Low carb diet (ing) the right way > rapid weight loss and muscle gain products > CA

Whether you are trying to lose a few pounds, get in shape after the birth of a child or get ready for a top bodybuilding show, Parrillo has the answer.  For more information on weight loss (fat loss), muscle gain, exercise and nutrition contact:

Parrillo Performance
p.  (800) 344-3404

The Right Way to do a Low Carb Diet

Cliff Sheats, PhD., F.R.S.H, Certified Clinical Nutritionist

Everyone seems to love low-carb diets and for good reason - they do work. When you cut your intake of carbs, you suppress the release of insulin. Low insulin stimulates the release of an-other hormone, glucagon. As glucagon goes to work, it signals the body to start burning fat for energy.  But with many low-carb diets, there are penalties.

Carbohydrate is your body’s preferred fuel. During digestion, carbs are broken down into glucose. Glucose circulates in the blood to be used for energy. If your muscles are deprived of glucose, your physical power suffers. You’re low on gas, and feel it. It becomes tough to stick to your eating program, and another attempt to lose weight could bite the dust.

But Parrillo CapTri® can come to the rescue. You can still apply the low-carb dieting strategy, but without the corresponding loss of energy. CapTri®, which is medium chain triglyceride oil (MCT oil), is burned in the body like a carbohydrate and spares glucose fuel for an energy-boosting effect. Thus, by supplementing with CapTri®, you have a pure energy source to help prevent diet-induced fatigue.

At the same time, CapTri® keeps metabolism high, and a high metabolism is conducive to losing body fat. There’s another fat-burning wind-fall associated with CapTri®. Some of the energy from CapTri® is converted into body heat in a process known as thermogenesis. This is the single most important reason why excess calories from CapTri® have less of a tendency to make you fat than excess calories from other foods.

CapTri® is burned so fast that excess calories from it are turned into body heat instead of being converted into fat. This is why I think CapTri® is one of the best supplements ever developed - it’s an excellent way to supply extra calories but has very little tendency to make you fat.  Here’s how to use CapTri®: One tablespoon with each meal; up to six tablespoons per day. Consult the Parrillo CapTri® Manual for more detailed usage guidelines.

Breaking News Fitness and Nutrition

Getting Motivated For Fitness

“Allison Chopra, a fitness expert at Indiana University, encourages her personal training clients to break their more ambiguous goals of say, feeling better or dropping a few dress sizes, into smaller goals that can be achieved in three to four weeks.

She discourages weight-oriented goals because weight loss is a long-term process and everyone loses weight at different rates.

Chopra offers the following tips concerning goal-setting, encouraging people to be SMART about their goals. The industry catch-phrase SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reward and Time:

Goals need to be attainable and realistic. Challenging yourself to eat no fat for a week could be setting your-self up for failure. Chopra encourages some of her clients to eat breakfast every morning, or at least do so for a week.

Be specific.  A goal of “eating better,” is an example of a worthwhile but ambiguous goal. A more effective or specific goal might be to limit sweets to one a day for the next week or to limit cookies to the weekend.

Keep track. Write down your goals and progress, noting it in a journal, notebook or other medium. Put goals in a visible spot. Fitness goals could include performing some form of physical activity for a certain number of days each week or a certain number of minutes.

- Indiana University (2007, September 22).   Getting Motivated For Fitness. ScienceDaily.

If you have questions on quick weight loss, muscle gain, fitness or nutrition contact:

Parrillo Performance
p.  (800) 344-3404

Bodybuilding products and supplements > how to gain muscle fast > CA

Community pick:  bodybuilding products, bodybuilding supplements, program and plans
Parrillo Performance
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A Bodybuilder Is Born:  Generations

Episode 17: Get out of the middle of the road!

By Ron Harris

School had just let out for the summer. This meant that my 14-year-old daughter would be a rare sight until after Labor Day. Sharing the common adolescent belief that her parents are not only un-cool, oppressive, and an embarrassment to be avoided, Marisa would manage to become as much of a fixture at her friends’ houses as possible without actually being furniture. During one stretch last summer, she was at one particular chum’s abode so often that I contemplated having her mail forwarded there. My eight-year-old son was a different story. He not only wanted to be around me, he wanted me to take him somewhere fun and exciting every day. “Daddy, what are we doing today?” was his echoing refrain. I tried to keep him occupied while still attempting to get my writing work done, but nothing short of a day at the beach or an amusement park like Six Flags constituted ‘fun.’ In fact, I was a little miffed at Six Flags for their onslaught of recent TV commercials rating the ‘fun level’ of everyday life (which never seemed to earn more than one flag on this scale) to the thrills and good times of plummeting down 300-foot dips and being spun upside down at 90 miles an hour on a roller coaster. In case you were wondering, the adrenaline-stimulating, not to mention gut-churning and bladder-loosening attractions of Six Flags, earned the following review from a maniacal Japanese guy screaming, “Six Flags! More flags, more fun!”

Of course, this advertising campaign was still a big improvement over the “Mr. 6″ commercials from a few years ago. I suppose the character was meant to embody the wacky and carefree spirit of the place. Mr. 6 was a young man with theatrical makeup to make him appear to be in his 70’s or 80’s, with an ill-fitting fat suit, a bowtie, and these big creepy cartoon-like glasses. Seen hip-hop dancing with wild abandon to the catchy dance hit “The Venga Bus is Coming,” I suspect he frightened away far more potential customers than his shenanigans attracted. I know I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near that spastically dancing goon.

My training clients Jared and Jeff were off on a very early summer vacation, having literally just begun heading east for their beachfront house on Cape Cod. I had never been there, but brief descriptions had given me a good idea of the place - not quite a compound, but more than you could simply call a ‘beach house.’ I wouldn’t see them for two weeks or so.

That was fine, because I had a lot of work to do. I was only three weeks away from my first guest posing appearance. Some of you may be unfamiliar with that term. A guest poser is someone who goes to a bodybuilding contest to perform, even though he or she is not competing in it. Your photo typically appears on the posters and flyers, which is meant to get more people to come watch the show. The guest poser is supposed to be at a higher level than the competitors, which is why most of them are professionals and appear at amateur events. If you’re really lucky, like the folks that attend the NPC New England Championships here in Boston
every year, you get to see Mr. Olympia Jay Cutler flex his monstrous 300-pound physique for your entertainment. If you happened to be going to this other contest in mid-July, you got to see me. I am not a pro, unless the pro is short for procrastinator. My only claim to fame is that I won this same show last summer, and I also happen to write a lot of training articles about the pros. I find that the more of these I do over the years, the more some people get confused and mistakenly think I’m a pro bodybuilder myself. I don’t pretend for a minute to resemble the magnificent beasts that are today’s pro bodybuilders. But, being the reigning champ of the show, being a decent poser, and being willing to do it for the right price (the promoter’s undying gratitude and the roar of the crowd), I was all set to get up on stage again in less than a month.

One of the reasons I immediately agreed to take the gig was that it would more or less force me to get in shape for the summer. If you are going to be in shape on the East Coast of the USA, summer would definitely be the best time. For a brief couple of months, everybody wears shorts and tank tops. And all of you that work hard on your bodies know how much a little appreciation helps keep us motivated over the cold, dark months that are never too far away. We all look better leaned out and with a tan. That’s when I get a lot of people asking me, “Are you a bodybuilder? Do you compete? Are you getting ready for a contest?” In the winter, the questions are usually more like, “Are you one of those slightly slimmer Sumo wrestlers?” and my favorite, “Hey pal, can you move it along, other people are trying to get all we can eat at this buffet too, you know.”

There was only one problem with this whole plan to get in shape to guest pose. I was not going to be competing, therefore I had nobody to worry about beating. That took a lot of pressure off me, which in this case was a bad thing. All that was really at stake was my pride, which would take a big hit if I showed up out of shape and smooth as a baby’s ass. And thanks to the World Wide Web, the people in the audience would not be the only ones to bear witness to my lack of dieting discipline. Oh no, pics and comments would be uploaded in a flash, and my nickname throughout the Western World would be ‘Fat-Ass Harris.’ The news of me looking like crap would be more of a topic of conversation in my industry than the Presidential election.

The show was in mid-July, and I had been putting off going on a really strict diet for far too long. Sure, I would eat a couple super-clean meals every day along with a couple shakes that were blends of Hi-Protein^TM and Optimized Whey^TM, but I was also not passing up the occasional two or seven slices of pizza, big bowl of ice cream, or bucket-sized bowls of sugary kids’ cereals like Honeycombs, Golden Grahams, or Honey Nut Cheerios. Because I was eating clean sometimes and putting down pure junk at others, I was on neither side of the road - more like the middle. I don’t know how many of you remember “The Karate Kid,” but Mr. Miyagi expressed the idea of doing something half-assed in a similar manner. “Walk on left side, okay. Walk on right side, okay. Walk in middle -”And with this, he clapped his hands together and made the universal sound effect of a car smashing into a hapless pedestrian and turning said pedestrian into a meat pancake. At about six weeks out from the contest, I looked in the mirror and realized I was in the middle of the road and had to move my ass away from there before I too got run over - if not by a Mack truck, then by the online jeers and mockery that would follow me appearing out of shape as sure as night follows day.

That’s the thing with getting ripped. Unless you are one of the few metabolically blessed types that can see a deep six-pack on their midsection no matter how much junk you eat, it takes a totally strict diet followed for a substantial amount of time to see significant loss in bodyfat. By giving in so often to cravings, I had been taking the proverbial two steps forward, one step back. Actually, since I had not been getting any leaner, it was probably more like two steps forward and two steps back.

You also have to do your fair share of cardio, and it can’t be the wimpy Valium-trance pace you see most people doing. I had never been guilty of that, and I had never been afraid to work hard on my cardio. With seven Liver Aminos^TM at each meal, I didn’t need to worry about iron deficiency, or ‘sports anemia.’

So now, at the eleventh hour, I finally had my shit together and was seeing better definition almost every day. But it only happened once I made a full commitment to stay on a contest-type diet. If you want to get really lean, that’s simply the only way to make it happen. The junk has to go, cold turkey. You can’t be a recovering alcoholic and still drink on weekends, and you can’t be on a contest diet to get ripped and be eating a ton of sugar and saturated fat once or twice a day. You’re either sober or you aren’t, and you’re either on a diet or you’re not. It took me almost humiliating myself looking flabby on stage to come to terms with that.

Now I just had some calculations to do before I decided where to take my son on our next family outing. Would it be cheaper to pay for gas for the 200-mile round trip to the nearest Six Flags, or to fly from Boston to Orlando to experience Disney World? For now, Six Flags won out, but as prices for fuel continued to climb, it might not for much longer. Six Flags, more fun? I worry that by the end of summer we might be lamenting, “Six bucks a gallon for gas? No fun!”

Community pick:  bodybuilding products, bodybuilding supplements, program and plans
Parrillo Performance
p.  (800) 344-3404

Pasadena kid’s tutors - tutoring to get ahead or early intervention

Original Article

Citizen Pick:
Comfort Zone Tutoring
One on One * In Home Tutoring

Ph. (888) 924-8541 or (951) 924-8560
E-mail: info@comfortzonetutoring.com
Visit: Comfort Zone Tutoring on-line

Finding a tutor in Pasadena is not an easy task. First, one needs to understand and identify the need for a tutor. Second, make sure you have found not only the right tutoring agency but also the best individual for your son or daughter.

CBS News recently reported on early intervention programs, one specifically in San Bernardino where special ed classes have been cut in half. This was due to the early intervention, which placed children in tutoring before or after school.

The reality is today that many kids need some extra one on one assistance.

There are solutions to this problem that create tremendous opportunity for your kids to keep up or even get ahead with their schoolwork. Some parents have chosen to home school, which obviously is very interactive and shows a tremendous amount of involvement on the parents part. In this situation a home schooled student could still need extra attention in a particular subject that might not be the educating parent’s favorite.

Other parents who work or don’t have the time to help their kids get ahead can bring in an in-home tutor, which logically seems to be the best way to go. The environment is comfortable and safe. It also eliminates that valuable drive time that most parents simply don’t have between all of the kid’s activities.

There are many large agencies offering kid’s tutoring from Sylvan Learning Centers, Kumon, Math Monkey to Tutorwhiz in Pasadena.

Obviously a one-on-one approach is the most effective. Yes we need to define “one-on-one” as one tutor tutoring one student. If you aren’t specific with these questions you’ll be surprised at how easily your hard earned money will go toward something that isn’t truly what you had expected.

Check that the tutors have the necessary credentials, which could mean they are teachers, college graduates or honors students with at least 2 years of tutoring experience. Also, are they using the school curriculum and will they contact your child’s teacher if necessary? These are all great questions to ask.

Do you want your son or daughter tutored in your home? Intuitively, this is a good choice. It’s time saving for the parents while allowing a safe learning environment for your kids. This likely will help with parent involvement too, time permitting. We all work long days but it’s important to know how our kids are progressing in school.

Is tutoring affordable? This is relative, but one question you should ask is, can you afford to not have your child keep up or get ahead?

Pasadena kid’s tutor citizen pick:

Comfort Zone in-home one-on-one Tutoring
Ph. (888) 924-8541 or (951) 924-8560
E-mail: info@comfortzonetutoring.com
Visit: Comfort Zone Tutoring on-line

Ca. Cities include: Alta Loma, Arcadia, Brea, Chino, Claremont, Corona, Duarte, Etiwanda, Fontana, La Canada, Moreno Valley, Norco, Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga, Redlands, Riverside, South Pasadena, San Marino, Upland, Yorba Linda.