The Roller Coaster of Life

Whoa …. WOW …. just coming off the “Manta” at Seaworld in Orlando i found myself in awe of just how great a ride that was.  Climbing the hill being held upside down in the seat, my weight baring against the restraints as I’m looking at the ground, in great anticipation of that first drop and rapid increase in speed.  Twisting, turning, dropping, corkscrewing, inverting and looping through all kinds of curves on one of the smoothest of rides I’ve ever felt was and exhilarating experience.  If you’ve never gone, then you need to “do it” at least once.  But you know what ….. that was a choice I made to ride the ups and downs of the roller coaster.

But since this Blog is basically about health, wellness and fitness, you just know I have to call you out on the ups and downs of our lives as it relates to the nutrition we eat or the exercise we do.  Any given day I can walk around and look at people and see their lack of fitness or their example of a good fitness routine in your life.  That goes for food as well.  I have great sympathy for those around me, because I KNOW that daily life is a struggle with these things.  It really is at times like a roller coaster ride with all of its peaks and valleys.  Sometimes we make a good effort to eat right, only to fall off the wagon and get right back into a slump of bad habits.  Don’t get me wrong, I include myself in this too. The same thing goes for fitness as well.  But here I see a great struggle for most people.  With having spoken with hundreds of people now, I can see that of the people I come in to contact with each day, probably only 5-10% of them have some sort of workout routine that they stick too.  It’s very sad in a way, when we think about our bodies and how it’s the one thing carrying us through life, yet 90% of people i see, are not doing anything to protect their bodies and strengthen themselves so that they can eat, live, work and play with less fear of injury.  WOW …. why do we do this to ourselves?  Complacency is one I think, but there are others, …. like stress, fast paced life, laziness, lack of knowledge and so on ….

Finding a healthy balance in eating is one thing and a lot of people can stick with it, but finding a workout program and sticking with it seems to be more of a struggle.  They’ll start a routine, and only after a few days give up, but then months later pick it up again, then drop it again riding the roller coaster of fitness decisions.

So here’s a few words of encouragement to you.  Find a work out program at home and muster all the mental strength you have and “do it” for 15 days.  I’ve noticed that if you can stick with something for that period of time, you’ll generally be on the road to more successes than failures.  That’s how I approach doing things in my life and have found great success.  Lastly, if one day you skip and don’t workout and you consider that a failure, then in your mind, forget about it.  Take the next day, a brand new day as the day you will succeed and move forward instead of letting past failures promote future failures.  Each day is a bright new day to succeed in whatever it is you are doing, so wake up with that mindset and you’ll put yourself on the fast track to success.

If you found this post helpful, insightful or maybe even just silly, then give it a “Tweet” and feel free to comment below!

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Hi There!  I’m so glad that you stopped by for quick bite! Well, at least maybe I’ll make you a bit hungry after this post.

So why is it everyone I see says they just can’t eat healthy when they go out for lunch or breakfast or dinner.  Bah!  Humbug I say!  Where’s your spirit of adventure?  Where’s that quest for the 66 lb. turkey hanging out in the market?  Will it take a Bob Marley to lead you by the hand to find the good out there?  No I say ………Okay, I got carried away a bit, he, he…. But seriously folks, you can eat well at restaurants.  You just have to look close at the menu and become educated.

Now I’ll post some well known restaurant menus items in a future article so you can really see what you’re eating, but look at the few things I found below.

Waking up early here on the Sun Coast, hopping in my little convertible and blasting over the St. Armand circle bridge I head to a favorite of mine, “The Blue Dolphin”.  Two of my favorite people in all of Sarasota, Pam and Alex greet me warmly as I enter the small café’.  Well known in all of Sarasota for having some of the best breakfast fare around, I quickly find a seat before the rush sets in.  Pam slides in the booth with me and we enjoy catching up on what’s been happening and the news of her daughter and such.  Pam knows my order by heart and places it with the chef.  So you see in the picture a huge omelet with egg whites, spinach and tomatoes. Oh my gosh!  The taste is incredible!  They must use 8 to 10 egg whites and I literally have to be wheeled from the café’.  Order a side of whole grain toast and you’ll be sure to start your day off right.  Now just do the same at your local café’.

For lunch I find a local restaurant serving a mix of American fare.  Once again treated like a King, they seat me in a booth by the window and promptly take my order.  This time I’ve ordered fish tacos.   Now at one time I really wasn’t a fan of these, but have quickly caught on.  Halibut, shredded cabbage tomato, and their sauce on tortilla.  Okay, now the tortilla and sauce could be nixed, but I generally only eat one with the tortilla and the rest I leave on the plate.  Sometimes I do sacrifice a tad, but all in all it was a great lunch with not too much to be guilty for.

For dinner I found Vino E Pasta.  The owner and maitre d’ seats me in the corner.  Now is that the power table or is the center table in the room, hmmm.  Ordering snapper, grilled with tomatoes, herbs and onions, with a side of pasta I complete my day of eating out with a renewed since that I can do this and still eat well.  Once again I forgo most of the pasta so I’m left with a very healthy meal and getting some of those Omega 3’s that we all need.

So can you do it?  Do you want to do it?  That’s the question.  Do you think that triple burger from Wendy’s and being super sized with the fries and cola are going to get you to the weight you’re looking for?  Well if that weight is upwards than be my guest.

But don’t be surprised some December night, late, late at night you hear a rattling sound, a chain clunking down the hallway, mist rolling under your door and you find me materializing right in front of you saying in a loud voice what your life could have been like if you had only chosen the right path.

Okay, again,……seriously, make some healthy choices today!  Your body will love you for it!  Please take amoment and SHARE this post bu clicking below and then just give it a little “Tweet” up top.  Thanks!

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Okay maybe it’s just that Love / Hate relationship but certainly it’s not one  of those workouts that I’m thinking of the night before and just jumping at the chance the next day to start.  You don’t agree?  Well maybe you’re not giving yourself the intensive cardio workout that your body is needing.

On a scale of 1 to 10 during your workout, what level would you say you are at if 10 is you can’t hardly breath and feel like you’re going to puke and 5 is pretty much just ho, hum?

So, these workouts typically aren’t fun for me.  And running, come on people, what’s up with that?  I hate it!  Did I just put an exclamation mark at the end of that sentence?  I did!  I just can’t help it!!!  Breathing hard, legs burning and your chest feeling like it’s about to explode.  Who loves that?

Now some of the cardio that I do is intense I have to admit.  It’s not for your average Joe, but really anyone with a desire and commitment can do it.  Take Insanity for example.  This program is aptly named because it truly is an INSANE workout.  Jumping, squatting, hopping around, up and down, plyo this, push up this, jeesh you would have thought I was back in boot camp, only 100 times worse.

But here’s a couple of good thoughts from my dear friend Tony Horton (check him out in the video below).  “You’re only good at the things you do often and you become great if work at the things you struggle with most”.  And I also agree with him that I don’t really enjoy these workouts but they’re important and I do them anyway!

So I’ve rambled on a bit about why I hate cardio.  But it is the one thing my body, my heart and my mind crave.  If I don’t feed them this particular thing, then they all will fall into a state of disrepair and unfortunately the worse that can happen is that my heart decides it’s the weak kid on the block and gives me grief for it.

You all know deep down that the easy low intense cardio that you’ve been doing isreally not helping you to burn fat.  That is one of the goals of doing cardio.  Studies have shown that high-intensity training and especially when combined with an interval workout can burn up to 9 times the amount of fat as other cardio workouts.  Further enhance this fat loss by doing them in the morning on an empty stomach and you’ll have the effects of the workout throughout the day to help burn fat.

So the morale of the story here is to “Do It Anyway”.  Regardless if it’s a little or a lot, just do it!  And if you need some motivating, shoot me an email and I’ll love to partner with you in your success.

If you found even just a tad bit of this post useful, please share it with a friend.  You can click “SHARE” below and then maybe give it a little tweet up top!  Thanks!

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What makes some people so successful in their career or life’s pursuits where it seems that everything they touch turns to gold?  On the flip side, how come a lot of other people we know seem to struggle and toil over the same issues time and time again?

Let me propose to you that the first person knows something or has something that the second person does not.  Would you agree with that?  I think most of you would.  So what is it?  That’s the million dollar question.  If you could just find out what that thing is and how you can get it, that would be the real solution to all your struggles in life.

I’ll pose a few scenarios to you;  And since this site is really about fitness, the first one will be about that …Why is it some people never manage the time to stay in shape, while others run a few miles each day even though their lives are just as busy?  They have the Slight Edge!  It’s there in your life whether you know it or not.  It’s either working for you or against you.  Your health is the most prized possession you have.  Yet many people don’t give their prized possession the attention it deserves. You wouldn’t expect to eat a double cheeseburger for lunch and then keel over with heart attack from it.  Not today and not tomorrow.  But a lifetime of that type of eating will certainly put you on that path.  So it’s not the 1 junk food meal, it’s the thousands over a lifetime.  Eating fresh fruit, complex carbs, lean protein and such will give your body what it needs. It’s easy to eat right and it’s easy to not eat right.  Both are easy, but in the long run they have dramatically different outcomes.

The same is true for exercise.  Not doing a bit of exercise for a week or so, won’t put your body in sad shape, but a lifetime of no exercise will certainly put the pounds on. A few workouts a week, twenty minutes here doing a fast walk or run, doing some resistance exercises here and there, all add up to what your body needs.  Both of these examples show the slight edge in our life.  A little bit each day will either reward us, or put us on the wrong path.  Yet the day we do it, just that one day in time doesn’t have much of an effect.  The days add up and the slight edge has worked for us.

The second example is finances.  It’s the same story a lot of you have heard.  Two people age 24 talk about retirement and how to invest to make a million bucks by age 65.  One takes steps, small as they are and invest 2,000 dollars a year for 6 years.  The other just meanders through life not giving much thought to retirement and then meets his friend again at year 7.  He asks his friend how he’s doing and how are his investment plans going.  His friend says ‘I’m all done!”  At age 65 by the magic of TIME his friend will have a million dollars even though he doesn’t have to invest 2 cents more here at age 31.  So the friend who didn’t start investing wants to be in the same shape and starts his trek towards the million dollars at age 65.  The only difference is, he now has to invest 2000 dollars a year until he’s 62 to reach that mark.  His procrastination cost him 33 years!

So the slight edge in life can have a profound effect.  But it’s never to late to start.  It’s not simply “Will Power” that will get you there.  All it is is TIME.  Do a little each day, regardless of the goal and you will achieve it.

So get off your (you know what) and get on the “Slight Edge” of life and succeed!

If you enjoyed this post and hopefully found it useful, please take a moment and click “SHARE” below and give it a little Tweet up top.  Thanks!

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It’s a bird, It’s a plane, It’s a Blog, no it’s a “Green Goddess Smoothie”!

Okay, not your typical blog here, but who ever called me typical?  But I did want to share this AWESOME little smoothie with you from my good friend Valerie Waugaman.  She might be seen flying high and be mistaken for a bird, or a plane, but she’s really “Siren” on the American Gladiators.  She’s also known in some circles as the “Green Goddess”.

I had the awesome chance of connecting with her and prying her weak little arms apart …NOT… away from her secret recipe for a smoothie concoction that is sure to set your day off right.  Now don’t turn your nose up, or start getting that green around the gills feeling.  This smoothie is VERY good!

So here’s the recipe.  Also I’ve included a short video of my friend and fellow Beachbody Coach.  Enjoy the drink and the show!

Green Goddess Smoothie

4oz.   Blueberry Pomegranate juice (other juice optional)

6oz.   Lite Vanilla Soy Milk (reg. milk optional)

1        Kiwi  (with the fur)

4-5    Strawberries

1/8    Lime

1/2    Medium Avocado

3 cups   Raw Spinach leaves (well packed)

1 scoop   Vanilla protein powder  (my current favorite is Beachbody Whey Protein)

Dash    Vanilla extract

10 drops   All natural Stevia sweetener, to taste (can be ordered at Sweetleaf.com my favorite is the vanilla creme stevia liquid)

1 cup   Ice

Blend all ingredients except ice.  Then add ice and blend.  Enjoy!

Here’s my friend Valerie in real life and as our favorite Super Hero! And you can find her at http://www.valspace.com  and don’t forget to SHARE this with all your friends if you enjoyed it.  But if it made you turn green ….then we may just have to go speak to the “HULK”!

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Motivational Monday’s

Hallelujah!

This one is just going to speak for itself!  But let me say, whether it’s getting out bed and trying to get started in that ‘thing” you’re going to do today, maybe working out, getting the courage to eat the right meals today, trying to put down the butterflies for that speech you’re giving or just knowing you have to stand up in front of a crowd and speaking or in this case singing from your heart.

My good friend Edward Elliott posted this on faceboook of Diane Hochman’s daughter and I grabbed it off of the authors Youtube, so I hope it encourages you today as it has me.  Enjoy ….  and PLEASE don’t forget to hit the Share button below and Tweet at top.  Thanks!

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Dessert Overboard

Oh my gosh!  A moment of weakness. Totally lost control.  What?  Dessert overboard that’s what I’m calling it.  We’ve all been there.  We’ve all had that moment of weakness after a nice meal and then came the server with these tempting desserts to really push you over the edge.

That’s what happened to me when my wife and I were invited to the dining event at a Mitchell’s Fishmarket before opening day of their new location in Winter Park, FL.  We were happy to attend, especially since all the food was free.  Driving up and then walking in we were treated like we were really worth something,…boy if they only knew … LOL.  We ordered some really great dishes.  She had the Salmon and I had Alaskan King Crab.  Both were great and had some nice steamed vege’s on the side.  So now I’m thinking we didn’t do too bad as far as calorie counts, then came the hook.

Our dessert choices were explained and these to were….yep….FREE.  Jeepers, who can pass up that?  So in for a penny, in for a pound…literally!  I think it was called “Sharkfin Pie”.  Oreo cookie crust, butter fudge ice cream, honey roasted peanuts, fudge and peanut butter.  Like I said “Oh My  Gosh”!  The calories in this had to have been in the red zone.  I know that there must have been a paramedic waiting in the kitchen for me to collapse from either dessert overload or cardiac arrest.

So here’s my point of all this.  Yep, I had a moment of weakness.  But I’m not beating myself up over it.  I did it, I was satisfied and I’ll move on towards a more successful day tomorrow, which I had by the way, especially with all the guilt…LOL.  Seriously though, it’s okay to splurge occasionally.  Get it out or in, and get over it.  But I have one word of advice to all of you who go to this restaurant and try this dessert, SHARE.  Please visit my earlier post on “Healthy Eating Habits” too.  I know I need to.

And please have fun sharing this post too by clicking the SHARE button below and maybe giving it a little “Tweet” up top.  Enjoy!  Yum!

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Turbo Fire is HERE!

Okay, the great thing about what I do is I also get to review NEW stuff!  SO……………  I actually got to do some of this in California with the none other than the author, producer and workout guru herself, Chalene Johnson!

Turbo Fire is one of those programs that comes around only once in a couple hundred years.  What?  Okay, a little stretch there, but it’s about to take this country by storm like her other  big hit Turbo Jam.

The moves, the cardio, the music, the class………….they’re all primed for you to get the best results of your life.  11,…count them, ELEVEN DVD’s that will have you stretching, punching, leaping, dancing and moving like never before!  You’ll go through intense Fire Drills so HOT sweat will literally be running off you.

But don’t take my word for it, WATCH the video !!!

So here’s what’s in the box.  Unless you go for the DELUXE version of course.  And always for more fantastic information on this, just click here “Fitness Programs“.

My last words to you today are “What are YOU waiting for?”  If not you, then please share this with a friend.  Just click on the SHARE button below and then give it a little “Tweet” up top.  Decide!  Commit!  Succeed!

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Smiling!

Even as we read the word and think of its meaning we smile inside.  It’s just the nature of things or the Spirit within us that yearns for a moment of happiness expressed in the simple, almost effortless movement of our face, especially when another person is doing it and directed at us.

It’s been said that it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown.  I’ve heard something like 43 to frown and only 17 to smile.  While most of us assume that’s a true statement, it’s not.  Opps, sorry did I just bust your bubble and make you frown?  I apologize for that and I’m giving you a great big warm smile to show you my sincerity.   With a little research we all can find out that there are only about 37 facial muscles, so the numbers just don’t add up.

As a matter of fact others have written much on this subject and a plastic surgeon by the name of Dr. David Song has been interviewed  and he concludes that it takes 1 more muscle to smile than it does to frown.  Hmmmm….  Very interesting.

So as I wonder about this and read much on the subject,  I’m convinced that there will never be a definitive answer for us.  So why do I even bring this up?  Well, for one thing I feel good when I smile.  I feel good when someone smiles at me.  And the opposite is true of course for the frown.  Now I have a vested interest in people’s lives, fitness, health and wellness.  The smile is one extension of what I’m about.  I like to think about that one extra muscle and whether a person knows it or not, that smile at me means all the more because it took more effort.

So let’s think about it for a moment.  You can see all over my site there is much about fitness, nutrition, workouts, energy, weights, cardio, exhaustion, sweat equity and the like.  I wanted for us to just take a moment and think about exercising those facial muscles, more specifically the ones that create the smile.  No barbells, no resistance bands (unless you count the ones in our braces) and no sweat pouring off  us.  Just good old fashion, think about it and do it!  Walk around all day today.  Smile at everyone you encounter.  Smile at your dog (of course we all do that), smile at your neighbor, smile at the checkout clerk, smile at the deputy giving you a ticket, just smile!

You will no doubt alter someone’s day and it just could be yours. So go exercise those muscles!

So let me leave this with you….If you found these musings about smiling worth a thought or two of your time today, please SHARE this post by clicking the Share button below and then tweeting it up top.  Thank you so much for stopping by today!

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Hi There!

No Push-ups, No Sit-ups, No Lunges, No Cardio ….No Sweat!

Just letting you have a peak into my typical weekend morning waking up with Sam!

Well, I just wanted to bring you into my “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” so to speak, so I got my camera out this morning, whistled for my loyal buddy Samson, leash in hand and off we went.  Just a quick walk out the door to the dock and a view of my neighborhood that I wake up to every morning.  Well usually I’m out the door at O’Dark thirty, but you get the drift as I see it on weekends.

I’m still a little sleepy as I describe the view, but I hope you enjoy seeing the water, hear th birds and see what beauty is all around us, even my very furry friend “Samson”.  Enjoy…

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