The Food Pyramid Is Now a Plate!
The food pyramid has been updated and has been turned into a plate! This is will be so much easier for people to understand as you can see clearly how to portion your meals.
Why Am I Not Improving?
I started this website as a means to educate all of my group fitness students on lifestyle choices that will help them get results outside of the aerobic room. In today’s post, I would like to address important lifestyle components that could make the difference between making our goals, and never getting there. These components are, diet, recovery and consistency.
Don’t Hold Your Breath
Below are some reasons why most of the population does not breathe properly:
What To Do In Case of an Injury
In all my classes, one of the the most frequently asked questions is what to do after an injury. Today I am addressing this question with 3 basic steps: Step 1: RICE: When an injury has first occurred, the protocol we are all taught to use is R.I.C.E. This stands for rest, ice, compression and elevation. Step 2: Restore Mobility: When swelling subsides and most of the tissue has healed, we start to move that area again in order to retrain the damaged tissue. Step 3: Restore strength, stability and flexibility to the area and scar tissue. On step 1:…
Turning Stress Into Strength
With her permission, Ellie Miraftabi, MFT. Ph.D. has been gracious enough to allow me to post her article on my website. Ellie is a licensed psychotherapist and coach. Thanks for contributing, Ellie! Turning stress into Strength By: Ellie Miraftabi, MFT. Ph.D. Today I want to discuss self-care and turning stress into Strength. More psychologists recognize that self-care helps them be better caregivers. There are self-care basis –eating right, getting enough sleep and exercising regularly – and more luxurious ones. Using them all If you do just one thing, make it exercise. Psychologist’s research and clinical experience show the critical importance…
Meditation (A Running Into Reality)
I’d like to address a common misperception I have heard from the public in their attitude towards meditation or people who meditate. This misperception is that practitioners of meditation are escapists. They meditate in order to escape reality. They escape to the mountains or to retreats in order to get away from things because they cannot handle life. This misperception is contradictory to the true meaning of meditation. To Quote Psychologist and Mindfulness Expert, Larry Cammarata, “meditation is not an escape from reality but a running into reality.” Meditation is not worrying about what we said or what other people…
How to Make Your New Year’s Resolution
It’s that time again when we make our New Years resolutions to shed off those extra pounds we gained from the holiday festivities. This is also the time that we decide to take better care of ourselves this year. But losing weight is not easily done on a whim. Every year, many people make the choice to lose weight in January. By March, a very small percentage stick to their resolution. It is one thing to make the choice to lose the weight, but doing it is another matter. This requires proper goal setting and planning. After all, twenty pounds…
How to Raise Your Metabolism (and keep the weight off for life)
TweetMaking the resolution to raise your metabolism is a great idea. This lifestyle change can help keep weight off for the rest of your life. As a fitness professional, I find that the greatest mistake people make is to crash diet or lose weight without exercising. This can be disastrous to one’s metabolism. Taking extreme measures to lose weight leads to self-deprivation and ultimate failure. Self starvation puts the body into survival mode. This leads to a lowered metabolism. The body will react by storing fat and burning off muscle and bone. This is the reason why careless dieting can…
Exercise for Stress Relief
Tweet Exercise for Stress Relief Stress relief through exercise is not a new trend. It may seem this way with all of the mind body movements that have made their way into the industry such as yoga, pilates and tai chi. Keep in mind, however, that yoga and tai chi have been around for thousands of years. Although, incorporating mindful awareness and breath to physical activity seems new to westerners, exercise has always been a form of stress release. The mere act lifting weights requires much focus and breath work. One does not need to be consciously meditating during exercise…
Plateauing
I mention plateaus a lot in my intense classes such as interval challenge and body blast because most of the people who take those classes are looking to change their bodies. In order to change your body, you must do things that the body is not used to. The body will make adjustments such as fat loss and muscle gain in order to adapt to the new stressor. Usually, when people work very hard to lose weight, their body changes. They also become fitter which is a positive thing as fit people have less incidences of heart disease, diabetes and…