Being January 1st I thought that it would be very important to remind people about how to join a gym. I was listening to some sports radio guy on ESPN this morning and he was telling people:

“If you are thinking about getting in shape, don’t. Don’t go and join a gym or get in shape it’s too much trouble. One of your friends probably convinced you it was a good iea and you don’t need to do that anyway. Keep doing what you are doing”

I was a little offended by the guy until he continued:

“My workouts that take 50 minutes always take 2 hours in January when so many people join a gym. Don’t bother getting in shpae, who wants to feel better about themselves, who wnat to get complements abouot how great they look, who want to look years younger, no just stay at home in front of the TV and eat fried food, someone has to to keep the economy going buying too much bad food.”

What a great rant. Anyway, last year I wrote a series of articles aboout what to look at when you are joining a gym. Here are the links to the articles:

Joining a Health Club – The how and why of joining a gym

Joining a Health Club – The Tour – The guys at the gym put on a little dog and pony whow and it is almost worthless unless you know your priorities and ask the right questions

Choosing a health Club – Distance from Home – Where would your gym be? Close to home? Close to work?

Health Club Staff – How to know what to look for in the staff at the gym itself. Your membership si paying for the staff you should get your moneys worth.

If you are going out in the next couple of days to join a gym I think that it will really help you make a better decision to read these articles.

Good luck with the gym shopping.

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Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

This is a post that I have written also for my new Family Vacation blog about eating when on vacation.

Vacations are marred by bad eating and not only bad eating but usually our daily schedules are thrown out the window.

When you are away from home it is very common that you eat based on hunger and snacks are almost always bad food. Both of these are very bad and there are ways to avoid it. Last month while on vacation my family was able to conteract this bad eating structure by planning all of our meals and snacks and here is how:

Kitchenette – The hotel we stayed at had a kitchenette and this was easily the best way that we were able to avoid any eating issues. Kids are terrible for not wanting to eat when it is time to eat and then being suddenly starving. With the kitchenette we were able to prepare probably about half of our meals and warm up other meals as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Teenage obesity is something we cannot ignore, for it is as much disastrous, perhaps even more disastrous, than adult obesity. For one, people who have been obese as teenagers are less likely to live a long life than those who live a healthy life as teens. For another, unlike adults who can control obesity with the help of diets, diet pills, and intense workouts, teenagers cannot do the same because of the following three reasons:

a) The teenage period is the period of growth for a human being. This is the time when our body needs more nutrition than at any other period. On the other hand, a lot of fad diets restrict your food intake in such a way that you are virtually cut off from eating most of the nutritious foods available. Obviously, teenagers cannot be prescribed such diets which would negatively affect their growth.

b) So far as diet pills are concerned, many of them come with harmful side effects. There are pills which have side effects such as nausea, vertigo, headache, indigestion, etc. Since teenagers tend to have weaker immune system compared adults, these side effects would cause great damage in their bodies.

c) Intense workouts are truly intense, in that they put a lot of stress on your body, particularly bone and muscles. As teenagers, we develop new muscles and our bones become stronger. However, since this is a period of bodily growth, a teenager’s body is not as strong as that of an adult. Consequently, if a teenager performs such intense workouts, he is very likely to injure himself seriously.

That said, all is not lost. There are several easy ways to keep your teenage kid fit and healthy. But it all depends on you. If parents are unwilling to cooperate, teenage obesity cannot be controlled. It is a fact that a child is more influenced by the lifestyle habits of his parents than that of strangers.

Don’t ever think that obese parents have obese kids solely because of genetic reasons. While genetic factors may have a key role to play regarding a person’s body weight, they are only as much powerful as one’s destiny. If a human wants, he can easily control his body weight just like he can master his density.
Okay so here are two tips to fight teenage obesity:

1) Weight loss experts often tout food as the biggest reason behind obesity. However, it is not food, but rather “bad food”, which causes weight gain. If a person keeps eating burgers, pizzas, cookies, cakes, soft drinks, soda, alcohol, processed fruit juices, etc., it is only natural that he would become overweight in the long run.

Remember that when it comes to eating, there is no healthier substitute than organic fruits and vegetables. Nature has plenty of healthy foods to offer us and if we wish to stay healthy and fit, we must eat only those foods and nothing else.

That doesn’t however mean that these natural foods need to be eaten raw. Get out of your laziness and start cooking meals at home using low fat oil. Remember that unless you become proactive about it, the health of your teenage kid would only get worse over time.

2. Today’s teenagers prefer to remain glued to television and video games instead of engaging in outdoor sports. Once again, parents have a key role to play here. If you watch television or remain glued to your computer screen for hours, it is natural that your kid would do the same.

Now, if you or your kid doesn’t want to workout, then don’t. But walking, running and jogging are some of the easy activities both of you could do to keep obesity at bay.

I finally watched last nights Biggest Loser tonight. Wow I think this is the best season yet. The show is so much more emotional with family members, couples, friends and in general people that have loved ones and have also left loved ones at home.

Often we look at the Biggest Loser as people turning their lives around but in this episode I really got the sense the these people are in a race to save their lives. The reward challenge gave four teams the opportunity to call home and my wife cried through the whole segment of people calling home.

The strange and irritating part of the show happened tonight. The food challenge. Whoever thought of this idea was sick and twisted and can not be part of the show but let’s set the stage. Everyone is craving bad food and know why they are not eating it. The show assembles every bad food that the people would like to have and then tells them that whoever eats the most will get $5,000. It is hard to turn down that much money and why should you get a reward for eating food that is obviously bad? I haven’t been able to figure this out since they first did it in the Biggest Loser Season 1 and they have continued it every season since then.

The brown team tonight was kicked out and it was very sad. As I said before the show is very emotional this season and everyone really and truly felt bad for kicking out the team that is really nice, fighting hard and still struggling over the team that has a guy who’s previous three generations of his family have died by 51. Man that was a tough call and everyone really felt it.

One of the guys, Neill, (what is with Neils on this show) was really showing how lazy overweight people can be. We all know that some people are lazy and get fat that way but lots of thin people are lazy too so let’s not bother with the stereotypes here. The fact is Neill has apparently failed aat almost everything that he has done so it is really hard for him to give it his all when his reflex says

“Take it easy and then you will have an easy excuse for failure”

He confronts it and loses pretty good tonight.

The weight losses for many of the people were bad and so it usually is on the second week of the show, the water weight goes in the first week and then the muscle is being gained as quickly as the fat is going in the second week so we should all expect that.

I can’t wait for next week.

With the switch back to Weight Watchers for my wife we have also added a new twist to our daily eating, no eating after 7:00 PM.

I didn’t want to mention this until after we had done it for a few days but what started out as a joke has become a great change in our lives. We started on Wednesday night not eating after an hour or so after dinner and over the last three or four nights I have missed snacking less and less.

The first two evenings of not eating I found that I was hungry when I went to sleep and my stomach was a little unsettled for some unknown reason but in the mornings I have not felt any different then I did before, not too hungry.

I have spoken to a few people that have done the exact same thing and found that they have lost weight wityhin the first week or two just from making the cahnge to no evening snacking.

What do you eat at night? Is it good or bad food or nothing at all? I know that I was not eating any really bad foods although I was eating some not very great food. I was eating fruit as well as trail mix and other kinda salty food.

There is one drawback that I am concerned about and that is the really long time between meals and what it will do to my muscle mass and my metabolism. I am a bit of a graser usually and eat throughout the day so my body never has to get nervous about me starving and because of this my metabolism is always pretty high and good.

Next of course is the whole catabolic balance. If your body is looking for energy it will use the energy within your muscles but if your muscles and the rest of your body can not find any energy it will go into a catobolic state where your body eats away at the protein and fat in your body. I know that this is what we are really looking for when we try to lose fat but the problem is that with any prolonged fast that you will lose the muscle that you really want to keep at as great a pace as you are losing fat.

Time will tell if this experiment with not eating at night will be a great method of cutting some calories and maybe even helping improve sleep cycles.

Big title but there are always times when we have failed and it is out head that blows it out of proportion. When we have a long term goal we need to expect some slipups and deal with them before we move on.

If we go back to a goal that is to lose 20 pounds by April 1st. The first thing to remember that life goes on and not all of our friends and family are always going to be as supportive as we need. You may be fine for the first few weeks of the new year when after a bit of time at home you decide to go out for dinner with friends from work. While out for dinner you sneak a bit of appetizers, dinner, some desert, a drink and go home depressed for having completely failed.

Well failure is only going to be temporary. We always try to make good decisions and occasionally we will not do exactly what we should. Read the rest of this entry »

I have seen the article Death By Junk Food a few times over the last few days. The story is about a 20 year old boy that ate nothing but french fries and junk food and died of liver disease at 20. This may be a sad story or a wake up call for bad diets but to me mostly it is a reflection on how badly people can eat and have family and friends around them just let it go.

There is not excuse for eating really badly all of the time. I may drink pop and eat chocolate but there is no way that my family or friends or myself for that matter would allow me to eat that way all of the time. There has to be a lower limit to had badly you are willing to eat and this way you can eat everything you should and it you add in a bit of bad food fine. There is no excuse for eating bad food all of the time and then occasionally complaining about your health.

Saboteurs are people and thoughts that are going to sabotage you when you are at all weak in your bid to better yourself. I can identify many internal and external forces that will try to stop me from what I want on an almost daily basis. Lets start with the outside forces first and then we can start blaming ourselves after that.

External saboteurs

External saboteurs are family, friends and coworkers and can always be identified by their compassion for what you are doing. Lets see if you can pick out any of these terms: “Well it’s not like I make cookies every day” or “You have sure been working hard at it, why not take a day off and go shopping?” or “You must be really proud of yourself for the changes, do you even miss chocolate at all?”. These are all examples of the way that people try to be nice but feel like maybe you are sacrificing too much. If you look back now on how your life was a few months ago it probably seemed a lot less exciting, you had a rhythm and schedule you were happy with and that rut was comfortable for you, think about how others around you feel. Almost all people have a rut that they get in that makes their life comfortable and when they see someone either really excel or make a lot of changes at once it makes them uncomfortable it makes them feel that their lives are inadequate and it makes them want to make sure that they are not being left behind. Other people can not be blamed completely for their feelings as you always have an out with them saying that you just felt like making changes and are happy with the way things are going and oh yes of course I miss the chocolate.

Internal Saboteurs

Internal Saboteurs are much more dangerous. Just as others do not want to see things around them change quickly your mind reels from this as well. Every time you give up a bad food your body and mind will ask you why things were some bad and why are you sacrificing again. Every time you try a different kind of workout your body and mind will complain that things were going well before and that you are wasting voluble energy and are still to sore from before to make this change. I always am happy when I make a change in my life as I have fluctuated in the past from being in great control of my level of fitness, my diet and my exercise and have let them slip away easily again this is some times a part of life, when you are not looking your body decides to take a vacation.

There are some really great ways to make sure that your life continues in the right direction and that is with proper goals and with reasons behind these goals. I want to cover this in depth tomorrow so today just look around and see what maybe looming on the horizons for things that are painful to you that may be trying to break the spirit of your change and try to write these things down. I have written down ideas in the past and then when I went back to them months later am shocked to see what I had thought of before. Sometimes I kick myself for not implementing those great ideas I had in the past and forgot about but you can probably see from that statement what one of my problems has always been.