Weight Loss For Us

Archive for February, 2012

It is possible that some fad diets do burn fat, but is it a diet you can live with for the rest of your life? They always have testimonials listed as to how well they work. They also show pictures of people that have lost weight and burned fat off in a remarkably short time. Do you really believe it is all possible? I believe it is possible to follow a fad diet and loose weight, but I don’t think the diet is one I can stick with. They all typically have foods I don’t eat on a regular basis. Sometimes the food isn’t very enticing. Using a fad diet to start may help accelerate your weight loss but don’t plan on that weight staying off. If you don’t want to spend your life bouncing from one fad diet to the next, you need to do some lifestyle changes and add exercise to your routine.

There’s the Grapefruit diet. Who has not heard of the grapefruit diet? I remember my mother following their advice when I was only a young child. I think it’s been being promoted since the 1930′s. You can loose weight quickly with it. They say that grapefruit has some sort of an ingredient in it that when you eat one in combination with a protein, they help you burn fat. Now that part I didn’t know about. I eat grapefruit and so does my husband, but we eat them as a late night snack before bed. Now I know what I am doing wrong. It’s possible the weight you loose while on the diet may only be water weight. It will help the scale move temporarily but the pounds will possibly be back when you return to eating like you did before going on the diet. The food choices are taken from low calorie, low carbohydrates and high protein type foods. You diet for 12 days to loose 10 pounds. I would advise anyone wanting to loose weight to also do some exercises. That will enable you to burn more fat and maybe keep the weight off.

The Atkins diet is a very well known plan too. My mom has also done a version of that one. Like the grapefruit diet, it is a high protein low carbohydrate diet. They have allowed so many of the foods we have been forbidden for years to eat. Some are sour cream, steak, eggs both the yolk and white parts are some examples. The plan looks at the reason many people are overweight is due to carbohydrates, not fat. Change your eating habits and instead of burning off carbohydrates when you are exercising or during your every day activities, you start burning fat instead. To burn fat, this looks like a very good idea.

This is only two of the diets out there that have been rather popular over the past years and still being used by dieters today. They do start up your fat burning engines. They help you loose weight. Your body shape will change and you may even see your belly fat burning off. That is the hardest fat to burn.

The question is, can you live on this type of diet the rest of your life? The grapefruit diet is only 12 days long. Then you must take a couple days off before starting it again. The Atkins diet doesn’t have a time limit. It is good to be under the care of your doctor when doing it, but can you give up your carbohydrates for ever? Aren’t carbohydrates good for you? That’s where we get our energy, right?

It is possible to live on the Atkins diet, but most would be unable to do it. I like my pies, potatoes and sweets too much. After loosing your weight on the diet, most will revert back to their old eating habits and gain the weight back.

You don’t ever want to be fat again, right? To do that, you need to learn portion control and but not deprive yourself of foods. When putting your food on your plate, only add a few of the foods that contain carbohydrates. Eat lots of vegetables, fruits and protein. Be sensible about the portions of even the foods that are considered good items to eat. If you do this, you should see a weight loss, maybe not as fast as some diets claim, but you will loose. Eat sensibly and you can adapt a diet for life, not just a few weeks. If you need to loose faster, one of the above diets can help, but remember to eat sensibly after loosing the weight.

Tags: do fad diets burn fat, loose weight, belly fat burning, grapefruit diet, fad diets, fat burning engines, high protein low carbohydrate diet

Many people are now thinking about weight loss. How they want their stomachs to have that rock hard look again. No more love handles, cellulite, jiggly butts, or belly fat. Everyone wants a trim lean look but how does one accomplish it?

If you eat well balanced meals, eat good choices for your snacks that are low in sugar and fat, exercise daily, you will loose weight. At least you will at first. Many will be disappointed at the fact that they may still have that ugly belly fat. Why isn’t the stomach flatter? You have been doing so many stomach crunches that your insides hurt but the results are disappointing.

First thing we need to take into consideration is your age. Have you reached that age where reaching for the body you had in the 20′s is no longer an option? I always heard once you hit 30, everything is down hill. I don’t think that is true. You will reach an age, I am not going to point out what it is, when you need to give up looking for the youthful body and just try to maintain a healthy one. You cannot stop the skin from sagging, it’s not going to snap back. You don’t have the muscle mass you had when you were younger or the energy. It also does take time to see results. They are not as quickly seen as when we were younger.

Even if you can’t look twenty any longer, you still need to take care of your body. To keep it working as efficiently for you as it can. To do this you need to burn fat and exercise. You really don’t have to go out and join a gym to get a good workout. An excellent workout that is good for your heart and will burn fat is walking. If you are just starting out, you may have to take it a bit slower than the other walkers around you who keep passing you up. That’s ok, as you get into better condition, you can speed up a little, but don’t try to compete with others, you can only do what you are able to do.

After you have been doing a regular walking routine for awhile and eating a balanced diet, you may see that tummy bulge going down a bit. Even if the scale doesn’t really read that you have lost weight, you are burning fat. Start off walking 2 days a week for about a half hour, then increase it to 3 days a week for 45 minutes and so forth.

Adding some weight lifting to your routine will help you rebuild some of your muscle mass. Tighten up those saggy underarms. Give you some additional strength that will come in handy when trying to do some of those chores around the house. With weight lifting, you don’t want to work the same muscle group every day. You want to skip a day in between work outs. Some people choose to do the upper half of body one day and the lower half the next day. Muscles need at least 24 hours to recover from a work out with weights. Doing weight training 3 days a week for about a half hour is a good start. To help you burn fat, try to do sets of 12 repetitions of each exercise. You can increase it to 15 when you are ready. There isn’t a real need to increase the weight you are lifting as much as there is to increase the repetitions if you are wanting to burn fat.

For your stomach, doing crunches and reverse crunches can help tone those loose muscles. It won’t get rid of the fat, but it can tone the muscles under the fat pulling the stomach in. The result will be a firmer looking stomach, but you still need to keep walking, toning and eating healthy to help burn fat.

Depending on your age, you may not look 20 again, but you can still look good for the age you are.

Tags: muscle mass, trim lean look, are you ready to burn fat, firmer looking stomach, ugly belly fat, eating a balanced diet

It’s that time of year again. As one year is ending, we are all thinking how we might do things a little different next year. Maybe this year you will write that book you have been talking about. Or is this the year that you are going to upgrade that kitchen and bath? We all start the year out with a lot of plans on doing things to make the next year even better.

What is the number one resolution most people make? Is it reading more books, studying your Bible daily, playing more video games?

The number one New Years Resolution is to loose weight. Burn off that fat that has accumulated around your mid section or hips. How many actually keep their resolutions? Very few.

If you are planning on loosing weight, what is your plan?

Many people start a diet with the first 3 letters of the word, diet. They slowly die from starvation. Stop eating everything for a time period. I actually use to go 7 days straight without eating a single bite. Did I loose weight, yes. Did I keep it off, no. I didn’t learn to eat right, I only quit eating. Once I started eating again, I would once again eat like I use to. Smaller portions to start, but gradually the old habits always return. I didn’t learn anything about how to loose weight.

What can you do different than starvation? Maybe we need to change that word diet. Having the first three letters of the word spell die isn’t very encouraging. We need to say instead, lifestyle changes. Burn fat, burn off calories, fight the bulge anything but diet. I don’t want to die.

Do you have a plan? Are you relying on pills to help you loose weight? Following a fat burning program you have seen advertised? You are going to see many ways to burn fat here in the next couple of months. Many programs will be being advertised. The market is ripe.

Many of these programs will help you. They will even teach you how to keep the weight off, learn new ways of eating. Some people may go overboard, starving themselves to death as I did. Eventually most learn that starvation isn’t the best way.

You need to learn what you are doing to gain weight to begin with. Do you have a hard time pushing yourself away from the dinner table? Do you eat bread, potatoes and a starchy vegetable with your dinner most of the time? Are deserts late at night your downfall?

I heard the other day that if you want to eat carbohydrates like potatoes, bread, crackers and deserts, it is best to eat them before 3pm. Later than that, your fat burning slows down. You tend to relax and watch more television. A person is just over all less active in the evening. What is our biggest meal of the day? Dinner is or supper as some call it. What time of day do we eat it? Usually most eat it after 5pm. Dinner is usually full of carbohydrates. This makes dinner so much harder to burn off.

Exercise is very important. Don’t do it too late in the day. Exercising then going to bed an hour or so later can cause sleeping problems. Exercise can be almost like drinking a cup of coffee. It is very motivating. Sleeping after wards is a very uncommon trait.

Remember, after you loose the weight, you need to continue burning fat daily if you want to keep the weight off. Making a lifestyle change will benefit you most.

Keep that New Years Resolution this year. Make that your newest resolution. You will be happier and healthier in the long run.

Tags: lose weight, new years resolution, fat burning program

Back in the early nineteen sixties there was a study completed on how to determine if you are fat. It was determined that is a lady is 5 feet tall and weighs less than 140 pounds, she is not considered fat. Go pass that 140 pound mark and you are overweight. That was good/bad news for me. I am a woman, 5 ft tall, and I weigh 140 pounds. That’s good news because it means I am not that much overweight and don’t have to loose much to be in the guidelines. The bad news is, I still am overweight. A man who is 6 feet in height and weighs over 204 pounds was considered overweight. It was found that 24.3 percent of the adult population in America was overweight. Another survey done in the early part of nineteen seventies, found that 25 percent were overweight and by the time a third survey was done in the later part of the seventies, there were 25.4 percent of the American adult population overweight. In the nineteen eighties, the numbers were at 33.3 percent. In 1994, research findings were published showing that in just 10 years time, residents of America had all together accumulated over a billion pounds. We are now in 2012, are you wondering what the results are now? My guess is it has continued to get worse. Too bad there isn’t a cure like the flue shot for obesity. Now we don’t only have fat adults, we are letting our children get fat too. I find it hard to watch some of the talk shows on daytime TV that have children on them that are so overweight they can hardly walk. The parents say they don’t really eat that much, or they feed them because they are so hungry. I remember one that ate a big bag of M&M’s for a mid day snack. Why has this happened to America?

There are many that try and tell us why we are fat. It’s because we don’t exercise. We eat too many sweets. Many say carbohydrates in our diet are the problem. Then there’s the low fat diets because we are eating too many fatty items. Now I am hearing how they add ingredients into our low fat, or no fat foods that actually make us want to eat more. We eat too many processed foods. There are so many different views as to why we are fat.

What can you do about it? First of all, stop and check out your own diet. Don’t worry about everyone else’s. Look for flaws in your diet that could be steering you in the direction of being overweight. Most of the time, anything you are over eating can be a problem. Even drinking too much milk or water can be bad for you. Portion control is very important.

Burn fat. That is so important. It is also important for your bodies well being. Don’t start an exercise program that is doomed to failure. Figure out some thing that you enjoy doing. If walking is your thing, go for a walk. It you like to dance, maybe work on your routine a few days each week. Then there is also weight lifting. It works wonders for burning fat if you do it right. Now I know we women don’t want big bulky muscles. Don’t worry. You aren’t built to have them. When lifting, you should not worry as much about how much you can lift as to how many repetitions you can do. Doing 12 to 15 repetitions in each set will help you burn fat. Doing only 5 or 6 repetitions of a set lifting as much as you can possibly lift, tightens your muscles, but it doesn’t burn fat.

If you are a woman, your body is built for storing fat. It’s a lifetime chore to stay trim. You may not be able to achieve it with all the factors against you, but you can possibly stay in a good range that you can feel good about.

Don’t count your calories so much as watch your portions. Try and eat something out of every part of the food pyramid to keep a balanced diet daily. Then get active in some way. If you do all of this, you have a very good chance of burning off that excess fat and getting a leaner, healthier you.

Tags: mid day snack, american adult population, adult population, bad news, americans are overweight, fat adults