Saturday, February 28, 2009

Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Lose Weight by Exercising!

No matter how much money and time you spend, you are not going to lose real fat as long as you keep hating exercises. Truth to be told, there are fad diets which claim to help you achieve quick weight loss but offer nothing except water and muscle loss instead!

There are also diet pills which promise to boost your metabolic rate sky high but in reality connect you with several harmful maladies. However, exercise is one faithful friend which always keeps its promise of helping you lose REAL fat! With exercises, you have not one but THREE ways to achieve weight loss!

1. Guaranteed weight loss: Diets come with no guarantee; they may or may not work for you, or even if they work, they may not offer you the promised weight loss results. But exercises are guaranteed to work for almost anyone and everyone, and there is no denying the fact that as long as you maintain your regular workout routine, you would be able to maintain your slim body as well!

2. Permanent weight loss: Usually, the weight you lose with the aid of fad diets or diet pills is not permanent weight loss! With most fad diets and pills you would lose weight by way of water weight loss, and NOT fat loss. Often these diets also cause valuable muscle loss. To add to your woes, the water weight you 'lost' would come back to you as soon as you quit dieting and return to normal eating!

Moreover, since you lost your valuable muscles through dieting, your fat burning capability is also reduced considerably, since the fewer muscles you have, the lower your metabolic rate would be! Obviously you cannot expect to burn fat and lose weight with a low metabolic rate! You can well imagine the end result of following such diets.

On the other hand, the weight you lose with the help of exercises, no matter how trivial it maybe, is bound to be permanent weight loss! Assuming that you would never deviate from leading an active lifestyle, you would NEVER gain back the weight you lost with the help of exercises! This is because unlike fad diets or weight loss pills, exercises burn REAL fat which is the primary source of all your troubles!

3. Forced weight loss: You may think that by starving or crash dieting you would force your body to burn all fat fast; however, the reality is just the opposite! People believe that when the body gets zero supply of carbohydrates (which is its primary source of energy), it would be forced to burn the existing fat deposits in order to produce the required energy!

But in reality your body burns muscles instead of fat. It is a fact that your body loves those fat deposits very dearly no matter how much you may hate them, mainly because it knows that it could use this fat to sustain itself in case a famine occurs in future.

Workouts, on the other hand, force your body to get rid of fat. When you start exercising, the first two or three weeks would be the most difficult periods of your life. You would find it extremely difficult to lift those heavy weights or walk on the treadmill. As such, you won't be able to workout for long enough.

This however offers your body a message that in order to make it easier for you to exercise, it needs to get rid of fat. As you exercise week after week and month after month, your body keeps burning the fat deposits, and the more weight you lose the easier exercising becomes for you! Once you get rid of all the extra fat and build valuable lean muscle mass, you would be able to easily lift almost ten times the amount of weight you might be lifting at present.

Now you need to decide whether you would prefer to lose weight rapidly with fad diets only to become fat all over again sometime later, or do it slowly with workouts and keep your slim figure permanently!

3 Surefire Tips on Healthy Foods and Food Habits

Do you know that you are able to lose weight merely by eating? If somebody told you that the lone way to burn fat and slim down is by following some fad diet and consuming like a mouse, I'd guess that he's plain naive. In this article I'll prove that you are able to lose weight by consuming the right varieties of foods in the right way!

1. A more good for you option to diet pills: Diet pills, while aiding you curb your appetite, accompany numerous adverse side effects; truth to be told, when you use them you lose more than gain in the bargain! Here is a healthier and more natural way to abolish hunger: increase your fiber consumption.

Natural fruits and veggies are ample in fiber. Fiber-rich foods help keep you full for hours so that you do not feel hungry too frequently. Add to it the reality that fiber-rich foods as well assist in relieving your bowel movement, and you'd know how crucial they're for your wellness! Aside from organic veggies and fruits, nuts and whole grains are other foods which have plenty of fiber content!

2. The good and bad beverages: If you would like to quench your thirst, you are able to either do it by drinking lots and lots of soda pop or plain water. The 1st choice would make you heavier and bulkier, although the 2nd one would help you lose weight! Here is an interesting truth about soda pop and soft drinks: since they're notoriously plentiful in sugar, they not only make you fatter but in addition to augment your thirst and hunger, so that you're forced to drink more of them for relief!

Not so with water! Water REALLY quenches your thirst, that too, without any unhealthful after-effects! Plus water in addition to boosts your metabolic rate as well as cleans your body of all harmful toxins and wastes, thereby making it easier for your body to burn fat and lose weight!

3. A better way to control your portions: We all recognise how crucial it's to eat in little helpings for the aim of weight loss. Here is one amusing thing to note: if you put very little food on a big plate, your brain would think that you've consumed less than your requirement, even though that might not be the case. Nevertheless, put that equivalent food on a littler plate, and you'd feel entirely satiated!

What was the difference between the two situations? Whilst in first case your plate was half-empty, in the 2nd case it was full and therefore managed to fool your brain into thinking that you're 'full'.

When I used to consume less food on big plates, I'd invariably go back to my icebox to pick up additional foods. However, ever since I've begun using littler plates, things have changed for the better! You may or may not believe it, but this is a reality nevertheless - in order to feel full, you not only need to fill your stomach but also eyes!

Two Unspoken Truths About Weight Loss

When it pertains to weight loss, people invariably seem to advocate dieting and exercising all the time, conveniently ignoring or overlooking the more additional major and minor factors which determine the success or failure of weight loss. Now I'm not saying that diet and exercise are not important, but it's as important to take note of the 2 weight loss facts I'm going to talk about in this article. If you fail to take note of them, you might as well fail to get rid of your fat belly and love handles.

1. Weight Loss Truth#1 - You can't slim down in an unhealthy environment: Struggling to slim down in unhealthy surroundings is like trying to setup a sacred place in a filthy area; both are utterly useless endeavors and would result in nothing, nada! If you really would like to lose weight, you need to infuse good and good for you habits, and for that it's crucial that you live in favorable surroundings.

For instance, how could you lose weight whilst your kitchen is filled with potato chips and pastries or the icebox is cram full of chocolates and soda? The fact is, with these unhealthy foods keeping you company throughout the day, you can't help but be enticed to take a morsel of them even if you recognize it's bad for you!

The lone way out is to substitute those junk foods with their healthier alternatives which would provide your body with the required amount of nourishment, minus the oil and fat! Examples of such foods are lean meat, eggs, organic fruits and vegetables, whole grains, nuts, fishes, soy, etc.

2. Weight Loss Truth#2 - You can't lose weight if you do not reward yourself: People battle hard with the motivator of being rewarded reciprocally, and the same holds true for weight loss also! Slimming down is such a powerful struggle that by and large you'd feel defeated and frustrated with your weight loss attempts.

When you fail to see any noticeable dip in the scale in one calendar week, you'd soon come to the determination that all your attempts for getting rid of belly fat have come to naught. However, that's not true in the least! For you to become productive in weight loss, it's crucial that you exercise patience and self-control day in and day out, but actually, it's easier said than done. This is where rewards come in!

In order for rewards to work, you had better have already set a weight loss goal as well as many lower milestones for the purpose for accomplishing that goal. Let's say that you've a goal of getting rid of twenty pounds of fat in 3 months, and a milestone of losing two pounds of fat each week. Now, you are able to reward yourself every time you accomplish a milestone.

Note that the reward could be anything EXCEPT FOOD! Consuming lots and lots of junk foods isn't the way to reward yourself for all the difficult work you've done, for these junk foods would merely let your weight loss attempts go in vain! However, you can set other rewards for yourself such as visiting a health spa, purchasing a pair of denims you've been eyeballing for a while, or fitting yourself into your old clothes, etc.