One of the best ways to boost your metabolism long term is to add 5lbs of muscle.

We discuss what hypothalamic amenorrhea is and how to get your period back naturally through diet and exercise if you have lost your cycle.

Can eating MORE actually help you lose weight? This article tells you why that may be the case for you.

Not losing weight on keto? We tell you why you may not be having success with this popular diet.

We tell you all you need to know about weight loss and menopause!

When it comes to getting fit, there are a lot of options available. You can go at it alone with a workout routine you found online, or you can hire a fitness coach or personal trainer to help you reach your goals.

At Couture Fitness we know that there are so many ways people try to achieve weight loss; from crash diets to intense workout regimens. The question is, what helps keep the weight off for good?

Hit a weight loss plateau? We tell you how to break past them. Hint…the answer is not to diet harder!

Think that everyone who has weight to lose is simply over-eating and under-exercising? There is an entire sub-group of women (and men) who defy this common belief. Read more here.

If you feel like your metabolism has slowed down with age, this article will explain why that might be (hint: its not because you got older!) and how to actually improve your metabolism at any age.

I just returned from a trip to Savannah, Georgia where I enjoyed all sorts of culinary delights thank to a Calories Up Lifestyle.

The answer to this question, like many things health and fitness related, is “it depends”. I mentally divide my clients and potential clients into two groups: those who are simply overeating/not exercising properly and those who are actually UNDER-eating and/or OVER-exercising.

Last Saturday I debuted as an NPC bikini competitor at the NPC Midwest Championship in St. Louis. This post will be short and sweet with pictures, a few stats, and a bit about what I'm doing this week. In short, it was a whirlwind weekend! I came, I saw, I kind of conquered (I didn't place, but getting on stage didn't kill me), and now I'm decompressing from it all!

It has been a few weeks since I last posted here. Why? Because I'm exhausted and a little run down. I’ve been dieting for 13 weeks and I’ve got five more weeks until my show so it's time to grind a little. My cardio has increased, I'm walking more, and I'm just tired. I had writing a blog post on my to do list several nights last week, but I opted to go to bed early instead. But writing these posts is a little like therapy, and I'm probably in need of a little therapy, so here we go! In this week's post, I'll cover what a day in the life is like during the last month of competition prep. If I weren’t prepping for a competition, I would definitely stop dieting because 13 weeks is a long time to be cutting calories!

I’m about eight weeks into my cutting/dieting process for preparing for a fitness competition. As I’ve written about before, I primed my body for this by doing about six months of reverse dieting.

'll cut to the chase as to how things are going. I just finished up my first month of training for a fitness competition with my bikini coaches.. So far I've lost about 5 pounds, 1% body fat, and an inch off of my waist, hips, and thighs. I've also increased all the weights on my lifts. So far, so good!

As you know, to prepare for another fitness competition, one of my first goals is increasing my daily caloric intake. Say what? Calories up? Yes. My good friend and colleague Allison, has convinced me this is the way to go for this prep. In her twenties, Allison destroyed her metabolism eating too little (~1200 calories a day) and doing endless hours of cardio.

For my first 12 week cycle (July to September) of preparing to diet for a fitness competition, I’m going to prime my body for weight loss by doing a reverse diet (intentionally increasing calories). When I set the goal of doing another fitness competition, I was only eating 1500 calories a day, and that was simply too low to diet on and expect to have any results.

Exactly five years ago, at age 42, I competed in my first (and only) fitness competition. Recently, in a goal setting session with my new life coach, I somewhat flippantly jotted down that among other things, ideal Jo would like to be doing fitness competitions on the regular. Isn’t this something everyone lists as a goal? Apparently not, because my coach commented that she found it intriguing that I put that down, and we should explore it.