Staying young, looking younger or just feeling younger is a multimillion dollar industry. There’s a really good reason for it. We have an ever-aging generation. This generation is the largest generation ever on the planet. Naturally, there’s a huge percentage-if not all-of this population that do not want to grow old. Therefore, anti-aging products are rampant in the marketplace.

But don’t get “taken” by the unnecessary products that play on the emotions of those who wish to look young. Being

Fueling your body with the right foods and regular, enjoyable physical activity is the best anti-aging remedy.

healthy, energetic, and in turn, looking and feeling great, do not come in a bottle. Rather, aging with grace and remaining healthy and energetic come from the things we do to our bodies throughout our lives. That’s why I have said time and again that “dieting” in a sense-doesn’t work. What you need to be healthy is a positive change in “lifestyle”.

Your body, at it’s current state, is a product of what you have done and put into it throughout the course of your life. So how can you improve your current state? How can you feel and look healthier, younger, and more vibrant than before? The following are three secrets and tips that will allow you to avoid the risks of buying certain products that are not needed.

Secret Tip #1: Feed Your Face. If you “feed your face” with the right foods-anti-aging food- on a consistent basis, you’ll find it easier to stay young. Another way to say this is to just make sure you’re not feeding your body full of junk that is sure to perpetuate the aging process. Also, know that if you try to escape the eating step, you’ll grow older faster. The body knows what it needs. Just give it to your body. The right foods will fuel the process and journey to where you want to go as far as fitness.

Secret Tip #2: Pick Something or Go Somewhere. In other words, get up off the couch, turn the TV off and do some anti-aging activities. This doesn’t have to be work either. Find an activity or two that you enjoy. Walk, run, weight train, ride a bike, get on a pogo stick. Do anything that causes your body to move and exert some activity. This will allow your body to stay young by stretching muscles and keeping you limber at the same time. When you exercise, your body also secretes  “feel good” hormones called “endorphins” which will cause you to eventually WANT to keep exercising and feeling good!

Secret Tip #3: Don’t Be A Party Pooper. Mentioned above for the #2 Anti-Aging Secret Tip was finding something you enjoy. That’s the whole secret of this entire article. Find something you have fun doing. Just know this: if drinking alcohol into a drunken stupor is the one thing you enjoy, you are not going stay young-or healthy for that matter-for very long. In fact, if you’re older in age and you’re doing this you may not even enjoy staying old for much longer. There’s only so much abuse a body can take before giving out.

The key to the entire process of anti-aging is to treat your body right and have fun doing it. Enjoy life, stay young mentally, emotionally, physically and you’ll see an anti-aging process that you’ll be happy about. That will give you the motivation and momentum to continue the positive lifestyle you have created.

Take Charge!

P.S. Want to: Learn the “Easy” way to get and stay in shape? Discover the secret to quick fat loss? How to exercise less and get better results? Discover the secret to ripped abs without doing endless crunches? Then be sure to get my “Amazing Fat Burning Formula” HERE.

P.P.S. If you like this post, and think it will help others, please help me help others by clicking on one of these “Share and Enjoy” links below.

Ice cream, chocolate cake, pizza, beer, soda, cookies, donuts, bread, butter… Wouldn’t it be great if we could build our best body and also eat these wonderfully sinful foods? It doesn’t seem fair that we, as humans, can develop all of these super tasty foods, yet cannot indulge in them as we want because we know they are harmful to both our external and internal selves and are not the “right foods” for our diet.

If you were dieting, how long could you last, knowing that these great tasting foods were there for you to eat whenever

By allowing a break from always eating the "right foods" we can better maintain weigh loss by not depriving ourselves of the things we love.

you wanted, but that you could not eat them because they weren’t the “right foods” on your diet? Forever? 6 months? 3 months? 1 week? In reality, there is a way to eat these “forbidden” foods, and still achieve a level of physical excellence that would seem impossible had they been a regular part of your diet. Though I cannot take credit for this excellent way of conquering two very important hurdles in everyone’s quest for the perfect body, I mention the reward system because it is a very powerful physical and psychological support system for continued success.

Bill Phillips, the creator of the Body For Life™ system and the book of the same name (I highly recommend that you read this book and apply its principles), came up with the idea of allowing one day to “let down your guard” and indulge in whatever food or drink you happened to be craving (as part of a maintenance program, and not in the initial 12 weeks of your transformation). You may be thinking to yourself that you don’t need to “cheat” and will be completely strict forever because you want the best results. This is a big mistake. In fact there are several reasons why you actually need to indulge every once in a while.

The first reason is physiological. As explained earlier, our metabolic system is the result of millions of years of evolution. It has developed coping and survival mechanisms that enable us to survive the inevitable periods of famine: the primary objective for your body is to survive – everything else is secondary. And, in order to survive the many eras in human history when food was scarce, human metabolism developed into a self-regulating mechanism. When food supplies were limited for extended periods of time, metabolic rates slowed – this was (and is) a crucial process for survival. It works when the body detects a reduced calorie intake and downward adjusts the rate at which it burns calories.

And, while this is an excellent survival mechanism that works well in times of famine, it works against us when we go on a diet. Since most diets call for a reduction of calories, over a period of time our metabolic rate naturally slows. This makes it harder for us to lose fat. Consequently, if we continue to diet, we have to continually lower our calories: the longer we diet, the fewer the calories. And, of course, the body compensates for this with another powerful signal – hunger. This usually leads to the end of the diet because it becomes unbearable. The all-powerful urge to eat is too strong for us to resist and we give in, usually in a big way.

On the other hand, by eating more calories than you need – in essence telling the body that there is plenty of food around – you are much less likely to reduce your metabolic rate. And, your chances for continued fat burning are increased indefinitely. But if you eat more calories than you need on a regular basis,then you won’t burn any fat: you will store it, and this is not the goal. So, the Max Fat Loss plan – one variation of calls for twice weekly “carb loading” days, where you eat more calories than during the rest of the week.

The second reason for rewarding yourself regularly is psychological. Consider two scenarios. In the first scenario, you are put on a diet program that is strict, and where you can only eat certain, approved foods. You will follow this program for life and never be allowed to eat any of your favorite foods ever again. In the second scenario, you are put on a diet program that is strict, and where you can only eat certain, approved foods. You will follow this program for life, but once a week you can eat whatever you desire. Can you feel the difference when thinking of the two programs? In one you will never be allowed to eat your favorite foods again. In the second, all you have to do is be strict for one week, and then you can eat your favorite foods. In terms of being able to keep mentally focused on the program, the second program is much easier to follow: nearly everyone can be strict for one week at a time.

That is the what it is all about – taking one step at a time, one week at a time, to achieve physical excellence. And, with the reward day concept, you can continue to stay in shape, have your cake and eat it, too.

Take Charge!

P.S. Want to: Learn the “Easy” way to get and stay in shape? Discover the secret to quick fat loss? How to exercise less and get better results? Discover the secret to ripped abs without doing endless crunches? Then be sure to get my “Amazing Fat Burning Formula” HERE.

P.P.S. If you like this post, and think it will help others, please help me help others by clicking on one of these “Share and Enjoy” links below.

My ex and I had a “discussion” this evening. Her niece was in on the conversation too.

It was very instructional… and eye-opening.

I might need your help… again…

No, I’m not going to ask you to pick sides, but to offer suggestions for us.

Christian chooses the right foods with his healthy morning smoothie

You see, we were talking about Christian, our son, and food. Namely, how do we go about giving him the right foods in spite of the negative programming going on all around him. In the face of all the brainwashing from television commercials peddling their “foods”, his schoolmates and the incredibly bad food choices their parents have made for them, even the teachers, all of whom really just do not know any better, how do we teach him the right foods from the bad foods, allow him to see those right foods choices as good, and not rebel one day?

We talked about how to approach the right foods choices with our son. How to keep him on “our side”. How to keep him honest with some of the wrong foods he’s undoubtedly tried at school, yet might not have told us. Like the oreo cookie he had today. He told us there were oreo cookies at school today and knew they were bad… yet he had them anyway. At first he said he didn’t have one, then my ex gently coaxed him to admit to having it. Instead of scolding him, which we never do with regards to food anyway, she said it’s ok to have one of them every once in a while. But not all the time. And there were better right foods for him to eat so that he could grow bigger and stronger. Unlike oreos and other foods with lots of sugar in them that could prevent him from growing up as big and strong as he could.

We’re always trying to educate Christian on the “why’s” of one food choice vs. another.

I was saddened by this when she told me. Both from the poor food choice, and the fact he lied to her. Obviously she handled it as well as she could. But I feel like I’m blasted from all sides with poor food choices for him that, unfortunately, taste great to a kid that doesn’t know any better.

Did you know that children’s sensitivity to sweet foods is 300% greater than adults? It’s a survival reflex designed to allow them to detect the minutest of harmful substances in food that are “off”, and help prevent them from eating things that might be poisonous. This means when they do taste something that is sweet, all of the “triggers” go off in their brain saying “eat it!… eat it!”

Here’s the problem…

In nature, where “natural” foods are found, there are rarely any really “sweet” things out there. Honey maybe, but other than the inherent sweet nature found in fruits, not much. Yet we’re so “smart”(sic) as humans that we’ve designed an almost infinite amount of these incredibly tasty foods that light up a kids tastes buds like a New York switchboard. Most loaded with sugar, and all being foods are bodies were NOT designed to handle or process properly. Especially in the amounts our kids, collectively as a Nation, are eating them.

Check out this statistic from the NIH (National Institute of Health):

2 year old eating a donut. Is this a right foods choice?

“After 10 years of age, type 2 diabetes becomes increasingly common, especially in minority populations, representing 14.9% of newly diagnosed cases of diabetes in non-Hispanic whites, 46.1% in Hispanic youth, 57.8% in African Americans, 69.7 % in Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 86.2% in American Indian youth.”

Most of the research out there does not give a clear reason why this epidemic in our children is happening. But my God man, if you have even half a brain (not talking to you, but to the “establishment”), you can see that the MASSIVE amounts of processed foods our kids are eating are killing the little pancreas’s of our children. Wearing them out before their time by years and years of massive sugar loads dumped into their systems with only a “not yet developed” pancreas to deal with it. Something has got to give. And the body’s cells and pancreas are the ones to pay the price… along with the child’s health. It is estimated that this early type 2 diagnosis can reduce their life span by 22 years!!! Imagine the wonderful train ride this child, now man, will endure his adult life with the secondary diseases that type 2 diabetes brings on? What kind of quality of life does this child have to look forward to?

Has this child, or his parents, made the right foods choices?

Here’s a key point… this chronic and massive sugar ingestion our kids take in on a daily basis is very sneaky – yet it happens nonetheless. Here’s what I mean.

ALMOST ALL PROCESSED FOODS “ACT” LIKE SUGAR IN YOUR CHILD’S, OR YOUR, BODY. For example, when bread is eaten, it causes your body to react to it’s ingestion in a manner “worse” than when you eat even pure table sugar.

Will your child make the right foods choice?

Get ready to have your world awakened…

Check out this list. It lists common foods and how they “react” in your body by the amount they raise your blood sugar levels after you eat them. It is based on the common 0-100 scale, with 100 being pure Glucose.

I’ll start with table sugar, which is sucrose = 65.

The following common foods are listed that are either above the reading for table sugar, or pretty darn close.
Whole Wheat Bread = 69
Croissant = 67
Rye Bread = 76
White Bread = 70
Donut = 76
Waffles = 76
Kellog’s Cornflakes = 84
Kellog’s Rice Crispies = 82
Shredded Wheat = 67
Quaker Puffed Wheat = 67
Bagel = 72
Water crackers = 78
Graham crackers = 74
Rice cakes = 82
Soda crackers = 72
Wheat thins = 67
Melba toast = 70
Shortbread cookies = 64
Baked potato (plain) = 93
Mashed potatoes = 86
French Fries = 75
Corn Chips = 72
Jelly Beans = 80
Pretzels = 83

This is not even close to being an all-encompassing list either…

Were you surprised by some of these foods? How many of these are you or your children eating on a regular basis?

HERE’S THE KICKER… If you or your child is eating food that comes in a box, or has a manufacturer’s label on it, it likely will raise your blood sugar levels significantly.

God and nature intended we eat foods that are “green and colorful”, not brown, white, and beige. I don’t make the rules for the foods our bodies need to function optimally. I’m just trying to help better interpret them for you.

So hopefully I’ve opened up your eyes a bit as to the insidious nature of processed foods, and manufacturer’s Machiavellian ways to line their pockets at your health expense.

It’s amazing how much we can learn every day… and how much there is yet to learn.

Take Charge!

P.S. Want to: Learn the “Easy” way to get and stay in shape? Discover the secret to quick fat loss? How to exercise less and get better results? Discover the secret to ripped abs without doing endless crunches? Then be sure to get my “Amazing Fat Burning Formula” HERE.

P.P.S. If you like this post, and think it will help others, please help me help others by clicking on one of these “Share and Enjoy” links below.