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.