Life Happens – Don’t Give Up On Your Health Goals

You’re on a roll. You’re eating healthy, you’re getting into a workout routine and the pounds are starting to melt off. Then life happens. You get sick, your schedule changes, you’re tempted by your favorite treat. The reason really doesn’t matter. The truth is that you fell off the wagon and ate some unhealthy food and didn’t make it to your weekly workout.

When stuff like that happens it’s easy to give up. A day of eating junk can turn into a week and then a month. A few days spent without going for a walk, a run or a trip to the gym turn into weeks. Don’t let that happen. When life happens – and it will –refuse to give up on your health goals.

The key is to get back into your routine as quickly as possible. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Instead, make it a priority to jump right back in. Get back to your healthy eating habits and get your body moving as soon as possible. Even if it’s just a little exercise here and there during a super busy time, make the effort to do what you can. Every little bit helps and every small step is a step in the right direction. 15 minutes at a time can make a big difference in the long run.

It helps to be prepared for potential pitfalls. For example, if you know things will get super busy at work and you won’t have time to head out for a healthy lunch or to go on your daily walk, make some plans the day before. Pack your lunch just in case you end up working through your lunch hour. At the very least you’ll still have a healthy meal.

Do little things to help you keep on track. Things like walking around during phone calls, a 15 minute mini- workout or a walk before work. Try doing some simple stretches before bed. Little things like this will add up and help you relieve some of the stress you’re under.

Keep some healthy snacks and plenty of water with you so you can make smart choices when hunger strikes. If time is precious and you just don’t have the extra hour or two to head to the gym or go for a walk, do little mini workouts throughout your day. Do some stretches, a few push-ups or walk over to a colleague’s desk instead of calling him.

Remember, every little bit counts and each step you take to a healthier you is a step in the right direction.

Set Yourself Up For Success – How To Stick To Your Weight Loss Goals

Setting weight loss goals is great, but the hard part is sticking to the plan and reaching your final goal. Today I want to share 8 tips with you that will set you up for success. Ready to learn how to stick to your weight loss goals? Here we go.

Use Visualization

Visualization is a powerful tool. Close your eyes and picture yourself at your ideal weight. How do you look? How does it feel? How will you feel being able to run around the park with the kids or climbing up those stairs without running out of breath? Paint a clear picture in your mind of the lean you. Make it a habit to visualize this slim and healthy version of yourself daily.

Create Accountability

Sometimes it’s just a little too easy to make bad choices. That chocolate cookie won’t hurt, and it’s not that big of a deal to skip a work out. Before you know it that whole plate of cookies is gone and you haven’t been out to walk for over a week. Accountability will help you keep on track. Find a friend who also wants to lose weight and hold each other accountable. Or ask a loved one to keep you straight. If this sounds a little too intimidating or just isn’t your thing, consider keeping a journal. Just knowing that you’ll have to write down that piece of cheesecake is enough motivation to pick an apple instead.

Make It Attainable

You want to push yourself, but you also want to make sure they are actually reachable. Setting a huge goal like losing 30 pounds can seem almost insurmountable. Instead, start with a smaller goal like losing 10 pounds over the next 2 months. Then set another 10 pound goal and repeat until you reach your weight goal.

Take Breaks

If you have attainable goals and some accountability in place, it’s ok to take a little break every once in a while. Take a break from your workout. In fact, except for low impact exercise like going for a walk, you don’t want to overdo it. 3 to 5 days at the gym is plenty. And it’s ok to have a piece of birthday cake on occasion. Just make sure you work on getting exercise and eating healthy 90% of the time.

Create Good Habits

Which brings us to another great tip. Use this time to work on creating healthy habits. Make going for that daily walk part of your new lifestyle. Make eating three healthy meals a family habit. Not only will it set you up for success now, those healthy habits will also help you keep the weight off long after you’ve reached your goal.

Celebrate

Losing weight is hard work. Don’t forget to celebrate each success. If you made it out for a 30 minute walk each day this week, celebrate with a mini movie marathon. Did you lose your first 15 pounds? Take yourself out to get your nails done or treat yourself to a cute new top. Reward yourself for each success and milestone reached.

Reaching Weight Loss Milestones – Don’t Forget To Celebrate Your Success

If you have more than just a few pounds to lose, it’s not going to happen overnight. It took a while to put on the extra weight, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that it will also take some time to take it back off. But that can seem a bit discouraging at times. One way to stay motivated is to set different little mini goals or weight loss milestones. Don’t forget that each time you reach a milestone you should celebrate your success and how far you’ve come on your weight loss journey.

When you set your milestones is entirely up to you. It partially depends on how much weight you have to lose. If you’re motivated by rewards, you may want to set plenty of little milestones along the way. It’s easier to make and meet smaller goals – like 1-3 lbs. The more realistic the goal the easier they are to reach, too.

Each pound lost is a success. Celebrating after every 5 pounds might be a good starting point. It’s a big enough goal that you have to really try to get there, but it won’t take you ages. You don’t want to have too much time between milestones so you don’t lose steam along the way.

I recommend you don’t use food as a reward. You don’t want to reinforce bad eating habits by using food as a reward. Instead, thing of other fun things. Get a new book, buy a new outfit, get a massage or buy some new makeup. Mani/pedi anyone? Even simple things like taking some time to just curl up on the couch with a cup of tea watching a movie can be a nice reward. Pick something that you want and that makes you work for that next weight loss milestone.

Another fun option is to make a poster similar to the ones used at fundraisers. Mark down each pound you lose and have it hanging up in your bedroom or bathroom. It will be a nice visual reminder of how well you’re doing and how much weight you’ve lost already.

Recording milestones and celebrating each one is a powerful motivator. Don’t be shy about sharing your success with others. Having your loved ones celebrate with you and cheer you on can be very helpful. Making your weight loss journey “public knowledge” also helps to hold you accountable. You’ll be even more motivated to keep going and stick with the program if you have to admit to your family that you’re giving up.

Keep going, stay motivated, set some milestones and celebrate your success.

Start Cooking Healthy Meals

If you want to change your diet and start losing weight/improving your shape, then often the best strategy is to start eating healthier meals.

And one of the best ways to do that is to start cooking more meals of your own. This way, you can know exactly what ingredients are going into your meals, you can choose to eat more vegetables and you can even save money.

But this where many people come stuck. Unfortunately, learning to cook isn’t all that easy and often the best laid plans end up going awry. Read on and we’ll see why that is and what you can do about it.

The Problem with Cookbooks

A good place many of us will start when trying to learn to cook is with a cookbook. This seems logical after all! Specifically, most of us will want to look for a cookbook that provides simple and quick meals, so we’ll gravitate towards things with titles like “15 Minute Meals.”

Often they promise to be affordable and simple as well as just being fast to make and put on the table.

But in all too many cases, that’s a little bit of wishful thinking. Either the writers are a little removed from the real world and don’t understand the limitations most of us have, or they just didn’t spend much time thinking the books through.

That’s why, very often, you’ll find that your recipe starts with “taking your chopped onion…”

As it happens, an onion doesn’t come chopped – and so leaving the chopping part out of the instructions is actually a little misleading. That just added 2 minutes to your preparation time – as does chopping the peppers, chopping the bacon and washing your chopping board and knife or clearing space.

Another similar problem is when the “simple ingredients” list calls for balsamic vinegar and then the very next recipe lists calls for apple cider vinegar. Cooking quickly gets expensive when you’re expected to buy different seasonings every time you make a meal!

If you have a small kitchen, you can then add struggling with space management and stacks of plates falling over to your list of troubles. We haven’t even touched on the fact that you have to divide the quantities and let loads go to waste if you’re living alone.

What sounds like a 15 minute meal is in fact a 45 minute meal at best that makes a lot of mess.

How to Make it Stick

So with all that in mind, how do you go about making your new diet plan stick? How do you fit cooking into your routine and learn some actually convenient meals that are still healthy?

One trick is to ask your mom for some recipes. She has most likely honed the art of cooking healthy meals quickly having raised you.

Another tip is to not divide the quantity and to instead freeze a lot of what you have left over.

Also don’t be afraid to experiment and to mix up the instructions. If you don’t feel like buying “a sprig of rosemary” then you can probably do without it. Either that or there are pre-packaged bottles of spices that you can use over and over again for a long time to come.

If you want to add some flavour, there are probably cheaper ingredients you can use that will last much longer.

Whenever you read the label and it says “quick recipe” make sure you add at least 20 minutes onto the prep time!

Running for Fitness and Fun

Running is one of the most basic and reliable ways to burn fat, improve fitness and generally enhance your health.

And if you’re currently reading articles on how to turn your fitness around and get into great shape, then running will often be recommended as the best place to start and as the easiest tool you can use. After all, it requires zero equipment and is something that anyone can do anywhere, any time.

Or at least that’s the theory. In reality though, running can be quite difficult to get into and it’s tough to convince yourself to start if you’ve never done any training before. This article will help to get you on the right (running) track with some key pointers that every new runner should know.

Good Shoes

This is perhaps one of the most important tips there is when it comes to running. The right shoes will make an absolute world of difference in the way you train and how well you manage to stick to a new running regime.

If you run without the right shoes, you’ll find it’s more tiring to keep going and that you end up with painful ankles, feet and knees in no time. Good shoes should cushion you through your run and even help you to travel further with less energy.

The right shoes will vary from person to person though and this depends on your gait as well as the shape of your foot. Some people do better with a minimalistic shoe, while others need something more structured. Head to a running shop then and try getting your gait measured so you can get the best recommendation.

Running Watch

They say you don’t need any equipment to get started with running and certainly a running watch isn’t an absolute requirement.

But that being said, a running watch will nevertheless make a gigantic difference to your enjoyment of running. That’s because it will let you run wherever you like while still getting an accurate measure of your distance, time and calories burned.

In turn, this means that you can explore and find new places but will also be able to challenge yourself to beat your best times and to keep on improving.

Without something like this, you’ll either have to run in a restricted manner to keep your distance the same, or you’ll be running without getting any feedback regarding your progress.

Start Slow

It’s very easy to get quickly disheartened with running as it doesn’t take long to feel out of breath or to start skipping sessions.

The key is to start out modestly and to try and enjoy running. Don’t head out to try and burn 1,000 calories – instead just take it slow, enjoy the scenery and don’t set yourself up with unrealistic expectations.

A casual jog through the woods is fun, relaxing and rewarding and it’s great being able to come home and load up your stats.

Once you find the fun in running, the weight loss will be easy!

Firing Up Your Metabolism

There are many factors involved in weight loss and actually your diet and your training are only one part of that.

While the IIFYM (If It Fits in Your Macros) crowd will tell us that the only thing that matters is calories, this is actually a drastic oversimplification. Try telling that to someone who has hypothyroidism, for instance, and you’ll likely get a slap.

Hypothyroidism is a condition that causes a change in the number of thyroid hormones T3 and T4. These regulate weight loss among other things and as a result, those who suffer from the condition end up gaining more weight than others while at the same time feeling more tired.

And the thing is, we all have differing hormonal balances. You don’t need to have hypothyroidism or another condition to be someone who finds it harder to shift weight.

Your metabolism has a big role in how your body reacts to training and dieting and so it’s important to make sure that it’s ticking away and you’re burning as many calories as possible throughout the day.

Unfortunately, several things can cause our metabolisms to slow down. Lack of activity is one, of course, but so too is age, weight gain and stress.

So how do you kick your metabolism back into gear?

Eat Breakfast

When you wake up in the morning after a long sleep, you’re in a fasted state with low blood sugar and you’ll be high in cortisol. In this state you’ll actually burn more calories and thus many people will try and maintain it as long as possible by not eating anything until lunch.

This is a mistake however, as this fasted state also slows down our metabolism. It’s not until you put some food in your system that your body wakes up and things start kicking in – you begin burning those calories for fuel, which in turn sends a signal to the brain that you’ve eaten and this perks you up and prevents you from snacking throughout the day. It also raises your metabolism.

Many experts including author Tim Ferriss recommend eating 30 grams of protein 30 seconds after waking up for the full effects.

Strength Training

If you’re trying to burn calories and all you’re doing is running, then you’re missing an important component. Lifting weights is actually fantastic for increasing your metabolism and especially when you use the big compound lifts like bench press, squat and deadlift. The reason for this is that using muscle requires a lot of energy and once you’ve built up your muscle, it takes energy just to maintain it.

HIIT

Also highly effective is “HIIT.” This is High Intensity Interval Training which essentially means alternating between periods of sprinting/high exertion and periods of relatively lesser activity like walking or jogging.

This combination puts you in an anaerobic state which uses up all the glucose in your blood stream and thereby puts your body in a fat burning mode throughout the rest of the day. This is sometimes called the “after-burn effect.”

Fat Loss Using Weightlifting

If you’re looking to lose weight, then you should absolutely consider taking up weightlifting.

Weightlifting is an activity that’s more often associated with building muscle than it is with burning fat but ask yourself: how many bodybuilders do you see who are overweight?

The truth is that weightlifting is actually one of the very best forms of exercise when it comes to losing weight and in many ways it’s actually better than running or even HIIT.

Why Weightlifting is Perfect for Losing Weight

In terms of the number of calories you’ll burn in a single workout, weightlifting is unfortunately inferior to running or other exercise. You can expect an hour of lifting weights to burn around 600 calories as opposed to about 1,000 calories for an hour of running.

But where weightlifting has the edge is in the way it encourages your body to burn fat continuously for the rest of the day. That’s because weightlifting breaks down muscle tissue which in turn requires repairing. This leads to the body releasing a number of anabolic hormones which are associated with building muscle and burning fat; things like testosterone, growth hormone and IGF1.

This process all requires energy and as a result, you’ll be burning more fat for a longer time after your session has ended.

What’s more, is that you’ll also burn much more fat while you’re sleeping once you’ve built up the muscle. This is because muscle also requires energy simply to maintain. The more muscular you are, the more you’ll be able to eat without gaining weight in the form of fat.

Better yet, building muscle will give you the kind of toned shape that you most likely are interested in getting. If you’re trying to get rid of cellulite for instance, then building muscle is going to be more effective at this than just dieting.

How to Get Started

But to burn the maximum amount of fat with your weight training, you’ll need to use it in the correct way.

The best way to do this is to use a whole body routine that will involve the maximum muscle fibre in each session. Likewise, you should aim to use the maximum amount of muscle fibre in each exercise.

This means that you should try to avoid those exercises that isolate a specific muscle group – such as bicep curls – and to instead aim for those that use lots of muscles in unison and mimic ‘real world’ movements. The best examples are the squat, the deadlift and the bench press.

Combine this with heavy weights and you’ll flood your body with anabolic hormones leading to heighted fat burning and toning. Of course you can also combine this training regime with additional CV to increase your short-term fat burning.

If you train using full body routines twice a week for example, that will leave you two days for running or other aerobic exercise. This is the perfect combination for all round body composition.

Diet and Training Boredom

One of the best and simplest ways to lose weight is to eat the exact same thing every single day. This way, you don’t have to count calories and you know you’ll never be making any mistakes. This is a fool-proof plan and as long as the caloric intake is low and your nutrition is ample, you’ll never need to worry about weight gain.

Or at least that’s the idea. In reality though, eating the same food very rarely results in success and this is due to one key issue: boredom.

If you are eating the exact same thing every day, then very quickly your diet will seem bland and uninspiring and you’ll end up wanting to give up. After a hard day in the office, coming home to the exact same boring salad is enough to make you want to go eat everything you see at a KFC.

Even if you have the intense mental discipline to stick with this for the first few months, you really need to ask yourself if it’s something you’re going to be able to stick with indefinitely. If the answer is no, then you should reconsider whether the diet you have chosen is really worth it.

Even if you do think you can stick at it, you should still do some soul searching. Eating is one of life’s real pleasures. Are you willing to completely give up all variation and fun in your food?

Training Boredom

The exact same also applies to your training. While sticking to the very same training program does work (despite some claims to the contrary) it’s also really boring. Doing the same exercises day in and day out is not fun at all and this is one reason so many people struggle to get into the gym.

And in both these scenarios, the lack of flexibility can also be a practical issue. What happens when your friends want to eat out? And what happens when someone is using the machine you need for your next exercise?

The Alternative

As mentioned though, there are also definite benefits to being a little more straightforward with your training and diet. Keeping things consistent removes a lot of the margin for error and the confounding variables.

So the trick is to find a compromise as the solution.

One way to do this might be to keep breakfast and lunch consistent (perhaps cycling through three options) but to be more creative with dinner. Another option might be to eat a diet that consists of several different allowed foods throughout each day. This might look like this:

Two eggs OR one can of tuna OR one cut of fish

Two oranges OR one banana OR a salad

And so on.

This approach also works well for your training and in that case you can write down a list of exercises for each body part and then just make sure you find a way to get some of each into your routine.

But actually, sometimes it’s fun to just hit the gym and do whatever you feel like. You’d be surprised by just how much benefit you can get from any training – so make it fun and make working out rewarding in itself!

4 Critical Mistakes to Avoid With Your Diet

The right diet is 50% what you do and 50% what you don’t do. In other words, it’s not enough just to cook healthy meals, you also need to make sure you’re not accidentally taking in calories from unknown sources.

This can make life a little bit difficult for anyone starting a new diet for the first time. You might be careful to follow each step just as you should but all the while find that you have a “leak” somewhere that prevents you from being as successful as you should be.

A successful diet then means finding and plugging those leaks and being careful not to make any accidental, devastating mistakes.

Here then, we shall look at some of the most common mistakes you need to avoid to ensure that you aren’t letting anything slip through the net.

Drinking Soda Drinks

When calculating calories a lot of us forget to count our drinks. This is a massive mistake, seeing as some drinks actually contain a ton of sugar and a ton of calories.

The worst culprit? Soda drinks. If you drink Coca-Cola, 7-Up, Red Bull or anything else on a regular basis, then you are adding potentially hundreds of calories into your diet by mistake. Suddenly it makes sense why you aren’t losing the weight, right?

Other common drinks that it’s easy to forget that add calories are tea with sugar or creamy coffees like cappuccino’s and latte’s.

Not Eating Enough

This might sound counterintuitive but actually not eating enough can also be a big mistake when you’re trying to diet. Basically, many people accidentally go too extreme while trying to lose weight and this leads them to end up with zero energy for training.

Likewise, restricting your diet too much might result in your being malnourished or not getting those all-important satiety cues from your body.

Going Overboard on Cheat Days

A lot of diets recommend having a cheat day in order to avoid your body adapting to the relatively low calories and to prevent yourself from going insane with hunger and boredom.

While this is a good idea, you shouldn’t take it as a free license to consume gigantic amounts of cake as that will only add thousands of calories to your diet and make it harder to lose weight. A cheat day means relaxing your diet a little – not turning into Bruce Bogtrotter from Matilda and eating handfuls of chocolate cake…

Not Sleeping Enough

There are many additional factors involved in improving your health and losing weight that don’t seem to relate directly to how much you eat. Sleep is one such example.

You actually burn an awful lot of calories when you sleep and you produce extra testosterone, growth hormone and other anabolic hormones that help you lose weight.

What’s more, being sleepy will increase your appetite thereby causing you to snack more throughout the day. Studies show that not getting enough sleep correlates with weight gain – so start prioritizing it!

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These Fruits and Vegetables Are Linked to Weight Loss

Not only are they healthy but they are often delicious as well and I’m obviously talking about red fruits because it so happens that a new study shows once again that:

 
Deep red produce is associated with the most weight loss

It may not feel like news when scientists uncover more evidence that fruits and vegetables are healthy. But Americans seem to need every shred of science to convince them to eat them. Despite reams of research backing up a plant-heavy diet for overall health and for a healthy weight, fewer than one in five adults eat enough of them, according to recent federal data.

In a study published today in The BMJ, researchers found that one little-understood group of compounds—flavonoids—might be partly responsible for the weight-loss power of produce. The researchers looked at up to 24 years’ worth of data from 124,000 people in the U.S. The people in the data set, who were ages 27 to 65, had reported their weight every two years and their diet every four years between 1986 and 2011.

The results revealed a relationship between diets high in flavonoids and less weight gain. The ones that had a biggest impact were anthocyanins, found in dark red foods like blueberries, cherries, grapes and strawberries, and flavonoid polymers, found in tea and apples.

Previously, the researchers had found that some foods, including blueberries, apples, pears, prunes, strawberries, grapes, peppers and celery, were linked to lower weight gain. “We wanted to better understand why those particular fruits and vegetables stuck out,” says Monica Bertoia, research associate at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health and lead author on the paper.

Fiber and glycemic load—how much a food raises blood sugar when consumed—didn’t explain the association, so they focused on flavonoids, natural compounds found in fruits and vegetables that seem to have a protective effect on their host plants. Past animal studies have suggested that flavonoids in whole foods might decrease the absorption of fat and may increase calorie expenditure..

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