How to Shake Off The Diet Mentality

Has this ever happened to you? 

You know, that moment when you realize it’s time to do something about your fitness.

Frustrated with your current fitness level?

It may happen when you’re looking in the mirror or standing on the scale.

Your first thought is to go on a ‘diet’ but as quickly as that enters your mind, the ghosts of a hundred diets past return…along with all the frustration.

Then you wonder, why bother?

The weight will come back, as it always has. Then you’ll be back in front of the mirror as discouraged as ever.

The answer is not to go on another diet.

The answer is to change your lifestyle.

Adopt a fitness lifestyle


How Do We Change Our Lifestyle?

We have to lose the ‘all or nothing’ mentality. We need to embrace simple, small changes that will add up to big improvements in  our health fitness over time.

These are your main avenues for change:

What You Eat

Let’s face it, some of the foods we eat aren’t the healthiest. Some are downright terrible (sugar-laden soda, for example). While others become bad for us due to the volume in which we consume them (the snacks you eat while watching TV, for example).

The solution to cleaning up your daily diet is NOT to go back on a ‘diet’. In fact, I never want you to go on a ‘diet’ again (Yes! you heard me right!). Instead I want you to make permanent healthy changes to your eating habits and stick with them 80% of the time.  You might not be able to sustain an 80% “clean eating” track record today, but you can work towards it with baby steps and get a little bit better every day.

Here are some practical examples:

Choose more veggies

✓  Choose salad over chips or fries
✓  Eat fresh produce with every meal (Yep.  Even breakfast)
✓  Limit desserts to one per week
✓  Cut out mindless snacking (get snack foods out of the house)
✓  Drink water, not soda (use sparkling water if plain water bores you)

At lifeSport Fitness, we don’t expect perfection from those we coach.  We all have slip ups, BUT — there’s no “diet” to go back on.  We just get back up on the “clean eating” wagon and move forward. We think the 80/20 lifestyle approach allows you to have some planned indulgences but still eat healthfully most of the time.

How You Move

Exercise is a huge component to a healthy lifestyle, and quite frankly many Silicon Valley residents are not getting enough of it. How often does an entire week go by without you ever lacing up your tennis shoes? Don’t disregard the importance and power of a good workout.

Your new healthy lifestyle means moving more or exercising on most days of the week. This may seem tough, but there are ways to sneak in extra movement in your day.

Here are simple ways to move more:

✓  Walk to talk with a friend at work instead of texting or emailing

✓  Do some squats or push ups on the kitchen counter while you have something in the microwave

✓  Play at the park with the kids

✓  Walk in the neighborhood after dinner

✓  Do some stretches every morning

While none of the above are meant as substitutes for a solid exercise routine, they are great ways to become more active and to improve your lifestyle.

Your lifestyle is the balance of all the choices that you make regarding your body. Swing the balance in your favor—make a majority of your choices health conscious.

Feeling stuck or overwhelmed? Need a little help figuring out how to implement the first few steps in changing your lifestyle?  Hit us up for a FREE 15 minute phone consultation.  We’d be happy to help get you pointed in the right direction with some lifestyle hacks you can try at home!

Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch to get you scheduled for a 15-minute phone consultation.

 

 

Low Carb Diet May Be the Way to Go

In the recent past, the principle of low carb diet has been trending in the area of weight loss. However, there has been a lot of conflicting information on nutrition and weight loss making it difficult for the average person to understand how it works and how to apply it.

In respect to that, we shall clear the air on the same by looking at some of the facts backed by pure science on how the human body actually metabolizes food.

The low carb approach


This approach has fetched high popularity due to several reasons. People have finally realized that the low fat/high carb approach that has been promoted for years doesn’t work very well. In fact, it not only leaves us fatter but it has been blamed for several illnesses and health complications.

Most Americans for instance are known of eating too much carbs and are deficient in the healthy dietary fats. With the new low carb approach, many of them are now cutting carbs and avoiding them completely. This is disastrous health wise.

In the past, people have tried the low carb approach and noticed significant weight loss. Scientifically, dieting on low carbs will reduce weight but not body fat. To explain this further, it’s vital to know that the human body holds 2.4gms of water for every gram of carbohydrates consumed. Lowering carb intake thereby means holding less water in the body but the fat content remains relatively high. As much as we go low carbs, the component should not be avoided completely.

Extremely low carb diets have been blamed for several health complications. A low carb diet depletes the muscles of glycogen leaving one with sluggishness after an active workout. The brain uses carbs for energy and thus the brain will not function properly with low carb diet.
French and Canadian researchers have found that consuming carbohydrate does not inhibit fat burning for individuals not exercising.

However, another researcher called Jeff Volek, a professor of nutrition argues that a low carb diet enhances the body’s ability to burn fat for fuel instead of glycogen-a byproduct of carbohydrate stored in the liver and muscles. According to professor Volek:-

  1. One should not be afraid in eating food such as chicken skin, marbled meat, butter, cream and saturated fat. All these are used as fuel but they are not stored as fat in the body. They don’t accumulate in the blood vessels.
  2. Scheduling of sweat days – these are the days in which the workout should help in burning out fat. Lifting heavyweights for around an hour helps to burn out fat in the body.
  3. Fighting soreness with omega 3-s. Research shows that taking a gram of fish oil every day may improve heart health, ease inflammation and relieve delayed muscle soreness after an exercise. Glucosamine and chon-droitin relieve achy joints if taken daily.
  4. Mastering of a low carb meal improves the body fitness. This is a mixture of mushrooms, sausage, cream, cheddar and brown meat in relative quantities.

Carbs are fine if consumed in small to moderate amounts and on days you do exercise, carbs are stored in the muscles and not as fat.

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