Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself
Posted by
admin 6 December, 2008
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No one eats perfectly all the time, so don’t give up if you have a bad meal, a bad day, even a bad week. The same is true with exercise. There are going to be days when you may not feel like doing your A.M. cardio workout or lifting weights later. If that happens and you miss a day, don’t give up and tell yourself it’s hopeless. Just try to make progress the next day.
Once again, keep in mind that the first few weeks of anything new can be difficult. You’re trying to change a lifetime of habits, and it can’t be done in a single day. It’s crucial to look at your new fitness lifestyle as just that—a lifestyle. Trust that you are taking control of your life and changing it for the better. Look to the future with a sense of eagerness and excitement!
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Take Photos
Posted by
admin 6 December, 2008
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No matter how out of shape you think you are, take a “before” photo prior to beginning your workout regimen and additional snapshots every two weeks until you reach your goal. This practice can be nerve racking, but nothing beats it when it comes to keeping your mind on your goal. It provides a starting point and biweekly reminders of your progress. I find it difficult to notice improvements on a day-to-day basis, which wreaks havoc on my motivation. When I compare periodic photos and notice the benefits of my efforts, however, I feel much more satisfi ed and strengthen my resolve.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Make Fitness a Priority and Readjust Your Mind-Set
Posted by
admin 6 December, 2008
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Everyone complains about time limitations. People justify not working out or eating healthy by saying, “I don’t have time.” If this is the case, you have to make time.
It’s not that hard to do. Think of fitness as a priority, something that you must fit in, like going to work, eating, sleeping, or even using the bathroom. It should be that much of a staple. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. That’s a lot of time. What matters is how you fill those hours. Take a moment to list all of the things you’re doing now that you make time for and ask yourself how important they are to you and your happiness. Are they more important than improving your health and getting the body you want? More important than feeling better? When I used this simple technique, I couldn’t believe how many ridiculous, habitual things I was unknowingly filling my days with and putting ahead of my fitness pursuits.
Just write down your short-term and long-term goals as well as what you planned to do to accomplish them. Writing things down just makes them seem more real.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Best way to handle food cravings during the day
Posted by
admin 6 December, 2008
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- Have lots of crunchy vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots, around whenever you get that cheating feeling. Bulky, fibrous veggies are unbelievably filling and nutrient-dense, but they’re exceedingly low in calories.
- Keep sugar-free Jell-O on hand to avoid late-night binges. Jell-O is tasty, fun to eat, and almost devoid of calories. Splurging on the entire box adds only a minor 40 calories to your daily plan.
- Third trick involves sugar-free gum. Sometimes on long car rides or during very stressful days you just get the urge to chew something, even when you’re not necessarily hungry. At this time a stick of gum works wonders to get your mind off cheating.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Eat Foods in Combination at All Meals
Posted by
admin 2 December, 2008
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Combining protein, carbs, and fat at every meal slows down the absorption of food, which makes you less likely to gain weight.
Here’s why: fats and proteins both lower the glycemic index of carbs so we don’t get a big fat-producing insulin surge, which leads to weight gain. Fat especially slows down the absorption of anything combined with it. That’s why one nice trick is to put a little all-natural peanut butter—and I stress only all-natural peanut butter, which lists peanuts or peanuts and salt as the sole ingredients—on our bread or rice cakes and why adding a teaspoon of flaxseed oil to a protein drink or fat-free yogurt is a good idea. This way it takes our bodies a while to absorb these foods and the nutrients are parceled out over time.
As many of you may already have guessed, this technique also allows us to eat some of the higher GI foods without being limited to meal after meal of low GI carbs like oatmeal.
Adding fat to our protein or carbohydrate meals also gives us a greater feeling of fullness in our stomachs, so we feel more satisfied at the end of a meal. Fats and carbs eaten in combination with protein also have another benefit—they are “protein sparing.” When eaten in moderation, carbs and fat will be preferentially broken down by the body and used for energy so the body will be free to use the protein sources for more important activities, like muscle growth.
Now, as always, there’s a slight exception to the rule of avoiding the big carb-induced insulin surge: that’s immediately after a workout. After hitting the weights for an intense hour, our muscle cells are begging to refill their depleted energy, or glycogen, stores with nutrients. So after our workouts we can deliberately elicit that insulin surge by eating a meal of 50 to 80 grams of carbs—mixing both simple or highly processed carbs and lower glycemic carbs along with about 30 to 40 grams of easily absorbed protein, like whey protein. This is where one of those meal replacement drinks often comes in handy. But right after our workouts is really the only time we want to have that insulin spike and gorge our muscle cells with goodies.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Eat a High-Protein Diet
Posted by
admin 2 December, 2008
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If you’re trying to keep fat off and muscle on, eating protein is second to none. Proteins, like chicken breast and egg whites, build muscle and are the least likely nutrients to be converted to fat and increase fat stores. Protein will also help our fat-loss efforts because, as clinical studies have shown, it causes a greater increase in our metabolisms than any other macronutrient. In other words, the body burns a substantial amount of calories just in the process of breaking down protein. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, protein is also a very potent appetite suppressant. No need for those over-the-counter appetite control pills when we’re on a high-protein diet.
Now the big question is, how often and how much protein should we eat each day? Well, it’s a fact that muscles grow because of net protein synthesis, which is the difference between protein degradation and synthesis. In the average couch potato, this net difference is zero. He or she isn’t causing any muscle damage, so protein requirements are the same day in and day out. If we’re bodybuilding or weight training intensely and correctly, we should be causing a good deal of muscle fiber damage, and thus we need extra protein to repair this damage.
As to how much protein we need, some studies show that to elicit muscle growth beyond what we’d normally achieve, we need quite a bit more than the RDA of 70 or so grams. I personally make sure to get at least one gram per pound of my lean body weight. For example, if I weigh 200 pounds and have a body fat percentage of 5 percent, my lean body mass is 190 pounds, so I’d make sure to get at least 190 grams of protein, preferably more, each day divided among my six meals.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Watch Those Carbohydrates
Posted by
admin 2 December, 2008
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Unlike protein, which we now know dramatically decreases our cravings, carbohydrates, especially those simple carbs, have been shown to dramatically increase our appetites.
We experience a big blood-sugar surge when our meals are primarily carbohydrates and hardly any protein or fat. This rise in blood sugar often causes mood swings, and the subsequent rapid drop in blood sugar leads to a lethargic feeling that makes many high-carb eaters just want to take a nap. Even worse, when our body’s energy reserves or glycogen stores are filled with carbs, the majority of the extra blood sugar floating around just gets converted to body fat. Carbs are our bodies’ preferred fuel source. As long as we continue eating a lot of them, our bodies won’t tap into fat stores at all. Why should they? They have all those carbs floating around. Burning body fat for energy happens when blood sugar is low.
Eating a diet too high in carbs can also lead to that bloated appearance since excess carbs tend to cause water retention. That’s why some of the high-carb proponents have a sort of puffy look and aren’t as toned and defined as their diets would suggest.
Excess dietary carbohydrates can lead to a chronically high insulin level. That, in turn, can cause insulin resistance, high cortisol levels, and, possibly, type 2 diabetes. Cortisol is a catabolic hormone—it breaks down muscle and other tissues. It is the enemy of a lean body. Moreover, high insulin levels are antagonistic to testosterone and growth hormone production. Those two substances are the body’s best muscle-building hormones. That’s why I maintain that food is only as relevant as the hormonal and biochemical pathways it affects. If you stay on a high-carbohydrate diet, you can go to the gym, work harder, and still remain a whole lot fatter.
By the way, the reason for those cravings is an evil little hormone called neuropeptide y. It signals the brain to crave more carbohydrates, and high GI dietary carbohydrates trigger this devil. Protein and fats don’t. In other words, high GI carbohydrates signal the body to want more carbs.
So to keep your cravings in check and keep your body in the fat-burning zone, eat carbs in moderation. They constitute about 30 to 40 percent of my daily calorie intake. Eat enough to keep your glycogen stores loaded, and always eat them in combination with other foods.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Have Four to Six Small, Balanced Meals a Day— Every Day
Posted by
admin 2 December, 2008
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Eating four to six small, balanced meals a day, meaning every three to four hours, fights hunger and prevents you from cheating with fattening between-meal snacks. It also keeps your metabolism and energy levels high throughout the day. Our bodies are being trained to stay in a constant food burning mode with a steady but not overwhelming flow of nutrients.
With only two to three large meals a day, your body gets overwhelmed from the relatively large amount of food it takes in at one time. Whatever the body can’t use at the time gets stored as—you guessed it—fat. Remember, anything that is not used by our bodies for energy or excreted as waste will be stored as fat for use later.
Eating by the clock will take some discipline and it will require you to take some food to work. However, you’ll find it to be a simple adjustment, and your wallet will also thank you. Bringing some food from home is a heck of a lot cheaper than those saturated-fat, sugar-filled, and calorieladen fast-food lunches we’ve all fallen victim to. By simply eating four to six small, balanced meals a day, you’ll satiate your hunger, you won’t feel like you’re starving yourself, and you’ll be raising your metabolism so that you burn more fat than you ever thought possible.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
Thinking Positively
Posted by
admin 1 December, 2008
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The one common thread that ties the mental, physical, and nutritional aspects together when we’re trying to improve our fitness is thought—conscious thought, not acting on impulse or out of habit. Too many people, fall into the trap of just doing the same things day in and day out—I call it “sleepwalking” through life—and then complaining or finding excuses about why their bodies or lives aren’t better.
Bottom line: a large part of how you look and feel today is a sum total of what you’ve been doing up to this point, so if you don’t change what you’re doing, you’ll keep looking and feeling how you do right now. If you’re happy with how you are now, then that’s great; otherwise, it’s time to start taking control of your life and your body and stop sleepwalking. Think about everything you do each day—what you eat, how much activity you get, and so on—and start making changes for the better, no excuses.
One of the first changes I made was to start thinking positively. Believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything. You achieve what you believe. If you can’t envision yourself with a great body living a great life, you’ll probably never get there, but if you keep that image in your head every day and work hard to achieve it, you’ll probably be surprised by how quickly it turns into reality.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
VARY EXERCISE CHOICES
Posted by
admin 1 December, 2008
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To keep your body guessing and continue to stimulate growth, vary your exercise choices. As with anything done over time, our bodies and minds get used to certain workouts, causing us to reach a plateau where we stop seeing the same benefits from our exercise investments. That’s usually because both our bodies and minds have become bored with the routine. They’ve been through it day in and day out, they know what to expect, and they’ve adjusted. To avoid getting stuck in an exercise rut, keep things fresh both mentally and physically by mixing and matching different workouts. Changing workouts on a weekly or monthly basis really helps me maximize results.
Categories : Dieting, Men's Health, Tips and Advices, Women's Health
