Stage 4 Surges & Maximizing Your Winners

(My Original Blog Post: http://mikeroussell.com/stage-4-surges-maximizing-your-winners/)
In regards to health and weight loss what is everyone’s actual goal? Lose the weight AND keep it off. The ‘lose the weight’ part is easy. It is the ‘keep is off’ part that isn’t. The scientific community, nutrition community, and fitness community have all been woefully unsuccessful at helping you keep it off. I think this is for several different reasons. Over the next two days I want to explore a solution to one of these reasons that I call ‘Stage 4 Surges’ and while doing so expose a major flaw is most people’s approach to dieting.

As a primer to this post watch this quick recap on the Stages of Nutrition

The Stages of Nutrition:

• Nutritional Freestyling: You eat whatever you want whenever you want.


• Proper Food Choices Varying Compliance: You try to eat the right stuff but you just don’t do it consistently.


• Proper Food Choices 90% Compliance: You eat the right stuff and you rarely falter (this is the target stage for most people).


• Calorie/Portion Counting, Proper Food Choices 90% Compliance: You need to fine tune your diet more for a specific purpose (weight loss, health, performance) so you start counting calories or portions and you stay on your plan just about all the time.

So as you can see what your diet approach looks like should depend on where you are. If you are just starting out and nutritional freestyling then there is no need to worry about how many grams of protein, carbohydrates or fats that you are eating. In fact this could hinder your progress. What you need to be doing is focusing on consistently eating more fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins throughout the day. The key word in that phrase was consistent.

If you can’t consistently do this then the gram quantities of anything don’t matter as you probably won’t have the discipline or skill set to consistently hit those targets.

The best part is that once you DO start consistently eating better (better defined as in line with the 6 Pillars of Nutrition – video below), your body is going to start changing for the good. It will probably change so much for the good that you’ll think ‘Jeez, why bother counting calories when I can just eat in line with the 6 Pillars of nutrition and get the body that I want’ (Okay, you may not choose those exact words when talking to yourself but you get what I mean).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mkAQGr8sAE[/youtube]

The key point and one that I stress again and again in my seminars is that the 3rd Stage of Nutrition should be your target Stage.

A couple months ago I was giving a seminar at the Fitness Circuit in State College, PA. During this seminar I introduced the attendees to the Stages of Nutrition and the 6 Pillars of Nutrition. After the presentation, I got into a conversation with the gym owner, Scott Ludwig, he loved the idea of the Stages of Nutrition - obvious he’s a smart guy :).  He went on to talk about how he could see the Stages being used in a back and forth type fashion. Exactly! (told you he was a smart guy)

Let me digress from my conversation with Scott to emphasize that nothing in life in linear. Not your weight loss, not your progress through the Stages of Nutrition, nothing. You will find yourself moving from Stage 2 (good food choices, less than optimal compliance) to Stage 3 (the target stage – good food choices, optimal compliance) and then maybe back to Stage 2. Hopefully never falling all the way back to Nutritional Freestyling. This ebb and flow of your compliance will most likely change depending on what is going on in your life. That is fine, it happens. When you find yourself slipping just step your game up, re-align your focus and achieve your compliance goals. Simple.

Back to my conversation with Scott. He wasn’t talking about the movement from Stages 2 to 3 to 2 and such but more using Stage 4 (Counting calories/portions, and optimal compliance) as a means for peaking. Good idea, right?

Think about the past 12 months. There have been times where you have been uber motivated to eat right and train, correct? There have been other times when you have been less than motivated or preoccupied with other things in your life such that you diet and training had to take a back seat (hopefully this wasn’t too far of a back seat and you were still hitting your compliance and training goals but they were just not as aggressively set).

Think about those highly motivated times. What could you have done if you really would have stepped your game up? How much extra weight could you have lost? How much extra muscle could you have built? There is a phrase that a business coach once told me that has always stuck with me….

“Maximize your winners.”

That is what I want you to do. Maximize your winners. Maximize those periods of high motivation and drive. Maximize the amount of calories you can burn. Maximize your ability to get that extra rep and burn off that extra layer of fat. Maximize the extra will power that you will have to ratchet down and tighten up your diet.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish up this post/article with what exactly is Stage 4 Surges how you can use them, and a major flaw is most people’s approach to dieting.

3 More Ways to Help Control Appetite

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/Ni1GV)
Today I'm going to continue on with sharing with you some of the ways that Naked Nutrition folks on Facebook

5. Sugar Free Gum - While often laughably touted on the TV show The Biggest Losers as the ultimate weight loss secret, chewing gum is a very effective option for many people - especially if you are prone to snacking.

6. Eating More Often - Increasing how often you eat is an extremely effective way to curb appetite. This again plays to the mental aspect of hunger, if you are constantly eating (or every 2-3 hours), your brain gets a different message about food and its availability than if you were only eating once or twice a day.

7. Exercise - I have seen this work both ways for people. Some find that exercise makes them more hungry while others find that it takes their appetite away. It is good know find out which type of person that you are so that you are prepared because you need to exercise regardless. A recent study showed that exercising in hotter temperatures results in people eating less. I'm not sure the answer to the exercise/appetite question requires that you pretend you are a high school wrestler and workout in a 95 degree room, but exercising in hotter temperatures did lead to the release of more peptide YY, a compound released by your intestines which reduces appetite something is going on at a biochemical level.

I wish I could tell you different, but there isn't a magic bullet to zapping appetite and you aren't going to 'get over it.' Hunger pangs will always be there while dieting. My best advice is to diet and get it over with. Lose the weight that you need to lose and then stop dieting and eat lots of healthy calories while maintaining your new weight. If you haven't already make sure to read my Lifetime Fat Loss post as Jack's story has rung true with many people.

4 Ways to Help Control Appetite

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/z7K6n)
Sometimes you just need to eat less. While I do everything possible in my writings and research to find ways to help you eat more food, still lose weight, improve your health, there is a limit to this. If you are not losing weight and want to lose 5, 10, or 15lbs you will need to eat less food than you currently are to make this happen.

The biggest stumbling block for most in this area is appetite and how to curb it. The bad news is that when you are dieting and eating less food you will always be hungry.Sorry to be the bearer of bad news here.

In a perfect world our body's would get used to the concept of eating less food and your brain would stop sending the 'I'm hungry' signal. Sort of like when you get a cut, it hurts for a little bit but then after a while your body stops transmitting the pain signal. Unfortunately, the human body's response to hunger is not the same as its response to a paper cut.

If you have been reading my blog for a while you will know that when looking at scientific research for an answer to a question, I like to use human research. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively difficult to continually restrict a group of people's calories and measure their appetite and hunger signals/cues in the brain to see how long they last. People have a tendency not so enroll in studies that would force them to under eat for decade.

So the best data we have to go on comes from animals. Studies from mice show that even after being underfed the equivalent of 7 human years (I say 'human' years because the lifespan of a mouse if much shorter - same concept as 'dog years'), the area in the brain responsible for sending the 'I'm hungry' signal is working just as hard sending that signal as it was on day 1.

Since it looks like our desire to eat more when we are eating less is always going to be there and considering that the brain is the driving force behind these feelings, we need to revert to tips, tricks, and other strategies to fool the brain into thinking we're not eating less. I took an informal poll on the Naked Nutrition Facebook page to see what people are doing to suppress appetite and fight this hardwired hunger response. Here's what's working for people:

1. Drinking Lots of Tea (Green, Black, Mate, etc) - While probably not as effective as all the ads on the internet claim, but tea has been used for hundreds of years as an appetite suppressant.



2. Fiber, Fiber, Fiber - Taking advantage of the satiating effects of fiber is also very important. One person adds ground flax to meals throughout the day. This is a great tip. Ground flax can be easily added to lots of things, it full of fiber, omega-3s, and other phytonutrients. In addition most fiber rich foods are generally not calorie dense foods which means that you can eat more without eating more calories.

3. Drinking More Water - While drinking water at a meal has not really been shown in scientific studies to make people eat less calories, it is still a widely used strategy by many people. What is really interesting is that if you take that same glass of water and use it to make a soup with the vegetables at that meal (so you are basically eating the same things just in a different form), studies show that you will then eat less - wild huh? Researchers think it has to do with visual cues and a glass of water just does not scream 'I'm going to make you full' to the brain (I know that it doesn't to mine).

4. Sugar Free Jello - This tip also fall under the category of eating foods that aren't calorie dense. Sugar free Jello is devoid of calories but the act of eating itself can help signal the brain that you should not be as hungry because you just ate. If there is one thing that research has shown us about eating behaviors, it is that calories don't matter. We are a very visually driven species, so seeing a big bowl of food that is low in calories (like Jello or a salad) will result in us thinking we ate a lot despite the fact that the actual amount of calories we ate weren't that much.

Tomorrow we'll look at the last 3 tips. If you have something that works for you that wasn't mentioned above please post a comment below so we all can benefit.

test

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/y8rMR)
test