Nutrition
The most important thing with any lifestyle change is your nutrition. Anyone can see results if they would just eat healthier foods and cut out the fast foods. Someone who work out 3 times a week and doesn’t eat the proper nutrition will only see meager results. They may love the results that they are seeing, but they could be so much more. Say they are losing a pound a week, so 4 pounds a month. If they were to work out 3 times a week and eat healthier foods it would take that pound a week and turn it into 2 – 3 pounds a week, so 8 – 12 pounds a month.
Without eating the proper nutrition while you are exercising is fighting an uphill battle.
This goes for everyone, someone who is trying to lose weight or gain weight.
Now how are we going to change your eating habits?
Cut out the fast foods
Yes, it’s so hard especially with your busy lifestyle, but this is the number 1 killer of proper nutrition.
Eat enough food
You want to eat more meals with smaller portions, normally 4 – 6 times a day. Everyone thinks that if I don’t eat, I will lose weight. Yeah you will, you will keep your fat mass and start to deplete your lean mass (Muscle). Your body basically eats itself because it needs a food source. When you do this you metabolism is in the basement.
Normally the average person eats 1 – 3 meals a day. When you do this you are teaching your body to store fat, every time you eat your body takes that food and stores it for later use because there is such a large gap between your meals that you body slowly burns the food. When you eat 4 – 6 times a day or every 3 to 4 hours your body takes that food and immediately uses it as fuel because your body knows that it will be getting more in a couple of hours. So your metabolism is through the roof. When you see those skinny people that are constantly eating and never gain a pound. This is the same concept; their body burns all that food right away instead of storing it as fat.
Meals
When I say that you should be eating every 3 to 4 hours; that doesn’t mean pig out every time. It depends on your lifestyle and how much access you have to healthy food. With work you may only have time to eat a little snack because of the time that you are allowed. You should have at least two good meals, full meals, a meat, bread, vegetable, and fruit. If you can only have two good meals that’s fine, just have snacks for the rest of your meals. Figure out what works best for you and your schedule. The ideal way would be three meals and two snacks or two meals and three snacks a day.
Like you know, the most important meal of the day is breakfast, it kick starts your metabolism every day. A lot of people use the excuse that they don’t have time. You don’t have to sit down and eat a full meal, just get something in you. If this means a banana, granola bar, yogurt, a glass of milk, something, and no coffee doesn't count.
Portions 
Try to get enough of breads, meats, vegetables, and fruits. You have been preached to since grade school to get all of the essential food groups, I know your sick of hearing it, but you need them to maximize your body. The two hard ones to get every day are fruits and vegetables, try to get at least one a day, it’s a lot better than none.
What goes hand and hand with portion control is knowing when you’re full, when you start to feel full stop. Everyone fills themselves to the gourd and then wonders why they did it to themselves. There are only two time a year that a person needs to stuff themselves silly, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Cardio
Cardio is great for the heart and clearing out the fatty deposits that are in our arteries that cause heart attacks and strokes. Most people think that if there not overweight they don’t need cardio, that’s a bad habit to think. This is especially true for guys; they think that cardio is just for losing weight. That’s why you see older men that are just lifting weight and don’t even bother with cardio, these are the men who look big, but have a gut. You need to balance your workouts to have both cardio and strength training, even if you are content with your weight.
Also with cardio a lot of people dread it because running on a treadmill or elliptical for 30 – 60 minutes is torture. I’m the same way, after a week you never want to jump on another machine out of sheer boredom. This is where you need to think of alternate ideas. Run outside, go to cardio classes, or get more involved with a sport that you like. If you like basketball, shoot hoops for 30 minutes at a brisk pace so that your working up a sweat, it would be the same as if you were on a treadmill, but your having fun doing it. Cardio classes are great because you’re so involved with the class that time flies by and you get a better workout than you realize. 
For cardio there are two important components, your Max Heart Rate and your Ideal Heart Rate. For your Max Heart Rate you take your age minus 220. Like it says it’s your Max Heart Rate and you should never go over it. For your Ideal Heart Rate you want to be anywhere from 65% - 90% of your Max Heart Rate. Ideal Heart Rate is where your heart rate should be at when you’re doing cardio.
AGE
Example) 30 Year olds Max Heart Rate 220-30=190
Ideal Heart Rate 65% - 90% 123 – 171 Beats/Min.
This is where a lot of people go wrong, they are dilly dallying when there doing cardio. There essentially wasting their time, to maximize your time you want to be in your Ideal Heart Rate Zone. Another key is that your body doesn’t start to burn body fat reserve until after 20 minutes of aerobic exercise. So to really burn fat you want to do cardio over 20 minutes.
Strength Training
Strength training can be intimidating to a lot of people. They really don’t know what machines to use and how to use them. They will watch other people to see how to use them and typically just go down the row of machines and do them all. This is the main basis of this website, to give people a workout routine that has been tailored to their goals and needs so that it takes the guess work out of strength training. You have the workout right in front of you. A lot of people don’t know what workout they should be doing, how many reps, how many sets, and what exercises. 
Strength training is important because it strengthens muscle, ligaments, tendons, bones, and causes skin to be tighter younger looking. You see people that have lost a lot of weight and have all this lose skin. If they would have combined cardio and strength training, their lose skin would have been more elastic and tighter to their body.
Also with lifting weights you are using multiple muscles to lift the weight, the more muscles you use the more calories you burn. The more muscle you have the more efficient your body is at burning calories; muscle burns fat, fat doesn’t burn fat.
Diets
Diets don’t work, there a quick fix, the only way that you lose weight or gain muscle is to change your lifestyle. It’s the only way that you will maintain your results that you are so pleased to have. The only way something works is for you to keep doing it. To a lot of people they don’t want to change their lifestyle, it’s 
too hard. Once you start to have a healthier lifestyle you see that you’re reaching your goals, you’re seeing results and you don’t want to go back to the way you lived. It becomes hard to want to go back to your old way of life. The bad foods that you use to eat don’t look appealing any more. You have way more energy than you use to. You can keep up with your kids and with your work; life just becomes easier because your body isn’t slowing you down. Just think of how long you have been unhappy with your body. In twelve weeks you could have the body you want (twelve weeks of hard work) or years of being unhappy, you choose which one is more appealing.
Measurements
Everyone bases their exercise results by the scale. If you don’t gain or lose weight you assume that your workout isn’t working. You may not see results on the scale especially at first. You may not be losing or gaining weight, but you may be losing inches. That’s why it’s so important to measure yourself. You see results other than what the scale is telling you, you then don’t get discouraged and abandon your workout. There are eight places that you should measure: neck, upper arm, lower arm, chest, waist, hips, thigh, and calf.
Where to measure
You want to measure the same place every time so that you're consistent and you want to be relaxed. (Don’t be flexing or sucking it in) You can measure with clothes on, but they should be tighter fitting, just make sure that what you do the first time is what you do every time.
Neck- Largest part
Upper Arm- Measure the distance from the top of your shoulder to your elbow, then divide in half to get the middle of your upper arm. Then measure that area. Ex) length 14 inches then you want to measure 7 inches down from shoulder and measure the circumference of your upper arm in that area. 
Lower Arm- Largest part
Chest- Center of chest
Waist- Largest part
Hips- Largest part
Thigh- Measure 6 inches up from your knee and measure
Calf- Largest part