Month: April 2015

May Step Challenge!

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So for the past few months I’ve done a Bikini Bootcamp, and for May I would like to do something a little different. Starting May 4th, one week from today, I am thinking of running a step competition. The warmer weather is starting to come around, so it will be easier for everyone to go on walks!

You’ll need to purchase a step counter to wear for the month to participate in this challenge. Every day, I will post a status in my FREE Health and Fitness group asking about your steps for the day. It will be your responsibility to make sure that you take a photo of your step counter at the end of the day and submit it on the thread to be counted toward your total.

I am going to leave this up to the participants, but someone in my April Bootcamp made a suggestion that I am considering for this challenge. Normally all of my challenges are free, and again, this is totally up to you guys – but depending on the amount of signups we have, we could do a small participation fee. Please know that I would NOT be keeping this money! The money would be tucked away, and then at the end of the month, the person with the highest total number of steps for the month would win a fitness program. This would provide a bit of extra incentive for everyone to do well. Like I said before, this all depends on the amount of signups that we get and the fee that we agree upon. Once we have the list of participants set and I’ve collected all of the money, I would then be able to come up with a list of all of the fitness programs that would be covered by the fee total. Ideally I would like to have enough of you participating that we’d only have to have a small fee like 5 or 10 dollars, and still come up with enough money to pay for any fitness program available – maybe even a challenge pack!

I highly recommend that you find a partner to do this with you. It can be a friend, family member, significant other, whatever the case may be. You could even partner up with someone else in the group! It just helps to have someone else to hold you accountable. If you find someone to do it with and they aren’t in the group, have them send me a message and I can get them added into the group to participate! If you currently aren’t a member of my group and would like to participate, click here to request to join.

Let me know what you guys think! I am fine with doing it either way, I just thought the prize might help motivate you all to do well. For those of you that have signed up, I encourage you to get your step counters as soon as possible so that you aren’t caught last minute without one. I also encourage you to start thinking about who may enjoy doing this with you, and to reach out to them and try to find a partner.

If you haven’t signed up yet – what are you waiting for?! This is going to be a lot of fun, and you may have a chance to win an awesome prize. Get in on the action while you can!

How to Stay Motivated!

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I know how hard it can be to stay on track with a health and fitness journey, and I have fallen off the wagon many times myself. It is HARD. If it were easy, everyone would be doing. It isn’t impossible though, and you just have to decide that you’re going to do this so that you can create a better life for yourself and those around you. You DESERVE to be healthy, happy, and confident! I found this photo online, and I thought that it was a great little tip for anyone trying to keep themselves on track with a health and fitness journey. It is also a great place to start if you’re thinking about making these positive life changes, because it allows you to prepare in advance to engage in positive self-motivating behaviours.

The first point says to take it one day at a time, which is great advice with respect to your nutrition and workouts. Tracking is crucial. Each day, you should track what you did. For your nutrition, you should track everything that you put into your mouth. I personally like to create a template of what I’m going to eat the next day a night in advance. It is MUCH easier to rearrange things to hit your macro ratios when you do this in advance, because once you’ve already eaten something, you can’t take it off your journal. Tracking is made SUPER simple with myfitnesspal, which even has handy apps for smartphones and tablets. Click here to learn more about tracking and macro ratios. In addition to tracking food, it is important to track what you do with your workouts. Once you complete a workout and have the number of reps you did on each exercise and what weight you used, you will then know what to do the next time you do that workout. It also helps to show you when you should move up in weight, and allows you to track your progress over time. Click here to learn about my tracking challenge.

Surrounding yourself with positivity is a big one. It is important that you spend time with people who lift you up instead of bring you down. Try to surround yourself with positive people who support your positive life choices. If you hang out with people that constantly bring you down, it is going to hamper your progress. Sometimes people close to you can even be unsupportive of your new shift to a healthier lifestyle and try to bring you down to their level. In many cases, they aren’t doing this to hurt you, but they see themselves reflected in your positive choices and don’t like what they see. They’ll realize that they should be making these changes too, but they don’t want to, so their subconscious tries to sabotage you and get things back to normal. This can be especially hard if it happens to be a spouse, living partner, or loved one. Click here to read more on this topic and what you can do if you find yourself in this situation.

One thing that you can do to help keep you focused is create a vision board. I actually put out a challenge to my health and fitness group a while back where I asked them to do this, so I won’t get into too much detail on this subject here. Essentially what this means is that you think in depth about where you are currently, and where you would like to end up. Then you create a board of all of the things you want to do when you achieve your goals, what you will look like when you achieve your goals, what is important to you and your family, things like that. If you’d like to take on this challenge, click here to read about it.

SMART with respect to goal setting is actually an acronym. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. I won’t get into too much detail here, because I actually have a blog post dedicated to this topic already. Click here if you would like to learn more about SMART and how it applies to your health and fitness goals.

One thing that helps many people stay on track is to reward themselves for achieving their goals. Some people find it helpful to reward themselves with a cheat meal at the end of each successful month. A healthier way to do this is to treat yourself to a new outfit. You could even just keep a jar in your workout area where you deposit a dollar for each workout that you do, and then when you hit your goal you can spend that money on something important to you. Maybe a spa day, who knows, that’s totally up to you! Be proud of all the small steps toward your larger goal, and allow yourself to be excited over those smaller successes.

Having belief in yourself is HUGE. It is really important that you believe that you can do it, because if you allow yourself to start thinking that you can’t do it, your thoughts will become a self-fulfilling prophecy and you will quit before you achieve your goals. If you’re struggling with something, tell yourself in your head that you can do it, even if you aren’t sure. Positive mental talk repeated over time will go a long way to helping you achieve your goals. Even if you can’t do something right away, there are all kinds of ways to modify moves. You just have to do what you can until you gain strength to do more.

Continuing from the last point, it is also super important that you don’t focus in on what you can’t do or the things you don’t like about yourself. Instead, focus on everything that you can do, the progress you’ve made, and the things that you do like about yourself. If you focus on the negative, you’ll never get anywhere. In order to be successful on your health and fitness journey, you have got to make an effort to shift into a more positive mental mindset. If you’re working out regularly and you’ve seeing results, this should happen naturally if you follow the advice in this article.

With this next point, the tracking I discussed above will really come in handy when it comes time to recognize your progress. It really helps to have a record of where you started versus where you are now, and seeing that progress firsthand can be really motivating. This can be in the form of a food journal, exercise charts showing progress over time with reps and weight increases, progress pictures, weight, measurements, etc. Any and all of these things will help you to recognize the progress that you’ve made along your health and fitness journey, and you should focus on that success. It doesn’t matter if you are still a long way off from your larger goal, and you shouldn’t let that discourage you from continuing. As I said before, focus on the positive!

One thing that helps a lot of people when it comes to staying motivated is to visualize themselves achieving their goals. So in this instance, you would sit down and relax while thinking about what you’ll look like when you achieve your goal. Think about what you will do when you achieve your goal and how it will impact your life and the lives of those closest to you. It may help for you to refer back to your vision board for ideas before you do this, and you can even update your vision board over time as you think of new ideas.

Another really important factor to staying motivated is to be kind to yourself. This may sound silly, but it really is crucial. If you are always down on yourself, pointing out all of your flaws, mentally criticizing yourself, et cetera you should focus on shifting to a more positive mental mindset. If you’re unable to do that on your own, you should find someone that you trust to talk to, or consider seeking professional help. If you are suffering from depression, you may find that cardio helps. I have never personally been diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I was going through a really tough time in the years leading up to making the shift to a healthier lifestyle. I was engaging in a lot of self-bashing, and I criticized my every flaw in the mirror. This behaviour wasn’t healthy. When I started doing Turbo Fire, a high intensity interval training program that focuses on cardio, I found a significant improvement in my mental mindset. I’m by no means a doctor or an expert, so I cannot say that this will work for everyone. However, based on my own experience, I think it is a great place to start.

Lastly, DO NOT compare yourself to others. Especially those who have been exercising and eating clean for a long period of time. I struggle with this a bit myself sometimes because I have a lot of friends that do fitness competitions. You have to remember that those people worked hard for a long time to get to where they are, while you may be somewhere in the beginning stages of your journey. Everyone is different, and we all go through different things. The weight loss process is not the same from everybody, and comparing yourself to someone else is only going to hurt you in the long run.

I hope you found this article on how to stay motivated to be helpful, but if you have any questions, feel free to send them my way! If you have been considering making some positive changes with respect to health and fitness and you just aren’t sure where to start, you are invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group.

Make S.M.A.R.T. Goals

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There are five factors to smart goal setting that will make you much more likely to achieve success with your goals. The word SMART is actually an acronym, and it stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant/realistic, and timely.

First of all, your goals should be specific. Anyone can say “I want to lose weight”, but not follow through. If you say “I want to lose 30 pounds in the next 3 months by eating clean and workout out at least 5 days a week” you have a MUCH better chance of achieving your goal. To get specific, you should refer to your vision board and think about where you are versus where you want to be. You should start thinking about how you’re going to achieve your goal and come up with a specific plan to follow, and then think about the five w’s (where, what, when, why, and who – as in with whom will you be working with on this journey) It helps to have someone do this with you, so I highly recommend finding a partner.

Next your goals should be measurable. This means keeping track of things. I discussed above tracking nutrition and exercise, but you should also keep track of weight and measurements. Do your weight and measurements in the morning after you’ve been to the bathroom and before you’ve eaten food. This is the best time to get an accurate answer, while if you wait until later in the day your food and water intake may have bloated you out a bit and added a bit of extra weight to the scale that shouldn’t be there. Also keep track of your clothing size, because it will feel great to know where you started and where you ended up. Lastly, and arguably most importantly, TAKE PICTURES!! Weight and measurements can sometimes be super discouraging because your progress doesn’t always reflect in the numbers. This can happen as you put on muscle, which is denser than fat. This causes your body to shrink while your weight may seem to stay the same or only lower slightly. Pictures are my favorite way of tracking progress.

Sometimes people aim a bit too high, and that is why it is important that your goals are attainable. Have you ever made a New Year’s Resolution to lose weight, spent a couple of weeks working out almost every day and following through on your nutrition, and then phased out? A lot of people have, myself included. Where did we go wrong? We expected to see awesome results in a very short amount of time doing something that is not necessarily sustainable. Going from no exercise and diet to exercise daily and all diet is a huge transition. When you embark on a health and fitness journey, you need to realize that the weight wasn’t put on overnight, and it certainly is not going to come off overnight. It will take time and effort to achieve your goals, so you need to pick a workout plan and a nutrition plan that is going to be sustainable over time.

Next is to ensure that your goal is relevant/realistic, and this is where you really need to evaluate your goal to find out if this is something that is really important to you. If you determine that it is, you need to think about the reason behind it – because that will come in handy later if you start to feel yourself slipping and losing motivation. You need to figure out the root of the reason you want this if you’re going to stick with it, otherwise you won’t mentally associate it as being a priority. Once you realize that this is important to you and you figure out the primary reason that is driving you to do this in the first place, your next step is to assess that specific goal plan that you created to determine if it can help get you to where you want to be with respect to health and fitness. Your goal also has to be realistic. You can’t set a goal to lose 100 pounds in one month, because that would be setting yourself up for failure. Choose a goal that is realistic and attainable, and it will give you motivation to keep pushing. Too many people set goals they can’t achieve, and then they give up because they get frustrated. You can avoid that from the beginning simply by setting realistic goals.

Lastly, your goal should be timely. Deadlines are great for getting people to move their butts into action, and you should definitely use that to your advantage. If your goal is to lose 30 pounds in 3 months, you can break that up into smaller increments and set a goal to lose 10 pounds each month. You could even break it up further and set a goal to lose 5 pounds every 2 weeks. This helps you to focus on small goals little by little. Each time you hit one of your smaller goals, you’ll be excited to be inching closer to your larger goal, and it will give you motivation to keep moving forward.

I hope you found this article on goal setting to be useful, but if you have any questions, feel free to send them my way! If you have been considering making some positive changes with respect to health and fitness and you just aren’t sure where to start, you are invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group.

Snacking Tip

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It is SUPER easy to overeat if you let yourself just eat directly from a bag or whatever it is you’re having. Instead, try getting some snack sized zip lock baggies, and portioning out bags of 100 calories each!

This tactic makes it super easy to track what you’re consuming, and it is great when you’re on the go. I would even recommend keeping a bag or two of some kind of nut or single serving bag of some other healthy snack in your purse or in your vehicle for when you are out and about. This will keep you from buying something unhealthy on impulse when you are hungry and away from your healthy food at home.

You can do this with fruits and veggies as well, and just keep a container full of 100 calorie bags at eye level. It has been proven that you tend to go for whatever is at eye level when you open the fridge, so keep the fresh fruits and vegetables front and center!

For more helpful tips, you are invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group!

Hump Day Humor

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Lol here is some hump day humor for my followers!

I think it is important to note that this can be very serious too though. If you eat a lot of junk food you may find yourself suffering from diabetes in the future. A majority of my older family members are all suffering from diabetes, and they are forced to use insulin and/or check their sugars on a daily basis.

You don’t have to choose that path! If you start changing your habits little by little, you will be amazed by the changes in your body and your health a year from now.

I challenge you to do something today that will create a brighter future for yourself and your family. 

Feel free to email me at hfmxj@stu.ca with the subject line “Transform my body” if you would like to make some changes, and you just aren’t sure where to start. I would love to work out a long term plan with you that can help you achieve your health and fitness goals.

You are also invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group! 

Couch to 5K

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I don’t know about anyone else, but I always thought that I just didn’t have it in me to be a runner. It didn’t happen often, but once in a while I’d be having a good day and I’d be full of energy, so I’d decide to go for a run. One time I was so hopped up on energy after a kickboxing workout that I ran almost all the way to the bottom of my street (and my street is actually pretty long lol), only to turn around and realize that the only reason I made it all the way to the bottom without stopping was because it was all downhill. Let’s just say the trek back up took twice as long, and most of it was NOT spent running lol.

I also have this issue where sometimes cardio would cause me so much trouble with my breathing that my throat would get this burning sensation and it would feel as though my throat was closing off. Because of bad experiences like the one above, and the breathing difficulties, I decided that I just sucked at running and I focused my efforts on other forms of exercise. After working out for a while with my Beachbody programs, I decided to give running another shot. What I discovered was that I actually CAN run, it was just that I was out of shape before. I am guessing that this is the case for the vast majority of people out there that say they could never run!

I have decided to start the Couch to 5K program because I would really love to improve upon my running skills. Today marked the start of my 7 week program, and I would love to invite all of you out there reading this to join me. Even if you think “well, I’d like to… but, I don’t think I could do it”, I want you to give it a shot. You only have to commit to three workouts a week, and for the first few weeks it is just 20 minute workouts! It is not all running either! To condition your body for running, you actually would be doing walking and jogging intervals to build yourself up for longer runs. Over time the runs will get longer, and the walking intervals will get shorter.

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Click Here if you are interested in joining me on this journey, and request to join my FREE Health and Fitness group. This is where we will be discussing all things related to the challenge, plus it is where you’ll find access to a wide range of health and fitness information. I hope to see you in the group!

Please don’t pass up on this out of fear – because I truly believe that you can do it.

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The truth about Network Marketing success

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One of the biggest objections that I get from people that I approach about my Network Marketing opportunities is that it is a pyramid scheme, and/or it is not a real job. Well, I am here to dispel these misconceptions and tell you exactly why that line of thinking is just plain wrong.

I think the biggest issue with these network marketing professions is that people tend to think that if you just join, you’ll be able to start making a LOT of money fast without actually putting in a lot of work. If you think of it as a get rich quick scheme, chances are, you are NOT going to find success in this industry. These businesses DO work, and they can provide you with unlimited earning potential. However, it is not a magic money tree that is going to continue giving you money for little to no effort – at least not in the beginning. Just like any other job, you actually have to WORK at network marketing in order to be successful. This means that YOU and you alone are responsible for your own success or failure with your business. The tools and training are all at your fingertips, and if you join under the right upline and with the right team, you will have the support that you need to be successful. However, the rest is completely up to you when it comes to putting in the time and the effort that it takes to sell your products, and build your team if you hope to move up through the ranks to be successful.

I don’t want to sugar coat this part because I think you need to be prepared for the fact that it is not always going to be sunshine and rainbows, and there are going to be a lot of people that are going to ignore your invitation to learn about the opportunity or straight out reject it. It can be scary at first, because nobody likes rejection, but you just have to realize that it doesn’t matter! If you believe in your products whole-heartedly like I do, then you just move on to the next person until you find someone that can understand and appreciate what you have to offer. It is really a numbers game, so the more people you get the opportunity in front of, the higher the likelihood that you’ll be successful. Anyone can make some extra income with network marketing, but if you really want to be successful, you need to step out of your comfort zone and get over your fear of approaching people about your business opportunity and/or products. Our team actually does challenges to motivate everyone to step out of their comfort zone and do something new and different to take their business to the next level, and that is a huge help. Small little steps compounded over time can make a BIG difference.

Again, you need to think of this as a real job, because it is a real job and a real business. Too many people out there are looking for something free to join in the hopes of making some easy money, but in most cases, that just isn’t going to happen. It is super unfortunate, but way too many people join a company thinking they’ll get rich, and then they quit before they ever get to experience the results of their small steps compounded over time. You should commit to at least one full year with a company before you throw in the towel, because a breakthrough could be right around the corner. Furthermore, with a real business, you have also got to be willing to invest something! If you’re going to join a company and promote their products, you kind of have to know what it is that you are promoting! For example, with Younique there are no monthly fees and you don’t pay a “startup fee”, but you do purchase a presenter’s kit that is full of our most popular products at almost a 50% discount. This allows all of our new presenters to try out our products so that they can market them to others appropriately and really gain a passion for the products and the company. Most other direct sales companies out there will have the same kind of system with their products, and it really is a valuable investment.

Thinking of a network marketing opportunity as a real job also means that you need to designate some time each day to working your business. Honestly, that can be as simple as taking 15-20 minutes out of your day here and there to make a few posts on social media, respond to a couple emails or messages, or make a simple blog post. A lot of us waste hours of our time on social media without even noticing! Why not use that to our advantage and use some of that time to take steps that can further our success with a given company?

“You work just hard enough to keep them from firing you and they pay you just enough to keep you from quitting. You are in a prison.” –Rise of the Entrepreneur

The fact of the matter is that our system is flawed because so many people are going to school in the hopes of finding a good job, but then end up struggling to find a job after graduation and being saddled with debt for years to come. People work sometimes 2 and 3 jobs just to make enough money to get by, and instead of going away for vacations, most people are stuck at home on their vacation days because they don’t have the money to do anything else. That is why network marketing is an amazing solution to these issues. It is something that you can do from home on your own time, and it is without all of the risk that usually comes from starting a business. Most companies have relatively low startup costs, and you aren’t responsible for coming up with the product to sell because that is already established for you. You aren’t responsible for producing the product, shipping the product, fixing issues, etc. All of these things are taken care of by the company, and you are just the third party tool that spreads the word about what you have to offer and brings in the new clientele and you get paid to do it. I find it so ironic that people are willing to spend 50+ years of their life working for someone else and struggling with money, yet they aren’t willing to spend 3-5 years working a business with unlimited earning potential and making enough money to not only get by, but to thrive! With network marketing, we get to be the CEO of our own business. How awesome is that?

Probably the biggest issue that I wanted to address was the common misconception that network marketing opportunities are really pyramid schemes. This one drives me craaazzzyy. It is one thing for people to genuinely ask about this, but it is a whole different story for a person to try TELL YOU that your company is a pyramid scheme. I am sorry, but in my opinion that is just childish and ignorant. Please do your research and learn the definition of a pyramid scheme before you insult someone like that, because though there are pyramid schemes out there, the vast majority of network marketing opportunities are legitimate. Honestly if you think about it, Corporate America is actually a pyramid scheme because you have the top people getting richer and richer while everyone else stays relatively at the same income level. Now, with network marketing, it is actually more of an INVERSE pyramid. Instead of the top earners doing well while the rest of us stay at the same low income, the top earners GET to where they are by helping those below them to do better. Our success is really the product of our team success, so in order to do better ourselves; we first have to help teach our team to be successful as well. This means that everyone on the team that is putting in the work will be moving upwards with their business!

“Think of your dream as a balloon on a string. Are you going to reach out and grab it, or are you going to let it slip through your fingers?” –Rise of the Entrepreneur

Are you willing to work and to learn? Could you benefit from an opportunity that would allow you spend more time at home? Do you need or want an extra source of income? If so, I would love to chat with you about the opportunities that I offer. I highly value both of my companies for different reasons, but fitness and beauty have become huge passions of mine. If you’re a woman that loves makeup, ask me about Younique. If you want an opportunity that would allow you to work on your health and fitness, ask me about Beachbody.

Network marketing IS a better way, you just have to be willing to take a chance and try it.