Going from Obese to Bikini Body — Briana Case Study (Plus: New Tools, 4-Hour Body Group)

All tactics, no excuses.

This post will explain exactly how Briana, a mother of three and reader of this blog, lost 100 pounds. It’s a lot simpler than you might think.

For additional real-world examples and the fundamentals, I suggest reading “How to Lose 100 Pounds on The Slow-Carb Diet.” There are several men and women profiled.

Sidenote: Many of you have been asking for a free 4-Hour Body support group… so I created it here. It’s designed to improve success rates by 50%+.  In a recent four-week test, 86% of people who finished lost an average of 8.6 pounds.  Many lost more than 20 pounds.  If you’re serious about progress, take a look.

Now, onto our post, which was written by Briana herself. I’ve avoided any major edits to preserve her voice.

Please add any questions or tips of your own to the comment. Both Briana and I will jump in to help…

If you’re meeting me for the first time today, you’d never guess that a little over 1 year ago, I was 100 pounds heavier and the furthest thing from being proud in a bikini.

And if you’d met “the FAT me” a year ago, you probably never would have guessed that the over-weight mother of three was actually an accomplished personal trainer who’d lost 73 pounds years earlier… and gained it all back.

That is really where my introduction to the Slow-Carb Diet (SCD) began.

Five years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom.

I had a husband, two kids, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, and a great dane. I was a young mom in my early 20’s, trying to balance everything and be everything to everyone BUT neglecting myself. I made my family the priority, which was great for them, but I lost myself somewhere along the way. Despite numerous failed attempts to lose weight and get in shape, the scale just kept creeping up.

Fat, depressed, and frustrated, I ended up surfing the internet one day for some new nutrition and training inspiration, when I stumbled across Tim’s blog and the post he wrote on How to Lose 20 lbs of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise. Four paragraphs in, I was HOOKED! I read it, I applied it day-in and day-out, and within 6 months I had not only lost the 73 POUNDS I had gained after having my first two kids, but I had completely transformed my body!

Needless to say, the experience was life-changing. After it, I felt compelled to pursue a career as a certified personal trainer and nutrition specialist. I wanted to empower, educate, and inspire other women to transform their bodies and regain a renewed sense of self — just as I had.

Shortly after I became certified, I went through a devastating divorce. As a newly single-mom, I set out to “4-Hour Workweek” my life, started my own multi-faceted health and wellness company, and spent the last 5 years helping to transform the bodies and lives of hundreds of women around the world in ways they never thought were possible.

Along the way, Tim wrote and released The 4-Hour Body, and my story was featured on national television and throughout numerous editorials, spreads, and fitness publications — the biggest of which was an appearance with Tim on the Dr. Oz show.

And then? I got pregnant with baby #3.

Long story short: despite being a personal trainer and all my previous hard work to be a “weight-loss success story,” I ended up being one of those Mego-Prego women who really went for it! By “went for it” I mean – if my weight gain had been an accurate barometer of my son’s birth weight, I should have given birth to a kindergartner!

From the moment I first found out that I was pregnant I decided to use the “eating for two” excuse. I indulged my cravings, and I packed on the pounds by way of ice-cream, Mexican food, lasagna, and a total break from the adapted SCD nutrition principles I worked so hard to establish in my own life and subsequently teach others.

Needless to say, I exploded over nine months, and by the time I actually gave birth to my 8 lb. 6 oz. bundle of joy, I found myself weighing the heaviest of my life–100 pounds heavier than normal.

So my baby is born… and I find myself asking, “Now what, fatty?”

Faced with the depressing reality that the new weight wasn’t “baby weight” and was really ALL ME, I made it my mission to swiftly re-apply the SCD principles to shed the post-partum pounds in record time.

It began with a commitment to change, and a real look in the mirror.

So many of us are miserable over the current condition of our bodies, we get motivated and inspired by reading stories such as mine, but that’s not enough. We need something lasting. Something that will motivate us to walk away from the bread basket, or in my case — back away from the sour cream twice-baked potato!

For me, that motivation came in the form of photos.

Before I began, I committed to document the entire process via a weekly pictorial where I would stand raw, real, and exposed in front of a camera wearing nothing but the same tiny black bikini. When I felt discouraged, or was having a internal struggle over something I shouldn’t eat, I would look at the photos of where indulging got me — FAT.

I took it one day and one meal at a time.

Beginning the day after I gave birth, I followed every slow-carb principle that is outlined — except for the cheat day.

The reason? I was breast-feeding, and through trial and error, it turned out that keeping my diet consistent by eating the same thing (more or less) everyday was much better for my baby (and my sanity), than trying to sooth a horrific colicky newborn 12-24 hours after binge eating on a “cheat day.”

The biggest SCD keys behind my latest post-pregnancy transformation were:

- Structuring every meal around a lean protein
- Meal frequency (eating every three hours)
- Totally avoiding refined, processed, starchy carbohydrates, and wheat (I came up with some wicked slow-carb recipe option substitutes)
- Eliminating dairy
- Completely cutting out fruit, which was my biggest craving during my pregnancy
- Drinking a gallon of water a day
- Upping my daily fish oil to 1 gram per 1% body fat — liquid form. Obviously, that’d otherwise be quite a few pills.

Just with the slow-carb diet ALONE and ZERO exercise (due to some postpartum recovery issues between week 1 and week 8), I lost 36 POUNDS.

(Click here for larger image)

And 12 months after giving birth, I hit my goal and lost 100 pounds (23 pounds of which were pre-pregnancy), and completely transformed my body.

Consistency is key. A typical day on the SCD might look like this:

Breakfast @ 7am
Egg white frittatas (made with veggies like mushrooms, bell pepper, and onion)

Snack @ 10
Veggies with hummus

Lunch @ 11:30
Usually dinner leftovers from the night before (i.e. Bison marinara sauce over zucchini spaghetti; Tuna stuffed avocados; etc.)

Snack @ 2
Small mixed green salad with chicken, cucumbers, green peppers, and tomatoes with a homemade lemon/garlic vinaigrette

Dinner @ 6
Tilapia fillet served over broiled garlic carrots, and coconut “rice” (cauliflower)

Biggest tip: If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail

As a mom, life can be hectic, and it rarely goes according to plan.

I always prepare ahead of time for those moments with some quick-grab protein snacks. Turkey wrap “roll-ups” with a little hummus and a sliver of bell pepper or cucumber inside is my fave! Or little snack-sized baggies of almonds sprinkled with cinnamon. Hard-boiled “hummus deviled eggs” is another.

Prepare or fail, the choice is yours.

Putting on a bikini 7 days after you give birth is uncomfortable. Some might argue it’s insane.

Standing in front of the bright lights of a professional photographer week-after-week (often times without seeing much change), especially when you’re a personal trainer who is 100 pounds over weight, is humiliating, humbling, and painful.

But transforming my body, documenting the journey, inspiring other mothers, and ultimately founding BikiniBodyMommy.com has been the most empowering 12-month process I’ve ever undergone.

The journey isn’t always easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

My name is Briana. I am a 31-year old mother of three, I’ve lost more than 100 pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet, and I work every day to be a success story.

###

Odds and Ends: New 4-Hour Body Support Group

I always wanted to guarantee that people could achieve rapid fat loss, and now I have the data to prove it.Today I’m launching a second, even bigger challenge on Lift. Think of it as one part training group and one part research experiment.First, join The 4-Hour Body group on Lift. Joining the group will sign you up for five habits from of The 4-Hour Body:- 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up- Measuring your weight, bodyfat %, and total inchesNext, just follow the habits and ‘check in’ each time you have completed one.Talk to other group members! When you set goals alongside other people, it keeps you accountable and leads to better results.  The 4-Hour Body community on Lift is there for this reason — use it!Finally, track your results.  Lift gives you numbers and graphs that show your progress.  Add pictures along the way (don’t forget to take the “before” picture) so that you can really see the changes.And as a final note, the last time I ran this challenge, Lift only had an iPhone version. But they just launched a web app that you can use from your computer or mobile phone.Have fun Posted on June 20th, 2013

View the original article here

A medical study of the Haitian zombie

We hear a lot about zombies these days – in films, in music and even in philosophy – but many are unaware that in 1997 The Lancet published a medical study of three genuine Haitian zombies.

The cases studies were reported by British anthropologist Roland Littlewood and Haitian doctor Chavannes Douyon and concerned three individuals identified as zombies after they had apparently passed away.

The Haitian explanation for how zombies are created involves the distinction between different elements of the human being – including the body, the gwobon anj (the animating principle) and the ti-bon anj, which represents something akin to agency, awareness, and memory.

In line with these beliefs is the fact that awareness and agency can be split off from the human being – and can be captured and stored in a bottle by a bòkò, a type of magician and spirit worker who can be paid to send curses or help individuals achieve their aims.

This purportedly leaves a passive easily-controlled animated body – the zombie – believed to be created to provide free labour on plantations.

Anthropologist Wade Davis claimed to have identified the ingredients of the bòkò’s zombification powder which supposedly included tetrodotoxin – a naturally occurring neurotoxin found in some animals, like the pufferfish, which can cause temporary coma-like states.

I won’t say much more about the ‘neurotoxin’ theory of zombification, not least because it was brilliantly covered by science writer Mo Costandi and I couldn’t improve on his fantastic article which will tell you everything you need to know.

But on the cultural level, zombies are identified by specific characteristics – they cannot lift up their heads, have a nasal intonation, a fixed staring expression, they carry repeated purposeless actions and have limited and repetitive speech.

This means that they are easily identified by the community and Littlewood and Douyon’s study was a medical investigation into three ‘returned zombies’ – each of which was identified as a member of the family who had died and who had returned with the characteristic features.

FI was a 30-year-old woman who had died after a short illness and was buried next to the house, only for her to be recognised in a zombified state three years later by her family, wandering near to her village.

WD died at the age of 18 shortly after his “eyes turned yellow” and his body “swelled up” and was buried in a family tomb. He was identified as a zombie at a cockfight eight years after he had been buried.

MM was a young woman who also died at 18 after a short illness, but who was identified 13 years later in the town market, walking around in the characteristic detached shambling way.

While the families put their fate down to sorcery, a full medical examination was carried out by the two doctors, including the use of EEG and CT brain scans.

FI showed no neurological damage but was diagnosed with catatonic schizophrenia, a very withdrawn form of psychosis. WD was found to have brain damage, probably from lack of oxygen, and epilepsy, which could be treated with drugs. MM was found to a developmental learning disability, probably caused by her alcoholism when her mother was pregnant with her.

The fact that doctors gave medical explanations for people identified as zombies is, perhaps, no big surprise, but most interesting was that DNA and fingerprinting tests that showed that two of the zombies were cases of mistaken identity. They weren’t the dead relatives that the families thought they were.

The authors of the study noted that it is unlikely that there is a single explanation for all people identified as zombies and there was a hint that the ‘neurotoxin’ theory could explain some cases. Two types of ‘zombification’ powder from local bòkòs were tested, and, in line with Wade Davis’s ideas, tetrodotoxin was found.

But more probable is that most cases are mistaken identification of wandering mentally ill or neurologically impaired strangers by bereaved relatives.

They noted “People with a chronic schizophrenic illness, brain damage, or learning disability are not uncommonly met with wandering in Haiti, and they would be particularly likely to be identified as lacking volition and memory which are characteristics of a zombi.”

Interestingly, the first known photograph of a zombie, shown above, was taken by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and reproduced in her 1938 book Voodoo Gods where it notes that the subject was photographed in a psychiatric hospital, which makes more sense in light of this more recent medical examination.

It’s worth making a final point that while zombies are a particularly well-known aspect of Haitian culture, thanks to the stereotypes and Hollywood hijacking, traditional Haitian psychology and related concepts of illness are hugely fascinating topics in themselves.

If you want to lose yourself in another understanding of ourselves and the world, you could do much worse than reading the World Health Organisation’s short report ‘Culture and Mental Health in Haiti’ which is available online as a pdf. The whole report is fascinating but start at the section on ‘Religion’ from page 6 if you want to get straight to the psychology.

Link to locked case study in The Lancet.
Link to Mo Costandi’s “The ethnobiology of voodoo zombification”.
pdf of WHO report on ‘Culture and Mental Health in Haiti’.

View the original article here

How To Revamp Your Study Habits For Better Grades

More and more people are going back to school to take courses to get further qualifications these days. These like-minded people want to improve themselves for better futures. These mature students, along with current students in college or university, may find it a real challenge to keep up with all the studying required to do well in their courses. Indeed, this is very much related to productivity issues of getting enough done.

When I started in university many years ago, it was a bit of a culture shock. One of the most extreme differences on campus compared to high school was that the professors didn’t really seem to care whether I showed up for classes or not. In some classes, many students were even falling asleep.

I enjoyed this freedom of showing up for classes whenever I wanted. But the rude awakening soon came when I got my first set of grades. My marks sank to ‘C’ averages and I was even at risk of failing a course or two.

My study habits were poor and last minute cramming for tests or exams made university life quite stressful. Some things had to change as I faced the possibility of dropping out of university without a degree. If you are either a current or returning student, I’m sure that you don’t want to be in this type of situation either.

Fortunately, I stumbled onto a study skills strategy that saved me. This method virtually eliminates the need to cram for exams. I started using this strategy to completely change my study habits and it made a huge difference for me.

This study strategy is ideal especially for courses that involve final exams that cover all material that was introduced during a semester or entire year. Here is what this strategy involves.

For each of your courses, schedule a regular study session each week.Stick to this study session schedule faithfully like a job.During each study session, review everything that you have covered in your course so far from day one to present.Continue reviewing all content each week even if you don’t have an upcoming test or exam.

Although there will be more material to cover each week for each course as you move along the semester, covering earlier material will become faster as you become more familiar with them each week. You might not have to increase that much time to each study session as the year goes by.

The beauty of this study habits strategy is that by the time final exams roll around, you will be quite familiar with most of the course content because you have been reviewing it each week.

Using this strategy will allow you to go into your final exams with much more confidence than ever before. The only new material is the most recent since older content will be well absorbed into your head from all those weeks of regular study.

This study strategy worked wonders for me as it took me from a ‘C’ average student to ‘B+/A-’ average by graduation. This not only allowed me to finish my degree successfully, it got me into MBA school where I needed to have even better study habits in place.

So there it is – my top study skills strategy that basically involves weekly review of everything that you’ve covered in your courses to date. So no more cramming for exams needed!

(Photo credit: Close-up photograph of a perfect grade via Shutterstock)

Clint Cora is a motivational speaker, author & Karate World Champion based near Toronto, Canada. Get his FREE 3-part Personal Development Video Series on how to expand your comfort zone and finally conquer even your most daunting goals in life.

View the original article here

Make study more effective, the easy way

Decades old research into how memory works should have revolutionised University teaching. It didn’t.

If you’re a student, what I’m about to tell you will let you change how you study so that it is more effective, more enjoyable and easier. If you work at a University, you – like me – should hang your head in shame that we’ve known this for decades but still teach the way we do.

There’s a dangerous idea in education that students are receptacles, and teachers are responsible for providing content that fills them up. This model encourages us to test students by the amount of content they can regurgitate, to focus overly on statements rather than skills in assessment and on syllabuses rather than values in teaching. It also encourages us to believe that we should try and learn things by trying to remember them. Sounds plausible, perhaps, but there’s a problem. Research into the psychology of memory shows that intention to remember is a very minor factor in whether you remember something or not. Far more important than whether you want to remember something is how you think about the material when you encounter it.

A classic experiment by Hyde and Jenkins (1973) illustrates this. These researchers gave participants lists of words, which they later tested recall of, as their memory items. To affect their thinking about the words, half the participants were told to rate the pleasentness of each word, and half were told to check if the word contained the letters ‘e’ or ‘g’. This manipulation was designed to affect ‘depth of processing’. The participants in the rating-pleasentness condition had to think about what the word meant, and relate it to themselves (how they felt about it) – “deep processing”. Participants in the letter-checking condition just had to look at the shape of the letters, they didn’t even have to read the word if they didn’t want to – “shallow processing”. The second, independent, manipulation concerned whether participants knew that they would be tested later on the words. Half of each group were told this – the “intentional learning” condition – and half weren’t told, the test would come as a surprise – the “incidental learning” condition.

I’ve made a graph so you can see the effects of these two manipulations

As you can see, there isn’t much difference between the intentional and incidental learning conditions. Whether or not a participant wanted to remember the words didn’t affect how many words they remembered. Instead, the major effect is due to how participants thought about the words when they encountered them. Participants who thought deeply about the words remembered nearly twice as many as participants who only thought shallowly about the words, regardless of whether they intended to remember them or not.

The implications for how we teach and learn should be clear. Wanting to remember, or telling people to remember, isn’t effective. If you want to remember something you need to think about it deeply. This means you need to think about what you are trying to remember means, both in relationship to other material you are trying to learn, and to yourself. Other research in memory has shown the importance of schema – memory patterns and structures – for recall. As teachers, we try and organise our course material for the convenience of students, to best help them understand it. Unfortunately, this organisation – the schema – for the material then becomes part of the assessment and something which students try to remember. What this research suggests is that, merely in terms of remembering, it would be more effective for students to come up with their own organisation for course material.

If you are a student the implication of this study and those like it is clear : don’t stress yourself with revision where you read and re-read textbooks and course notes. You’ll remember better (and understand much better) if you try and re-organise the material you’ve been given in your own way.

If you are a teacher, like me, then this research raises some distrurbing questions. At a University the main form of teaching we do is the lecture, which puts the student in a passive role and, essentially, asks them to “remember this” – an instruction we know to be ineffective. Instead, we should be thinking hard, always, about how to create teaching experiences in which students are more active, and about creating courses in which students are permitted and encouraged to come up with their own organisation of material, rather than just forced to regurgiate ours.

Reference: Hyde, T. S., & Jenkins, J. J. (1973). Recall for words as a function of semantic, graphic, and syntactic orienting tasks. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 12(5), 471–480.

View the original article here

Therapy for Social Anxiety Changes the Brain? Study Says Yes

 Time management and organization skills from an ADD expert. by Dr. Stephanie Sarkis Therapy for Social Anxiety Changes the Brain? Study Says Yes Social Anxiety Therapy: Can It Change Brain Waves? Published on March 21, 2011

A study uses an EEG to measure brain wave differences before and after psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder:

ScienceDaily (2011-02-14) - When psychotherapy is helping someone get better, what does that change look like in the brain? This was the question a team of psychological scientists set out to investigate in patients suffering from social anxiety disorder.

The study recruited 25 adults with social anxiety disorder from a Hamilton, Ontario clinic. The patients participated in 12 weekly sessions of group cognitive behavior therapy, a structured method that helps people identify - and challenge - the thinking patterns that perpetuate their painful and self-destructive behaviors.

Related Links Soothe Your Senses with LavenderCan't Wait!Mirror, Mirror in the GymFish Oil Effective for Depression - Without Causing Sexual Dysfunction!Better Mood, Better Performance: Happiness Helps Us Make Good Decisions...Sometimes Find a Therapist

Search for a mental health professional near you.

Find Local:AcupuncturistsChiropractorsMassage TherapistsDentistsand more!

Two control groups - students who tested extremely high or low for symptoms of social anxiety - underwent no psychotherapy.

The patients were given four EEGs - two before treatment, one halfway through, and one two weeks after the final session. The researchers collected EEG measures of the participants at rest, and then during a stressful exercise: a short preparation for an impromptu speech on a hot topic, such as capital punishment or same-sex marriage; participants were told the speech would be presented before two people and videotaped. In addition, comprehensive assessments were made of patients' fear and anxiety.

When the patients' pre- and post-therapy EEGs were compared with the control groups', the results were revealing: Before therapy, the clinical group's delta-beta correlations were similar to those of the high-anxiety control group and far higher than the low-anxiety group's. Midway through, improvements in the patients' brains paralleled clinicians' and patients' own reports of easing symptoms. And at the end, the patients' tests resembled those of the low-anxiety control group.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110214142344.htm

 

View the original article here

Smart Study

Mastering Web Application Development Using Visual InterDev 6 is designed to teach developers how to build dynamic, data-driven Web applications. Developers will learn to integrate Dynamic HTML, data from multiple sources, and server-side COM components into their Web applications using the Microsoft Visual InterDev Web development system, Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Internet Information Server.

Price:

Click here to buy from Amazon

How to Study Effectively (Not Just for Students!)

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

View the original article here