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Don’t let one slip or even several days or weeks of neglect stop you from looking and feeling your best. It’s time to get back on the fitness wagon. Even if you fell off the wagon, then sold it for money for Oreos, it’s never too late to start over and get back into the routine of working out. One thing about exercise, it’s not a task, like doing laundry, where if you let it go for a few days, you can catch up again in one night. It takes time to get back on track, so you may have to take it slowly at first.

Sure, you messed up, but don’t let that stop you.

When you were learning to walk, you fell, stumbled and didn’t do it well at all. You never let that stop you. Slipping up and falling off the wagon is part of learning a new lifestyle. Some people get it immediately and once they start, it’s part of their life forever. Most people start and stop several times until they find the right motivation or learn to make it a habit in their life.

Were you in front of an open refrigerator all night?

Healthy eating is one of the biggest problems people face. They often feel that if they cheat on their diet or healthy eating habits, it’s all over but the shouting. That’s not true. In fact, there are cheat days built into healthy eating. Sometimes, eating a bit of the food you’re craving helps you stick with a healthy eating plan. In fact, eating more than normal on occasion may even help you shed weight by letting your body feel as though food is plentiful. Chalk up that eating marathon to a bad day and get back on track.

Are you feeling too tired to go to the gym.

When you’re tired, what you may actually need is a little exercise to get your blood circulating. However, if you’ve been working out furiously and not taken any time away from the gym, you may have overworked your body. Examine your workout habits and see if you really need rest. That’s not falling off the wagon but giving your body time to mend. Your personal trainer can help you identify the problem.
– Decide to workout for just ten minutes. If your exercise program has been put to the side, use the ten minute theory. Put on some music, run in place, do a few squats. If you feel like doing more time, go ahead. Otherwise, try ten minutes a few more times throughout the day.
– Take it one day at a time. Rather than say you’re going to eat healthy from now on, say you’re going to eat healthy tonight…and do it. Little by little get back to old healthier eating habits.
– Work with a personal trainer. If your exercise wagon crashed and burned, a trainer can help you create a new one.
– Switch your routine around to have more fun. Add fun activities like bouldering, bike riding and even Kangoo jumps to the workout.

Comfort foods are often high calorie foods that tickle your taste buds and lower levels of stress. While you do have to beware of comfort foods, they really do provide stress relief, but not just from the pleasure of eating them. It’s from the neural activity it causes. One study on mice showed that rats under duress responded to sugar water, their comfort food, and displayed signs of reduced stress. When the liquid bypassed their taste buds and went directly to the stomach, there was no relief. That says comfort foods work only when they linger on the palate for a few moments and set off the taste buds.

Find a substitute for the food you crave.

All foods have certain characteristics. Sure, all comfort foods hit the taste buds, but sometimes it’s more than that. Sometimes, you need to hear the crunch and feel your jaw working. Crispy crunchy snacks are often your weakness in this case. Tooth grinders and clenchers often find these types of crunchy snacks best. Try a crisp apple instead of pretzels or chips. Salty foods are also important food cravings and again, chips might be your answer. Substitute with air popped popcorn. In the experiment on mice, a sugar substitute worked to replace the sugar water.

Find a physical outlet.

Whether you’re angry or sad, exercising helps. Stress of all types produce stress hormones that leave you feeling terrible. In order to get rid of that feeling, working out, not eating, is the answer. You need to do something active, to mimic the fight or flight response, which is what nature meant to happen. Run up and down stairs, take a brisk walk or do anything that gets your body moving. It works to eliminate that feeling of frustration, anger, sadness or just general depression and the blahs.

Identify what causes the urge to eat the comfort food.

You have to know what the problem is in order to solve it. Taking the time to chart your cravings and the events that led up to them is important. If you find you want comfort food every time you visit a friend, is there something lacking or wrong with your relationship? Does your work make you want to grab a big bowl of mashed potatoes or is it frustration with your budget? Work on solving the problem or learning to deal with it. The first step is always admitting one exists, not hiding out in a big helping of food.
– Learn portion control. You don’t have to give up comfort food, just limit the intake. Combine it with fresh veggies or other healthy snack. I have a client that loves mashed potatoes. Now, instead of eating a bowl full, she puts a small amount in a dish and uses it as a dip for celery. She gets the taste, but in a far smaller amount.
– Use fruit to quench that craving for something sugary. Make sure it’s one of the sweet fruits, such as bananas or grapes.
– If you love ice cream, make your own low calorie, healthy alternative. Slice a banana and freeze it on a tray, then mash or blend it until smooth. It tastes cool, creamy and a lot like ice cream.
– Fried foods are often at the top of the list. Baked alternatives are a good choice. Try some baked sweet potato fries. Experiment with various healthy foods until you get the same sensation of your comfort food.

We will be writing about a variety of informative topics to help you achieve your health, weight management, and fitness goals. Be sure to check back often and let us know if there’s a specific topic you’d like for us to include. Here are some of the topics we will be covering – hope you’ll enjoy it!

• Expert Advice,
• Health & Fitness,
• Motivations,
• News & Events,
• Nutrition Tips & Strategies,
• Recommended Books,
• Supplements,
• Weight Loss Strategies,
• Workouts & more!

If you’ve ever tried to create a workout program on your own, you’ll find there are hundreds of different exercises and many different ways to do them to reap benefits. It can be confusing, which is why we provide the programs live or online. We make sure you get variety in workouts for several reasons. The first is easy. It prevents the boredom that can occur when you do the same workout repeatedly. You simply go through the motions after four to six weeks and eventually that boredom will make it harder and harder to workout, until eventually you quit.

You’ll push past the plateau when you switch your workout regularly.

When you do the same workout repeatedly, plateauing often occurs. It’s when the body becomes too efficient at doing an exercise or specific group of exercises and burns fewer calories. Efficiency is good in our daily life, but when it comes to weight loss, not good at all. You’ll see slower weight loss and less progress, which is why trainers offer a wide variety of workouts to help you accomplish your goals.

When you do the same workout repeatedly, you can develop stress injuries.

Runners often have stress injuries like shin splints, Achilles tendinitis, stress fractures and plantar fasciitis. Those come from doing the same type of movement continuously. You’ve heard of tennis elbow and workout injuries from strength training that start with pain, but if the exercise continues, ends in chronic persistent pain even when not lifting. Overuse injuries mostly occur in older individuals, but if you run constantly, it can happen at any age.

You need to work muscles on all planes to ensure functional fitness.

There are three planes of motion. The first divides the body into left and right halves. It’s called the sagittal plane and encompasses backward and forward movements. Bicep curls and back squats exercise that plane. The second is the frontal plane, that divides the body into a front half and back half. It involves side to side movements, like side bends. The third plane is the transverse plane and that divides the body into the top half and bottom half. When you do twisting movements you’re working that plane. Switching exercises frequently focuses on strengthening muscles on all planes.

There are many muscles in your body, some very small, some large. When you vary your workout, you ensure that you build all the muscles in your body.

Switching your workout is good for both your body and brain. Learning new exercises, like learning movements in ball room dancing, stimulates the creation of neurons in your brain and keeps the ones you have in better health, boosting your memory and aiding your learning skills.

Switching your workout keeps you more excited about exercise. Some people find that it also helps to find a different way to workout, like bike riding, when you don’t go to the gym or exercise with an online program.

Every time you switch your workout, your body has to adapt to the change. You might feel sore for the first few days, until it makes the adaptation.