Hi I’m Dori Madsen. I’m a NextFit trainer and I wanted to share 5 tips that help my clients reach their weight loss goals. I am asked day in and day out what’s the best way to keep the weight off. I always tell people it’s not as complicated as you might think. Here are my 5 easy-to-do tips.

1) Don’t feel bad about throwing away food you don’t need to eat.
If you have already purchased the food it doesn’t make a difference if you put it in your mouth or in the trash! The best thing would be to not purchase things you do not need in the first place. But in the case of cleaning out your cupboards and fridge to get rid of things you do not need just relish in the fact that you will no longer be tempted by these things and you will be making room for all of the wonderful foods you will be eating instead.

This week’s featured exercise is from Adrienne Reed, PBS TV host and power yoga specialist. This week she shares with us a fundamental yoga flow known as Sun Salutation A.

This week’s featured exercise is from Chris Kluge, a certified personal trainer and a mixed marital artist with a black belt in Jiu Jitsu. Here he shares with us one of his proven methods for strengthening and shaping the entire lower body.

For those of you that missed the first Featured Exercise of the Week, this is Kathy Smith demonstrating how to make walking a real workout.

This week Kent Burden, the author of the award-winning book 'Yin Yang Fitness: The Whole Package of Health,' tells us about one of his favorite exercises.

Welcome to our new segment, "NextFit Nutrition Bites". These segments will provide valuable information and helpful tips in bite size bits that are easy to understand and remember. Melanie Douglass is a registered dietitian and a NextFit trainer. Here she explains how 500 calories doesn't always come in the same size package.

My name is Bryan Haycock and I'm an exercise physiologist here at NextFit. I am only one of many who will be posting to the NextFit blog.

We are so excited to share with you all of the great info that our world class trainers bring with them to NextFit. You won't want to miss the truly helpful tips and advice on exercise, eating, and of course living a healthy and active lifestyle.

Look for indepth articles as well as short and to-the-point tips. You'll see all your favorite trainers giving detailed demonstrations of their favorite exercises in our Featured Exercise segments. You'll get tips you can use for making good food choices in our Nutrition Bites video segments. There is so much great stuff coming that I can't list it all.

We want to hear from you! After reading an article or watching a video be sure and leave a comment. We value your input and want to know what you think. If there is some topic we aren't covering well enough, let us know and we'll get right on it. We know how challenging lifestyle change can be so we want NextFit to be as useful as it can possibly be. The only way we will accomplish that is if we do this together so don't be shy!

-Bryan

How to make this your healthiest year

Not this year. This is not the year of setting unrealistic health goals, making a heap of lifelong changes overnight, or constantly having to say the words, “I’ll start tomorrow.”

After a few holiday months of “live free and eat hard”, it’s natural to want to do a 180 with our lifestyle habits, and finally, make our own health a priority. But the blatant reality is that most of us tend to fail when it comes to making sensible, maintainable changes that actually lead to the results we desire. Don’t get me wrong. We don’t fail because we are weak. We fail because we are strong. Let me explain…

This week's featured exercise is from Yumi Lee, Hollywood trainer to stars like Brad Pitt and Hugh Jackman.  She's going to show you one of her favorite moves for tightening and toning your glutes.