Manage your cravings

There are two types of cravings. They are recuring cravings and one-time cravings. Once-time cravings are the seemingls random need for a certian food. En example is really wanting a pickle one day, when you dont really like or eat pickles regularly. The other craving, the recuring craving, it the troublesome one. This is when you constantly want a food for seemingly no reason. An example is that you constantly want ice cream, or you want a soda at a spefit time every day. This is the craving that you have trouble with and that needs to ba managed.

Let me start off by saying, the once-time cravings are usually biological in nature. Meaning that you probably are craving it because the food has some nutrient in it that you need. It is adviasable to heed this craving. Since they are few and far between, it is ok to give in to them. The other craving is the detrimental one. This is the craving where you constantly want McDonalds french fries or chocolate chip ice cream. You have these cravings when you are not even hungry. You are just eating to satisfy you craving.

It is easiest to think of a craving like a mini addiction. You want the food for no other reason then to satisfy the craving.  You dont want it all the time, and you reaize it is a craving. That is why i call it a mini adiction. This mini addiction is fairly simple to break. It is simple but it oes take time and persistence. The steps to beat a craving are: awareness, deferment and routine.

Awareness: You must become very aware of you craving. You need to know what food you crave. This is easy most of the time because you usually crave one food. But if you crave something sweet or something full of carbs, you need to identify what you are most likely to eat when that craving hits. I, for instance, craved carbs. I looked at the food i ate when i satisfied this craving. They turned out to be mostly gold fish crackers. The second thing you need to become aware of is the times of you craving. You need to know when or what situations are present when the craving hits. Is it at 11:00 every day, or when you are watching TV?

Deferment: Once you are aware of when, where and what your craving is, you can now work on stoping it. Plan ahead and defer your craving elsewhere. If you crave chocolate, remove the chocolate from your house. Get rid of the food you crave. But this does nothing to the craving and it will make you nuts. You need to also replace the food with something else. There are many things to replace a craving with. You could replace it with a healthy food or a low calorie food. You could have a big glass of water. Some fay to brush your teeth. The mint flavor reduces the craving and you dont wnt to dirty you teeth. Find something that works for you. It will be difficult at first, so pick something that you will be able to do. You also want to have this replacement thing ready to go when your craving usually hits. If you are replacing a craving for a candy bar at noon with an apple, be sure to have that apple ready at noon.

Routine: The puropse of this to to retrain you brain. You need to do you deferment when ever you have this craving. Planning ahead makes it easy on you. Since you wont have to think about finding the deferment fod of thing it becomes mindless. Mindless is what you are looking for. Doing something mindlessly is called routine. You need to replace your craving enough times that is becomes mindless and routine. When that happens, your craving is gone.

I wont pretend that this is easily done. The first few times of replacing the craving is very annoying. You mail fail at it the first few times and give into the craving. Just stick to it. It will become easier and easier until the craving is gone. Take time to enjoy what you are replacing your craving with. The more you focus on your craving replacement, the less you think about wanting your craving. Stick to it and you will succede.

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Setting goals in your weight loss quest is a great way to achieve weight loss. Setting goals is also a great way to destroy your plans. How can I just say that? I sad goals are good and then turn around and say goals are bad. Effectively setting goals will greatly increase your successes. Ineffectively setting goals will cause failure. How do you effectively set goals? What are ineffective goals? 
Effective goals for losing weight are much different that traditional goals. Traditional goals may require planning and hard work. Weight loss goals require only persistence. In fact, when losing weight you only have two goals. Actually you need two types of goals. The first goal is you long term target weight or fitness level. The second goal is your weekly routine.

Long term target: Your long term target weight goal is the weight or fitness level you want to achieve for the future. This is the easiest goal to set. All you do is set a number you want to achieve in the future. If you want to lose weight, you goal is to be 30 pounds lighter. If your goal is to become more physically fit, your goal is to be able to run an 8 minute mile. Your goal here must be simple and attainable. If you set impossible goals, you are missing the point. Notice, you have not set a time frame. This is on purpose. Your long term target goal is only a point you want to reach. It takes the amount of time it takes. My long term target is: “I want to weigh 180 pounds”. I weighed 230 when I set this goal. Notice it is simple: be 180 pounds and attainable; 50 pounds is a weight that is able to be lost and is healthy to do so. Also, there is no time frame.   
Weekly Routine: This is the goal that takes the work. Actually the point of this goal is to make something that is hard into something mindless. Your weekly routine is the things you do in a week that will cause you to lose weight or get fit. If you wish to lose weight, you weekly routine will include exercise and eating good. If you want to get fit your weekly routine will include the same. To make this clear, I will describe my weekly goal. I wake up at 7:00 every day. After I wake, I go for a fast walk for at least 30 minutes. I come home, shower and eat a healthy breakfast. My breakfast is usually fruit, water or juice, and some toast. After breakfast I shower and go to work.  I make my own lunch. If I want a snack at work, it is fruit or vegetables. When I get off work, I go home and either walk another 30 minutes or lift weights. I then eat a healthy dinner. I go to sleep, no later than 12:00. That is a day. I do this every day. My goal is to do this for one week. I achieve my goal if I do this every day for a week. At the beginning of the week, I set the exact same goal. At first you daily routine will be difficult, and you may fail at your goal of doing it for the week. That’s fine… you have next week to achieve it. Eventually you will succeed at achieving you weekly goal. You just keep setting the goal and achieving it. The point of this is to get to the point that setting and achieving this weekly goal becomes routine, hence “weekly routine”. You want it to become mindless. You just want to be able to set this goal and achieve it week after week.

The two goal system is the only effective way to set and achieve weight loss or fitness goals. Here is an example of an ineffective goal. “I want to loose 2 pounds a week for 20 weeks for a total weight loss of 40 pounds” This sounds like a reasonable goal. But what happens if you miss a 2 pound mark? You have to loose 4 pounds the next week. If you miss that then you need to lose 6 pounds. Eventually you will need to lose an unreasonable amount of weight in that week. You will have failed. The problem was that you are stuck in a time frame and you have no routine. The same goal using the two goal system goes like this. “I want to be 40 pounds lighter. I will work out everyday for a week and not eat fast food” If you miss your weekly goal, by say missing a work out or eating McDonalds, you don’t need to work out twice as much or eat twice as less McDonalds. That doesn’t even make sense. If you mess up one week, you have next week to achieve the goal. Really, you goal is to make setting and achieving you weekly goal so routine that it is just that… routine. Think of it as practice. You practice setting and achieving you weekly goal until you are really good at it. 

Once achieving your weekly goal becomes routine you will notice yourself getting closer and closer to achieving you long term target. Eventually you will reach your target weight or fitness level. The beauty here is that you won’t have to stick to any diet or workout to maintain what you have succeeded. The actions you preformed to achieve your long term goal is already routine to you. It would be much harder to break your routine than to just continue doing it!

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Become Aware of Unhealthy foods

Spotting unhealthy foods is pretty strait foward, once you know where to look. The basics of identifying unhealthy foods is really just learning to cut through all the marketing that food companies use. My rule of thumb is: “if you dont make it youself it is probably unhealthy”

Foods that come from fast food joints, most restraunts and foods that come in packages are not so good for you.  First off, you cannot get a healthy meal at a fast food place. Some places may have salads or low calorie options, but they are still not healthy. They are better for you than say a double whoper, but thay are not good for you. Everything in fast food places is packed with fats and sugars, their healthy options just have less. Often the food is so processed that it is severely limmited in nutrinion. Sure you can get a McDonalds salad, but the same salad made at home, with fresh ingredients is many times more healthy.

The same goes for restraunts. Restraunt food is usually fresher and more nutritious, but not always. Restraunts also like to use alot of fat and salt to make their meals more appealing. People love fats and salts, they make everything taste better. However, most places use too much fat and salt, making a seemingly healthy meal quite bad. My rule is, dont count on getting a healthy meal at a restraunt. Eat out because the food tastes good, but keep it to a minimum.

Packages food is pretty bad too. Im talking about chips, twinkies and similar foods. Packaged veggies or nuts are good, but not as good as fresh foods. Just avoid packaged and processed foods as much as possible. I know it is not possible to eliminate packaged foods, but if a fresh alternative is available, then take it.

There is a saying “never buy a wine with a nice label” The reasoning is, if they had that much time and money to spend making pretty labels, it must have not spent much time making the wine tasty. The same goes for foods. If the package is overly telling you that this food is low in fat or carbs or whatever, they are prbably spending all their time on marketing and not much time on making healthy foods. Fruits and vegetables have no labeling and they are the most healthy foods around.

Unhealthy foods are easy to spot, just look for the bright label. If some one is trying to sell it to you, a restraunt, fast food place or packaged treat, its probably not too healthy.

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The wrists are often overlooked by weight lifters.  Having weak wrists can prevent heavy lifting in other areas and lead to injury.  If you are having trouble in upper body lifts it may be do to weak wrists.

To build up your wrist strength you may want to try doing wrist curls and/or reverse curls.

Reverse Curls
Use a flat bar.  Grip the bar with palms down, so you are looking at the back of your hands.  Now perform a curl. 

Wrist Curls
You can use either a flat bar or dumbbell for this lift.  Rest you arm, palm up, on a flat bench with your wrist hanging off the edge.  Curl your wrist up and back down. 

These exercises may seem simple, but they can dramatically increase your arm strength.  Try adding them to your arm workout.  I bet you will see dramatic size increase in your forearms and increased strength in your normal curls.

Strengthening your wrist may actually improve your bench press as well.  Many times people think they can’t lift much on bench, but in actuality its their wrists that can’t hold the weight.  This many not be true in all cases, but if you are just starting to work out it may be that your wrists are weak.

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Ever have trouble stopping yourself from snacking from the fridge??  I know I have.  When I wrestled in college it was especially hard.  I had to fit into a specific weight class and couldn’t be as much as an ounce overweight.  Thankfully I didn’t have to go through a terrible amount of weight loss to fit into my class, but I did have to watch what I ate very carefully.  When ever I would have trouble stopping myself from snacking I would tape a picture of myself on the fridge.  Now this wasn’t a normal picture of me, it was a picture of me on top of the medal stand at a wrestling tournament.  Every time I went to the fridge for a snack I saw that picture and remembered how good it felt and how important it was to me to make my weight class.

I know this is a unique situation for me, but it can work for you too.  Try taping up a picture of how you look now as well as a picture of what you want to look like.  Every time you go to the fridge for a snack you will have to see not only what you look like, but also what your goal is.  Since you will be face to face with you and your goal you will have to decide what is more important to you.  Is that snack more important than your fitness goal?  The choice is up to you, but having a visual reminder will help you stay on track.

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