Tips of the Day (TOTD)

Nutrition Tip of the Day
Substitution Tip #3: Try substituting applesauce for vegetable oil. It works great in cakes, brownies and breads; and it adds a ton of moisture! You can also use pumpkin instead of applesauce to add some fiber. These substitutions, most of the time, will cut the calorie content in half!

Exercise Tip of the Day
Don’t Base your Progress on Weight Loss/Gain
The best way to track your progress is to measure how your clothes fit and how you feel (Do you have more energy? Are you less stressed?)! As practitioners, we like to use body fat percentage as our tracker. Unless you have access to calipers and a trained professional you may not have this at your fingertips (the electrical scales and handheld models are not very accurate), so the best way to measure your progress is to see how your clothes are fitting—not the scale!
Muscle weighs more than fat; however it has a “higher metabolism” than fat. That simply means that it uses more calories an hour than fat to sustain its functioning (almost 10 times more calories are burned with muscle!). When your body is composed of more muscle, you will burn more calories! That is the reason why Olympic athletes, like Michael Phelps, can eat up to 5,000 calories a day; their bodies are composed of less fat and more muscle (this is what body fat percentage measures). They need more calories to keep up their daily functioning, and they are expending massive amounts of calories in physical activity.
So, don’t worry too much about that scale. In the beginning you may see steady weight loss and then you might hit a plateau. But, rest assured that if you are being diligent and persistent your body will be changing its composition.
This is something that is SOOO important to remember and hard to do! I often forget this and want to see a drastic and steady weight loss (by the way, 2 pounds per week is considered a healthy amount of weight loss)! But, I have to remember this tip often :)