Fix Your Sleep to Fix Your Weight

Fix Your Sleep to Fix Your Weight

“Get a good night’s sleep” is often the last thing we say to family members at bedtime. That phrase may mean more than we originally thought. Sleep is now considered to be the best and simplest way to beat the battle of the bulge by losing weight and keeping it off.

The Sleep diet has nothing to do with food – and everything to do with getting healthy by stabilizing hormones and balancing metabolism. These two factors are essential to your overall health and can prevent diabetes and heart disease.

Studies about sleep continue to grow – and 2018 will reveal even more about how our sleep habits affect our health. Research has already revealed that sleep restriction causes an overload of stress hormones and prevent your metabolism’s ability to function properly.

Lack of sleep also causes an extreme decrease in the hormone, leptin. Leptin regulates your fat storage and can cause weight gain. Ghrelin is also a hormone that has much to do with an increase in appetite. Lack of sleep increases the presence of that hormone in your body and can cause overeating.

Studies show that there is a definite connection between sleep time and weight gain. If you sleep less than five hours or more than nine hours per night, your chances of weight gain are increased.

Your body views excess weight as a holding tank for energy, so when you’re tired the body piles on more fat to get the energy you need. The remedy for fatigue and weight gain is – sleep.

It’s important that you get enough sleep and that it’s quality sleep to get the weight loss results you want. Food diets often don’t work because they’re restrictive and make extreme changes to the foods you eat.

That’s when cravings occur and you give in only to gain more weight. The sleep diet doesn’t work like that. It can work very effectively to shed pounds – but there are certain rules you must follow to make it work.

You can try the sleep diet for a week to see how you fare. First, you must know how much sleep you want each night. What would your bedtime be if you set your desired number of hours to 8? Now, stick to that time.

It may be more difficult than you think. You should give up alcohol and sweets that might keep you awake at night during the sleep diet so you can get an accurate reflection of how the diet will work for you.

Studies up to now indicate that constant sleep deprivation might increase cravings for high-calorie foods. Women who are sleep deprived have much more chance of gaining weight than those who slept at least seven hours per night.

Sleep is a great benefit for your body. You’ll feel less fatigued and it will be much easier to stick to consuming healthy foods. Do what you need to do to get a good night’s sleep and you’ll rest easy knowing you’re doing the best thing for your body.

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Banish Foods that Cause Weight Gain

Banish Foods that Cause Weight Gain

Food that you consume will either help you lose or gain weight. It’s going to be much easier to choose the healthier foods in 2018 because of new research conducted on various foods and how it affects your body.

Rather than diets which may not focus on what your body needs to lose weight and become healthy, making the right food choices is likely to become the new celebrity diet plan for 2018.

Whereas constant dieting ends up making us gain weight, getting rid of the foods that will help us lose weight and keep it off for good is the better choice by far. Banishing foods from your shopping list isn’t a quick fix, but a life change that will reset your body’s method of dealing with excess weight.

The great thing about this method to lose weight is that you’re never hungry. You don’t need to limit your intake of food – you just need to make better choices. Fruits, grains and vegetables are some of the healthy choices you can make.

Some of the foods you should avoid if you want to lose weight are coconut oil (choose olive oil instead), white bread (choose whole grain bread instead), cheese (lower your cheese intake to once per week) – and alcohol (choose water for zero calories).

Also, choose fresh fruit rather than dried to enjoy sustainable weight loss. Dried fruit contains much more calories than fresh and contains no water. And, watch out for enhanced water.

They could contain as many as 130 calories per drink and lots of sugar as well. Green tea is one of best drinks (after water) that you can choose and research has proven that it helps with weight loss.

Artificial sweeteners have also been found to promote long-term weight gain. Even though the calories aren’t there, our bodies react by changing our metabolism and by changing our insulin response and glucose levels.

This disruption of our metabolism and other reactions of the body leads to excess storage of fat and many illnesses such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and metabolic syndrome.

We all know that potato chips are fattening and contain treacherous trans fats. But, did you know that potato chips can cause the most weight gain – even more than ice cream and other fattening foods. Choose fresh fruits and veggies for an energy-laden snack.

The year 2018 will see people concentrating on making better food choices than trying to adapt themselves to a diet that will only make them gain more weight. Start making better food and drink choices now and reap the benefits right away.

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Meditate to Get the Best Weight Loss Results

Meditate to Get the Best Weight Loss Results

Over the past years, meditation has enjoyed an increase in popularity as more people realize that meditation techniques can do for their health and outlook on life. This ancient practice has been around since the Stone Age and has become trendy in recent years.

Now, it’s become more than a trend as studies indicate that it delivers health benefits beyond what we originally thought. In 2018, meditation techniques are poised to become more popular than ever as science releases more information about its amazing benefits.

And meditation offers even more benefits than we originally thought. For example, new studies indicate that besides stress reduction, meditation can also help balance your hormones and that it surpasses the most popular diet plans for losing weight.

Now we know that dieting is actually a bad idea. It may cause inflammation and cause changes in your metabolism that can produce weight gain, binging and even eating disorders.

Research on the effects of meditation on weight in a controlled group shows that those who practiced meditation lost more weight than the dieters. Meditation actually changes the way you eat because you’re thinking more with your mind than giving in to cravings.

With meditation you’re focusing your attention on the present moment to have a calm and clear path to success, especially when it comes to stress. Stress is the catalyst which drives many people to eat more or eat in an unhealthy manner.

You’ll become more aware of the thoughts and urges you have when it comes to food by engaging in a more mindful way of dealing with weight loss – rather than a strict diet plan which may result in more emotional eating habits.

Another benefit of meditation is that it doesn’t cost anything. All you need is a quiet place, a comfortable position and an attitude that you’re going to focus your attention on something else – a phrase (mantra), your breathing or something else to relax you.

For meditation to be successful, you must make a commitment to stop what you’re doing and become more aware of what’s within and surrounding you. This may take some time to master, but when you do you’ll have transformed your thinking to a more positive way of looking at things.

Meditation, in the New Year of 2018, will garner much more attention than in the past as a way to support positive changes in your life and helping you to become more in touch with your body’s needs. Learn all you can now and be ahead of the crowd.

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Unlock Your Genes to Change Eating Habits

Unlock Your Genes to Change Eating Habits

You’ll learn much more in 2018 about using DNA results to unlock the health and diet secrets you hold in your genetic code. DNA is becoming a big business and more people are becoming aware about genes and how they affect the body’s ability to metabolize what we consume.

For the first time in our lives, medical and scientific research has determined that our DNA can affect not only our eating habits, but the way our bodies metabolize foods we consume to make us gain or lose weight.

For example, certain types of genes metabolize many foods and drinks (such as caffeine) much more slowly – increasing the risk of serious health problems. The New Year will bring about significant changes in the way we think about diet and health.

DNA testing is available now and the future of genetic startup companies looks promising as more people are willing to take the genetic test so they can choose which foods they should eat to promote health and lose weight.

In the past, we’ve used certain diet plans (at least one every year) for everyone even though we’re all different and our genes determine what we should eat – or not – for maximum results.

Personalized DNA testing more accurately guides you to the medical recommendations for intake of Omega-3 fatty acids, sodium and vitamin C – and as a bonus, provides information about food and drink you should avoid – such as alcohol and sodas.

With all the interest in DNA testing, there are bound to be new businesses that pop up to take advantage of the surging demand. DNA-based products are ready now, and 2018 promises to offer many options.

The personal genomics company, Helix, recently launched the first online site that you can shop for services. You can have your genome sequenced and even have access to other services such as Vinome which advises you how to use your genomic results to choose the right wine for you, for example.

Another service – EverlyWell – provides testing for food sensitivities and how your metabolism operates. You’ve been able to test your genetic makeup for a while to determine your nationality makeup, but now you can go beyond and see what you’re doing that directly impacts your overall health.

DNA testing is expanding at a rapid rate, soon offering diagnostic tools, wireless clothing that provides health reports and other personalized products.

The entire genomics market is expected to grow rapidly and generate billions of dollars on a global scale. In 2018, fad diets, weight loss plans and supplements will begin to take a back seat to the more personalized way to determine the best method for you to lose weight and achieve maximum health benefits – through your DNA.

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Diet Success Tips for 2018

Diet Success Tips for 2018

The New Year of 2018 is rapidly approaching – even though you may still be catching the last rays of the waning summer sun. How do you view the year ahead – with trepidation or excitement?

It may help to begin now to plan the future year so that when it does finally hit, you’ll be prepared to make it your best year ever. No matter what your age, if you can look in the mirror and know you’re doing your best to be fit and happy, you’re a success.

Things are changing rapidly in healthy diets and mental acuity to help you be the best you can be. Genetic discoveries are made every day that can impact the way you eat, exercise and maintain your health.

The 2018 year promises to be a great year for learning new ways to control your appetite and motivate yourself to be fit and healthy. Personalized nutrition plans, calculated for your body type and metabolism, using your mind to reach diet and fitness goals and much more will be revealed in the coming year.

Armed with knowledge you can easily prepare for the upcoming revelations in 2018 that will help you meet your diet and overall fitness goals. It’s exciting and fun to anticipate what’s in store that could make us rethink the way we approach dieting and health issues.

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Don’t Shoulder the Burden of Everyone Else’s Problems

Don’t Shoulder the Burden of Everyone Else’s Problems

Sometimes, people get a bit too caught up with everyone else’s issues and can’t focus on their own. It’s very easy – especially if you’re trying to be a nice person – to try to help everyone with everything.

You end up being so focused on being a positive contributor to everyone else’s lives that you can’t stop and solve your own problems or work on your own dreams, which only allows your issues to grow larger and larger until they finally overburden you.

You’re putting yourself in a bad position, as well as making the people around you overly dependent on you. You might not even notice that everything is piling up until you’re already becoming overburdened.

First you might have to work a bit later to help out your boss and coworkers. Maybe someone you know at work needs help with a home project, and they need your help. However, your spouse needs you to get a few things done around the house while they get finished with some other chores.

Your kids might need help on their schoolwork or projects. You might have an old buddy from college coming to town later who wants to meet up again. Before you know it, you’re absolutely swamped.

But that doesn’t mean you have to say no to everyone. You have to learn how to manage your time to include time for yourself, as well as learning how to say no to unnecessary tasks.

If your kid’s project isn’t due for another few weeks, you can put it off for a little bit to spread out the burden. You don’t really need to help your coworker finish their home projects.

Politely, yet firmly, tell them that you can’t help because of other tasks you have to do. If you’re always the person that helps everyone, people will begin to take advantage of that.

If you want to pursue something rewarding for yourself, such as a career change where you’re launching your own online empire, don’t let others stand in the way of that. It takes time, and if you find yourself always using excuses as to why you can’t get it done, find out if those excuses are due to handling other peoples’ tasks.

It’s very important that you set aside time for yourself to think, rejuvenate, and enjoy life. You might pick up a hobby or begin an entrepreneurial business to better yourself. This time is essential for you to live a happy, healthy life.

Otherwise, you’re just stuck helping everyone else live their lives. You can find time to help your friends and family while still dedicating enough time to help yourself. Even then, you should try to help your friends and family become more independent, and learn how to do their home projects and school work with little to no help, because help won’t always be there.

Don’t Just Change Your Beliefs – Change Your Behaviors

Don’t Just Change Your Beliefs – Change Your Behaviors

Everyone has a point in time in which they change their beliefs because they think differently due to some event. Perhaps it was something traumatizing, or something minor, like reading a blog post.

Either way, despite our newfound changes in thinking, we don’t always change out behaviors to match our beliefs. For example, maybe you read how successful entrepreneurs master time management and it sounds great, but you don’t actively do anything to alter your disorganized behavior.

Or you might find a new way of dieting, and start noticing all of the unhealthy things everyone eats. However, you might not actually be eating the healthiest yourself. You might wish that everyone were nicer around you, while still being a bit unpleasant to those around you.

This kind of behavior can hurt your relationships with your friends and family and generate a lot of unwanted stress. When you don’t practice what you preach, you’ll find yourself looked down upon by the people around you as a hypocrite.

People will only accept your beliefs if you accurately reflect them, otherwise you’ll just make your beliefs look bad or you’ll make yourself look bad. You’ll also feel bad emotionally, when you reflect on yourself and realize that you’re not the person that you want to be, or think you are.

It’s difficult, though, to make these changes. When you realize that you’re not behaving as you believe you should be, it can be hard to change your actual behavior. Be sure to spend time every day thinking about what changes you want to make, and then dedicate time to following through with those changes.

It won’t happen immediately – it will take a few weeks for you to get totally used to changing your behavior. In the meantime, ask a friend or family member to help you focus on this change and keep you on track.

If you’re the only one paying attention to it, you’ll find yourself forgetting about the change until you’ve completely forgotten about it. When you start really acting as you believe you should, you’ll find that you’re happier with who you are as a person.

This leads to you finding happiness in life much more quickly, because you’re not discontent with your personality. It will also improve your social life, because when people hear you talking about your beliefs and also accurately reflecting them, they’ll see you as a more trustworthy person, and will show you more respect. Not many people can put their money where their mouth is and actually follow through with everything they say.

Gain Appreciation for What’s Going Right in Your Life

Gain Appreciation for What’s Going Right in Your Life

Sometimes, people see life through a filter of negativity, only focusing on the bad parts. They always think about what’s going wrong in their lives, what gets them riled up, and what they hate.

Many people like to indulge these thoughts and complain about these things to their friends and coworkers, either in person or over social media. If they’re working on their online business, the focus isn’t on accomplishments, but on what they failed to achieve instead.

This is even more prevalent in people who have it rough. It’s much easier to be upset about the bad things happening to you than to be grateful for the good. To be truly happy, you have to be able to appreciate the things that are going right.

Focusing too much on the negative aspects of your life negatively affects you and the people around you. You’ll be in a perpetual state of gloom if gloom is all you ever know. You can’t effectively work towards your goals if you’re stuck in negativity.

You can’t even begin to fix what’s going wrong in your life if you focus too much on it – you won’t even know where to begin if it’s all you know. Instead, dedicate your time and energy toward appreciating the positive aspects of your life.

We should all take more time to appreciate the things in our lives that are going right. Think about what you have that others would be desperate for, whether it be a house, a car, a job, or even a family.

Even just living in a first world country is a great benefit. So instead of focusing on how much you hate your boss and wish you could leave it to pursue an online business, think about how wonderful it is to have a source of income as you work on your entrepreneurial dream, because many people aren’t so fortunate.

When you focus more on the things that are going right in your life, you make it much easier to work towards your goals. When you appreciate the things that are going right, it gives you greater drive to accomplish your goals, because you know the feeling of success and want to feel more of it.

When you focus too much on the negative, you don’t get that drive to change your life for the better. Even your friends and family will feel the effects of your positivity – by seeing your upbeat attitude, they’ll be inspired to follow in your footsteps.

By doing this, you can feel more accomplished by having contributed positively to their lives. Learn to take time to appreciate what’s right, and you’ll find that you’ll have more positive experiences.

Being in Charge of Your Life Doesn’t Mean Closing the Door on Vulnerability

Being in Charge of Your Life Doesn’t Mean Closing the Door on Vulnerability

When people begin to take control of their own lives, it’s very easy for them to over-do it with their newfound lease on life. You might start thinking that you have to be fully in charge all the time, because any signs of weakness might cause you to falter.

This can backfire on you if you’re an online marketer who needs the input of others to succeed. You might shut out other people’s advice and try to handle everything on your own, attempting to be completely rock solid.

While you can’t be flimsy and be used like a doormat, you can’t go to the other extreme and be completely hard, either. You have to find a reasonable middle ground. Closing off everyone and everything and trying to be completely invulnerable is one of the worst things you can do when trying to help yourself.

By doing this, you’ll drive away your friends and those who are genuinely trying to help you succeed by giving you good advice. You’ll find yourself less confident and sometimes depressed because you’re trying too hard to not be vulnerable.

By closing off access to your friends and peers, you’ll cut off potential opportunities for networking and success. You simply can’t be successful or happy at the extreme ends of vulnerability.

There’s a middle ground between flimsy and rock solid when it comes to being vulnerable. You have to learn to be firm, yet flexible enough to be able to adapt when you need to.

Show just enough vulnerability to make you seem much more genuine and relatable. People will take you much more seriously and respect you more if you acknowledge your weaknesses, but don’t dwell on them too much.

This is the sign of a true leader, and will lead you down the path to success by opening up new opportunities. It can be difficult to find the appropriate balance between vulnerability and strength, and it may also vary from person to person.

If you’re going through a really bad time in life, you’ll find it might be better for you to be more strong than vulnerable, until you reach a point in life where you’re comfortable enough to relax a bit.

Once you’re in a spot where you feel safer, you can be a bit more vulnerable and accept help more often. However, you should never, under any circumstance, be completely closed off or completely vulnerable. Find the balance that works best for you, and stick with it.

Choose Your Reaction to What Life Sends Your Way

Choose Your Reaction to What Life Sends Your Way

Most of the time, when a major or even minor event is thrown our way, we simply react to it. There’s not a lot of thought process behind it – it’s just something that we do naturally.

However, by thinking about how you want to react rationally, you can better control your life. There are very few instances in which a kneejerk reaction is a good thing. When a difficult situation arises, stop and think about what the appropriate reaction is, and how you should react.

You can control your response to anything if you just take some time to think it over. When you choose how you want to react to a situation, you hold all of the power in that moment.

If someone does something with the intention of upsetting you or making you angry, like a customer who rants to you that your product is horrible and they want a refund sixty seconds after buying it, being able to respond to it calmly takes away their power.

Your life will no longer be dictated by the things happening around you. Nothing can make you feel a way that you don’t want to. Nobody can control your emotions but you. By taking the reins, you can live a happier, more satisfying life by being able to look on the bright side of things.

Immediate reactions are usually irrational, and irrational actions can get you in a lot of trouble. For example, you might be getting tailgated on the highway. You automatically get upset, and you start to see that car behind you as an enemy, and you try to get them away from you or get back at them.

In the process of trying to respond with anger, you could be distracted by their presence and crash – or cause an even worse altercation. Instead, think about simple solutions to solving the problem at hand.

This applies to everyday life, as well. If someone says something derogatory towards you, don’t just try to fight them, just find a way to escape the situation safely, and know that you were the better person in that instance.

In some situations, the immediate reaction that you have is appropriate, such as the loss of someone close to you. You don’t have to make a situation like that positive. For the emotions that follow, such as grief, choose how you’ll handle having these feelings.

Talk it out with a grief counselor rather than just putting it on the back burner. It’s important to recognize situations in which hasty reactions are acceptable, and situations in which well thought out, controlled responses are preferable.