By Christopher McCombs

Strange as it may sound, the number one obstacle that most people encounter on the road to fitness is their own friends and family. Though they may mean well, friends and family can steal time away from when you are supposed to be exercising, force you to eat terrible food, and just generally slow down your fitness progress, particularly if they don’t like exercise themselves.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, you it’s possible to use your family and friends as a way to help you get the body that you want.

Don’t Assume The Worst – Usually your family and friends genuinely don’t mean to frustrate your fitness goals, they just don’t quite understand what its like to try to eat right and do exercise regularly. Many people don’t even quite understand the benefits until they try it themselves. So don’t let diet and exercise become a point of friction in your personal relationships.

Don’t Let Little Comments Get to You – Sometimes even those are close to us can be condescending in ways that they don’t intend. When you tell people that you are working to get fit, even something as seemingly innocent as “Oh, well I hope that works out for you” can seem a bit like an insult when given the wrong tone. Just don’t let it bother you, and know that you can do it if you stick to it.

Compromise – Sometimes the absolute best thing that you can do is just meet your friends halfway. If your friends are trying to pull you to a movie when it is your scheduled exercise time, try and convince them to go see a later showing. If everyone at work is called into the conference room to eat pizza, you might try pulling the cheese off to just have the sauce and bread.

Leading a fit lifestyle doesn’t have to turn you into a hermit. In fact, you might even try to bring your family and friends into fitness with you. You might go for a walk around the park and chat, or check out a healthy restaurant together. Who knows? Maybe you will become a positive influence on their lifestyle rather than they becoming a negative influence on yours

Know that You Deserve It – Sabotage might be initiated by outside forces, but it is usually validated from within. Feeling like you aren’t making any progress with you fitness regimen can cause you to be more inclined to cheat and skip workouts. After all, if it doesn’t make any difference anyway, what does it matter? Don’t fall into this line of thinking.

It is important for you to understand that fitness and the body you want is within your grasp if you just keep pushing. You should also make certain that you have goals, so that you have an inner fire that keeps you going.

Orange County resident Christopher McCombs is a Orange County Bodybuilding expert. He is also a sought after personal trainer marketing coach.

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Lots of people say they would prefer cigar smoke to cigarette smoke and think that cigar are smoke is less harmful than the smoke from cigarettes. However the truth is that cigar smoke is actually more dangerous.

Any second hand smoke from a tobacco product is known as environmental tobacco smoke, and refers to all the smoke released from burning tobacco including cigars, pipes and cigarettes. Research shows that the smoke from cigarettes and cigars is similar and many of the same types of irritants are released. But there is one difference which is overlooked.

People argue that smoking cigars is safer because you do not inhale. However because of their size more environmental tobacco smoke is released into the atmosphere creating a greater danger from secondary inhalation. This is most definitely a case where size is not better.

Cigar and cigarette environmental tobacco smoke contains carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, and of course the well-known nicotine. Some dangerous carcinogens are also released namely benzene, arsenic, nitrosamines, hydrocarbons, and vinyl chlorine.

The difference is that the manufacture of a cigar is a long process of fermentation and ageing, in the process of which large amounts of carcinogens are produced. A fermented cigar is wrapped in a non porous wrapper to stop the cigar from burning too quickly. Once lit, these concentrated carcinogens are released, and of course, a burning cigar, (which has been designed to burn slowly), produces more smoke in the immediate area, which produces a greater risk of secondary inhalation to both the smoker, and anyone else nearby.

The truth is being near cigars that are being smoked puts you at greater risk from inhaling this second-hand smoke than from cigarettes.

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The problem with sugar is simply that all plants and animals utilise sugar as a means of storing energy. The sugar that is of the most use to us is sucrose, which is the main sugar in our diet. This dietary sugar appears to have been intended to come from plants that make sugar as part of the process of photosynthesis.

Health experts always dispute just how much sugar is needed in our diets. Surprisingly the answer is no sugar is needed, but since the 1500’s when refined sugar first became widely available, it has been used to sweeten food and make it more appetising.

Our problem is we like sweet tasting foods, and of course people buy sweet tasting foods rather than blander ones. Which do you enjoy more, cereal with some sugar and milk, or cereal with just milk?

Additionally sugar gives you an almost instant energy kick, but although it will give you that instant energy it provides no valuable nutrients.

Unfortunately sugar is easily changed to fat, hence the saying from your lips to your hips. Excess sugar simply leads to obesity and dental problems because bacteria in your mouth can easily break down any sugar there for energy and in the process leaves behind acidic residue which dissolve teeth.

Surprisingly while looking at sugar is for this article I discovered that a recent Harvard study where researchers looked at more than 38,000 healthy middle-aged women and their sugar intake, concluded that women with high sugar intakes were no more are at risk of developing diabetes than those who consumed lower amounts.

This would seem to suggest contrary to popular opinion that sugar levels are not the primary causative factor of diabetes. However it would suggest that sugar intake is one of the primary causes of obesity, as nearly everything we consume now has added sugar.

Scientists would recommend that no more than 10 per cent of our daily calorie intake should be sugar. Unfortunately this is just about impossible to keep to, because even one can of soft drink will exceed the average person’s 10% of sugar intake in an organic diet.

Unlike seventy years ago when most families grew or made a proportion of their own food, we now mostly buy ready-made processed food, and with additional steroids now being pumped into cattle to make them produce meat quicker, the end result combined with additional hidden sugar is a natural obesity trend.

What does this mean? Well it actually means that it’s not entirely your fault that you are overweight. Less food consumed today makes you fatter than greater amounts of food consumed in the first half of last century.

Consumer buying and manufacturers driven by profit have created a problem with sugar which is seriously affecting the health of many nations worldwide.

Simply put, this is why we are all suddenly becoming fatter more quickly and easily than ever before.

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