CoachGShort Weekly Newsletter December 18th

Making Your New Year’s Resolutions

I love a new year.  It almost seems like we can start all over, finally become that wonderful, productive, healthy, happy person we’ve always wanted to be. The trouble is, the enthusiasm to make changes, especially with exercise and diet, tends to fade once we realize we can’t change everything overnight.  If you want to make lasting changes, there are three things you can do to make your resolutions work all year long: Adjust your attitude, change your lifestyle and come up with a plan for success.

Adjust Your Attitude

If you have the wrong attitude about fitness, you’re already setting yourself up for failure.  Most people look at exercise as:

• Punishment for bad eating
• An obligation
• Painful
• Time consuming
• Impossible to sustain over a long period of time
• Boring

If any of these sound familiar, how long do you think you’ll stick with your program?  Nobody wants to do something painful, boring or obligatory.  Before you throw yourself into weight loss, suss out your attitudes about exercise and figure out whether these attitudes are true or just lies you’ve been telling yourself for years.  Then, try a different perspective and look at exercise as:

• A break from a stressful workday
• A way to boost energy and mood
• The only time you’ll have to yourself all day
• A chance to get totally physical and let your mind rest
• A chance to reward your body for working so hard
• A way to improve your quality of life immediately

And here are some more key points about exercise that you must understand:

1. Willpower won’t work.  Willpower is for short-term success.  Long-term success requires planning, discipline and finding ways to motivate yourself every day.
2. Motivation will not magically happen.  What motivates youwill change from day to day.  You have to recommit to your goals each day, tweak them to fit changes in your lifestyle and attitude and find new ways to motivate yourself over the course of your life.
3. You will not always want to exercise and eat healthy.  Even the most committed exerciser doesn’t always want to do it.  Know that you will have to work on it every day.
4. Diets don’t work.  Stop wasting your time following someone else’s plan for you.  Make your own plan based on realistic changes–if you can’t follow your chosen diet for the rest of your life, you’re wasting precious time.

Adjust Your Lifestyle

The facts about being overweight:

• You can’t be overweight unless your lifestyle is set up to encourage it.
• You can’t be overweight if you haven’t allowed yourself to eat too much.
• You can’t be overweight if you’ve made a daily schedule that doesn’t allow time for exercise.

Never forget that losing weight and maintaining that weight loss is a lifetime prospect.  You will never stop working to maintain your fitness and weight.  So, before you start that same old diet or exercise program, ask yourself this question:  Can I sustain this diet for the long term?  Is this exercise program something I can do every day?

Once you recognize the gravity of permanently losing weight, you’ll need to change your lifestyle to accommodate this goal.

• Figure out your bad habits.  Keep a food/activity journal for an entire week.  Do it without judgment or shame–you’re simply trying to figure out what you’re doing every day that may be hurting your weight loss goals.
• Replace those bad habits, one at a time, with different habits.  Experts know that you can’t break bad habits without forming new ones.  If you take away your daily Egg McMuffin and don’t replace it with something else you’ll drift right back into the old McDonald’s habit.

This may sound simplistic, and it is.  Giving up something yummy for something healthy isn’t easy.  You have to change your environment to make it impossible to have or even want that Egg McMuffin.  Get started with these ideas:

• Decide what you’ll eat instead of fast food.  Stock up on breakfast foods you like, keep meal replacement bars in the car or try healthy fruit shakes or smoothies.
• Eat before you get in the car so you won’t be starving and, therefore, tempted to hit the drive thru.
• Change your driving route to work so you don’t even pass by McDonald’s.
• Don’t carry cash in the car (even if you DO have the urge to indulge, you won’t be able to), write down your weight loss goal and tape it to your steering wheel or your glove compartment so, when you’re reaching for your wallet, you’re immediately reminded your goals.

Make a Plan

You’ve figured out how to change your bad eating habits by replacing them with good ones and you’ve learned to create an environment that doesn’t allow those bad habits to exist.  Now, you need to make a plan for what you really want.

Set Your Goals

Write down specific goals you have (not just ‘I want to lose weight.’).  List everything, for example:

• How much weight you want to lose.  Make sure the amount of weight you want to lose is reasonable for your height and frame.  This Ideal Weight Calculator will give you a starting point for setting your goals.
• A target date to reach your goals.  Make sure you’ve given yourself a reasonable time to reach that goal – (a safe bet would be to lose a pound a week)
• Why you want to lose this weight (i.e., I want to look good in a bathing suit for summer)
• What you think will happen if you reach your goal
• How you’ll maintain your weight loss once you reach your goal (remember, it’s a lifetime thing–even when you reach your goal, you can’t quit!)

For more, check out Setting Realistic Fitness Goals or How to Set Weight Loss Goals to make sure you’re setting goals you can really reach.

Set Up Your Program

To set up a good routine, you’ll need to know the basics of a complete program.  You’re program will involve cardio, strength training and stretching.

For help choosing a program contact me and we will find the right program for you!  You can find my contact information at the bottom of the newletter or visit my site www.beachbodycoach.com/coachgshort to look at the different products that BeachBody has!

Ensure Your Success

Success involves using every resource you have to keep you going.  Do whatever it takes to be consistent including:

• Enlist all family members to get involved.  If everyone eats healthy, you won’t have to fight to avoid that bag of chips your spouse munches on every night
• Join a BeachBody Challenge
• Get a friend to exercise with you
• Take time every week to schedule your exercise routines
• Keep a workout bag packed so you don’t have to scramble for your gear
• Keep a fitness journal to track your workouts and progress
• Reward yourself often with massages, new clothes or a vacation
• Change your program every 6 weeks to avoid plateaus
• Re-visit your goals every three months and gauge your progress.  If you’re not reaching your goals, maybe you should change them to something more accessible

The important thing to remember is that losing weight requires that you change your lifestyle.  You have to change the way you think about exercise and eating, change the way you schedule your day and how you prioritize your tasks. It’s easy to lose a few pounds, but it’s hard to keep them off for good.  Being prepared for what’s ahead is your first step in the right direction.

Using Meal Replacements For Weight Loss

Information & Research:

Do you find that losing weight is difficult because you are eating on the run with no time to shop, cook, or plan meals? Do you eat out or get take-out food a lot and then eat restaurant portions that may prevent you from losing weight and keeping it off? These are some of the reasons people who want to lose weight often consider using meal replacements.

What Is A Meal-Replacement?

A meal replacement is a portion-controlled, prepackaged meal, shake, drink or bar that contains approximately 100 to 200 calories and is used to replace an entire meal or snack to help you reduce your total calorie intake and thus lose weight. These include nutritionally fortified diet protein shakes, snack bars, and low-calorie meals.

The weight loss shakes and bars are usually low in fat and calories, with about 100 to 200 calories, 2 to 5 grams of fat, about 10 to 15 grams of protein, various vitamins and minerals, and up to 5 grams of fiber.

How Do Meal Replacements Work?

Meal replacements help people lose weight by providing a controlled amount of calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat in a prefixed portion. They simplify meal planning because they are convenient — easy to store, and requiring little preparation. They are also reasonably prices, usually costing less than the meal they replace.

Meal replacements reduce the number of decisions you have to make about what to eat and reduce your exposure to tempting foods that might result in overeating.

Many effective weight loss plans that use meal replacements recommend either using them in addition to eating 1 or 2 healthy “grocery” foods meals, or replacing 2 or 3 meals and several snacks per day to lose weight, and then replacing 1 meal per day to maintain weight.

Using a meal replacement instead of an entire meal or snack can help you to reduce your calorie and fat intake and your blood sugar levels. When you first start using meal replacements, you will likely notice an immediate reduction in your blood sugar levels because you will probably be consuming fewer calories and less carbohydrates than you would with your usual meal.

How Effective Are Meal Replacements?

Recent studies show that meal replacements have an important role to play in the diet of anyone who wants to lose excess body-fat and build healthy lean muscle.

A good example comes from a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers from the University Hospital of Ulm in Germany assessed the effects of low-calorie diet combined with meal replacements on weight loss in a group of 100 obese patients.

Half of the group followed a self-selected diet of 1,200 to 1,500 calories per day, which included three meals and two snacks. The other half followed a similar self-directed diet except that they replaced two snacks and two of the three meals with meal replacements (shakes, soups or hot chocolate).

After three months, the people on the
self-selected diet lost an average of 2.9 lbs., while the people using meal
replacements lost an average of 15.6 lbs.

After the first three months, everyone was asked to replace one meal and one snack per day with a meal replacement. Over the next 24 months, original self-selected diet group lost an average of nine additional pounds, and the original meal replacement group lost an average of another seven more pounds. At the end of the study, the self- selected diet group had a 5.9 percent weight loss, whereas the original meal replacement group had an 11 percent weight loss.

Another study by researchers from the University of Nevada report similar results. Women using meal replacement supplements were able to maintain a far greater weight loss over the course of a year than those using other methods to control their weight.

For the full articles and more studies please click here: Using Meal Replacements For Weight Loss

I truly believe in this product! I recommend giving this product a try and with the Beach Body Bottom-of-the-Bag guarantee if you are not totally satisfied in the first 30 day you can return it for a full refund (less s&h). If you are interested in trying a sample please either message me on teambeachbody.com or send me an email at gshort@shortfam.com

Beach Body Coaching Team!!!

 

What are you doing to fight obesity?

Who else is looking to spread the word of health and ready to “END THE TREND”?

Contact me @ me@coachgshort.com for details on how you can spread the word, get in shape and help your finances!! Together we can end the trend!!

Success Story Of the week!!

Please contact with any questions.
Gregory Short – Independent BeachBody Coach

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