The "Secret" to achieving your ideal body

Have you ever said to someone "wow you've lost weight, you've GOT to tell me your secret"? And reguardless of the response the person gives it's usually not too much of a secret or a surprise of how they did it. The reality is there's no secret; the concept of weight loss is simple, and we all know it, so why do we continue to ask? It's because losing weight isn't easy; it requires commitment, education, and motivation. Whether you're motivated to lose 50 lbs or 5 lbs, I'm going to tell you 3 simple things you need to know about your metabolism that will give you a boost to get the extra body fat off; and all you need to do is make the commitment to work towards feeling great in your skin.

1. Change your body composition


Your body is comprised of metabolically active tissues (lean body tissue), metabolically inactive tissue (fat tissue), and water. If your goal is to decrease your fat tissue you need to increase your lean body tissue. The easiest way to do this is by building muscle. Our muscles dictates our metabolism. By increasing muscle mass you are helping your body burn through the energy that is consumed and hopefully a little extra (if fat loss is the goal).


Go to your bathroom right now and throw away your scale, because you will no longer be focusing on how much you weigh but rather your percent of body fat compared to lean body tissue. This is because muscle weighs more than fat and it takes up less space. Exchanging 10 lbs of fat for 10 lbs of muscle may be the difference of 1 or 2 pants sizes, and your weight hasn't even changed!


Don't worry about becoming "bigger" by adding muscle to your bones. If you are increasing your daily activity level; you will be losing fat while you build your muscle, soon you'll need suspenders to keep your pants up.

2. Eat fat burning foods

You can control whether or not your body is going to use the food you consume as fuel or store it as fat. Depending on the types of food you eat, you can switch your metabolism into fat burning mode or fat storage mode.
Eating foods that rank high on the glycemic index, foods that are overly processed or refined, cause the body to release a hormone called insulin, to nuetralize the glucose levels in our blood stream and save the excess as fat. This is fat storage mode.

You can flip this metabolic switch to fat burning mode by eating foods that are low glycemic index, and slowly release glucose into our blood stream. Your bodies cells are able to gobble up the glucose as it comes to them and also use it to break into the extra energy that you have stored in fat cells.

Wondering what these magical foods are? I'll tell you the "secret": Vegetables, fruits, lean meats, beans, lentils, and legumes, and whole grains. Shocker I know.

So stay away from all those low fat, low calorie, low carb, no carb foods, packaged processed and refined foods you are doing your metabolism more harm than good.

3. Relax:

Stress could very well be the reason you are having trouble losing those last 5-10 lbs.

Stress has negative affects on your metabolism: when you are stressed about something, your body releases cortisol, the fight or flight hormone. This hormone was built into the body to get us out of life threatening situations and therefore signals the body to hang on to as much energy as possible so we can be strong whether we are "fighting" or "flighting". However your body doesn't know that what is actually causing stress is a meeting with the boss, or a traffic jam, and it still holds on to the energy, via the cortisol, particularly around the vital organs, or your mid section.

Choosing to incorporate one of these three points will not give you the super metabolism you need to burn through extra body fat. In order to be successful you must combine stress reducing activities with low glycemic index foods and exercise. By doing this you have the power to manage your metabolism to create the body you really want.

A vision of Health

My mission is to empower people with the tools required to live an abundant and healthy life. In order to accomplish this task I must first look at what exactly a healthy life is. Some may percieve health as simply the absense of disease, however my vision goes beyond physical health.

I'd like to create an illustration about what a "healthy life" is to me. Say life is a journey, picture a road of sorts, and moving down the road is a wheel, I'm going to call it the "wheel of health". In this wheel are 5 spokes each representing a different area of our health; physical, mental, social, spiritual, and financial. The strength of each of the spokes effects the efficiency and the movement of the wheel, if one spoke is broken the entire wheel can collapse. Good health could be defined as a balance between the 5 spokes.

Taking the analogy a step further, we can actually increase our health, by growing longer, stronger spokes, therefore expanding our wheel. A larger wheel means we can cover more ground on the road we are traveling.

Depending on our situation we tend to focus on strengthening different spokes of our wheel at different places on our journey. That's life; if you've got a flat tire you've got to pump it up.

How many of us feel like we are traveling down the road with an oval wheel, or worse a flat tire? Whatever your motivation is to become more healthy I encourage you to seek out the resources to do so.

Having expertise in the physcial aspect of health I aim to be a resource to people seeking strength in thier physical "spoke". Not blind to the fact that all the spokes play a role in our physical health, I will challenge you in all areas.

I see an opportunity for others who are more versed in other areas to help me out; I am looking to connect with other "health experts" in order to offer a wealth of resources to my readers and clients.

I Challenge you to create your own vision of health. What does being "healthy" mean to you? What does it look like? Share your thougths and ideas, we can all be inspired by each others goals and creativity.