Tag: myfitnesspal

“Obesity runs in my family”

Leave a comment

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!

1 Comment

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

Leave a comment

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

3 Comments

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?

Leave a comment

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!

May Step Challenge!

3 Comments

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!

1 Comment

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.

Hunger VS Boredom

Leave a comment

This was a huge thing for me! I am a big time night snacker, and I loved snacking while I watched tv. Watching movies or shows without food just felt foreign to me. What this is though is habit and comfort, it isn’t hunger.

When you catch yourself heading for a snack, I want you to think to yourself: “Am I really hungry, or is this just habit?” If you are hungry, try drinking a big glass of water to hold you over until your next meal. Believe it or not, water can actually curb your appetite short-term. If that doesn’t work and you’re still hungry, go for some of healthy snacks! Celery is a great snack choice, especially if your goal is weight loss. If you are snacking at night, try to stay away from fruit because of the natural sugars. It is better to consume fruit earlier in your day.

Click Here if you would like to gain FREE access to information regarding health and fitness, including recipes for healthy snacks and meals!

My Fitness Pal

2 Comments

Hey Everyone! I have had a couple of people in the group approach me about meal plans, so I wanted to write a blog post for everyone in case anyone else had the same issues with nutrition. I am going to do you one better than simply give you a meal plan. I am going to do for you what my coach did for me when I started getting into fitness – show you how to use myfitnesspal. This is an AMAZING tool because it takes all of guesswork out of counting calories and macronutrients (carb/protein/fat). I strongly advise each of you to create an account at www.myfitnesspal.com because it will be super helpful for you to keep track of your nutrition and make sure you’re on track. After I explain a bit about myfitnesspal and how to use the features, I will then discuss macronutrients and the levels you should be focused on depending on your goals, and then I will get into some healthy meals and snacks that you can use on your plans. Honestly, this method works SO much better than anyone simply providing you with a basic meal plan to follow day after day. Anyone can give you a meal plan, but you are GOING to get sick of the foods on the plan and you are most likely going to give up. With MFP, YOU are in charge of what you are eating and are able to change it up from day to day as long as you stay within the calorie and macro limits. You’ll fluctuate a bit in macros from day to day as you change things up, and that’s okay, as long as you are around the numbers you are supposed to be using.

Okay so how do you get started? Like I said above just go to the link, and create an account by either signing up through facebook or email. I believe it will ask you some information about your current weight and stuff like that just to help determine a calorie level. Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the “My Home” page automatically. This is where you can track your progress and see how many calories have yet to be consumed each day. Honestly though, I recommend filling out your meal plan for the day the night before. This way you can shift things around a bit to make the macros match up, that way you get them closer to the goal than if you were doing it as you ate your meals. Under the Home tab you can also visit Goals, which is where you update your calorie limit if you want it changed as well as how many workouts you do and your macro targets. If you want to change anything you just hit change goals, and then go to the Custom option to set your own fitness goals. If you have lost some weight or seen a decrease in measurements, you can track that under the Check In tab. The rest of the subtabs for home are all self-explanatory, so I’ll move on to the Food tab. This is where you do all the work! You just click the day you want to prepare, and it automatically has 3 meals and 3 snacks set out for you to update with foods. You just click “add food” and it brings up a database where you enter the food you want, click the right food and the proper amount, and click “add checked” to add it to that meal option. Once you’ve been using it for a bit there will be a bunch of foods listed under the tabs “recent and frequent” to make it easier for you to use. You can also save meals if you plan to be eating the same kinds of meals more frequently to make it easier, instead of having to repeatedly search for those ingredients or items every time you make it. If you’re making something completely original, you can visit the Recipes tab to log in all of the ingredients. This works AWESOME if you are making soups or chili or anything like that with multiple servings because all you do is put in the ingredients used and the amount of servings it makes, and MFP calculates how many calories and macros are in each serving!! Lastly, the only other thing you really need to know about MFP is the Exercise tab. This is completely optional, and I honestly don’t care if you use it or not! It is totally up to you, but if you are running or walking or doing some kind of physical activity and you want recognition for it – by all means, log it in!

Now that you know how to use MFP, let’s focus on calories and macros. This is going to differ depending on weight and size, and if you are doing workouts on a regular basis. However, as a ballpark number for those of you not doing fitness programs, I would say somewhere between 1300-1500 calories. You DO NOT want to go below 1200 calories a day. If you do, your body can enter what is called “starvation mode” and it will be completely counter-productive. A lot of people seem to believe that if you just don’t eat that much you will lose weight, but in reality your body will start storing the foods you do eat as fat because it will think it isn’t being fed enough to function properly. If you’re working out on a regular basis you will want to add 400-500 calories to that calorie range to create a deficit for the calories burned off in your workouts. Again, this will depend on your size and weight. As for macro nutrients, if you want to be on a fat burner diet I would aim for 25% carbs 25% fat and 50% protein. Everybody is different though, so if you are finding that you are sluggish and totally grouchy on that plan, you may need to modify. If that happens to you it is just because your body needs more carbs, so just bump it up in increments. So start the next day at 30% carbs and 20% fat with protein staying at 50%. If that still isn’t working for you, and it may not be when you’re just starting out, modify it again to 40% carb 40% protein and 20% fat. Once you’ve been doing your plan for a few weeks I would suggest bumping it back down and seeing how you fare. It could be that the first method was too drastic of a change starting out, but once you’re used to eating better it may be easier for you to manage the other level.

Okay so now that you know how to use myfitnesspal and you know what kind of a range you should be focused on macro- and calorie-wise, I am going to give you a list of meals and snacks that I like to have on my own plan to help you figure out some healthy foods you can be eating yourself. Keep in mind that you will want to measure everything out with measuring cups or count the chips or whatever you have to do to make sure you’re getting the amount you’re putting in to MFP – otherwise, the calculations will be off.

Meals:

-Homemade soups: You can throw in just about any vegetable you want with spices and bouillon cubes for flavor. Just try to pick something with a lower sodium content. Add some chicken if you want for a better protein source.

-Homemade chili: Throw in tomato paste and diced tomatoes with lean ground hamburger, kidney beans, chili powder and any spice you want for flavor, and whatever else you like in your chili.

-Omelet: cook a couple eggs with some egg whites (you can buy little cartons with egg white so you don’t have to waste your eggs getting the whites) and throw on chopped veggies when it is cooked.

-For meats I prefer lean ground beef and boneless skinless chicken breast. Lean ground turkey is also an option, as well as haddock and some other fish. You can add your choice of vegetable to this with white rice, sweet potato, or regular potato. Good veggie options include carrots, celery (really good for a snack if you have the munchies – people into fitness comps eat a lot of this when trying to lean down), asparagus, cucumber, peppers (any color really), and broccoli.

-Greek yogurt with fruit mixed in. I prefer to chop up strawberries, but you’re welcome to add whatever you like. Plain yogurt is better, but I can’t stand the taste so I use vanilla and just measure it to make sure the calories are the same. If you want to use plain yogurt and don’t like the taste, you can skip the fruit and add a serving of peanut butter or Nutella for flavor.

-Cheerios with almond milk.

-Shakeology with almond milk. I personally like the chocolate shakeology with vanilla flavored almond milk. I also mix in some frozen strawberries for flavor, and if I am using vanilla shakeology I mix in a teaspoon of Nutella.

-Ezekiel bread with a serving of peanut butter or Nutella.

-Stir fry: Dice up some boneless skinless chicken breasts and throw the pieces in the frying pan. You can add whatever veggies you want, some rice, and seasoning or soya sauce for flavor.

Some meals I like to have ONCE a week as a cheat meal:

-Nachos: Organic nachos (Kirkland brand, comes in a big brown paper bag at Costco), salsa, and tex mex cheese.

-Homemade pizza: You can find healthier pizza crusts at the grocery stores so you just have to go searching for one. I add pizza sauce to mine (measured out), pepperoni, pineapple, and tex mex cheese.

Snacks:

-Fruit: apple, banana, strawberries, blueberries, grapes. Try to limit yourself to 1-2 servings of fruit because they are high in natural sugars. I personally just have an apple a day and then have the strawberries in my shakeology.

-Greek yogurt as a bedtime snack.

-Plain rice cake with a serving of peanut butter or Nutella.

-Protein shake: I prefer Gold Standard chocolate whey protein from GNC. You can get cheaper stuff at Costco and other places though I am sure.

-GoGo Quinoa chocolate chip cookies: These are vegan and gluten-free, and you can purchase them at Costco.

-Skinny pop popcorn: You can find this at Costco and it is a great alternative to chips. I would recommend just having this on weekends if you are craving junk food. Measure out the proper amount. It is only 39 calories a cup, but you still want to measure so you know how much you’re eating. Trust me lol I know from experience that it is easy to eat way more than you’re supposed to with this stuff if you don’t measure :P

-Almond and unsalted roasted cashews are good in moderation, but you don’t want to have too many.

There you go! Now with the snacks I would recommend having 2-3 snacks a day that are between 100-200 calories and then your meals in between. To make it easier on yourself for on the go snacks, you can get little Ziploc baggies and measure out those amounts in whatever snack item you want and put them in a basket on the counter so that you can easily grab and go on the fly! There are tons of other healthy foods out there as well, but this is just a template to get you started from my own personal diet. I hope you find this useful. Please feel free to comment on this thread with any questions that you may have or if you need clarification on anything. I stopped using MFP for a while because when you’re eating the same foods all the time you kind of get used to the macros lol, but I will be starting up again soon. You’re welcome to add me as a friend on there if you want (handle is jsajm) to review my food journals in the days to come once I start using it again. If you’re not sure you’re on track, you can also just tell me to visit your page and check out your food diary.

Click Here if you would like to take me on as your coach!