Category: Diet

The Best Exercises For Weight Loss – Review

While many people want to lose weight, not everyone wants to go on a diet. Some people wonder whether doing more exercise could help them lose weight. And others would prefer to do something less frantic, while still losing weight. Are you searching for the best exercises for weight loss? This article reviews three main areas in which exercise can help with weight loss – Intense training, Weights and Yoga. You can still try them for a month, to see if they work and suit your way of life.

The slow and steady method loses the race when it comes to losing weight. Recent American research revealed that overweight men and women who performed 300 hours of cardio over the course of a year (that’s about 6 hours a week) lost only 5 pounds of weight in the process. So while regular exercise is great for general health and fitness, it’s not so good for weight loss, as these figures mean it takes at least 60 hours of cardio workouts to burn one pound of fat. On the other hand, intense short bursts of workouts can help burn more calories and fat overall. Here are some of the best exercises for weight loss.

Intense Training

Intense training keeps your body burning fat up to 72 hours after the workout session. It improves your metabolism which is very important for losing weight fast and effectively. Of course, your diet plays an important part too, when burning fat fast. In fact, no one can out-train a bad diet. Even if you do the best exercises to lose weight and then go and eat an extra 400 calories of garbage, the exercises won’t help you lose weight. Instead, you will keep on putting on weight and blame it on the inefficiency of the workouts. That’s why you need to have a good combination of the right diet and workout plan when losing weight fast and effectively. If you switch to a healthy diet plan, it is easy to burn excess fat with these effective high-intensity training strategies.

Interval Training

Interval training, also known as HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) is one of the most effective fat loss workouts. It is characterized by bouts of high-intensity workouts alternated with short rest periods. It burns more fat in a short time frame compared with traditional cardio workouts. It also enhances your body’s ability to burn fat faster through the production of fat-burning hormones. Interval training increases the production of HGH or growth hormones and adrenaline. Both these are efficient fat-burning hormones. In fact, adrenaline helps suppress your appetite – which is very important for losing weight. also, interval training will make you healthy and fitter in fewer sessions compared with cardio workouts. Interval training works on your muscles. It helps your muscles to use oxygen more effectively so that the heart doesn’t have to pump oxygen to make the muscles work. A stationary bike or treadmill is the best equipment to start your own interval training workout regimen. You can start by doing regular warmup exercises. After that, pedal or run harder (at least 20% harder than your normal cardio sessions). After 45-60 seconds of pedalling or running, bring the intensity down to the intensity of a normal cardio workout. Alternate your workouts between 45-60 seconds of hard workouts and 45-60 seconds of easy workouts for best results. Make sure you complete 5-10 intervals to complete the workout. This type of training has been used under medical supervision to help people with heart problems get good exercise.There are a lot of articles and youtube videos available on the internet giving advice on HIIT. But you may be wondering why, if you spend less time exercising with HIIT, how it can help you lose weight? Research in Australia has found that overweight people doing HIIT eat significantly fewer calories the day following their HIIT exercise. So HIIT helps you lose weight by training muscles (which then use more energy than fat), increasing the production of fat burning hormones and reducing your appetite the following day.

A sprint is another effective workout to lose excess fat fast. It is a total-body workout that you need to incorporate into your workout schedule. It is an extreme form of interval training that pays dividends in a shorter period of time. You need to keep the sessions on the shorter side to maximize the benefits and minimize the risk of injuries. It is best to keep it to 50 to 60 yards per sprint. It will help you keep to a high-intensity during the session and prevent you from breaking down or leading to injuries. Instead of going the long distance, you should increase the number of sprints to improve your overall results from the exercise. This is the type of exercise that Roger Bannister, the first man in the world to break a 4 minute mile, used as his training regime in the 1950s. Many middle distance runners now incorporate sprints in the training regime, so these have a long history of use. If you cannot run or don’t want to run outside, you could incorporate a few seconds of fast running on the spot into your home exercise routine. Depending on your level of fitness, you start off with gentle running on the spot, then do 5 seconds fast running on the spot, as fast as you can, then drop back down to gentle running on the spot. Increase the length of the fast running to 10 seconds as your fitness improves. If you have any worries or concerns about your health or fitness for doing these of course, consult your medical adviser.

High-intensity strength intervals are another effective exercise to lose weight fast. Make sure you pair the strength exercises to work on opposing muscles. This will help you keep the heart rate high while building muscles and maximizing fat loss. For instance, you can perform a dumbbell reverse lunge and a pull-up. Your arms and back will rest during the lunges. The legs will rest during the pull-ups. Your reps should be of high-intensity to get the maximum benefits from these workouts. You should continue to alternate between these workouts for a set time of 10-15 minutes. These are some of the best exercises for effective weight loss.

Are you searching for the best exercises for weight loss? High-intensity short burst exercises are the best to help you lose weight fast and effectively.

Trimming Down With Weights

This exercise recommendation is a cheat because you won’t necessarily lose weight, however, you WILL look trimmer AND your clothes will get looser or fit better, which is what most people want. Working out with weights is not just for those who want to win Mr Universe competitions. Anyone can benefit from working with weights and this includes women, who will NOT bulk up to look like the hulk – that is a myth and an excuse for not exercising! Using weights (light ones) will trim your muscles: and trim muscles use more energy than fat and also take up less room. This means you will look slimmer, as well as using more energy (lose weight) while resting.

Yoga For Weight Loss – Review

While yoga may be seen as less intense than interval training and weight lifting, it is surprising just how much energy it uses, even though it also has a calming and therapeutic effect. Anyone can use yoga as a weight loss program but some programs are specifically designed to help with weight loss. One of these is Yoga Burn, meant specifically for women, which teaches you a sequence of moves then helps you adapt and progress through the moves to ensure your body does not get “used” to the program. This is a common problem for people using exercise both to increase fitness and for weight loss. They follow a program but their body gets used to this, whereas your body needs a constant challenge to keep improving fitness or losing weight. This is where the yoga burn program fits in Click Here To See It.

Exercise can help you lose weight, provided you don’t sabotage it with an unhealthy diet. Why not try it for a month?

How To Keep Weight Off

Lost It?

It’s all very well losing the weight, but keeping it off can be another problem altogether, especially if you chose a rapid weight loss diet as your method for losing weight. Once the weight is off, there is the temptation to return to your previous way of eating (WOE) and a consequent build up of fat again. Been there, done that, got the (bigger) T-shirt back again! It’s not the fault of the diet – it promised to get the weight off and it worked. It’s just that KEEPING weight off requires changing your normal way of eating in some way.

Problems

Impulse eating

This is where you pass the fruit bowl and take a piece of fruit and then another. Fruit is good for most people, however, most of it is high in natural sugar, so eating a lot can add calories that you weren’t counting on consuming. This also applies to the cookie tin, a quick “treat” from the local store, a piece of cake in the office to celebrate someone’s birthday and a friend sharing a bag of candy. There are so many impulse opportunities in our lives these days and it is hard to say no to them all. You can deal with the fruit bowl and cookie tin problems by not keeping them in the house. I know someone who always has a full cookie tin, “in case someone calls”. They deny eating them but their visitors are not sufficient to account for the cookie tin always being full of fresh cookies!

Mouth boredom

This is where your mouth gets bored with nothing to do, and it wants something to chew. Very often this translates to raiding the fridge for snacks or a sandwich, to keep you going until the next meal time. You may find some help by using sugar free chewing gum. This gives your mouth something to do while not adding sugar to your diet. Just take care with sugar free gum as it can have a laxative effect, if you use too much. Hot drinks (no sugar) can also be helpful. For a refreshing drink, try a few slices of fresh ginger in hot water, then add lemon juice. If it’s too hot for a warm drink, this is just as nice allowed to cool, or even iced.

Comfort eating.

This is where you are under stress or anxious and find that eating, especially the so-called comfort foods like potatoes and ice cream, helps relieve the stress or calm the anxiety. This requires finding ways of reducing stress and anxiety without using food. It has been said that exercise is the most (and best) under-used stress and anxiety reliever available and food the most over-used.

Keep It Off

There are a few ways of keeping the weight off, without feeling constantly deprived and without constantly having to refuse those little treats.

The Post Diet Diet

Try the 5:2 diet. On this diet, you eat normally 5 days a week and stick to 500 calories a day (women) or 600 (men) on two days a week. You can choose which two days. Many people find a Monday and a Thursday to be their best days. This is also a long term diet strategy that a number of people use. If you don’t need two days to keep your weight down, then use 6:1 and have just 1 day a week where you restrict your calories. Many people find this doable by telling themselves, that it is just for today and tomorrow they can eat “normally”. It works because it helps to regulate the appetite and also people do not eat “enough for two days in one” on the following day so the overall calorie intake for the week is reduced.

Then there is the 16:8 diet. This refers to the 24 hour day, in which you eat ONLY during a window of 8 hours, staying away from food (not water) for the other 16 hours of the day. This is doable by stopping eating 4 hours before bedtime, assuming you are in bed 8 hours and waiting for your breakfast until about lunchtime the next day. If you have finished your meals by, say, 6pm and can wait until 10am the next day before eating your breakfast, you will have an 8 hour window for eating between 10.00am and 6.00pm. You can move the hours around to suit yourself.

You could work on a slow increase in calories or carbohydrates. If you have lost the weight you need by whatever means and are now moving onto a maintenance diet, you could try increasing your intake slowly, whether in terms of calories (low calorie diets) or in terms of carbohydrates (low carb diets). This requires self discipline, to calculate a little extra, then sticking to that until you find the point at which you no longer lose weight and then stay at that level of carbohydrate or calories.The Atkins diet (low carb) provides suggestions for gradually increasing your carb intake at the stage 4, maintenance level, and the 800 BSD provides suggestions for gradually increasing your calories.

There is also one suggestion that you should eat ten times your desired body weight in calories each day. This is said to reduce your weight while you are heavier than that and keep you there once you have reached your desired weight. If your desired body weight is 140 pounds, then on this diet, you could eat 1400 calories each day.

A Healthy Long Term Diet

It is of course, vital that you find a healthy long term diet that keeps you at your desired healthy weight and also provides all the nutrients you need for health.  One recommended diet for this is the Mediterranean diet, which includes plenty of vegetables and healthy fats, as well as protein. The Mediterranean diet is one that you could stick to for a life time if you choose.

Overcoming Stress

If comfort eating is a problem, whether just at certain times or because your life is stressful anyway, then find a way of reducing stress and anxiety without using food as a crutch to ease your stress or anxiety. This may involve letting certain people go, taking up meditation, listening to relaxation tapes or learning to become aware of when you are using eating to reduce your stress and anxiety levels. Exercise can be a great stress and anxiety reliever. If you are taking medication for relieving stress or anxiety then do not change your dosage without consulting your medical adviser. Exercise can be used in conjunction with medication to provide great relief and reduce reliance on food for comfort.

 

Diet Help From The Green Box

Watch this article as a video here, if you prefer, or else read it below.

Maintenance

Losing weight is hard enough, sometimes. And when you get to your desired weight, you think, “I am NEVER going to put it back on again!” But lo and behold, a few weeks later, the weight may already be starting to increase, as the pounds pile on. There are several reasons for this and it is NOT THE FAULT of the diet you chose. If you lost weight on that diet and you are healthy as well as a lower weight or at your desired weight, then congratulations! Your diet worked for you and you worked your diet to achieve your target.

After you lose weight, you need a maintenance plan in place to remain at your desired weight. There are several plans you can use, such as 5:2, 16:8, The Mediterranean diet, The Paleo diet, etc and which one you choose depends on you and the kind of food you and your family like to eat most of the time.

Problems

But there can be other problems, nothing to do with the maintenance diet you choose. Once you have lost the weight and are on your chosen maintenance plan, you also have to watch out for these monsters! (Not just the cookie monster.)

Monsters

  1. The Boredom monster: This monster is ALWAYS looking for something to do with your mouth and it usually ends up with eating what you shouldn’t. Once you have finished your weightloss diet, this monster thinks that it’s time to play and play means moving that mouth. Moving it may mean you are eating what you shouldn’t.
  2. How to Beat the Boredom Monster: Drink water, chew sugar free gum, or raid the green box (see below).
  3. The Hunger Monster: This monster tells you that you are always hungry. It kept quiet while you were dieting but now it’s finished, it wants to get you straight back to where it was – yes, into fatland and the only way it can do that is to tell you that you are hungry and get you to eat what you shouldn’t.
  4. How to Beat The Hunger Monster: Use your green box (see below), take plenty of hot drinks, these help you feel full. Eat more protein, take a protein drink. Keep hard boiled eggs in the fridge and eat one or two at a meal, they will keep you fuller longer. You could try a teaspoonful of coconut oil with a hot drink (coconut oil coffee is delicious!). The fat will make you feel full and it is a healthy fat.
  5. The Stress Monster: This monster appears when you are feeling low and stressed. It tells you that it will disappear if you eat comfort foods. It’s lying.
  6. How To Beat The Stress Monster: Use the green box, drink protein shakes. Give yourself a break and don’t beat yourself up over it. Try and heal the stress.

The Green Box

Keep a small box in the fridge with green vegetables in it, ready for eating. I like to keep cut up celery and some lettuce hearts. Boredom and Hunger Monsters both want food as soon as possible and they can be kept quiet with a snack from the green box. I also like cucumber but I cut a chunk off fresh when I want it. I also have frozen spinach and I cook about 6 rounds of that at a time and keep it in a saucepan on the stove and again, something quick to eat will keep at least 2 of the monsters at bay.