard all the stories and harangue from university types and health authorities, so I’ll spare you going through it yet again. Suffice to say that smoking is one of the largest risk factors for an early demise, right up there with obesity, the problem we’re all here to solve. So, can you quit smoking, and reduce your risk of dying young, without gaining weight and increasing it again?

Actually, yes, you can quit smoking and lose weight . There is also no guarantee that if you have a more or less healthy body weight now, that you will automatically pack on the pounds should you manage to quit smoking. The good news is that while the majority of people who quit smoking do gain weight over the short term do gain weight, there is no reason why you have to. In any case, even if you do gain weight as you quit (and I’ll give you some ways to avoid doing that) most people manage to lose weight over the long term after they quit.

The single biggest thing you can do to lose weight when you quit smoking is to actually start before you quit. Increase your activity level, and most importantly, change your eating habits before you stop smoking. Why? Because if you are eating healthy and you do increase your caloric intake temporarily as you’re quitting, you will at least be eating a greater quantity of healthy foods, rather than just eating more junk. Overall, your caloric increase will be less and you will get more nutrition than if you simply ate more breaded, deep fried foods and sweet treats.

One of the most powerful strategies for quitting smoking is to replace your need for a cigarette with something else. Many people tend to gravitate towards food, but that is not the strategy I’d advocate here. The secret is to use exercise and physical activity as a stand in for smoking. That way you’ll increase your activity level and become more physically fit as you quit. You’re basically killing two birds with one stone, to co-opt an overused metaphor .

To keep your oral fixation in check without increasing your caloric intake, chew sugar free gum. That will help keep you satiated without having to smoke a cig.

Switch to decaf if you are a coffee drinker. Quitting smoking can make you feel jittery and unsettled, as the nicotine level in your blood decreases. Caffeine amplifies this effect, so try to cut back there as well. You can still feed your Starbucks habit every morning, just ask for a half decaf, or heaven forbid, a full decaf latte next time. Speaking of lattes, changing to non fat or 2% and sugar free for your latte can  trim an extra couple of hundred calories each day. Even at only a 100 calories daily reduction, that ads up to a 10lb loss over the course of a year. Bonus!

It is essential that you get at least 7, but preferably 8 hours of sleep every night. Sleep deprivation can increase your desire to both smoke and eat. Getting enough rest will help you fight those urges, and make sure you’re getting the most from your workouts.

Nicotine replacement therapy may work for you . You can quit smoking, but still get your daily dose of the nic, for a while at least. Then you’ll slowly wean yourself from the stuff. If you’ve already quit smoking, you’ll be good to go. Ask your health care provider about prescribing a nicotine replacement therapy, such as the patch.

One key is to plan for an increase in cravings. Keep your house, car, and office well stocked with healthy cigarette substitutes, so you don’t resort to eating or chewing on whatever you find. That can be a recipe for gaining weight in a hurry. With a little planning, you can avoid this.

Make sure you get plenty of emotional support from those closest to you, although if all your family and friends are smokers, that may be easier said than done. If you can get a friend or family member to take the journey with you, maybe you can both quit smoking and lose weight together. Make it a competition. If you’re a competitive person, that can be the edge you  need to pull this off.

Use any combination of strategies to ensure your success. The point is that you do not have to automatically gain weight when you quit smoking. In fact, with some planning, you might actually lose it.