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Think about how we maintain our skin by exfoliating on a regular basis to create a clean environment for you skin grow and be healthy. You can exfoliate your bad habits the same way.

All those underlining bad habits that sit below the surface need to be systematically cleansed and removed over a period of time.

If left unexfoliated, it makes it hard for you skin to remove those dead cells and this can harvest a lot of nasty germs and bacteria. Similarity if we don’t exfoliate those undesirable habits or thoughts, then this leads to a proliferation of the bad habits that will continue until they have been at addressed.

So don’t be too hard on yourself regarding immediately removing these bad habits as they were created over a period of time and require similar period to be reprogrammed and replaced with good stuff.

So you have to continuously exfoliate those thoughts, reprogram those neurological pathways.

Quite often these habits may develop from an incident that happened some time ago, your feelings of self-worth and self-esteem may have been compromised.

All these bad habits that require exfoliating are what I call junk thoughts that circulate around in the mind, they can quickly overtake and have them commanding role in our actions.

This morning, funny exercise quote from Fitmate who just returned from a romantic island honeymoon.
After being together for over 10 years, our fitmate had done very little intense exercise outside a regular fitness class.

Well the new hubby was shocked when our fitmate had voluntarily got up to go for a run along the beach, while this is great to see, it was equally surprising for the hubby to see this new found energy.
Maybe our bootcamps aren’t for everyone but it’s great to see it having a positive effect on someones life with new healthy habits being adopted.

After years of performing the same habits, it can be challenging to introduce new patterns of behavior. Our mind is a powerful thing can can accomplish anything if you truly believe.

It’s the simple things that help weight loss, today’ tip is about resisting the temptation to buy all the energy rich, fatty food that tastes yummy but is hard to resist.

I was talking to a Fitmate who lacked the self control and discipline when it came to chocolate and ice cream. Actually I’d say a lot of people have a weakness, especially the home made variety. Rather than rationing the chocolate over a few weeks or even a month it became a competitive eating event to finish off the sweets as soon as possible. Every hour of every day, the temptation was too strong to resist, whether you are eating for emotional reasons, for comfort or enjoyment it’s these re-occurring thought patterns that take over.

The simple solution is too remove the temptation all together by simply not buying the sweets in the first place. I’m not saying to go cold turkey and remove the fun food from your life but key strategies need to be adopted until the thought patterns leading to chocolate eating feasts are changed.

Like anything is life, if you can get through the cold turkey period of withdrawals, in time your body will no longer crave these sugary, fatty treats. Belive it or not, your body can adapt to change.

While riding I met Ben who has continued his weight training regime and maintains the muscle mass while cycling 300km per week.

What it interesting is that there is a belief that high levels of cardiovascular fitness training can work against a person wishing to maintain the hard work performed by weight training.

Well Ben is testament that after a long period of weight training, in Bens case 20 years, the muscles develop a memory meaning that after a long period of resistance training, the muscles will not contract or turn to fat. With regualr training the muscles become stronger and more efficient at processing contractions. Your brain creates these neurological pathways, similar to my field of wheat example whereby if you keep walking down the same pathway, these become deep well highlighted tracks that are easy to follow.

Think about a person who has been jogging through out their life and they take a break for 6 months, when they resume jogging the time to regain there formal fitness levels are shorter to someone who runs infrequently over a similar period.

The main thing is to maintain regular weight training and manage the energy intake of carbohydrates, protein and fats.

If the equation is skewed to greater energy expenditure than intake, you body will use the energy stores of glycogen, fats and then breaking down muscle for energy, not a good thing. This process is called catabolism where by the body utilises other form of glucose in the body for energy production and starts to break down muscle tissue in the absence carbohydrate.

Think of your mind like an orchestra, you are the conductor in control of your thoughts.
There are different sections of the orchestra, woodwind, brass, strings and percussion as you have in your mind, happiness, sadness, joy, fear, greed and many more forming part of the overall sound produced.

The great thing is that you are the conductor and can choose which thoughts to include. Imagine if you were Beethoven composing the 5th symphony and all of the sudden you heard the sounds of tribal drums banging out the bass in the background.
Now just because beethoven heard these sounds does he need to take ownership and include them in this composition? They would be dismissed as Beethoven has the control over what is composed, what is appropriate to the piece for the overall feeling and sound.

Now fast forward to 2009, you are saying to yourself that you really wont to lose weight, feel healthier and have the energy to play with you children, yet in the background all of these random thoughts are circulating: you’re hopeless, you’re fat, you’re a loser, who am I kidding, it’s too hard, why bother.

Like a conductor we must control which thoughts we keep and take ownership for while the junk thoughts get thrown in the rubbish bin.
The great thing is we can control the thoughts the same way a conductor controls the orchestra, imagine if in the opening sonata that the trombone player starts to play either at the wrong time or something which is not part of the musical piece, what happens? Is the trombone player allowed to continue or is he swiftly ordered to cease playing?

Similarly take control of the junk thoughts and only keep the positive thoughts just like the orchestra take control.