Blog on weight, How to Lose Fat on the Cheap

Maybe it's time to do a little reading. I tried for more than 10 years to lose body fat and while I could lose weight, I couldn't keep it off. I spent years yo-yoing up and down. I'd lose a few pounds, sometimes even 20 pounds but after I few months I'd start to gain it back. I finally got tired of spending the money on gym equipment and low-cal frozen dinners. I wanted to find out how the body works and what I was doing wrong. I finally learned that if I wanted to keep the weight off I had to lose my body fat. Food is Health; Exercise is Fitness The way I see it is this; Food is Health, Exercise is Fitness. You need both. It's simple really. Eat good food everyday, move your body every day and health can be yours. Remember that little (yet extremely powerful) saying from Hippocrates, "Food is Thy Medicine?" Well, I've seen it first hand in my life. When I began to change my diet many years ago and eat healthy, it changed how I felt phys...

I wrote before about making a lifestyle change as a way to lose weight.  There has been much written about the Mediterranean Diet, it's not a real diet with set rules about your everyday meals. It's a lifestyle of eating the way Mediterranean people have been eating for centuries. On the front page of my website, I write about the Mediterranean lifestyle of eating in the diet section. This food pyramid shows you what to eat and drink and how often. You can find the food pyramid online. When I gave up on diet plans you buy in packets at the grocery store. And decided I wasn't going to sweat the pounds off. I read a book on the Mediterranean Diet and it all started to make sense to me. Cutting back on the food I was eating, only made me hungry after an hour or so. I needed to change my eating habits totally. I stopped eating traditional meals, no more 3 meals a day. Now I was going to eat 6 times a day. So you might ask, how do I lose weight that way.? Good question. ...

Have you started a new diet plan? Maybe you're struggling with a weight loss program that seems to be dragging. Whether you've set short-term weight loss goals or committed to long-term wellness, there are ways to make your diet work better.  And the good news is that it takes just 20 minutes of your time. Set Short-Term Weight Loss Goals Research into weight loss has revealed that goal setting is one of the most important steps in the weight loss process. Why? Because setting short-term diet goals provides a road map for long-term health and wellness.  For example, your long-term goal might be to lose 50 pounds. Losing that amount of weight might improve your health and change the quality of your life. That's exciting! But if you lose weight at a reasonable pace, it might take 6 months to a year to reach your goal. It's hard to stay motivated for that long.  But if you set short-term weight loss goals along the way, you'll have reasons to celebrate du...

Is skipping breakfast really a big deal? What the difference? If your trying to lose weight, I think that breakfast is important. It all goes back to the basic reasons for eating. If you want to stay healthy, you eat for the sake of your body. In other words, I Eat first thing or the first hour I’m up to give my body the fuel I need to concentrate, to give me strength to workout or to get to work and to be productive. When I was younger, I didn’t think about those things. When I was younger I still had the stored up nutrition that all of us are born with, but as you age you use up that nutrition and you start to lose your edge. Your not as sharp. It happens over many years and most people don’t realize it until they’re in their 40’s. By that time they caulk it up to aging or the fact that their out of shape, but the truth is they have spent their adult life eating wrong and not replacing that nutrition (vitamins and minerals) that they use up everyday. We get in the habit of e...

Start a Food Log By Alia Hoyt I post I reblogged from WebMD. This author goes into depth on the subject of weight loss and reasons why some of us can't lose weight. A cookie here. A bowl of pasta there. A handful of veggies drenched in ranch dressing. We think we know what we're taking in nutritionally, but reality is often pretty far off base. In particular, calorie intake when dining out -- which, let's face it, most of us do more often than we should -- is usually grossly underestimated, as revealed by a 2013 study published in British Medical Journal. Even so-called "healthy" meals can get derailed in a hurry, thanks to poor nutritional choices. "Salad dressing is the number-one source of fat in [many] women's diets, which attests to how many women turn a good salad into a cardiac disaster," explains  Eat Your Way to Happiness  author Elizabeth Somer, MA, RD. When it comes to diet, we do a lot of things right, but most of us manage ...

Losing weight is a balancing act between the number of calories you eat and the number of calories you burn. For example, women depending on height should stay in a range of 1500 to 2000 calories a day. A man depending on height can consume say 1800 to 2500 calories. Those estimates will depend on your age and activity levels and how much you workout. Weight loss comes down to burning more calories than you eat. This is important, you can’t exercise away a lot of calories. A normal workout, say a combination of running and walking for an hour, will only burn about 300 calories and that’s based on someone who is experienced at this type of workout. Someone new at this type of routine might only burn 100 calories. If your counting your calorie intake and don’t forget the drinks, You can balance the "consumption to burn" ratio by cutting back on sugary beverages or maybe snacks. Once you understand the equation, you’re ready to set your goals. Remember you don’t have to do...

Verywell.com has some good articles about fitness and diet. I often read their posts and even reblog some of the material. This one is worth the read. From VeryWell.com Men and women have struggled for years, searching endlessly for that magic diet pill to reverse all the bad diet and lifestyle decisions they’ve made in the past. Diet pills come in all shapes, sizes and colors with different fantasies attached to each one. They range from celebrity-endorsed campaigns to more science-based programs that guarantee success. However, the major question still persists as to whether or not all this diet talk is simply a lie. Don't Fall for Diet Myths and Illusions People are sick and tired of being sick and tired. To make matters worse, a majority of the confusion about diet myths stems from the fitness and nutrition experts, who cannot seem to agree on anything diet related. The Importance of Behavioral Change I would like to break here and mention that I’m not writ...

This is worth a read, this author thinks the same way I do. You've heard it before: "You have to make your new way of eating part of your life." "It can't be a 'diet,' or you'll go off it." "The reason people regain weight is that they go back to their old way of eating." All true. But much easier said than done! How can you transition from a "diet" to a "way of eating?" Here are five tips to help you on this path. 1) Find the Right Amount of Carbohydrate for You The idea of carb reduction is that eventually you will figure out what carb level keeps you at your best—high energy, low hunger, lowest sustainable weight, and stable blood glucose. Ideally, the amount of carbohydrate you eat will be low enough not to be flirting with the side effects of high-carb eating too often, but this is different for every person.  Once you find your carb level and experience how good you feel when eating the correct a...

Our body fat is indeed different depending on its location. Subcutaneous fat is the layer of fat just under the skin, all over the body. Visceral fat is located deep in the abdominal cavity around the organs. We have a limited amount of control over the distribution of our body fat. Body fat distribution varies by age, gender, ethnicity, and genetics. You may have a normal BMI – thinking your weight is not putting your health at risk – but have a waist circumference that indicates abdominal obesity. By waist circumference, abdominal obesity is defined as 35 inches for women, 40 for men. Abdominal obesity increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, and later life dementia. A large waist circumference has been linked to negative outcomes even among people with normal BMI numbers. Additionally, some studies have compared two groups of obese patients with the same total body fat, but low or high levels of visceral fat. The high visceral fat groups were found to...

Why You Need to Eat a Better By  Shereen Lehman This is a great blog post by VeryWell.com Learn why it's so important to eat the right way.  A Healthy Balanced Diet Hinterhaus Productions / Getty Images Eating a  healthy balanced diet  isn't all that complicated. Just choose a variety of foods from all the major food groups including fruits and vegetables, meats or protein sources, dairy or calcium, grains and cereals, and healthy oils and fats. It also helps if you also want to consume the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight and cut back on all the unhealthy junk foods. Sometimes the question isn't about what makes up a healthy diet; it's about why should a person eat a healthy diet. So, in case you're wondering, here are my top ten reasons why you should eat a healthy diet. Makes Losing Weight Easier Sawayasu Tsuji / Getty Images Oh sure, you can lose weight by eating low-ca...