How To Drop Weight And Become Healthier Using These 7 Simple Everyday Life Tips

These days more and more people are getting intellectual instead of physical jobs. Sitting in the office chairs all-day long has become a norm for many of us. Stress, busyness and rush make us forget about regular food and stuff our stomachs with cheeseburgers and sodas, which don’t do anything good for our bodies.

As a result of such crazy life rhythm, we rarely find time for exercises, gyms or balanced nutrition. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the reasons why there are now more that 60% of U.S citizens that have overweight. However, it is possible to change your lifestyle and lose your weight if you are willing to.

These 7 day-to-day life tips provided below will help you to drop your extra pounds, become more energetic and healthier.

1.Drink More Water

Our bodies need a lot of water. Water removes waste from our organisms and carries various nutrients into all our organs and cells. Your body also loses water by using it for various ways. For this reason you have to replace it and drink water more often than you are used to.

Start your day with a glass of water in the morning. Drink a glass of water before any meal. Take a bottle of water with you when you go to work. Your body needs approximately 3-5 liters of water during one day. So don’t hesitate to drink plenty of water wherever and whenever you can.

2.Eat Fruits and Drink Fruit Juices

Eating fruits and juices helps you eliminate toxins from your body. Eating a variety of fruits also helps you get enough fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants. That’s why you should eat fresh fruits and drink natural fruit juices as often as possible.

Fruit juices from stores are often sweetened. If you want to drink juices, make fresh juices yourself. If you think it takes too much of the time, then look for juices with labels that say “100% fruit juice”. These are much healthier for your body as long as they contain much more vitamins.

3.Eat Lots of Vegetables and Vegetable Salads

When it comes to losing extra pounds, vegetables are a great choice. They are natural and contain different vitamins, minerals and tons of other useful chemicals known to provide benefits for your body. Vegetables are low in fat and calories, they help control blood glucose levels, reduce blood cholesterol and reduce the risk of colon and other cancers. All these features also help control your weight effectively.

If you feel that eating vegetables alone isn’t great choice for you, then make some salads. Mixing vegetables together gives you even more different vitamins and health benefits. There are tons of tasty, healthy salad recipes on the internet. You can also use you imagination to make some great salads.

4.Eat Only When You Are Hungry

How many times you’ve been to a party where you saw lots of different and tasty looking meals, which you were offered to try.

Don’t eat, because you are offered to. Eat only when you want to.

Many people also like snacking. In between meals or when have nothing to do. Quit snacking. Most snacks contain a lot of fat and calories. Replace your usual snacks with vegetables or fruits. These are healthy to your body and you’ll never get fatter, only thinner.

5.Carry Healthy Food with You

Many of us work busy office jobs and don’t have time to eat regularly. In this case, bring your own made food with you. Instead of bringing sandwiches with meat, take vegetable salads, carrots, chicken salads. Any low fat food will do. This way, you won’t have to wait for a break to fill your stomach. You’ll be able to have fixed times when eating food.

It’s also important to try to eat about 5 times a day, rather than 3 or 2. Eat in smaller quantities, but more often. This helps you to increase your metabolism.

6.Work Out When You Can

Working out in a gym is not only a great way to grow some muscles, but also to drop a few pounds. Exercising helps you burn your calories instead of storing them in your body as fat. Our bodies were made to be active, so exercising slowly and easily can actually help you get more energy and make you feel much better.

At the end of the week, try to lose all the stress and burn your calories in a gym or having some kind of physical activity at home. If you have time, then try to do easy exercises everyday.

7.Don’t Lie Down or Sit When You Can Move

Many of us like to watch TV lying on a couch or sitting in a comfortable chair. Of course, when you come home after hard working day, you’re tired, and all you can think of, is a couch and a remote in your hand. But such laziness won’t help you lose weight. Contrarily, it will make you grow some more pounds.

So don’t lie or sit, when you can walk and move. Instead of staring at TV, like a goofy, go ahead and work out in your garden for example, clean your garage, fix your car, go to walk in park or beach. Breathe fresh air and move more often. Not only does it help to reduce stress after work, but also ups your mood and makes you more energetic.

In Conclusion

Remember that all these tips will help you to lose weight, but only if you are determined and are ready to devote some of your time. Don’t expect to slim down 4 sizes after eating 5 carrots and drinking orange juice.

Your body, just like many things in this world, needs time. So be patient. And if you will honestly use at least some of these tips, you are going to change your lifestyle, which in the end will lead you to a thinner and healthier body.

Could Low Carb Eating Help You Loosing Weight

There are an increasing number of people who take on the process of low carb eating believing that it will help them for their weight loss.

However, there is still an existing and hottest question when dealing with low carb eating, and that is if low carb eating a healthy way of life. So what then is the answer? Find out here.

Speaking of the low carb eating, it is a common consideration that it is not important to count calories in the low carb eating lifestyle. As such, you have the freedom to eat as much as you want and whenever you want. But despite this truth behind the low carb eating lifestyle, many experts have noted this is never a healthy way of life.

Many people are indeed metabolically resistant. So in instances like this, the proper way of reducing food intake may aid the dieters to motivate or sustain the consistent weight loss that they wish. Still, when talking about low carb eating, it is the carbohydrates that must be kept low, not the calories.

To further support the view, it is a given fact that in low carb eating lifestyle, you are definitely been eating fats and oils. As such, you rarely ever be hungry for in general, those foods that are high in fat are ever satisfying. A high fat eating coupled with a low carb eating supplements will tell your body that it is not starving just like the case of fasting, but rather your metabolism in this stage maintains a normal level. So while consuming fat is one of the prerequisites for a healthy low carb eating, it is then necessary to limit the consumption of trans-fats like margarine. Instead of that, it is recommended that you use real butter, for it is a good fat. And for your interest, good fats are found in olive oil, flax seed oil, canola oil, and oils that are greatly found in nuts.

So then, is low carb eating healthy? Well, on a low carb eating, you can definitely lose weight constantly and it can reduce your insulin levels, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, and even stabilize your blood sugar, which is of course great for diabetics. And since in low carb eating, you will be taking less fruits and vegetables, it is then necessary that you take a good full-spectrum multi vitamins and fiber supplements.

It is also important to consider that the main purpose of the low carb eating is to bring your body chemistry and insulin level back into balance. And so to make this, you need to take a diet that is unbalanced in the opposite direction of the way that you have been eating for the rest of your life.

The Science Of Low carb Diets Why They Work

You long for firmer muscles and smaller waist. Everybody does. Do you think you can’t lose weight? Yes, you can. But the truth is you can’t lose weight without a diet – a plan.

Low Carb Diet

Weight-loss experts and diet plan authors all agree that much of our excess weight comes from the carbohydrates we eat, especially the highly refined or processed ones such as potatoes, baked goods, bread, pasta and other convenient foods. To aggravate the problem, few of us get enough exercise to ward off excess pounds.

The basic science behind the low carb diet is to limit the consumption of foods with a lot of carbohydrates. The low carb diet includes many popular weight-loss programs such as the Atkins, South Beach, Zone and Carbohydrate Addict Diet.

Does It Really Work?

One of the food groups which the body needs to survive are carbohydrates. Carbohydrates also referred to as carbs come in two types – sugars and starches. Sugars are simple carbs usually sweet tasting like biscuits and sweets and easily digested. Whereas, starches are complex carbs found in bread, pasta, noodles and rice and take longer to digest.

The body transforms all these digestible carbs into glucose, the sugar that our cells use as fuel or energy. When glucose molecules pass from the intestine into the bloodstream, the pancreas releases insulin, a hormone that mobilises cells to absorb it. Muscle, fat and other cells then absorb the excess glucose from the blood and insulin levels return to normal.

After a meal high in glycemic index (ranking of foods according to how fast their sugars are released into the bloodstream), blood-sugar levels rise higher and rapidly. The insulin needed to fill all that sugar into muscles and fat cells also weaken the activity of glucagon, a hormone that signals the body to burn stored fuel when blood-sugar levels fall below a certain point. Glucose level drops so low leaving the body starved for energy. The brain and intestine then send out hunger signals. New cravings are created requiring more carb intake. We, then overeat that leads to more fat, rise in blood insulin level, more hunger, and more weight gain and the cycle goes on.

On the contrary, adhering to a low carb diet puts an end to this cycle. Reduced carbohydrates would mean decreased insulin level, increased glucagon level, weight loss, improved triglycerides (fats carried in the blood which are necessary but when excessive cause coronary damage), decrease in LDL (bad cholesterol), increase in HDL (good cholesterol).

The bottom line – Give refined or processed carbohydrates which cause rapid changes in blood sugar, trigger hunger, thereby encouraging overeating that ultimately leads to obesity smaller spots on your plate. Anyway, nobody ever died from skipping potatoes, pasta, rice and white bread.

That said; go get yourself a few good low carb cookbooks. Better still, leaf through this site’s 1,000+ low carb recipes – a seemingly endless variety of recipes. Try every recipe imaginable and make this diet as enjoyable and diverse as possible.

Yes, you can diet. Lose weight! Live longer!

What Is The Zone Diet

The Zone Diet is one of the five most discussed diets currently being endorsed. Developed by Barry Sears, a former researcher at MIT, it is based on maintaining insulin levels by striking a balance between carbohydrates and proteins at each meal.

Sears suggests that the major cause of obesity is an imbalance of insulin in the body. He maintains that the diet currently recommended by most medical institutions is high in carbohydrates and low in fats – a combination which he contends contributes to the production of too much insulin, and results in obesity.

The Zone Diet is based on the concept of achieving a physiological state in which insulin and eicosanoids, two hormones, are maintained in zones that are carefully balanced. By controlling the balance of insulin and eicosanoids, you increase the loss of fat, and decrease the likelihood of heart disease and diabetes, decrease inflammation and increase blood flow, and increase your physical and mental stamina.

The Zone Diet

The diet program of The Zone is designed to balance your intake of protein and carbohydrate at 1 part protein to 4 parts carbohydrate. It advises a moderate intake of carbohydrates, proteins and fat in order to control insulin. It prescribes a maximum amount of low-fat protein at one meal at 3-4 ounces, which is nearly exactly the recommendation of the USDA and the FDA. The majority of carbohydrates on the Zone diet come from vegetables and fruits, with limited amounts of bread, rice, potatoes and grains. Most fat intake should be from monounsaturated fats like olive oil, safflower oil and other ‘heart healthy’ oils.

While this sounds a good deal like the Atkins diet (restricting carbohydrates), the differences are very clear. Atkins recommends a diet high in protein without regard to fat, with the intent of provoking ketosis, a potentially unhealthy condition. High carbohydrate diets recommend increasing carbohydrate levels and inducing the production of insulin which, maintains Sears, increases weight gain. Instead, the Zone Diet recommends achieving an optimal balance of nutrients with moderate amounts of proteins, carbohydrates and fat all playing a part.

The other component of the Zone diet worthy of note is the supplementation of diet with fish oil. Fish oil, particularly pharmaceutical grade fish oil, provides omega 3 fatty acids which are an important component in healthy cells. Study after study in the past five years has confirmed the importance of fish and omega 3 fatty acids in the diet.

A sample meal on The Zone’s eating plan might include:

1 3 oz portion of broiled salmon

Spinach salad with apples and walnuts dressed with walnut oil and lemon juice

1/2 cup of brown rice

1 glass fruit or vegetable juice

The eating plan recommended by The Zone diet combines small portions of low fat proteins, fats and fiber-rich vegetables and fruits. It also suggests eating some protein with each meal or snack, and at least 3 meals and 2 snacks daily.

Who should use the Zone Diet?

As always, if you’re under the care of a physician for any chronic medical condition, you should consult them before embarking on any diet plan that substantially changes your eating habits. There are significant differences between the Zone Diet and that recommended for diabetics and heart patients, for instance. Overall, the recommended portions of foods and the balance between them is consistent with a healthy diet, and is maintainable for a lifetime.

Dietary Fiber For Diabetes Heart And General Health

Most people understand the importance of dietary fiber in their diet. Much has been said about its importance in heart health, diabetes, cancer prevention, and even weight control.

What is less well understood is how different types of fiber effect the body. Some provide fecal bulk, some are absorbed more quickly into the blood stream than others, and thus raise blood sugar levels more quickly, and yet others provide benefits to the heart.

Thus, despite the apparent simplicity, fiber is a complex topic. And whilst all types of fiber are important, if you are looking at preventing or managing specific conditions, its not enough to just look at the total dietary fiber as written on food packaging.

Dietary fiber is broadly classified into soluble and insoluble fiber. Soluble fiber is fermented in the colon, and plays a role in slowing the absorption of glucose into the bloodstream. It also encourages the growth of the ‘friendly’ bacteria that help break down bile, and are involved in the creation of B vitamins like folic acid, niacin, and pyridoxine.

Insoluble fiber, on the other hand, acts a bit like an intestinal broom. It provides bulk to the stools, and makes sure they pass through easily and quickly. This is the type of fiber that keeps you ‘regular’, not insoluble fiber.

Insoluble fiber does provide a feeling of fullness, however. This makes it great for weight loss and controlling hunger. It also keeps blood sugar levels more stable, although research into the rate at which carbohydrates enter the bloodstream have found there to be some significant differences within the foods that make up the fiber group. Dietary fiber can thus be rated by its Glycemic Index, which effectively ranks fiber foods with each other on a relative scale.

The idea is to try and include more low gylcemic index foods. Foods with a high glycemic index cause blood sugar levels to spike, providing too much energy to the blood in the form of carbohydrates, which in turn sets off the body’s sugar controlling hormone – insulin. You thus get a ‘high’ followed by a sudden drop. This in turn leads the body to want more carbohydrates to balance itself again, leading to cravings and overeating, as well as tiredness and moodiness.

Low glycemic index foods include lentils, chickpeas, baked beans, fruit loaf, salmon sushi, barley, milk, low fat custard, soy milk, yoghurt (not diet yoghurt), apples, strawberries, grapes, spaghetti, peas, carrots, fructose, strawberry jam, and chocolate milk.

Moderate glycemic index foods include pea soup, rye bread, porridge, muesli, ice cream, bananas, pineapple, kiwi fruit, new potatoes, beetroot, white sugar, honey, and mars bars.

High glycemic index foods include broad beans, bagels, white bread, brown rice, watermelon, udon noodles, desiree, pontiac and sebago potatoes, and glucose.

We need both soluble and insoluble fiber, however. A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that in a group of 6000 French men and women, those with the highest levels of soluble and insoluble fiber in their diet had a lower risk of being overweight, a lower risk of having blood pressure problems, cholesterol problems, and they had better levels of triacylglycerols and homocysteine. The last two are measure3 of heart health.

Fiber from cereals was linked to lower body fat, lower blood pressure, and lower levels of homocysteine. Those with a higher intake of vegetables, also a source of fiber, had lower blood pressure and lower homocysteine levels. Fiber from fresh fruit was associated with a lower waist to hip ratio (good news for dieters!), and lower blood pressure. And fiber from dried fruit, nuts, and seeds (like sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds) was also linked to a lower waist to hip ratio, lower body fat, and a better fasting glucose concentration. Fasting glucose relates to having a steady level of glucose between meals. If it dips too low, we crave things, often sweets.

Fiber has another interesting benefit. In people with type 2 diabetes, it has been found to lower the levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol, and increase the levels of ‘good’ cholesterol. It has already been established that fiber supplements will lower the levels of bad cholesterol in people, whether they have diabetes or not. But this new study found that fiber supplements also decreased the reabsorption of cholesterol from meals.

To get this benefit, it is important to time taking the fiber supplement in synch with meals. The study participants took a fiber supplement drink before mealtimes, and this ensured that the fiber was in the intestines when the meal was being eaten. The people in the study participated for 90 days and their average age was 59 years old.

22 Reasons To Drink Mangosteen Juice

A coworker of mine at work brought in a mangosteen supplement drink and she was selling it for $30 (her price) for a 25 fl oz bottle. She also gave me information and these 22 reasons why everyone should be drinking mangosteen juice:

1. prevents hardening of the arteries

2. protects the heart muscle

3. anti-Parkinson, anti-Alzheimer and other forms of dementia

4. anti-depressant

5. prevents and arrest fungus

6. prevents bacterial infections

7. viral fighters and prevention of infections

8. prevents fum disease

9. anti-diarrheal

10. lowers fevers

11. eye care-prevents glaucoma and cataracts

12. pansystemic – a synergistic effect on the whole body

13. energy boosters – anti-fatique

14. anti-aging

15. weight loss (wooo, I’ll drink to this!)

16. lowers blood fat (what the heck, I didn’t know there is fat in our blood!)

17. anti-tumor benefits

18. cancer: Mangosteen helps in the prevention of cancer with its powerful anti-oxidants.

19. lowers blood pressure

20. numerous references to “Immunostimulants”

21. blood sugar lowering

22. it tastes good

I thought to myself, holy smokes! Who in the world would buy that? What is mangosteen? I have never heard of it or have the slightest idea what it looks like.

Upon further research, the mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana) is a tropical evergreen tree, believed to have originated in the Sunda Islands and the Moluccas. The tree grows from 7 to 25 meters tall. The edible fruit is deep reddish purple when ripe. In Asia, the mangosteen fruit is known as the “Queen of Fruits,” while the durian (Durio spp.) is known as the “King of Fruits.” It is closely related to other edible tropical fruits such as button mangosteen and lemondrop mangosteen.

The outer shell of the fruit is rather hard, typically 4-6 cm in diameter. Cutting through the shell, one finds a white, fleshy fruit 3-5 cm in diameter. Depending on the size and ripeness, there may or may not be pits in the segments of the fruit. The number of fruit pods is directly related to the number of petals on the bottom of the shell. On average a mangosteen has 5 fruits (round up figure).

I have eaten a lot of exotic fruits in my life, including the King Of Fruits – durian, but I have never seen or tasted this Queen of Fruits. I bought the $30 bottle from my coworker and chucked down the mangosteen juice. I do feel more energetic for the rest of day, and I will have to let you know in the near future if it will help lose some weight!

The Benefits Of Beta Carotene

There is some merit to the old saying, “eat your carrots or you’ll go blind.” Carrots are an excellent source of beta-carotene and problems with the eyes are one symptom of a deficiency of beta-carotene. However, there are other sources of beta-carotene that offer a sufficient source of nutrients. It shouldn’t surprise you that vegetables and fruits are your best source of beta-carotene.

Why should you be concerned about beta-carotene? In addition to problems with the eyes, if you don’t consume the recommended amount of beta-carotene, your immune system may be at risk. Beta-carotene is an antioxidant and having sufficient amounts in your body means that toxic elements, bacterial and viral infections, and skin problems will have a more difficult time taking control over your system. If these benefits sound a lot like the benefits you receive with sufficient vitamin A, it’s because beta-carotene is a form of vitamin A referred to a carotenoid. Beta-carotene is found in plants and when once in the liver it is converted to vitamin A.

Scientists are always researching other uses of vitamins. There are reports that beta-carotene can help to prevent and treat cancer. Although there are just as many reports that contradict these findings, it makes sense because beta-carotene exists naturally in a wide assortment of vegetables and fruits, foods that are associated with lowering the risk of cancer. The discrepancy in the reports may be linked to how the test subjects were given beta-carotene. There is a possibility that beta-carotene supplementation is best when taken as part of a multi-vitamin group.

If you have been diagnosed with cancer, you shouldn’t take beta-carotene supplements without approval from your doctor. The investigations into the benefits of beta-carotene in cancer patients are still new and further research is required to obtain the best results.

While beta-carotene supplements in low doses are virtually side effect free, there is the chance that if you consume excessive amounts of beta-carotene supplements that your skin may turn an orange color. It is probably not a good idea to ever take vitamins in high doses, especially without a doctor’s approval.