Tag Archives: paleo

How Often Should You Have a Cheat Day?

July 13, 2014Uncategorizeddiet, dieting, exercise, Fitness, lose weight, Low Carb, Motivation, N. L. P., NLP, paleo, Pounds, shred, success, take action, workoutadvancedweightlossresources

Restricting yourself from pleasure foods can be difficult. This is why cheat days or cheat meals are so important. Cheat meals allows you to indulge in foods that you may have been craving and also re-activate your fat burning hormones.

But these indulgences are shrouded in mystery. How often should your cheat? Should you cheat the whole day or just one meal? Can you have anything you want? These are just some of the questions that people ask when considering a scheduled cheat.

First off, I would like my readers to consider that I am not a dietitian. I’m just a guy who lost sixty pounds. My only credential is success. With that in mind, lets move on.

The truth is, there is no right answer to when and how often one should have a scheduled cheat. This is due to the fact that everyone is different. However, I do have general recommendations. For example, I recommend that a person refrains form cheating for the first six weeks of their diet. While there may be some exceptions to this, those exceptions are few and far between. The first six weeks are critical. This is where you retrain your body to mobilize fat storage habitually. This means that the body is training to use fat storage rather than store fat preferentially.

After the first six weeks, I recommend a cheat day without limits. In other words, I don’t care when, how long, or what you eat on your cheat day. The only thing is you must have one. And it must be at least two feeding. After the first cheat day, I recommend that a person go on the induction phase of the low-carb diet again. Going on the induction phase after a cheat will accelerate the fat burning process.

As a person progresses the more cheats he or she can have. It could go from every six weeks to every four weeks to every three to ten days. There is no hard-and-fast rule. But your cheats must be monitored carefully. If you are gaining weight, then you need to stop and give yourself another four to six weeks to once again re-adjust your body.

How many feeding should you have? Again, there is no strict rule. However, I recommend that cheat day is not really a day. It’s good to avoid all carbs the first half of the day. Then have two cheat meals along with a snack and a dessert. It should last between six to eight hours. If you have been on a low-carb diet for more than six months with success, then I recommend that after your cheat meal you go back on the induction phase of the diet for about three to five days.

What can you have on your cheat day? The sky really is the limit. However, the common mistake is not eating enough carbs or trying to eat only low-glycemic carbs. Remember cheat days are a time to indulge. These indulgences help psychologically and physically.

Finally, success is the only measure of a diet. Don’t be afraid to adjust and readjust as needed. And remember, cheaters always win by losing!

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July 10, 2014UncategorizedBuilding, coaching, diet, exercise, Fitness, free offer, healthy eating, lose weight, Low Carb, Motivation, Muscle, NLP, paleo, Pounds, shred, success, take action, Weight, Weight Loss, workoutadvancedweightlossresources

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The Importance of Cheat Day (Why Diets Fail)

July 8, 2014weight losscoaching, diet, exercise, Fitness, food, health, Low Carb, Motivation, NLP, paleo, Pounds, shred, success, take action, Weight Loss, workoutadvancedweightlossresources

How did you spend your Fourth of July? I spent mine eating bagels, donuts, cookies, potatoes, potato chips, corn chips, and ice cream (among other things). But I did not fall off the wagon. Rather I indulged in a well deserved cheat day.

If you do not already know, a cheat day is a day when you can eat all those foods that you do not normally eat. Foods that are “bad for you.” Cheat days are important and you should not skip them. Why are they so important? Here are two reasons.

Psychological

In an earlier post, I talked about one of the reasons why diets fail. And that reason was an un-manageability factor. In other words, any diet that is going to work has to be a diet that you can live with.

How does this concept figure into a cheat day? Well, what if you were on a diet that forbid you to eat any unhealthy food–ever. Could you do this? I know I could not. While I love eating healthy, I also love some unhealthy foods as well. If I were told I could never eat them again, eventually I would break down and go off the diet. And without the regulation one gets form cheat day, I would probably continue to eat unhealthy food and regain weight.

But this is not a problem when you have a scheduled cheat day. I know that all my sacrifice is going to pay off. I know that there is a day coming when I can eat all those pleasure foods I have been avoiding. And the best part is I’m not breaking my diet! Cheat day gives me the psychological advantage to continue to eat healthy between indulgence days. I don’t have to live without those foods forever. All I have to do is weight a little while.

Health Benefits

The other reason to have a cheat day has to do with the health benefits that accompany them. That’s right. Cheat days have health benefits. It is not all just indulgences.

How is cheat day healthy? As many of you know (particularly those of you who follow a low-carb diet), fat loss is a hormonal process. As you lose weight, you also decrease the production of weight-loss hormones. When you have a cheat day, you re-set all your fat burning hormones. This becomes very important when you are trying to continue to lose weight. In fact, not having enough cheat days is one of the reasons why people plateau and stop losing weight.

So enjoy your cheat day. And don’t cheat your self out of it!

One last thing. You may be wondering how often you should have a cheat day. You may also be wondering what and how much you can have on a cheat day. Keep coming back to this blog to find out.

Find Something New to Love (Get Motivated to Lose Weight)

June 30, 2014UncategorizedBuilding, dieting, exercise, Fitness, food, health, healthy eating, Low Carb, Motivation, Muscle, N. L. P., paleo, Weight Lossadvancedweightlossresources

Dieting can be tough. However, if you only think about how tough it is, you are bound to fall off the wagon. This is one of the reasons why diets fail. The dieter focuses on the food they are not allowed to have. This kind of fixation will ultimately result in feelings of despair and want. That is a recipe for failure.

Of course, there are many, many ways to fix this problem. I will, more than likely, address a verity of techniques to overcome negative dwelling patterns. But in this blog, I want to discuss one thing that is bound to put yourself in the right frame of mind so you can stick to you weight-loss program. And that one thing is simply this: Find something to love. What I mean by this is find some new activity or aspect of your new life to throw yourself into. Here are some suggestions:

1. Low-carb Cooking: Some have thrown themselves into low-carb cooking. There is a lot of fun in learning how to cook delicious food without the high-carb ingredients. Challenge yourself in the kitchen. Grab a low-carb cookbook and try a new recipe every night, or at the very least once a week. I am particularly fond of low-carb desserts.

2. Martial Arts: This is a personal favorite of mine. I have been involved in the Martial Arts since I was seven-years-old. Not only will you learn new skills, but you will also dramatically improve your confidence. There is nothing like knowing that you can defend yourself if needed.

3 Weight Lifting: Get your pump on! Lifting weights is one of the quickest ways to see results in your body. This creates an upward spiral. The more positive changes you see, the more you will want to weight lift. The more you weight lift the more positive results you will see. Eventually, you just keep going in a positive direction.

Here are just a few ideas. I’m sure you can come up with some of your own. And in no time at all you will find something new you love even more than bad food.

Make a Declaration

June 26, 2014Uncategorizedexercise, Fitness, Low Carb, Motivation, NLP, paleo, Weight Lossadvancedweightlossresources

A client of mine recently fell of the wagon after only a few weeks on his diet program. Of course, I asked him what happened. He said that his mother invited him over for a Saturday dinner. When he arrived, he found that the meal was spaghetti. There was not a low-carb option. In addition, spaghetti was a personal weakness for him. It is no surprise that he broke down and indulged.

But this leads to the question: How could this situation have been avoided? Here is one thing to keep in mind: Not everyone knows we are on a specialized eating plan. This is particularly true for those who have just started. My client’s mother is not clairvoyant. She could not have known that her son needed to stay away from high-carb foods.

This is less of a problem for those of us who have been eating healthy for some time. For example, most (if not all) of the people in my social circle know that I have specialized dietary needs. They also know that I am committed to this kind of lifestyle. As a result, I’m usually in a situation where there is a low-carb option. But this was not the case when I first started. I had to tell my friends and family that I was on a new weight-loss plan. I had to make a declaration.

Of course some of my friends had seen me fail on diets before. Because of this, friends would invite me to places where there was very few low-carb items on the menu. In other words, they did not think I was serious. However, this happened less and less as time went on. The more my friends saw me make good decisions the less they invited me to places where bad decisions were the only option. But it started with a declaration.

My client’s situation may have been avoided if he declared in advance to his family that he was on a low-carb diet. He could have asked his mother to help him make a healthy decision. Would this have solved the problem. Not necessarily. His mother may have chosen to serve spaghetti anyway. But it would have given his mother the choice to either help or hinder her son’s goals.

When you first start a new weight-loss program, you need to stack the deck in your favor. Making a declaration will at least let people know that you are serious about your health goals. And in fact, staying silent about your dietary needs is really just another way of declaring, “I’m not really committed to make a change.”

Make a Commitment Already!

June 16, 2014Uncategorizeddiet, exercise, Low Carb, Motivation, paleo, success, Weight Loss, workoutadvancedweightlossresources

When people find out that I have lost 60 LBS, they often ask me how I did it. I don’t generally like to give out all my information for free, seeing that I am in the health and fitness industry. However, I will give them generalities, the kind of thing any one can find on the internet. I will tell them to stay away from carbs. I mention bread, potatoes, sugar, rice, and pasta specifically. Then I will hand them a business card and let them know if they are serious they can contact me for a more thorough health plan.

The sad thing is very few (I mean very few) people are committed enough to make an appointment. What’s even sadder is that the majority (the overwhelming majority) of those people who are only looking for free advice fail in reaching their weight loss goals. In fact, over time, I have seen them get further away from any type of health improvement.

But, if they did just make the commitment and set an appointment, they would gain so much. They would gain a mentor who has been there and knows what it is like to lose weight. They would gain the strategies that I have learned in pushing past plateaus. They would also learn the techniques that I have applied to myself and others that help overcome laziness and stay motivated.

So why are people so reluctant to make the commitment? Well, there is probably not just one answer to this question. But I would venture to guess that one reason is they just don’t think that the consultation worth paying for. What that really means is they do not think success is worth it’s price. It’s true that success has it’s price, but so does failure. And the price of success carries far less of a price tag than the price of failure.

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