January 15
There are few things more powerful in your fitness and dietary regimen that integrating periodic rewards.  But most ironically, in our culture, one of the most prevalent rewards for almost anything is of course, eating!  It makes no sense, obviously, to reward one’s self with food after a long and arduous program to cut calories and weight.  Therefore as you begin your program it would be very helpful to think in advance about what rewards would be powerful enough to give you an incentive as you step through your program.  Some examples would be treating yourself to a concert or articles of clothing and so forth.  But linking in tangible rewards as you reach your milestones is very important and is very powerful and can make all the difference in the short run and especially in the long-term.  Treat yourself often because – you are worth it! 

January 14

There is a two edged sword in forging a new lifestyle called ‘goal-linking’.  It has both positive and negative qualities, but there is a secret to making to work for you at the same time minimize its undesirable characteristics.  Using this technique will enable you to develop a continuous motivation that links goals together in a never ending chain.  For example, you may wish to get in shape for a family event that is happening a couple of months in the future.  This is very powerful motivational tool that enables you to focus on a goal that has energized your healthy lifestyle.  But after the family event is over, the focus in the motivation has suddenly disappeared.  This is frequently a very common deathknell for many lifestyle programs.  And yet it is such a powerful tool that the alternative is; by using your fitness calendar, you can link another goal on your calendar ahead of you and chain your fitness program to another motivational objective in the near future.  Thus by goal linking continuously ahead into the future from one objective to another, you can use this powerful tool to your advantage and not have to suffer the unfortunate reality of sudden loss of motivation just when things are looking good.

January 13 

One of the most powerful of all tools in forging a collection of new habits, (which is defined as ‘creating a new lifestyle’), is consistency.  The opposite of consistency, is of course, complacency.  Because developing a fitness lifestyle is not easy, the human mind will attempt to take the easy way out and try to talk you out of your fitness and nutritional regime, one small decision at a time - all the time.  Eventually, the habit that you were trying to develop turns into a disaster and a failure, one small seemingly insignificant decision at a time.  Therefore consistency is vitally important in any lifestyle change and in any fitness and nutrition program.  While it is very true that “life happens”, and that our habits are sometimes interrupted by everyday events, those interruptions must be exceptions and not become the rule.  One of the best tools that I have used to enforce consistency is a calendar.  I mark major activities, weight goals, nutrition goals and other data points each day on my fitness calendar.  This allows me to see at a glance my record of consistency.  And when I go back to that calendar and I look at those days when my consistency lagged I am also able to see that the results of my program lagged right along with it.  Without that tool it is easy to lose track of what you’re doing and slip right back into the old lifestyle that you are diligently trying to escape.  You can purchase a ready-made calendar, print a custom calendar from the Internet or just make your own out of a plain sheet of paper.  But that piece of paper is a powerful tool that will help you develop and maintain the consistency that you need to develop a new lifestyle with full success! 

January 12 
Forging a new lifestyle out of a lifetime of developed habits and practices is no easy task!  If you step back and take a look at your lifestyle, you will see that it is actually nothing more than a collection of expressed habits and behaviors that are tied to your daily clock.  If you want to experience a true change in lifestyle, you will have to individually change at least some of those habits until you achieve your new lifestyle objective.  The word ‘habit’ itself is defined as an action that is repeated over and over again, day after day, as a reflexive behavior that has become the norm in anyone’s life.  If you wish to change your lifestyle; again, you will have to change your habits.  The best way to make a new habit to replace an old one is repetition.  If you repeat a behavior in a cyclic manner day after day, it soon becomes an ingrained habit.  And once that habitual behavior is established in the course of your life, it becomes the first element of a true lifestyle change.  Therefore if the lifestyle change involves fitness and health, we will need to replace old habits of eating, sleeping and attention to including fitness activities as a part of our everyday lifestyle.  It is always a good exercise to sit down and draw a line down through the middle of a blank page.  Then in the left column write those habits that we have that you need to get rid of.  And in the right column write a list of habits that you wish to develop to replace the old ones.  This becomes a single page picture of the task that lies ahead of you!  Because the technique of habit building is repetition, your next task is to assimilate each of these new habits and began to integrate them into your daily life one at a time, every day, until they become a natural part of your life.

January 11 

The building of a whole new lifestyle is based upon the exact construct that each of us used to arrive at the lifestyle that we are living today.  As we look around our lives today we discover that we typically do things the same way every day, day after day.  We awaken at a certain time, we go to bed at a certain time.  Go to work, we come home, we have dinner, we have entertainment patterns that we engage in each evening, and then at the end we all typically retire at the time that we are most comfortable with.  The next day it all begins again.  Embedded in that day of expressed habits developed over years and decades, are our activities related to routine exercise (or lack of routine exercise) and our eating habits.  Each of those things combined make us what we are physically, mentally and define the overall state of our health.  Therefore to bring about a true, permanent lifestyle change, we each need to examine every aspect of our life and determine which parts need refining, changing and even getting rid of things that are not healthful.  Therefore in order to construct a such a lasting change, we need to first analyze our old life, plan for the new life that we wish to have and then finally go about changing our daily habits to make a lifestyle change actually come to pass and to make it permanent.  Forging whole new habits and getting rid of old habits is not easy and it takes time.  It also takes long term personal commitment to progress and to guaranteeing a healthier tomorrow.  It all begins with that personal decision to redirect our lives and while it is not easy it is the most rewarding thing in any human existence.

January 10 

A lifestyle of fitness and pursuing a healthy existence is a day-by day adventure.  We don’t accomplish it all at once – it is accomplished a single day at a time.  One recent statistic that I encountered stated that 70 to 80% of all fitness programs ultimately crash and burn.  I believe that this is so because people tend to get involved in a fitness program to accomplish the goal of losing weight or to prepare for some activity such as a race or a marathon.  Once that goal is achieved, then psychologically there is no reason for continuing something that is difficult for a certain period of time – which is a lifestyle change.  And if the goal is linked to an event or an achievement, then it was never a lifestyle change at all - it was a goal setting exercise.  At FitScience.net we are focusing on the pursuit of fitness and healthy existence as a permanent lifestyle change, not a goal setting exercise!  There is a world of difference.  We want for you the very same things that we want for ourselves and that is to rid ourselves of a lifetime of poor habits and to develop new ones that will last an entire lifetime.  While it is true that initiating the lifestyle change is difficult, once the change has been integrated anyone’s life, it is no longer difficult because it has become a permanent way of life!  And that is the new life that is full of the joys of health, longevity and freedom from all of the negative things that come from the old life, the old habits and the old expectations.  Stay with us throughout the year as we get there day by day.

January 9 

As you begin your personal, individualized fitness program, you will discover that the very first major challenge you will face is called, ‘getting off your dead rear’.  I realized that may sound a bit over the top amusing, but I do not think I can overemphasize the fundamental truth of that statement!  Just getting off your dead rear is the first step to health!  If we can just get up out of our easy chairs and walk to the door, drive to the gym, or just get out and run – a major part of the challenge has been completely won for the day!  Of course a true lifestyle change does not at all entail just working out.  A we will discover together, it also consists of diet and supplementation.  But even diet and supplementation activities require the same thing – that we get off our dead rear throughout the day and go do the things that are necessary to keep us healthy and vital well into our later years.  What we each do today guarantees another day down the road.  If we can just somehow get up out of our chairs and go do the right thing, we guarantee the extent and the quality of all of our tomorrows.  So, let’s get off our rears and go get it done!  Right now – today!

January 8
The average human body experiences an amazing beginning in its early years. As the youthful body grows and forms, it is designed to function at the optimum of the body’s design characteristics. In normal cases, the calorie loading is burned readily by higher metabolism, therefore the fat loading is minimal and because of optimal hormone balance, the human musculature is optimized toward leanness. There is abundant energy available and coupled with the lack of excessive mass, the youthful body is a wonderful, capable, resilient, easy to live with organism. But as most readers of this will acknowledge, toward the end of the second decade, things begin to significantly change. The energy level begins to drop off, the motivation to expend energy decreases and the encroaching fat layers become more obvious. What we all took for granted in our first two or three decades literally disappears. What we first enjoyed has normal has been replaced by a new normal, and that new normal is perhaps best defined as ‘struggle’. A lot of people don’t like that struggle, but instead of fighting against it they give in to the lethargy and inevitable decline. But you don’t have to give in! As I hope I will clearly demonstrate here, the struggle can very successfully be turned around into an adventure! Instead of facing a tough, uphill struggle – it is possible to engage in a life time of adventure and exploration of your own body and mind that results in health, a clear and sound awareness - and in the end, frankly, it can be a whole lot of fun!

January 7

There is a powerful tool that will help you get the motivation you need to get started - the humble pen!  With this ancient tool, you can begin to chronicle your fitness journey from the very first day.  I highly recommend starting a personal Fitness Journal that you can go to each day.  In your journal you can keep your weight chart, your daily activities, and even include a personal daily diary.   I have kept one of these in a 3 ringed binder for the past 13 years.  It is very encouraging to skim through these pages over the years and to read about my own successes and my own share of failures!  There is no more interesting story than your own - so please do not lose even a single day of it.  I can promise you that in less than a year, you will have forgotten many of your triumphs and struggles.  Think of your fitness journal as a written copy of yourself with perfect memory cheering you on day by day.  Forming a dynamic team with your journal will assure you are never making this passage alone!

January 6

There are three linked tiers to any fitness program.  They are: nutrition, supplementation and exercise.  These three tiers can be best understood in terms of a common piece of furniture - a three-legged chair called a stool.  This stool is totally stable, of course, with all three legs placed on the floor. Anyone can completely trust their entire weight on it unreservedly.  Each leg supports and complement the other. But if you remove one leg, the stool suddenly becomes unstable.  Yes, one can successfully sit on it, but it is hazardous at best.  Further, if one removes two of the three legs to the stool, it is even more unstable.  Some may even be able to carefully balance on a one legged stool, but it is not a good idea, of course, and it could go down at any moment.  A successful fitness program can be described the same way - all three tiers - nutrition, supplementation and exercise all support and complement one another.  In my gym, I have more than one good friend there who faithfully trains day after day, year after year and never miss a single day!  And yet, they and are still obese and most are actually getting heavier year by year.  They train hard, lift far more than I will ever be able to manage - but they totally ignore any nutrition and supplementation regimes.  I have always assumed they train for enjoyment and not for necessarily to lead a healthy lifestyle.  As we explore getting started in the month of January at Fit Science, we will discuss this in more depth, of course.  And as they are so essential and so vitally important, an entire month this year will focus on each of them.  February: Your Body in Motion.  March: Nutrition.  April: Supplementation.  Stay fit - stay healthy - stay with Fit Science!

January 5

Understanding the science of losing weight is not difficult at all!  For a human to lose weight, they merely have to consume less energy than they burn.  If they do, they WILL ALWAYS lose weight - they must.  It simply is not any more complicated than that.  If I describe this in even simpler terms, for a human to lose weight, they must consume less energy than their body requires to stay alive, which forces the body to access and use stored fat and protein for energy.  In reality, it becomes very complicated because the human body is an astonishingly complex biochemical machine that has an overriding control mechanism that is responsible for survival.  Once the readily accessible energy stores (food) have been depleted, the body turns on one of the most powerful of all human drive mechanisms - even more powerful than the male drive for sex - and it is called hunger.  Even before the body begins to access stored energy, it will signal hunger.  This drive is extraordinarily commanding.  To begin any fitness program, it is essential to understand this drive, learn to never ignore it - but instead learn how to satisfy it.  Few people can control it.  But that's just fine!  Hunger is a sign of health and was never designed to be controlled.  If you wish to lose weight - we can be most successful by respecting this drive as a positive one and by satisfying it intelligently.  We accomplish this by what we eat and when we eat!  Stay with us here day by day at Fit Science, and we can share our experiences and successes at satisfying hunger in order to lose weight, getting fit and staying healthy. 

January 4  
Getting started (or even re-started) on any fitness program is difficult, I don’t care who you are. Imagine this for a moment. If your target is to lose 25 pounds, that means that during your workout, you are dragging a quarter of a 100 pound block around with you everywhere you go – jogging, treadmill, elliptical machine and even walking. Actually pick one up and try this to see what I mean. Next time you are in the gym, snag a 25 pound weight and (carefully) walk around the floor with it. It’s heavy. Even though that excess weight is distributed relatively evenly over your entire body – it STILL weighs in at 25 pounds! Getting started is difficult partially because it takes more energy and effort to move your ideal weight PLUS all that excess weight in an exercise regimen, in addition to making a whole new habit that requires self-discipline. The idea here is to burn more calories than you consume and force your body to burn its fat stores. If you do it right, you will burn mostly fat, just a little protein and with determination and discipline, that 25 pounds will disappear – forever! And at that point, you will be happier, literally lighter, feeling better and more confident that your health is improving each day. And as a bonus, because of less weight to drag around and the new routine you have learned, it only gets easier each day because by the laws of physics - it takes less effort to move around less weight!

January 3 
Once you have consulted a real, flesh and blood physician for medical clearance to work out, it would be very cost prohibitive to return to him or her every time you have a medical question regarding your fitness goals.  In this case, most people I know turn to the internet for fitness advice from nutrition, technique, supplementation and avoidance of injury.  And- anyone who has ever tried this approach has the same impression after only one hour or so: many sites disagree with one another and all the advice is significantly and qualitatively different!  The solution to this is to do your research very carefully, consult others in your sphere of influence and decide on one or two  internet physicians with a good reputation (that you can verify through thorough internet reviews) and that has a very large body of material posted.  Obviously, if your question is about your own medical situation and is unique to you, please schedule another visit with your personal physician!  I can unreservedly recommend two sites that I rely on:  Dr. Jennifer Landa, MD, my own in-the-flesh wellness physician and the Chief Medical Officer for BodyLogicMD.  She has written books on these subjects, has an active YouTube presence and her own website.  She is the cutting edge expert in fitness and many 21st century medical approaches.  And finally, I most highly recommend Dr. Joseph Mercola, MD who has one of the internet's largest body of completely trustworthy and well researched fitness related materials and advice.  Just be careful who you choose as your expert and always turn to your own personal physician if the question is significant.

http://drjenniferlanda.com/

http://Mercola.com

January 2

In any fitness program, your physician is your best friend beginning before day one of your program.  It is not wise to embark on a fitness program until you first pay a visit to your doctor. To go directly from a sedentary lifestyle into an exercise program without professional advice is dangerous. I would love to advise you to skip it because physician visits can be expensive and such a requirement could discourage a lot of people from even starting. But unfortunately, I cannot. If you have insurance, it should not be much of a burden. But if you are not covered, inquire about availability and price at your local urgent care facilities for what is called an 'athletic physical'. They often perform school athletic physicals which should be sufficient for you unless you have preexisting medical problems. Just explain to the examining physician what you are doing before the exam begins. The doctor can rule out any heart/circulation irregularities and can advise you individually on getting started. Knowing you one-on-one, the physician can then also offer good advice on a suggested pace, supplements and diet. The visit to your doctor is an important first step as you embark on one of the most significant ventures of your entire life – a life that just got longer by acting on the wisdom to get started today!

January 1
There is no better new year’s resolution than to resolve to be healthy.  Unfortunately, most New Year’s resolutions never even make it out of the month of January.  The reasons for such a dismal record is fairly simple:  “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”  How do we humans get around that?  By attaching a realistic goal to the resolution and thereby appeal to the ego of the flesh.  Don’t just strive to lose 50 or 100 pounds in 2016!  But instead, resolve to lose 3-5 pounds in January. When that goal is achieved, add another one.  Resolve to lose another 3-5 pounds in February.  Strategically link  your resolutions together into an achievable reason to celebrate early in the year and then often thereafter.  If the flesh enjoys anything – it is a reason to celebrate and to feel good about itself!  Feed your flesh healthy food, exercise it and then achieve and record frequent success in 2016.  This is accomplished by chaining your resolutions together one small success at a time and your big goal will surely be overtaken by intelligently attending to the smaller ones!