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When we eat more calories than we burn we gain fat.

The scale goes up. 

The same is true of the opposite; when we eat less calories than we burn we lose fat.

The scale goes down. 

Knowing how closely related calories are to scale weight is important because we can use the scale to indirectly measure calorie intake. 

AKA no food logging. 

Doing so is easy. 

Find a weight range you are comfortable with. Remember the weight classes wrestlers were dividing into in high school?...

When I was growing I was taught to filter my speech with the suggestion: "Would you say it to your grandma?"

Now I ask clients about their eating and exercise with: "Would you teach it to your kids?"

Like a teenager losing half their vocabulary with the first filter the second one eliminates a whole bunch of diet and workout BS. 

Would ya teach your kids not to eat carbohydrates ala keto?

How about having them consume half their daily nutrition from powders  and all of their vitamins...

Believing there are good and bad foods, or cheat and non cheat, or any other black and white break down is a distorted way to think of food. Such labeling of food often leads to binge eating. 

There is no such thing as good food or bad food. Or a right food or wrong food. There is no such thing as a fattening food or fat burning food.

If you want to lose fat the only way to do it is to be in a calorie deficit. It doesn’t matter where the calories come from in a purely a fat loss...

I will eat right when things calm down. 

When she was younger Kelly was able to maintain a healthy weight because of all the sports she played. As she got older and settled into her career as an accountant she started steadily gaining weight. Her desk job was sedentary and she missed all the activity her younger years provided. Over the course of a decade she gained close to fifty pounds of fat. She reached a point where she had to do something about it and started working to lose...

Your first priority should be you. If you don’t take care of yourself first you won’t be much use to anyone else. 

One way to get stuck is to get your priorities wrong. Getting them right is harder than it sounds. When I started personal training I worked with a bunch of people who were older than me. I was 20 ish and spent my days walking clients through exercise sessions. It doesn’t take many counted out loud sets for the conversation to shift to the person...

How is modern more stressful? 

Many modern stressors simply mimic danger whereas the responses we developed were to actual danger. That traffic jam is not as threatening as the pack of hungry predators. Your boss’s bad mood pales in comparison to the dangers of an unsheltered snow storm. Our modern situations seem stressful psychologically but they don’t present the same physical threat we have grown accustomed to. Today our stressors are small but constant. In the...

It seems like having to calculate your eating and moving will turn everything into a tiresome book keeping chore. Where does it leave spontaneity and its joyful abandon to the whim of the moment? Learning to watch our food and movement doesn't mean we need to turn into accountants who constantly weigh our decisions against an endless balance sheet. Actually, the opposite typically happens. It is true logging everything you eat may be hard and annoying. But once you get good at it there are...

It is hard to be content right now. When the mind is not occupied by a specific task, like a job or conversation, thoughts begin to wander in random circles. In this case “random” does not mean that there is an equal chance of having happy and sad thoughts. What happens instead is that the majority of thoughts that come to mind when we are not concentrating are likely to be depressing. There are two reasons for this.

First, the number of negative things to think about always...

Until the 1950's the word priority was mostly used singularly. It wasn't until the misguided belief that multi tasking is a good idea spread that priority turned into priorities (plural). Now we assume we need numerous priorities and multitasking is the way to get them done. Deven thought working this way deeply affects our productivity A study by Microsoft found that focusing on more than one priority at a time reduces productivity up to 40%. Hewlett Packard found the IQ of those interrupted...

Take control of your stress

It’s important you know how to manage your stress. Practicing stress management daily will help keep you healthy. 

The skill of de stressing

One of my favorite quotes is:

“Just when you feel you have no time to relax, know that this is the moment you most need to make time to relax.” Matt Haig

Most of us in North America have a mistaken view of relaxing. We think our 1 to 2 annual vacations are enough time to rest up from our...