have a weakness when it comes to snacks. Basically, I can eat an entire bag of potato chips in less than an hour. This is especially bad for me because salty foods make my blood pressure go up, as it does with many people. Lately, salt and it's chemical name sodium, has been in the news alot. The 2010 report from the USDA on Dietary Guidelines (http://www.cnpp.usda.gov/DGAs2010-DGACReport.htm) shows that sodium intake is increasing for all Americans. It is especially high for young men, with an average of over 3,500mg per day. Considering the recommended amount is 1,500mg/day, we have a ways to go. Sodium is directly linked to increases in blood pressure and to cardiovascular disease, so don’t kid yourself, too much salt can kill you. But even if high blood pressure isn’t an issue for you, you could still be holding pounds of excess water weight due to high sodium consumption. Yes, I said pounds!!!

Now, I don’t really put much salt on my food – a pinch in the water when boiling grains or pasta. A little on my salad, and on meat, but I never use the salt shaker at meals. I even eat my egg whites sans salt. The truth is we don’t usually over salt our foods ourselves. The real culprits for our high sodium diet are packaged foods and sauces. Obviously, snacks are loaded with salt – chips, pretzels, crackers, even most dried nuts are also heavily loaded with sodium. It is also very prevalent in cereals. You think you’re being healthy by eating that high fiber cereal, but you’re consuming a ton of sodium in most of them. Grape Nuts for example has 290mg of sodium per half-cup serving. That is around 30% of the total recommended dietary daily allotment. Funny thing, on the website Livestrong.com, the so-called experts highly recommend Grape Nuts and falsely state that its sodium content is only 5% of total recommended amount. Even based on the old dietary value of 2,400mg of sodium per day, the nutrition label on the side of the cereal box says it is 12%, not Livestrong’s 5% of total dietary value. In any case, you have to read the labels and just know all those packaged ready to eat cereals have sodium added. One of my favorite morning meals is a bowl of Hodgson Mill MultiGrain cereal, which is high in fiber and also has flaxseed and soy. It is like quick oatmeal (ready in 5 minutes), only it taste a lot better and is even better for you. Oh, and its sodium content is ZERO.

The other main culprit in our salty diets is prepared sauces and soups. Look at the labels of any pasta sauces and you will see how high they are in sodium. And for you bean lovers, watch out for canned beans. I just looked at a can of black beans from Goya – 460mg sodium per serving. Soups are just as bad if not worse. For example; ProgressoLight brand soups (endorsed by Weight Watchers and Livestrong) have huge amounts of sodium. The Progresso Light Chicken and Dumpling soup label says it has 690mg per serving. The sad thing is that people see the cover of these products and believe they are healthy. The actually believe the marketing hype and their mouthpieces in the media and that is why the overall health of our country is still getting worse.

The report by the USDA does acknowledge that changing our sodium intake will take time because of acquired tastes. They state that for the first couple of weeks, people on a restricted sodium diet craved salty foods. But, within a fairly short time, they no longer craved salty foods (8 weeks or less). I know from my own experience that if I eat salty foods one day, the next day I crave that flavor again. But, if I don’t eat salty foods, I not only don’t crave them, I find I start to taste more of the natural flavors in foods and appreciate the subtle flavors from other spices. Most cooks know that you can substitute lemon juice for salt in most foods and get the same taste bud effect. Although not recommended for children, adults would do well to “heat” up their food with cayenne pepper. The spice has been shown to help digestion, reduce inflammation and have anti-oxidant value. It is especially good to add to soups, eggs, and chicken dishes.

Lastly, I want to emphasize how much water your body can retain when you eat salty foods. I literally can gain 5 lbs in one day from eating salty foods and snacks, and it is all water retention in my cells. Sodium gets stored in your muscle and fat cells and sucks in water that ordinarily would be excreted out. I see many clients who look bloated after eating salty foods the night before. The only remedy for this is to drink water and do significant amounts of aerobic exercise (over 30 minutes) to get your cells flushed of the sodium as you sweat. Just sweating from heat exposure isn’t as good. Then, if you sharply restrict your sodium intake, within two or three workouts, your body should have lost the excess water weight.

For more nutritional information, please see my “7 Lifestyle Eating Principles”. Best of luck to all of you and stay healthy!!!

You may have seen the person walking around with huge calve muscles or with large trapezius muscles on the shoulders. Or how about the middle age person on the bus with the extra huge hip muscles. You might assume (wrongly) that they overdeveloped the area by lifting heavy things at some time in their life. The reality is that even with huge muscles, they may not be any stronger than someone with normal size muscles. The weird thing about hypertrophy (the process of muscle cells getting bigger) is that it can happen just from overuse and not necessarily from resistance training. In fact, it is actually really hard to significantly increase muscle size just from lifting weights once in a while. A recent article in the New York Times Science section this week pretty much validates what I have been telling women for years, which is, that lifting heavier weights will help them to tone their muscles and trim their bodies, not build them.
After we reach adulthood, the size of our muscles is largely determined by our everyday activity. Generally, people become less active as they get older and muscles will atrophy (get smaller) from this disuse. If you remain active, then muscle size and strength will remain as you age. If you stress the muscles regularly through exercise, then they will increase in density as they become stronger. However, only if you stress them intensely, and eat lots of protein, will your muscles grow in size. This is what bodybuilders try to do. It is very hard to actually gain weight from just lifting weights however, because as your muscle fitness improves, your metabolism increases. This means you will burn more calories even at rest. So, someone who lifts weights as part of their exercise routine will burn more fat than someone who doesn’t and will get leaner. That is why the women in the study who used heavier weights actually lost weight compared to the women who did lighter weights for more repetitions. Which is not to say that lifting light weights doesn’t have any benefit. Everyone should start with light weights to establish good form first before progressing to heavier weights. In addition, certain benefits and purposes are only achieved when the weight is light enough to allow the deeper intrinsic muscles to work properly. This is especially true for many Pilates exercises and also in general for circular and rotational movements. Most, if not all, people who only lift heavy weights for strength exercise are lacking in functional strength because of the neglect of the intrinsic muscles.

Getting back to the mystery of people who have large muscles, but not from lifting weights; the root cause is poor posture and inefficient movement. Let’s look at large trapezius muscles, which are the muscles on top of the shoulders going up the base of the neck from the back. These get overdeveloped when someone habitually lifts objects by first pulling up the shoulder. This habit becomes unconscious and even when lifting a pencil, the muscle firing sequence begins with the trapezius so that even when the weight is minimal, the muscle still gets contracted. Over time, the subject may even try to lift their body weight with the trapezius, e.g. when moving from sitting to standing, or when straightening up from a forward bend. The muscular imbalance is perpetuated by inefficient movement, excessive tension in the area, and is often combined with forward head posture and rounded shoulders. Learning to isolate and articulate the shoulders, and learning to release unnecessary tension through breathwork and stretching, are key to training the subject to bring more balance to this area of the body.

Another common area of overdevelopment of muscles is in the hip, primarily the medial gluteals, which are higher than the gluteus maximus and more toward the sides of the hips. The primary cause of this problem is a forward leaning posture usually stemming from an anterior tilted pelvis, and sometimes coupled with weak quadriceps. Leaning forward even a few degrees will shift weight bearing from the legs to the gluteals. Every time the subject stands or walks, they are holding the weight of their upper torso with the gluteals. This repetitive stress on the muscles will build them up, though without adding more strength. In fact, the strength of muscles held in constant tension is usually less than a normal muscle. For this person, corrective postural exercises for the pelvis, along with stretching and core work will hopefully bring down the hypertrophied area and lead to more efficient movement.

I hope this article was helpful and made you think a little. Please post your comments or thoughts.

The Most Often Asked Question in Fitness

What is the best way to get a flat stomach?

Boy, if I had a quarter for every time I've been asked that question. The real answer to the above question is a four part solution:
1) Although you don't have to be super lean to achieve a flat belly, it certainly helps. So, the best way to lose fat around the stomach area, and the rest of your body, is by doing regular aerobic exercise. Contrary to what alot of trainers and infomercials for ab machines tell you, there is no such thing as a spot reducing exercise. So, to burn fat in one area, you got to burn fat in the whole body. And the best way to do that is with aerobic exercise. This is a fact that has to be accepted. Now, to get yourself leaner you will need to do cardiovascular exercise at least 4-5 times a week, with at least one of those workouts being for over 45 minutes at moderate intensity (65-70% of maximum THR) (heart rate calculator) to initiate greater fat burning as a percentage of total calories burned. See, studies have shown that up to that duration, the body's metabolism will still use carbohydrates in the bloodstream for the majority of the energy needed. After 45 minutes, the metabolism starts to shift to fat molecules for energy for the majority of energy needed. It is never 100% from fat, more like changing from 75/25% carbs to fat, to 30/70%. The difference is significant. The more often you do longer periods of aerobic exercise, the quicker the body will adapt to fat as it's preferred energy source for exercise. Highly trained marathoners can start to burn fat as their primary source of energy within 5 minutes of running.

2) The next part in planning your aerobic workouts is to make one of the other workouts include "intervals", which are several higher intensity periods of at least 1 minute in duration, at or near 85-90% Maximum THR* (see above). To do this, first warm up at moderate speed for 5 minutes. Then, increase the speed, incline, or resistance to a level where you can maintain it for 1 minute. After the interval, give yourself 2 minutes at slower speed to recover. Repeat three times. After a few weeks, try adding another interval. Then, after another few weeks, try increasing the duration of the interval 15-30 seconds. It doesn't matter what form of aerobic exercise you do although for fastest results, I recommend running if you are able to since it tends to burn the most calories per minute next to Cross-Country skiing.

3) Do Pilates exercises under the supervision of an experienced instructor. There is actually a technique of letting the abdominal sink in without force that will teach you to reflexively (unconsciously) draw the stomach in for natural support. All other forms of abdominal exercises are not taught this way and, while they may make your stomach area stronger and harder, they can actually make the area protrude out. You can check out the Yogilates video programs and New York Style Pilates programs for instructions on this technique.

4) You don't need to diet, but you do need to eat and drink moderately and sensibly. Two things that you need to watch out for are carbonated beverages, even diet ones, as they tend to bloat the stomach and put outward pressure in the intestines. The other is salt an salty foods. Salt makes the cells in your body retain water, increasing their size. Avoid packaged snack foods, especially chips, pretzels, crackers, and watch out for any canned or jarred sauces such as pasta sauces.
So there you have it. These four steps are the only sure way to get a flat stomach area.
Lastly, if you would like a more complete and personalized fitness and lifestyle program, feel free to contact me directly.

The new decade is here, and I am amazed at how little things have changed. We are still at war, the economy still lags, cars are still running on gas, etc. In terms of health and fitness, never before have I seen so much attention being paid to losing weight. And I mean paid!! All the television talk shows have segments on it, and of course there is the hit TV show The Biggest Loser, and it's offshoots. In addition to this, there are the diet program wars, with millions spent on advertisements for each. Despite all this, here is the depressing fact: of all the people who will start diets this year, only about 2% will succeed at keeping the weight off. The reality is diets don't work and you will just be wasting your money if you buy into a program that puts you on one without looking at your life first and assessing the factors beyond calories consumed. These "lifestyle" issues are the real reason people have gained weight, and they have to be addressed systematically, individually, and objectively for any change to stick.

As a certified Lifestyle & Weight Management Coach, I have seen many clients with different weight issues and situations. Over the years, I have come up with a questionnaire that goes beyond the standard Health History form to ascertain critical information for evaluating a person's lifestyle and identifying practical, non-subjective, causes for poor weight management. This lifestyle questionnaire is key and shows individual parameters that guide the coach to offering solutions that will work for that person. Nutrition and diet books, programs and experts only provide basic information, but they can't, and shouldn't, presume their advice will work for all people because everyone is different. One of the main contributors to poor nutritional habits is stress. We know that excess stress, which can be either physical, mental, or emotional, can not only cause you to make bad decisions when it comes to what, when, and how you eat, but it also elevates the hormone cortisol, which has been scientifically shown to promote weight gain. What this means, is that even for people who are relatively only slightly overweight, it would help to look at things going on in their lives other than just how much they are eating and exercising. Sometimes, it is just a matter of being conscious of what is causing stress in your life, and then learning to be mindful of the way it makes you feel. Mindfulness is a skill one can learn to control your reactions to stress by basically not reflexively sabotaging yourself and instead allowing the feeling to subside and deciding to take a positive step instead. Common sense and mindfulness are the cornerstones of my integrative approach to lifestyle coaching and have the added benefit of leading to permanent changes in behavior and attitude.

So, with all that being said, I still would like to give everyone some general nutrition advice just so you can feel empowered to make healthy changes sooner, rather than later. Here are five common sense nutritional principles anyone can adopt:

1. To reduce water weight, where the cells of the body bloat with excess water, you should reduce your salt/sodium intake. The best ways to do this are to eliminate crackers, chips, pretzels, and any other packaged cereal products which are usually loaded with sodium. In addition, avoid canned, bagged, or jarred pasta sauces which are also loaded with sodium. Same for all frozen prepared foods. Yes, you may want to start making your own sauces, and instead of chips, eat cut up carrots and other vegetables that give you a similar "crunch".

2. To keep your metabolism on an even keep, try to eat your breakfast within 2 hours of getting up. I know a lot of busy professionals who eat late dinners and then skip breakfast. What they probably don't realize is that they are sabotaging their metabolism. Your metabolism is the rate at which your body burns calories at rest. In the morning, if you don't eat something within two hours of waking, your metabolism will set lower, meaning you will burn less calories and store more in your fat cells. Remember, you don't have to eat right after waking up, and it doesn't need to be a farmer's breakfast (meaning eggs, bacon, toast, etc). It just needs to be within 2 hours and should be something healthy like an egg white sandwich on whole wheat toast, or a yogurt and an orange.

3. Substitute organic low-fat cheese and yogurt for milk and hard cheeses to lessen fat and cholesterol in your diet. Dairy products offer you the easiest and most readily available source of the vital nutrient calcium. However, whole milk products are not recommended for most adults because they contain high amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol. Other than a few teaspoons in your coffee, you never need to drink milk. I personally haven't had milk as a drink for years. Adults can get all the calcium they need from organic low-fat yogurt or cheese and green vegetables.

4. Eating moderately is one of my "seven lifestyle eating principles", and to help you control the amount of food you consume, I recommend using small to medium plates to serve your food. Nine inches across is ideal and all of your meal should fit on that plate. Oh, and for people who may try to stack up the food, your height restriction is 3 inches and the weight should be no more than 12oz. Eating smaller portions is critical to successful weight management. Your stomach is not unlike a balloon. It can get stretched when you overeat. Then, after you have digested, your stomach won't feel quite full again unless it gets expanded the same amount. Here is where you have to train your stomach to be smaller again. Start by tricking your stomach by eating a large salad of basically calorie free lettuce and other salad vegetables (low-fat dressing). This volume will satisfy your stomach's size memory without adding to your fat storage. Then, over the next few days, gradually eat smaller portions at all your meals, while adding some low-fat snacks, like an apple or yogurt, in between meals so you don't feel real hungry. Eventually, your stomach will get accustomed to the less stretched size and will feel full on less.

5. Eat slowly. This is an exercise in mindfulness and research has shown that people who eat faster tend to eat more than people who eat slower. What eating slower does is it allows you time to be conscious of what you have eaten, the time you are eating, and how much you have eaten. Knowing how full you are is different from feeling like your taste buds want more stimulation. Practice eating six bites or spoonfuls (about 1 and 1/2 ozs) of whatever food your eating and chewing each mouthful completely. Then pause. Take a sip of water and try to gauge how full you feel. You may feel full already, or need only a couple of bites more to be satiated. Even if eating slower doesn't lead to eating much less, it is still a good exercise in mindfulness and can give you a greater appreciation of food and the time we spend nourishing our bodies.