Fitness Tips
It was years before I was able to make exercise a consistent part of my life, and I know how hard it can be to find the motivation to work out. That's why I am sharing all my tips and experiences in the hopes it will help you find our own fitness mindset!
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Low-Intensity Exercise: How to Tone Up by Toning it Down
Low-intensity exercise tends to get overshadowed by the high-intensity variety, such as HIIT. (High-intensity interval training.) It’s not hard to see why; we live in the society where everyone is eternally crunched for time. Anything that promises the best results in the least amount of time is going to win over a lot of people. ** My blog posts contain affiliate links, which means that I may earn a commission on purchases you make after clicking on those links. (At no extra cost to you!) Full disclosure here. ** I’m included in those numbers and and haven’t been shy about proclaiming my love for HIIT, and fitness programs like The…
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Making a Lifestyle Change – 7 Lessons Learned After a Year of HIIT
This weekend marks one year since I made a lifestyle change to include regular HIIT workouts into my weekly routine. It all started on Black Friday of last year when the (affiliate link->) Bodyboss Method was having a sale on their 12-week HIIT program. And although I finished that program a long time ago, I have continued to incorporate other HIIT workouts into my routine and consistently exercise five days a week. This is the first time that I’ve stayed consistent for a full year! If you’re looking to make a lifestyle change, here are seven things I’ve learned in the past 12 months that have helped me make the…
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The Lunchtime HIIT Workout: How to Make it Work for You
As a busy nine-to-fiver, you already know how hard it is to fit anything into your work week besides work. So the idea of a lunchtime HIIT workout session might seem laughable to you at first. It doesn’t help that sometimes you need to run errands on your lunch or something unexpected comes up that prevents you from even taking a lunch hour. I get it. But believe it or not, lunchtime workouts are not impossible! And with all the benefits, it’s worth considering adding a lunch hour workout into your weekly routine now and then. Hear me out: ** My blog posts contain affiliate links, which means that I…
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Does Walking for Weight Loss and Counting Steps Really Work?
In recent years, I’ve become a huge advocate of walking for weight loss. In 2016, I was gifted my first fitness tracker for Christmas. It was a Fitbit Charge 2, and I immediately became obsessed with it, and “getting my steps in.” I was constantly competing in step challenges with my friends, which had me pacing around my house at all hours. As someone who had slipped into a mostly sedentary lifestyle, it was just the gift I needed to get me moving again. And who knew walking could be such fun! Maybe you’re in that boat now, and thinking about counting steps or walking for weight loss. But does…
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Why I Haven’t Been Sick in 4 Years!
The last bug I caught was a doozy. I had gone five years without calling in sick for work, and then just days into a new job, I came down with the worst throat infection I’d ever experienced! I had to miss several days of work because the pain and fever were so bad that I could hardly get out of bed. The bug weakened my immune system so much that even when I recovered from the worst of it, I kept catching new viruses and was pretty much constantly sick for three months straight. That was four years ago. And, perhaps miraculously, I haven’t been sick since! Oh, there…
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BBG & Sweat App Review (Is the Subscription Worth it?)
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know I’m really into High-Intensity Interval Training, aka HIIT, and I love experimenting with different fitness apps! I decided to write a SWEAT App review since I’ve been using it on and off for the past year and wanted to share my experience! ** My blog posts contain affiliate links, which means that I may earn a commission on purchases you make after clicking on those links. (At no extra cost to you!) Full disclosure here. ** I found this program the way I find pretty much everything I purchase these days – while scrolling through my Facebook news feed. I…
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The Audible Advantage: 5 Reasons to Try Audiobooks
I’d been seeing Audible audiobooks on Amazon for years but didn’t have the slightest interest in them. I like to savor the words on a page. Plus, something about listening to books seems like “cheating”, because you’re not actually “reading” them. But this year I’ve been having trouble reaching my reading goals. I realized I needed to try something different if I was going to squeeze a bit of literature into my day-to-day life. So I put my text-only snobbery aside and gave Audible a try. And I’m glad I did! If you’ve ever been curious about how audible works, what it’s advantages are, or what books to try with…
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7 Unique Benefits of Cycling and Spinning (Why its One of the Best Workouts!)
I didn’t really consider all the benefits of cycling and spinning until this year. That’s because up until quite recently, I was a total running snob. At my peak in 2013, I was running over 40 km a week. I remember one warm May day that year, I ran a half-marathon in the morning and then spent all afternoon gardening. I wasn’t even sore the next day. But those glorious days are long gone. A couple months later, a nagging pain in my hip cropped up that wouldn’t quit with stretching or rest. It’s a chronic issue I’m still dealing with today and has limited how much high impact exercise…
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Why I Don’t Follow a Strict Diet (And What I Do Instead)
You’re not going to see a lot of posts from me about diet and healthy food. Don’t get me wrong, I think a healthy diet is really important. But here’s the problem: my healthy diet might not look like your healthy diet. I truly don’t believe there is an ultimate, one-size-fits-all diet. That’s because we all have our unique likes, dislikes, and body chemistry. If avocados make you ralph, then your diet shouldn’t include avocados. Not to mention you can drive yourself crazy debating what healthy foods actually are. You can Google “is [any food] healthy” and “is [same food] unhealthy” and get any number of articles supporting both sides. …
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Why Motivation for Fitness Starts with Mindset
I had no motivation for fitness in my younger years, but I had been blessed with a relatively high metabolism back then. It was something a shock when the weight started to creep on in my mid-twenties. It started innocently enough. A couple of pounds gained over the holidays. A size up in pants each time I went shopping. But then I started to feel sluggish, unmotivated, and struggled with long stretches of low mood that bordered on depression. I attributed it all to the normal stresses of life. Then I got on the scale one day in my early thirties and realized that a decade of working a desk…
