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Walking to Lose Weight

By Nancy G Smith

Introduction:

Walking at a continuous pace not only boost your energy level, but also reduces your weight. Walking should be aimed at particular distance or duration covered to maintain the proper health and control weight.

Walking is one of the best exercises to control weight and to burn excess calories if good methods of walking are practiced.

Walking styles:

It is always necessary to maintain good walking style to get the maximum benefits of this exercise and at the same time minimizing any health risk. The following walking styles should be maintained for obtaining the benefits.

• Try to be as straight as possible including back while walking.

• Your arms should be swing in front and back straight at a maximum angle of 90 degree centigrade with the body.

• Take more steps per minute instead of taking longer steps.

• Walking should be maintained in a straight line as possible and try to keep your foot very close.

• Try to breath deeply.

• You should start walking slowly in initial days and should increase the speed and miles gradually as you proceed, keeping in mind your body’s response to these exercises.

Losing weight and fitness level:

Being overweight can cause a decreased level of fitness. Burning extra calories by walking will not only make you slim and trim but also increase your overall fitness level. A lack in exercise always tries the decrease in efficiency of muscle and energy levels.

Trainer’s advice for Walking:

Heart rate is one of the factors for burning calories and thus controls weight loss. Higher the heart rate, higher calories will be burn and thus walking will be more effective for you, but at the same time you should also consult to an expert trainer, physiotherapist or physician for maintaining a specific heart rate. Ageing may cause some reduction in efficiency and pump ability of heart and a 20 years young male can achieve a maximum heart rate of 200 beats per minute and the same person at the age of 40 may achieve a maximum heart rate of 180 only. Your trainer may advice you to attain not more than 60 % of the maximum heart rate, if you observe any difficulty you should consult to the trainer or the physician.

Program for Walking:

Make a simple program for walking.

• Start with a few minutes in initial days and gradually increase the duration.

• For achieving effective results of the walking you should continue walking for a minimum of 30 minutes daily or at least 5 to 6 days of a week.

• If your conditions allow you to walk briskly, walk as much as you can. In case you observe any symptoms of breathlessness, vomiting, dizziness or any unusual symptoms, you should contact to your doctor.

• Before walking do exercise for stretching of the body parts such as arms, head, shoulder, ankles, stomach, back etc, for a few minutes.

• If you get tired during walking, you should gradually slow down your speed.

• Too much of brisk walk can cause breathlessness in some of the people.

• You should adhere to your walking schedule daily and try to convert your walk in three time zones, first slow walking for 4-5 minutes, second brisk walking and third slow walking for 4-5 minutes.

• The first and third time zones are for warm up and clod down zones. Brisk walking should be gradually increased from 405 minutes in initial week to 25-30 minutes after 8-10 weeks.

Nancy Smith loves walking, lawncare, and tracking each step with her Omron pedometer. Check out her diet blog today if you want to read about her latest adventures.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Nancy_G_Smith

               

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Weight Loss Scams Revealed

By Gillian Tarawhiti

Wouldn’t it be nice to lose weight quickly, with minimal effort or fuss? Of cause you would! I for one would love to just sit back do nothing and the weight will just fall off.

Whether it’s a Low Carb, Low GI Diet, A choice of diet pills or “natural” weight loss pills, diet shakes, or exercise equipment, we’ve all seen the fantastic claims people including celebrities make about losing tons of weight AND how they can show you how to do the same thing.

I can tell you right now that 99% of these people are total frauds. You may have even fallen prey to one of these scam artists, selling you their latest “weight loss” program. Me too!

In the past I’ve brought so many of these programs that I can’t even recall how many. I don’t know why, but I tend to find the “good” in people, and I was “sold” by these marketing schemes time and time again, even after being scammed by another. Finally, after so many disappointments, I got FED UP. I decided to get to the bottom of this fascination we have with Weight Loss Programs and find out if there really were any LEGITIMATE programs for Weight Loss.

Legitimate as in not only dealing with LOSING WEIGHT but also what caused the Weight Gain in the first place.

The American Heart Association has several tips to that helps guide you to identify a Fad Diet or Program if it is recommended.

• Magic or miracle foods that burn fat. Foods don’t burn fat – they create fat when we eat more than we need.

• Bizarre quantities of only one food or type of food such as eating only cabbage or tomatoes. These foods are fine as part of an overall healthy diet, but eating large quantities of them could lead to unpleasant side effects.

• Rigid Menus. Many diets set out a very limited selection of foods to be eaten at a specific time and day, exactly as written. Often these limited diets don’t address the widely varied taste preferences of our diverse population.

• Specific food combinations. Some foods taste good together, like the classic “soup and sandwich,” but there’s no scientific evidence that eating foods in certain sequences or combinations has any medical benefit.

• Rapid weight loss of more than two pounds a week.

• No warning given to people with diabetes or high blood pressure to seek advice from the physician or healthcare provider. Some fad diets could raise blood pressure or blood glucose even if you loss weight.

• No increase physical activity. Simple physical activities, like walking or riding a bike, are one of the most important ways to lose weight and maintain weight loss. Yet many “fad” diets don’t emphasis these easy changes.

Now don’t be discouraged, which weight loss program is the right one for you, which one isn’t just a fad diet. In my research I have found a few programs that not only deal with losing weight but also the cause of why you got fat in the first place (which by the way, is ultimately the main reason why we end up putting the weight back on) and also adding in successful, simple strategies to increase exercising.

Whatever you do, I wish you a healthy year for you and your’s

Author Bio: Gillian Tarawhiti BSc, Dip BM, Dip Ed, is Founder and CEO of Community Training Centre & Gain Back Your Life Centre, A registered EFT Practitioner, Member of AAMET and Online Training and Support to the new and not so new netpreneurs. Gillian is also the author of eBay Billion Dollar Goldmine, and the creator of NO DIET WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM(TM) and the Multiple Ripple Effect System © 2004. Permission is granted to reprint this article in print or on your web site so long as the paragraph above is included and contact information is provided to http://www.gainbackyourlife-eft.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gillian_Tarawhiti

               

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Gradual Change of the Weight Watchers Diet

By Luke Sanger

As we all know by now, Weight Watchers is based on a points system and that point system basically runs the diet and everything in the diet is based on this point system. There are a few variations of the POINTS system but there isn’t much of a difference at all. The main differences are based on how the dieter looks at fiber and how much fiber they want to eat. If the dieter uses fiber as a “point enhancer”(reducer) then they would substitute the 50 pt. value in the Weight Watchers Formula for a 70 pt. base value. Other variations are that the POINTSfinder manual calculator that is handed out in Weight Watcher meetings does not reach a points value of 2 until after 70 calories have been reached, rather than 50 as the formula states. This makes the point values 20 pts. higher than first thought.

As time has progressed, so has the Weight Watchers diet. Recently the diet has started to take into consideration how much people want to exercise and how that affects the point system in a whole new way. Certain exercises are given certain negative point values to offset eating some foods that might not have been allowed in earlier variations of the diet.

The Core Plan

When the Atkins Diet and the South Beach diet became more and more popular, Weight Watchers had to come up with a different variation to compete with these diets to be able to keep their dieters happy and feeling like they were still using a diet that was modern and up to day. So, the Core Plan was invented to mirror the Atkins and South Beach diets respectively. In essence, the Core Plan eliminates certain foods all together and focuses on “core” foods that they should eat until satisfied but not full. These core foods are basically deemed healthy foods from all food groups. Still staying with the points system, dieters are allowed 35 pts. a week to eat non-core foods.

The Flex Plan

This is yet another variation that was touched on above that includes exercise into the Weight Watchers equation. A set number of points are given for a given day based on the dieters current weight. Then, the number of points could be increased when the dieter would exercise. This is a reference to the clever title “flex” which allows the dieter more points that are not based on their weight that they could use each week, but are not required to use.

TurnAround

This program was adopted in late 2004 and incorporates all the above plans into one big plan, and was created to help a person maintain a healthy lifestyle beyond just eating foods with points assessed to them. The program includes healthy foods of course, but also 8 Good Healthy Guidelines, activities, and support of other Weight Watcher members. This well balanced plan is supposed to help a dieter maintain their weight through a lifetime maintenance plan.

Weight Watchers is a diet that is tried and proven by millions of people around the world. Find more info and blog entries about this time-tested diet and other great diets here at http://www.eweightlossblog.com, or you can find great health tips and diet tips here at http://www.ihealthblog.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Luke_Sanger

               

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Journaling Your Way To Weight-Loss

By Johnny T. Flynn

Many of my diets have been unsuccessful over the years. I’m not proud of that fact, but I do feel that many of my failed diets have taught me valuable lessons. It is extremely important to try to learn something from each diet that goes south. If you don’t learn anything, your mistakes will be repeated.

One of the best ways to learn from your mistakes is to start writing in a journal. A journal is a personal tool, and I wouldn’t normally tell you how to use one. But I feel I must share with you some of the ways I learned to use my journal.

For starters, write down everything that you eat, as you eat it. This may seem strange, but as I’ve mentioned before, many of us do actually forget some of the things we eat during the day, especially the small stuff. This is especially true if we are continually snacking. Do you remember how many handfuls of Sugar Frosted Flakes you munched on today? Was it two? Or was it more like nine? You must be precise in order to gain any benefit from this technique. Don’t write down that you ate “some” M&Ms. Write down that you ate “three handfuls” of M&Ms. At the end of the day, you can take out any calorie counting booklet and add up your total calories for the day. You can be the judge. How many calories did you consume? Was it a good day, or a bad day? If it was a bad day, which items made it so? Can we cut back on that tomorrow? Great!

Don’t cheat, and don’t fudge (no pun intended). If you try to pretend that you didn’t eat all that ice cream last week, and you tell your friend that you stuck to the diet but still gained weight, then you have more problems than just being overweight. Most of my friends can tell when I’m lying anyway.

If you can’t be honest with your friends, you have to at least be honest with yourself. If you aren’t honest with yourself, that’s called denial, and that will do nothing but continually frustrate you. When you weigh-in, you will find that the scale remembers everything you ate. A record of where you slipped up on your diet is priceless information. Don’t deny yourself that feedback.

A second type of journal entry could be your weekly problem log. You only need to fill out this log for weeks that you didn’t lose weight. You need only summarize what you feel are the reasons you did not lose weight this past week (stress, holidays, a sale on brownies, etc.). Here is a sample log:

PROBLEM LOG
WEEK 3: I ate an entire chocolate bunny, or two.
WEEK 7: I thought the chocolate sauce was nonfat.
WEEK 9: Chocolate. Never mind what, just chocolate.
WEEK 11: We had no trick-or-treaters, and I ate all the fun-size Snickers because they were bothering me as they lay there.

Trends often emerge within a problem log. In this case the trend is chocolate. The appropriate correction is to eat less chocolate, preferably no chocolate. Yes, life is unfair.

The challenge then is finding ways to lower your intake of chocolate. The best thing I could do to help myself is to stay away from 7-Eleven stores. We all have our secret little places that we go for our “fixes.” Resist the urge to go to them and pretend you need a vegetable fix, or a fruit fix instead. Take a big bite out of that carrot and say out loud, “Yes, oh I needed this so much.” Make sure no one is within earshot first.

Not everybody’s problem log will be filled with “chocolate” entries. Some people will drink too much alcohol (oops… multiple problems), while others will eat too much junk food. Others will drink a 12-pack of soda per day, while still others will eat as much meat in a week as some of us do in a year. The point is that by using a log in this way, you will be able to see which items or events most severely affect your weight-loss.

A journal can also be used for keeping track of your exercise sessions. Keep track of how many hours you exercise per week and what type of exercise you perform. It is also helpful to have a weekly exercise goal in mind as you journey through your diet. This can be expressed in calories or in hours, whichever suits you best. The goal is a constant reminder to include exercise in your weight-loss plan.

One of my favorite ways to use a journal is to regroup and reorganize after a terrible weigh-in. I tend to write down whatever I’m thinking at the moment just to get the pen rolling. Often the first few words reveal my mood, and I’m not often a happy camper. Here are some examples:

January 6 - Okay Johnny, what happened? Wait, let me guess, you shouldn’t have eaten at McDonald’s three times this week. When will you learn to stay away from those places? Are you on my side? Or are you just going through the motions?

January 27 - Let me just say one thing…WHAT’S WITH THE FOUR PIECES OF CAKE AT THE WEDDING? What could you possibly be thinking? Your plan was to stick with vegetables this week. Did you temporarily forget that cakes are not in the vegetable family? What can you do to keep away from that junk next week?

February 17 — Ok, this week is shot. Seems to me that we’re having a lot of blown weeks, aren’t we Johnny? And didn’t we have this same conversation a few weeks ago? Yes, I think we did? Wait! Maybe there are some other areas of your life that we could screw up too. Why should we limit it to dieting…

You might think I’m being a bit harsh on myself in these journal entries, but I get all of my frustrations out right then and there. I usually stop being upset with myself after a few paragraphs, and then I write some positive goals for the upcoming week.

Keeping a journal of your thoughts and reflections concerning your diet each day is also helpful. No topic that pertains to diets is off limits. Sample topics might include: Have you been drinking eight glasses of water each day? Did you blow it big time last night at dinner? Have you had a revelation or breakthrough in your diet strategy?

It is important to focus on what has been negatively and positively affecting your progress each week. It’s helpful to review the past week’s journal entries over the weekend or on whatever day you choose. This serves as input to your diet planning process. Throw out what doesn’t work, and welcome whatever does work for you. As you reread your journal, you may be surprised at what you have written. Was that really you who wrote that paragraph three weeks ago? Did you really eat all that in one day? Or “My God, I’m so paranoid.” You’ll be amazed at how many states of mind you find yourself in.

Within your own journal, you can do more than write. I like to draw pictures of the restaurants that are safe to visit, and I like to draw pictures of and make lists of the foods that I can and cannot eat, separated by a big thick impenetrable line that I drew and did not dare cross. I even tried to draw an apple fritter at one time, but it didn’t look appetizing. It looked more like a poorly groomed, ugly hairpiece, but that’s not the point. I knew it was an apple fritter and I knew I couldn’t eat it. That type of stuff works for me; you must find out what will work for you.

Remember, however, that the journal won’t do the hard work for you. The journal can help you see trends in your eating behavior, but you are going to have to reverse the bad trends on your own. So please learn these lessons well, and if you need to start your diet over, like I have done many times, start over with conviction.

Johnny T. Flynn (Author) Heavy Lettuce: Adventures of a Journeyman Dieter, ISBN: 0976352516, website: http://www.heavylettuce.com, email: Johnny@heavylettuce.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Johnny_T._Flynn

               

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12 Tips For Faster Fat Loss Now

By Gregg Gillies

Let’s face it. Burning off fat can be frustrating, especially those final 5 - 15 pounds. Sometimes, it seems like no matter what we do, the weight won’t come off.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the important aspects of fat loss that you may already be implementing, and some that you are most likely not using. These could make all the difference in burning off those final pounds and giving you the lean, defined physique and six pack abs that you’ve been working so hard to get.

Mental Tips on Getting Started

1. Determine the reality of your current situation. Be honest with yourself about where you are and how far you have to go.

2. Figure out the things you are doing now that you would not have gotten involved with, knowing what you now know. Examples are smoking, drinking sugar laden soft drinks, junk food snacking late at night, spending most of your time on the couch, etc.

3. Do a complete and honest analysis of yourself and your skills regarding health and fitness. What do you do well? Where do you need to improve?

4. Determine a measure that you can use to gauge your progress.

5. Set specific goals for each day, week, and month of what you need to do to move yourself toward your goals and discipline yourself to accomplish these small goals that will lead you to big rewards.

Analyzing Your Lack of Fat Loss Progress

Here’s a short checklist of reasons that your fat loss progress may be stalling.

1) Too Many Carbohydrates.

This doesn’t mean you have to eliminate carbs from your nutrition plan. The right carbs are a vital part of your fat loss efforts, not to mention your health. However, any additional carbs above and beyond those needed have a good probability of being stored as body fat. Weight training does require a higher carb intake. But most people don’t train intensely enough for the amount of carbs that they take in.

2) Stack Your Carbs.

Eat most of your good carbs in your morning meals and in your post-workout meal. This will help to stabilize your insulin levels and help you burn body fat for energy later in the day.

Forego the pasta, potato or rice at your evening meals for lean proteins like fowl or fish, along with a side dish of veggies. Or enjoy your favorite protein shake recipe. Okay, maybe not your favorite if your favorite contains a lot of simple carbs, but you get the idea.

3) Too Much of the Wrong Type of Cardio.

What happens to the guy or gal who performs 1-2 hours of cardio a day? (We know you’re out there!)

They send their body into a tailspin, a state where the “starvation hormones” secreted by the body skyrocket (it’s your body’s survival mechanism, a response to too much exercise!) causing fat cells to try to hoard their energy!

Too much cardio will eat away at muscle tissue, causing your metabolism to slow down and your body to start storing fat. In other words, the exact opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. Substitute shorter duration, high intensity interval training for the slow, long duration cardio you’ve been doing and watch your metabolism get a boost as you burn more fat in less time.

4) Never “Cheating” on Your Diet.

Once in a while you should let loose and give yourself a break from the rigors of dieting and scale watching. In fact, it’s helpful in losing weight.

That’s because continual dieting eventually leads to roadblocks where the body responds by slowing its metabolic rate. Strict dieting also takes its toll on you mentally, and can leave you feeling deprived.

That’s a bad combination! Taking in a couple of high calorie meals once every 7-10 days not only provides a mental break from dieting, but helps you side-step roadblocks by preventing the body from entering a starvation state where the metabolic rate slows.

Another way to approach this is on a daily basis.

Here’s an example. Don’t forget the numbers are for the example only. You’ll need to adjust the calorie number to what’s appropriate for you.

Day 1 - 2,600,
Day 2 - 2,500
Day 3 - 2,400
Day 4 - 2,300
Day 5 - 2,200
Day 6 - 2,100
Day 7 - 2,000
Day 8 - 2,500
Day 9 - 2,400
Day 10 - 2,300
Day 11 - 2,200
Day 12 - 2,100
Day 13 - 2,000
Day 14 - 1,900
Day 15 - 2,400
Day 16 - 2,300
Day 17 - 2,200
Day 18 - 2,100
Day 19 - 2,000
Day 20 - 1,900
Day 21 - 1,800

At this point, I will take a look at my progress (using body fat calipers, the scale and the weight increases on my exercises) and then devise a new plan for the next three weeks.

The cycling of calories in this manner is good both for building muscle and losing fat. How high you start and how low you go depends both on your goals (building muscle or losing fat) and your individual metabolism. If you are building muscle you don’t want to make your low days too low. You just want to have some slightly lower calorie days so that you keep fat gain to a minimum as you add muscle.

For losing fat, you don’t want your high days too high (for obvious reasons) but you also don’t want your low days too low, otherwise you will lose lean muscle and put your body into starvation mode, which will cause it to slow your metabolism down and store fat - two big no no’s. If the weight stops coming off, don’t always go lower on calories but consider increasing your cardio training (or just increasing the intensity of the time that you do your cardio - the more intense it is, the more calories you burn during the same amount of time).

You still need to be careful with the amount of food you eat when you do this. After all, it doesn’t take too much to completely wipe out that week’s progress.

5) Paying Attention to The Scale Only.

The scale is not the “end-all” measurement of progress. You also monitor a couple of other things, primarily body composition, energy and strength.

As I’ve said before, don’t go just by the scale. It can deceive you and frustrate you. Get yourself a nice pair of electronic skin fold calipers and keep track of your muscle gains and fat loss.

Skin fold calipers, along with the scale are a much truer indication of your progress.

6) Eat More Good Fat

Getting enough of the good fats will help you lose fat, build muscle, and recover faster from your workouts. In addition, it has myriad health benefits, including being good for your heart. Good fats include: polyunsaturated ( especially Omega-3’s), such as those from fish and nuts, as well as monosaturated fats, such as those from peanut butter, olive oil, egg yolks, and fish oil.

Bad fats include saturated fats from things such as animal and coconut fats. Then there is the worst kind of fat the man made kind, trans fatty acids which can be found in our typical, of no redeeming value, junk foods such cookies, chips, fries and margarine.

Limit, if not stay completely away from, the bad fats and try to get about 30 - 35% of your calories from the good fats.

“Studies show that higher-fat diets make more sense for fit people than low-fat diets,” says Liz Applegate, Ph.D., author of Encyclopedia of Sports & Fitness Nutrition. “In one study, endurance athletes ran up to 24 percent longer before they fatigued when they ate a diet that was above 30 percent fat compared to one that was below 20 percent,” she says.

More importantly to most readers of this newsletter, researchers are now beginning to realize the fact that a nutrition plan high in the good fats helps the body to burn fat. Omega-3 fatty acids increase the size of your cells’ fuel-burning furnaces so your metabolic rate rises and you burn more calories every minute of every day.

Omega-3’s also help your body’s sensitivity to insulin. This helps your body store less fat. In addition, the fat you do store is more readily and easily converted into energy and burned during activity. This keeps your blood sugar levels stable and keeps you away from those famed sugar crashes and cravings and irritable mood swings.

7) Don’t Get Frustrated by A So Called Lack of Progress.

I received an email the other day from a man who wanted to thank me for the quality information I have provided to him.

He’s lost 100 pounds in the past two years and he didn’t think this was very good progress because of what he’s seen others do.

Stuff like this drives me nuts. He made phenomenal progress and should be extremely proud of himself and what he accomplished. Please people, don’t let the progress of others (especially those in ads) cause you to get frustrated with what you’ve accomplished.

Sure, you can use those outstanding results to motivate you but don’t let them make you think what you aren’t doing isn’t special. Don’t let it derail you from your goals.

Gregg Gillies is the founder of www.buildleanmuscle.com . Want to boost your metabolism, burn more fat with less effort and lose all the weight you want…fast? Grab his free report at www.fatlosssecretsrevealed.com

Interested in gaining 21 pounds of muscle in only 9 weeks? Grab his free report at www.fastmasstips.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gregg_Gillies

               

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Weight Loss Tips - 2 Tips To Lose Weight Naturally Without Starving Yourself

By Jean Lam

Being fat and overweight is a major problem in the world. There are millions of people who suffer from excess weight and who would have liked to have a normal body. But the truth is most of these people don’t really know the effective ways to lose weight, haven’t tried hard enough although using the right methods, get discouraged too easily or don’t understand the weight loss process and how the body really works in relation to food, weight, fat, exercises. To lose weight, you need to understand this process first so that you know you’re going in the right direction for your weight loss objectives. Food components like fat, carbohydrates, protein contain a specific number of calories. Alcoholic drinks contain calories and water has no calories.

Everytime you eat food or drink alcohol for instance, your body gains calories. If your body gets too many calories than you burn, your body will store the excess calories as fat and you’ll naturally gain weight. For example, if you consume 2000 calories per day and you burn 1000 calories per day, the excess 1000 calories will be stored as fat deposits throughout your body.

In order for you to lose weight, you need to burn out more calories than you consume. For example, if you consume 2000 calories per day and you burn 2500 calories per day, you will lose weight. Well you might just say “Why don’t I just cut down on my calories intake considerably, hence I don’t really have to burn many calories to lose weight?” Well that would be starving yourself and is not a good idea at all. This will make you weaker, hungrier and you will eat quite a lot after. Anyway it does not help. Your body needs food and calories to get energy. You need to eat enough so as not to starve yourself and be able to burn these calories and more after. On the other hand, if you burn out the exact same amount of calories that you take, you will stay the same.

Two simple things to losing weight naturally revolve around proper nutrition and exercises. There is no shortcut to losing weight in a healthy way.

Consider these 2 tips to lose weight naturally:

(1) Eat normally and healthily

Don’t cut down on your usual meals. Take your breakfast, lunch and dinner. Skipping your meals is not a good solution for your weight loss goal. The thing is what you eat is what is important to help combat your weight problems. If you eat more fats, you’ll have a harder time burning calories because fats contain more calories per gram than carbohydrates and protein. Try changing your eating habits. For instance, instead of eating fried foods, try boiled or steamed foods. But this does not mean you should avoid fatty foods at all cost even taking your favorite snacks which can contain fats. The best thing is to do it moderately.

Here are a few simple and healthy food suggestions. Add tuna in your meals. You have tuna packed in oil or water. Opt for the one in water which has almost no fat as compared to the one in oil with considerably more fat. Tuna is low in calories and has a high nutritional value. You can make a tuna salad with tomatoes, lettuce, onions, olive oil and avoid adding any high-fat condiments like mayonaise. If you want to add mayonaise, just add lightly. Then you can make a tuna sandwich with it. Boiling chicken breasts without the skin is a good choice too. You can also eat it in a sandwich as well. When you eat meat, make sure you trim off the fats first. Adding fish in your meals is recommended. Not only is fish good for health and low in fat and calories, they are good for the heart because they are rich in omega-3 fatty acids mostly oily fish like sardines, salmon, tuna, herring amongst others. It’s recommended to eat at least 1 fish dish a week.

(2) Be active and exercise

Being active is one of the most important steps in losing weight. If you are just idle and don’t move a lot, you won’t progress. You need to exercise. Here are a few activities you can engage in ie weight training, jogging, aerobics, swimming, bicycling, walking amongst others.

As you can see, losing weight doesn’t have to be very complicated. But it does require some work from your part. If you adopt the habit of eating normally and healthily, you will get that routine with time and you will get use to it. At the same time, be active and exercise yourself and enjoy the activities that you’re doing. You won’t see all this as an ordeal but rather as your way of living and it’s a healthy one. In the long run, you will be surprised by the results. Just give it time and you will burn the calories, the excess fat and you will lose your excess weight. Good luck in your weight loss goals.

This article can be freely published on a website as long as it’s not modified in any way including the author bylines, plus the hyperlink must be made active just like below.

Jean Lam is the webmaster of Weight Loss Resource featuring articles, tips, resources to help you lose weight and get a healthier body and lifestyle.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jean_Lam

               

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Weight Loss and the Glycemic Index

By Donovan Baldwin

Okay, the first couple of paragraphs might sound slightly complicated, but it gets easier after that. Bear with me.

By definition, the glycemic index (sometimes abbreviated GI) is a way of ranking carbohydrates based on the short-term or immediate effect they have on your blood glucose level. When carbohydrates break down rapidly they are given a higher glycemic index than those that break down more slowly. Those with a high GI are digested more rapidly and encourage a rapid increase in blood glucose while those with a low GI are digested more slowly and release glucose into the blood stream more gradually.

The glycemic index of a food is expressed as a number. This number can be arrived at a couple of different ways, but in all cases, some food, often glucose itself, is considered to be 100. In some cases, researchers may assign another food a value of 100 so that they can compare a particular diet to that particular food…perhaps a food that is a staple in the diet being examined.

WHAT THE GLYCEMIC INDEX MEANS FOR YOU

As we said, foods with a low GI take longer to digest and release glucose into the blood stream more slowly than foods with a high GI. Regular and sustained consumption of high GI foods has been linked to an increase in obesity and the development of metabolic disturbances. In fact, testing seems to show a link between weight loss, or at least weight management, and a diet which relies heavily on low GI foods. Studies also seem to show that there are other positive health effects as well in addition to the improvement in health that may occur as a result of healthy weight loss.

Eating a low GI diet over an extended time seems to result in a lower risk of Type II Diabetes and coronary heart disease. A low GI diet may also lower risk of atherosclerosis.

PROBLEMS WITH CHOOSING A LOW GLYCEMIC INDEX DIET

While a close approximation to the GI of a food can be given, actual GI of that food may depend on a range of factors, including how ripe it is, how long it has been stored, where it was grown, and the processing it has undergone. The GI of a food may actually fluctuate from individual to individual, and even within the same individual depending on factors such as time of day, blood glucose levels, and the person’s health to name a few. Additionally, since few foods are eaten alone, it is difficult to estimate the GI of a combined dish or meal.

Despite these drawbacks, the GI of a food or a meal can be estimated with some accuracy, and with proper knowledge of the GI of various foods, a diet can be constructed that will help an individual lose weight while maintaining health. There are charts, graphs, and even weight loss programs that have ranked and ordered foods and meals by their GI and can present these to the consumer as a finished package, product, or reference. Some well known weight loss programs which use the GI of foods to construct their eating plans and products are the South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet, and the Nutrisystem Weight Loss Program.

FOODS WITH A LOW GLYCEMIC INDEX

As might be suspected, foods with lower GI’s include most common fruits and vegetables, drinks and juices made from fruits and vegetables, whole grain breads, eggs, most dairy products, fish, poultry and…oh happy day…chocolate. Low GI foods are generally considered to be those with a GI of 55 or lower.

GOOD CARB VS. BAD CARB OR GLYCEMIC INDEX

Generally speaking, “bad” carbs tend to be foods with a high GI, while “good” carbs are foods with a low GI. As can be seen from the list above, choosing healthy carbohydrates, or low GI foods, does not have to be a chore. It is simpler for an individual to begin substituting healthy, low GI, foods and snacks for higher GI foods such as extra slices of cake, white bread, refined rice, foods sweetened with sugar, and potato chips, than to try to subsist on many of the eating plans offered by fad diets.

Donovan Baldwin is a Dallas area writer. A graduate of the University Of West Florida (1973) with a BA in accounting, he is a member of Mensa and has held several managerial positions. He has written poetry and essays for his own use, and instructional media in many of the positions he held. After his retirement from the U. S. Army in 1995, he began writing articles on various subjects for websites he owned as well as for use by other webmasters. He has a keen interest in health, fitness, diet, and weight loss. He has a blog on these subjects at http://www.nodiet4me.blogspot.com. You can find more information on a weight loss program using the glycemic index at http://diet.free-business-hosting.com.

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6 Tips to Maintain Weight Loss

By Audrey Okaneko

Congratulations!! You’ve lost the weight you’ve been working so hard to lose. Now, how do you keep it off?

I’ll share some of my own tips for helping to keep the weight off that you worked so hard to take off.

1. Stay accountable to yourself. Weigh yourself either once or twice a week. In order to maintain your weight you need to know how much you weigh.

2. If you do gain one pound or two, make the changes today that will aid you in taking off that one pound or two. You know how to lose weight, you’ve done it before. Lose that one pound before it turns into 5 or 10.

3. You know your weaknesses. If keeping chips out of the house is what it takes, then continue to keep the chips out of the house. If planning out meals so that you know what you’ll be eating each day is helpful, then keep doing it.

4. If you’ve been journaling, then consider continuing to journal what you eat. It is very easy to slip back into old patterns without even realizing what is happening. If you journal what you are eating, then the words are right there in front of your eyes.

5. Continue to make exercise part of your everyday routine. Consider changing what you do for exercise. Play tennis, take a swim, take a walk, take an aerobics class, take a dance class, ride a bike. Mix it up, but keep exercise in your daily routine.

6. Don’t skip meals. As you learned during the weight loss period, your body does better with 3-5 meals a day, versus just one meal a day. Stay in the habit of eating at least 3 meals per day.

As you learned during weight loss, do not deprive yourself, instead take the necessary steps above to take off that one or two pounds and get back to the weight that is right for you.

Audrey Okaneko has been sharing her tips with others for quite some time. She can be reached at audreyoka@cox.net or visited at http://www.scrapping-made-simple.com

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Women’s Health and Fitness - Reducing Cortisol Levels Can Help You To Lose Weight

By Gill Webster

It is now known that stress can actually stop you losing weight especially around your middle. Stress can cause your body to secrete high levels of cortisol hormone into your bloodstream, because of your body’s “flight or fight” response to stress. Stress can be either psychological (mental and emotional) or physical.

Cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands and is actually important for the regulation of blood pressure, the immune system and many other functions. Cortisol can be good in small amounts but high levels can lead to an increase of abdominal fat, which can lead to heart attacks, strokes and can also increase your bad cholesterol levels and decrease your good cholesterol levels.

High levels of cortisol can also decrease your bone density, leading to osteoporosis and loss of muscle tissue, which will also slow down your metabolic rate, and it can also increase your blood pressure along with other problems.

Each of you will react differently to stress; some of you will produce more cortisol to a particular stress while others will produce less. It has been found that those of you that produce more cortisol will actually eat more food as well, in particular carbohydrates.

What you need to do to combat producing too much cortisol is to learn ways to relax and also to maybe change your lifestyle.

Relaxation can be achieved in a number of ways either by exercising, mediation, yoga or breathing to start with.

Maybe one of the easiest and simplest ways is breathing. This is done by gently breathing in through the nose, gently expanding your abdomen and then gently expelling the air through your nose pulling in your abdomen at the same time. Whilst breathing out the air you need to focus on that breath. After several breaths in and out you should start to feel yourself relax. You need to practice doing this exercise a few minutes a day to start with building up to five minutes in the end. You can also practice this when you are feeling stressed or when things are getting on top of you. Just a few minutes can slow your body down and help it to feel relax.

Life style changes can be like changing your eating habits for a healthier diet, getting enough sleep, or even organizing your time more efficiently so that you do not feel so stressed. Also looking after your body will help your body to cope with stresses that you come across during your day.

So if you are exercising frequently and eating properly but still not losing any weight especially from around the middle then maybe you are suffering from high levels of cortisol caused by stress. Look at ways to solve the problem and hopefully then you should see a difference in your weight and around your middle.

Gill Webster is dedicated to helping women over 40, learn how to live a healthy beautiful life. To learn more, jump to http://www.feelinggreatafter40.com and sign up for her free newsletter on health and fitness.

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Your Ideal Muscle Building & Fat Burning Workout

By Gregg Gillies

Fitness training is not just a physical pursuit of lean muscle, fat loss and a new, sexy body. It’s an intellectual pursuit as well. In order to get the results you want, you have to develop an ideal plan that’s right for you.

Most people never take this step. They copy some routine or diet they’ve read about and if it helps them make progress, great, and if not, they quit out of frustration without taking the time to think things through and develop a training program that will give them real progress. Don’t let this happen to you.

You don’t need to blindly follow the weight training routines, dietary regimens and overall programs of the people you read about in the magazines. Don’t get me wrong, they can be great programs, but they may not work for you exactly as written. You may need to make some changes to make the programs be effective muscle building and fat burning programs.

For example, the barbell squat is the cornerstone of many of the most effective weight training programs in existence and I highly recommend it. However, there really are some people that either can’t squat, or do not have a body type that makes the squat nearly as effective for them and they may be better off substituting another leg exercise like the leg press or lunges. If you don’t think about what you are doing, you’ll never make this step and you’ll short circuit your ability to build muscle and lose fat.

A personal example for me is the bench press. I have found, through experience, that the decline bench press is a much more effective exercise. First, the flat bench press can wreak havoc on your shoulders and rotator cuff. In addition, I have longer arms, making the bench press more of a tricep exercise for me than a chest builder. The decline bench press puts me in a position that elminates both of these negatives.

There are a number of highly effective basic weight training routines, many of which I’ve shared on www.buildleanmuscle.com. And a lot of people will make great progress on these routines, as is. But the real key to these programs is that you can adapt them to suit you, like in the examples I gave above.

Here are 5 key tips to an effective weight training and nutrition program for you.

Train Hard

This one seems so simple, yet so few people really put forth the necessary effort to see the results they want. If you are going to try training, you might as well give yourself the best chance for success and that means training hard. Everyone must work hard. That’s just the cold, hard truth. This doesn’t mean that you have to train for hours every day. But it does mean that the time you spend working out must challenge you. You gotta put in the work.

Being persistent is a key component of working hard. Too many people get overenthusiastic about starting a new fitness program or nutrition program and they go nuts the first couple of weeks. This leads to soreness and burn out and they end up back on the couch before they see any real progress.

Even if your training program is perfect, you still have to work it. You won’t see results, otherwise. Forget all the gimmicks and fads. Use the proven, basic exercises that work and work them.

Don’t Overtrain

This is crucial to your long term fitness success. If you overtrain, you won’t make any gains. You’ll also feel like crap and want to quit, either because you’re exhausted or because you are discouraged at your lack of progress from so much effort. Some people love the easy way out so let me make clear that avoiding overtraining is not an excuse to take it easy and only workout once a month!

When it comes to bulding muscle (and even losing fat) more is not always better. Quality counts big time (see training hard above). If you’re making great progress on your current routine, it does not mean you’ll make even more progress if you triple the amount of work you are doing. Your body needs time to recover from your training. With weight training, work hard doing a few sets of the basic exercises. With cardio, consider doing more high intensity interval training as opposed to long time periods of slow-go cardio.

Eat Right and Rest

You don’t need to follow some new diet fad in order to lose fat or build muscle. Stick to the basics and you’ll be fine. This means mostly raw foods, fruits and vegetables, lean meats, etc. Stay away from simple sugars, processed foods, and foods with trans fats. Get good fats in your diet and supplement with a good essential fat acid supplement like Udo’s Choice Oil Blend.

Attitude Determines Your Altitude

Maintaining a positive attitude is very important when it comes to being successful with your health and fitness program. No, this isn’t easy. And, unfortunately, a lot of the negative pressure will come from those closest to you. If you’re always around people who are constantly negative and try to bring you down, get rid of them. I know that sounds harsh, but if you want to be successful you need to be around other people like you, not people who do nothing but complain. No bs, no excuses.

The Best Routine For You

Once you have all these things in place, you can start experimenting with changes in the basic routines that suit you best. Maybe dips are the best chest exercise for you, instead of the bench press. If so, do dips! Maybe you do better on three hard sets of 6 reps each, instead of one all out set of 12 reps. Then do three sets. Maybe you get better results when you train with 3 minutes of rest between sets (or 30 seconds) instead of a minute and a half. Then make the change!

Little changes like this can go a long way toward building muscle and losing fat, while keeping you from quitting. While you have to work hard, you may find that it’s easier to work hard when you workout in a way that suits your mental makeup. Your exercise program needs to relfect that. While I believe squats are the best exercise around hands down, and you should learn to like them, if you hate them to the point that you quit training, what good are they? Maybe you’ve found that you can workout much harder and more consistently with leg presses then do leg presses. You’ll make better progress on a slightly inferior exercise if you work it hard, then you will if you don’t workout at all because you hate the exercise you are supposed to do.

Train hard, don’t train too much, eat right, get quality rest, stay positive, and experiment to find what works for you. This will take you a long way toward building muscle, burning fat and making health and fitness a permanent part of your life.

Gregg Gillies is the founder of http://www.buildleanmuscle.com. Interested in gaining 21 pounds of muscle in only 9 weeks? Grab his free report at http://www.fastmasstips.com. Want to boost your metabolism, burn more fat with less effort and lose all the weight you want…fast? Grab his free report at http://www.fatlosssecretsrevealed.com.

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