5 Reasons You Can't Lose Weight

I saw this on the Beachbody forums and thought this would be a fun tidbit to share.



5 Reasons You Can't Lose Weight -- and How to Eliminate Them

You haven't had a bite of pizza or a lick of ice cream in, like, forever, but you still can't lose a pound. What’s up with that? Here's the real what, plus some expert fixes.

1. Consciously or Not, You're Clueless
"Very few Americans tell the truth about what they eat," says Elizabeth Somer, RD, author of 10 Habits That Mess Up a Woman's Diet. In one USDA study, more than 80 percent of women underestimated their daily food intake by a whopping 700 calories! Part of the problem is visual: Most people don't have a clue about what a true portion looks like, Somer says.

The Fix

• Find your measuring cups and spoons. And if you don't have one, buy an inexpensive kitchen scale.
• Measure out the recommended portions of everything you eat for a week. You'll quickly learn to accurately identify a 1/2-cup serving of pasta, a 2-ounce muffin, a teaspoon of butter, a cup of cereal, or a 4-ounce portion of chicken.

2. You Skip Breakfast
Successful dieters share a common habit: They eat breakfast, say University of Colorado researchers who monitor people who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for a year or more. The benefits are big. As well as preventing 10 a.m. attacks on the vending machine, eating breakfast boosts your mood, memory, and work performance.

The Fix

• Adopt the gold standard: Top 1 cup of whole-grain cereal with berries and fat-free or low-fat milk. Add OJ and coffee and you'll be good to go for hours.
• Try the make-ahead version: The night before, put these into a preheated wide-mouth thermos: 1/2 cup old-fashioned oatmeal, a few chopped dried apricots, a pinch of brown sugar, a dash of cinnamon, a drop of almond extract, and 1 cup of hot fat-free or low-fat milk. Close tightly. In the morning, just open the thermos, sprinkle with slivered almonds, and spoon out a warm, delicious, ready-to-eat breakfast!

3. You Eat Without Thinking
Do you nibble off the plates of others? Constantly taste while cooking? Feed small fry in “one for you, one for me” bites? Each mindless nibble averages 25 calories, and with only four mindless bites a day, you gain a pound a month!

The Fix

• Turn mindless eating into mindful eating, says Somer, by keeping a food journal and writing down every single thing you eat. You'll be amazed.
• Eat food only when served on a plate to avoid overindulging.
• Eat sitting at a table, not watching TV, driving, or flipping through magazines. And don't rush meals -- enjoy each bite.

4. You Drink More Calories Than You Know
Sugary sodas, teas, and juice drinks don't fill you up, yet they pack on pounds. So do happy hours. For example, a bottle of sweetened green tea has 140 calories, the equivalent of a chocolate chip cookie. And a large margarita can have up to 800 calories -- more than four cake doughnuts!

The Fix

• Can't give up regular soda? Make it an occasional treat.
• Nix supersized cocktails and drinks made with high-calorie mixes or cream.
• At parties, alternate a glass of wine with a glass of sparkling water.
• Make your own iced green tea, and sweeten lightly (1 teaspoon of sugar has only 16 calories). The plus: Home-brewed tea usually has more healthy antioxidants, which often get lost in commercial processing.
• Cut juice calories by mixing 1/3 cup of OJ, apricot nectar, or your favorite juice with 2/3 cup sparkling water.

5. It's Not You, It's Your Life
You swear you want to eat well, but in the next breath lament how hard it is to find the time, money, or mental energy to make it happen.

The Fix

• Try tough love: Stop blaming others, the weather, your job, your life, the dog, etc. Focus on reaching your goal. "People lose weight every day, often despite overwhelming odds," Somer says.
• List your excuses, and then brainstorm solutions. Lack of time? Cook large quantities and divide into single portions to eat throughout the week. Keep meals simple, and buy prepared foods, including sliced veggies and fruit.

Finding ways to eat right makes you not only slimmer and healthier but also physically younger: Maintaining a desirable weight can take 6 years off your RealAge



Personally, I'm entirely guilty of number 3. My youngest will often feed me bites or I'll taste test while cooking or munch a bite of this or that while I'm making lunches for the next day. A pound a month will certainly slow down progress.

Anyway, some great advice.

OH YAY! New Toys!

So... I was poking around BeachBody.com which constantly prompts me to review my bank about and see if I can order anything new. :) Anyway, I ran into a thread in the Turbo Jam section of the forums that talks about Chalene Johnson's new program. Chalene Johnson is the creator of the Turbo Jam program I'm doing at the moment and one bubbly ball of energy. So I was reading up on her new ChaLEAN Extreme program and I'm SO excited! I can't wait for October!

YAY!

And here is Chalene mentioning it on her blog.

Surge Training!

So a friend of mine sent me an article this morning and I thought it was an interesting take and cardio routines. It's called Surge training. It's similar to interval training with it's burst of energy for 30 - 60 seconds and then a rest period. For example, one could run their ass off for 30 - 60 seconds and then take it to a brisk walking pace for a rest. Then you'd repeat that three times. A lot of programs out there use burst of energy, intervals, anaerobic portions to inhance the fat burning. This seems to have taken that idea and branched out. I like it because it can be easily adapted to any cardio that you do. I also like that they mention how pills are shit, diet is important, and strength training is also beneficial. It's not a promise of impossible results with no work. Here's the article.

Surge training promises to work off the weight

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

If you want to drop those extra pounds, you shouldn't work out more than about half an hour a week, says Dr. Dan Pompa, a Wexford chiropractor who is one of the nation's chief advocates of surge training.

As a college student at the University of Pittsburgh, Ann Caldwell, 23, was on a host of medications and couldn't lose weight no matter how much she exercised. But she's lost more than 30 pounds on her 5-foot-4 frame in the year and a half since she started following Dr. Pompa's exercise and nutrition recommendations.

"I was one of those gym rats working out hour upon hour with no result," she said. "Surge training has changed my life. I don't diet. I've never felt better."

Ms. Caldwell was so impressed with what Dr. Pompa has done for her that she went to work for him.
Surge training consists of short spurts of intense exercise, followed by rest.
"It's similar to the concept of interval training, only done within a more limited time frame and with a strong focus on the importance of recovery time. It's the difference between a sprinter and a long distance runner," Dr. Pompa said.

Surge training works not so much because of what you do while you're exercising but because of what your body does after you've finished, Dr. Pompa said.

"To understand 21st century weight loss, you have to understand hormones," he said.
The right kind of exercise stimulates hormones -- chiefly human growth hormone or HGH -- that burn fat and build muscle, Dr. Pompa said. But if you do the wrong kind of exercise, you'll stimulate instead hormones which resist fat burning.

"The point of surge training is to shock your body into responding physiologically so that when you're done exercising, you're in a better metabolic state for getting toned," Dr. Pompa said.

Rest is critically important, so you should allow at least a day between each surge workout, he said.
"You work against yourself if you don't do that," he said.
The purpose of surge training is to burn up the glycogen (a sugar the body creates that is the primary short term source of energy) in our muscles, forcing the body to create more from our deposits of fat. The fat loss actually occurs in the 24-36 hours after we've exercised, not during it, Dr. Pompa said.

He recommends doing a high intensity aerobic exercise for 30 to 60 seconds, followed by two to three minutes of rest, whatever is required to recover your breath and get your heart rate back to normal. This should be repeated three times.

"That'll be enough to deplete the glycogen in your muscles," Dr. Pompa said. "Research shows that beyond three or four sets there is very little additional benefit for the effort expended."

Almost any form of cardiovascular exercise can be adapted to surge training, he said. You can do it on a treadmill, elliptical machine or exercise bike at the gym, by climbing stairs at home, by running or cycling outside.

Classic aerobic exercise -- a lower intensity workout over a longer period of time, like the 30-45 minutes I've been spending most days on an exercise bike -- actually can retard fat loss, he said.

"Classic aerobic exercise raises stress hormones, the hormones that stimulate appetite, break down muscle, and increase fat storage," Dr. Pompa said.

"There are lots of good reasons for going for a long run or bike ride," he said. "It's great for your heart, improves your endurance, and stimulates the production of endorphins, which give you the so-called runner's high. But if your primary goal is weight loss, it's counterproductive."

Resistance exercise (weight lifting), on the other hand, is an excellent complement to surge training, Dr. Pompa said.
"Resistance training is surge training," he said. "You'll gain muscle through surge training alone, but you'll gain more muscle, and take the fat off faster, if you combine surge training with resistance training."

It's best to do surge training after a weight lifting workout, said Dr. Pompa, 43, but he sometimes does surge training and resistance training on alternate days.

"If you're in the habit of working out every day, this is the way to do it without sabotaging your weight loss goals," he said.

A 1989 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Pompa earned his doctor of chiropractic degree from the University of Life in Marietta, Ga., in 1995. He changed the emphasis of his practice in 2005 after suffering from a series of debilitating ailments, which he cured by changing his diet and adopting the surge exercise program.

Dr. Pompa is interested primarily in the nutritional side of health. He thinks many of the ailments from which we suffer are the product of toxins introduced into our bodies by eating "man-made" foods rather than "God-made" foods.

"Toxins can inhibit fat burning as much or more than improper exercise does," he said. "But the primary reason for being concerned about them is the effect they have on our health."

Dr. Pompa uses surge training as a lure to get people to attend his "Makeover Seminars," the next of which will be held at the Marriott Pittsburgh North in Cranberry on Saturday.

Dr. Pompa's views on diet and nutrition are controversial within the medical community, but he's on sounder ground with surge training, said Dr. Moira Davenport, a sports medicine physician at Allegheny General Hospital.

"Surge training seems to make some sense, but it's never been borne out in the literature," she said.
A few studies of elite athletes tend to support Dr. Pompa's claims for surge training, Dr. Davenport said, but no studies she's aware of have been done on the effect of surge training on ordinary people.

"It's something that hasn't been looked at much," she said.