Amber O’Neal
Born and raised in Elgin, Illinois, I am an odd candidate for starting a fitness and nutrition company. As an overweight child, exercise was something that I despised with a passion and avoided at all costs – even volunteering to grade papers for the teachers rather than endure recess outside with the other kids. While I grew up on healthy food, portion control was an unknown entity, and by middle school I had become the dreaded “big girl.”
Committed to changing my figure and my fate, I began taking aerobics classes at age 14. As the pounds whittled away, I felt empowered to test new physical limits - even joining the girls’ basketball team in high school, and I have continued to remain active ever since. I’ve never met a workout that I wouldn’t try at least once.
After gaining the typical “freshman fifteen” in college despite my physical activity, I began to pay closer attention to my eating habits – reading every nutrition magazine and book that I could get my hands on. Through my own self-study and experimentation, I found ways to satisfy my appetite without going overboard, and with that I began my fitness and nutrition journey.
After college, a friend suggested that I become certified to teach aerobics since I was always at the gym anyway. Originally thinking it was an absurd idea; I later pursued the certification and found my true calling as a part-time aerobics instructor at a major fitness chain. After quickly realizing that many of my students needed more intimate instruction in order to reach their goals, I became a certified personal trainer.
Several years later, I was ready to make a pivotal career change. In 2006, Café Physique (www.CafePhysique.com) was born out of my desire to offer a 360? approach to fitness. Convinced that for the ordinary person, progress would not be permanent without habit-altering lifestyle changes; I designed a company that offers full lifestyle management in the form of fitness training, weight loss management, and educational services.
| MY READERS BLOG POSTS: |
The hardest part about exercising is not deciding what to do - it's actually sticking with it. Everyone is excited and motivated when they first start a new workout training schedule, but it's easy to lose passion over time.
Unless you're in the small minority of people who have more money than they know what to do with, the thought of totally wasting cash is properly motivating so "put your money where you mouth is."
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Drink more tea. When the whole Starbucks craze started, I always felt left out when my girlfriends wanted to meet for coffee because while I love the aroma of fresh brewed coffee, the taste makes me gag and cringe. But then a friend turned me onto hot tea, and things have never been the same since.
I love hot tea for many reasons. For one, it has turned out to be my herbal Xanax. It calms me when I'm feeling anxious, and comforts me when I'm having a rough day. I'm known for being freezing cold at all times, so I enjoy holding a hot mug while reading a book or people watching. These are all of my emotional reasons for drinking tea, but here are 10 health reasons to make the switch!
- Tea contains antioxidants that protect your body from the ravages of aging and the effects of pollution.
- Tea has less caffeine than coffee. An eight-ounce cup of coffee contains around 135 mg caffeine; tea contains only 30 to 40 mg per cup. If drinking coffee gives you the jitters, causes indigestion or headaches or interferes with sleep -- switch to tea.
- Tea may reduce your risk of heart attack and stroke. Drinking tea may help keep your arteries smooth and clog-free, the same way a drain keeps your bathroom pipes clear.
- Tea protects your bones. It's not just the milk added to tea that builds strong bones. One study that compared tea drinkers with non-drinkers, found that people who drank tea for 10 or more years had the strongest bones, even after adjusting for age, body weight, exercise, smoking and other risk factors. Read more...
Motivation will not magically happen. Your motivation will change from day to day. You have to recommit to your goals each day, tweak them to fit changes in your lifestyle and attitude and find new ways to motivate yourself over the course of your life.
If you're sitting on the couch watching Oprah's Best Life episodes while eating Kashi cookies dipped in melted Hershey's kisses from Halloween (don't even laugh - it happens) and waiting to feel "motivated" to head to the gym, you are fooling yourself. Read more...
Stop wasting your time following someone else's plan for you. Make your own plan based on realistic changes because if you can't follow your chosen diet for the rest of your life, you're wasting precious time.
Most people who go on diets gain back any of the weight that they've lost. This is because it is very difficult to maintain a strict eating regiment and because dieting often disrupts our bodies' natural metabolism. Read more...
Willpower is fine for short-term progress, but long-term success requires planning and finding ways to feel motivated daily.
In the past, a lack of willpower has been blamed for causing us to fall off the diet wagon, but new research indicates that trying to will your way to long-term success rarely gets the job done. Willpower is finite, and when you're stressed, tired or even bored, you can easily hit the limit in terms of "I will not eat that brownie. I will NOT eat that brownie. I WILL not eat that brownie..."-type thinking. Read more...
It’s true that eating healthy can be more expensive than buying junk, but there are things you can do to lighten the impact on your wallet. Keep in mind that food is much more expensive in restaurants, take-out/delivery, and fast food chains than it is in a grocery store, so don’t use money as an excuse for not buying healthy groceries if you’re eating out multiple times a week. Read more...
The issue
A household is considered food secure when the family doesn’t live in hunger or fear of starvation, so food security refers to the availability of food and one's access to it. Poor households often have a consistently difficult time affording quality food and typically end up with poor diets characterized by lots of starch and refined sugar. And as one expert put it, “…it's fair to assume, these people are not loading up on brown rice and quinoa [an organic grain]. So, we're talking about empty calories that predispose people to becoming overweight and definitely increase the risk for heart disease and diabetes.” Read more...
Quality time together
Many couples already spend considerable time apart because of career demands and other responsibilities, but the need for quality time together often increased dramatically when preparing for a wedding. What was once free time is now spent picking out invitations and meeting with vendors, so they are looking for ways to stay connected. Having a scheduled workout appointment with a personal trainer is a way to guarantee that they’ll have at least a bit of bonding time every week. Read more...
Hopping around from guru to guru and being disappointed with the results, or lack thereof, has led savvy women to become empowered when it comes to their health. In the process, they have learned a very big lesson. Modest lifestyle changes can add up to major results. You don’t have to be a raw-egg-drinking-ultra-marathon-running-twenty-four-seven-workout fanatic to live a healthy lifestyle. In fact, you can be fantastic just by making a series of moderate changes and good decisions over time. Read more...
I know you’ve heard of it…the little magic pill you can pop to help accelerate fat loss, speed up your metabolism, block carbohydrates from entering your blood stream and trick your mind into thinking that you already ate. It’s not sold on street corners like the illicit drugs of the urban ghetto though. No, this little pill is readily and legally available to all – even hawked in magazines that you find on popular retail shelves. It’s promoted on television by health experts, celebrities and even some doctors. And your best friend’s cousin’s hairdresser even heard about it on Oprah last week. It’s sold in bright-colored little boxes and marketed under various brand names. It comes in different forms – sometimes blended in a shake, crushed into a nutrition bar or soaked into a frozen meal, but at the end of the day one aspect of this little pill is consistent. It always represents a pipe dream. Read more...
Try this experiment for a week - or even just a day: Fix your plate as you normally would, but before you eat, take the time to determine how many servings of food you are taking in. You may be surprised to find out that you are ingesting 3-4x the recommended servings.
Most Americans don't know what an actual serving looks like because we're so used to receiving and eating such large portions. If you find that you're "supersizing" at every meal, you should gradually reduce your serving sizes and chances are that you will be satisfied with less food. Read more...
While on a quest for weight loss, we often search for every small advantage we can find. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it leads us to make emotional food choices rather than choosing healthy foods based on proven facts. Emotionally, the following list of foods may sound like great options, but read on to find out why they may fool you: Read more...
Try this experiment for a week - or even just a day: Fix your plate as you normally would, but before you eat, take the time to determine how many servings of food you are taking in. You may be surprised to find out that you are ingesting 3-4x the recommended servings. Read more...
Some days, you just won’t feel like working out. Maybe you haven’t been able to get as much sleep as you need or you've been having some stress at work or in your personal life. No matter the reason, sometimes you just aren’t in the mood for moving and sweating. Whenever this happens to you, try these strategies for working up the desire to hit the gym:
Remind Yourself of Your Goals - Start thinking about why you started exercising in the first place and what the end results will be. Do you want to lose a certain amount of weight? Get more toned? Have more energy? A quick reminder of why exercise is important to you can be just the motivation that you need to eek out another set of reps. Read more...
