It’s that time again; time to start buying holiday gifts for friends and families. While you’re out finding the perfect present for them, though, consider what it is you want to receive this year. If you are like many people who are hoping to get in shape, you may want to add some of the top fitness products to your wish list this season. You should also consider these presents for loved ones who share your goal for a healthier life.

Everyone has their own preferred method of working out and getting into shape. Thankfully, though, there is surely a fit gift to suit every personality. For example, people who love to work out with a group are likely to appreciate a membership to a gym or health club. Get one for your best friend, and sign yourself up too. Then, you can go together and make getting into shape a social experience. Another great option is to sign up for a fun class. Get a gift certificate for a local dance studio and learn to strut your stuff, or hit the yoga mat to discover a new way of healing your body and your mind.

If you and your friends already share a fitness hobby, you can get great gear to step it up a notch. Love to bike? Consider getting a pair of quality fitness sunglasses or a mileage tracker for your cycle. If running is your thing, check out the latest shoes that record how far and how fast you run. Other great options for any sport are heart rate monitors, music players, and environmentally friendly sport bottles.

The gym may not be the place for everyone, though. If you are someone who prefers to get sweaty in solitude, your best gifts are likely to be found in the DVD section. Add a few of the top video workout products to your wish list and clear a space in front of the TV. With the recent surge in fitness interest, there are hundreds of great programs to choose from. If I were making a recommendation, I would consider P90X, 10 Minute Trainer or Turbo Jam! Everything from pilates to kickboxing can be done right in your own home with the aid of your DVD player!

If the television isn’t quite personal enough, consider a paid membership to an online training site. You can gain access to personalized workouts and nutrition info. Most sites even let you download routines to your iPod or mp3 player. They also let you record your progress and celebrate your successes. Plus, it’s easy to sign up with a friend and send each other progress reports.

No matter what your interests, there is sure to be a fitness gift perfect for you or another exercise enthusiast in your life. So, drop a few hints to family and friends to let them know which of these fit gifts you’re hoping to unwrap this season. Don’t think they’ll get it right? Splurge on yourself this year. You deserve it!

Have you been searching for P90X Coupons? Or maybe the best price for P90X?

P90X Coupons are hard to find. When/If you do find a P90X coupon, make sure you are actually receiving a coupon or discount. For example, if you compare our prices, as shown below, you will find that Extremely-Fit is offering the BEST prices. I invite you, and encourage you, to compare our prices with others. For example, you would NEED a P90X Coupon from Super-Fit, Ultimate Fitness, or Extreme Body Workout just to match our starting price! So in this case, a P90X coupon from one of these retailers, sounds great, but it could still be a overall higher price than Extremely-Fit.

Also, make a price comparison of shipping and handling. Often, our competitors inflate their shipping charges. They may have the same price as Extremely-Fit, however, their shipping charges are much higher. So you are not really getting a P90X Coupon at all!

We are committed to our customers in two ways. One, we offer competitive prices to our customers. And two, we offer you our support after the sale. If you have questions, we have answers. Not sure on diet and nutrition, email us. Not sure which program is best for you, email us. Questions about the products selected and purchased from us, email us. With your purchase of any exercise program, you gain the support of Extremely-Fit. Simply send us an email. Nutrition advice, exercise advice, rotations, diet, anything at all. Even if our prices were not cheaper than the competition, this is an incredible incentive.

We will be giving special offers from time to time. However, we are already offer great prices in our starting price. Just look below. We do not inflate our price to offer you a coupon or free shipping. You could buy directly from the manufacturer at a more affordable price than some of our competitors. At Extremely-Fit, our goal is to get you in the best shape of your life. Competitive prices and free support! Thank you for shopping with Extremely-Fit.

	Extremely-Fit	Extreme Body Workout	Super-Fit	Ultimate Fitness
P90X	130.15	134.23	136.80	132.40
P90X Chin-up Bar	67.80	72.80	76.80	72.40
Reebok – Heart Rate Monitor	82.80	88.80	84.80	87.40
P90X Recovery Drink	51.90	56.90	53.90	52.45
Turbo Jam Maximum Results	67.80	72.80	76.80	69.90

Prices include Shipping & Handling Charges to Mountain Home, Arkansas, these prices are approximate and may have changed since I last visited these stores. I encourage you to compare our prices to those of other stores. Our goal is to provide you with the absolute best price, and the best service. Further, I offer my services to you (if needed) as an online coach to help you succeed in your fitness goals. I want to see you get Extremely-Fit, and am committed to my customers!

Buy P90X

With Thanksgiving approaching quickly, many people are preparing for their annual feast. However, before you dive into a plate stacked high with sweet potatoes, cornbread, stuffing, and, of course, turkey, consider this: the average holiday meal contains 3,000 calories. That’s way more than what most people need in a day, let alone at a single sitting.

So, how can you enjoy Thanksgiving without adding inches to your waistline? The answer is simple. Take the time now to plan a delicious Thanksgiving menu with some lighter choices. It does not take much effort to slim down your feast. Plus, your guests will never guess that this food is healthier for them. All these light options are full of flavor and flair for your holiday meal.

For many, the Thanksgiving feast begins with some appetizers. Your best bets for keeping things slim is to pair fresh fruit and vegetables with a light dip. You can find lighter versions of premade dips in stores, or make your own with a simple recipe. Also, instead of cheese or cream based dips, try something different like hummus (which comes from chickpeas) for veggies or fat-free Greek yogurt for fruit. If you want some fancier appetizers for your guests, consider a simple shrimp cocktail recipe. Shrimp are remarkably low in calories and high in heart-healthy omega-3s. Another great pick are miniature kabobs and meatballs. Just make sure you pick lean meats like chicken and turkey.

To start your meal, prepare a simple, broth-based soup. This light course is actually proven to help you eat less during the rest of dinner. Try something new, like pumpkin or squash soup, or stick with a traditional staple, like hearty vegetable. Just try to avoid adding noodles or meat to your soup. You will have plenty of turkey and stuffing to make up for it later.

Next on the menu are side dishes. A simple rule of thumb is to AVOID CASSEROLES! This means steering clear of sweet potatoes candied with marshmallows and green beans bathed in cream or topped with fried onions. Instead, pick some lighter sides that actually appear classier at the table. Some good options are roasted butternut squash or steamed vegetables in a light dressing. As for the stuffing, try switching the eggs in your traditional recipe to egg whites. You can also ditch richer breads for some hardened, light whole wheat slices. Another trick is to double the amount of vegetables in your recipe and dice them extra. This will help you and your guests fill up on vegetables instead of carbohydrates. Willing to take an even bigger step? Get rid of traditional bread stuffing and try something else. Mushroom and barley stuffing or wild rice pilaf are great healthy alternatives, but you can surely find others.

Of course, no Thanksgiving feast is complete without the Turkey. If you are willing to be bold, skip the whole bird and get a boneless, all white meat breast instead. Not sure it’s Thanksgiving without the bones and legs? Serve yourself a skinless piece of white meat. Dark meat is not as lean and the skin adds unwanted fat and calories. Finally, top your feast off with some lightened desserts. Look for a great crustless pumpkin pie recipe to save calories on a classic. You can also serve baked apples instead of a loaded apple crisp or crumble, or get creative and make some mini fruit tarts with puff pastry. Just remember, this holiday is about enjoying friends and family, not about stuffing yourself silly!

And if you find yourslef splurging more than you should, pick up a ChaLEAN Extreme cardio workout, or even a P90X cardio, and work off that holiday feast. Happy Thanksgiving!

We always talk about how we want to lose weight. But that’s not really what we mean. When we talk about losing weight, we’re really talking about losing fat, getting rid of the spare tire, turning the keg into a six-pack. It’s about more than getting ready for swimsuit season or squeezing back into your “skinny” jeans, though. (More importantly, it’s about having a healthy body fat amount so we don’t put ourselves at risk for myriad diseases.) After all, our bodies need some fat. Fat is responsible for regulating our body temperature. It insulates our vital organs. It stores energy that our bodies draw on to function. Not to mention, everyone wants a few strategically placed curves, and you can’t get them with just bone and muscle. So, what exactly is a healthy body fat amount?

1. What is body fat percentage? It’s simple enough. It’s the amount of adipose tissue (body fat) we carry compared to our weight. A 160-pound person who is carrying 32 pounds of fat would be said to have 20 percent body fat. We all want to be working toward an ideal body fat percentage, staying in a range wherein we carry enough fat to feel and look healthy, but not so much that we develop the health issues associated with obesity: hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. So what are the ideal ranges, and what are the best ways to get rid of unwanted excess adipose tissue, aka body fat?

   Most organizations classify a healthy body fat percentage as 20 to 25 percent for women and 8 to 15 percent for men. Women who have over 30 percent body fat and men with over 25 percent are generally classified as obese. There can be some variations that are healthy. Athletes will tend to have less body fat, for example; however, below a point, low body fat can be as dangerous as high body fat.

   
   There are various ways to calculate body fat percentage, with varying degrees of accuracy and expense. Many clinics offer what they describe as the only truly accurate readings, derived from water-displacement, ultrasonic, or X-ray tests. Much simpler than that are many home body fat scales. While simple, they are fairly inaccurate. The best home device is an inexpensive and simple test using skinfold calipers. These calipers measure folds of skin at various parts of the body and provide an estimate of body fat percentage based on those measurements.

   Inaccurate or not, most trainers recommend using some sort of body fat calculation in addition to being weighed on a scale. For most of us, though, true accuracy isn’t that important, just as long as we’re sure that our body fat percentages are going down. We can starve ourselves and lose weight to reach that goal, but a lot of that loss will be muscle loss and won’t give us the healthy look or feeling that most of us seek.

2. Muscle burns fat. One reason we want to be so cognizant of our body fat loss, as opposed to mere weight loss, is because muscles burn calories, and if we lose muscle, it will make burning calories—and, by extension, fat—much more difficult. Because the more muscle you have, the more calories you will burn—even when you’re resting! So it’s important to follow an exercise program that combines resistance activities, like weight lifting, that build muscle with aerobic cardio activities that burn calories. This combination is key to the success of Beachbody’s programs, including Chalene Johnson’s brand-new ChaLEAN Extreme.

   The really good news is that when you exercise, your body begins turning stored fat into glucose for fuel before it begins breaking down muscle for fuel. This is why high-level athletes can eat so much and still stay sleek. Take Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps’s 12,000-calorie-a-day diet, for example. Because he has such a low percentage of body fat, he has to provide his body with enough fuel or his body will begin breaking down proteins in muscle, since it’s pretty much out of body fat to go to for fuel. Several P90X graduates often complain of an ammonia-like smell after working out. That smell is indicative of the protein breakdown that occurs when their new elite, low-fat bodies have begun tapping into muscle for fuel. It generally means that they need to start eating more to make it through the workouts—a problem most of us would love to have! Most of us aren’t dealing with the problems of elite athletes trying to get enough fuel; we’re just trying to get our bodies to approach that kind of shape.

   One popular exercise myth is that if we’re trying to lose body fat, we should just do lots of cardio and sweat and burn fat, then build muscle later. That’s a sort of “lose weight now, get in shape later” approach. There’s some truth there. The more we exercise, the more calories we expend and the sooner our bodies tap into our fat stores for energy. But by building up muscle, in addition to doing cardio activity, we can burn a lot more calories, even while we’re at rest, and maximize the calorie burn during cardio. Plus, when the stored fat begins to melt off, there will be lean, sexy muscle in its place.

3. How diet affects body fat composition. Something we’ve discussed before is the myth that dietary fat contributes to body fat. This is only half true. The fact is that body fat, or adipose tissue, comes from stored calories. Your body fat doesn’t care whether the calories come from fat, protein, or carbs. Don’t believe me? Try drinking a six-pack of fat-free beer every day—you’ll have a pony keg under your shirt in no time. The term “beer belly” comes by it honestly, and beer doesn’t have a gram of fat. Neither does soda, and it’s one of the main culprits behind the obesity crisis.

   Fat does have more calories per gram than carbohydrates or protein, so it is wise to monitor the amount of fat in your diet, but if it’s healthy fat, like the kind found in avocados, olive oil, fish, or nuts, there’s no reason to exclude it from your diet. It is wise to avoid saturated and trans fats, but that has more to do with lipids in your blood, not the composition of adipose tissue.

4. Can you target areas to burn body fat? There’s a French proverb that says that sooner or later every woman must choose between her face and her bottom. What this means is that it’s a myth that you can target one area of your body over another for fat loss. While we may mainly want to get rid of our guts or slim down our thighs, our bodies are largely democratic about where they take stored fat from—they take fat from all over.

   If you’ve seen Madonna lately, you can see the results of her latest workout regimen. She has incredibly low body fat, but her face has lost the fat as well, so that her bone structure is more prominent and has a more sunken appearance (although it looks like some cosmetic procedures have helped her fill it out somewhat). So if you ever see a product advertised that claims to burn fat off one part of your body and not others, it’s over-promising. You can target muscle groups specifically, but fat burning is general.

Any activity will go a long way toward reducing body fat percentage. And health professionals advise that even a modest decrease in body fat percentage will have extraordinary health benefits. So even if achieving your ideal supermodel weight seems impossibly far away, you can really increase your quality of life by making a few minor changes in your activity level and diet. Engaging in a comprehensive program like ChaLEAN Extreme, which encompasses resistance training and aerobic exercise, as well as a healthy diet, is a great place to start. Here’s to seeing less of us!!

by Joe Wilkes