If you’ve not heard this story before you haven’t been paying attention.

Today JNL is a virtual force of nature in the fitness world, having graced the cover of ever major fitness magazine on the planet. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, The CBS Early Morning Show, Fox & Friends, Inside Edition. Her various domains are spread across the internet. Her videos are all over YouTube. And a quick search for Jennifer Nicole Lee (or JNL) on Google will give you quick glimpse of the scope of her media empire.

The best selling author of two books:

## The Mind, Body & Soul Diet: Your Complete Transformational Guide to Health, Healing Happiness (January 2010)

## The Jennifer Nicole Lee Fitness Model Diet: JNL’s Super Fitness Model Secrets to a Sexy, Strong, Sleek Physique (October 2010)

Jennifer Nicole Lee is poised to release her third book this Spring. Entitled The Fun Fit Foodie it promises to feature more of JNL’s nutritious and easy to prepare meals.

Search among her over 400 videos on Youtube for the term ‘foodie’ and you will find a number of examples of what to expect in The Fun Fit Foodie. Asian Pancakes, Curry in a Hurry, Shrimp Stir fry, and Sweet Potato Casserole (a Thanksgiving recipe she presented with her son Dylan). These are simple recipes, easily prepared, low in sodium but bursting with flavor that comes from fresh healthy ingredients.

JNL’s mission in life is to raise the quality of people’s lives through promotion of healthy choices. She believes that healthy eating is key to a better life and will tell you time and time again that it’s fun to cook.

Look for The Fun Fit Foodie in stores this spring.

If you haven’t heard the remarkable story of Jennifer Nicole Lee, or JNL as she’s often called, you haven’t been paying attention. A mother of two who lost 80 pounds after the birth of her second child, she embraced a wholesale lifestyle change that included rigorous exercise and a healthy diet, and went on to be crowned Miss Bikini America 2004 and, at the age of 31, was named the first ever Miss Muscle & Fitness.

Now one of the most sought after FITNESS MODELs in the world, JNL has made it her personal mission to inspire a new generation of women to pursue and ultimately achieve their fitness goals so that they too can enjoy the bodies and lifestyles they so richly deserve.

The best selling author of two books:
## THE MIND, BODY & SOUL DIET
## THE JENNIFER NICOLE LEE FITNESS MODEL DIET BOOK

Jennifer Nicole Lee plans to release her third book this Spring. Entitled THE FUN FIT FOODIE it promises to feature more of JNL’s trademark nutritious and easy to prepare meals.

Many of these recipes can also be found on her website and through her YouTube channel. A quick YouTube search for “JNL” and “foodie” will call up her Fun Fit Foodie branded videos.

These mouthwatering recipes, such as Curry in a Hurry, Asian Pancakes and Shrimp Stir Fry, are cooked and served up by JNL herself who wants you to know that cooking fit is fun.

She also talks about the need to pursue a low sodium, low sugar, low fat, low carb diet but shows how remarkably easy that is and how delicious the results can be.

Exercise is only half the equation when it comes to the pursuit of a toned FITNESS MODEL body, the other half is diet. But eating healthy does not have to mean joyless, tasteless meals. JNL has healthy Italian love of eating and won’t settle for anything less than fabulous. After all, an international fitness celebrity, or a woman striving to become one, deserves nothing less.

Hello JNL Fitness Friend!

I’m on a mission! To help women end their emotional eating habits, once and forever!

And this time of year, with holiday shopping, events, parties, and family coming in, or us traveling to family-things can get a little stressful! We have never ending demands, and that leads to an emotional roller coaster, which usually ends with us stuffing our faces with junk!

I suffered from the binds of emotional eating much of my early life, as these negative habits were instilled in me from my family members and other women close to my family.

But it wasn’t until I became a mom that I made a commitment to myself to unlearn these old, unhealthy eating rituals!

Many of you have visited my www.JNLYouTube.com Channel. Today, I made a video about my own personal story, and how emotional eating is the #1 self sabotaging behavior of most women!

Take a look here, and make sure you SUBSCRIBE : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpNNz8_GRaI

I also recorded my last episode of “The Jennifer Nicole Lee Show” Podcast, where I shared how you can “Break the Binds of Emotional Eating”

You can take a listen here, and even download this special message www.JNLPodcast.com

Also on www.iTunes.com you can download from there too, simply by searching under “The Jennifer Nicole Lee Show” Podcast.

Also, for your FREE report, you can visit www.101ThingsNotToDo.com and enter in your name and email address, to get more amazing fitness tips!

My life’s purpose is to help “increase the quality of everyone’s life”. My sincerest wishes are to help those who may be silently suffering in their own bad habits. I am here to tell you that it’s not your fault, and that we can become stronger together!

I’m crazy about something new – Crystal Lite’s Pure Fitness! I’ve always talked about how hydration is fun-da-men-tal when you do your workouts, but at the same time, always drinking water can sometimes become a drag. Here’s the story.

Keeping Hydrated When You Work Out

We all know it’s fundamental to stay hydrated before, during, and after your workout. You lose a lot of liquid when you sweat, and there needs to be a way your body can get that back. So we drink a lot of water. And there’s no way that’s anything but crucial. But…

Water “Fatigue”

Sometimes we get sick of water. So many other things – so many other healthy things, in moderation! – are so much tastier that sometimes water can seem kind of bland or unremarkable.

And while it pains me to say that, it’s true. There are tons of times that I’ve just wanted a sports drink or something sweet instead, and been unable to have it. With discipline it hasn’t been a problem, but now I think I’ve found a solution.

Making Your Own Sports Drink

Why would I be unable to have a sports drink, for example? Well, part of the way you get a healthy body is by knowing your weaknesses, and having a ton of sugary drinks around the house or gym is just a recipe for disaster – not only for me, but for my family too! I just don’t want that many sugary things available to them all the time.

So – the solution? Making my own sports drink! No, I’m not opening up a lab and creating a brand new energy drink from scratch – I’m talking about taking a super-easy to use packet, adding it to some water, and having a ready to go sports drink with way fewer calories than an average one. This isn’t something I’m going to drink all the time – it’s not replacing water! – but it’s great to have once in a while.

Why This is Important

I’m all about taking matters into your own hands when it comes to your health and fitness, but at the same time, I know that the very act of having a bunch of sugary energy drinks in your home can lead to having too many of them!

Sometimes it’s not a question of your own personal willpower – your desires for sweet drinks aren’t a thing to be defeated and destroyed, as much as they are to be dealt with in smart ways. So just not bringing a case of sports drinks into your house is often the best thing you can do.

The Good Stuff About Crystal Light

Here’s the thing – with these Crystal Light Pure Fitness packs, I don’t have to stock an entire fridge full of sports drinks, and I can simply make the drink whenever I want a refreshing alternative to water!

There aren’t any artificial sweeteners in there, plus it’s got electrolytes, just like the sports drinks, in case you’ve just done a particularly strenuous workout over a long period of time and you’re concerned about losing sodium through so much sweating.

And what’s really important to me? No preservatives either, and only 15 cals for every 8 fluid ounces. It’s also caffeine free, gluten free for those of us with an intolerance, free of any allergens, and the packages themselves are portable, slim, and easy to take with you.

My Family Loves It!

But here’s the real test – as soon as I brought these Pure Fitness packages into my house, my kids stopped asking me for sports drinks, and my husband – who’s tried a bunch of them – told me he liked it more than most of the others!

And it was way easier, made with water from my tap, and totally got rid of the temptation to stock up on sugary sports drinks when I didn’t have to!

For those of us who want something other than water (sometimes!), but don’t like moving right over to sports drinks because we know they can’t be the only thing we consume, and they can’t be consumed casually, these Crystal Light pure fitness packs are kinda perfect!

Have you ever seen someone with love handles, and arms as thin as twigs? This is that classic skinny-fat body type that I see a lot at the gym.

Usually, these people are absolutely handcuffed to the cardio machines, trying desperately to take off those few pounds of weight but being completely ignorant (it’s not their fault!) of how to do it best, especially for their body-type.

Women Have This Problem More

It’s not that men can’t have a skinny-fat body — there are plenty of guys out there with this exact problem — it’s that men have an easier time doing strength training. As a result, they’ve got easier “access” to the exact tools needed to bust out of this body type and say goodbye to it forever.

Women, of course, can do all the strength training they want, but there are lots of myths, stereotypes, and silly ideas out there that prevent far too many women from picking up anything more than a 2-pound pink dumbbell. You gotta ignore these myths!

Why Cardio Won’t Solve the Problem

Because it’s all about burning calories. Cardio does a few things very well:

1. It bores the hell out of you.
2. It burns calories in a not-very-efficient way.
3. It helps you lose fat without really building up any muscle.

Cardio really does work for a lot of people with a lot of fat to lose. But the skinny-fat people don’t have this problem — it’s not a matter of getting rid of pounds and pounds of fat, but rather making an adjustment to the body fat percentage they’re carrying around.

Getting Your Fat % Down

You can’t do it with cardio alone. You need to build your muscles up, to build that lean muscle tone that demands the fat on your body as precious fuel. Only then will you start to make a serious dent in your fat percentage that will see your skinny-fat body switch to a lean, toned one, more ideally balanced out and absolutely killer to see in a mirror.

Where to Start

If you’re already a “thin” or “skinny” person but have a bunch of stubborn fat around your waist, or a little belly, or some extra fat hanging around your arms, on your butt, or in some “problem zones”, slaving away on a stairmaster is just a waste of time.

Leave the machines for the people that really need it — people who need a solid mix of cardio and strength training to lose a lot of weight. You aren’t one of those people.

Relegate cardio to a warmup and nothing more. Concentrate on nothing but strength training here, and don’t use tiny, ineffectual weights that offer you no challenge. You want to change your body fat percentage here, not break a tiny sweat. There’s a reason those love handles are sticking around, no matter how “thin” you seem to be, and it’s not because you haven’t done enough cardio.

Push yourself out of your comfort zone and say goodbye to that skinny-fat body type forever.

So what’s the secret?

There are two essential things you need to know when it comes to stretch marks, plus a few things you just have to accept. Let’s talk about those latter things first:

Your Weight Loss Won’t Always Do What You Want

There’s no such thing as “spot” reduction of fat, and by the same token, there’s no such thing as making your getting-in-shape journey follow an exact set of rules. The same applies for stretch marks — you can’t predict where they’re going to appear, and you can’t will them away from showing up in any particular place.

Sure, there’s a pattern to their appearance, and they appear more often in certain places rather than others (basically areas where our skin is looser and fat more readily deposits itself — the arms, the stomach, the butt), but getting rid of stretch marks (or “preventing” their appearance) can be as much a fool’s errand as trying to only lose weight around your belly.

The One Difference With Stretch Marks

Unlike the “spot reduction” myth, however, you can work specific areas of your body to try and avoid or reduce stretch marks — you just need to do it as part of your overall fitness training, and not go on a campaign of time-wasting that only deals with superficialities.

So first, accept the fact that you can’t really tell your stretch marks what to do. Then, to do everything you can to combat them, do the following things:

1. Don’t Lose Weight Too Quickly

Stretch marks show up when your skin and its supporting structure doesn’t (or can’t) adjust to the changes in composition brought upon by your weight loss. If you’re dieting too aggressively, or overtraining, or under-eating in order to lose a lot of weight quickly or unhealthily, stop right now.

Taking a holistic, overall, sensible approach to getting fit and losing weight means not obsessing over where you’re losing the weight or how fast you’re losing it. You might be changing your shape without actually shedding any pounds, and a scale isn’t going to tell you this. Take it steady, be smart about it, and you’ll minimize the chances of stretch marks.

2. Do Strength Training

You need to do exercises that keep your body (including your skin) firm and toned. If you’re doing nothing but cardio, trying to sweat away the pounds, building zero muscle and just attacking your fat with an inefficient, unbalanced approach, then yes — you’re going to get stretch marks.

The goal isn’t just to “melt your fat away”. The goal is to strengthen your muscles. To get lean, to get toned, to get a firm, fitness-model-style body that burns fat as fuel and is strong and shapely from top to bottom.

The overall approach is essential — you need to workout smarter. You’ll lose weight in a better, more efficient, more healthy way — not just through dieting and not just through endless calorie-burning (strength training burns calories far better than just cardio, anyway, and does it even when you’re not exercising).

How to Get Started

Read the articles on my site. Follow my workout videos. Make the decision that you’re going to be smart about your fitness, not swing like a yo-yo from diet to diet, but rather work on the basics, the fundamentals, the really important stuff first. When you do that? Everything else (yes, even stretch marks) falls into place automatically.

How to Stop Emotional Eating – Coping With Emotional Stress (Part 2 of 2)

In my previous article I talked about a few different things:

• whether food was addictive
• some of the triggers that bring on emotional eating
• how you can change your habits

But there’s something that leads to emotional eating that is an even bigger issue, one that I didn’t truly get into because I decided it deserved its own article. And that’s emotional stress.

Why Emotional Stress Leads to Overeating

It’s simple — a lot of us make a connection between comfort/stress relief and eating. We learn, when in moments of emotional duress, that food can heal our emotional problems in the short term.

After all, we have to eat several times a day to survive — so it’s easy to convince ourselves that the emotional eating we’re doing is simply part of a normal routine, one that just happens to really help our stressful feelings.

But it’s the exact opposite of that.

Dealing With Root Problems & The “Replacement” Strategy

It’s not easy to identify root problems in our lives. They can range from difficulty at our jobs, to relationship problems, to problems with friends, to the grief of losing a loved one.

Ordered in list like that, it seems simple. But it rarely is — it’s not easy to point and say “because of X, I have been doing Y.” Things pile up. Things overlap. Things get complicated, just like life.

But if we can isolate emotional eating, and realize when we’re doing it specifically as a response to a single problem, we can try a “replace” strategy — simply finding a habit or activity that doesn’t lead to weight gain and doing that instead of eating. It could be anything — listening to music, calling a specific friend; it doesn’t matter what, really.

What matters is that we’ve come up with a new distraction and we are engaging it each time we’re tempted into emotional eating.

Why Distraction Doesn’t Always Work

There’s just one little problem with the above method.

1. Alternative habits don’t involve the satisfaction of food. Calling an old friend won’t release the same chemicals in our brain as eating a bunch of chocolate or potato chips will. Listen to music might stir up some emotions, but if we’ve become mildly dependent on the physical response that overeating brings, finding an alternative might not be effective enough for us to stick with it. Plus, it’s a lot easier to opena a bag of chips, day after day, than it is to repeatedly call an old friend (until you drive them up the wall!)
2. It still doesn’t get to the root problem. The real goal is to eliminate the underlying issues you have, so that you don’t have to look for alternative habits in the first place. The distractions you’re seeking should be a stopgap solution along the way to actually healing the main issue that caused you to start overeating in the first place. But that’s a big job and certainly isn’t done in a day or two.

How to Address the Underlying Issues

There are lots of ways. You might decide counseling is right for you. Or you could find support in a circle of friends that you lean on a little more, in order to make it through a tough time.

It might be something as simple as slowing things down and starting to meditate — to spend some time alone with yourself in a contemplative way that lets you think about and get over the things that are causing you pain and stress.

Whatever your solution, you want to always move towards the underlying issue. You might never solve a major problem in your life, but you’ll learn to cope with it, and that’s often what you need.

And when you find success, and get rid of a bad emotional eating habit that was keeping you overweight? Don’t forget to reward yourself. Do something you really wanted as a tangible reward for overcoming difficulty — just choose something that doesn’t involve a gigantic meal!

Believe!