One of the biggest nutritional mistakes people make outside the gym is focusing on getting lots of protein for muscle recovery and starches for energy but then not getting enough fruits and vegetables.

I’m sure when you were a child your mother always told you to eat your fruits and vegetables! Why was this so important? This was so important because she new and was taught that fruits and vegetables were so important for you to grow up healthy and strong.

Now that you are older and full grown many of you have abandoned the fact that you still NEED your fruits and vegetables every day!

Why are fruits and vegetables so important? Lets take a look at some of the health benefits of fruits and vegetables:

-Fruits and vegetables are LOADED with fiber, vitamins and minerals that are crucial for tissue growth, repair and many other important body functions. The fiber, vitamins and minerals in fruit and vegetables are also shown to help treat, and prevent many chronic diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and stroke!

- Fruits and vegetables are full of many phytochemicals that are important for optimal mental function. Do you suffer from depression, or attention disorders? Eat your fruits and veggies!

-Fruits and vegetables provide an alkaline load to the blood. Since proteins and grains present acids loads to the blood. Eating fruits and vegetables every meal will help prevent an acid/alkaline imbalance. Too much acid and not enough alkaline means loss of bone strength, and muscle mass, which means more body fat!

- Fruits and vegetables will help fill you up and control your appetite and blood sugar which in turn will help with maintaining energy and fat burning.

Make sure to get a healthy variety, think color. Eating fruits and vegetables of different colors gives your body a wide range of valuable nutrients, like fiber, folate, potassium, and vitamins A and C. Some examples include green spinach, orange sweet potatoes, black beans, yellow corn, purple plums, red watermelon, and white onions. For more variety, try new fruits and vegetables regularly.

You can not go wrong with eating fruits and veggies every meal! I recommend 2-3 servings (1/2 cup) of fruits and vegetables at each and every meal. This would be around 10-15 servings if you eat frequent supportive meals.

“Yeah right!?” “How the heck can I get 10 servings of fruits and veggies every day?”

Fresh and frozen fruits and veggies are ALWAYS recommended. But the next best option is VGF 25 +. This not a multivitamin this is a whole food super pill with 25 fruits and vegetables, antioxidants, essential good fats, and amino acids.

This is usually everything your body is lacking if you’re not eating healthy frequent meals, if you’re lacking fruits and vegetables, or even if you think you’re eating healthy. VGF 25 + will fill in all those nutrition gaps most people suffer from. That’s why I personally take it myself 3 times a day and have and put my name on the line recommending it to my clients.

This supplement was designed to fill in nutritional gaps that most suffer from. it was designed by registered dieticians, and nutritionists.

Just a reminder if you take a Centrum or Meijer vitamin you are getting synthetic vitamins made in a lab with lots of chemicals! YIKES!

You can not go wrong with VGF 25+ all natural whole food vitamin.

You can read more about VGF 25 + and its benefits below.

for women click HERE

for men click HERE

Your Fitness and Nutrition Coach,

~David Modderman

2) Cutting Out Carbs with no strategy in place.

The low carb diet craze has been in effect for over decade. Some of the more popular diets like Atkins and South Beach were two of the better known diets where you eliminate the majority of starchy carbohydrates in your diet and some things like fruit as well. This is a major mistake as an effective solution to long term fat loss. Why are carbs so important?

Carbohydrates are your bodies preferred source of energy. Meaning for you to have steady energy and blood sugar throughout the day you need to have carbohydrates in our diet. Why have the low carb diets worked so well for people to lose weight in the short term?

When you eat carbohydrates your body will use them for immediate energy/fuel and also store them as glycogen in your muscle in your liver for reserved energy. Most people are not aware that glycogen holds and attracts water. For every gram of glycogen your muscle holds it attracts 2.4 grams of water.

So when you eat carbohydrates your body will instantly hold more water. When you suddenly just stop eating carbs your body will hold less water. Make sense? So people who weigh themselves daily after cutting out carbs will see a 5-10 pound weight loss in just a few days. So in your mind Carbs =make you fat. However, you’re not losing fat your losing water. Water is temporary and meaningless in regards to weight loss. Your goal is to lose that ugly fat around your waist and behind and not just weight correct? Then you need to stop just cutting out carbs and have a real strategy to lose fat and keep it off.

The first strategy of carbs is to make sure you are getting the right ones. There are some carbs that are very healthy for you and needed and some that are very bad for you. You want to get all natural non processed carbs which are high in fiber and low in sugar

Good sources of carbs are foods like: sweet potatoes, apples, old fashioned steel cut oatmeal, and broccoli. (almost all fruits and veggies)

Bad sources: candy, potato chips, donuts (pretty much any food with simple sugar and white flour)

What if I told you carbs are essential for long term fat loss? There is no magic to just cutting out carbs. Just cutting out carbs with no strategy in place can really backfire.

A few things will happen on a very low carb diet:

1) Lose water weight (which is temporary and meaningless)
2) Mess up metabolism and lose lean muscle mass which will lead to more fat storage
3) Slow production of thyroid hormone

I educate my clients on how to eat the RIGHT carbs the RIGHT way to reach whatever goal they have whether it is to lose lots of fat or gain lots of muscle. Eating carbohydrates to see the best results and reach your goals requires proper knowledge and strategy. Do you know eating the right carbs at the right times during the day on a fat loss plan can accelerates fat loss by 50%? You need to learn not how to cut carbs but HOW to strategically manipulate/cycle them for the best results.

Contact me now to learn how to cycle and manipulate carbs to increase fat loss by 50%!

Your Fitness and Nutrition Coach,

~David Modderman

This is a problem and I will explain why:

A calorie is a unit of heat or energy. Every time you move you conduct heat and energy therefore your body actually needs calories to function and yes to burn more calories. Most people when I say the word “calorie” associate this with something negative. Many are wired to believe just by watching how many calories they eat alone is a successful weight loss plan. This is flawed because one would assume and are taught a calorie is a calorie. This is not true. Maybe, a calorie is a calorie outside the body but as soon as it’s put in your mouth and swallowed/digested it changes.

For example a 270 calorie Snickers candy bar compared to a 270 calorie 7 ounce grilled skinless chicken breast are equal in calories but do you think they are digested the same? Do you think they affect your metabolism and blood sugar levels the same? NO!

A candy bar will have a big ingredient list (many unnatural) and it will most likely contain a lot of fat (some trans fat –hydrogenated oils -the number one cause for heart disease) and lots of sugar, this sugar will spike your blood sugar levels and then it will crash it leaving you feeling like you want to take a nap about 15-30 minutes after eating it. After your blood sugar crashes you will eventually crave more sugar or fat to bring blood sugar back to normal…unfortunately blood sugar will never stabilize from this food. The candy bar contains fat and sugar and comes with very little natural ingredients so this will have little or no effect on your metabolism. (0-.5% increase on metabolism during digestion)

Snickers ingredients are: milk chocolate (sugar, cocoa butter, chocolate, skimmed milk, lactose, milkfat, soy lecithin, artificial flavor), peanuts, corn syrup, sugar, skimmed milk, butter, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, lactose (a milk product), salt, egg whites and artificial flavor.

So let’s now take a look at that 270 calorie 7 ounce grilled chicken breast. The chicken breast will contain mostly lean protein; it has only one ingredient CHICKEN. It has little fat and contains almost all protein (the most thermic macro nutrient)so this would literally have a very positive leveling effect on your blood sugar give you stable energy and increase your metabolism by up to 20-40% during digestion. The chicken breast will also fill up you longer than any candy bar would.

Still think a calorie is just a calorie? If your goal is long term fat loss the ingredients are much more important than the just calories. Most fail to realize how many calories they actually need to burn fat it’s probably a lot more than your 800-1200 calorie diet plan, and if this all you are all eating good luck losing fat and keeping it off for the rest of your life.
If you’re buying 100 snack packs of cookies thinking this is a good way to lose fat (not just weight) and keep it off you are severely misinformed. One hundred calorie pack of cookies or a 200 calories serving of natural hummus and carrots which is better for weight loss? The hummus of course! Look at the ingredients first not just the calories!

Avoid anything with a long list of unnatural ingredients no matter what the calories are and what it says about being healthy on the front of the package. You should be looking for and eating real whole natural foods and ingredients.

Look for Mistake #2 next week!

Your Fitness and Nutrition Coach,
~David Modderman

Mistake #4 -Doing only ab exercises and thinking the crunch machines will burn fat.

In Mistake #1 – I discussed how doing only cardio and no weight training is not an effective strategy to see results no matter your goals. Resistance training is a must. Yet, some think just doing abdominal and stomach exercises are all the resistance training they need to do. The thought process is “I want to lose my stomach so that’s all I need to work.”

It’s impossible to go to a busy gym and not see someone doing stomach exercises. When I used to work at the big box gym I was amazed by how many people I would see just doing ab exercises and cardio and then come to me because they were not seeing results. I still to this day see people using all the different ab machines and doing hundreds of crunches forward and to the side, and back and forth, twisting, and crunching. In their mind they are targeting areas and crunching that fat away.

The spot reduction method has been around for decades and will probably never die. It seems everyone wants to reduce their waistline and marketers know this is by giving us fat wraps, fat burning creams, ab belts, and hundreds of ab devices you can buy off TV. People will always ask me one burning question about all these products do they work? Do they burn fat off your stomach? “NO!” There is not a cream, ab device. or wrap that will burn fat off your stomach. So is doing hundreds of crunches a waste of time? No, because you can definitely strengthen your stomach muscles especially if you are doing the right exercises but these exercises will not burn fat. Even though we are told and people still believe I am here to tell you cannot pick the one spot you want to burn fat and do one exercise to target that area and lose fat in the area alone. Fat is burned by your muscles proportionally throughout your body. How do you lose fat off your stomach then? You can lose fat by following a structured full body (not just stomach) resistance training, moderate aerobic exercise, and solid nutrition.

So if you want to abdominal/stomach exercises to strengthen your stomach and core and not necessarily burn fat what are the best and the worst?

Let’s start with the worst. If you want to strengthen your stomach and core (your lower back, oblique’s, abs, and pelvis muscles) then get off the ab/crunch machines.

The crunch machines you see at commercial gyms are probably the most over used and most ineffective machines for strengthening your core and seeing results at your waistline. Not mention most of the time when I see people using this machine they’re using lots of weight and their momentum to propel themselves forward rather than using muscular control. Secondly, the abs hardly even contract during this exercise, and when they do it is a very brief period. The sad thing is many trainers or gym employees at the gym actually give this machine to their clients or members as an effective way to strengthen their core and burn fat off their stomach. Also, if this employee was educated they would know these machines target only the anterior (front) muscles of the abdominal wall and will do little for their client. I see a lot of people who use this machine religiously everyday and they are actually creating an imbalance because they are strengthening the front muscles and not the stabilizers, back and sides. This will create an imbalance because a crunch machine is a stable hunk of metal and it will only isolate the front muscles, the side, lower back and stomach stabilizers muscle will not be activated this will lead to a weak back and strong front.

The most effective and efficient way to work your stomach muscles and core is to do exercises that work all your stomach muscles in harmony. The best way to do this is to train your core and abs in an unstable environment by using a stability ball, bosu ball and using body weight on the floor or ab board. Doing exercises like squats, and dead lifts are great for your core as well as isolation stomach exercises like stability ball crunches, planks, and bosu ball jackknifes in an unstable environment with proper form will allow you to strengthen your entire core safely and effectively.

In summary:

1) Ab exercises are not effective for burning fat off your stomach. Focusing on eating the right foods, do full body resistance training, and moderate aerobic exercise will be much more effective.

2) If you want to train your core effectively get off the machines and focus on doing full body exercises like squats, dead lifts, and isolation exercises like stability ball crunches and planks.

Look for Mistake #5 Coming soon!