Pearson Fitness & Nutrition

Let’s turn Drives thru into a Walk thru

2010-03-21T17:16:00.001-07:00

The other day while getting gas next to a coffee chain I like to refer to as fourbucks, I watch car after car as it left the drive thru with their morning caffeine injection. What I noticed was that each of the people in these cars was over weight and/or smoking. Come on people if you are going to pump yourself up with these over priced and over caloric morning drinks, let’s get out of the car and maybe burn of few of these calories.

Getting kids to exercise.

2010-03-02T20:07:00.000-08:00

This morning while laying in bed watch the local morning news, they had a guest on and he was a very fit personal trainer. He was there to promote getting kids to exercise and even went as far as mentioning getting them into the gym. He showed exercises for the kids including jump roping, pushups and others. This is not the answer.

We all know about fat lazy kids these days and how he obesity rate is going up and so is the number of kids with diabetes. We’ve all hear and told the stories of how we use to play outside all day and well into the evening hours, football, kickball, baseball, hide and seek, flash light tag, etc. Sorry to inform you but times have changed, kids have changed; our homes, our lifestyles, and neighborhoods have changed.

To get someone especially kids to exercise it has to be something they look forward to. I see too many people at the gym on some piece of exercise equipment looking like they are being tortured as punishment. People need to look forward to their workouts and have some kind of goal in mind, such as 3 day walk for Breast Cancer, a 5k walk/run, you get the picture.

Now how do you get kids to do the same? Some kids join team sports and that’s how they get their daily exercise, but what about the kids that don’t make the team or don’t care to be apart of the “team thing”? Let them try a triathlon. Keep reading. Most kids ride their bike every day, run around with friends at school on the play ground and after school, and swim in the summer and even indoors in the winter. There are many different distances for triathlons; many are geared towards kids check out one I located in VA, www.tritnow.com. I’ve attended many of theses races in the past couple of years and have seen many kids coming across the finish line with the biggest proudest smiles on their faces. When they cross the finish line they are a “Triathlete” Some of these kids have been in wheel chairs. The only person they have to compete against is themselves. Kids can start their own or join a local triathlon club and train with other kids. This might not be the only way to get kids outside and exercising but I think it’s much better than keeping them inside of a gym and gives them a goal. Tri-it.

Who is educating the doctors?

2010-02-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

Attending a Christmas day brunch I was forced to mingle among may people I didn’t know matter of fact the only person I knew was the person that I arrived with. Standing in the kitchen with two other males who were in the same situation as I was, we introduced ourselves and what we do for a living. One of the gentlemen stated he was a doctor, general practitioner if I’m correct.
When I started talking about a class that I teach, “Healthy Eating Every Day,” (www.pearsonfitness.com) and mentioned it was a great class for helping people to learn how to eat properly and was great for people want to adopt a balanced eating pattern by consuming a variety of nutrient-dense foods while limiting the intake of saturated and trans fats, cholesterol, sugar, salt, and alcohol.
I was hoping he would ask for card so he could refer some of his patients to me. (Never stop networking) Instead he stated “Why would anybody do that when we have great meds that we can give them.” Scary.

I have a friend who is over weight and I have been giving her handouts that I use for my classes, (www.pearsonfitness.com) about how to eat properly and have worked with her on portion sizes, and getting her to walk 30 minutes a day. The last time I saw her I noticed immediately that she had lost weight; I could see it in her face. I let her know that I noticed and she grinned from ear to ear. She stated she was going to the doctors the next day and she couldn’t wait till she got weighed.
I called her the next day to see how the doctor visit went and she said she lost 8 pounds, I congratulated her, and explained to her that she was right on track, that she was losing 1 to 2 pounds a week. I asked what the doctor said and she said the doctor said, “She should give up and have gastro bypass surgery.” I told her to find a new doctor.

It is so easy for these doctors to think they can give every body a pill or surgery and their problems will be gone. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is a reason most of these people are in the situation that they are and a lot of it has to do with learned behavior or lack of education. It’s time for doctors to step up to the “plate” and rethink what they are telling their patients. It is time for these doctors to re-educate themselves and not by the pharmaceutical companies.

Rebuilding Kevin

2010-02-11T20:51:00.000-08:00

This is my story of how I went from being 40 pounds over weight, sluggish and very unhealthy person and how I transformed my body into a fit and healthy person. Maybe 40 pounds doesn’t sound like a reason to write in a blog, but the story is more than just losing weight it’s about reclaiming my body and how I became a fit and healthy person.

I sure as hell didn’t go about it in the right way and made many mistakes. I hope you can take what I have learned and apply it to your own life. Diets don’t work; if they did then everybody who went on a diet would be thin.

As you read this blog you’ll see that I had a lot of things happen in my life and I still kept up my fitness and stayed healthy. You will have many things in life that seem to try and sabotage your goals. I have found during the bad times working out help me get through these bad times and was much cheaper than therapy.

People always say they don’t have time to exercise and eat healthy, I say to those people, “then you better find a time to be sick.” Ever since I have starting taking care of my body, I have very little days of being sick, the worst I’ve had is a cold for three days. This is not to say by any means that if you do what I did then you will never get sick. Many things affect our body in different ways, and this includes out genetic makeup, your environment, among many other things.
I own and operate a computer repair business in the Washington DC area. If you are from or have ever visited the Washington DC area you know what a fast pace area this is.

I travel in my car from client to client repairing their computer problems. My first problem is that I’m sitting in my car most of the time, and then when I arrive at a client then I’m sitting in a chair in front of their computer. The key word here is sitting. Not much exercise here unless you count pressing down on the gas and brake pedal as aerobics.

My first stop of the day was always at a convenient store purchase a pack of cheese and peanut butter crackers and a diet soda. I would consume these on the way to my first customer of the day. After finishing with the first customer I would search for the closest convenient store and purchase candy bar. I would usually do this two to three times until lunch time.

Now at lunch time I would have a hotdog, a bag a chips and a diet soda. After lunch continue my morning stops between clients.

I would always make sure that I cleaned out all the evidence of my car of the junk that I ate, the candy wrappers, the empty soda bottles.

Where did those 40 pounds come from? Doesn’t the diet soda cancel out all the bad things you ate?

After work I would head home from some ice cream to hold me off till dinner. Dinner was some kind of meat, with some kind of pasta, with bread and butter on the side. No vegetables. After dinner I had more ice cream with a diet soda. Before bed I would run out to the convenient store to get a diet soda half an hour before bed. Sure took along time to fall asleep.

Problems

Besides have a lot of gas and stomach problems, other things started to change. My wife and I always took showers together in the mornings until the both of us could no longer fit in the shower together. My stomach was crowding us. This might be TMI (too much information) for some people, but I’m trying to express what effect living an unhealthy lifestyle can have.
When making love our body didn’t fit together they way they did on our honey moon just two years ago. It was more like being on a see-saw. (More TMI.)

My back was always hurting and I used it as an excuse with my wife why I needed her to tie my shoes for me. The truth was I really couldn’t reach them because my fat stomach was in the way. Walking up a fight of steps I would be winded and unable to speak. This came from carrying around the extra 40 pounds, not exercising and eating all the wrong food.

Try this; let’s say you want to lose 20 pounds. Find a 20 pound weight to carry around with for a day. You probably couldn’t do it for more than an hour. Well that’s what you’re carrying around all day on your hips or your front end. This is what makes you feel sluggish, back hurt, and doesn’t improve on your sex life.

I became tried all the time and didn’t want to work, play, or do anything that required me to move. I was always getting sick.

I finally got sick and tired of living this way and decided I need to make some changes in my life.

The first step I took was on January 1st 2002 my new-year resolution was to quit caffeine. Why is caffeine it bad for you? You could read report after report on caffeine and some will say it’s bad for you and some say it has no effect on your health.

The reason I started here was the fact it was addictive. I didn’t want something that required me to use it to get me going in the morning and keep using it to keep me going the rest of the day. Nothing was worst than coming down of a caffeine kick. I didn’t want this monkey on my back.
So I stopped caffeine cold turkey. I had a bad headache for two day and found it hard to sleep at night. After that if I need some kick to get me through the day I ate fruit. Lots of Fruit! For awhile I purchase carbonated flavored water to satisfy my soda drinking urges. Finally I switched to plain water and found that a bottle of water will fill you up and you eat less.

The bottom line is - I haven’t had any caffeinated sodas in years and I have no problem getting myself motivated in the morning.

Eating all the wrong foods

Well if you read all the diet books out there you will never know what you are suppose to eat and what your not.

I ate rice cakes and pretzels, all day long thinking this would help me lose weight. The opposite happened. I keep getting bigger and heavier.

I noticed one day one of my clients that had always been over weight was now all of sudden thin. I asked him how he did it and he handed me the book that helped him do it. It was a low carbohydrate diet book. I followed this book to the letter and ate everything it told me to. I didn’t eat anything with carbs in it. I lost the weight very quickly.

Hold on before you go out and buy the book and try one of these types of diets.

Here’s the problem with this diet, I lost all my muscles. I was still tired and sluggish, I later found out the body does need carbs, but its need the good ones. My client who gave me this book regained all his weight back eventually as what happens with all diets. Remember diets don’t work. So save your money the next time you hear about some new fad diet. The answer to losing weight is to expend more calories every day than what you consume. The healthy part is where you get these calories from.

Getting back my muscles was now important to me so I joined a local morning boot camp where we worked out Monday thru Friday from 5:45 am till 7:00 am. We worked on the upper body two days a week and the lower body two days a week, and one day a week we ran. I stared needing carbs to make it through each work out and figured out I wasn’t gaining any of my weight back. (I guess you do need carbs.) I was starting to see food as fuel and not just for pleasure. I was starting to learn a lot about food and exercise and how the two work with each other to form the perfect healthy and fit body.

Trust me when I say I missed the sweet foods, I used to go to the grocery store and look and handle the ice cream containers and the look at the calories and fat content and then think about how hard I worked to get in shape and how much further I need to go. So I put it back into its cryogenic sleeping area because I knew that they would never stop making ice cream, so when I reach my goal I knew I could enjoy ice cream once in a while without gaining weight back.