Justin G. Walls, Certified Personal Athletic Trainer

Rituals make our food more flavorful - some simple gestures, not necessarily related to the food, make our involvement, and therefore our enjoyment, of the food, much higher. Nutrients are better on a plate than in a bottle - the food-first approach is everyone's best recommendation. Living on pills isn't. Get Informed! - know what to look for and what to know about supplementing your diet without risk of side effects or wasting your money on stuff that won't get absorbed. Get the app! -  have all your nutritional information on your smart phone Another "things you might be getting wrong" list - this focuses on weight perception and weight loss Best points about meals and weight loss: Only eat when you know what you're eating- so try to make the food yourself  Foods higher in fiber and higher in flavor go best together- like broccoli and garbanzos Watch the dressings on your salads- vinegar and olive oil are best bets for low calorie fla...

Use Breathing to Relieve Stress Ever notice how athletes will take a breath or two before going for the big play? Breathing is one of the easiest ways to relieve stress. You can read up on stress and the different forms of relief at this great article on Bodybuilding.com . I want to focus on a simple technique to reduce stress and light anxiety. Firstly, breathing is a stress response as part of our natural "fight or flight" response. However, we are able to access this response and slow our own breathing to reduce the hormone secretion during a stress response. Controlling breathing will also regulate heart rate and blood pressure. Combining breathing techniques with exercise is an added effective technique at changing our overall pathology of stress relief which usually manifests itself as neck and shoulder pain, which can be relieved through good old fashioned "talking about your stress". Research has shown that punching a bag, for example, my actually reli...

In a fascinating piece of survival economics, Howard Schneider asks in a WaPo fitness column as to whom we could expect to survive and lead in a "World War Z" scenario. The question is: is it better to be really fit and lean with little body fat, have lots of fat because food will be scarce, or somewhere in between? Brad Pitt- fit to survive! It basically boiled down to striking a balance between fitness and body fat reserves. A person with low body fat reserves will likely find it difficult to survive in a post-apocalyptic Earth due to the need to consume more calories each day. However, a person with high fat reserves would probably be too slow to effectively run away from danger. Don't rest too long!   We have discussed body fat percent in a previous post . It really is a better assessment of fitness than weight alone. So from now on, think of yourself not as being the most fit looking, but as being the winner in the survival of the fittest!