WHY?

I was sitting this morning thinking about all the excuses I used to make for not getting healthy and fit.  Then I began to think of all my friends who have complimented my success, but then made excuses for their own inability to commit to some form of diet and exercise. Here are a few:

• People should love me for who I am. (Yes, but if you love others don't you want to bless them with a long, healthy life).
• I enjoy good food - I prefer to enjoy life and die happy. (Do you really enjoy the side-effects of poor health - I didn't. Are you really happy with yourself when you look in the mirror)?
• You mean I have to give up ice cream at bedtime. (Yes, you have to make sacrifices if you want to succeed. Do you really want to wake up 1 or 2 pounds heavier every week)?
• __________________________ Fill in the blank. Don't think I am not compassionate, because I was that same person. I made all the excuses. I even reached the point more than once (in failed attempts), and just said, "whats the use!"

I feel very hypocritical writing this blog. I have not arrived. I still have cravings and cheat at times. Who am I to preach to others about health and fitness when I spent more than a decade allowing my body to atrophy on the couch. It is my hope and prayer that because I do understand that I can speak frankly about the need to change.

I am going to place a challenge before you. Answer these questions and then ask yourself if you can make a positive change for one day:

1. What is the single most damanging obstacle to your good health? Is it a certain food, your hatred of exercise, what? For me it was eating late (especially chips, sodas, cheese and crackers and snack foods. I probably consumed 1,000 calories after dinner each night).
2. Deep down, do you want to change? Do you want to feel better, look better and have more energy? Don't lie to yourself on this one - look in the mirror when you ask yourself this.
3. Can you devote one day to good health?

I had no idea when all this started I would or could lose 38 lbs. I wanted to lose 10 so I could go to the beach and not be totally ashamed of how I looked. It was amazing what taking life one-day-at-a-time can do. After a couple days I lost a pound, then two, then five. Here is what happens if you take things one day at time.

• Day One: I feel terrible. I don't want to walk, much less run. By 8:00 pm I am dying inside and want to raid the fridge for something / anything to eat.
• Day Five: I have been walking for a few days, lost a couple of pounds and feel a little encouraged. I still want to snack at night. I wish there where bigger portioins on my plate at mealtime and the cravings are awful.
• Day Ten: I have lost 8 lbs. I find that I can't eat as large a meal as I once did. I walked over 3 miles for the first time in a long time. The cravings are starting to subside and I am not as hungry all the time.
• Two Weeks: I have lost 10 lbs. and I feel differently about everything. I believe in myself and my ability to succeed. I still like good food, but don't crave the sweets, refined sugars and empty carbs as much anymore.
• Four Weeks: Lost over 20 lbs. and I am a different person. I can run for change. I feel energized. I work more effectively. I eat 5 times a day and rarely do I feel hungry.
• Two Months: Lost 37 lbs. and I am an advocate for change - ONE DAY AT A TIME!  Set small goals for each day. Then set small goals for each week. Before you know it - you won't recongize the person in the mirror.

Two final things that keep me motivated. I have a picture of my "fat" self on my phone. I look at it occasionally to remind me not to go back there. Second, and I hate to admit this - I love the response I get from people who haven't seen me in a while. About a week ago a friend walked past me about 10 feet then stopped and turned around - "what have you done to yourself," was the response. That feels so much better than the short-term high I get from hot fudge lava cake.

Why are you letting these things stand between you and success?

Everything is a Drug

I recently read an interesting and somewhat challenging book by Tim Ferris, "The Four-Hour Body." One of the revelations that I have come to agree with is that "everything is a drug." Ferris spends a lot of time talking about how atheletes and body-builders are typically way ahead of the medical community in understanding the things that transform the body. While I don't advocate putting harmful drugs in your system or violating federal laws and regulations - Ferris' fundemental principle is true - "everything you put in your mouth is a drug."

Very simply, when we begin to understand how different foods, vitamins, supplements and medications affect our body - we are much better suited to make intelligent decisions concerning what we eat and what supplements we take. It took me far too long to realize the negative affects that refined sugars and empty carbohydrates where having on my body. Too many cookies, or an extra piece of pie (I do eat them in moderation), and my stomach is messed up for the next 24 hours. Interestingly, these products don't have the same affect on my wife. Why, it's pretty simply - our bodies function differently.

Why do some people smoke their entire life with what appears to be minimal negative affects and others (like my brother) never smoked at all and get cancer in their mouth, or lungs? I am not advocating smoking, or drinking to excess or anything we know is bad for you - but our bodies react differently to the stimulus we expose them to.

I love Advocare - the company has great things to offer most anyone (if you haven't had Spark, you are missing the product of the century). I also realize the some people function best on Weight Watchers, Adkins Low-Carb Diet, etc. The key is learning as much as you can about how your body responds and also realize that - YES, one twinkee at bedtime will mess up a day of healthy eating an exercise. NO, its not fair - but it is the reality of what "junk food" does to our bodies.

So what things have I learned that are fairly universal:

• Eat your largest meals early and reduce the size as the day goes on - eating late has been a problem for every person I know who struggles on ANY diet program.
• Refined sugars and pre-packaged foods are killing us - all of us. Even if your body doesn't react poorly to sugary breakfast cereals, more and more studies are showing that the chemicals in our foods are killing us (and they are addictive).
• Even moderate exercise makes a difference. I started out just walking and I could quickly see a difference in my energy levels and reduced appetite.
• You have to commit for longer than a day, week, or fortnight. The real results for me started after about 3 weeks. My cravings stopped, my weight loss was steady and my body started to long for good food and exercise.
• Get an accountability partner - having someone push you and encourage you helps keep you on track when you are tempted to quit, or cheat.

I want to challenge you for just one day to do two things:

1. Keep a food journal of everything you eat. My friend Chris Davis turned me on to this. If you have trouble staying committed, you should look Chris up at Slim and Fit in Brentwood, TN.
2.  If you are only doing it for one day as an experiement, write down the following: a) Calories, b) type of food (protien, carb, refined sugar), c) Write down all the chemicals and compounds added to your food.

I didn't realize what things were killing me till I got home one day from being on the road in meetings and stuff. I went to Panera Bread for breakfast. My breakfast sandwich had 650 calories (few of them were good for me. A carb loaded bagel, fried egg, bacon and cheese). I had a good week so I thought I would have a scone to go with it (another 350 calories of empty carbs). Add my coffee, creamer, etc. and I had consumed 1,000 calories before breakfast was over. It was not a good day - I gained 2 lbs., my energy levels dropped, but worst of all, I had no idea what I had done to my body that day until about 10:30 pm when I started looking up the foods I ate.

Think of everything you put in your mouth as a drug and you might just think twice.

If I can help you in your effort to lose weight or get more fit. Drop me an email at trentwheeler@rocketmail.com, or visit my Advocare site at www.advocare.com/12044713

Counter-inuitive Fitness

For the past several years I have played around at getting in shape.  This year I not only got serious about my own health and fitness, I also got serious about learning all I can on the subject. After reading several books and dozens of blogs and articles I have reached a few conclusions:

• Most people fail because they quit too soon. They don't allow the body time to adjust to the changes that are taking place. A few early discouragements and they are toast.
• I believe many of us lack a sincere faith in our own ability to succeed. I know that was the case  with me after so many failed attemps. Early discouragement led to low self-confidence that led to giving up.
• Finally, I believe that too many of us accept what others have told us, conventional thinking, or our own misconceptions and that is deadly to an effective program. A perfect example is counting calories (all calories are not the same. 50 grams of refined sugar has a much different affect on the body that 50 grams of a high-fiber energy). We will look at lots of other misconceptions in future blogs.

I have learned that a lot of my own pre-concieved ideas of health and fitness where holding me back. Let me give you a few tips that might be helpful.

• Water: If you read the earlier blog on water you understand its importance to fitness, but the biggest misconception is the fear of gaining water-weight. Your body stores water when you fail to adequeately hydrate. We were at the beach last week and had problems with water retention in our hands and feet. Being in the sun we suffered mild dehydration and our body compensated by trying to protect our water stores - it shoved them into our hands and feet.
• Eat Often: I now eat 5 times a day. Sometimes it may only be an energy bar between lunch and dinner, or an apple in the mid-morning, but I feed my body regularly - just feed it less. The body does the same thing when you "starve it" as it does when you deprive it of water - it slows your metabolism and stores fat. It thinks you are being deprived of food, so it adjusts. It goes back to hunter-gatherer days when people ate what they could forage throughout hte day.
• Melting the Fat: I am working hard, walking, running, and exercising why is it taking so long to burn off the fat. I used to envision fat in a frying pan - how it just melts under the heat. The painful truth is that fat burns fewer calories than muscle. If you have let your self go, then the first part of the journey back is the hardest. The good news is that every pound of muscle you build will burn 300-500 additional calories a week (with no extra effort). Debbie & I were discouraged at first, but now that we have replaced much of the body fat with lean muscle, we are calorie burning machines. We can go out and splurge one evening, eat an extra 1,000 calories and burn them off the next day with moderate exercise - that wouldn't and didn't happen before we got rid of the fat.  BE PATIENT and PERSEVERE - the rewards are amazing.
• Metabolism: It isn't true that a young person's metabolism burns more calories than an older person. A recent study showed that when a 20 year old and a 50 year old (same basic body type) followed the same diet and exercise patterns, the 20 year old burned about 495 calories while the 50 year old burned 465. At 53, I am living proof you can get your metabolism running at a high rate again.

Don't wait to get started. The single best thing I did was find a program that gave me structure. Most of you know that I am a huge fan of Advocare. The 24 Day Challenge transformed me, and now I regularly use Advocare products to help me stay fit, burn the last little bit of fat, and build healthy muscle. If I can help you, email me at trentwheeler@rocketmail.com, or visit my advocare site to learn more www.advocare.com/12044713 or www.trentwheeler.com.

Next Post: Everything is a Drug

Why Can't that be Me?

Have you ever sat and watched the infomercials on television where the people lost 50 lbs and looked 20 years younger and asked - "Why Can't that be Me?" I have more than once! I have also read hundreds of motivational books, how to get rich articles and purchased everything from Carlton Sheets "No Money Down," Bill Phillips "Body for Life," and John Commutta's "Transforming Debt into Wealth."

I have ridden that roller coaster up and down through success and failure most of my life, but the recent transformation I made with my health and fitness taught me two very important lessons:

1. As I look at my life it has been a steady, gradual, upward climb. In other words despite the peaks and valleys, I have been moving in the right directions. Sometimes it serves us well to look back over the long-term and see the progress we have made.
2. Every weight loss system, success program or financial counseling book I have read all have a common theme - "commitment to a process." Every year as I neared my birthday I made resolutions (yes, I make mine in April, not January). I was going to get fit and healthy, earn more, pay off debt - yada, yada, yada! But I had trouble keeping my commitment to self-improvement.

Why can't that be me? It can! There are very few valid excuses for not reaching your personal goals. We have a world of information at our fingertips. When I decided to get healthy, I studied multiple programs and settled on Advocare for two reasons: 1) I had seen first hand the program work for others; 2) Almost all the research I did gave the company high marks. Most importantly, I did my homework. I studied health and fitness and became educated about how my body functions and was committed to breaking my bad habits.

Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to transform your income? Maybe you just want to learn to play the guitar, or have the most beautiful lawn on the block. All this and more is achievable and the information is at your fingertips. My son taught himself guitar at Mahalo.com, I learned about fitness by downloading a number of books to my Kindle Reader and by reading the blogs of fitness experts.

NO EXCUSES - you want to succeed: Commit, Learn and get up and DO something about it.

Water of Life

I just returned from Nigeria about two weeks ago and spent a good portion of my time in a region that didn't have any potable water. I was foturnate to be able to get some bottled water each day, but it made me starkly aware of the importance of water.

Most of my friends and many of my blog readers know that a couple of months ago I embarked on a journey from fatness to fitness. I was nearly 40 lbs overweight, had GERD (severe acid reflux), high blood pressure, sore joints, etc., etc. After signing up for the Advocare 24 Day Challenge I have lost 36 lbs. and started exercising again. The results have been so amazing that I decided to start sharing all I have learned about health and fitness on my blog. Today we take a look at water!

The discipline of dieting and exercise are hard, the principles are pretty simple and one very important factor is the importance of hydration. The average person should be drinking 1 ounce of water per day for every two pounds of body weight. In my case that is about 87 ounces (or a little more than 5 bottled waters a day). Since I started dieting on April 2nd the only real drawback from all the water I have been drinking are the number of trips I make to the rest room each day. Here are a few facts about water/hydration:

• Drinking one bottled water before and/or with your meal can increase your metabolism as much as 30%. Of that metabolic increase 40% is attributed to the energy your body expends trying to heat the water in your system.
• If it is the heating of the water that drives up your metabolic rate then it makes sense that the colder the water you drink the better.
• Water maximizes your exercise and workouts. When you don't drink enough and become even slightly dehydrated you lose significant benefits to your workouts and can even have a negative impact on your lean muscle mass.
• Water helps supress the appetite and helps the body metabolize stored fat. When your kidneys don't get enough water, they throw the excess load on to the liver. One function of the liver is to metabolize fat, but if it is has to carry the extra load thrown on it by the kidneys the task of metabolizing fat is lost.
• In what seems to be a contradiction, the body retains more water when it is poorly hydrated. When you deptirve the body of water, it responds by "storing water" for future needs causing swelling in the hands and feet.
• Water adds elasticity to our muscles improving the benefit from our workouts and helps keep skin from sagging.
• Water helps rid the body of waste. If your urine is clear - it is sign you are drinking plenty of water.

These are just a few of the benefits of water - if you want to get more healthy drink lots and lots of it. One caution, a small dose of coffee or coke is acceptable, but keep in mind that caffiene also causes dehydration in the body - thus requiring you to drink more water.

www.advocare.com/12044713