Every year there are people, who strive to get in shape , to feel and look there best. But, they don’t end up making it happen.

I want to share with you 6 pitfalls that if you avoid them, you ‘ll get the body you want.

1. Perfection – You think you have to be perfect to get results. When you’re not, your emotional reaction to a bad weekend or meal will cause you to quit or throw it out the window for weeks at time.

Solution – Strive to be better a little each week. You don’t need to be perfect, you need to be better than you were last week.

2. You will do too much cardio and not enough weights. You may lose weight, but because if you lost muscle due to lack of strength training, you won’t look the way you expected.

Solution – lift 2-4 x a week.

3. You won’t mix up your cardio, you’ll do too much high intensity or not enough. Too much high intensity will lead to overuse of muscles and  injuries and insufficient recovery. Releasing more stress hormones as well as limiting your results.

Solution – Mix up low intensity cardio like walking, sled pushes, light jogging, hiking with intense version like sprints, circuit and interval training.

4. You will work on everything except for sleep. You may improve your nutrition and start working out. But, your lack of poor quality sleep will get the best of you.

Solution – Get 7-9 hours of sleep or gradually improve it by doing relaxing things before bed.

5. You’ll focus on calories first, while you ignore the importance of quality nutrients like protein, fats, vitamins and H20 can have on your body.

Solution – Start eating healthy doses of nutrients, then worry about portion sizes. Here is a quick guide line:

Eat 3-4 servings of protein a day

Eat 3-4  servings of veggies per day

Include healthy fat with each meal

Note – I’m not saying calories aren’t important. Calories are very import to lose fat; but like anything, too much reduction to fats is big mistake.

Drink 1-2 cups with most meals

Eat healthy starchy carbs after your workout

6.  Your struggles, failures and setbacks destroy you. Instead of teaching you lessons, you will focus more on how much it sucks to struggle and how hard it can be. This will be your biggest setback

Solution – Start seeing struggles and failures as a lesson. What is it teaching you and how can you do it better next time? What could you do differently? How could you be more prepared to put yourself in a better position to succeed?

Try to do this most days, Write in a note book:

What happened to you?

Why is it positive?

What is the lesson you learned?

How can you apply it to your nutrition and workouts?

There are the  6 reasons why most will fail.  If you can overcome them you’ll be on your way.

If you read about losing fat or fitness stuff you’ll see thing like:

Metabolism

Metabolic exercise or workout

Metabolic rate

Metabolic boosting foods

It’s often a word people really relate to fat loss, that is used to market a certain exercise or nutrition.

Here are five facts to shed some light on what is and it is not.

1. Define it.

Metabolic- Relating to metabolism, the whole range of biochemical processes that occur within us (or any living organism).

Metabolism is a term that is used to describe all chemical reactions involved in maintaining the living state of the cells and the organism.

It doesn’t really have to do with fat loss. Yes, some these chemical reactions can contribute to fat loss but they can also contribute to weight gain.

2. Your metabolic rate- How these are used most often, are to refer to the amount of calories your body will burn by itself. So think of it like this: if you sat on the coach all day you’d burn a certain amount of calories, no matter what. This is related to lifestyle and lean muscle mass.

So when the workout claims to be metabolism boosting it’s usually because:

–  It will build muscle which may have elevated your daily metabolic rate.

– Of the stress of the workout, has temporarily elevated your metabolic rate, so you can recover from said workout

– When they talk about metabolic food. There are calories burned, when you consume foods. Some foods will take more energy/calories to digest.

3. 6 meals a day myth- There is a thought that if you eat more frequently you’ll burn more calories because of the calories burnt through digestion. That might say it boosts your metabolism. This isn’t true. The amount of energy you burn through digestion is related to the total amount of calories consumed not the frequency. If you eat 1500 calories in 3 meals or 6 meals; it won’t make a difference as affecting your metabolism.
4. Build muscle to build up your metabolism- This is why strength training can be huge to help shed fat. As we get older, we lose muscle mass and our metabolic rate goes down. So, as we get older we burn less and less calories. Strength training can reverse that.

3. Conditioning – If you run or do high intensity sessions for the purpose of fat loss, the most effective thing is changing it up. Your body gets used to it and it gets more efficient at it and it will burn less calories and it won’t lift your metabolic rate as much.

An example: if you start running, at first you’ll burn a lot of calories than after you start getting good at it, you’ll burn less and less. This is because your body has become more efficient so it doesn’t have to use as much energy

I hope that gives you a good idea about what your metabolism is or isn’t, also a couple of ideas on how to boost it as well.