It seems that it is now too much for our children to actually expend a few calories in their quest for countless endless candy. (Or is it that we’re too out of shape to accompany them on foot?) So we load up our Darth Vaders, Harry Potters, and Lady Gagas in the back of pick-up trucks, on trailers, or on golf carts, and chauffeur them from house to house. Which still wouldn’t be so bad if they actually had to get out of the vehicle and run up to the door, ring the bell, and yell “Trick or Treat!”

But that’s inconvenience. So in many neighborhoods – especially those with long driveways – the kind folks dispensing the candy sit at the end of the driveway, waiting for the next truck load of kids, and then stand up and put the candy in the bags of the children, without the children actually having to move.

The scene I witnessed last night was eerie. No kids, testing the level of their courage by approaching strange front doors, lit only by light of jack-o-lantern. No kids, running with glee from a house where they scored a full-size chocolate bar. And no quick shuffling parents, trying to keep up with the exuberance of children hopped up on sugar. It was mostly motorized vehicles moving slowly up and down the street as good-willed neighbors delivered the goods curbside.

Most of the children were calm. The parents were subdued. Movement was discouraged. Just take your candy, say “Thank You,” and behave as if you were in school. Orderly, safe, fat, and unhealthy.

The best part (if you asked the child) of being transported through trick-or-treating is that children probably gathered far more candy than they could have on foot. But is that the point? Get as much candy as you can without having to expend any energy, or have an adventure, to get it?

The drive-thru mentality has permeated even Halloween. And we parents are leading the way.

How do you lose weight?

I always wonder when I’m asked this, does the person want the real answer or are they looking for a shortcut? Doesn’t matter… I’ll give you both.

As much as we’d like to deny or ignore it, our bodies gain weight or lose weight based on the amount of calories we take in versus the amount of calories we burn. Calories are simply a measure of energy. So if you consume food that contains 2000 calories and your body only burns 1500 calories through the day, you have an energy surplus of 500 calories for the day. If you do that for the whole week, you will gain a pound of body fat (a pound of fat is 3500 calories.)

If you want to lose weight, create a calorie deficit rather than a calorie surplus. That forces your body to tap into its fat stores to make up the difference. So if you consume 1500 calories in a day, but you burn 2000 calories by adding some exercise to your routine, your body will dig into 500 calories worth of fat. You do this for a week and you will lose a pound of pure body fat.

Simple right? It should be. Your body was created by elegant design and when you feed it quality, calorie-appropriate food and you move it the way it was designed to move, you have harmony.

The problem is, we impatient Americans don’t want lasting weight loss and harmony. We want to fit into our skinny jeans by next week. So we devise short cuts and quick fixes, with disastrous results.

We decide that if a 500-calorie-a-day deficit will create a one-pound-a-week weight loss, then a 1000-calorie-a-day deficit will be twice as good, and a 1500-calorie-a-day deficit will be even better! Why lose only one pound a week if you can lose three?

The problems begin with something called a resting metabolic rate (RMR). This is the amount of calories your body burns at complete rest. It is the amount of calories you need for your brain to function properly and for your body not to cannibalize itself (eat its own muscles) to provide the energy it needs. That RMR for most people is between 1000 and 1800 calories.

When you drop below your RMR, your body can still function, but it does so by tearing down healthy tissues. The body believes its starving to death so it begins to pull energy from anywhere it can.

And most people can’t drop their calories below their RMR by themselves. Nature intended this as a protective measure. So they use dangerous diet drugs or other foreign substances to help them.

For this intended “short-cut,” you are ingesting dangerous substances, even if a doctor gives them to you (the FDA just asked Abbott Labs to remove Meridia from pharmacies because of the increased risk of heart attack and stroke it causes.) You are also cutting your calories way below what your body needs to survive, forcing your body to go into starvation mode, eating both fat and muscle… and sometimes even shutting down organs.

You will definitely lose weight on the quick fix diet. And yes, friends and coworker will comment on how great you look. A loss of 30 pounds or more, especially in a month, is tough not to notice. But what happens when you begin eating like a healthy human again? You spent a month convincing your body you were starving, and now your body is primed to store fat, and your RMR is now much lower than it was before – because your amazing body adapts! So now, if you eat any realistic amount of calories, your body will instantly store it as pure fat! This is called yo-yo dieting and it is the result of almost any drastic, quick fix diet. Your 30-pound weight loss turns into a 50-pound weight gain two months after you complete the diet.

We see this all the time in our studio. In fact, a client just started with us, after a local doctor had prescribed a drug, she lost weight, had heart problems, and gained back twice as much weight just two months after her “successful” weight loss! She wants real, lasting weight loss this time. Unfortunately, since the quick fix diet damaged her metabolism, she’ll have to work even harder.

So, that’s how you lose weight: 1. Reduce your calories by no more than 25% through daily exercise and sensible eating so that your weight loss is permanent or 2. Create a radical calorie deficit, ingest dangerous drugs to do so, lose lots of weight and gain it all back plus 20 pounds in two months.

I was in the grocery store earlier this week and there was a woman with two small children standing in the checkout line in front of me.

Her cart was filled to the brim with junk. Not one fresh vegetable that I could see and I think the only fresh fruit I caught a glimpse of was green grapes. When the cashier finished ringing her up, her total came to around $175 or so. The woman replied, “I can’t believe how much money I spend on food! It’s crazy!”

Here’s the kicker, she was talking on her iPhone, carrying a Louis Vuiton handbag, and her nails were perfectly manicured. And she was complaining about how much it costs to feed her family.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about looking great and I love new technology and pretty handbags…but what bothers me is where our priorities seem to be trending. We feed our families pre-made and processed foods and eat out on an average of 1-2 times per week (according to a recent Gallup poll, this number excludes those who never eat out). We complain about how expensive it is to eat healthy, fresh foods, yet we’ll pay upwards of $300+ for a cell phone, $200 for a Nintendo DS for our kids, $200+++ for a designer handbag or shoes….you get my drift.

“The average monthly dollar estimate for eating dinner out is $121, or a third of the total amount Americans say they typically spend on groceries for the entire month ($364).” -Gallup

Though it may be “cheaper” to buy Costco-bulk processed foods or packaged snacks, think about the long-term costs:

Many attention-deficit and lack of concentration-related issues in children and adults are linked to improper diet and lack of exercise. Consider the long-term costs of doctors, time out of school/work, medication, and not to mention the emotional effects on you and your family.

If you eat whole, natural foods you and your family are less likely to overeat. In fact, it’s almost impossible to overeat when you eat whole foods. So you might spend less on packaged foods, but most processed foods actually physiologically trigger you to eat more because of the deadly combination of fat, sugar, chemicals, and lack of real nutrients to satisfy you.

6 foods to get the most bang for your buck:

• Nuts (buy in bulk and freeze what you’re not going to eat over the next week)
  
• Beans (canned or dry) – cheapest form of the perfect combo of energy-filled carbohydrates, protein, and filling-fiber
  
• Fruits and Vegetables that are in-season – if you try to buy anything out of season, you’ll pay upwards of 2-3 times as much
  
• Frozen fruits and vegetables - for “veggie-emergencies.” Green beans, spinach, edamame, and other greens are great frozen options. I love using frozen fruit for my protein shakes.
  
• Eat less meat. If you pay $1.99-$4.99+/pound for meat, you can easily substitute your protein with a meal of beans and fresh vegetables for roughly the same price. It might take a little work to find some new recipes, but worth it in the end!
  
• Grains - whole oats, barley, quinoa, brown rice…these are easier to cook with than you realize
  

Money WASTERS:

• Bars (of any kind…granola bars, “health” bars, snack bars, kids bars). These should be down to “Plan E” food options
  
• Chips & crackers - don’t believe the “whole grain” hype on most chips and crackers, most still contain a primary ingredient of processed refined flour and often have heart-clogging fats.
  
• Most Boxed Cereals - most cereals (even the ‘healthy’ ones) do not carry enough full nutrition to really start your day the right way. Many are loaded with sugar and processed flours. Make your own granola with your whole oats, make oatmeal…look to add some new breakfast foods to your recipe rolodex.
  
• There’s a whole lot more…mostly what you’re buying from the “center” of your grocery store. Stick to the perimeter of the store, and you’re usually in better shape to make good choices!
  

So, moral of the story? Absolutely enjoy your technology, nice handbags, and manicures…revel in giving your children fun new toys, but make sure you’re spending your money in the right places when it comes to what you’re feeding you and your family…this way you can enjoy your handbags and manicures for a lot longer and enjoy those crazy new tech gadgets they keep thinking up!

Lindsay Vastola, CFT is corporate manager-turned-fitness professional specializing in designing fitness programs for the success-driven career woman. Updated frequently, you can find information on Lindsay’s latest transformation programs, online workouts, and nutrition tips on her blog at http://www.BeABoardroomBabe.com. She is also the founder of Body Project Fitness located in Central New Jersey. Her goal is to help the ambitious career woman get to the top and look damn good while she’s at it!

The anorexic, a 26-year-old who weighs 73 pounds (and was crying because last time she weighed she was at an even 70) has body that’s shutting down, but continues to choose to starve herself. Even though she knows in her head that what she is doing is killing her body, and killing her family, she still defines herself by what the scale says and will live in a totally sick way to manipulate those numbers.

Then there was the stay-at-home mom who should be called a stay-in-bed mom, because most days she chooses her pillow and comforter rather than engaging with her healthy, beautiful family. She isn’t really physically sick, but acts that way, because being in bed is easier than taking responsibility for your life.

When you cocoon yourself in sickness, you create a socially acceptable excuse to not move forward in life. People just feel sorry for you, you feel sorry for you, and your life can just drift away.

The sad thing is, most of us know somebody who chooses sickness over wellness. They don’t think they are, but when they choose to be very overweight, unfit, eat in a way the causes regular headaches, stomachaches, digestion issues, when they choose depression and sadness over gratitude and getting help, when they choose addictions that will cut their lives short – they are most certainly choosing to be sick.

What a waste…

It seems the hCG diet, from the infamous and laughable research done in the 1950s by Dr. A.T.W. Simeon on young boys with underdeveloped gonads, is making the rounds in men and women eager to subject their bodies to anything in hopes of losing weight quickly. Dr. Simeon believed that the use of the hCG hormone was causing these underdeveloped boys to lose weight, so he decided to switch his focus from injecting young boys with a foreign substance to help them develop genitalia to injecting overweight people with a foreign substance to see if they could lose weight.

But what is hCG? Glad you asked. It is a hormone that appears in pregnant women around the 14 week of pregnancy. It is believed that Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (hcG) not only helps the developing fetus grow gonads (that’s the Gonadotropin part of the name), it also helps insure that the fetus receives plenty of nutrients during a stage in the pregnancy when the woman may not yet know she’s pregnant, and, in leaner times in history, may not be eating enough for two.

In short, Dr. Simeon thought that injecting healthy non-pregnant people with a pregnancy hormone was the key to weight loss. However, the only way it worked was when the subject dropped their calories to no more than 500 calories per day!

Really? That’s the amazing discovery? Doesn’t it stand to reason that I could inject small doses of Yoo-hoo Chocolate Drink into a person, or place happy drops of sunshine under a person’s tongue (hCG can also be administered sublingually – which doesn’t make it any safer or more effective) and they would lose weight because they are starving themselves on 500 calories a day!!

At 500 calories a day, it doesn’t matter what else you do, you will lose weight! You don’t need any quack telling you to fill your body with pregnancy hormones ( that should be a major RED FLAG!) if you are also going to eat only 500 calories a day!

So yes, I’m telling you that you will lose weight on the hCG diet. You can’t help but lose weight when you are starving yourself. But if you think you’re just losing body fat, think again. When you go on the hCG diet, you’ll also be instructed not to exercise during the 26 – 43 days you are on the diet. This is because you will be too weak to move on only 500 calories and because your body is cannibalizing itself – eating away at it’s healthy muscles – just to sustain itself. Your body will try to preserve as much fat as possible – regardless of what hormone you’ve added to the mix – because it believes it is starving and would rather sacrifice muscle than let go of the fat it may need in a month or two if this “famine” continues.

So once the diet is finished, the bathroom scale may announce a number you like better, but your health – and future ability to fight off body fat – has been compromised… so get ready for the Yo-Yo to bounce sky high. After a body has been through a famine – either real or self-induced (like this diet) – it is stoked to store as much fat as it can. It’s metabolism is shot, it has much less muscle mass (one of the reasons the metabolism is shot), and it wants more than anything to have more fat so that it can survive the next famine/diet. When you return to eating like a normal, healthy person, those fat cells will fill up again and reproduce faster than you can say, “What’s for lunch?” And without the benefit of the muscle you had before, or would have gained from exercising, you will weigh 10 – 20 pounds more than you did when you started the diet, most likely within 6 months after its done.

Remember, the hCG diet is not FDA approved. (hCG is FDA approved as a fertility drug, but not as a diet aid!) There have been absolutely no long-term studies proving the safety or enduring effectiveness of this diet. You are literally risking your long-term health and almost ensuring an unwinnable battle against excess fat in the future. Ask any reputable health professional and you’ll hear the same thing.

I know it sucks, but the truth is there are no quick fixes. Losing weight requires two things that are tough – sensible eating and exercise. Those are the only two things that have EVER proved to work, each and every time. No, you won’t lose 30 pounds in 30 days. But you will lose weight at 1 -2 pounds per week, you will gain self-confidence and the self-respect of doing what your body has been begging you to for decades, and you will never face that awful Yo-Yo factor again.

Do it right. You really are worth it.

So, BANG…here you go!

Lil J’s Firecracker Workout

Equipment necessary: dumbbells, stability ball, medicine ball (or you could use your stability ball if you needed to!), cones for suicides (if you really want to ratchet up the intensity!)

20 reps of all exercises before moving on to the next one in the circuit

Circuit 1

Back lunge, Right side lunge, Left side lunge, Firecracker – Jump lunges

Run suicide on four cones

Circuit 2

V-ups, Crunches, Plank (20 sec. count), Firecracker – Stability ball pass from feet to hands

Run suicide on four cones

Circuit 3

Lateral raises w/ dumbbells, Shoulder press w/ dumbbells, Tricep kickbacks w/ dumbbells, Firecracker – Med ball (or Stability ball) slam, side to side

Run suicides on four cones

Circuit 4

Squats (regular), Sumo squats, Pulse squats (ouch!), Firecracker – Jump squats

Run suicides on four cones

Circuit 5

Upright row w/ dumbbells, Reverse flys w/ dumbbells, Bent-over rows w/ dumbbells, Firecracker – Supermen (pulse upward w/ power!)

Run suicides on four cones

Circuit 6

Jumping jacks, High-knees, Butt-kicks, Firecracker – Mountain Climbers

Oh yeah, and run suicides on four cones J

No-Sweat Beach Workout

Do 10 reps of each exercise and jog between each set at the chair and in the water.

Repeat the sequence 3 – 5 times. For a longer workout, add a 10-minute beach run between each sequence.

By the way, this workout works in your backyard if you’re taking a stay-cation. Put out a lawn chair and run about 30 feet from the chair to perform your “water” exercises.

Rock on, beach girls!

Jan’s Energy Balls

1/2 CUP PEANUT BUTTER
1/2 CUP SUNFLOWER SEEDS
1 TBLS AGAVE NECTAR
1/2 CUP ROLLED OATS
1 CUP RAISINS
1 TBS FLAX SEED MEAL
 
MIX ALL INGREDIENTS TOGETHER. MAKE INTO BALLS AND REFRIGERATE FOR AT LEAST 30 MIN!

I’m headed to Florida next week for some R&R beachside with some incredible friends. So watch for the next Fun Girl post to come from the hopefully-not-too-oily Santa Rosa beach!

Rock on, Fun Girls!

As per their request, here’s that workout.. for your own enjoyment in your backyard, neighborhood, or neighbor’s pool (make sure you make that friendly neighbor do the workout with you!) 

Two-minute alternating stations – shallow and deep. Perform each exercise for two minutes before moving to the other side of the pool for the next exercise.
 

Aqua Circuit – in any order. Perform each exercise for 30 seconds or 15 repetitions.
 

• Diving board pull –ups. Get your chin above the diving board
• Leg extensions at edge of pool. Hold the edge of the pool behind your head. Extend your body and legs out and pull in.
• Push-ups against the edge. Use the water as resistance as you push back forcefully.
• Tricep dips on a pool bench or on the outer edge of a hot tub. (Yes, there is more interesting things to do in a hot tub…)
• Squats in shallow end with lateral kick right. Use the water as resistance to the lateral kick.
• Squats in shallow end with lateral kick left.
• Step ups on pool steps. Alternate lead foot.
• Lap swim.
• ½ push-outs. Imagine you are pushing yourself out of the pool. Push through the heels of your hands on the edge of the pool until your upper body is out of the water. Then release.
• Pool edge crunches. Put your feet over the edge with the back of your knees all the way up to the edge. Recline back and crunch upward. To perform a fuller range of motion, hold your breath and duck under water on each reclining motion.

Repeat the circuit 2 or 3 times, taking a break only between circuits, for a full-body strength and cardio workout! 

Rock on, Fun Girls! 

Beyond the fact that you don’t normally see many 80-year-old women in a serious training facility, Sara is different in a way that’s tough to put a finger on. Yes, she’s willing to tackle a tough exercise program – the first regular program in her life – when most women are making their way to the rocking chair. Yes, she’s magnetic and personable. But I think truly makes Sara extraordinary is the sense of courage, survival, and love that she wears like a familiar perfume.

Sara says she began training with me two years ago because of osteoporosis and diminishing strength. I believe, however, that she also wanted something in her life… after 78 years… that was totally her own. Sara is naturally thin, so weight was not an issue. But like many women who don’t exercise, she had a high level of body fat on that thin frame. We took measurements so we could track her progress as she shed the body fat (her granddaughter called the flab on the backside of her arm “fluffery”) and regained some muscle.

Sara eventually performed bent over rows, planks, and dips like women a quarter of her age. And we watched her body fat drop and her lean muscle grow. Her balance improved immensely and she had more energy than ever.

And then one day her weight began to drop unexpectedly. Every time we weighed in, she had lost more than I felt she could afford. And she was tired.

Sara was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer, but told very few people. She told her doctor that she wanted to pursue aggressive treatment only when necessary. She continued her workouts and regular life. Eventually the doctor recommended chemotherapy. The cancer had gotten worse.

Sara complied, envisioning the radiation killing off the cancer and making her stronger with every treatment.

During her chemo, Sara made almost all of her workouts. She was more tired than normal, and would have to rest between sets, but she stayed her course, knowing she couldn’t neglect her body at a time she needed it’s powers the most.

And Sara won.

This week we celebrated Sara’s news of the remission of her cancer. She had long admired two of my clients’ 1931 Model A Ford that she had seen before one of her workouts. Ray and Jane, owners of this most awesome car, said that one day we’d all go for a ride.

After toasts of mimosas to Sara’s great health, Ray and Jane took Sara and I on that ride through our historic town square last Wednesday. Sara’s beautiful white hair blew in the wind as wound our way through wildflower pastures and over the lake… all with the top down. She looked like a queen.

The sun shone gently on this perfect day… as if to say, “This is for you, Sara, and the light you bring to this world.”

To the ultimate Fun Girl… beautiful, healthy, radiant, and tackling an challenge with an uncommon courage. Thank you for your inspiration, Ms. Sara!