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How To Count Calories and Why

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 From Verywell.com If you're having trouble managing your weight it's probably because you don't burn as many calories as you might think. You have to consume 500 fewer calories a day than the number of calories you burn. Many of us don't really know how many calories we burn so we over estimate think we burn 3000 or 4000 calories a day because we go to the gym for an hour a day. Wrong, The dedicated workout enthusiast only burns about 300 calories in a one-hour workout. Apps to Help with Calorie Counting If you think an app would be helpful to your calorie-counting goals, here are a few to try: Lose It! MyFitnessPal Calory FatSecret Cronometer MyNetDiary Summary The number of calories you need each day varies from person to person based on age, sex, height, weight, and activity level. To lose weight, you must take in fewer calories than you burn. To gain weight, you need to consume more calories than you burn. Protein is an important nutrient to increase for muscle gai...

What Is Fatigue

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Fatigue is a complaint I hear from most of my dieters. If you try and starve yourself to lose weight you will lose vitamins and minerals that you commonly get from food causing fatigue. It is not complicated. But there are many other causes of fatigue. There are numerous potential causes of fatigue as a major complaint. They range from those that cause poor blood supply to the body's tissues to illnesses that affect  metabolism , from infections and inflammatory diseases to those that cause sleep disturbances. Fatigue is a common side effect of many medications. While numerous patients with psychological conditions often complain of fatigue (physical and mental), there is also a group of patients where the cause of fatigue is never diagnosed. Fatigue is a symptom of an underlying disease and is described in many ways from feeling weak to being constantly tired or lacking energy. Since fatigue is a symptom of an underlying condition, the treatment depends upon the condition that is ...

Changing Your Life; The Promises We Make Every New Year

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  If you’ve already broken a New Year’s resolution or two, take heart. I can let you in on the ultimate secret for successfully making a change in your life. First posted on WebMD.com A century’s worth of psychological research reveals an interesting paradox in who we are. On the one hand, once we reach adulthood our basic personalities remain unchanged for the rest of our lives. We keep doing the same things—and feeling the same way—over and over. But, on the other hand, every day we change our behavior drastically in response to different environments. Most of us are one person at work, for example, and another person at home. The implication of these findings for making (and keeping) New Year’s resolutions is clear: It is easier to change our environment than to change ourselves. So, if you want to change yourself, change your environment. Said differently: Whenever possible, don’t try to fight temptations – avoid them! The easiest way to make a change in your life is to modify ...

In Defense of Food

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  In Defense of Food and the Rise of ‘Healthy-ish’ A new PBS documentary and Bon Appetit’s issue espouse a radically moderate approach to eating. Sophie Gilbert The problem with giving things up, though, is that inevitably it creates a void in one’s diet that only Reese’s pieces and a family-sized wheel of brie can fill. Then there’s the fact that so many abstinence-espousing programs require spending money on things;  Whole 30 cookbooks  Weight Watchers memberships and  $10 bottles of bone broth . For a process that supposedly involves cutting things out, there seems to be an awful lot to take in. This, Michael Pollan posits, is the problem with food: It’s gotten extraordinarily complicated. The writer and sustainable-eating advocate has written several books on how the simple business of eating has become a minefield in which earnest Westerners try to tiptoe around gooey, genetically engineered sugar bombs without setting off an explosion of calories, corn sugar, a...

Understanding Obesity

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Most Americans don't really understand what it means to be Obese, doctors say. Obesity doesn't really mean that you weigh too much. When you look at a chart of a person's height, for each height there is a range that you can weigh and still be considered normal. For instance, I'm 6 foot tall, and I can weigh anywhere between 145 to 195 and still be considered normal. That's because small-boned men might not be able to carry as much weight as large-boned men. Also, the man with more muscle mass will weigh more just because muscle mass weighs more than fat. Obese is actually determined by the difference between your muscle mass and your body fat. Body mass is the difference between your total weight and the weight of your bones plus your organs. Once you know what your body mass is if more than 30% of your body mass is body fat you are obese. For example, two men both 6 foot tall, both weigh 180 pounds but the muscular man is slimmer and wears smaller size pants ...

The Worst Things On Your Salad

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From VeryWell.com Dieters often choose salad as a meal option because they think it will help them to lose weight. But many times the salad that they make or that they order in a restaurant is full of fat and calories. The result is that they gain weight instead. Be careful eating salads, you can easily end up with 600 to 800 calories. That's equivalent to 2 meals just in one salad. Add a soft drink and you may add 200 more calories. If you want to slim down faster, avoid these ten unhealthy salad ingredients. While they are popular ingredients in many restaurant salads, they add very little nutritional value to your meal. Instead, they fill your salad bowl full of needless fat grams and useless calories.  The bacon loaded on top of your favorite weight-loss salad might add a whopping 400 calories and 30 grams of fat to the total nutrition. Of course, the number will depend on how much bacon is added. But bacon on any salad is bound to boost the fat and calorie count through the ro...

Can Drinking Tea Help Me Lose Weight?

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  Can Tea Help Me Lose Weight  posted on verywell.com Many hopeful dieters drink tea, especially  green tea to lose weight . So can this beverage help you slim down? Possibly. But there is no strong evidence to support many of the weight loss claims that are made on packages. Tea, because of the caffeine, is a diuretic for some people, but that doesn't give any permanent weight loss. The reason green tea is so popular, there is an additive in green tea that lessens the effects of caffeine so you don't become jittery. And yet, you've probably heard of friends and family members who have  lost weight by drinking green tea or taking green tea supplements . It is possible that the products have worked for some. Green tea provides caffeine that may help you to stay alert and active. As a result, you may burn more calories during the day. But it also might keep you up at night. Many weight loss experts promote  the positive effects of a good night's rest  du...