By Stephanie S. Saunders

It’s that time of year. The leaves turn majestic hues of red and gold. The air becomes fresh and crisp. We can finally put an extra blanket on the bed and cuddle up with a cup of hot tea. Yes, it’s fall. We just spent 8 months killing ourselves to get into that bathing suit, but now we’ve replaced it with a worn pair of jeans and a much more relaxed attitude towards food. After all, it’s the holiday season, and no one’ll notice a few extra pounds under layers of clothes. A little extra weight just gives us a New Year’s resolution to focus on, right?

Wrong. According to a study by researchers at Sweden’s Linköping University, those 4 weeks of celebrating can actually lead to long-term weight gain.

Essentially, the researchers took a group of healthy young people, increased their caloric intake by 70 percent, and lowered their exercise levels. They also had a control group whose diets weren’t altered. At 4 weeks, the participants in the test group had gained an average of 14 pounds. After 6 months, and no longer on an increased-calorie diet, only a third of these participants had returned to their original weight. After 1 year, the test group members were each still an average of 3.3 pounds heavier. After 2 and a half years, the "gluttonous" group continued to gain, while the control group still maintained a stable weight.

Now, most of us don’t increase our calories that drastically for 30 days straight. Sure, there’s Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving leftovers, Hanukkah, the work Christmas party, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day, not to mention the extra sweets, cocktails, and (ahem) fruitcake. But according to the New England Journal of Medicine, the actual average weight gain over the holidays is only 1 pound. (They obviously didn’t poll my family or friends.) So what’s the big deal? The problem is, a year later, the vast majority of people have not removed that pound. Continue this pattern over 30 or 40 holiday seasons and the problem becomes—quite literally—huge.

So how are we supposed to get through the holidays without gaining weight? Here are eight effective ways to get yourself ready to beat the holiday bulge.

Keep exercising. Most fitness trainers will tell you the slowest point of their year is between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Sure, their clients schedule workouts with the best of intentions, but then they cancel them for parties and gift shopping. It’s hard to remain balanced when you have a million things to do and gifts to buy. Yet the greatest gift you can give yourself is to stay focused on your fitness goals and get your workout in. Shopping getting in the way? Do it online and save some time. Parties getting in the way? Just show up later. Who cares if everyone else is a couple of cocktails ahead of you? You’ll be healthier, and you won’t have to worry about the embarrassing YouTube^® videos in the morning. Just stay consistent, even if it’s inconvenient. You’ll be much less likely to look like Santa (both belly-wise and red-nose-wise) at the end of the month.

Offer to prepare healthy fare. This suggestion won’t be well received by those of us who’d rather spend Thanksgiving sitting around watching football than toiling in the kitchen, but if you do the cooking, you have the control. Your family could have a tasty and satisfying meal without ingesting thousands of calories and fat grams. The way the turkey is prepared, the type of stuffing, how vegetables are made, whether the cranberries are real, and countless other things can make or break the healthiness of a meal. There are tons of cookbooks out there, plus recipes in this and past newsletters, that can help you out. Yes, it does require a bit of work. But you’re part of the Beachbody community. You can do anything!

A wise person once said, "The toughest part of a diet isn’t watching what you eat. It’s watching what other people eat." That really is the crux of the problem with dining out in public. When you’re surrounded by people who are consuming the equivalent of their body weight in fat grams, it’s really tough to stick to that chicken breast and steamed veggies. But if you have a game plan, you’re more likely to walk out with both a satisfied tummy and a satisfied mind. So spend a few minutes on researching, on eating, and on exercising beforehand, and be strong when you get there. The effort will be worth it, and you might even be an inspiration to your dining partner. What greater reward is there than that? Oh, yeah—a six-pack.

Time to get honest with myself… I got back from Summit, got sick, then started having too much fun… I’ve been way off track. I did workout, but not everyday and I wasn’t eating right at all. It’s amazing how hard it is to lose the weight and how fast it can come back. Here I am a month and half later and I’ve gained almost 10lbs!

Starting today I’m back on track… alarm is set for 6am again. I know for me that’s the best time for me to workout. If I try and do it later in the day I come up with too many reason to miss a day. I’ve made my workout calendar… I like to make my own calendar where I can mark off the days and make little notes how the workout went. All the junk food is out of the house. If it’s not in the house I have to make a big effort to cheat.

I’m posting this here to keep myself accountable. Please feel free to ask me if I worked out today!

How do you keep yourself accountable? Do you need a workout/accountability buddy? Message me, we’ll do it together!

We’ve all heard “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have”. Meaning how the right clothes can help you get the job/career or promotion you’re looking for. Why not try that for your fitness?

Sometimes I don’t feel like working out… sometimes I have to talk myself into it. One thing I’ve found that helps is dressing for it. If I can just put my workout clothes on I’m more in the workout mood. I can find that watch out world I’m so strong I can make it happen anything happen feeling and attitude that I need to push through a workout.

Go ahead and buy some fun workout clothes that make you feel good, something that makes you feel athletic. Even if you don’t feel like you’re the most athletic person… if you dress for it you might be able to channel it and become it.

By lifting weights regularly, you increase your lean muscle mass, which burns calories at a much higher rate than any other body tissue.

Here’s the thing about diet soda… It’s great if you’re using it as a stepping stone from full-sugar soda to water. But it’s counterproductive if you drink it every single day. That’s because research has found that artificial sweeteners make you crave real sugar—so drinking diet soda makes resisting super-sweetened foods and drinks that much harder.

We all know that water is good for us, but often the reasons are a little fuzzy. And even if we know why we should drink water, it’s not a habit that many people form.
But there are some very powerful reasons to drink lots of water every day, and forming the habit isn’t hard, with a little focus.
The thing about it is, we don’t often focus on this habit. We end up drinking coffee, and lots of soda, and alcohol, not to mention fruit juices and teas and milk and a bunch of other possibilities. Or just as often, we don’t drink enough fluids, and we become dehydrated — and that isn’t good for our health.
I’ve made drinking water a daily habit, my friends have always teased me that I bring a water bottle everywhere I go. I drink soda, but I try to limit how much soda I drink.
Here are 9 powerful reasons to drink water (with tips on how to form the water habit afterwards):

1. Weight loss
   Water is one of the best tools for weight loss, first of all because it often replaces high-calorie drinks like soda and juice and alcohol with a drink that doesn’t have any calories. But it’s also a great appetite suppressant, and often when we think we’re hungry, we’re actually just thirsty. Water has no fat, no calories, no carbs, no sugar. Drink plenty to help your weight-loss regimen.

1. Heart healthy
   Drinking a good amount of water could lower your risks of a heart attack. A six-year study published in the May 1, 2002 American Journal of Epidemiology found that those who drink more than 5 glasses of water a day were 41% less likely to die from a heart attack during the study period than those who drank less than two glasses.

1. Energy
   Being dehydrated can sap your energy and make you feel tired — even mild dehydration of as little as 1 or 2 percent of your body weight. If you’re thirsty, you’re already dehydrated — and this can lead to fatigue, muscle weakness, dizziness and other symptoms.

1. Headache cure
   Another symptom of dehydration is headaches. In fact, often when we have headaches it’s simply a matter of not drinking enough water. There are lots of other causes of headaches of course, but dehydration is a common one.

1. Healthy skin
   Drinking water can clear up your skin and people often report a healthy glow after drinking water. It won’t happen overnight, of course, but just a week of drinking a healthy amount of water can have good effects on your skin.

1. Digestive problems
   Our digestive systems need a good amount of water to digest food properly. Often water can help cure stomach acid problems, and water along with fiber can cure constipation (often a result of dehydration).

1. Cleansing
   Water is used by the body to help flush out toxins and waste products from the body.

1. Cancer risk
   Related to the digestive system item above, drinking a healthy amount of water has also been found to reduce the risk of colon cancer by 45%. Drinking lots of water can also reduce the risk of bladder cancer by 50% and potentially reduce the risk of breast cancer.

1. Better exercise
   Being dehydrated can severely hamper your athletic activities, slowing you down and making it harder to lift weights. Exercise requires additional water, so be sure to hydrate before, during and after exercise.

How to form the water habit
So you’re convinced that water is healthier, but you’d like to know more about how to make drinking water a daily habit.
Here are some tips that have helped me:

• How much water?
  This is a debatable question. What’s clear is that the old recommendation of “eight 8-ounce glasses a day” isn’t right, for several reasons: that amount includes all dietary water intake, including food and non-water beverages; it also ignores a person’s body weight, which is an important factor in figuring the amount; it also varies if you are sick or exercise. It’s also not good to just drink when you’re thirsty — you’re already dehydrated by then. Best is to form a routine: drink a glass when you wake up, a glass with each meal, a glass in between meals, and be sure to drink before, during and after exercise. Try to generally keep yourself from getting thirsty.

• Carry a bottle
  keep a glass of water at your desk, and drink from it all day long. When it’s empty, fill it up again, and keep drinking. I normally carry a drinking bottle with me everywhere I go. My husband laughs at me because I get excited when I get a new cool water bottle.

• Set a reminder
  Set your watch to beep at the top of each hour, or set a periodic computer reminder, so that you don’t forget to drink water.

• Substitute water
  If you would normally get a soda, or an alcoholic beverage, get a glass of water instead. Try sparkling water instead of alcohol at social functions.

• Filter
  Instead of spending a fortune on bottled water, invest in a filter for your home faucet. It’ll make tap water taste like bottled, at a fraction of the price.

• Exercise
  Exercising can help make you want to drink water more. It’s not necessary to drink sports drinks like Gatorade when you exercise, unless you are doing it for more than an hour. Just drink water. If you’re going to exercise, be sure to drink water a couple hours ahead of time, so that it will get through your system in time, and again, drink during and after exercise as well.

• Track it
  It often helps, when forming a new habit, to keep track of it — it increases awareness and helps you ensure that you’re staying on track. Keep a little log (it can be done on an index card or a notebook), which can be as simple as a tick mark for each glass of water you drink.

Info from Zen Habits blog.

A year ago I was really pushing to lose some weight because we were going to Hawaii and I was going to HAVE to put on a swim suit. One of my favorite movies is Blue Crush – if you don’t know that movie, it’s a surfer girl movie. Kate Bosworth’s body in that movie I think is amazing! Her body now is a bit too skinny for me, but in that movie… she had this athletic, lean muscle body. But when I watch that movie especially the beginning where she’s going for her run on the sand – it inspires me… makes me want to run or do some kind of workout.

I started finding pictures of Kate Bosworth in this movie and putting them up as motivation pictures… then one morning I woke up and I had a new background on my desktop…

My cute computer talented husband put my head on that rock’n body! And it helped! Seeing that picture everyday really helped me keep my eye on the end goal and helped me visualize and believe I could get there. In 8 weeks I was able to lose 11lbs – I didn’t get to that body before we left, but I looked and felt a lot better in a swim suit than I would have.

Funny side note; the next morning with my then 3yr old woke up and saw the picture he said “Wow! Mommy… it’s like magic! Where’s your tummy?”

People who cut calories to lose weight generally do so, but people who cut calories and exercise are 10x more likely to keep it off. Those who don’t exercise usually end up gaining the weight back and start yo-yo dieting.

If you want to really define and tone your arms, as well as your whole upper body, push-ups can be your best friend! If you’re not doing them as part of your overall workout regimen, see if you can add a few in every week. It’s a great, and portable, exercise to tone and strengthen your upper body and even your core!