Lose it! Keep it Off!

I recently read this article in Berkeley Wellness letter about losing weight and keeping it off (stopping the yo yo dieting) and it truly sounded like the workout ‘regime’  I’ve been following with my trainer- Scott Crawford – for over a year. It’s encouraging and exciting to think I will be able to maintain the great results I’ve had – just by continuing to do what I’ve been doing and staying focused. I’ve lost body fat  – and at an accelerated rate when I combined a more structured diet plan with my workouts. We tracked  heart rate, body fat measurements and food journal with Teri Tom, MS, RD – and I dropped from 22% body fat to 16.8% in a month and a half! And the best part about it – I feel great!

The National Weight Control Registry has been looking into information on over 5000 people who maintained a weight loss of at least 30 pounds for more than 5 years.  Here are the successful strategies that these maintainers had for losing the weight and keeping it off:

1. Eat a high carbohydrate, low fat diet. Most calories (55-60%) should come from ‘good complex’ carbs – like whole grains, veggies, fruit and high fiber foods – NOT high sugar foods. 24% of calories come from fat and the rest (16-21%) from protein.

2. Be aware of calories consumed – total calories count – no matter what you eat.

3. Eat breakfast

4. Monitor and watch yourself – weigh yourself once a week and keep a food journal of what you eat

5. Exercise – A LOT – 60-90 minutes a day. Carve out time every day and plan to do something. Look for ways to keep active during the day and walk. Walking is the #1 activity.

And one more point about protein. Most Americans consume way more protein than they need -and you don’t need more protein if you exercise. The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for adults is .8 grams/day for each kilogram (2.2 lbs) of weight. That would be 64 grams for a 175# man and 47 grams for a 130# woman. (1 ounce of chicken  or 1 cup milk = 8 grams) …so it adds up quickly.

By Bonnie Crouse

This entry was written by bcrouse, posted on February 24, 2010 at 9:24 am, filed under Experiences, Food, Life is Fitness, Lifestyle and Spa, Nutrition and tagged , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Benefits of goat milk in Soma Get Fit spa products

Chivas Skin Care, starter kit

by Lauren Johanson

All of us here at Chivas Skin Care are excited to be sharing our line of all-natural spa products with Soma Get Fit.  What makes our line unique is that many of our products are made with goat milk.  “Goat what?” you might ask.  Yes, goat milk is the main ingredient in the massage lotion used by Soma Get Fit’s bodywork specialists, as well as the goat milk bath salts and goat milk facial crèmes used for the Soma body treatments and facial treatments (as well as our signature goat milk soaps).

Goat milk has long been regarded as the ultimate skin luxury. It is said that Cleopatra’s beauty secret was bathing in goat milk.  And we now know why!  Goat milk is:

Chivas Skin Care, goat milk

  • Nourishing because it has more vital vitamins and triglycerides (fats) than either cow’s milk or water. It is packed with vitamins A, B, C & D as well as protein, calcium, potassium and magnesium.  Great for mal-nourished skin!
  • Gentle because it has a pH level that is closest to that of our skin.  It contains Caprylic Acid which maintains this low alkalinity. Great for sensitive skin!
  • Moisturizing because its short-strand protein structure allows it to be easily absorbed into the skin.   Great for dry skin!
  • And recommended by dermatologists to patients who suffer from dry skin conditions such as psoriasis and eczema.

For more information about goat milk, including tips, news and recipes, visit our Chivas Skin Care blog.

This entry was written by ljohanson, posted on November 8, 2009 at 9:44 pm, filed under Products, Santa Barbara, Skin Care and tagged , , , , , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Give In To The Moment

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by Jason Campagna, M.D., Ph.D.

Fitness is about many things– and can mean different things to different people. I have a suggestion: whatever it means to you, live in the moment and enjoy the journey. Fitness is a process, not a destination. The prevailing way of living in our Western societies is to plan out our lives, both for the long term and on a day-to-day basis. We have planners and digital calendars that map out our lives, sometimes to the minute. We feel we’re in control, with plans like this.

But it’s an illusion.

We cannot control our lives to this degree, no matter how we try. Things will always come up to spoil the best-laid plans, and the more detailed our plans the more of a guarantee that something will go wrong.

And what happens when the plans go wrong? We are stressed out, because things get out of our control and don’t live up to our expectations. This is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people, actually.

Think about how often your days actually go according to plan, exactly — it’s pretty rare, because we have no way of predicting the future. No matter how hard we try. There’s always an email that will disrupt things, a last-minute meeting, cancellations and postponements, emergencies and fires to put out.

So if plans will almost always go wrong, and when they do we get stressed out, isn’t all the time we spend creating the plans a bit of a waste?

But what’s the alternative? Giving yourself to the moment. This will not work for everyone, I’ll admit: there are those who will have a hard time giving up the illusion of control, and others who are controlled by their bosses or peers and cannot work or live this way.

Still, it’s something worth considering. Here’s how to do it — starting with the don’ts:

  1. Don’t plan. Planning is an attempt to control the world around us, but it’s a futile attempt. Throw out your plans, for now at least until you’ve decided this method isn’t for you. What do you do instead? More on this below. For now, just stop planning.
  2. Don’t worry about the future. Will something bad happen? Are there things coming up that we must anticipate and prepare for? Of course, if there’s a massive hurricane headed your way, you should probably get ready. But otherwise, just realize that the future is unpredictable, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Focus on right now, and you’ll always be able to handle what comes.
  3. Don’t have expectations. If you expect people to act a certain way, or hope that things will turn out a certain way, you’ll always run into problems. Forget about outcomes for now. Go into things without expectations, and they will always turn out perfectly (if a bit messy).
  4. Don’t get annoyed when others act a certain way. Don’t expect people to act any way other than how they actually act. They are exactly the way they should be — even if that’s selfish or weird or aggressive. Those are their problems. Your problem is figuring out how you should act. I’d also advise you to try to understand others — why do they act the way they do?
  5. Don’t overreact. This is a major problem when people plan and things go wrong — they overreact, and get upset and emotional and blow things out of proportion. Stay calm, because if things “go wrong”, they didn’t actually go wrong — they just happened. More on how to react below.
  6. Don’t try to be proactive. This is a common prescription (being proactive) in management and business literature. And while I think the general idea is fine — do something to prevent problems from recurring rather than just fixing them after they happen — one of the problems this creates is always worrying about what might happen. And creating solutions before there are problems — if there never is a problem, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating the solution, and a lot of energy worrying about the future.

And now for the dos:

  1. Do be open. What would it be like to go into each day without a plan, but just to see what happens? A bit scary, because of the lack of security and control, a bit chaotic perhaps, a bit like we’re a piece of driftwood floating in the middle of a churning sea. But in truth, this is what it’s like to go into each day *with* a plan — it’s just that we normally fool ourselves about the amount of control we have. So start the day with no plan, and be open to what emerges in each moment.
  2. Do what you love. So what should you do, now that you have no plan? Do what you’re passionate about, do what excites you right now. Create something amazing. Pour yourself energetically into a project. Build something new. And what you think you’re creating might turn out to be completely different from what emerges, but you’ll have fun doing it and something even better might be revealed.
  3. Do act, in the moment. Giving yourself to the moment doesn’t mean being passive and just letting life happen. It means acting, but doing what is best at this moment, what you are excited about right now, what needs to be done, in the present.
  4. Do respond appropriately. Life happens, and we must respond. But instead of overreacting, we can respond calmly and appropriately. We can take the action that’s required, fix the problem, do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening again, and move on without it ruining our day.
  5. Do accept. Accept what happens. It might not be what you considered ideal, but it’s what life has given you, what has resulted from your actions in an unpredicatable world. Accept it, respond, act, move on. Don’t get caught up in things not going your way, but accept that’s what has happened.

Again, this way of living won’t be for everybody. Some don’t have the freedom to live this way, and others just won’t give up control. Some will think this is a passive way of living, but it really isn’t: it’s just a way of living in the moment without being caught up in the future (or the past) so much.

And when we live in the moment, we’re really living life to the fullest. This is the gift of the present.

This entry was written by jcampagna, posted on November 5, 2009 at 9:16 pm, filed under Fitness, Life is Fitness, Lifestyle and Spa, Santa Barbara and tagged , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Exercise Comes in Many Forms

by Rich Fahmy

The other day someone that I know to be very active said that since he doesn’t exercise he worries that he’s not getting the benefits of it.  I started to laugh and said “You’re one of the fittest people I know!”  It dawned on me that my buddy Joe (the names are changed to protect the innocent) believed that health benefits associated with regular exercise must be had at the expense of time in a gym.
When you really think about it, the health club is one of the most ludicrous concepts we’ve come up with in the past few decades.  We actually GO INTO a building to be active!   Sometimes we take escalators into the building, we look for the closest parking spot possible, and we even take the elevators once we’re inside.  We run for miles but go nowhere, we take stairs that lead nowhere, we place ourselves in elaborate contraptions to move pulleys and levers, and we lift inanimate weighted objects around our body and place them back on a shelf.  THIS IS WEIRD!
Ok, maybe not THAT weird.  We have become a society of desk jockeys.  Our jobs consist of little activity and largely the transfer of information.  We wake up to sit in traffic, then sit at work so we can sit in traffic again on the way home, only to sit more at home because we’re so tired from our day of sitting.  We no longer forage, run from predators, or have to kill lunch.  So, we come up with a place we can go to be active.
So please don’t get me wrong here, GO TO THE GYM if you don’t get regular activity otherwise.  My point is that if you are someone that walks three times a week, kayaks twice a week, then finishes off with a 50 mile bike ride on Sunday, don’t think that you’re not getting the benefits of exercise.   And my other point is to the gym rats of the world: real life activity counts and counts big time.  Swap a day of working out in the club with paddle surfing, a hike, a walk/jog with the family dog, running on a beach.  Your body sees more benefit from actually propelling itself over the ground while running rather than trying to catch up to a speeding belt.  Go have fun while you work out!
Enjoy and be healthy!

About the author: Rich Fahmy, M.S. is a respected industry authority on personal training.  He owns Oracle Fitness Education, a company that provides continuing education designed for fitness professionals.

This entry was written by rfahmy, posted on November 4, 2009 at 11:54 pm, filed under Fitness, Life is Fitness, Outdoors and tagged , , , . Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.