Articles » Losing Weight
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Why Is It So Hard To Lose Fat?
The most basic goal of every living creature is survival and the most basic requirement for survival is energy - in the form of calories taken in from food. In order to survive in the harsh conditions that have existed for most of human history, the human body had to find a way to make the most of food when food was abundant, so that it could keep going when food was scarce. It achieved this goal in two ways: energy storage and energy conservation. When there are a lot of calories in the diet, the body uses what it needs and stores the rest in fat cells. When calories are cut back, the body conserves energy by slowing down its energy burning processes, or metabolism.
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Why I Walk To Stay In Shape (And Why You Should Too)
Changing a few little habits here and there is a good way to burn off maybe 50 to 100 calories a day. But in addition to that kind of exercise, you want to make vigorous, honest-to-goodness exercise part of your lifestyle. It will speed your weight loss, increase the mobilization of fat, make you feel better and help normalize your body chemistry. The best way for most people to do all that is to get into the habit of taking at least one long daily walk.
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Why Eating Fast Food & Quitting Smoking Will Pack On The Pounds
If you eat out frequently, especially in fast-food restaurants, you're probably eating more fat and calories than you want or need. Fast food has several problems. First, although low calorie choices are available, most people don't order them. A typical fast-food meal averages 700 to 1,200 calories. Part of the blame rests on the fact that portion sizes are out of control.
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How much you eat isn't a matter of willpower or lack of it. It's an inborn, powerful biological drive to assure human survival. Trying to override the system with diet and food restriction is counterproductive because it triggers the body's chemicals to turn on your appetite and increase hunger. Every time you under-eat or deny your body's need for food, you actually crank into high gear a complex system of chemical reactions that tells you to eat. A vicious cycle? You bet.
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Throw Away Your Bathroom Scale!
It may seem hard to believe that the bathroom scale can be your enemy in low-fat living but if you're accustomed to a morning weigh-in that leaves you feeling guilty, angry, discouraged or demoralized, then it's worse than your enemy - it's a skilled saboteur that stands ready to undercut your fat-fighting work.
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There Is No Excuse To Have An Overweight Child!
Getting children down to normal weight is easier than doing the job with an adult for the simple reason that most kids do not have the money to go into a store and come home with boxes of pastries, cases of beer and gallons of ice cream. If you have no junk food in your house, don't use sweets as a reward and don't keep nagging your child to eat, there should be no great difficulty.
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The Truth About Vitamins And Minerals
Contrary to what some people might have you believe, vitamins and minerals do not give you energy. They can't because they don't supply calories. However, if you are deficient in certain vitamins or minerals, you may feel lethargic, in which case replenishing these nutrients can get you back up to speed. In addition to performing countless other jobs, vitamins and minerals help convert food into energy; they're the compounds that allow chemical reactions to take place in your body.
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Shed Fat With These 6 Active Tips
Discovering time to exercise is like trying to get more laughter in your life: It's usually easier said than done. To master the tricks, you need to be part escape artist and part strategist, but most of all an opportunist. The moments that you can grab for activities come suddenly and pass swiftly, and if you don t take advantage of them, every cell of your body pays a certain price. Here are some ideas to help plan your playtime.
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Is A High-Protein Diet The Best Way To Lose Weight?
Many people say it is, and have the results to prove it. On the other hand, there are also many people who have not had such success with the high-protein diet. First, although weight loss during the first few weeks on a high-protein diet is definitely more impressive than when eating a mixed diet, it's been discovered that almost all the difference is a result of water loss. But you can only lose so much water, so eventually that rapid weight loss slows down.
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How To Keep The Weight Off For Good
You can lose weight without exercising. People do it all the time by simply eating less. But you cannot expect to keep the weight off if you don't work out. Studies show that among people who are successful at maintaining weight loss, more than 90 percent exercise. On the other hand, at least 90 percent of those who don't exercise gain back all of their weight, if not more, within a few years.
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Get Your Diet Advice From The Experts
One way to ensure that you receive accurate nutrition and diet information is to search out a registered dietitian, or R.D. This person is a professionally trained authority in the role that food and nutrition play in health. R.D.s are a reliable source for information about nutrition and can provide sound advice on eating and health.
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Fat Fighting Myth: You'll Never Enjoy Food Again!
Healthy foods do not have to be bland, low-calorie foods are not tasteless, and living by your healthy eating plan does not mean abandoning everything you ever loved in the world of food. There are whole schools of cooking - from the nouvelle cuisine of France to the new "light" cuisine of California - that are based on healthy, low-fat foods. You can eat out and eat well at gourmet restaurants the world over and still maintain food control.
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Drinking Water To Aid In Losing Weight
For years, physicians have been advising us to drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water every day for best health. And it makes good sense, since our everyday environments seem custom-designed to leave us parched. Homes and offices have radiant or forced-air heating in the winter and low-humidity air conditioning in the summer. Cars and public transportation have temperature-controlled air that's usually a lot drier than it needs to be for comfort. All the time we're sitting in our living rooms, offices and cars, we're usually drinking much less water than we're losing.
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Controlling Your Eating At Restaurants
The greatest danger of eating in restaurants isn't the entree, it's the breads, chips, and other foods that most restaurants supply customers with before the entree is even ordered. How many times have you gone out to dinner and found yourself saying, "I'm not even hungry anymore," when the entree arrived, all because you had stuffed yourself on bread or some other appetizer? And how often did you go ahead and eat the entree anyway?
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Being Thin Is A Lifestyle, Not A Punishment
Deprivation doesn't just happen, it's something that is done to you. The dictionary tells us so. A person who is deprived has been stripped of some "necessity of life or healthful environmental influence by an external person or force." Children living in poverty are deprived. Families trapped in war-torn cities are deprived. Prisoners on starvation rations are deprived. They have no choice, no control over their situation.
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Beginners Course About Using Free-Weights
Free weights are bars with weight plates on each end. The long bars are called barbells and the short bars are called dumbbells. It takes two hands to hoist a barbell. You can lift a dumbbell with one hand (although you might do some exercises using two hands on a single dumbbell). Barbells and dumbbells are called free weights because they're not attached to any chains, cables, or weight stacks. You are free to do with them whatever you want, although we recommend using them for strength training.
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Are Diet Pills Good For Your Body?
Not all supplements and products that promise a leaner and thinner you are actually healthy, especially when the side effects are taken into consideration. Below are more fat-burning diet products that you may have heard about.
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With so many over-the-counter diet remedies promoting weight loss, it's no wonder that desperate folks continue to throw away their hard-earned money. This article presents ammunition for making a more rational decision the next time you find yourself searching the shelves at your local pharmacy or health food store. Remember to always read every ingredient listed on a brand name label; chances are you'll find one or more of the following substances. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
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1. De-automate your housework and make your body work harder. Wash dishes, mix batters and open cans by hand, and hang your wash on the line instead of using a dryer.
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1. Start your diet with a food diary. Record everything you eat, what you were doing at the time, how you felt. That tells you about yourself - your temptation times, the emotional states that encourage you to eat - and may help you lose weight, once you see how much you eat.
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10 Healthy Tips When Shopping The Breads-And-Cereal Section
1. Stick with whole grain varieties, including whole wheat, multigrain, rye, millet, oat bran, oat, and cracked wheat. This goes for all types of bread: sliced bread, pita, bagels, English muffins, crackers, and so on.
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7 Ways To Help Replace Meat In Your Diet
Day by day, you can take deliberate steps to trim the fat in your diet by shifting away from meat. Whether or not you cut it out entirely, you'll discover that what starts out as a bit of a challenge can become an enjoyable new habit.
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3 Ways To Ward Off Food Cravings
Food cravings aren't all in your mind. You crave foods because your body "remembers" the physiological effect the food had when you consumed it in the past. In fact, research has shown that the foods we perceive as enjoyable or rewarding actually activate the same "reward pathways" in the brain that are triggered by certain drugs of abuse, like cocaine. When you experience a "food flash," you are really experiencing a milder form of the drug cravings that afflict recovering addicts.
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1. Underwater Weighing: Underwater weighing is the most accurate method for determining your percent body fat, but it's the least practical because it's done with sophisticated equipment at university research facilities. This method is based on the premise that fat floats - think of how oil rises to the top in a bottle of salad dressing. Therefore, by submerging a body in a tub of water, you can determine how much of it is lean and how much is not.
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3 Meal-Structuring Tips For The Low-Fat Lifestyle
Always know what you're going to have for dinner well before you begin preparing a meal. If you get into the habit of doing that, there will be no pressing need to measure portions, count calories or forgo your favorite foods. When you plan your meals, eating appropriate portions will follow naturally.
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How You Eat Is Important To Weight Management
Most of us think of eating as being as natural as blinking or breathing. Unfortunately, it is not that simple since many have learned to eat incorrectly. Without proper eating skills, you will have trouble when on diets. With our fast-paced society, many bad habits have become the norm when eating. If you can break these habits, you will be more likely to drop pounds.
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Whether it’s a famous actress or a beautiful model, you can find many celebrities selling their revolutionary weight loss program. Because they have the perfect body that we are striving for, we will often find the program to be tempting. Of course, the celebrity is also popular, making it more likely that people will want to "be like him/her".
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Breakfast Is A Key To Losing Weight
Do you feel like you eat the ground running in the mornings? With rushing to shower, get dressed, fight traffic, and get to work, you may decide that you don’t have the time to slow down for breakfast, or at least a nutritious breakfast. You may not feel hungry early in the morning. You may feel like skipping breakfast will help you lose weight. However, what most people do not know is that skipping breakfast is bad for your health and bad for weight loss.
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During any exercise and diet regimen, losing the first few pounds is often very easy. That's good because it's a great motivator when you see results right away. But as you lose more, the rate of loss, and the speed with which you see visible effects, slows down. It's hard to keep going when you aren't seeing the benefits.
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Few commercialized areas of science are so filled with myths as that focused on weight loss. Everyone wants a simple, safe, no-willpower solution. Someday, we may actually get one. For now there are no magic cures. But there are quite a few myths that need to be exploded.
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Women are the major consumers for weight loss programs and diets. Men tend to focus more on exercise. But either topic is, and should be, popular with both sexes. Men, too, need to concern themselves with proper diet and nutrition as part of a rounded program of weight loss and health.
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Women, to put it bluntly, are biologically different from men. Those differences imply some guidelines for diet, exercise and health matters in general.
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Is Weight Loss Surgery For You?
Diet and exercise are the preferred twin partner methods for losing weight and excess body fat. A proper diet and age-appropriate, regular exercise will help almost anyone stay fit and in the correct weight range.
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Lose the Toxins: Lose the Weight
You might be looking for a diet that is more natural featuring homegrown and/or organic vegetables as well as fish or meat that you have caught/raised for yourself. The detox diet fits this description. Designed to help remove toxins from the body, this diet is considered to be necessary for a fully healthy body by many fans. Since chemicals and other pollutants surround our bodies, the detox diet helps the body to eliminate those toxins through the lungs and skin. Many times other strategies that use holistic theories such as exercise, supplements, and hydrotherapy are combined with the detox diet for a more comprehensive effect.
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According to many of the newest diets out today, counting calories is out of date. Instead, they preach counting the carbs and protein. Dieticians, however, disagree explaining that keeping the calories low is the key to losing weight. The basic rule still remains that burning more calories than consumed causes weight loss.
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A typical mother of three small children daydreams of getting back to her before marriage weight. While breast-feeding her 18-month-old, she is still too busy to make losing weight a priority, especially since she recalls having trouble losing weight after each of the other pregnancies.
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Exercise: A Key Ingredient to Weight Loss
Unbelievably, a recent statistic that has been released on the Internet states that 50% of people who are trying to lose weight do not exercise. Although that may sound incredible, it is really not that shocking considering the direction of the American culture over the past few years.
