Skinny Jeans?

By Lauren Maniscalco

Celebrity Pilates & Barre trainer and Expert Sports Nutrition Specialist, Lauren Maniscalco will help you flip the script and fit into your skinny jeans once and for all. This is not another eat lettuce and starve book. It’s also not a book with some disingenuous, over-caffeinated chick pretending she just loves working out six hours a day. So what’s inside? • How to get out of your way to achieve optimal health. • Real world tactics to empower you. • A full length Pilates & Barre workout that you can do at home. • Dummy proof meal plans. • Non cardboard tasting recipes. • Fool proof tips to get a better night sleep. And so much more. Lauren shares what has worked over the years time and again for her clients and herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lauren Maniscalco
• Release date: Mar 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310849138

Lauren Maniscalco

Lauren Maniscalco's passion and purpose in life is helping people feel their best through Barre and Pilates! Lauren is a third generation classically trained Pilates Instructor under Penelope Wyer Barrow who was the first to offer teacher-training programs in the Southeast under Romana Kryzanowska. She was selected in the Top 10 Best Pilates Instructors 2014 internationally through Pilates Anytime and featured in Pilates Style Magazine. She is fortunate to have trained under Mari Winsor, Jay Grimes, Brooke Siler, Kathi Ross-Nash, Chris Robinson, and Bob Liekens for continuing education. Lauren has offered teacher-training programs out of Coastal Body Studio in Charleston, SC and has been a guest senior instructor in various studios throughout NY, NV, CA, GA, NC & SC. As a synergetic complement to Pilates, Lauren went on to get certified in Barre through the Beyond Barre Method based out of New York. Her passion is to educate the method Joseph Pilates so brilliantly crafted both in person and online through her streaming Pilates and Barre classes. She has worked with celebrities and professional athletes to help transform their bodies and compliment current training regiments. When not performing Teasers around town, she and her husband love to travel, be on the water and try new restaurants.

Book preview

Introduction

Why add this health and wellness book?

Do it to lighten the mood, not take your diet or workout SO seriously, and to have fun along the way.

In the past my weight yo-yoed, but, more importantly, my health and overall wellbeing did. My Mom was the queen of trying every fad diet to hit the market, so I pretty much followed suit. I remember doing the Atkins Diet with her at age 12 and walking around with plastic baggies of bacon. In case you’re wondering, this is not a good health practice.

My exercise history used to range from comical adult co-ed kickball league games to temporary linebacker shoulders for specializing in the butterfly stroke as a child. Theater kept me in check through high school, and in college I thought a couple of aerobics classes and runs practically made me the authority on exercise.

But when I moved to Los Angeles to become an actress, it all went to hell there. Obviously, there is an enormous amount of pressure on people in the entertainment industry to stay well below a healthy weight range, but I had never been heavier in my life. I’m guessing it was because I ate plain iceberg lettuce, was starving two hours later and then wondered why I would down a whole bag of cookies. I did, at least, start to enjoy running because of the runners high - and mostly because it was free.

I connected with an agent in New Orleans in 2005; they had significant tax incentives for filming there, and a shortage of talent in Louisiana. I was going on auditions I would have never got in L.A. I went from trying out for Sorority Girl #9 to principle roles in ABC movies of the week. Life was looking good. Two months later Hurricane Katrina hit, and by not taking it seriously when I evacuated, ended up losing all belongings except for a weekend overnight bag. So what do you when you are broke & jobless? Very naturally, you move to Manhattan in the middle of winter.

After much soul searching and begging God for a sign to call me to do something else in life, I went back to school for Dietetics. I had watched family members struggle with their weight and I had constant negative self-talk from being in the entertainment industry. I wanted to find a way to help others and, to be honest, help myself.

After moving from New Orleans to finish my degree, I really got into running. I decided I should run a marathon (temporary sanity lapse). God bless my friend Josh. Josh was a track coach for the local high school and definitely earned additional community service helping me. He got me through training runs and showed me all the hidden hot spots in town to do long runs. It may sound impressive that I ran a marathon, but in all honesty, anyone can do it. It’s more about committing the time to train than being superhuman strong. I didn’t have any friends yet, so really, I didn’t have anything better to do.

When you finish a marathon, ‘they’ say you should take a couple of weeks off from running to give your body a break. I could be wrong, but doing activities that your body needs a two-week break from might be the ones to skip in life. At that point, I heard about Pilates and figured it worked for Madonna and Jennifer Anniston, so I might as well give it a try. I bought a month unlimited pass and figured, once again, I had nothing better to do since I couldn’t run.

After the first class, I remember liking it but thinking this is never going to work. I wasn’t sweating my guts out, hyperventilating, burning calories pounding the payment so clearly I will get fat. Then something weird happened; four weeks later I had completely slimmed out in ways I didn’t know possible and felt stronger than ever. Pilates is where the real journey started.

So what can you expect from this book? We are going to begin with the mind before we get to the diet and exercise part because that’s what makes the other stuff a piece of cake if you do it right. My hope with this book is that my tips and shortcuts save you years of struggle and craziness toward feeling and looking your absolute best.

Most importantly, we are going to keep it real; because nothing is more annoying than some disingenuous, over-caffeinated chick pretending she just loves working out six hours a day.

Part 1: Get Yo’ Mind Right

How to be Mindful When You’re Losing Your Mind

Drop the bad attitude at the door. End of the chapter.

We all wish it were that easy right? But in all honesty, how and when did we get so off track? You would NEVER even speak to your worst enemy the way you talk to yourself. Yes, I am going to give you lots of great practical things you can do to help improve your diet and exercise, but if you get nothing else from this book, it would be to stop all the negative self-talk.

Yea I’d like to think I’ve evolved into a mindful, healthful being, but I still have those days where negativity creeps in. It usually comes after a day of maybe a little too much sugar in my diet, but I too do the mirror routine. At first, you avoid the mirror because you know it’s not going to go well. Then you somehow end up in front of it thinking, if only my inner thighs weren’t so squishy or when did my arms expand to the same width as said guilty thighs? It’s disgusting that we do this to ourselves. These are the same body parts that I am beyond fortunate to have, and I’m sure an amputee wouldn’t care if they were a little jiggly. And they not only get me around but allow me the privilege to move and contract to keep me active and healthy.

It breaks my heart when I hear an 8-year-old say she is ‘fat.’ The over exposure to the media is a double-edged sword. The beautiful thing is it brings awareness to tough topics; the disturbing part is that it exposes women and men to unrealistic images of today’s standard of beauty from a very young age. Ok, let’s say you somehow get through your youth with a pretty good outlook on this stuff. I was probably somewhere in between, but I do remember leaving home at 17, bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the world. Hear me roar. Only to go through the typical, real world growing pains, when no one gives a shit if they hurt your feelings. Ha! I’ll show them, I remember thinking, but after a while you begin to doubt yourself. And it doesn’t happen overnight, you slowly become a little less sure of what the hell you’re doing in life.

I worked at a cocktail lounge on Melrose in Beverly Hills. It was not that glamorous – I worked mostly day shifts because I wasn’t hot enough to get the primo night shifts. If you don’t know the whole acting thing in Los Angeles, it’s that we all work in the hospitality industry to allow time for auditions. And since we were a dime a dozen, it wasn’t unusual for countless resumes to be dropped off at my manager’s office throughout the week. I specifically remember my manager telling me if the potential waitress wasn’t attractive enough to put an asterisk in the upper left-hand corner of their resume. Umm, what? People do that out here? It’s not just some urban legend?

Besides the media and living in Los Angeles, what are the other reasons that would get you down or promote this negative self-talk? The common ones are: bad childhood, lost your job, your boyfriend/girlfriend dumps you, your husband leaves you for a 22-year-old, you just had a baby, you’ve dealt with abuse or trauma, you're going through menopause, it’s a Tuesday, and the list goes on and on.

How do you recognize it? The obvious one is standing in front of the mirror and saying we’re fat, but there are many lesser-known common culprits. We judge ourselves for eating a cookie. We spend the day second-guessing the interaction we had with a potential client. We get critiqued at work and assume all of the work we do sucks. We miss a workout and think it's an automatic eight pound gain.

I also see the avoidance method a lot. Why even bother going to the job interview? You’re convinced you’re not going to get it anyway. You skip the blind date your friend sets you up on even though he sounds cool and is obsessed with Thai food too because first dates are awkward, and it’s probably not going to go anywhere. What’s the point going for a 15-minute walk to break up the day; it’s not even going to put a dent in the huge breakfast donut?

Trust me I’m not judging, no one is immune to this stuff. I’m convinced every once and awhile even Gandhi didn’t feel hot to trot to help people. Everywhere we turn, society gives us a default reason to second-guess ourselves.

So besides snapping our fingers and instantly looking like Gisele while having Oprah’s power and finances, how do we shift our way of thinking? There are only two ways in my opinion. One is to move your body; change your physiology. The second is to tap into your spiritual side.

Oh great. She seemed normal, and now she’s going to bust out the woo-woo stuff. I hear ya. Listen, I come from a predominately German family and yes, I am most all of the stereotypes. Cold hearted, nonsympathetic, no patience for inadequacy, and certainly not capable of expressing emotions. The acting thing was really a losing battle. So if I can embrace spiritual growth, so can you.

Let’s start with acknowledging that there is something bigger than you out there. Whether you’re Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or Spiritual, the one thing all of these religions and spirituality have in common is: don’t be an asshole. If you don’t have some sort of spiritual outlet, it means that you believe you’re it in this world. How depressing is that?

Have you ever noticed that? If you don’t connect with something outside of yourself, you spend your whole day focusing on and obsessing on how you are going to tackle everything, get ahead, and keep achieving the proverbial steps in life. Or the other end of the spectrum, everything is always happening to you, the world is out to get you (and only you), you can’t possibly do A, B, or C because you have problems. I’m not saying don’t be ambitious, or sometimes bad things happen to good people, but when you focus on only you, two things happen:

First off, it makes you an asshole. That’s right. If you have this constant psycho inner dialogue going, how are you going to notice the injured, older woman trying to reach for a loaf of bread on the top shelf? Or see your son is withdrawing because he’s starting to have a hard time in math class? Or notice your spouse is trying everything she can to work on your marriage?

Secondly, it is an impossibly tough way to go through life. No wonder you’re always preoccupied, you have constant panic and fear that things won’t turn out exactly how you have them planned in your mind. If you’re already married and have kids, forget about it, you now have paralyzing angst over taking care of everyone else too. This is where Faith comes in. I think Grace is the more PC term, but it’s my book, and I resonate more with the word Faith so just