The Official Blog of Tara Marie Segundo, M.A.
Want to have a social life this holiday season while watching your weight? Here are some easy tips to keep your waistline in check and still enjoy the dolce vita. I call this list, TEN WAYS TO ENJOY A PARTY AND NOT REGRET IT IN THE MORNING!
1. Don’t be a two-fisted eater. Slow down, chew, talk, and keep one hand free to wave at your friends across the room!
2. Drink smart. If you want to drink alcohol, drink one glass of sparkling water between imbibing in the fun stuff! This will fill you up and slow down your intake of alcohol (and empty calories).
3. NEVER go to a party famished. There are two reasons for this: there may not be any (even moderately) healthy fare offered, and arriving starved will undoubtedly lead to binge eating!
4. No loitering allowed! Back away from the buffet after you have filled a plate, and go to the other side of the room to mix and mingle. Hang out under the mistletoe, NOT at the buffet table!
Sir Isaac Newton said in his first law of motion, which is also known as the law of inertia, “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”
Newton’s Laws of Motion were first published on July 5, 1687, and since then nothing has changed.
It’s a fact: a body in motion stays in motion, and a body at rest stays at rest. Get up and move your body everyday and you will want to eat in such a way that you feed yourself rather than gorge yourself.
As you think about what you put in your body, I ask you to consider this:
Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.”
The Chinese Proverb states, “He that takes medicine and neglects diet, wastes the skill of the physician.”
William Shakespeare said, “Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.”
Here in America, we have the very simple proverb, “You are what you eat.”
Are you having trouble sticking to an exercise routine and a healthy eating plan? Here are some practical tips that you can put into practice right away!
First of all, forget about motivation! Relying on motivation doesn’t work, and neither does relying on will power. Instead, you need to decide what you want! Do you want to lose body fat, do you want to increase your muscle mass, gain flexibility? Whatever you want, clearly define your goals and write them down.
If you are like me, my whole life is on my computer. I am very careful to back up my files on an external hard drive, and I periodically make DVDs of my files, just in case my external hard drive fails.
I have friends that have suffered through a computer crash and saw what they had to go through to recover from it. I have also had files get damaged and was very grateful to have my back ups. A computer savvy friend of mine suggested that the safest way to back up files is off-site, as if my apartment burns down, the DVDs and the external hard drives will do me no good!
A client asked me the other day about CLA: what it is and how it works in the body. Well known in the world of body building as a “must take” supplement, this is one that I have been taking for years and recommend to all my clients who want to get lean and mean.
CLA stands for conjugated linoleic acid—a fatty acid known for promoting good health. Decades of research indicates that CLA actually changes body composition by reducing body fat and increasing or preserving lean muscle mass—giving you a leaner, healthier appearance. It prevents the storage of fat on your belly and in the liver. Studies have shown that you literally can lose 6-8 lbs. of belly fat in the first 6 months of usage.
When you are trying to transform your body, your health, and your life, there will be pitfalls along the way….that’s just how it is. These pitfalls or “booby traps” are things to which we are all susceptible. The only way to make sure that you don’t stop your forward momentum toward your goal of personal transformation is to challenge your thoughts and the thoughts and opinions of others that could derail you.
I am always asked what I do to get my glutes so round and developed. Since I have designed a very detailed leg/butt routine that consists of thirteen different exercises (doing 4 to 10 sets per exercise), I tell people that there is no brief answer to the question.
However, if I had to choose the top three exercises (of the thirteen in my lower body routine) that really have developed my glutes, I would select the following:
Are you eating a low-fat diet rich in complex carbohydrates with moderate amounts of protein, and you’re still one of the millions of people getting fatter and fatter?
Did it ever occur to you that even though your diet may be low in fat it’s too high in calories, and that’s why you’re not losing weight?
The “eat-all-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-low-fat” approach is the reason that many people think it’s OK to eat half a box of low-fat cookies everyday as an afternoon snack…then they wonder why they can’t zip their pants!
Think of your body as a bank account: if you make more deposits than you do withdrawals, your bank account grows. In the same way, if you consistently eat more calories than you need (and make too many “deposits” in your fat cells) your hips grow!
While there are many factors that determine how many calories your body utilizes each day, the bottom line is that you cannot eat as much as you want just because it’s low in fat; calories do count!
