What Am I Missing?

One of the students from a multi-format exercise class I teach at a local company presented an interesting quandary for me today. I’ve seen it before and it’s downright perplexing until you dig a bit below the surface.

The mystery in question is if you exercise regularly, eat a very healthful diet and you have the body fat to lose, then why the heck isn’t it happening?

While it seems that these habits alone should give you a lean, firm body, it’s not necessarily the case. No doubt you will be leaner and firmer than you would be without a nutritious diet and regular workouts. But the question is, are you sabotaging your best achievable condition with some simple-to-correct behaviors?

Here are six possible obstacles to you achieving your lean ideal and how to correct them:

• Not enough vegetables — This is the single most underused tactic to flattening your abs. If veggies were half the food you ate, it would be almost impossible for you to get enough calories unless the rest was loaded with fat and sugar. Include veggies with at least two meals and one snack and watch your waistline start to disappear.
• Not enough water — Make the calorie-free beverage the centerpiece of your liquid intake by having two glasses or more for every other beverage you consume. You’ll better metabolize fat and be much less likely to slip in excess calories around the food.
• Not enough intensity with your workouts — Most exercisers pull back when their bodies start to adapt to the training process. That doesn’t happen in basic training boot camp or at competitive athlete training facilities. Stepping up the intensity of your training, provided there are no obvious health risks, is an important key to carving away that stubborn belt-line blanket.
• Too much food per sitting — Even if you’re having stir fry, you can stuff yourself and take in more calories than you need. Eat until you’re comfortably satisfied but not until you have trouble moving around quickly. It’s better to eat more frequently than it is to eat so you’re not hungry for several hours.
• Too much exercise time per week — More isn’t always better. And at some point you can easily slip into diminishing returns or even plateau because your body doesn’t have enough rest time to balance out all the work time. You’ll burn more calories during and after your workouts if they are hard, rather than long. Cyclist events can last hours but an amateur boxing match burns much more energy in six minutes than anything for which you’d have to pace yourself to sustain for 60 minutes or more. Bonus benefit: You raise your capacity to burn more calories with everything you do by practicing a short-duration, high-intensity cardio approach.

• Too much late day eating — Eating a heavy lunch and waiting several hours before an even more caloric dinner is death to the aspirations for a slim waistline. And it may be the most common roadblock to getting leaner. You can fix this easily by either splitting your lunch into two mini-meals (one at noon, another between 2:30 and 4 p.m.) or simply cutting back on the volume at lunch and adding a snack of , say, fruit and cheese an hour or two before dinner. That evens out your blood sugar and cuts your dinner appetite so you have fewer calories in your system by the time you go to bed.

Take a close look and see which of these apply to you. You just may be able to trim an inch or two more off your midsection by June.

Learn more about Dan Taylor at http://trivalleytrainer.com/.