When people think of fitness, they think of going to the gym and working out to get in shape. Or they think of sitting on an some machine to burn calories. They believe that the only way to win the battle of the bulge is to bust your ass working out.

What most don't understand is that while working out is important, fitness isn't won in the gym. It is won at the kitchen table. While working out builds muscles and makes one look buff, it is the fuel we put in out bodies that makes the gains possible. It provides us with the energy to work out and makes it easier for us to lose weight.

All foods we consume are broken down into a unit of energy called a kilocalorie. We generally refer to them as just calories. Our body needs a certain number of calories to function daily. This is known as the basal metabolic rate or BMR. This is an easily calculable value. Below is the formula for men and women. The results of the calculation should be accurate within 10%.

Women:
655 + (4.3 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)

Men:
66 + (6.3 x weight in pounds) + (12.9 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)

Plugging in numbers for myself I get a BMR value of 1758 calories. That means I burn that many calories a day doing nothing more than breathing. For someone with a day to day desk job like I have, you can multiply that number by 1.2 to get the basic number of calories that I burn in a given day. This number is what I call the tipping point. When I do the calculation I get 2109. Thus 2100 calories is my tipping point.

Weight control is simple equation. All of the fancy plans and diets you read about all come down to this simple equation. If I eat more than my tipping point of 2100 calories a day I store the excess calories as fat and gain weight. If I eat less than 2100 calories a day, I burn excess body fat to meet my daily needs. By doing so I lose weight. Now if I want to lose a pound of weight I must burn off 3500 calories worth of fat. That means I would have to eat at a 500 calorie deficit or 1600 calories a day for an entire week to lose 1 pound of fat.

The reason we exercise is to change the basic formula. If I burn 400 calories a day in exercise then my tipping point is 2500 calories a day. That means I can eat 2000 calories a day and still lose 1 pound a week. A much more reasonable way to lose weight.

Since the formula for BMR is not completely accurate and your daily activities can vary, you might have to play around to find out what your tipping point is calorie wise. The only way to know for sure is to track your daily caloric intake.

The only way to know that number is to track what you eat every day. I know that can sound painful, but sites like Fitday make the process a lot less painful. They have most foods in their database so all you have to do is plug in what you ate and they calculate all of the calories automatically. I have been using it for a few months now and I find it is easy to track my food intake.

If you are looking for additional motivation to track your food, a recent study has shown that people who track their food lose considerably more weight than those who do not.

Keeping a food diary -- a detailed account of what you eat and drink and the calories it packs -- is a powerful tool in helping people lose weight, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

The study involving 1,685 middle-aged men and women over six months found those who kept such a diary just about every day lost about twice as much weight as those who did not.

The findings buttressed earlier research that endorsed the value of food diaries in helping people lose weight. Companies including Weight Watchers International Inc use food diaries in their weight-loss programs.

The third step in my program is tracking the food we eat. By doing so we can learn what our tipping point is. That gives us powerful knowledge. It allows us to make smart decision about what we need to eat and how much we have to work out to meet our goals. It is a vital metric in living a healthy lifestyle. In the next step we will discuss what we need to be eating to live a healthy life followed by a strategy for exercising.

The first step in our series was to commit to a healthy lifestyle. An attitude that I am going to do this come hell or high water. The second step on the journey is to consider how we plan on measuring our results. We need good metrics to track our bodies progress as we start living healthy.

The preferred measuring tool for most people is the scale. I understand the popularity of it. It seems a reasonable measure and it is easy to use. Unfortunately, weight is it isn't the best indicator of health. Why? The best way to illustrate the problem is to use an example.

Picture in your mind Joe Six Pack. He is 6'1"" and weighs 250 pounds and leads a sedentary life style. What do you think he looks like? I am guessing you are picturing a guy who is clearly over weight will a beer belly. Now picture in your mind Ray Lewis, the Pro Bowl Linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens. I am guessing you are picturing a guy who is ripped and is waiting to remove your head from your shoulders. He too is 6'1" and weighs 250 pounds. They weigh the exact same. Yet who do you think is healthier?

OK, so weight can be a bit misleading. What would be a better method? Measuring a person's body fat percentage. Body fat percentage is your fat weight divided by your total weight. Joe Six Pack from earlier is probably over 30% body fat. Raw Lewis on the other hand has around 7% body fat. It is now obvious which person is in better shape.

How do I measure body fat and what should my body fat percentage be?

Measuring body fat is generally not as easy as stepping on a scale, but there are several ways to do it. The best way to do it is to use hydrostatic or underwater weighing. It is accurate but tends to be expensive and not something you can do every few weeks.

Another good method is to use skinfold calipers. They are an inexpensive tool for measuring body fat. It makes spot measurements in various places on the body and from those measurements determines a body percentage result.

Another method that is easier to use and doesn't require any special equipment is the US Navy Circumference Method. It is a simple tool developed by the military to accurately determine body fat percentage in adults. It appears to be as accurate as the skin fold test and easier to do. I also prefer it because it is easier to make consistent measurements with a tape measurer than calipers.

All that is necessary to determine body fat percent is a your height, weight, neck and waist measurements. Women need an additional hip measurement. The results are plugged into a formula and out spits the results.

For men the formula is

%Fat=495/(1.0324-0.19077(log(waist-neck))+0.15456(log(height)))-450

For women the formula is

%Fat=495/(1.29579-0.35004(log(waist+hip-neck))+0.22100(log(height)))-450

If you don't want to calculate the results by hand, a number of sites provide calculators for the equations.

Now that we know how to calculate it, where does our body fat need to be? For men and women ideal body percentages are different. Below is a chart describing ranges of body fat.

Looking at the chart we can see that Joe Six Pack from our earlier example is clearly obese while Ray Lewis is a top athlete. A result which more accurately reflects our initial images of these two people. In my opinion to live a healthy life style you need to be in the fitness range. Ideally you probably want to be in the athlete range, but it isn't necessary to lead a healthy life. When I began my journey to health I was around 25% body fat. Currently I am just over 15% and consider myself healthy. Even so my goal is to get down around 10%.

Another problem with just using weight to determine health is the daily fluctuations that occur. People who track weight seem to do it on a day to day basis. The up and down nature of weight leads to disappointment and frustration. People despair and give up rather than continue. A nice side effect to measuring body fat percent is it is something that doesn't make sense to do daily. It is something you do every two weeks or even once a month.

There is no room for daily frustration. If you follow the rest of the steps in this plan you will get results between measurements which makes it easier to continue until a healthy lifestyle becomes a habit.

My biggest accomplishment this year has been to get into the best shape of my life. In the process, I have learned a ton of stuff about fitness, training, and eating. What I want to do is distill this information into a simple five step plan that anyone can follow to lose weight and get in the best shape of their lives.

Being healthy is a simple process. It just isn't easy to do in the real world. Why? Because time is always pressing. There never seems to be enough time in the day. We are so consumed doing stuff that health always seems to take a back seat.

What I contend is that no matter how busy you feel, their is always time for a healthy lifestyle. How many times have you heard someone complain about not having time to be healthy, but they can tell you all about their favorite television show. There is time, you just have to make it.

The first step to being healthy is to commit. Health must be one of your top priorities. Here is tip that might help the process. When you plan your week, you should start by setting time aside to shop, to cook, and to work out. If you schedule time for these activities first, I think you will be surprised with how much blank space will be left on your calendar. For those who are super busy this may take some creativity but it can be done.

The second obstacle is you social life. You go out and eat. You go out and drink. You want to be social. It is hard to eat healthy while being social. The key is choosing smart foods and stopping after 1 drink. But as you get results it will become easier and easier to say no.

I am not going to lie. Living a healthy life is not easy. It takes planning. It takes time. It takes discipline. It takes dedication. There is no 15 minute plan or universal pill you can take to be healthy. But if you make the commitment and stick with it for three months it will work. You will be surprised with all of the energy you have. You will feel better about yourself. You will become more productive. You life will be transformed for the better.

I can give you the knowledge you need to reach this state. What I can't give you is the desire and motivation to obtain it. So take a moment and visualize how you want to look. Think about how it would make you feel. Embrace that vision and commit to living a healthy lifestyle so you achieve that goal. If you don't take the first step, it will be impossible to succeed.

I am one who believes that the only way to truly gain anything is through hard work. If I want to learn something, I spend time understanding the topic and then I try to apply it in the real world. Only then am I able to internalize the knowledge. I play golf. The only way to get better at golf is to continually practice and work on weak spots. I own a company. The only way to grow a company is through long hours and hard work. Very little worth while is ever easy.

As such, I always have found infomercials amusing. Just spend five minutes a day working out on some silly machine and you can have a rock hard body. Or you can buy a "special" program that will allow you to lose weight without having to do anything. The never ending supply of wonder devices and diet schemes never fail to amaze me. Thus I was surprised when I came across the infomercial for P90X. It didn't promise that you could have an amazing body working out 10 minutes a day. It didn't promise some miracle weight loss program. It only promised one thing. If you worked your ass off, in 90 days you could be in the best shape of your life.

At the time, I had been looking for a way to get in better shape. I have never been in bad shape, but I wanted to drop a few pounds, put on some muscle, and be in all around better shape. The call for hard work appealed to my nature. Here was potentially a program that would fulfill my need. I did some research on the product and concluded it wasn't a scam. I decided to give it a shot. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I have made. Below is my review of the product.

The P90X program comes with a set of 12 professionally constructed workout DVD's, some documentation on how the program works, and a strict but detailed eating plan. In addition to the DVD's one must get a set of free weights, a pull up bar, a heart monitor, a yoga mat, and a yoga block. I had a pull up bar that came with my Solo Flex, but I had to buy the rest. I purchased PowerBlocks for the free weights and found a heart monitor, a yoga mat and a yoga block at a local sporting goods store.

The program consists of eating the recommended diet and performing one of the DVD's every day for 90 days. The hardest part for me was changing my eating habits. I was one of those guys who ate fast food or whatever else was available. I didn't really care what I ate. That had to change. I had to start eating better foods if I wanted to get results from P90X. So I stopped eating crap and started eating better. I also reduced my intake of alcohol since it is nothing but empty calories.

The first DVD for day 1 is "Chest and Back". The workout consists of 6 different push ups, 4 different types of pull ups, and two more back exercises with free weights. The push ups and pull ups are all maximum reps. After completing all 12 moves I was exhausted. But the workout wasn't over, I got to do the 12 exercises all over again. It was crazy. I have never done a workout anywhere near that intense. It was at this point, I had wondered what I had gotten myself into.

After Chest and Back, I still had to do "Ab Ripper X". ARX consists of 12 different moves. Each move has 25 reps. I know the math is fuzzy but it comes out to a total of 350 reps. After the first couple of moves, I was lucky to do a third of the reps. I was exhausted and sore (a good sore). At the time I thought it was possible to complete Ab Ripper X.

The Chest and Back workout is about 1 hour long and includes warm up and cool down stretches. One of the really nice features of all the videos is that each of them provides a series of warm up stretches before the workout and a series of cool down stretches after the hard stuff. The more difficult aspect of the program is the length of time it takes to do the daily workouts. Almost all of the workout videos take around 60 minutes to complete. Ab Ripper X is shorter and adds an additional 15 minutes to complete. I knew from the length of the workouts that it was going to take a commitment to work out 60 - 90 minutes every day. That can prove difficult to do every day for 90 days.

Day 2 is "Plyometrics". Otherwise known as jump training. It is another 60 minute workout that is killer. It is considered the mother of all of the workout programs. It kicked my butt. Heck the warm up almost wore me out. The main part of the workout consists of different hi cardio squat and jump exercises. I was quickly breathing hard and my heart rate was sky high. It wasn't long before I was struggling to keep up with the video. I had to pause numerous times just to catch my breath. The most sadistic part of the workout are the 30 second breaks they take after each set of moves.

Day 3 is "Shoulders and Arms". Shoulders and Arms is another weight training video. This one rotates between a shoulder, bicep, and tricep exercise. You do 15 different moves in all. Like the first DVD, each move is done twice. One of the difficult parts the first week was determining what weights to use. I had no baseline to decide which weight to choose. So I guessed. Fortunately, they provide sheets to write down the number of reps and weight use. They encourage writing everything down throughout all of the workouts. It provides a baseline for future workouts and illustrates improvements. Afterward, I had to do Ab Ripper X again. I struggled just as bad as the first time I tried it.

Day 4 is "Yoga X". I always thought Yoga was something for wimps. Yoga X is anything but. It is a 90 minute Yoga session that is brutal. The first half is dedicated to moving asanas. These are a set of moves that are not only difficult, but take a good deal of strength. The second part is dedicated to balance postures and different stretching exercises. I sweated and struggled my way though the entire workout. My wife who has done Yoga before thought it was insanely difficult.

Day 5 is "Legs and Back". By the 5th day I had begun to get used to the intensity of the workouts, but they were still hard. The Legs and Back routine rotates between various squatting exercises and pull ups. My legs were wobbly by the end and I struggled to do some of the later moves. I followed it up with another round of Ab Ripper X. Ab exercises are not easy when one's legs are tired.

Day 6 is "Kenpo X". The routine consists of various punching and kicking routines. The cardio is easier than Plyo and is probably the easiest of the first six workouts. While it is challenging, I didn't have any problems making it through the entire routine.

Day 7 thankfully brings with it a day of rest. They include a "X Stretch" DVD that lasts about an hour and walks through stretching everything that can be stretched. It is a nice way wind up a difficult week of training.

That was just the first week. The program repeats the week for two more weeks before entering into a recovery period in the 4th week. The recovery period introduces the 8th DVD, "Core Synergistics". The Core routine is a tough workout that focus on the body's core muscles from waist to shoulder. Along with core, the program had me doing more Yoga X, X Stretch, and Kenpo X.

After the recovery week, the program moves into phase II. This time "Chest and Back" and "Shoulders and Arms" are replaced with "Chest, Shoulders, and Triceps" and "Back and Biceps". Otherwise it is the same rotation of workouts. Phase II goes on for 3 weeks before entering the second recovery week. Phase III alternates Phase I and Phase II weeks for four weeks. The program ends with one final recover week. All total, it is 90 day training program.

It is a tough program, but it works. As the 90 days wore on I began getting use to the pace and length of the workouts. By the end I could do Plyometrics without needing breaks. I could do all of the Yoga moves. In fact, I stopped using the video and did the routines from the book. It allowed me to better focus on the breathing aspects of Yoga. I slowly pushed harder on Ab Ripper X until I could do the whole routine without resting.

At the end I could tell I was stronger. I could barely do a pull up when I started. When I was done I could do 12. I struggled to do 25 push ups when I started. I could do 40 when I was done. I doubled my time in the wall squat, and found I could do more weight and more reps on a standard bicep curl. My resting heart rate had lowered to a 45. On top of that I had lost 10% body fat and 7 inches off my waist. I was definitely in the best shape of my life.

Two weeks after finishing round 1, I started up round 2. The results continued to accelerate over the first 30 days. Unfortunately, at the end of phase I had to go in for my surgery. I have been side lined from training for the last two weeks. I am itching to get back to it. I can't wait to see what kind of results I can get after two rounds of P90X. I definitely recommend this product to anyone who wants to get into the best shape of their life.