Fit Communications

Here’s an article by exercise physiologist Greg Landry. I interviewed Greg last year while working on a freelance article on marketing to women.

Greg writes prolifically on health and fitness. You’ll find more of his work on his website.

Top-10 tips for a successful New Year’s resolution for weight loss and health
By Greg Landry, M.S.

When all the celebrating of the holiday season is over,
60 percent of American adults will resolve to "lose weight and get in
shape" for the new year. After years of helping people reach their weight
loss goals, I’ve put together 10 keys to help make your New Year’s resolution
for weight loss and fitness a successful one.

1. Do some type of aerobic exercise (walking, jogging,
swimming, stationary cycling, aerobic dancing, etc.) on a daily basis . . .
preferably in the morning. (Request a copy via e-mail.) 

Try to average 30 to 60 minutes per day. However, if some
days you can only do 15 minutes, that’s still a lot better than doing nothing.
Forget this twice-a-week stuff. Our bodies were designed to be active on a
daily basis. When we are, our metabolism is super-charged and it also puts us
in a "healthy" frame of mind. People who have exercised in the
morning make better food choices during the day.

2. Tone your muscles with weight training three days per
week. Toned muscles really boost your metabolism and cause you to burn more
calories 24 hours a day yes, even while you’re sleeping you’ll be burning more
calories. Toned muscles look good too.

3. Always eat breakfast. Skipping breakfast sends a
message to your body that you’re "starving" because you haven’t had
food in 18-plus hours. As a protective mechanism, your metabolism slows down
and your body begins to burn your muscle as fuel.

4. Avoid fad diets. For healthy, permanent weight loss,
develop an active lifestyle and concentrate on eating carbohydrates such as
fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and limit the amount of fat you consume.

5. Eat earlier in the day. Research has demonstrated that
you can lose weight simply by eating a substantial breakfast and lunch and a
light dinner. Dinner should be eaten as early as possible, preferably at least
four hours before bedtime.

6. Don’t eat less than 1,200 calories per day. Less than
1200 is usually not enough to support your basal metabolism and thus will slow
your metabolism.

7. Look for situations to be active. Park as far from the
store as you can rather than looking for the closest parking spot. Use the
stairs rather than the elevator, a rake rather than a blower, etc. Look for the
"difficult" way to do things yes, even while you’re sleeping you’ll
be burning more calories. Toned muscles look good too.

8. Avoid alcohol. I call alcohol the "triple whammy."
It depresses your metabolism, stimulates your appetite, and is loaded with
calories.

9. Drink 60-plus ounces of water a day. Your body needs
plenty water to function properly, especially during weight loss. Water can
also help you to feel full. Carry a bottle of water with you and drink
frequently throughout the day.

10. Avoid the "3 P’s": weight-loss pills,
powders, and potions. There are no quick fixes.

BONUS TIPS:

11. Combine healthy fats and fiber in your diet for
powerful appetite control.

12. Avoid low-carb diets like the plague. Request my
article "Top 15 Reasons to Avoid Low-Carb Diets" by e-mail.

Author and exercise physiologist Greg Landry offers free
weight-loss and fitness success stories, articles, programs, and his "Fast
& Healthy Weight Loss" newsletter at his website www.Landry.com.

Copyright 2005 by Greg Landry, M.S.

This will stretch the limits of your credulity, I know, but check out the following headline and blurb from MSNBC.com:

Study says eating fast food makes you fat
Eating lots of fast food can make you fat and increase your chance of developing diabetes, a new study finds.

Shocked, shocked, I am.

Here’s the second paragraph:
"A study published in the Lancet medical journal this week found those who frequently ate fast food gained 10 pounds more than those who did so less often, and were more than twice as likely to develop an insulin disorder linked to diabetes."

It’s nice to know that what we already knew has been verified.

The appeal of fast food, of course, is its, well, fastness. You’re starving, you’re in the car on the way to somewhere, you didn’t eat at home because there was nothing decent in the refrigerator and you didn’t have time anyway. So you end up going through the drive-through.

Fitness-obsessed people who consistently eat well cultivate the habit of preparing food in advance–using their day off to cook and to prepare vegetables and salads, then carrying around their supplies in a cooler. I aspire to this but haven’t gotten beyond lurching through the day, grabbing the least-offensive thing available to eat and hoping for the best. There is plenty of room for me to improve. Plenty.

After hearing me extol the virtues of weight-training, a friend e-mailed as follows:

“So how does one begin training with weights if one has not even exercised regularly in the past? We’re talking very poor muscle tone here.”

I could say a lot in response, but I’ll hold myself to a few general observations.

1. Weights work for everybody. It doesn’t matter whether you’re approaching them as an athelete, a couch potato, a man, a woman, an octogenarian, a teenager, or a wheelchair-bound person. With weights, you can work with and around your limitations.

Weights are wonderfully democratic. If you are working your hardest to perform a set of seated dumbbell presses with a pair of 10s, you’re doing as much, relatively speaking, as the much more muscular guy or gal who’s using many times more weight. Everyone has to start somewhere–and everyone has her own limitations. So focus on what you can do, and don’t worry about how you compare with anyone else.

2. Start out right. Learning the proper form for each movement helps prevent injury and targets the muscles that the movement is supposed to strengthen. Sure, there’s a place for some controlled “cheating,” but you don’t need to know that now.

So take a class taught by someone reputable, hire a personal trainer for a few sessions, or ask a knowledgeable friend to work with you. Ask the staff of your gym to show you the basic movements.

If these fail–you don’t know anyone, you can’t afford a trainer, and you live in the sticks where there’s no gym–get a video or DVD that demonstrates weight-training exercises or buy an authoritative book with plenty of pictures. (A couple of good choices, with more suggestions to follow: The Book of Muscle by Ian King; Getting Stronger: Weight Training for Men and Women by Bill Pearl.)

3. Learn to appreciate the difference between good pain and bad pain. This is simple: injuries, joint pain, chest pain, sudden agony of any kind is bad. Duh. On the other hand, working your muscles really hard causes good pain–the burn of lactic acid, the all-out fatigue that says you can’t possibly lift that bar one more time. When you feel bad pain, stop what you’re doing, and get help if you need it. When you feel good pain, smile (or grimace), and keep going.

4. Give the process time–but expect good things. Jogging is great, riding a bike is great, walking is great. All of these forms of cardio training are great. Ditto yoga, ballroom dancing, gardening, and whatever other physical things you enjoy doing.

But (and this is a big but, paraphrasing Peewee Herman) none of those activities will reshape and firm your body like weight-training. Sorry.

It takes a while to transform your physique, but if that’s what you want, you gotta lift weights. It’s the fountain of youth. Weight-trainees may be carting around excess adipose on top of their muscles, but their bodies are firm. Their bones are nice and dense too.

Most women grow muscle very slowly. We’re not even going to talk about the ludicrous notion that you might suddenly become a hulk. Unless you’ve got too much testosterone in your system, you’re not going to look like a man from lifting. You’re going to look like a gorgeous woman. You’re going to feel terrific.

In three to six months you’re going to notice some real improvements; in two to three years, you could be a stone fox. Depends where you’re starting from and whether you need to shed some fat.

5. Take it easy. Don’t kill yourself when you start. Three days a week is plenty. You can do cardio on your gym days or your off days or both, but don’t try to lift more than three days a week or on consecutive days.

Don’t think you need to train for hours. Beginners don’t need a lot of volume to make substantial gains. We can talk sets and reps later. But I’d recommend keeping the workout to 30 to 40 minutes max, not counting a nice whole-body warmup on the treadmill first and whatever cardio you want to do after you work out with weights.

Get plenty of sleep, plenty of water, and good nutrition. You know–fruits, vegetables, lean meats, fat-free dairy, all that stuff.

Here’s a shocker from MSNBC.com:

Obesity rising sharply among preschoolers
More than 10 percent of children ages 2 to 5 are overweight, the American Heart Association reported Thursday.

I feel fortunate to have grown up at a time when children could play outside more or less safely and when playing outside in dry weather was the expected thing. My mother is a fabulous cook, so we always had good meals. Mom often served desserts and cookies were usually available. But the meals were healthy and the cookie jar wasn’t available to us 24/7. No doubt we burned off our cookies by riding our bikes, climbing trees, and otherwise fooling around outside. We never had potato chips and that kind of junk in the house, and it was a very special treat when Mom or Dad would bring home a six-pack of 7-Up, and we all got to have one.

Of course, we had to participate in gym class at school. I hated every minute because it was usually oriented around team sports. I was always awful at team sports because they require hand-to-eye coordination, and I ain’t got any.

In junior high, when we got into calisthenics, I was reborn. That was something I could do. (Only the softball throw kept me from getting a President’s Physical Fitness patch, or whatever the thing was called.)

Ditto summer track programs, ditto jogging, ditto weight training, which I discovered in college.

The only point to this soliloquy is that I feel sorry for kids who grow up with a steady diet of junk food, passive entertainment in front of the TV, no gym class, no opportunity to discover their own physicality. The odds are against them growing up lean.

I’m excited about my Christmas present from Anne, my workout partner. Tonight she gave me a 65 cm exercise ball–something I’ve been wanting but hadn’t gotten around to purchasing. I’ve been using a ball for crunches at the gym, but this will spur greater creativity at home.

If you’ve looked at a fitness magazine in the last couple of years, you know that balls are all the rage–primarily, I suppose, because they are inherently unstable and therefore force one to use formerly unrecruited muscles to stabilize oneself.

I have an entire e-book devoted to "core" training, and probably one-third of the movements rely on a ball. Gotta try ‘em.

Thanks, Anne!

OK, so perhaps you’re asking yourself, "How can she think that at 48 she will be able to exceed her former levels of strength?"

That’s a good question. Indisputably, my body has changed from my mid-’80s peak. Things I notice: I require more recovery time. I have some joint problems (right ankle, lower back) to contend with now, and those problems influence my choice of exercises. For example, I would think long and hard before adding squats and deadlifts to my routine. This forces me to be more creative in designing my workouts.

So as a 48-year-old lifter I focus more on rest and sleep; I can recover from three weight workouts per week but not more; I push myself in the gym, but I back off if I start feeling twinges in shoulders, back, etc. I am more likely to hie myself to the chiropractor or orthopedist if pain is persistent.

In other words, I must listen to my body more carefully than before. But this is not a bad thing.

I am buoyed by studies in which elderly people in nursing homes make large strength gains when they begin to exercise with weights. And anecdotal evidence shows me many older lifters who continue to make gains. Obviously there’s a point at which one’s strength will deteriorate–but that point is much later in life for those who are active.

Finally, I achieved my former personal bests after about three years of consistent lifting. That’s not such a long time. I don’t believe I ever came close to topping out.

We shall see.

Speaking of the older lifter, Dave Draper is a terrific source of inspiration. His e-mail newsletter is the best, and it’s free. I recommend signing up. Just for fun, I ordered an autographed 8 by 10 photo of Dave. I plan to frame it along with the 8 by 10s I have of Lori Bowen (autographed) and Carla Dunlap (not autographed).

Anybody out there remember these women? They had beautiful physiques in the early to mid-’80s, before steroids destroyed the sport of women’s bodybuilding.

Good news on the benching front: managed to get 10 reps at 85 for my first work set, same as before the 12-day layoff. That’s a relief. I’ll be delighted to get back to reps at 95. There’s something so satisfying about slapping a pair of 25s on the bar. At any rate, eventually I hope to get back to my strength level (and perhaps exceed it) in my lifting heyday in the mid-1980s. Strongest I ever got was reps at 115 and a 125 single (which was my bodyweight at the time).

How can I possibly remember all this? Well, I can’t. It’s all in my training logs.

You do keep a log of your workouts, don’t you? You don’t? How in the world will you know when you’ve made progress?

My favorite log is a week-at-a-glance-type appointment calendar. With it, it’s easy to see how many workouts you’ve gotten in a given week and what kind of progress, if any, you’re achieving from week to week and month to month.

When I was really motivated I used to log not only exercises, sets, reps, and poundage but also my emotional and physical state. Tired? Energetic? Dragging through the workout? Motivated to set a new personal record?

A workout log is also a good place to keep track of one’s weight.

Up next: I’m thinking of creating a new category of this blog just for links to sites I find useful or amusing.

First recommendation: women who love weights will enjoy Mistress Krista’s women’s weight-training site.