Posts Tagged ‘weight loss programs’
The research is crystal clear here, food addictions are real. You see, food can cause alterations in your brain the same way that powerful drugs do.
The bad news here is that many people do not know how to overcome their addiction.
So, without further ado, here is what you can do about your food addiction:
1. Get rid of all the bad food: If you don’t have access to bad food, you are less likely to eat. In fact, changing your environment is far easier than changing your self control. Don’t rely on will power here, take the easier route.
2. Create caloric deficits with exercise, not food restriction: If you are trying to lose weight, make sure you have a heavy focus on exercise. You see, caloric deficits from exercise create less hunger than food deficits from dieting.
3. Use natural stimulants: Natural stimulants will provide you with mild highs while increasing your health. I would suggest focusing on loose leaf teas such as green tea and yerba mate. They will help you get through the food withdrawals.
Although most people focus on the effect exercise has on their outer appearance, it also has a profound impact on your mind.
So here is how exercise can make you feel like a super hero:
1. It teaches you to single task: In a day and age where multi tasking has become a plague, having an activity that retrains you to single task is golden. After all, countless research has shown that multi tasking is less efficient than single tasking.
2. It can increase social bonding: Even if you don’t talk to anybody and simply exercise your heart out, you are still being surrounded by people. And study after study has shown that social involvement increases immunity and mood.
3. More anabolic hormones: I recommend staying natural, of course. And testosterone, the main mind altering hormone, can change your outlook on life. It accomplishes this by giving you an enhanced sense of security and well being.
4. Enhanced core temperature: Every reaction in your body depends on temperature. As temperature increases so does the rate of reactions. Even better, blood flow to your brain increases as well. This in turn increases processing speeds.
You can’t just focus on exercise and diet when trying to lose weight, you also have to look at the mental aspect of things.
Despite this basic truth, too many people refuse to give psychology equal importance in comparison to exercise and diet.
Thus, here is how to increase your weight loss chances of success by optimizing your psychology:
1. Use specificity to your advantage: Loose and vague goals lead to loose and vague action. You need to have specific goals for the best results here. A specific goal will lead to much higher levels of motivation and will keep the fire burning for much longer.
2. Measure your results: Not only will this keep you motivated, but it will also prevent you from overlooking the progress you are making-a common human trait. Now you don’t have to measure everything under the sun, but you should at least measure your body fat.
3. Have a giant endpoint: If your goal is on the small side, your action will also be on the small side. If, on the other hand, you have a giant goal, you will have more motivation to generate giant action. This is the key to overcoming insurmountable obstacles.
Jiggly and loose arms are something that no woman should have to endure. Unfortunately, too many women subject themselves to this living nightmare.
Thus, without further ado, here is a 6-step guide to effective arm toning:
1. Use specificity: While it’s important to burn fat off your entire body for the best results, you also need to be very specific with exercises that directly tone your arm muscles. In fact, research shows that you can increase local levels of growth hormone in your arms.
2. Target the area where arm fat lives: There are three parts to your triceps muscle. And the area where arm fat lives is called the long head. So make sure you do exercises that directly work this area. One great exercise here is overhead extensions.
3. Target the inner head of the triceps: The inner head is definitely not as visible as the long head, but for the most complete arm toning, you shouldn’t neglect it. Fortunately, the easiest way to do this is so simply reverse your grip on standard pressdown exercises for the triceps.
Hormones are the most powerful substances in your body. In fact, you could argue that they have the biggest impact on your fat loss efforts.
So, without any more delay, here is how to make sure they don’t limit your weight loss by increasing their secretion naturally:
1. Feel good hormones: In the medical community they are referred to as beta endorphins. And the best way to increase their production is by increase the total amount of exercise you do per workout while simultaneously decreasing rest periods.
2. The young hormone: Every wants to stay forever young. And one way they do it is by taking growth hormone. Now doing this has some nasty side effects, so increase your levels naturally. The best way to do this is by increasing the intensity of your workouts.
3. Catecholamines: These hormones are a double edged sword. When secreted in excess they break you down and lead to exhaustion. When secreted in controlled amounts they can supercharge your energy levels. And a great way to get your catecholamines pumping at the right time is with a little caffeine right before you exercise.
There is a lot of advice out there on how to diet for weight loss. And some of this advice is good while some of it is borderline dangerous.
To further complicate matters, it can be very difficult for the average person to filter out the good from the bad.
So without further ado, here are 5 ways to modify your nutrition for maximum weight loss:
1. Always inspect the nutrition facts: Companies can deceive you with the packaging of a product, but all the ingredients have to be in the nutrition facts-there is no way around this. So make sure you always read the nutrition facts when purchasing food you are unfamiliar with.
2. Increase unsaturated fat intake: And make sure you simultaneously decrease saturated fat intake. You see, not only do saturated fats decrease circulation, they also increase the amount of calories going to your fat cells.
3. Hydrate when hunger increases: It’s possible for your body to slightly confuse thirst for hunger. So before bingeing on food when you feel hungry, try drinking lots of water first. As an added bonus, hydration will help you digest food better.
If you want to lose weight, you have to restrict your calories to some degree. There is no way around this basic fact.
And to complicate matters, too much caloric restriction can backfire by making your immune system so weak that you have to spend days in bed. Now keep in mind that days in bed will burn through calorie burning muscle tissue.
So, without further ado, here are 5 tips for preventing your immune system from tanking when you are burning body fat:
1. Increase your standard of hygiene: One of the biggest and simplest mistakes people make is not keeping their hygiene in check. You see, a lack of hygiene increases the amount of germs your body has to deal with. And this can increase your chance of getting sick when restricting calories.
2. Drink filtered water: Water from the faucet may not make you sick, per se. But it has higher concentrations of bacteria that stress your system. So try to get a basic charcoal filter at the very least to give some relief to your immune system.
There is much debate about whether or not fat loss is about calories in versus calories out. And while caloric intake is definitely important when it comes to fat loss, there are much stronger players here-hormones.
You see, hormones don’t really play within the bounds of the closed calorie model. They are extremely strong substances that penetrate your cells and create change.
Thus, here is how to make sure your hormones don’t prevent you from losing weight:
1. Keep your cardiovascular system healthy: Surprisingly, an unhealthy cardiovascular system can have a negative impact on your entire hormonal system. This mainly happens when your blood pressure is too high. So make sure you exercise hard, take some aspirin and get on medication if you doctor thinks this is right.
2. Don’t take hormones: Ironically, if you take exogenous hormones you can trigger a cascade of events that will set back your fat loss mission. You see, when you artificially increase hormones in your body, your systems will naturally downgrade their own production. In addition, you can have a wide range of negative effects on your heart.
If you can work out harder you will lose more fat, there is no doubt here. And the level of your workouts is largely determined by your muscles.
Now a big and well nourished muscle can produce a lot of work allowing you to have super charged workouts. But there is a system further up the chain which controls your muscles-the nervous system.
Thus, here is how to make sure your nervous system doesn’t prevent you from losing weight:
1. Use speed: Don’t just exercise with heavy weights and slow tempos. While this is ok for a beginner, at some point you will want to incorporate some speed training to develop your nervous system. Just make absolutely sure that you maintain strict form.
2. Get blood to your brain: Most things originate in the brain. Thus, making sure sufficient blood is getting to your brain is key for peak nervous system performance. One easy way to do this is by taking aspirin. Now aspirin becomes more beneficial the older you get.
3. Challenge your balance often: Your nervous system gets a powerful workout whenever you challenge your balance. But the challenge has to be tough or else you really won’t see any benefits here. So train on the outer edge of your abilities to see maximum gains.
Simply breaking down fat cells is not enough to maximize fat loss. You see, fat cells aren’t burned at the same location where they are disassembled.
As a result, maximizing blood flow in your body is necessary for maximum fat loss.
So here is how to lose more weight by increasing blood flow:
1. Stress your heart: But stress it in a good way with some cardio. Now please don’t think you have to go out and run a marathon because this can actually cause more damage than good. Instead, opt for small sessions of high intensity cardio spread throughout your week.
2. Measure improvement: Just like you would measure changes in body composition when trying to get in shape, you should measure changes in your circulatory health as well. Some good things to measure are blood pressure, blood cholesterol, blood sugar and heart rate. All of the above influence your ability to pump blood.
3. Control your emotional center: Negative emotions don’t just stay in your head, they have profound effects throughout your entire body. Said effects can age your circulatory system, thus reducing your ability to get blood around efficiently. So make sure you have some type of daily routine that allows you to keep things in balance.