Would you like to “jump start” your metabolism and lose your ‘mommy belly’ once and for all? If so, the following seven tips are exactly what you need to improve your workouts and ignite your metabolism. Try some or all of these tips, but beware, the result may be a number of admiring second glances and the need to pull your ‘skinny jeans’ out of the closet.

1. The majority of your workouts should be composed of free-weight, bodyweight or cable exercises.

Compared to machines, free-weight, bodyweight and cable movements often require more skill, create muscular balance, and have a greater metabolic cost. For example, it is more difficult to balance the weights, and to coordinate muscles when performing free-weight exercises. Although this may sound like a disadvantage, it is actually a benefit. By balancing and stabilizing free-weights or cables you are working more muscles through a greater range of motion resulting in more muscles developed and more calories burned.

2. Use exercises that work more than one muscle at a time.

When focusing on fat loss, you can’t worry about “shaping” exercises, instead you should use exercises that’ll get you the biggest bang for your buck and work as many muscles as possible. Isolation exercises can be used at the end of a workout to work on a specific target area, but they just serve to supplement your core movements.

Virtually every savvy fitness professional is privy to the fact that compound exercises recruit the most muscle groups for any given body part.

If you seek lean, toned muscles and the increase in metabolism that comes with them, you must choose exercises that work as many different muscles as possible. One of the main reasons why squats are superior to leg extensions for improving your body is that they also work your butt, hamstrings and inner thighs in addition to toning your quadriceps while leg extensions focus on just the front of your thigh and don’t really offer any other benefit. That same rationale hold true for arm exercises too. That’s why dumbell presses and dips will are more valuable for your arms than triceps kickbacks and pushdowns.

A good rule of thumb is to use movements that will allow you to use the most weight. These will have a systemic effect on your body that’ll help maintain or increase your lean muscle, and in turn ignite your metabolism.

3. Pair exercises.

Pair your exercises together so that you alternate between upper-body exercises and lower-body exercises or between exercises that target opposing muscle groups (e.g. chest and back).

This type of approach will keep your workouts short and efficient by eliminating much of the downtime that comes between sets of a single exercise since you are working on one movement while resting from another. This approach can also yield huge benefits in your mission to burn fat. Since you’ll constantly be moving and keeping your heart rate elevated, you’ll be burning far more calories than you would during a typical workout.

4. Keep your reps between 8 and 12.

Through research, it has been determined that the best range for building lean muscle is roughly between 8-12 reps. Since the main focus of your resistance training efforts is to gain lean body mass and stimulate your metabolism, this rep range fills the bill perfectly. “High reps for tone and fat loss” is one of the biggest (and most unproductive) training myths! Somehow the aerobics, yoga and Pilates’ community have convinced us that when we perform bodyweight exercises or light resistance training for high reps, our muscles magically take on a beautiful shape without growing or bulging. On the other hand, if you challenge yourself with moderately heavy weights, your body will take on a bulky, unflattering appearance. If you believe this, you probably still believe in the Tooth Fairy!

5. Rest only 30 to 60 seconds between sets.

When you keep the rest periods under one minute, it’s easier to stay focused on the task at hand and keeps your heart rate elevated. In addition, it forces your muscles to recover more quickly between sets, along with keeping your nervous system revved up.

If your first movement in an upper/lower body pair is squats, you might want to rest 60 seconds before attempting your second movement. However, if your first exercise is a fairly “easy” exercise, like lat pull downs, you might only wish to wait 30 seconds before doing the second part of the pair.

6. Perform total body workouts.

You must drop the notion that muscle groups work independently of one another. Muscles work together and should be trained that way. Besides, not only does this approach mean less time in the gym, but by working the whole body three times per week, you’ll be maximizing the fat burning effect of your program.

7. Cardio is not the cure-all for fat loss.

Cardiovascular exercise aids in the creation of a caloric deficit, but the caloric expenditure during cardio is temporary. Strength training addresses the core of the problem by permanently increasing the rate at which the body burns calories by adding muscle. The best programs will include both strength training and cardiovascular training, but the core or the programs effectiveness is resistance training.

Take these strategies and incorporate them into your workout routine. Not only will you save a lot of time, but you’ll also soon see a leaner and more toned body. Not to mention a few more turned heads and the re-emergence of your skinny jeans.

About the Author

Holly Rigsby is a nationally recognized women’s fitness coach, certified personal trainer (CPT) and the author of the internationally popular e-book – Fit Yummy Mummy – Burn Your Baby Fat & Get Your Body Back. Go to http://www.fityummymummy.com to get her FREE: “The Five Biggest Fat Loss Mistakes.”

A correlation between cell phone use and testicular cancer, reduced Testosterone levels, lowered seminal volume and sperm count?  Read on to see…

by Mike Geary – Certified Nutrition Specialist, Certified Personal Trainer
Author of best-selling program:  The Truth about 6-Pack Abs
You’ve probably started hearing in the media about emerging studies showing possible correlations between heavy cell phone use and brain tumors.  But what not many people are talking about is the risk of carrying cell phones in our pockets for hours each day.  This is where it gets even more interesting and a little scary too!

First of all, to both guys and gals… read this article carefully, as it contains some potentially scary health issues related to cell phone use.  And although the examples are geared towards men’s issues, I wouldn’t trust that it’s only men that can experience health issues from heavy cell phone use.

You’re also going to want to pass this page on to your friends and family to help them protect their health, and the health of their “crotch”… sounds funny, I know…but this is serious business.

To start, I realize that some people simply don’t believe that something as small as a cell phone can give off any radiation levels that could harm your health over time. But we’re not talking about immediate harm… we’re talking about long term harm from chronic use, which most of us in this day and age use cell phones or have them in our pockets daily.

According to a recent article published on Yahoo Health, and a large health study conducted, the 2010 Interphone study…  “People who chatted via cell for just 30 minutes a day for 10 years saw their risk of glioma (the type of brain tumor that killed Ted Kennedy) rise 40 percent”.

I feel like we are all currently in an inadvertent giant human guinea pig study right now with cell phone use.  Not purposely, but simply because cell phones (and another dangerous new phenomenon, our constant exposure to radiation from “wifi” and other wireless technologies) moved onto the scene so fast and infiltrated the entire population over the last 10 years.

Think about it… most of the population has only been using cell phones and wifi heavily for less than 10 years now… that’s not a long enough time to know long term consequences (such as 15-30 year cancer risks) and most studies that supposedly “prove” the safety of cell phones have been funded by the telecom industry and have ridiculously low usage levels that they study.

We’re definitely finding that the average person has a cell phone either strapped to their ear or carried in a pocket for more hours per day than any studies have any definitive long-term safety data on.

As Tim Ferriss points out in his fascinating new book, The 4-Hour Body “Most of the studies performed in the US that conclude no negative effect are funded either directly or indirectly (as with many IEEE studies) by cell phone manufacturers and carriers.  Does this prove malfeasance?  No, but it should raise a red flag.”

One of the things that scares me about the possible harmful long term effects of carrying a cell phone in my pockets is potential testicular cancer.  I honestly feel that as the years go on, and we get to a level of chronic cell phone use where people have been carrying these things in their pockets for 10 or 15 years or more, we’re going to see testicular cancer rates skyrocket.

But cancer risks are long term, and we may not have enough data from studies yet to prove definitive cancer risks such as testicular cancer.  So let’s look at more current measurements that can prove health problems associated with cell phone use…

According to Tim Ferriss in his book, The 4-Hour Body “Lo and behold, jumping from article to article on Medline, there were more than a handful of studies that showed significant decreases in serum testosterone in rats following even moderate exposure (30 minutes per day, 5 days a week, for 4 weeks) to 900 megahertz radio frequency electro-magnetic fields (EMF), which is what most GSM cell phones produce.”

Beyond lowering testosterone, can cell phones hurt your “swimmers”?

Tim did some more digging, but this time switched gears from just cell phone effects on lowering testosterone levels, and he began researching cell phone effects on sperm count and function.

Tim continues, “Of the dozens of studies that I found, most done in Europe, more than 70% concluded the same thing: cell phone radiation impairs sperm function.”

In The 4-Hour Body, Tim also presents the results of a study he read about male Wistar rats that were exposed to a mobile phone for 1 hour continuously per day for 28 days… the end result of the study was that the mobile phone exposure to the rats significantly reduced the % of motile sperm.  The conclusion was that mobile phones negatively affect semen quality and may impair male fertility.

Think about this… they were only exposed to the mobile phone radiation for 1 hour per day for 28 days, and showed negative effects on sperm count and function…. how many of us out there carry a cell phone in our pocket for like 8-10 hours every day!!!!

Doesn’t look good for our “boys”, does it?

Now it gets even more interesting… It turns out that Tim first started researching the correlation between low sperm count and cell phone use because he went and got a sperm count test, and found out that his numbers were surprisingly low.

In Tim’s words… “the lab results, which were available the afternoon after my session, put my sperm count on the low range of normal, borderline problematic. I couldn’t believe it.  Assuming it was a lab mistake, I repeated the drill 3 weeks later and came back with an even lower count. The more tests I did over the next 12 months, the lower the results.”

After Tim started researching the effects of cell phone use on sperm count, he realized that for years, he’d been carrying a cell phone in his pocket for about 12 hours per day, most days of the week.

So he decided to do a test…

For 11 weeks, Tim decided that he would no longer carry his cell phone in his pocket… or as he puts it “my phone was no longer allowed to cuddle with my testicles“.

Instead, instead he kept the phone on the other side of the room if working at home, or if he had to go somewhere, he kept his phone either strapped to his arm with an ipod armband, or in a backpack pocket.  If he had to carry it in his pocket, he turned it off, and only turned it back on occasionally to check messages.

He actually performed this test for 11 weeks for a specific reason… sperm production takes an estimated 64 days in humans… so he wanted to wait that long, plus an extra 2 weeks for buffer.

The results of the 11 week “no-cell-phone-in-the-pocket” test:

The numbers are shocking…

• Ejaculate volume:  44% increase
• Motile sperm per milliliter:  100% increase
• Motile sperm per ejaculate:  185% increase

Now Tim admits that his study wasn’t perfect, as there may have been other influences that weren’t accounted for, such as his diet not being exactly the same during each time period.  However, he feels confident enough that these results speak for themselves…. after all, the results are pretty significant!

Personally, cell phone health issues is also a topic I’ve been reading a good deal about in the last couple of years.  Whether there’s any conclusive evidence of cancer risk from cell phones, perhaps that’s still to be determined… but I think we have significant evidence that cell phone use (and particularly carrying it in the pocket) can reduce both Testosterone levels (not good!) and also reduce sperm count and function (also scary!).

And please guys… don’t start carrying around 2 cell phones in each pocket as a form of birth control!  All jokes aside, remember that there are possible bigger implications to this than just reduced sperm count… we’re talking lower testosterone levels, possible increased cancer risk, etc.

What about women?  Please ladies, I wouldn’t trust that health issues are only happening to men… I’m sure there are complications that can happen to women too…so beware ladies!

In fact, on the recent Yahoo Health article, according to David Carpenter, M.D., director of the Institute for Health and Environment at the University at Albany (regarding carrying cell phones near the pelvis, or using laptops on the lap), “For women, the studies aren’t quite there yet, but I think we can say that anything that might cause cancer almost always causes birth defects, so pregnant women—or those wanting to become pregnant soon—should take extra precautions.”

What I’ve done to help protect myself from these risks is this:

1. When I’m at home, I keep my cell phone on the other side of my home office, or in another room.  I try not to keep it anywhere near me most of the day.  If I get a call, I simply get up and answer it, the same way that we used to have to walk across the room to answer a phone before the days of mobile phones!

2. In my car, I keep my phone off of my body and put it in the front console or the passenger seat if I don’t have a passenger.  The farther away from your body, the better.

3. When I go to the gym, go hiking, biking, etc… I leave that sucker in the car!  I don’t want it on my body any longer than it has to be.  After all, I think a LOT of us need to learn how to not be a slave to our cell phones.  The texts and voicemails will be waiting when you’re done your hike or your gym workout…don’t be a slave to your phone!

4. If I absolutely must carry my cell phone on me, such as if I’m meeting friends out and need to be able to contact them… well, in that case, I simply try to keep the phone out of my pocket as much as possible… if we’re at a restaurant, I put the phone on the edge of the table instead of in my pocket, or I just turn it off if I no longer need to get in touch with friends.

5. Remember that EMF dangers aren’t only with cell phones…it also occurs with Wifi, and other wireless devices.  So I also try to never use my laptop on my lap… If I’m at an airport, I usually try to find a table to sit at, so the laptop isn’t actually sitting on my “junk”.  Also, if possible, I try to use a wired internet connection (ethernet) instead of Wifi or mobile broadband.  In my house, I’ve also switched to a wired internet connection and gotten rid of the wireless router altogether.

With all of this said, will I ever give up my cell phone?

Well, let’s be realistic…the cell phone has become an important part of our lives, and most of us aren’t willing to give it up.  However, I plan to take the 5 steps that I listed above to minimize my risk.

I hope you take this issue as seriously as it should be taken.  It’s time most of us wake up and realize that we are all inadvertently involving ourselves in a giant human guinea pig study on the risks of chronic cell phone and wifi use.

Thanks to Tim Ferriss and his new book, The 4-Hour Body, for providing some of the tests and info in this article!

Thanks to Mike Geary, author of best-selling program: The Truth about 6-Pack Abs, for providing the content of this article. Other article from Mike Geary include:

Is Abdominal Fat Dangerous?

3 Foods That You Should STOP Eating

However, if you take in too many of the wrong carbs your body will turn them into fat.

In this short 4 minute video, Isabel De Los Rios ends the confusion over carbs and shares the simple rules that you can follow to get the right carbohydrates to stay energized while at the same time avoid overloading your body and gaining weight.

At the 3 and 1/4 minute mark she shares a quick and easy sample diet plan that you can use during your day.

>>Visit The Diet Solution Program<<

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This is because of hormones in your body that signal the change in diet. Your body does not understand that you are dieting and intentionally eating fewer calories in order to burn fat, all it knows is that something changed and now there is less food coming in.

Your body is concerned that you might be headed for starvation and it responds to this “threat” of lower calories by shutting down your metabolism. Why? Because this allows you to keep your fat which you might need if this “starvation” gets any worse.

So if you follow the logic that a low calorie diet causes your metabolism to slow then the opposite must also hold true.

Okay, I hear your confusion, you are saying that eating high calorie meals are what got you overweight in the first place. And this is where the real science comes into play. You must strike the right balance in dieting so you are keeping your calories low enough to get the pounds off but also boosting your metabolism, and here is how…

Diet strictly for 6 days of the week and then on day 7 add a high calorie meal that is at least 25 – 50% higher in calories then a typical meal. This one meal is enough to restore your fat-burning metabolism to near full strength and it will move you off your plateau.

Sometimes you must do the unexpected to lose weight and using a high calorie meal as a weight loss plateau breaker is a fun and effective way that works.

No one teaches the Cheat Day Method better than Joel Marion and he even takes it one step farther in his Xtreme Fat Loss Program by having you eat whatever you want every 5th day. You can read his plan here: Xtreme Fat Loss

They overate at Thanksgiving and desperately want to drop the extra pounds before Christmas.

This is when thoughts turn to quick weight loss strategies and the idea of doing a cleanse comes to mind.

So how do I feel about doing a cleanse?

Can a cleanse help you lose weight?

Is it harmful to do a cleanse?

Most people define “doing a cleanse” as either eating very little or consuming only one type of food for a set time period.

The desired end result is either quick weight loss or a “cleansing” of the “gunk” built up in the digestive system (or both).

In my opinion, following a cleanse diet for a few days is not going to do harm to the average person (of course you should tell your health care professional what you plan on doing to avoid any health complications). However, I have never seen any scientific studies that proved through the use of before and after colonoscopy examinations, that the colon was cleaner after a cleanse.

And to further that thought, one of the more popular cleanse diets is called the “Master Cleanse” this diet tries to convince you that you will be healthier after a week of eating nothing other than molasses and lemon juice cocktails mixed with cayenne pepper. (Yummm)

Really?

This is going to clean out your intestinal tract?

Why not do a healthy “cleanse” that feeds your body foods that it can use like protein and vegetables? Vegetables are high in fiber which helps move food through the digestive tract efficiently and protein feeds your muscles so you are not destroying your metabolism during the cleanse.

An added bonus of a healthy cleanse is that when it is over your weight is down and your body is not starved of nutrients making you want to pull a chair up to the refrigerator door.

If you would like to lose weight quickly and want to learn a better way to do it, then you might be interested in The 10 Day Diet.

And above all, enjoy the many aspects of the holiday season, this can be a wonderful time of year.

Happy Holidays!

Yet there is a problem with your plan to burn more calories and that is you have less time during this busy season.

How do you up your calorie burn while at the same time spend less time working out?

The answer is to create an exercise “afterburn” that will keep your body burning fat at a faster rate for up to 36 hours after your workout ends.

Now let me be clear, you will have to workout in order for this to work. Yet the thing is, if you are willing to put a good 20 minutes of exercise in and do it right, then you can get the same if not better results than hitting the treadmill for a slow and steady hour or longer.

What is the right way to exercise?

Let me first share what we all used to consider the essentials for weight loss exercise, and that was “the longer the better”.

Personal trainers of yesterday would have their clients climb onto a treadmill or exercise bike and grind away for one or more hours. This of course was BORING, so they started to come out with exercise equipment that could hold a magazine, think about that for a second, is this really building condition into your body?

This old school exercise was not without its benefits. Yes, you received some cardiovascular benefit and yes, you burned calories. But the thing is, once you climbed off the exercise equipment the benefits stopped.

Researchers had to find a better way and they did.

It has been shown, through tons of research that shorter exercise sessions that constantly vary the intensity at which you work have the added benefit of boosting your calorie burning metabolism.

They also found that not only can this result in more fat loss, it can put your body in a state of maintaining a higher level of calorie burning for up to 36 hours after you stop exercising. This is the afterburn and this is what you want in order to reduce your exercise time and boost your weight loss.

Here is a nice video to learn more about how to lose weight with exercise.

Yet the truth of the matter is that every one of us possess exactly what we need, right now, to lose any extra weight we are carrying around and live a healthy and fulfilling life.

In fact, everything you need to change from unhealthy habits to healthy ones is already inside you. You don’t need a different body, a new job, a better schedule, more money or a personal trainer.

All you need to do is tap into this incredible resource by using the most valuable tool you have for losing weight – your brain.

There is so much dieting information and so many tips and recommendation on how to lose weight that we have forgotten how to use our own brain when making eating decisions.

By learning how to harness this incredible power you can create a mindset that will release you from the continual cycle of weight loss/weight gain and allow you to lose the weight once and for all.

The thing to remember is that your brain is always active and it is constantly searching for information that is in line with the beliefs you hold on to.

Negative thoughts about losing weight make it nearly impossible to reach your goal.

The good news is that you are not born with your beliefs, they develop as a result of your observations and interpretations of the things going on around you.

Since beliefs are learned, they can be unlearned and replaced with new beliefs.

So what do you believe? What thoughts fill your head? How do you really feel about the body you were given? Do you deserve a great-looking body? Do you believe in your ability to lose weight?

If you find you have developed negative thoughts and beliefs about losing weight then you will need to start questioning those thoughts.

Are they true?

This is a shift in thinking and will take some time and honest effort but once your brain starts to let go of the beliefs that drive you to overeat, your body will be free to let go of the stubborn pounds.

Check out this book, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life if you would like to learn how to question your beliefs.

How did that work for you?

The truth is that when you completely deny yourself something, human nature kicks in and you rebel.

This diet plan typically ends with you at the grocery store loading your cart with Hershey bars and little chocolate donuts.

The alternative is to question your cravings for chocolate (more on this later).

Your brain works on a loop and once you establish a habit such as eating chocolate, your brain reminds you of that habit.

“Hey body it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, you are tired…this is when you eat chocolate.”

Your brain then starts processing all of the forms of chocolate you could eat – vending machine candy bar, co-worker’s M&M jar, mini-mart down the street.

You are hopelessly fixed on getting chocolate and feel as if you must eat some so you can free your mind and move forward with your day.

Here is something different to try…

Question your thought.

“I need chocolate to move past my craving.”

Is that true?

Can I absolutely know that’s true?

What if at the very moment your craving hit someone pulled the fire alarm and you needed to evacuate your office building immediately.

Would you still need your chocolate fix or would your brain have other thoughts to work on?

Your thoughts lead to your actions.

Question your thoughts, find the part that is untrue and your cravings will start to dissolve without stress and without worry.

Would you like to practice this skill?

You are invited to join me for a free informal Holiday Eating Group where we will meet via phone 3 days in December to learn how to question thoughts that lead to overeating.

To receive more information on the group visit this page:

Information Request For Free Holiday Group

It is important to understand what you want out of your exercise program before you start.

Do you want to boost your weight loss?

Then you will want a type of exercise that maximizes your calorie burn and boosts your fat burning metabolism.

Many people wrongly believe this means working out longer.

And I will admit, when I got into teaching people how to lose weight about 13 years ago that was the accepted thought among exercise and weight loss experts.

That advice is now considered “old-school” and much less effective than shorter workouts that vary the intensity you work at.

In fact, one of my main forms of exercise is a short 20 minute treadmill routine that has me changing the speed/intensity every minute.

This type of exercise has been shown to boost your metabolism, which keeps your body burning fat at a faster rate for up to 24 hours or more.

If you would like to know more about the best way to lose weight with exercise, then you might enjoy this short video

Watch the Video Here

What type of exercise works best for you? What do you enjoy doing the most? Leave a message below.

Another popular belief is that after 21 days of practicing a new healthy eating habit that they will abandon older destructive habits and be born anew.

Here is the problem that I see.

Habits don’t just change because you are doing things differently.

Habits will not change until you change the thoughts that drive them.

Thoughts ==> Behaviors ==> Results

So how do you change your thoughts?

The answer is quite simple but applying the answer takes some work.

The answer is that you need to learn how to question your thoughts (are they really true?) and when you learn how to do this the old destructive thoughts let go of you and you find peace with food.

By peace I mean you can sit at a table with a big slice of chocolate fudge birthday cake and easily evaluate if you will have some, all or none. The emotional response is no longer in control when you question your thoughts effectively.

The reason I say this technique of changing your eating habits will take some time is because most of us have layer upon layer of thoughts that drive us to eat.

That birthday cake gets plopped down in front of you and your brain starts rapidly firing thoughts that make it impossible for you to peacefully decide not to eat it.

That looks so good.

If I don’t eat it now I might never get any.

I wonder how I can finagle a second piece without looking like a pig.

I can’t resist chocolate.

All of these thoughts layer on top of our brain and prevent us from even entertaining the thought of whether we would be okay if we passed on the cake.

You will not be okay if you pass on the cake. Is that true?

Play with this thought for a while. Allow yourself to explore if you would suffer terrible consequences if you passed on the cake or if these stories are all imaginary.

Then you are free to have a bite of cake, half a piece of cake, a whole piece of cake or no cake and regardless of the amount there is no guilt consumed.