• You need more than a week to see exercising or dieting results.  Usually, it takes anywhere from 4-6 weeks to start seeing results and at earliest 12 weeks to reach early goals.

• You may weigh more from exercising because muscle weighs more than fat and you can build muscle quickly. If you are on a fat burning diet, do more reps with lighter weights. You will still gain muscle but the fat will melt away. Also, with less fat, oxygen and vitamins will be able to get through your body quicker and you will feel better and have more energy.

• Change up your exercise routine after a month or so. You will not benefit from constantly doing the same exercises week after week. Your muscles will get used to specific movements. By changing exercises or intensity shocks your muscles which helps them break down and rebuild quicker.

• Rest. You need at least 48 hours between major workouts, i.e. Chest. Never exercise the same muscles on consecutive days. Daily cardio is OK but working out with weights should be limited to 3-4 times a week. Trust me, you can overdo it. A little goes a long way when its intense.

• Don’t just do 10 reps because its the ‘norm’.  It all depends on your routine.  If you want to burn fat, and can do more than 10 reps, to them.  If you want to build muscle and strength and can do more than 10 reps, increase the weight.  And form is very important. 100 poor sit ups where you jerk your body around and use momentum do nothing for you. Do 10 real sit ups: Lay down on the floor, legs out, bent or not. Place your hands behind your ears and elbows flat on the ground. Press your belly button into the ground and squeeze your abs as you sit up without your legs coming off the ground or your elbows folding.  Hard, isn’t it?

• Drink Water.

• Keep a log of your exercises and weight, and anything else you think important. Progress is never more evident than with actually proof. Write it down!

• Do whatever you can to keep yourself motivated. Go with a partner, listen to music, whatever. Just keep at it!

• And finally, those over the counter fat burning and diet supplements are bottled heart attacks. All you need to do is drink lots of water and eat right. Eating right doesn’t meant a zero-fat or zero-carb or all protein diet. Eating right means a balance of fats, carbs and proteins tailored to your needs. If you are weight training, carbs and proteins are your friends. If you are trying to lose weight, strangely enough, you need fats and carbs, but the right ones. You need carbs before you work out. You need protein after you work out. You need fats, but you don’t need twinkies; you need essential fatty acids, like fish oil. Just remember: Fish, peanut butter, nuts, berries, any type of greens, beans, rice, chicken, yogurt, cottage cheese are your friends.

[Source: CNN]

Ask doctors if their male patients ignore big and obvious health symptoms, and they’ll respond with laughter — huge peals and guffaws.

Once they regain the ability to speak, these doctors will say things such as “I don’t even know where to start,” and “You don’t have enough room in your story for all the symptoms men blow off.”

Conventional wisdom, they say, is true. Women listen to their bodies and go to the doctor when something isn’t right. Men tend to seek medical attention when they’re at death’s door — or when their wives prod them into going.

“I think it’s a macho thing,” says Dr. Barron Lerner, professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University. “Or maybe it’s denial. Maybe they think if they deny a problem, it doesn’t exist.”

“I call it the ostrich phenomenon,” says Dr. Harvey Simon, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and editor of the Harvard Men’s Health Watch newsletter. “Guys are very prone to sticking their head in the sand and hoping when they emerge everything will be back to normal. It’s a very, very bad idea.”

While the list, according to these physicians, is endless, here are the top five symptoms men ignore — sometimes until it’s too late.

1. Chest pain

You’d think this would be the last thing a man would ignore, but our men’s health experts say it happens all the time.

“They think, ‘Oh, I’m just out of shape, or I’m having a little indigestion, or I’m under pressure,’” says Dr. Joseph Scherger, a clinical professor of family medicine at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s quite classic for men to do that.”

Simon says, “I tell my medical students that the most common symptoms of a heart attack is chest pain, and the second most common one is denial.”

Bottom line: Anyone experiencing chest tightness, chest pain or shortness of breath needs medical attention.

2. A big belly

“Belly fat is the worst fat you can have,” says Dr. Harry Fisch, a professor of clinical urology at Columbia. “A big belly is a sign a man has low testosterone levels. And the lower the testosterone, the greater the risk of diabetes and coronary artery disease.”

While a woman might go on every diet in the world to lose weight, men often have a different solution: They lower their belts.

“I’ve had men say to me, ‘See, my pants size hasn’t changed.’ I say, ‘Baloney. Your belly is still there. It’s just above your belt,’ ” says Simon.

3. An unenthusiastic penis

Impotence may be purely psychological, but it also could be a sign that a man has cardiovascular disease.

“The penis is the dipstick of the body’s health,” Fisch says.

If the arteries that supply blood to the penis aren’t working right, those supplying blood to the heart and brain might not be working so well either.

Our experts advise men with erectile dysfunction to use their doctors for more than just Viagra dispensers.

“A doctor ought to be working these men up for coronary artery disease, high blood pressure and cholesterol, which are often linked to erectile dysfunction,” Simon says.

4. More frequent urination

Urinating more frequently can be a sign of prostatitis, or inflammation of the prostate gland.

“I’ll ask a patient if he’s getting up at night to urinate, and he’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, two or three times.’ I ask him if that bothers him, and he’ll say no. I tell him it should,” Fisch says.

5. Prescription drug addiction

“Men sometimes don’t realize they’re addicted to prescription drugs,” says Dr. Joel Heidelbaugh, a family medicine specialist at the University of Michigan Medical School. “Maybe they’re taking medicine for back pain, and a couple of years later they’re still on them. They can’t function without them, and they don’t even know it.”

Heidelbaugh says he’s seen patients addicted to drugs such as Vicodin and Oxycontin without knowing it. “They never realized they need to get off of them,” he says.

There is one area, Heidelbaugh says, where men zip right into their physician without hesitation. “Rashes in the groin, masses in the testicles, pain in that area — that gets them into the doctor,” he says.

Scherger adds, “Men are probably more keyed in to their groins than other parts of their body. They’re pretty fixated on their penis and genital area. That’s where they have the least amount of denial.”

Want to stay young and sharp? Keep building muscle.

Scientists long believed that the decline in muscle mass that accompanies aging was unavoidable. Now, researchers have finally clued into the fact that maintaining a high level of physical activity is effective for retaining not just muscle mass, but also musculoskeletal function well into the golden years.

A recent study conducted at the Department of Environmental and Health Sciences at Johnson State College compared a group of physically active women between 65 and 84 years old to an age-matched group of relatively inactive women. Perhaps not surprisingly, the physically active seniors demonstrated significantly enhanced reaction times, faster muscular initiation, greater force generation and higher peak-power output. Study authors concluded that the lack of physical activity may be “responsible for a large portion of the loss of neuromuscular function seen in older adults.”

In a separate study, researchers confirmed a connection between belly fat and the risk of dementia later in life. The easiest way to determine whether you are at risk is to calculate your waist-to-hip ratio. It’s simple enough: Grab a cloth tape measure and measure your waist (i.e., the smallest point when viewed from the front, or around the navel) and then measure your hips (i.e., the widest point when viewed from the side). Divide the two numbers, and if the result is > 0.8 (for women) or > 0.9 (for men), it’s time to clean up your diet and get serious about training.

[source: Muscle and Body, June 2008]

I had a conversation with a woman this weekend about colon cleansing and if she should do it because of all the benefits she’s heard in the media. There are many products out there for cleansing your colon and they state that they remove toxins, impurities and will flatten your stomach and give you more energy. This isn’t necessarily true or false. It really depends on your situation.

The colon is a storage tube for solid wastes. The main function of the colon appears to be extraction of water and salts from feces. (source: Wikipedia) This is why you can fluctuate from constipation to normal bowels to diarrhea. Depending on your diet, healthy and activity level, your body will absorb a certain amount of water and salts from your byproducts. But this also depends on how well your small and large intestines work. That is where the majority of absorption of food is done. And this is where many of the impurities get trapped. So, the first misconception of colon cleansing is that it only cleanses your colon. Wrong. It’s meant to “scrub” out your whole lower digestive system. And this can be good or not so good.

As a society, we’re obsessed with instant gratification. A typical colon cleansing takes anywhere from 48 hours to 2 weeks. In terms of diets and eating habits, this is immediate. By doing this, you are shocking your body just like you would if you followed the South Beach Diet. You’ll get rid of stuck feces and toxins but you also strip your intestines of the healthy bacterias that you’ve built up that help you digest your food. So after the cleanse, you have to rebuild your digestive system with a good diet.

My two cents on all of this: If you’ve eaten a lot of processed or fast foods for many years, you may have some built up toxins or feces from an unhealthy diet. If this is you, you could benefit from a colon cleanse followed with a healthy diet. If you’ve always eaten healthy, a colon cleanse is not necessary. If you take a look at the ingredient lists for many of these products, they include a mixture of herbs, seeds and fiber. If you just supplement your diet with good fiber and probiotics along with eating multigrain foods, then you shouldn’t have these issues. Your body will keep itself clean. This is what your body does best! That’s why you have these organs. Just give it the right food. Have multigrain breads with some peaches. And check out some of those new yogurts like DanActive which contain probiotics. Even just plain yogurt has the necessary bacterias your body needs to help digest foods. It’s that simple.

The incline dumbbell press is one of the most important upper body workouts for developing big and strong pectoral muscles.

Protein bars, meal replacement bars and protein shakes are very popular among athletes or causal exercisers. The purpose of them is to fuel your body with the correct ratio of protein, carbohydrates and fats before and/or after a workout. They give you the energy you need before your activities or replenish your body after a workout or game. And it is extremely important to fuel your body with the proper nutrition otherwise your workout means nothing. But you shouldn’t rely only on just Balance Bars or Optimum 100% Whey Protein for this nutrition. The protein and good carbs and fats that you need are most likely already in your refrigerator or pantry.

An article by Gina Kolata from the NY Times website focuses on some doctors’ points of view on why you need proper nutrition for your muscles.

“During exercise, muscles stop the biochemical reactions used to maintain themselves such as replacing and resynthesizing the proteins needed for day to day activities. It’s not that exercise is damaging your muscles; it’s that they halt the maintenance process until exercise is over.

To do this maintenance, muscles must make protein, and to do so they need to absorb amino acids, the constituent parts of proteins, from the blood. Just after exercise, perhaps for a period no longer than a couple of hours, the protein-building processes of muscle cells are especially receptive to amino acids. That means that if you consume protein, your muscles will use it to quickly replenish proteins that were not made during exercise.

But muscles don’t need much protein, researchers say. Twenty grams is as much as a 176-pound man’s muscles can take. Women, who are smaller and have smaller muscles even compared to their body sizes, need less.

Dr. Rennie said that 10 to 15 grams of protein is probably adequate for any adult. And you don’t need a special drink or energy bar to get it. One egg has 6 grams of protein. Two ounces of chicken has more than 12 grams.

Muscles also need to replenish glycogen, their fuel supply, after a long exercise session — two hours of running, for example. For that they need carbohydrates. Muscle cells are especially efficient in absorbing carbohydrates from the blood just after exercise.

Once again, muscles don’t need much; about one gram of carbohydrate per kilogram of body weight is plenty, Dr. Tarnopolsky said. He weighs 70 kilograms, or 154 pounds, which means he would need 70 grams of carbohydrates, or say, 27 ounces of fruit juice, he said.

Some, like Dr. Jeukendrup, say they use a commercial protein-energy drink after training hard, for convenience.

Other researchers take their own nutritional advice. Dr. Tarnopolsky has a huge glass of juice, a bagel and a small piece of meat after a two- or three-hour run. Or he might have two large pieces of toast with butter and jam and a couple of scrambled eggs. But no energy bars, no energy drinks.

Dr. Phillips might have an energy bar during a long workout. But ordinarily he does not worry about getting a special carbohydrate-to-protein mix or timing his nutrition when he exercises. Instead, Dr. Phillips said, he simply eats real food at regular meals.”

Last night I made a perfect london broil and I’ve been thinking about what to do with the leftovers.  I have a jar of roasted red peppers and came up with something easy to do and healthy.  And bare with me because I’m not a baker, so I don’t cook based on strict recipes.  I take “a little of this” or “a handful of that” so use your common sense when cooking or just ask me for more details if you need.

Ingredients
Jarred or freshly roasted red pepper, chopped
A few cloves of garlic, depending on taste
Extra virgin olive oil
Sour cream
Leftover cooked sirloin, sliced into thin strips
Soft or hard taco shells

Directions for Sauce
In a blender, chop up the cloves of garlic finely.
Add roasted red pepper and pulse to smooth consistency.
Drizzle in the extra virgin olive oil while blending until smooth.
Fold in some sour cream.
Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Line taco shell or tortilla with sauce, then add sirloin, more sauce, and other stuff like corn, rice, guacamole, etc.

Are you in shape? Are you confident wearing a bathing suit now that the summer season is upon us? Or are you just going to invest in more of those long, over sized t-shirts that cover your flab? Don’t fret. I know a magic pill that will turn you into an Adonis overnight…

It’s called consistency. And I lied. It won’t happen overnight. Welcome to reality.

Many people will wait until a week before the summer season officially begins to hit the gym, start a super special diet or swallow those fat burning wastes of money that will get that sexy six pack or tight butt everyone dreams of. Unfortunately, with the way many of us eat and live throughout the year, this makes it very difficult to see results. And because of that, people typically give up soon after starting and lose all motivation. Does this sound like you? It’s all too common in our society and one way around it is to change your way of thinking about your health.

Don’t think about getting into shape for the summer. Don’t think about a 12 week diet. Think more about leading a healthy lifestyle. Your health, fitness and nutrition shouldn’t change with the calendar. It should be considered on a daily basis. Don’t even think about it as a task with a goal. If you obsess too much over the number on the scale, then it becomes only about the number and not yourself. Are you doing this all to lower (or sometimes raise) a number on a scale? Or is this so you can feel better, have more energy and look the way you want? Stop reading for a second and think about it.

Here are some simple tips to help you stay consistent:

• Plan your exercise time like you plan your meetings. This will make it a part of your lifestyle.
• Find a workout buddy. This will help your motivation.
• Keep a workout log. You will see your results.
• Do exercises you enjoy. You won’t be motivated to work out if you hate doing chin ups.
• Plan your meals for the week. You won’t make last minute runs to the pizzeria when you don’t know what to make for dinner.
• Eat at the same times during the day. And eat five to six small meals. This will increase your body’s metabolism because it knows when to expect meals.
• Never keep unhealthy snacks around you. To solve between meal cravings, consider a flavored or vitamin-infused water.

I’m not promising you that this will get your cut and ripped by this summer. Or by next summer. But I guarantee that if you start approaching your nutrition and fitness as part of your lifestyle and not as just a chore, you will stick to it.