How To Avoid The Slowdown Syndrome

As of today, we are now about 14.5% into 2012. The question is are you 14.5% closer to your goals?

If you are kudos to you and keep working hard towards achieving excellence. If you are not, you still have time to get things headed in the right direction.

Sometimes what I've noticed that slows your progress, is that many people tend to skip on their workouts and take too many cheat meals sabotaging their own efforts.

Other times, however, even with the best intention and sticking 80 to 90% of the time to your plan, you still find it hard to see any progress made in your fitness quest.

The truth of the matter is that as much as being compliant with your training and nutrition program, there are many other factors that can impact how much you progress. Often time some of these are out of your hands and some you can actually manage with a few tweaks here and there.

Lets talk about at least 3 of these factors: SLEEP - STRESS - GROUP ENVIRONMENT

Today I will focus this post on SLEEP only (I'll cover the rest on the next couple of days one topic at the time).

SLEEP is essential for you to lose weight and maintain or grow your muscles. When you sleep, your body goes to work by helping you recover and rebuild muscle tissue. When you don't get enough sleep your immune system gets weak, you tend to gain weight and store fat and your overall performance, mood and energy is affected.

This occurs because your body has a hard time balancing hormones. Lack of sleep will affect how these interact.

Lack of sleep increases cortisol: when you don't sleep enough your body releases too much cortisol (a stress hormone) which in turn makes you release and store more fat and breaks down your muscles as an energy source.

Lack of sleep reduce testosterone: This in turn creates a significant drop in testosterone (men or women it doesn't matters) which leads to loss of muscle gain, strength and performance.

Lack of sleep reduces human growth hormone production, which mainly occurs when we sleep. An important natural occurring hormone for muscle repair and growth.

Lack of sleep affects insulin levels. It causes a demand for more insulin which leads to you gaining more fat and could lead to diabetes.

In short a drop of sleep hours below 6.5 to 7 hours a night leads to muscle loss, your metabolism slows down, and you will gain weight and store fat.

You should aim for at least 7 hours a night of proper sleep to insure your body gets what it needs for optimal performance.

If you have a hard time sleeping, consider the things that take place during the night that leads just before to bed time.

Avoid:
- as much stress as possible, especially within the hours prior to going to sleep.
- caffeine, at least 5 - 6 hours before bedtime can interrupt your sleep or keep you awake, robing you from precious sleep time
- alcohol can also interrupt your sleep, not to mention that in its self too much of it leads to muscle breakdown. Limit the amount you drink as much as possible. 
- if you have a sleeping partner, I can't recommend much that would be healthy in case they are the reason you are not getting proper sleep... So try to at least make sure your bed is comfy enough that will help induce your body to rest.

If you follow the above advice and get your Zzzzz in, you are off to saving your precious muscle, losing fat and feeling good. Of course like I mentioned above there are other factors you must consider in your quest for fat loss and muscle gain, outside of exercise and nutrition.

In my next post I will talk about how STRESS can affect your weight loss and muscle building goals.

How alcohol makes you fat

Before you pass on judgment, cringe and say ‘woa’ Ed what are you talking about…? Understand that if your goal is to lose weight and drop body fat then alcohol is your enemy. Consider cutting it down or eliminating it entirely.

Most of us already have it tough trying to lose weight, drop body fat, exercise properly, and eat better and our increase performance, so this takes it over the top.

Some people jokingly say that alcohol belongs in the fruit section or that alcohol doesn't make you FAT, rather it makes you LEAN against walls, doors, cars and people… LOL

How Alcohol Makes You Fat

-Alcohol first passes through the esophagus as it travels to your stomach.

-From there, 20% of the alcohol is absorbed immediately by your bloodstream.

-The remaining alcohol travels to your intestines and is absorbed from there.

-The alcohol in your bloodstream then travels directly to your liver. It is here that the body breaks the alcohol down, something that is absolutely essential since alcohol is toxic to the body.

-Alcohol brakes down into acetate and acetaldehyde which IMMEDIATELY signals to your body to stop burning fat (note: once the acetate is taken into the bloodstream it is used as your primary source of energy, thus shutting down all process in your body to burn fat). Even worse, another waste product of alcohol, acetyl CoA, actually starts to make more body fat.

What Does this Mean?  

-Your body can only effectively process 0.5 to 1 ounce of alcohol per hour

-How much damage? A 12-ounce beer contains about 0.6 ounces of alcohol. If you consumed 5 of these, your body would be inhibited from fat burning for up to 6 hours. This is aside from the fact that your body will actually be storing fat during these 6 hours! The more you drink, the longer your body is inhibited from burning fat in addition to a greater fat build up from excess acetyl CoA. As you can see, one day of binge drinking can set you back days if not a full week when it comes to fat loss!

-What’s the worst-case scenario? Mixing alcohol with sugary beverages promotes even further fat gain due to the resulting insulin surge that triggers fat storage (e.g. regular beer or cocktails mixed with regular soda and/or fruit juice)

-Also it gives you a sense of false hunger which usually leads to you eating more, and since you are not processing all that food it leads to more fat storage in your body.

-How do you feel next day after a night of drinking? Exactly, like shit. Alcohol leaves you feeling tired and destroys your metabolism. Which also leads to dehydration and muscle loss, so after you’ve put all effort at the gym, boot camp, eating well for most of the week you can destroy it all in just one night of excessive drinking.

- Keep in mind alcohol leads to gaining fat, slows down your metabolism, makes you dehydrated, lose muscle which in turn leads to a significant loss of testosterone and that leads to a drop in your sex drive and overall performance in bed.

Don’t be mistaken, it’s not wrong to a drink once in a while. However if your goal is to lose weight, drop body fat and be lean then you must minimize alcohol consumption, even better eliminated it completely while you’re in the zone in your goal to lose weight.

If you must drink:

a.) Choose wine or hard liquor and “light” beer

b.) Limit alcohol consumption to 1 day per week with a 1-2 drink per day max.

If your goal is to lose fat and get in the best shape possible I encourage you to contact me for a FREE consultation of proper fat lose, solid nutrition and exercise programming.

Eduardo Lorenzo, NASM-CPT specializes in sports performance, injury prevention, corrective exercises, physique enhancement, Boot Camp and weight loss programs.