Thanks for your patience.

She was explaining to me the results she’s been getting from her weight loss program as well as what she’s been struggling with.

I let he know that she’s not alone. She hit on three big weight loss obstacles that almost everyone who wants to burn fat runs into and must overcome to reach their goals.

One of her biggest challenges is controlling her eating from an emotional standpoint. This is a huge problem for a lot of people.

We attach emotion to food. And that’s the fault of the environment we all grow up in. We attach emotions to food long before using it as a coping mechanism.

Think about it.

Almost everything social centers around food whether it’s family gatherings, birthday parties, going out for pizza or fast food as a team when you play sports at a young age and on it goes.

It’s only natural as we get older to extend that and use food as a coping mechanism for things we try and deal with.

The second is the not knowing what to make for our meals.

And the reason for that is that good, healthy foods, while there is an incredible variety and stuff that tastes great, are not readily and convenient. They have to be prepared.

Good food doesn’t sit on the shelf for weeks, already prepared, like junk foods do (because of all the junk chemicals, of course).

So almost every time you go to eat you have to prepare something, which starts with trying to figure out what to prepare (by the way, this is what’s so great about the quality of protein powders and meal replacements nowadays, as long as you use only them to supplement your program).

Which makes it easier to say the heck with this and grab something convenient which won’t be something health.

And third is that little things do add up. While it’s a real pain, calories should be counted every once in awhile.

They should be counted for a few days even if it’s just every five or six weeks.

When you don’t, it’s easy to do those things that damage your weight loss program more and more often.

Just an extra hundred calories a day will put on a pound of fat every 35 days. And a hundred calories isn’t much.

Heck, it’s 1 1/2 medium sized apples, or less than one tiny Balance Bar.

So it starts out by having a cheat meal once a week and before you know it you’re sneaking a tiny something every day and it’s insidious because it’s so unnoticeable until it’s all of a sudden really noticeable.

On the flip side of that, it is good to treat yourself every once in awhile.

A good nutrition plan is a lot harder to stick to if you’re telling yourself you can’t have your favorite foods EVER again! That’s exactly when you start craving all that stuff.

One thing you can do that I do from time to time is to spend some time on Sunday preparing and cooking stuff that you put in the freezer to take out when you want to eat that week.

I know people that cook practically all their meals for a week on Sunday, stick ‘em in tupperware in the freezer and they are set for the week.

You could just try doing that with 5 meals and they can be the meal you have in the evening when you get home from work.

Another thing you can do is to have higher calorie days but you have to plan it.

Instead of having little things here and there when you feel like it that add up, know that you’ll have a cheat meal or food on Saturday.

As long as you don’t go crazy it will help with your discipline and your fat loss because if you have the same exact calorie amount each day and/or eat too few calories for too many days, your body will get used to it and reset your metabolism at a lower rate.

Our bodies like the status quo. They have a set point weight and they want to keep it.

Put these fitness and health tips into your weight loss program and see if your results don’t start to improve!

• Focus on things like juicy fruits. No, I don’t mean the gum. I mean fruits that have a lot of juice and water.These are high volume, low calorie foods that also happen to be very good for you.

  Eating foods like this, besides all the important health benefits, will help you to lower your daily caloric intake, allowing you to burn more fat.

  Be sure to include veggies, low-fat yogurt and other foods high in water and low in fat.

• Also, try getting some of the Miracle fruit - a tiny African berry.It’s tart but has miraculin in it, which causes food you eat after you have a berry to taste candy-coated! Not a bad deal, especially for you sweet tooths out there.

  Check health food stores or grow your own with plants - www.logees.com or www.toptropicals.com.

Adding these two fat burning diet tips to your health and nutrition program will help make it easier for you to burn fat faster.

The same six pack abs are probably the most elusive achievement for anyone who is trying to lose weight and get in shape.

So what ab exercises are the magic bullet when it comes to a six pack abs workout?

Well, there’s the twist.

Abdominal exercises, while important, aren’t the key to getting great abs.

It drives me crazy every time I see an infomercial for some silly piece of “new” “breakthrough” ab exercise equipment.

Let me tell you right now.

Squeezing your abs for a few minutes every day on some infomercial ab equipment is NOT going to get you six pack abs, help you lose weight, get rid of your love handles or give you a flat, sexy stomach. No way!

Endless crunches will not melt away the fat from your midsection.

It just doesn’t work that way. And despite the “burn” of high rep ab exercises, you barely burn any calories while doing those endless crunches.

Your fat burning time is best spent elsewhere on more effective training.

You also don’t work the ab muscle intensely enough to develop it.

So endless high rep crunches fail on both counts - poor muscle building and poor fat burning.

Two thumbs down as the cliche goes.

Proper ab exercise just doesn’t involve endless crunches or sit ups. At least not if you want to achieve the results that you are looking for.

The truth about six pack abs is that it takes a complete fitness program that involves proper diet, weight training and cardio (preferably high intensity interval training).

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do ab exercises.

It does mean that ab exercises shouldn’t be your focus and most definitely shouldn’t be the only exercise you do.

In fact, you can get a flat stomach without doing any abdominal exercises.

I don’t recommend this, but not for the reason that you need to work your abs to get a flat stomach. It’s just not true.

You need to get your body fat down to a pretty low level to see your abs.

And getting your body fat down that low requires strict attention to your nutrition program, your weight training routine and your cardio program.

You should work you abs for overall health and fitness reasons, to be better able to do every day things, to be able to excel in sports or other activities that you may participate in, and to provide balance to your body so you can prevent injuries.

A lot of injuries occur because of body imbalances, like overdeveloping the abs without exercising the lower back.

I believe a lot of hamstring injuries that occur with professional athletes is because they overdevelop their quad muscles relative to their hamstring muscles.

So if you want to get 6 pack abs, be sure to incorporate a complete nutrition and fitness workout program into your life.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Are you looking for weight loss motivation? Then you have to read this email I received the other day, from Emma.

Emma, purchased my ebook From Fat to Fit Fast! and this is what she had to say.

Aren’t weight loss success stories like this cool? You have no idea how great it is to open up an email and read something like this.

Emma’s thanking me but she supplied the weight loss motivation, the sweat, the discipline and the hard work on the program.

She should be extremely proud of herself. Great work, Emma! All I supplied her was the knowledge with From Fat to Fit Fast!

Now go be your own weight loss success story!

I believe this happens for two reasons. One, most people still aren’t aware of the incredible fat burning potential of high intensity interval training.

Two, this type of cardio fat loss training is very hard work. It’s much easier to walk on a treadmill or spin a stationary bike for an hour than it is to do 10 or 15 minutes of interval training.

With a typical aerobics fat burning program you perform your exercise (treadmill, stationary bike, elliptical trainer, etc.) in a steady state manner at around 60 - 75% of your max heart rate. Usually, your sessions last 30 minutes to an hour and a half.

With interval training your workout sessions are much shorter and you can add a lot more variety into your program. High intensity interval training is just like it sounds.

You alternate all out aerobic exercise with active rest. Here’s an example:

Luckily for me, I have a hill just down the road that is perfect for interval training. I jog over to the hill.

This takes about 4 - 5 minutes and serves perfectly as my warm up. Then I sprint up the hill to the top. This takes me about 15 - 20 seconds. I turn around and walk back down, which serves as my rest interval. I then repeat for a certain number of intervals and the jog (or walk) home serves as my cool down.

Another great interval training program is jump rope. You may need to practice a bit on this one. After a brief warm up, I will jump rope as fast as I can for about 10-20 seconds, followed by a slower cadence for about half a minute.

This form of interval training is brutal and will get your heart rate up fast! You won’t last long on this program.

Always warm up before starting your intervals. If you’re not in the best of shape break into it lightly, starting with more low or moderate intensity cardio. You might also want to check with your doctor. No sense in getting hurt right when you start your interval training.

Interval training has been shown, in study after study, to be a much more effective fat burner than steady stater aerobic exercise.

You will:

1 - Burn more calories by elevating your metabolism so you lose fat faster

2 - Increase your power

3 - Increase your speed

4 - Increase your endurance

No matter what your fitness goals, interval training is one of the best ways of helping you achieve them. And the variations are endless.

You can vary the training parameters (exercise to rest ratio, number of intervals) to make the workouts harder or easier, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

You can also use any number of exercises for your training, such as cycling, sprinting, treadmill, elliptical trainers, jump rope, rope climbing, hill sprints, and more.

Don’t continue doing endless hours of aerobics that aren’t helping you reach your goals anyway. Get more out of your cardio workouts by performing high intensity interval training.

If you want to build muscle, lose fat and get fit fast, you need to add this type of cardio to your program.

The fitter you get, the better job your body does at burning fat and building muscle. And you’ll build your fitness levels faster with interval training.

I’ve discussed high intensity interval training in previous entries.

A new study, led by Jason Talanian (Journal Applied Physiology, 102: 1439-1447, 2007), showed some impressive findings.

Subjects that completed seven high intensity interval training workouts over a two week period were able to increase aerobic capacity by 13 percent, boost fat burning capacity by 36 percent and
increased key aerobic enzymes by nearly 25 percent.

After the two weeks of interval training, the subjects used less muscle glycogen (stored carbohydrates) during a 30 minute bicycle ride at 60 percent of maximum effort.

The high intensity interval training program they followed consisted of 10 sets of 4-minutes of cycling at 90 percent of max effort alternated with 2 minutes of rest.

Long-term studies on this topic confirm that high intensity cardio training causes more fat loss than typical low intensity aerobics.

The body does use more fat for fuel at lower intensities and more carbohydrate for fuel at higher intensity levels. However, the important factor is the number of calories burned.

The interval training burns more total calories while also increasing the body’s ability to use fats as fuel for the rest of the day and night.

In other words, you get a calorie burning boost while at rest after interval training. This is something you don’t get with lower intensity aerobics.

A big part of this frustration comes about because of all the hyped up before and after results you see in magazines and on infomercials.

When you constantly see fat loss claims like someone losing 54 pounds in 12 weeks, it can be tough to stay motivated when you’re only losing a pound a week.

And that makes you vulnerable to becoming frustrated. It also makes you vulnerable to fad diets and infomercial gadgets that don’t work.

That’s why your mental state and motivational strategies are so important when it comes to losing weight and staying in shape.

Here are five quick mental tips you can use to help you stay on track with your fitness program.

1. Determine the reality of your current situation. Be honest with yourself about where you are and how far you have to go.

2. Figure out the things you are doing now that you would not have gotten involved with, knowing what you now know.

Examples are smoking, drinking sugar laden soft drinks, junk food snacking late at night, spending most of your time on the couch, etc.

3. Do a complete and honest analysis of yourself and your skills regarding health and fitness. What do you do well? Where do you need to improve?

4. Determine a measure that you can use to gauge your progress.

5. Set specific goals for each day, week, and month of what you need to do to move yourself toward your goals and discipline yourself to accomplish these small goals that will lead you to big rewards.

What do you do? Speed reading intervals as your high intensity interval training cardio session?

In all seriousness, a recent study done at the University of Alberta found that a health and fitness oriented email newsletter might be exactly what you need to stay on the fitness track.

The Alberta study involved 1,300 adults from five large companies.

They were all sent two weekly emails on new ways to train, as well as healthy cooking nutrition tips.

After receiving this health and fitness newsletter for 12 weeks, the study participants filled out a questionnaire about their health and fitness habits.

The results showed that those who received the newsletter were more active and ate healthier than those that did not receive the
newsletter.

And six months later, the same results.

So if you want to boost your fat burning or muscle building results, return to my blog often.

And don’t forget to subscribe to my free newsletter. The sign up form is in the upper right hand corner.