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How many times have you started working out? How many times have you started a new program by feeling excited, committed, and confident that this will be the time you finally get the body you’ve always wanted?

So you start, and a month goes by, then two, then three.  Everything’s going well until one day, something comes up and you have to skip a gym day.  “No big deal. It’s just one day”, you say.

Then you lose your momentum and start skipping a gym day here and there every couple of weeks. “I’ll make it up next week,” you say.

Then eventually, you start going one day a week less, until before you know it, you’ve stopped going completely. “I’m just too busy,” you say.

Why do people quit the gym? If the above story sounds like you, you’re not alone: lack of time/being busy is one of the most frequently quoted reasons for quitting the gym.

But for many of us, it’s not that we don’t have the time: it’s that we’re not seeing any immediate return on the time spent exercising and so we give up.

Time is valuable, and if we’re not getting any positive results from spending it at the gym (or anywhere for that matter), we will put our time elsewhere in activities where we do get results.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could end the cycle of start-stop, start-stop?  Whether you’re on your first fitness journey or your fifteenth, here are some important things to consider to make sure the time you spend on your fitness is well spent so you never have to start over again.

1. Commit to the Gym AND a Diet

Ever hear the expression, “6-pack abs are made in the kitchen?” It’s true: working out alone doesn’t mean much if you don’t also take control of your diet.  If your goal is weight loss, you need to burn more calories than you take in.  Yes, that means keeping track of your calories.

It gets really hard to stick with the gym when you aren’t seeing results after a couple of months.  That’s because if you’re doing everything right and being consistent, you should be seeing progress.

But before you get too frustrated, know this: counting calories works and it’s not that hard if you can get a sense of how many calories your body needs.  You can do that with the following steps.

1. At your gym or doctor’s office, get your body composition analyzed.  For counting calories, what you need to get is your Lean Body Mass (sometimes called Fat-Free Mass) and body fat percentage.

2. Use your body fat percentage to calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate, the number of calories your body needs to support itself, excluding the energy needed to move and do work.  You can do that with this online calculator.

3. Once you have your BMR, you need to use it estimate how many calories your body uses in a day, including activity/exercise. That’s called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). You’ll need to multiply BMR with an Activity Factor that best reflects how active you are. Those activity factors are:

 

 4) With your TDEE in hand, now you have a much better idea about how many calories your body needs to maintain itself.  You need to adjust your caloric intake to your goals.  You must reduce your daily calories to be under this TDEE and be consistent if you want to lose fat.

To gain muscle, although everyone agrees that you need to exceed your TDEE, the amount necessary remains difficult to accurately determine. One study of bodybuilders reports you’ll need to exceed it by about 15%., whereas the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends an overall caloric increase of between 300-500 calories a day.]

2. Measure Success By Tracking Changes In Your Body

It seems logical to use a scale to track your progress.  You probably have one at home, and since you’re expecting to see weight loss changes, it makes sense to use it to track your progress.  However, using a scale can give you a false impression of your progress that can leave you feeling discouraged, or worse – make you think you’re not getting results when you actually are!

• Your muscle gains can influence your weight change.

If you’re new to the gym and you start incorporating some strength training in your routine, you’ll likely start gaining some muscle while you lose fat.  Your muscle gains might not completely offset your fat loss gains, but they will influence your scale weight and make it seem like you aren’t making any progress when you actually are.

In this above example, this person increased their Skeletal Muscle Mass and decreased their Fat Mass.  If the muscle gains are greater than the fat losses, this can lead to an overall weight and BMI increase.  

However, this leads to an overall reduction in both body fat mass and body fat percentage.  This means that even with increased weight, overall fitness and physical appearance will improve.

• Your diet is affecting your water retention.

If you’re on a diet, especially one that’s restrictive on calories and carbohydrates, you’re likely going to see some noticeable changes in your weight right away – but then they’ll stop.  No, you’re not hitting some kind of wall or plateau: you just experienced initial water weight loss is all.

This happens because by cutting carbohydrates out of your diet, you’re also cutting out glycogen – the energy molecule provided by carbohydrates.  Glycogen has a very interesting attribute: 3-4 grams of water bond to each molecule of glycogen.  So, when you start cutting carbs out of your diet, you’re also cutting out the excess water.

3. Set Reasonable Goals

Not seeing results after a lot of time and energy invested at the gym and in your diet is very frustrating.  However, you can let go of a lot of this frustration by setting reasonable goals.

• Reasonable Fat Loss

First off, you can’t expect any reasonable fat loss without being in a caloric deficit – using more energy than you’re eating.  Without having an estimate of your TDEE, you’re going to be doing the fitness equivalent of grasping in the dark.

Once you have an estimate of your TDEE, you can set a reasonable caloric deficit to achieve measurable fat loss.  Although there is some variation, most experts and resources, including the Centers for Disease Control, agree that a caloric deficit of about 500 calories each day equaling to 3,500 calories a week will result in a pound of fat loss per week.

This means there’s good news and bad news.  The bad news is that 1 pound of fat a week might be a little slower than you might have hoped for.

The good news is that this 1 pound of fat is a real pound gone, and as long as you don’t fall back into habits with poor diet and little activity, you can keep off that pound of fat even after you reach your goal.

• Reasonable Muscle Gain

Any discussion about how much muscle you can gain and how fast you can gain it invariably brings up discussion of your genetic threshold.  It’s widely understood that you can’t (naturally) gain muscle at a constant rate forever and that beginner lifters gain more muscle faster than athletes who have been developing their bodies for years; however, what’s not so well understood is what the limit or rate is.

Lyle McDonald of Bodyrecomposition offers a model he means to be taken for general use which holds that in the first year of consistent and proper training, a beginner can expect to gain 2 pounds of muscle a month, or about half a pound of muscle a week.

Gaining muscle requires a whole different set of nutritional requirements and workouts from that of losing fat. Although both goals have their own challenges, building muscle may actually be the more difficult of the two.

Unlike fat loss, building muscle requires increasing your caloric intake beyond your TDEE and performing consistent strength-based exercises properly, while giving yourself the recovery time necessary to let your muscles grow and develop.

You’re also going to need to monitor your protein intake to makes sure you’re providing your body with enough nutrients to promote muscle growth.

Never Start Over Again

Ultimately, a healthy body is a reflection of a healthy lifestyle.  A healthy diet that involves staying active and doesn’t involve overeating will result in the appearance you want.

Tying it all together, the best way to break the cycle is to think about your health and fitness as a lifestyle choice instead of something based on physical appearance or a number on the scale.  Looking at it that way, time becomes irrelevant, as you will slowly and steadily work towards your goals.  In time, you’ll get there, but in the meantime, you’ll be enjoying all the physical benefits that living a healthy lifestyle can bring, including:

• More energy
• Better sleep
• Better mood

As well as the more intangible ones like

• Feeling more comfortable with your appearance
• Having your clothes fit you better
• Having other people notice that you’re looking more fit and healthy

Make sure your time at the gym is worth it. In fitness and health, slow and steady really does win the race!

Source: https://inbodyusa.com/blogs/inbodyblog/92274497-how-to-end-the-cycle-of-starting-over/

This article originally appeared on the Isolator Fitness blog and is reposted here with permission. To view the original, click here.

Ideally to achieve maximum health we would eat only fresh, natural, organic foods and we would completely avoid processed or packaged options. But nothing is ideal in reality and so there are times that we must depend on the information that is provided to us through nutrition labels on packaged food items to determine which processed options are better than others. The nutritional values of fresh, natural and organic foods are also important to consider when deciding what to purchase and consume but these are not always as easily found.

Fresh, Natural, or Organic Foods

Fresh produce, beef, and seafood don’t come with nutritional labels printed out on them, but that doesn’t mean that the information isn’t out there and available for you if you decide to look. These nutritional facts will read much like the labels on your packaged food, except that in most cases you’ll find that what you’re consuming with natural foods is much healthier than what’s packed inside processed food. Some packaged food will read as “organic”, “all natural”, or “nothing artificial” but those are not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about non-packaged and fresh fruits, vegetables, beef, chicken, pork, salmon, tilapia, etc.

Packaged Foods

Nutritional labels on packaged foods allow you to compare the calorie, fat, trans fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium and sugar content in any given food. With that knowledge you are in an informed position to make the most accurate decision about which foods to stay away from due to higher levels of these ingredients.

To determine which foods are better for your specific and personal dietary choices it’s also important to peruse the ingredients list to see what additives and other ingredients are present. It is always better to choose options with ingredients that you have in your own kitchen, while avoiding the chemical additives. Often times the smaller ingredient lists and larger vitamin lists provide healthier content, but this is not always the case, and the lengths of these lists should only be considered one of many things to look at when reading a nutritional label.

Some packaged food will even say “organic”, “ natural”, or “no artificial ingredients” but many people don’t know what the difference is, so they end up buying the wrong products, for their personal dietary needs.

 

Packaging Term	What It Means
Organic	Free of growth hormones and antibiotics 95% of the ingredients are organic Grown with non synthetic or sewage fertilizers No GMO’s
All Natural	No FDA requirements Foods are generally made of natural ingredients but may contain hydrogenated oils, added sugars, flavoring (as long as it’s a natural flavoring), and other non natural ingredients
No Artificial Ingredients	Least regulated Food may be made of an even mixture of natural and artificial ingredients, so you’ll have to read the nutrition label carefully

 

Making Sense Of Nutrition Labels

Although the information is laid out for you in a seemingly organized fashion, making sense of what you’re reading when looking at a nutritional label is not always an easy task. Many people don’t consume enough iron, calcium, fiber, or vitamins A and C, despite the fact that they are always included on the nutritional labels. Here are the main characteristics you should look at on a nutritional label and what they mean.

 

Chart Section	What It Tells You
Serving Size	How large a serving is usually in both standard and metric measurements How many servings are present
Calorie Information	How many calories, and calories from fat are present in a single serving
Daily Value %	How much of your daily nutrient requirement is satisfied by a single serving (shown in percentage form) Usually based on a 2,000 calorie per day diet
Nutrients	List of nutrients including: fat, sugar, carbohydrates, and protein How many grams of each nutrient are included in a single serving Usually the lower daily value percentages are the healthier options in this section (protein is the exception)
Vitamins & Minerals	List of vitamins & minerals that are included in a single serving (Try to consume 100% of your daily value for Vitamin A and C, iron, calcium, and fiber everyday)
Footnote	List of key nutrients paired with how much of each you should consume Usually based on a 2,000 calorie per day diet

The footnote section is the best place to look for clarification if you’re confused about how much of a certain nutrient you should be consuming in any given day.There are also some commonly printed phrases printed on nutrition labels and packaged food containersthat be confusing if you don’t know what they mean. These are phrases that you should become familiar with so that you better understand what it is that you’re purchasing and eating. Here are a few of the most popularly printed phrases and what they really mean:

 

 

Phrase	What It Really Means
No Fat/Fat Free	May contain some fat, as long as it’s less that ½ gram per serving
Lower or Reduced Fat	Will contain at least 25% less fat per serving than the original food item
Low Fat	Will contain less than 3 grams of fat per serving
Lite	Will contain either ⅓ of the calories or ½ of the fat that would be found in the original food item
No Calories/Calorie Free	May contain calories, as long as it’s less that 5 calories per serving
Low Calories	Will contain no more than 50% of the calories per serving than the original food item
Sugar Free	May contain some sugar, as long as it’s less that ½ gram per serving
Reduced Sugar	Will contain at least 25% less sugar per serving than the original food item
No Preservatives	Will not contain any preservatives (natural or chemical)
No Preservatives Added	Will not contain chemically added preservatives.
Low Sodium	Will contain less than 140 mgs of sodium per serving
No Salt/Salt Free	May contain salt, as long as it’s less than 5 mgs of sodium per serving
High Fiber	Will contain at least 5 grams of fiber (or more) per serving
Good Source of Fiber	Will contain 2.5 grams to 4.9 grams of fiber per serving
More/Added Fiber	Will contain at least 2.5 grams more fiber per serving than the original food item

Source: https://inbodyusa.com/blogs/inbodyblog/85335553-how-to-read-nutrition-labels/

Raise your hand if you said something like:

“In 2016, I’m finally going to lose weight!”

If you did, you’re not alone.  According to Statistics Brain Institute, a company that compiles statistics on a variety of topics and industries, losing weight was (unsurprisingly) the #1 New Year’s resolution made in 2015.

However, according to the same research, only 8% of people reported achieving their resolution by the end of 2015.  Also not terribly surprising.

But forget 2015.  It’s now into the third week of 2016, and this year is the year that you can actually achieve your fitness/weight loss goal.  It’s completely possible; you just need to go about it the right way.

Yes, it will take hard work and dedication. No, it doesn’t mean that you have to give up everything you enjoy doing (unless what you enjoy doing is surviving on exclusively burgers and soda).  Follow the below steps and by this time next year, you’ll be celebrating the beginning of 2017 with a new, fitter you.

Step 1: Throw Your Scale out the Window

This is key. In 2016, you’re going to part with your bathroom scale. Why? Because it’s been serving you a steady stream of lies every time you’ve stepped on it in the past.

How?

You say that you want to lose weight.  But what is weight, really? It’s really just a number, and seeing a number rise or fall on the scale doesn’t tell even close to the whole story. What you’re actually trying to say when you say you want to lose weight – whether you realize it or not – is you want to lose fat. Pounds of fat.

The truth is: your body isn’t just a vessel that weighs a certain amount; it’s made up of a lot of different things, including fat, muscle, bone mineral, and body water.  This way of dividing your body into its parts is called your body composition.  When you lose (or gain weight), the actual changes in your body that your scale registers as weight changes are actually changes in one or more parts of your body composition – changes in muscle, changes in fat, etc.

Weighing yourself on the scale when you’re trying to lose weight – or worse: weighing yourself every day – can set you up for failure by not accurately reporting your progress, causing you to become discouraged.  Here’s how.

Here’s a profile of someone who is just beginning their fitness program, and is doing moderate to heavy weight lifting as part of their plan.  Here’s the same person, about three months later.

As a result of a proper diet and consistent exercise, this person has lost 5 pounds of fat. But because this person has been building muscle as well, their weight hasn’t changed at all.

If this person’s goal was simply “weight loss,” despite their positive gains in muscle and losses in fat, this person might think that no progress was made.  After months of kicking yourself into shape and being super careful about your diet, a lack of movement on the scale can be extremely discouraging.

This is why you need to focus on improving your body composition – not weight loss.  Weight loss doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know what you’re losing and gaining.

Step 2: Learn a bit about calories

“Counting calories.”

For some people, this phrase brings feelings of the purest dread.  Not only do people think it’s a lot of work, but that it also means the end of eating anything delicious.

Fortunately, keeping track of calories isn’t that hard, and depending on what your goals are, you may be able to eat more than you think.  But first, here are some basic truths on calories.

First: let’s get something straight right now – from an energy storing perspective, it doesn’t matter all that much how often/when you eat.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (bold text added):

The time of day isn’t what affects how your body uses calories. It’s the overall number of calories you eat and the calories you burn over the course of 24 hours that affects your weight.

It helps to think of your caloric needs like a daily budget.  If your needs are 2,400 calories and you “spend” a 1,000 calories on breakfast, that’s fine – it’s just that you only get 1,400 calories until breakfast the next day.

Second: everyone’s caloric needs are different; so that 2,000 daily recommended calorie intake on the nutrition label? Consider that to be the most general, vaguest set of guidelines that almost certainly will set you up for failure, especially since it was picked in no small part because it was just an easy number to remember, rounded off to the nearest thousand for convenience ¹.

To find your individual caloric needs, you need to estimate something called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure – the amount of calories that you burn in a 24-hour period.  Generally speaking, your TDEE has two major components:

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): the total number of calories your body requires to “stay on” and power bodily processes like brain activity, pumping blood, breathing, digesting, etc.
• Activity Rate: an estimated index of how active you are over 24 hours

To get TDEE, multiply BMR with Activity Rate. For example, someone with a BMR of 1600 calories and is moderately active (exercises 3-5x a week) would have a total caloric need of around 2,480 calories, nearly 500 calories more than the traditional 2,000 calorie diet.

Use your TDEE as the baseline from how you create your diet.  “Cutting calories” doesn’t mean “starvation” – it means making a moderate reduction in your caloric intake as determined by your daily needs.

Based on what your goals are, designing a diet and knowing what’s an appropriate caloric intake does get a little more complicated, but there’s a complete guide to using BMR to creating a diet right here.

Step 3: Choose 1 Goal (from 2 options) and Plan Your Diet

source: Flickr

In 2016, you’re not going to think about “weight loss” any more.  Instead, you’re going to think about choosing from one of the two following goals: “fat loss” or “muscle gain.”  Both of these goals will have the effect of reducing your overall body fat percentage but achieve it in different ways.

But just one goal – not both at the same time? Can’t you lose fat and gain muscle at the same time? Maybe. But it will be extremely difficult to effectively do both over any extended period of time.  This is because the nutritional and caloric needs your body requires to gain muscle effectively are different from those when you want your body to lose fat.

• Fat Loss

If you want to lose fat, you need to encourage your body to enter what’s called a catabolic state – a state when your body breaks down body tissue instead of building it.  This requires you to take in fewer calories than you bring in.

But remember: your TDEE is made of two parts, BMR and Activity Level, so taking in fewer calories doesn’t necessarily (and shouldn’t) mean you have to cut out breakfast completely or something equally drastic.  If you weren’t working out at all before, simply increasing your activity level by starting an exercise program while maintaining your caloric intake may be enough to trigger fat loss.  If this sounds like you, simply beginning an exercise program is a good way to get started.

However, most people will need a combination of caloric reduction and exercise to achieve consistent and healthy fat loss.  How many calories you need to reduce will vary based on your individual body composition and goals.

• Muscle Gain

You can’t lose fat forever, and at some point you will need to work on developing muscle – or at the very least, work to preserve the muscle that you have already.  This will require a different diet and exercise plan than the one designed for fat loss.  Instead of getting your body into a catabolic state, you’ll want to enter into an anabolic state – a state where your body builds tissue instead of breaking it down.

To build muscle, your body needs resources.  This means proper nutrition – sufficient protein intake is critical when trying to increase muscle mass – but equally as important is eating enough calories.  There is a popular misconception that taking in excessive amounts of protein is the key to muscle gain, but in a Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition publication, high performance athletes who failed to meet their caloric needs were found to have limited lean body mass gains, despite increasing their protein beyond their daily recommended needs.

So what is a good estimate of your caloric needs for this goal?  Although nutrition plays a large role in determining diet, from a caloric standpoint, research suggests that maintaining an energy surplus of about 15% is appropriate for developing musculature.  This means, all else being equal, the moderately active person with a BMR of 1,600 calories would want to shoot for around 2,852 calories a day.

Step 4: Plan for a Marathon, not a 100-yard dash

source: Flickr

In a world where virtually every piece of information in all of human history can be searched for in seconds by anyone with a smartphone, people are used to getting the results they want when they want them.  Unfortunately, you can’t expect the same from your body.

That’s why if you hang around enough fitness people for long enough, you’ll eventually hear them talk about a “fitness journey.”  That’s because that’s exactly what fitness is – a journey. It’s not a sprint, and it will take time to make meaningful changes that last.

For example, in a study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, participants were divided into two groups that created a 25% energy gap between what they ate and what they burned. The first group did this by only dieting (25% caloric reduction) and the second achieving it by splitting the energy deficit by both diet and exercise (12.5% caloric reduction + 12.5% increase in energy use due to increased exercise).

The results were interesting: both groups were able to reduce their body weight by about 10% and their total fat mass by 24%, indicating that for fat/weight reduction, caloric reduction by any means is critical, regardless of how it is achieved.  For a 180 pound person, a 10% reduction comes out to 3 pounds of loss per month, which is less than a pound a week.

This can be challenging for some people – to not see any measurable changes on the scale after a week of diet/diet+exercise.  Even after two weeks, you may only see your weight decrease by a pound, maybe two.  If you’re measuring your weight by just using a scale, this can be especially frustrating (another reason why you should get rid of it).

Plan for the long term, and don’t expect to see dramatic changes right away.  And because you’re planning for the long term, that also means that you don’t need to be perfect every single day.  That’s going to put on too much pressure, cause frustration, and maybe cause you to fail.  That’s why this guide’s final step is important.

Step 5: Let Cheat Days Happen (and don’t feel bad about it)

source: Flickr

That’s right.  Break your diet every once in a while. Skip the odd gym day and go out for pizza and beer. It’s OK.

Didn’t expect that, did you?

But wait! Isn’t this how you “gain it all back”?  You hear stories about people breaking their diets and then gaining 5 pounds or more over a cheat weekend, erasing a month of hard work.

This is where your scale – if you’re still using one – really can screw you up with negative thinking and discouragement.  So you gained 5 pounds over the weekend; is your scale lying?  Not exactly. Yes you gained 5 pounds, but more than likely, it’s 5 pounds of water.

Your weight will fluctuate throughout the day based on what you eat and drink.  If you’re dieting, a pretty common/near universal strategy is to reduce your carbohydrate intake (aka “cutting carbs”).

By reducing your intake of foods rich in carbohydrates, you’re reducing your overall glycogen stores. Glycogen is a molecule your body converts into energy and is a source of short-term energy; as opposed to fat, which is typically used in cases where energy from glycogen or other short-term energy sources aren’t available.

What does glycogen have to do with scales, water, and cheat days? Everything, actually.

Water molecules love glycogen.  In fact, for every gram of glycogen in your body, there will be 3-4 grams of water bonded to it.  Your loading your body with glycogen when you’re eating your carbohydrate-dense food and drinks on your cheat day, and water is bonding to it.  So when you step on the scale the day after, it’s very possible to see yourself gain several pounds in a day.

This doesn’t mean you gained it all back.  Chances are, it’s just water and once you get back on your diet and exercise program, your weight will be back to where it was in a couple days. Watch.

5 Step Plan Review

Let’s review your 5 step plans for a weight loss plan that you’ll actually do in 2016.

1. Throw out your scale and get your body composition tested.  If your gym doesn’t do it, join one that does. The longer you stick with a scale, the longer you’ll be frustrated.
2. Learn the basics of calories and find your TDEE.
3. Pick 1 goal. You can change it later.
4. Prepare for your own “fitness journey.” Slow and steady wins the race.
5. Have a cheat day. It will help you stay sane, and it will give you something to look forward to every week or two to keep you motivated.

Good luck!

 

Source: https://inbodyusa.com/blogs/inbodyblog/84369153-how-to-make-a-fitness-new-years-resolution-you-ll-actually-do/

When it comes to showing the effectiveness of corporate wellness programs, showing a positive ROI can be a little tricky.

On one hand, you read reports like this one in the Harvard Business Review that trumpet the effectiveness of successful corporate wellness programs at companies like Johnson & Johnson, which was reported as saving $250 million over 5 years at a rate of $2.71 in savings per dollar invested.

If you’re an employer, you read articles like this and think: “Great! Healthier employees plus measurable savings? Who wouldn’t want that?”

But on the other hand, contrarian reports like this one from the RAND Corporation tell a different story.  According to RAND, only disease management programs have positive returns in savings; for lifestyle management programs – the ones that promote exercise and healthy lifestyles – employers can expect a return of only fifty cents on the dollar.

Following RAND’s logic, it would make sense for the fiscally-minded executive or HR director to only provide benefits that treat chronic illnesses and not spend money encouraging their employees against unhealthy choices that lead to conditions like obesity, for instance.

But taking this line of thought can come at a high price for companies. Unhealthy employees and employees who are steadily becoming unhealthier tend to become less productive.  Employees who can’t work at their full potential are a source of loss.

Yet you won’t see these employees taking sick days; you’ll see them at their desks day in day out, present – but not productive.  Called “presenteeism,” unhealthy employees who come to work are costing their companies billions in lost productivity. If you’re an employer looking for positive ROI on your wellness program, this is something you cannot afford to ignore.

It’s Not Just About Sick Days

In order to understand how corporate wellness programs deliver significant benefits over the long term, it’s important to understand where costs for employers come from. The first two you probably know.

There are direct costs for sick employees, like medical and pharmaceutical costs.  Then there are sick days that employers are legally obliged to give, which represent money spent on employees who aren’t working.  That’s referred to as “absenteeism.”

These costs have been traditionally understood as costs corporate wellness programs can mitigate: healthier employees don’t take sick days, don’t lose productive hours, and don’t make as many insurance claims for illnesses.

Presenteeism, by contrast, occurs when employees should be absent but feel that they should be at work because of their obligations or for fear of disciplinary action.  But what is presenteeism?

According to research published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, presenteeism occurs when:

• There is lost time between when an employee comes to work and when the employee begins work

Or when hours are lost when an employee:

• Loses concentration
• Must repeat a task
• Works slower due to feelings of fatigue
• Does nothing

All of these actions may cause the employee to be less productive, meaning the company is losing productive hours from individuals who are at work when they should be absent.

Lots of seemingly minor issues can cause an employee to be a “presentee” worker.  Simply coming into work sick when they should be absent will cause an employee to be less productive.  But then, there are other, more silent factors that can cause loss of productivity including headaches, back pain, indigestion, acid reflux, etc.

Many of these minor complaints can be traced back to one chronic problem that is only growing with each passing year: the ongoing rise of obesity in the United States.  While it might seem hard to imagine that your employees’ diets and exercise habits are having a direct effect on their productivity, a growing body of research suggests otherwise.  Let’s take a look.

Lost Productivity

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than one-third of American adults are obese, which research in the Journal of the American Medical Association defines as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) equal to or greater than 30.  For reference, here are the BMI ranges and their corresponding weight classifications according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Statistically speaking, if you employ American adults in your business, some of them are likely to fall into this category.

Furthermore, the CDC estimates that the annual medical costs attributed to obesity are $147 billion, and that costs for people who are obese are $1,429 greater per individual than those who are not.

From an employer’s standpoint, employee obesity might not rank very high on the list of business concerns.  The trend towards a sedentary lifestyle is something that an individual chooses for themselves, and an employer is not a parent.

But as an employer, you expect productivity from your employees, and in recent years a growing body of research has started to indicate that overweight and obese employees are costing their employers billions in lost hours due to both absenteeism and presenteeism.

A 2009 study examining the costs of obesity in the workplace begins by noting that increased medical expenditures ranged from an additional $170 for overweight employees (BMI: 25.0 – 29.9) to greater than $1,500 for employees with grade II obesity (BMI: 35.0 to 39.9).  Some of these costs were attributable to absenteeism, and the employee group with the greatest rates of absenteeism – women with grade III obesity – missed 1 week more work than those of normal weight.

1 week of lost productive hours, assuming an employee works 40 hours a week, can range in the high hundreds to thousands of dollars per employee (depending on salary), with the loss compounding for each additional overweight employee.

That’s just absenteeism. When the costs of presenteeism are added in, the amount of productive hours and money lost due to obesity becomes hard to ignore.

Research conducted by Finkelstein et al. estimates that the total costs among full-time employees that are attributable to obesity total some $73.1 billion.  When broken down by type of cost – medical, absenteeism, and presenteeism – the results are as follows:

For women, costs related to presenteeism are estimated to be $15 billion – 38% of the total costs related to poor health.  For men the costs related to presenteeism are $15 billion as well, but for this group, presenteeism is the greatest source of financial loss, more than direct medical costs and losses due to sick leave.  The authors concluded that:

“…presenteeism is the single largest driver of the costs of poor health among full-time employees, regardless of BMI. Moreover, with the exception of overweight men [BMI: 25-29.9], medical expenditures, absenteeism, and presenteeism increase with increasing BMI.”

The “Threshold Effect”

These findings are confirmed in a second study published in the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. This study looked at employees in the manufacturing industry in Kentucky and found that annual loss per worker due to obesity was $506 in presenteeism and $433 in absenteeism.

More interestingly, the paper’s authors noted something they uncovered that they termed a “threshold effect.”

Among overweight (25-29.9) and mildly obese employees (BMI 30-34.9), the authors did not observe any significant costs related to productivity loss.  However, these costs began and steadily increased once BMI ranges extended into moderately or extremely obese ranges (BMI: 35+).  And they scale rapidly with the size of the company.

In the study, of the employees in the companies under review, 12.9% were categorized as obese.  Although obesity rates vary from company to company, using this figure as a model, a company of 100 employees can expect a loss of $6,376 due to productivity losses related to presenteeism caused by complications related to obesity.  And remember, this money is excluding the direct costs and absentee costs.

The authors of this study conclude:

“…health effects on productivity are concentrated among the most obese workers with BMIs of 35.0 or  greater, suggesting that employers should consider workplace interventions targeting obesity.  Even modest weight loss could result in hundreds of dollars of improved productivity costs per worker per year.”

Shifting Perspectives on Corporate Wellness

Given the massive financial impact presenteeism can have on bottom lines and the link between obesity and presenteeism, corporate wellness programs can and must be seen in a new light when thinking about ROI.

Although the conclusions drawn by the RAND study about the ROI of corporate wellness programs aren’t necessarily incorrect, they are a bit narrow-minded in that they only take into account measurable, direct returns on dollars invested without considering the costs in productivity loss related to both absenteeism and presenteeism.

One significant oversight in the RAND study is the classification of the factors that lead to developing obesity, such as poor eating habits and lack of exercise as being under the umbrella of “lifestyle management programs,” – the programs that yielded only 50 cents per dollar invested. These were the programs RAND advised against investing in.

But as research has shown, the link between obesity and presenteeism represents a huge potential drain in resources.  A well-run corporate wellness program can yield a huge ROI if it can increase productivity in its employees, and according to the CDC, maintaining a healthy workforce lowers both direct and indirect costs, including the ones related to absenteeism and presenteeism.

These indirect costs aren’t to be dismissed, and fortunately, they are preventable. In Health and Productivity as a Business Strategy, Loeppke et al. (2009) demonstrated that while there is an additional $2.30 in productivity losses for every dollar spent on employees’ medical and drug costs, there are at least $2-4 absorbed in health costs related to productivity losses caused by absentee/presenteeism for every dollar invested in their health.

Bottom Line

If you want to get the most out of your employees and avoid losing money, you need to keep them healthy and productive.  In order to keep them productive, you need to offer and encourage your employees to use resources to take care of their bodies and improve their health.

But even beyond your bottom line: offering these types of resources demonstrate that you care about your employees as people and not just as people who work for you.  Most people like being productive, and everyone likes being healthy.

Isn’t it time to rethink how you manage your wellness program?

Source: https://inbodyusa.com/blogs/inbodyblog/82261057-how-weight-loss-proves-the-roi-of-your-wellness-program/

Here’s a little story about growing a business in the good old days:

Once upon a time, if a customer wanted to buy a product, they went to a store near them that carried the product and bought it.  The customer was happy: they got what they needed; the store was happy: they made a sale. The happy customer returned again, the store made more sales, the business grew, and everyone was happy.

A warm and fuzzy fiction, isn’t it?  Sadly, in the ultra-competitive, marketplace of the 21st century, that’s all this story amounts to.

That’s because in the 21st century, online shopping, driven by the explosive growth of smartphone and app technology, has made shopping from home incredibly easy. Online shopping, or e-commerce, affects every type of industry and retailer across the board. That includes the nutrition industry.

At first glance, the nutrition/health store industry seems stable: according to market research conducted by IBIS World, the annual growth rate for physical, brick-and-mortar health stores in the US grew by 3.4% from 2010-2015.

However, in the same period, online sales for the same products grew too – and not just a little.  According to IBIS World, online vitamin and supplement sales grew by 12.3%; more than triple the growth of physical stores. With bigtime vendors such as Amazon, Bodybuilding.com, and Iherb.com weighing in on the market, it’s hard to be surprised. That marginal growth isn’t going to last forever, especially in a world where Amazon is promising aerial drone deliveries direct to your doorstop in 30 minutes or less.

Why get in the car when you can get exactly what you want from your couch, anytime you want, delivered via air in less time than it takes to drive to your store, shop, and drive back?

Simple: because at your store, you can offer something that no faceless website or mechanical drone can ever hope to provide.

Superior customer service from a real person who is an expert on nutrition, offering personalized counseling, advice, and service that your customers will never be able to get online.

Even with the internet, your customers still crave that face-to-face interaction and expertise, if you can provide it. A study by NICE Enterprise Group recently demonstrated that in terms of customer satisfaction, people strongly favored either speaking to a real person at their location (44%) or on the phone (60%) over many digital channels, including website (39%), social media (1%), smartphone apps (6%), and email (9%).

Still, even if you are the most well-respected expert on nutrition in your local community, you can’t provide superior customer service without something driving traffic through your door.

You still need a reason to get people off their couches to come talk to you.  What can be that traffic driver?

Offer body composition analysis tests at your nutrition store.

The Key to Customer Service

What is body composition analysis?  What does that have anything to do with customer service?

Body composition analysis is a method of determining what makes up your weight: muscle, fat, bone, and water.  And whether your customers realize it or not, they’re already coming to your store to optimize their body composition. Most of them want to change their body composition by gaining muscle or losing fat (and probably both). Now, by looking at their body composition results, you can guide them to exactly the right product on your shelf to help them reach their goals quicker.

What this amounts to is this: you’re providing each customer personalized 1:1 attention and offering them solutions so that they can meet their individualized goals.

That’s superior customer service.

How can you test for body composition?  Although there are many ways to test body composition, there is only one practical method for in-store testing that’s accurate, reliable, and gives you enough information to make the right recommendations. That’s body composition testing using bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) technology.

For nutrition stores, it’s the ideal choice. These devices are small and can be easily set up in a retail store.  They also perform tests automatically, typically under a minute or less.  Best of all, they don’t require any pinching or poking of your customer, like what happens when you use skinfold calipers.  No one is going to come to your store to get pinched and poked.

What information do you get from a typical BIA body composition test?

Nearly all BIA devices will determine body fat percentage.  Using this number and multiplying it with a customer’s body weight will give you their Fat Mass.  You can subtract that number from their body weight, and what remains is their Lean Body Mass (which includes, but isn’t the same as, muscle. More on that here)

If you’re an InBody customer, you will have access to additional information such Skeletal Muscle Mass (what most people refer to as just “muscle”) with a graph showing if the amount is under, over, or within the normal range for that person’s body.

You and your customer probably don’t need a body composition test to determine if they are overweight.  Your customers probably know this already, and this can be identified on the graph if the bar for Weight extends into the range under the “up” arrow.

What your customers may not know, however, is if they are underweight.  This can also be identified on the graph by checking if the bar ends in the range under the “down” arrow.

You can also provide extra value to your clients by showing them where their Lean Body Mass is located and how developed they are from both an upper/lower body and right/left body perspective.

InBody clients can also reveal their a customer’s Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), which describes how many calories your customers need to keep their bodies operating at their full potential.

With BMR, you can quickly determine how many calories your customer needs to gain/lose weight based on their activity level.  With that information, you can start crafting customized diet plans based on your customer’s unique body composition and recommend the exact products. If you’re interested in that, you can read this complete guide to using BMR to creating diet plans.

Putting It Into Practice

Here are a couple situations where you can provide excellent customer service, build lasting relationships with your customers, and help your business grow.

• The First-Time Customer

Scenario: A first-time customer comes into your store.  They come into your nutrition store with the initial thought of buying whey protein because they “want to build muscle and get toned.”

Action: After hearing what your new customer’s goals are, you tell them that you’ve got a pretty good idea of what products might work for them, but in order to be sure, you offer them a free body composition test, just as a thank you for walking in.  You can mention to them that you usually charge a fee for this service, but for first-timers, you give it to them on the house thanking them for considering your store.

You test them, and you see their results look like this:

From this graph, you notice that this customer is underdeveloped in Weight, Skeletal Muscle, and Body Fat. You can make the recommendation that because this person’s Fat Mass is already low, they just need to focus on gaining weight and muscle.  You can recommend that in addition to whey protein, that they also get a weight-gaining product to increase their calorie intake to ensure they have the nutrients to perform at the gym.

Results: A first-time customer walked into your store thinking that they were only coming in for whey protein, and walks out with a body composition test, whey protein, and weight gainer.  Not only that, they walked out feeling like they made the right choice because you took the time to get to know them and offered them exactly what they needed to hit their goals.

They walk away happy because they feel like they just unexpectedly got great customer service, and you’re happy because you just potentially doubled your sale from what you would have sold before, AND you ensured that that customer will be a repeat customer.

• The Weekly Weight Challenge

Scenario: In order to build traffic to your store, you create and advertise a fat loss challenge with weekly weigh-ins to track progress. The challenge can go for as long as you like, and the winner gets a gift card to your store.

Action: You advertise to your customers that you’re going to be holding a fat loss challenge: whoever can lose the most pounds of fat in 8 weeks wins a big gift prize to your store.  You charge a small entry fee for each participant that will cover a free body composition analysis – one a week, at each weigh-in – during the competition.

Every time one of your customers comes in for a weekly weigh-in, you can comment on their progress and offer recommendations that might help them win the contest.

Let’s say one of your customers come in on the second week of the competition, and their body composition results look like this:

Imagine this person lost half a pound of fat over 2 weeks. You tell them you think they can do better if they make a couple changes in their diet.  You recommend that they introduce a fat-burning supplement to help them stay focused and increase their metabolism.  6 weeks later, that person you helped wins the contest.

Results: By holding a fat loss contest and charging a small fee to participate, you’re guaranteeing traffic coming into your shop every week.  They’ll want that free body composition test, and they’ll want to know if they’re on the track path to win.

Every time someone from your contest comes in, you’re creating another opportunity to offer exceptional customer service by analyzing their results.  When you analyze their results and make recommendations, you’re creating new opportunities to potentially sell more products.

But selling products will just be an extra bonus. What you’re gaining is something even more valuable – a reputation of expertise and customer service.  Your customers have friends, and they talk to them.  By offering fun, exciting, and educational that they can only get from your store, you’re creating more traffic for yourself, increasing your revenue and growing your business.

Get Your Name Out There By You Getting Out There

If you really want to drive traffic and growth for your nutrition store, get out from behind the counter and go out to where your customers are using  your products – their gym.  If you’ve got a body composition analyzer, you can use it as a bridge to get you connected with business owners in your local area.  Here’s how.

From one of your customers, find out if you can get introduced to the person who runs their gym.  When you meet with a local gym owner, you can propose a mutual cross-promotion arrangement where both of you can improve the image of your respective businesses. It might go something like this.

You bring your body composition analyzer to a gym on a set day.  The gym owner can advertise your arrival to their members prior to your coming on that set day.  What you’re there to do is test as many people as possible for a fee.  Create a profit-sharing plan with the gym owner at whatever arrangement works best for the both of you.

Another arrangement could be that you bring samples of your products and promotional material for your shop that you can hand out when you give the body composition tests.  Don’t sell your products at the gym unless that’s been agreed to by the gym owner.

Why This Benefits The Gym Owner: Your partner gym owner gets to use a body composition tool and provide it to his members at absolutely no charge.  In fact, all he has to do is say yes, and he makes money.

On top of all that, now it’s the gym owner that’s providing excellent customer service because of a service you provide.  Your partner gets to build rapport with his customers, ensuring that he retains his members continue paying their memberships, building his reputation in the community.  All of that costs him nothing, and what remains is more money for him and a new, profitable partnership with you.

Why This Benefits The Gym Members: The gym members get to have their body composition analyzed and interpreted.  If you decide to give away free samples, then they’re getting free stuff too.

Why This Benefits You: You get to expose your services to a whole new group of potential customers, and you get to do it in the place where they are most receptive to hearing about health supplements – their gym.  You get your name out in the community, and you can get people interested in coming to your store to buy your products.  You’ll be driving traffic to your store.

You also get to benefit from what can be a valuable and profitable partnership with a local gym owner.  Because your businesses complement each other, there are many creative ways you can cross-promote your two businesses to the benefit of both.

One advantage of this strategy is that it is scalable.  You can build more partnerships with more gym owners.  For example, if you work to build relationships with 4 gym owners and do body composition testing once a month at each, now you’ve got a place to test people and promote your business outside of your store once a week.

Exceed Expectations Always

As a nutrition store owner, you provide vitamins, supplements, and wellness products to the community.

The baseline expectation of your customers will be that you have what they want in stock, whenever they come into your store.

But if the only service you provide is just being a place where people can buy products, slowly but surely, you are going to lose traffic and profit to the internet.  Once one of your customers experiences how easy it is to order online, they’ll start ordering online all the time. Why wouldn’t they?

Wouldn’t you?

If you want to keep your customers and grow your business beyond what you thought was possible, you need to provide something that the internet will never be able to do: the personal touch of human interaction. You need to exceed the expectations your customers have of you.  You need to offer superior customer service, and with a little effort, you can do it. Here’s how:

• Be the expert

As a nutrition store owner, you know your products inside and out.  Every product is in your store for a reason, and if someone tells you what their goals are, you know exactly which one to recommend.

But today’s customers are smart. They know how to research online, and they will probably come into your store thinking they know what they want already.

Be the expert. Use their individual body composition results to guide your recommendations.  Not only are you creating opportunities for yourself to upsell and move more products, but you’re also providing personalized service with someone’s actual body composition results.  No website can do that.

• Engage with your customers

Time is valuable. Your customers are busy people with busy lives, and like anyone else, have to decide when and how to use their time.

Make your customers want to spend a small amount of their valuable time at your store.  To do that, you have to give them a reason to, and not just to buy more products when they run out.

Host events at your store like fat loss challenges.  Get them interested in coming back.  Offer them a prize to keep them engaged.  The more you get people interested in coming through your store, the more opportunities you have to prove your value and sell.

• Reach out to your community

Whether you realize it or not, you are part of a greater network of like minded businesses  that can compliment each other. You just need to tap into it.

Get involved with businesses in your local community, and use your body composition analyzer as the vehicle that opens the door to the relationship.  You have a valuable resource – share it.  Every person you test becomes a potential customer of yours.

By being out in the community, you will begin to build a reputation for yourself as the go-to person for supplements and health information.  You will begin to be much more than simply a storefront and a place where people pick up their protein powder once a month.

You can become the person that people come to for the information and products that impact their lives.  You can offer advice, plans, and products that make people healthier and happier.  That’s superior customer service.

And that, no matter how technology improves over time, is something people will always want.

Source: https://inbodyusa.com/blogs/inbodyblog/79958209-how-to-increase-sales-at-your-nutrition-store-with-body-composition/