Tag Archive for: Long Beach Nutritional Coach

Clean Eating Plan

The Secret Power of CBT for Clean Eating

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One of the hardest parts of eating clean is turning down the tasty snacks that you know are bad for you. You don’t have to starve yourself of course or eat all that strictly. There’s nothing wrong with a nice pasta dish packed with vegetables and meats…

But what you should avoid is that massive chocolate cake after dinner that will add 450 calories to your diet and leave you feeling sick. It provides zero nutrition and it sets your diet back in a way that can sometimes be hard to recover from psychologically. But don’t worry – there’s a trick!

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Total Body Transformation

Why Bodyweight Training Outdoors is the Ultimate Workout

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A word that gets thrown around a lot at the moment when it comes to training is ‘functional’. What is ‘functional’? Well essentially, this term refers to the idea that some types of exercises provide real-world and usable strength, whereas others do not.

One of the exercises often called functional is the deadlift because it involves squatting down to pick something heavy up off of the ground using all the muscles in the leg in unison as well as muscles in the back.

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Clean Eating Plan

Why Bread and Milk Are Not the Enemy

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If you’re looking to lose weight and improve your health, then one of the first things you need to do is to choose from the huge amount of different diet plans out there. Essentially, you need to decide who you’re going to listen to and what theory of weight loss you want to subscribe to!

And things get tricky right away. What you’ll find is that everyone has a different opinion and that these opinions vary hugely. Some people to tell you to stay away from fats while others tell you to dunk them in your coffee! Who do you listen to?

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Total Body Transformation

More Ways to Engage Muscle Fiber Without Weights

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When building muscle, there are a few things that make an impact on your progress. One is how much you are able to pump the muscle with blood and metabolites. When you train and your muscle is tense, this forces blood and hormones like testosterone and growth hormone to collect there.

Now the muscle will be ‘occluded’ meaning that blood will pool and all the signals will be sent to encourage more growth.

The other thing that matters is the amount that you recruit and use your muscle fibers. The more you tear your muscles (called ‘microtears’), the more they’ll be forced to work to repair themselves and grow back bigger and stronger. Simultaneously, using your muscle fibers in any capacity can improve your ‘mind muscle connection’ and thereby help you to increase the amount of control you have and your ability to engage muscles as you need them.

This means that the actual amount of weight you’re using doesn’t really matter. As long as you are challenging the muscles, you can use no weight or lots of weight.

This is why body-weight training works but it’s also why there are more options available to you if you want to get more creative with your weight training. Here are some examples:

Self-Resistance

One way to challenge yourself during a workout is to provide the resistance yourself. This allows you to precisely control the amount of resistance you’re up against and thereby to strengthen muscles accordingly.

To do this, you simply need to grab hold of one arm for example with a free hand. You then prevent that free arm from curling with the other arm and thereby provide yourself with the necessary resistance you need to grow.

Self-resistance is a great way to train if you don’t have access to any equipment and you’re travelling but it can be tough on the joints and not particularly enjoyable so it isn’t a good long-term solution!

Dynamic Tension

One way to train your muscles is through something called static contraction. This simply involves tensing and contracting your muscles as much as you can even without any movement just to recruit muscle mass and just to control your mind-muscle connection.

When you use dynamic tension, this takes this one step further by including movement. You simply need to go through movements like curls but while tensing your biceps. There are no weights but the tension combined with the movement provides essentially the same thing.

Speed Training

Finally, another option is something called ‘speed training’. This involves curling weights and using your muscles in other ways but as you do, you will be going through the movement as quickly as possible. This in turn means that you’re using the same amount of power in the muscle fibers in order to accelerate. The weight isn’t there but you’re still required to produce just as much force as though it was – and as a result you can get similar benefits from this kind of training!

Clean Eating Plan

How to Improve Your Energy Levels With the Right Diet

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Wouldn’t life just be a lot better if you had more energy? Serious – low energy is probably responsible for a huge proportion of our problems! It’s low energy that makes it hard to wake up in the morning, it’s low energy that makes us not really want to exercise and it’s low energy that prevents us from performing our best or really enjoying life.

The problem is that it takes energy to start changing your lifestyle and to do things like exercise more or sleep better to improve your energy… so where do you begin? The answer is simple: you begin with your diet!

energy

There are tons of ways that you can improve your energy levels through your diet, here are just a few!

Glucose Hit

One way you can add more energy using your diet is just to consume more glucose. This won’t give you long-term energy but will instead help you to improve your energy in the short term and give you a small kick when you’re struggling.

And interestingly, one of the best ways to get that hit of glucose is to ‘cheat’ and have glucose from man-made, processed sources. A glucose tablet is one option, another is to eat Wine Gums!

MCT Oil

Using glucose on a regular basis is not a recommended way to keep your energy levels up though. Instead, it’s better to use MCT oil, which comes from coconuts and other natural sources. This type of oil doesn’t get absorbed by the body in the same way as other fats and it encourages the body to produce ketons – a type of energy that has a lot of particular uses for the brain.

Chia Seeds

If you want an example of someone with high energy levels, then look no further than the Tarahumara tribe! This group of indigenous people are able to run hundreds of miles in a single go and they accomplish this at least in part thanks to chia seeds – seeds that are capable of absorbing several times their weight in water!

Iron

Iron is used to create the red blood cells that carry oxygen around the body. More iron = more oxygen where you need it – meaning in turn that you’ll have more energy.

Vinpocentine

Another way to get more oxygen around your body when you need it is to cause vasodilation and widen the blood cells. This can be done with any food containing nitrates – including garlic. But vinpocetine is a natural ingredient that goes one step further by ensuing the vasodilation occurs mainly in the most important regions of the brain.

CoQ10

Meanwhile, anything that can increase mitochondrial energy metabolism will greatly enhance energy levels – CoQ10, PQQ and creatine all being very good examples (and all being found in organ meats).

Total Body Transformation

How to Train Your Legs With Body-weight Exercises

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Training the legs is something of a hot topic among bodybuilders and athletes. Gym goers who ‘skip leg day’ are often referred to unfavorably and for good reason; training the legs has knock-on benefits throughout the entire body whereas leaving them out tends to make you look dis-proportioned and odd.

The question then is why so many people leave legs out of their routine in the first place. And the answer is a) legs are boring and b) legs are hard to train.

legs

The simple fact of the matter is that your legs don’t have hands attached to them. And this means it’s harder to pick up a weight, thus meaning you have to load yourself up some other way and involve the whole body. That instantly reduces the number of exercises available to you and means that leg exercises necessarily take up more space and leave you a lot tireder.

And it also makes it much harder to train your legs with body-weight alone. But there are ways. Read on to discover some of the best of them…

Jumping Squats

One of the simplest ways to train your legs with your body-weight alone is to use jumping squats. This simply means that you’re squatting down and then jumping at the apex. This is a simple exercise and you wouldn’t think that it would make a huge difference – but it is great for building up power and can quickly create a burn thanks to the amount of acceleration involved.

Box Jumps

Speaking of which, box jumps require even more power to launch you high enough into the air – especially if you stack them high. This is in some ways just as challenging as a squat and a great way to build hamstrings, quads, calves and hips.

Jumping Lunges

This is simply a lunge where you jump, switch legs in mid-air and then land with your legs in the opposite position. Doing this is a great way to build strength in the hamstrings and again involves jumping to create more acceleration.

Lunge Walking

Simply walking by stepping from one lunge into the next. This is a surprisingly effective workout because you’re plunging so deep in between and spending the majority of your time under tension.

Single Leg Squat

Another way to make the squat more challenging with just body weight is of course to do it on just one leg. This then requires twice the strength and also forces you to balance a lot as well. A more advanced version is the ‘pistol squat’ which requires your foot to be flat on the ground while the other one is pointed straight out in front of you, toes facing up.

Side Squat

This is between a squat and a lunge and involves stepping out to one side, lunging deep and then stepping back to the middle before repeating on the other side.

Sissy Squat

Finally, a sissy squat is a squat you perform by leaning back and going up on your toes. Your knees point forward and you lean back like Neo. This is tough on the joints so more of a party trick to be used springily!

Clean Eating Plan

The Easiest Ways to Cut Calories and Junk From Your Diet

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If you’re trying to improve your diet, you’ll often find it’s easier to concentrate on the things you need to erase from your ongoing eating routines rather than trying to add things. And the most recommended way to make that successful is to concentrate on just the smallest things that will cause the smallest change to your feeling of fullness and energy during the day.

Here are some extremely easy alternatives to cut calories and reduce the number of junk in your diet!

diet

Get Rid of Soda Drinks

One of the very absolute things that someone can do for their diet is to erase soda drinks from their diet. That signifies no more Coca-Cola and no more 7-Up. Why? for the reason that these drinks are completely packed with basic sugars while selling nothing healthy in return. They’ll make you feel hungry and they’ll add plenty of calories while cooperating to lipogenesis (fat storage).

Choose the Proper Coffee

What’s just as bad or arguably even worse is when you stop by Starbucks on the way into work and grab yourself a large Americano. There’s nothing wrong with the coffee – rather it’s the large numbers of cream, full-fat milk and chocolate sprinkles that get added. easily switch that morning beverage for an Americano or a black coffee/sea and you’ll automatically save yourself the hurt – cutting your diet by 100-200 calories instantly.

Stop Adding Sugar

Another hint is to stop adding sugar to your tea. Once again, this adds useless calories and then constructs hunger pangs going after your release of insulin that will suck up all of your sugar and leave you shaky.

Moreover although, adding sugar to everything generates gets you familiar with things tasting candy. In other words? You create a candy tooth. And now nothing you consume is going to be as satisfying except there’s sugar on top!

Remove the Butter

Butter isn’t unhealthy for you as such, but if you’re trying to lower your calories especially then lathering this onto everything you eat undoubtedly isn’t going to help! Get used to eating your sandwiches with just the spread and you’ll find it easier to lose weight!

Share Dessert

Even when we’re dieting, it can be complicated to turn down a cool dessert when everyone else is indulging – mainly because we may feel as although we’re being monotonous or preventing others from enjoying their food.

The basic answer? Offer to share with someone! You’ll save cash and calories!

Total Body Transformation

A Ten Minute Full Body Workout That Anyone Can Use

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When it comes to building muscle, losing fat and moving into shape, the biggest trouble for most people is easily sticking to their training goals. This is called ‘adherence’ in the industry and easily means your skill to adhere at a training program long sufficient to see the results that you require.

Even a poorly designed physical workout can help you to create muscle and get results if you adhere at it. And it is much better to perform a bad workout for a long period of time than it is to perform the best workout possible for a day and then give up.

workout

But this is something a many people don’t surely consider when they plan to get into shape. Too often they will come up with habits that involve training for an hour each session, 5 times a week. If you’re previously feeling too tired to be especially active, if you’re previously stressed with work… trying to fit in 5 hours of exercise a week is a immense ask. This is especially true when you think that you’re possibly going to have to travel to the gym additionally, get washed, change clothes… etc.

This is where a body-weight physical workout can come in so handy. And this is specifically true if you use a physical exercise that hits the entire body in a single session, only takes ten minutes and can be completed anywhere. Use this physical workout first thing in the morning before work and before you go in the shower. Train in your boxers in order to not develop more washing. Now you have a behavior that surely is just 10 minutes and that no one must have any trouble sticking with.

What does that physical workout look like? Here it is:

Three Exercises to Rule Them All

This physical exercise is generated up of 3 exercises that together will train the entire body while additionally providing a few cardio benefit. Those 3 exercises are:

  • Pull Ups
  • Press Ups
  • Jumping Squats

Perform each exercise to failure and then move straight onto the following exercise when you finish without break. You can rest after the jumping squats for one minute before commencing the behavior again and going for 3 sets. It should take around 10-15 minutes.

This behavior hits all the radical muscles in the body for the reason that it emulates a more involved split that bodybuilders use called PPL (Push, Pull, Leg). Pull ups hit the lats, the biceps and the abs. Push ups train the pecs, the triceps and the shoulders. And jumping squats hit the entire reduce body and provide the cardio.

Now this physical workout isn’t going to be sufficient to help you create massive muscles overnight. It can burn fat and it can tone your muscles and harden them. But in order for you to surely train you require to use heavier weights performed more steadily and for longer.

So use this as a tool to kick off your new training regime and to get into the pattern. additionally, use it every time that you can’t fit a full behavior in.

Weight Loss Advice

Losing Weight Fast, But Healthy

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Even though losing weight rapidly is almost always a bad idea, sometimes you have an event like a wedding nearing and have no other option but to embrace the techniques of losing weight fast.

Thankfully, the best tips for weight loss can help you slim down quickly while still remaining healthy. Check out 5 of them below.

weight loss

1. Stay Hydrated

Keeping the body hydrated is one of the best tips for weight loss. Drinking water not only helps when it comes to getting rid of toxins, but it’s also useful when it comes to speeding up digestion and metabolism. Though it may seem unlikely, drinking enough water can actually prevent your body from retaining water. It can also lower cravings, and drinking one glass before every meal can help you eat less calories by making you feel full faster.

2. Avoid Processed Carbohydrates and Sugars

Refined carbohydrates like processed grains, white sugar, and white rice should be avoided when you want to lose weight in general, but if you want to lose weight fast you might want to avoid all carbohydrates completely. Eating less carbohydrates makes it more likely for your body to burn fat stores and it also reduces intense cravings, which are usually caused by spikes in blood sugar from eating sweets. If you simply can’t live without carbohydrates and sweets make sure you at least stick to whole grains and fruits.

3. Get Some Exercise

When it comes to the best tips for weight loss, exercising can also help with those extra pounds from water retention. In the long run, it can help you build muscle, improving your bodies fat burning potential. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn by default, making rapid weight loss a breeze. Try to exercise at least 30 minutes a day, and be sure to vary your workout routine from week to week.

4. Try a Raw Food Diet

If you’ve got at least two weeks until your deadline, try eating only fresh fruits and vegetables. If rapid weight loss is your goal, this is possibly the most effective of the best tips for weight loss. However, if extreme is not something you can cope with, just try replacing as many of your calories as you can with fruits and veggies. Among the 5 best tips for weight loss, this one is perhaps the hardest, but also the most rewarding.

5. Get Enough Sleep

The body works extra hard during sleep to get rid of harmful toxins and balance hormone levels. So when you don’t get enough sleep every night you really cripple yourself in many ways. When it comes to losing weight, research shows that not getting enough sleep can slow your metabolism and throw hormones that control your appetite off balance. So one of the best tips for weight loss is to always get at least 7-8 hours of sleep every night in conjunction with all your other weight loss activities.

Workout Routines

Finding The Right Workout For Your Lifestyle

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Everyone knows exercise is important. But like most people, you may always have a reason why this is not possible. The most common alibi is you don’t have time. Or you really don’t like working out in a gym. Today, there are so many ways to get active.

Whether you have no gym budget or just easily get bored with your routine. There is a fitness routine that suits you.

exercise

Some people really hate going to the gym. As long as you get moving, you can still reap the fitness benefits of a gym membership. There’s lots of activities you can do outdoors. Hiking, biking and walking are some examples. You can also bring your workout regimen to the park. You can use your body weight for weight training exercises. Squats, lunges, push ups and crunches can be performed anywhere.

For others, working out is a time to socialize. If you’re one of them, dancing is for you. Spinning can be too intense. You can try Zumba, swing, hip hop or ballroom dancing. If you don’t like dancing, you can join a biking or a running club.

No time for the gym? No problem. You can do your workouts right at your desk. You can do triceps dips on your chair during lunch break. Invest in some resistance bands and do bicep curls and triceps extensions. You can even do some push ups if you can find some space. Doing combination moves like squats and bicep curls can save more time.

If you can’t afford a gym membership, don’t fret. Exercises can be easily performed at home. Buy resistance bands, dumbbells, maybe a stability ball. Browse the internet for instructions on how to execute exercise moves properly.

If you need a challenge, sign up for a marathon event or a bodybuilding show if you’re into weight training. Set big goals for yourself. Then break it down into smaller ones. Getting bored with your workout is a common complaint.

Try varying your workouts every 6 to 8 weeks. Or try the elliptical, the treadmill and circuit training for 15 minutes each. Join a group workout next. The possibilities are endless. The point is to get moving.

Exercise need not be confined to the four walls of the gym. Get exercise out of the gym and take it to a hiking trail. Or take it for a whirl on the dance floor. You can take it home with you or even bring it with you to the office. There are so many choices as long as you make exercise a priority.