Tips For Preventing the Holiday Weight Gain

Balance and moderation may be the last things you think about during Thanksgiving. But, the fact is, the holidays give us too many opportunities to take a step away from our weight loss and fitness goals. Here are a few simple strategies
you can use to minimize the effects of your Thanksgiving feast on your body.

Don’t go to the Thanksgiving dinner hungry.
Starving yourself all day before the big meal will send your metabolism for a ride – a SLOW ride. You should eat breakfast and lunch as you normally would on any other day.

Don’t Drink Your Calories.
You will get plenty of calories from food during your Thanksgiving feast. Even a couple of sodas or beers can add several hundred calories to your intake and can also reak havoc on your digestive system.  Soda and beer can cause gas and bloating and will give you that dreaded stomach bulge you’re trying to avoid!

Eat like a Cow!
Did I say that? Yes! What do cows do extremely well? They chew their food! Your body needs some time to realize that it has a job to do after you’ve fed it. Allow time for your digestive enzymes to break down your food and use it for energy.

Balance Your Meals.
Thanksgiving dinner is not an all-you-can -eat buffet. Fill your plate primarily with lean protein and vegetables. You can still leave some room for your favorite foods, as long as its minimal. 

Go skinless on your turkey.
Choosing skinless turkey will slash away a good portion of fat and cholesterol. Save your appetite for the healthier side dishes and desserts.

Make a conscious choice to limit high fat items:
high fat food items are found in the creamy or cheese-filled food selections.  For instance, mashed potatoes are usually made with butter and milk; green bean casseroles are often prepared with cream of mushroom soup, cheese and milk and topped with fried onions; candied yams are loaded with cream, sugar and marshmallows.  If you cannot control the ingredients that go in to a dish, simply limit yourself to a smaller helping size. Moderation can save you hundreds, if not thousands of calories!

Pace yourself throughout the gathering.
Thanksgiving Dinner is quite a production in most families.  Therefore, we tend to want to honor the host by stuffing ourselves, acknowledging their hard work, well-prepared and delicious meal.  Avoid this trap.  It is still just a meal.

Research healthy Thanksgiving recipes in advance.
They’re all over the Internet! For example, instead of making stuffed turkey sandwiches, make a healthy turkey stew. Just boil a few slices of turkey in water, add bay leafs and a little white wine, and you have a great low-fat turkey stock. Now you can add as many vegetables as you want, and can even include some healthy whole grains if you’re dying for those carbs!

Eat one small meal at a time!
Many of us have multiple Thanksgiving meals. we go to grandma’s house for breakfast, then to Uncle Joe’s house for lunch, etc. If you’re locked into multiple eating commitments, make sure you treat each meal as a moderate one. Try small amounts of the foods offered at each meal instead of piling it on every time. Most Americans eat about 6,000 calories on Thanksgiving Day! Don’t be a statistic!

Get some exercise!
Don’t use the holiday as an excuse to sit on the couch all day. There are hundreds of scheduled turkey trots in the DC Area and most of them allow you to register the same day. Personally, I’m doing the Turkey Burnoff on Saturday the 28th with clients and Friends.  It’s at Seneca Creek State Park in Gaithersburg if you’re interested…
http://www.mcrrc.org/racing/2009/race_descriptions.php#turkey_burnoff
If you can’t join us for that one here are some other local area events going on throughout the entire DC, Maryland and
Northern Virginia region…

http://www.runwashington.com/archive0/news/nov03turkeyraces.html

If that sounds too overwhelming, just go for a walk or schedule a backyard football game. Made you could invite a few of the Washington Redskins players and have the kids show them a thing or two.  I’m sure they could benefit from the advice!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dennys Passeto and Entire Achieve Fitness Team

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by Dennys Passeto

There is an abundance of misinformation that exists when it comes to developing nutritional plans that support weight loss. The majority of people who are striving to lose weight or transform their bodies by dieting end up failing, not because they lack the motivation, but because the information they receive on how to do so is inaccurate.

There are tons of fad diets that we have come across in the past few years that force people to make extreme changes in their diet by either excessively restricting caloric intake or by drastically cutting out certain macronutrients. These diets are not only detrimental to your metabolism, they also require a huge amount of effort.

However, there is a solution that will not require you to  work harder on your diet or to make drastic changes. By implementing a simple technique that is relatively easy to execute, you can make positive changes to your metabolism and to your body. This powerful technique is know as calorie cycling.

Calorie cycling accomplishes weight loss through constantly  varying your eating routine by reducing your caloric intake in short, 2-3 day cycles. In most of today’s fad diets, you end up shocking your body into a rapid weight loss scheme and your body reacts by slowing down your metabolism so it can store fat for energy use later. Calorie cycling, however, does not allow your body to fully acclimate to a particular routine, and, in turn, your metabolism stays up to speed.  This enables you burn off more fat with regular exercise.

So, how does this technique actually work? Let’s look at  an example. If you are used to eating a 2000 calorie/day diet, then your body becomes accustomed to burning that amount of energy each day. With calorie cycling, you would cut 400 or 500 calories out of your regular intake for a short period of time, about two days or so. Luckily for us, our bodies will take about 2 days to recognize this change,  and in the meantime, will continue to burn the 2000 calories a day that it is used to getting.

Therefore, if your body is still burning the 2000 calories but you’ve only been feeding it 1600, it must find the  energy elsewhere. As long as your diet consists of some core healthy foods in the form of lean proteins, fruits and vegetables, then your body will use those missing calories in the form of stored body fat. The beauty is, you don’t  need to make enormous sacrifices or changes to your current diet for this technique to be effective.

Obviously, this type of strategy has to be done correctly to be effective, so you have to exercise some common sense. Ideally, the calories you cut out of your diet for those  short periods should be calories that come from unhealthy foods, primarily flour, sugar, and any heavily processed foods. In addition, your cycles of calorie restriction should not be permanent, about a day or two before you return to your normal intake.

The powerful part of this program is that you can continue to increase the efficiency of your metabolic system by continuing  to cycle your calories. In other words, your metabolism will continue to increase throughout the cycles until it has reached  its maximum fat burning level!

The end result of this “diet” is that you’re not really dieting at all! You are simply eating healthy foods in varied caloric cycles, therefore you’re not shocking (and damaging) your metabolism. Once your metabolism is in high gear, with the assistance of regular exercise, you’ll start to see that stubborn fat be blowtorched!!

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by: Dennys Passeto

For years, the media has come to vilify saturated fats in all of its forms. These  include butter, red meat, cheese, and the most talked about culprit – coconut oil. While some research would suggest that saturated fats are associated with a host of serious diseases, is it possible that saturated fats can also have some major health benefits?

The short answer is yes! There is a form of fat called CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), which is a natural form of healthy fat that occurs in meat and in the dairy from grass-fed animals such as cattle, bison, deer, goats, etc. CLA has been shown to provide many health benefits, including lowered LDL (bad) cholesterol and increased levels of HDL
(good) cholesterol.

While CLA has been proven to be beneficial to your overall health, keep in mind that not all saturated fats are created equal when it comes to their CLA content. Only meats and dairy products that come from grass-fed meats contain the most natural form of CLA. Typical grain-fed meats that are typically found at your local supermarket only contain about 20% of the CLA content that is found in the meat from ruminant animals.

Coconut oils have also been one of the most criticized forms of saturated fat by the media. Yet, study after study has been conducted, only to discover that coconut oils can actually lower your cholesterol, boost your metabolism, and decrease your waist size. Unlike other fatty acids that have been publicly accepted as healthy, coconut oil is rich in medium-chain triglycerides.

For all intensive purposes, medium-chain triglycerides are small enough to enter the mitochondria of your cells directly. This enables your cells to use these fatty acids for energy immediately. Otherwise, fat would be stored for later use. When fat is being used for energy instantly, it won’t have a negative effect on your body composition.

Overall, many saturated fats perform a critical role in allowing our body to absorb certain fat-soluble vitamins, such as A, D, E and K. They also play vital roles in the health of our bones, joints, and immune system functions. Probably the most powerful function of saturated fats for the general public is the fact that they actually slow down absorption from our foods, allowing us to go longer without feeling hungry. This sounds like a critical piece to the weight loss equation if you ask me! However, keep in mind that fat is the most calorie-dense macro-nutrient, so should be consumed in moderation when trying to support weight loss efforts.

The fact is, saturated fats provide a concentrated source of energy in the body and help provide the building blocks for a variety of key hormones. Without these building blocks, your body would not be able to perform everyday functions that are essential to life.

A great example of this is that the media encourages us to replace butter with lower-fat, “healthier” substitutes like margarine or other artificial spreads. These alternatives that are marketed as healthy replacements contain hydrogenated oils that are produced artificially (man-made) and their altered form has been linked to a host of
life-threatening illnesses. Yet, these products continue to be promoted as health foods.

The popularity of these replacements over otherwise healthy saturated fats represents a triumph of advertising duplicity over common sense!

It all comes back to eating a healthy, balanced diet that is comprised of natural foods. And yes, saturated fats occur in natural foods!

These nutrition tips combined with a sound exercise program will get you on the road to achieving ANY fitness objective. If you feel like you’re already on the road to success – great!  But if you know someone that needs a little extra help, we’d like to let you know that we offer Gift Certificates for all of our personal training services.

If you’re looking to get an early jump on your holiday shopping, simply pick a package that you would like to give to a friend, co-worker, or loved one and we will send you a very nice certificate to give as a gift.

And since we hardly ever think about ourselves during the upcoming holiday season, I’ve got something special FOR YOU!

Sign up for a package of 12 sessions or more by Nov. 30th and we’ll give you a 3 session Jump Start Gift Certificate Absolutely Free to give to anyone of your choice.  This is a $300 value!  You can see it on our website for yourself: Jump Start Personal Training Package. The only requirement is that the individual reside in the Maryland, DC, Northern Virginia Metro area.  So go ahead, get your metabolism ready for the holiday debauchery starting now and cross a gift off of your list for a friend or family member.  They will BOTH thank YOU for it.

Call Mike to take advantage of this great offer at 888-872-7961 ext. 1.  Don’t miss this opportunity to get yourself and your loved ones back into shape for 2010!

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I’d like to introduce you to what I believe is the best kept secret to freeing yourself of back pain for good.

So many people suffer with reoccurring back pain because common treatments only address the symptoms and not the true cause. When you just treat symptoms, back pain never really goes away.

Long-lasting pain relief comes only when you look at the cause.

The Lose The Back Pain system is your personalized guide to understanding what’s causing your back, hip, or neck pain. And after it helps you discover the cause, this system shows you how to correct the problem and “lose” the pain!.

It’s the ONLY Self Diagnosis and Self Treatment System that addresses BOTH the cause and the symptoms!

Ever wonder why so many people can’t seem to find lasting relief?

There are hidden causes of back pain that most people don’t know about. Now Jesse Cannone, creator of Muscle Balance Therapy™, and the author of… The 7 Day Back Pain Cure wants to change that.

Muscle imbalances play a significant role in most back pain. One side of your body may be stronger than the other. Some muscles may be more flexible and still others may be tight and shortened from overuse.

These muscle imbalances stress your joints, ligaments, and surrounding muscles, causing pain. Muscle Balance Therapy™ strives to balance your muscles so muscle tension returns to normal. When your left and right sides, and front to back of your body’s muscles are balanced, your spine can be evenly supported. Posture improves, vertebrae slide back into place, releasing pressure from pinched nerves and muscles. Your back pain vanishes!

The Lose The Back Pain system helps you identify your muscle imbalances through several simple self-assessments. Once you’ve located your imbalances, the system teaches you how to use Muscle Balance Therapy™ to rebalance, stretch, and strengthen your problem areas.

The system simply brings your body back into proper alignment and helps reverse the process that created the pain in the first place.

Imagine having Jesse and Steve guide you step-by-step through the simple assessments on the first DVD, then the stretches and the exercises on the second. You know you’re doing them correctly as you watch them demonstrate, right in the privacy of your home.

Even if you’re suffering from sciatica or a herniated disc, you’ll find conditions like those included on the DVDs and in the Self-Assessment Workbook.

The system includes: 2 DVDs, 3 audio CDs, a reference manual, and personal workbook for you to create your custom treatment plan.

And here’s the best part – and this really sets these guys apart from the rest. You are welcome to call or email them with your questions about your specific situation! Personal support can make all the difference when you’re dealing with back pain.

If you’re still suffering with back, hip, or neck pain, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Click here to learn more about the Lose The Back Pain system

Yours in health,

Dennys Passeto

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Anyone who has followed the Bartendaz or seen their videos can attest to their amazing display of strength, power, balance and explosive athleticism. The group has blown away what was once the physical performance standard for athletes!

Yes, their style and presentation may be obnoxious to some, but once you get past the talk at the beginning of their clips, you can really appreciate the time and dedication it takes a human being to perfect these movements. Considering the fact that it can take months for a person to develop the strength to perfect a single pull-up, the ease with which they execute these exercises is truly amazing.

This group has come to redefine elite fitness. The perfectly balanced athlete displays tremendous core strength, flexibility, body control, agility and accuracy. These guys bring that to an entirely different level. Ok, enough pumping them up – check out their video below. Again, ignore the first minute of talk and try to absorb the incredible display of fitness!

Truly breathtaking, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine what kind of training program they used to perfect some of these movements. You can see the true mastery of skills across any possible modality of training – plymetrics, gymnastics, power lifting, resistance training….the list goes on.

The one thing that is truly inspirational about this video is that it makes all of our fitness goals seem that much more attainable! Whether your exercise program is geared toward weight loss, hypertrophy, increasing flexibility,sports performance enhancement or just improving your nutritional habits, this video shows us what the human body is capable of when pushed to its limits.  These guys aren’t even Olympic athletes!

Hopefully some of us will use this as fuel the next time we step in the gym. If your body tells you that you can’t get that last rep (or you don’t believe it when your personal trainer says you can), remember what is truly possible when you push yourself!

If you liked that video, check out this other performance they put together with some new and improved moves!  Again, please feel free to leave your comments below.

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