Tag: Exercise

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General Weight Loss Tips

Insanity Workout Day 10: Minus 50 to 29

Today marks the 10th day of the Insanity Workout for me. Last week I was so sore, there were days when I was moving like an old lady. Today the soreness is more specific, like the back of my right thigh, but my body is getting used to the activity. I like being in a place where my body feels more conditioned and everything is more fluid.

It’s helpful for me to have a plan of action as far as exercise goes. I wake up do a little work, and when Josh wakes up we exercise. The calendar tells me which workout to do, and I do it. When I have a plan, the excuses are smaller. I can get to a place mentally where I do it anyway. It’s staying there that is the challenge. The more times that I do this, get up and exercise, or start again with a routine, the easier it becomes. The alternative is becoming less and less appealing each day that I take the time to make what I want happen.

***

I hope you all had a delicious Thanksgiving last week. I wasn’t in the mood to post, but want to let you know that I often post my exercise on twitter and facebook, if you care to see what I’m doing there. I’m also tracking my food on myfitnesspal.com. I’m weighing in once a week and so far I’m close to 3 pounds loss from Friday when I weighed in. I’m looking forward to another loss on Friday.

This is so random, but do you go through outfit phases? I do. I will wear the hell out of an outfit that I love.  This is my new favorite outfit. I don’t know why, it’s just comfortable and comforting to me. The jacket was purchased at Maurices, late fall last year at a deep discount. The jeans are from walmart of all places and sandals are from Avenue. It happened to be really warm Saturday. I know that look on my face says “something smells”, but it was one of the better ones. I also want to use this outfit to track my progress, by taking a picture wearing it every month.

More randomness: here’s me and Josh on Sunday after a dinner/lunch thing and I wanted to post because I was wearing a new wrap dress that I’m pretty sure was not flattering at this stage of my life, but I wore it anyway and because Josh looks so darn cute.

And finally, the last random photo for this post. My favorite salad at the moment. Leafy greens (preferably arugula or spinach) with cranberries, goat cheese, almonds and ginger dressing.

 

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Weight Loss Exercise

Why Group Fitness Works

Whether it is Zumba, bootcamp, yoga or kickboxing, whatever your workout pleasure is, there’s nothing like a great fitness class to get you to the gym and keep you coming back for more.

That’s why major fitness chains keep eyes peeled and ears pricked for the next big thing.

Benefits of Group Fitness

Why Group Fitness Works

Why Group Fitness Works

“The single biggest benefit is community,” said Tim Keightley, who oversees group fitness at Gold’s Gym, which has more than 600 locations around the world. “You meet a community of people so it’s a lot harder not to come back next week.”

Not only do group exercisers visit the gym more often, they are more likely to renew their memberships, according to Keightley, who said industry figures show that group exercisers use the gym about three times a week to the average gym member who goes 1.7 times.

“You throw on the music, you let someone decide the exercise for you,” he said. “It really allows people to escape, which you can’t do when you’re on a treadmill.”

Keightley said his teams put out a new schedule every month. “And two weeks into it they’re already evaluating to see what stays and what goes,” he said.

Thirty-minute workouts, military-style bootcamps, circuit training, and Zumba, the Latin-inspired dance fitness class, are currently what stays, according to Keightley, because they appeal to the 28-to-44-year-old professionals who are Gold’s core clientele.

Read more at Reuters

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Weight Loss Exercise

Positive Outlook Helps Focus




How you think and handle your emotions and stress is probably the most important factor in your general well-being or happiness. This, in turn, directly impacts your physical health and your abiliting for losing weight. And, when you think about it, even if it wasn’t connected to your health (it is!) would it still not be of primary importance?

Positive Outlook Helps Focus

Positive Outlook Helps Focus

Positive Outlook Helps Focus

It is no simple matter to ‘be happy’ or ‘think positive thoughts,’ or ‘relax and go with the flow.’ I put these in quotes because they sound like cliches, which they are. Still, they are of utmost importance. That is, what you eat, how you breathe and your thoughts all impact each other. That is actually why I chose to mention this subject. Because it is both the most important and hardest to practice when losing weight,

I wanted to set the stage with other, more straightforward things first. After all, it is easier to simply stop eating a certain junk food and start eating something healthy or to start exercising than it is to change your focus in a more positive direction. Yet if you start with better nutrition and more exercise, it becomes a bit easier to get more positive in your outlook.

More and more people are starting to believe in the notion that we create our reality with our thoughts and emotions. The Law of Attraction has become a popular subject since the release of the book and movie, The Secret (there is considerable debate over this, but I recommend you see it/read it if you haven’t already).

Whether we physically create our reality this way is debatable though some interpret quantum physics in a way that supports this. However, it is much more clear and obvious that, at the very least, our thoughts and emotions some say ‘attitude’ largely determine our experience of reality. This includes our well being and happiness. So, it follows that, if we want to feel good and be happy, we do best if we think positive thoughts and feel positive emotions.

The problem is that life, in the form of events, other people, memories, news stories and other sources, often sends things our way that we don’t find pleasing. So we feel angry, sad, nervous or some other negative emotion. This, in turn, sends signals to our body and all its cells and organs that causes stress. What is even worse, is that these signals tend to be self-replicating. That is, negative or stressful states tend to perpetuate themselves, causing more such states in the future. Fortunately, the reverse is also true the more you can feel good or happy, loving, relaxed, euphoric- the more you can feel good in the future. The body, once again, absorbs these messages as well and this has a very healing effect.

One very important aspect to have a positive outlook helps focus and how to do it is:

LIVE IN THE PRESENT!

I was almost going to devote a whole post to this, but I am trying to keep this brief. Living in the present means that you let of regrets of the past and worries about the future. No one, except maybe some meditation masters living on a mountaintop, lives in the present 100%. It is still a worthy goal, though. It is most important, naturally enough, to let go of negative feelings regarding the past or future, but even positive ones can be limiting if they keep you from realizing your potential in the present moment.

A person who is often nostalgic about happy times in the past has a belief that the best of everything is already over. If someone is always looking forward to some future happy outcome, they, too, are missing out. The problem with the future is that it never arrives. When what we think of as the future does occur, there is always a new future to look forward to. It is a fact of quantum physics that time as we believe in it is not real. It is an intellectual construct that makes everyday life easier to manage. It is not real in any fundamental sense. Keep this in mind when you find your mind wandering into the illusions of the past or future.

So the first step in thinking more positively is to set it as a priority in your life. There are many tools to help with this several in this report, especially breathing and the techniques in the following chapter- but the particular techniques you use are secondary to your basic commitment to do this. You simply cannot have well-being if you are not thinking good thoughts. Period

So if having a positive outlook helps focus why not start this right now and change you life?