Lose Fat, Strengthen Joints, Rapid Fat Loss

Yesterday we talked about Maximizing Your Nutrition Success.  If you haven’t had a chance to check out that post and/or leave your comments yet, please be sure to do so.  It’s a really important post, and you need to know this information before advancing to this stuff.

Today we’re talking about ‘functional nutrition,’ or a program that actually meets your daily life demands.  If it’s not reasonable and effective, it’s out.  At least that’s my motto.

How do you feel about all of the extreme diets and programs out there?  Do they make you feel inadequate when ‘mess up’ by accident?
I find this to be one of the #1 reasons that people fail to succeed on diets.  They tend to feel down about themselves as they go through them, instead of positive and inspired by their commitment to create real, lasting change.

Seems backwards, doesn’t it?

Be sure to click the ‘Like’ button below and then leave your comments.

Be Sure To Hit The ‘Like’ Button Below Before You Comment

Maximize Your Nutrition Success

by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Neuro Metabolic Fat Loss & Fitness Expert

Nutritional success for weight loss comes down to 3 main factors:

1. Calories In, Calories Out, While Preserving Muscle
2. Meal Timing
3. Hormonal Manipulation For Fat Loss

Once you learn how to maximize the effect of each one of these three categories, you are sure to start losing that ‘scale weight’ you’ve been working on.  A lot of people ask me how they can get the scale to budge, even though they may be exercising correctly and losing bodyfat every day.

Scale weight is much more closely correlated with nutritional habits than it is exercise habits, especially when you don’t have more than 30-40 pounds to lose.  Often times, we can replace fat with muscle, albeit at a very fast rate, without ever losing a pound.  This is because muscle weighs more than fat, and we haven’t done anything to affect our overall calories consumed, or the way they are processed.

Let’s go a little bit deeper into the benefits of keeping all 3 principles in mind:

Calories In, Calories Out, While Preserving Muscle:

2 + 2 = 4, right?

Well, 3,500 calories = 1 pound.  If we burn, let’s say, 1200 calories per day as our Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), then we are going to be able to consume up to 4,700 calories per day if we wanted to gain a pound every single day and we didn’t exercise.  If we added 600 calories of exercise to the picture, we’d gain a pound per day by eating 5,300 calories.  Makes sense, right?

Now, let’s take a look at how this looks over the course of a week.  Let’s say we more realistically consume 1,600 calories per day, we burn the same 1,200 from our BMR, and we exercise for a total of 300 calories per day.  Essentially, we have a surplus of 100 calories per day, or 700 calories per week.

These 700 calories per week, provided that we don’t change anything, will equate to gaining one pound every 5 weeks, or about 10 pounds per year.  If we gain muscle in the process, every pound of muscle eats about 50 calories per day, so that number might be 5 pounds instead of 10.  Sounds about right, eh?

This is why keeping your caloric deficit in mind matters so much when you are trying to lose weight.  Any slight addition of 100-200 calories per day above normal, which can easily happen when you’re participating in a new exercise program or diet strategy, can clearly affect our outcomes.

I’m not a big proponent of counting calories on a daily basis.  In fact, I find that to be unproductive and unnecessary; but I’d certainly suggest that you do so for a week or two, or at least until you have a better idea how much you’re consuming.

Please note that I mention that you need to ‘preserve muscle,’ while counting calories.  Most diets fail to acknowledge this, and you end up losing muscle.  Similarly to what’s stated above, every pound of muscle lost is equivalent to your body burning 50 calories less per day through your BMR, or gaining 1 pound every 10 weeks.

Meal Timing:

Just as important as the Caloric Deficit with Muscle Preservation principle, we need to consider meal timing.  It’s been well-supported that we can lower cholesterol and improve weight loss simply by spreading the same number of calories over 6 meals instead of three.  Plus, from a calorie-restricted standpoint, this is psychologically much easier on us; eating often gives us the feeling of being full, so we don’t tend to succumb to as many cravings.

Balancing macro and micro nutrients within a given meal is important for keeping your energy level high throughout the day.  However, your body doesn’t operate on ‘one meal at a time.’  Rather, your body looks at your total nutritional intake for the day before deciding how to react, completely.  If you happen to miss some protein with breakfast, make sure you get it with lunch, etc.

The easiest way to determine how often to eat is by taking your total number of waking hours per day and then dividing by 6.  That’s how often you should have a meal.  Personally, I recommend 3 main meals, and 3 mini-meals.  Mini meals look just like your main meals, except they are about half the calories.

Please note:  I am NOT suggesting snacking.  Mini-meals are often leftovers, or meals prepared specifically for ‘snack-time.’  This is a much healthier approach to weight loss and healthy living.

Hormonal Manipulation For Fat Loss:

Interestingly, how you eat will affect the hormonal releases in your body.  In fact, most stress-related cortisol issues, as well as many other disease states in the body, can be overcome through proper nutritional planning.  When it comes to fat loss, however, the effect can be visible and dramatic, just by knowing when to strategically choose types of nutrients.

For example, and this is something that Joel Marion talks about in his program Cheat Your Way Thin, low carb days tend to lead to a reduction in the amount of insulin produced in the body.  Initially, this might be a good thing, but over a few days our bodies stop producing the right amount of insulin, and any sugar that we consume ends up being deposited as fat.

Ultimately, we hurting our body’s ability to burn through sugars and lose fat by altering the amount of insulin production.  Our bodies begin to store fat from every nutrient, as this is a survival strategy during times of famine.  Fascinating!

Conversely, your body can learn to up-regulate the amount of insulin production, temporarily, along with other hormones that get released simultaneously, and this can tell our bodies that we are in time of feast; feast timing results in our bodies consuming as many calories as possible that we intake, creating a larger caloric expenditure for the day.

One thing to be careful of, however, is how long to keep your insulin levels, as well as leptin levels, high before you start gaining weight.  This is where the concept of ‘cheating’ came into play, and we started seeing bodybuilders and fat loss nutritionist recommending that you allow different ‘cheat meals’ into your nutritional programming.

Let’s go one step further – what if I told you that you absolutely had to have entire ‘Cheat Days’ in your program in order to lose weight more easily and moderately?

It’s true.

Have you ever experienced the opposite effect from eating too much before?

I sure have… I remember gaining 15 pounds in 3 days during the holidays once upon a time… now, a similar behavior might have me lose 3-5.  I’d like to share with you how I do this, but first, please share your stories, comments, and questions below.

*If you found this article to be helpful, please click the ‘Facebook Like’ button below & then leave your comments.  If you missed yesterday’s post on Workout Technology – The Evolution Of Fitness, please click here.

The Flexibility Cure
by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Human Movement Expert

I have a mission for you – Mission Unbreakable.  This is a program that hits the market tomorrow, and it’s a mission to make your body… well, you guessed it:  Unbreakable.  Along with the help of co-creator BJ Gaddour, we are going to help you move restriction free, speed up your metabolism, and stand up taller.  This type of programming eliminates achy joints and painful muscles.

But that’s for tomorrow…

As for today, I’d like you to focus on the next 6 weeks:  You are going to identify and fix the following 3 issues, which in combination, create the muscle imbalances in your body:

1. Muscle Mobility/Activation
2. Flexibility
3. Tissue Quality/Mobility

Flexibility, functionally, is all three areas put together:

• Muscle Mobility/Activation – Your muscle’s ability to lengthen with movement.  For example, as you squat, you are lengthening your quads.

• Flexibility – Passive stretch on a muscle. For example, stretch until you feel a slight burn and hold the position.

• Tissue Quality/Mobility – Muscle fiber alignment with adequate blood flow.  For example, after you tear a muscle, scar tissue forms and creates a web of tissue to protect the old tear.  This web of tissue puts pressure on the muscle and does not receive good blood supply.

6 weeks from now, you’re going to be scratching your head and wondering how it’s even possible that you made this much progress with your flexibility and mobility, after having tried various other methods for so long.  Your body will move freely and your body’s aches will be in the past.

Plus, we’re going to make this our ‘meditative’ part of every day… so we’re actually going to look forward to ‘stretching’ everyday.

“This Is The Flexibility Cure”

You will literally double your flexibility, get rid of your aches and pains, and stand up straighter before you know it!

Our flexibility affects everything.  Our mobility is our body’s ability to grow.  Our metabolisms are higher when our bodies are in balance.

You know the old ‘Elementary Anatomy Song,’ right?

“The ankle bone is connected to the….  knee bone… the knee bone is connected to the… hip bone…”

Well, the same is true with the systems of your body and flexibility gains.  Your nervous system is connected to your musculoskeletal system, is connected to your endocrine system, etc.  It’s not as good of a song, but the idea remains true

Understanding how one system affects another is the most important part of any flexibility program.  In order to properly create a stretching program, you should know:

• How your nervous system sends electricity to muscles and this leads to “hard spots” (the place it ‘hurts so good’ when you get a massage)

• How muscle restrictions are like squeezing a muscle and then trying to use it (doesn’t work)

• What ‘normal’ muscle feels like and what ‘restricted’ muscle feels like

• How to determine if you should be performing mobility/activation, flexibility, or tissue mobilization exercises to get better results with your fitness program and/or decrease pain

• The angle your muscle fibers run, and how this affects position for a stretch

• How speed of stretching affects results (ideal time span for greatest benefit in the least amount of time)

I know this brings up a brand new method for flexibility for many of you.

Did this post help you answer any questions you’ve had about flexibility results you’ve seen so far?

Is it possible that you were working on just one type of flexibility and that’s why you weren’t seeing the results and carry-over effect to your exercise program?

When you finish answering the questions above, please click the ‘Facebook Like’ button so your friends can answer too!

Workout Technology – The Evolution Of Fitness
by Dr. Kareem F. Samhouri, CSCS, HFS
Neuro Metabolic Fat Loss & Fitness Expert

Workout Technology has advanced so much in the last several years:

• At-home aerobics (outdated)
• Power walking (outdated)
• Machine-based circuits (outdated)
• Cardio, cardio, cardio (outdated)
• Interval-based weight training (Alive & Well)

But the principles remain the same…

1. Build cardiovascular endurance
2. Burn as much fat as possible from every workout
3. Improve your strength, relative to your body shape/size
4. Improve exercise efficiency – more results, less time
5. Balance your body for best results
   

Build Cardiovascular Endurance:

Building cardiovascular endurance is an important aspect to your exercise program.  This is because you need to improve your heart’s ability to expel blood to the rest of your body (and receive it in return) in order to ensure a healthy state in your body.  Essentially, improving heart function increases chances of survival and decreases risk of diseases like diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.

Cardiovascular fitness also helps to improve lung function and expel more oxygen to the rest of the body.  The elasticity of your lungs improve when you improve your cardiovascular fitness level, and breathing becomes easier.  By requiring less breaths and having a lower resting heart rate, your body undergoes less stress with daily living, and it’s thought that this results in an increased lifespan by several years.

Improved Quality of Life + Improved Quantity of Life = Better Life

We used to think that you had do long, boring cardio in order to improve cardiovascular fitness.  Thanks to the Jabali studies, amongst others, we now understand that you can do about 20 minutes of high-intensity exercise and reap up to 2 hours of moderate-high intensity cardio benefit to your cardiovascular system.

Workout Technology advanced and exercise got easier.

Burn As Much Fat As Possible:

We’ve always wanted to burn as much fat as possible with every workout.  Whether we were counting calories on a treadmill or doing aerobics, the goal was to ‘get a great burn’ and then reap the benefit of our efforts.

Over time, we learned that alternating high and low intensity exercise, combined with resistance training to momentary muscular failure, yielded far better caloric expenditure.  The logic was simple, but the argument was hard to comprehend for awhile…

We learned about EPOC – Excess Post-Oxygen Consumption.

Basically, for up to 48-72 hours after an intense exercise bout, our bodies undergo a repair process.  This repair process removes lactic acid from our systems and repair mini muscle tears that take place from heavy sets to failure.  Any body process consumes energy.  In this case, the energy consumed by EPOC, as our body consumes oxygen for days after an exercise bout to self-repair, is worth 2-3x the number of calories you can burn during a bout of ‘cardio’ on the treadmill.

Workout Technology advanced and exercise got easier.

Improve Your Strength, Relative To Your Body’s Shape or Size:

How many different products have we seen, relative to a specific body size or shape on the market to date?  Whether it’s a product for abs, buns, thighs, women, or men, we’ve seen it all.  One point remains true:

Our bodies are unique, 
and each one responds differently to exercise.

That’s why we’ve had to come up with so many programs.  But I believe one major component is missing… self-assessment.  No one understands your body as well as you do.  With the proper education related to your body, you’ll become immediately aware of what needs to be done in order to succeed.

When trying to improve fitness levels as a whole, assessing your body for fat storage patterns is important, but not because you need to exercise those areas.  Instead, this is important because it is indicative of increased levels of certain hormones in your body.

For example, fat storage in your lower abdomen is indicative of increased levels of cortisol, meaning that your body is too stressed, not that you should do more sit ups and stress it further.

However, it is also important to assess where you are weak or strong, left to right, side to side, or top to bottom.  Your body craves symmetry, and this is dependent upon both strength and length.

In the case of flexibility (or length), this is the closest thing to having a great manual therapist assess every muscle in your entire body for restriction or limitation.  Your body has ‘pain sensors’ where you have restriction, so you can easily find them on yourself.  In fact, it stands to argue that you’ll find your own restrictions more easily than the best manual physical therapist in the world will find them on you.

Once you find your restrictions and learn to release them, your flexibility will finally improve… Rapidly!

Workout Technology advanced and exercise got easier.

Exercise Efficiently – More Done In Less Time:

Everyone wants more for less.  It’s human nature.  By learning how to exercise in the most efficient way possible, one of two things are true:

1. You get more results in the same amount of time.
2. You get to exercise for less time and get the same results.

Both seem like rather appealing options, right?

It used to be that exercising for increased efficiency meant regulating your heart rate to be in the ‘fat-burning zone’ of 40-60% max heart rate, or in the ‘cardiovascular zone’ of 60-85% max heart rate.  Now, we know better.  

We know that increased efficiency means improving the demand on all 3 energy systems:

1. ATP-PC – 0 to 2 second energy system
2. Anaerobic – 2 to 60 second energy system
3. Aerobic – 60 seconds and beyond energy system

By depleting and replenishing all three energy systems, we are maximizing caloric expenditure, muscular strength, as well as muscular and cardiovascular endurance.

Effectively, we are not multiplying our results by three, but we are exponentially allowing ourselves to burn up to 9x more calories with this approach.

You Can Burn Up To 9x More Calories 
When You Exercise Efficiently

Imagine what you could do with your flexibility… your body could finally move freely, and your posture could improve in a very short period of time.  Standing up straighter means better oxygen to our bodies, and therefore, more endurance.

More endurance = More Results

Workout Technology advanced and exercise got easier.

Balance Your Body For Best Results:

This is where the importance of strength and length really come in.  Your body is composed of a system of checks and balances:

• When your heart rate increases (outside of exercise), your blood pressure decreases to prevent too much blood flow at once.
• When your breathing increases in rate, you exhale more forcefully than you inhale, in order to blow off carbon dioxide and allow room for oxygen.
• When you build muscle, your body limits your ability to grow if you do not have enough mobility in the group of related muscles, in order to prevent injury to your joints or fracture to your bones.

Your body will literally turn muscle off if it believes it is too short for more growth; and it will build restrictions in muscles that have been over-shortened for a time period, either due to injury, posture, or position.

You should be grateful for the smart body that you have.  But it’s important that you understand how to make use of this process and see it for the advantage it brings you with your workouts.  By learning to properly understand and assess where your body is limiting growth, you are able to restore function to these areas and take control of your future progress.

Flexibility, Mobility, & Activation
Are The Keys To Balance In Your Body.

Workout Technology advanced and exercise got easier.

Have you had trouble gaining flexibility?

Have you already seen incredible results based upon the flexibility gains you’ve made?  If so, please share your experience below.

Would you like some help?  Please ask your questions below & I’ll be sure to comment or follow up with another blog post, depending upon the level of interest.  The more great comments, the more great info you’re going to get!

Either way, be sure to click the ‘Like’ button below

I’m getting ready to create a couple of motivational audios that have been requested of me for quite some time now… subscribers of mine regularly ask me to provide more stuff in the motivational category for you, and I’ve been meaning to do it.

Well, this week, it’s getting done.  I’ll be creating 2 audios (probably about 15-20 minutes each) that you’ll be able to listen to each morning to prime yourself for Transformation Success.

After this week, they’ll be off the market until I can get the sites built and start selling them online, but this week only, they can be yours FREE.

I’ve decided to prioritize these audios for you this week, because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about 1000 Calorie Challenge coming out, since it’s well known that Joel Marion and Arnel Ricafranka are good friends of mine and trusted colleagues.

I still think about how crazy it is that my whole family knew of Joel before I did (from his internationally acclaimed book The Cheat To Lose Diet)… and all of my friends knew Arnel long before I did as well… from his six pack abs program that got all of them ripped.

To think how many lives you have to touch to make an impression like this possible?  It’s really neat…

Needless to say, these guys are qualified to give great nutritional and fat loss information.  That said, I think there’s really a missing element in 1000 Calorie Challenge:

Motivational Audios To Guarantee Mindset Success

This is such a fundamental principal if you ask me… with no disrespect intended, I believe you can literally cut the time frame in half you’d need to spend building up to 1000 calorie workouts if you could just understand how to wrap your mind around doing the impossible.

My body is SO much more capable than I used to think.

I had to learn how to motivate myself to eat for success and inspire better fitness before I could truly transform and reach the level of fitness success that I have.

It’s through shear heart, will-power, and determination that we win ‘Challenges,’ so to speak.  I know you’re working hard to find the right program, get the right results, etc.

The bottom line is that A LOT of programs can get you there, but the opportunity to succeed isn’t always there.  That’s why I’m forcing your hand… I want you to make decisions, conquer goals, and look back and know you accomplished what you set out to do.

Hence, fitness deadlines.

Here’s your newest (and very opportune) fitness deadline:

Grab 1000 Calorie Challenge through the link I send you in tomorrow’s email and I’ll give you:

1. Nutritional Motivation
2. Fitness Inspiration Audio

absolutely FREEE…

1000 Calorie Challenge works, but it’s a bit extreme.  You don’t have to eat only 1000 calories & burn the same amount in a given day to lose weight, but you do have to have a strategy for success in order to do so.  This week, we’re giving you an opportunity to succeed with a strategy that we know works.

Are you ready for this?

Oh, and for Day 1 Action-Takers, there’s going to be a 5 fitness celebrity coaching call ($597 value), just to entice you a bit more and guarantee your questions get answered…

Please comment below & hit the like button as well:

Let me know if you have any questions, if you’re excited about these audios, or if you’ve benefited in the past from any of the motivational stuff I’ve provided: