Ab Exercises

Don’t bother with fad diets or gimmicks. The truth is, healthy weight loss can only be achieved through burning more calories than you consume.

The two main ways to lose weight are to restrict your diet to fewer calories and to exercise. It’s easier to lose those unwanted pounds through dietary changes than through exercise but the real winning way is to combine both exercise and dieting to lose weight.

What type of diet is the best for weight loss?

Actually, any sort of healthy diet is alright. So long as you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight regardless of whether you follow a low carbohydrate, low protein, low fat, vegetarian, raw food, etc. All or any of those can work. The key is lowering the number of calories you consume.

However, drastically cutting the number of calories you eat each day is more harmful than good. Crash dieting or starving yourself can be harmful to your body. It’s not even effective as a healthy weight loss regimen.

If a person goes on a crash diet, the body slows down its metabolism and starts storing more fat. After the initial weight loss, the weight is quickly regained or even increased. In the long term, the crash dieter will likely suffer health problems since crash diets are designed only for short-term use.

How do you know if a diet is harmful to you?

Fad diets or crash diets are generally easy to spot. They are short-term and require no long-term commitment. They drastically cut your calorie intake and do not have the daily nutrients that you need to stay healthy.

Such fad diets include eating only cabbage soup, eating only fruits or subsisting in a liquid diet. After a few days of extreme calorie restriction and lack of the proper nutrients, dieters can feel lightheaded and dizzy.

It is best to use your common sense – if you start feeling headaches or pass out, that diet is harmful. A healthy diet for weight loss should not include any side effects.

How many calories should be cut from the diet?

It’s safe to cut 500 calories from your daily diet. Experts say that a diet of 1,050 to 1,200 calories a day and one hour of brisk exercise each day will safely allow you to lose weight. You can expect to lose 3-5 pounds per week on this type of diet.

If you want to lose even more weight, do not cut more calories. Lower than 1,000 can be dangerous for you health. Simply exercise more if you want to lose more pounds.

How can you easily diet?

One surefire way of losing weight through dieting is very simple and free. Cut down on snacks, stop drinking sugary sodas and eat whatever you eat everyday during each meal but reduce portion sizes.

Instead of eating a huge 7-inch pancake, cook 4-inch pancakes. Don’t eat a steak the size of a dinner plate; one serving should be the size of a hamburger bun. Stop eating a big bowl of soup, just try a medium sized bowl.

Dieters do not need to severely cut portions right away. Portion control can be done gradually and painlessly. Eat a bit less each day and you should be able to control your portions much better after a few weeks.

What type of exercise is good?

Any type of brisk exercise is good for weight loss. Something as simple as taking the stairs everyday combined with a several 10-minute walks can effectively help you lose weight.

A more motivated person can lose more weight through exercise so dieters should combine their weight loss diet with physical activities that they enjoy. Popular exercises include brisk walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, yoga and tai chi. Getting friends and family involved can make an activity more fun.

Once the dieter has achieved his ideal weight, exercise is also the answer to long-term weight loss. Studies show that people who are able to maintain their weight loss over the long term get regular physical activity.

Now that you know this, go ahead and start a diet an exercise plan for healthy weight loss.

Are you losing interest in exercise because you feel that you’re going nowhere? The bad news is that you have probably hit a plateau. The good news is that this is a very common problem and you can actually overcome it! The reason why this happens is that your body is resistant to change or in other words, hates to lose weight. So, after you have lost weight early on in your program, you might reach a stage where you stop losing any. This can be really frustrating for you, because you are maintaining the same exercise routine and diet plan.

The key is not to be overwhelmed by this frustration and instead try to push through this phase. Do not even think about quitting because there is light at the end of the tunnel. Here’s how you can tackle a plateau and attain your fitness goal.

1. Keep a tab on your daily calorie intake. This is the net of the total calories you consume minus the calories you lose via exercise. Ideally you should not lose more than 500-700 calories a day. This leads to hunger and makes it really difficult for you to lose weight.

To prevent this you should know your daily calorie requirement. Keep your net calorie intake just below this figure and you’ll be fine.

2. Are you losing muscles? In case you are, you need to understand that weight loss can be achieved only by losing fat mass. Muscle burns fat even when you are at rest and so losing it means your fat loss decreases too.

Try to ensure that your diet is nourishing your body sufficiently. Right nutrition can ensure that you do not lose lean body mass at all.

3. Have you lost weight rapidly? If during the initial phase of your diet and exercise program, you have lost weight drastically, you may have lost lean body mass instead of fat. A drastic loss of weight can also result in less calorie requirement for activities. And if you don’t burn calories, how can you lose weight?

The key here is to increase lean body mass while losing fat mass at the same time.

4. Have you been doing the same exercises for a long time? If so, your body might have grown accustomed to the exercises and they no longer affect your body mass as much as they used to. Also when you started working out, you body faced a new type of challenge and so reacted better.

A personal trainer is the best person to ensure that you keep doing new exercises and also work out at variable intensity, duration and frequency. But if you do not have a trainer, you can ensure this yourself. Use interval training for best results.

5. Are you overtraining? In your zeal to keep losing weight, you might be pushing yourself too hard. When you work out more intensely than you should, your body develops a resistance to losing calories when you are at rest. So, take it easy and do not burn out.

A plateau can only be as difficult to overcome as you make it seem. Do not let your shoulders drop when the scales disappoint you. Try these ideas and keep losing weight!

So you want to get into shape and is looking for professional help in the form of a good personal trainer. However, unlike your doctor or engineer, the personal trainer industry in most countries are not regulated and so how can you be sure that the trainer you intend to hire is up to the mark?

So here are some tips to finding a good personal trainer to help you to attain your health and fitness objectives.

The first thing you should do when interviewing your trainer is to ask for past references of clients he/she has trained. A good and successful trainer should be more than glad to supply you the list of contact. When you call the references, ask if they have achieved their goals and what they like best about the trainer when training with him/her. This is a very good indicator of how good your gym instructor can be.

Second rated trainers or one with less than sterling record will be hesitant to give you any references. If you find any hesitation, then you may want to rule out the trainer.

Ask to see the trainer’s certification because many people who workout in the gym themselves simply call themselves personal trainers without attending any formal courses. They train people from the experience they’ve gained from training themselves.

I am not implying that these type of trainers are no good, but a certified trainer have at least gone through some formal education and training and is most probably updated about the latest in the industry and new science discovered as they may have subscribe to journals from their certification bodies.

Also, a certified trainer is likely to be also trained in Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and First Aid in case there are any accidents or injuries sustained while working out.

The next thing you should ask your potential trainer is what is his/her training plan for you should you decide to hire him/her. Everyone is unique and have different goals and thus a good instructor should be able to formulate a safe and progressive plan for you to reach your objective. Ask for specifics and clarification if you don’t understand something in his/her plan and hear out the explanations and gauge whether it made sense.

You should never base your selection of an instructor solely on physical appearance. A person with a well buffed body may not know the first thing about safety or methods of instruction. However, physical appearance can be an indicator that this is someone who is disciplined as it takes discipline to get into good shape. If your trainer do not take care of his/her body, how can you expect this person to be able to diligently take care of yours?

Last but not least, you should choose a trainer which you can be comfortable with and has a personality that is acceptable to you. You are paying good money for quality instruction and you must have a good time working out with this person. There is absolutely no reason why you should pay someone whom you are not comfortable working with. There is nothing to feel shy about this.

So if you are looking for good quality personal trainers, then you may want to adhere to the above guidelines.

Although genetics can play a role in how high your triglyceride levels are positive diet and lifestyle changes can drastically affect triglyceride levels for the better. High triglycerides (levels above 200mg/dL) put a person at greater risk for heart disease.

So what are triglycerides? When you eat more calories than you need, these calories are converted into triglycerides and stored in your fat cells until your body needs them for energy. Triglycerides are also transporters of dietary fat. They serve useful functions in the body; however, having levels that are too high is not healthy. Triglycerides are derived from fats in food or are made in the body from other sources like carbohydrates. Check out the following actions that you can take to lower your triglycerides naturally without medication so you can reduce your risk of heart disease.

Greatly Reduce Your Intake of Sugar and Other High Glycemic Carbohydrates: In my opinion, reducing your sugar and unhealthy carbohydrate consumption is the best and surest way of lowering your triglycerides naturally. High glycemic carbohydrates are foods like white flour, white rice, juice, pulverized whole wheat, instant oatmeal, high fructose corn syrup, and white potatoes to name a few. Sometimes even healthy whole grains like whole grain brown rice, quinoa, steel cut oats may need to be eaten in moderation versus other lower glycemic carbohydrates like green leafy vegetables.

Exercise: Get some aerobic exercise most days of the week. If you aren’t getting much of anything now, start just by moving more. Walk wherever and whenever you can. Start a garden. Cook more at home. You’d be amazed at the increase in movement when you cook your own meals from scratch instead of buying already prepared meals, eating out, or purchasing microwaveable meals. You get lots of lifting, bending, and stretching. Eventually, start including more aerobic exercise into your routine.

Increase Omega-3 Fatty Acid Consumption: Omega-3 fatty acids are thought to lower triglyceride levels. In addition, fish is often a normal part of the diet in populations that are long-lived and that have a lower incidence of heart disease. The best source of omega-3 fatty acids comes from such fatty fish as wild Alaskan salmon and sardines but omega-3 fatty acids can also be found in walnuts, flax seeds, purslane (a leafy, green vegetable not that common in the US), meat from grass fed animals, and omega-3 fortified eggs.

Decrease Alcohol Consumption: It just takes just a little bit of alcohol to raise triglyceride levels in susceptible people. Alcohol can often be a source of excess calories that will be converted to triglycerides and stored as fat. If you have high triglycerides try eliminating alcohol altogether and see what happens.

Do Away with Trans Fats: Trans fats are found mostly in such packaged foods as crackers, cookies, cakes, pies, pretzels, pancake mixes, popcorn, some margarines, and crackers. When dining out, you are likely to stumble upon trans fats in your food when eating out at fast food restaurants or ordering desserts in any restaurant. Look for hydrogenated, partially hydrogenated or shortening on the ingredient label if you want to identify if there are any trans fats in the food you are purchasing. Trans fats raise LDL cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol) and triglycerides while lowering HDL cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol). Added trans fats have absolutely no place in a heart-healthy diet.

Sometimes making all the changes just mentioned can be difficult. The changes often require a change in habits and patterns of living. Typical reasons why implementing these changes can be difficult are as follows: too little time, cravings for sweets and alcohol are hard to control, not sure how to prepare healthier foods, too tired to exercise. The best way to succeed with diet and lifestyle changes is to have time and support to make your new health goals a reality.

A disturbance in chemical balance of the body, in which chronic excess uric acid in the blood leads to the deposition of the needle shaped urate crystals in and around the joints and tendons, where they cause inflammationGout not only causes inflammatory arthritis but also causes teno synovitis, bursitis, or cellulites ,tophaceous deposits, urolithiasis and renal disease.

The onset is sudden, unexpected , and excruciating and painfulIt strikes an intense pain in the joint ,most often the big toe, but some times other joints ,including knees, elbows, thumbs, or fingers

Generally pain disappears after medication but usually they recur againGout commonly occurs in middle aged menIt is usually uncommon in women and very rare in childrenMen who are obese and who have high blood pressure are more prone to the disease

CAUSES:

•Hereditary

•Improper function of the kidney

•Reaction to the alcohol

•Reaction to certain drugs

•Enzyme deficiencies

•Lead poisoning

•Disorder is associated with an injury or any surgical procedure

•Highly proteinous diet

•Idiopathic causes

•Starvation

•Psoriasis

•Toxaemia of pregnancy

•May also occur in some forms of tumors and cancers

SYMPTOMS:

1.Joint of the big toe is the common and primary site of affection in majority of the patients

2.Other sites of affection are ankle, knee, hand, heel

3.Sudden and intense pain of the affected joint

4.The gouty joint becomes hot, red, swollen and severly painful

5.Acute attack may be accompanied by fever , anorexia, malaise, head ache, nausea, or change of the mood

6.There is tendency to have recurrent attacks , but symptoms typically donot last a week

7.There may be secondary degenerative changes in the form of tophi

HOMOEOPATHIC APPROACH:

LEDUM PAULSTRE:

It is a good remedy in acute and chronic cases of goutTearing, shooting, stinging, type of painJoint swollen , hot and paleThere is no accompanying feverSoles painful can hardly step on themBall of great toe swollenGout begins in lower limb and ascends

BRYONIA ALBUM:

Joint red, hot, swollen with stiches and tearingEvery spot is painful on pressureWeariness and heaviness of the limbsSwollen sensation in the joints with intense painConstant motion of left arm and leg

BENZOIC ACID:

Useful in persons with uric acid diathesisSwelling of wrist with gouty depositsGouty deposits and nodes are painfulTearing pain in the great toeTearing pain in tendons and joints with stichesOedema of lower extremities

LITHIUM CARB:

Uric acid diathesis causing goutWhole body is soreJoint swollen tender and red and painful to touchPain in hollow of foot extending to the kneeAnkle painful when walkingParalytic stiffness all over the bodyNodular swelling of the joints

COLCHICUM:

Inflammation of big toe and heelAcute pain making patient scream when touchedTearing, jerking pains especially in finger jointsMetastasis from big toe to the heartJoint stiff feverish and tender and swollenSensation of pins and needles in hands and wrist finger tips numbEdematous swelling pits on pressure