Answer Fitness®: Practical Fitness Advice for Everyone

One Simple Trick to Stay Away From Junk Food

Staying away from junk food can be a challenge for anyone trying to eat more healthy. Try this easy trick to break the “junk food junkie” label.

Junk food.

Who doesn’t love it?

Potato chips, candy, soda, fried foods, french fries … Twinkies.

Let’s face it: If it wasn’t “junk” and terrible for our health and waistline, we’d eat it all day. Even the most fitness-conscious person will admit that if we could instantly make Snickers and Mountain Dew a health food, they’d be downing candy bars and soda in a second. 

Problem is, you can’t lose fat or stay healthy on a diet of soda, snack cakes and fried potato products. 

So how do you break the cycle?

Simple: You learn the fine art of “substitution.”

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The Five Myths of Dietary Fat | Diet Tips

Think eating less fat will make you thinner? Not necessarily. Answer Fitness debunks the five most common myths people have around dietary fat.

Navigating the sometimes contradictory research and information around dietary fat can make a person’s head spin. Should I eat more fat? Less fat? A different kind of fat? Here are the five most common myths around dietary fat:

Myth #1: Eating more fat makes you fatter

Not true.

Eating more calories than you burn makes you gain fat.

Whether those excess calories come from protein, carbohydrates or dietary fat, any calories that you eat above your daily energy requirements will get stored away as body fat. 

The issue with dietary fat is that it’s extremely calorie dense, meaning that it contains more calories per gram than other macro-nutrients like protein or carbohydrates. This means that gram-for-gram, foods with a higher fat content contain more calories (9 calories per gram of fat versus 4 calories per gram for carbohydrates and protein.)

So if you aren’t careful, you can end up eating more calories in foods with higher fat content, even though you are eating the same amount of food.

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Am I Fat? | Why Body Fat Percentage Is More Important Than Weight

Here’s a Little Secret: The scale lies. Learn why you should focus on decreasing your body fat percentage, instead of just your weight.

Stepping on the bathroom scale is a daily ritual for many dieters, athletes and fitness enthusiasts. After all  being healthy and in-shape means weighing less, right?

Scales seem to be everywhere: The home bathroom, the gym or health club locker room, and – of course — the doctor’s office.  We’re a society increasingly obsessed with our weight, but ironically, one that is becoming fatter than ever.

But what if you knew that your trusty scale was deceiving you? What if you found out that losing a pound or two (or even five) doesn’t mean you’ll look any thinner or more in-shape? What if I told you that losing weight is actually making you fatter?

Why Weight Loss Should Never Be Your Goal

Our preoccupation with moving that pointer on the bathroom scale down closer to zero is at the root of most people’s frustration with becoming healthier and more fit.  Crash diets, fad diets, endless hours of cardio, extreme calorie restriction and eating disorders can be traced directly to our desire to step on the scale and see that we’ve lost weight.

Yet the number that you see on the scale each morning is a terrible indicator of body composition.  Weight alone can’t tell you anything about the distribution of that weight. It doesn’t take into account the ratio of fat to lean tissue, which can cause very lean people to think they are fatter than they really are, and fat people to think they are leaner.  

In other words, losing weight can actually be a bad thing, especially if you are doing it at the expense of lean tissue like muscle.  If all you are using to gauge your fitness progress is scale weight alone, you are only getting half-the-picture.
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Six Great Reasons To Keep an Exercise Log

Keeping an exercise log can help you stay on track with your fitness and diet goals.  Learn the six reasons why you need one.

Making progress toward your health, diet and fitness goals isn’t easy … especially if you aren’t keeping track of that progress. One of the seven healthy habits of highly-fit people is that they keep a log of their exercise (and often, diet) in order to keep themselves accountable.

But are exercise logs really necessary? Can’t you just keep track of your workouts in your head?

Check out these six reasons for keeping an exercise log or journal and decide for yourself:

Reason #1: Exercise Logs Let You Measure Progression

One of the basic principles of weight training is progression.

During each additional workout you need to challenge yourself to overload the muscle a little more than the last workout.  Depending on your goals, this progressive overload will continuously strengthen the muscle, increase endurance, size or a combination of the three.

However, if you don’t know how much weight you used, the number of repetitions or how many sets of a given exercise you performed, it becomes very difficult to consistently overload the muscle and make progress.

By keeping detailed notes of your exercises, the order in which they were performed in, the weight used, repetitions, sets and rest periods, you’ll always know exactly what you did in your previous workout. This will help you make sure that your next workout is slightly different and slightly more challenging than the last.

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Should I Use Free Weights or Weight Machines? | Weight Training Basics from Answer Fitness®

Free weights and weight machines each have their advantages and disadvantages. Learn how to use both to get great results in the gym.

Few issues are more hotly debated among health and fitness professionals than whether free weights are better than weight machines.

The good news is that you really don’t have to choose between the two, since they both can help you increase strength, build muscle and increase muscle definition.

There are, however, differences between the two. And understanding these differences can help you make better decisions about when each type of equipment is appropriate for your weight training, and how often you want to include them in your workout routine.

The Advantages of Weight Machines

Weight machines are often the first choice of equipment for people who are new to weight and strength training. And this is for good reason.

Weight machines by design encourage good form, because they limit the range of motion to the specified exercise you are performing. They also isolate the specific muscle group you are targeting by disengaging secondary muscle groups that normally are called upon stabilize the body during performance of an exercise.

If you’ve never performed a bench press (a free weight exercise), for example, you may not be familiar with how to align your arms properly in relation to your body in order to perform the exercise effectively and with minimal risk of injury. A chest press machine, on the other hand, will ensure that your arms are positioned correctly and will give you a sense for how the movement should be performed.

By starting out on weight machines, you can work on get a feel for the exercise, which can then be applied to a free weight workout.

Machine weights also tend to allow you to use more resistance, because you aren’t limited by the smaller (and often weaker) stabilizer muscles that are called upon to balance a free weight. This can help you make bigger gains in strength, and can help beginners establish a more solid base before moving on to more challenging free weight movements.

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Do I Need A Personal Trainer? | Fitness Advice from Answer Fitness®

Whether you need a personal trainer depends on your experience in the gym and personal fitness goals.  Learn whether a personal trainer is right for you.

When you think of personal trainers, you probably think of Celebrity Fit Club, the ultra-rich and competitive athletes.

But personal trainers have gone mainstream, and they are more accessible than ever before to the masses.

Getting individualized fitness advice, training and diet and nutrition information from a trainer doesn’t mean you have to be Jessica Simpson or A-Rod.  Housewives, fitness-conscious Baby Boomers, Type-A business people, and even overweight children are increasingly turning to personal trainers to whip them into shape.

But do you really need a personal fitness trainer? And are the benefits worth the price?

Fitness Trainers: Luxury or Necessity?

The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that in 2006 there were nearly 250,000 personal fitness trainers employed in the U.S.  In the next ten years, that’s expected to grow nearly 25 percent.

Yet despite their growing popularity, hiring a personal fitness trainer isn’t for everyone.

Although some gyms and health clubs provide free personal fitness training services, most personal trainers come with a price tag. Depending on your location, that could run you anywhere from $30 - $70 a session — and sometimes even more in certain fitness clubs and locations.

So is it worth it? Is a trainer really necessary?

The answer is that “it depends.”

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Five Healthy Breakfast Ideas from Answer Fitness®

A healthy breakfast can help you stay energized during the day and keep the pounds off. Try one of these healthy breakfast ideas to jump start your day.

Why make time to eat breakfast?

Because it makes good fitness sense.

Research indicates that people who regularly eat breakfast may have less body fat and are less likely to overeat during the rest of the day. More importantly, when they lose weight, they tend to keep it off longer. 

Two studies in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association support this.

While they were funded by cereal companies, the science has been peer reviewed and seems solid: People who it breakfast have more success with weight loss over the long haul.

If the thought of trying to wrangle up a healthy meal in the morning causes you to shudder, relax. Regardless of your schedule or prowess in the kitchen, try one or more of these five breakfast ideas to get your morning off to a healthy start:

Healthy Breakfast Idea #1: Oatmeal

Oatmeal is a power food that belongs in every healthy pantry.

Inexpensive (a large container of oats will cost you less than $3), loaded with heart-healthy soluble fiber and plenty of complex carbs, oats are one of your best breakfast bets.  On their own, they can be bland, but dressed up with cinnamon, a touch of honey, dried or fresh fruit, or even a scoop of whey protein powder, they become something that transcends their humble reputation.

If you don’t care for the consistency, try Scottish Oats (which are grainier and have more texture) or provide a little crunch by adding chopped walnuts, pecans or sliced almonds.

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