You’re a month into your new fitness program and you’re not seeing the results you expected: You are not alone.

And yet, you are.

“Every person is different,” says Sue Dissinger, Health and Wellness Director for the YMCA of Greater Charlotte. Your age, sex, genetics, personal physiology and environmental factors all combine to make your fitness challenge different from the guy on the treadmill next to you.

That may help to explain why, a month into your New Year’s resolve for a new you, it may feel like you still see too much of the old you. Perhaps the most common beef after a month of eating better and exercising? I’ve hardly lost any weight!

“Your entire body composition changes, not just the number on the scale,” says Logan Washburn, fitness director for the UNC Wellness Center at Meadowmont in Chapel Hill. “The way your clothes fit, for instance. Are they loser? Do they fit better? That’s something to pay attention to.”

If you’re exercising hard you may actually gain weight during the initial phase of a new fitness push, Washburn says. You’re burning fat and adding muscle; since muscle weighs more than fat, weight loss isn’t always a reliable initial indicator of success. However, since fluffy fat takes up more space than dense, compact muscle, loser clothing — especially around the waist — is.

If you’re a stickler for statistical evidence that your efforts are making a difference, check your percentage of body fat, which will decrease as muscle replaces fat.
You should also check your PH level, advises Danny Russo. Russo is a Charlotte-based personal trainer/fitness guru who travels the country with his RN wife, Janet, spreading the word of wellness to women through his FEW (Food, Exercise, Water) Program.

“The first thing I tell them,” Russo says when he appears before women at health clubs, hospitals, churches and community centers, “is to pee on this little strip of paper.” Because of our often unhealthy, chemically dependent diets, Russo says most of us have acidic body chemistry, which can open the door for a host of diseases and makes our bodies less efficient. Translation: fat and other unhealthy stuff tends to stick around.

Russo says he also instructs his clients to cut back on sodium and add potassium to their diets to take care of excess water retention. “You can drop 10 pounds of water and two dress sizes in just a few days,” he says.

And if you aren’t eating enough, you may be frightening your body into a circle-the-wagons mode. According to the Mayo Clinic, the average moderately active adult should consume at least 2,000 calories a day; even for a non-active person that total shouldn’t drop below 1,200. When the body isn’t getting enough fuel, it starts conserving and hangs on to as much fat as it can. “You don’t want to lose more than one or two pounds a week or your body goes into shock,” says Washburn.

A month into a new wellness program is also a good time for a gut check. Ask yourself:

• 

  Is the regimen you’ve chosen working for you? “There is no one program,” says Russo. Agreed, says Debra Delano. Four and a half years ago, the Charlotte resident weighed 257 pounds; a year later she was down to 157. Along the way she discovered that some of the exercise classes most popular with others — Zumba and yoga, for instance — weren’t for her. Instead, she’s become a disciple of weight lifting (“I lift a crazy amount of weight”) and line dancing, every Wednesday evening at Coyote Joe’s and often for 45 minutes, on her own, before work.

• Are you pushing yourself? Washburn says pain should never be part of your workout equation.  However… . “Exercise to where you’re slightly uncomfortable, to where you’re a little short of breath.” And, “It’s OK to be a little sore afterward.”
• Do you need a support system? Face it, left to our own devices it’s easy to blow off a trip to the gym after a long day of work. Enter a support network, be it a personal trainer, a group exercise class, or someone who’s going through the same thing you are. “Having someone to talk to on a regular basis can be important,” says Dissinger. “Someone who can help talk you through the barriers, about the feelings you’re having.”

If your long-term goal seems too far off, set short-term, weekly goals. “Tell yourself you’re going to go to the gym three days for 30 minutes, or you’re going to eat five vegetables a day,” says Washburn.

If there is a magic number in all this, says Washburn, it’s 12, as in weeks. “That’s how long it usually takes to break a habit and establish a new routine.

“Remember,” she adds, “it’s a lifestyle change. Your body’s changing. It takes time for your brain and body to kick in.”

Meanwhile, the Charlotte Y’s Dissinger says getting over your short-term hurdles may be as simple as sharing.

“The biggest thing is to not keep your feelings to yourself,” she says. Talking to someone, be it a  certified trainer or another sweaty comrade in the trenches, could be all it takes.

“There might be a simple fix to help you stay with it and get over the hump.”

The post When the going gets tough, keep going appeared first on GetGoing NC!.

Move more and eat better in 2011 using these seven simple strategies:

1. Mix it up. The big trend in fitness isn’t one thing, it’s everything. Avoid drudgery, avoid stressing the same muscles and work your entire body by doing a variety of workouts. “Incorporating several different forms of exercise in a training program can be an excellent way to develop the various components of fitness,” according to the American Council on Exercise. If your goal is to lose weight, varying your exercise regimen — walking one day, lifting weights the next, taking a Zumba class after that — keeps your muscles from becoming too efficient at any one exercise and thus burning fewer calories.

2. Find what works. If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t do it. Think, personal trainers advise, about what you like to do, or what you liked to do in the past. Did you love riding your bike as a kid? A preponderance of fun-to-ride bikes — from the aptly named “comfort” bikes to speedier and more aggressive urban bikes — has flooded the market, and with nearly 150 miles of greenway in the Triangle, it’s easy for the grown-up you to rekindle your childhood love. Or maybe you get so caught up in the joy of dance you don’t realize you’ve had a good workout until the following morning. Zumba, dance exercise with a Latin zing, and Nia, a marriage of dance, the martial arts and the “healing arts,”  are two popular dance options.

3. Eat smart, eat simple. It’s a paradox, but the more we learn about food, the poorer we seem to eat. Good-eating advocate and author Michael Pollan writes in his latest book, “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual,” “for all the scientific and pseudoscientific food baggage we’ve taken on in recent years, we still don’t know what we should be eating.” Pollan, whose “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” were both best-sellers, doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but his “Food Rules” offers 64 succinct suggestions for common-sense eating. They range from “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” to “Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle” (fresh food generally lines the walls, processed foods are in the aisles). Some suggestions are only a sentence; none takes up more than a page.

4. Try the unthinkable. Running, for instance. Few exercises elicit a more visceral negative reaction than running. Yet an increasing number of people who find their metabolism slowing as they pass 40 are turning to running as a way to keep the pounds off. Consider: A 170-pound person who walks three miles in an hour will burn 337 calories; that same person will burn more than twice that many calories (775) running six miles in an hour. One reason running doesn’t seem as arduous anymore: an explosion of walk-to-run programs. A walk-to-run 5K program takes nonrunners and, over the course of 12 weeks, converts their walks into runs to the point that they can run an entire 5K (3.1 miles).

5. It’s a lifestyle, not a quick fix. There’s a reason programs such as Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and TOPS have been around so long while the all-grapefruits-all-the-time diet fads quickly fade. Fad diets — promising fast results based on a quick fix — may work in the short term, but once you’ve dropped that 20 pounds, you’re back to your old, bad habits. Programs that focus on changing behavior have a better chance of helping you lose weight and keep it off. According to WebMD.com, a healthy weight-loss program should include a daily minimum of 1,000 to 1,200 calories for women and 1,200 to 1,600 for men; promote slow, gradual weight loss, generally 1 to 2 pounds a week; offer flexibility in food offerings; and not cut back on your recommended daily allowance of vitamins, minerals and proteins.

6. Find a support group. Look at it as misery loves company, if you must, but knowing you’re not alone in any challenge can make a difference. According to the Mayo Clinic, “A support group can help you cope better and feel less isolated as you make connections with others facing similar challenges.” In a convenience store getting hit on by Little Debbies? A fellow dieter who can talk you down is just a cell phone call away. And for those times after a long day of work when you don’t think you have the strength for Pilates? The guilt of knowing your classmates are gutting it out should be enough to get your butt in gear.

7. Persevere. Losing weight, moving more and adopting a healthier lifestyle aren’t easy. It won’t happen, in a healthy way, over night. And studies have shown that most resolutions fall by the wayside before January is over. But if you slip up, don’t throw in the towel. According to a study by the University of Scranton, 71 percent of people surveyed who achieved their resolution slipped up at least once (and usually early on, in January). So you miss a day at the gym or a seductive slice of cheesecake crushes your vow of no desserts? Look at why you slipped up — maybe five days a week at the gym is too much with your schedule, maybe one dessert a week isn’t a bad thing — and adjust if you think it will help you reach your goal, and carry on.

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