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Finally – Discover The Complete Formula For Guaranteed Body Transformation Success

By Holly Leonard

You are about to gain insight into the most complete body transformation formula and you'll learn exactly what you need to do and why you need to do it in order to achieve your fitness goals. Not only will your body transform, but you will also develop a better understanding of how your body works. You will learn how to make wise, informed choices around a balanced nutrition and exercise program. In the process you will be able to replace your unsupportive habits and develop a new outlook on how to gain complete control over how your body looks and feels and achieve a consistent, long-term fit and healthy lifestyle.

Traditional health and fitness programs isolate only one or two factors necessary for fat loss success. The truth is the following five factors MUST be in place in order to bring about a lasting, positive physical change. If any one factor is neglected or missing, the fitness program will fail to produce the results you are seeking. I guarantee if you incorporate the following five factors into your program you'll achieve incredible results in no time!

Factor One: Supportive Nutrition

Your nutrition has by far the greatest impact on your fat loss success. Eating supportively will not only allow you to improve your health and energy, but it also provides the ideal environment for your physique transformation - building lean muscle while reducing unwanted body fat.

If your goal is to lose body fat, you must eat slightly fewer calories than you burn through activity. This may seem simple, but when calories are reduced, the body becomes imbalanced. It’s your body’s job to restore balance, and it inevitably does so by either reducing the amount of calories it burns for energy (by breaking down muscle tissue instead of fat) or by forcing you to eat more through hunger and sugar cravings. This is one of the main reasons why fad diets do not produce long-term results and cause you to gain weight. The goal of any results-oriented health and fitness program is to ensure that you lose fat, not valuable lean muscle.

Most quick-fix diets are simply low-calorie diets disguised by great advertising and clever marketing techniques. Right now there are currently thousands of diets listed with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This number alone should prove that no single diet alone works to produce long term fat loss results. If a magic diet or formula for fat loss existed, everyone would be on it and no one would be overweight. Obviously, this isn’t the case!

But why is it that some people do lose weight on fad diets? The immediate success most people experience from fad diets is due to water loss, muscle loss, eating fewer calories or a combination of those factors. However, less than five percent of these dieters are able to keep the weight off. In fact, most people who diet end up fatter once they get off the diet. Diets simply don’t work long term because of improper nutrition and the failure to change exercise and eating habits for life.

America is fatter as a society today because we consume approximately 300 to 500 more calories per day than we did 10 years ago, yet we move significantly less because of advances in technology such as computers, escalators and other labor-saving devices.

Supportive nutrition can be mastered by understanding that everything you eat and drink can either positively or negatively affect your fat loss goals.

Factor Two: Smart Supplementation

Supplementation gives your body the nutrients it needs without adding tons of extra calories. It is virtually impossible to satisfy your body’s nutritional needs with the number of calories needed to lose body fat. In addition, due to a typically busy lifestyle, it is incredibly challenging to eat perfectly every day for the rest of your life. Therefore, when following a health and fitness program, muscles become undernourished, causing your body to shed the muscle it can’t feed. By supplying the body with the nutrients it needs without additional calories, (e.g., a multivitamins) you can help satisfy all your nutritional needs for repair and growth without exceeding the amount of calories your body needs to maintain the mandatory deficit for fat loss.

The benefits of using supplements as low-calorie nutrition during an exercise program are well researched. The daily use of a multivitamin formula has been found to be the most inexpensive nutritional insurance you can buy.

The reason behind adding supplements to your daily meals is to supply the body with proper nutrition and select compounds that have the potential to improve health, alter body composition and increase performance and metabolic rate.

The Categories and Uses of Supplements

A multivitamin formula should be the foundation of any complete fitness program. Additional vitamins and minerals will boost your nutrient intake beyond what is available through whole foods you eat. These additional nutrients allow cells to reach their potential creating the ideal environment for positive physical change. Taking other supplements before creating a nutritional foundation is like adding expensive accessories to a car that doesn’t run properly.

Altering Body Composition:
It is often difficult to get enough nutrients from your normal diet to support your fitness goals. Any time there is an increase in cellular activity, such as during exercise; the body increases its use of nutrients. By supplying these nutrients through multi-vitamins, recovery shakes, and meal replacement shakes, the attempt is made to satisfy all nutrient needs for repair and growth without exceeding the amount of calories needed to sustain the mandatory deficit for fat loss. When undernourished, the body must shed the muscle it cannot feed.

Increasing Performance and Metabolism:
Specific nutrients and combinations of nutrients have been found to improve exercise performance and increase the calories burned during and after exercise. Supplying the body with a recovery shake consisting of protein and fast-acting carbohydrates can improve performance and, therefore, assist with fat-loss and muscle-gain goals.

Smart supplementation is recommended in order to supply the body with the right combination of nutrients and compounds that have the potential to enhance performance, reduce body fat, increase muscle and/or improve health. Proper supplementation creates the environment your body needs to get maximum results.

Factor Three: Resistance Training

Resistance training is the superior method of exercise for reshaping your body and shedding unwanted fat. Want to raise your metabolism? You must start by understanding that the main tissue that burns calories is muscle, even while you sleep. Muscle is your fat burning machine. The more muscle you have the more fat you burn. The absolute best way to raise your metabolism and burn fat is to build and maintain muscle through resistance training.

Resistance training is performed by using weights, balls, bands, machines and even your own body weight to effectively challenge your muscles. The goal of resistance training is to gradually and progressively overload your muscles so they grow stronger. This signals your body that it’s growing and healthy, not deprived and starving.

As you increase your lean body mass, you increase your metabolic rate and this makes it easier to shed fat. With a faster metabolism, you'll burn more fat all day long - even while you're sleeping! Fat doesn’t require any energy at all to maintain - it just sits there doing nothing. That’s why resistance training takes priority over cardio-based exercise for people who want to maintain a lean physique. Resistance training addresses the core of the problem – the rate at which the body uses energy, all day long.

There are numerous reasons for increasing muscle beyond making clothes fit better, appearing toned and smaller, and staying lean. One of the major benefits isin the possible prevention and rehabilitation of bone injuries. Since proper resistance training strengthens the muscles as well as the supporting structures of your body, resistance training will protect our joints from the stresses of an active lifestyle.

Another great benefit of resistance training is improving the ability to perform daily activities. By increasing strength through resistance training, you move more efficiently with daily activities such as; lifting your children, carrying groceries, playing sports, moving furniture, taking out the trash etc.

The most important aspect of resistance training is correct form of the exercise. Too many people are concerned with how fast an exercise is performed or how heavy a weight is being used. Most of the time this means the exercise is done incorrectly. This can cause injury and most often results in resistance training without the benefit or results you are seeking.

If your goal is to improve your body composition and develop a lean physique, I recommend that you commit to a full body resistance training program designed specifically for your body type, abilities and fitness goals for 20-45 minutes, at a minimum of 3 days per week. Allow at least one day of rest between workouts for muscle recovery and growth.

Factor Four: Interval Training

Cardio respiratory exercise is a term that describes the health and function of the heart, lungs and circulatory system. This system is considered the body’s transportation network for it functions by circulating blood and nutrients throughout the body. The goal of any cardio workout should be to get as many large muscles working as possible. Your muscles need to work hard in order to burn the greatest amount of calories during and after exercise. The best way to ensure you are burning the maximum number of calories during and after your workout is to perform interval training.

How much is too much? The Concept of “Interval Training”:

It is important to perform interval training for your body quickly adapts to cardio-based workouts very quickly. The more you do, the more efficient your body becomes, causing you to burn fewer calories from your fat stores each time you exercise. Because your body adapts so quickly, cardio-lovers are forced to adjust their workouts to last increasingly longer in order to provide the same calorie burn. This not only increases the amount of time you have to spend in the gym but also increases the odds that your body may start breaking down muscle instead of fat for fuel. This is the exact opposite of what you want! Additionally, the benefits are only temporary. Aerobic activity doesn't increase the amount of fat you burn after your workout like resistance training. Your metabolism returns to normal shortly after stepping off the treadmill. The goal of any workout should be to boost your metabolism after the workout is over

Interval Training, alternating between periods of high-intensity and low-intensity will greatly enhance the rate at which your body burns calories long after your workout is over. The most effective Interval training programs are design around the FITT Principles: Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type.

Frequency
Frequency refers to the number of times interval training is performed per week. I recommend no less than three days per week; with no more than two days rest between workouts is recommended. For the first six weeks, beginners should work out every other day. However, if you are extremely overweight, experience joint pain, or perform a weight-bearing type of cardio (jogging, aerobic dance, etc.), rest at least 36 to 48 hours between sessions to prevent injury.

Intensity
Intensity is described as the speed or the workload of a workout. When beginning a new exercise program, a qualified fitness professional can determine the intensity level most appropriate and effective for your starting point and your goals It is important that you continually monitor the intensity level to ensure that you reach your fitness goals in the least amount of time.

As a general recommendation when you are performing your intervals

There are many ways to effectively monitor exercise intensity. One common method is Rate of Perceived Exertion scale (RPE).

The RPE scale is used to subjectively measure the intensity of your exercise. The RPE scale runs from 0-10. The numbers are used to rate how easy or difficult you find an activity. For example, 0 (nothing at all) would be how you feel when sitting in a chair; 10 (very, very heavy) is how you feel at the end of an exercise stress test or after a very difficult activity such as sprinting. A good rule of thumb that’s pretty effective is: If you are doing your interval training and you are at your high point you should rate your RPE around 7-10. The low point of your intervals should be around 3-4 intensity. Be sure to start off slow and progress yourself to more intense interval workouts.

Another way to measure exercise intensity is with the use of a heart-rate monitor. A heart-rate monitor is considered the most accurate method of measuring pulse rate.

Time
Time is the length of time an exercise is performed, not including warm-up and cool-down. More is not necessarily better when it comes to cardio. In fact, to reap the fat burning and cardio benefits you really only need 20-30 minutes of intervals. It is important to remember that as you become more fit, the intensity of your intervals should increase.

Remember, more is not necessarily better.

Type
Type of exercise refers to the activity used to create a stimulus. Before choosing an exercise consider your goals, physical capacity, interests, available equipment and time constraints. Any activity that continuously uses larger muscle groups and is repetitive, is best.

In the end, you want to make sure that your cardio is strengthening your heart and lungs and working as many muscles as possible and improving your cardio-respiratory efficiency, which is going to help oxygenate and feed every cell of your body.

And you also want to make sure you’re burning fat without sacrificing muscle tissue so interval training is the way to go.

Factor Five: Professional Support and Accountability

The more customized your health and fitness program is for you, the better your results will be. When you combine an effective fitness program with proper nutrition, supplementation and accountability, you can make incredible physical changes.

The role of a fitness professional is to provide you with the right amount and type of work for your goal and current ability. However, your body is naturally driven to adapt to this workload (i.e. plateau). A plateau occurs when the body adjusts to changes in internal and external conditions or circumstances. We still can’t predict when a person will plateau, but one thing is for certain – it will happen.

Doing the same type of exercise without variation or failing to increase the challenge when your body "adapts" to the present workload, are just two examples of conditions that will bring your results to a complete halt. In order to avoid a plateau during your fat loss journey, you should make changes in your exercise routine or eating habits to help you reach the next level. The best way is not to do more of the same, but try new exercises or change the frequency, intensity, or duration of your routine.

Even if you begin by following the Five Factors for Fat Loss Success as discussed, it does not end there. There are many factors that may affect when and how significantly the other four components will need to be manipulated to keep you on the path to success. A comprehensive fitness program will help you avoid plateaus by keeping your body guessing until you look the way you want. This can only be accomplished by following all Five Factors and correctly applying the information provided in this article.

About the Author:

Coach Holly Leonard, owner of BeFit Health and Wellness Solutions, is a Body Transformation Expert who has helped over 300 Pioneer Valley men and women reclaim their healthy, fitness and vitality through proper fitness and nutrition. For more expert advice on how to master your metabolism so you can make 2009 your best year ever, check out http://www.befithealthandwellness.com Today!