Living the BeyondFit Life
You may be wondering about living the BeyondFit Life. If you want balance in your life when it comes to food and fitness, I’m here to tell you, there’s no better way!
Many women struggle to maintain weight loss long-term. While fad-diets, 30-day plans, and other “quick fixes” might help you drop pounds initially, keeping weight off proves incredibly challenging.
Research shows that 95% of dieters regain lost weight within one to five years, with up to two-thirds of dieters gaining more weight than they lost dieting. Why? Because the trendy programs they try to follow prove impossible to adhere to long term!
Ask yourself: “Is this something I could do for the rest of my life?” If not, it’s not going to work!
Living the BeyondFitLife: Lifestyle > Diet
Diets don’t work if people can’t maintain them.
Somewhere in the sea of social-networking fat loss tips, the ultimate fat loss weapon of adherence has been forgotten. Pure and simple, adherence comes down to you doing what you’ve got to do–being able to stick with what you’ve started. When it’s all said and done, what’s the best thing to do to create lasting body change? A plan that becomes a lifestyle!
So if your fitness and nutrition program isn’t sustainable, you’re at risk of not only gaining back what you lost, but actually gaining back MORE weight than you lost.
Fortunately, strategies to increase your chances of successfully maintaining a healthy weight DO exist.
For the last 10+ years that I’ve worked in the fitness industry, I’ve spent lots of time studying thousands of women who have been successful in maintaining long-term weight loss. Additionally, I have discovered the common characteristics that these successful women share. What helps them keep weight off over time?
It’s not a quick fix or a trendy fad. Rather, a few long-term strategies have helped them–and WILL help you–cut through the fitness industry scams and help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight for LIFE. (That’s the BeyondFit L-I-F-E).
Living the BeyondFit Life: 3 Foundations: Nutrition, Training and Hormones
Living the BeyondFit Life: Foundation 1 – TRAINING
How to get MORE results from your workouts in LESS TIME.
Want fat loss results without spending hours at the gym? Of course you do!
When you begin to use intelligent exercise, you transform your body and create lasting change in just 30 minutes or less. We all know that shorter workouts are better for adherence and sustainability long term.
Most likely you’re performing long duration, moderate intensity workouts. These may burn some calories during the time you spend exercising, but they’re likely doing little to improve your metabolic potential. If you want results, you need to be smart with the workouts you choose. Yes, time spent on the elliptical is better than time spent on the couch, but it’s still not the BEST thing you could be doing to reach your goals. When fat loss is the goal, you want to look for ways to get the biggest metabolic “bang” for your “buck.”
You need to look for workouts that give you MORE for LESS. You need to #dofitnessbetter.
3 Workouts that burn more fat in less time:
- BeyondFit Life’s signature Hybrid Weight Training Circuits
- Short Duration, High Intensity Sprint Workouts
- “Met Con” or Metabolic Conditioning Workouts
Why are these workouts so effective? Click here to read 3 Reasons BeyondFit Workouts are Superior for Fat Loss.
Living the BeyondFit Life: Foundation 2 – NUTRITION
The secret nutrition approach that lets you eat MORE and weigh LESS.
Let’s face it, as busy women, we have a lot on our metaphorical “plates.” From diapers to dishes, laundry to little league, school, work, the list goes on. Busy women need all the help we can get when it comes to balancing hunger, managing cravings, and giving us energy to get through our busy days.
That’s why the food we put on our actual PLATES proves essential to fat loss.
Fat loss power foods contain more protein compared to carbohydrates. Additionally they provide more fiber content compared to total carbohydrates.
Among other benefits, these foods help to stabilize blood sugar and dramatically decrease hunger and cravings.
Don’t bounce from diet to diet trying lemon juice cleanses, cabbage soup for a week, or whatever else the latest fad suggests! When you use the BeyondFit approach of “THE 2 Ps” you can EAT MORE food (no need to starve on chicken and broccoli, or count every point that’s on your plate) and end up WEIGHING LESS.
Living the BeyondFit Life: Foundation 2 – Nutrition: Protein
As a Metabolic Effect certified Hormonal Nutrition Consultant, I work with many women who simply can’t lose weight. My goal is to help them create an optimal diet plan for fat loss that will not only help them get results, but keeps their metabolic potential high and balances their hunger, energy and cravings.
When we begin our consults, my clients send me a 3-day food log of what they currently eat. One of the mistakes I see from the very beginning is lack of enough protein.
What’s “enough” protein? And how do you get the protein you need without living off boring old chicken breasts (yuck!)? Your goal should be to get 0.8 to 1.0g of protein for every pound of lean body weight.
Whether your goal is related to fat loss, fitness, or even just general overall well-being, it’s important to make sure you’re getting enough protein! And don’t worry, you won’t bulk up! Protein helps speed up your metabolism and balances your blood sugar levels, preventing insulin spikes, which cause weight gain. Protein contains amino acids that your body needs. Finally, it is the key to burning fat and increasing your metabolism!
Living the BeyondFit Life: Foundation 2 – Nutrition: Produce
A common mistake when women begin dieting includes cutting out carbs–even the good ones. Yes, limiting your carbohydrate intake is important if you looking for fat loss results. But some carbohydrates prove necessary for energy, and not all carbs are created equal.
You can eat a lot more veggies and fruits for the same amount of calories than you can starchy carbohydrates. Vegetables and low sugar fruits provide your body with the fiber it needs to feel full. They also provide essential vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
In addition, most fruits and veggies score low on the glycemic index. Furthermore, they don’t spike blood sugar or put your body into storage mode like starchy carbs either.
Remember, focus on foods that…
- Control hunger. They make you full quickly and keep you full for longer because they digest slowly.
- Raise energy. Because they digest slowly, your body absorbs their nutrients in a slow steady fashion. This gives a steady supply of fuel and raises energy levels.
- Reduce cravings. Another benefit of slow digestion is balanced blood sugar. This, along with the sustained energy and reduced hunger, means cravings happen less often as well.
Living the BeyondFit Life: Foundation 3 – HORMONES
The missing piece of your fitness + fat loss puzzle.
To burn fat, you need two things: a caloric deficit and balanced metabolic hormonal balance. In other words, training + nutrition aren’t enough. If you want to #dofitnessbetter, you also need to FIX YOUR FAT FIGHTING HORMONES.
Calories don’t control metabolism, hormones do. If you run a caloric deficit, you will likely lose weight. But because calories don’t control metabolism, you may or may not be losing mostly fat.
Hormones control metabolism. When insulin, cortisol, leptin, stress hormones, thyroid and other hormones that control fat metabolism become “balanced,” fat loss, not just weight loss, is the more likely outcome. Balancing these hormones means getting them in the right amounts, ratios, and enabling them to interact correctly with their cell receptors.
Lowering calories can help you lose weight, but paying attention to hormones can make sure that weight is fat.
This is a key distinction to make when you’re learning to #dofitnessbetter. If you ignore this important piece of the puzzle, you fail to get (and keep) the results you’re looking for.
WARNING: 3 PROBLEMS WITH IGNORING HORMONES.
1) If you ignore hormones, you decrease your metabolic potential.
The BeyondFit Life (#dofitnessbetter) builds muscle and actually increases the rate at which your body burns fat. A focus on weight loss without the hormonal piece of the puzzle does the opposite. Low calorie diets and hours upon hours of aerobic exercise prove disastrous to your metabolism. When it comes to body change, they make things worse, not better.
Plain and simple, muscle remains the key to your metabolic potential. If you follow the trendy fad diet approachs, you may burn calories, and may even lose weight. But that weight most likely comes from muscle rather than fat. Muscle burns 2-10 times more calories at rest than fat and other tissue, so loss of muscle mass (through weight loss) means a decrease in your metabolic potential. But for every pound of muscle you gain, you burn up to 30 more calories per day, even while at rest
Sounds like a pretty sweet deal, don’t you think? BeyondFit Life works smarter while fad diets just work YOU harder.
2) If you ignore hormones, you won’t truly change your shape.
In addition to increasing your metabolic potential and helping your body burn calories–even while you REST–muscle also changes the shape of your body. If you focus on fad diets, you won’t build muscle. And if you don’t build new muscle, you can’t transform your body (a.k.a. give yourself a new shape).
This major difference of ignoring your hormones that exists between fad diets and learning how to #dofitnessbetter with BeyondFit Life prove the key for fat loss. Fad diets may shrink your size, but doing fitness better and focusing on hormones for fat loss is the only way to improve shape and tone.
Like a melting ice cube, you may get smaller, but your shape won’t change. What’s worse, after your fad diet, you’ll be a cube sitting in a melted puddle of water. (Hello loose and saggy skin!) If you want to minimize saggy areas and tighten otherwise loose connective tissue, muscle is the key. ]
Women following fad diets may become smaller short-term. But a woman living the BeyondFit Life becomes smaller AND changes her shape for LIFE!
3) If you ignore hormones, you cannot sustain your fitness plan.
Ultimately, fat diets and the fitness industry standards do not work because they are simply not sustainable. Even if fad diets DIDN’T decrease your metabolism and DIDN’T leave you as a saggy, only slightly smaller version of your previous self, they would still fail because they’re just not something you can maintain for any extended period of time.
Most of the plans, programs and fitness methods you find don’t show you how to live a complete and balanced lifestyle. You might lose weight and keep it off for a few weeks–maybe even a month, or a couple of years–but the key component that every major fad diet or weight loss program ignores is that no program will work if you can’t stick with it. (Adherence, anyone?) And you can’t stick to a diet forever.
Your fad diet program only works as long as you can drink the shakes, stick to the food list, count the points or ignore that tummy growl again. At some point, you’ll grow tired of being tired, hungry, and craving every food you “can’t” have. Eventually, you’ll just stop.
You’ll run out of willpower. And you’ll stop because the fad diet approach is incomplete.
The missing piece of the sustainable body change puzzle is the hormonal changes required for sustained body change. BeyondFit Life (#dofitnessbetter) offers you the last piece of that puzzle that the fad diets leave out.
So what does it mean to “#dofitnessbetter” and fix your fat fighting hormones? Here are 7 (simple) ways to balance your metabolic hormones + tools to help you live a BeyondFit Life.
Living the BeyondFit Life for the REST of Your Life
There’s no magic pill when it comes to weight-loss maintenance; rather, multiple lifestyle factors work together to preserve your weight and health.
Focusing on sustainable eating changes, regular activity that you can fit into your schedule, and the social support and accountability that you need to reach your goals is your best bet for attaining and maintaining a healthy weight that lasts a lifetime.
Join the BeyondFit Life Club today to start living your better, balanced life NOW!
