Thanks for your patience.

She was explaining to me the results she’s been getting from her weight loss program as well as what she’s been struggling with.

I let he know that she’s not alone. She hit on three big weight loss obstacles that almost everyone who wants to burn fat runs into and must overcome to reach their goals.

One of her biggest challenges is controlling her eating from an emotional standpoint. This is a huge problem for a lot of people.

We attach emotion to food. And that’s the fault of the environment we all grow up in. We attach emotions to food long before using it as a coping mechanism.

Think about it.

Almost everything social centers around food whether it’s family gatherings, birthday parties, going out for pizza or fast food as a team when you play sports at a young age and on it goes.

It’s only natural as we get older to extend that and use food as a coping mechanism for things we try and deal with.

The second is the not knowing what to make for our meals.

And the reason for that is that good, healthy foods, while there is an incredible variety and stuff that tastes great, are not readily and convenient. They have to be prepared.

Good food doesn’t sit on the shelf for weeks, already prepared, like junk foods do (because of all the junk chemicals, of course).

So almost every time you go to eat you have to prepare something, which starts with trying to figure out what to prepare (by the way, this is what’s so great about the quality of protein powders and meal replacements nowadays, as long as you use only them to supplement your program).

Which makes it easier to say the heck with this and grab something convenient which won’t be something health.

And third is that little things do add up. While it’s a real pain, calories should be counted every once in awhile.

They should be counted for a few days even if it’s just every five or six weeks.

When you don’t, it’s easy to do those things that damage your weight loss program more and more often.

Just an extra hundred calories a day will put on a pound of fat every 35 days. And a hundred calories isn’t much.

Heck, it’s 1 1/2 medium sized apples, or less than one tiny Balance Bar.

So it starts out by having a cheat meal once a week and before you know it you’re sneaking a tiny something every day and it’s insidious because it’s so unnoticeable until it’s all of a sudden really noticeable.

On the flip side of that, it is good to treat yourself every once in awhile.

A good nutrition plan is a lot harder to stick to if you’re telling yourself you can’t have your favorite foods EVER again! That’s exactly when you start craving all that stuff.

One thing you can do that I do from time to time is to spend some time on Sunday preparing and cooking stuff that you put in the freezer to take out when you want to eat that week.

I know people that cook practically all their meals for a week on Sunday, stick ‘em in tupperware in the freezer and they are set for the week.

You could just try doing that with 5 meals and they can be the meal you have in the evening when you get home from work.

Another thing you can do is to have higher calorie days but you have to plan it.

Instead of having little things here and there when you feel like it that add up, know that you’ll have a cheat meal or food on Saturday.

As long as you don’t go crazy it will help with your discipline and your fat loss because if you have the same exact calorie amount each day and/or eat too few calories for too many days, your body will get used to it and reset your metabolism at a lower rate.

Our bodies like the status quo. They have a set point weight and they want to keep it.

Put these fitness and health tips into your weight loss program and see if your results don’t start to improve!

• Focus on things like juicy fruits. No, I don’t mean the gum. I mean fruits that have a lot of juice and water.These are high volume, low calorie foods that also happen to be very good for you.

  Eating foods like this, besides all the important health benefits, will help you to lower your daily caloric intake, allowing you to burn more fat.

  Be sure to include veggies, low-fat yogurt and other foods high in water and low in fat.

• Also, try getting some of the Miracle fruit - a tiny African berry.It’s tart but has miraculin in it, which causes food you eat after you have a berry to taste candy-coated! Not a bad deal, especially for you sweet tooths out there.

  Check health food stores or grow your own with plants - www.logees.com or www.toptropicals.com.

Adding these two fat burning diet tips to your health and nutrition program will help make it easier for you to burn fat faster.

The same six pack abs are probably the most elusive achievement for anyone who is trying to lose weight and get in shape.

So what ab exercises are the magic bullet when it comes to a six pack abs workout?

Well, there’s the twist.

Abdominal exercises, while important, aren’t the key to getting great abs.

It drives me crazy every time I see an infomercial for some silly piece of “new” “breakthrough” ab exercise equipment.

Let me tell you right now.

Squeezing your abs for a few minutes every day on some infomercial ab equipment is NOT going to get you six pack abs, help you lose weight, get rid of your love handles or give you a flat, sexy stomach. No way!

Endless crunches will not melt away the fat from your midsection.

It just doesn’t work that way. And despite the “burn” of high rep ab exercises, you barely burn any calories while doing those endless crunches.

Your fat burning time is best spent elsewhere on more effective training.

You also don’t work the ab muscle intensely enough to develop it.

So endless high rep crunches fail on both counts - poor muscle building and poor fat burning.

Two thumbs down as the cliche goes.

Proper ab exercise just doesn’t involve endless crunches or sit ups. At least not if you want to achieve the results that you are looking for.

The truth about six pack abs is that it takes a complete fitness program that involves proper diet, weight training and cardio (preferably high intensity interval training).

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do ab exercises.

It does mean that ab exercises shouldn’t be your focus and most definitely shouldn’t be the only exercise you do.

In fact, you can get a flat stomach without doing any abdominal exercises.

I don’t recommend this, but not for the reason that you need to work your abs to get a flat stomach. It’s just not true.

You need to get your body fat down to a pretty low level to see your abs.

And getting your body fat down that low requires strict attention to your nutrition program, your weight training routine and your cardio program.

You should work you abs for overall health and fitness reasons, to be better able to do every day things, to be able to excel in sports or other activities that you may participate in, and to provide balance to your body so you can prevent injuries.

A lot of injuries occur because of body imbalances, like overdeveloping the abs without exercising the lower back.

I believe a lot of hamstring injuries that occur with professional athletes is because they overdevelop their quad muscles relative to their hamstring muscles.

So if you want to get 6 pack abs, be sure to incorporate a complete nutrition and fitness workout program into your life.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Are you looking for weight loss motivation? Then you have to read this email I received the other day, from Emma.

Emma, purchased my ebook From Fat to Fit Fast! and this is what she had to say.

Aren’t weight loss success stories like this cool? You have no idea how great it is to open up an email and read something like this.

Emma’s thanking me but she supplied the weight loss motivation, the sweat, the discipline and the hard work on the program.

She should be extremely proud of herself. Great work, Emma! All I supplied her was the knowledge with From Fat to Fit Fast!

Now go be your own weight loss success story!

I believe this happens for two reasons. One, most people still aren’t aware of the incredible fat burning potential of high intensity interval training.

Two, this type of cardio fat loss training is very hard work. It’s much easier to walk on a treadmill or spin a stationary bike for an hour than it is to do 10 or 15 minutes of interval training.

With a typical aerobics fat burning program you perform your exercise (treadmill, stationary bike, elliptical trainer, etc.) in a steady state manner at around 60 - 75% of your max heart rate. Usually, your sessions last 30 minutes to an hour and a half.

With interval training your workout sessions are much shorter and you can add a lot more variety into your program. High intensity interval training is just like it sounds.

You alternate all out aerobic exercise with active rest. Here’s an example:

Luckily for me, I have a hill just down the road that is perfect for interval training. I jog over to the hill.

This takes about 4 - 5 minutes and serves perfectly as my warm up. Then I sprint up the hill to the top. This takes me about 15 - 20 seconds. I turn around and walk back down, which serves as my rest interval. I then repeat for a certain number of intervals and the jog (or walk) home serves as my cool down.

Another great interval training program is jump rope. You may need to practice a bit on this one. After a brief warm up, I will jump rope as fast as I can for about 10-20 seconds, followed by a slower cadence for about half a minute.

This form of interval training is brutal and will get your heart rate up fast! You won’t last long on this program.

Always warm up before starting your intervals. If you’re not in the best of shape break into it lightly, starting with more low or moderate intensity cardio. You might also want to check with your doctor. No sense in getting hurt right when you start your interval training.

Interval training has been shown, in study after study, to be a much more effective fat burner than steady stater aerobic exercise.

You will:

1 - Burn more calories by elevating your metabolism so you lose fat faster

2 - Increase your power

3 - Increase your speed

4 - Increase your endurance

No matter what your fitness goals, interval training is one of the best ways of helping you achieve them. And the variations are endless.

You can vary the training parameters (exercise to rest ratio, number of intervals) to make the workouts harder or easier, depending on what you are trying to accomplish.

You can also use any number of exercises for your training, such as cycling, sprinting, treadmill, elliptical trainers, jump rope, rope climbing, hill sprints, and more.

Don’t continue doing endless hours of aerobics that aren’t helping you reach your goals anyway. Get more out of your cardio workouts by performing high intensity interval training.

If you want to build muscle, lose fat and get fit fast, you need to add this type of cardio to your program.

The fitter you get, the better job your body does at burning fat and building muscle. And you’ll build your fitness levels faster with interval training.

I’ve discussed high intensity interval training in previous entries.

A new study, led by Jason Talanian (Journal Applied Physiology, 102: 1439-1447, 2007), showed some impressive findings.

Subjects that completed seven high intensity interval training workouts over a two week period were able to increase aerobic capacity by 13 percent, boost fat burning capacity by 36 percent and
increased key aerobic enzymes by nearly 25 percent.

After the two weeks of interval training, the subjects used less muscle glycogen (stored carbohydrates) during a 30 minute bicycle ride at 60 percent of maximum effort.

The high intensity interval training program they followed consisted of 10 sets of 4-minutes of cycling at 90 percent of max effort alternated with 2 minutes of rest.

Long-term studies on this topic confirm that high intensity cardio training causes more fat loss than typical low intensity aerobics.

The body does use more fat for fuel at lower intensities and more carbohydrate for fuel at higher intensity levels. However, the important factor is the number of calories burned.

The interval training burns more total calories while also increasing the body’s ability to use fats as fuel for the rest of the day and night.

In other words, you get a calorie burning boost while at rest after interval training. This is something you don’t get with lower intensity aerobics.

A big part of this frustration comes about because of all the hyped up before and after results you see in magazines and on infomercials.

When you constantly see fat loss claims like someone losing 54 pounds in 12 weeks, it can be tough to stay motivated when you’re only losing a pound a week.

And that makes you vulnerable to becoming frustrated. It also makes you vulnerable to fad diets and infomercial gadgets that don’t work.

That’s why your mental state and motivational strategies are so important when it comes to losing weight and staying in shape.

Here are five quick mental tips you can use to help you stay on track with your fitness program.

1. Determine the reality of your current situation. Be honest with yourself about where you are and how far you have to go.

2. Figure out the things you are doing now that you would not have gotten involved with, knowing what you now know.

Examples are smoking, drinking sugar laden soft drinks, junk food snacking late at night, spending most of your time on the couch, etc.

3. Do a complete and honest analysis of yourself and your skills regarding health and fitness. What do you do well? Where do you need to improve?

4. Determine a measure that you can use to gauge your progress.

5. Set specific goals for each day, week, and month of what you need to do to move yourself toward your goals and discipline yourself to accomplish these small goals that will lead you to big rewards.

What do you do? Speed reading intervals as your high intensity interval training cardio session?

In all seriousness, a recent study done at the University of Alberta found that a health and fitness oriented email newsletter might be exactly what you need to stay on the fitness track.

The Alberta study involved 1,300 adults from five large companies.

They were all sent two weekly emails on new ways to train, as well as healthy cooking nutrition tips.

After receiving this health and fitness newsletter for 12 weeks, the study participants filled out a questionnaire about their health and fitness habits.

The results showed that those who received the newsletter were more active and ate healthier than those that did not receive the
newsletter.

And six months later, the same results.

So if you want to boost your fat burning or muscle building results, return to my blog often.

And don’t forget to subscribe to my free newsletter. The sign up form is in the upper right hand corner.

Check out her fitness and fat loss tips.

Gregg: Michele, I know that a snowboarding accident got you into the gym but what motivated you to pursue working out beyond rehabbing your broken arm?

Michele: When I first started going to the gym, it was because I needed to, not because I wanted to.

But it didn’t take long at all for me to notice the women in the gym who were in incredible shape… and I was in such awe.

I dreamed that someday I would look just like them.

As soon as I started to see the changes as my muscles developed, I was completely addicted to weight training.

I don’t think I have been away from the gym for a week straight, ever, since I started six years ago.

Gregg: Wow. That makes me feel like a fitness underachiever!

How long did it take you to get to where you are now, and what would you say to our readers who are already tired and frustrated and just want to finally “get in shape”?

Michele: This is a tough question to answer without writing a novel.

I have had many ups and down along the way to where I am today, so there is no simple answer.

When I first started training I got too skinny, and had to work very hard to change my mentality and learn how to eat to nourish my body, not just to shrink it.

I do know, however, that with twelve weeks, a solid program, and 100 percent commitment to achieving your goal, anyone can have the body that they want.

The commitment part is the hardest, but it is what makes all the difference.

You have to be in it with your entire being: your body, your mind, and your heart.

Gregg: One thing I’d like for you to address because I feel it’s a big one with women, is weight training.

Even nowadays, a lot of women shy away from weight training because they don’t want to look like Arnold.

If they train at all, it’s with the tiny pink weights and they never even break a sweat.

You’ve developed a gorgeous, sexy, lean hard body and you couldn’t have done it without weights.

What do you say to these women to get them to not just train with weights but train hard and make it an important part of their overall program?

Michele: I have many clients who have come to me with these concerns, and I always ask them what they want to look like.

Do they want to be a smaller version of their current body, or a lean, fit, feminine body?

Take a look around at the people in the gym, where do you see the lean fit women?

It is physically impossible for a woman to pack on pounds of muscle to the point of looking masculine just by lifting weights.

We don’t have enough testosterone to do it! And I know from experience that it is a LOT harder to build muscle than it is to lose fat.

I challenge my clients to at least try it out and let me train them with weights.

And the funny thing? No one has ever come out looking like Arnold. But they do love the results.

Gregg: What advice would you give to someone who’s brand-new to the fight to get and stay in shape and struggling to stick to a proper nutrition and exercise program?

Michele: Believe in yourself!

If others can do it, there is nothing that says YOU can’t, except for your own level of commitment.

Surround yourself with like-minded people who will support your efforts rather than sabotage them.

You’ll be surprised at how many people you (yes, you!) can motivate to get fit.

If it seems tough, I always say to give it two weeks.

Anyone can follow a diet for two weeks, so I challenge you to go fourteen full days eating exactly on your plan.

Don’t get overwhelmed by thinking about the months ahead.

It takes two weeks to break a habit, so it is usually very easy to actually WANT to keep going when those two weeks are over, because you will feel so good that it becomes rewarding rather than depriving.

Gregg: Speaking of getting started and sticking with a program, Michele, what’s the biggest mistake you made when you started and how did you correct it?

Michele: I would say that my biggest mistake when I first started was cutting calories way too low.

I started lifting, loved the results, and realized that the less I ate, the faster I lost weight.

The problem was that I didn’t realize how wrong and dangerous that way of thinking was at the time.

It took a long time for me to accept that I needed to eat a whole lot more to support my level of activity and the muscles that I was trying to develop.

I thought I was buff at the time, but now I am embarrassed to even look at the photos.

Gregg: What do you think is the most important thing or skill you’ve learned with regard to health and fitness?

Michele: I could tell you how many calories are in just about anything! Does that count as a skill?

Gregg: LOL! I’d have to say yes.

What are some common pitfalls you feel people can stumble upon and how do you help them avoid these obstacles?

Michele: The worst thing I ever hear is “It’s okay to order pizza, I went to the gym today.” But that’s not how it works!

If you want to lose weight, you have to go after your goals from every angle. That means working out, AND eating right.

Another one is alcohol.

If you aren’t paying attention to calories that you consume from your drinks, even the best-intentioned diet won’t give you the results that you want.

Be the designated driver, then you don’t have to feel like you have to drink when you go out.

Gregg: Great advice, Michelle! Moving forward and knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently with your own journey, if anything?

Michele: I don’t think so.

I learned from every experience that I had along the way, so I don’t think I would be in the same place if I changed anything.

The road was rocky in some places, but I still learned and grew as a result.

Gregg: Do you feel that ongoing feedback and motivational tools would help in maintaining a fitness program?

I always encourage my clients to take pictures periodically.

Michele: Absolutely! It is very hard to stay committed 100% of the time if you don’t have something driving you to do it.

Whether it is taking the next week’s photo, reporting to your coach, or posting in an online training journal, it is so much easier to keep your focus if there you are accountable to someone.

Gregg: If you were to advise a close friend or family member how to follow in your fitness footsteps, what would you tell them?

Michele: The first thing you must do is to create goals, both short-term and long-term, and visualize them often.

Create a game plan, enlist the help of people you trust, and give it everything you’ve got.

You will never know what you are capable of unless you try.

Don’t be afraid to ask a ton of questions.

But most importantly, I would tell them to enjoy the journey!

You will learn so many wonderful things about yourself, and it may seem tough at times but you should cherish the experience and the accomplishments.

Gregg: Speaking of the journey, the most common excuse I hear from people who don’t eat right or train is that they don’t have the time to even get started on the journey.

What advice do you have for people who use ‘lack of time’ as an excuse to eat poorly and avoid exercise?

Michele: There is always time to exercise.

Just get out of bed a little earlier, it doesn’t interfere with any of your commitments during the day.

It may not be fun at first, but it is a very easy way to get more time.

And eating right is not as time consuming as it sounds, if you are just starting out, the biggest thing is to make smarter choices.

You can still eat on the go, but read your nutrition labels and be mindful of what you are putting in your body.

Gregg: What’s a typical day for you when it comes to training and nutrition?

How are you able to consistently fit them into your busy schedule?

Michele: I fit everything in because I make it a priority.

Just like my other appointments, I make sure that I get my workouts in.

I have an elliptical at home, so I get up in the morning and do cardio before breakfast every day.

I drink a protein shake for breakfast, usually while I am driving to work.

My office is right by the gym, so I bring my gym bag with me everyday and I will do my weight training after work.

For my meals, I will either pack food to take with me, or else get lunch at the salad bar.

I have a bunch of ready-to-drink protein shakes in the fridge at the office, so I am never without food.

I usually eat a big salad for dinner, and then have a scoop of protein powder before bed.

Gregg: What do you think are the keys to becoming successful, whether it’s competing or losing 15 pounds of fat?

Michele: It is absolutely essential to believe in yourself.

We can do anything if we set our minds to it, so to be successful in your fitness goals, you have to wake up every morning and believe that you can do it.

Consistency and commitment is another big one.

Anyone can diet for a week, but true results take a change in lifestyle that is much broader (and much more rewarding) than a quick-fix diet.

I also believe that to be successful, you need to surround yourself with other fitness-minded people, who can support and encourage you along your journey.

Gregg: What’s one of the things you find most challenging about what you do?

Michele: The hardest part is not the actual hours spent in the gym or the limited food choices, which may seem like it would be the obvious answer.

To me, it is challenging to always have to be planning ahead.

Sometimes I get home from a long day and all I want to do is take a shower and head straight to bed, but if I don’t cook and pack my cooler for the next day I won’t have the meals that I need!

I usually cook a ton of food on the weekends, but it still wears me out to have to constantly think about having everything prepared.

Sometimes I miss the spontaneity of just heading out with friends for a fun event without having to think about where my food will come from.

I think that we all face this, though, and it is definitely rewarding and worthwhile in the end.

Gregg: You’ve already won three regional NPC shows and are an Allmax sponsored athlete. What are your future plans?

Michele: My current focus is developing my career as a fitness model.

I have a few projects lined up that I am very excited about, so expect to see a lot more of me soon!

I am also getting ready to compete in 2008, but my schedule is not set in stone just yet, so I am not going to name any shows at this point.

I am excited to continue to represent Allmax and be an important part of their marketing campaign, as well as grow my personal training business.

Gregg: Michele, thanks so much for taking the time to share your fitness experience and knowledge with my readers!