Measure Your Progress

An extremely important part of your fitness program is being able to measure your progress.

Body fat testing is not painful, nor is it expensive. You can get it done at most any gym or fitness center. Simply ask if they have an expert who can measure body composition.

It's also a good idea to take before and after photos' and post them somewhere you'll see them every day.
But most importantly, measure 5 - 10 different aspects of your progress.

My most successful clients measure everything in their life that's affected by their weight loss, normally on a simple scale from 1 - 10, such as:

* their daily energy level
* their attitude
* the way they feel when they look in the mirror
* the way they fit into their clothes
* the compliments they get from people
* their level of mental focus
* their waist, hips, and thigh measurements
* their body weight
* their body-fat level
* their endurance in their workouts
* etc, etc, etc...

Make a long list of ways you can measure your progress - but be sure to include things that are truly important to YOU.

If having loads of energy is important to you, then you should be measuring your energy level every day to see if your diet and/or workout routine are doing their job.

On the other hand, if you already have a lot of daily energy, than you might not want to measure that - you might prefer to measure other things that are more important to you at your current stage of life.

Take time to design your list, then chart your progress in a daily journal every day for each of the categories on your list. Then take an average for the whole day, and write that average at the top of your page.


by : Christopher Guerriero

Take A Serious Look At Your Body Fat

There are many diets and fitness programs out there that are concerned with one thing: how you look. They are centered around the idea that in order to be attractive and valuable you must be thin. These diets and fitness plans are merely ploys to get people to spend money on the latest fad out of a guarentee that they will lose weight instantly and never gain it back while eating their favorite desserts and not lifting a finger. Those plans just don't work. In fact, they can do even more damage than good. As a fitness trainer, I consider one of my most important tasks to be informing people about the truths about health. People need to learn that their body fat levels are much more important than their weight.

As people are so consumed with their weight and their physical appearance, naturally little time is given to caring about actual symbols of health such as percentage of body fat or muscle mass. I find that this is one of the hugest truths about health that need to be firmly planted into people's minds. Why? Because body fat levels say a lot about the actual composition of our bodies and hence about our actual levels of health. Some of the thinnest people in the world have high body fat levels because they eat very little and they do no fitness routines to build and maintain muscle. So while they may be tiny, they are not strong nor are they healthy by any true standard.

Watching your body fat levels can happen in a variety of ways. An important first step is to get a simple test done that will reveal your current body fat percentage. It is a good idea to meet with a physician or a fitness trainer and discuss a plan of seeing your body fat percentage lessen to be in normal range. Making a goal and a plan for how to reach your goal is one of the best ways of attaining anything to do with health.

So take a serious look at your body fat percentage. Begin to watch what you eat. Add lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and replace sugar-filled drinks with water. Those two changes paired with an increase of exercise will have you feeling and seeing results in no time. Your level of body fat does not have to be your enemy. Use your body fat level as an inspiration to get into the best shape of your life for the rest of your life.



By: Julee Mitchelsin

Body Fat Do You Have Too Much

Body fat is an important issue of your overall health. Reducing your body fat is important, because too much body fat can make you more prone to serious health difficulties, such as a heart attack or a stroke. It can also drain your energy and create problems with your movement. There are ways to reduce your body fat percentage that don't require a serious diet or a lucrative program that costs thousands of dollars. All it takes is a little bit of creativity and some willpower.

One of the first things you should do is to figure out your body fat percentage. You can find this out through a number of methods, but an exact number representing your body fat percentage is usually quite hard to discern, and your doctor can provide numbers that are more accurate in a few minutes. It involves an equation and finding out your average density.

If an individual is serious about reducing body fat, the first place to start is body fat measurement. This evaluation may not be a great ego booster, but it is a good motivator. If an individual has dangerously high body fat, a drastic change in lifestyle might be necessary, and this may be the push he or she needs to make a change and get healthy. The body fat measurement can be used as a guide to put one on the right path to better health.

Replace Food with Better Food

One of the first things you should do is to replace rice, pasta and breads with vegetables. This isn't like the Atkins diet, in which you drop the carbohydrates in your diet. This technique replaces a type of carbohydrate with another type of carbohydrate, providing your diet with a better way to burn them altogether. Fruits and veggies are better fat burners than rice, pasta and breads, so they will help you reduce your body fat.

Drink Water

Next, drink plenty of water each day. Consuming a lot of water actually makes it harder for the fat to stick to your body, allowing you to lose body fat and keep it off. Water also flushes your body out and removes harmful toxins, creating a better body system with which to fight off body fat. Water also raises your energy level, if you drink enough of it, and can improve your concentration.

Resistance Training

If you add some light resistance training to your workout and you do it before you do any cardio, you'll find that you will have an easier time with your goal to lose body fat. This occurs because your body does not actually burn fat for the first portion of your exercise, so it is better to allow your body to warm up to lose body fat. Elevate your heart rate by doing some light training, then go forward with the whole routine.

A proper diet, keeping well hydrated and regular exercise are excellent and cost-efficient ways to improve health without spending large amounts of money. Expensive diets and special programs to reduce body fat percentage are not required to lose weight, but creativity and a genuine commitment are. If an individual is serious about losing body fat and is willing to put in the time and energy toward doing so, then that's already one foot on the road to better health.



By: Gary Holdon