Most women believe that in order to lose weight the first thing they need to do is eat less and move more. In a way this is true, but there really is more science behind that. What typically happens is women eat maybe 1 or 2 meals a day, drastically reducing their caloric intake and then adding a walk in for exercise. They may see the scale move but what are they really losing? I bet you’ll be surprised. Read on… Your body’s metabolism is the key to losing unwanted body fat. When working with women, I am not concerned about their weight as much as the level of body fat they are carrying around. A healthy bodyfat level to be at is between 19-25%. Most women who have dieted for years will find themselves at 30% or more. Those are dangerous levels that invite disease into their bodies. Although they may have lost 50 lbs. of body weight, they may still be at 30% body fat and at risk for heart disease, Type II diabetes and other ailments. How can they be at risk when they wear a size 8 dress pant? Because they never lost bodyfat while dieting. They lost body water and precious lean muscle mass. Lean muscle mass is the main manipulator of your metabolism. The more lean muscle mass you have the more calories you burn at rest. When your metabolism is humming along at a strong rate, it does not need to use bodyfat for energy. It’s alive and functioning at optimum levels. Fat that is stored on your body for energy is not needed and your body lets it go. You continue to build strong, lean muscles and your metabolism gets stronger and faster, you indeed get leaner, stronger, toned and full of energy. This is the picture of health and vitality. Now take the woman who is dieting. She is eating 3 meals a day and not focused on the right type of exercises. She’ll go for a walk around the block. It works for about 1 month. She’s dropped 5 pounds. She’s excited! Month 2 rolls around and the scale has stopped moving, she cuts her 3 meals into smaller portions and adds another block to her walk. The scale finally drops again. She’s excited! Month 3 rolls around and the scale has not moved or has gone up. Yikes! She drops to 2 meals a day, adds another block to her walk and an exercise video. Month 4 comes too quickly. She sees the scale move again so she cuts calories even more and increases her walk for a full 2 hours every day. She’s tired, frustrated and wondering why this is not working? I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The only way for her to keep the scale moving is to continue to decrease calories and increase the amount of time spent on low, steady state exercise. Is she really losing fat? No, she is losing water and precious metabolic boosting muscle that is why she has to continue decreasing calories to see change. If she continues on this path, she will lower her metabolic rate to such a level that her body will go into panic mode and begin conserving every morsel of food that enters as bodyfat so it will have the energy just to function. The result is a cranky, tired, moody, flabby, and frustrated woman. I know, I’ve been there. Ladies, I want you to know the truth. The scale is not your friend. You have been lied to for years. There’s even a tv show dedicated to keeping these lies alive (Biggest Loser Challenge) where your worth is determined by a number on the scale! How have we as a society allowed this to happen? Satan has been at work! God made you in His image. You are a beautiful, strong, and vibrant woman. Don’t allow Satan to get a foothold in your mind. Oh how I wish I could give you all hugs right now! Here is the picture of a woman on the right path: She determines why she wants to accomplish this goal of being healthy and full of energy. She enlists the help of her husband and children. She puts together a plan of action including how to deal with obstacles that will be thrown her way. Her plan does include strength and interval training as the core of the program. She also determines her caloric intake and creates meal plans for the week. She cleans out her cupboard of all manmade, adulterated foods and buys food in their original God created package. She gets connected with other women who are doing the same steps (this site of course!) and stays accountable no matter what happens to try and bump her off course. All her workouts are scheduled in for each week just like math and english class. She sticks to her workouts because she is full of determination. Each week she discovers how much better she feels. Her clothes are getting loser, she is getting more flexible and full of energy. She finds herself hungry more often because her metabolism is on fire. She has more lean mass so she can eat more food, quite the opposite of the dieting woman. She does not suffer from mood swings, turbulent hormone levels or bloating due to eating whole foods. Does she know how much she weighs? Does it really matter if she is feeling this strong and vibrant? This is what I want for you. I will elaborate more on how to stop dieting for life in another post. This one ended up way longer than I intended. Hugs~~ Post from: Homeschool Fitness Coach

My husband and I decided to start following Dave Ramsey’s, Total Money Makeover.  We’re already on a roll by getting our emergency fund saved and actually bit off a bit of our credit card debt.  It’s pretty exciting.  My biggest obstacle has been the grocery bill.  I used to be rather good at spending only $60 every two weeks for groceries, but I just haven’t paid much attention to what I’m spending lately with my busy-ness and I was shocked to discover that one month our bill totalled over $700!  So, I was on a mission today to see if I could stay within a $150 budget.  Now, I know there are women out there who spend a lot less on their weekly grocery bill, but you got to start somewhere.  I have found a few blogs that are very helpful with letting you know what the weekly deals are and coupons to use, etc.  So, I headed out today with my list for 4 different stores.  It took me about 1 1/2 hours to shop and I only spent $118.  Wow!  So, now the competitive streak in me has been awakened and I want to beat my PR next week!  Ha!  I will be studying the Walgreens and CVS tips on different blogs and figuring out how to make my coupons work hard for me.  I see a new addiction coming on.  My 12 week Storm Force Fitness challenge has been coming along wonderfully.  I have dropped 2% bodyfat in the last 3 weeks even though I only got 2 of the 4 workouts done last week due to business getting in the way.  I am making up for them this week while everyone else is enjoying a more relaxed week.  Ugh!  I am getting ready to launch my first book this week.  I have a few technical problems to fix with my webhost and my covers for the book and CD’s are being created right now.  Hope to have it all done soon.  I feel like it has already taken an eternity. Here is my workout plan today: Storm Force Pulse Pyramid II - 30 minute workout Meal Plan: Meal 1:  1 egg, 3 egg whites, spinach, red peppers, .5 oz colby jack cheese Meal 2:  Cottage cheese and blueberries, almonds Meal 3:  Cantaloupe and 4 cheese cubes (while shopping) Meal 4:  Post workout shake, apple, almonds Meal 5:  Homemade chicken soup in the crockpot Meal 6:  1/2 cup cottage cheese, 1/2 scoop vanilla protein powder, 1/4 cup frozen blueberries, 12 almonds Post from: Homeschool Fitness Coach

Kathy Lowers, Founder of Considering Homeschooling This week we are hoping to hear some happy cheeping from the chicken eggs we are incubating.  Homeschooling is ideal for do-it-yourself living creature projects and the butterfly, lady bug, praying mantis, silk worm projects -- to name a few -- that we have done were easy and yet so valuable. How wondrous it is to view the metamorphosis of one of God’s creatures, right in your own home. A public school classroom might have a fish tank with some leaves and a chrysalis or an incubator with some eggs; the students may or may not see the butterfly or chicks emerge during school hours.  Their teacher might teach the life cycle of a butterfly or chicken, but no credit to the Creator could be given. In contrast, Christian parents who teach their children at home find that such a project rises to an infinitely higher dimension.  At home, there is a bonding between parents and children and among siblings as they experience a living miracle -- and there is a resulting acknowledgement and awe of the One who designed it. So, I jumped at the chance when a homeschooling 4-H mom offered her incubator and a clutch of chicken eggs.  Never having incubated eggs before, I assumed it would be a cinch, just like a cocoon.  Just pop the eggs in the incubator and after a while, you would get your chicks, right?   After some web sites, books and experience regarding this subject, the children and I discovered that incubating can be a complicated and risky process. For one, the incubator we have is not the expensive, digital kind that controls its own temperature and humidity.  It is the old-fashioned version where you have to keep checking the temperature, which seems to meander up and down on a whim.  A few times it got below or above the instructed 99.5 degrees, and we panicked, tweaking it back to the proper temperature, but wondering did the fluctuation affect the chicks? Chicks cannot survive extreme temperature deviations.  And then you have to keep the humidity at the ideal level, which varies according to where you are in the 21 day cycle.  You have to add water into special wells in the incubator.  If there is not enough water, the chicks will stick to the shells.  If too much humidity is present, the chicks will drown. Eggs in an incubator must also be turned several times a day.  A hen instinctively turns her eggs to keep the developing embryos from sticking to the sides of the shell. One of more interesting aspects of the incubator project is “candling” the eggs. You shine a light through the eggs to see if you can determine if there is life in them; sometimes you see a beating heart or movement -- very cool.  What you usually find is that some eggs were never fertile while others started growing but “quit” -- either because the environment was not right or just because they were not meant to make it.  You have to remove the non-living ones because they could explode. Out of fourteen eggs we had five infertile ones, two rotten ones, and seven that may or may not make it -- we’ll know in about three days.  I have to admit I have felt pretty incompetent and stressed when I thought the humidity or temperature was off.  But, we tried our very best to give these eggs the cleanest, safest, most conducive environment possible for coming out healthy.  That, along with prayer, gives us some optimism. I could not help realizing there is a strong analogy here between incubating eggs and raising up children.  While at the beginning all the eggs appear the same, all children start out with such potential, such seeming innocence before some are destroyed by the way of the world. But some Christian parents think that they can place the fragile soul of a child in any old environment, like the extreme anti-God environment of government schools, believing that child will come out just fine through going to Sunday school 45 minutes each week. These naïve parents imagine their child being a great evangelist to all the other youngsters there, not realizing their child is being evangelized more smoothly and intensely, by humanist teachers and curriculum. By the time the process is nearing the end, some have really become rotten, both eggs and children.  While sometimes there was no preventing a bad egg, Christian parents putting their children in the perverted incubators of the public schools is by far the biggest contributor to failed children. If you are a loving parent who really knows Jesus and adheres to His Word in all you do, if you can create an uplifting, safe, inspiring Christian environment for children in your home – and I am convinced most real Believers are more than capable of this -- then you should be homeschooling.  Don’t let the world incubate the souls of your children; God gave that job to you!

Kathy Lowers, Founder of Considering Homeschooling This week we are hoping to hear some happy cheeping from the chicken eggs we are incubating.  Homeschooling is ideal for do-it-yourself living creature projects and the butterfly, lady bug, praying mantis, silk worm projects -- to name a few -- that we have done were easy and yet so valuable. How wondrous it is to view the metamorphosis of one of God’s creatures, right in your own home. A public school classroom might have a fish tank with some leaves and a chrysalis or an incubator with some eggs; the students may or may not see the butterfly or chicks emerge during school hours.  Their teacher might teach the life cycle of a butterfly or chicken, but no credit to the Creator could be given. In contrast, Christian parents who teach their children at home find that such a project rises to an infinitely higher dimension.  At home, there is a bonding between parents and children and among siblings as they experience a living miracle -- and there is a resulting acknowledgement and awe of the One who designed it. So, I jumped at the chance when a homeschooling 4-H mom offered her incubator and a clutch of chicken eggs.  Never having incubated eggs before, I assumed it would be a cinch, just like a cocoon.  Just pop the eggs in the incubator and after a while, you would get your chicks, right?   After some web sites, books and experience regarding this subject, the children and I discovered that incubating can be a complicated and risky process. For one, the incubator we have is not the expensive, digital kind that controls its own temperature and humidity.  It is the old-fashioned version where you have to keep checking the temperature, which seems to meander up and down on a whim.  A few times it got below or above the instructed 99.5 degrees, and we panicked, tweaking it back to the proper temperature, but wondering did the fluctuation affect the chicks? Chicks cannot survive extreme temperature deviations.  And then you have to keep the humidity at the ideal level, which varies according to where you are in the 21 day cycle.  You have to add water into special wells in the incubator.  If there is not enough water, the chicks will stick to the shells.  If too much humidity is present, the chicks will drown. Eggs in an incubator must also be turned several times a day.  A hen instinctively turns her eggs to keep the developing embryos from sticking to the sides of the shell. One of more interesting aspects of the incubator project is “candling” the eggs. You shine a light through the eggs to see if you can determine if there is life in them; sometimes you see a beating heart or movement -- very cool.  What you usually find is that some eggs were never fertile while others started growing but “quit” -- either because the environment was not right or just because they were not meant to make it.  You have to remove the non-living ones because they could explode. Out of fourteen eggs we had five infertile ones, two rotten ones, and seven that may or may not make it -- we’ll know in about three days.  I have to admit I have felt pretty incompetent and stressed when I thought the humidity or temperature was off.  But, we tried our very best to give these eggs the cleanest, safest, most conducive environment possible for coming out healthy.  That, along with prayer, gives us some optimism. I could not help realizing there is a strong analogy here between incubating eggs and raising up children.  While at the beginning all the eggs appear the same, all children start out with such potential, such seeming innocence before some are destroyed by the way of the world. But some Christian parents think that they can place the fragile soul of a child in any old environment, like the extreme anti-God environment of government schools, believing that child will come out just fine through going to Sunday school 45 minutes each week. These naïve parents imagine their child being a great evangelist to all the other youngsters there, not realizing their child is being evangelized more smoothly and intensely, by humanist teachers and curriculum. By the time the process is nearing the end, some have really become rotten, both eggs and children.  While sometimes there was no preventing a bad egg, Christian parents putting their children in the perverted incubators of the public schools is by far the biggest contributor to failed children. If you are a loving parent who really knows Jesus and adheres to His Word in all you do, if you can create an uplifting, safe, inspiring Christian environment for children in your home – and I am convinced most real Believers are more than capable of this -- then you should be homeschooling.  Don’t let the world incubate the souls of your children; God gave that job to you!

As a full time wife and mother, money is NOT one of my biggest resources. So when I do get some I can immediately think of something to do with it! Are you where I am? Recently I was thinking of oh so many things I [...]