Having suffered several of my own fitness plateaus, I know the sheer frustration of exercising and dieting as hard as you can with no results. But before you to throw in the sweaty towel and gorge on crème brulee and cannoli, I urge you to take a deep breath and calmly examine whether there are any nutritional obstacles between you and your athletic goals.

For example, many women try too hard by eating too little. I know . . . I know . . . all of our lives we’ve had the mantra drummed into our heads: the less we eat, the thinner, sexier, and fitter we’ll be. Such refrains make fitness experts crazy. One Portland, OR trainer told me about one of her clients who spent a month eating very little and exercising a lot only to gain 7 lbs. of fat and no muscle.

Remember, our bodies think we still live in caves, and are just one failed mammoth hunt away from starvation. By eating too few calories, our bodies scream “Red Alert –Impending Famine” then cling to our fat like a life raft and discard our muscles like yesterday’s garbage. Eating six or seven small meals a day stimulates our metabolism, burns more calories, and reassures our bodies that food is not scarce.

Eating the right foods before and after workouts can end most any fitness rut. I used to begin my morning workouts on an empty stomach only to crash 10 minutes later. I chalked it up to me “not being a morning person,” but what really happens during our empty-tummied energy bonks is this:

Much of the energy we need for exercise comes from a complex carbohydrates that is stored in our muscles and liver as glucose. Even when we sleep, our bodies continue to burn this fuel so that when we awake next morning – having gone 6 + hours without food – our livers have burned about 80 percent of its stored glucose reserves. As we begin our workouts on empty stomachs, we quickly burn the remaining stores causing our arms and legs to turn to jelly as we fall off the treadmill. Now that I eat a light breakfast of protein and carbs an hour before my morning workout, I’ve become a born-again morning person.

Skipping the post-workout meal can result in a loss of muscle that in turn can actually slow metabolism. When we exercise at a moderate to high intensity, we actually deplete fuel or glucose from our muscles and liver. Yet, our brains must have a steady supply of glucose to function properly. If we don’t replenish these stores after our work out, our bodies will break down muscle tissue into amino acids, and then convert them into a usable fuel for the brain. Skipping the post-workout meal can result in a loss of muscle that in turn can actually slow metabolism.

After completing weight-training sessions, we should eat foods rich in protein complex carbs. Resistance training performed at moderate to high intensities breaks down muscle tissues, creating “micro tears.” Proteins build and repair these tears enabling the muscles to become stronger and denser. Carbs, on the other hand, create insulin spikes which help move nutrients to the muscles faster and more efficiently.

My most recent nutritional blunder involved too much wine and whining: I spent evenings sipping Chardonnay while lamenting my inability to lose fat. Then my trainer informed me that even small amounts of alcohol prevent the body from burning fat. In fact, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reported that drinking just two vodka martinis in a one-hour time period can reduce the body’s fat metabolism by as much as 73%.

Most of the alcohol in the body is broken down in the liver by an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which transforms ethanol into compound called acetate. When acetate is released into your blood stream, it replaces fat as your body’s main source for fuel and stops any fat burning you body may have begun. Soon after I cut wine from my diet, my body fat began to slowly decrease.

Finally, if nothing – at least nutritionally – seems to end your plateau, then you may want to reevaluate your fitness goals. Are they athletic objectives like running a marathon or winning a bike race? Or are they aesthetic ones like fitting into a size 4 jeans or having a 25-inch waist? If a small size is so important, then I suggest you look at body size with a new perspective.

Feminist Abra Chernik wrote a moving essay “The Body Politic” describing her long struggle with anorexia nervosa. Instead of being strong and fit, she grew weak and powerless. Chernik explained, “Gazing in the mirror at my emaciated body, I observed a woman held up by her culture as the physical ideal because she was starving, self-obsessed and powerless, a woman called beautiful because she threatened no one but herself.”

Food is not our enemy . . . healthy foods are the one-stop way to reach our long and short-term fitness objectives – no matter what are body sizes may be.

You see, I’m an outdoor-loving adrenaline junkie, and for years I kept fit by climbing up steep cliffs in remote areas or actually any area that had a decent rock face. Then came marriage and children. Rock climbing is not only a dangerous sport, but a time-consuming one as well. I didn’t want to be away from my small children for long periods of time or worse, forever. So I had to look for another form of exercise.

For me, an essential ingredient of a successful workout is cardio. Yet, going from a shear rock face 300 feet above the ground to an Elliptical inside a gym was a difficult transition. I found many of those exercises monotonous. Gradually I invented ways to ease the boredom, several tricks I’d like to share with you.

For a fun cardio session, an iPod or MP3 Player is a must. You’ll want purchase a group of dance songs or at least tunes that have a quick beat. Granted, disco songs are not normally my favorite, but when I’m on the treadmill, I love running to Gloria Gaynor and the Village People. As much as I love the Indigo Girls and Counting Crows, I find it hard to get a stimulating workout listening to their often-doleful ballads. Fun tunes and fast songs enable me to move more and make the time pass a lot faster.

Daydreaming is another useful tactic and costs no money. Some days, – in my head – I’m the first middle-aged American mother to scale K2 when my body is actually on the Stair Climber. Or I pretend I’m finishing an ultra marathon when, in reality, I’m in my first 30 minutes on the Treadmill. Our bodies react to our thoughts whether they’re real or not, which makes daydreaming a sure way to increase your adrenaline and energy while turning minutes into seconds.

Another way to maintain your interest in cardio is to set specific goals for your workout routines. I’ll never forget the time I reached a goal of running a 5k under 30 minutes on the treadmill, or when I lasted a whole hour on the Stair Climber. I also like to make goals for exercising outside. If I run for thirty minutes straight one week, then I’ll hike it up to 35 minutes the next. Perhaps you want to run in a 10K race. Simply go online and find an upcoming event in your area, and train for it. Your workouts will have more focus and meaning, and you’ll feel a wonderful sense of accomplishment once you’ve achieved your goal.

And speaking of running outdoors, if you have hiking paths in your area, use them. Trail running is a fun and scenic way to exercise and you’ll be hard-pressed to feel bored doing it. It’s also great on your body – I’ve talked to too many people who can no longer run on any surface because they blew out a knee or a hip by running on pavement. Leave pavement to the cars.

As a last resort, you can do what I did and get a puppy. Rain or shine, in sickness or in health, I must run this dog at least twice a day. Otherwise, he’ll repay me with even more chewed up furniture and torn-up seat cushions than usual. My canine has been my best motivator yet.

via Running Man- Real Cardio For Real World Results.

Intervals are when you perform cardio in short bursts of speed and intensity with even shorter rests to cool down. This somewhat schizophrenic fast-slow, fast-slow method is not new. Serious runners have used it for almost fifty years.

However, recent studies have shown that incorporating intervals into your workouts will render greater fat loss, increased muscles, and better endurance. It can also improve your cardiovascular fitness and increase your body’s metabolism.

For example, a 2005 research study conducted by University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada examined whether interval training would change the way the body burned fat.

Eight college-age women completed ten sets of four minutes of intense cycling, followed by two minute rests. They completed seven interval workouts within a two-week span. After interval training, the amount of fat they burned in one hour of sustained moderate cycling increased by 36 percent.

British exercise scientists discovered that speed-rest workouts on stationary bicycles increased the subjects’ levels of human growth hormone, a key ingredient in building muscle and burning fat.

In addition, a study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that after just two weeks of interval training, six of the eight college-age men and women doubled their aerobic endurance. The eight volunteers in the control group showed no improvement.
Even if pure running or cycling isn’t your game, you can still choose from a variety of interval workouts.

If you want to improve your cardio fitness and muscular strength, then look no further than the Circuit Interval Workout. You simply perform two mainstays of fitness – strength and endurance – in specific alternating time cycles resulting in excellent overall fitness.

Another first-rate interval weight loss workout is called good old-fashioned hill sprints. Simply charge up a hill or increase the treadmill’s incline and sprint for two minutes, then slowly trot down the hill or lower the incline and jog for one minute, repeat. Three weeks of these killers will give you the strongest quads in your city.

Researchers and fitness experts believe that interval sessions enable you to perform more prolonged high-intensity weight loss workouts than you could in one continual effort. The rests gives your body time to flush out waste products from your working muscles, while lowering your heart rate just in time for you to rev it all up again.

You’ll also train your body to burn fat more efficiently and effectively. As you exercise at maximum capacity, your body employs new muscle fibers. As the fibers develop, they will help the body burn fuel and calories even during light workouts. Now that’s efficiency.

The best part of interval training weight loss workouts? . . . the benefits are noticeable within weeks. After just five interval sessions within 15 days, I was back on track to getting fitness results.

We have all seen men (and some women) with beer bellies caused ostensibly from imbibing too much stoat and pilsner. Yet, only five percent of calories from alcohol convert into fat. The fact is – beer bellies are caused from too much food not too much beer. Although alcohol isn’t the innocent bystander it may seem to be at first.

Research shows that alcohol inhibits your body’s feeling of satiety. For example, in 2005, the European Journal of Endocrinology found a clear connection between alcohol intake and ghrelin inhibition. Ghrelin is a crucial hormone that controls our feelings of hunger and satiation. So with more beer comes more pretzels, chips, and other bar grubs.

In addition, a Canadian study shows that alcoholic drinks increase our appetites more than carbohydrate-based beverages. And researchers from Denmark’s Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University came up with similar findings. Here, they gave a group of men a series of meals and told them to eat as much as they wanted. They ate more when the meals were served with beer than when they were given soft drinks.

To make matters worse for our bellies and waistlines, scientists have linked alcohol consumption to problems with insulin. A large study at the Graduate School of Medical Science at Kyushu University found that people who regularly drank alcohol showed decreased in insulin sensitivity. And if you’re insulin resistant, you will more readily gain weight, especially in your middle. You’ll also have greater chances of developing Type II diabetes.

Yet, I’ll never forget what I learned when I hit a seemingly endless weight loss plateau. My trainer told me that my nightly Chardonnays could be preventing my body from burning fat. Strong evidence supports the fact that even small amounts of alcohol inhibit your body’s fat-burning abilities.

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a study in which eight men drank two shots of vodka and sugar-free lemonade in 30-minute intervals. Each drink was less than 90 calories. Researchers measured the men’s’ fat metabolisms before and after each drink. They found that lipid oxidation (a measurement of how much fat your body burns) dropped by a whopping 73% for several hours after they drank the vodka.

In fact a study published in the International Journal of Obesity, evaluated two different diets followed for three months. Both diets restricted calories to just 1,500 calories a day; with one group enjoying 150 calories from wine while the other group received 150 calories from grape juice. The group imbibing in the wine lost an average of only 8.3 pounds while the teetotalers lost 10.4 pounds.

Most of the alcohol is broken down in the liver by an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which turns ethanol into compound called acetate. When acetate is released into your blood stream, it replaces fat as your body’s main source for fuel putting the brakes on any fat burning you body may have begun. Lo and behold, soon after I limited my wine consumption, I began to lose weight.

Listen up guys! As you enjoy your drinks of choice, you’ll not only have more fat on your body, but you’ll enjoy less sex in the bedroom – apparently alcohol puts the kibosh on testosterone production. One night of drunkenness can accelerate the breakdown of testosterone and increases your levels of cortisol, a muscle-wasting hormone. Jocks may even have a worse time than couch potatoes as the negative effects of alcohol on testosterone are made even worse when you “jock-out” and exercise before you drink.

I’m not a big fan of extremes in anything. And an occasional bottle of beer or glass of wine won’t hurt anyone. Alcohol can hurt you, however, when you make it part of your daily routine, especially when you could replace it with a healthy diet and exercise.

– The Journal of Nutrition found that CLA conserved muscle tissue while it decreased body fat in people who were overweight and obese. Subjects taking 3.4 grams of CLA daily lost an average reduction of six pounds of body fat compared to those taking a placebo.

– A study published in The Journal of Internal Medicine Research found that healthy individuals who exercised and enjoyed normal body weight still reduced body fat when taking CLA.

– A study published in the International Journal of Obesity concluded that CLA reduced abdominal fat in obese men.

Apparently, CLA works by raising the body’s sensitivity to insulin so that fatty acids and glucose can pass through muscle cell membranes and away from fat tissue. This results in an improved muscle to fat ratio.

But thanks to changes in cattle-feeding practices, many people are not getting enough CLA in their diets. In mainstream beef operations, steer are confined to a small feedlot, where they are trough-fed a rich diet of grains. To prevent any illnesses caused by their diet and to make them grow faster, the cows are also given heavy doses antibiotics. Most reach the 1,200-pound slaughter weight in just 14 to 16 months.

Grass-fed steers, on the other hand, roam free in pastures, and are fed neither grain nor antibiotics. Many of these animals take two or more years to reach slaughter weight. Yet their meat, albeit a bit tougher, has up to five times more CLA than regular beef. In addition, today’s generic dairy products have, on average, just one third of the CLA they had before 1960.

And since 1960, obesity has become an national epidemic. According to the American Obesity Association, nearly 70 million U.S. adults are obese or severely obese. These people risk developing such maladies as: hypertension; type 2 diabetes; coronary heart disease; stroke; gallbladder disease; osteoarthritis; respiratory problems; and certain cancers.

To safely consume enough CLA each day, you’ll want to consume free-range organic beef and organic dairy and take a safe nutritional supplement that includes this important compound. Then you may enjoy a healthier lifestyle and a smaller waistline.

In essence, regular and effective weight training workouts will help you retain more muscles and thereby burn more calories – even while you sleep. And, ladies, you have eight times less testosterone than men; so weight training will make your physique look more like Marilyn Monroe’s – not Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.

So how does building muscle increase our BMR even while we sleep? Muscle, not only gives us strength, but it also increases our body’s metabolic activity. One pound of lean muscle burns up to 50 calories per day compared to one pound of fat which burns about nine calories a day

Skeptics of weight-lifting point out that compared to other parts of the body, the muscles are rather lazy. In RunnersWorld.com, Amby Burfoot informed readers about an article from an issue of Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care entitled, “Dissecting the Energy Needs of the Body.” Burfoot said:

“This article gave me new respect for my kidneys, which burn 182 calories per day for every pound they weigh, and for my brain, which locks in at 110 calories for every pound it weighs. But my muscles, damn them, are lazy. They burn six calories per pound, barely edging out fat’s two-calorie burn.”

What Burfoot fails to mention is that the average person can easily carry 125 pounds of lean muscle mass which burns (6 x 125) 750 calories per day. Kidneys, brains and other organs all weigh less than one pound. Second – no matter how hard we try – we cannot change the mass/weight of our kidneys, brains, etc. in any significant way. However, we can control our muscle mass – sometimes by 20 or more pounds by embarking on a sensible weight-training program.

As matter of fact, the American Journal of Cardiology published a landmark study that compared aerobic exercise with weight training to just aerobic exercise. Two groups had to complete a 10-week program: the first group performed 75 minutes of aerobic exercise twice a week; while the other group completed 40 minutes of aerobics and 35 minutes of weight training. At the end of the study, the group who only did the aerobics increased their endurance by 11 percent, but had no increase in strength. The group that combined cardio and weights showed a 109 percent increase in endurance and a 21 – 43 percent increase in overall strength. The study proved that we cannot maintain or increase our muscle mass on cardio exercises alone.

The most effective ways to increase your muscle mass is to eat the right foods at the right time. According to sports dietician and author Nancy Clark MS, RD, you’ll have a much more effective workout if you eat some carbohydrates and a little protein ten minutes before exercise. Carbs provide fuel you need for endurance and energy; the protein breaks down into amino acids, which will help repair muscles after the workout ends.

After a long and hard workout and after some of your muscle fibers have ripped and torn, glycogen decrease while the cortisol increases, causing more break down and damage to the muscles. Eating a decent portion of protein up to one hour after exercising reverses this process by repairing and strengthening your body’s muscles.

And if you really want to burn more calories while you sleep, you must, of course, sleep. Not getting a good night’s slumber will make you fatter than your more rested counterparts. Lack of sleep interferes with your body’s ability to recover after a strenuous workout. Too little rest can also wreak havoc among the hormones that regulate your metabolism and fat storage. Studies have shown that sleeping less than five hours a night can reduce levels of leptin by 15 percent – which slows metabolism – and increases ghrelin by 15 percent – which increases hunger.

So run, lift, eat well and burn calories while sleeping eight hours each night. Sounds simple right? Perhaps not, but Marilyn did it – mostly.

But how does exercise affect other, less tangible areas of our lives? Can exercise help us attain our professional and personal life goals? The latest research has indicated that – yes- regular aerobic exercise can help us achieve financial, professional and personal success.

The Journal of Small Business Management wanted to find out if small business owners who habitually exercised attained more professional and personal goals than their sedentary counterparts. Professional goals included such items as financial success and family security; while the personal goals included themes like personal fulfillment, independence, and freedom. The Journal found a strong connection between running and professional/personal well-being.

“Specifically the entrepreneurs who regularly run were better at attaining personal satisfaction, independence and autonomy. Their companies also indicate significant improvement in sales over companies managed by non-runners.”

Interestingly, the entrepreneurs who eschewed running in favor of lifting weights reported success in reaching their personal goals, but had no more success in reaching their professional goals than their non-exercising colleagues.

The study makes sense. John Roederer is not an entrepreneur, but, as the Superintendent of Schools in Mount Pleasant Iowa, he has reached many of his professional goals. Roederer brilliantly explains how exercise helps him in his work by saying:

“Because the nature of our job, we do more with our minds than with our bodies. However, thinking requires a great deal of energy. The brain represents just two percent of the body’s weight but requires almost 25 percent of its oxygen. Exercise is not only good for the body, but it also stimulates the mind and spirit. Physical exercise fuels cognitive capacity. As a result I have made physical exercise a lifestyle habit.”

In addition, researchers at the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine who surveyed 683 workers in various jobs found:
Workers who exercised had better overall job performances.
Employees who did cardiovascular workouts on a regular basis completed a greater quantity of work.
Obese workers reported more difficulties than their fit counterparts in getting along with coworkers.

Vigorous exercise can also boost your body’s immune system, enabling you to effectively ward off colds and flu. The American Journal of Health Behavior found, in their study, that overweight employees (who most likely did not exercise) missed more days at work than their fitter colleagues. And obviously, the fewer days you’re either absent or feeling rundown, the more time you have to achieve your professional goals. Working out on a regular basis releases endorphins in your brain that actually help to improve your mood and make you a more pleasant boss and colleague. Remember, careers are made and broken by a worker’s ability to get along with others.

It is rather easy to see how exercise can help you achieve your personal goals as well. Though there is no study to prove it, many singles meet while participating in activities like hiking, rock climbing, mountain biking and even yoga. Men and women who are energetic and have a zest for life’s activities are highly attractive to the opposite sex.

And whether you’re living a fun filled life as a single person or whether you are a stay-at-home mother of five, you must still muster the energy to finish often-mundane chores at home. Those who are physically fit more energy to do boring tasks like laundry, and are better able to deal with stress, which is certainly par for the course when caring for small children. Overall, activities of daily life become less of a chore for active people.

So if you’re having trouble attaining your professional and/or personal goals, take a look at your level of exercise. Regular running, biking or even aerobics classes may be the key to getting you back on track.