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With attention focused on the danger of salmonella in tainted peanut products, it’s easy to forget that the infection more often results from eating contaminated meat, poultry or eggs.

By Tom Venuto
Burn The Fat 

I have no doubt that a scientist somewhere just read the title of this article and said out loud, “YES! Venuto is right! That little thing in your head – the hypothalamus – it IS the thing that is keeping you fat! By George, that Venuto guy isn’t a dumb bodybuilder after all – he’s been doing his research!” At which moment, I will be shaking my head and thinking, “you need to get out of the laboratory and into the real world, with real people, buddy.” Okay, okay, to be fair, Neuro-endocrine control of appetite and body fat really is quite fascinating. But today, I’m talking about PSYCH-ology, not PHYSI-ology. The little thing in your head that’s keeping you fat is actually just a….

Limiting belief!

Self-limiting beliefs are among the biggest problems that people deal with in their struggles to achieve a healthy ideal weight. They’re also one of the reasons that so many people start to falter or fall off the diet and exercise wagon as early as late January or early February in their New Year’s goal pursuits.

If you’re that science guy I spoke of and you’re about to bail because you’re thinking, “Here we go again… another psycho-babble, self help article,” then think again. A belief is the force behind the placebo effect, which is well known by every scientist and medical professional. A respected doctor gives a patient a pill and is told it’s a powerful drug. The patient gets well immediately, not knowing that the “miraculous” substance was a dummy pill. Inert. Sugar. The miracle was in the mind.

But beliefs are not only involved in the mind-body connection, they are unconscious programs that control your behavior. The most important factor in whether you achieve the body and the health you want is NOT what diet or training program you follow. It’s what makes you follow your diet and training program. And guess what? What you believe controls your behavior – whether you will stick with your program or sabotage it with cheating, bingeing or inconsistency.

What to do about limiting beliefs

Ok, so now you agree that beliefs are psychological factors that affect you physically by controlling your behavior, including your eating, exercising and lifestyle. What now? 3 steps. 2 questions.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY LIMITING BELIEFS

You are fully aware of many of your beliefs. For example, beliefs about spirituality or politics are usually in the front of your conscious mind.

But the beliefs that hold back your health and physical development the most are usually the ones you don’t even know you have. They are like unconscious “brain software,” running silently in the background.

So the first step is to bring those unconscious and potentially damaging beliefs up to the surface so you are aware of them. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know you have one.

2 Quick Questions That Will Help Draw Out Your Beliefs

Beliefs can go back to childhood, but don’t worry, you don’t have to go to a psychotherapist and be regressed back to kindergarten. It’s simpler than that. But it does pay to do this questioning process as a formal “exercise” with serious quiet time, with pen and paper (instead of just thinking about it).

Question #1: What causes me to be overweight (or unhealthy, or not having the body I want)?

Question #2: What’s preventing me from getting leaner? (or healthier?)

Spend some time with it and see how big of a list you can create. Ask yourself whether each belief helps or hurts you. Does it move you forward or backward. Does it empower or disempower you? The ones that hurt you or hold you back will be obvious. You may come up with beliefs such as:

“I’m overweight and I can’t get leaner because”:

I have no time
I’m too old
I can’t stop eating
I hate exercise
You just can’t do it when you have 4 kids
It’s impossible after having a hip replacement

But the million dollar question is: are these beliefs actually true?

Beliefs are not facts. You may hold your beliefs as absolute reality, but when you deconstruct them and challenge them, you may see that they don’t hold any water.

Self limiting beliefs are false interpretations (negative thought patterns) that hold you back. And you keep holding on to them because making excuses and staying the same is a lot more convenient than changing, isn’t it? Change requires hard work, effort and leaving your comfort zone.

Your mission now: weaken the limiting beliefs and get rid of them

STEP 2: CHALLENGE THOSE BELIEFS

How do you challenge a belief? 4 ways:

(A) Challenge it directly: Is the belief even valid at all? See if you can find a “counter example” that disproves your belief. For example; if you think that after you’ve had 3 or 4 kids, it’s impossible to get a nice flat stomach, what will you say after I introduce you to a dozen of my clients and readers who had 3 or 4 kids and went from bulging belly to rock-hard flat stomach? If they did it, then how could your belief be valid? Answer: It WASN’T! You believed something false and inaccurate and it was holding you back!

(B) Challenge the source: Is it your belief, or have you been living what your parents, peers or culture handed down to you? Just the realization that a belief wasn’t yours to begin with is enough to shatter it.

(C) Challenge the usefulness of the belief: Ok, so you believed something when you were younger. Does still believing it has any usefulness today? Does it help you move closer to what you want in your life today? If not, then wouldn’t today be a good time to get rid of it?

(D) Challenging the belief by weighing the consequences: If you keep this belief, what is it going to cost you? What will the pain be like? What will you miss? And what will these consequences be if you don’t change it NOW?

STEP 3: INSTALL A NEW BELIEF

Nature abhors a vacuum, as Spinoza once said. You don’t simply get rid of a belief, you must also replace it. What things would you want and need to believe instead that would create positive behaviors that would move you toward your goal? Write them down, then massage them into an affirmation. For example, if you’ve hung your hat on the belief that you didn’t have time to exercise, could you write a new affirmation of belief similar to this?

“I’m a very busy person, so that means I must set clear priorities and I must keep my health and body on the top of my priority list. I always schedule time for my most important priorities, I am efficient with my training, and I use every minute of my day wisely. And if Barack Obama, the busiest person in the world, can train for 45 minutes a day 6 days a week, there’s no excuse for me. I can do it too.”

Write down your new belief affirmations and read them, right along with your goals, every day.
Then “activate” this affirmation by doing what Olympic and professional athletes do: engaging in mental rehearsal. Visualize yourself carrying out the behaviors that this belief would generate. Think about and feel what it would be like to take those positive actions steps and play mental movies of how your life would change by doing so. Involve all your senses: see it, hear it, feel it.

Keep it up until you start to see your behavior change and your habitual actions come into alignment with your goals/intentions. If you’re diligent, you’ll see changes in attitude and behavior with 21-30 days. It may happen sooner. It may take longer if you’ve carried deep, lifelong limiting beliefs. But in less than a month, the roots of the new belief pattern will be formed.

Then you can update your goals and affirmations to reflect your current priorities and move on to the next goal you want to achieve or the next limiting belief you want to change. Keep THAT up, and pretty soon, you will be LIMIT-LESS!

BELIEVE ME, spending quality time understanding and working on your beliefs is a lot more productive than spending time in forums arguing about whether a low carb program is better than a high carb program… or even whether the cure for obesity is found in the arcuate nucleus of the lower hypothalamus. It’s in your head all right… but most people have been looking in the wrong place.

Train hard and expect success,
Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
Burn The Fat 

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: http://burnthefat.rxsportz.com

Ben Warstler, CSCS, NSCA-CPT

Bodybuilding is a fantastic sport.  I mean the competitors are intense and the dedication and discipline they must have to be successful is not easily paralleled in society.  Those who participate in bodybuilding have the tenacity, dedication, and time, not to mention the genetic predisposition to be successful.

Do you and I have that ability?  I mean do we have 6-8 hours in the day to do nothing but eat and train?  Do we have the genetic make up to be successful in this sport (maybe some of us do).  Do we have such a strict eating schedule that we can not enjoy a slip up from time to time? In truth that is a body builder world. It is their profession to eat and train, and they spend a lot of time doing it.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, we don’t have that luxury.  We have jobs, families, and other obligations that take up almost all of our time.  Often the last thing we think about or make time for is for exercise, and when we do make the time we only have small windows in which to train.  So we better make them count.

So why do so many gym goers still train like bodybuilders?  Maybe some of them have aspirations for big things in the sport, then that is great.  But many gym goers are training just to stay in shape or are training to lose belly fat. But they aren’t to blame they take the programs they get out of the latest muscle magazine and hit the gym.

Bodybuilders don’t train to lose belly fat.  They train to be the most blown up and biggest and most ripped of anyone else on stage.  For the average person, that isn’t the goal they have in mind at all.  Many people just want to see their abs, or fit into the same size clothes they did in high school. 

The reality is that bodybuilding routines and fat loss routines are two very different things but many use them together thinking they will still yield the same result.

A typical body building routine will have you training one body part per day or a split routine of two body parts on separate days.  You will train all of one muscle group first before moving on to the next muscle group. Often you will do several exercises for the same muscle group and will rest for a few minutes between sets. Your typical body building routine will take at least an hour and a half to complete. You will train a lot of single joint movements and a few multi joint movements but your goal is to get a really great pump in the muscle.

A typical fat loss routine will have you training either full body or also in split body routines. You will alternate between muscle groups or movements and will have little to no rest from one exercise to the next.  This is more like a circuit format where you will rest at the end for a short time before starting a new round.  Your typical fat loss routine will take less than an hour to complete.  You will train a lot of multi-joint exercises as your goal is to boost the metabolic demand on the body which means you are increasing how much oxygen you need and how quickly your heart can pump blood.  The higher the metabolic demand the higher the fat loss effect (afterburn-calories burned after exercise).

As for the nutrition, these are two very different animals.  In bodybuilding there is a huge calorie amount taken in to help build bulk and build muscle.  So your calorie intake is going to be much more than what you are used to if you want to see results (about double depending upon body type and previous experience).  Your carbohydrate intake will also be very high.  With fat loss programming, your calorie intake is cut so you are at a deficit from your normal intake, and your carbohydrate intake will be restricted to an extent.

As you can see they are at two very opposite ends of the spectrum when you look at nutrition.  As for exercise there are some similarities but also some glaring differences.

So before you go into the gym and start training from any program you find in a magazine, make sure it has your goals in mind and it is the most effective training program for those goals.

Ben Warstler, The Former Fat Kid, is a fitness professional specializing in fat loss and sports conditioning.  Using his experience of struggling with his weight, he has been able to help hundreds of clients lose thousands of pounds of body fat.  For more information on Ben and the Former Fat Kid Fat Loss System, go to http://formerfatkid.rxsportz.com.

We’ve been wondering how long it would take for news on the health of Corporate Yoga to pop up, because we’ve been waiting for a good reason to talk about it.

Amid the turbulence, strung out citizens seem to be clinging to yoga as stress relief even more these days, and who could need it more than the overworked American, distraught over massive layoffs and anxious they might be next to get the axe. In this age of Recession Yoga it makes absolute sense (or it should anyway) for companies to make some concessions for its remaining workforce, like soothing their nerves with midday yoga. In that case you’d think there might be a little more buzz about offices adopting yoga programs. But let’s get serious, with all the budgetary cutbacks, and some going so far as to slash free plastic cutlery in the kitchen, is yoga really on the budgetary agenda?

So this story on MSNBC about exercise programs in places like Google and Random House seems nice and all but, sadly, it’s hardly realistic. Besides the fact that Random House, which boasts a 22-year commitment to corporate fitness, had a harsh wave of layoffs itself, with the future of publishing looking grim. Google has  seen its own cutbacks as well.

We agree, yoga is a great idea, but we’re of the mind to believe it’s not priority at a company that’s hemorrhaging employees. And honestly, that money would probably be best used elsewhere (healthcare? pensions? forks?). We’re sure Google’s “Stretching on the Toilet” bathroom publication is a good read, but it probably doesn’t function well as TP when the toiletry budget gets cut!

We expect to be posting more on the Corporate tip soon enough in our continuing coverage of Recession Yoga.

Anyone else experiencing a surge or slowdown in company commissioned yoga?

Also mentioned in the article is “friendly competition” amongst colleagues which strikes a little too closely to The Office’s “Weight Loss” episode where a weight loss competition between branches leaves Kelly starving herself and passing out for the win (it sounds dark, but it’s the usual Office humor).

Working Out From 9 to 5 [MSNBC]

photo omintheoffice

Hey-O! Fire up your online shopping fingers yogums, we have a date! Well, we have a month! April 2009 will see the beginning of a new age, the dawn of the Lulu’s descension on the internet as we know it. We mentioned in Jan the decision to push up their online store launch due to slowed retail growth and the crappy economy. Coinciding with the new interweb strategy is a new product line and perhaps their new blog?? Uh oh! Sound the alarms, fire up the parade. We told you! Internet greatness shall commence. Just in time for complete economic meltdown. Oh, but they are hiring. A fearless warrior  (online business coordinator) is needed to lead the mission. You must be goal-oriented (harr) and great! (duh) so no mediocres need apply, and you better do it quick so you have enough time for “education” at the Forum.

Did we mention they already have close to 1 million addresses at the ready for the launch? Now how do you suppose …

And so our only question (suggestion?) is:  Do we get a free bottle of booze with our online purchase, to numb the sting of spending the month’s grocery budget with a side of shipping+handling fees? Seems only fitting.

Thanks to our favorite lululemon stock analyst gumshoe who sniffed this out.

Earlier…Lululemon to Bring Greatness to Online Shopping in 2009 Even Earlier Than Expected

We mentioned  a news bit just before the holidays about yoga for the homeless in NYC, adding that we hoped it might catch on. Well, needless to say we were pretty happy to read about Street Yoga, a Portland, OR based organization created to benefit homeless and at-risk youth with free yoga, because well, a $15 class is not going to cut it.

Street Yoga, just like brushing your teeth, but better.

Street Yoga believes that yoga can build physical and mental strength and facilitate the healing process, helping kids feel at home in their own body, mind, and community.

So why yoga when food and shelter are first priority?

At it’s core it’s a matter of respect and dignity. Why do we brush our teeth? Because, at best, it helps us feel more healthy, whole and hopeful. Yoga provides that, and so much more.

So is Street Yoga on the “street”?

No, dummies. Just kidding, we love you, come back!

They also have weekend teacher training workshops if you’re interested in learning useful techniques and perhaps starting a program in your area. As far as we know there is nothing of that nature in NYC right now… are we wrong?

We just want to say we think this is fantastic…and what we’d like to refer as “prehabilitation,” which is to say a better introduction than Prison Yoga.

Next training in Seattle [Seattle P-I]

Street Yoga

Maybe we can forget holograms,  soon enough we’ll be watching TV on our contact lenses! So says futurist Ian Pearson who’s convinced this technology will be available in 10 years. The technology is already here actually, they’re just working on fitting it closer to the eye. The age of Virtual Yoga for sure.

Also in the pipeline is “emotional viewing” where “digital tattoos” pick up emotions from characters on TV and pique your senses making you feel the same way they do. Freaky! Empathy as an extreme sport.

Could you imagine the possibilities when it comes to happiness, or bliss? Yogis seek relaxation through yoga practice, but what if you could find euphoria better-than-vicariously through watching feeling it on TV? Not to mention the other usual suspects of reaching ecstasy. ahem, drugs, sex, etc.

[Telegraph UK]

Wake Correctional Center in Raleigh, NC has seen its share of repeat customers. Dr. Steven Landau teaches yoga at the all-male, minimum security prison to hopefully slow down that revolving door. In fact, he’s performed his own micro study showing that inmates who’ve  attended his yoga classes more than 4 times had an 8 percent chance of returning, while those who had attended less than 4 times had a 25 percent chance (who knows how he configured these statistics).

What we do know is that yoga seems to have an overwhelmingly positive affect.

[inmate] Louis Allen says the class has taught him to think before he acts.

“Once you learn to deal with your mental thoughts and control them better, it’s a lot easier in life. And as far as going out, I don’t think I’ll have no problem staying out this time,” he said.

While Dr. Landau claims this program works better than just schooling, due to what he curiously describes as “shifting personality,” (hmm), we’re just glad yoga is providing the tools for potential success on the outside.

“Learn how to be happy here in the present and even happier when you get out,” Dr. Landau announces over the loudspeaker. Great advice if ever we’ve heard it. Keep on keepin on.

By the way, hey California, kinda looks like they’re making due with a plain old  “room”.

Prisoners Turn to Yoga [Raleigh. MyNC.com]

Shenae Grimes (the  “Brenda Walsh” of new 90210) was snapped all hot and bothered after a Bikram class in LA the other day. She’s all like “…and then he said he didn’t kiss her and she was like oh no he didn’t!” You know, or something of the 19-year-old persuasion. We think she might cool off faster without those snuggy UGGs – what’s with that anyway?

more pics at [JustJared]

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Nadya Suleman, the mother of the octuplets born last month, gets $490 a month in food stamps, the Los Angeles Times reported.  Suleman told NBC News’ Ann Curry that she didn’t receive government aid.

Marijuana use may increase the risk of developing testicular cancer, in particular a more aggressive form of the disease, according to a U.S. study published on Monday.

The so-called breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 can raise the risk that a man who develops prostate cancer will get an aggressive form of the disease, U.S. researchers reported.

Greater amounts of physical activity than currently recommended may be necessary to prevent people from gaining weight, according to updated guidelines.

I love my husband – I really do. He’s my best friend, my support system, and the love of my life. And we share the same (warped) sense of humour, so he makes me laugh ~ most of the time.

Occasionally, though, he drives me nuts! I mean, what is it about men that they can switch on a light but can’t switch it off? Or they can open a cupboard door but can’t close it?

Oh, and if they open the fridge and what they want doesn’t jump out at them, is it beyond them to move a few things around until they find what they want? (Yes….) And don’t even get me started on men and their remote controls!

I guess it doesn’t help that I’m going through my mid-life “magic” right now, which means anything and everything can get on my last nerve. But that said, he doesn’t have to encourage me to lose it, does he?

Sigh… I now know why it’s called “MENopause.”

Of course, having spent half of this blog complaining about him, I’m now going to defend him. (As a Libra, I always have to consider both sides, even when I’m arguing with myself – which is kind of fun, in a perverse way)! I have to admit that he’s easygoing, patient, and has a very high tolerance level – but he’s definitely no pushover!

I’m sure there are tons of endearing things I do that irritate the heck out of my husband (not that I can think of any) and on any given day we can disagree on a multitude of issues. But there is one thing that we both agree on – and that’s how much yoga has improved my (lately) thorny disposition.

Whenever I go to my yoga class, I find that all my frustration just melts away. Going through my yoga poses enables me to focus on finding that essential balance in mind, spirit, and body. I always return home feeling refreshed, at peace, and in love with the world again. And for this reason alone, my husband says he’s eternally grateful to yoga. It turns his mid-life wife back into someone vaguely familiar, someone with a sense of humour who’s tolerant of others, especially him!

Now, if I can only persuade him to sign up for a yoga class….

Tags: men, husband, wife, mid-life, irritation, balance in life

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