Happy New Year!

Hello Everyone!

I hope you all had a fantastic new years and Christmas! 2009 is a going to be a big year at DC Health as we have some very exciting new developments that will be announced in the next few months. Get ready to learn a lot this year!

With the new year we see people getting on the bandwagon and setting goals that are unrealistic and not likely to be achieved. This is the time of year of fad diets, intense exercise programs with no balance or thought and the quitting of addictions. The sad thing is that only 12% of these people ever achieve their goals and follow through on their resolutions.

I am not a goal setting expert not a motivational guru. What I want to address when looking at these shocking statistics is some of the inherent reasons why these people fail with goals and what things we really need to look at to achieve our goals from a physical standpoint.

Many people vow to lose weight every year. Quite often they will start a fad diet, such as a protein shake diet or lemon detox or some other ridiculous diet. What they need to look at first before is the fundamentals of healthy eating and nutrition. With every single client I see the key is not a miracle supplement of diet plan, it is the following of time tested and true principles that work. before you attempt any diet these are the principles you should follow:

1. Eat every 2-3 hours, no matter what. You should eat between 3-6 meals per day.

2. Eat complete (containing all the essential amino acids), lean protein with each meal.

3. Eat fruits and/or vegetables with each food meal.

4. Ensure that your carbohydrate intake comes from fruits and vegetables. Exception: workout and post-workout drinks and meals.

5. Ensure that 25-35% of your energy intake comes from fat, with your fat intake split equally between saturates (e.g. animal fat), monounsaturates (e.g., olive oil), and polyunsaturates (e.g. flax oil, salmon oil).

6. Drink only non-calorie containing beverages, the best choices being water and green tea.

7. Eat mostly whole foods

This is simple advice. When i give this advice many people say to me, 'well I already knew that'. The question I often throw back at them is 'well, why aren't you doing that'?. Talk about seeing a rabbit in the headlights!

The second area I like to address is exercise. Many people throw themselves into high intensity and density exercise programs with no regards to their physiological load (total amount of stress their body is under), joint health, previous training history or current medical conditions! To not get your body checked out and assessed by a professional blows my mind! To give you an analogy, if you went on a plane and the pilot just decided to go for it and take off without a pre-flight check you might be a little concerned! This however is what I see every day.

One simple pre-flight check that you can do on yourself is to test your respiratory efficiency. This is one of the key elements of program design as how well you breathe dictates how you can and should train. The test is simple; simply go for a walk and count how many steps you can take per one full inhale and exhale through your nose only. if you can achieve over 18 steps this is a good sign. If you cannot however it tells me that your breathing and physiology are comprised in a way that will seriously hamper your results. The best thing to do with starting a program is never go over 50% intensity and never train past your nasal breathing threshold. If you lose the ability to nasal breathe comfortably you are trying too hard.

This vital step covers many bases. It prevents post worout soreness and fatigue. It should help you finish exercise feeling energized, not drained, improve your stress levels and make exercise fun! I believe one of the main reasons people drop out of exercise is that it is not fun! If we have fun we are more than likely to stick to it. The second reason is that it is too hard. This nasal breathing technology helps take exercise out of the 'too hard basket' and puts you back in a place where you control the intensity.

I hope with these suggestions you can hopefully end up with the 12% of people who successfully achieve their new years goals. I will tackle the nature of addictions in a separate post as it is a very complex topic.

Till next time, Paul

'Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking'
Albert Einstein