ReachFitness.tv Blog

Kristen emailed us recently to keep us posted on her progress and she’s doing great! Her email is posted below.
Congratulations, Kristen!

Hi Rob….
I wanted to send you another update.
I have been so humbled and honored by being on the front page. Your site helped change my life, and I’m glad to help out in some way, hopefully help inspire others to change theirs.

I ran my first 5k last weekend. Came in in 35:15, even with it being the first time running on hills, and first race. Decent enough though, considering I could barely walk 1 mile(much less 3.1!) in that long when I started!

I’ve lost about 75pds total…50 inches total…and 25% of my body fat.
When I cant get to the gym, or go run, I go right back to the site, sweat a bit to my favorite videos, and push myself to the limits on the advanced ones. I’m just really grateful for finding this site over a year ago, and the support that yall’ve given.

This was me in Feb 07

This is me Oct 08

This is my team from the community that are doing fitness challenges together!–I’m in the middle. This was after our 5k)

People who havent seen me in awhile ask “who is that?” when they get around me. And more than my weight has changed…my whole life.
It’s amazing how many walls in my life have fallen because of shedding extra pounds.
I still have a ways to go, I’m still trying to qualify for the US Air Force, but for the first time in my life, I believe I can! I believe I’m able to do whatever in this world that I want to do, no matter what.

Thank you. I just logged onto the site to do some quick exercise, and had to say thank you again.
Thank you for helping me change my life.
Kristen

Kristen is one of the thousands who have joined ReachFitness.tv. Recently, she sent in an update on her progress, along with a before and after picture! Here’s what she had to say:

I just wanted to bring an update. Truthfully, I’m not on ReachFitness anymore as much as I am outside or in the gym with friends. BUT, if not for this site, if not for the confidence that it allowed me to grow, for the physical abilities that the site helped me reach, I’d probably still be at 265, moaning that I was too scared to go to the gym, or too unhealthy (or cheap!) to buy exercise DVDs.

I love having access to the site though. If I’m not able to get to the gym, I can work in a quick cardio routine from 2-3 of the videos. On on my “off” days, I love to do some salsa, or any type of the dancing.

I’m attaching a “before/after” picture. I still have a long way to go, and well, I’ve lost 10 more pds since the ‘after’ picture was taken a couple weeks ago.

I remember asking you about running. Well, instead of waiting, and continuing to wait for someone to tell me how and what to do, I just DID it. I started counting my steps. I couldn’t run but 50 steps at a time, so I did that. Then walked till I caught my breath, and started over. Over and over until I couldn’t do it anymore. As I kept going, I’d just try to take 10 more steps of running(jogging!) each time. Pretty soon, I was able to do intervals. Running the ’straights” and walking the corners of the track, then running full laps while taking a “corner walk” break every now and again.

This morning, I’m out with friends at the track. I’m running with them, encouraging THEM to keep going, keep breathing, “you can do it”, stuff like that. I’m able to run 2 miles without stopping, talking pretty much the whole way. My goal is to join the US Air Force(my husband is currently in the US Army, but should get out soon). Before I started exercising, that my was my dream, and it seems so unrealistic. Now, it seems like I can get there.

I’ve lost 45 total inches, 13 of those off my waist, 10 off my hips. Dropped my body fat 21%. So, even though I have quite a bit to go(I’m about 210pds now, with a 36 inch waist), it looks feasible, it looks possible. And I wanted to thank you and ReachFitness TV for getting me started.

Kristen

If you love guacamole but don’t want all the fat, here’s a low fat version (with peas!) that is surprisingly good. Guac aficionados (like myself) would say all you need for true guacamole is a ripe avocado, clove of garlic, sea salt and a fork. But I’ve made this for friends and it gets requested over and over. It’s from pcrm.org.

Mockamole
(Serves 6)

If you long for your favorite south-of-the-border dip but don’t want the fat of avocado, try this reduced-fat version of guacamole. You can use either green peas or green beans for part of the avocado. Green peas will give this dip a slightly sweet flavor that we found especially appealing.

1 avocado
2 cups cooked peas or 1 cup cooked green beans
2 tablespoons chopped onion
1/4 cup salsa (or more to taste)
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
Salt to taste

Blend the avocado and peas or green beans together in a blender, until smooth. Stir in the onion and salsa. Just before serving, stir in the fresh lime juice and salt. Serve with baked tortilla chips.

Recipe from The Vegetarian No-Cholesterol Family-Style Cookbook, by Kate Schumann and Virginia Messina, M.P.H., R.D.

I was just about to write about the joys of steel-cut oats when a friend sent me an article devoted to them - http://www.thestar.com/article/298472.

Like anything worth eating, they take longer to make than the instant version, about a half hour, but the taste and texture make a world of difference. Also, there are claims that refined, instant oatmeal has a higher glycemic index so it is digested fairly quickly, leaving you hungry sooner than if you ate the unrefined, steel-cut oats (see one such study here).

So if you’re a porridge enthusiast, give the steel-cut a try. At the very least, don’t eat the flavoured instant oats - lots of sugar and salt and garbage in those. Here are the recipes that accompany the article:

Perfect Oatmeal
Honeyed Fig Topping
Oatmeal Banana Brulee
Steel-Cut Oats With Nutty or Dried Fruit Topping

We all know exercise is good for you but a new study suggests it can even make us younger while a sedentary lifestyle can speed up aging.

The study in the Archives of Internal Medicine measured the length of telomeres, protective covers on the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age, on 2,401 white twins and discovered those who exercised more had longer telomeres. Longer telomeres = younger biological age. The authors also suggested that being a couch potato can actually accelerate the aging process. They concluded that doctors should promote the “potentially antiaging effect of regular exercise.”

Facelifts, butt lifts, body lifts be damned - just keep moving to get a younger body! You may not be able to see your telomeres on the outside (perhaps if we did, we’d work harder to keep them long and undamaged!), but you may live longer by taking care of them on the inside.

Now that the holidays are over, we’re hoping to get some new videos up soon, especially to keep you focused on your resolutions. Look for some new yoga videos from Toni soon, and Dexter, as busy as he is, is hoping to add some more advanced kickboxing vids in the coming weeks as well.

In the meantime, I hope you stick to your goals and remember that every day is a chance to make a new resolution, not just January 1st. The most important advice I could give is to simply get in motion. Wake up every morning and be thankful you have a body to move, then move it! Walk for an hour outside, make a gym date with a friend, do a fitness video, climb your stairs. Commit to something and do it.

In terms of nutrition, replace your beverages with water. If you make bigger dietary changes, just remember that you don’t have to change everything at once and that if you falter, don’t feel guilty about it. If you’re eating healthy most of the time, indulging in a big meal or dessert a couple times a week won’t sabotage your goals. You’ll find that your cravings change with healthy eating so give it time and try to stay consistent.

In what is proposed to be the most comprehensive study ever published on the evidence linking cancer risk to diet, physical activity and weight , research links body fat, alcohol, red meat and processed meats to several cancers. The report goes so far to say that “bacon, ham, sausage and luncheon meats should be avoided completely” and that just “48 grams of these processed products consumed per day bumps up the risk of colorectal cancer by 21 per cent”.

While even small amounts of alcohol raised the risk of various cancers, the experts still allowed 2 glasses a day for men and 1 for women given evidence that small amounts also may protect against heart disease.

You should also say good-bye to hamburgers, sugary drinks and pastries.

But before you think you’re sacrificing your happiness just to live longer, understand that your tastes and cravings actually change with your diet. The more fruits and vegetables you eat (the panel suggests the normal 5 or more a day), the less you will crave refined foods high in sugar and fat. It may take a few weeks for your body to realign its cravings, but have faith that it will happen and start turning your life around before it’s too late.

We’re all supposed to get at least 60 minutes of physical activity in our day for optimal health (intensity affects duration, so check out the health benefits page for more info). Most of us, however, ask for more hours in the day just to finish our work, so finding an extra hour just to exercise can be a difficult task. But I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll say it again - you don’t need to do it all at once. You can spread it out really easily throughout the day (especially when using online videos!).

Here’s an example. Set your alarm for 10 minutes earlier tomorrow (we can spare 10 minutes of sleep, can’t we?). Drink a glass of water and head to the computer room and start up 8 Minute Abs 1 or 2. Get on with your day. Come home for dinner. Put that casserole you prepared the night before into the oven to bake for 30 minutes. Do Mixed Interval 1 or 2 and then Quick Stretch 1 or 2 while baking. That alone can be an intense workout so you’ve already reached your daily goal. But if it wasn’t an intense workout and you want to do more, before bed, do The Art of Balance I or Stretch & Relax.

Without scheduling a full hour in the day, you should be able to find 10 or 20 minutes here and there and take advantage of the convenience of the online videos. If you can’t, then perhaps we need to discuss time management issues, but I’ll leave that for another day.

According to the Harvard School of Public Health, 18 million Americans have Type 2 Diabetes, 41 million are pre-diabetic, and kids are getting it at an increasing rate relative to their expanding waistlines. 90% of cases are preventable through exercise and proper eating, yet billions are spent ($132 billion, according to their stats) in treating it and not necessarily preventing it. With blindness, circulatory problems, kidney failure and death listed as symptoms, we should all be more than a little concerned.

In case you missed it from a few weeks ago, here’s an article that describes how combining both aerobic exercise with weight lifting helps to stabilize the blood sugar in diabetics better than if you did just one form of exercise. According to a study co-author, this could “translate into a 15 to 20 per cent reduction in the risk of major cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke”.

That’s fairly significant, so if you have Type 2 Diabetes, or have a lot of excess weight (the leading precursor to Type 2 Diabetes), then get moving to BOTH the cardio videos and body sculpt videos! The immediate result is that you’ll feel better, but the long-term result may just end up saving your life.

We hope you all have enjoyed having free access to many of our fitness videos over the past several months. The word has quickly spread and thousands have joined our humble little site in hopes of getting healthier. But now we will be starting to charge a fee - very small, mind you - for access to all videos while still keeping a choice few available for free.

So, for the price of a couple coffees and donuts (depending on where you buy them; it may be the cost of just one coffee!), 5 bucks a month will keep you on your road to health and wellness. Oh, and we’ll be adding a bunch more videos as well starting with a great intro to balance from Toni, another 8 minute abs and the Ultimate Circuit Challenge for you advanced types out there.

More changes are to come! But while we make site updates and changes, please feel free to report any broken or mistaken links to support@ReachFitness.tv.

Cheers, and keep moving.