Posts Tagged ‘weight loss tips’

My Top 10 Weight Loss Tips

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this artice it’s that I’d like you to keep it readily available as a quick reference. The 10 super quick weight loss tips, even though some are quite easy, could totally change your life for ever. Many times readers tell me how much they have benefited from them. I am certain you will too.

1. Drink Warm Water In The Morning

A warm cup of water first thing in the morning (and even better with a squeeze of lemon) goes right through the bowels and cleans mucus out from the day before. Drink another cup of warm water in the evening too.

2. Lubricate, Don’t Flood

Your stomach needs to be lubricated, not flooded. When you drink fluids with meals, you drown your digestive enzymes and only partial digestion takes place. Therefore, drink fluids, juices, or preferably water, 30 minutes away from meals – say 30 minutes before or after, but not during.

3. Chew Slowly

Chewing slowly until food becomes liquefied is one of my most important recommendations. Really savor each mouthful. Feel the texture and capture the flavor of your food. It’s when your saliva comes into contact with your food, as it is being chewed, that the digestive process begins. The chewed food will then pass easily through your digestive system with maximum nutrient uptake.

4 Eat When Calm

You physically can’t digest food properly if you are upset or have just had an argument. Eat when calm. Your digestion will be much better.

5. Not Too Hot – Not Too Cold

The temperature of food and drink entering your body affects the strength of your spleen, your energy battery, and other organs too. Ice-cold drinks weaken the organs. Eating piping hot foods that burn your palate aren’t much better, since they injure mouth membranes, damage gastric stomach lining, and degrade taste buds. Tepid or air temperature foods, drinks and water are best.

6. Decorate Your Plate

When you smell food, feast your eyes on it or even think about it, your brain spurs into action, sending a message to the salivary glands to secrete saliva which contains a digestive enzyme. So prepare attractive delicious meals to enhance your digestion.

7. Rotate Foods

Don’t eat the same foods every day. You don’t need too much of one single food and it can often lead to food allergies, sensitivities and intolerances. So instead eat a particular food just once every four days as opposed to every day. You’ll not only prevent allergies, but will also nourish your body with a broader array of varied nutrients.

8. Listen To Your Body

Take note of what foods you crave. If you really want a specific food – its color, the smell or the feel – just enjoy and go with the attractions. It may be that your body needs something nutritionally contained within that food. I’m not talking chocolate cookies here! I’m referring to all those fresh herbs, fruits, vegetables, seasonings, and so on that are readily available in any food shop or supermarket. Walk the produce aisle for fresh fruits and vegetables with an open mind and an open spirit. What looks good? What feels good? What smells good? Which foods look healthy and robust? Then make your choices. Try a food combining diet that explains which foods to eat together to improve weight loss.

9. Enzymes! Enzymes! Enzymes!

Sprouted seeds, raw vegetables, raw fruits, nuts and seeds are loaded with live enzymes, the key to nutrient absorption and vibrant health.

10. Break The Fast

Always eat something healthy and substantial for breakfast. This is the time period when your stomach energies are at their strongest, and your digestive enzyme juices are rearing to go. You will gradually weaken your stomach and digestive function if you skip breakfast. No matter how little it is, eat something decent. Fresh fruit, oatmeal, millet or quinoa porridge are all good morning choices.

Nutrition 101: A Lesson In Homeostasis

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Homeostasis and Healthy Weight Loss Tips

Have you ever stopped to wonder why you need food to survive? It might seem fairly obvious, but the complete explanation is exceedingly complicated. In essence, however, it all boils down to homeostasis, which is really just a fancy word for physiological balance, or equilibrium. The more steadfast and unfaltering our overall homeostasis, the better our state of health.

From the moment we are conceived until the moment we draw our last breath, our life represents a glorious and (temporarily) successful battle against the most lethal force in the universe: entropy, the tendency towards chaos. Our very existence as living organisms relies on a precariously maintained balance between interdependent systems and processes. Should even a tiny component of this bewildering array of life-sustaining functions be thrown off-kilter, it damages our health and jeopardizes our ability to offset future disturbances. You don’t need to understand all the intricate details of homeostasis in order to know how to lose weight fast, but knowing the basics will certaily help.

The human body can compensate for a wide variety of assaults to homeostasis. However, each time our body engages to combat an ongoing threat to our health, our physiological equilibrium shifts to a new, less stable set point. The more chronic battles we must fight, the more the balance of life tips toward chaos. Eventually, we run out of ammunition. When our body can no longer defend itself against disequilibrium, we lose the war against entropy and draw our last breath.

Conceptually, you can think of homeostasis like an old-fashioned scale. However, instead of a single beam from which two pans are suspended, there are millions of beams suspended from millions of other beams, like an infinitely complicated child’s mobile. Some of the beams are colossal; others are microscopic. And at both ends of every beam, regardless of its size or position, you will find a pair of pans.

Each time you add or subtract a weight from a pan on the scale of homeostasis, every single one of the millions of beams adjusts accordingly. While beams in closest proximity to the disturbance usually display the greatest movements, even the most remote beam will shift incrementally with the addition or removal of weight from any pan. To prevent pans from tipping, the scale requires a steady supply of both counterweights and a processing and distribution system for delivering the appropriate denominations of those counterweights to the areas where they are needed. In other words, to successfully maintain the complicated balancing act of homeostasis, the body requires a steady supply of both matter and energy. This is where food comes in.

To illustrate this point, let’s consider your muscles. To be firm and toned, your muscles need the elemental building blocks of tissue growth. Muscle toning also requires energy to deliver the building blocks to the muscles, energy to direct the building blocks to where they are needed within the muscle fibers, and energy to remove damaged tissue and metabolic waste products. Not to mention the huge amounts of energy demanded by the very muscle contractions that made your physique firm in the first place. Small wonder that your muscles represent such a metabolically active region of your body!

Although you are capable of using all three basic macronutrients – protein, carbohydrate, and fat – as caloric energy sources, carbohydrate is your body’s preferred fuel for muscle contraction (which is another reason why a low carb diet is not good for long term health and weight loss). However, only protein can provide the building blocks your body needs for muscle growth and repair. In fact, the structural integrity of virtually all human tissue, from muscles, tendons, and ligaments to skin, hair, and organs, relies on a protein framework. In the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, dietary protein is broken down into molecular subunits, known as amino acids, which can then be reassembled to create new proteins according to your body’s specific needs.

While it’s true that fat can also make a structural contribution, especially toward padding your hips, thighs, and belly, excess fat accumulation usually represents an unneeded and unwelcome contribution. However, eliminating dietary fat from your meal plan is absolutely, positively, one hundred percent counter-productive to eliminating stored fat.

When your diet lacks sufficient amounts of the right kinds of fat, stored fat becomes largely inaccessible as an energy source. I think that bears repeating: If you don’t eat fat, you won’t burn fat.

One of the keys to fat loss is knowing which fats to eat, and which fats to avoid. Indeed, there are several distinct types of fatty acid, the molecular subunit of fat, and each impacts human physiology and homeostasis differently. Knowing the difference between them can spell the difference between a flabby body and a firm physique, between clogged arteries and clear ones, and between chronic disease and extended longevity.

In addition to the three fundamental macronutrients, your body also requires a staggering array of micronutrients, including vitamins, minerals, and other trace elements. Micronutrient deficiencies can spell the demise of homeostasis, good health, and a firm physique.

Now that you have a basic understanding of why you need to eat in order to build a firm physique, I’d like to provide you with a better understanding of how you need to eat in order to hone your beautiful body. To put it simply, your success in the arena of physique firming is a direct reflection of your success in the battle against entropy (and disease). Like every other component of your physiology, good muscle health is inextricably linked to good health in general. And a diet that promotes a beautiful body and smooth skin is a diet that, by definition, also promotes optimal health. This is an extremely important point: Eating for a firm, youthful physique equals eating for optimal health, and vice versa.

The Lean Essentials:

  • Food provides matter and energy for maintaining physiological equilibrium or homeostasis.
  • The three basic macronutrients, protein, carbohydrate, and fat, can all be used as caloric energy sources.
  • Carbohydrate is your body’s preferred fuel for muscle contraction.
  • Only protein can provide the building blocks your body needs for muscle growth and repair.
  • You need to eat fat in order to burn fat.
  • Eating for a firm, youthful physique also means eating for optimal health.

How To Lose Weight and Gain Muscle At The Same Time

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

Thanks to some (very bad) science, for many years, the medical community clung to the idea that weight gain was a natural and largely unavoidable consequence of aging. This view was based on research data that showed that most adults get fatter as they get older. Unfortunately, the study failed to account for a number of very important variables, including physical activity, and following healthy weight loss tips. Subsequent re-search has indicated that people don’t really get fatter as a direct result of aging per se. They get fatter because, as they age, the vast majority of people become less active.

When researchers delved more deeply into the phenomenon of aging and weight gain, they discovered that most adults were not merely gaining body fat as they got older, they were also losing muscle mass. This fact alone has enormous bearing on why people tend to gain weight as they age.

Muscle is a very special tissue. In terms of metabolic activity, pound for pound, muscle tissue is second only to nervous (brain) tissue. In other words, it takes more calories to maintain a given volume of muscle tissue than the same volume of just about every other tissue in the entire human body. And because we possess many more pounds of muscle than any other tissue type, the vast majority of our daily caloric expenditure goes to using, repairing, and maintaining our muscles.

This is true even if you lead a relatively sedentary existence. In fact, if you are currently sedentary, very marginal increases in muscle activity can greatly enhance caloric expenditure and fat burning. And if you are currently active, very modest increases in muscle mass will accomplish the same goal. In other words, the more toned you are, the more fat you will burn. Don’t worry, you don’t have to spend hours at the gym lifting weights to reap the benefits of a revved metabolism; a little extra muscle goes a surprisingly long way.

Additionally, the more muscle you possess, the higher your resting metabolic rate, and the more calories you will burn over time even if you’re just lying around channel surfing. Of course, channel surfing is not the ideal way to accomplish muscle toning. The old adage “use it or lose it” is especially true when it comes to firm flesh. Adults who do not exercise regularly will typically lose between five and seven pounds of muscle mass every decade. To put this into perspective, a five-pound muscle loss translates to roughly 250 fewer calories burned each day. This can add up to over 25 pounds of fat gain in a single year.

How can you prevent this from happening to you? Simple! Adopt an exercise program designed to efficiently build and maintain adequate muscle to fuel around-the-clock fat burning. But is it really possible to add muscle while you shed body fat?

Intuitively, the idea seems to defy logic. After all, it takes an excess of calories to build tissue, and a caloric deficit to lose tissue. Right? Not entirely. Despite half a century of (good) science to the contrary, many people (including, unfortunately, many so-called weight loss experts) continue to view human metabolism like a bank account into which we deposit and withdraw calories like currency.

Weight Loss Tips – Recognizing Your Trigger Foods

The notion that you need to spend more calories than you consume in order to lose body fat is deceptive. Dozens of studies indicate that the appropriate dietary practices, coupled with regular exercise, will induce simultaneous muscle gain and fat loss – without counting calories. Physiologists are discovering that the quality of the calories you consume is far more important than the overall quantity. Likewise, the quality of the food is far more important than the food group to which it belongs. You will never have to sacrifice variety for good health, or good health for good looks. When it comes to nutrition, thankfully, they all go hand in hand.

Best Ways To Lose Weight

Friday, February 19th, 2010

What would you say if I told you that you could have a dramatically improved physique in just six weeks by following some healthy weight loss tips? What if I could guarantee that, 42 days from today, you will barely recognize your own reflection? Staring back from the depths of your bathroom mirror, picture someone with slimmer hips, firmer thighs, tighter buns, flatter abs, more denned arms, and clearer, younger-looking skin. And that familiar stranger will be smiling – and not just because you look great; you also feel great. Your energy will be higher than it’s been in years; your mood will be positive; you will be well rested and know you can handle whatever your busy life throws your way.

Heard it all before? Does it sound a little too good to be true? Do you have the uneasy feeling that deprivation, suffering, and cravings are lurking just around the corner? Maybe with some complicated calculations and impossibly involved recipes thrown in for good measure? If you aren’t a little skeptical, you really should be. The vast majority of today’s diet books, weight loss products, and exercise gadgets are nothing more than faddy gimmicks that contradict the basic machinery of human physiology and, as a result, are doomed to fail.

Well, with most diets that’s what you get – deprivation, cravings and starving. Rather than defy natural laws, a healthy weight loss program harnesses them. A healthy weight loss program is not a fad or a quick fix. It doesn’t call for the radical elimination of entire food groups or hours of tedious calisthenics. What you have is a simple, sustainable road map to the physique you’ve always dreamed of having, a weight loss diet that will give you rapid, dramatic results that you will begin to see and feel within the first week.

How can I be so sure that such a healthy weight loss diet will work for you?

Because a healthy diet is not about weight loss. It’s about regaining physiological stability so that your body performs like the finely tuned, fat-burning machine it was designed to be. Unlike most fashionable (read fad) weight loss plans, a well structured and healthy weight loss diet will not turn you into a smaller, flabbier, hungrier version of your former self. It will not leave you exhausted, depleted, and primed for renewed weight gain. On the contrary, this type of program will melt unwanted fat while it tones your muscles, leaving you sated, energetic, and lean.

You Are Not “Going On A Diet”

The vast majority of so-called diets cater to our penchant for quick fixes. But when it comes to healthy eating, there is no such thing as a magic bullet, not even green tea weight loss diets. Fad diets that eliminate entire food groups and starvation diets that severely restrict calories contradict the basic machinery of human physiology. In the long run, these approaches are doomed to fail.

Although severe caloric restriction may lead to initial weight loss, the very nature of such an approach precludes its long-term effectiveness. Weight loss by caloric restriction triggers hormonal modifications that our species evolved to survive times of famine. These physiological mechanisms involve metabolic slowing, muscle wasting, exaggerated fat retention, and changes in brain chemistry that contribute to the development of behaviors like binge eating. The preferential loss of lean tissue (muscle) over fat often results in a false sense of accomplishment. You do lose weight. However, the “new you” is merely a smaller, flabbier version of the old you. Once normal eating patterns resume, the weight rapidly returns, plus an added ten pounds. Why? Because the muscle you sacrificed during the period of forced starvation, combined with metabolic slowing, make it that much harder for your body to burn fat.

The Miracle Of Muscle

When it comes to having a firm, flab-free physique, have you ever noticed that many people are able to coast along on youth until they’re about 20 or 25 years old? After that, without at least minimal attention to diet and exercise, body composition begins to deteriorate. The untended human physique will get softer and flabbier with every passing year. In fact, for many years, the medical community subscribed to the belief that decreases in metabolic rate and subsequent weight gain were “natural” and “unavoidable” consequences of aging. Well, I can assure you that’s simply wrong!

The Many Health Benefits Of Losing Weight

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

After all the gloom and doom about the health implications of being overweight, you’re probably ready for some good news. If being overweight is bad for your health (and it is), then learning how to lose weight is the best cure.

According to the experts, a weight loss of as little as 5 to 10 per cent reduces an obese adult’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and arthritis. Overweight people already suffering from these conditions usually improve when they lose weight. Losing weight also reduces the incidence of a whole host of heart and lung disorders. If you’re wondering why you should lose weight, I can’t think of a better answer.

Other Problems Associated With Overweight

Even though health considerations are probably the strongest argument in favor of losing weight, being overweight can make your life difficult in many other ways. If staying healthy and preventing disease do not motivate you, maybe the aesthetic, social, emotional, and financial consequences of being overweight will give you the push you need.

Aesthetic

Especially in our society, an overweight image is not the “look we like”. The most attractive clothing is designed for slimmer folks. Even if you have given up on dressing in the latest fashion, it is hard to look your best when your clothes are either too tight or utterly shapeless to hide your form.

Social

Not looking your best has social consequences as well. First impressions count for a lot, and, like it or not, first impressions are usually visual ones. Whether you’re hoping for a date, a friend, a job offer, or just not to be the last one chosen for the Saturday football game, you’re at a disadvantage if you’re overweight. It may feel unfair, and it probably is, but that’s the way it’s been since primary school and the way it is now.

Plain and simple, there are strong social biases against fatties. Many people regard being overweight as a character flaw, a sign of slovenliness and lack of self-control.

Emotional

Many of the negative responses of others are shared by heavy people themselves.

Self-esteem and a positive self-image are harder to come by when you are overweight. Depression often accompanies weight problems, sometimes as cause and sometimes as a result. People who are depressed tend also to be physically inactive. It’s another one of those vicious circles.

Being more active can help lift depression just as it helps you to lose weight. Many of the body chemicals that influence mood are influenced in turn by physical exertion.

Doing some regular exercise can help boost your confidence when you are trying to lose weight. Exerting your body encourages the release of endorphins, or “happy hormones”, making you feel good about yourself.

Financial

Obesity makes a huge dent in the funds of the health service of more than $25 billion a year, or 6 to 8 per cent of the total health care budget, because of the many problems associated with being seriously overweight.

People who are overweight cost the health service more money for health care than people of normal weight. Overweight people suffer from higher rates of disease and more complications. They are also involved in more accidents that result in injury. They are hospitalized more often and tend to suffer more complications from surgery and other medical procedures. People who are overweight may also experience more difficulty in getting life insurance because of their high-risk status.

Those who are able to get insurance will often pay higher premiums.

If you are overweight you are more likely to have health replications that require treatment in hospital and suffer injuries m accidents. Recovery rates are also likely to be slower.

Learning how to lose weight fast can be hard work and often seem to hard or overpowering to even contemplate. But with these simple and healthy weight loss tips you should be able to start losing weight right away and see some very promising and encouraging results within a matter of days.

Weight Loss Tips – Understanding Blood Cholesterol Levels

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

Cholesterol is a fatty substance produced by the liver and present in some foods. In normal amounts, it is essential for many body processes, including producing hormones.

Having “high cholesterol” is not always caused by eating foods high in cholesterol, but there is no question that a diet full of fatty foods is a contributing factor. Genetics play a role, which is why “cholesterol problems” often run in families. Lack of exercise, smoking, and being overweight must take a lot of the blame, however. there is also a connection between high cholesterol levels and diabetes.

There are two important types of cholesterol: high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL). To keep it simple, HDL is “good” cholesterol, because it protects against atherosclerosis. LDL is “bad” cholesterol, because it leaves deposits on the artery walls. So it’s a good thing to have high HDL and low LDL.

Triglyceride is another fatty substance found in the blood as well as in some foods. Like LDL, high triglyceride levels are considered a bad thing. When the level of LDL and triglyceride in the blood is too high, the excess tends to be deposited on the inner walls of blood vessels. This narrows them, eventually resulting in atherosclerosis.

Cholesterol levels are measured by taking a sample of your blood, sometimes after you have not eaten for 12 hours or more. The results are usually reported as the total cholesterol level. Sometimes the levels of LDL, HDL, and triglycerides are also given separately, and a ratio of HDL to LDL is calculated.

Among the potentially life-threatening risks associated with high blood cholesterol are high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, and stroke.

Being overweight and having high cholesterol levels is another one of those vicious circles. According to the experts, every 10 per cent increase in weight increases cholesterol by 12 points. The more fat you consume, the more weight you gain; the more overweight you are, the higher your cholesterol.

Regular exercise is the way to break out of the circle. Exercise burns calories, helping you to use the food you eat as energy rather than store it as fat. It also lowers cholesterol levels.

Following a healthy weight loss diet is the other important aspect of improving your cholesterol count. But be careful which weight loss tips or diet you decide to follow – there’s a lot of incorrect, wrong and sometimes plain unhealthy information out there. Weight loss is big business, especially around holiday periods, so don’t be fooled by the latest weight loss supplements or products that claim to help you lose weight easily. Chances are they don’t work, and could affect your health. Stick with healthy eating and plenty of exercise and you’ll do very well.