2012 Most Valuable Motivator: Jackie Warner

Featured Article, Fitness, Motivation
on July 2, 2012
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Name: Jackie Warner

Claim to fame: While most of America was first introduced to Jackie Warner on Bravo’s Work Out in 2006, the Midwestern-born soccer, softball and equestrian competitor had actually started training in 1990 at the age of 22. Within a year, the self-made millionaire in the cell phone industry opened her first health club, Lift, in Southern California. Her next club, Sky Sport & Spa, was made famous on Work Out, a show that not only gave us a good feel for Jackie’s in-your-face approach to training, but her personal trials and tribulations as well. She returned to television in 2010 in the Bravo show, Thintervention with Jackie Warner. She is author of the New York Times bestseller, This is Why You’re Fat (and How to Get Thin Forever) and 10 Pounds in 10 Days: The Secret Celebrity Program for Losing Weight Fast, and stars in several best-selling DVDs. Her online training program, FitOrbit.com, gives users access to her personalized advice on fitness, diet and motivation, as well as tools to help users track their progress.

Health philosophy: “Eat, move, believe.”

Vitamins/supplements: A daily multivitamin and omega-3-6-9 combination pill.

Favorite workout: Power-circuit training—a combination of strength-training exercises done at maximum resistance and performed in quick succession without rest in between to keep your heart rate up.

Motivational trick: “I change my playlist frequently so that I don’t get bored with my music and I’m not listening to the same music all the time.”

Favorite healthy dish:Seared chicken breast with a yam and a spinach salad, or brown rice and salmon with broccoli.

Secret weapon: H2O Booster from Jackie’s own line of supplements. “The water booster is incredible. It contains 3 types of vitamin C, a panel of electrolytes, and some herbs, all of which have natural properties for balancing hormones and revving up your metabolism for weight loss.”

Five Minutes With Jackie Warner

A quick conversation with the Thintervention star.

Spry: A lot of the diet books out there are so complicated, but your 10 Pounds in 10 Days is totally opposite. Why did you think it was so important to simplify things?

Jackie Warner: I don’t write books coming from my perspective. I’m an athlete—I train 6 days a week; I eat extremely healthy, super-clean foods; I really limit my alcohol intake to almost zero—that’s not a realistic American lifestyle. I’m not a busy mom, I have a flexible schedule. I try to understand what makes Americans tick: what their life is like and how I can create a healthy lifestyle within anybody’s life. The highest rate of failure comes from over-complicating your fitness or diet plan. I want my books to be so simple that they can fit into any lifestyle.

Spry: You advocate setting “easy” goals vs. “hard” goals. Tell me more about that.

JW: A hard goal would be to say to yourself, “OK, I’m going to cut all carbs from my diet so I can lose 30 lbs in two months.” That’s a hard goal. An easy goal is, “Jackie told me that drinking more water speeds up my metabolism by 33 percent so I’m going to the grocery store and stock my fridge with 1-liter bottles of water and I’m going to drink 3 of those a day for a month.” You can pick up water anywhere. That’s a simple fix that’s not too expensive and you can do every day.

At the end of the day, you must turn self-loathing into self-loving. To create self-esteem, you have to create simple goals for yourself on a daily basis and achieve them. Self-loathing comes from setting goals on a daily basis and NOT achieving them.

RELATED: Top Trainer’s Favorite Ab Exercises

Spry: The 10-pounds-in-10-days concept flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Most experts suggest aiming to lose 1 to 2 pounds a week, or you won’t keep it off. Tell me why your fast weight-loss approach is something that you think is more successful.

JW: The experts you’re referring to do not take into account what happens when a woman loses quick weight the healthy way. When you lose weight quickly, and it’s enough to make a difference—you know, like 2 sizes—people really want to maintain that weight loss. They’re more motivated to maintain. But if you’re losing weight slowly and methodically and aren’t seeing results, you quit. You give up.

You have to understand who we are as a culture. We are Americans. We are results-oriented. We need it right now. We need to see that our efforts are making a difference—we need to see the pay-off for all the deprivation. I’m selling books to Americans, and American culture is very different than the world culture in terms of weight loss.

Spry: Your diet focuses on 10 foods in particular: apples, avocados, broccoli, chicken breast, grapefruit, new potatoes, oatmeal, spinach, alfalfa sprouts and celery. Why do you call them “superstar foods”?

JW: These are the foods that have the highest hormone-balancing ingredients, the most liver-detoxifying ingredients, and most importantly, they have gene expression. Gene expression refers to the concept that certain foods can “turn on” good genes—fat-burning genes—and “turn off” bad genes. And this idea is really important because a lot of people feel that they are born with the genes they are born with, and they can’t really change that. But now, as we’re learning more about DNA, we’re finding that you can actually turn on good genes and turn off bad genes.

Spry: Tell me about your online training program, FitOrbit.com.

JW: Well, I think it’s the wave of the future—with this online program, people have many options, and they can download it from home. I have a team of the top trainers from around the country teaching my principles from my book. What’s so cool about it is that anything you’ve ever wanted to try, your trainer will coach you through it.  You have daily communication with your trainer. They’re not only a support system for you, but they can modify the exercises to adjust to anything—travel, to your living room, to the outdoors. I love the flexibility of it. Also, there’s a fully downloadable workout program for any kind of activity you’d ever want to try—boxing, rollerblading, dance, hip-hop, etc.

The most important aspect of this program is that when you’re in a hurry and can’t follow my principles or diet, you can type in your zip code and you get a list of the healthiest restaurant alternatives in your area, including the nutritional panel at that restaurant.

Spry: Your motto is “Eat, move, believe.” Why does that phrase resonate with you so?

JW:Those are the three things that have to be firing at once in order for you to achieve not just weight loss, but healthfulness—and happiness. You must eat nutrient-dense foods, you must move your body every single day to release good chemistry in your brain and keep you balanced, and you must believe that you are worth having a beautiful, sexy body.