Tag: Fitness

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Alison Sweeney Total Body Makeover Tips




She’s more than just the host of The Biggest Loser—she lives the show’s healthy lifestyle. Alison Sweeney built an exclusive 30-day plan for Health magazine featuring her favorite tips, moves, and recipes, including lessons she’s learned from celebrity trainers Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels. Below are Alison’s top five tips to try this month.

Total Body Makeover Tips

Scrap all unrealistic expectations – “I’m not a fan of having a supermodel on your refrigerator…Nobody is going to all of a sudden, at 40, look like an 18-year-old model. Set your goals to positive things. Instead of thinking, ‘I need to work out because I want to lose weight,” I’m thinking, ‘I have to run a 26.2-mile race, so I have to run. Today. Now.’”

Don’t put off what you can do today – “When I do one thing that’s good, I immediately start to feel better. I don’t wait for Monday. I don’t wait for a holiday. I don’t wait for my birthday. I don’t wait for January 1. I start right now.”

Make Alison’s chopped salad for dinner – “A friend of mine brought over a vegetable salad that was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. Just cut up cooked broccoli, asparagus, green beans, raw carrots, and roasted corn into neat little chopped bits and add cilantro and avocado, then toss it. The fat from the avocado and a little bit of salt – that’s the dressing. It’s so good and so refreshing!”

If you crave sugar tonight, go to bed early – “One thing I learned from Jillian [Michaels] is that when you’re tired, you crave sugar because your brain needs sugar to sustain itself. So when you’re tired, one of the first symptoms is that you’ll look for something sugary to eat because you’re trying to stay awake. So think of it that way, instead of, ‘Oh, I’m so weak-willed.’ It’s not that. Close your eyes! You need rest.”

Put out your sneakers tonight to taunt you tomorrow – “If my sneakers are out, they’re like, ‘Pick me, pick me!’”

For the full plan, please visit: http://www.health.com/health/article/0,,20618606,00.html

Related content:

  1. Biggest Loser Starts Tonight

Alison Sweeney Total Body Makeover Tips, 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating

Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Eliminate Pain with these 3 Keys to Promoting Joint Health




As people grow older, they frequently complain that they have problems with joint pain, hip pain, back pain, neck pain, and other types of pain. They then go on to blame their pain solely on the fact that they are getting older. Sure their body may have been through a lot, but that does not mean that the pain cannot be prevented or fixed.

To fix anything in life, you just have to take the right steps.

Exercise for Joint Health

You know your body needs physical activity on a regular basis. You do not have to go climb a mountain or run an ultra-marathon, you just have to do things that challenge your current fitness abilities.

Exercise is important for maintaining a healthy body weight, keeping muscle tissue strong, and also for promoting joint health. When you exercise, the bones in your joints and the muscles around your joints are strengthened.  It is important to have strong muscles surrounding your joints because they help support the joint. If the muscles are weak, unnecessary stress is placed on the joints. This can cause pain and increase the risk of injury.

Mobility Work to Eliminate Pain

Your mobility is basically how well your joints and soft tissues are able to move.

Every day, your body endures a variety of stresses and strains. Over time little things add up, causing soft tissue and joint restrictions. When your joints and soft tissues are not healthy, they are not able to move fluidly through a normal range of motion, causing pain and discomfort.

The pain and problems associated with these restrictions can be avoided and corrected. You just need to practice moving your body through the motions.

Here are two things you can do to improve your mobility

Stretching: Both static and dynamic stretching are beneficial to the soft tissues in your hip. If you need a stretch to try for your hips, get in to a full squat position.

Here’s how to do a full squat:

  • Stand up straight.
  • Place your heels so that they are positioned below your shoulders.
  • Slowly push your hips down and back, like you are going to sit in a chair (focus on dropping your hips and your knees will automatically bend).
  • As you squat down, you will need to lean your torso forward in order to keep your center of gravity over your feet.
  • Go down until you reach the end of your range of motion and hold that position for a little while.

Squat Tips:

  • Keep your chest up and put your arms in front for balance.
  • When you go to stand up, push your hips back so you do not place unnecessary stress on your knees.

Rotational exercises: These exercises are particularly helpful if you have hip joint pain. They can be used to move each of your joints and their supporting tissues through their complete range of motion. Here is another one you can try for your hips…

 Front to Back Leg Swing:

  • Stand up straight.
  • Lift one foot off of the ground and balance on one foot.
  • Swing the leg that is not in contact with the floor back behind yourself, then swing it in front of yourself.
  • Repeat this motion several times, and then switch legs.

Leg Swing Tips:

  • Use your arms to balance, and hold onto something if you need to.

Eat Properly

Food is essentially a drug.  Due to this simple fact, you can either use food to help yourself or to hurt yourself.  When it comes to keeping your joints functioning well, it is important that you eat foods that contain fatty acids and anti-oxidants. Both anti-oxidants and fatty acids help to reduce inflammation. When you reduce inflammation, you also speed up the healing process which will help relieve joint pain.

In addition to eating foods that help reduce inflammation, you should also eat in a way that helps prevent inflammation in the first place. I am taking about eating to control your body weight. Maintaining a healthy body weight ensures that additional stresses are not placed on your joints. In the long run, this will help reduce the wear and tear caused by daily activities.

Bonus: Drink lots of Water

Other benefits of water have been stated before here on Fitness Tips for Life, here is another one to add to the collection. Drinking lots of water promotes joint health be ensuring that the muscle tissue around your joints have the proper fluids to function smoothly. It also helps the cartilage in your joints to perform optimally.

 

About the Author:

Dave is a trainer who focuses on sustainable methods of training. He maintains a personal website about hip pain, which can be found here.

Related Blogs

  • Related Blogs on Back Pain
  • Related Blogs on Fitness
Categories
Weight Loss Exercise

Gratitude, Thankfulness, and Forgivness




This one thing has everything to do with the way you look at your life and how you treat others and I think that it can make a huge difference internally to the way you look at yourself and those around you

Gratitude, thankfulness, and forgiveness will change your life

We all live a life judging others, judging ourselves and trying to change people to conform with the views and opinions that we have. Well maybe not always but often anyway. We all know what is right and wrong for certain things and with others we are not so sure. That’s just human nature. The times I see that in myself are in the times that I “think” that I am sure of the truth and at the same time I find I don’t judge or try to change opinions in places that I do not have a hard and fast view.

I have found though that it is important to break down the ego and look at gratitude, thankfulness, and forgiveness as much as I can so that I can be open to change and learn  more from others, this brings me to a higher, better consiousness and a far better place to accept myself and see my own flaws.

The ego is the enemy more than anything. So how do we do these things?

Gratitude – To have gratitude we have to see where we are and what we have in our lives that is good. Everyone can harp on their weight, bad job, unsupportive people in their lives, but really this does not ever help us to move forward. Instead try and make sure that you are always and only looking at the best of things in your life. Sure you can change things in your life but if you are always looking at the crap in your life it is hard to move forward.

So always be grateful for the great things, situation, and people in your life as an anchor. Many people use a gratitude journal or just write down once a day the 10 things that they are grateful for at that very moment

Thankfulness – In all areas of your life you have to promote the people and situations that you are in at that very moment. This is really thankfulness. I personally look at gratitude as being the whole of my life and thankfulness at the little things at that instant to be thankful for. The sunny day, the guy that lets me in in traffic, the kids listening to me, and especially a big hug from my wife. Thankfulness is critical to making sure that you understand that life is not going through the motions but is instead a fantastic bunch of little situations and events that make a life full.

Forgiveness – This is a hard thing for most people, me included. Forgiveness simply means that no matter what happens bad in your life you are willing to forgive the person that did it. You can’t hold onto anger, fear and resentment in your life as it will harden you and suck out the great emotions in life and instead fill you with sadness and hatred.

So that guy that bumps ahead of you in line, he’s probably in a big hurry, forgive. The coworker that puts you down in a meeting, they have ego issues, forgive. The kids drinking next door and keeping the neighborhood awake late into a Saturday night, they are having fun and don’t even realize people are hoping to sleep, forgive them.

Forgiveness is the toughest of the three here because you are hurt by the situation and often the other person is not at all. Forgiveness as I said though is critical because you can never move forward if you are resenting others, believe me I tried.

For anyone that is a Christian or Jewish, or Muslim this is not news. Religion has taught these truths for thousands of years but that fact is that most people don’t actually practice these in their day to day lives. I am sure, actually I can promise you, that If you integrate gratitude, thankfulness, and forgiveness into your daily life if will really change you and help you move forward.