Jimmy Pena's Blog: Let's Get 'Extra' Lean!

Entertainment news, gossip, America's fittest fans, celebrity photos... wait, America's fittest fans? That's right! That might sound like a stretch, but with Mario leading the way, we're confident it can and will be true!

Now, for many of us, training to look like Mario is like asking a cat to climb Mt. Everest, but we can all do our best to be in the best shape possible, right? While we make the best show on television, all we want you to do is make yourself at home, literally!

Over the next few weeks, Mario, Dr. Jim Stoppani and I will show you how -- through smart eating and simple training -- you can become healthier than ever before, all because you did something "extra."

The goal is for you to learn what foods do to your body and how you can manipulate food combinations to perform at your very best. If it's been a while since you've exercised, or you're coming back from an injury, or you just want to burn some extra calories, Mario's bodyweight program is the perfect solution. Mario knows that bodyweight exercises are extremely helpful in developing overall body strength, allowing you to build lean muscle and elevate your metabolism at rest. And you can also turn your living room into a calorie-burning studio with some intense bodyweight cardio moves that Mario will show you each week!

Tips to Get Started

Knowing what to eat on a diet to lose weight on a diet is actually pretty easy. Simply take any good-tasting food you enjoy and stop eating it! That is the typical basis of most diets out there. And that is one of the major reasons why most diets fail. What if we told you that you can actually eat the majority of foods you enjoy and still lose weight?! Well, we're telling you exactly that. The key is in knowing when to eat them.

Bad foods can generally be placed into one of three categories: high fat foods, high-carbohydrate foods, and high fat/high carbohydrate foods. The answer is in understanding what type of foods to eat on what days. Each week you have higher fat days (low carbohydrate and high protein as well), high carbohydrate days (low fat and high protein as well), and even a high fat and high carbohydrate (and high protein) day. The key to eating the foods you want is to separate the carbohydrates from the fat. That means when you eat higher fat foods, you eat low-carbohydrate foods -- and when you eat high-carbohydrate foods, you eat low fat foods. Protein will always stay the same -- fairly high.