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Weight Loss Exercise

Secrets to losing weight

Secrets to losing weight

Many people struggle with losing weight either for a short time in the spring or summer or for their whole life. There are many things that you can do to make the difference between being overweight or not. Based on the way that your lifestyle is there are two big things that you have to concern yourself with, diet and exercise.

Diet is what you eat. We all know that we should not eat food that is bad for us but how about the flip side. How about eating more foods that are better for us. Today at lunch I could have gone out for fast food or I could have stayed in and eaten the soup and fruit that I brought with me. I ate the soup. Today is generally the way that I eat which is eating by design. I plan in the morning what I will eat and then pack it with me so that I do eat it and not something that is more convenient at the time. Tomorrow I may go out for lunch instead but I know that in two weeks I will have eaten all but three meals or so by preparing them myself and not by having a restaurant prepare them for me. I eat what I should and if I eat any prepared food that I know that it is one bad decision compared to all of the good decisions that I make.
Water is also a big part of my diet. I drink water throughout the day so that my body can easily digest my food and also so that I am not hungry and looking for some junk food.

Exercise is the other part of a great health plan and is the basis, to me, of how to best lose weight. I ride a bike to work all summer so I can get two good workouts in a day but on the weekend I take it easy so that during the next week I am not getting too sore to keep up my exercise schedule. Exercising one a day is a great way to get better health and if you can keep up a high heart rate of at least 30 minutes a day it will burn more calories constantly during the day every day. Now that winter is coming I will be balancing my cardio on an indoor elliptical trainer with some weights to gain a bit more muscle. The importance of weight training can not be understated. If you have more muscle your body has to work a little harder to keep itself going, this will burn more calories.

Lastly I think that losing weight has a lot to do with a great, excited attitude. I have always found that when I am in my best shape I have a great attitude about my exercise and my eating. Workouts are a breeze and I am working towards my exercise goals consistently. My eating is really good and I am proud of the things that I am putting into my mouth and finally my outlook is great because I feel excellent about the way I look and feel.

Adopt these tactics and your weight loss will be a lot easier and more fun than it has ever been before

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Weight Loss Exercise

Using Negatives in weight training

There are two parts of a rep when you are doing an exercise. If you think about the way taht you do a bench press you raise the bar off of your chest and then at the top you let the weight down again. The letting down is known as the negative portion of the repetition.

If you focus on the negative portion of the repetition in some workouts you will make much better gains as it is another way to shock the muscle. The following link lings to an article that talks about this very thing.

In essence the best way to do a negative is to use the same weight as you normally would, do the raising of the weight the same way as usualy but in the lowering poertion control the weight more and double the time that it takes to lower the weight.

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Weight Loss Exercise

Sleep, Rest and Relaxation and health | sleep and rest



Sleep, rest and relaxation are a very important part of your daily ritual. I know that in the past I have gotten reved up with many projects and before long something has to be let go and it is usually the sleep that I need for a while. Don’t do it! As your sleep and rest start dropping you lose focus and can be lured into bad habits, sugar, coffee, and bad food. The worst thing about a lack of rest is that your body will not have a chance to heal from your earlier workouts, this can be very bad as you not only will feel sore longer but it will also suck your optimism for your new lifestyle.

How Much Sleep to Get

How much rest is enough? You probably already know this. I myself do not wake up with an alarm clock or clock radio anymore. I am fortunate to have a flexible start time and know that I will not sleep in past 8:00 in the morning. Try going to be earlier in the evening for a few nights and see when you wake up. In the fall and winter I always tape the TV shows that I watch so that I can get a chance to watch them when it is convenient to me not when it is convenient for the TV networks.

Another thing that pro bodybuilders do is have a nap in the afternoon, a nap can be great in cleansing your mind and letting you learn to relax better but you will probably find as I do that it si almost impossible to do except maybe on the weekends.

You can probably see from the tone of this information that I am delivering here that you must stop treating sleep and rest as something that takes away from something and instead learn to treat it as your own personal time, something a little more sacred than just something unavoidable that has to be done.

The Effects of Sleep

According to leading sleep researchers, there are techniques to combat common sleep problems:

  • Keep a regular sleep/wake schedule
  • Don’t drink or eat caffeine four to six hours before bed and minimize daytime use
  • Don’t smoke, especially near bedtime or if you awake in the night
  • Avoid alcohol and heavy meals before sleep
  • Get regular exercise
  • Minimize noise, light and excessive hot and cold temperatures where you sleep
  • Develop a regular bed time and go to bed at the same time each night
  • Try and wake up without an alarm clock
  • Attempt to go to bed earlier every night for certain period; this will ensure that you’re getting enough sleep

According to sleep researchers, a night’s sleep is divided into five continually shifting stages, defined by types of brain waves that reflect either lighter or deeper sleep. Toward morning, there is an increase in rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, when the muscles are relaxed and dreaming occurs, and recent memories may be consolidated in the brain.

No Hitting the Snooze Button

The experts say that hitting a snooze alarm over and over again to wake up is not the best way to feel rested. ‘The restorative value of rest is diminished, especially when the increments are short,’ said psychologist Edward Stepanski, PhD who has studied sleep fragmentation at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. This on and off again effect of dozing and waking causes shifts in the brain-wave patterns. Sleep-deprived snooze-button addicts are likely to shorten their quota of REM sleep, impairing their mental functioning during the day. (New York Times, October 12, 2004)

Certain therapies, like cognitive behavioral therapy teach people how to recognize and change patterns of thought and behavior to solve their problems. Recently this type of therapy has been shown to be very effective in getting people to fall asleep and conquer insomnia.

According to a study published in the October 2004 issue of The Archives of Internal Medicine, cognitive behavior therapy is more effec