Losing Fat in Specific Areas: Is it Possible

By Ross Harrison

Most people are looking to improve certain parts of their body. Common concerns are excess flab around the stomach, under the arms, or in any number of other areas. There is a general belief that performing specific exercises will help people lose more fat in certain areas of the body. This is typically known as spot reduction and it is a popular concept, but does it really work?

The simple answer to this question is no, spot reduction is a myth. However, no matter how often this is said, people still want to believe they can lose fat in a particular area by exercising specific muscles. As a result, people often end up doing many exercises to isolate specific muscles, especially the abdominals and arms, hoping to burn fat in those specific areas.

Unfortunately, this is not the way the human body loses fat. You will lose fat throughout your entire body with any type of exercise, regardless of the muscles being used. Exercising specific muscles will however make them stronger, firmer, and improve their appearance, which can create an illusion that more fat is being lost in those areas.

Believe it or not, performing excess exercises for the abs and arms at the expense of other muscles will ultimately decrease your overall fat loss. Exercises that isolate the abdominals, biceps, or triceps have a smaller impact on the body than exercises that use larger muscles or incorporate many different muscles at one time. Exercises such as squats, lunges, chest/shoulder presses, and back rows/pulldowns have much greater physiological effects on calorie burning, hormonal adaptations, overall fitness, and of course fat loss.

While it is true that exercising any muscle causes fat loss throughout the body, it does not mean that fat will be lost evenly. There is one factor that does have a significant impact on where you lose fat and that is your genetics. Most people have specific areas where they easily accumulate fat or store a proportionally larger amount of fat compared to the rest of their body. These are commonly referred to as problem areas and they will vary from person to person.

Problem areas are typically the first to gain fat and the last to lose it, so they are often significant obstacles to long-term fat loss. Luckily there is one approach that is generally successful in dealing with problem areas, but it may not what you want to hear. The key is dedication and consistency with your nutrition, as well as variety and progression with your exercise. Initially you may not lose fat from the areas you want, but if you stick with it, you will start losing fat from those problem areas.

If on the other hand, you have good eating and workout habits some or even most of the time, you may experience some positive fat loss, but once you stop exercising or start eating poorly, the fat you lost from your problem areas will be the first to return. If you are serious about long-term fat loss, you have to make exercise and nutrition a priority throughout your life.

Ross Harrison, CSCS, NSCA-CPT is a certified personal trainer, strength and conditioning specialist, and nutritional consultant who teaches people how to lose weight, get in shape, and improve their quality of life with exercise and nutrition. For more information or to sign up for his free health and fitness newsletter, visit precisionhealth-fitness.com.

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Lose Weight Fast – Naturally With These 8 Simple Tips Part 1

By Sacha Tarkovsky

This diet will ensure your full of energy and vitality improve skin tone make your hair glossy and detox and make you lose weight fast.

The above diet is totally balanced and unlike fad or crash diets will not deprive you of any food groups or make you feel ill

So here are your tips to lose weight fast.

1. Go Organic & Up fruit & Veg Intake

Switch your shopping to buying organic ingredients and up your fruit and veg intake

2. Drinks

Cut down or eliminate alcohol, fizzy drinks and caffeine. Switch to Green tea loaded with antioxidants and make sure you get plenty of fresh water – 2 litres a day.

Water is will flush out your system and is known to help speed up the fat burning process. Also as many hunger pangs we get are thirst pangs this will keep appetite in check.

3. Eliminate processed foods

Such as burgers and Pizza’s and get more good carbohydrates such as oats, brown rice and jacket potatoes to ensure that your blood sugar levels are kept even and you have plenty of energy.

4. Get good fats

We all need good fats their vital to our health and vitality. They will protect against illness, supports the immune system make your skin, hair and nails look better

The best way to get them is from oily fish such as, mackerel, salmon, sardines, herrings and olive oil.

Make Sure you get 3 - 5 servings a week and take a fish oil capsule daily.

5. up your intake of lean protein

Lean protein provides an immediate satiety factor - it keeps you full for longer periods.

It also prevents insulin spikes that lead to energy falls and sugar cravings.

It maintains muscle mass which is crucial in the fat burning process.

At least 20 – 30% of daily calories should be lean protein get it by eating:

Cottage cheese, low fat yogurt, skimmed milk, egg whites, fish, shrimp prawns, skinless chicken, turkey, beef, lentils, fish, kidney beans, tofu and soy products.

6. Eat fiber

This keeps food moving through your bowel. Just like water, fiber rich foods bulk you up and make you feel full.

The average person could lose around 10 pounds per year just by doubling their fiber intake. The average person consumes about 8g per day this should be increased to 25g per day.

It’s found only in plant foods and our bodies are unable to digest it so it’s simply eliminated.

In the process it cuts calories by attaching to some of the protein and fat that you eat along the way eliminating that as well

Finally, fiber rich foods are normally low in calories and filling so eating more of them means you’re eating fewer calories and consuming less calories from other foods.

Start your day with a high fiber cereal and keep eating fiber throughout the day.

Good choices include: strawberries, apples, figs, and chickpeas, potatoes with skins, broccoli, brown rice, beans, and nuts.

7. Eat regularly

You can eat 3 main meals a day with two snacks in between.

Never skip breakfast so that you don’t suffer hunger pangs later in the day. Your body has been without food for 8 – 10 hours so fuel it and set your self up for the day.

8. Portion Control

Make sure you aware of portion control. With your 3 main meals to get the portion size of brown rice you can have as example, clench you fist and that’s the amount you can have same with vegetables and protein consumed.

Why the above diet will help you lose weight and be healthy

The above diet will help you lose weight naturally as it’s balanced and It will give you energy, vitality and make you feel and look better – Try it and see.

Want to see daily Suggestions?

Then check out part two of this article, where we will go over some sample daily foods and some supplements and herbs you can take as well.

MORE FREE INFO

On all aspects of health, nutrition, supplements and more on diet visit our website for a huge resource of articles, features and downloads and at www.net-planet.org/index.html

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Sacha_Tarkovsky

               

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.

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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

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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

               

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

               

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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10 Weight Loss Tips

By Naveenkumar Rastogi

1. Burn more calories than you consume. If this makes you go: “D-uuuh!!”, snap out of it and consider that this elementary aspect of dieting excapes countless clueless — and doomed — dieters. Tabloids may claim to have the “miracle foods” that’ll allow you to eat like a pig and have the pounds melt off, but it’s a load.

2. Establish your base metabolism, and set a target calorie goal approx. 500 calories below it. I wrote an article dedicated to establishing your metabolism earlier, so look it up in the article archive if you need a refresher.

3. Keep an honest log. Make estimates of how many calories you stuff yourself with every meal and tally up the total to make sure you stay within your target calorie goal. Convenient “mistakes,” under-estimates and forgetfulness allows you to eat more now, but you’re defeating the whole point of dieting.

4. Actively choose good sources of fat. This may sound like stupid advice — shouldn’t you AVOID fat when dieting? Well, yes and no. You have to keep consuming some fat, just not going overboard. Avoid butter, bacon, whole milk, coconuts and such like the plague. Instead, make use of olive oil (virgin) and fatty fish. Peanut butter is an interesting topic. I used to put it in the same category as the “bad” fats. It belongs there, packing saturated fat as well as artery-clogging trans fatty acids. However, based on highly unscientific testimonies by others as well as personal experience, it seems like a handful of peanuts once in a while when dieting can do wonders in keeping energy levels up while not wreaking havoc with your overall diet. Strange and illogical? You betcha. But it just so happens to work anyway, kind of like bumblebees flying though they technically shouldn’t be able to.

5. Eat small but frequent meals throughout the day. You’ve heard it a million times, I’m sure, but facts remain: In order to keep an even level of blood sugar, you have to eat small, balanced meals.

6. Don’t go wimpy on the weight training. When you diet, you’re in the danger zone for losing muscle mass most of the time. To avoid this, keeping pumping iron, and be diligent about it!

7. Avoid alcohol. Given that barbeque-season is upon us, this can be tough when your friends bring out the ice-cold brewskis. The solution is simple: Only associate with other bodybuilders, so you at least won’t be the lone dweeb sipping a diet soda! For those of you who have the ridiculous idea that your life should not revolve around bodybuilding: Snap out of it.

8. Do cardio in moderation. Doing 45 mins on the stairmaster every day is a great way to get the pounds off quicker. 2 hours is not so great, since you’re bound to start losing muscle mass. When and how much is individual (and depending on what you’ve had to eat earlier in the day) but avoid cardio sessions in excess of 1 hour. If you need the punishment do one session in the morning and one in the evening. Also remember to stay in the 65%-70% heart rate zone for optimal fat burn.

9. Schedule “cheating” days to stay sane. Dieting is no fun. No matter how gung-ho and motivated you are when you start out, you’ll have days when everything is darkness and the world is out to get you. Make sure to get a treat once a week on a set day (Saturday is good) as it gives you something to look forward to. A juicy burger is fatty and calorie-dense, but if you prepare by doing extra cardio for three days in advance you’ll come in right on target for the week.

10. Don’t be afraid of soy. I used to avoid fake-meat products, but having been married to a vegetarian for 3+ years I’ve tried soy hot dogs, burgers, chicken patties, even riblets that taste just like the real thing. And here’s the kicker: Soy products is mostly protein! Granted, soy protein is not the highest quality out there, but if you drink a glass of milk or have some other high-quality protein source with it you can bump up the overall quality in a hurry. Besides, soy has a number of great health benefits when eaten in moderation and contains very little fat.

Naveen Kumar is the author related to www.terepharmacy.com For Purchasing please visit www.terepharmacy.com/ (TerePharmacy.com No1 for Deca Durabolin, Sustanon, Dianbol, Anadrol and Viagra) Web Site = www.terepharmacy.com

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Stop Sabotaging Your Diet

By Laura Pueschel

When you’re getting ready to start a new diet do you already feel doomed to fail? Are you saying to yourself, “Okay, I’ll give this diet a shot, but it probably won’t work either”? There are many reasons that a lot of diets don’t work, or work for awhile and then you start putting the weight back on. Here are some things you can do about it.

1 Stop saying “I’m on a diet”.

Doesn’t just the thought of being on a diet make you feel deprived? And besides, unless you’re one of those people who need to drop 5 pounds quickly to fit into that outfit for the reunion, you’re looking for a long term solution. You want a way to take the weight off and keep it off. When you say “I’m on a diet”, that suggests that some day you’ll be “off” the diet and go back to eating the way you used to, which is when the weight you’ve worked so hard to lose will come back. Tell yourself you have a new eating plan, and get excited about all the new healthy foods you get to enjoy.

2 Don’t expect perfection.

There will be days when you’re really motivated and do everything right, exercise, eat the right food at the right time, everything perfect. And then there will be most days, when you don’t make the time to exercise, eat some-thing really fattening, or both. The important thing to remember is not to beat yourself up over it. You’re going to have good days and bad days, and many days in between. Just don’t give up. What’s important is that you keep working toward your goal.

3 Don’t set your goals too high.

So, you want to lose 100 pounds to get to your ideal weight . If you focus on that one number you’ll get intimidated before you even start. Instead, break it up into manageable 10 pound goals and find a way to celebrate each milestone, it will help keep you motivated.

4 Don’t expect instant results.

You’ll see ads everywhere promising “lose 14 lbs. in 7 days”, or “drop 10 lbs. by next week”. Don’t believe it. Try them if you must, but remember these “fads” only work for the short term, the weight will come right back on as soon as you stop. Think about how long it took you to put on the weight you want to lose, and then give yourself a break.

What you need to remember is that weight loss is a process that is ongoing. You learn along the way what works for you and what you need to do to stay at your goal weight once you reach it. Just don’t give up.

Laura Pueschel writes about healthy weight loss and sensible fitness for http://www.advantageweightloss.com

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