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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Top Tips for Slimming Down This Summer


So if you live in a cold climate like me, you know that Summer time is always a season that is looked forward to. It is the time that you can put on your shorts and tank tops and pop down to the shops in your flip flops. The only drawback of summer is that it comes right after the cold seasons, where you are more likely to have put on the pounds so if you are feeling a bit nervous about getting your bikini on this summer, take a look at these top tips for slimming down:

1.) Swap the Soda for Water - OK, now I know that this is not easy for some people. I can think of quite a few people I know who don't even like water!! But you can jazz it up... Ever thought about having sparkling water with a bit of lemon or maybe even some cucumber? It is very refreshing and you can almost convince yourself that you are sipping on a Gin and Tonic!

2.) Steaming is For The Winter - When it is cold outside you may need some 'comfort food' to keep you going but now the sun is out, ditch the steaming. Get your veggies on a barbeque instead. Not only is it good for weight loss it makes the veggies taste completely different which is always a good thing.

3.) Try Alternative Exercise Methods - Would you rather jump in front of a train than run on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes? You are not the only one. If you find conventional exercise boring, think of some alternative ways to get your body into shape. What about belly dancing? or Salsa dancing? There is also a great new exercise which is becoming popular called Piloxing. (Yep, that's right, it is a combination of Pilates and Kick Boxing and people are having some great results from this. Remember exercise does not have to be conventional so spice up your life a bit.

4.) Eat In: OK - now you will have to be the judge of this for yourself obviously. But the problem with restaurants (even some of the ones which claim to be healthy) is you just don't know what the EXACT ingredients are when you have ordered something, nor do you have any control of the cooking methods which are used to produce meals. So I am not saying never eat out but you will find it a lot easier to count your calorie intake if you are preparing the food yourself.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nadine_A_Douglas

Friday, May 10, 2013

7 Facts About Healthy Eating


Healthy eating is all about taking nutritious foods on a daily basis. It's an important habit that should be acquired. There are lots of benefits that come with the habit. You'll always enjoy sound health if you're committed to consuming nutritious diets on a daily basis. There are unique facts you need to know about healthy eating. Let's examine some of them.

• Healthy eating protects the human heart. The condition of your heart depends a lot on the kind of foods you eat on a daily basis. Nutritious foods improve the condition of the heart. They also fight all forms of heart diseases on a regular basis.

• Balanced eating helps a lot in controlling weight gain. You can easily maintain your weight by consuming nutritious diets on daily basis. If you're obese, you can easily slim down by consuming lots of fruits and vegetables. If you're extremely slim, you can add adequate weight by consuming starchy foods. You'll always maintain your weight as you keep following a good diet plan.

• Consuming nutritious meals helps a lot in reducing the risk of diseases. It helps you remain physically fit on regular basis. When you eat properly, you can be free from all kinds of diseases like diabetes, stroke, cancer, and so on. You'll also be free from kidney infection, lung disease and other diseases.

• Healthy eating improves your energy level. You can boost your daily energy level by consuming quality foods regularly. You'll always be strong and fit. Your strength will always be renewed as you keep following a good diet plan.

• Regular consumption of nutritious diets helps a lot in enhancing your immune system when your immune system is improved, you'll find it difficult to fall sick. You'll continue to build enough resistance against sicknesses.

• Your brain improves when you take quality diets. You'll start thinking correctly. You'll also start taking the right decisions on regular basis. Your nervous system will also be in good condition as you keep following a good diet plan.

• Taking quality foods makes the skin to look beautiful. Your entire body will start to shine on daily basis. You'll not have any reason to worry about rashes, eczema and other skin diseases as you keep eating nutritious meals.

In all, healthy eating remains the best avenue of enjoying sound heath. It improves your overall physical appearance on daily basis. You need to create time to discover the right steps to take in consuming quality foods. You can consult your dietitian for further assistance.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Roy_Chidubem_Okonkwo

Ladies, You Can Eat Pizza and Still Lose Weight


It's well established that in order to lose body fat and body weight, you need to bring your daily calorie intake below your maintenance level for a certain time period. At first you lose weight, then your progress slows and then you hit a plateau where you seemingly can't lose any more weight. If you reduce your calorie intake even further, now you start to lose muscle in addition to losing fat due to your insufficient calorie intake. Again, that's not good because this will lower your metabolic rate, making it even harder to lose fat. Also, when you restrict your calorie intake for a period of time, your body starts to think that you're starving and reacts by lowering your metabolic rate and increasing your appetite.

Researchers believe that the reason your body does this relates to levels of a hormone in your body called leptin. The role leptin can play in keeping you lean is yet another reason not to banish carbohydrates (carbs) from your diet, since occasionally overfeeding on carbs can revamp your leptin levels.

If you're on a reduced calorie diet, leptin levels will begin to fall in your body. When leptin levels fall in the body, this effectively reduces your resting metabolic rate (RMR), triggers increased cortisol production (a catabolic hormone that promotes muscle loss and makes it hard to lose fat), and also increases your appetite, essentially promoting body fat gain. It is your body's defence mechanism because it thinks you are starving. To keep your leptin levels normal and hence your appetite sated and your RMR at optimal levels, it is helpful to have occasional overfeeding days (particularly of carbs). This could be one day a week where you forget all about your diet and eat whatever you want in whatever quantities you want. Most likely you're going to consume a lot of high carb foods, which will aid in increasing your leptin levels.

Try to make the majority of your overfeeding day comprised of carbs but avoid sugary foods such as fizzy pop, sodas, biscuits, and other sources of high fructose corn syrup. Also, try to go approximately 1000 calories higher than your maintenance calorie intake for the overfeeding day to assure a good response.

You could still lose a lb a week even with the overfeeding day. For example, if you stay at a 750-calorie per day deficit below your maintenance level during the other 6 days per week and you're 1000 calories over your maintenance during the overfeeding day, that's still a 3500-calorie deficit for the week (+1000 - 750x6 = -3500). Since the overfeeding is only one day per week, it will not ruin the benefits of the other 6 days per week where you're following a good diet and will actually supercharge your metabolic rate to make sure you keep your fat loss or weight loss efforts on track. What you're actually doing is tricking your body into thinking that food is plentiful once again and it doesn't have to lower your metabolic rate since it no longer thinks it is starving.

Besides being important physiologically for maintaining continual fat and weight loss, the overfeeding day is also very important mentally by giving you that one day a week to look forward to where you can overeat and not worry about it.

NOTE that for a smaller individual with lower daily calorie requirements, you need to modify the calorie deficits and surpluses to smaller amounts.

Personally, my typical overfeeding day includes a large pizza and a cake! I may also have the occasional glass or two of red wine or even a couple of pints of beer. I look forward to my treat day as it gives me the opportunity to let my hair down (for those of you who know me, I have very little hair but you get my drift!!).

When you initially undertake a weight loss programme, I wouldn't recommend the overfeeding day until you have reached at least your short-term goals. Otherwise, you just think it's OK to eat pizza and drink wine a lot. Only incorporate the overfeeding day WHEN you feel ready.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Paul_Edgar

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Fast and Effective Ways to Build Your Muscles

90 % of the individuals who want to build muscles fast do not know how to do it successfully. The effective ways of carrying out muscle building are muscle training and a healthy diet.

Healthy Diet
Meals of high protein content that have low lactose supply commendably help in the building of muscles and the reduction of excess fats from the body. Eat enough protein while effectively avoiding fat. Ingesting lean protein helps in the building of muscles because lean protein contains no fat.

Small Meals
Eat carbohydrates and proteins immediately after training. This will initiate muscle repair and build up because proteins are digested quickly. You should make an effort to take a minimum of five small meals every day so as to provide a steady supply of energy to the body by keeping the rate of metabolism accelerated.

Alcohol
Completely excludes alcohol or effectively reduce it from your diet. This is because alcohol interferes with muscle building through disrupting the muscles' ability to produce ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate). ATP is a product of respiration that is necessary for muscle contraction and thus essential for muscle buildup.

Hydrate your body
Ensure you take a lot of water before, during and after your workout for the purpose of hydration. This is because when lifting weights you sweat a lot and the water lost should be replaced. Sufficient supply of water will ensure a high metabolic rate while dehydration will slow down the rate of calorie burning thus resulting in storage of the calories as fat.

Muscle Training
Muscle training should be conducted in a well divided manner which is as follows:

1.) Exercise
Do warm ups with a set of 50% of the weights you will use in the actual training session. Lift weights that will allow you to complete six to ten repetitions of the same exercise without tiring up. Working out with heavy weights will encourage faster growth of muscles. Faster muscle growth will be achieved through carrying out full body movements in your training. In carrying out a compound exercise ensures the combination of two lifts for example, a squat and a shoulder raise.

2.) Allow repair
Ensure you lift weights for up to 45 minutes per session, then skip a day between lifting weights in order to allow muscle repair. This can be done through training your upper body on every other day and training your lower body in the days skipped.

3.) Training Log
Make notes of all the exercises you perform, the weights you use and the number of sets and repetitions done. In order to achieve fast muscle growth increase the amount of weights you lift and constantly challenge your muscles.

4.) Less Aerobic Exercise
Do more cardio exercises or High-intensive interval training (HIIT) over aerobic exercises. Cardio exercise improves your health by making the heart and lungs efficient and reducing fat gain. Cardio exercise is done through three 30 minute sessions while HIIT is done through a 20 minute session.

5.) Enough Sleep
Get enough sleep in order to facilitate muscle recovery of the body through repairing of the small muscle tears that occur during weight lifting. Enough sleep must be 7 to 8 hours of rest.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Obesity - How to Lose It

Are you obese? At your last check up did your doctor tell you to lose weight?
Your doctor did? Please send him/her a thank you note and perhaps a gift.

The reason is that most doctors in America shy away from confronting their obese patients. Well at least the ones that are not excessively obese. Instead of meeting the problem head on, they will make mealy-mouthed suggestions like, eat fruits and vegetables, exercise more often, go for long walks, blah, blah, blah.

No wonder over a third, like 35.7% of Americans are obese. As a nation, we spend $148 billion each year for treating problems related to obesity.
So let us tackle the problem head on.

DEFINE OBESE

Medically, the following are the definition of normal and obese weight:
  • A Body Mass Index (BMI) from 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal.

  • Adults with a BMI of 25 to 29.9 are considered overweight. There are exceptions. Some people in this group, such as athletes, may not have too much fat, and may not have an increased risk of health problems due to their weight.

  • Adults with a BMI of 30 to 39.9 are considered obese.

  • Adults with a BMI greater than or equal to 40 are considered extremely obese.

  • Anyone more than 100 pounds overweight is considered morbidly obese.
There are simple calculators to calculate BMI. So, a person who is 5.3" high and weighs 125 pounds has a BMI of 22.1, which is normal. A person who is 5.8" and weighs 175 pounds has a BMI of 27 and is considered overweight, not obese. Remember these are indexes for non-athletes.

HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT SIMPLY AND SUSTAIN WEIGHT LOSS

Here are some practical and common practices that will help you to lose weight without stress.
  1. Have a thorough physical examination--blood, stools, urine and EKG. This will reveal any medical condition that may be causing weight gain such as thyroid or hormonal imbalances

  2. Intelligent snacking: Snack on healthy foods. Crunchy vegetables or slightly grilled meats are good because they contain nutrients and less fat. Get in the habit when you feel hungry, to drink water and munch on something healthy

  3. Exercise. Get into the habit of regularly exercising. Even walking and brisk walking (see Resource guide for an excellent website) are good and less troubling to your knees. Exercise or walk routines should be changed often. Your body does have a tendency to "get lazy" if you exercise with predictable routines. So walk uphill one day and level another. Switch between cardio and lower ab, muscle resistance and stretching, push ups and jumps, etc. etc. In other words, trick your body to strain, but not overly so.

  4. Reduce sugar, salt and alcohol use.

  5. Stress less.

  6. When cooking, use less oil, butter and other fats

  7. Missing a meal once a week is good. E.g. one evening just drink milk and eat a fruit and skip dinner.

  8. Eat a good breakfast, and a light lunch and dinner

  9. Make sure you consume most of the carbohydrates before evening. Your body slows down its metabolism as the day progresses, which is why eating a good sumptuous breakfast in the morning is essential.

  10. Leave at least 2 hours between your last meal for the day and sleep.

  11. Skip milk and drink almond milk--it has half the fat and twice the calcium than even the skim milk

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Healthy eating facts you should know

It's absolutely wonderful there exists something anyone can acknowledge with regards to what we take. Seems like like we are deluged along with completely new technological conclusions and also completely new fat loss programs each and every day. To generate issues a whole lot worse, that generally appears like these records is unclear. What exactly is a person to accomplish? Effectively, you are able to relax quick, due to the fact there are a few basics connected with ingesting that will have not altered, and also usually are not likely to transform.

Let's start with calorie consumption. Lots of novelty diet programs do what exactly they will for you to confuse the matter. They talk connected with "negative calorie" food, or perhaps the way particular food can easily get rid of fat. Even so, it all comes down for this: calorie consumption tend to be energy. For that reason, if you wish to slim down, and then you should ingest fewer calorie consumption when compared with you burn.

If you wish to gain weight, then you certainly do the alternative. In addition, when you prohibit your current calorie consumption an excessive amount, your body will go in hunger mode, and will reduce calorie consumption much more slowly and gradually, so that it is tougher to lose bodyweight (if that may be your current goal). And so, meaning you should not go far too reduced the amount you eat, but alternatively require a sensible procedure for your diet.

The opposite important factor connected with calorie consumption is that will these people need to rely. It doesn't indicate it is best to rely your current calorie consumption and grow obsessed with all of them. What exactly it lets you do indicate, even so, is that will every one of the calorie consumption you ingest really should have a number of nutritional value, or perhaps which they need to rely for something. That means reducing virtually any vacant calorie consumption. One of the primary culprits allow me to share sweetened soda pops. these kinds of generally contain sweets and possess no nutritional value.

Right now we should use this excess fat within our diet programs. This wasn't all that previously that will foodstuff manufacturers thought we would spin away low-fat variants of many unique products. This became inside the hope connected with capturing a new talk about in the health-conscious marketplace. Though it's true that will excess fat possesses 9 calorie consumption for every gram (protein and also carbohydrates merely include 4), not all fat will be the same.

For example, it's extensively approved that there are absolutely no balanced amount of trans fat; for that reason it is best to do your better to fully eradicate all of them from a eating habits. Bad fats will be the subsequent worst type of, nevertheless you could have a number of in your diet without an excessive amount be anxious, however, you need to control all of them. Next you can find both groups of balanced fat: monounsaturated and also polyunsaturated. It's not possible to always take since many of these as you would like, nevertheless in case you are going to possibly be ingesting fat (and it is best to acquire some), and then these are better alternatives.

Many ingesting actually comes down for you to the two of these fundamental issues: calorie consumption and also excess fat. What exactly diet program you comply with doesn't make a difference approximately the way you take. And so, any time choosing a diet plan, be sure you appear that around and this in addition, it has a sensible technique. Whenever you try this, you won't need to merely feel greater about being using a balanced program, you will probably possibly be much more likely for you to follow it.

Diabetic weight loss diet - healthy foods benefit you

Should you be diabetic and obese, you might need a excellent diabetic weight loss eating plan never to merely management excess fat and also cope with leveling off your current blood sugar levels. Retaining excess fat and blood sugar levels under control is usually crucial for you to cutting down the likelihood you may go through the very critical problems which have been considered linked to diabetes.

Naturally the important thing for you to losing weight is usually to select well balanced meals to nibble on. Food items that will in addition assist management insulin manufacturing and generate really are a in addition, way too. Finding out eat a new nicely balanced eating habits for a lot of can be a little tricky. A vital component of retaining an individual blood sugar levels under control is usually learning to stability protein, extra fat, and glucose of each meal consume.

Retaining glucose under control is usually essential simply because some glucose convert pretty much instantly straight into simple all kinds of sugar and lead to the actual pancreas for you to get rid of insulin straight into your whole body for you to deal with the actual meteoric rise inside blood sugar levels. In the event this is not brought under control, you'll discover oneself to comprehend difficulties than just diabetes.

That understands, maybe should you shed the actual weight you won't should prick your current hand constantly and put in so much insulin straight into your system each day. Maybe your current diabetes will even disappear should you become fit and healthy.

Dieticians and medical professionals get transformed the convinced that almost all diabetics would be the similar and almost all can adhere to the same common eating habits. They can not. A superb diabetic weight reduction eating plan nowadays is usually designed for the specific affected individual and stimulates perfect eating routine with regard to perfect well being. Simple glucose are usually kept with a bare minimum and protein that is certainly an excellent source of Omega-3 efas are usually prompted. Omega-3 efas are only in abundance inside sea food with all the greatest awareness obtained in fish.

Diets reduced weight and cholesterol and an excellent source of environment friendly leafy fruit and vegetables and excessive fiber food items just like wholemeal is important inside curbing diabetes. Many fruits ought to merely be consumed inside moderation due to their excessive pure sugars content material that may produce blood sugar levels spike and then tumble quickly due to insulin overburden.

Blood glucose needs to be checked regularly before and immediately after dinners and before bed time for getting a definative notion of how the foodstuff consume affects your current amounts particularly when body fat. Diabetes isn't a having a laugh matter and when you are body fat on top of the actual diabetes you ought to be extra watchful. Carry points little by little, retain watchful, correct files of each blood sugar levels check out and retain a new foodstuff newspaper, way too.

Find some suggestions with regard to arranging your meals and goodies by by going to the American Diabetes Association's website and studying the diabetic food pyramid. An individual can acquire some excellent details about diabetes and eating habits whilst on the spot and learn to put that which you understand straight into exercise.

With Type II diabetes now in epidemic proportions in the United States because of the obesity epidemic following a good diabetic weight loss diet is as vital as the insulin you have been prescribed.