Carbohydrates + Protein + Fat + X = basal metabolic rate (BMR) + Lifestyle + Exercise

Your brain is an unconscious chemistry wiz, obsessed with keeping the above equation in constant balance. As you may remember in science classes, every action has an opposite reaction - our bodies function in much the say way. If you increase the quantity of your exercise thus burning more calories, your brain reacts by telling you to eat more. You begin to vegetate physically and your brain lowers the frequency of your hunger pain. It’s actually quite astonishing if you think about it, the number of endless calculations that must be done in order to keep your entire body chemistry functioning at peak efficiency. Not only does your brain control through chemical signals your metabolism, blood pressure, pulse, sleeping patterns, insulin and a host of other things but it also gives you time to learn new things is it truly is an incredibly adaptive system. Even under the most stressful of conditions - it still keeps things running relatively smoothly.

If you’re a diabetic or have another serious disease that requires constant tracking to keep you healthy, you know better then most how much appreciation we should all have that this is done automatically for the vast majority of us. I hope this gives you some perspective as to why we should all work hard consciously to give our brain the best food, exercise and attention it deserves. It’s for your own benefit.

Atkins, South Beach, Beverly Hills, Fat Flush, Mediterranean etc. - what do all these names have in common? They are all diet plans, some stricter then others and they are all the self-proclaimed “proven way to permanent weight loss”. Let me tell you a little secret, although they all have different foods and nutritional plans they ALL rely on one thing to make you loose weight is yep, it’s that little thing called calorie reduction. Truth is, you can actually gain weight on any of these programs if you eat more then what your body needs - put another way, excess calories are stored by the body as fat. The very thing paying to get rid of!

You may ask then, why are there so many diet plans out there? Simple answer is money! Now, you may say - it worked for me! Fantastic, but if you want to keep the new you and not get into the cycle of jumping into another program in the coming months, hence feeding the diet industry more of your hard earned cash, you need to do the following. Workout with weights, monitor your diet and measurements - including your BMI. Before you do anything, you should consult a certified nutritionist, doctor and an experienced personal trainer. All those diets should be seen as a stepping stone to getting you on a diet that YOU can live with. What you want to do is turn the motivation of reaching one goal towards reaching future healthy lifestyle achievements.

Amazing how many people still believe this complete lie - it doesn’t even have a shade of truth. The two main purposes of your fatty tissues are to serve as an energy source for the body and a storage devise when your body has an excess of calories - without fat, human life would be impossible. Muscle on the other hand is what the body uses to allow you to eat and move in the first place is ignoring one will always be at the expense of the other. Think of it this way, muscle is an engine and fat is the fuel. You may be looking down as asking yourself right now “if this is true, why do have an excess amount of fat and not muscle”? Well, muscle is a very expensive commodity - the bigger the engine, the more fuel it needs. Every pound of muscle that you have on your body burns an average of 60 calories per day. The primary focus of your body is to keep you alive long enough to reproduce, so it’s an incredibly fuel efficient system. This is why females generally have a higher percentage of fat then males because their body must sustain an infant from fertilization till it can fend for itself.

Your next question should be “why does my firm body seem flabby after a few months of getting off a great exercise routine?” You should now realize that it’s impossible for muscle to turn into fat anymore then its possible for the fuel you put into your car to magically transform into an engine. Well, you have two factors at work here, because muscle is an expensive tissue to maintain, after the body realizes its no longer needs as much as before, it gives the muscle less resources - so it “shrinks”. As a result the firmer and usually bigger muscle you use to have is now smaller. Now here is the kicker that people fail to realize, with your body having to maintain less muscle then before, its daily caloric requirements also decrease. So essentially the reason why most people get “fat” after a change in activity is because they are feeding their body the same amount of fuel but for a smaller engine. The body soaks it up and converts it to fat

Achieve! One step at a time

“I’ll get to it tomorrow” is does that sound familiar? You hear it from both procrastinators and over-achievers with one major difference, people who succeed in life often do get to “it’ tomorrow while procrastinators simply use this phrase to either buy more time or worse, an excuse for inaction. If you want to achieve a goal in life, you must work daily towards it, no matter how small the increment is. For instance, you want a backyard deck, doing it all in one shot may sound very daunting to you. Imagine if all you did was manage to do is purchase nails one day, purchase a “how to” book the next, followed by lumber etc, within a week guess what - you have everything you need to build that deck of yours. Then follow up the next week with making the holes with an auger one day followed by support beams and foundation - before you know it, within 2 weeks you may actually have your dream deck done. The point being, you got yourself into a habit of working every day towards a specific end goal and within no time, you achieved it. Imagine if you applied this to other aspects of your life - how far you can get!

From “life insurance” to writing your own will - we all have to deal with death either by choice or circumstance. No matter what you have done in your life, who you know or how much wealth you have accumulated, there is absolutely nothing that can be done about when it will all end. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that may lead to your demise such as forgetting to turn off the stove before going to bed or a number of unrelated events that all work together - either way, what is meant to happen will happen. Is there light at the end of the tunnel - nobody knows but one thing for sure, as we all have a limited amount of time on this earth to enjoy what life has to offer to us. We all owe it to ourselves to enjoy every second of our life and get the most out of it.