Archive for the ‘Exercise and Diet’ Category

SmartphonesNowadays, a smartphone can actually make you gain weight instead of losing it because it causes you to lay or sit around and play on it instead of exercising. Well, there are actually ways you can lose weight with your smart phone. Read on to learn the top 5 ways to lose weight with your smart phone. Read the rest of this entry »

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Are you putting off getting fit because you don’t think you have the time? Think again! It’s easier to live a healthy lifestyle while taking care of business than you might imagine. eCollegeFinder, a resource for learning about online colleges, recently listed nearly 150 of the best fitness blogs on the Internet as part of the Top Health and Fitness Blogs Award. Each of the blogs was asked to give suggestions on how busy college students can still maintain a healthy lifestyle. The answers given are applicable to anyone with a tight schedule, student or not! Here are some of our favorites:

* Adrienne Langelier Racing says… that fitness needs to be a priority. Fitting regular exercise into your life will actually give you more energy to complete the other tasks you need to take on! If you make time to work out, you’ll sleep better and feel better, both paramount in keeping up with your responsibilities.

* Adventures in Running says… running is one of the best and most inexpensive ways to get in shape. When you don’t have time to incorporate multiple workouts into your day, choose running for a full-body exercise without the cost of gym membership.

* Pumps & Iron says… be flexible. While time management is key, learning to be flexible with your schedule can help you avoid quitting on fitness altogether. It may be discouraging if you’re forced to miss the time you allotted to work out or to cut your workout short. However, any time you can spend exercising is better than no time at all. Focus on making the most of the time you have to devote and if you have to miss one work out, don’t sweat it and don’t give up!

* Sweaty Escapades says… join a sports team. Organized sports will keep your exercise schedule regular and you’ll be working out with friends who share your interests. Turning fitness into a social experience can transform exercise from a chore into something you actually look forward to.

For more advice on keeping fit on a tight schedule, check out the contest and read more about what the winners had to say, or read this article – How to Stay Healthy in College


We live in a society today that is constantly changing their findings and recommendations in the nutrition subject. Merely every finding or experiment is contradicting or misleading. Some people are at the point where it is difficult to find anything worth eating. There are so many health issues involving our diet and many people strive to be cautious of their food selections. It is challenging to achieve a healthy diet when you read all these articles that say different things. So, even with this article, take what you want from it and apply it to some of your other findings. There really is no right or wrong with nutrition these days, because you will always find some information or person telling you something completely different. The list below shows five habits seen today that are surprisingly making you fat: Read the rest of this entry »

Weight Loss ResolutionsWith those New Year’s resolutions quickly approaching it’s hard for several of us to find the time or extra money for any sort fitness to get started on those resolutions and finally get in shape this year. Many of us think the thought of an expensive gym membership and/or buying fitness supplies to workout is not only costly but timely as well, but this does not always have to be the case.

It’s not only important to your health to stay active, but it may actually save you money when it comes to medical bills down the road by staying in shape! So What Are You Weighing For?! Use these 4 money-saving tips for squeezing in fitness and get started on those New Year’s resolutions: Read the rest of this entry »

With Christmas time brings all the holiday parties, endless shopping trips, and family gatherings it’s no wonder so many of us have a hard time fitting in fitness. Yet along with all of those mall food court trips, holiday parties with buffet lines, and family dinners this is one of the most crucial times to be making sure you squeeze in your fitness routines.

We know it is all about calories in vs calories out, and unfortunately Christmas time usually brings extra calories in. So it’s important we find the time to squeeze in fitness to counteract these calories.

With Christmas merely 12 days away here is a fun 12 days of Christmas of Fitness routine I found on a fellow blog GoTheExtraMileBlog.com. She explains the “jist of the challenge is that you add the exercise for the day onto your regular routine. Each day, you do the exercise before along with the new exercise shown.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/914398

For those who are pregnant, traditional weight gain and loss ideas should go out the window. No more dieting techniques to suppress your appetite! You can’t afford to start a weight-loss diet during your pregnancy. Read the rest of this entry »

According to this infographic Sitting Is Killing You, “we’re sitting down more than ever before in history; 9.3 hours a day, even more time than we spend sleeping (7.7 hours).” These long periods of sitting are doing more damage to our health than some may like to believe, in fact you may want to sit down for this.

Sitting at a desk all day The previously mentioned infographic went on to explain that sitting 6 or more hours a day makes you up to 40% likelier to die within 15 years than someone who sits less than 3. And that people who have sitting jobs are twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease.

Now those with sedentary desk jobs, as many of us do, may feel like there is often very little that can be done to avoid this. And unfortunately for us, according to a HuffingtonPost.com article, “research shows that extra-curricular trips to the gym – running the mornings before work or hitting up a post-office spin class – can’t undo the effects of a day spend on one’s behind.”

So what are those of us to do who sit our bottoms at our office all day?! Well it looks like the only available option is to remake our office environments with a few slight adjustments to your normal work day. These hours behind the desk can also serve to double as your workout while you continue with your workload.

Stepfanie Romine, contributor to DailySpark.com, writes 13 Ways to Get Moving at Work that have helped her: Read the rest of this entry »

When we sign up for a gym membership we usually have the idea that we are going to build some intense and amazing looking muscle, and sculpted arms. Many of us fail to think about the actual type of muscle that we will be building. Unfortunately weightlifting only affects veneer muscles or the “glamour muscles”, these are the muscles that you are going to see, but are not actually as useful in everyday situations. So if you want to build some effective muscles you are going to have to train your body down to the core.

Traditionally this is done by body weight exercises and other routines like yoga, but there is a new way to build core muscle. This new routine is known as balance lifting. This is something that you will incorporate with your dumbbells. Instead of standing or sitting when you do your curls, try doing standing on one leg. This is immediately going to give you tension all the way through your leg and into your torso. When you balance you force the deepest muscles in your body to be worked to max potential. These muscles do not build muscle mass, but rather shrink your body and make it tight. This is a great way for women to tighten their stomach, and get those flat abs that they have always wanted.

Depending on the amount of weight you are lifting with, the intensity of the workout will vary. If you have fifty pounds in each hand, unlikely, than you are going to be putting a lot of tension on your core, but if you only have five pound weights you probably won’t be impacting too much.

Find a happy medium for yourself, if you are a very small women, who does not want to build any muscle mass, then five pounds may be the perfect amount for you. If you are male, then you should not touch the 5 pound weights, you need to be exercising with at least 15 pounds, and that is still very light; I just didn’t want to offend anyone who can’t lift a decent amount of weight.

When you start to bring balance into play you strengthen your core muscles and tighten your body. This isn’t just going to make you smaller and stronger, but it is going to make it easier to lift more faster. For a perfectly well rounded exercise you should start incorporating balance into your weight lifting. You will be surprised at how fast you start to see and feel results.

how to stay healthy at collegeIf you’re like the majority of college students, you’d probably never been on your own before starting school. You undoubtedly relied on your parents for pretty much everything, including the incentive to eat healthy food. Being on your own, you probably didn’t worry too much about what you ate, or whether or not you got enough exercise–you were most likely too busy going to classes and enjoying your new-found freedom. However, if you’re like most new students, you quickly realized the importance of living a healthy lifestyle. If this sounds familiar, you may be interested in the following tips on how to stay healthy in college.
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The key to most diets is having the willpower to eat less, while maintaining physical activity to tone your body. Everyone on a diet wishes to eat more and still lose weight, but let’s face reality – that just isn’t going to happen! There are some diets out there that claim to help you by suppressing your appetite, thus making it a little bit easier to go through the struggles of decreasing your caloric intake. Here are a couple of different ways to assist you in weight loss, while suppressing your appetite, but you should always consult your doctor before beginning one of these plans. They will know what is best for you and your body type.

Gastric Bypass Surgery: This surgery has a very high success rate, (about 93% in obese or morbidly obese patients, and 57% in super obese patients according to this article.) Through a surgical procedure, a gastric bypass patient will have their stomach shrunk down to the size of a golf ball. This will only allow them to eat a couple ounces of food at a time. They will have to eat tiny meals throughout the day, and they will also have to take vitamins in order to get all of the nutrients that they need, since they no longer have the capacity to get the nutrients from the food they are eating. This diet plan isn’t a good option for everyone, because the surgery is very invasive and can be dangerous for some individuals. However, if you have tried everything else that you can and still haven’t managed to shed the pounds, it may be a good option for you.

HCG Diets: HCG is a hormone produced in pregnant women. The homeopathic HCG drops sold over the counter are now illegal because they are a complete scam. People who took these drops and followed the “HCG Diet” sometimes had success in losing weight, but only because the diet calls for a caloric intake of only 500-1000 calories per day. Essentially by starving yourself, you will lose some of your fat stores, but in the long run, the second that you increase your calories, the body will start to store fat again because it knows that it may need to draw from it in the future. Those who followed this diet under doctor supervision, using the injections of HCG tended to have a higher success rate, but it is still a controversial method to losing weight.

Diet Pills or Powders: Diet pills and powders used to suppress appetite are effective in some people, but not in others. Most of these diets are similar to the HCG diet, in that you must drastically reduce your calories in order to see results. Therefore, it’s nearly impossible to determine whether any weight loss is coming from the pills or powders, or if you are losing weight simply because of the drastic caloric decrease. Some of these use herbs which are known for their appetite suppressant abilities, so they are more likely to help you since you won’t be starving all of the time. On the Lemonade Diet FAQ page, they state that “Most of our customers who follow the diet strictly lose weight. We can’t guarantee how much a person will lose. Everybody is different and every person adheres to the diet differently.” So if you don’t follow 800 calorie per day guideline, then you will likely not lose weight on this diet, which means that the powdered drink mix isn’t there to help you lose the weight, but simply to suppress your appetite while you attempt to lose weight by decreasing your calories.

A tradition route of combining a healthy diet and exercise is always going to be your best bet for losing weight. Though you will have to practice some willpower, and may make a few mistakes here and there, if you can commit to this type of diet, you will be better off in the long run than many people trying to miraculously lose weight through some obscure diet plan.