Walking to Lose Weight

December 25, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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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Weight Loss Scams Revealed

December 25, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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 www.gainbackyourlife-eft.com

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Gradual Change of the Weight Watchers Diet

December 24, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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 www.eweightlossblog.com, or you can find great health tips and diet tips here at www.ihealthblog.com

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Journaling Your Way To Weight-Loss

December 24, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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: www.heavylettuce.com, email: Johnny@heavylettuce.com

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12 Tips For Faster Fat Loss Now

December 23, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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

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

December 23, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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.

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Weight Loss and the Glycemic Index

December 22, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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 www.nodiet4me.blogspot.com. You can find more information on a weight loss program using the glycemic index at diet.free-business-hosting.com.

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6 Tips to Maintain Weight Loss

December 22, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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 www.scrapping-made-simple.com

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

December 22, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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 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

December 21, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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

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The Good and the Bad of the Atkins Diet

December 21, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

By Shauna Hanus

Here is a break down of the Atkins diet, via three good points to the Atkins diet and three bad points of the Atkins diet.

The Atkins diet three good points.

1. The Atkins diet burns fat. When you begin the Atkins diet your body is switching from burning carbs for energy to burning ketones which come from fat for energy. The Atkins diet is designed to do this so your body becomes a fat burning machine.

Conventional diets use the concept of eat fewer calories than you use in a day which causes your body to burn fat reserves. The Atkins diet approach burns fat quicker because you take in less carbs and your body is forced into burning ketones.

2. You are not hungry on the Atkins diet. The Atkins diet has you eating your main source of protein from meats at each meal. By utilizing meat as your main source of protein your body feels full longer. Meat takes longer to digest which keeps you feeling full longer.

3. The Atkins diet has health benefits. In studies the Atkins diet has been shown in some people to reduce cholesterol, triglycerides and blood pressure. Also the Atkins diet may help to relieve the symptoms of acid reflux, diabetes and sleep apnea.

The Atkins diet three bad points.

1. The Atkins diet burns fat fast. Toxins that have built up in your body and stored in fat cells may be burned off too fast when you first begin the Atkins diet.

2. You may feel tired on the Atkins diet. When your body switches its fuel source from carbs to ketones in the first few days of the Atkins diet you may feel some form of fatigue. The tired feeling should begin to settle out as your body begins to adjust to the Atkins diet.

3. You eat fewer vegetables on the Atkins diet. The Atkins diet promotes more meat and fewer vegetables. Vegetables are an important source of minerals, fiber and calcium. When your body shifts to the Atkins diet you may suffer a loss in vegetable intake.

After you read the three good points of the Atkins diet and the three bad points of the Atkins diet it is up to you and your doctor to decide if the Atkins diet is the best choice for you.

Shauna Hanus is a work at home mother that discovered after having children she had gone from a slender size 8 to a size 16. Once she decided to do something about her weight she began to tell others what she has learned. Shauna’s site www.buydietfood.com is dedicated to real people who want to lose weight and lead a healthy life style. Shauna offers tips on weight loss, healthy diets and guides you through selecting a diet that will work for you. Visit www.buydietfood.com to see how you can start leading a healthy active life today.

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Schizophrenia Treatments

December 20, 2006 by  
Filed under SCHIZOPHRENIA

By Elizabeth Morgan

Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain, the cause of which is not known. The exact problem in the brain is only partially understood. In this condition a physical ailment creates a serious mental problem. The treatment is aimed at reducing the symptoms and managing the disease.

A person suffering from schizophrenia thinks that he is a special person, a cut above the rest, and so everyone is trying to do him in. He or she suffers from hallucinations and delusions. His thought process is disorderly and becomes far removed from reality.

Anti-psychotic drugs have been used for quite some time and are the first line of treatment for schizophrenia. The early drugs, like clozapine, were as effective as the newer ones. But their side effects were more severe than the newer drugs like risperidone and olanzapine. There are many more drugs under development. These drugs are very effective in preventing hallucinations and delusions. When the symptoms disappear it is important that the drug is tapered down slowly, to prevent relapse. Later in the treatment of schizophrenia, anti-depressive, anti-anxiety and anti-convulsive medications may be necessary to treat other symptoms, like bipolar mania and the side effects of the primary treatment.

Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) is a treatment given by highly trained health professionals. It is given under general anesthesia and muscle relaxants. It does not cause pain or cause the body to convulse. The shock given in the brain causes a seizure in the brain. Though the exact mode of the cure is not known, it is believed that the electrochemical changes that the shock creates help the patient.

Medication for schizophrenia is normally supported by psychotherapy. Proper psychiatric care, family support and group therapy are some of the treatment options that are very effective. Researchers are still working to find the root cause of Schizophrenia. Possible causes include bad genes, as the disease tends to run in families. The National Institute of Mental Health is sponsoring drugs that may able to cure schizophrenia, not just control symptoms.

Schizophrenia provides detailed information on Schizophrenia, Types Of Schizophrenia, Symptoms Of Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia Treatments and more. Schizophrenia is affiliated with Side Effects Of Antidepressants.

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If Diets and Weight Loss Programs Leave You Cold – Start Your Own!

December 20, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

By Donovan Baldwin

Anything that I write on the subject of weight loss has GOT to include facts. Not supposition. Not opinion. Not argument. Not pie-in-the sky. None of that. I said “facts”, and I am talking about proven facts on the subject of diets and weight loss.

Fact #1: Diets are not a permanent weight loss solution.

Fact #2: Even a “good” diet is usually mis-handled. (Okay, one opinion.)

Fact #3: You won’t get there without exercise.

Fact #4: In place of a “diet” you need to substitute good nutrition.

Fact #5: Almost everything else is a helper or a hindrance.

Fact #6: You need your own weight loss program, not somebody else’s.

A DIET IS NOT A PERMANENT WEIGHT LOSS SOLUTION

It is well documented that dieting, that is removing certain things from you normal list of foods you eat or eating only certain foods, does not work as a permanent weight loss solution. The explanation of this could be the subject of a book itself, but to make it short, you get bored, it’s hard to stay on the diet, dieting produces changes in your body that encourage weight gain, you lose energy, it just isn’t fun and so on. Pick any diet you want. Are you prepared to spend the rest of your life eating that way? Probably not. The only real solution to a lifetime problem is a change in lifestyle and behavior.

DIETS ARE COMMONLY MISUNDERSTOOD AND MISHANDLED

Here’s a classic example: The Atkins diet! Ask almost anybody you know what the Atkins diet is, and they will say it’s a diet that lets you eat lots of things like steak, bacon…you know, the fun stuff, without worrying about those nasty old veggies and carbohydrates. That’s why it’s called “low carbohydrate”, right? Shows how far most people read. A few pages into the Atkins diet plan, you learn that eating like that is only supposed to be done for about the first two weeks, to shift your body into the proper mode for the next three phases. In each of those phases, Dr. Atkins actually instructed people to begin adding certain foods, including carbohydrates, back in because it is not healthy to remain on a straight diet of chicken-fried steak or whatever for the rest of your life.

Just to drive the point home, I have a friend who went on the Atkins diet over two years ago. After a couple of years, he was still eating the from the list of foods that were recommended for the first two weeks! He lost weight at first, he’s gaining it back now, and then some, and has no idea why the Atkins diet doesn’t work any more.

It’s interesting to note that the Atkins diet, and almost any other weight loss program, diet drink, diet pill, fitness coach, you name it, includes exercise as being important to their product being effective.

YOU HAVE GOT TO EXERCISE FOR WEIGHT LOSS

In fact, many people could lose most of the weight they need to lose just by getting into the right exercise program and staying with it! That’s half the problem. Our bodies are designed by Mother Nature to DO THINGS! Clicking the remote doesn’t count. Again, this topic is broader than the scope of this article, but the facts are that if you want to improve your overall health, defeat or at least delay dozens of mental and physical conditions, get more enjoyment out of life, live longer, live better, AND lose weight, you need to exercise.

The basic rule of weight loss and weight gain is that if you eat more calories than you burn you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you burn, you lose weight. That simple.

For most people it really seems simple. If they eat less, they will lose weight!

IN PLACE OF A DIET YOU NEED TO SUBSTITUTE GOOD NUTRITION

As pointed out above, simply cutting foods out of your diet is not the answer. However, the solution is simple – just eat sensibly. Nobody ever said you can’t eat chocolate cake, just that you shouldn’t eat two or three pieces a day, and the piece you DO eat should be a normal size. We all have at least a vague idea of what foods we SHOULD be eating, and we have a good idea of what we shouldn’t be eating, or at least eating a lot of. This is an active process. Most people drive up to the window and say, “Give me your 99 cent greaseburger and a cup of water with sugar.” When asked if they want to “supersize” it, they agree. Even the good restaurants serve a lot more food than it is healthy to eat, but most people go ahead and eat it anyway because they have no idea of how much they should be eating, because it tastes so good, or because they were taught to clean their plates.

DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE FRILLS

You see a lot of diet and weight loss products that claim that they have found THE SOLUTION to your weight loss problem. Hardly anybody gets overfat (Arnold Schwarzenegger is “overweight”) because of one single thing. Mostly, it will occur over a period of time because of a combination of factors. While nutrition and exercise are two of the absolute MOST important factors, simply changing one without the other doesn’t work as well as putting both into action. Little things like an electric exercise belt, a pill made out of grapefruit, or a secret drink from Tahiti might help your weight loss program, but if you aren’t already doing the two most important things, don’t expect to see much in the way of results. That’s why so many of these diet and weight loss products have a remark on the label that says something like “…when used in conjunction with a proper diet and regular exercise.”

There is good scientific evidence that things like cortisol and caffeine can influence weight gain and weight loss, for example, but if you were to try to control your weight over a lifetime by controlling these factors, you probably would not notice any real results. If, however, you were to begin eating sensibly and getting more exercise, taking cortisol blockers or cutting caffeine out of your diet MIGHT contribute a few extra pounds of weight loss, but it is weight you will probably lose eventually if you stay on your weight loss program.

YOUR WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM, THAT’S THE GOAL

You are not your brother, your sister, or your mother no matter how closely you are tied to them genetically. What works for one of them might not be what you need. While there is scientific fact to back up the exercise equations outlined above each person is going to react in their own unique way. You need to exercise, but maybe not as much as your friend. You need to eat less chocolate ice cream, but maybe you can’t eat as much as your friend does. You need to make any weight loss program work for you by designing it around you. Do the exercises you like to do, just make sure you are doing enough. What’s enough? Well, you will have to experiment and see. Eat the foods you like, just eat them in sensible quantities and eat primarily foods that have a lot of real nutrition in them. What foods? Again, you will have to find your way, probably by trial and error, although there are many excellent books to give you guidance.

Speaking of goals, your goal is to be healthy and happy. Wanting to weigh a given weight because somebody else weighs that amount is senseless. You shouldn’t even be trying to weigh what you weighed in high school, because, physically speaking, that was a different person. He or she was someone with a different metabolism, lifestyle, and tastes. Concentrate on getting your exercise and eating properly and let your body figure out how much it needs to weigh.

Trying to tailor a weight loss program on someone else’s results is just asking for trouble as far as weight loss is concerned. They may be able to run faster than you. They may have a higher metabolic rate than you. They may have a different bone structure. They may have fewer obstacles than you. Let’s face it, somebody like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can have the best equipment, the finest personal trainer, and can make the opportunity to sculpt a beautiful body. Plus they have the incentive of knowing that their multimillion dollar salaries depend on their maintaining the basic equipment their genetic makeup endowed them with. You and I have an old set of barbells, a cracked sidewalk, sneakers that are falling apart, live paycheck to paycheck, and the kids are going to be home in two hours. You and I are not going to look like Brad, Angelina, or Arnold. Just do the best you can with what you’ve got, and you will not regret the outcome, trust me.

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. After retiring from the U. S. Army in 1995, he became interested in internet marketing and developed various online businesses. He has been writing poetry, articles, and essays for over 40 years, and now frequently publishes articles on his own websites and for use by other webmasters. He has a blog on the subjects of health, fitness, diet, and weight loss at nodiet4me.com/ and a website on the subject of weight loss at nodiet4me.com

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10 Weight Loss Tips

December 20, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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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Christian Faith, Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia; Part Two

December 19, 2006 by  
Filed under SCHIZOPHRENIA

By Matthew Robert Payne

If you have read part one you have already ready read five pages of the things I had to write about tonight. I am not sure how other people write. I write from the heart, and so I do not do a lot of study, even when I write a teaching from the scriptures, I write and use scriptures that I know. I’d like to think in my articles I would say the same things if I was speaking to you face to face.

My life keeps me quite lonely. I am happy to say I have made a couple of friends through my articles, one Bipolar man overseas that might collaborate on designing a website with me, and another Bipolar girl in my own city who is going to become a café latte coffee friend and someone to chat to on the phone. Both were touched by my articles and so for fellow Bipolars and the people who love them I spend another night up typing.

So how do I write five pages without editing except for my proofreader?

Just like this. I sit down and start speaking by using my hands on a keyboard. I have a radio playing favourite hits from the last 20 years and my brain clicking and thoughts tumbling out and putting sentences together and they come out onto the screen at roughly 25 words a minute. I am hopeless at spelling and grammar and not even spell-check can fix my problems, but my proofreader can do wonders with what I write. Perhaps if you have not any confidence in your writing you might find yourself a proofreader and put something down on paper. I am so pleased to have my proofreader. He is a good friend and he loves to read what I have to write and guess what? He is Bipolar also!! Lol

When you live with a living God and you know that God sees everything you are doing and you have been loved by Him like I have, then you have confidence to share your warts and all truth. When you have no fear of truth coming out, you can simply sit down and write from the heart. When you write the truth from your heart, on many occasions the Holy Spirit can use what you have written. Many times in conversation with people, they say, “that’s amazing that you are saying that, I was only reading that yesterday and wanted to know the answer to that and look tonight you have told me.”

When you write from the heart, rather then write from much study, so much more is left up to pure inspiration and with inspiration the Holy Spirit gets a chance to place sentences into your mind. When you’re crafting a sentence the same can be true but it comes more from your mind then from your spirit. Writing from your heart and speaking from your heart is speaking from where your spirit resides. And there the first page is gone already!

Writing a warning from God to a nation.

When Jesus told me to write to the nation of the USA with a last day’s message it was around 12.30am in the morning. Little did I know it would be forty five pages long!

As they only allow a maximum of five pages online here in each article it would have to go to nine articles. I have not yet done that and made it nine articles.

So what can you do when the Holy Spirit directs you to do something like that?

You obey.

I have only read it twice. I had a friend edit it a little for me, taking out some of my bias out of the message. I had it on a website and had 1500 read it and have only had 3 people write to me. I don’t know how many people read all of it but 1500 people in this last year since December 2005 have read it. I’d like to put it on another website one day and advertise it.

Am I mad to write a prophetic message from God? Well no. It took some guts to write it. Since I wrote it I have read a couple of confirmations of it. God is angry with the moral decay of the West and the lukewarm Christianity that exists today. He is angry with the half hearted Christian life that is a life of taking from Him rather then a life of full time service. He is upset with the average Christian not leading anyone to the faith and not even sharing their faith.

On sharing your faith, an excellent book and the very best book I have read is “Share Jesus without fear, by William Fay.”

As an evangelist/prophetic person I value when an evangelist speaks. William says close to 90% of conversions to the Christian faith come from one on one encounters with a Christian and another person. In his book he shares a tried and proven method of doing one on one Gospel presentations of which he has done 25,000 himself. He is more than qualified.

No one taught me to prophesy, no one taught me how to use my gift of prophecy to evangelise people, well that’s if you don’t call the Holy Spirit a person lol. Yes I have been many things simply through the Holy Spirit and when I prophesy to a person or to a whole nation isn’t that the self same Holy Spirit that must bring the message?

Being delivered from demons…having demons speak to you…having a demon pretend to be the Holy Spirit and tell you lies and direct you to do things that you assume are God telling you to do.

I suggest every person who knows a person gifted in deliverance get themselves checked out by that person. A person can be full of pride and not have a demon of pride, yet sometimes they do. Humility is the answer to pride but being humble is hard to be when you are full of pride. Even with a low self esteem I struggle with pride.

Having demons speak to you.

You cannot speak to another person on earth through telepathy. This may upset some of you who currently do so and this may even hurt you more, but I am going to say it. If you think you are currently speaking to a known celebrity or some famous person on earth, ask them for their mobile phone number and ring it right away. If they don’t give you the number, they are a demon pretending to be a human. This hurts to know, but its only when you are willing to give up your voice that you have hope of getting right with God.

Having a demon pretend to be the Holy Spirit and tell you lies and direct you to do things that you assume are God telling you to do.

When Jesus or God is speaking to you, in many cases it is NOT Jesus or God. On many occasions it is a false spirit.

On these occasions you can test the spirit according to 1 John 4:2 by asking, “Are you Jesus Christ who came to earth in the flesh and dwelt among men and died for their sins and on the third day came back to life?”

If the spirit answers yes, then you have Jesus and you can speak and trust the spirit. If you get no answer or anything but a yes don’t listen to the spirit. I have two people that have told me this, and this test is from 1 John in the Bible, and I trust it. So go ahead and test the spirits.

The false Jesus, or false Holy Spirit has got me into a lot of trouble. It has been the source of a lot of my delusions and my manic behaviour and many things that have got me in trouble with the law. I test the spirits these days before I go ahead. Satan is very upset that I am not having many two way conversations with Jesus these days as he is not getting the opportunity to deceive me.

Many Christians never really hear the clear voice of Jesus or the Holy Spirit yet Jesus says quite clearly in scripture, “My sheep hear my voice and they follow me.”

After reading this you may be all freaked out and wondering how on one hand I can write a prophecy or prophesy to a person in the flesh or over the Internet and on the other hand be so honest on how many times I have been deceived.

I know Christians who will never step out in the gift of prophecy simply because they do not want to get the false Jesus on the line. They are willing not to hear from Jesus all their life so that they won’t be deceived. Most people have no idea about testing the spirits.

Staying up for three days and three nights without sleep.

I try not to do this too often, but I have to say I do enjoy doing it. To be able to stay up for two days is a gift I have that my mental illness allows me to have. It forces me into a mania a “high”. After a day and a half I can get quite emotional.

Sometimes when I am on the phone to my mother and I start crying she is able to tell I am “High” and often asks if I have been sleeping. This is answered with the truth and it makes my mother worry.

To be able to stay up all this time, a person has to be busy doing something. You can’t just lay on a sofa and close your eyes and relax or you are soon asleep. You have to be able to be talking or writing or watching TV or something.

The longer I am up the more creative I am. Sometimes I spend a whole night up and I write five of my articles in a day and a half. Sometimes it’s taken me three hours to write part one and down to here in part two. It’s 3am in the morning and I will stay up all night and today and go to sleep tonight.

Jesus spent a lot of time up. Sometimes He went all day and all night up. The less sleep He had the more on fire He was because He had spent more time with His Father.

Sleeping for two days straight.

I used to fall into a major depression once a year and now it seems every few weeks I have a cycle where I simply can’t get out of bed. I sleep forever and even around 3pm in the afternoon when I get up, unless I am busy I end up going back to bed I am so tired.

Well three days like this and all the sleep pulls me into a depression. This is very hard on me. I have just suffered a whole week like it and it is very tiresome. This week I simply felt so overwhelmed and overtaken by my illness that I thought of giving up. My prayer life has suffered my Bible reading has suffered. The more I don’t pray and the more I don’t spend time in the Word the less spiritual strength I have to fight.

If you have a loved one who sleeps a lot. Please accept this is not because they are lazy. Right now I could be sleeping, but I am up trying to fight this depression and having a creative night that might do a few people some good.

Mental illness can be such a struggle. A few weeks ago everything seemed rosy in my life. This last week in depression has sent me on a bender. If I was a drunk I would have really picked up the bottle. I know Satan hates the fact that I have given up the sex workers and is trying to bury me, but I have bought myself some St Johns Wort and I know that if I have to fight this with chemicals within a few weeks St Johns Wort will be winning the battle.

I love Jesus so very much. All night He has been playing me songs on the radio and singing to me and encouraging me. So even though sometimes I get stuck in bed for days, I know when the Holy Spirit inspires me I can stay up all night and write something like this article, The Christian faith, Bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia.

Being so depressed you can’t even wash clothes, shower, shave or cook for yourself…

It’s been two days since I have showered, I have almost run out of clothes, I have a weeks growth on my cheeks. I have no food in the house save breakfast cereal of which I have been eating.

In the past week I have only been up at the most, six hours a day and at the beginning of the week it took of all my mental strength not to ring all of my appointments this week and cancel them all, I simply could not be bothered to keep them.

After I finish this I have promised myself I am going to treat myself to a shower and a shave and to change into my last pair of clean clothes. I have loaded the washing machine and when the time is right about 7am I am going to put the washer on and by the time my case worker comes at 10 am the clothes should be hung out to dry.

Depression just locks you down. It kind of just shuts down your system. And just when you need friends you sort of shut yourself up from your friends and close your self off to others. That’s if you have many friends anyway. I am fortunate that I need to be in touch with my proofreader as we speak at least a couple of times a week.

It hurts so much being depressed. But because the hurt can’t be measured some people just can’t seem to understand it. For a person that has had mental illness for fourteen years I thought it would take something pretty big to shake me. But I have to say this past week has given me a shake, that it’s only scripture and the promises in the Bible that keeps my faith strong.

But I have to share with you, I am really scared. The first 30 articles might be a lot more upbeat then this one. But I have to tell you the truth. Satan hates people. He wants us to kill ourselves if he can achieve it. I am past looking for ways to kill myself but depression really scares me.

Take the time to pray for me and others who suffer with these illnesses. I hope part one and two gave you some insight.

Matthew shares his heart in these articles and can be found at www.online-prayer.net You can read more of his articles at his link below.

If you want a copy of his upcoming book of articles which will have the first sixty of the articles on this web-site called “The Musings of a Mad Prophet” please contact Matthew via email so he can contact you around February 2007 to tell you of the progress of the book.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Matthew_Robert_Payne


The High Fiber Food Diet Secret

December 19, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

By Gary Gresham

High fiber food is not talked about much but definitely a secret to losing weight. Did you know that boosting your fiber intake actually helps you drop pounds?

High fiber food also has many other health benefits but most people don’t know about losing weight with fiber rich food.

Here is what a recent study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association discovered.

The main difference between “normal-weight” adults and their overweight counterparts was the amount of fiber they consumed.

Both groups had similar intakes of sugar, bread, dairy products and vegetables. But the normal-weight subjects consumed 33 percent more dietary fiber and 43 percent more complex carbohydrates each day (per 1,000 calories) than those who were overweight.

So why do you suppose high fiber food plays such a big role with weight loss?

First, high fiber foods are most often low in fat and calories. Also the body can’t break down fiber, so it runs right through your digestive tract and never has a chance to turn into fat.

But the biggest advantage of high fiber food is that it swells in your stomach and actually makes you have a full feeling. When you feel full, you’re less likely to eat or snack.

High fiber food also helps to stabilize blood sugar levels, preventing those peaks and valleys that can send you running to the refrigerator.

Most fiber rich foods like fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains also have a healthy dose of antioxidants that give you defenses against disease.

Millions of overweight people continually look for quick fixes and unnatural weight loss solutions. But most are usually disappointed with the roller coaster results.

That’s because many find it hard to believe that something as simple as incorporating high fiber food into your diet could actually help you lose weight.

But for those who are looking for long-term, healthy weight loss, high fiber food could be the beginning of their weight loss success story.

Copyright © 2006 Fat-Burning-Secret.com All Rights Reserved.

Gary Gresham is the author of “Fat Burning Secrets.” Discover simple yet powerful changes that can have a major effect on your weight loss results with this free report at: Free Fat Burning Report

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gary_Gresham


Stop Sabotaging Your Diet

December 19, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

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 www.advantageweightloss.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Laura_Pueschel


Schizophrenia

December 18, 2006 by  
Filed under SCHIZOPHRENIA

by Elizabeth Morgan

There are many mental disorders whose root cause is the psyche of the person, particularly traumas from early childhood. But schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder caused by a disabling brain illness. About one percent of Americans are afflicted with this problem at any given time. It does not make much difference with sex and age, but becomes most apparent when people reach their teens.

Though it is clear that a brain disorder is the root cause, there is no concluding proof as to exactly what is the problem. There is much encouraging research to pin down the problem. The National Institute of Mental Health suggests that the most probable cause could be linked to faulty neuron connections during the development of the child in the womb. It lies dormant until puberty, and the effect may become visible afterwards. Persons with schizophrenia lose touch with the real world. Their perception of people and events starts divorcing from the reality. Their hallucinations, delusions and the strange voices that they hear are very real to them. They delude themselves into believing that they are the victims of cheating, persecution or conspiracy. Generally they lose the capacity for logically carrying out their thought process, particularly when a lot of thoughts crowd in the brain. Their emotions are rather subdued, and expressions mostly blank. Contrary to popular thinking, the schizophrenia is no more violent than a normal person. But the tendency for suicide is higher with schizophrenia.

Not knowing the exact cause or the mechanism of schizophrenia, the treatment is mainly symptomatic. Based on clinical experience, a whole series of anti-psychotic medications are available to the physician. The drugs effectively reduce and sometimes eliminate the symptoms. But there is no complete cure. Anti-depression, anti-anxiety and anti-convulsive drugs have also proved effective. In a small number of acute schizophrenia patients Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) has proved very effective.

Though this is a brain disease and not a mental disorder, family support, social support and, more importantly, psychotherapy are other factors that can help the patient enormously. A lot of research has gone into getting to the root cause of the problem but a lot more still needs to be done. The efforts include genetic, brain and epidemiological studies.

Schizophrenia provides detailed information on Schizophrenia, Types Of Schizophrenia, Symptoms Of Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia Treatments and more. Schizophrenia is affiliated with Side Effects Of Antidepressants.

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Weight Conversion Scales

December 18, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

By Eric Morris

Weights and measures refer to legal units of measurement in different countries. The science of developing universally accepted weights and measures is called as metrology. The institution that implements the S.I. unit of measurement worldwide is The Bureau International Des Poids et measures (BIPM).

The SI unit of weight is the Kilo Gram (KG). The other conversion measures used in the world to measure weight are Carats, Grains, Grams, Ounces, Pounds, Slugs, stones, and Tons.

The Kilogram is the basic unit of mass. It is the mass of an international prototype in the form of a platinum-iridium cylinder kept at Sevres in France. It is now the only a basic unit still defines in terms of a material object and also the only one with a pre-fix, kilo already attached.

The U.S system of measurement is very similar to that of the U.K. Weight is measured in the following way-

437.5 grams=1 ounce

16 ounces= 1 pound

14 pounds=1stone

100 pounds=1 hundred weight (cwt)

20 cwt = 1 ton (2000 pounds)

The conversion scale is as follows: Kilogram=

Carats X .0002

Grain X .000 064

Gram X .001

Ounce X 0.028

Pounds X 0.453

Slugs X 14.593

Stones X 6.350

Tons X 1016.046

Tonnes X 1000

Conversion weight scales are adept at calculating the various values of a single weight reading in different weight measures. This helps in international, universal as well as precise readings of weight measures for various purposes including commercial, medical, sports and other uses.

The grain was the earliest unit of mass and was used to weigh silver and gold. The Pound was derived from The Mina used in early civilizations. Smaller unit was the Shekel and a larger unit the Talent. The Carat is a unit for measuring gemstones that had its origin in the Carob seed and was later standardized at 0.2 gram. When weighing of goods began, units of mass based on volume of grain or water were developed. The stone, Quarter and ton were large units used in Britain. But today only stone is used to measure

Personal body weight.

Today the market has many scales that have the function of weight conversion. Digital scales are available that can make readings for ounce, carats, grams, and pounds and are equivalent to several weighing machines rolled into one. An Acculab Vicon Digital Balance for instance weighs in oz., Lb, dwt, grains, Newton’s, carats, Taels plus user defined units.

Weight Scales provides detailed information on Baby Weight Scales, Best Weight Scales, Body Weight Scales, Digital Weight Scales and more. Weight Scales is affiliated with Digital Bathroom Scales.

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How To Find A Diet That Works

December 18, 2006 by  
Filed under OBESITY

By Vienna Miller

Losing weight can feel like an overwhelming task. But it’s not as hard as it seems – nor as complicated. Your weight loss can be fast and simple – if you choose the right diet or weight loss plan.

The problem today is not that we don’t know how to lose weight – but that we don’t know which method to choose. There are countless diets and weight loss plans out there – and many of them do work for some people. But not every diet will work for you. You don’t want to waste valuable time and energy on a diet that doesn’t work.

So how do you find a plan that will speed you towards your dream body? In order to find a diet that works best for you, look for these 3 factors:

#1 It Has A Proven History

If it worked for other people, the diet has a high probability of working for you too. Look for realistic sounding testimonials – which means they won’t sound perfect since they are written by real people. In general, the more testimonials the better.

It’s always more reliable when people are willing to give their full name on a testimonial however many people can be shy about this so don’t expect it.

Before and after pictures are always nice to have although again, not necessary since lesser known diets that work well may not have the money to sponsor a before and after weight loss contest.

#2 It Fits Your Personal Style

While many diets may work – they may not work for you because they don’t mesh with your personal style. Every person is different and has specific preferences, needs and experiences in the weight loss arena.

For example, if you don’t like eating meat or dairy products, choosing a low carb diet plan might not be your best option. If you’re always on the go and don’t have time to prepare meals you might want a plan where the meals are prepackaged and easy to prepare. If you cannot stand to feel hungry when losing weight, you might want to a plan that lets you eat several mini-meals throughout the day.

So before making your final choice, make sure it fits best with your personal style. I’ve seen people lose weight at lightning speed (and even enjoy the process) when they choose a diet based on their personal style.

#3 It Gets You Excited

One of the most underrated keys to success in any weight loss plan is enthusiasm. Too often the thought of losing weight takes on a negative connotation in our minds. You have to get excited about the diet – you have to believe in it and be motivated to commit your time to trying it.

When you don’t believe in the diet you don’t believe that it will help you lose weight – and what you believe you will eventually manifest.

Make sure the diet plan you choose gets you excited and enthusiastic. Perhaps it introduces a totally new concept you’ve never thought of before. Perhaps you’re salivating at the ultra-fast results it produces. Or even perhaps you can relate to the written testimonials. It doesn’t matter as long as it gets you enthusiastic and excited about your weight loss.

So those are 3 key factors that will help you find a diet that works. When deciding on a weight loss plan, keep these 3 factors in mind and you’re guaranteed to choose a diet that will work best for your body and give you incredible results!

Vienna Miller is a contributing writer to Diet Reviews – a website offering the latest diet reviews and weight loss plans that actually work.

For the latest weight loss tips and free diet articles visit www.freetobethin.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com/?expert=Vienna_Miller

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NOTE: The contents in this blog are for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment or a substitute for professional care. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health professional before making changes to any existing treatment or program. Some of the information presented in this blog may already be out of date.