By Artur Davis, on Wed Nov 28, 2012 at 3:30 PM ET It is a measure of Chris Christie’s aura that serious people think his effusive praise of Barack Obama in the hours after Hurricane Sandy might have reelected the president. The likelier truth is that there are precious few undecided voters in Ohio and Virginia who know the name of the New Jersey governor, much less value his imprimatur as the tipping point in their electoral decision-making process. But Christie’s force of personality is one of the few authentic magnetic fields in politics that don’t bear the name Clinton or Obama, which guarantees disproportionate, even illogical, levels of attention when he makes moves.
That bravura suggests why Christie remains such an intriguing path for Republicans contemplating 2016. To be sure, there are mounting doubts about whether he is the one. The narrative that Christie is not a team player is gaining traction with Republican activists, who were confounded by the sound-bites of a Republican hero lavishing praise on the arch-enemy. The professional operative class that assesses political personalities for signs of trouble links his post-Sandy comments with a keynote address that seemed oblivious to the party talking points in Tampa, and they see a worrisome absence of discipline. The ones with a bent for pop psychology see brittleness masked as self-regard, and suggest that Christie must have been partly motivated by a fear of how difficult his reelection might be in a state Obama dominated, or even a burning fuse based on not being given a right of first refusal on the vice presidential nomination.
But the critiques on Christie are a reflection of the odd waters of modern politics. If Christie’s press conference seemed too much, it is largely because such post-disaster events are so typically sanitized with platitudes: In other words, public figures shrinking under the glare and resorting to a contrived, bland insincerity. The consensus that Christie underperformed in Tampa stems from a mindset that success on such stages is measured either by a cascade of glossy but insubstantial poetry or at the other end of the scale, a hard-edged partisanship. Surely, a politico with Christie’s game shouldn’t have spent his moment describing the minutiae of gubernatorial leadership; surely, if he outlined the national threat, it should have been in the form of a prolonged lease on the White House by the other party not in the possibility that both parties might be overwhelmed by the demands of the historic moment.
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Artur Davis: Why Chris Christie Won’t Fade
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Nov 27, 2012 at 12:00 PM ET This absurdity of holding on to petty resentments.
True story.
Last night–and I don’t remember the details—but I had a dream in which a tall gentlemen I seemed to respect but didn’t know well and who was wearing a yellow-ish jacket passed me by on the street and intentionally brushed up against me in that way that seemed to say he was upset with me or sending me a message of disrespect.
That’s all I remember from the dream. The rest of whatever happened has been forgotten–which I think was mostly pleasant.
 But twice today I’ve thought about the brush off passerby.
And I’ve decided the next time I have this dream and he shows up–assuming I can remember to do it—I am going to go out of my way to walk past him and brush up lightly against him (not in an offensive way that is trying to start a fight but rather just to let him know that what happened last night in my dream gets acknowledged, was not OK with me, and send the message that I hope it doesn’t happen again.)
On the other hand, I could just forgive him or assume it was an accident. In my dream. And let it go.
I want to let it go but this slight seems different and worth holding on to a little longer. Because, you know, it’s the principle of the thing. Right?
You know what I mean?
By RP Staff, on Tue Nov 27, 2012 at 9:00 AM ET  Last night, The RP took on his semi-regular gig as a national political commentator on Wall Street Journal Radio’s The Daily Wrap with Michael Castner.
The RP and Castner celebrated all of the “No Labels” talk this week: Republicans breaking the Grover Norquist “no tax” pledge, both sides talking compromise on the fiscal cliff, references to the Reagan/O’Neill iconic partnership. And they discussed how all Americans should sign on to No Labels’ efforts to continue pressure on Washington policymakers to continue the problem-solving momentum.
Click here to listen to the podcast.
By Artur Davis, on Mon Nov 26, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET  I read Karen Cox’s provocative essay about what it takes to revive southern Democrats, (“A New Southern Strategy”), with a view that was doubtful from the start. There was the skepticism from having heard the logic before: it is a perennial preoccupation of southern progressives to envision an latent regional majority based on suburbanized whites, minorities, and educated professionals, although to date, Virginia and North Carolina are the sole places where the coalition seems to materialize and even then, only intermittently. Cox also does not acknowledge, much less grapple with, the fact that the South’s most rapid economic modernization has happened at the same pace and time as its decisive tilt toward Republicans, in direct contradiction of the progressive expectation.
Then are the persistent factual blunders, from her conclusion that the Republican edge in the South is driven by outsized rural populations, when it is in actuality the suburbs outside the metropolitan cities that account for the consistent GOP advantage, to her glossing over the fact that southern big cities have tilted Democratic not so much out of their cosmopolitanism, or their burgeoning market in downtown lofts, but because their minority populations have steadily expanded (a misinterpretation Alec MacGillis takes her to task for in The New Republic).
More problematic than Cox’s treatment of data, though, is her threshold assumption that a more liberal South is an automatically enlightened place and that a more conservative South is a primitive dead zone that disdains modernity and ratifies the Old Confederacy’s historic pathologies. It’s the left’s stereotypical dichotomy of political polarization—but it is also a worldview that papers over the peculiar and more ideologically ambiguous disputes that dominate southern state capitals.
To be sure, there are conventional partisan battles in the South that mimic fights in Washington: whether to accept federal dollars to expand Medicaid, whether to set up the state exchanges created in the new healthcare law, and the aggressiveness of local immigration laws. But there is a much larger raft of region-specific policy dilemmas that thankfully don’t have a strong national analogue: they range from pervasive public corruption, to the explosion of a low wage casino culture in minority counties, to notoriously underfunded state universities, to tax structures that reverse federal policy by soaking low wage workers and families.
 The fact is that those perennial challenges have been managed less by conservative Republicans, and more by Southern Democrats, who until the last few election cycles, still dominated state legislatures and held their share of governorships—trends with which many national observers are unfamiliar, as they erroneously assume that the deep red presidential voting patterns in the South have been as strong at the state level. Cox, a University of North Carolina historian, obviously knows better and must be aware of (1) the inconvenient truth that Democrats have had considerable governing responsibility during the South’s recent history and (2) the decidedly un-progressive ways Southern Democrats have used their powers.
At least one assumes she is. Does Cox actually understand that in Alabama, Democrats have only sporadically embraced reforming a state constitution that perpetuates one of the most sharply regressive tax structures in the nation, or that the state’s Democratic Party is funded primarily by a gambling lobby that enriches itself on the backs of the low wage poor? Would it be bothersome to Cox that the same gambling interests lavished huge campaign sums on an initiative to monopolize the state’s casinos in the hands of a couple of magnates, inside a few counties that are almost entirely black and impoverished? What about the effort the state Democratic Party spent trying to block an ethics package aimed at reducing lobbyist influence in state politics, the kind of good government crusade progressives salivate about at the national level?
To a depressing degree, the same elements that have warped Alabama’s Democratic Party into a weirdly retrograde force, at least on local issues, are equally present with their regional co-partisans—they include a faux populist aversion to elite supported reforms, an obsession with racial patronage politics, and a persistent trouble with raising money that leads to a few convenient if corrupting alliances.
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Artur Davis: Toward a More Liberal South?
By Loranne Ausley, on Wed Nov 21, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET  In the past few weeks we have heard a lot of discussion about the demographic shifts that played so prominently in this election. While it has prompted some discussion ( The New Republic), Sunday’s article in the New York Times may have said it best:
“If the Democrats are going to be a true majority party, they will need to build a coalition in all 50 states. So rather than see the South as a lost cause (pun intended), the Democratic Party and liberals north and west of us should put a lid on their regional biases and encourage the change that is possible here.”
We all know that change is possible here which is why we have joined together to create The Southern Project.Many of you joined our official launch in Charlotte, or have had the opportunity to participate in subsequent conversations in Washington, DC or in Boca Raton before the final presidential debate. We are working on a state by state plan which will include significant post election analysis to help drive pre-legislative session agenda research in key southern states, starting in Virginia, and continuing our work in Florida and North Carolina. We will be in touch with you as this research and analysis becomes available, and as we look for ways to make sure this research is actionable across the south.
I’m truly honored by the group of people who have joined us in building this project and look forward to our work together.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Nov 20, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET There are no ties weaker than the ones that bind politicians. So, no major surprise that surrogates who were just trumpeting Mitt Romney’s election as essential to the country’s future and celebrating his record as ideally suited to cracking open the partisan gridlock are doing their share of distancing from the defeated candidate. They have a lot to distance from: ranging from internal polling that was so off base it wasted the ticket’s precious time with last-minute campaigning in states they did not come close to winning, to Romney’s characterization of the Democratic base as tools whose affection was bought off by “gifts”.
But a cautionary note: Romney’s frustrations are the musing of a candidate legitimately perplexed by the Democrats’ ability to hold together a base that should have been frayed by the economic deterioration of the last four years. And if Republicans are being brutal but right about the politics of dismissing Romney, they are wrong if they ignore the question he was stabbing at: exactly how does a political majority keep intact when so many of its underlying policies aren’t exactly working in the interests of the coalition inside that majority? And if a flailing economy was not enough to weaken that base, what does that mean for the future given the unmistakable shifts in the national demographic?
Case in point: the African American solidarity behind Barack Obama in the face of severe black unemployment and poverty, and at the same time that Obama has aligned himself with a gay rights movement that is disdained by a consistent 30 to 40 percent of the black voter community. Another example is the 70 plus percent support Obama amassed from a Latino community that barely yielded him 50 percent approval ratings for much of 2011 and that was openly critical of his failure to push, much less pull off, comprehensive immigration reform. And for good measure throw in Obama’s sixty percent with voters 18-29 and more improbably, his ability to sustain their participation at 2008 levels despite months of polling evidence that the poor job market for young adults would diminish their enthusiasm.
Arguably, (and amusingly given the backlash from inside the party) Romney’s observations were only a clumsily put version of what numerous Republican commentators have said in a more sanitized way—that Democrats have nursed an entitlement culture that promises an engaged, assertive government to a variety of groups who are facing the imperfections of the free market. (Conservatives who argue that a softening of the GOP’s hard-line on immigration will be outweighed by Democratic pledges of more government benefits for Hispanics are channeling Romney). There is something to this assessment in its most reductionist form: between a health care law that has, for all its other imperfections, insured more young adults and low income minorities, to an executive order that eases off on the deportation of young undocumented immigrants, to a student loan reform that has cut the borrowing obligations of recent college undergraduates, the Obama administration has built a portfolio that delivered results for elements of its base that might have drifted.
Dismissing that record as a bounty of gifts was both impolitic and naive. There is nothing untoward or unpredictable in electoral groups siding with a party that has pursued initiatives friendly to their interests. But even the glossier version of Romney’ remarks, the pundit classes’ abstracting of initiatives that are base-friendly as an entitlement culture, is off-key because it underestimates exactly what else Democrats have managed to do. The more accurate assessment is that Democrats have stitched together a coalition that is linked less by dependency on government than by a shared perception of Republican and conservative insularity.
Republicans who marvel at the loyalty of the 08 Obama coalition fail to appreciate that the coalition was and remains socially aspirational rather than economic. Its foundation is a yearning for a culture that is stripped of its ethnic and social boundaries and hierarchies, an embrace of diversity as a strength rather than a source of disarray, and a suspicion that conservative individualism is both un-cool and at odds with the wired, interconnected reality of the 21st century. It should have been no surprise that the black/Latino/youth base responded so powerfully to Democratic insinuations that Obama’s defeat would mean a retreat from a modernist notion of American identity, and that consolidating that identity proved more compelling than jobless numbers (especially when Obama’s argument that Republican intransigence was more at fault than his own policies took hold).
To be sure, the Obama campaign did not trust its appeal entirely to inspiration. There was a healthy dose of fear-mongering: witness the demonization of voter ID laws, which Democratic operatives relentlessly painted as a scheme to suppress minority and youth turnout, as well as the allegations from Obama allies that ordinary Republican partisanship was deep seated revanchism and white backlash.
That Republicans minimized this demonization while it was in progress meant that it was rarely answered. GOP strategists comforted themselves with assumptions that liberals were practicing an identity politics that would backfire, or that cold economic realities would thwart the Democrats’ tactics, or at least constrain their turnout. Instead, the best evidence is that Democrats pulled off the feat of turning Republican orthodoxy into a cultural identity in its own right, one that was white, traditional and unattractively reactionary. The result was a galvanized Obama base that shattered Republican voter models.
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Artur Davis: The Real Reason Democrats Held Their Base
By Artur Davis, on Fri Nov 16, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET The Republican self-assessments, and the hardly disinterested kibbitzing from liberal pundits, are as scattered as would be expected in the wake of last week’s defeat. Some of the ideas have the virtue that they at least were not implicated in a 2012 strategy that failed. But in world where all rationalizations are not created equally, it’s worth dwelling on some of the more problematic pieces of advice floating around the atmosphere.
 Hold firm on immigration.
Laura Ingraham, Ross Douthat and others have sounded the alarm that a Republican embrace of immigration reform, which they label presumptively as amnesty, will fail because Democrats will simply raise the bidding by promising Hispanics ever more government benefits and largess. They are right that immigration is no panacea. For one thing, any immigration reform remotely palatable to conservatives will not treat all undocumented immigrants alike, and the GOP’s likely preference for privileging families and long time residents will be challenged by Democrats who favor a dusted off version of the abandoned 2006 McCain Kennedy bill, which drew no such distinctions. An Obama Administration that clung to the position that virtually any state based immigration standards were illegal is extremely unlikely to accommodate the inevitable conservative preference for an approach more respectful of federalism. In other words, Republicans entering the immigration fight will not be greeted with an olive branch.
But a softening of the Republican hard-line on immigration is frankly not about co-opting the left. It is, instead, recalibrating the GOP line so it is not so easily cast as a reflexive backlash at a surge in the Hispanic population. The orthodoxy in the Republican primaries and in the Fox universe was even in its best light, contradictory of conservative impulses: for example, an avowedly pro-family party was averse to making the consolidation of families a linchpin of immigration policy and a party that is determined to tie welfare benefits to responsible behavior seemed uninterested in a Dream Act aimed at promoting college attendance and enrollment in the military. An immigration view that seemed suspiciously adrift from the usual conservative values couldn’t help but be seen as a code for a much worse instinct.
Of all of the left’s cultural bogeymen this past cycle—voter ID laws, Republican resistance to gay rights, and the anti-immigrant mantra—none affected a larger swath of swing voters than the immigrant bashing charge. A Hispanic electorate that barely gave Barack Obama 50 percent approval ratings for much of 2011 crested at 70 plus percent support for the president on Election Day. The size of the Hispanic deficit doomed Romney in Nevada and Colorado, and Democrats are right that a repeat in 2016 could arguably put Arizona and Texas in jeopardy.
Join Obama’s grand compromise.
There is much truth to the notion that Obama effectively framed this election as a choice between a middle class champion and a millionaire coddling plutocrat. To be sure, the Republican Party needs to shed its royalist economic image. While that likely does not mean embracing a breakup of big banks or the decentralization of the capital markets structure (Craig Shirley’s ideas in the Washington Post) it would make ample sense for Republicans to adopt the kind of smart, market oriented ideas Douthat and Reihan Salam have extolled for awhile, and as Governor Bobby Jindal proffered this week, to make that kind of conservative innovation a leading edge of the party’s rhetoric.
But morphing into a more middle-class friendly party does not inevitably mean yielding on the cornerstones of the current economic debate, by acquiescing on Obama’s proposed tax hikes on the wealthy or retreating from a spending cut focused approach to downsizing the deficit. In fact, the compromise that a rising number of top rank CEOs are urging, letting go the Bush tax rates for earners above $500,000 in exchange for a phased in reduction of the corporate rate, is a classic example of a pragmatic seeming position that is actually quite deferential to the Republican donor base. The party’s donors and lobbyists would invariably trade a marginal rate boost that their accountants could trim away to holding the status quo on reams of corporate deductions.
Hence, the weakness of cosmetic positions that are badly flawed in practice, but accomplish some strategic repositioning. It is actually to Mitt Romney’s credit that he rejected a quick-fix middle income tax cut during the primaries, and unlikely that a Romney embrace of the Simpson Bowles Commission would have done anything other than saddle him with rolling back the popular mortgage deduction. The impact of the Ryan Plan remains debatable, but given that seniors gave Obama a negligible edge on Medicare, one smaller than the Democratic edge on the subject in the last two presidential cycles, it is also a stretch to say that the shrewdest future course is silence on entitlements.
Count on an increase in the GOP’s African American vote.
Perhaps in the interest of holding ground on immigration and ceding an outsized Hispanic vote in perpetuity, there is an emerging school of thought that the easier route might be to target a notably higher African American vote than Romney’s 7 percent, which itself was an over-performance from summer polls showing virtually no black votes for Romney( not to pick on Douthat again, but there are strong traces of this analysis in his last column and it is an emerging favorite of African American Republican bloggers).
The math seems unassailable. Running up the black vote to low double digits would do wonders to Republican numerical calculations for future races (or perhaps it would compensate for the unwisely understated assumptions this cycle about black turnout). The challenge for Republicans is that no nominee has reached those levels of blacks support since 1972 and only George W. Bush in 2000 has crossed the ten percent line, and then only barely.
There are usually two dubious assumptions at the base of an African American strategy for Republicans. The first, that the near monolithic black vote is a function of a superior outreach machinery by Democrats, and that Republicans could lessen the gap with a more assertive deployment of advertising or social media. Second, the idea that there is a suppressed black conservative vote that could be activated by more artful use of themes like opposition to same sex marriage.
Both theories downplay the extent to which the black advantage for Democrats is a reflection of one community’s entrenched skepticism of the Republican label as well as its considered judgment that active Democratic style government intervention is in its best interest. That mindset is only hardened by the near universal belief in black circles that Obama has faced uniquely vigorous opposition from Republicans for racially tinged reasons.
A Republican candidate who came to verbal blows with the Tea Party and the GOP’s southern wing and who was an avowed moderate would have a head start on gaining ground with blacks; so for that matter would a socially conservative Democrat who criticized, say, gay influence in the Democratic Party have a running start at securing more white Southern evangelical support. Neither variant has a remote shot of emerging in the current left-right duopoly of American politics. Absent the wildly improbable, or the inclusion on a Republican ticket of Condi Rice, there is no empirical reason to think that in the short term, Republican percentages in the black electorate would rise more than a point or so to average post Nixon levels. (In fact, a smaller black turnout post Obama would wipe out the gain from returning to Bush 2000 support levels).
These aren’t disastrous ideas—don’t over-assume the benefits of a turnabout on immigration; lose the image of being the party of No; and rediscover the tradition of Lincoln—but they miss in different ways what, in the context of race, conservatism has done to itself and in the context of economics, the nature of the cards we are dealt. This road back is a long one.
(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from OfficialArturDavis.org)
By Jeff Smith, on Fri Nov 16, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET 
Q: I’m a first-time candidate. After guiding me to victory in my primary, one of my chief strategists asked me to hire his ne’er-do-well son. The son was a campaign volunteer and got along well with everyone, but I turned down the request. I didn’t want to start out my career like that. Did I make the right call, or did I make an enemy for life?
—A Political Neophyte, Kansas City, Mo.
Both.
Q: Does direct mail still work? Is it a good use of money relative to other forms of communication, like TV, radio or knocking doors?
—Initials withheld, New York City
Increasingly, no. There are some places it still works, though. Rural Missouri and St. Louis’ southern suburbs, for instance, are home to large concentrations of seniors, some of whom rarely leave the house, aren’t online except to use email, and for whom snail mail is a highlight of the day. Parts of the outer boroughs in particular also have high concentrations of elderly residents.
Of course, in rural Missouri, television buys are cheap. And moving images (TV ads) are generally more effective/persuasive than mail. So TV is preferable to mail there. But in a legislative race in the outer boroughs, New York City media market TV buys aren’t feasible, so mail is a decent option.
Radio is often a good option for negative ads, since listeners tend to forget the source of the attack and thus don’t hold the attacks against the candidates making them to the same degree they would with a television spot, for instance. But again, this is prohibitively expensive for legislative and City Council candidates in the New York City market. Upstate, it is much more feasible.
Of course, having someone actually talk to voters is always preferable to mail, radio or TV. But some areas are remote and/or difficult to canvass because of the distance between homes. And even in areas that can be canvassed effectively, some campaigns lack volunteers. They may employ paid canvassers as a substitute, but that can be dicey: Those jobs typically pay approximately $10 an hour or even less, and sometimes paid canvassers have more legs than teeth.
My chief opponent in a congressional primary used an oxymoronically named D.C. firm called Grassroots Solutions that hires paid canvassers. They were so stupid that they picked the only day of the entire election cycle when you know who is actually going to vote—Election Day—and spent the morning waving signs outside my office instead of at poll sites talking to voters. So be cautious about hiring anyone who claims they’ll help create “organic” grassroots support.
In sum, yours is a question with which every campaign must grapple. Except in anomalous areas like senior-heavy sections of the outer boroughs, money that once went toward mail will largely be steered toward online advertising in the future. In addition to the Internet’s status as a place where people spend more time than the 15 seconds it takes them to go from the mailbox to the trash can, the Web provides ad buyers information about the number of people who actually see and click on an ad, which mail is unable to do. In a metrics-obsessed Moneyball world, tools that enable campaigns to gather information while assessing the effectiveness of their messaging are increasingly essential.
Read the rest of…
Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Nov 15, 2012 at 9:15 AM ET In my latest column for The Huffington Post, I explore how average citizens — you and me — can influence policymakers to promote problem-solving, instead of hyper-partisan paralysis.
SPOILER ALERT: It involves No Labels.
Here’s an excerpt:
There’s a leadership crisis in Washington.
Although we’ve re-elected President Barack Obama, much of the president’s success depends on what happens in Congress. If we want our country to move forward over the next four years, we need Congress and the president to put political point-scoring aside and work to solve our country’s most pressing problems.
The most immediate challenge is the fiscal cliff, which threatens to push America back into recession, unless Democrats and Republicans in Congress — working with the White House — can cast aside partisan interests in favor of a balanced solution. Each side will have no choice but to support some things it doesn’t like and take political risks. But with the fiscal cliff looming at the end of the year, time is running out and tough choices are necessary.
It has become clear that fundamental change is needed to make Congress work more efficiently and effectively to address this cliff and more of America’s most pressing problems. Given how little time our representatives spend actually working together, it’s no surprise that breakthroughs are few and far between. House members spend almost as much time in their home district or traveling as they do legislating. Instead of working at problem solving in Congress, they are focused on partisan infighting and planning the next campaign.
In order to truly solve problems, lawmakers need to come out from behind their bunkers and start talking with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. It’s happened before. President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill put partisan interests aside to shore up Social Security’s finances. A Democratic Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower agreed to build the interstate highway system. More recently, President Bill Clinton worked with Republicans in Congress to reform welfare programs.
We can’t wait for Washington to get to work. That’s why No Labels — a growing grassroots movement of about 600,000 Democrats, Republicans and independents who favor a new politics of problem solving — has put together two common-sense action plans — Make Congress Work! and Make the Presidency Work!These plans would improve communications across partisan lines, modify or eliminate rules that promote gridlock, and establish new timetables for taking action. Most importantly, they would foster a new environment of leadership in Washington.
Click here to read the full column.
By Josh Bowen, on Thu Nov 15, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  A famous scientist with a hair style I envy once wrote, “Everything should be kept as simple as possible but not simpler.”
Simplicity, a novel concept that couldn’t possibly be true in exercise, could it? I mean with all the 3am infomercials about insane workouts using everything from your body weight to the kitchen sink and weight loss products that promise “instant results.” There is no such thing as “instant” results but there is a strategy of simplicity I tend employ. In continuation with this blog and all its wisdom, I would like to take the time and share some knowledge with those people looking for that perfect weight loss book or that magic cure to get rid of love handles. Well now you’re asking how I lose weight. How do I keep the weight off? In my career as a personal trainer I have realized one important thing: keep it simple. Nutrition and weight loss are very simple. Just follow my instructions.
1. Don’t over eat. Figure out why and when YOU do overeat. Is it an emotional reason? A lack of planning? Maybe just a lack of knowledge and accountability. We don’t get better unless we know what is preventing us from turning the corner, so access yourself and stop overeating. Keep it simple.
2.Carbs are not bad they are your #1 energy, use them as such. Stay away from foods with a lot of sugar, choose oatmeal over donuts, broccoli over bread and apples over bananas. Keep it simple.
2A. Get rid of the sugar in your diet. You don’t need it, its only making problems worse, say goodbye! Keep it simple.
3. Eat smaller portions. Learn when to say no to seconds and thirds. Your body does not have to eat that entire pizza, save the rest for the dog, I am sure he gets hungry too. Keep it simple.
4. Dessert is a habit, not a physiological need for survival. Habits can be broken. Just say no to the banana split. Keep it simple.
5. When eating out (if you must!), say no to Whoppers, Big Macs, and Thick burgers. Say yes to Grilled Chicken. When asked, “If you want fries with that,” Say my trainer said no. Keep it simple.
6. Eat smaller and more frequent meals. Humans are periodic eaters and continual metabolizers. In order to increase that metabolism we have to eat more frequently. For example, in order for the fire to burn it needs wood, same thing applies to your metabolism. Keep it simple.
This is by no means an all-inclusive list but you get the point. Weight loss is not that difficult nor is it that complicated; it just requires a little knowledge and a lot of gumption. If you want to continue to eat whatever you want you have two options:
- Move a lot (a lot!)
- Or keep gaining weight year after year after year.
Then one day you might realize that trainer guy was right. Keep it simple!
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