Dear Readers, I thought you would enjoy and benefit from this article by Tom Venuto titled, How Do Bodybuilders And Fitness models Get So Lean? I know I have.  Duane

Questions and Answers:

By Tom Venuto, CSCS, NSCA-CPT

QUESTION: “Tom, on your www.burnthefat.com website, you wrote: ‘Who better to model than bodybuilders and fitness competitors? No athletes in the world get as lean as quickly as bodybuilders and fitness competitors. The transformations they undergo in 12 weeks prior to competition would boggle your mind!

Only ultra-endurance athletes come close in terms of low body fat levels, but endurance athletes like triathaletes and marathoners often get lean at the expense of chewing up much of their lean muscle.”

There seems to be a contradiction unless I’m missing something. Why do bodybuilders and fitness competitors have to go through a 12 week ‘transformation’ prior to every event instead of staying ‘lean and mean’ all the time? If they practice the secrets exposed in your book, shouldn’t be staying in great shape all the time instead of having to work at losing fat prior to every competitive event?”

ANSWER: Thanks for your question. There’s a logical explanation for why bodybuilders and other physique athletes (fitness and figure competitors), don’t remain completely ripped all year round, and it’s the very reason they are able to get so ripped on the day of a contest…

You can’t hold a peak forever or it’s not a “peak”, right? What is the definition of a peak? It’s a high point surrounded by two lower points isn’t it? Therefore, any shape you can stay in all year round is NOT your “peak” condition.

The intelligent approach to nutrition and training (which almost all bodybuilders  and fitness/figure competitors use), is to train and diet in a seasonal or cyclical fashion and build up to a peak, then ease off to a maintenance or growth phase.

I am NOT talking about bulking up and getting fat and out of shape every year, then dieting it all off every year. What I’m talking about is going from good shape to great shape, then easing back off to good shape…. but never getting “out of shape.”

Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Here’s an example: I have no intentions whatsoever of walking around 365 days a year at 4% body fat like I appear in the photo on my website. Truth be told, that is day of contest condition.

Off-season (when I’m not competing), my body fat is usually between 8 – 10%. Mind you, that’s very lean and still single digit body fat.I don’t stray too far from competition shape, but I don’t maintain contest shape all the time. It takes me about 10-12 weeks or so to gradually drop from 9% to 3.5%-4.0% body fat to “peak” for competition with NO loss of lean body mass, using the same techniques I reveal in my e-book.

It would be almost impossible to maintain 4% body fat, and even if I could, why would I want to? For the few weeks prior to competition I’m so depleted, ripped, and even “drawn” in the face, that complete strangers walk up and offer to feed me.

Okay, so I’m just kidding about that, but let’s just say being “being ripped to shreds” isn’t a desirable condition to maintain because it takes such a monumental effort to stay there.

It’s probably not even healthy to try forcing yourself to hold extreme low body fat. Unless you’re a natural “ectomorph” (skinny, fast metabolism body type), your body will fight you and you’ll always be hungry.

Not only that, anabolic hormones may drop and sometimes your immune system is affected as well (and I hate to say this, but sometimes – for some people – even the, uh… “reproductive functions”… decline a bit when you’re that lean).

Hey, I’m just being honest. It’s just not “normal” to walk around all the time  with literally NO subcutaneous body fat.

Instead of attempting to hold the peak, I cycle back into a less demanding off-season program and avoid creeping beyond 9.9% body fat. Some years I’ve stayed leaner – like 6-7%, (which takes effort), especially when I knew I would be photographed, but I don’t let my body fat go over 10%. Thats “the line” I draw – it’s like a personal “rule” for me.

This practice isn’t just restricted to bodybuilders. Athletes in all sports use periodization to build themselves up to their best shape for competition.

Is a pro football player in the same condition in March-April as he is in August-September? Probably not. Many show up fat and out of shape (relatively speaking) for training camp, others just need fine tuning, but none are in peak form… that’s why they have training camp!!!

There’s another reason you wouldn’t want to maintain a “ripped to shreds” physique all year round – you’d have to be dieting (calorie restricted) all the time. And this is one of the reasons that 95% of people can’t lose weight and keep it off - they are CHRONIC dieters… always on some type of diet. Know anyone like that?

You can’t stay on restricted low calories indefinitely. Sooner or later your metabolism slows down and you plateau as your body adapts to the chronically lowered food intake and reduced body weight.

But if you diet for fat loss and push incredibly hard for 3 months, then ease off for a while and eat a little more (healthy food, not “pigging out”), your metabolic rate is re-stimulated.

In a few weeks or months, you can return to another fat loss phase and reach an even lower body fat level, until you finally reach the point that’s your happy maintenance level for life – a level that is healthy and realistic – as well as visually appealing.

That’s how we physique athletes do it…

Bodybuilders have discovered a methodology for losing fat that’s so effective, it puts them in complete control of their body composition. They’ve mastered  this area of their lives and will never have to worry about it again.

If they ever “slip” and fall off the wagon like all humans do at times … no problem! They know how to get back into shape fast.

Bodybuilders have the tools and knowledge to hold a low body fat all year round(such as 9% for men, or about 15% for women), and then at a whim, to reach a temporary “peak” of extremely low body fat for the purpose of competition.

Maybe most important of all, they have the power and control to slowly ease back from peak shape into maintenance, and not balloon up and yo-yo like most conventional dieters.

What if you had the power to stay lean all year round, and then get super lean when summer rolled around, or when you took your vacation to the Caribbean, or when your wedding date was coming up?

Wouldn’t you like to be in control of your body like that? Isn’t that the same thing that bodybuilders and fitness/figure competitors do, only on a more practical, real-world level?

So even if you have no intention of ever being a bodybuilder, don’t you agree that there’s something of value everyone could learn from physique athletes?

Don’t model yourself after the huge crowd of “losers” who gobble diet pills, buy exercise gimmicks and suffer through starvation diets like automatons, only to  gain back everything they lost! Instead, learn from the leanest athletes on Earth - natural bodybuilders and fitness competitors…

These physique athletes get as ripped as they want to be, exactly when they want to, simply by manipulating their diets in a cyclical fashion between pre-contest “cutting” programs and off season “maintenance” or “muscle growth” programs.

Even if you have no desire to ever compete, try this seasonal “peaking” approach yourself and you’ll see that it can work as well for you as it does for elite bodybuilders.

If you’re interested in learning even more secrets of bodybuilders and fitness models, visit the Burn The Fat website at: http://www.BurnTheFat.com

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto,
Fat loss coach
http://www.BurnTheFat.com

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burnthefat.com

Source: By PETE BARLAS, INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY

Jane Mark and business partner Phil Basten sought a faster way than e-mail to link business clients with their customers.

Jane Mark stresses the fact that her startup service, Sokule, was generating revenue right out of the gate.

The owners of online ad agency Jam Marketing considered using Twitter to do this, but they feared the microblogging service might not be a perfect fit for business.

“With Twitter, you talk to your mother and your grandmother and all that,” Mark said.

So Mark and Basten launched Sokule. It’s a service that lets businesses promote products and services via postings not just on Twitter, but on a large number of social networking sites.

Sokule has one other big difference from Twitter. It generates revenue. Or as its home page states: “Like Twitter — But Monetized!”

“Looking at Twitter, we said why the heck would someone (develop) a database with 10 million people and not make any money from it,” Mark said.

Sokule offers a free service that lets businesses post messages, at the Twitter limit of 140 characters, on both the Sokule site and on Twitter at the same time.

Under the paid service, though, subscribers post a message to Sokule and it in turn makes sure it gets posted to Twitter and 17 other social network sites. The sites do not yet include Facebook, but Mark and Basten said it will be added within weeks. They aim to post to a total of 40 social sites by December.

Sokule also gives its paid subscribers a few other goodies. For example, it will add links to customers’ Web sites in the postings.

The key is the quick, wide broadcasting of users’ messages. “Now, you only have to go to one place to advertise on the Net,” Mark said.

Few social networking sites are geared to businesses, but businesses use Twitter, Facebook and other social sites to promote brands and products. Companies have been dazzled by the size of the Twitter audience, says Greg Sterling, head of Sterling Market Intelligence.

“Twitter’s proven to be successful for a lot of businesses doing various kinds of marketing or customer service,” Sterling said.

Sokule’s biggest challenge, he says, is to attract a large enough audience to make it worthwhile for businesses that sign up.

“It’s the chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “If they have more usage, that will attract more usage. But it’s hard to get going.”

Some 9% of U.S. small businesses use Twitter to promote their companies, BIA/Kelsey said in an Oct. 21 report. An additional 32% plan to boost their marketing efforts by creating a page on Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn over the next year, the research firm said.

Say goodbye to feeling blue this winter and get that sunny, summer feeling all season long.

Vitamin D

USANA has now created a seasonal vitamin D product, available from November to March. In addition to the vitamin D already found in the Essentials, this vitamin D supplement is now available on its own and will help you maintain optimal health through the cold winter months!

Because our bodies use sunlight to make vitamin D, studies have shown that people in North America are extremely vitamin D deficient during the winter months. The problem is widespread and increasing, with potentially severe repercussions for overall health and bone-fracture rates. USANA’s vitamin D supplement is formulated with maximum strength vitamin D to ensure you get the vitamin D you need throughout the winter months in one tablet. Vitamin D is the perfect complement to the Essentials and HealthPak™ this winter.*

Health Basics

• Necessary for normal bone mineralization and growth
• Helps in the development and maintenance of bones and teeth
• Helps in the absorption and use of calcium and phosphorus
• Helps to prevent vitamin D deficiency
• The current recommendation of 400IU of vitamin D per day may not be enough to prevent vitamin D deficiency during the winter months. USANA’S supplement has 2000 IU of vitamin D per tablet.

Did You Know?

Vitamin D is produced in the skin upon exposure to sunlight. During the winter months, many become vitamin D deficient because of increased time spent indoors.

The USANA Difference
Effective
Safe
Science-based
Pharmaceutical Quality
Help your body beat the winter blues by getting your extra dose of vitamin D!

For more information click here or Call Duane at 913-660-0439

Please enjoy this article by Winsome Coutts on How Do You Raise Happy Kids.

As a grandmother and self-help writer, I’m often asked by readers, “How do you raise happy kids?” This is a question near and dear to every loving parent’s heart. No matter what we teach them, if we haven’t taught them how to be happy,

or can’t parent in a way that makes them feel happy, it’s rather all for naught, isn’t it? So it’s a very pertinent question.

I’ve been blessed with having two happy children and two happy grandchildren. I applied certain principles in raising my kids, and see my son and daughter-in-law apply the same in raising their adorable daughters, Klara and Stina. In this article, I’ll share two tips I’ve learned along the way.

The first is the importance of modeling happiness. You can’t give something you don’t have. How can you teach kids happiness if you don’t have it yourself? Some parents think loving their family means living only for them, driving them everywhere, cleaning up after them, and putting their kids’ needs and desires way ahead of their own. Parenting shouldn’t turn us into a short-order restaurant or a cleaning or taxi service. It does for some parents. That teaches kids a bad lesson.

A child who perceives his parent as a servant, someone whose life has meaning only through catering to his whims, learns to be selfish. He comes to believe others exist to do his bidding. I have a friend who was raised like that, and she tells me when she grew up, she kept having the strange feeling, “Where are all the servants?” Being catered to was such an ingrained part of her childhood that adjusting to adulthood was difficult for her, because “the servants” were missing.

Kids who are raised this way tend to feel the world owes them a living. So breaking out of the “doormat” mode, if you’re in one, is pretty central to giving your kid a chance at a smooth transition to happy adulthood.

When you take care of yourself, make time for yourself, and do things that make you happy, your child learns those behaviors from you. If she sees you going for your dreams and making decisions based on your inner truth, she learns that doing those things is good. On the other hand, if you model dropping everything to fulfill her latest dictate, she learns that parenting means self-denial and victimization. She may then become a self-effacing parent herself or go the other extreme and forego parenting entirely because it looks like such a sacrifice.

So to raise happy kids, be good to yourself. Treat yourself with respect and dignity the same as you treat your child. Don’t allow disrespect toward you any more than you’d allow someone to be rude to your kids. Make time for your creative desires and dreams. Plan in some scheduled personal time each week (or day), and make sure that you take it.

Let your kids see you’re doing this, and tell them the reason: “Mommy needs to have some fun, too,” or “Moms need time every day to relax.” This shows your child that you value yourself, and that personal time is important to everyone’s happiness.

The second tip I’ve learned for raising happy kids is the tremendous value of focused attention. The best form this can take is uninterrupted, one-on-one personal time with your child. Think back to your own childhood and some of your happiest memories. Chances are they include that hike you took with Dad, or the time you and Mom went to the restaurant for a dessert.

When we set aside an hour or two to be with our child, away from distractions and interruptions, we tell him he is important and loved. Giving focused attention is much more powerful than the diffused attention kids get while we cook dinner, drive them somewhere, or break up conversations to take calls on our cell phone.

Children thrive on loving, focused, personal attention the way plants thrive on sunshine. Structure in some focused attention every day, even if it’s only for five or ten minutes. Look at your child when he talks to you, so he knows you’re completely with him. In love, it’s the subtle things that count.

Giving focused attention teaches self-worth: your child knows she’s valuable because you value her, enough to carve out time for you and her, uninterrupted by the world, for those moments. That spells love, and when she knows you love her, by your actions not your words, that brings security and heart fulfillment, essential foundations of happiness.

In this busy world where parents work two jobs and where kids’ social calendars can rival those of debutants, it isn’t easy to make time to take care of yourself and uninterrupted time for you and your child. But for happiness, nothing could be more important. Think about your schedule, what is nonessential that you can cut out, or wasted moments that you can eliminate. Use that harvested time to be good to you and your kid. Your child’s happiness, and yours, depend on it.

Winsome Coutts holds a teacher’s certificate in education and has written hundreds of articles on self-development. She has studied with Bob Proctor and John Demartini, popular teachers featured on “The Secret” DVD. She is the passion behind the www.4lifehappykids.com and is a parent and grandparent.

Winsome is author of “Go for Your Goals” for kids – a set of downloadable e-books that guide your child through the joyful steps of learning visualization, goal-setting and the Law of Attraction. Simple language enhanced with beautiful illustrations and worksheets make these books appealing and motivating. To learn more, visit www.4lifehappykids.com

SALT LAKE CITY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Nov. 2, 2009– USANA Health Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: USNA) today launched its seasonal Vitamin D supplement. The supplement will be available every year from November to March, the months when many people do not get enough vitamin D.

“Recent reports show that populations around the world are suffering from vitamin D deficiency, and there is also evidence that suggests vitamin D deficiency increases during the winter months because of decreased exposure to sunlight,” said Dr. Tim Wood, USANA’s Executive Vice President of Research and Development. “The problem is widespread and increasing, with potentially severe repercussions for overall health and bone-fracture rates. USANA’s Vitamin D supplement is formulated with maximum strength vitamin D to ensure you get the vitamin D you need throughout the winter months in one tablet.”

Vitamin D is essential to bone mineralization and growth and plays an important role in the maintenance of muscle strength and coordination. Vitamin D also supports cardiovascular health and promotes balanced immune function. The current recommendation of 400IU of vitamin D per day may not be enough to prevent vitamin D deficiency during the winter months. USANA’s supplement has 2000IU of vitamin D per tablet.

Learn more about USANA’s products by visiting our Web site, reading our blog, becoming a fan on Facebook, or following us on Twitter.

About USANA

USANA Health Sciences develops and manufactures high-quality nutritionals, personal-care, energy and weight-management products that are sold directly to Preferred Customers and Associates throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Mexico, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Source: USANA Health Sciences, Inc.
USANA Health Sciences, Inc.
Dan Macuga, 801-954-7280
Vice President of Marketing & Public Relations
Dan.Macuga@us.usana.com