What Are You Looking For Exactly
For any website owner that uses Google analytics to track who and how people are coming to their site, it baffles me when I see that someone finds my site through a keyword phrase and spends 0:00 time on whatever page the entered on. Obviously that particular post didn’t meet their needs.
Here are the top 3 topics or phrases that have the highest number of people spending the least amount of time on that post.
Biggest Loser Sweet Potato Fries Recipe
This is one that really confuses me as their is only 1 recipe in the biggest loser cookbook for sweet potato fries. Here are five phrases that people have used to find my post.
biggest loser baked sweet potatoe fries
biggest loser cookbook sweet potato
biggest loser sweet potato fries
devin alexander sweet potato fries
baked sweet potato fries, recipe
All of them are pretty relevant to what the post was about. Parmesan-pepper sweet potato fries from the Biggest loser cookbook.
Here is the recipe read it, make it and enjoy.
Biggest Loser Sweet Potato Fries Recipe
How many times a week to exercise
This is a very subjective question and you might get a few different opinions on this depending on who you ask.
Here are five phrases that people have used to find my post on this.
how many day per week should you workout?
how many days a week can you work out
how many days a week must you exercise
how many days a week should i work out
how many days a week should you exercise?
Again all of these are relevant to the topic of the post and yet according to analytics no one stayed to read it.
How Many Days Should You Exercise per Week
Was it too long to read?
P90X
This one is all over the map. There are so many different aspects to this program, that people are finding my site through a wide variety of phrases. I have only talked about p90X a few times but I’m getting a lot of people looking for info on it.
Here are some of the recurring questions which I will attempt to answer here.
Can you buy p90x at Walmart?
No you can get it through Beachbody.com, or at an As seen on TV store.
Can you do p90x if you are out of shape or overweight?
Yes you can. P90X is intense and intended to take fit people and make them extremely fit. But if you are overweight and have 30 – 40 pounds to lose you can still do P90X. Just take the fit test and see if you meet the minimum fitness requirements to start: P90X fit test
How much weight can you lose on P90X?
This all depends on how much weight you have to lose to begin with but 10 to 30 pounds in 90 days is not uncommon. I’ve seen a few people lose 40. Keep in mind that you are going to be hopefully adding muscle so your total “weight loss” might not be the best indicator of success.
Take a look at those articles and let me know what you think. Do you have any suggestions or improvements that can be made to them?
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High Protein Breakfast
Ah breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Some of the most common tips that dieters are given while trying to lose weight is to never skip a meal and start your day with a healthy breakfast.
I have always eaten breakfast except when I’m extremely rushed. Most of my breakfast meals consist of either cereal, bagels, toast, oatmeal or eggs on occasion. These foods have always left me feeling full enough but I’d find myself feeling hungry again an hour later.
I thought that is was just my body’s increased metabolism firing on all cylinders early in the morning. While I’m sure that is part of the answer it never completely explained why I was so hungry again so quickly.
High Protein Breakfast Foods
The missing link to the breakfast dilemma was protein. All of my previous breakfasts were very high in carbohydrates (even the complex kind) and drastically low in protein.
The solution was to introduce more protein and cut back on the amount of carbs I was eating. Here are a few sources for getting more protein at breakfast time.
- Cottage Cheese
- Turkey Bacon
- Egg Whites
- Peanut Butter
- Soynut Butter
- Low Fat Cheese’s
- Almond Butter
- Chicken Bacon
- Turkey Sausage
- Quinoa
- Protein Shakes
Those are just a few higher protein breakfast items. There are many more I’m sure. Leave a comment to suggest a something I’ve missed.
Breakfast Alternatives
Have you ever had breakfast for dinner? I know I have. Sometimes it was pancakes or a bowl of cereal. I’ve even had bacon and eggs for dinner a few times.
So why not flip it and have things you would normally have at lunch or dinner for breakfast? Below is a list of some of my favorite “Dinner for breakfast meals”
- Tuna Sandwich
- Steak and sweet potatoes
- Chile
- Homemade Pizza
- Salmon
- Chicken Salad
- Veggie Lasagna
To be honest most of these meals are leftovers from the night before. I usually make a lot of extra food as part of being organized for weight loss. I divide a large meal into it up into smaller portions so that I can make my food dollars stretch and it prevents me from eating out too often.
I will be posting some of my favorite high protein breakfast recipes over the next few weeks. So subscribe to my RSS feed so that you don’t miss them.
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Diets Do Work
How many stories and articles have you read that say diets don’t work? In the past week alone I have read a total of 7. That phrase I think is very misleading. In my opinion I think diets do work, some very well.
It all depends on how you look at them and what you are trying to accomplish. A diet is nothing more than a plan or program that either changes how you eat, how much you eat or how you workout. I am not talking about diet pills here as you can read how I feel about them at: Why diet pills are so popular. Unfortunately people look at diets as the solution to their weight issue and think that it will help them keep the fat off for good (this time).
Why Do Diets Work?
There are basically 2 types of diets one that restricts your food intake or one that makes you increase your exercise to either build muscle or burn extra calories.
The diets themselves do work when followed as designed. If people weren’t seeing results they would not be as popular as they are. Think about that for a minute. Do you know someone that has lost weight on Atkins or the South Beach Diet? I know many people that have followed these plans with great success. Many of them have gained their weight back once they went off the program, but that doesn’t mean that the diet didn’t do what it was intended to do. That is, make you lose weight.
When Diets Are Not The Answer
If you are looking to make a lifestyle change and not just lose weight that is when you should avoid diets. Making a change of that magnitude covers many areas of your life. Including how you view food (as fuel more than a comfort) and your notions of exercise as a useful tool to improve all aspects of your health.
This is what I like to promote as long term it is by far the most effective. It’s sad that there are no infomercials created to promote it though.
Popular Diets Plans
Here are some of the more popular diet plans and programs that are currently out there. Plug these into Google and You come up with 1,000,000 plus pages about them. If you do decide to follow one of these please use caution and do your research.
- Atkins
- The South Beach Diet
- The Abs Diet
- The Zone Diet
- Weight Watchers
- La Weight Loss
- Calorie Shifting
Change Your Expectations
Don’t expect a diet to be the solution. Even though it might work short term in most cases if you return to your old eating and exercise habits the weight will come back. People who experience this again and again are known as yo-yo dieters and that is not what you want to be. (hopefully)
If you change your expectations of what a diet means to you and what you hope to achieve by following it then you can save yourself the disappointment if it doesn’t deliver on it’s promises.
Hopefully you will realize that a lifestyle change is what you really need and you’ll take the necessary steps towards getting the healthy life that you want.
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Forget The Sugar and Eat Your Fruit
Ever since I started my weight loss journey It seems like everywhere I go I notice weight loss, health and fitness topics and issues much more frequently. They are everywhere and everyone is talking about them.
The same thing happened when I took up running road races. I was more aware of running in advertisements (billboards,TV and newspaper/flyers), more runners on the streets and more races announced in the papers.
The latest incident happened 2 days ago when I went to a local Tim Hortons for lunch. I was waiting in line ready to order my chicken club. There were 2 ladies behind me talking about going to the gym and other random stuff.
Then one of the women said something that caught attention (yes I was listening in on their conversation, you can only read the menu so many times before you get bored). She said “I’m off fruit, it adds too much sugar to your diet. I can lose more weight without the stuff anyway” interesting view I thought. The other women with her thought so as well, as she called the “no fruit lady” crazy and said she couldn’t live without bananas and some other kinds of fruit that I can’t remember right now.
I ordered my food and waited off to the side. The no fruit lady came up after me and ordered the chili meal deal. Which includes a bowl of chili, a donut and a drink. Her donut was a chocolate dip and her drink was a medium double double (the official beverage of Canada 
) which is basically coffee with 2 milk packs and 2 sugar packs.
I stood there thinking to myself are you kidding me?
I really don’t like to pass judgment on others as I know I am no where close to being perfect myself. But when someone makes a statement like “I’m off fruit, it adds too much sugar to your diet” and then order a super sugary donut and coffee I have to question their intelligence.
Fruit is good for you, period.
Yes fruit has sugar in it, that is a given. A typical medium apple has about 14 to 16 grams of sugar in it. That is roughly the same amount as the coffee and donut mentioned above. So based strictly on sugar content fruit is not that great.
Forget The Sugar
Fruit has so much more to offer including vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Most fruit is low fat, low calorie and is full antioxidants that may protect you from certain cancers and other diseases.
As far as taste goes you can’t beat the fresh crisp taste of an apple, the sweetness of a pineapple or the juiciness of a fully ripened orange. That is just the tip of the iceberg there are literally hundreds of different varieties of fruit for you to try.
Fruit is a great snack in between meals, as a side dish or even as a dessert.
Don’t Be Fooled
Yes I understand that sugar is important to watch while trying to lose weight. Natural sugar is just as bad as the refined stuff, gram for gram they are the same (4 calories).
What I am saying is that by cutting out fruit completely you are robbing yourself of valuable nutrition and can actually hurt your weight loss efforts. While changing my body I have continued to eat plenty of fruit daily (2-3 servings at least).
Too often we get caught up in seeing the numbers on the scale move that we forget that one of the reasons for losing weight in the first place is to be healthier. Why give up the benefits of fruit for a small change on the scale? Remember that just because you weigh a little less doesn’t mean you are necessarily healthier.
Here is a couple of really good sites on the benefits of fruit as well as recipes and proper storage and selection guides.
Center For Disease Control (CDC) – Some good recipes and facts on fruit.
Fruit Storage Guide – Good guide on storing fruit and veggies. (scroll down)
Fruit Selection Guide – Some good tips on selecting fruit.
What are your thoughts? Are you a no fruit guy or lady?
Are there any other sites that you recommend related to fruit?
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Do Not Do It For Yourself
I was talking to some co-workers today and we got on the subject of weight loss. (big surprise) We were discussing what it would take for us to give up junk food and completely make a change in the way we eat and exercise.
Everyone chimed in with their own ideas and it was an interesting discussion. One person made a comment that I accidentally laughed at. Not that the comment was funny, but it was more that I could see myself saying that exact thing just a few years earlier.
The Comment
The comment was this “If I am going to take control of my weight I need to do it for myself and no one else” or something to that effect. Now on the surface it makes sense and it agrees with my whole accepting personal responsibility philosophy. But the point I disagree with is the “I need to do it for myself” part.
I don’t know about you, but I am terrible at doing things for myself. Whatever the task is I almost always put it off until later. Even when I do get around to it, I almost never put in 100% effort. This applies to why weight loss efforts as well.
Don’t Do It For Yourself
The success I have achieved so far was not because I wanted to lose weight for myself. It was because I wanted more for my kids, more for my wife and more for my friends/teammates.
More in the sense that I wanted my kids to be more active, have an active father that could keep up with them and show them how to live a healthy life. Most importantly I wanted them to have a father that was there for all the best moments in their lives. I can’t do that if I’m dead from a heart attack!
For my wife I wanted her to have a husband that was able to help around the house, including the yard work and home renovations. I wanted her to have a husband that she could be proud of and one that could give her a more fun and active life. That’s hard to do from the couch!
For my friends and teammates as well as my family I wanted them to have a physically active leader. Someone that would be actively involved and encourage them to improve themselves.
In my experience I have always put in more effort when it will benefit others and that is something that I am quite proud of.
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How Many Days Should You Exercise Per Week
This is another question that I hear quite a bit. There are a lot of differences of opinion by everyone on just how much exercise you need and how often you should be doing it.
To address this properly you need to first define what exercise means to you. Is it a simple walk, a long run, high intensity interval training (HIIT), or something more like a personal training session.
What are your Goals?
You need to clearly know what your goals are. What is it that you’re trying to acheive by exercising? Is it to lose weight, gain strength, add muscle, burn calories or just maintain what you have.
Once you know what your target is you can start to customize an exercise schedule for yourself.
Different Levels of Intensity
Not all activities are created equal. Some are more intense (Strength Training) and some are very moderate (walking). Intensity is really a key factor in determining how many times a week you should be exercising.
What the Government Recommends
In school we where taught to exercise for 3 days a week at 30 minutes per session. Since it was backed by the government that’s what was pushed on us. Since about 2005 though they have revised their recommendations to the following:
Exercise as part of living an overall healthy lifestyle.
Endurance Activities: (4-7 days a week)
* walking
* golfing (without a ride-on cart)
* yard and garden work
* propelling a wheelchair (“wheeling”)
* cycling
* skating
* continuous swimming
* tennis
* dancing
Flexibility Activities: (4-7 days a week)
* gardening
* mopping the floor
* yard work
* vacuuming
* stretching exercises
* T’ai Chi
* golf
* bowling
* yoga
* curling
* dance
Strength Activities: (2- 4 days a week)
* heavy yard work, such as cutting and piling wood
raking and carrying leaves
* lifting and carrying groceries (not to mention infants and toddlers!)
* climbing stairs
* exercises like abdominal curls and push-ups
* wearing a backpack carrying school books
* weight/strength-training routines
So how many days should you exercise per week?
This is what I recommend for weight loss:
Strength Training – 3-4 Days per week.
You need a solid training routine that will effectively work the major muscle groups. You can achieve this with or without the use of weights. Body weight exercises are very efficient and effective.
Building muscle will increase the amount of calories that you can burn while at rest, which you’ll need. As you lose weight your body’s need for calories at rest (BMR) will naturally decrease. Believe it or not but that fat on your body consumes calories just to keep it there. The less fat you have the less calories you need.
Cardio (Aerobic exercise) – 2-3 Days per week.
Cardio is great for burning calories and getting rid of the extra weight. You don’t need to spend hours at it though. I have been doing HIIT twice a week in addition to my Sunday morning runs.
Aerobic exercise isn’t restricted to running/jogging type of exercises. You can do Kenpo, Tae Bo, or other Martial arts styles of exercise. Joining a spinning class or just going out for a good steady paced bike ride will also do it.
Final Note
Basically I think you need 5 days a week of exercise at a minimum to really lose the weight quickly. If you are just starting out it’s ok to build up to this for the first few weeks. Anything less and the results will take much longer to appear.
I am currently using P90X as my workout guide. It incorporates all 3 types of exercise nicely into 60 to 90 minute videos that you can do at home. Their schedule is 6 days a week with 1 day rest and it is intense.
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