By Molly Magunga, MS ATC, CPT, CES

Hello everyone! This week’s “Fitness Tip of the Week” is about being successful with healthy nutrition goals. I believe the current focus on diet plans or restricted eating has created a lot more feelings of failure than success. There are too many ways to feel like you have failed or “cheated” on diets. If you are following a diet that is so restrictive that you need to “cheat” the plan to be keep your sanity, it isn’t a sustainable plan long term. The term “yo-yo diet” exists because of this. You start a diet and it seems to work. The moment you stop, you gain the weight back. You then restart the diet again or try a new one. Up, down, up, down. This doesn’t need to be your life forever. If you develop healthy nutrition goals that involve a well-balanced plan, you won’t need cheat days and you won’t fail.

No More Cheat Days

There is a difference between dieting and developing healthy eating habits. One is sustainable long-term and the other isn’t. One has the goal of making the body healthier and the other’s goal is weight loss in a healthy or unhealthy way. You can sacrifice dieting and work towards healthy nutritional goal and still lose weight. When you ditch dieting and work on other all health, you will no longer need cheat days.

The thing with dieting is that most diets are an all-or-nothing set up. A lot are set up where you cut out or severely limit whole food groups. With this mentality, you are so lacking with what your body needs that it leads to binging (over eating). This also leads to a ton of guilt.

“I can’t believe I hate that whole pizza.”

“Why did I even buy that ice cream cone.”

“I am going to have to workout twice a day all week to make up for this week.”

The sad part is that that is exactly how diet culture wants you to feel. Certain diets makes you think that there are good and bad food groups. The truth is that no food is bad in moderation and this over eating is usually because your body is so lacking for what it needs that it over compensates.

Success with your Healthy Nutrition Goals

We know that diets aren’t healthy or sustainable in the long run. If you truly want to live healthier and maintain a healthy weight, you have to play the long game. What do I mean? I mean you need to start with small, sustainable goals. Replace soda with seltzer water. Cook at home twice more a week. Pack your lunch for work instead of purchasing it. Eat one extra serving of veggies a day. Give that small goal a few weeks to work its magic and then you add to it. You will be able to maintain all those small goals over time and really make great improvements to your overall health.

Everyone is starting from different points, so I can’t really give tips on nutrition improvements. What I can provide is some tips to help you be successful with your individual nutrition goals.

• Tip 1: Practice Mindful Eating
  • It’s a lot easier to stray from your goals if you are not actively involved with what you are eating. If possible, try not to eat while working or distracted with things like television. Enjoy your food and be present. Pay attention to your body while you eat. This allows you to know how you feel eating certain foods and knowing when you are full.
• Tip 2: Incorporate Your Favorite Foods
  • Remember, everything in moderation. If you incorporate your favorite foods into your nutrition plan, you will be satisfied with your goals and more successful. There are ways to make your favorite foods healthier as well. If you love pasta or pizza, try different veggie toppings with your favorites to add more food groups.
• Tip 3: Be Kind to Yourself
  • It’s a process making change. Don’t punish yourself if a goal isn’t as easy to maintain as you hoped or you lighten up on a previous goal. Remember why you picked those goals, refocus, and keep trying.
• Tip 4: Hydrate
  • Hydration often becomes an oversight when thinking about nutrition goals. Proper hydration helps regulate your body. Thirst can also be confused with hunger, so keeping your hydration up will help you know better when you need food.

If you have any questions on this topic, feel free to contact me at mmagunga@healthworksfitness.com or comment below!

by Molly Magunga, MS ATC, CPT, CES

Hello everyone! This week’s “Fitness Tip of the Week” is about strength training for weight loss. This is a topic more personal to me because of my own weight loss journey. There are a lot of misconceptions about strength training, as it relates to weight loss. Strength training isn’t something you need to hold off on until after you get to your goal weight. It’s something to incorporate in now to help you get to your goals. I can speak from experience the success you can see by incorporating strength training into your weight loss plan.

The whole goal of weight loss can be simplified by knowing weight loss occurs, for most people, by burning off more calories than you consume. You can either keep your activity level the same while reduce caloric intake, keep diet consistent while increasing activity levels, or a combination of the two. Now, we all know it’s really not that easy and a lot of other factors, like body type or health issues, complicate matters. For this week’s post, I won’t dive into all the other factors that can affect weight loss and simply focus on the benefits of strength training for weight loss.

So why is strength training important for weight loss and what are these misconceptions about it?

When focusing on weight loss as a goal, many people get caught up with the number on the scale. They think getting stronger will cause them to gain more weight and “bulk up.” First off, how much muscle mass you build is largely based on your body type and how your training is structured. Second, focusing on a scale number rather than actual body composition isn’t the best way to monitor weight loss. The reality is doing strength training helps improve your body composition, look leaner, and lose fat weight. The awesome, fun fact about building more muscle is that muscles use a lot of energy, more energy than fat tissue. This means the more muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn at rest! This is why you need to strength train if weight loss is your goal. It doesn’t prevent you from reaching your goals; it helps you!

Tips on Strength Training:

Strength training is a very complex form of exercise with many ways to structure programs. So how can you use strength training to help with weight loss? Well, I have a few tips for you.

1. Challenge yourself
   • Don’t be afraid to use weights that feel heavier to you. If you don’t feel much muscle work happening through an entire set, the weights are too light. As long as your form is correct through the whole set, challenge yourself with the weights you use. You won’t bulk up just because you pick up weights. 

2. More Repetitions
   • Incorporate in higher repetitions of an exercise to really feel the burn. Higher reps challenge your muscle endurance, which depletes more energy and creates lean muscle development.

3. Use Complex Movements
   • Picking exercises that use multiple muscle groups is a great, time-saving trick to burn more calories during your workout. The more muscles working, the more energy burned. 

4. Big lifts are Important
   • Big lifts like squats, deadlifts, bench, or pushups are really important to a weight loss strength program. Big lifts are called that, because they involve large muscle groups and require a lot of energy to complete. 

5. Cardio and Weights Together
   • You shouldn’t pick between cardio or weight training when developing a weight loss plan. Variety helps prevent plateaus and the deplete energy in different ways. 

6. Nutrition Importance
   • No fitness plan is complete without nutrition incorporated in. Besides the calorie consumption component, macronutrients are so important with exercise. Muscles need protein. It’s their bricks. You can’t build or repair muscle tissue without it.

If you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to contact me at mmagunga@healthworksfitness.com or comment below!

by Molly Magunga, MS ATC, CPT, CES

Hello everyone! This week’s “Fitness Tip of the Week” is about macronutrients. The results you see inside the gym are hugely impacted by what you are putting in your body throughout the day. Regardless of your fitness goals, nutrition is a key component to success. A well-balanced diet of what your body needs is like a tool box for your body. It will have everything it needs to build, repair, and make things work! 

There is no way I can break down all the ins and outs of nutrition in one weekly tip, but I think starting with the basics is a good start. By basics, I mean our macronutrients. No matter your goals, every diet starts with how much of each macronutrient you need. There are three in total and they are carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. None of these categories are considered “bad” or off limits. Your goals dictate how you use each of these. Your diet isn’t complete if you aren’t consuming all three on a daily basis. 

Protein:

Your body uses protein as the building blocks within your body. One analogy I like to use to describe how your body uses protein is to think of building a brick house. Your muscles are the finished product, but the protein is the actual bricks. You won’t be able to build a complete house using just mortar. You need the bricks for structure. Protein helps your body build all types of tissue and repair it when it becomes damaged. Often times, we think of our main protein sources as animal based in nature (i.e. steak, chicken, tuna, etc), but there are a lot of great plant based proteins (I.e. soy, lentils, chickpeas, nuts). Any type of physical activity involves muscle work, which means you need protein to help keep your muscles healthy.

Carbohydrates:

It shouldn’t be a surprise that carbohydrates (carbs for short) have the worst reputation of the three macronutrients. The main reason carbs have a bad reputation is they tend to have more calories per serving than proteins, fruits, or vegetables. If you are trying to lose or maintain weight, carbs are usually the macro we are told to lessen to accomplish that, because it cuts out the most calories. They are still a very important macro to have in our diet. Have you ever noticed on days you haven’t gotten enough sleep or are more tired than usual, you tend to crave carbs? Our body craves carbs because they are how our body gets energy. Carbs are the easiest macro for the the body to breakdown and use for energy. They are so important to fuel every system in our bodies, which is far from a “bad” macro.

Fats:

This is another macro that gets a bad name as well. You may be thinking: I’m trying to decrease my body fat percentage, why do I need fats? Well, healthy fats help regulate your metabolism and help with vitamin absorption. The key to nutrition is everything in moderation. Adding a little avocado, olive oil, or nuts to a dish for flavor is all that is needed to keep you body working optimally. The biggest thing to know about this macro is that there are healthy fats and unhealthy fats. Unhealthy fats can be hard on your heart and increase your risk for heart disease. For more information on healthy and unhealthy fats, check out my heart health post from the beginning of this month.

Again, your body and your fitness goals have a lot of influence as to what your personal diet would look like. There are tons of recommendations out there, but working with a professional is the best way to know you are on a good and healthy track to your goals. Life is all about balance, so knowing the right balance for you and your body is all you need to be successful.

If you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to contact me at mmagunga@healthworksfitness.com or comment below!