Success Story: From Scrawny to Brawny
eyun | February 8, 2012
This skinny student made fitness a passion and carved out a serious physique.
ZACH LOPEZ
Hometown: Snellville, Georgia
Occupation: Student
Age: 21
Care to downsize that order? Many want smaller portions
msnbc.com: Diet and nutrition |
Study finds that, when offered, many restaurant patrons choose to consume less food and fewer calories.
Would You Like to ‘Downsize’ That?
WebMD Health Channel - Diet & Weight Management |
Forget “supersize” that. Tulane University marketing professor Janet Schwartz, PhD, would like fast-food restaurants to instead ask their customers if they’d like to “downsize” that.
No Evidence That Online Dating Works
eyun |
Study: Find someone you like? Better take it offline fast!
Online dating is like shopping for new sneakers on your iPhone —at some point you have to see your “perfect match” in person to know if it’s a good fit.
Transformassacre Week 5: Put Away The Baby Weights
msimone |
Exercise Cleans Out the Body’s Garbage
eyun |
Your cells rely on exercise to help remove damaged parts and debris.
Ripped abs and a four-minute mile aren’t the only benefits of exercise.
Lap-Band surgeries halted at 2 LA clinics
msnbc.com: Diet and nutrition |Two Los Angeles-area outpatient clinics affiliated with the 1-800 GET-THIN marketing company have temporarily stopped Lap-Band weight-loss surgeries while they conduct a review of the procedure.
Exercise and Weight Loss Lesson of the Week: What are your expectations?
exercise |We (or maybe it’s just me) talk a lot about setting realistic fitness and weight loss goals, but you may not realize how important that is. The reason? Every time you fail to meet those expectations, you not only feel bad about yourself, your dopamine levels actually drop, taking you in a downward spiral of frustration and depression. (If you want to learn more, check out David Rock’s Your Brain at Work (compare prices), an excellent discussion of how your brain responds to different situations).
Here’s an example: You wake up in the morning with a plan to exercise after work. You visualize it, maybe even feel a little excited about your coming success. Your expectation? That you’ll still have that energy, that same good feeling as your workout time rolls around.
But what really happens after work? You’re tired, cranky, hungry. Instead of visualizing a great workout, you’re imagining the effort it will take – Finding a parking place, changing clothes, fighting for space and machines…and that’s before you even start exercising. Suddenly, it doesn’t look so appealing and what started out smelling like roses now smells suspiciously like failure. But, is it really failure or could it be your expectations were too high?
Having realistic weight loss expectations starts with knowing what your expectations actually are. Sometimes, we often don’t even realize we have expectations until we don’t meet them. If you find you’re disappointed in yourself more often than not, take a look at your expectations and objectively decide if they’re realistic.
If you step on the scale and feel disappointed, what number were you expecting to see? Were you hoping to lose 5 pounds over night? Is that realistic?
If you vow to eat healthy all day, only to run into the same old temptations and giving into them, what were you expecting of yourself? Did you have all the resources, all the support you needed to deal with those temptations or were those expectations unrealistic?
The good news is, just as unmet expectations cause dopamine levels to drop, every time you meet expectations, those levels go up, making you feel good about yourself and motivating you even more. What do you think? Do unmet expectations keep you stuck in a cycle of frustration and failure? If so, changing your expectations may be just what you need to feel successful.
Exercise and Weight Loss Lesson of the Week: What are your expectations? originally appeared on About.com Exercise on Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 05:00:12.
