If you’re gonna be a bear this winter…. Be a grizzly
How do you tell a brown bear from a grizzly bear?
Climb a tree and...
A. If the bear climbs it and eats you, it s a brown bear.
B. If the bear KNOCKS THE TREE DOWN and eats you, it s a grizzly.
 
As you sit reading  this, what image just came to your mind?
Chances are it was a gigantic, imposing  grizzly with extraordinarily powerful muscles and a frame to match. As the cold weather rolls in, it's historically been the pattern of  bodybuilders and  strength athletes to start piling on the clothes, eating  bigger training heavier, and seeking to  gain as much mass as possible, to "become a bear" if you will. If this sounds like you, or if you've been on a quest to become a bear but you seism to end up looking more like a soft, cuddly little teddy bear than the "fear of the forest," maybe you could use some advice from a grizzly - a human grizzly by the name of Art Atwood.
Art wasn't always a grizzly. He started training with weights when he was twelve to increase speed and power for football and track, which he competed at through high school at a bodyweight hovering around 180 lbs at 5’11". Later, while at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, Art met his now good friend and first "nutritional mentor" Tony Frontier. Tony told Art he had an excellent training program but his calorie intake and nutrition were too weak for the effort he was putting forth. At the same time that Tony had Art eating huge quantities of food, he encouraged him to enter the Mr. Wisconsin. Art entered the teen division and won the light-heavyweight and overall title at a shredded 185 lbs.
After winning the 93' Teen Wisconsin, Art didn't compete again until 1999. During those six years Art managed a number of fitness clubs and nutrition stores, finished his degree in Exercise Kinesiology at UWM, and learned all the information that he could about bodybuilding, nutrition, and supplements.

What does spaghetti sauce have in common with a Bloody Mary? Unless you're I adding alcohol to your  pasta sauce, it's the contribution made to each by a powerful vegetable - the tomato. Tomatoes are the best source of lycopene, a vitamin-like antioxidant and member of the carotenoid family that contributes to the tomato's red color. The redder the tomato, the greater its lycopene content.
Lycopene is thought to inactivate free radicals — natural by-products of daily living that can damage healthy cells in the body. In addition, studies are beginning to associate lycopene with cancer prevention.
The   use   of   tomatoes    (preferably cooked tomatoes) in your kitchen is the best way to soak-up lycopene and its potential benefits. Here's a deliciously healthy recipe to get you seeing red.

This misconception is probably the most common of all. When it comes time to lose weight, the first step that pops into everyone's mind is to keep caloric intake to an absolute minimum. If you want to drop some weight, this is not the way to go. The human body is a complex system and unfortunately it will take a little more effort to outsmart it and drop that excess weight.
After drastically reducing caloric intake, the body senses that it isn't receiving an adequate amount of energy and nutrients. In response to the significant nutritional cutback, the body slows down  its  metabolism to conserve the food that it is receiving. For this reason, many individuals are still unsuccessful in their attempts to lose weight.
Worse yet, you can lose highly metabolic lean muscle from doing this!

When does muscle growth occur? If you said during a workout, you're wrong! While performing the exercise, you are actually tearing and breaking down your muscles, making them weaker. The muscle growth and increase in strength occurs during the rest period (i.e. after your workout). Therefore, if you don't allow enough time to recover, you are running the risk of developing OTS and severely limiting your body's potential for growth.
You could spend two hours at the gym day in and day out, but if you aren't letting your muscles fully recover between sessions, then all of that hard work will do more harm than good. A more effective plan would be to cut down the amount of time you spend at the gym, and reinvest that time into eating healthy meals and getting quality sleep. Wouldn't you rather build muscle eating or sleeping than spend another hour at the gym anyway?

We know what you're thinking. You think that you're making a healthy choice by ordering that Diet Coke with your #3 big bargain meal. Not even close. While ordering a Diet Coke instead of a regular Coke will save you a couple hundred calories, the difference will hardly be notice-able because it will be buried in the obscene amount of calories found in the sandwich and fries.
Your effort to make a calorie-conscious decision is definitely applauded, but you need to be aware that a much more drastic step must be taken to make your fast food meal a part of a healthy nutrition plan. Skip the bargain meals altogether. While you may be getting more food for the same price, the extra food doesn't come alone. It will also bring you unwanted fat, calories, and cholesterol. Instead of ordering the #3, just order a regular-sized sandwich with small fries. Or better yet, substitute the sandwich for a salad and trade in the fries for a baked potato. Your options will vary from restaurant to restaurant, but going in there with this frame of mind will have you more prepared to make a smart food choice.

Many people have a tendency to hit aerobics hard in the days before a contest. They’ll be doing up to 4 hours a day in an effort to cut fat and make up for any extra weight. The trouble is, they’re BURNING BOTH FAT AND MUSCLE. The fat may go, but a good deal of muscle mass goes with it. 25–30 minutes of aerobics should give you enough work to burn some fat without ompromising muscle mass. Do your 30 minutes every other day up to 2 months before the contest. Then begin to do 25–30 every day. Stop aerobics a week out from the contest.
It may also be advantageous to stop training legs 2 weeks before a contest. The legs begin to retain water, and lines are brought out to the point the legs are ripped by contest time. You hould cut all training of any type completely 3 days before the contest to minimize catabolic and maximize anabolic conditions.

Here's another popular one. We all know someone (or maybe you are that someone) who tries to stay in shape, so they hit the gym a few times a week. The only problem is that right after you leave the gym, your next stop is the drive-thru at the fast food joint or the couch with an enormous bowl of calorie-packed ice cream sitting in your lap. Don't laugh! This situation is more common than you'd think. Many people are under the assumption that since they work out multiple times a week, they are "allowed" to eat whatever they want because they are going to burn it off at the gym anyway. Sorry, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way.
EXERCISE CANNOT MAKE UP FOR A POOR DIET!
While a steady amount of physical activity may be able to mask some of the effects of a poor diet, it won't completely cancel out the excessive fat and calories. Most people don't realize how easy it is to consume 1,000 calories, and how difficult it is to burn that same number of calories off.
A thousand calories sounds like a lot... and it is. Consuming this amount of energy from nothing but fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and other healthy snacks would take a large amount of food, but with the temptation of fast food restaurants, high-calorie packaged goods, and overwhelming portion sizes, taking in 1,000 calories in a single meal is much easier than you think. For instance, a Big Mac® and medium fries, a common American meal, stacks up 1,040 calories, and that doesn't even include a beverage.

After you get caught-up in the flow of a regular workout schedule, it doesn't take long until the positive effects begin to have an influence on your state of mind. Your energy levels rise, your self-esteem grows, and the muscle definition starts to become more noticeable as you look in the bathroom mirror. The satisfaction you gain from completing another successful workout can soon lead to addiction-like behavior. Like any other addict, you increase the frequency. For the first few months, it was three days a week for 30-minute sessions. Now, you're hitting the gym five days a week for two hours at a time. The common train of thought is, "if a little is good, a lot must be better." Well, it is definitely possible for this train of thought to backfire and result in a condition called overtraining syndrome (OTS).
Are you constantly suffering from  fatigue? Are you suddenly more vulnerable to colds, sore  throats, and other illnesses? Have you been engaging  in high-intensity workouts without any gains?

A sugar replaced called isomalt, which was introduced over 15 years ago, has been shown recently to have a low glycemic index, much lower than other bulking-agent sweeteners currently found in a variety of foods. The glycemic index measures the effect that a given carbohydrate has on blood sugar levels (the highest rating being 100 and the lowest being zero). The lower the glycemic index the less that blood sugar levels rise. Consequently, less insulin, the hormone responsible for shuttling blood sugar to storage sites, is released into the bloodstream. Lower insulin levels mean lower levels of circulating triglycerides, which have been implicated as contributing to cardiovascular diseases, obesity and the onset of diabetes.