Tag: lose weight

July Health & Fitness Challenge!!

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In case you are unfamiliar with me and my coaching, I do a challenge every month in my FREE Health and Fitness group. The first three months went really well in terms of participation, and then this past month the challenge had a lot less participants. Instead of coming up with something myself, I thought that I would put it out to all of you!

What kinds of challenges would you find beneficial? It needs to be something that just about anyone could do. For example, the bootcamps I have done in the past had 4 workouts per week to complete MINIMUM and a simple meal plan to follow. The step challenge that we did simply required each participant to wear a fitbit and report back to me with all of their steps each week. Our biggest loser challenge required participants to access the Beachbody On Demand FREE Trial for the month. These are all things that pretty much anyone could do, without requiring a gym membership or expensive equipment.

The idea that I came up with for July is a YouTube Challenge. I am always pulling cool workout videos off of YouTube and sharing them in the group as a weekly challenge anyways, so I thought it might be fun to make it a theme for the month! If you vote on this challenge, I would put together a schedule of Beachbody based workouts found on YouTube to be completed throughout the month. Each week I would post the schedule for the upcoming week.

So far, the only other suggestion is to repeat the step challenge! If you have any other ideas, you need to go and request to join our group. Once approved for membership, you will be able to vote for your favorite idea, or submit a new idea for consideration!

Please let me know ASAP if you are interested in participating in this challenge.

If you must compete, compete against yourself

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A lot of people get down on themselves for not looking like an athlete or having the results that they want right away. They let that discourage them from continuing just because it is taking longer than they had hoped to look the way that these other people now look. The problem with that is that you don’t know their journey. You don’t know how long or how hard they had to work to get to the point that they have reached.

It is super important that you stop competing with people who have most likely been at it for years to get those results, and start competing with yourself! Make it your mission every day to do more and push harder than you did yesterday. THAT is how you get better, and that is how you will get awesome results!

It is a truly great feeling to master something that you could never do before. When I started doing P90X there were a lot of moves that I simply couldn’t do, and even more that I had to modify to get through. I had to pause the DVD quite a bit for water breaks during the cardio workouts as well. Imagine how I felt the first time that I did plyometrics (which is – in my mind – by far the toughest P90X workout) without pausing it, without skipping anything, or without modifying a SINGLE move. I don’t even have the words to describe it. You can experience that feeling too, but the key is to not give up before you do.

If you’re ready to start implementing some changes into your lifestyle, I would love for you to join my FREE Health and Fitness group. There you can learn about health and fitness in a safe and private environment with others who are struggling on a health and fitness journey as well. We do monthly fitness challenges, and I would love to see you participate!

“Obesity runs in my family”

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I used to be the one to make that statement pretty frequently, but I now know that it is just another excuse for letting yourself go and not switching to a healthier lifestyle.

Yes, some families (like my own) are born with health issues or a less active metabolism, which can cause them to be more susceptible to weight gain. However, being in such a family I also know that the habits of the family could also be a huge factor. Junk food is a daily thing, overeating happens with almost every meal, and exercise is minimal to nonexistent. If those behaviours could change, I have no doubt in my mind that they could lose weight. The “obesity runs in my family” line is taking the easy way out, and I say this from personal experience.

And yes, some people are blessed with the genes to stay slim despite eating nothing but junk food, while others gain a lot of weight. Honestly though, you need to understand that being skinny does not necessarily equate to being healthy. What happens to a lot of people that are skinny throughout their youth, and take advantage of their fast metabolism by eating nothing but junk food just because they can? In many cases, that behaviour catches up to them. Over time their metabolism tends to be less and less active, so as they get older they will start putting on weight. By that point their behaviour is ingrained in them, and it will be much harder for them to make the switch to a healthier lifestyle.

Either way of life is unhealthy. You can be skinny and unhealthy, or you can be overweight to obese and unhealthy. They both come with risks, one more so than the other, but neither are good for you. You can choose to stay that way or you can work your butt off and make a change.

I would love to help you along your journey, so if you would like to get started on making some changes you are  more than welcome to join my FREE Health and Fitness group. If you are ready to make some BIG changes and really get serious about your health and fitness journey, you can should consider viewing our Team Beachbody June Specials as well as our Summer Blowout Sale!

Winner of May Step Challenge!

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Whoohoo! Big shout out to Kassie again for winning the May Step Challenge. I am super excited to say that her prize has arrived, and she will soon have a full fitness and nutrition program to continue with her weight loss journey on a more intense level.

Kassie has been a total rockstar in my FREE Health and Fitness group. She participated in both my March and April Bikini Bootcamps, and she also participated in my May Step Challenge. Kassie exceeded the goal of 10,000 steps a day pretty much every single day, and most days she would double it! She won that challenge by a total landslide, and she definitely earned this reward.

I am super proud to say that Kassie has lost 40 pounds, and she has been continuing with me for my June Biggest Loser Challenge. Although I suspect once she gets this, the Beachbody On Demand platform might get put to the back burner haha! Kassie has worked her butt off (figuratively and literally lol) with me for over 3 months now, and I could not be happier that she is the winner of this awesome program.

Enjoy your program Kassie, and I look forward to seeing how far you can go with this program!

Note: If you would like to learn more about this program or its original counterpart, please head over and view my page on our June Promotions. 

Interest VS Commitment

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I have been running challenges in my free health and fitness group for the past three months, and I’ve noticed a common theme. It is really unfortunate, but what I have noticed is a steady decline in participants over time. I keep a spreadsheet for each week with a record of participants and their results for the week, and each week of a program I see fewer and fewer names on that list. The very first time I did a challenge, it was almost overwhelming with the amount of people that were interested in participating. At the end of the month, we had less than HALF of the original participants still in the group.

“There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results.” ― Kenneth H. Blanchard

With my latest challenge, I had a decent number of people demonstrate interest. However, when it came time to follow through, I’ve only had a few people stick to their commitment. We live in a world where it is easy to make commitments over Facebook, and even easier to blow off those commitments just as fast as you make them. I wanted to make this post for anyone that demonstrated interest in any of my challenges, but failed to follow through – or even just anyone in general who has committed and failed to follow through on any health and fitness journey.

If you made that initial commitment, you need to know that there was a REASON. On some level, you felt as though getting involved in health and fitness could help you or improve your life in some way. Maybe you’ve read my story, and it inspired you to want to do something for yourself. Maybe you’ve been feeling down because you’ve put on some weight. Whatever the case may be, there was a reason that you felt compelled to participate in a health and fitness challenge.

If this sounds at all familiar, I challenge YOU to start thinking about your reason. Dig deep, and try to figure out your internal struggles that may have been driving your desire to participate in a health and fitness challenge. If you can figure out your “why”, you can begin to use that as motivation to follow through on your commitment to health and fitness.

Biggest Loser Challenge

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If you follow my blog, you may already be aware of this. If you are new to my blog – Welcome! For those of you that don’t already know, I have been hosting special challenges for the people in my free health and fitness group every month for the past 3 months.

One of my Bikini Bootcamp ladies lost 29 POUNDS while she was participating in my March and April challenges. I’ve also had a lot of people tell me how much that they have been enjoying the May Step Challenge. Everyone enjoys different things, so I want to shake things up a bit again and do something a little different.

My challenges are always FREE to be a part of – however, I do expect a time and effort commitment. If I am going to invest my time and energy into coaching you, I want you to put the time and effort into yourself through your workouts and nutrition. This is for people who are SERIOUS about making a positive change in their life, and who want to take CONTROL of the direction that their life is headed.

Instead of having people do workouts that I put together, which is what I did in the bootcamps, I will be having everyone access the 30 Day Free Trial of our Beachbody On Demand platform. I am actually using this myself right now, and I am loving it. This way nobody is stuck doing any particular type of workout – you can pick and choose from hundreds of different workouts and design your own plan. If you like structure and having a set schedule to follow, you can choose to follow a particular program schedule; or you can try what we coaches like to call a “hybrid”, which is a schedule consisting of two or more different programs. That is something that we can work out together before the start date.

If this sounds like something that you would be interested in, please notify me via email at hfmxj@stu.ca with the subject line “Biggest Loser”. We will begin this challenge on June 1st, so get your name in ASAP!

I am super excited to see this through, and I can’t wait to coach you along your journey :)

Can’t do tough exercises?

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This goes for fitness too! You’re going to find exercises that you can’t do, that is just a given. It is going to happen, and it happens to EVERYONE when they start something new. You can choose to be frustrated by that, and give up saying that it’s too hard;

OR

You can choose to keep working at it every single day until you can do it! You just have to learn to modify and make the moves a bit simpler until you work up the strength to accomplish the real thing. I master new things that I originally couldn’t do all the time, and you can do that too!

One thing that I love about our Beachbody fitness programs is that they always feature at least one person that is demonstrating modified versions of all of the moves. This makes it easier for beginners, or for people who struggle in certain areas of fitness, to get their bearings and work up to the full workout.

Choosing the modifier does not mean you are taking the easy way out… unless of course you’ve built up the strength to do it the right way, and you’re choose the modifier to be lazy :P That’s not good either haha! Just use the modifier as long as you need to, and every so often try the hard way. You’ll be able to see small improvements over time, and then one day, you’ll do it for real – and it is truly an awesome feeling to accomplish something for which you’ve been working so hard.

I hope you found this useful! Click here if you would like to make me your FREE Team Beachbody Coach. If you could benefit from a safe place to learn about health and fitness, and engage in regular fitness challenges – you are invited to join my FREE Health and Fitness group. I hope to see you there!

Are you holding extra water weight?

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Sometimes you don’t even realize how much your lack of water intake can be affecting your body. Water weight is just one side effect out of many that can happen for people that are dehydrated. When you think about it, the majority of our body is actually made of water, so it makes sense that we would need to drink a lot of water to keep it running smoothly. This way we are always clearing out the toxins, and bringing in fresh, clean water into our system.

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I never used to be a water person. I lived on root beer, juice, and chocolate milk! Now I actually like drinking water, and I carry a water bottle with me everywhere I go. It was not an easy transition, but you just have to start out by easing your way into it. What I did was use Poweraid Zero (0 cals) to my water for a while to make it taste better, or I would add lemon slices or fruit to it. There are plenty of things that you can do to make it taste more appealing. Once you’ve gotten into that, you just slowly ease out of the flavoring – or not – a little flavor never killed anyone!

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With all of those benefits, why not give it a try?! Lemons and other citrus fruits can add a lot of flavor to your water, and as you can see, they help with a lot of other factors as well.

water bomb drink water

If you’re the kind of person that really struggles to get your water intake in, you can start by doing something like this! I did this for a while, and it really does help to be able to see exactly how much water you’ve drank throughout the day. This way, if you haven’t met your daily goal amount, you can easily finish it off at the end of the day. That is something that you probably wouldn’t do if you didn’t have the proof right in front of you that you haven’t drank the right amount yet.

I hope you’ve found this useful!

Click Here if you would like to have me as your free health and fitness coach!

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!

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.