Archives August 2013

Don’t Base Expectations on Celebrity Weight Loss Stories

It seems that out of all the people who are trying to lose weight, celebrities are receiving the most attention; there is Josh Peck, Jessica Simpson, Kelly Osbourne, Jonah Hill, Perez Hilton, Jennifer Hudson, Drew Carrey, Seth Rogen, and the list goes on and on.

In many cases, it was claimed that the celebrity in question had lost more than fifty, sixty, or even seventy pounds sometimes. Naturally, there is always an interview that comes along with the article, and at some point, they inevitably touch on the subject of what the celebrity did to lose all of this weight, and what they have to say to others out there who are aspiring to accomplish the same thing.

While celebrity weight loss advice may be frank and honest, there is one big reason as to why you shouldn’t base your expectations on it. These celebrities have all the money in the world. While most of us maintain the belief that money doesn’t buy happiness, it cannot be denied that having a lot of it makes achieving your goals much easier.

All of these celebrities that have lost weight didn’t do it alone. Their path was paved for them by the weight loss experts, professional nutritionists and fitness gurus they hired specifically to make all the right and healthy choices for them.

However, this is not to take anything away from these stars: they had to make some kind of effort to go through with the process, and they certainly deserve some praise for all the changes they managed to make to their own lives. However, unless you are supremely wealthy yourself (if you were, chances are you wouldn’t be reading this), you simply cannot compare your own situation with theirs.

If you are trying to achieve some dramatic weight loss results, then you need to keep in mind that the road you will have to travel will be much bumpier than the one laid for the celebrities. You will have to do many things by yourself; some of you may even have to put together your own dieting and exercising plans.

Needless to say, it will take you more time and effort than it took those celebrities in order to achieve the same results. As sad as it may be, it is the reality of the money-driven world in which we live.

So if you are not to base yourself on celebrity weight loss stories, what kind of expectations should you have for losing weight?

Well, if you are planning on losing weight naturally, then you should aim to lose between one to three pounds per week. While you could do more than that, losing weight is a long-term project; once it’s off, you need to keep it that way.

If you lose it too fast, your body won’t have the time or the opportunity to get used to a healthy and balanced way of living, meaning that eventually, you will go back to the old habits you’ve been following your entire life. Don’t get discouraged if the results don’t come as fast as you would like them to. In the end, slow and steady wins the race.

Walking for Weight Loss is an Easy and Effective Solution

What’s the hardest part of losing weight?

While you may be tempted to answer by referring to that period when you are still learning to fight and control your impulses and cravings, many others would beg to differ.

For a lot of people, the hardest part of the weight loss process is keeping the weight off once it has been lost. As a matter of fact, it’s so hard that it’s keeping the weight loss business afloat; if everyone could become slim and never gain weight again, eventually there would be nobody left to purchase weight loss products.

Needless to say, many are looking for ways to maintain their weight once they have dropped their excess fat, and as it happens the answer might lie in something as simple and lightweight as walking for weight loss.

The Effectiveness of Walking for Weight Loss

Various studies have looked into the effectiveness of different types of exercises when it came to burning calories, and it surprised many when it was observed that walking about two thousand steps at a brisk pace burns somewhere around a hundred calories. For reference, two thousand steps is about one mile’s length and takes a person on average fifteen minutes to travel.

And so it was found that walking is great for losing weight… but how is it the perfect tool in order to maintain it?

Well, it was estimated by researchers at the University of Colorado that most adults consume somewhere around ten to thirty excess calories per day, leading to gains of somewhere between one and three pounds per year, and that’s if you are following a more or less strict nutritional plan as well as a light exercising regime.

Surprisingly enough, the key to keeping the weight off is to simply walk for an additional fifteen minutes for five days per week.

15 Minutes of Walking for Weight Loss

If you will be taking an extra two thousand steps five days per week, you are going to be burning an extra five hundred calories. For the sake of the argument, let’s say that you are typically gaining an excess of fifty calories every day. Under these circumstances, you would be gaining an excess of three hundred and fifty calories per week, but burning five hundred through walking.

In the end, you will be burning an extra hundred and fifty calories per week, even leaving you with some room to cheat on your diet once in a while.

Taking Walking for Weight Loss to The Limit

If you really want to tap into the full potential of walking for weight loss, then the best thing to do would be to walk not for an extra fifteen minutes, but for an extra forty-five minutes to an hour, five days per week.

At this point, you are going to be burning somewhere around 1500 to 2000 extra calories per week, which will actually help you lose between one and two pounds.

All in all, regardless of what type of exercising system you are following, you would do well to integrate regular walking into it; it doesn’t take up much time, effort, money or equipment, but the results it yields can be truly phenomenal. Get a good pair of walking shoes and you’re set to go.

How a Physician Can Help you with Weight Loss

Different people have different methods of going about weight loss; while some try extreme diets, other people simply start jogging in the mornings.

Needless to say, most people end up trying a number of different dieting methods before they see some actual results; there is no one way to lose weight that will work for everyone. However, there is something, or more precisely, a type of person out there who can help literally anyone lose weight; physicians.

For physicians weight loss is as familiar as the palms of their hands; many dedicate their lives to specifically helping people with weight problems, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that they cannot help you as well.

Physicians Weight Loss Evaluation

Before looking into how a physician can help you to lose weight, let’s have a look at what a physician does. To sum things up in a nutshell, a physician is someone who is capable of evaluating you, placing a diagnosis on what is wrong, and making recommendations pertaining to improving and maintaining your health.

While many of them remain general practitioners, others choose to specialize themselves in different fields of health and medicine, and you guessed it, weight loss is one of those fields. Depending on which physician you are going to see, the way your problems will be treated may be different; some of them go as far as specializing themselves in a specific treatment methods.

In any case, how exactly can physicians help with weight loss?

To start things off, they can evaluate your physical condition better than you could ever hope to yourself. They can tell you what kinds of deficiencies you have in your body, whether there are organs malfunctioning in it, how in shape you are, and most importantly, what you need to do in order to get better.

First, this means that you can use the physician’s advice to safely put together a dieting plan for yourself… heck, many of them can even do it for you. Second, the information they provide you about yourself will allow you to design a workout regime that will challenge you without pushing you over the limit.

Why Use a Physicians Weight Loss Advice?

But why should you bother with a physician when you can easily purchase diet menus and exercising plans off the internet?

Well, there is one thing a physician can do for you which not a single program out there can: he or she will offer advice and diagnosis specific to your case.

All the diets and exercising plans out there are not exactly guaranteed to work, even if they do happen to be legitimate. With a physician, you are always going to be confident knowing that every single set of exercises you do and every meal you eat has been specially planned to help you out.

The Physicians Weight Loss Recommendation

All in all, to sum things up, for many physicians weight loss is what they have dedicated themselves to, meaning they have more knowledge and experience dealing with it than practically anyone else on Earth.

They can give you counsel pertinent to your specific case on how to lose weight in the most effective way… if there is one kind of person who can help you drop the pounds safely, naturally and at a good pace, it’s a physician.

The only caution when following a recommended physicians weight loss program is when they recommend diet pills or weight loss surgery; in which case you may want to learn more about that and even get a second and if needed, a third opinion.

Tips to Making the Perfect Weight Loss Smoothies

The power of smoothies has been underestimated for many years by people, but as it happens, they can be made into an extraordinary source of fiber and nutrients while not containing much fat or calories.

However, what many people ignore is that making weight loss smoothies isn’t something you can just do by mixing fruits and vegetables together; there is a way that needs to be followed, and to help you out here are a few tips for you to keep in mind when making your weight loss smoothies.

Weight Loss Smoothies Tip #1 – Try to Avoid Sweeteners

Regardless of which kind of sugar you want to add to your smoothie, even a little bit of it will make it harder for you to lose weight. On the other hand, you can use natural sweeteners, such as ripe bananas for example, to make your smoothie delicious without having to worry about the fat and calories it contains.

Stevia is also a great natural sweetener that contains no calories per serving, it’s not a dangerous chemical based artificial sweetener, it’s not sugar, but it has an extremely sweet taste and only a tiny amount is used in comparison to sugar.

Weight Loss Smoothies Tip #2 – Use Only Fresh Foods

You should definitely avoid buying packaged, canned or marinated foods for your smoothies. In most cases, they have much less of a nutritional value than fresh fruits and vegetables. Of course, buying fresh and organic vegetables can get a little expensive; if you are looking for a way to save money, simply go for the frozen versions, or perhaps you could purchase them in bulk when in season and freeze them yourself.

Weight Loss Smoothies Tip #3 – Saying Goodbye to Dairy Products

Regardless of how delicious they may be, dairy products are a great source of fat and calories, even including the all the yogurts that are dubbed as being “healthy”. The only necessary nutrient they provide you with is calcium, and you can compensate for it by mixing oranges, figs, dandelion greens and chia seeds into a smoothie with more calcium than milk could ever dream of providing you with.

Chia seeds are an excellent source of fiber and they contain a natural compound that cut hunger cravings and give you a nice satisfied feeling.

Weight Loss Smoothies Tip #4 – Go Easy on the Fat

While your body does need a certain amount of fat in order to function properly, you should definitely limit the amount you put in your weight loss smoothies to “a tiny bit”.

Apart from the fact that even good fat will hinder your weight loss efforts, putting too much of it in a smoothie with fruits will make you feel very bloated, not to mention it will cause you to pass some intense gases.

You should get the fat you need by eating coconuts, nuts and avocados separately from your smoothies.

Weight Loss Smoothies Tip #5 – Don’t Make Smoothies Your Only Solution

While weight loss smoothies can definitely help you to lose a lot of weight and keep your body full of the nutrients it needs to function properly, simply drinking them won’t be enough.

In order to lose weight at a noticeable pace, you need to burn more calories than you are taking in, and that can only be achieved if you dedicate yourself to following some kind of diet and exercise workout plan.

Unfortunately, there is no effortless solution for losing weight, at the moment at least, and smoothies are one piece of the entire puzzle… although that certainly doesn’t make them any less important. You can learn more about different types of smoothies for weight loss at http://MyFitnessNut.com and be kept up to date with the newest in health and fitness when you subscribe to the My Fitness Nut Newsletter.

Scientists have been shoving it down our throats for years, and by now pretty much everyone knows that losing weight is all about the calories. If you want to see a reduction in your body fat, you need to burn more calories than you are ingesting every day.

Forcing your body to dig into its own fat resources to accommodate its energy needs is, aside from surgery, the only way to drop the fat. However, making that happen is a bit more of a complicated process, but many people ignore that.

As a result, they have taken the above theory to certain extremes, with many people deciding that fasting for weight loss is the best way to go; they won’t be taking in any calories at all, meaning the body will always have to dig into its resources for its energy requirements.

Just like most ambitious plans, this one sounds logical until it is put to the test.

Is Fasting for Weight Loss Practical?

On top of requiring calories in order to function, your body also needs a large number of nutrients to support the different processes happening within itself. To remain strong and healthy, you need iron, dozens of vitamins and minerals, fats, carbohydrates, proteins, fibers, and much more.

As you can guess, the body doesn’t keep those ingredients in reserve as it does fat, meaning that by fasting you are actually going to be making your body less and less healthy with each passing day. At some point, your immune system won’t be able to function properly any more, leaving you wide open to any number of nefarious diseases.

But let’s pretend for a second that nutrients aren’t a problem, and that you have managed to fast for a certain amount of time and have a lost a lot of weight. At this point, two questions need to be asked:

Where did the lost weight come from?

How long will you be able to keep up these results?

To answer the first question, while it is true that much of the lost weight will have come from fat, some of it will be important lean muscle mass, and losing muscle doesn’t make you healthier in any way.

As for the second question, simply imagine the moment at which your diet ends and you discover that you have lost, say, twenty pounds. What is the first thing you are going to do?

Chances are that you will want to gorge yourself in a ton of food. Well, putting aside the fact that your stomach would simply burst for not being used to digest anything for a while, you will also find all of the weight you thought to have lost.

Once the diet will be over, your body will do everything in its power to get itself out of the state it considers to be abnormal in order to return to how things were before you started fasting for weight loss.

All things being said and done, fasting for weight loss is definitely not the way to go, regardless of how bad you want results; in the end, you will only end up hurting yourself with the weight coming right back on, minus the muscle loss, as fast as it left your body.

Five Tasty and Healthy Foods to Lose Weight to Brighten Up your Menu

It seems that far too many people these days associate weight loss with being reduced to following a diet of bread crumbs and water. Thankfully, in reality things are far from being that bad, especially since it was discovered that many of our favorite foods can still be eaten while on a diet if you were to simply use different ingredients for them.

Here are a few healthy foods to lose weight which you should definitely think about including in your diet.

Healthy Foods to Lose Weight Tip #1 – Raspberries

Regardless of whether or not you actually like them, the fact remains that raspberries are full of a very important enzyme called ketones. This is the enzyme which your body naturally produces in order to break down fat and turn it into energy.

By putting more raspberries in your diet you are effectively going to increase your body’s metabolism, raising the rate at which it burns fat, effectively losing weight faster than before.

Healthy Foods to Lose Weight Tip #2 – Green Tea

While it wasn’t conclusively proven beyond all doubt, recent clinical studies strongly suggest that green tea has some tremendous weight loss benefits, especially when combined with an exercising regime. As it turns out, green tea is full of antioxidants and various other ingredients which help with fat oxidation.

Otherwise said, green tea contains ingredients that help the human body process fat and turn it into energy at a faster rate, which as you can guess, helps with weight loss.

Healthy Foods to Lose Weight Tip #3 – Papaya

Sweet cravings are something that definitely needs to be addressed when making up your diet plan, especially if you have a sweet tooth.

The answer, in this case, is to substitute your sweets with fruits, such as the papaya for example. Being sweet, very light, and extremely beneficial for your health (containing tons of vitamin C, A and iron), the papaya is the perfect way to keep your impulses at bay all while strengthening your system.

Healthy Foods to Lose Weight Tip #4 – Cucumbers

Even though cucumbers may not be able to bring too much to the table in terms of nutrition, they are capable of doing something that not too many other foods can; they can make you feel nice and full without taking up a lot of calories. It would be wise not only to use cucumbers in your salad, but also to eat some before your meals as well as during your snacks to prevent yourself from eating too much, or to suffer from hunger cravings.

Healthy Foods to Lose Weight Tip #5 – Oats

Finally, because every list of healthy foods to lose weight needs to include a proper source of fiber, there are oats. As most of you already know (but have probably forgotten), oats are a great source fiber, they are great at making you feel full, not to mention that clinical studies have actually proven that they have some benefits for weight loss.

You would do best to eat some oatmeal for breakfast, perhaps even for lunch while you are at work with the help of instant oatmeal packets. Whatever oats you choose to eat, make sure that they are sugar-free; you can add your own ingredients such as fruit to it if you want it sweetened and enjoy variety.

You can learn more about healthy foods to lose weight and other great diet tips at http://MyFitnessNut.com and subscribe the My Fitness Nut Newsletter to get the most recent updates concerning diets, fitness and weight loss.

Being a woman in this world may very well be one of the hardest things to do, especially considering many countries around the planet still have laws that repress their women rights severely. Regardless, if there is one thing women have always been valued for, it’s their image, at least the one they allow the world to see.

As it happens, on top of being good for your health in general, being fit is also considered, at least today, as being the more attractive type of body. Long story short, if you want to look your best you will need to keep your weight at a healthy level, and what follows are a few tips centered on weight loss for women which should help you to achieve just that.

Weight Loss for Women Tip #1 – Never Skip Your Meals

It may be tempting to hold out on a meal, and logically, it makes a lot of sense: you are going to be taking in less calories, meaning that you will be losing weight faster. However, in practice, things seldom turn out the way they are expected to in theory.

When you are skipping a meal you aren’t actually skipping it… you are just pushing it back for later. Eventually, you are going to get very hungry, and you will most likely end up over-compensating for it by eating more than you would have in the first place. If you really don’t want to eat a lot, then perhaps you should follow the next tip…

Weight Loss for Women Tip #2 – Have Many Small Meals

You eat because you are hungry, and anyone who wants to live does the same. As such, eating less would require you to find a better way to fill yourself, and one of those ways consists of eating in smaller portions, but more often.

In many cases, when you are eating a big meal you are actually consuming much more than your body actually needs, although you don’t really have a way of knowing that. Try to eat about six to seven times per day, small portions of light foods that keep you filled up for a decent amount of time.

Weight Loss for Women Tip #3 – Keep Your Emotions in Line

As demoralizing as it may sound, food and emotional comfort go together like bread and butter. Millions, if not billions of people around the world see food as being a source of comfort, and whenever they feel depressed or sad, they turn to eating as a way of relieving themselves.

There is a whole theory behind why this happens, involving chemical processes in the brain, but what you should keep in mind is that maintaining a rational approach will help you lose weight. It is true that many events, and sometimes people in our lives simply make us feel things without a second of warning, in which case you need to remind yourself that eating is just one of many ways of coping with stress.

You should try some relaxation techniques, taking up a sport as a hobby, or anything else that will keep you distracted from eating. All in all, the process of weight loss for women is somewhat different than it is for men, calling more for permanent lifestyle changes than anything else, and the above tips and those found at http://MyFitnessNut.com should help you get started on making them a reality.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about liquid diets which are alleged as being the ultimate solution to losing weight as they are supposed to provide an easy-to-follow method that will yield you some dramatic results in a short amount of time…

A surprisingly short period of time!

If the testimonies of people who have used these diets are to be believed, they are the best thing since sliced bread was invented. However, many people are expressing doubts about what the actual liquid diet weight loss effects are, and if only consuming liquid is really a healthy way of dropping the pounds.

Are Liquid Weight Loss Diets Effective?

For starters, it is important to address the issue of whether or not they actually work. On this front, everything seems perfect as the people who have gone through with the liquid programs have reported seeing some drastic differences at the end of it all.

Some people are even claiming losing as much as twenty to thirty pounds in a 30 day month. However, there is a flip side to the coin that is seldom discussed…

The effort that it takes to achieve this level of efficiency.

Consuming liquids only on a liquid diet means that you will be forbidden from consuming any type of solid food, at least while you are on the diet. You will only be able to drink juices, and at most, nutrient rich meal replacement shakes.

Needless to say, not only would you be constantly fighting with your cravings, but you will also have to contend with hunger for a good part of the diet. In other words, it will take a tremendous amount of willpower and determination to make it through a liquid diet weight loss program, but at least the results are guaranteed… or are they?

Results You May Not Want with a Liquid Diet Weight Loss Plan

Perhaps in the short term it can be said that you are going to get what you paid for. However, what happens after, when you come off the liquid diet? After all, you can’t possibly hope to sustain yourself on liquids for the rest of your entire life.

Well, the first thing that is going to happen is that your stomach won’t be used to processing solid foods anymore, meaning you will have to slowly teach it to do it again. If you planned on eating a big feast at the end of your diet, you better drop that idea right now, unless of course you want to be rushed to the emergency room for your stomach bursting and splashing all the nearby organs in a stomach acid bath.

In addition to that, on top of having to suffer before getting back to a normal diet, how long do you think the results are going to last? While a liquid diet weight loss sure is sweet, it’s really the only thing you will have learned from the program.

Furthermore, you won’t have a clue as to how you should maintain your body’s shape; how to maintain a careful balance between losing weight and gaining it all back. In the end, a 100% liquid diet weight loss program will end up being costlier to you than just going through with the weight loss process naturally by using a weight loss program that provides a good balance of both liquid and solid foods.

Lately we have been bombarded in the news about stories of how various people, practically all of them well-known celebrities, have managed to go through a dramatic weight loss program.

For instance, there is Josh Peck who has recently slimmed down into an attractive young man after playing the role of the fat comedian for years, there is Jessica Simpson who lost 60 pounds not long ago, Kelly Osbourne who made some tremendous progress and has put in place her own fitness program; just to name a few.

Are Dramatic Weight Loss Stories Encouraging?

While it is indeed encouraging to hear and read about all of those stories, they do have a negative effect on people, even it seems like they should be doing the contrary. Those who are truly in need of dramatic weight loss often look for these stories, and end up coming to the same conclusion that the only reason those people could lose their weight was the time and money they all have in abundance.

That’s probably not being too far from the truth either.

Getting Paid $100,000 Plus Per Pound for Dramatic Weight Loss?

Yes, it is true that those celebrities had a much easier time than anyone else losing weight as they have the money to hire an army of fitness experts, nutritionists, psychologists, and perhaps even “Yes! men” to help them keep their morale up.

Additionally, celebrities get paid by weight loss program companies big money to lose a significant amount of weight in exchange for sponsor support of their programs. Multiple six figure bankrolls for every pound lost… Just how motivated would you be to achieve dramatic weight loss if you were getting paid $100k plus for every pound you lost?

I bet you’d be pretty darn motivated too.

However, just because they took the easy road doesn’t mean it’s the only one… far from it. The reason as to why only celebrities seem to be reported on when they make drastic weight loss progress, is because they are already celebrities.

They didn’t become known because they lost weight… journalists and the paparazzi are doing their job as they always did, it’s just that sometimes a star makes dramatic changes to their appearance, and that always attracts a crowd of readers.

In any case, the whole point of it is that you mustn’t feel as if you are unable to lose weight because you don’t have the resources. The truth is that you already have the main resources you need to lose weight: an ability to move and to think.

When all is said and done, weight loss is still about taking in fewer calories than you are burning through your daily movements and exercise, and no amount of professionals or fitness experts will ever be able to change that.

Use Free and Low Cost Information to Achieve Dramatic Weight Loss

You don’t need to be wealthy to purchase a dieting guide and a workout system… as a matter of fact, many of them are so cheap that practically anyone could afford them nowadays. You can even make do with the free information provided at http://MyFitnessNut.com.

The real challenge when it comes to dramatic weight loss is overcoming yourself. Our brains and bodies don’t like change, and they are going to resist it however they can. You will often find yourself simply unmotivated and unwilling to go through a few exercises or make an effort to resist eating something you like.

You are Your Own Biggest Obstacle to Dramatic Weight Loss

Yes, you are your biggest obstacle to losing weight. You need to find a way to motivate yourself to make the changes that need to happen in your life. If you can’t think of something, simply remind yourself that the more you are overweight, the higher your chances of developing a myriad of conditions and diseases, including coronary heart disease and cancer.

If for no other reason, the will to live a healthy and happier life for yourself and the people who love you should give you all the motivation you need.

It seems that people are starting to get a bit more creative in the ways in which they are fighting weight gain and helping obese people achieve weight loss. Up until recently, pharmaceutical pills, diets and workout plans were pretty much the only roads to success.

However, it seems that something changed when we decided to take a closer look at common foods; it was found that many of them possessed potential for helping us lose weight with the ingredients they contain. For instance, ever since it was discovered that raspberries were full of ketones, an enzyme that helps to break down fat, their extract has been used as a basis for countless weight loss supplements.

Naturally, with all the health benefits that green tea has, it didn’t take people long to start wondering about whether or not there is such a thing as a weight loss tea.

Green Tea is One Weight Loss Tea That Works

Well, if recent scientific forays into the weight loss benefits of green tea are to be believed, the existence of a weight loss tea may very well be a reality. However, it has to be said that not all types of teas are beneficial for weight loss, let alone beneficial for your health.

There are various artificial combinations that end up having extra calories or fat in them, not to mention they need a bit of sugar to taste decent. In any case, if you are looking for the one tea that is going to help you lose weight, then your best bet would lie with green tea.

Why green tea anyway?

Well, recently there have been a few studies which have looked into its benefits, and the results were more than encouraging. In one study it was proven that even without exercising or eating right, simply consuming the antioxidants found in great quantity in green tea could help you lose between two to three pounds in three months.

If you were to also exercise and eat right, there is no telling as to what green tea may help you to accomplish.

Most of the studies performed on it were very similar, with there being two groups of subjects, both made to follow the same routine with only one of the groups being made to drink green tea.

The scientists who were running those experiments came to the conclusion that the antioxidants found in green tea help the body to process fat and burn it into energy, increasing your metabolic rate, even when aren’t doing any exercise routines.

To make a long story short, it was found that simply consuming green tea regularly (at least one cup per day), can definitely help you lose weight.

Want Weight Loss Tea Benefits But Hate Drinking Green Tea?

If you aren’t too fond of the taste of green tea or don’t want to drink it for any other reason, a number of green tea supplements have already been made available for public consumption.

Make sure to do some research on which ones are the best; there are many who combine their extracts with filler ingredients so that they can sell more bottles at the same price while giving people less than what they pay for. You should only take weight loss tea extracts that are a hundred, or almost a hundred percent pure and made by a reputable company; anything else simply will not be worth your time.