TEN WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR BODY SHAPE FOREVER (BY PAUL CHEK)

Today’s gyms are loaded with people desperately trying to transform their sagging bottoms, beer belly tumors, chunky cheeks and flabby triceps into a beautiful, slim, sexy work of art worthy of adorning the cover of the latest fitness magazine. However, while many people are still going to the gym to achieve their goals, increasing numbers of people are turning to hormonal trickery, metabolic stimulants, and surgical procedures (sucking, tucking, stapling and augmentation) to achieve the look they want. In fact, on a recent seminar tour through Australia, I was shocked to see Adelaide setting a trend with a new gym complete with a cosmetic surgical center, offering a range of cosmetic procedures right up front on the menu of gym services!

While most people know that exercise is important for improving and maintaining an ideal body shape, few actually realize the act of exercising itself is a stressor to the body. Think about it…how do you feel after a good workout? Sore, right! That’s because you’ve broken down tissue and it’s healing. Broken down anything = stress and such stress is only “good for you” when you have the capacity to recover from it.
Having been in the health and exercise business for over twenty-one years, I can assure you the fastest way to optimal exercise recovery, and the body you’ve always wanted, is Mother Nature’s way. What is Mother Nature’s way? Let’s put it this way – have you ever seen a wild animal in its natural habitat that was obese? Have you ever seen a wolf with flabby legs, a deer with love handles or a tiger with a double chin? No! The reason for this is simple – all wild animals follow Mother Nature’s guidelines, conforming to their unique body plan. Bill Wolcott, author of The Metabolic Typing Diet, states, “You don’t feed lions leaves, and you don’t feed giraffes steaks!” If you do, you are very likely to end up with sick, fat lions and giraffes…on Prozac! Sound familiar!

It would seem pretty obvious by comparing the escalating rates of obesity and degenerative disease today, with that of our ancestors, what we are doing today isn’t working – namely diet, exercise and lifestyle factors. How far back do you have to go to find a strong healthy Ibibio race? Not far at all – but things started to change right after they were exposed to processed food! In his book Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Weston A. Price clearly documented resistance to disease, good health and vitality among natives that had not been exposed to white man’s food. Like the lion eating meat and the giraffe eating leaves, natives ate what was
natural to their environment and exhibited far greater health and durability than we do today. With that in mind, if your body shape needs changing, you should not be asking what surgical procedure you should undergo or what fancy new supplement you should take, rather you should ask what you should be taking away! Building on that foundation, I will now share the ten
10 Ways to Improve Your Body Shape Forever! 1
most effective ways to support your physical-emotional-mental physiology so that you have a positive response to exercise and can change your body shape for the better – FOREVER!

1. Change your mind! What you see in the mirror begins as decisions you make, right in your own mind. Just as you chose to eat chips and packaged foods that wouldn’t keep a rat alive, you must choose to be healthy, for that is the foundation of all lasting changes in body shape! In order for any or all of the following methods for changing your body shape to work, you have to decide to do it correctly and then do it!

2. Drink plenty of water! To keep your biochemistry working correctly, your systems of detoxification working optimally, and the rest of your body’s cells to be healthy, you need to drink half your body weight in ounces of water daily; a 200 pound person needs to drink 100oz. of water per day; for metric conversion, multiply your weight (in Kg’s) by .033. For example, a 100 Kg person (100 x .033) will need to drink 3.3 liters of water daily. I recommend drinking water with a total dissolved solids of > 300 parts per million, which can usually be found on the bottle’s label. Coffee, beer, store-bought juices, tea, milk or soda do not count toward your daily water requirements. In fact, anything with alcohol or coffee actually has a dehydrating effect, displacing much needed water. Most people notice a rapid improvement in energy levels when drinking adequate amounts of water.
Another important point is to avoid drinking cold water, particularly if you are exercising. While some experts say that cold water enters the body faster, I beg to differ. Cold water sits in your stomach until it is heated to body temperature, and only then can it be released into the small intestine for absorption. While exercising, the last thing you want to divert energy to is heating water! You also don’t want your fluid hungry muscles losing performance or cramping because they are dehydrating as you exercise. To prove that room temperature water enters your muscles faster than cold water is easy to do; next time you got to the gym, drink a liter bottle of water from their refrigerator and at the end of your workout, vigorously shake your torso back left and right and you will surely hear your water sloshing around in there. Next time, bring a liter of water with you and try to keep it as close to body temperature as possible until you begin your workout (room temperature is fine if it’s at least 70° F.) and drink it as you train. When you complete your workout, do the shake test and you will see that there is noticeably less, or no sloshing at all…the water has entered your muscles where it belongs!

3. Eat organic food! Did you know
that you replace an average of 2,000,000 red blood cells every second! The question is, what are you making them out of? Your body’s cells are constantly regenerating
themselves and the material they use to rebuild themselves comes directly from your diet. Today, commercially farmed produce (even in New Zealand!) is loaded with pesticide residues. Commercially farmed animals are pumped with growth stimulating hormones, antibiotics, as well as a host of other drugs; commercially farmed fish are even worse! What you need to realize is, if you want to change your body shape, all toxins brought into your body through your food have to be processed by your liver. When your liver can’t keep up with the task, toxins are stored in your fat cells to protect your internal organs. When your fat cells are full of toxins, your body simply makes more fat! Organic foods not only provide higher density of the very nutrients needed to detoxify the body, they don’t get sprayed with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and rodenticides!
To learn much more about the effects of food on your body and why much of what you are bing told to eat to support your exercise program today is not true, listen to You Are What You Eat! and study the companion workbook (www.chekinstitute.com).http://shop.flpnigeria.com/product/flp-nigeria-application-form
4. Eat food for your unique biochemistry! As Weston A. Price showed in his investigation of native societies, those natives eating their native diets were healthy, disease-resistant and had beautiful bodies. The key point being that they were eating their native diets! As soon as native populations began deviating from their native diets, their health began to deteriorate and they commonly became fat! Today, due to all the race mixing we’ve done, it is very hard to determine our native diet. The best thing you can do is take the test in my book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy! and follow the instructions for how to proportion your animal/fish foods (proteins & fats) relative to carbohydrates. If you know your blood lines, simply eat the way your relatives did 150 years ago and within as little as two weeks, you will see your body begin to look the way it should according to your natural body plan! With your improved energy levels, you will find your exercise program much easier to get through. You will also find that your body responds to exercise much faster!
5. Chew your food! Sounds simple and fairly obvious right? Not chewing your food until it is liquified is one of the most common causes of poor digestion. Eating foods quickly, results in large chunks of food entering your stomach, making it very hard for the stomach to break the foods down before entering the small intestine for absorption. Since parasites commonly enter your body in food, if your body is even slightly diminished in hydrochloric acid (stomach acid) production and you eat too fast, large chunks of food make it to your small intestine. This
allows parasites to lay eggs and/or enter your blood stream and swim around your body, finding their favorite organ or tissue to nest in. Once there, they begin feasting on your food supply and defecating in you, which toxifies your body. Since poor digestion and absorption from not chewing your foods adequately rob
the body of needed nutrients, the body actually thinks you are dieting and then starts adding fat to get you through the perceived famine. Quite simply then, if you want to change your body shape for the better, slow down, chew your food thoroughly and optimize your stomach’s ability to kill parasites by exposing them to stomach acid.

6. Build good digestion! You could be eating the best food on the planet, yet if your digestive system isn’t working properly, you won’t absorb, assimilate, metabolize and eliminate food molecules correctly. The result is that the worse your digestion, the more malnourished you become. Your body’s reaction is either that you lose weight and become skinny, or you gain weight because your body stores fat as a reaction to what appears to be a diet at the cellular level. To improve digestion, try these tips:
- Drink two glasses of water 15 minutes before each meal.
- Chew your food until it is liquified (see above!)
- Never eat while stressed! Don’t watch the news, have stressful conversations or read stressful information while eating. Even listening to chaotic music while eating can disrupt digestion. Don’t eat in a hurry either!
- Don’t mix fruits or starchy foods such as potatoes, rice or beans with meats. These foods require antagonistic chemical reactions for proper digestion and if your digestive powers are weak, combining them often leads to indigestion, gas, fatigue, ill health and unfavorable body shape! You are best to start your meal with as many raw above ground green vegetables as you can tolerate and follow them with your choice of meat or fish.
- Drink only enough to wash your food down while eating. Drinking more can dilute hydrochloric acid concentration in the stomach and weaken digestion.

7. Manage your stressors! As the old saying goes, don’t sweat the small stuff! Today, many people have become so accustomed to being rushed, financially strapped, and maintaining destructive relationships, it becomes habitual for them. They often recreate problems when things are going too smoothly. If your body shape isn’t what you want it to be, it is very important to realize that being over weight or under weight alone are stressors on the body and are indicative of a stressor the body can’t effectively handle. Therefore, avoid stressors you don’t need. Look at your relationships, look at your bills, look at your time commitments and commit yourself to eliminating anything that is not improving the quality of your life! Just doing this can take a real weight off your back!
My wife and I marvel at the fact, as
we travel around the world teaching seminars and workshops, we have everything we need in our two suit cases. Yet, most of my patients are suffering unnecessary stress, working themselves into the ground to pay for jewelry, clothes, cars and homes
that are adding no significant quality to their lives. In fact, if you ask most people when they are the happiest, they will tell you, “when I’m on vacation”…when they are living out of two suitcases and take a couple weeks to forget about all the financial stress created by unnecessary material possession. The reason many people are too tired to exercise is because they are carrying houses and cars they don’t need around on their back!

8. Go to bed on time! The human body is designed to rise and fall with the sun. I can assure you, if you stay up past 10:30 at night with any regularity, you are destined to have imbalances between your stress hormones (they will be high) and your growth and repair hormones (they will be low!). Having an unfavorable body shape and a poor response to exercise is one of the most common reactions to repeated circadian (24 hour) stress and disrupted sleep/wake cycles. For a simple, yet well illustrated lesson on how to manage circadian stressors and many practical tips that will improve your sleep patterns and energy levels, read chapter 12, “Are You Getting To Bed On Time” in my book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!

9. Work hard, rest hard! Many people beat themselves to death in the gym, forgetting that the body only gets stronger at rest. If you can’t improve your performance in the gym by at least 1-3% every time you walk into the gym, you don’t belong there! To have a great body means you be equally disciplined about resting as you are about exercising. Just remember that exercising is a breakdown stimulus and breakdown + breakdown = BREAKDOWN! If you want to learn more about designing your own highly effective workouts, read chapter 10 “Putting It All Together” in my book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy!
10. Have goals! As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there! Today, it takes discipline not to eat all the garbage being stuffed in your face by the media, celebrities and even people around you that don’t know any better. If you set good, realistic and achievable short, mid-range and long-term goals, you will always have something to focus on and are far more likely to achieve the body shape you want. Once you set your goals, either tell people that can provide positive, encouraging support, or tell people that will really make you miserable if you don’t achieve them (negative support), which ever is more motivating to you.
By thinking out your goals and writing them down, you have made a major commitment toward achieving them and are far more likely to follow your plan that if you just wish you looked better than you do!