These tips outline the things I did in my winning challenge and some of them are slight variations on Body for Life ‘by the book’.  I think it’s important to complete the 12-week challenge ‘as written’ first without tweaking so that you are familiar with BFL and know how your body responds.  Tweaking is not for newbies, ok?

Once you have decided that you, yes you, are going to set your sights on an especially transformative transformation or that you are taking firm aim at one of the big prizes then there are a few things I learned that can definitely make the difference between a jaw dropping result and a ho-hum one.

1. Get it into your head that you CAN make it happen. Become mentally prepared to succeed.  If you have your eyes on the BFL prize then remind yourself that someone has to win and there is no reason why it can’t be you.  This is just simple reality.  Your body is not fundamentally different from any of the thousands of people that have achieved the sort of results that you see in the Body for Life book. Success is 95% mental and the first step is believing in the possibility of it.  It sounds ‘ooky spooky’ but if you can make time every day to just relax and imagine yourself as you want to be then it really does help you to make the mental adjustment toward believing you can be that person. 

2. Everyone has setbacks.  If it were easy then everyone would be fit and fab.  True winners get over their setbacks quickly and focus on making TODAY count (like Leonardo in Titanic ‘here’s to making it count’).  I finished my winning challenge on Dec 27^th.   I BFL’d through the many Christmas and pre-Christmas functions and sometimes I didn’t keep it together at all!  Luckily, it really is consistency that counts, not perfection.  Yesterday is finished, move on, quickly.

3. Move it!  Seriously, if you are busting your ass in your workouts but otherwise spending all of your waking hours at your desk or on your couch, then you are missing out on UPA (Unstructured Physical Activity) and even NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, or the extra calorie burn that results from UPA). Don’t be afraid to fit more movement into your day.  It won’t destroy your hard-won muscle.  Go for a walk in the morning, take those stairs, join a dance class, move, move, move.

4. You are probably not training with enough intensity.  Don’t feel bad, I thought I was training hard enough until I got a trainer and increased all my weights by 5-10kg in the first session.  You are undoubtedly capable of more than you think, but it won’t be easy or comfortable.  In your final reps with the resistance training and when you are hitting your 10’s in those cardio intervals you should be needing to find a new strength within yourself in order to finish. Try to reach a new level or, as Bill P calls it , a high point in every session. It can be helpful to get a trainer or an experienced partner in order to avoid bad form and injury.  If you are working alone then don’t be shy about getting close to that mirror.  Work as hard as you can without losing your form.  Pain is just weakness leaving your body. ;O)

5. Many BFL Champions made use of extra cardio sessions to crank up their fat loss.  If you are keen on the idea then start small.  The idea is to get a bit of extra moderate activity without compromising the intensity of your regular workouts.  I did 45 mins of moderate cardio in the mornings in addition to my regular HIIT sessions but now I think this was too much.  I have since read that for fatloss the best time to add your moderate cardio is directly after your HIIT, so my suggestion would be to add 20 mins of huffy puffy onto your HIIT sessions.  You should be breathing at a level where you could still hold a (slightly breathless) conversation during this extra cardio.  The extra cardio should be the first thing to go if you feel like you are burning out.

6. Mix it up with cardio.  I know you hate the rowing machine.  That’s just your fat cells crying for mercy.  Your body is remarkably efficient at adapting to any activity and you need to keep it ‘surprised’ in order to progress.  Most people are aware of this principle when it comes to resistance training, but the same is true for cardio.  If all you have is (for example) a treadmill then use it, but try to get outside sometimes, run up a hill.  If you work out at the gym then use all the machines, even the ones you hate. 

7. Don’t be afraid to add green veges to your meals in order to make them more filling and add fibre and nutrients.  Brocolli, courgette, celery, asparagus, all dark leafy greens, cucumber, cauliflower, mushrooms (ok, they are white, but same deal) – all of these have very low energy density and don’t add a hell of a lot of carbs or calories.  Speaking of fibre, you may also want to make use of a fibre supplement like Psyllium to – uh – keep things moving. ;) 

8. There are two things that you may not realise the true importance of.  Although they are not ‘nutrients’, water intake and sleep can have a profound effect on the success of your program.  As well as keeping a bottle of water with you (and actually drinking from it!) at all times, you should also take advantage of foods that contain water.  High water foods like veges, fruit, soups and casseroles not only help keep you hydrated but also help you feel full more quickly.  Lack of sleep plays havoc with your appetite and carb cravings.  Many people with weight problems also have sleeping problems and science is discovering more every day about the strong link between sleep and bodyfat levels.  Sleep requirement is an individual thing, so experiment to see how much sleep makes you feel your best.

9. When it comes to your food, keep it real.  Real food is still superior to a Myoplex bar, yummy as they are (sorry Bill).  You should aim to get most of your nutrition from real food and try to keep your meal replacement bars and shakes to times when you need them for either convenience or to keep your sanity.  The more unprocessed you can make your nutrition, the better off you will be and it’s a good idea to get a few recipes up your sleeve so that you don’t suffer from foodie monotony.  If you go to google and type in ‘Body for Life’ recipes, you will find some tasty things to keep you busy in the kitchen.  It is a good idea to make it your habit to seek out and learn to prepare the least processed foods – that is ‘as found in nature – nothing removed, nothing added.  It is far harder to inadvertently overeat unprocessed foods and your body actually uses energy to break them down thus stoking your metabolic furnace.

10. It’s quite a popular thing to manipulate your carbs in order to hurry along your fat loss.  You don’t need to go crazy about it, but there are a few little tricks that you might like to stow up your sleeve.  The first thing is to educate yourself about the Glycemic Index and attend to your carb quality.  Aim to always choose low-glycemic carbs like kidney beans, steel cut oats and sweet potato.  These foods break down nice and slowly in your system which keeps your hunger and appetite in check for longer. Not all whole foods are low-glycemic, so it’s worth doing a bit of research.  Rice, for example and white potatoes are very high glycemic.  It gets a bit complex because glycemic response varies according to amount eaten and what other foods are eaten at the same time (for example, adding fibre to a meal always brings down the glycemic load) but for now just head over to Nutrition Data and swot up on your low-glycemic carbs.  The exception to the rule is in the hour after you have done a particularly intense training session.  If you want to eat some higher glycemic carbs, have them then, along with some protein.  I know this goes against standard BFL eating,  but it can help your post-exercise recovery.

The next thing with carbs is that some people find it useful to minimise starchy carbs (whole grains, yams etc.) and simple carbs (fruit, dairy, honey etc).  What I did, and it worked very well, is to put those more energy dense carbs at breakfast and lunch if I was training in the morning or at breakfast and dinner if I was training after work and stick to non-starchy carbs for all other meals. 

11. I know it’s very uncool to talk about calories, but like it or not, the BFL program works because, even with Free Day, you should be consistently maintaining a negative calorie balance – that is, over a week, burning more than you eat.  Output > Input.  Therefore it is worth learning a little bit about calories just so that you can choose your foods more exactly if the fat is not leaving at the desired speed.  I am talking about knowing that an egg is 75 calories but an egg-white is only 20.  A piece of bread is about 100 cals and so is a fairly substantial sweet potato.  You learn that making the effort to cut the fat off your meat can save you hundreds of calories.  Knowing these things puts you a little more in control and it is invaluable knowledge for once you get into maintenance.  You don’t want to turn into a jumpy, twitchy, calorie obsessed freak (although most of us go through that phase and it’s probably pointless to try and warn you off it) but just understand the basics.  Again, you can learn all this stuff from Nutrition Data.  I will talk more about calories in a future article – this one is long enough already!  Which leads us on to….

12. Free day!  If you are serious about making this challenge the ‘one that counts’ then you will have to manage Free Day with some more finesse than you might have in the past.  You CAN, I repeat, you CAN undo your efforts for the week with one day of going hoggy-ho.  No lie.  I kept Free Day to an indulgent breakfast on Sunday morning and maybe a large latte or a glass of wine later in the day.  Sad but true.  It’ll all be worth it when your abs show up to play.

To summarise:

1. You are not different to the thousands that have succeeded so far. You can do it too.
2. So you accidentally ate two Big Macs.  Move on, right now.
3. Move your butt, often, and not just in the gym.
4. Aim for intensity in your training.  Reach a new level every day.
5. Add some extra moderate cardio if you think you need it and you still have abundant energy for your intense BFL training.
6. Mix it up with both cardio and resistance training so that your body is always needing to adapt.
7. Learn to love green veges.
8. Water and Sleep.  Important.
9. Choose real, unprocessed food over meal replacements whenever possible.
10. Choose quality low-GI carbs.
11. Educate yourself on the basics of calories and macronutrients
12. Make Free Day your friend, not your nemesis.