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General Weight Loss Tips

How To Lose 10 Pounds In One Month

Many people struggle to lose weight for one main reason: they fail to set concrete goals. Instead of specifying an exact and quantifiable goal, plan, and deadline, they content themselves with vague targets like, “I want to lose weight.” This is no way to win. To be successful in any endeavor, including weight loss, people must set concrete goals, define the stepping stones that will mark the path, and create and stick to a plan that will keep them moving forward towards the target.

If you want to lose weight, set a goal, one that is quantifiable, or can be represented with objective numbers. For the purposes of this article, let’s say the goal is 10 pounds in a month. Now chunk it down – there are four weeks in a month, so you’ll need to lose about 2.5 pounds a week. At seven days per week, you’ll need to lose about a third of a pound each day. If each pound of fat contains 3500 calories, this means you must burn around 1250 calories a day through diet and exercise.

Thus, losing ten pounds in a month is difficult, but not impossible, especially if you are very overweight. In that case, those first ten pounds will be quite easy, as long as you follow the plan. If you simply want to lose the ‘last’ 10 pounds off your frame, this goal will be harder to accomplish. No matter your situation, to meet this calorie target, you will have to consistently follow a strict and detailed plan of diet and exercise. Here are the main steps:
1. First, determine how many calories your body uses each day based on your age, sex, weight, and activity level. There are many of these ‘calorie calculators’ around the internet, so find a good one and enter your vital statistics. Let’s say that your basic burn rate in a day is 2500 calories.

2. If you did no additional activity, you’d have to eat 1250 calories a day in order to hit your calorie target and induce weight loss. This would be very difficult to sustain, as you’d be hungry all the time and you’d suffer from malnutrition. Thus, you need to add in daily workouts to up your calorie burn. Let’s say you shoot for 500 calories burned in exercise. This takes your daily calorie burn at 3,000, and thus you need to eat 1,750 calories a day – a much more doable target.

3. Once you’ve determined your calorie target, plan out your daily meals so that you eat that many calories or less. A few guidelines: first, don’t starve yourself. If you consistently deprive your body, it will go into starvation mode, lowering your metabolism and killing your fat burning machine. Instead, you need to make sure your body is well supplied throughout the day with food and water. Instead of eating two or three big meals, eat 5 to 6 small meals throughout the day. This will help control your hunger while also keeping your metabolism roaring. Second, make sure to eat a wide variety of foods from all food groups, focusing especially on whole grain carbohydrates, lean proteins, healthy fats, fruits, and vegetables. Drink plenty of water each day, and avoid empty calorie beverages like soda and iced tea. If you make the right choices, 1,750 calories should be plenty of food to keep you satisfied each day, but you may still need to get used to ‘real’ portion sizes and wean yourself off the excessive portion sizes that are seen as ‘normal’ today.

4. Once your nutrition plan is in place, design your daily workout regime. You will want to mix in cardiovascular exercises and strength training. Shoot for about 4-6 cardio workouts each week, 3 strength training workouts, and daily flexibility training. Each type of workout will give you specific benefits. Cardio will improve your heart and lung health while also burning calories. Strength training will burn calories too, but it will also build muscle mass, increasing the number of calories you burn simply by existing. Flexibility will help you recover from workouts more quickly and will reduce your chances of injury.

If you follow this clear, detailed plan without fail, you will be sure to hit your goal after one month. The journey doesn’t end there, though – fitness and health is a lifetime quest; a journey, not a destination.

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What is Interval Training?

I’ve seen interval training get a lot of attention recently because it is supposed to be a quick way to get fit, in this article we look at what it actually is. Interval training is when you use timed intervals to alternate between two different levels of intensity as you exercise. For example, you could warm up, then go on the treadmill for 1 minute of easy jogging at 7km/h, then crank it up to 14km/h for 1 minute, then go back to 7km/h and repeat that for as long as you want to train for.

The reason this is so good is because if you tried to push yourself to do 14km/h on the treadmill for as long as possible in one session then you might only last a few minutes, then you’d stop because you were exhausted. With interval training then the recovery interval you give yourself after each intense interval allows you to push on and do far more of the intense intervals than you could do if you tried to do them all in one go.

Another thing I have found with interval training is that as you are so focused on waiting for the minute to end so you can change the speed up or down, then time goes by much faster. Usually jogging is incredibly boring for me and after 5 minutes I am fed up and just want it to end, but I don’t get that with interval training.

Interval training is probably a more natural way to exercise anyway, consider sports, when you are close to the action then you are doing an intense interval as you try and get the ball etc, then you get to rest as the action moves away from you. Plus we have actually descended from hunters, and that is how they would have exerted themselves too.

The treadmill was just an example though, you can actually use interval training to spice up almost any kind of exercise, you could be on the elliptical trainer, the rowing machine, or even out on a normal bike on the roads. The good news is that studies suggest your metabolism can be elevated for hours after finishing interval training, rather than returning straight back to normal after most other types of exercise, so you are burning fat for a long time even after you finish your workout!

If you prefer changing your diet to lose weight rather than exercising, then check out Cheat Your Way Thin instead.

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Isnt This A Scary Way To Think About Anorexia?

Really? You want to be anorexic? My sister was anorexic for about 2/3 of her life, so I’ll tell you what she did. It started when she was 13. Due to some horrid events out of her control, she somehow got psychologically twisted into believing that the only thing in her life she *could* control was her weight. And the best way to do that was by controlling the amount of food she ate. She began to cut way back on the amount of food she ate. At a time when her age, height and activity level dictated her eating between 1800 and 2000 calories a day, she was probably eating more like 1000/day. As she started to drop weight, she got excited because she realized her new-found weight loss method was really working fast! Never mind the fact that she was losing the ability to think properly.
Have you ever gone a day without eating? 1/2 a day? You start to shake, get snappy, lose focus on little things. Keep that up for a day or two and your body begins to understand something critical: it’s not getting any nourishment and probably won’t be any time soon so it better do something fast to preserve itself. “Hmm. . . ” it thinks. “If she won’t feed me, I will!” So it starts to consume fat, then muscle, then eventually, if you let it go long enough, it starts to consume your organs. All the while, you’re not feeding your brain so you have no ability to think for yourself. You lose the ability to reason. . . you can’t see that you’re actually allowing your body to consume itself. You can’t even think to try to reverse the process you’ve already begun. Eventually, someone has to do the reasoning for you. Wow! talk about control! But hey! you’ll be skinny, oh yes!
Back to my sister. When people start noticing how skinny you’re getting, pressure is brought to bear on you to gain some weight. Nobody is ever happy with the weight you are. You’re either too heavy or too skinny. So you learn tricks to fool people. Push food around on your plate. . . make them think you’re eating. But when you are forced to actually eat something, then you make a bee-line for the bathroom to vomit. Ahhhhh!! now THERE is a great solution to your problems! You can have your cake AND throw it up too! If you decide to go that route, you’ll feel so in control of yourself! “Hey look what I can do! I can eat but not gain a pound!” Just be aware of the consequences (and these aren’t “potential,” these are guaranteed consequences):
1) the hydrochloric acid, the acid that lines your stomach used in digestion, the acid that gives you that burning feeling in your esophagus when you vomit, will eat away the enamel of your teeth with repeated exposure. Eventually, you’ll start to get tooth decay. Mmmmm now there’s a pleasant side-effect! Ever smell the breath of someone with tooth decay? But hey! you’ll be looking hot in those size 1 jeans! Not really. . . anorexics are never happy or satisfied with their body image.
2) Electrolytic imbalance – your body is a marvel. It’s like a well-oiled machine when you take care of it. It knows exactly how much you need of certain nutrients to keep it cooled, warmed, functioning properly, etc. When you starve yourself and/or purge (the soft word for vomiting), you throw your body’s chemistry off. Sugars, salts, potassium, other minerals and vitamins. . . all those things a body needs for proper functioning get out of whack. The only way to bring them back into alignment is a stint in the hospital whereby they force-feed you those nutrients through a needle stuck in your arm and a feeding tube stuck down your nose, if you refuse to eat. That’s if you’re lucky and it’s caught in time and you haven’t yet suffered heart failure or slipped into a persistent vegetative state a la Terri Schiavo. Remember her?
15 years in a coma before her husband and parents battled it out in court for the right to let her die or let her live. In the end, her husband won the right to pull the plug. I’m guessing he thought that was a small price to pay because she was so thoughtful in life that she starved herself to give him a skinny wife.
3) A third consequence binging/purging cycle is your face changes shape and your skin becomes nasty. Your jaws, right where they hinge below your ears, start to enlarge. I’m not sure what causes that (I think it may be a glandular thing), but the overall effect is you start to look a bit like a chipmunk. Your face gets round, an ironic twist for someone who wants to look super skinny. Your skin also goes bad. It gets dry, flaky, and you have breakouts galore. These aren’t necessarily acne; sometimes they’re just sores. But that’s what happens when your body isn’t getting what it needs to survive. It starts the early stages of decomposition.
4) One more consequence of anorexia is lanugo. This is a fine, downy like hair that starts to grow over your whole body, including your face. It’s usually very pale, but at roughly 1/8″ to 1/4″, it’s quite visible especially because there is so much of it. This happens because of your body struggles to survive and keep you warm as you strip it of its protective fat and muscle layers.
All of these things happened to my sister. It’s guaranteed to happen to anyone who goes down this road. But hey, looking like a hairy chipmunk with bad skin and teeth is a small price to pay for fitting into that dress or those pants. Just ask my sister. . . oh wait, you can’t. She’s dead. )
Rewind a little. By the time my sister was about 26, she had spent half her life starving herself. She was down to an apple, a piece of bread, and a couple leaves of lettuce a day. That’s about 200 calories. And she was running 7 miles a day. How in God’s name her legs were able to carry her is beyond me. She was also doing a bazillion crunches and push-ups a day. It was only a matter of time before her 84 lb. body gave out. She was in and out of the hospital for years because her internal organs were suffering severely as a result of her neglect and mistreatment. She had numerous abdominal surgeries which resulted in rather lovely scars that criss-crossed her tummy. She was always in severe pain from the strictures caused by the repeated cutting and closing of her abdomen. (Strictures are spaghetti-like scars that grow inward and intertwine with your organs. . . especially your intestines. When these grow, more surgery is required to remove them. A rather viscious cycle. )
Well, to make a long story short, her heart finally gave out on her. She died alone. But hey! she was wicked skinny when we buried her! I’m so glad she chose to lose all that weight because it made her coffin much lighter.
Honey, I spent a lot of time writing this not to be flippant with you. I did it to scare you senseless. Anorexia is not a glamorous thing. It’s not pretty. It’s not beautiful. Vogue and Cosmopolitan will not be banging down your door to sign you as their next hot thing. The fact that you are contemplating (no, desiring!) such a horrid path is very frightening. At 6’1″, 167 lbs. , you are perfect. . . exactly where you should be. You should be concentrating on healthy habits, instead. Eat lots of fruits and vegetable, whole grains, lean meats, low-fat dairy products. Exercise. Find an activity that gets your blood pumping and that makes you happy and feel good about yourself. It could just be hip-hop dancing. . . doesn’t have to be anything formally organized. Just move. If you do these things everyday, you will not have a weight problem. You’ll be as you are: a lovely young woman. . . one with a little meat on her bones.

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