Weight Management Tips

WholeLife Matrix: Health and WellBeing - Nutrition and Weight - Weight Management

"The key to keeping weight off after a diet is incorporating habits of sound nutrition, regular exercise, and reasonable expectations that you can stick to for a lifetime." - Joan Salge Blake, MS, RD, clinical associate professor at Boston University

It is important to manage your weight to live a healthy and happy lifestyle.   Here are some tips for looking and feeling your best!

1. Enjoy Daily Exercise

Exercising regularly will boost your mood and concentration, reduce stress, and help keep your mind and body healthy.  Pick types of exercise that you enjoy doing and can continue to do on a regular basis.  There are many options such as running, biking, swimming, and tennis.  You do not need to do strenuous exercise to lose weight or to maintain your weight.  Just walking for twenty minutes a day can help you to lose weight or to maintain your weight. Regular exercise will help you to burn fat, feel less hungry, and stay fit. It is also important to get sufficient sleep to regulate our body.

2. Drink Plenty of Water

Drinking 6 to 8 glasses of fluids every day will help keep you from overeating and will keep you hydrated.  Try to avoid sugary drinks. Drinking tea can also help. It has been shown to prevent dental decay, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis. There are a variety of teas that are recommended for weight loss.

3. Fill Up on Fiber

The recommended daily intake for fiber is 25-30 grams. High fiber foods include whole grain breads and cereals, whole wheat pasta and rice, dried beans, fruits and vegetables.  Four to five cups of fruits or vegetables are recommended for each day.  They are a good source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber and naturally low in calories and fat. Fiber helps you to eat less and curbs hunger by filling you up faster.  Eating a salad before your meal or a cup or bowl of vegetable soup can reduce calories by ten percent.  Also, soluble fiber can lower your cholesterol.  

4. Low Carb Diet

It is good to have a low carbohydrate diet because carbohydrates can raise your blood sugar level, increasing your insulin, which causes your body to store fat.  With a low carb diet, you won’t be hungry between meals because you will be burning fat.

5. Including Dairy

Including three servings of milk, yogurt, or cheese a day can help your burn fat and lose weight.  Dairy products are a good source of vitamin D and calcium.

6. Control Your Portions

Portion your meals in a calorie-conscious way thinking of both the quality and the quantity of the calories you will be consuming. Carefully counting calories may help you to lose weight, but for the long run, you need to learn to manage your portions to control your calorie intake. To control your portions, try to use smaller to medium sized plates. One quarter of your plate should include a palm-sized portion of lean protein such as fish or chicken (about 3 ounces).  Another quarter of your plate should contain unrefined grain such as brown rice (about the size of your fist).  Half of your plate should be filled with various colorful vegetables.  Eat your food slowly to enjoy your meal and to allow time for your body to signal that it has had enough.  If you still feel hungry after you have finished eating your portions, wait 20 minutes.  If you are still hungry, eat a piece of fruit, some more vegetables, or a tossed salad.

In the WholeLife Matrix, we have four aspects for developing and accessing weight management: 

1.  Weight Monitoring

2.  Exercise

3.  Body Mass Index

4.  Stability Over Time

7. Managing Your Calories

Do not skip meals.  Eat three meals a day and snacks to fuel your body so that it will work efficiently throughout the day.  Eat breakfast to jump start your metabolism and consume most of your calories in the first half of the day.  You will need less calories during the evenings when you are less active.  Check your weight on a scale if this encourages you and helps you to make sure that your weight is not going back up.  Weight fluctuates daily and hourly so it is recommended that you weigh yourself once a week. You can also tell if you are gaining or losing weight by how well your clothes fit.  Keeping a food log of what you are eating each day and the approximate number of calories for each food can help you keep track of how much you are eating and how healthy the foods are.  You can also include your exercise plan and weight goals.

Are you ready to win?

Managing Lasting Relationships

“Treasure your relationships, not your possessions.” Anthony J. D’Angelo, The College Blue Book

Relationships are critical to maintain with family, friends, significant others, and your staff and colleagues. This is true for everyone including busy entrepreneurs. I dedicate this blog to David Anthony Ferrara “Dino”, who died on Saturday July 18, 2009 at the age of 44. Only 500 people (of the thousands who’s lives he touched) attended his funeral; these were family friends and business contacts with whom he’d been affiliated over the years. He was a truly successful person and entrepreneur. He helped build and sell a $30 Million company all the while:

1. Making plenty of time to spend with his kids: coaching their lacrosse teams, teaching them about charity and to care for others by volunteering at their church. He fed the poor and led bingo for the elderly at retirement homes. There were countless stories of how he’d hop on an airplane at the drop of a hat to help his brothers, cousins, aunts; anyone in his family who was in need.
2. Participating regularly at events that united his friends: he played golf annually with over 30 buddies he met in grammar, elementary and high school in Baltimore, in college at Bucknell, and during the years through other friends and family. He’d do things like drive out to the desert to play golf with a friend he hadn’t seen in a while and make it back in time that evening for his daughter’s lacrosse game.
3. Managing key relationships throughout his life with staff and colleagues: he went to college with Pete Henig who at the time was editor of Red Herring. Pete introduced Dino to Michael Schwab. Dino nurtured that relationship and was able to raise money for his company. His partner in the business was his grammar school friend David Boden and most of the employees were also either long time friends or became close friends.
4. Supporting his wife April. Their relationship was fun to watch. When you saw the two of them you could tell they were meant to be together. April, an entrepreneur herself, was looking to sell a catering business she’d built and had been running for years. She approached me to check it out and see if I would be interested in buying it. She had an event scheduled with a very influential client (Maria Shriver) to see how to run the business. My husband was out of town that day, and at the time my son was not even a year old. I didn’t have anyone to leave him with so Dino brought their two young kids up to my house to baby sit our kids, so April and I could work at the event. He’d do anything for her.

When you think of all the key elements of the whole life matrix, none is more important than your relationships. To be successful and to have it all, you need to make maintaining relationships your primary goal. Dino did. People were willing to introduce him to their cherished contacts because they knew he’d take care of them too. Though Dino died at very young age, he lived an incredibly full very successful life, and through his treasured relationships built a legacy.

Breakfast of Champions!

"If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health". - Hippocrates

It's a good idea as an employer to promote healthy balanced lifestyle habits among your employees. There's a lot you can do to encourage and support employees to follow such a lifestyle. Having a physically fit workforce has the potential to enhance performance, reduce the number of trips to the doctors' office, and helps motivate creativity. This benefits both the employee and the company!

Many people complain about feeling low energy, having headaches, and lower productivity around 2:00 to 3:00 pm each day. These feelings are tied to the fact that they do not eat often enough and don't eat the right nutrients. One key to eating well is to avoid getting too hungry. Studies show that eating small meals spaced a few hours apart offers the best balance to your metabolism to keep your body using fuel efficiently. Encourage your employees to have a healthy "breakfast of champions" and a "power lunch" and snacks to keep from hitting those low blood sugar levels that effect mood and performance.

How can employers create an energized work environment? You can provide education on the subject, a refrigerator to store their meals and snacks, a microwave to heat foods, a blender to make healthy shakes, vending machine with healthy snacks, and bottled water to prevent dehydration. These easy steps will go a long way toward keeping employees more productive while at work. By keeping them from getting too hungry you help maintain a happier, healthier workforce.

Are you ready to win?

Performance and the Work/Life Balance

"Discipline is the whole key to being successful. We all get 24 hours a day. It's up to us what we do with those 24 hours."
Sam Huff, NFL Linebacker

According to Dictionary.com, performance is the manner in which or the efficiency with which something reacts or fulfills its intended purpose.

At Possibilities Unlimited, we are committed to coaching you and your business to peak performance. When athletes train, they know that their peak performance comes when they achieve the best results with the least effort. When they develop a rhythm. When they combine their skills and experience to maximize their opportunities. We work with clients to reduce the effort needed to achieve the desired results – to achieve peak performance.

Business people are busy people. Business people do not have time to waste on situations that are not working. They typically have more things to do than they have time to do them. Well guess what? You will always have more to do than time to do it. We coach people to change their relationship with time. We train people to live the business/life they create instead of one created by the circumstances.

We coach people to put vacations back into their lives. To put family time back into their lives. Golf time back into their lives. Even elite athletes recognize the importance of rest and rejuvenation. You can’t be at the top of your game if you never take a time out.

Managing time is a skill and a discipline just like running or lifting weights. Everything we do happens in time. Work and play both happen in time, and if we can’t manage our time, we can’t manage our business/life balance. We coach people on how to achieve peak performance in the time they have available, and produce more efficient, profitable businesses in the process.

Remember that winners are those who consistently achieve peak performance on the playing field. That peak performance is a result of both hard work and rest, of managing time to achieve a competitive balance. For specific tips on how to set up a weekly schedule for your business, visit our website or call us for a personal consultation.

Are you ready to win?

Winning in Business With the Business/Life Playbook

“The difference between the possible and the impossible lies in the man’s determination.”
Tommy Lasorda, Major League Manager

Welcome to the Consulting2Win Playbook where you can find strategies to win the game of Business/Life. At Possibilities Unlimited, our goal is to create the game plan for your extraordinary life.

Business is a game like any other. People go into business to have more time and more money. They dive into a business with the idea that it will result a fulfilling life outside that business. Instead, they usually wind up working more hours for less pay, diminishing the quality of both their professional and personal lives. This happens when business owners and managers are left to make all the decisions themselves with only a limited perspective on the whole playing field. You can’t hold the ball, run with it, and manage all the other players all at the same time.

What most business people lack is a coach, someone on the sidelines who can objectively assess the team and draw up plays that will point the way to victory. Possibilities Unlimited provides that coaching. We are the eyes on the sidelines, the objective third party point of view. Because we are not in the day-to-day circumstances of the business, we can lay out strategies without being attached to the emotions of the situation. This no-nonsense direction helps clients make better decisions and moves them closer to the goal line.

At Possibilities Unlimited, you are the player, we are the coaches and the business is the team on the field. You get credit for executing the plays. We are there to help you find the open man, make the clutch shot, and emerge victorious.

Each week, we will look at key situations in business and give you a strategy for improving your results in those circumstances. We’ll look at all kinds of business challenges and relate them to today’s ever-changing marketplace. We encourage you to print out the ideas and tactics, and be diligent about putting them into play. Before you know it, you’ll have a comprehensive playbook of specific actions to manage your business over time.

The playbook is a resource drawn from our years of coaching people to win at the game of business/life. If you prefer a more individualized approach, please contact us. We can customize a program that specifically meets the needs of your business, and position you take home the gold.

Are you ready to win?