For the past decade I’ve been primarily focusing on coaching middle age and older adults and without question, the most common issue that gets brought up in PAR-Q’s (physical activity readiness questionnaire) is suffering at times with some degree of low back pain.

Now this probably won’t surprise anyone, but have you ever stopped to wonder why low back issues are so common once we get on the south side of forty? I mean it’s not like everyone injured their back in an accident or suffers from a degenerative condition.

How do we explain the commonplace for low back pain with some many individuals who never had issues when they were younger? Well, I believe there’s a simple explanation for this, but it may not be what you think.

We can find clues in looking at how most people go about treating their low back pain. Whenever I ask individuals about their previous solutions, I hear all kinds of things from getting chiropractic care to inversion tables,...

Anyone who has ever dieted and cut out processed sugars will tell you about the mood changes, irritability, headaches, and other not-so-fun side effects. The fact of the matter is when you consume excess sugar over long periods of time it’s going to uncomfortable when you cut it out.

Not only are you dealing with drug like withdrawal symptoms due to sugar affecting the opioid receptors in the brain, but you’re also dealing with the side effects of detoxification. In short, there are a host of physiological changes going on throughout your body when you start removing this very, very addictive substance.

While there’s no way to avoid all discomfort with beating a sugar addiction, you can most definitely reduce the symptoms with a well thought out strategy and become victorious. In today’s post I’ll provide you with some tips and help you to improve your chances of sticking with it until you see success. 

Over the past twenty plus years I’ve been...

There’s more and more research coming out all the time on the role Vitamin D plays in metabolic and immune functions. Now let me start by saying I typically don’t read too much into studies where scientists isolate an individual vitamin in attempts to demonstrate a particular benefit. This is what I often refer to as “nutrition-ism” where food manufacturers pay big bucks to have researchers attempt to demonstrate a health benefit with their processed food product.

The whole processed food industry is suspect in my opinion anyways. Just like the whole idea of “fortifying” or enriching foods with vitamins, minerals, and fiber can make low quality food products appear healthy when they’re anything but. They’ve been duping us with food labels for years when it comes to vitamins especially.

Have you ever really studied a food label for something like crackers? Supposedly, we can get 90% of our Vitamin C needs in the example below,...

One of the biggest controversies in weight loss and wellness is the faulty belief that dietary fat intake is one of the main culprits to obesity and metabolic disease. We need to pump the brakes on this idea.

Now it should be obvious that if you consume excess amounts of dietary fat (regardless of the source), meaning more total energy in calories than your body needs, then well yeah, it’s going to result in body fat increases and negatively impact your health.

However, when you really start examining the evidence, saturated fats from natural sources don’t come out being the evil villain many have labeled it as being over the past forty plus years. And the advocates for this idea weren’t fringe loonies but many of our so called “experts” in government and mainstream medicine.

This shouldn’t come at a surprise to anyone who isn’t sleepwalking, but the low-fat dietary recommendations that started back in the 80’s which led to insanely...

Adequate sleep and recovery is one of the seven essential components needed for effective fat loss and body transformation. Without enough sleep your body stays in an on-going catabolic state where hormonal imbalances essentially block fat loss. As a double whammy, you’ll also be more likely to gain weight with stress related eating habits. Research has shown that individuals who do not get enough sleep are, get this, a whopping 73% more likely to be overweight than those getting 7-8 hours per night!

In today's blog post I’m going to explain just exactly why this happens along with providing you some tips on how to improve your sleep patterns and therefore your weight loss. The first principal we must come to terms with is that health and body composition hinges on sufficient rest and recovery. The old adage, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” may sound cool but the truth is you’ll just get there quicker. You can only push the human body so hard for...

Although most all exercise is beneficial for improving your health, is there one form of exercise that trumps all others in helping to stabilize blood sugar levels and improve insulin sensitivity? In today’s post I want to discuss this topic and share with you my thoughts based on personal experience and research.

Before we dive right in, I want to be perfectly clear with a few things up front. When I find a particular methodology with fitness training to provide a positive result and then I make reference of what I found, it doesn’t mean the science is settled and the case is closed. For crying out loud, haven’t we had enough of that lately? Take the information for what it’s worth and do your own experimentation and evaluation of the research associated with it.

I want to clarify this in attempts to avoid the senseless debates that sometimes come up. There are a lot of people, so called “experts” included, that have very rigid positions on...

You’ve undoubtedly heard the advice about writing down the foods you eat when trying to lose weight. Journaling has long been considered by many weight loss experts as an effective, yet strangely often underutilized strategy for lifestyle and behavioral change. It appears there may be something to this as confirmed through research. A research study by the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research showed that individuals who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records.

The study was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and included over 1,685 participants. Similarly, the National Weight Control Registry which tracks over 5,000 individuals who have lost large amounts of weight and maintained that weight loss, found that an overwhelming majority of successful study participants tracked what they ate.

The research seems pretty clear that writing down what you eat improves results. It may seem like boring and tedious work,...

If you have symptoms such as regularly feeling tired and fatigued along with recurring allergy issues, suffering from anxiety, difficulties with concentrating, poor sleep patterns, and find it difficult to lose weight, you may be dealing from hidden adrenal fatigue also known as hypoadrenia.

This is part one in a three-part series that I’ll be doing on adrenal fatigue and how to correct it. First, we should develop a basic understanding of the adrenal glands and what they do. There are two adrenal glands located on top of the kidneys. These glands are involved several physiological functions including blood sugar regulation, central nervous system processes, cardiovascular function, hormone production, gastrointestinal function, and liver function to name a few.

The adrenal glands also play an important role in helping the body respond appropriately to stressors. They produce hormones in a complex symphony that is orchestrated with two other glands in the brain called the...