Weight Loss And Exercise
A lot of us live our lives like penned animals. Built to move, too often we put ourselves in a cage. We have bodies designed for racing across the savannas, but we live a lifestyle designed for migrating from the bed to the breakfast table; to the car seat; to the office chair; to the restaurant booth; to the living room couch and back to the bed.
It was not always this way. Not long ago in the United States, a man who worked on a farm did the equivalent of 15 miles of jogging every day; and his wife did the equivalent of 7 miles of jogging.
Today, our daily obligations of work and home keep us tied to our chairs, and if we want exercise, we have to seek it out.
In fact, health experts insist the obesity problem is probably caused at least as much by lack of physical activity as by eating too much. Hence, it is important that people need to move around.
However, that does not mean that a lap or two around the old high school track will offset a daily dose of donuts. Exercise alone is not very efficient, experts say. They contend that if you just exercise and do not change your diet, you may be able to prevent weight gain or even lose a few pounds for a while.
Nevertheless, it is not something that you are likely to sustain unless exercise is part of an overall program. The more regularly you exercise, the easier it is to maintain your weight. Here is what to do every day to make sure that you get the exercise you need.
1. Get quality Zzzs.
Make sure that you get adequate sleep. Good sleep habits are conducive to exercise, experts point out. If you feel worn out during the day, you are less likely to get much physical activity during the day.
In addition, there is evidence that people who are tired tend to eat more, using food as a substance for the rest they need.
2. Walk the walk.
It is probably the easiest exercise program of all. In fact, it may be all you ever have to do, according to some professional advices of some health experts.
Gradually build up to at least 30 minutes of brisk walking five times a week. Brisk walks themselves have health and psychological benefits that are well worth the while.
3. Walk the treadmill.
When the weather is bad, you might not feel like going outdoors. But if you have a treadmill in the television room, you can catch up on your favorite shows while you are doing your daily good turn for your weight-maintenance plan.
Most of us watch television anyway, and indoor exercise equipment enables anyone to turn a sedentary activity into a healthy walk.
4. Seize the time.
Excuses aside, lack of time is certainly a limiting factor in most lifestyles. That is why health experts suggest a basic guideline for incorporating exercise into your schedule.
Get as much exercise as you can that feels good without letting it interfere with your work or family life. If you need to, remind yourself that you are preventing many health problems when you prevent weight gain; and keeping your health is a gift to your family as well as yourself.
4 Weight Loss Myths
It is important, when dealing with a highly charged and emotional subject such as weight loss, to assess the information that is out there and determine what is fact and what is fiction. There are many myths surrounding the weight loss industry, and they sure don’t help when you are looking to shed a few pounds. Here are 4 weight loss myths for you to avoid.
Myth: Snacking makes you gain weight.
Probably the exact opposite applies here. When you are trying to lose weight, eating several small meals during the course of a day can be a good thing. If you eat just a few large meals they can make you feel sleepy and lethargic after you eat, and you can feel hungry in between meals. Small and healthy meals and snacks help to keep your energy levels up, keep your body processing, and stop you from getting really hungry and then binging.
Myth: You can lose weight quickly and keep it off.
If you look around, it’s not hard to find many ads that tell you that you can lose, say, twenty pounds in a week. And maybe you can, but the chances are that it won’t be a healthy way to lose weight, and you can’t make many lifestyle changes in a week, if any, so the odds are you will put the weight right back on. Slow and steady wins the race regarding weight loss. Think of long lasting changes and good health in your eating habits.
Myth: Eating the same food will help you to lose weight.
There are plenty of diet programs on the market and you’ll find that a lot will recommend eating almost exclusively the one type of food. This is a bad idea which in the long run can have some very negative consequences. If you only eat one type of food, or from one food group, you are not giving your body what it needs. You may lose a lot of weight to start with but you might begin to have cravings and end up putting the weight back on through eating junk food.
Myth: You should skip meals.
Skipping meals will only throw your body into starvation mode and it will think there is no food around. This makes it even harder to lose weight because your metabolism will have slowed down. The most common meal to skip seems to be breakfast, but it is important to eat a good breakfast. After you have had a nights sleep, your body needs calories that will signal it to get going. This takes us back to myth number one, because instead of skipping meals, you should eat more frequent small meals and snacks.
Take a moment to think about what is best for your body and your desire to lose some weight. Take the practical approach and don’t try to starve yourself, don’t skip meals or lose weight quickly, and don’t try fad diets. If you eat healthy while decreasing your calories and increasing your activity level, you can make that weight loss a reality.
Your Weight Loss Goals For The New Decade
Hello everyone. Hope you are all doing well as the New Year gets under way. Here in the UK we have virtually come to a standstill because of the weather. The country is covered in snow and ice with no sign of a let up on the horizon. We are all freezing cold. Let’s hope it’s a bit better where you are.
Today, as a follow up to my post about New Year resolutions and the FREE special report, we have a guest post from Tom Venuto. Tom takes it on a stage, and instead of looking at the year ahead, he is looking a bit further. This is quite a lengthy post, so I will split it in two and publish the second part tomorrow.
Goal Setting For The New Decade: Beyond The New Year’s Resolution
By Tom Venuto
www.BurnTheFat.com
When you pause and reflect on the past decade as you look ahead to a new one, it makes you appreciate how short life is, how valuable time is and how quickly the time can pass you by – with nothing to show for it, if you don’t plan otherwise.
That’s why the passing of another decade can feel like a wakeup call as much as a fresh start: Looking at the technological wonders that surround us in 2010, I can’t help thinking it feels like science fiction.
In fact, modern technology is one of the reasons why some people have succeeded at body transformation while others have failed.
I’m still in awe of the web. The satellite navigation system in my car amazes me every time I drive. I can store a library of books in a device that fits in my pocket. It blows my mind that we can speak to each other face to face through the internet live on video. That’s straight from Star Trek! And those are just the everyday little things.
The cover story of the January 2010 National Geographic magazine is titled, “Merging Man and Machine” – it’s about bionic limbs. Richard Branson’s company, Virgin Galactic just unveiled spaceship two and is preparing to launch civilians into sub orbital space flights.
It’s the greatest time to be alive in all of human history! Unfortunately, today’s modern conveniences have brought a dark side upon us.
Rising obesity has paralleled the march of technology. The chair-bound, desk-job, computer, car, elevator, television based society of today is helping to make millions of people fat and lazy.
Our current way of life is less than a century old, yet our biology hasn’t changed in tens of thousands of years. Our bodies were designed to move and work, not sit and click.
We’ve become spoiled. Complacent. Dependent. And we are paying a price for it. We are fatter than ever before in all of human history. More than two thirds of Americans are now overweight. One third are obese.
People are dying because they‘re too fat.
Ironically, none of our new technology can solve our body fat problems. There’s no easy way. No pill. No machine. No drug. More knowledge isn’t going to help. We already have most of the answers. We know more about the human body than ever before. But it’s all academic.
The problem lies in the doing. You have to do the work – in the gym and in the kitchen. Hard work.
We are a quick fix society. It’s partly human nature, but technology is making us more impatient. We can have products delivered to us with one click and even do it from our cell phones. We have instant downloads, movies on demand, and drive through coffee shops. We get our food made and delivered in just minutes while we are sitting in our cars, and it’s still not quick enough. The internet is blazingly fast, but most people will abandon a web page in seconds if it hasn’t loaded. It’s no different with fat loss. We want six pack abs yesterday.
Simultaneously fighting the pull of human nature and the convenience of new technology is no easy task. But there is a solution: Future Orientation.
The most successful people in the world today are those who have a long term perspective. They plan 5-10 years in advance and beyond. They know how to enjoy and live in the present moment, but they take action and make decisions based on their future vision.
About the Author:
Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burnthefat.com
Organization As An Aid To Weight Loss
A disorganized person is always rushing and a person who is always rushing will tend to eat too fast. A person who eats too fast will tend to eat too much and a person who eats too much will tend to get fat.
Mess causes distress and that in turn causes people to eat too much. Are you beginning to see the picture of how having a well organized life will help you to maintain a more balanced and healthy body?
Many people resort to eating in the effort to handle stress and being disorganized is a surefire way of increasing levels of stress in your life.
Being organized will also ensure that you have the right food in your house and you don’t have to resort to low quality foods that you keep as a backup for those times when you run out of the nutritious food that you should be eating.
Being organized will also help you to eat at regular times throughout the day and by being regular with your eating it will help you to maintain more consistent blood sugar levels that will reduce the chance of you getting into low blood sugar and over eating to compensate.
By planning ahead with your meals you can plan to have better meals and you won’t need to resort to fast foods because you haven’t got any other food organized by the time you’re ready to eat.
By being organized and having a shopping list where you have determined in advance the right foods for your diet you will be less likely to buy food that you shouldn’t be buying when you go to the supermarket.
Organization is one of the keys to success in following any weight loss program. It also helps to reduce the amount of time that you have to think about food and think about losing weight and when that doesn’t become such a big focus in your life you are more likely to succeed.
Starting To Make The Changes.
The sooner you start on the path to reaching your weight loss goals the sooner you can enjoy all the benefits of better health and well-being from the reduction in body fat that you will be able to achieve.
If you have been considering a weight loss program for some time, or you have been on other weight loss programs in the past and have not succeeded to date, then today can be the day that you decide to change your way and give yourself improved health for the rest of your life.
Even the smallest change that you can make today will be the first step to a new you.
If nothing else, decide to drink enough water today to remain hydrated and accept that alone as your first step towards improving your health and reducing your weight to more acceptable levels where you can feel happy about your body.
The start of any weight loss program can be the smallest change in direction in your life. What is the most important factor is actually making that change and taking that first step.
Doing that today could be the breakthrough that you need to push yourself to better things.
Nobody even needs to know that you have started on a weight loss program because the change will be minimal and very often talking about doing something stops people from actually doing it. Energy can be wasted in words whereas action will change your life.
The fact that you are reading this information means that you have either taken action already or you are still anticipating taking the action that you know is needed. For your own health and well-being today is that day.
The quality of your life in the future can very well depend on the action that you take right now.
