Sunday, 05Feb12

Rest Day

_________________________________________________________

Super Bowl Sunday

Alright NLP’ers, let’s not get to emotional today. You know that we are playing the New England Patriots. We have been working out hard all week, do we really want to destroy all the hard work we put into our bodies. No, seriously, we have to get out of that mindset that its OK to eat as much as the Brooklyn Bridge weighs, when really its not. We also have the big idea that because it’s Super Bowl Sunday, it’s the biggest excuse to eat like shit, when its really is not. I realize how pathetic this is. How did this tradition begin? There is no crossover between watching athletics and forcing food into one’s body. Will this epiphany stop you from making an annual three-pound Velveeta purchase on Super Bowl Sunday? Oh, hell no! I’ll buy that shit, try as quickly as I can to mix it with salsa and get it in the microwave before kickoff.

This doesn’t just go for football games, but most live sporting events. I don’t know why people feel the need to gorge themselves while watching an especially important sporting event, but I do, even though this is essentially like saying: “Hey, you guys out there on the field are physically fit in a manner that defies modern science, so I’ll appreciate that prowess by pouring fat into my arteries and drowning my brain cells in alcohol.” Don’t know what to make for that Super Bowl party this sunday? Well whatever you decide to bring or make for your friends and family doesn’t have to sideline anyone’s diet. Here are some healthy alternatives from Men’s Health.

Whatever you do, make our hot wings recipe. These wings are so delicious that they have the ability to instantaneously alter your life for the better—taste will seem like an entirely new and improved-upon sensation, your girlfriend will suddenly look like Minka Kelly, and the voices of your friends who showed up to your party justto root against your team will suddenly disappear until Monday morning.

2. On second thought, assign a guest to make our wings. You know how your hands and face look after you eat wings? Well that’s how your entire kitchen looks after you make them.

3. You know what is easy to make? Say, 10 of these incredible hoagies. Do as the great American Henry Ford once did: build an assembly line. As the bread splitting condiment captain, (politely) ask your girlfriend to be the meat and cheese maestro. The dog can help clean up any projectiles that may fly off the line.

4. Next to the bowl of chips and salsa, set out a bowl of extra-strength antacids. You will resist the urge to overeat, but the hot wings, beer, and chili will do to your buddys’ guts what Jason Pierre Paul plans to do to Tom Brady.

5. After the first scandalous GoDaddy.com commercial airs, taking out your smartphone and logging on “to see more” is not appropriate.

6. …unless it’s an all-guys Super Bowl party. Then stream it to the big screen.

7. Patriot wide receiver Wes Welker is a miniscule 5?9? and 185 pounds and Patriot tight end Rob Gronkowski is a refrigerator-like 6?6? and 265 pounds. Remember those facts. A guest will ask.

8. Reconsider the invite you extended to your girlfriend’s vegan pet therapist.

9. Because people unaccustomed to craft beers often don’t realize that some weigh in at over 11 percent ABV (which means a big bottle is equivalent to a bottle of wine. Read: highly irresponsible) be sure to pick beers that are under 6 percent ABV. Unless you want to play DD and drive everyone home after the game.

10. Speaking of beer. Variety is better. Buy two macros (we suggest a regular and light version), and a few different craft styles. Here are 32 ideas.

11. Never let the government plan your Super Bowl party. We can guarantee no one will come next year.

12. The Super Bowl is the only day of the year that girlfriends willfully and happily let their boyfriends wear replica sports jerseys—no questions asked. Take advantage. And while you’re at it, you know who else needs a jersey? The dog.

13. There are many fun things you can do at halftime. Watching Madonna is not one of them.

14. Skip the monotonous, mind-numbing pregame coverage and put the Puppy Bowl on the TV. You may even see a dog in a jersey.

15. Side bets on the Puppy Bowl: Highly encouraged!

16. Speaking of bets—that uncle with a serious betting problem? You’re taking a serious bet by inviting him to your party. If his team wins, he’s like the happy, lovable, funny Robin Williams in Patch Adams, but if his team doesn’t win, he’s the psychopathic Robin Williams in One Hour Photo.

17. Acceptable toppings for nachos include: jack cheese, pepper jack cheese, cheddar cheese, grilled steak and/or chicken, beans, sour cream, onions, tomatoes, any type of fresh or roasted peppers, guacamole, fresh salsa. Unacceptable toppings include: Velveeta or any other nuclear waste colored cheese product and any canned chili that is visually indistinguishable from dog food.

18. Cook early. If you’re still in the kitchen when the game starts, no one is getting up to grab you a spatula, or an oven mitt, or help you put out that fire on the stove. No one.

19. With Tim Tebow out of the running, 40 percent of the people at your Super Bowl party don’t really care about the game. They’ve come to eat your food and drink your beer. Serve them everything they could ever want, with a hefty serving of spite and passive aggression on the side.

20. But if any of those people “Tebow,” cut them off from all food and drink. Tebow doesn’t eat unhealthy food and he sure doesn’t do much beer drinking, so guess what—neither shall Tebowers. -Psalm 3:67

21. Dancing like Victor Cruz? Totally acceptable.

Enjoy the game!

Sunday, 29Jan12

Rest Day

________________________________________________________________

Intermittent fasting, whey protein, and weight loss?

For those of us who’re looking to lose weight, a recent study published in the British Journal of Nutrition might offer some hope.  Losing weight is never easy as it requires a lifelong commitment to changes in dietary habits as well as activity level.

Years ago, I read a book by Greg LeMond, the former three-time Tour de France winner.  I loosely recall him mentioning something about you can’t lose weight by sitting on your couch eating hot-fudge Sundaes.

Conventional wisdom being the usual edict of calories in and calories out holds true for the most part.  However, some recent research suggest that intermittent fasting might offer an unconventional weight loss strategy.

Though I’m not going to bother citing a reference here, the Body for Life book by Bill Phillips was probably the first mention of the often promulgated advice of 6 small meals per day.  The purported benefit of this meal plan was that it would prevent your metabolism from slowing down while also keeping you in an anabolic state for those who engage in resistance training.

For most people, if you’ve ever tried the eat 6 small meals per day method, you probably find that you end up getting used to never feeling hungry.  After awhile, chances are you lose discipline over portion control and the next thing you know it leads to simply eating too much and too often.

Not wanting to stop at my intuitive feelings over the meal frequency myth, I found a very recent review study that has debunked this myth.  A review published in the Journal of Nutritionmade the following conclusion:

Taken together, these findings suggest that increased eating frequency (>3 eating occasions/d) has minimal, if any, impact on appetite control and food intake, whereas reduced eating frequency(<3 eating occasions/d) negatively effects appetite control.

Okay, so this review only addresses the effect of meal frequency on appetite control and food intake, what about weight loss?  From a study published in the British Journal of Nutrition, they found that meal frequency had NO benefit on promoting weight loss in obesity subjects on a calories restricted diet:

We conclude that increasing MF (meal frequency) does not promote greater body weight loss under the conditions described in the present study.

Intermittent Fasting?

Contrary to this diet regime, a recent study published in the International Journal of Obesitysuggest that intermittent fasting can not only be effective for lowering insulin resistance, blood pressure, and cholesterol, but also promotes weight loss.  This and other studies in this area contradict the fear that your metabolism will ‘slow down’ causing you to gain weight if you don’t eat 6 small meals per day.  In fact, intermittent fasting was more effective than calorie restriction at reducing insulin resistance in this particular study.

Okay, so now we’ve established that eating frequently won’t suppress your appetite , reduce your energy intake, or help you lose more weight.  If you want to improve your insulin resistance and lose weight, intermittent fasting is an option worth considering (in consultation with a health professional).  What if you just want to suppress your appetite to help you lose weight, is there anything that works?

Effects of whey protein on suppressing appetite:

Speaking of losing weight…  Another recent study, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, found that there’s a dose-response effect for drinking a whey protein beverage 90 minutes prior to eating.  Participants in this study, however, were already within a healthy weight range (BMI 19-25, both men and women).

In this study, the participants drank a 400 ml  [400 calorie] beverage 90 minutes prior to eating an ad libitum test meal.  In addition to a placebo beverage containing flavored water, they were also randomized to a 400 calorie beverage containing 12.5, 25, or 50% of the calories from whey protein.

Energy intake after preload:

• placebo – 987 Calories
• 12.5% protein beverage – 841 Calories
• 25% protein beverage – 808 Calories
• 50% protein beverage – 681 Calories

From this data, consuming a whey protein beverage prior to large meals, particularly dinner, may be beneficial for those looking to reduce their appetite and lose weight.

Sunday, 22Jan12

Rest Day

______________________________________________________________________

What Your Poop and Pee Are Telling You About Your Body

Sunday, 15Jan12

Rest Day

____________________________________________________________________________

I hope you all enjoyed the NLP Holiday Party, It was a great time with great people.

Sunday, 01Jan12

Happy New Year !!

_________________________________________________________________________

Why New Year resolutions don’t work and what to do about it?

In 2011 we should be going in with a little bit modified approach. Instead of making a huge list on what your going to do or not, plan the habits that you will be implementing. It takes around 30 days to implement a habit, which means if you start tomorrow, next year you could be implementing 12 new habits, one habit at a time.

So why New Year resolutions don’t work? There are 3 main reasons what people do wrong when they are setting their new year resolution. Main reason number 1, you bite more than you can chew. People spread them out too much, they make it so next year they want to be good at EVERYTHING. If you are to follow your new year resolution, you would need to work all the time on achieving your goals alone in the entire of your next year, hence most of those types of resolutions fail miserably.

So if you spent entire of your year, losing pounds, quiting smoking and getting out of debts when will you have free time? Life is huge and long, so fix what’s broken one thing at the time and commit yourself to it, especially if you are new at committing yourself to your goals.

Reason number 2, they are to ambitious. People set high standards and set themselves highest goals possible and expect to achieve them in 365 days? Entire life is needed for excellence, I am not saying it’s not possible to lose 80 pounds in a year, or to quit smoking from the get go, it requires strong will and even stronger commitment to your goal, but setting high standards can lead you to bad feelings about yourself. And when you get depressed about failed goals, many people return to previous pattern of behaviour.

And lets get to the third and most important reason – people simply don’t care about what they’ve promised to themselves. Many people make resolutions just for the sake of it and because everyone else seems to be doing it, and they forget it after first new years eve hangover. I believe you don’t want to be this kind of people, simply because you are here and you take your improvement of your life seriously.

So how to fix your new years resolution? By keeping it as simple as possible. We should be managing new years resolutions for quite a while and each year I can set more goals, but if you are beginner, stick to only one and be committed to achieving it. Don’t think in actions, think in habits. Habits are the most awesome and the best way to remain on the right track. Don’t try to hard to do what you have planned, take your time and develop a habit, when this occurs results will come over time and achievement will come naturally by itself. We’ve grown up in the world were glorification of instant satisfaction of needs is encouraged. Forcing people into buying new products, our marketing culture thought us that, what they didn’t teach us is commitment to their goals.

For this year we encourage you to take on your resolution and think about it. When you gave it a good thought, think of how you can make a habit of it and how to implement it in your daily lives. Than we challenge you to make a commitment, by publicly announcing your new years resolution by telling all of your closest friends what you decided for next year, and ask them to hold you accountable for it! So instead of only issuing a task I am officially making my New Year Resolutions with you: “We are making a strong commitment to our members that we will give them the best in health and conditioning and to help them reach their wellness resolutions.

Happy New Year everyone and stick to your New Year resolutions!

Sunday, 25Dec11

Rest Day… 

_________________________________________________________________________

We here at Next Level wish all of you a MERRY CHRISTMAS.

Sunday, 18Dec11

Rest Day

________________________________________________________________________

6 Great Reasons Why We Need to Exercise

I had never thought of sharing on “why exercise” and always assumed that we all believed and agreed that it was an essential part of everyone’s lifestyle regardless of whether one had the time or discipline to do it, until about two years ago I gradually pulled myself out from a sedentary lifestyle and I established a workout regimen in the morning and started to read more about the different types of workout such as aerobic training, resistance exercise and weight bearing activities. I reckon that exercising may be very often emphasized by all, but sometimes, its benefits may not be so clear and obvious to everyone.

1. Helps Strengthen Your Heart

Aerobic exercises benefit the circulation of your blood through your heart and blood vessels, that is, your cardiovascular system. They make our heart work harder, pump more blood, and reduce the risk of developing heart disease. With each beat of your heart, a surge of blood is pumped into your body’s intricate web of blood vessels. The pressure exerted on your artery walls as blood passes through helps keep the blood flowing smoothly (what you know as ‘blood pressure’). A build-up of plaques in your arteries, caused by cholesterol in your bloodstream can affect your blood flow and cause serious damage to your cardiovascular system.

A workout on a regular basis benefits your heart because it helps lower the build-up of plaques in arteries by increasing the concentration of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol) and decreasing the concentration of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol) in your blood, while keeping the blood pressure at the optimal level.  As a result, your heart is able to do a better job in delivering oxygen to all parts of your body. Blood travels more efficiently, bringing much-needed oxygen from your lungs and nutrients to the rest of the body. That’s why people generally feel more refreshed and energetic after exercising.

Want to consider some aerobic activities? Try swimming, basketball, rope skipping, jogging (or brisk walking), in-line skating, soccer, or biking.

2. Maintains Strong Bones and Muscles

I am sure most of us have tried doing push-ups, weight lifting in some form, or repeatedly used your muscles to counter some kind of resistance. These are called resistance exercises which the experts believe could strengthen our muscles; preserve bone mass, increase bone density. Regular resistance training can help prevent the bone-weakening disease, osteoporosis.

Walking and jogging are also important activities that bear your body’s weight and help build strong muscles and bones. Other resistance workout include pull-ups, running, kettlebell training, and rowing.

3. Helps Manage Your Weight

This benefit is well-known to all who are weight conscious or trying to lose the extra pounds.

Your body needs a certain amount of calories every day just to function. If you eat more calories than your body needs, it may be stored as excess fat. For instance, if you have an excess of 10kg fat, and each gram has some 9 calories, then you have 90000 calories for your body to use!

Exercising helps you achieve or maintain a healthy weight by stoking our metabolism, utilizing and burning the extra calories. And if you exercise, your body works harder and needs more fuel. Even after you stop exercising, your body continues to burn calories at a modestly increased rate for a few hours. The more intensely you workout, the more calories you burn. By burning more calories than you take in, you can reduce body fat, giving you a healthier body composition. Losing body fat can make you look and feel better and can reduce your risk of obesity.

4. Induces Quality Sleep at Night

Many people who have problems sleeping find doing moderate exercise at least three hours before bedtime help in relaxing and sleeping better at night.  The recent Hibernation Diet Theory teaches that regular exercise could activate production of recovery hormones during sleep, increases our body’s metabolic rate and promotes fat-burning. It makes a powerful association between poor sleep and obesity, a disease that has been rising dramatically in developed countries and has reached epidemic levels in the United States. While most of us would associate poor weight control with aging, low metabolism rate, and poor eating habits, many other research studies have also reported and pointed to the relationship between insufficient sleep and weight gain.

So start today, get a good night’s sleep, aim for eight hours a night if you can, and add resistance workouts will speed up your weight loss and the body will worker harder at night.

5. Puts You in a Better Mood

We all know that it definitely feels good to have a strong, flexible body that can do all the activities you enjoy and be able to move your arms and legs freely without feeling tightness or pain. But you may not know that exercising can actually put you in a better mood.

Exercise combats depression by activating the neurotransmitters, which are basically chemicals used by our nerve cells to communicate with one another and often associated with avoiding depression. The balance of these neurotransmitters, namely serotonin and norepinephrine plays a role in how we respond to daily events. When experiencing stress, our level of serotonin, norepinephrine or both may be out of equilibrium. Workouts may help synchronize those brain chemicals.

Exercising also stimulates the production of endorphins, another type of neurotransmitters that produce feelings of well-being, provide for “natural” pain relief, and help you relax.

Sounds good? If you just had a tough day at work and need to let off some steam, go for a workout or a brisk 30-minute walk to calm yourself down.

Well, if you have not any form of physical training for a long while and find it a pain to do so, I suggest that you start doing it 2 times a week and slowly increasing to 3 and then 5 times or more a week. You can do 10 or 15 minutes bouts of workout each time to make up a 30 minutes session a day.

6. Inspires Your Lymphatic System to Work Better

Now, this is a relatively new knowledge for me and thus has become my latest edition to this page (which was previously known as “5 Great Reasons Why We Need to Exercise”). While the above reasons have given us enough incentive to workout, there is yet another reason which I never knew before, the extremely essential lymphatic system. It is a vital network of vessels and nodes responsible for regulating fluids, distributing proteins and filtering out poisons in the fluid between the cells. It is a protector and a defence system against infection, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and disease. The three most important methods of lymphatic circulation are external massage, muscle expansion and contraction, and intense exercise. This means the more you move, the livelier it becomes. When the lymph is not overloaded, our health is maintained with nature’s own detox design. But if the lymph is running sluggish and there is too much waste, a blockage in the lymphatic system happens, leading to symptoms like chronic fatigue, water retention, eczema, allergies,  arthritis, and infections.

Sunday, 11Dec12

 Rest Day

__________________________________________________________________________

Sunday, 04Dec11

Rest Day…

________________________________________________________________________

15 Ways to Get Unstuck and Change Your Life for the Better

It’s simple to sayyou want to better yourself and change your life, but life changes don’t just fall out of the sky. First things first—you need to get unstuck.

You need to get out of the rut you’ve been in for way too long.  Wanting, wishing, hoping and dreaming are just not enough to do that.  In order to change your life, you must be willing to change yourself.  You must be willing to accept that doing what you’ve always done only results in getting what you’ve always gotten.

If you are truly ready to invest in yourself, to get unstuck and to create the outcomes you desire for your life, these techniques will put you on the right track.

How to Get Unstuck and Change Your Life

1. Take your mask off. Wherever you are right now is the perfect starting place for transformation.  So, take your mask off.  Instead of buying things you can’t afford, saying things you don’t mean, pretending that everything is perfect and putting on a front to impress others; accept yourself just the way you are. Masquerading is much too stressful and humiliating.

2. Don’t take it personal. No matter what you do in life, you’ll get criticized by someone at some point.  This is especially true when you make moves towards changing your life.  The quicker you realize that criticism is inevitable, accept it, and stop taking everything personal—the quicker you can breathe a sigh of relief.

3. Stop dragging your feet. You can’t solve today’s problems by putting them off until tomorrow, so stop procrastinating.  Once you’ve made a decision about what needs to be done, follow through. Don’t waste another day putting changes on the back burner.  The perfect moment may never come, so sometimes you just have to take the plunge.

4. Socialize. Even for introverts who enjoy a significant amount of alone time, some degree of socializing is necessary.  Unfortunately, people often respond to life’s difficulties by isolating from others.  Bad move!  Too much time alone can exacerbate emotional health problems and keep you from changing your life for the better.  The times when you feel like isolating or avoiding interaction with others, are often the times when you need that interaction the most.  So, don’t shut everyone out and get lost in your head.  Get out and about, network, make time for friends and share your world.

5. Live for yourself. You can’t please everyone, and trying to do so will surely keep you stuck.  Remember to remain in touch with who you are, refusing to lose yourself in an effort to do what pacifies the crowd.  Follow your own path, live for yourself and do what feels right for you.  You know you better than anybody.

6. Utilize support system. Doing everything yourself can be a major barrier to success.  If you want to change your life, make sure you have a strong support system in place.  Ok so you’re self-sufficient. That’s great. But everybody needs help sometimes.  Friends, family members, colleagues, physicians, therapists—these may be some of the people that make up your support system.  Reach out to them rather than pretending you don’t need help in times of physical or emotional distress.

7. Forgive everyone. Holding a grudge is one surefire way of staying stuck in a rut.  If you want to move forward and better yourself, start by forgiving those who have hurt you.  Then top it all off by forgiving yourself.

8. Make up your mind. Because over-thinking can lead to sustained stress and unhappiness, it’s important to improve your decision making skills.  There will be occasions for planning, analyzing and rethinking; but life is all about striking balance.  Too much indecisiveness and second-guessing threatens to thwart all attempts to get unstuck. Make a decision and realize that, even if it doesn’t work out as you hoped, it’s not the end of the world.

9. Get active. Physical activity is great for both the mind and body.  It helps to release the brain chemicals responsible for happy feelings while reducing the risk of nasty ailments like heart disease.  Despite the temptation to lounge for hours in front of the T.V., get off your ass.  Something as simple as a walk around the block can make a world of difference.

10. Look good. This isn’t one for the superficial—this is for everyone.  When you look your best, you feel your best.  And when you feel your best, you easily attract and create your best life.  Give your body a pampering treatment, dress for success and walk with your head held high.  Do this even if you aren’t leaving the house. You’ll notice that, at the very least, you feel like there’s a little more pep in your step.

11. Relax your expectations. If you expect others to think and act the way you do, constant disappointment will consume you.  Accept that your children, parents, spouse, friends and others are not on this Earth to live for you.  Lighten up on them—and don’t forget to do the same for yourself.

12. Compare to yourself. If you must make comparisons, remember to only compare you to you.  Ask yourself if you are succeeding at your goals, not the goals of others.  Make sure you are happy and successful by your standards, not those of someone else.  Your competition is with yourself, so concentrate on being the best you that you can be.

13. Tame your inner critic. The voice inside your head has more influence on the way you feel than nearly anything else.  So, don’t get lost in negative self talk.  Positive thinking, and positive self talk, will help you to get your inner critic under control and focus on possibilities rather than limitations.

14. Find your bliss. My favorite saying is, “follow your bliss;” but before you can follow it you must find it.  Get to know yourself better and discover what it is that you’re passionate about. Find what brings you joy, inner peace and positivity. That’s your bliss!  Find it and follow it faithfully.

15. Let go. You can change your life, but trying to change others is futile.  Stop trying to control what is outside of your control and redirect that energy to your own self improvement efforts.  The best way to have a positive effect on the world is to positively affect yourself.

You’ll have to step outside of your comfort zone if you want to get unstuck, but there are no limits when you’re willing to put forth the effort.

As you contemplate whether or not you are truly ready to change your life, remember this: The improvements in your life perfectly reflect the investments you make in yourself.

Nothing changes until you change.

Sunday, 27Nov11

Rest Day

_______________________________Enjoy Your Day_____________________________