Fitness & Wellness

If you’re like many people, simply deciding you’re going to workout because someone said it was good for you isn’t going to help you stick with a fitness program. Somehow, eating a nutritious meal because it’s good for you, sounds like something mothers tell their children and if you are like most people, it didn’t make you want to eat Brussels sprouts. Having a motivation to stay healthy or get healthy can be your focus, spurring you on when you’d rather grab an order of fries than a salad or watch the latest Netflix release.

Changing daily habits takes a while.

If you’ve ever started a program of healthy eating and regular exercise, only to have it end in less than a month, you understand that it’s not always easy to stick with healthy options until they become habits. That’s one reason working out at the same time every day is important. It helps you form a habit, which makes sticking with an exercise program easier. It’s also a good reason to do meal prep, so you don’t have to worry about what’s for supper or are forced to cook when you’re simply exhausted. Even if you’re really motivated, taking steps to prevent failure can help.

Identifying your downfalls and limitations can help with your motivation.

A food diary can help you realize how many extra calories you eat without realizing it. It can improve your motivation. Tracking your fitness goals, including the number of sets and repetitions can help you realize how much progress you’ve made, even if you don’t see the results yet. Keep your goals in front of you and also your motivation. Do you want to be healthy? Why? That’s not a silly question. Staying healthy can mean you’ll see your child graduate and marry or allow you to live independently in old age. That’s really motivating.

Finding what drives you doesn’t have to be shared.

Nobody should judge your reasons for starting a fitness program. However, they should be yours and you shouldn’t do it just because a spouse said you need to lose weight or get healthier. You need to want it. They say the best revenge is success, so maybe you want to look your best and feel your best as revenge for a bad break-up. It’s far better than sitting home crying or harassing the other party. It also helps get rid of stress. Maybe having more fun time with kids or grand-kids is your goal. You also may just want to feel good about yourself, which you should do no matter what your physical shape, but by getting healthier, you’ll be showing you think you’re important.

• Focusing on living healthier means more than just working out regularly or eating healthier. It includes healthy habits like getting enough sleep, hydrating frequently and learning to deal with stress.
• When you’re super motivated, you’ll find ways to increase the activity in your life. It might be something as simple as doing some exercises during a television commercial or even taking the stairs rather than the elevator.
• If you love food, use that love to help you lose weight. Learn new recipes that are healthy and share that food with others. You’ll probably find people want to join you on your journey to fitness.
• Use your motivation to get fitter to enrich your life. Do you want more energy to play with the kids? Don’t wait, do it now to burn calories. Do more things that are physical, which can include deep cleaning your home that you might otherwise be put off for later. You’ll get a double benefit.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

We all know that eating a tub of ice cream isn’t good for you, but would it be better if you ate a tub of frozen yogurt. Since it first hit the market, it’s been a huge hit. After all, yogurt is a healthy option, but, is it? Frozen yogurt still has sugar and flavoring added. If you go to a fancy frozen yogurt shop, you can add tons of toppings that would make a candy manufacturer blush. That can’t possibly be healthy. The answer is that it isn’t.

Frozen yogurt begins its life as a healthy option, then begins the road to an unhealthy treat.

Both frozen yogurt and regular yogurt start out by adding live cultures of streptococcus thermophilis and bulgaricus to milk. Even though these cultures remain alive even after freezing, some do not make the cut through the other types of manufacturing methods. Those methods vary, so not all frozen yogurts actually have live bacteria. Also not all yogurt have the same added ingredients, which means some are less healthy than others.

Frozen yogurt contains less fat than regular ice cream does.

Given the probiotic content can’t be judged across the board, what about fat content? That also varies based on the way the frozen yogurt is manufactured. It is lower than ice cream. There are two main ingredients in both ice cream and frozen yogurt. One of those ingredients is milk and the other is sugar. After those two, flavorings and added ingredients like chocolate chips of fruit pieces are added into the mix. Ice cream uses cream, not lower fat milk. The problem is, when you remove the fat, you also have to add more sugar to make the product palatable. More sugar means it’s not as healthy.

Let’s compare the nutritional value of each.

Let’s compare the nutritional value of a ½ cup of each, vanilla ice cream and vanilla frozen yogurt. A half cup of vanilla ice cream is 140 calories, while a half cup of yogurt only 111 calories. That’s good if you’re counting calories, but when you get to carbs, the comparison turns the other way. Vanilla ice cream only has 16 grams and frozen yogurt has 19 grams. There are 7 grams of fat in vanilla ice cream and 3 grams of fat in frozen yogurt. Ice cream has 10% of the daily value of cholesterol, while yogurt has 7.5%. Comparing other nutrients, potassium and phosphorus are about the same, while there’s 8% of the daily value of calcium in vanilla ice cream with just 7% of the daily value in frozen yogurt.

• The truth is, neither ice cream nor frozen yogurt should be eaten on a regular basis to replace healthy foods. If you’re opting for frozen yogurt, always check the nutritional value and opt for the healthiest one.
• One way to make a quick tasty treat that is healthy is to use plain Greek yogurt. Top it with walnuts or other nuts, chopped frozen fruit, like black cherries, and even a little wheat germ and mix. The frozen berries make it thick, cold and tasty.
• If you want frozen yogurt or ice cream, it’s okay occasionally, but keep portion control in mind. The serving size for both is a half a cup.
• Our online nutrition and meal planning service can help you develop the habit of eating healthier and teach you how to chose food wisely.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

At Body Sculptors in Louisville, KY, helping people look and feel better is our major goal. We strive to help you find ways to get better results in less time by using scientifically based workouts and healthy eating habits. One question that often is asked is whether it makes a difference what or when you eat when you workout. The answer is a resounding yes. After a workout, you need to replenish your body and one thing that helps is the consumption of bananas.

Your body depletes its stores of energy during a workout.

During a workout, you not only sweat, which means you have to hydrate, you also use stored glycogen. Your body has to replenish both stored glucose and electrolytes that help muscles to contract. The muscles have micro-tears that also need repair. That means it needs amino acids, the building blocks of protein, to help rebuild the muscle tissue.

To get those much needed nutrients, you need a quick snack after a workout.

The food shouldn’t be junk food, but something rich in nutrients. Not only does a banana contain high amounts of electrolytes lost in sweat, it has high water content and stores of natural sugar to replace the glucose. There’s nothing artificial in the banana, nor additives like added sugar, artificial sweeteners or preservatives. It has fiber, so the sugar content doesn’t cause the blood sugar levels to rise quickly. One study showed that if trained athletes ate a banana and hydrated after working out intensely, it increased levels of natural anti-inflammatory metabolites. It does the same thing NSAID medications do to deter inflammation.

The anti-inflammatory metabolites released also provide another benefit.

The rise of the metabolites may also decrease soreness often felt after a workout by enhancing recovery. Bananas also improve immune function with bioactive compounds, such as carotenoids, phenolics and biogenic amines. Bananas contain all these benefits, plus vitamin C, which aids the immune system and B6, necessary for changing food into energy for the body.
A banana chopped into Greek yogurt with a glass of water could be the perfect combination of carbs, protein and rehydration. Other options are a banana, water and a handful of nuts.
When compared to sweetened sports drinks, bananas were just as good at replacing nutrients, while preventing after workout inflammation. They also provided more nutrition.
Rather than using ibuprofen, many athletes now find bananas are better to prevent pain. Unlike ibuprofen, they don’t cause cell damage that later causes inflammation.
Not only are bananas a good post-workout snack, they’re also a good option to consume before you workout when combined with a source of protein.
For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

Did you want to start eating healthy this year, but you’re not sure where to start? We can help you. While some people love to dive right into a project and make all the changes at once, others like to dip their feet in the water and change a little at a time. We work with all types of people and understand that. For those that love doing everything at once, just check out our healthy menus on our Fit Meal Formula plan. If you want to start with tiny steps, here’s how you start.

Give up sugar and products with added sugar first.

There’s nothing like doing the hardest thing first and working from there. Giving up products with added sugar is definitely one of the toughest for many people. One of the reasons is that sugar is addictive. Not only does it affect the same receptors in the brain as cocaine, which bring you pleasure, but the more sugar you eat, the less sweet it tastes, so you have to eat more and more for the same enjoyment.

Find ways to add more vegetables to a meal.

Use vegetable noodles, like zucchini instead of lasagna noodles or enjoying the flavor of spaghetti squash instead of pasta. Make up vegetable soup to act as a meal starter or for a warming lunch. If you’re making a sauce, such as spaghetti sauce, add a few extra veggies, like some bell peppers or a little spinach. Add veggies to your smoothies or use a veggie and fruit smoothie for lunch. Roasted veggies or kabobs are delicious and can fill you up, not out. Increase the amount of vegetables you eat and you’ll reduce the amount of higher calorie foods.

Skip those processed foods and eat more whole foods.

All food is processed, since washing food is processing it. We’re talking about highly processed foods. Those types of food have additives, chemicals and often very little nutrition. If you want a snack, opt for fresh vegetables with dip or yogurt with fruit. In fact, you can make a delicious parfait by layering Greek yogurt, frozen cherries chopped in pieces and walnuts or sliced almonds.

• Make sure you have a healthy protein with your meal. Healthy protein can come from animals or plants. Fish, eggs, poultry, nuts, beans and lean beef are good examples. Protein leaves you feeling fuller longer, so you eat less.
• A simple way to ensure you get the maximum amount of your vitamins each day, make sure you have a rainbow plate of food at each meal. Choosing fruits and vegetables that have a wide variety of color means they offer a wide variety of nutrients and phytonutrients.
• Do you drink soft drinks? Change to water. Even diet cola can affect your waistline and put on visceral fat around your middle, according to recent studies. Visceral fat is the worst type of fat and hardest to lose.
• When you’re ready, we’ll be ready with healthy menus, shopping lists and an easy way to ensure you’re eating healthy every day. We make it easy for you to stick with healthy eating.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training

No matter how hard you work your abs, if you have a layer of fat covering them, nobody can see your hard work. While spot exercises create strong underlying muscles, when you lose weight, you lose it all over your body, not just in one spot. So finding the cardio that burns belly fat the best is actually finding one that burns the most calories.

Cardio may not be the best way to lose belly fat.

The truth is, the best fat burner is a combination of strength training and HIIT—high intensity resistance training. Strength training builds muscles as it burns calories and muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue does. HIIT isn’t a type of exercise, but a way of doing any exercise. It bounces between going at top intensity for a short period, such as 30 seconds to two minutes and then dropping back to a recovery intensity for the same amount of time or longer. You can use this technique with any cardio workout.

Take it easy and go walking or running, but modify it to a HIIT workout.

You probably put walking on the back burner, thinking it’s far too easy to burn tons of calories, but what about power walking. In fact, you can set your calorie burning ovens on high by making it a HIIT workout and adjusting the intensity. Not only does HIIT burn more calories in a shorter period, it burns extra calories longer. It increases your metabolism longer after you’ve finished exercising.

Bicycling can also be a HIIT workout and burn fat quickly.

No matter what type of exercise you do, including bicycling, using the HIIT technique helps burn more fat and that includes more belly—visceral—fat. In fact, some studies show that people doing HIIT workouts three times a week for a 20-minute session, lost not only fat, but inches around their waist, indicating belly fat disappeared, too. Burning off the visceral fat is not only good to flatten your stomach, but also important to your health. It’s the most dangerous type of fat to your health.

• If you need to lose belly fat—which translates to losing weight—but have bad joints, try an elliptical workout. It’s a good cardio workout that doesn’t pound your joints like jogging and other types of exercise.
• Remember to make your daily life more active to burn fat. You can run up and down stairs to burn calories and those burnt calories mean fat loss, which can also cause you to lose belly fat.
• Create circuit training to burn belly fat. You can create a workout that burns fat more quickly. Just shorten the time between exercises to maximize the results.
• No matter what type of exercise you do, what you eat is important. In fact, to get rid of belly fat, eating healthy should be your first step, with exercise forming the second.

For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training