Category: weight loss

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?

8 weeks is up!

Picture of clothes too big for model

Finished 8 Weeks

I made it through the full 8 weeks of the 800 calorie Blood Sugar Diet (BSD) though I was rather lax in the last week! I lost over 10% of my starting body weight, more than the diet expects and managed to fit into my designer jeans that have sat untouched in my wardrobe for several years, YAY!

At the start of December, I could not do up my designer jeans. Over Christmas and New Year, they did up no problem, though I had muffin tops overhanging the waist. Now there are not even muffin tops.

But best of all, the chest problems that prompted me to start this diet have disappeared! That’s the best of all.

Keeping The Weight Off

Some nutrition specialists seem to be very sniffy and iffy about diets, whether they are based on low calorie, very low calorie, low carb, high fat, low carb, Mediterranean or paleo diets and all the other diets available, whether promoted by doctors, wight loss gurus or others. Their constant cry is “But it doesn’t stay off”, as if it were the fault of the diet for not being both a weight loss AND a weight maintenance diet at the same time.

Some diets are weight maintenance in a later phase, for instance, some low carb diets, such as the Atkins diet, provide phases of dieting, with phase 1 being weight loss which transitions gradually into phase 4 which is weight maintenance. The 800 BSD diet recommends 2 possible methods of keeping weight off after losing it; to move onto a Mediterranean diet, high in salads, good fats and fish or to gradually add calories back into your diet after reaching your desired weight, until you stop losing, so that you may move to a 1,000 calorie daily diet for one week, then a 1100 calorie diet for the next week, etc. There is of course the 5:2 intermittent fasting diet which will work whichever diet you used for losing weight. I have seen one recommendation that says a maintenance diet in terms of daily calories, is 10 times your desired weight in pounds. On this basis, someone who wants to weigh 140 pounds (10 stone, 63Kg) would need a daily calorie allowance of 1400 calories and someone who wants to weigh 145 pounds would need 1450 calories daily. Whether or not this works, I do not know, as I have not yet tried that. But I am coming to the place where weight maintenance instead of weight loss will be necessary – exciting!

5 Tips For Surviving On A Very Low Calorie Diet

Surviving Low Calorie

It may be good for your health to lose weight if you are overweight or obese but getting the motivation to stick to a low calorie or very low calorie diet can be hard, especially if you are having to deal with hunger, which can be a problem for the first 3 days. The benefits can seem a long way off, while that piece of confectionery or extra dessert is immediate and may be right in front of you.

Sometimes, we sabotage our own diet but other people can also cause problems for us, possibly jealous of our success in losing weight or through pity at seeing us struggle when we so obviously would love a cookie! Some people who do not need to lose weight do not seem to realize that “just one won’t hurt” or “a little bit won’t make any difference” makes it very hard for you to resist, especially when you would love to have some, or even a lot. They also do not realize that having that extra piece of food or a forbidden food can trigger cravings that will be even more difficult to overcome tomorrow.

There are also those who believe they are telling us to stop dieting for our own good. In some cases that may be true. A person with anorexia or who is below the ideal weight for their age, gender and height should not be on a weight loss diet. But others seem to believe that weight loss is bad altogether. They may have their own reasons for saying this or even believing it, including the fear that they themselves may need to follow a similar way of eating or because they have been fed misinformation or misunderstood something they heard.

So here are tips for overcoming the problems and staying on your low calorie diet.

1. Ditch the NaySayers

If you are having difficulties with someone trying to sabotage your weight loss diet, then ditch them, at least for a little while. The 8 week 800BSD is only for 8 weeks. If someone is trying to stop you from improving your health by losing weight with a recognized way of healthy eating, then they are not thinking of your health and you need to avoid them for a while or at least when you are feeling particularly vulnerable.

OK, it’s not always possible to ditch them, so if not, try to avoid conversations about food or diet or weight loss. If they say something like “you’re looking so thin!”, then remind them that you are not yet at your healthy target weight or that you still weigh more than you did when you both first met and that you were not exactly skinny then! They have a picture in their mind of you as being an overweight person. They need to adjust their picture of you to being one of a person at their ideal target weight. That will take them time.

It’s especially hard if the person who appears to be sabotaging your efforts is your nearest and dearest or your parent, who cooks your evening meal every day. They presumably have your best interests at heart but they also have their own interests to serve, even if they don’t acknowledge that. They may be proud of their cooking and feel hurt and rejected if you don’t eat it or not as much as previously. Try to get them on your side, so they are more concerned about your health than about their own cooking prowess. Try to get them to serve more salads and green vegetables and fewer potatoes or less pasta, bread and rice. Even if they are playing the guilt game “you don’t like my cooking any more”, try NOT to play them back, “you don’t care about my health”, but instead, let them know how thankful you are that they care about your health and that they take the trouble to make you a meal, which is much appreciated. Once they realize that their time and effort are appreciated, they may be more willing to make changes that can help.

2. Overcome Hunger

There are some foods you can eat without having to count them in your daily allowance. I have found fresh celery very useful. It’s only about 30 calories for 2 large stalks and that is very filling as well as providing useful fiber.  You can cut up some stalks of celery and keep them in the fridge when you just have to nibble. Cucumber is another useful vegetable. I buy a whole one and cut off a chunk every so often. I don’t count those in my daily allowance. Occasionally, I buy a single red chili pepper and cut it up along with the celery, to give it a bit of “bite” but I try to make the chili pieces last at least 2 days.

Sugar free chewing gum is another way of overcoming hunger. It doesn’t provide (many) calories but it gives your mouth something to do and overcomes mouth boredom which is sometimes translated as being “hungry”. Be careful with this though, if you are not used to it. Many of the types available contain phenyalanine which some people must stay away from and most of them can have a laxative effect, which may or may not be helpful to you.

Eat plenty of green veg or green salads with your meal. Spinach, green beans, cabbage and broccoli (and cauliflower, though it is not green) will all fill you up and provide more fiber, without many calories, as will lettuce, cucumber and other salady green stuff.

If you find you have eaten fewer calories than your daily allowance, make sure you have something quick and reasonable available so you are not tempted by cookies or candy. A small can of tuna has about 100 or 120 calories. A spoonful of mayonnaise has 100 calories, so you can make a quick snack of tuna and mayo to eat with a fork to keep you well fed and with no excuse for eating what you have chosen not to.

3. Renew Your Motivation

If you have a favorite book or article that prompted you to get started on your weight loss journey, keep a copy of it nearby and read it again, to remind yourself of why you wanted to lose weight. Fear; and feelings of doom if you don’t lose weight may not be the best motivators but they may be what you need in order to stick to your diet at times.

Get advice from your doctor. They may already have been trying to get you to lose weight. Some can be very helpful, though many were never trained in nutrition. If not, find a doctor with whom you CAN work and who will support you on your journey.

4. Work out your REASONS for losing weight

  • Do you want to get a beach body for a special holiday?
  • Maybe you want to get new clothing for an event, such as a wedding?
  • Maybe you have had a diagnosis of diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol and want to improve your situation?

Reminding yourself of your reasons and what you will get at the end of your diet will help you stick to it.

5. Record It

Keep a journal or a vision board. Write down your reasons for losing weight and find pictures that will show you how you want to look in 6 weeks or 6 months’ time. Maybe one of you at an earlier age or someone who looks similar to what you want to look like. Keep a record of what you DON’T eat when you are tempted and give yourself a reward for that. Even a check mark in a list can keep you going. You could always give yourself a small monetary reward for 10 check marks and save it towards something special, maybe new clothes or a special outing.

Keeping a record of what you DO eat can also be motivating. The very fact of having to record it, may help you avoid eating something on the no no list.

Keep a record of meals you CAN eat and enjoy and a record of calorie counts in case you are worried about going over your allowance or can add something extra in.