Fitness & Wellness

One of the biggest deterrents people face when they want to achieve any goal is lack of belief that they can do it. The power of belief is important, whether you’re developing a business, focusing on fitness or simply want to feel better. Belief in a doctor or medicine is half the cure and so is belief in yourself when you want to accomplish a goal. If you believe you can do it, you’re halfway there to conquering your goal.

Are you afraid to try?

One of the reasons people fail to believe in themselves is that they’re afraid of the results. Sometimes, they’re afraid they’ll fail again and failure certainly doesn’t feel good. If that’s you, think of Thomas Edison’s quotes, two of which are my favorites. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” The only failure is lack of trying. Don’t let fear get in your way.

You need to believe that change is good if it makes you healthier.

People often sabotage themselves or people they love if they think something will change the dynamics in their life. If you’re worried what will happen if you look and feel better, change your focus to having a higher energy level. Focus on what won’t scare you or face it with the knowledge that you actually control how you feel and looking better won’t change a thing except your energy and health. Find out what stops you from believing in yourself and address it.

The power of belief can help you achieve fitness or block you.

Everyone has a belief system that guides the through life. If you’re a mom, you may think that doing something for yourself is selfish and all your free time should be devoted to your family. If that’s part of your belief system, stop right there. YOU OWE IT TO YOUR FAMILY TO BE FIT AND HEALTHY. Staying fit means you have more energy and time to devote to them. It also means you’ll be a better role model.

• Do you have family members that put you down when you tell them about your fitness program? Don’t tell them. Our apps let you change your eating habits and workout in the privacy of your home. Only you have to know.
• Are you worried that you might injure yourself because you’re so out of shape? It’s one reason we create a workout that’s personalized. Take it easier when you start and you won’t suffer from sore muscles that make you quit.
• Schedule your workout at the same time every day and make it an appointment. If you’re changing your eating habits, get rid of food that’s sabotaging your efforts and stock up on healthy snacks.
• Become the role model for your children and family. If you’re the family cook, don’t tell everyone it’s healthy, just cook and serve healthy meals. Get the kids involved when you exercise and get them in the habit of moving more.

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

One of the biggest problems with losing weight, especially if you’re working out on your own, is plateauing. The best way to deal with a plateau is to avoid it in the first place. You can push through the plateau if it occurs and knowing what caused it helps. Plateauing occurs when the body becomes efficient at making the moves of an exercise. It happens when you don’t vary your workout enough. As a trainer, I vary clients workouts enough so your body is always working at maximum.

Initially, losing weight is easier.

No matter what your workout program, the longer you do it, the harder it is to lose weight. Think about it. If you’ve lost weight, going from 170 pounds to 140 pounds, you’re carrying 30 fewer pounds around everywhere you go. Even if you’re burning more calories because you have more muscle tissue, your body still won’t be working as hard. It’s like carrying a 30 pound weight around for months and then putting it down. You simply won’t work as hard. Your body will require fewer calories. That’s one reason many people suggest your weight loss goal be a percentage of your body weight.

What if you’ve switched out your workout and doing everything right, but still are plateauing

No matter how hard you workout and how much you change your workout, if you’re not seeing progress, maybe there’s another problem or no real problem at all. The scales sometimes lie. That’s right. They may say that you aren’t making progress when you really are. Remember, muscle tissue weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue does. It’s like comparing metal with feathers. The container holding a pound of feathers will definitely be bigger. If you haven’t lost weight, but find your clothing is now looser or way too big, you’ve lost inches! That’s also progress.

If your workout is varied and you’re not losing inches or weight, there’s another problem.

Sometimes, people forget all the food they eat throughout the day. Maybe it’s something as simple as grabbing a few M&Ms as you walk by the candy dish or you’re not counting what you drink. Soft drinks have calories, too. Even if you opt for diet soft drinks, while it doesn’t have an effect on your weight, studies show that people who drink them end up with more abdominal fat. Scrutinize your eating habits carefully and see if there are hidden calories you’re not counting.

• Never give up. Each person is different. Not everyone’s body has the same time schedule for weight loss. Sometimes, there’s a difference based on when you weigh yourself. There are daily fluctuations in weight, too.
• Don’t focus as much on how much you lose, but more in the joy of losing it. Feel how great it is to be able to move comfortably through the exercises and notice how your endurance, flexibility and strength has improved. Enjoy the moment and know the weight will come off if you keep it up.
• Make sure you’re tracking yourself when you workout and tracking what you eat. Remember, portion control is also important. If you’re working out with a trainer, he or she probably will find out the cause with a few questions or modify your workout.
• Keep active even if you’re not working out. Park further from the store and walk. Take the stairs. Ride your bike to the store or walk, rather than take a car if you’re close. You’ll save gas and get more exercise.

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

You can’t beat a healthy diet if you want to lose weight. In fact, no matter how much you exercise, you won’t shed a pound if you’re eating a lot of high calorie junk food. However, exercise boosts your weight loss. Weight loss isn’t magic. It’s all about math. If you eat 3500 fewer calories than you expend, you lose one pound. While exercise burns a lot of calories, you’d have to workout for over two hours to burn off a Big Mac meal. To work off the calories in a white chocolate crème Frappuccino from Starbucks, you’ll have to go at high intensity for 50 minutes. You can see that, while exercise helps, eating healthy is top priority.

When you exercise, you’ll give your metabolism a boost.

While diet is important, you really need exercise to help take off weight and keep it off. When you use diet alone, the weight you lose isn’t always just fat. You can lose lean muscle tissue, too. Exercise not only helps burn calories but also builds muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolism is. That’s because muscle tissue also requires more energy for maintenance than fat tissue does. It means you’ll be burning more calories 24/7 and have more energy to be more active and burn extra calories, too.

Stress can mean belly fat.

That’s right! The hormones of stress, cortisol in particular, are associated with abdominal fat. When you workout, you’re burning off the stress hormones that cause the fight or flight response. It does more than that. It helps you relax, boosts your overall mood and makes you feel good. It can eliminate the need for stress eating and comfort food. Comfort food often includes high calorie things like ice cream, while stress eating may include crunchy food like potato chips. You can see that eliminating those can be a huge benefit.

Why do you want to lose weight? You want to look thinner, of course.

Sometimes, the scales aren’t the ultimate answer when you’re measuring your success. Sometimes, it’s inches, rather than weight. Exercise builds muscle tissue. Muscle tissue weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue does. A container holding a pound of fat would have to be bigger than one containing a pound of muscle tissue. It’s lie comparing a container to hold a pound of steel to a pound of feathers. When you exercise, even if you don’t lose one ounce, you’ll still be thinner as your body builds muscle tissue. That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?

• What’s the best type of exercise? While aerobic exercise burns loads of calories, but those calories come from both fat and muscle tissue. Strength training also burns calories, while also building muscle tissue that boosts your metabolism.
• The body has two hormones that control appetite, ghrelin—the hunger hormone and leptin—the one that makes you feel full. Exercise reduces the amount of ghrelin the body makes.
• The longer you do your workout routine, the more efficient the body becomes and the fewer calories it burns. That’s why varying your workout regularly can help prevent plateauing.
• Exercise increases your energy level, so you’ll be more active even when you’re not working out in the gym. That means you’ll burn more calories even when you’re not trying.

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

Can you be your healthiest if you have only a healthy diet, but no fitness program of regular exercise? The answer is no. The same is true if you workout regularly, but fill your body with junk food. You need both a healthy diet and a program of regular exercise to look and feel your best. There’s a saying that you can’t out-exercise a bad diet. That’s true whether you’re trying to lose weight or just get healthy. You need the proper nutrition and controlled caloric intake that a healthy diet provides.

Eating healthy means making smarter choices.

Eating healthy isn’t really dieting. Once you learn how to make smarter choices, there’s no calorie or carb counting. There’s no magical food and you can still eat your favorite foods, just not as frequently and with portion control in mind. No matter how hard you’re working out, if you stop at the pizza or burger shack afterward for a burger, fries or pizza and a beer or shake, you’ll still gain weight! You’d have to workout for hours to burn all the calories in that meal.

Eating healthy provides all the nutrients you need to build the body you want.

If you want to build muscle tissue faster, you won’t do it by eating candy bars. You need a good source of protein in your diet to help you do it. Everyone has different goals and while eating healthy has some basics, we help you choose the food you need for the nutrients to attain your goal, whether it’s shedding weight, putting on weight or building muscles and getting fit.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to exercise.

Healthy eating is a top priority, but it won’t keep you in shape as you age and won’t give you all the benefits exercising regularly offers. Those include lowering the potential for serious conditions, such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and even osteoporosis. In fact, one study shows that exercising not only helps maintain bone density better than some medications for osteoporosis, but it also can help reverse some of the changes and make them stronger.

• Living healthy also means getting adequate sleep. While you’ll sleep better when you workout, sticking with a sleep schedule is also important. Adequate sleep helps with weight control and lowers the risk of heart disease.
• What you drink also counts toward a healthy diet. Soft drinks and sugary drinks provide empty calories and can even add to the risk of serious conditions. Even diet soda can cause visceral fat. It’s fat around the abdomen.
• Make sure you stay hydrated and drink plenty of water. You need at least eight 8-ounce glasses each day. Sometime, dehydration makes you think you’re hungry when you’re really just thirsty.
• If you’re choosing a healthier lifestyle, focus on all the benefits and how good you feel, not on what you have to give up. Body Sculptors can help you with a healthy menu of delicious food that will make you glad you chose healthy eating.

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

There are a lot of reasons people take supplements . Older people that find it hard to eat all the food they require to get adequate nutrition, whether because of lack of appetite or because of poor absorption where more nutrients are required, may need to supplement their diet. Some people use supplements to help build muscle, while others mistakenly think that taking a supplement is all that’s necessary and they can continue eating a bad diet. Taking supplements can even cause health issues, especially if used recklessly.

Nothing can replace healthy eating.

One of the worst reasons people take supplements is that they think they can stay with their bad dietary habits and solve the problem with supplements. The truth is, it’s not only the worst reason for taking supplements, it doesn’t work. When you eat junk food, you’re consuming junk that man wasn’t meant to eat, like preservatives and other additives. Supplements also don’t contain the phytonutrients you find in food, such as anthocyanin that gives the color to red, purple and blue fruits and vegetables. Whole food provides nutrients that work together to make the body healthier.

You can get too much of a good thing.

Watch out for taking too much vitamin A, D and E. Those are fat soluble vitamins that can build up in your body if you take too much and cause serious conditions, such as liver damage. Even water soluble vitamins like vitamin C aren’t risk free. It can cause diarrhea, vomiting, heartburn, nausea, headache, cramps and even insomnia. Even though you need calcium for strong bones, too much calcium can actually weaken the bones.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies are real.

Most people are aware that pregnant women and seniors often require more nutrients, but many other people may also require them. For instance, one study showed that vitamin D deficiency is rampant and it’s primarily due to the increased use of sunscreen. To prevent the problem, start a program of smart tanning and wear sunscreen the rest of the time. It’s especially important for pregnant women, women pat menopause and children, since vitamin D plays an important role in building and mineralizing stronger teeth and bones, it keeps you mentally more alert and boosts your immune system. It helps reduce abdominal fat, provide stronger hair and improves heart health.

• Protein supplements or protein powder may help you lose weight and tone muscles, but it’s not a miracle supplement. It’s excellent added to a smoothie made of fresh fruits and vegetables. Taking too much isn’t good for your health.
• Consider checking with your physician and get tests to see if you need supplements. Also, supplement can exacerbate some health issues and interfere with medication, which is another reason to discuss it with your health care professional.
• Supplements from natural source are normally better than those made in a factory. Krill oil or fish oil, for instance, are both natural and provide a source of healthy Omega-3 fatty acids.
• You can adjust your diet to increase your intake of certain vitamins and minerals and we can help. If you have special needs and want a dietary guideline, we’re ready to give you that help.

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