Focus on Being Healthy

Weight gain is a side effect of living an unhealthy lifestyle. Weight gain is a symptom. It is not the problem that needs solving. We need to shift our energy away from fighting with the never-ending symptoms of unhealthiness, and instead get right to the root of the problem.

If you can instead focus on improving your health, and have a little faith that the inside of your body is changing for the better, you will eventually see your external appearance align with its internal counterpart. Focus on getting healthy and the weight loss will take care of itself. You will soon begin to see the positive side effects of being healthy being reflected in your body composition.

Here is your 10 step plan to fitness greatness.

Focus on Eating Quality Foods

Instead of directing all of your energy into trying to determine how many calories you should be eating, focus your energy on slowly changing your eating habits until 50, 60 70, 80, and then 90 percent of your food intake is made up of whole foods. I can assure you that a diet consisting of 90% whole foods will do wonders for your body composition.

Calorie intakes are a tricky thing. Individual metabolisms make it difficult to throw out blanket recommendations for how many calories you should be eating. Unfortunately, one of the top questions people ask me is how many calories they should be eating. More times than not, 10-12 times body weight ends up being a good starting guide, but even that is not perfect. I use the BodyMedia FIT Armband to determine my intake, but that is only after the quality of my diet is at least 90% whole foods.

The true power of body transformation lies not in manipulating calorie intakes, but instead in providing your body and mind with whole, nourishing foods. Macronutrients such as protein, fat, carbohydrates, and the calories they provide are fun to play around with, but the real magic happens when you fuel your body with an abundance of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and energy from whole foods.

Read more about why you should focus on the quality of your food before you change the quantity.

Focus on Getting Active

You’ve heard it plenty of times before – eat less and move more. But what does it mean exactly to get active? Does that mean adding a workout to your day and calling it quits? What exercise is required to get fit and healthy?

Well, getting active means going beyond throwing in the token workout here or there. It is true that some exercise is better than none, but the goal of losing weight and getting healthy doesn’t just mean doing a daily workout. It means living an active lifestyle.

If you were to ever study fit people and their daily activity you would soon see that they go beyond the daily 30 minute workout. They get up off their butts and they move. They walk more. They take more steps than the average person does, and they spend less time just lounging around. They engage in opportunistic exercise by finding creative ways to make their daily tasks just a little more active and intense.

This pays big dividends in their physiques and their health in the long term. Just 100 extra opportunistic calories a day equals out to 10 extra pounds of weight loss in a year. Multiply that by however many years you wish, and you can see the power an active lifestyle has over a short term exercise program.

Here are 5 easy steps to forming the daily exercise habit.

Focus on Creating a Positive Self Body Image

Body image problems are abound in our society. Pictures of beautiful people are plastered all over the place in malls, magazines, and television. Many people take these images as cues that this is what they need to strive for, and they won’t be happy with their bodies until they achieve these looks.

Creating a positive self image starts now. You must begin to see your true beauty within, and you must do that before you begin to transform your inner health and outer physical appearance. Love your body regardless of what it looks like. It does not define who you are. Learn to accept yourself, and the rest will follow.

Here are 10 ways to build self-confidence and love what you see in the mirror.

Calories? Suddenly they seem like such a trivial little thing.

Learn all about the basics of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) here.

High Intensity Interval Training

Just to refresh your memory, HIIT is exercise performed in short bursts of intense intervals, using large muscle groups. These short bursts can vary in length, but the shorter the time period, the more intense they should be. HIIT workouts can range from just a few minutes (read about Tabata protocol here) to about 20 minutes or even longer, depending on your level of endurance and your goals. Just a 12-15 minute HIIT workout, done at the right intensity, can be all that is needed for a fantastic cardiovascular AND strength training workout.

Intensity is Key

The MOST IMPORTANT thing to remember about HIIT is that during the intense intervals, you should be pushing yourself as hard as you possibly can. This is not going to feel like steady-state cardio where you might be able to talk or look around and let your mind wander. You will need to push yourself to a point that you are breathing heavily, your heart is pumping, and you can’t think about much else besides performing another rep of your exercise. An easy way to find out what this feels like is to hit your local track and pretend like you are in a race – sprint as fast as you can possibly run until you feel your body run out of steam, probably after 5-10 seconds. With this one sprint that took just a few seconds, you have now activated the systems of your body that will send you into fat-burning muscle-building mode for the next 24 hours. You can now transform this feeling to pushups, cycling, swimming, burpees, squats, plyometrics – any exercise that you can perform and ramp up the intensity, either by adding weight, speed, or difficulty.

So while hopping on a treadmill for an hour and running at a steady state may burn 300 calories vs. a 12 minute HIIT workout only burning 100 or so, the minute you step off the treadmill your body stops burning calories, so 300 is the best you’ll do. With HIIT, you’ll continue to burn massive calories for 24 hours on top of the 100 during the 12 minute workout. It’s like turning on a fat-burning program that runs in the background while you go about daily life.

HIIT is one of the ways I got from average to ripped in 12 weeks, here’s how.

Change It Up

Another important thing to remember is that maximum fat burning takes place when you are consistently making your body guess what is next. The more you can “shock” your body, the more it will scramble to recover afterwards, activating the all-important EPOC effect – excess post-oxygen consumption. This means your body creates a deficit of oxygen during exercise that it will need to “pay back” over the next 24 hours, using your fat stores to fuel the process, which is why you keep burning calories. So what you don’t want to do is the exact same HIIT routine performed at the same intensity over and over. Switch it up by trying new workouts as often as you can, at varying intervals. One day, go to the track and do 10 sprints. The next time, do plyometric drills in 30 second intervals for 20 minutes. The possibilities are endless as long as you are working at a high level of intensity.

Take a Break

The other important component of HIIT is the rest factor. During the breaks between the high intensity intervals, it is vital to rest. This gives your body the chance to re-start your energy producing systems so you can hit the next interval with intensity again, maximizing your effort and thus your fat-burning. If you don’t feel like you have to rest, you’re not performing your high-intensity intervals as hard as you should be or you’re ready to move on to a tougher level.

Here’s why active recovery is an essential part of fitness routines.

It’s also important to have rest days in between HIIT workouts to give your body the chance to fully recover. If you don’t fully recover, you won’t be receiving all of the benefits that HIIT has to offer, and won’t be able to perform each workout at max effort. HIIT can also be very shocking to your central nervous system, and over-doing it can cause major burnout and too much of a negative energy balance. This is especially important when you first begin HIIT. Once you work up to it, you may be able to do these workouts more often. Until then, it’s best to have active recovery, traditional strength-training, and endurance cardio in between your HIIT days.

Eat for Your Workout

If you’re doing HIIT workouts often, you’re going to need to eat the right foods and the right amount of calories to fuel this high level of activity. For the best performance, eat a small meal with carbohydrates about an hour before your workout. The carbohydrates will be easy on your stomach and will give you the extra energy you need to get your body performing at it’s top capacity. After your workout, eat a protein/carb meal as soon as you can to help your body replenish your muscles. Here’s more about what to eat after your workout.

If you are noticing that in between workouts you feel sluggish and/or overly fatigued or sore, you may not be eating enough calories to match your new level of intensity.  Too much of a negative energy balance (the gap between how many calories you’re taking in and how many you’re expending) can cause all sorts of problems, including your body refusing to let go of fat. If you’re going to workout like an athlete, you’re going to have to eat like one!

So it’s pretty simple-ramp up your intervals so you are reaching your maximum effort, eat for your activity level, and rest efficiently between intervals and workouts, and soon you will be getting the results you’re looking for. Enjoy, HIIT is one of the most fun ways to keep exercise interesting!

Negative Body Image Keeping You Down?

I’d be lying if I told you I’ve never experienced these feelings myself. It’s easy to doubly beat myself up since I’m a fitness coach. Not being 100% comfortable in your own skin can take an emotional toll on yourself. Wondering what other people are going to think when they see you’ve put on a few pounds or you aren’t lean 365 days out of the year can really mess with your head. Through conversations with family and friends, I know I’m not alone in these feelings.

Be Honest With Yourself

The first step in dealing with these feelings is to come to grips with the fact that you have a problem. You know who you are. You avoid situation after situation that involves even a remote chance that someone is going to judge your body. If you want to build up your self image, you need to stop associating your self worth with you external appearance.

Your body fat percentage does not determine the kind of person you are. There are amazing people in this world that change people’s lives every day, and I can guarantee you that being 10% body fat or 30% body fat has no bearing on their success.

People Have More Important Things to Worry About

Here’s the thing, while you might think that your body image is front and center in people’s minds, the reality is that you are not the center of the universe. We might have thought that as kids, but some of us have subconsciously held onto that belief into adulthood. People have their own problems to worry about and their own lives to live. The last thing on their minds is wondering how you look. I’d hope your friends love you for who you are.

You Can’t Control What Other People Think

To the few people who do make critical judgements – forget about them. You can’t control what they think, and more likely than not, if they have something negative to say, it’s usually born out of their own insecurities. Worrying about things you cannot control is a hopeless cause. Let other people think what they may. They have to live with their thoughts, not you.

None of Us is Perfect

Are you perfect? Do you think anyone of us is perfect? We aren’t. No one is. Some people’s “imperfections” manifest themselves externally, while the majority of people hold their insecurities internally. They keep them hidden out of fear of judgement. However bad you think your problem is, I can guarantee you that there is someone else out there that would gladly change places with you. I’m not trying to belittle your pain, but let’s put our problem into perspective and realize that things could be a lot worse.

Live Your Life and Be Happy

The moment you let your body and self image dictate your life will be the moment a small piece of you dies inside.Your self-perceived body image should not be the deciding factor in your life’s decisions. You can and should be able to still live your life to the fullest, without fear of criticism, regardless of where you are in your own personal fitness journey.

Don’t let your negative thoughts control your world. Be proud of who you are and strive to be 100% comfortable in your own skin, regardless of what that skin looks like. No one else’s opinion matters but your own, and your opinion is completely within your control. Choose to love yourself.

Do you have an unhealthy relationship with food? Find out here.

What is Orthorexia?

A term created by medical specialist Steven Bratman, MD in the late 90′s, orthorexia describes an eating disorder in which individuals obsess over healthy eating to an unhealthy degree. Orthorexics may be obsessed with the cleanliness and purity of their food, and on such a regimented diet that it consumes much of their day. In extreme cases, orthorexics may succumb to malnourishment and even death because of strict food limitations.

Those who suffer from orthorexia may exhibit the following behaviors:

• a fixation on the quality of the foods they consume
• remove “unsafe” food groups from the diet to the point of malnutrition, which may include the complete avoidance of fats, grains, preservatives or man-made chemical additives, animal products to an obsessive degree
• spend all day planning or shopping for meals
• may be overly body and health-conscious
• refuse to ever eat food at restaurants or social gatherings
• spend more than 3 hours per day researching or thinking about health food
• become anxious or fearful thinking about food
• become socially isolated because they won’t eat anywhere but home or food they prepared themselves

Living with balance is so important in a healthy lifestyle, here’s how to find it.

What’s Wrong With Caring About What I Eat?

Orthorexia is NOT the same as what one might call a health food nut, nor is anyone who eliminates a food group like grains or meat (Paleo or vegan diets, for example). The difference between someone who cares about the quality of their food and orthorexia is the obsession that accompanies it, to the point of taking over their life. Where someone who is a healthy eater may occasionally eat a piece of cake that may or may not contain an artificial color, even though they know it isn’t ideal, the orthorexic may refuse even if it’s his own birthday cake. It’s an extreme form of living that can become not only mentally unhealthy because of the amount of anxiety and isolation it causes, but can also become physically unhealthy when the person’s diet becomes so restricted that they are only allowing themselves 3 or 4 foods and become malnourished.

Here is more help on how to overcome your food addiction.

Dr. Bratman suggests asking yourself these two questions if you think you may be suffering from orthorexia:

• Do you care more about the virtue of what you eat than the pleasure you receive from eating it?
• Does your diet socially isolate you?

For the majority of people, striving for a healthy, clean diet is completely normal when it is accompanied by a sense of balance. Food is one of the great pleasures of life and should not provoke anxiety or stress in any form. Obsessing over what you eat is a red flag and should be brought up to a professional who can help.

Staying Healthy Without Obsessing

It’s important to make the best decisions you can make for yourself. Of course if you feel better removing grains from your diet, avoiding produce treated with pesticides, or removing processed foods from your diet, there is nothing wrong with this. Striving to be healthy is a great thing, especially considering the unhealthy state of the western population right now. Make sure that your healthy choices are just that: choices, and not obsessions. I believe strongly in avoiding processed foods for my health, but every now and then I’m not going to die from a little hydrogenated oil if I eat a cookie or two.

Also, try to avoid labeling foods as “good” and “bad”. Instead, you could categorize healthier, nutrient-dense foods like fruits and vegetables as “all the time” foods, and less healthy, low nutrient ones as “every now and then” foods. This helps you to mentally avoid the trap of connecting emotions to food, and also promotes a sense of balance rather than extremism.

If you are concerned that you or someone you love may be suffering from orthorexia, please contact a professional who can help.

Don’t Try to Lose Weight – At All

The easiest way to put your weight loss efforts on autopilot? Stop trying to lose weight in the first place! You must think I’m crazy, but let’s not forget that weight loss/gain is a symptom of your current lifestyle. Wouldn’t it make more sense to focus on the core problem instead?

Your body, mind, and health are the sum of your daily habits. Focus your efforts on making healthier choices in all aspects of your life, and you will continue to make progress towards your ultimate goal of healthy and fit. Once you make the shift from trying to lose weight to being healthy, you’ll notice a sense of freedom from the shackles of weight management.

End the Calorie Counting

But isn’t weight loss all about calories in vs calories out? Yes, energy balance is the determining factor when it comes to weight loss. However, there are round-about ways to control your calories without counting them. Controlling portion sizes and eating quality foods are two of the easiest way to accomplish this.

Try to focus your efforts on simply making good food choices. Each time you decide to eat something, simply ask yourself if what you’re eating is “healthy or not”. If it’s healthy, eat it up! Your body has a great built in system for regulating the amount of whole foods you eat. Feed your body processed foods, and it doesn’t know what to do with them. The lack of nutrients and the foreign chemicals cause confusion that result in overeating.

Is there a place for calorie counting? Absolutely, but you might as well not add more work to your weight loss efforts than is necessary. Change the quality of your food first, and if necessary you can start manipulating calories. You’ll soon realize that portion sizes and food quality are the dynamic duo that positively affect body composition.

Break Out of the Day-to-Day Grind

When people decide to lose weight, thoughts of what to eat, when to eat, what to do for a workout, how much to eat, is this working, and self-doubt start to consume your mind. If left unchecked, those thoughts can quickly turn fitness from a passion into an unhealthy obsession.

If you think all day long about weight loss, other aspects of your life aren’t going to get the attention they deserve. You need to leverage your time and especially your thoughts so that your fitness can happen in the background while you live your life.

At the beginning of your weight loss journey you will need to direct much of your energy into changing your daily habits. Changing habits that have been engrained in your mind for a lifetime is hard work, and a constant awareness and emphasis will need to be concentrated on doing that.

However, as time goes on, you will inevitably need to start shifting your time horizon. Once you really let it sink in that weight management is a rest-of-your-life activity, you can stop gripping so tightly to the day-to-day cause and effect of your lifestyle choices. Your lifestyle is either being run well or it’s not.

Looking at your lifestyle over periods of weeks or even months will really help make the time fly. Right now you’re taking it a day at a time, but eventually you’ll start stringing days together until they become weeks. Those weeks then become months. Once you’ve made it that far, you’ve successfully put your fitness on autopilot.

Don’t Force Your Workouts

For the most part I love to exercise, but that doesn’t mean my life hasn’t been filled with periods where I just didn’t want to lift weights. Motivation is a tricky thing, and willpower can be used up quickly. The key then is to find physical activity you enjoy doing, and then find creative ways to make that activity harder and more intense.

If you dread having to wake up and work out, or just plain hate what you do, you’re never going to make the exercise habit stick for the rest of your life. Instead, think long and hard about the activities you do enjoy doing, and then go out and get active. Some of my best workout weeks were periods that I didn’t dedicate time to exercise at all.

During these weeks maybe I was building a shed or hauling around dirt and heavy stones to build a flowerbed. Not only did I get in a great functional workout, but it never even felt like I was exercising. Plus, I got the added bonuses of a sense of accomplishment and beautification of my property. The strenuous exercise was a side effect of the activity I enjoyed doing. Find exercise you enjoy doing, and you’ll never work out a day in your life.

Just a Symptom

Being overweight or obese is just a symptom of a greater problem: sickness. When you don’t care for your body, when you abuse it by feeding it low-quality nutrient-sparse foods and/or never exercising, you’re creating an internal environment of illness. Maybe you don’t feel sick per se, but do you struggle with fatigue? Insomnia? Joint pain? High blood pressure? Low energy levels? Acne? Auto-immune disorders? Digestive issues? Anxiety? Chronic headaches or migraines? Sleep apnea? Reproductive disorders and hormone problems? Hair loss? Blood sugar crashes?

When your body does not receive the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and care it so desperately needs, it cannot function as it is supposed to. The results will be illness as your body struggles to function without these important components. Abusing your body in this manner does not always mean being overweight or obese, in fact normal sized and underweight people can struggle from these same symptoms if they are also not caring for themselves properly.

Focusing only on weight loss will be futile. Counting calories and manipulating macronutrients will do absolutely nothing for the real problem. You may be able to force weight off this way, but until the body is functioning properly and total wellness is achieved, it will be temporary at best.

What is the true meaning of fitness? Find out here.

The Big Picture

When you begin to view the big picture in this manner and stop focusing on just fixing the symptoms, fitness will come naturally. Once the body begins to receive the simple care that it so needs to function at its highest potential, everything will fall into place. Magically one by one, your symptoms of sickness, including excess fat, will begin to disappear and you will experience total wellness. But this won’t be temporary this time, because you’ve finally focused your attention on the entire problem. It’s hard to go back to abusing your body once you’ve experienced freedom from sickness, and have mentally made the connection between how you FEEL and how you treat your body.

When you exercise, you’ll give your muscles stimulation, your organs oxygen and blood, and your entire body will receive feel-good endorphins to relieve stress, anxiety, and depression. When you eat nutrient-dense foods, your body gets everything it needs to build new and healthy cells, to keep all systems functioning properly, to fight cancer and other illness, to keep insulin levels under control, and to have energy for daily life. Self-care means feeling GOOD.

Read this: 50 Reasons Why Being Fit is Awesome

The Road to Fitness and Leaving Sickness Behind

I realize it’s easier said than done. We abuse our bodies for many subconscious reasons that are very hard to understand.

Why do we overeat? The answer just might set you free.

But a good first step is to just make a mental connection between your symptoms beyond excess fat with how you treat your body.  You may never have put your chronic headaches or insomnia together with your daily soda, or your overeating together with your lack of nutrients. Maybe you have even more serious conditions that you’re taking medications for – have you ever considered that the solution may simply be healthier food and exercise? Isn’t it worth a shot?

The next step is to try adding some nutrition to your daily diet. Don’t take anything out of your diet at first, just simply add the good stuff in. Drink water with every meal, add a veggie, have fruit with your snack. You will be surprised at how your cravings and even your symptoms will begin to change once you feed your body the nutrition it wants. Once you’re comfortable with those higher-quality foods, then you can begin to remove some of your unhealthier habits, one at a time. This is your entire life we’re talking about here, so slow changes are the best because they will stick.

Begin to add more physical activity in, anywhere you can get it. This could just mean taking the stairs to your office, or it could mean beginning to exercise in a gym. Track your daily calorie burn with a BodyMedia armband like we do.

Take care of your mental health that may be causing body abuse issues by journaling, seeing a therapist, or speaking with a friend.

But the most important step in ALL OF THIS is to really notice and document how your body begins to heal from sickness. Write it down and celebrate it when you notice less headaches, when you feel less winded taking stairs, when your skin clears and your stomach isn’t cramping all the time. This is so essential in long-term maintenance.

Let this become your standard. Don’t settle for less than fit, and never experience self-induced sickness again.

Get Muscle Working For You

Most of us are focused on weight loss, and because of this, building muscle takes a back seat to your list of priorities. Exercise is usually done with the major goal of burning excess fat from your body. While those calories you burn during your cardio session will add up, the real magic happens when you’re not even paying attention.

Muscle loves to graze on fat. It does it at all hours of the day and even the night. In fact, in a day, one pound of muscle burns approximately 5.67 calories, whereas a pound of fat only burns approximately 1.98 [1]. This might not seem like much, but like the laws of compounding interest, it adds up over time. Someone with 90 pounds of muscle will burn an extra 500 calories a day. That’s 3500 calories in a week, or 1 pound of fat. Over the course of a year that would be over 50 pounds.

Think about that for a second. Your muscle is consuming 50 pounds worth of calories a year, and it’s doing this all behind the scenes without you having to even lift a finger. Does that sound like a good deal to you? It does to me too, and that’s why strength training should be the anchor in your exercise program.

Here are 50 tips for how to build muscle the right way.

What’s Considered Strength Training?

Most people think strength training and weight training are one-in-the-same. This is a common misconception. Weight training is a form of strength training, but it is only one of many ways you can get the benefits strength training provides. Any exercise that provides load-bearing resistance to your muscles, and is anaerobic in nature can be adapted to your workout program and be considered strength training.

Weight training is my favorite form of strength training, as it very efficiently gets the job done. However, if you don’t have a gym, bodyweight exercises can build you an impressive physique too. Exercises such as pushups, pullups, situps, burpees, bodyweight squats, plyometrics, and sprints will bring most people’s physiques in line with their goals.

Here are 10 fat-blasting exercises you can do almost anywhere.

That’s not all there is though. Even activities like pilates, when done with enough resistance and intensity, can build an impressive physique when combined with proper nutrition. Don’t be afraid to experiment with various activities. Find something you love to do and then find creative ways to make it difficult. Make sure the activity is a full-body movement, and you will forever have a strength training exercise that you can live with and enjoy doing for the rest of your life.

How Much Strength Training Should You Do?

As with most things in fitness, it’s going to depend on your goals and the type of exercise you do. At minimum, I’d recommend a strength training session no less than once a week. Hitting each body part once a week is enough time to keep your muscles from getting weaker and atrophying between training sessions.

At maximum, I recommend not training the same muscles at high intensities more than once every 48 hours. You need time to repair and build muscle, and continually hitting the same muscles before they’ve had a chance to recover is a recipe for stalled progress, mental fatigue, and over-training.

Here are 10 muscle-recovery tips for improved performance.

Structure your exercise program around strength training. Whatever sport or activity you’re involved in, strength training stands to benefit you in many ways. Some sports and physiques will need a higher ratio of strength training to other exercise, and other more moderate physique goals or aerobic activities will need less to achieve optimal performance and appearance. Just make sure you’re making it part of your program.

I haven’t even begun to talk about the numerous health benefits, so consider that an extra bonus. Don’t be afraid of bulking up, and don’t be intimidated by the people in the gym. Take a step out of your comfort zone and see how great the reward can be.

Be a real fitness freak with the Body Media armband displayed proudly.

The Pressure to Fit In

There is so much social pressure in our lives over EVERYTHING. We are judged for the car we drive, the house we live in, the amount of recycling we do, the activities we participate in, and yes, the things we eat. It’s impossible not to let these social pressures affect us if we’re not strong in our convictions.

Read: The Social Pressures of a Healthy Lifestyle

The thing about going along with the majority is that the majority is usually WRONG. I love the advice that I’ve heard for success, “Whatever the majority is doing, do the opposite.” This is so true. The majority of our population is sick and unhealthy, obese and out of shape. Cancer and other life-style related illnesses are literally an epidemic. Therefore, it’s really no surprise that there’s so much social pressure to just drink the damn soda, or to bring the sweetest trans-fat and sugar-loaded snacks to the kids’ soccer games, or to work work work and grab the cheapest and easiest food. The majority wants to feel ok about their choices, and so they guilt us and make us feel different, obsessive, and abnormal when ours are different.

And hey, this doesn’t just happen between the fit and the non-fit. Even in the fitness world, there is pressure to train like this or eat like that. You eat GRAINS??? Oh Em Gee.

Should you be gluten-free? Find out here.

Forget ‘Em

Who cares what their opinion is of you? Who cares if they think you’re wrong? If it’s working for you, that is ALL that matters, then you don’t NEED them to agree with you. Someone will always judge your choices, and you. That’s the nature of life, and most certainly the nature of success. The weak will always be looking over the shoulder of the successful and making up reasons why THEY aren’t successful too, to justify themselves and their insecurities. Judgements are usually only projections of insecurities, not a reflection of any truth about us.

Learning to live with balance is so important in a healthy lifestyle, here’s why.

The thing is that no one can control how we feel about ourselves but us. That is a scary yet empowering realization to have. No one can make us feel less than or weird without our permission. So if you want to eat a salad when everyone else is eating pizza, do it and don’t apologize to anyone. As a matter of fact, thank yourself silently for being true to yourself and refusing to accept mediocrity for your body. Be the “over-the-top” mom that brings waters and bananas to the game, be the co-worker who goes for a run at lunch instead of binging at Chili’s after a stressful meeting, and let your freak flag fly just as it is.

Who knows, you may make it look so good that others will follow, and you may end up being a true inspiration for the ones who need it most.

Increase Your Intake of Essential Fatty Acids

Most people’s diets are severely lacking in omega 3 fatty acids. That’s a shame because omega 3s have the potential to make the biggest impact on people’s health. Essential fatty acids cannot be manufactured by the body, so they need to be obtained through your diet.

Your can up your intake by eating fatty fish, omega 3 eggs, walnuts, chia seeds, flax seed, or by supplementing like I do with Carlson’s Omega-3 Oil. Omega 3s can aid in weight loss and help prevent obesity [1][2]. But that’s just scratching the surface of all the health benefits.

Here are 32 more impressive health benefits of Omega 3 fatty acids.

Improve the Quality of Your Fluids

We all know how great water is for you, yet water only makes up a small amount (or none at all) of many people’s liquid intake. If this sounds like you, start taking small steps towards improving the ratio of your water intake to other liquids. If plain water is too bland for you, try adding some lemon, lime, or orange slices to your drink.

Here are 8 healthy drinks besides water for added taste bud stimulation.

Up Your Raw Food Intake

I am far from being a raw food purist, but I do realize there are many benefits to eating raw food. Try getting a balance of raw food to cooked food. Certain nutrients and antioxidants are more plentiful when food is eaten in raw form, just as other foods are when they are cooked. A simple salad loaded with veggies or a fruit smoothie can do a body good.

Moderate Your Restriction

This is more for people with disordered eating problems, but it can apply to everybody. When we start off trying to lose weight we have a tendency to start with restriction – restricting calories, restricting certain foods, etc. This obviously needs to be done, but rarely does it need to happen to the extent that most people take it too. Aim for more balance in your nutrition. A little bit of “forbidden” food here or there can go a long way towards keeping you sane, and can keep your deprivation from turning into a full-out binge.

Here are 5 tips for putting an end to your binge eating behavior.

Say Goodbye to Artificial Sweeteners

Yes, I think artificial sweeteners are the devil. I don’t think there’s any place for them in a healthy lifestyle. In my opinion, you’re better off eating sugar. New studies are coming out all the time about the risks to your health and the diseases they cause. Do yourself a favor and get rid of them – completely. Instead, use honey if you need a sweetener or maybe even some turbinado sugar.

Here are 26 shocking reasons to give up soda for your health.

Journal Your Daily Nutrition

The small amount of work you put into writing down what you eat can pay huge dividends. Not only do you learn a lot about your food and your relationship with it, but you can also increase the amount of weight you lose if you do it [3]. You don’t have to add up calories and macronutrients, although you might need to at some point if you’re trying to break through a plateau.

At least write what you eat, the time you eat it, and in what quantities. If you want to take it a step further, write down the way you feel at each meal time. Doing so can help you uncover hidden problems with your eating behavior.

Here are 6 convincing reasons to start journaling your food intake.

Add More Fiber to Your Diet

It’s no surprise that fiber is good for you. It slows down gastric emptying and slows the release of glucose into the blood. That alone will improve your insulin sensitivity, and in return, improve your health and body composition. Fiber also adds bulk to your meals, which will help fill you up and control your hunger.

Here are 11 easy ways to get more fiber in your diet.

Get Rid of Your All-or-Nothing Attitude

I used to be guilty of this attitude. I’d mess up on my diet and would write the whole day off as a loss. That was a big mistake and led me to continue to eat the foods I messed up with in the first place. If I didn’t hit my calorie goal – loss. If I missed my workout – loss. Having a goal to be perfect is a sure way to set yourself up for failure. Keep making progress and you will eventually reach your goals.

Read why failure in fitness is essential to your success.

Find Opportunities to Strengthen Your Power Over Food

Who controls who? Does food control you, or do you control food? For many people, they feel powerless over their food choices. Look for ways to take back control over your eating and gain power over food. For example, the simple act of saying no to processed food during a time you would normally eat it can empower you. Leaving a little bit of food on your plate at each meal can also put you back in control. Cleaning out your pantry and throwing away the low-quality foods is yet another way gain power.

Here are 35 more diet and exercise tricks to help you lose weight.

Practice Mindful Eating

What do you do when you eat? Do you sit in front of the TV? Do you read a book? Is your mind preoccupied with something else while you eat your meal? Pay attention to your eating. Savor every bite. Chew your food. It’s easy to let your eating get out of control when you’re not paying attention. Remove yourself from the environments that cause you to eat uncontrollably. Become more self-aware of your actions and your health will improve as a result.

Is your bad attitude holding you back in fitness? Read here.

You Can Never Compete With Carefully Crafted Perfection

The images you find online and in magazines feature models who yes, are in really great shape…but have also been carefully treated with flattering lighting and poses, tans, makeup, and even Photoshop retouching. They probably dieted down for their shoot to ridiculously low body fat percentages, and carefully reduced any water weight to make their muscles appear even more “cut” using professional tricks.

You then end up comparing your imperfect self that you see everyday in the mirror or in pictures to someone else’s perfectly calculated and masterfully created modeling portfolio. Just like you, these models have days where they are bloated, have pimples, and I’m sure many have stretch marks and cellulite that have been hidden. You may also be a mid-thirties mom of three comparing yourself to a teenager (guilty!). While you may feel temporarily inspired to work harder, I promise you that it is a perfection that you will NEVER be able to reach, because it’s NOT YOU nor is it all that real.

Are you a busy mom? Here’s your guide to re-claiming your hotness.

External Gratification Won’t Last

What ends up happening is we decide that we aren’t good enough and must change our external appearance to look more like the models. We label it a goal, we think of it as positive thinking and inspiration, and off we go, killing ourselves to reach that level of fit. We may make massive changes in our bodies, and find that gratification momentarily, but then we check ourselves against those fitspiration models again and dammit, it’s still not good enough. So we either kill ourselves some more, going to extremes to reach that “goal”, or we give up out of frustration. The idea that we aren’t good enough unless we have that six pack or those perfect glutes (guilty!) ends up making us absolutely insane. Self-loathing follows, and long-term happiness and gratification are impossible to come by.

Learning to accept yourself is the first step to finding the physical transformation you want, read why here.

Look Within

If you start your physical transformation from a place of caring about yourself, loving yourself enough to treat your body well and stop abusing it, the changes are so much more likely to be permanent. You won’t be on this constant quest for something you can never find, but instead you’ll just be doing what feels truly good every single day. You’ll jump off the endless cycle of Must-Fix-Self–>Work-Hard-To-Fix-Self–>Yay-It’s-Better-But-Not-Perfect–>I-Give-Up–>I-Hate-Myself–>Repeat. Instead, you’ll fall into a daily routine of self-care, which will lead to a physical transformation that will be permanent and APPRECIATED by you.

To do this, stop judging yourself against pictures of perfection. If you need a visual for inspiration, use quotes or even photos of you at YOUR best. Start being thankful for what is looking back at you in the mirror, no matter how hard that is to do. Start to appreciate all the things you can do, have accomplished, and the beauty and wonder of YOU. Tell yourself in the mirror every single day “I accept myself exactly as I am right now”. Re-frame your perspective on low-quality junk foods as abuse to your body, not a reward or a comfort. Re-frame your perspective on exercise as a way to feel good, not a punishment. Re-frame healthy foods as preventative medicine and energy for your life. It’s a daily process that won’t always be perfect, but with daily practice will improve over time.