Look Better Naked… Via Unified Lifestyle™

Whether you want to lose excess body fat, hit a golf ball further, tone up or even put on a couple of pounds of shapely muscle… individually they are all worthy goals. However, there is one ambition we all have in common… a desire to look better naked.

That and all of the above can be accomplished by following a Unified Lifestyle™

It’s called a LIFESTYLE for a reason. It’s not a diet style, or an exercise style or even stress or time management style… A Unified Lifestyle is comprehensive solution to improving quality of life – Body, mind and spirit – period.

Overly simplistic, one-dimensional short-term solutions are just not practical.  Health management is obviously a long-term plan. A “lifestyle” as the name implies is something you can and will do for the rest of your life… so being realistic is a critical component to success.

For example dieting alone, when the term diet refers to depending solely on nutrition typically doesn’t work. I am sure you or either someone you know has tried drastically changing eating habits; usually conducted over a short period of time, and you may have even experienced what you believed to be positive results that were only negated when old eating habits were revisited.

Ironically the least popular choice of the one-dimensional approaches – is exercise. It’s fascinating really – everyone knows that exercise is good for us – but most don’t do it. Why? There are a number of popular excuses – You feel intimidated about going to a gym, its seems like hard work, You think you don’t have the time … after all it might interfere with your TV schedule, you can even convince yourself that you can’t afford it, then there’s always some kind of pain you don’t want to aggravate, which is likely related to not exercising in the first place …but most …Just don’t  want to do it.

For those who actually do start exercising more often than not they get frustrated and quit or stop seeing positive results because they make one of four common errors:

1.     Under exercise meaning an insufficient amount or intensity to stimulate change.

2.     Conversely and just as ineffective – is over training – people tend to start an exercise program by going gung ho and attempt to maintain a pace that simply isn’t maintainable and quickly burn out and quit all together

3.     Exercise incorrectly

4.     Plateau because they fail to change their routines and intensity on a regular basis.

In order to stimulate change you must challenge yourself …you must vary the workout…it also keeps your brain involved by keeping things interesting. A good reason to seek advice from qualified personal trainers from time to time.

One reason why exercise as a whole when done correctly and consistently is more effective in stimulating positive or potentially lasting change aside form the obvious benefits of maintaining lean muscle mass, function and enhancing your quality of life by being active is the likelihood of making better food choices. It just wouldn’t be logical to invest time working out and then go eat a pile of junk food.

So, a significant advantage of exercising is the probability that you will become multi dimensional and add at least one more component of health to your lifestyle …that being good nutrition.

Food clearly is an important part of the solution. I believe that approximately 70% of the positive results in managing body composition can be accomplished through enhanced nutrition. However, as I alluded to earlier depending on nutrition alone typically doesn’t work… we must consider the importance of exercise, optimizing internal organ health and other lifestyle components like managing stress and getting adequate rest that make up the other 30% of the equation.

A clinical study supports my analogy of 70% of the positive benefits being attributed to nutrition when following a Unified Lifestyle.

To summarize a 12-week study that compared the effects of:

- Dieting alone, versus

- Dieting combined with aerobic (cardiovascular) activity, and

- Dieting combined with aerobic activity and weight lifting

Results: Measured what percentage (%) of each pound lost was fat.

The Diet Alone Group – 69% of each pound lost was fat

While that may sound good… but that means that the balance of every pound lost (practically one third) of the weight sacrificed consisted of either water and / or muscle.

The Diet and Cardio Group – 78% of each pound lost was fat

The Diet, Cardio and Weightlifting group – 97% of each pound lost was fat!

Clearly a Unified Lifestyle provides superior results. There is no subtle way to say this – yes cardio is an important component to over-all health – but strength training guarantees long-term body fat management success – that’s right guaranteed! And weight training enhances bone density and is the only way to reshape your body – Aerobic Cardio training DOES NOT CHANGE OR ENHANCE MUSCUALR SHAPE, resistance training is the ONLY way to positively change the muscular shape of the body.

A common mistake made, especially by women is to avoid strength training for fear of getting too muscular like. Instead, women tend to focus almost exclusively on cardio machines thinking that it will somehow add dimension and firm sagging parts… it won’t.

Muscle is an active tissue that boosts metabolism and supports your whole skeletal structure. If you are thinking – yeah… but I don’t want to get big and muscular or look like a body builder. Well I can only respond to that with – get over yourself!

If you think getting a big muscular physique is easy – think again – Large amounts of muscle can take years to achieve and requires constantly feeding and challenging the muscle to be maintained – and ladies – you lack ample amounts of testosterone, the necessary hormone required to promote muscular growth

Clearly the multi dimensional Unified Lifestyle approach provides superior results. But don’t think for a second that exercise is suppose to represent some kind of self inflicted torture.

We’ve all heard the saying …no pain no gain … It has such a negative connotation, yes we need to train with intensity and I’ll be the first to admit…anyone who says they love exercising is probably lying – what they more than likely mean… is they love how they feel after exercise.

But that’s where the grey matter comes in to play. I recommend you adopt the saying no brain … no gain.

Think about what inspires us to change – we all get to a point wherever that may be and say enough is enough – that’s our brain getting involved and making the conscious decision for change. How well you can manage your brain or visa versa… your brain manages you will determine your success – your potential is limited only to your belief.

© 2011 Copyrights Grant Roberts, All Rights Reserved