Month: January 2011

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General Weight Loss Tips

January Wrap-Up and Looking Ahead

I was reading Caroline’s blog this morning and cracking up over her “it will be christmas again soon” sentiment. January is coming to a close and well, here comes February.

So far this year I find myself every week checking in with my goals. The goals I set at the beginning of the year, and the new goals that develop as the year progresses. I use Sundays as my goal gathering and planning day and find that it helps keep me in check for the following week.

As I look back over the month I see a list of stuff on my calendar that I did do and didn’t do. The first couple of weeks of the year I didn’t exercise much mainly because I was cramming all of my time with extra projects. Each of those days I had on my to do list “do insanity workout” and then finally the last two weeks of the month I did it. I did Insanity every day (with Sundays off). I write this, along with all of my posts, as a reminder to myself that I’m not giving up.

What if I let those first two weeks set the tone for the year? What if I was determined to be perfect, a new person on January 1st? Would I have given up completely on the idea that eventually I’d get into it. And I did.

I’ve said this before, but when I think about why I blog. Why I share my struggles, why after 4.5 years I still come to this place to share where I’m at even if it is sometimes painful and slightly embarrassing…it’s because of my potential. It’s because deep down I trust that each time I try something new, I’m getting closer. Sticking to this one thing, even if at times I truly wasn’t here, or struggling to be here- I knew somehow there was some important growing going on even if it didn’t always feel like.

With that said, I’m just two weeks in. It’s not over, it’s not even close from over. And I have to realize that. That I need more weeks like I’ve had, adding up on each other. There isn’t a stopping point. This is my life now, if I choose to accept it. My life as someone who has to exercise, who has to consider what she is eating. This isn’t a temporary blip, a chapter of my life that ends when I see a reasonable number on the scale. I’m making this my life now.

I’ve gotten to the point where I can honestly say that the desire to be healthy is much stronger than the desire to overeat or not exercise. I’m not saying I’m cured, or perfect, or won’t even overeat again but I’ve never felt that before. I’ve always wanted the easy path. I wanted to still eat everything I wanted, I didn’t want to sacrifice my time. I didn’t want to push myself. Sure I came here, and logged exercise and points or calories. I’ve done that, but I did it in the mindset of “this is temporary, this won’t be my life forever”.

I’ve accepted that this is who I am. Someone who has to watch what she eats, and someone who has to push hard during exercise. This is my life now. I can push myself harder than I thought. I can realistically exercise everyday without getting burned out. I can take time to prepare meals. This isn’t punishment, this is investment.

So as I look ahead to February I see more solid weeks of exercise. More calorie counting. It looks fun and promising. I will eat delicious and whole foods. I will cook as much as possible. I will try new recipes. I will not go to bed without exercising. I will take Sundays off to rest.

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Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Dietrine carb blocker

What is the Dietrine carb blocker?

As you know I am a big proponent of using a good diet and exercise to lose weight although a carb blocker is an interesting idea. There is no such thing as taking a pill to lose weight and even if a pill did the job I am not sure that in the end it makes you any healthier than a classic couch potato.

Most of the time we can just exercise and have a good diet and will lose weight easily that way. Sometimes this does not work though. I get emails every week from people that seem to have trouble losing weight, if they just have two pieces of bread they seem to gain weight easily the next day. I have looked around for a long time for something that would help everyone with this problem.

I have just run across a type of diet supplement known as a carb blocker.

The Dietrine Carb Blocker works with your body’s own natural processes to prevent carbs from being stored as fat. The effective ingredient works by neutralizing the alpha amylase enzyme, effectively limiting the breakdown of carbohydrates into glucose and fat, meaning that your caloric intake can be dramatically decreased, even with carbohydrate-rich foods.

This all may seem a little technical, but the upshot is fairly simple. The Dietrine Carb Blocker will prevent your body from turning carbs into excess fat, safely and easily. It starts working immediately, so you simply need to take two capsules before eating any especially starchy meals.

Are carb blockers a scam?

So my next step was to look around and find something that would work and would not be some kind of scam. I had a few qualifications for a good carb blocker:

  • Had to be natural – Who wants to pollute their body with chemicals?
  • Had to be cheap – Health food stores always seem to charge a ridiculous amount for what you get
  • Had to be proven effective – There are far to many scams in the diet industry and I didn’t want to get ripped off.

I found a bunch of products out there and the trouble was that many are fly by night operations that you can not get hold of by phone, or they exagerated claims (if you could lose 30 pounds a month wouldn’t every have used your product?), and finally most of the products were some kind of crazy dangerous ephedrine product that didn’t actually block carbs at all but could instead cause heart problems.

Dietrine is a carb Blocker

Dietrine carb blockerIn the end I did find one product that seemed to be a good carb blocker and that is a product called Dietrine. Dietrine seems to give me all of my qualifications. It is made out of beans, you can only buy it online so there is no five layers of middlemen selling to the health food store. And the company has been around for a long time, you can even phone them to ask about that.

If you are one of those people that seems to gain weight far to easily from Italian food or can not seem to lose weight even with diet and exercise than it seems like this Dietrine carb blocker product may be exactly what you are looking for.

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Cheating day on a diet

Cheating day on a diet

Cheat Day on a Diet

Taking a day of your diet is good. A diet is a great example of having commitment to what you want and I applaud anyone and everyone that does a good job of committing themselves to staying healthy with a good diet. The trouble is trying to stay on a diet every day for months or years on end. This is what people aspire to but it is not very easy to do.

Cheating day on a diet confuses your metabolism

A few diets seem to say that you should try to confuse your body by staying on your diet for a few days or a couple of weeks at most and then getting off your diet for anywhere from one to three days. What do you think of this? Well the idea behind the days off on a diet is that you need to confuse your body so that it does not just adjust to lower caloric intake or just lower your metabolism to maintain fat levels.

Diets with a Cheating Day

Would you like to know examples of off day diets? There is a Weight Watchers diet adjustment that involves changing the amount of points you eat a day and cycling though these. You could do a kind of day off on this plan. The Body for life plan is that you do diet and exercise six days a week and eat whatever you want for one day a week. And finally there is the fat loss for idiots program that has you do the diet for 11 days and then take 3 days off before you do it again. This is the most confusing for your body (this is good) and easiest for you to manage.

Rules for a Diet Cheat Day

The best way that I see people doing there diet with days off is to have rules still for your days off. Try to follow the following rules:

  1. The idea is to eat what you want but do not overdo it.
  2. First of all you need a good regimen for your diet days and then for your days off the rules should be about how you cheat.
  3. Try to make sure that you are not being ridiculous because it is your day off. Do not eat a whole large pizza or a gallon of ice cream.
  4. Do not binge, no huge meals just meals that make you comfortably full
  5. This is the day that you go to a restaurant if you want.
  6. Do not eat three days worth of food in one day. The idea is that you can cheat but you don’t want to spend the whole week just catching up.

I hope that this plan for days off helps. I know that I have struggled with this in the past but the best thing is to just expand on your regular diet and at the same time make sure that get to eat those things that you are craving, in small measures of course.