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Many people try not to gain weight over the holidays. But if you’re already working hard to lose weight, why stop now? With a little effort, you can actually lose weight over the holidays. Here are a few simple strategies that work.

Use a smaller plate

According to the latest research, you’ll eat 30% fewer calories if you fill up a smaller plate, because a smaller plate gives you the illusion that you’re actually eating more food.

Never show up hungry

Let’s face it; during the holidays most of us like to “save up” our calories for the party or holiday dinner. The problem is if you’re starving when you show up you will most likely overeat.

A better strategy is to eat several small meals with protein, carbs and some healthy fats throughout the day to keep your hunger in check. And never show up at a party hungry.

Have a glass of water before your meal

Believe it or not, you will tend to eat more when you’re dehydrated, so drink a glass of lemon water before your meal.

Cut back on the alcohol

Most people who drink consume at least 10% of the total calories from their meal as alcohol. So if you want to cut down on the amount of calories you’re consuming just skip the alcohol, or cut the calories in half by mixing your wine with sparkling water. Half the wine equals half the calories.

Get moving

You don’t have to go to the gym, just plan a family hike after breakfast, or a walk around the neighborhood after dinner.

Serve the healthiest foods first

If you start your meal with a simple salad or a bowl of fruit, you will tend to eat less of the other stuff available. It sounds crazy, but research confirms that the first foods you see at a buffet will influence how much of the other stuff you eat.

So here’s a simple trick or “hack” that you can use to eat healthier over the holidays, with very little effort. Serve the healthiest foods first. Not with or after the other stuff. Start your meal with a fruit or vegetable salad. Then eat the other stuff.

Develop coping strategies for emotional triggers

For most of us the holidays are about family gatherings and being around people that often push our buttons. So it’s important to develop healthy coping strategies to deal with our emotional triggers and unresolved relationships, instead of turning to food.

One simple strategy is to recruit a friend or spouse to be the “interrupter” between you and anyone who typically triggers your unresolved relationships.

Remember, you can lose weight over the holidays without depriving yourself or counting calories. Just keep in mind that one meal won’t make or break your plan. However, if every meal becomes a holiday treat, you’ll find yourself spinning out of control very quickly. This doesn’t have to be the case.

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What is the real cause of most lifestyle diseases? It’s not what you think.

You’ve been taught that you’ve eaten too much cholesterol and that’s the cause of your coronary artery disease.

You’ve also been let to think that eating too much sugar leads to diabetes.

The truth is cholesterol is a good thing. It can be dangerous for some people, yet it doesn’t affect others. But it’s not the real cause of heart disease. It’s a great way to sell a lot of statin medication.

Unfortunately, even your statin medication won’t cure your heart disease. It will help bring your cholesterol down, but it’s not going to protect you against having a heart attack.

People with diabetes take a lot of different medications for their condition. And they’re told to stay away from too much carbohydrates, but that’s not the real problem.

The problem with diabetes is that insulin serves as a key to unlock the doors to your cells, allowing blood sugar to be transported into the cell. Unfortunately, with a diabetic condition, insulin works just fine, however, something is preventing the insulin from opening the lock to the cell. Something is stuck inside the lock.

Physiologically, we know that the cells are producing too much fat and some of those fat molecules get stuck inside the “lock” preventing insulin from doing its job.

So type-2 diabetes really has nothing to do with carbohydrates or insulin for that matter. It has to do with too much fat inside the cells.

So what is the real cause of most lifestyle diseases?

Well, imagine that you walk around your house and you stub your toe real hard on a piece of furniture and it hurts like hell. Your body’s natural response is an inflammatory response. So it develops a protective barrier around the injury with b-cells and all the other protective cells that work on injuries to heal it.

But imagine that every day you walk by that same bloody piece of furniture and you keep stubbing the same toe again and again. Your body then goes from an acute inflammatory response to a chronic inflammatory response where your toe just never heals. And your body is always in a state of inflammation where it is constantly trying to heal itself but it’s never healing.

When your body is in a state of chronic inflammation that leads to other disease conditions.

So chronic inflammation is the real cause of most lifestyle diseases.

If you look at what goes on in your arteries it is not the cholesterol buildup in the arteries that causes the problem. It’s really the oxidation of the cholesterol that becomes inflammatory. In other words, the plaque becomes unstable because of free radical activity.

Chronic inflammation is the result of poor lifestyle habits.

So instead of encouraging you to change your lifestyle, your doctor would rather write you a prescription because at least he/she knows that most people will take their medication.

But does that change your condition?

You take medication to relieve your symptoms of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and other diseases. Meanwhile your poor lifestyle habits persist. And the chronic inflammation continues to make your disease conditions worst as time goes on.

Do you see how futile our medical system is? We spend a lot of money on medication, but our conditions get worse over time because we’re not addressing the real problem.

The only viable solution is what I call the lifestyle cure. You can reverse heart disease, diabetes, metabolic syndrome and other diseases by choosing to live a healthier lifestyle.

The choice is yours.

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Millions of Americans suffer from all different types of chronic diseases and up to 90% of those chronic diseases, like coronary artery disease, type-2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome etc. are preventable and reversible.

Most people who suffer from chronic conditions aren’t aware that their condition is reversible because their doctors never told them that their conditions are reversible.

Usually people think that if they have type-2 diabetes and heart disease, that they can only manage their symptoms instead of working to reverse the condition.

So this begs the question, is your lifestyle making you sick?

We know for a fact that up to 90% of these chronic diseases are preventable. That’s why they are called lifestyle diseases.

Heart disease, some cancers, coronary artery disease, type-2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome, these conditions are a result of our unhealthy lifestyle habits. So if you were to go back to a healthier lifestyle, many of these conditions will start to reverse themselves.

Most people with a lifestyle disease condition never miss their medication, yet they rarely exercise, when the exercise is by far more important than the medication.

So is your lifestyle making you sick? Is your lifestyle killing you?

If you’re missing your exercise everyday and your daily habits do not support a healthy lifestyle then the answer is absolutely yes.

Health is a lifestyle. And great health is a dedicated healthy lifestyle.

A lot of people are of the erroneous idea that it takes years for your arteries to become completely clogged, which results in a heart attack. However, most heart attacks result from arteries that are only about 50% clogged.

These are the arteries with the most reactive type of plaque and are filled with inflammation that causes the plaque to become unstable, leading to a rupture of the artery walls causing a heart attack.

So what I really want you to think about is do you have the kind of lifestyle that is going to allow you to create great health and vitality and to go through your day with lots of energy and to feel great at the end of the day.

Do you have the lifestyle to support and sustain the things that you do over the long term?

Are your current lifestyle habits helping you to build radiant health and vitality, or is your lifestyle making you sick?

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I work with a lot of people with various conditions like heart disease, type-2 diabetes, hypertension, people who have had strokes, brain cancer, other cancers, metabolic syndrome, and lots of other conditions.

And I know the popular thing for a lot of doctors to tell people is that they can manage their condition. They can manage their symptoms.

You will never hear a doctor say the word “cure” to you.

But the truth is you can reverse your condition.

I started a Facebook group called “The Lifestyle Cure” for those interested in building radiant health and vitality. I called it “the lifestyle cure” not because I’m professing to cure you of anything, because I can’t cure you of your condition, nor can your doctor. That’s why your doctor will never use the word cure, because only you can cure yourself of your condition.

You have to live the lifestyle necessary to reverse whatever condition you have.

Your doctor probably never told you that you can reverse your condition, but he or she will tell you that you can manage your type-2 diabetes with lifestyle and medication. You can manage your heart disease with lifestyle modification and medication.

You can manage your symptoms.

However, managing your symptoms do absolutely nothing to reverse what causes those symptoms in the first place.

So would you rather settle for managing your symptoms or would you rather dig deeper and go to the root cause of why do you have type-2 diabetes?

Why you’re overweight. Why you have heart disease.

Did you know that 80% to 90% percent of lifestyle diseases are preventable and reversible?

Even if you’ve had a heart attack and parts of your heart is scarred leading to a build up of scar tissue because your heart muscle wasn’t getting the necessary blood flow because of a clogged artery, or whatever the case might be.

That tissue is sitting there dormant. It’s not dead. It’s sitting there dormant waiting for the possibility that you might change your lifestyle and that that normal blood flow would return to that part of the heart.

It can heal itself. Your body wants to heal itself because it wants to live. Your body wants to live. Your body wants to be healthy. Health is your birthright, so why settle for managing your symptoms when you can reverse them.

This is what I call the lifestyle cure because only your lifestyle can reverse your condition.
You have to be willing to live the kind of life that will enable your body to develop health.

You have to be willing to create the kind of habits daily that is worthy of great health and vitality.

The question is, are you are you willing?

It’s not a matter of can you, it’s a matter of are you willing?

Your body is waiting.

The body you want is waiting on you. The health you want is waiting on you.

Aren’t you worth it? Isn’t your family worth it? Isn’t your life worth it?

What about the causes that you’re fighting for? Who are going to take up those causes if you’re not around?

Do you know that most people never truly live fully? They’re too preoccupied with a diseased body. Preoccupied with their symptoms. They’re too preoccupied with not feeling well. Preoccupied with not having any energy.

Is that what you really want? Don’t you deserve better?

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How to Defeat Self-Sabotaging Behavior on Your Way to the Top

Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a variety of high achieving leaders of organizations, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and business owners.

And what I’ve noticed among this group of very successful people is that, the paradox of playing the success game often means that in order to succeed in a competitive global environment most of these individuals became workaholics…The job came first, family a distant second and there was no time for anything else.

So as a result their health suffers, personal relationships are in the toilet, and most found themselves speeding down the highway to burnout.

This is not uncommon. Most highly successful people all struggle with the making time for self-care. To change this, you have to create a shift in paradigm from the workaholic grinding it out, to a Values Driven Strategic Investor, investing in yourself.

What is a Values Driven Strategic Investor?

It is someone who places great value on good health and realizes that good health is his/her greatest gift and the most important asset on their balance sheet. And most made the conscious commitment to invest in their health and to strategically create a lifestyle that brings the greatest possible return on investment, good health.

Why would you want to be a Values Driven Strategic Investor? For one thing, it’s not the workaholic grinding it out; it’s the Values Driven Strategic Investor who gets the greatest return on their investment.

You’re putting in time so you might as well get the greatest return on your investment. And what is the greatest return on your investment? Good health. How much would you pay for that? I’ll tell you’re currently paying for it right now.

Let’s make no mistake about it; poor health cost you a lot of money every year. So obviously, good health makes the best financial sense.

If you’re severely overweight or obese, you can expect to pay an extra $1500 out of pocket. Add diabetes to that and you can expect to pay an extra $3300 out of pocket. A non-severe heart attack can run you an extra $22,000 out of pocket.

If you’re overweight, have diabetes and a heart attack, you could be looking at an extra $30,000 out of pocket. So obviously, good health makes the best financial sense.

I want you to also keep in mind that just 30 to 40 pounds could also mean that you have abdominal obesity. That means women’s waist is equal to or greater than 35 inches, 40 inches for men.

And the difference is the type of fat. Subcutaneous fat under the skin is not dangerous because you can burn it off. But the dangerous fat is visceral fat, which is inside your body and around your organs. It is dangerous because it increases your bad cholesterol, leads to diabetes and can lead to a heart attack, fatty liver, high blood pressure, osteoarthritis, and a host of dangerous health issues.

Now having said all that, it doesn’t matter where you are right now, what matters is what are you willing to do about it.

I hope you decide to become a Values Driven Strategic Investor investing in yourself, going after the maximum return on your investment, which is good health. Why? The alternative is leading you sick, broke and nearly dead.

Most successful people, who have unfortunately neglected their health over the years in pursuit of their success, end up spending a lot of time energy and money trying to get their health back.

You don’t have to wait until that happens. You don’t have to wait until you have a heart attack, bypass surgery, until you get diabetes, or if you if you already have it, until the symptoms become unbearable. You don’t have to wait until you go to the doctor and get a diagnosis. You can make the change now.

You can choose to become a Values Driven Strategic Investor, investing in your most important asset, your health.

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Did you know that gratitude is actually good for your health?

So this Thanksgiving, be truly grateful for the things and people you have in your life. Most people think that Thanksgiving is all about food, but gratitude can improve your health and wellbeing.

One study, conducted by a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis, found that grateful people had lower blood pressure, less depression and stress, more energy and an overall positive outlook on life.

The same study found that people with high blood pressure were able to reduce their blood pressure by 10 percent just by expressing regular gratitude and keeping a gratitude Journal. And here’s the kicker, they were also able to reduce their dietary fat intake by 20 percent.

So as we embark upon this holiday season of eating and gluttony, beginning with Thanksgiving and right throughout the Christmas holidays, take some time and be truly grateful for what you have in your life. For what you’ve accomplished and for the people you have in your life, because gratitude is good for your health.

Happy Thanksgiving! And as usual, may the best of your todays be the worst of your tomorrows.

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5 Simple Shifts in mindset, habits and behaviors to Get Your Sexy Back and grow older without feeling old.

Entering a new decade should be reason for celebration. However, it’s often filled with fear, anxiety, doubt and regret.

Many of the clients I work with are women entering their fifties and beyond. And the common thread between most of them, and others I’ve had the pleasure of talking with on the phone, is that they want to get their sexy back and feel young again. Or at least not feel so damn old.

What do they mean by “get your sexy back?” They want to regain their confidence, feel comfortable in their own skin, and love the shape they’re in.

So, wherever you are in your life, I challenge you to think about what the next decade could look like for you.

You may have to make some major (or simple) shifts in your mindset, habits and behaviors in order to close the gab between where you are and where you want to be.

With that in mind, here are five simple shifts to get you on your way.

Your Future Begins Today

There’s an old saying that “the future will bring whatever you show up with.” So it makes no sense sitting around worrying about what’s going to happen. The real questions you should be asking yourself are:

What do you want to see happen?

What do you want your life to look like five or ten years from now?

What do you want your body to look like?

How do you want to feel?

And most importantly, WHY is all that important to you?

Having a strong emotional reason why your goals are important to you will be your biggest motivating factor, especially when you’re ready to give up on your dreams.

So remember, your choices today will shape your future tomorrow.

Which means, you don’t have to remain overweight or obese if you’re willing to make better choices.

You don’t have to keep “managing” your diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or other lifestyle diseases, if you’re willing to make better lifestyle choices.

You don’t have to remain in that emotional eating trap, if you’re willing to make new choices to feed your hunger and FEEL your feelings.

In fact, this next decade could be a decade of transition into the beginning of a new healthier, fitter, sexier, more confident you.

Many of my clients in their 50’s, 60’s and beyond are healthier, fitter, sexier and more confident than they were in their 30’s and 40’s. Why not you?

It’s Never too Late to be What You Might Have Been

I talk to people everyday who are disgusted with themselves. They tell me that the only time they look in the mirror is when they brush their teeth because they hate what they see.

Some remember being fit and athletic in their younger days and wonder how on earth they allowed themselves to get so out of shape, overweight or obese.

Well, the good news is it’s never too late to be what you might have been.

As I’ve said before, many of my clients in their 50’s, 60’s and beyond are healthier, fitter, sexier and more confident than they were in their 30’s and 40’s.

So why not you?

Regret won’t get you anywhere. But making new choices will.

You don’t have to like where you are, so use it as a starting point. Then ask yourself two questions:

1. Where do you want to be?

2. How can you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be as quickly as possible?

It’s Not Your Age; It’s Your Habits!

Yes, I’m sure you’ve said to yourself, “I’m too old for this.”

But I assure you, age has very little to do with having the health, body, confidence and sex appeal that you want.

As long as you’re willing to change your mindset, make new choices and create new habits, your next decade could be your best ever.

At 54 I play tennis against guys half my age and run them around the court. I also play against guys in their 70’s who are still able to beat me.

So it’s not about your age. It’s about the daily habits and choices you make.

If your “eat, move, sleep, live” habits are not helping you to create a better ––by that I mean healthier, happier, and more fulfilling–– life as you get older, you will end up looking and feeling much older than you need to be.

So starting today you can easily put more life in your years by changing one old habit and creating one healthier habit each week.

Start Today!

The vast majority of people I speak with on my free Health Strategy Calls tell me how committed they are to transforming their lives. Yet months later most are no further along than when we first spoke.

Don’t let this be you.

If you’re serious about changing your body and your life, start TODAY!

Commit to changing one old habit that is no longer serving you, and creating one new habit that is going to take you closer to your goals.

If you make it that simple by the end of the month you’ll be much further along.

You Will Get Further Faster with Help!

Most people never even get started because they don’t know where to begin. Others fumble along, never quite getting the results they want because they don’t really understand how to get results.

Or maybe they don’t have the right people in their corner to keep them accountable.

To help inspire them when they’re in need of a little inspiration, to lend a helping hand when they need a little support, or to have the right words for them when they need a little encouragement.

So who’s on your team?

Who’s in your corner?

Who’s there with you, committed to you achieving your goals even more than you are?

Remember, you will get further faster with a little assistance.

So don’t be one of those people who never even get started.

Find yourself a great coach whose mission is to inspire support and encourage you along your journey. And most importantly, get you results.

You don’t just want any coach, however. You need a habit coach; someone who understands how to completely reprogram your brain’s “habit loop.”

I know this may sound a little self-serving because this is exactly what I do with my clients.

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