The Official Blog of Tara Marie Segundo, M.A.
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!
Are you having trouble designing the perfect exercise program to reach your goals? If you can’t afford a pricey personal trainer and need to create a balanced, effective exercise program on your own, consider the F.I.T. PRINCIPLE. F-I-T stands for frequency, intensity and time. These three variables can be manipulated to generate different results based on what you are trying to achieve.
I often get asked about easy ways to monitor one’s heart rate during exercise. I am normally not a big stickler about this, as your body has a way of telling you when you need to slow down. However, some people must monitor their heart rate diligently due to a previous cardiac event or another health issue. These people should wear a heart rate monitor, which will provide an accurate, up-to-the-minute reading of their heart rate.
For people for whom there is no cardiac issue to consider, there are 3 easy ways to gauge exercise intensity without the use of a monitor.
