Fitness

Get Fit Now

A 5-step plan to get healthy in the new year

By Pascal Durand

Fitness trainer and nutrition consultant, Pascal Durand, advises a five-principle program for transforming your lifestyle and achieving your fitness goals in 2009. Make no mistake: This program is not for the tepid. These five principles include: motivation, balancing hormones, nutrition, intense weightlifting and cardio interval training. Durand maintains that following these simple steps will help you to reach your desired fitness goals, as well as extend your life significantly while decreasing your risk for diseases and cancers. So go on, get moving in 2009! —J.M.

Phase: 1 Get Motivated
Motivation is the strongest psychological component of fitness and wellness and often it can be crucial to your success. Why are you looking to change your lifestyle? What is your goal? Keeping highly motivated at all times can be difficult, but often it is the difference between success and failure. Only after this mindset is
achieved can you move forward.

Phase 2: Are Your Hormones Happy?
Hormones have a profound effect on your everyday health and well-being. A low thyroid hormone level will lower metabolism and prevent fat loss. Human growth hormone deficiency is linked to poor muscle tone and increased body fat. Having your doctor check your hormones should be the start to your fitness program. High cortisol levels are also associated with increased body fat and muscle loss, and a low thyroid hormone level will lower metabolism and prevent fat loss.

Phase 3: Understand What You Eat
Nutritional education is crucial to a true lifestyle change. Anyone can diet for short periods of time to lose weight, but to achieve wellness goals you must learn the fundamentals and incorporate them into your daily routine. Losing fat is not about starving and depriving yourself, but rather about the food choices you make. Studies have shown that diets do not work in the long term. Did you know that to burn more fat, you need to eat more often (ideally, every two to three hours)? Every time you eat, your gastrointestinal tract “turns on,” and starts digesting the food and absorbing nutrients. It takes calories to fire up the human digestion machine, so you must burn more calories than you consume. Studies have shown that a low glycemic load diet enhances fat loss among individuals with high insulin secretion. (Ask your doctor if you have a high insulin secretion.) Try to incorporate high fiber and lean protein mixed with healthy fats, legumes, fruits and vegetables into your diet. Try adding in some anti-inflammatory fats (omega 3 and omega 9) like olive oil, avocado, walnuts, fish oil, hemp seed as well as some MCT (medium chain triglycerides) like organic extra virgin coconut oil (a natural fat burner). All of these foods act as a natural anti-inflammatory. Remove from your diet any kind of pro-inflammatory fat such as vegetable oil, refined oil and trans fat, high glycemic load carbohydrates, processed food, empty calories and refined flour. Also, limit your saturated fat from animal products as much as possible, except for organic eggs high in omega 3, and divide your diet into six small meals. Another good trick I use, is to eliminate starchy carbohydrate intake at night. An important part of this program includes the use of probiotics, spirulina, chlorella, wheat grass, herbal tea and plenty of purified water. You can even add some specific herbal supplements, as needed.

Phase 4: Start LiftingWeights
Have you ever wondered why some people at the gym are in a great shape while others seem to get no benefit whatsoever from working out, even if they work out frequently? The people who are in great shape have a high intensity work out with cardio and weights and, of course, must eat a healthy diet. Working out with heavier weights has numerous benefits including building muscle, burning fat and improving bone density, while lighter weights have very little effect. A high intensity session burns a lot of calories during the actual work out and elevates metabolism for up to 24 hours after your actual work out. Once you are working out this way regularly, your metabolism will be stimulated to the point where you are now burning more calories at rest, while simultaneously improving your insulin-resistance. The more intense your work out session, the more you deplete your glycogen, stored carbohydrates and the more fat is burned during the recovery phase. Each pound of muscle that you add to your body burns another 50 calories per day at rest. An extra 10 pounds of muscle will burn approximately 500 calories a day or an extra pound of fat every seven days, without making any other change. Unfortunately, most doctors, nutritionists and personal trainers place too much emphasis on cardio and not enough on weightlifting for fat loss. Nothing can replace heavy and intense weight lifting for fat loss. Observe long distance runners, they are skinny but not very lean and toned in comparison to sprinters. For women, intense weight lifting should mean a maximum of 10 to 12 reps per exercise. And by heavy weight, I mean that you should work until failure. Of course your physical limitations (or injuries) should be taken into consideration by your trainer as noted by your physician.

Phase 5: Keep Up The Cardio
Combining cardio and weight lifting is necessary to achieve great results since they coordinate with each other. Exhaustive research has shown that cardio interval training is the modern way of creating a healthy heart and burning fat more efficiently. It creates a better blood supply to all the heart’s muscle tissue, lowers blood pressure, controls type 2 diabetes, improves brain chemistry to reduce depression, improves lipid profile and burns even more calories.

During my 29 years of training, the mistake I see most often, even among trainers, is doing cardio before weight lifting. The body will not burn fat until the glycogen is depleted, which is why you need to lift heavy weights prior to doing your cardio. You cannot lift heavy weights with a depleted glycogen, so it’s easy to see why this can be a vicious cycle. Do not confuse this with a warm-up cardio routine before you work out! Follow these five phases to get healthy inside and out. The new year is about health, fitness and living well. Don’t just set your goals— achieve them. These tips are just the right tools to help you get there.

Pascal Durand is a Certified Personal Trainer and Nutrition Consultant with 29 years of experience in health and nutrition. Contact him with your fitness questions at 561.676.9527 or contact him at Palm Beach Weight and Wellness at 561.881.3828.