While this advice is sound, you may have a hard time swallowing it.

Sugar….who’d a thunk? Sadly, it can be your worst diet enemy.

Sugar comes in many forms, here’s a list of other names for sugar:

barley malt
beet sugar
brown sugar
buttered syrup
cane-juice crystals
cane sugar
caramel
carob syrup
corn syrup
corn-syrup solids
date sugar
dextran
dextrose
diastase
diastatic malt
ethyl maltol
evaporated cane juice
fructose
fruit juice
fruit-juice concentrate
glucose
glucose solids
golden sugar
golden syrup
grape sugar
high-fructose corn syrup
honey
invert sugar
lactose
malt syrup
maltodextrin
maltose
mannitol
molasses
raw sugar
refiner’s syrup
sorbitol
sorghum syrup
sucrose
turbinado sugar
yellow sugar

What could possibly be wrong with sugar and its derivatives? Why would I pick on sugar?

Good questions. Fact is, there’s really nothing wrong with sugar, it’s the quantity of consumption that’s in question. If you start to read labels, you’d be surprised to see that sugar is added to literally every food item, even in foods that you wouldn’t expect to find sugar. The average North American diet consists of 20 teaspoons of added sugar daily. This is a lot especially when you consider this doesn’t count naturally occurring sugars found in food.

According to the World Health Organization, no more than 10 percent of calories should come from added sweeteners. In a diet composed of 2,000 daily calories, that would amount to about 200 calories, or 50 grams of sugar.

Sugar is an addictive substance. Once you taste something sweet, you crave more. The more sugar you ingest, the more sugar you want. You’ll you lose your taste for naturally occurring sugars when you eat intensely sweeten foods.

Here are a five of the obvious detrimental things that sugar does to your body:

* Refined sugar contains no fiber, no minerals, no proteins, no fats, no enzymes, only empty calories. When you eat sugar, your body must borrow vital nutrients from healthy cells to metabolize it. Calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium are taken from various parts of the body to make use of the sugar. Calcium is used to neutralize the effects of sugar so sometimes the body draws this from the bones. Bones can then become osteoporotic.
* If sugar consumption is continued, an over-acid condition results, and more minerals are needed from deep in the body to correct the imbalance. In essence, the pH of the body isn’t balanced.
* Sugar makes the blood very thick and sticky, inhibiting much of the blood flow into the minute capillaries that supply our gums and teeth with vital nutrients. This can lead to diseased gums and dental problems.
* The pancreas overreacts to large amounts of sugar in the blood and releases too much insulin. This can lead to diabetes.
* Refined sugar may be one of the major dietary risk factors in gallstone disease. Gallstones are composed of fats and calcium. Sugar can upset all of the minerals, and one of the minerals, calcium, can become toxic, depositing itself anywhere in the body, including the gallbladder.

So what’s a girl to do? Well, your best bet is to become aware of all the places sugar hides and then try to reduce your consumption. Over time you’ll develop a taste for naturally occurring sugars. If you try to cut out sugar, you’ll likely experience some withdrawal symptoms. You’ll have crazy cravings and may feel sluggish and have a headache. After 4-5 days though, this will pass.

It’s easy to figure out your sugar consumption by reading food labels. The best way to visualize sugar content is to take the carbohydrate count and divide it by four. For example: if a serving size has 28 g of carbs, then that would amount to 7 teaspoons of sugar. Your goal should be to limit sugar consumption to a serving size of no more than 4 teaspoons of sugar or 16g of carbs at a time. Try to keep refined and process sugars out of your diet completely.

Give your diet a good hard look and cut back on sugar where you can at the very least. Cutting it out completely may be too much of a step to start. Baby steps and stay on track and your body will thank you in the end.
To me, cutting back on sugar is a great way to get bikini ready.

That’s it for today, stay tuned as I’ll be getting back to you later this week
with more ways to get into your bikini before summer.

Sincerely,
John Verd

P.S. I found a great program to help support your fitness program at home called Female Fat Loss Over 40. Please check out Shawna’s program Click Here!

Quinoa is quite possibly the perfect thing to have for breakfast to start your day off on the right foot.
Servings: 1

Here’s what you need:

* 1/2 cup quinoa, cooked in water according to instructions on package
* 1 Tablespoon golden raisins
* 1 Tablespoon date pieces, chopped
* 1 Tablespoon pecan pieces, chopped
* Dash of cinnamon
* Dash of nutmeg
* Drizzle of pure maple syrup

1. Top cooked quinoa with raisins, date pieces, pecan pieces, cinnamon, nutmeg and a drizzle of maple syrup.

Nutritional Analysis: One serving equals: 344 calories, 5g fat, 59g carbohydrate, 6g fiber, and 12g protein.

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Here’s what you need…

• 2 cups wild rice, cooked
• 1 Tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 sweet potato, halved and thinly sliced
• 1/2 cup red onion, thinly sliced
• 1 cup mushroom, sliced
• 1 Tablespoon ginger root, minced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 Tablespoons mirin (rice cooking wine)
• 2 Tablespoons soy sauce
• 1 Tablespoon toasted sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon corn starch
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 2 cups green beans, chopped
• 4 cups chicken breast, cooked and cubed

1. In a large saucepan place the sesame oil over medium heat. Add the sweet potato, onion, mushroom, ginger and garlic. Sauté for 5 minutes.
2. In a small bowl combine the mirin, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, cornstarch and red pepper. Set aside.
3. Add the green beans and chicken into the pan and continue to cook for 2 minutes. Pour the soy sauce mixture in and mix until fully incorporated. Cook for another 3 minutes.
4. Serve over wild rice.

Nutritional Analysis: One serving equals: 299 calories, 8g fat, 23g carbohydrate, 2g fiber, and 33g protein

Most people wait around for motivation to strike them like a lightning bolt. Well, I’ve got news: motivation isn’t something that happens to you – it’s something that you create for yourself.

If you don’t feel motivated to achieve your goals, it is likely due to mental roadblocks that hold you hostage. Read the following 21 Mindset Tips and prepare your mind for success.

1. Success comes first in the mind, so visualize yourself accomplishing your goals.
2. Remember, you are the only person who can hold you back.
3. Forgive yourself and love yourself despite past failures.
4. Decide what is important in your life, and focus on that.
5. Conquer each negative thought the moment it enters your mind, when it is weakest.
6. Give up the idea that things won’t go right unless you worry about them.
7. If you bring the body of your dreams to the point of resolve, then you’ll soon be living in it.
8. Look towards your future, if you believe the best is yet to come then it will be.
9. You become what you think about most.
10. The margin between success and failure is very small and easily bridged by determination.
11. Start your day by accomplishing your hardest task first.
12. Set small attainable goals, rather than one monumental goal.
13. Convince yourself that exercise is fun, and it will be.
14. Know your big reason why.
15. Create a motivating play list of songs to use as the sound track to your workout sessions.
16. Every decision you make leads you either closer toward achieving your goal, or farther from it.
17. If you think you’re a fat person, then you’ll stay fat. If you think you’re fit, then you soon will be.
18. Once you’ve set your goal, your attitude either pushes you toward accomplishment or failure.
19. If you don’t know exactly where you want to go, you will likely end up someplace else.
20. You can have the body of your dreams, but first you must give up the belief that you can’t.
21. You can only have two things in life: excuses or results.

If you’re sick and tired of making excuses, then contact me today to get started on a results-driven fitness program.

Here are the details on our “Tag, You’re FIT!” promo and how YOU will win a complimentary MONTH of training, if you refer the most people!

1. Stop by our studio and pick your Game Plan keytags and hand them out to friends, which they can redeem for a week of any training we do.

2. Tell them to register at www.gpfitness.com, then click on “Free Consult” and enter the key-tag number. (info is on the back of each tag)

3. Get credit!

The contest will run until until Jan. 29th. and I’ll announce the winner Feb 1st.

Good luck and have a great week!

John

2 cups brown rice flour

½ cup tapioca flour

¾ cup brown sugar or sucanat

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 teaspoons xanthan gum

2 tablespoons cinnamon

2 tablespoons ground ginger

2 teaspoons allspice

½ teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg

2 tablespoons dry mustard

¼ teaspoon white pepper

¾ teaspoon sea salt

2 cups pureed pumpkin

⅓ cup water

⅓ cup butter or Earth Balance natural margarine, melted

¾ cup honey

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 cup chopped pecans (optional)

½ cup raisins (optional)

To do:

Preheat oven to 350º F. Butter one 9- by 5-inch brand pan or two 8 x 4-inch bread pans.

In a bowl, combine the flours, sucanat, baking soda, baking powder, xanthan gum, spices and salt. Mix well. In anotherbowl, whisk together the pumpkin, water, melted butter orEarth Balance margarine, honey and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients in 2 to 3 portions, gently mixing together between additions, being careful not to over mix. Mix in pecans, if using, with the last portion of dry mixture.

Pour mixture into the buttered bread pan/s. Bake for 55 to 65 minutes if using the

9- by 5-inch pan, or 45 to 55 minutes for the 8- by 4-inch pans, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the bread cool in the pan on a cooling rack for 10 minutes. Invert pan while bread gently slides out and place on a cooling rack upside down.

*Or 24 muffins. Bake at 350º F for 25 minutes.

Phys Ed: Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Joubert/Photo Researchers, Inc A neuron in the brain.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/phys-ed-why-exercise-makes-you-less-anxious/

Continued:
In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.
For years, both in popular imagination and in scientific circles, it has been a given that exercise enhances mood. But how exercise, a physiological activity, might directly affect mood and anxiety — psychological states — was unclear. Now, thanks in no small part to improved research techniques and a growing understanding of the biochemistry and the genetics of thought itself, scientists are beginning to tease out how exercise remodels the brain, making it more resistant to stress. In work undertaken at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for instance, scientists have examined the role of serotonin, a neurotransmitter often considered to be the “happy” brain chemical. That simplistic view of serotonin has been undermined by other researchers, and the University of Colorado work further dilutes the idea. In those experiments, rats taught to feel helpless and anxious, by being exposed to a laboratory stressor, showed increased serotonin activity in their brains. But rats that had run for several weeks before being stressed showed less serotonin activity and were less anxious and helpless despite the stress.
Other researchers have looked at how exercise alters the activity of dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain, while still others have concentrated on the antioxidant powers of moderate exercise. Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress. In an experiment led by researchers at the University of Houston and reported at the Society for Neuroscience meeting, rats whose oxidative-stress levels had been artificially increased with injections of certain chemicals were extremely anxious when faced with unfamiliar terrain during laboratory testing. But rats that had exercised, even if they had received the oxidizing chemical, were relatively nonchalant under stress. When placed in the unfamiliar space, they didn’t run for dark corners and hide, like the unexercised rats. They insouciantly explored.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”
The stress-reducing changes wrought by exercise on the brain don’t happen overnight, however, as virtually every researcher agrees. In the University of Colorado experiments, for instance, rats that ran for only three weeks did not show much reduction in stress-induced anxiety, but those that ran for at least six weeks did. “Something happened between three and six weeks,” says Benjamin Greenwood, a research associate in the Department of Integrative Physiology at the University of Colorado, who helped conduct the experiments. Dr. Greenwood added that it was “not clear how that translates” into an exercise prescription for humans. We may require more weeks of working out, or maybe less. And no one has yet studied how intense the exercise needs to be. But the lesson, Dr. Greenwood says, is “don’t quit.” Keep running or cycling or swimming. (Animal experiments have focused exclusively on aerobic, endurance-type activities.) You may not feel a magical reduction of stress after your first jog, if you haven’t been exercising. But the molecular biochemical changes will begin, Dr. Greenwood says. And eventually, he says, they become “profound.”

Easy Baked Salmon

1 pound Chinook salmon fillet, cut into 4 equal pieces
1 teaspoon dried basil or dill (or both)
Dash salt
Dash pepper
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
Lemon wedges

Preheat the oven to 350˚. Place the 4 pieces of salmon on a baking sheet. Sprinkle the basil/dill, salt & pepper evenly over the fish. Drizzle with the olive oil, and pat down to distribute evenly with the spices.

Baking time depends on thickness: bake 10 minutes for each inch of thickness of fish. On a typical piece of fish, it will take approximately 20-25 minutes. Check for doneness by cutting into the thickest part of the fish. If it is translucent, place back in the oven and check in 5 minutes; if it is flaky it is done!

Serve with lemon wedges or Yogurt-Dill Sauce; enjoy!

Yogurt-Dill Sauce

1 cup plain, unsweetened yogurt
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
2-4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (about 1 medium lemon)
1-2 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon dried dill or 2 tablespoons fresh dill

Mix all together and serve with fish; also good with falafels or mixed in with vegetables and/or rice.

For more info, and great nutritional advice, contact Johnna Dietz
johnna@wholebody-nutrition.com
Whole Body Nutrition

Weight Gain season starts now and runs straight through New Year’s.

The next two months will bring ample opportunity for you to indulge, to enjoy and to expand your waistline. Of course the choice is yours.

Why do I bring this up now and not mid way through December? Quite frankly now is the time for you to plan for the weeks ahead. Once the whirlwind of holiday activities and obligations begins, you’ll be too caught up to put a plan into action.

So in this moment of clarity, this calm before the storm, let’s outline a plan that will save you from unwanted holiday pounds.

1) Put Your Feet to the Fire: Exercise is the first thing to go when people get busy, and the holiday season is notorious for deserted gyms. This year do something drastic-obligate yourself to exercise. Promising to yourself isn’t enough, you need to promise to others so that you won’t drop the ball.

Commit to working with a fitness expert – the perfect solution for consistent, challenging and effective workouts. You’ll get the attention and assistance that you need to power through the holidays in better shape than ever – talk about motivating!

Join a class – we’ve determined that you simply won’t be as effective on your own during the busy holiday season, so joining a class would lend accountability. Stick with something challenging that gets your heart rate elevated and incorporates strength training.

Find a serious exercise buddy – some friends can be the biggest help while others end up pulling you down. When looking for an exercise buddy choose carefully and consider the following questions:
- Do they share your fitness goals?
- Are they typically encouraging?
- Do they stick with things?
- Are you at the same fitness level?

Get your spouse involved – what a great way to spend more time together during this busy season, and you’ll be able to support each other in your shared quest for fitness. Decide on an exercise activity that you can both enjoy and set a schedule for your workout dates.
2) Cut the Fat: I mean this literally. I’m not going to imply that you shouldn’t indulge in any seasonal treats, but think moderation. So often the holidays are used as an excuse to eat until the point of being uncomfortable – would you really miss that bloated feeling? Decide on a few fattening treats to cut out this year.

Do you really need to bring sweets for everyone in the office, especially since you know that you will end up with the leftovers? How about a fruit basket or flower arrangement?

At holiday parties load your plate first with greens, vegetables and lean meats before breads and heavier foods. Also drink water with your meal and keep alcoholic beverages to a minimum.

Watch what you drink, most beverages are filled to the brim with calories. Hot drinks from Starbucks, cocktails at parties and eggnog around a crackling fire-all very enjoyable and all filled with empty calories.

At no other time in the year are we faced with so many sweets. To avoid being a Scrooge, but without adding pounds to your frame, try the one treat rule. Each time you’re in a social situation that involves sweets just eat one, and enjoy your treat slowly.
If you truly want to enjoy the coming festivities without dealing with added pounds it is all in your hands. The key is your mindset.

Most people approach the holidays with the mindset that says ‘I deserve to indulge and I shouldn’t have to exercise since it’s the holidays.’ This is fine if you don’t mind entering 2009 a few pounds heavier, a little less healthy, and with lower energy than ever before.

I believe that you deserve better. I believe that you should enter 2009 in better shape than you are today, healthier than you’ve been in a long time, and with more energy that you thought possible.

I’m always available to help – call or reply to this email to set up a fitness and consultation with me and I’ll show you how you can see a lot of change over the next few weeks to come.