Lionheart Functional Fitness

Getting back and staying back on track can be difficult. Especially if you’re new to fitness, new to eating healthier, or continuing to abstain from the gym. LFF has at-home programming & nutrition plans that are designed specifically for you.

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Use this plate as a guide for creating healthy, balanced meals—whether served on a plate or packed up for lunch.

Water: drink water, tea, or coffee (with little to no sugar). Limit dairy (1-2 servings/day) and juice (1 small glass/day). Avoid sugar drinks.

Healthy protein: choose fish, poultry, beans, and nuts; limit red meat and cheese; avoid bacon, cold cuts, and other processed meats.

Whole grains: eat a variety of whole grains (like whole-wheat bread, whole-grain pasta, and brown rice). Limit refined grains (like white rice and white bread).

Vegetables and fruit: the more veggies—and the greater the variety—the better. Potatoes and French fries don’t count. Eat plenty of fruits of all colors.

Don’t forget to use healthy oils (like olive and canola oil) for cooking, on salad, and at the taxable. Limit butter. Avoid trans fat.

Holidays can really throw you off track while you’re working hard at losing weight. Sometimes one weekend of fun can send you back tracking for days, weeks, or even months. Here’s what you can do to reinforce your intentions:

Get back into your routine. Be intentional on Monday or the holiday can easily slip into your week. Drink lots of water, make good nutrition-related decisions, and be sure to move your body and get a little sweat going.

Give your digestive system a rest, especially if you’re up a few pounds after the weekend. Try juicing for a few meals or drinking meal replacement shakes/smoothies. If you pre-break down your post holiday meals by juicing or blending them, your digestive tract can spend more resources digesting your “cheat” meal(s).

Tighten your belt. Consider cutting sugar, grain, and/or dairy entirely for a week or two following the holiday. It’ll give you an awesome jump back into your groove and the quick results will be encouraging.

Don’t sweat the small stuff! Didn’t make the best choices over the weekend? Disappointed with the number on the scale? It’s ok. Just don’t let that disappointment take over. Give yourself a little grace and get back on the horse. Even if you have to re-lose 5 pounds that you already lost, it’ll come off fast if you’re intentional over the next week or so.

To our followers, have a safe and happy 4th of July! 💥🍔🌭🥧🍻

Intermittent fasting is not a diet, but rather a dieting pattern. By fasting and feasting deliberately, you consuming your calories during a specific window of the day, and choose not to eat for a larger window of time.

By cutting out an entire meal each day, you’re consuming fewer calories per week—even if your two meals per day are slightly bigger than before. And, let’s face it, a lot of adults skip breakfast anyway. You just need to couple what you’re already doing with better food choices...

Intermittent fasting can help because your body operates differently when “feasting” compared to “fasting”. When you eat a meal, your body spends a few hours processing that food, burning what it can from what you just consumed. Because it has all of this readily-available, easy-to-burn energy, your body will choose to use that as energy rather than the fat you have stored.

During the “fasted state”, your body doesn’t have a recently consumed meal to use as energy. Thus, it is more likely to pull from the fat sores in your body as it’s the only energy source readily available.

The same goes for working out in a “fasted state”. Without a ready supply of glucose and glycogen to pull from (it’s already been depleted over the course of your fasted state and hasn’t been replenished with a pre-workout meal), your body is forced to adapt and pull from a source of energy that it does have available: the fat stored in your cells.

Growth hormone is increased during fasted states. Combine this with a decrease in insulin production and, thus, an increase in insulin sensitivity, and you’re essentially priming your body for muscle growth and fat loss!

The Tortoise and the Hare. We all know the story. The thing is, it was the Tortoise’s passion or spirit to not stop for a moment, for continuous effort, and hard work that eventually led to his success.

~Slow progress isn’t failure.
~Slow progress adds up.
~Slow progress teaches you to try out new things.
~Slow progress makes you resilient.
~Slow progress teaches you to not give up.

When we want to live healthier and lose weight, too often, we try to do everything at once. Gizmos and gadgets, exercising 7 days a week, vowing to sleep more, start taking supplements, stick to that juice-only diet.

What if I told you that, not only are you wasting your time, but no matter how much you exercise, you cannot out-train a bad diet? In fact, exercising is a tiny fraction of how our body’s burn calories.

If you want to lose that Quarantine 15, consuming fewer calories is a great place to start. The best way to do this is by consuming good, healthy, whole foods. We’re talking about minimally-processed, nutritionally-dense foods to help you stay energized and satiated throughout the day.

Adjusting your diet is a substitutive habit change, not the creation of a new habit. We HAVE to eat. We’re not adding anything particularly new to our daily routine, we’re merely substituting what we’re eating or how much we’re eating.
It’s the difference between reducing the number of sodas you drink each day from 5 to 4 or cooking your meals at home each night, compared to convincing yourself to get out of bed at 6AM to go running.

Make a series of small substitutions to gradually return to a proper baseline for what “normal” is:
-Properly-sized portions
-More veggies
-Less processed foods
-Minimal calories consumed from soda/fruit juice/etc.

You DO NOT have to give up your favorite foods. You simply need to adjust the average number of healthy decisions you make when it comes to eating foods each week.

Excellence is a noble goal, worthy of your time and effort, but how does the pursuit of excellence drive your day-to-day operations? Understanding this concept can direct decisions, establish core values and competencies, and ultimately determine your success.

The pursuit of excellence has everything to do with your happiness and your growing confidence. It has to do with your health, wellness, fitness, and results. In other words, the pursuit of excellence is the pursuit of improving your life.

This seems simple enough, and it is. Just don’t confuse simple with easy.