gfnhoffice
gfnhoffice
Raise your hand if you are:
• A busy person
• Someone who hates to cook
• Someone who gets home late
• Someone who is out the door early
• Someone who has at least 1 day a week where they have a couple of hours free
That kind of sums up a lot of us, right? Let me share with you how I manage to eat well with all of those things going on.
CROCKPOT
I would be in big trouble without my crockpot. 90% of my meals are crockpot meals, because I am all of those things I listed above. If you are struggling to eat well because of some of the reasons above, then I have a challenge for you.
Step 1: Plan 5 crockpot meals
Step 2: Go to the grocery store with your plan/needs
Step 3: Buy freezer bags
Step 4: Prep 5 crockpot meals when you get home from grocery store- make enough for leftover lunch!
Step 5: Throw bags in freezer
Step 6: Enjoy a stress free week next week- you’re welcome 😉
When we get home from work often times we are tired, hungry and vulnerable. It is easy to fall off track when you just don’t feel like it or you just don’t care, because you had a bad day. Imagine coming home and your house smells AMAZING and dinner is served! It’s like having a personal chef.
So, what’s for dinner?
Coach Meagan
“When a child learns to walk and falls down 50 times, he never thinks to himself: ‘Maybe this isn’t for me.’”
So what does this mean? I talked a little in my last post about motivation and that the human body wants to move and thrive. Now I wanted to talk about that from a little bit of a different angle. A child who is learning to walk will fall down so much but still keep pushing to walk. I’m sure none of us remember that moment, that time when we were learning to walk. That’s raw, ingrained determination. We are biologically dispositioned to want to move and we will not stop trying until it happens.
It is ironic to me, in many ways, that our body has so many systems in place in order to get us moving, then rolling, and then crawling. Yet as we get more educated to the world around us, we further ignore those biologically engrained lessons. What happens when we do? We gain weight and we can get depressed (whether from how we view ourselves or just because our body wants to move and we aren’t letting it). Then we can’t move well, and soon enough we are unable to do things we used to love to do, and so continues the cycle.
Just because something is difficult, or you have to work a long time towards it, or you have fallen down several times, does not mean you weren’t meant to do it. You were meant to move. You were meant to be lean and muscular. You were meant to eat protein, not cheese puffs and sugared gluten paste. So keep working hard, keep moving, and keep eating right. Give your body the things that nature designed it to have – exercise, protein and vegetables. There’s a reason that when you give the body what it was designed for, it responds the way it should, so don’t deprive it.
Make it Happen!
-Coach Adam
Do you live in a household where everyone is 100% supportive of your goal? No enablers, no temptation, family joining your journey toward a healthier you? If you do then God bless you, consider yourself lucky. If you are not so lucky, then here is a situation you might be able to relate to and how to overcome tempting obstacles.
You get out of training. It was a long day, you’re exhausted, you have dinner prepped, but still need to cook it. You check your phone and you have a text, “I called us in a pizza, can you pick it up on your way home?”
What do you do? Like I said, you’re tired and hungry and maybe you feel like you just earned this splurge…
#1: There is no such thing as earning food. You will never out train poor nutrition, I promise.
Sometimes we have to pick our battles. Nutrition is a battle I fight constantly with my husband, but I lose every time (doesn’t mean I will stop trying). So what did I do? I picked him up his pizza and I made my planned dinner. Was it hard? Of course. Especially when he was offering me, “just one bite.”
I know myself and you know yourself. There is no such thing as “just one bite.” It opens up the door to, “Well, I might as well…” Stay strong to your plan. PLAN your splurge. It feels good to be in control. It is HARD to be in control with the constant temptation, but victory feels a lot better than regret. If you have kids, then it is YOUR responsibility to set the example.
I ask my husband to keep his junk food in his car or at work or hidden from me. If I know it is there, then it is hard to keep telling myself no. Someday, I will get him on board with nutrition, but in the meantime I will keep fighting and continue to set the example for my son. Don’t let someone else enable you. And if you need a reality check to remind you why you should stay on track- step on the Fit3D regularly. THAT is my motivation!
Make it happen!
Coach Meagan
“Motivation? Here’s your motivation, GET YOUR BUTT IN THE DOOR!”
I was thinking earlier today about a lack of motivation. As it tends to happen, my mind wondered in different directions… from remembering students saying similar things, then to where this “lack of motivation” comes from.
See, for me in high school, being someone who was out of shape, the motivation was what you can imagine for most teenage boys… girls. No need to get into it, but the point is that it was about training to try to look better. That was even the prevailing thought going into college. Only recently did I realize that I wanted to train for more performance based reasons.
Here is the motivation that I think very few of us consider when we make our decision. We think too reactively, and not proactively. That has been one of the staples of western civilization compared to eastern for some time now, especially in terms of medicine. We typically don’t go to the doctor for regular checkups, we only go when something is wrong. We only start exercising when we start feeling lethargic or overweight. We only start eating right when we can’t stand what we see when we look in the mirror every morning. We take pills to get rid of symptoms of an underlying condition we could have prevented if we had just taken control earlier in our life. We don’t start worrying about our heart until we: A) have a heart attack or a scare, or B) we lose a friend or loved one to a heart attack.
This is a little bit of tough love for you, but it’s just that, love (yeah yeah yeah, corny, I know) because I care about you all. Motivation is NOT an excuse. If being healthy and living well so you don’t have to deal with major health problems isn’t enough, then find yourself a race or an event to train for (again, proactive, not reactive, see what I did there?). The fact is – guess what – the human body was made to move. It was made to run and jump and pick things up. It wasn’t made to sit in a cubicle answering calls or typing up reports. If you are having trouble getting in the door and it’s because you don’t know “why” you are training, or you are trying to figure out why you started training, or you need a reason to resume training… well, there it is, that’s the key. Maybe you don’t want to be Mr./Mrs. Olympia, maybe you aren’t an athlete or don’t plan on running a race or anything. But you are still meant to move. You’re meant to run, jump, and climb. There is your reason for coming to training. Yes, work is tough, and yes, life is tough. It’s true, but if you are using that to deter you from coming, then where are your priorities?
So start acting proactively. Don’t wait until you have a heart attack or can’t walk up a flight of stairs to get back in here. Get in here so you CAN walk up a flight of stairs and aim to NEVER have a heart attack. Or, here’s something for you from another angle. Don’t wait until you are rejected by that person you want to be with, or until you hear that offhanded comment from someone you know. Get your butt in here, work hard and keep it from EVER HAPPENING IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Both of those things have happened to me several times. It’s not fun and it’s not okay, but it happens. Here’s your motivation, here is what it comes down to – you can’t control everything, but what you can control is how you eat and how often and how hard you exercise. YOU have the power to look the way you want to look and live the way you want to live, so stop saying you don’t have the motivation or you don’t have a reason for training. There is always a motivating reason you can find. Stop letting the fact that it’s cold, or you don’t feel like getting out of bed, or you had a busy day at work outweigh that motivating factor. Maybe a few times that’s the case, but on the whole, your health is the one thing in this world you can actively control. If that’s not motivation enough, then I don’t know what is.
Make it happen!
-Coach Adam
Time is money and a lot of us don’t have enough of it! At some point or another, you have probably found yourself wishing you had more hours in the day. Maybe finding enough time to do all the things you want/need to do in 24 hours is discouraging.
Chances are you prioritize all the needs and then fill in the wants as you see fit. Here is my question: where are YOU on that list? You are important and without a healthy YOU, then needs and wants can quickly become and issue. Obviously, you probably need to work, but are you living to work or working to live? We all have our own struggles. Some of us struggle with the training piece while others struggle with the nutrition piece. The number one excuse is time. And time really is an excuse. We all get the same 24 hours per day and if something is important enough to you, then you make time and find a way.
You and I both know a woman who works well over 40 hours per week, homeschools 3 children, eats like an adult, and trains like an athlete. Who am I talking about? Coach Nancy. If you thought she twiddled her thumbs in between training hours, then you are mistaken. This woman is a prime example of someone that makes time for what is important to her and her family.
The only person who can create time to get to where you are trying to go is YOU. So on your calendar, pencil in whatever it is that you need to work on and make it happen.
Coach Meagan
Challenge yourself – a very easy principle to think about, yet often a difficult one to accomplish. I have seen a lot of this recently: being given three options and choosing the lesser of the three. I realize often those three exercise options are based on the band system we use. However, it never happens that we have a band restriction in every station with every series of exercises. Obviously, pain can be a factor – I understand and fully appreciate that.
Getting better, stronger, and healthier involves a need to challenge yourself. If you look at a set of exercises and always choose the easiest one, even when you could realistically do all three, you will not get to where you want to be very quickly, if at all. This pattern may be a sign. If you aren’t willing to challenge yourself while exercising, then you may be less willing to challenge yourself by breaking other unhealthy habits.
Make no mistake – when it comes to being healthy, there is no halfway. If you eat super healthy but never exercise, you will have problems. In the same way, if you come to training 4 days a week and go running or spinning the other 3 days of the week, but eat junk food and get no sleep , there will be issues as well.
Improving the body’s ability to exercise, whether its strength or endurance, is based on mechanics known as “progressive overload”. Not to get into the science too deeply, but it boils down to this: you challenge yourself, your body responds to that challenge for next time. If you do 2 or 3 more squat thrusts than you did last time, your body adapts to be able to do those 2 or 3 more every time (to a certain point, of course).
Let’s say you’ve been picking up 45 pounds for squats every time for the last month. Well, you aren’t progressing, your body is staying stagnant. If you step it up to 55 pounds, its going to be more challenging the first time. But your body learns how much effort it takes to lift that weight and adjusts accordingly, either by increasing the strength of the muscle fibers or by increasing the signal strength from the brain. That can’t happen if you never pick up something heavier…if you never push it a little longer…if you always leave 2 or 3 in the tank.
You are all capable of more than you give yourselves credit for. So…challenge yourself! Don’t pick the easiest exercise just because you can, even if you can only do 2 reps of the more difficult exercise compared to 10 reps of what you would normally do. The more you work on that more challenging pattern, the more you will progress and the more you will eventually gain (or lose, depending on your goal). So don’t sell yourself short. Challenge yourself and make it happen!
Coach Adam
Coach Nancy is the recipe master, but today I am going to share my new favorite dinner (or lunch or even breakfast)!
For those of you who don’t know, I do not enjoy cooking. I am not one to step out of my comfort zone, because honestly I am not that great of a cook. I am impatient, boring, and my husband doesn’t eat the same way I do so I don’t have to spice things up for anyone else.
So back to this concoction I threw together the other night – I will call it Spinach Artichoke Stir Fry. It was quick, easy and so incredibly delicious. Here is what was in it – and remember I cook for one and like to have a left over from my dinners!
• 4 generous handfuls of fresh spinach (I chopped it up)
• ½ a jar of artichokes, also chopped
• ½ squeezed lemon
• 1 chopped garlic clove
• 3 diced chicken breasts
Now that I am reading this, I am wishing I had put some diced tomatoes in there… next time! Anyways, I baked the chicken first then chopped it up and added it to my Wok pan, then stir fried everything up with some EVOO.
If you need a quick easy dinner, then you’ve got your answer right here. It reheats beautifully as well.
Hope you enjoy it 🙂
Coach Meagan
“Are you moving poorly because you’re in pain? Or are you in pain because you are moving poorly?” –Gray Cook
I think we can all agree that we, as human beings, are creatures of habit. Well, guess what – not only does that happen on a conscious, neurological level, but it also happens on an unconscious, anatomical level as well.
What does that mean? It means that not only do you go to the same coffee place every morning, have the same routine, use the same hair products, and often do the same things on the same nights of the week, you also bend over to pick up a piece of paper the same way, you sit at your desk the same way, and you drive the same way. After a while, those movements become engrained in you the same way. You go to the same barber for 15 years and, even if the last three times you went they butchered your hair, it’s more than likely you are going back a 4th time. If you have sat at your desk in the same position for 15 years – shoulders shrugged, hunched over your keyboard – most likely you will still sit like that in years 16 and 17 as well. Our ankles get bound up, either from years of sitting, or, for many women, from years in heels. Before you know it, every time you need to get something that falls on the floor, you either bend at the waist, stretching out those lower back muscles that aren’t supposed to be stretched, or you squat down coming onto your toes putting unnecessary compression on your knees.
Then one day you decide to make a change. You hear about Get Fit NH and you sign up. We bring you in and you have your initial assessment to check those movement patterns. All too often one of two things happens:
A) You don’t take the screen seriously, you push yourself and do patterns the screen showed you shouldn’t, and before we know it, you’re in a sling or can’t walk up or down stairs. Or,
B) You have one screen and don’t take it seriously, then when the option to rescreen presents itself, you blow it off.
Well, the above paragraph shows why this screen is so important. We use the screen to see how you move so that we can assess what we need to do to make sure you are exercising safely and effectively. More often than not, many of the injuries we see are not because “I just picked up too much weight when I squatted” or “Man, my arms just aren’t strong enough”. Instead, injuries happen because there is some type of restriction in that pattern. The body has become so used to doing a movement in a certain way that it starts to rely on muscle groups it shouldn’t rely on. In many cases, your body may rely on the wrong muscles more than the muscle groups it should be using. Guess what that leads too if not corrected? It leads to pain.
So which comes first – pain or moving poorly? Well, the pain has to come from somewhere. Unless there is an outside factor such as disease or severe injury, that pain is born out of improper motor patterns. Joints don’t just spontaneously combust and start to hurt randomly one morning. So take these screens seriously. Find the time to get rescreened and listen to the results. Often the root of our problems is not the pain itself, but what causes the pain in the first place.
Make it happen!
Coach Adam
Molly Crisman!
On to my second spotlight – it is a pleasure to write about another extremely hardworking student. Molly has taken the program by storm and pushed herself to get better. Every time she is in the room, she is always pushing herself and getting as much as she can every single session. In my opinion, it is not only those who have achieved their goal, but also those who are well on the way that deserve to be applauded. It’s one thing to say you want to do something, get healthier, lose fat, gain muscle, whatever it is you desire. It is another thing entirely to come in and work your butt off every single time to get there, which is exactly what Molly does. Here is Molly’s story in her own words:
“I first started with GFNH back in October 2015 after months of my dad trying to convince me to join. With commuting to work 4+ hours a day, I always had an excuse as to why I could never join. Once I changed to a job much closer in October (and after gaining 20+ pounds), I knew it was time for me to make my health a priority. I also had the added pressure that my wedding was right around the corner, and my dress had become a little snug (a bride’s worst nightmare!). My dad has always spoken so highly of the Get Fit NH team that I figured I’d give it a shot!
My first few classes at GFNH were rough. I was extremely out of shape, always sore, and could barely complete the one hour workout. What has really helped me (and continues to help), is always having my dad there to keep me accountable. We motivate each other to push past our comfort zones. The coaches at GFNH have also been instrumental to my success. Each coach took the time to get to know me and continues to encourage me day in and day out. For me, the accountability of my dad and the coaches is what keeps me coming to class each day.
After the first few weeks of being sore (I never knew how sore I could get!), I saw some major changes in myself, both physically and mentally. I felt stronger, leaner, and my stamina had dramatically increased. I was sleeping much better and would wake up with a lot more energy. How awesome is that? Those small changes were a huge motivation to keep going.
After 5 months I can honestly say that working out at GFNH has been life changing. I have settled into a routine that has set me up for success. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely have days where all I want to do is sit on my couch and eat junk food, but the family environment at GFNH gives me the motivation to keep coming back. We all rely on each other for success. Here’s to hoping that dress fits me in June!”
I can tell you right now that with how hard Molly works every single training session, she will get there, no doubt.
-Coach Adam
We are quite a few weeks into the New Year now. At the start of a New Year, we are eager to change our ways and talk about how we are going to get better this year. How are those New Year’s resolutions working out for you? If you are still holding on strong, good for you! If your resolution is long lost, then don’t worry, you are not alone and it isn’t too late to change your ways. More good news – you don’t have to wait until next year to give it another go (phew!).
If you have successfully made the change of writing 2016 rather than 2015, then I am confident you are capable of making other small changes. At the start of a new year, most of us accidently write the wrong year, but over time it becomes second nature. That’s like any change. There will be some “oops” moments, but you fix it and you move on. No matter what your goal is, don’t let that oops moment ruin your day, your week, your month and definitely not your year. Making changes takes patience and it is a skill. Keep working at mastering that skill. We are here for you every step of the way.
Make it happen,
Coach Meagan
You must be logged in to post a comment.