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Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Green Tea gets a lot of hype and many...
Green Tea gets a lot of hype and many people forget this is just as good of an alternative http://su.pr/1HCNqE
Monday, July 12, 2010
Friday, July 09, 2010
Body Transformation Roadmap
(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/3vOmK)
So I've been a little delayed with technical problems for the release of the new Naked Nutrition Insider. But every will get fixed this weekend so we'll be a go on Monday. In the meantime I wanted to share with you the featured article from Janurary's issue. The article focuses on how to achieve your New Years Resolution Weight Loss Goal and since we are a little over 1/2 way through 2010 I thought it would be a good one to share. Maybe you need a shot in the arm to refocus on the goals you set Jan 1st of this year or maybe you never set any...either way this article will give you a road map on how to achieve what you want.
Resolution Roadmap
Strong, Fit, & Healthy Featured Article by Mike Roussell
Identification
In the opening editorial of last month's issue of SF&H, I encouraged you to audit your life and figure out what isn't working. If you remember I shared two things that weren't working in my life. One of these was my inability to consistently accomplish my professional writing first thing in the morning when most fresh and alert. After identifying this problem my resolution was to get up before my family does and write for 60-90 minutes each day. I'm happy to tell you that I'm writing this article at 5:37am.
So, what isn't working for you? I had a client once who was in sales and spent a good portion of his day driving around from sales presentation to sales presentation. The problem that he was having was that as a result of all the driving he either ate out or on-the-go in his car, with both options resulting in him consistently making bad food choices. Once we identified this problem we were able to make a specific plan to deal with this road block. All the excellent nutritional advice in the world would not have worked with this client had we not first addressed the primary issue of his unique daily schedule and how to incorporate good foods into it.
If you haven't already, then sit down to do a quick audit of your life and identify what is not working. Once you have your list, I'll help you move forward and problem solve three main areas of your life, mindset, diet, and training streamlined so that you can reach your 2010 goals.
Mindset
When it comes to diet and losing weight (a very popular New Year's Resolution of course), the mindset that you need to be successful is often overlook and rarely given enough attention (not nearly as much time as you would spend on your diet or training). This is a mistake as your thoughts frame your feelings and inevitably your actions. If you think of yourself as an overweight person that eats fast food and other junk, then in the end you are going to revert back to that behavior as it is continuous with your own mental image of yourself. World famous speaker and author Brian Tracy refers to this phenomenon constantly in his teaching. He encourages people to identify habits of lean people and do those things, make these your habits and image of yourself and you will create a lean physique. I call this the principle of inevitable results.
In Your Naked Nutrition Guide I talk about people in fitness and advertising professions that plan and pack all their meals at the beginning of the week so that as the week goes on all they need to do is pull out that predetermined meal and eat it. This is without a doubt one of the behaviors that allows them to maintain such low body fat percentages. See yourself as that person, or the person you are striving to be, maybe it’s an old picture of yourself much thinner. Research has shown that one strategy of people who successfully lose weight and keep it off, is always having a mental image of what they want to look like to keep them on track and moving toward their goals.
If in your life audit you find that you lose steam on your goals after 2-3 weeks or you find that you are constantly doubting your ability to lose the weight, focus on putting the 'inevitable results’ principle into action. Resources:Goals by Brian Tracy and The New Psycho Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz.
Diet
As a reader of this newsletter, hopefully you have a pretty good grasp on your diet. However, you'll undoubtedly be able to identify 1-2 areas where you are having problems. I would feel comfortable in assuming that if you are having trouble reaching a weight loss, muscle building, or health related goal then nutritional compliance is an issue. Please start tracking how well you are sticking to your plan. On page 11 (in the Key Concepts section), or issue 3 of SF&H, I included a link to a downloadable compliance tracking sheet. If you haven't already, then download that file, print it out, stick it to your refrigerator, and start tracking. This one habit will probably make a bigger impact on your success than anything else.
The next piece nutritionally is to identify where you are in the Stages of Nutrition. This is important as it will let you know what kind of nutrition plan you need to develop based on your current nutritional habits. I have made my 50 minute Stages of Nutrition presentation available to you as an added members bonus in the Strong, Fit, and Healthy members section at MikeRoussell.com
Training
Regardless of your health goal this year, whether it is to decrease your risk for heart disease, lose 10 lbs, or gain 20 lbs of muscle, exercise needs to be an integral component. Not only will exercise help you burn more calories and build more muscle it will also keep you invested in your plan. While I don't have scientific studies to support this, my own experiences and observations have shown me that people adhere to their diets better while involved in an exercise program. I believe that it has to do with supporting your commitment to one goal in several different areas of your life. If you are staying on your diet AND training hard, why would throw your diet out the window on Wednesday night for a medium pizza when you just spent 60 minutes at the gym working to burn calories and fat - the two actions do not jive.
The Metabolic Workout of the Month is a great place to start getting ideas and variety for your workouts. Most of the workouts in this section can be added to your current training program in place of traditional cardiovascular activity (running, biking, etc). When picking a training program two very inexpensive but very effective options you should look at are ‘Power Training’ by Robert Dos Remedios, ‘The New Rules of Lifting’ and ‘The New Rules of Lifting for Women,’ both by Alwyn Cosgrove and Lou Schuler with the later also co-authored by Cassandra Forsythe, and finally ‘The Female Body Breakthrough’ by Rachel Cosgrove. These books are readily available at Amazon.com or Barnes and Nobles and will provide you with top notch training programs to help you reach your health and fitness goals in 2010.
Regardless of what you choose for an exercise program, the one thing that you must vow to do is MOVE MORE. Over the Christmas/New Year’s break when my family traveled back to Vermont, I had the chance to meet up with a previous mentor at the University of Vermont. She has recently lost 25lbs, looks and feels great. In addition to tracking everything she ate, she attributed her weight loss to moving more. She set a goal of taking 10,000 steps everyday. I commented on how that must be really hard if not impossible as her job requires a lot of desk work. She replied that she realized that but had to make it work so she forced her self to take breaks during the day to go on short walks. It is these kinds of actions and commitments that make the difference. Move More this year. Go to the nearest sporting goods store and pick up a pedometer, track your activity levels. While pedometers are not the world's most accurate devices they will give you a good idea of how much you move each day relative to the previous one. If you need more convincing read the "Key Concepts: NEPA" article at the back of Issue 3.
Action
The one thing left for you to do is IT, or as Nike's slogan commands "just do it." Identify what isn't working in your life in the areas of your Mental Muscle, Diet, and Exercise programs. Practice the principle of inevitable results. Vow to track your dietary compliance all 52 weeks this years. Find out where you are in the stages of nutrition and build your nutrition plan accordingly. Finally commit to a top quality exercise program and move more everyday.
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
Free Issue of Strong, Fit, & Healthy to Download
(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/rHvML)
I hope that everyone had a great holiday weekend. We had a classic 4th of July Weekend full of BBQ, the twins running around in the backyard and playing in the kiddie pool, and lots of sun (I needed a good vitamin D infusion).
Before I get into the free download info I wanted to make sure that you checked out my last 2 blog posts (they are a 2-part series) on Stage 4 Surges. I think that it is one of the best blogs of the year here at the site and hope that you will find it extremely useful. Check it out here --> Stage 4 Surges.
Onto today (and tomorrow). Starting tomorrow, I will be re-opening and re-releasing my Naked Nutrition Insider Program. I have been working on this for several months and if you have been a reader for a long time then you will really like the updated program. The flagship component of the Naked Nutrition Insider Program is the Strong, Fit, & Healthy Newsletter. I'm kind of a put your money where your mouth is kind of guy so I figured that the best way to see what the Strong, Fit, & Healthy newsletter was all about would be to give you a copy. So below you can download the first ever issue of Strong, Fit, & Healthy.
Over the next couple days I will be posting some more great health and nutrition info to build on the this free issue and other benefits of being a Naked Nutrition Insider. So look for my email tomorrow as I have put together an amazing deal for you. In the meantime download Strong, Fit, & Healthy below.
Enjoy!
Monday, July 05, 2010
Stage 4 Surges - Minimizing Body Fat the Fastest Way Possible & Keeping It Low
(My Original Blog Post: http://mikeroussell.com/stage-4-surges-minimizing-body-fat-the-fastest-way-possible-keeping-it-low/)
In the previous post I started talking about the idea of timed periods of intensity built into your year long training program called Stage 4 Surges. The name comes from the fact that you would move from the 3rd Stage of Nutrition to the 4th Stage of Nutrition. These surges center on your current life situation and motivation levels.
Let's finish this discussion by looking at a different approach to peaking so that instead of peaking you will instead plateau at your idea body weight.
When you are ready, when your motivation is high, when your plan is set...move up to the 4th Stage of Nutrition, count calories or portions, be perfect….but only do it for a finite period of time. 4, 6, 8, or 12 weeks. Don’t diet until you are burned out. Lose the weight and leave on a high note. Maybe your goal is to lose 30lbs and after 4 weeks you’ve only lost 15lbs but you are completely spent. Your compliance is slipping, your motivation is low - Don’t force the issue. No one can keep up that level of intensity and focus forever without losing ground in other aspects of their lives. Plus, you don’t want to stop dieting because you just “can’t stick with it anymore.â€
To steal from the overused sports phrase, it isn’t ‘Go Hard or Go Home’ it is ‘Go Hard then Go Home.’
Transition back to a healthy but less rigid approach (i.e. the 3rd Stage of Nutrition), instead of reverting to eating garbage food as many people end up doing, until you feel your fire comeback (and it will a lot sooner if you keep the weight off and don’t gain it back). When it does, move back up to Stage 4 and get back into attack mode.
Here’s what’s going to happen, despite the fact that you will back off on your dietary control moving down from Stage 4 to Stage 3, you are probably still going to lose some weight. This makes you different than 99% of other people that just ‘finished dieting.’ After a couple weeks of maintaining or losing more weight you’ll really become motivated. I'm willing to bet that the normal course of events after you finish a diet is to slowly gain the weight back, imagine how motivated you would be if the weight kept coming off.
Take that motivation and energy, re-commit yourself to a Stage 4 Surge and you’ll take another huge leap towards your goal. This stair stepping approach to long term and permanent weight loss success is much more effective than the usual 2 steps forward, 3 steps back approach that plagues most people.
I’m not telling you to start tomorrow, tighten your dietary control and go at it. I’m telling you to listen to your body, look at how your life (family, job, etc.) is going, and when you see an opening for when you can triple your efforts and focus DO IT.
If you are ready to ratchet things up then the best resource I have for you is Warp Speed Fat Loss 2.0 but it isn’t for everyone and it isn’t for you until you see that opening in your life and are ready to go for it. When it is over, don’t go back to eating junk, scale it back to consistently making healthy choices, until you are ready for another sprint. It is the middle of the year now. When December 31st comes around you are going to look at how much weight you lost between Jan 1st and December 31st. It isn’t going to matter if you lost 20lbs during May but gained it all back by November. Trying to force the issue with unnecessary dietary control 24/7/365 is how you do that. If you want to be 10, 20, or 30lbs lighter on December 31st then maximize your winners.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
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.â€
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.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
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 Facebook5. 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.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
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.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
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