You must be willing to die to diet.
February 11, 2010 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
The word diet creates a a negative image and some say dieting is like dying because die is the first part of diet. I say hallelujah! We have an opportunity to learn how to die while we diet. What a great training ground God has given us. Jesus teaches us that we are to die of this world so that we can be reborn. When we are reborn we learn to leave the world behind and allow the Holy Spirit to more freely work in us. Dying of this world is what it means to grow in our Christian faith and to live in Christ so that we can be free from the bondage of food.
Are you ready to die through diet? Knowing that this is your opportunity to be reborn you should feel a new joy about the word and ability to diet. Dieting is no longer a negative thing for Christians, but a chance to grow and give glory to God. We will have more dying to do than to just die from dieting, but a new beginning is awaiting us. It is never easy, but it will be worth every difficult step of the way. When times get tough know that you are not doing this to glorify your self, but to die of your old self so that the new self can be born and that God can be glorified.
Christians can lose weight by surrendering.
February 4, 2010 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
The Bible doesn’t tell us to have a strong willpower. That if we try hard enough we can keep from sinning. It tells us to surrender our will to God and follow the Holy Spirit. Even some research is pointing in that direction. Roy Baumeister did a study to see if resisting a chocolate chip cookie for five minutes made willpower stronger, weaker or unchanged. They found out that those that had to resist eating a chocolate chip cookie for even five minutes gave up on complex math problems more quickly than those that didn’t have to use their willpower. They concluded that our willpower fatigues us and eventually we not only quit trying to avoid what we are trying to avoid, but we give up on other things that challenge us as well.
Willpower sounds like a recipe for failure to me. Our addictions and bad habits with food can’t be willed away, but Jesus can steer us away from these bad habits if we let Him do the driving. It is time now to ask God to guide us in the path to health and wellness, and surrender our will to His. What does this mean? Reread the section of “who’s in charge?” in the e-book to get a more in depth explanation. This is a simple concept, but takes lots of practice and continued growth to achieve. Let weight loss be your training ground to surrendering to God, and as you become better at surrendering just imagine the blessed and glorious life that awaits for you.
Building Functional Abdominal Strength
January 28, 2010 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
Those that have wash board abs did not get them by doing sit ups or crunches. They did not get them by doing any of the infomercial ab machines that are out there. They got them because functionally they use their abs all day long (and they have a low body fat so that they can be seen). If you do not use your abs when you walk, reach, push, pull or lift throughout the day then you will not have ripped abs. If you don’t use them functionally you will lose them.
Now, something that is even more important than having a wash board stomach is have a body that protects itself from injury. If your abs are not being used throughout the day with walking, pushing, pulling or lifting then you are at a high risk of injuring your back, shoulders, hips or knees. Our abs are a huge group of muscles that consistof four layers. They function in all three planes of motion. Because we are a society that does not highly move in all three planes of motion each and every day our abs have a tendency to get turned off (if you don’t use it you lose it). This is one reason why we are seeing a high rate of increased injuries to the back, hips, shoulders and knees. It is much more involved biomechanically involved then I want to discuss in this blog, but the basis is that the abs are the crossroads between the upper and lower trunk. It is the connection that creates stability when we reach, lift, push or pull between the upper body and the lower body. When we lose that connection the body is forced to compensate somewhere else and try to get it from another body part that is not designed to perform a specific activity without help from the abs. Hence, over time we break down.
How do we turn on our abs? One of the best ways is with walking or running. But it must be done correctly. We must get a good pelvic turn that is matched by a good upper trunk turn. We can accomplish this by taking a good long stride that is matched by our opposite side arm swinging forward. I can’t tell you how many people I see every day that walk incorrectly. I can tell you that I rarely see someone who walks correctly. For most of us it takes practice to get it right. Seek out a good personal trainer or friend that can help you if you think your gait is incorrect. If you still need help, try seeing a physical therapist. The one thing that you should notice if you pay attention is that you should feel your abs working when you are walking correctly.
There are many other ways of turning on our abs, but the best ways to help prevent injuries are the ab exercises in standing. When we strengthen our abs on our backs we over stabilize our pelvis which takes the functional components out creating a potential for injury to occur. Almost every exercise that uses arms and legs together will activate your abs. If you have more questions on other ab exercises talk to anyone of us at Crosstrain Fitness and we would be glad to help you out.
Investment Strategies For Christians and Their Health
September 1, 2009 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
We are a society that focuses a great deal on retirement. We analyze our financial portfolios to ensure that we’ll have enough money to retire. We hope that if we do everything “just right,” we’ll get to retire early. We know that we cannot let the short-term effects of the market discourage us from our long-term goals of financial freedom. Think of health as your other portfolio. We cannot let short-term thinking limit long-term goals. Our long-term goal is to achieve optimal health. We will have some difficulties along our journey, but we cannot let them discourage us. We may get through this program with little change in our weight, but it is like dollar cost averaging – if we keep making investments in our future, we will eventually see a shift to the positive. We should never overlook the importance of our long-term health investments. It is nice to invest and save for retirement. We don’t want to be a financial burden on our family or society. The same should be true of our health. Just as we invest in our finances, we must invest equally in our health for the future. Too many of us
are retiring with adequate financial investments while lacking the health investments to enjoy the retired years. Throughout our earthly lives we must invest in our friendships, marriages and families if we want to enjoy those around us, but most importantly, we must also invest in our souls. We have an opportunity to receive eternal life, but we must invest our lives in serving and following Jesus Christ. Health and financial investments are important, but nothing is more important than investing in our souls.
God never said it would be easy for Christians to loss weight.
August 14, 2009 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
Being a Christian has several benefits, but if you are expecting an easy life because you are a Christian then you have the wrong impression. Don’t get me wrong here, it is a great life to be with God, but it will be challenging. The Bible teaches us in James 1:2-4 that we must endure tough times to become mature in our faith. God doesn’t allow our life to be tough because he wants to torment us, but because He wants us to mature and grow so that we can experience the full blessing He wants to give us. All of the Biblical greats endured tough times in their life, but also saw great blessings from God.
Weight loss is challenging for a reason. It is our opportunity to glorify God and to grow in our maturity. The world wants us to believe that we can be healthy with ease and that it will only take a few weeks to lose ten pounds. These are lies from the great deceiver. Your health goals and journey are a lifetime venture. When the world convinces us that it will only take a few weeks then it knows we will quit trying after a few weeks whether we lost the ten pounds or not. The deceiverdoesn’t want us to battle back, he wants us to look for the easy way out, and he is pretty good at it. If you have ever tried to lose weight before you know how hard it is. Most of us have learned to use food as our comforter and stress reliever. When we loss that we become overwhelmed and stressed. We may even endure physical withdrawals such as headaches. I become irritable and my thoughts are slower and I loss my focus at work. The list is long and varies, but it is exceedingly harder to lose our extra weight then it is to gain more. I sometimes think about why it is so much harder to live a healthy life than it is to live an unhealthy life. God knows, and we can only guess that He did it that way for our benefit in some way or another.
The best way is to accept the challenge and be prepared for battle. If we battle alone we will lose. If we follow the world’s ways we will lose, but if we turn to God we can follow Him and He will see us through to a life of health and well being. Crosstrain Fitness will help guide you on a health journey that puts the focus on living with God and turning away from the world.
How does guided meditation help Christians with weight loss?
August 6, 2009 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
When Tiger Woods is in motion to hit a ball he doesn’t think about his swing plane, stance, posture, wrist position, grip, tempo, hip and shoulder turn. It would be too confusing. He relies on muscle memory from the hours and hours of practice. Without continued practice Tiger would lose some of the muscle memory that keeps him sharp.
The world lies and deceives us to pull us in and separate us from God. One way is to tirick us to believe that gluttony and slothfulness is the path to peace and happiness. This message is thrown at us all day long by the world. We need a way to fight back. Guided meditation allows us to do this. We can fight back by practicing mental awareness. Golf is similar to Christianity and weight loss. It requires a certain mental memory to maintain our winning edge. Guided medtation is one way to maintain the psychological keenness we need to stay focused on being the Christians God desires for us and to stay on the path of health and weight loss.
Tiger has played golf his whole life, but he knows that he needs a certain amount of practice to maintain his excellence. The same is true for us. Most of us have had success lossing weight, but at some point we stopped practicing and we allowed the world to lead us. We know physically what we have to do, but it is the mental keenness that we lost. Guided meditation will give us back the mental awareness we need to continue our success. The one thing we need to do is to make it part of our practice schedule that keeps us sharp and on the right path.
Can being a Christian really help me lose weight?
July 31, 2009 by Luke Carlson · 1 Comment
Calling ourselves Christians and being a Christian are two different things. Being a Christian means we seek to live with God at the center of our life. We actively try to move away from the false gods the world tries to pull us towards like food, sex, drugs or shopping, just to name a few. The world wants us to believe that these things will bring us happiness and peace so we turn to our false idols and soon find ourselves spinning out of control. When we learn to turn to God for comfort and not food, we will lose weight. It is a very simple concept, but don’t get simple confused with easy. It takes practice, patience, perseverance and a focus on the one true God that gives us the peace and happiness He so willingly sacrificed His only Son to accomplish.
What is the best free ab exercise?
March 27, 2009 by Luke Carlson · 1 Comment
What is the best abdominal exercise? The debate will always be there, but few can argue against the best abdominal exercise being a push-up. We may not feel our abdominals working that hard because we can only percieve so much at a given time. So we only notice our arms and chest having to work so hard. But, if you have ever done a plank you quickly notice how hard the abdominals work in order to stablilize the trunk. Again when we are using our arms and chest to dynamically move the rest of the body up and down our perception of our abdominals having to work is just not that noticeable.
Why the push-up is so far superior to other traditional abdominal exercises is not just because you get a greater ab workout, but because you get an excellent full body workout. Pushups work your chest, arms, upper back, shoulders, the entire core (including the hips and pelvic muscles), the hamstrings, quads and even the muscles of the lower leg. Push-ups require no equipmnent, can be done anywhere and best of all require no cost. Truely, some of the best things in life are free.
God’s Willpower and Losing Weight
February 23, 2009 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
When it comes to health, we have allowed our primal thinking our will to align with the paths the world walks. If we continue to follow the path of our world and rely on our willpower, we will eventually fail.
In order to succeed, we must walk the path God lays before us while surrendering our will to Him. His path is a course we may find extremely difficult to follow! Why? We fear giving up the ways of the world because they feel good. We fear that following God will not be fun and may even be painful.
When we live by our will rather than God’s, we succumb to the bondages of food. We fear losing the instant gratification that our unhealthy nature seeks, but we fail to see how it slowly and certain ly destroys us. God may not instantly gratify us, but He will help us grow and mature, slowly and steadily, to experience greater joy and peace. We will never be able to attain this level of joy and peace unless we surrender to God’s will.
How do we surrender to God’s will? We recognize and acknowledge that we are weak compared to God. God desires for us to recognize our weaknesses so we will seek Him. As we seek and find God, we receive His power, finally discovering His resources to overcome our obsession with food. Paradoxically, we become stronger only when we become weaker. This is what we learned in 2 Corinthians 12: 9-10, “Each time He said, ‘my gracious favor is all you need. My power works best in your weakness.’ So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may work through me. Since I know it is all for Christ’s good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
When we define willpower as the power we receive when we align ourselves with God’s will a transformation will take place in us that will allow us to lose weight and so much more.
Christianity and Weight Loss
February 18, 2009 by Luke Carlson · Leave a Comment
Does God care how much I weigh?
No, but he is concerned with how we care for the gift of life that he has given us. When we fall into the darkness of the world’s alluring traps of pleasures foods and overeating we move away from God’s light. When we are in the darkness is when we start to gain weight. Being lost in the darkness we don’t see the warning signs like weight gain, decreased energy and bouts of depression. Our doctors may try to help by giving us medications for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression and being over weight, but this doesn’t help us get out of the traps the world has set to keep us in the darkness. Being over weight and unhealthy are only symptoms or warning signs that we are not living in the light of God.
How do we move into the light?
We focus our time and energy on Christian disciplines that will transform us from creatures of the darkness to followers of the light of God. We can not do this on our own, we need the grace of God. If you need someone to help guide you on the path to health and weight loss we at Crosstrain Fitness LLC are here to help.
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