Building a strategy toward optimum fitness

Healthy Now

By Greg Rothman, M.S. P.T.

In my last column, I wrote that only three things are necessary to help you stick to your New Year’s resolutions and achieve your fitness goals. The first is the belief that success is possible, the second is a sound strategy, and the third is the will to follow through.

My hope is the last column instilled in you a recognition that failed past attempts need not translate into a bleak future: Most people who have joined gyms, started exercise programs and been on diets have been misled into using flawed strategies that had no chance of working in the first place.

So, in this column and the three that follow, I’ll lay out a strategy that I’ve used to help hundreds of people reach their fitness goals. It’s a strategy that will stoke your metabolism and ensure that you are releasing and burning fat, improve your strength and endurance, and help you build or maintain lean muscle. The strategy has three parts, and each is necessary and builds upon the other two.

The first part is supportive nutrition: eating in a way that supports lean muscle and helps release and burn stored fat. The second involves adding strength and muscle to your body, or maintaining it when you’ve built enough. The third is exercising aerobically—in moderation—since doing too much sacrifices the lean muscle that stokes your metabolism. (Do too little, and burning calories will be difficult and any excess will get stored as fat.)

Because the nutritional piece of the puzzle seems to be the most difficult, I will devote the rest of this and next week’s column to solving it. Subsequent columns will discuss the other two.

My basic nutritional rules can be found on my Website at: www.emPowerFitnessNYC.com/diet_nutrition. There, you will find suggestions for changes you can make for optimal nutrition and lists of the best foods from each nutrient category. Print out the list and put it on your refrigerator for easy reference.

But being creatures of habit, sometimes just knowing what to do and even having it all laid out before you is not enough. We must build good habits while getting rid of bad ones.

It takes the average person only three weeks to form a habit, and habits, good or bad, are very hard to break. Consequently, I often give clients my list of nutrition rules and from it have them create two good habits and rid themselves of two bad ones, making sure they stick with the changes for three weeks—just 21 days. When they do this, it really sticks with them.

Need help deciding which habits to form? If these rules are like The Ten Commandments, then Commandment One is “Thou Shall Stabilize Thy Blood Sugar.” Not what you were expecting? No one really talks about this one, but it is the No. 1 predictor of whether your body will store fat or release it.

Do this by following the first two rules on my Website’s nutrition page: Eat breakfast within 30 minutes of waking; then follow that by eating a supportive meal (as described there) every three hours. Creating these two good habits alone will in a short time have your metabolism working at a much faster pace and will also enable your body to release fat. Oh, and you’ll also have more energy throughout the day, eliminating that mid-afternoon “crash” that many people experience.

If I were going to choose two bad habits to get rid of first, I would suggest these: Eliminate hydrogenated (trans) fats, and minimize your intake of sugar, white flour and processed foods. Just getting rid of, or minimizing, these categories in your diet will go a long way toward helping you feel better: Storage of new body fat is brought to a halt and stored fat begins to be released and burned at a much faster pace.

Start the New Year by incorporating these habits into your lifestyle. Take the next 21 days to make these habits stick. Next week, I’ll be back to help you build upon these and decode the rest of the nutrition maze for you. Then, once we have a solid foundation of nutrition to build upon, we’ll turn to exercise, where I’ll give you the best strategies to make your strength and cardio workouts as effective and efficient a possible.

Greg Rothman, M.S. P.T., is the owner of emPower Fitness Studios (emPowerFitnessNYC.com). He received his masters degree in physical therapy from Columbia University and has 15 years’ experience in the rehabilitation and fitness fields, most recently as the personal training manager and top-level trainer for Equinox Fitness Clubs in New York City. SEND YOUR QUESTIONS about nutrition, fitness and sports injuries/rehabilitation to Greg at emPowerFitness@aol.com.