3 Great Abdominal Exercises

One of the most thought of exercise by overweight people is abdominal exercise. The abdomen is usually the focus of attention when one is obese. Psychologically, if one thinks to get his waistline down, it may imply that his or her weight has gone down too (and this is usually true). This is probably why people tend to focus on their abdomen when doing exercises.

However, overweight individuals need a specialized form of abdominal exercise. They are especially designed for individuals who are having a hard time rising from the floor due to the weight. For this reason, it is ideal to have abdominal exercise from a sitting position.

The first method is the easiest sitting exercise. It’s best to use to get someone started on the regimen. If religiously done, it could keep you going until you lose that excess weight.

In order to do this, you need to sit on a chair. Making sure you don’t slouch, hold a pair of dumbbells across your chest. You need to hold one dumbbell for each hand. If this is too tough for you, you can hold something lighter, like canned soup.

Keep this position in place as you slowly tilt your body to the right. Keep both of your buttocks firmly planted on the chair. Get your upper torso back to center position and tilt your body to the left. Start with twelve repetitions for each side until you can work yourself up. Gradually increase your weights too.

The second great abdominal exercise I can recommend is to sit on a chair and slowly lean forward, as if you’re going to touch your toes. Make sure not to lunge abruptly forward. Slowly draw your body back to a straight, sitting position, and repeat the procedure until you feel your abdominal muscles tighten.

You can combine the 1^st and 2^nd abdominal exercise I provided for you. You can tilt your body to the right, back up, forward, back up, to the left, then back up again. Do the whole cycle 12 times and gradually increase as you build your stamina and strength.

The last exercise you can do is to lie down with your back to the floor. Bend one knee then straighten your leg. Raise that leg up and down 12 times. Do the same to the other leg for 12 times too. These help tone the lower stomach.

These are the three best abdominal exercises for overweight individuals. These will probably take a while to master, but with persistence and commitment, you’re on your way to losing that excess weight!

Is Eating Snacks Good or Bad for the Diet?

Is Eating Snacks Good or Bad for the Diet? Snacks are a part of a lot of people’s daily routine. There are tones of reasons why this is. It could be so that they feel too hungry during the afternoon between lunch and dinner. It could also be because it’s a habit from a childhood practice when Mommy started preparing cookies and sweet every afternoon. Or, it can be something to occupy an idle part of your day.

Either of these reasons may be good or bad for your diet. You will need to evaluate your purpose of eating snacks, and I can help you through it. If we find that you’re snack habits are causing bad effects for your calorie limits, then we’ll need to change that. However, if it’s actually good for your diet, then we’ll keep it. Let’s get to know which reasons about snacking are harmful and which ones are helpful for your diet.

Let’s look at the reasons why you would eat snacks. First off, do you feel too hungry between breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner that you really need to grab a bite? Do you feel you’re going to faint if you don’t deal with your hunger pangs with a snack? If so, then these are healthy reasons to eat a snack. 

Eating a snack so you don’t gobble anything and everything you can get your hands on during lunch or dinner is a great reason to continue morning or afternoon snacks. Dieting is not about starving yourself. It’s about controlling the amount of calories you eat. Honestly, it wouldn’t help if you can’t control how much you eat because you are too hungry to care. So, eat a snack to keep yourself in check when eating lunch or dinner. Just make sure you control the calories you eat during snack time too.

If your reason for eating snacks is just to fill up an idle part of your day or any other reason not related to a hunger that needs settling, then your snacking reason is harmful for your diet. You need to find a diversional activity that can help you stop eating for fun. Walking and exercising are great alternatives, and it helps burn calories too! Some people snack as part of a habit since childhood. Some snack to fulfil their eating impulses and sweet-tooth cravings. The only way to get by this is to accept the fact that snacking for these reasons can ruin your diet. Try to remember WHY you’re dieting in the first place to help you with this problem.

Is Eating Snacks Good or Bad for the Diet? By now, you should be able to figure out if your snack is helpful or harmful for your diet. If it’s helpful, then continue with it. Just make sure to count calories, as always. If it’s harmful, then stop it. If you can go without a snack from lunch to dinner time, then it would be best to just skip a snack.

Top Ten Reasons to Exercise Everyday

Exercise has long been proved and tested to increase the quality and longevity of life. So how come not everyone’s hitting the gym? It’s because exercise is hard to maintain. To motivate you, let’s discuss the top ten reasons why you should exercise. There are thousands of reasons out there, but let’s go over the top ten reasons why you should exercise daily.

Let’s start with number 10 on the list.

10.) Better aesthetics. I placed this as my number ten reason because it’s not that important but it’s still a priority for some people as to why they’re exercising. Everyone wants to look good. Who wouldn’t, right? That’s why they hit the gym to get that ripped set of abs or a thinner waistline. Exercising helps develop your muscles to make you look good.

9.) Faster recovery from injury. Research has shown that a fit person who gets injured recovers faster than an out-of-shape individual. This is because the protein in your well-developed muscles is utilized to help repair broken tissues and bones. I placed this as my number 9 reason because not all people tend to exercise so they can heal faster when they get hurt. However, it is a good thing to know.

8.) Exercise prevents osteoporosis. Exercise helps increase your bone density. It can help prevent osteoporosis and other bone problems like arthritis, scoliosis, and others.

7.) Better posture. Combined with a better bone density, well developed back and abdomen muscles promote good posture.

6.) Added strength and endurance. Exercising daily helps you perform tasks not everyone can do so easily. If you are physically fit due to exercise, you may be taking a lot of activities for granted, which out of shape people are finding hard to do. Concrete examples may include climbing a flight of stairs, walking long distances, running a marathon, swimming, or simply getting up from bed.

5.) Exercise improves your mood. Going for a jog or a brisk walk to start your day can leave you feeling great and charged all day, compared to a sedentary person. Exercise helps you feel better by getting your blood pumping. Hormones, such as epinephrine, keep you active and are only released when you exercise. These hormones help you out and helps improve your mood.

4.) Better personal values. Exercising requires personal discipline and training. By constantly exercising, you discipline yourself and respect your principles and priorities. You can even often find that people who exercise are more responsible, diligent, and hard-working than those who don’t. Exercise does not only tone your muscles, by it refines your attitude too.

3.) Exercise keeps you that small waistline! Face it. Everybody wants a fashion model look. Well, exercise helps you by burning fats and increasing your body metabolism. Your body needs energy to exercise. It gets them from burning some of your fats and calories.

2.) Stress reliever! Stress is related to 99% of all diseases and disorders in the world out there. That’s because stress makes you weak, and when experienced in a long-term basis, may cause illness. Exercise is one way to relieve stress. Work out those frustrations, problems, and concerns!

1.) My number one reason is life longevity. I bet everyone who’s on their right mind agrees when I say nobody wants to die young. Exercise helps you get a longer life by keeping your body healthy and your organs active.

These are my top ten reasons to exercise daily. Actually, there are thousands of reasons out there. Look for your own top ten reasons to help motivate you to exercise daily. 

Is Swimming an Effective Exercise in Helping Me Stay Healthy?

Is Swimming an Effective Exercise?  The secret to getting exercise work wonders is through consistency. You will never lose that excess weight and stay healthy if you don’t keep religious with your exercise schedule. One of the major causes of inconsistency is lack of discipline, commitment, and motivation.

To counter this, I advise that you seek exercise that is enjoyable for you. By creating an enjoyable exercise regimen, you won’t have to dread each coming exercise session. Instead, you’ll be looking forward to it! One of the most fun and enjoyable exercises out there is swimming.

Swimming is a great form of aerobic exercise that everyone can learn and practice. It’s great since it practically exercises all the muscles in your body, including your heart muscle! A healthy dose of swimming weekly can keep you healthy, young, and strong.

A lot of people find swimming fun and exciting. If you are one of those people, then you’d better sign up to the nearest gym with a pool. You can use this as your exercise and you can remain consistent since it’s something you like to do.

So, is Swimming an Effective Exercise?  Swimming, like most aerobic exercises, increases your heart rate and body metabolism. This means that it burns calories and helps you shed off weight. To make it effective, you should swim for at least 20 minutes each session. The 20 minutes must be spent doing laps, not wading and splashing around. You can do this after your exercise to cool off and have fun.

There are a lot of strokes you can use when doing your swimming laps. You can either do the freestyle or frontstroke, backstroke, breast stroke, or the butterfly stroke. The freestyle is probably the easiest to learn and exercises all your muscles. It is a great stroke for beginners. The backstroke and breast stroke are strokes that are a bit tough to learn, but once you get a hang of them, you can easily use them for more variety in your exercise. The butterfly is the hardest stroke to learn. It is a high-intensity stroke for advanced swimmers.

Start out with easy strokes and a few laps each day. Work yourself up when you feel your usual laps aren’t that hard to do anymore. Don’t over exert yourself and do bobbings every end of a lap. Never forget to stretch and warm up before swimming, and cool down after. You don’t want to get hurt, especially while you swim. Finally, it’s best to bring a swimming buddy with you. You can not only motivate yourselves, but you can also watch out for each other in the pool. Is Swimming an Effective Exercise?  With everything mentioned above, yes it is. 

Weight Loss Myth #3: Eating One Meal a Day

Here is another weight loss myth. People often get the concept that in order to lose weight, they should eat one meal a day and live off water. Well, that may be an exaggeration but you get my point. But in truth, dieticians encourage people who want to lose weight to eat at least five meals in one day.

You might be wondering if you’re reading some bogus advice. However, this fact is accurate. According to experts, eating 5 meals in a day will help you lose weight because you will be feeling full the entire day, you won’t get cravings for impulsive meals like burgers, fries, potato chips, and all those other food that gets your mouth watering when you see a commercial.

These five meals must contain a health and well-balanced breakfast, lunch, and dinner and two light snacks. The food you need to aim for are high fiber (green, leafy vegetables, and fruits), moderate carbohydrates (rice, bran muffins, whole wheat toast), good sources of fat (fish oil, vegetable oil, olive oil and the like), and lean proteins (fish, chicken, pork, and steak without the fatty parts).

The main food you need to stay away from are those loaded with bad cholesterol and sodium. They can be in the forms of canned food, junk food, burgers, pizza, fries, sodas, instant noodles and the like. Typically, all fast foods are unhealthy and almost all processed food too. Remember, it doesn’t mean that if it’s not salty, it’s low in sodium. You should learn to read content labels when choosing your food.

Eating five meals in a day doesn’t mean you’re overeating. You need to balance out your five meals or get a consult from a dietician if you need advice about what to eat and how much. It’s not the number of meals you eat in a day, but how you control what you eat.

Depriving yourself of adequate food will starve and hurt your body in the long run. You may not see the effects of starvation, but as it progresses, you could die. Giving yourself adequate food through 5 divided meals daily will keep you well-nourished and cancel out sudden impulses on food cravings. Make sure to cross out this practice as a weight loss myth. 

Learn How to Count Calories - Step 5 - Tracking Your Daily Caloric Intake

Welcome to the last step of your 5-step How to Count Calories guide. I bet each of you have finally formulated plans circling around your daily calorie targets. If you’ve done that, then good! You’re almost done. If not, then take your time. This is not a race and we need to make sure we do things the right way.

So if you’re ready for the fifth and final step, then it’s all about tracking your daily caloric intake. Since you’ve done the planning and done the implementing, it’s time to do the evaluating. How many calories were you able to eat today?

Well, if you try to recall everything you ate today on the top of your head, you’d probably miss some items and end up with a bad answer. The most effective way to keep track is to keep a Food Journal. This journal can be the size of your palm, so you can carry it anywhere and write down things on the go. Write about all the things you ate and by how much. However, if you have high-end phones, PDAs, or other gadgets, you can use them as well.

At the end of the day, open up your journals (or phones) and calculate how much calories you were able to eat. Did you fall on or below your daily caloric intake target? If yes, then congratulations! Make sure to keep it up! If no, then don’t worry. We’re still starting out. They say the best start is to begin at the bottom and end on top. It would be bad if it were the other way around.

If you exceeded your daily target and ended up with more calories than you intended, try to review the things you’ve eaten today. You will probably find some things you can live the day without. Like a cupcake, a glass of soda, pieces of fries, a bag of chips, or other things that shouldn’t be in your diet. Try to keep a mental note to avoid these foods the next day.

If you’ve lost all the junk food in your diet but you’re still exceeding limits, try to minimize your eating. For example, instead of eating 1 serving of potatoes per meal, try half a serving. Apply this concept in other things too.

Just remember, when your cutting things out of your diet, start with the non-healthy and calorie packed food first. So if it’s a choice between your usual chocolate dessert for dinner and your morning apple, lose the chocolate.

All these calorie counting may be hard at first. But if you put your mind into it and integrate it in your system for 1 week, you’ll find that it’s human nature to count calories. You probably won’t remember the time when you didn’t count them. By now, you should be an expert when it comes to how to count calories. 

Learn How to Count Calories - Step 4 - Controlling How Much You Eat

By now, you’ll have already learned about the basic concepts of calories, how to count them, and have decided how much calories you’re going to take daily. Congratulations on making it this far! This is the fourth step of your 5-step plan in learning how to count calories.

Now that you have decided on a daily calorie intake that can help you lose weight, we’re going to talk about controlling how much you eat. Obviously, counting calories and setting goals won’t be enough. You need to put that into action and lose that fat.

I understand this may be the most difficult step. What we need to do to help you out, is to keep things real, practical, and feasible. What I mean is we need to taper or wean you off your usual eating habits until you fully implement the number of calories you’re supposed to be eating daily to lose weight.

Let’s say for example you drink 10 glasses of soda daily. That’s a lot of soda (and a lot of calories)! So you can lose weight, you’ll need to get rid of this habit completely.

Saying that starting tomorrow, you won’t drink soda (not even 1 drop!) is impractical, unrealistic, and not feasible. You’re mind might be set on the idea but your body will be screaming for your daily dose of soda. So what we need to do to help you completely get rid of the habit is to take things slowly.

Instead of immediately getting rid of the soda-habit on day 1, why not drink 8 glasses of soda on day 1 instead of 10? On day 2, you can drink 6 glasses and so on until you reach day 5 where you shouldn’t be drinking any glasses of soda at all. This way, we taper your body off your habits until it gets used of not having them. Apply these on your other eating habits. This will help you control what you eat.

Another technique on controlling what you eat is to drink a glass of water before meals. This will help you get full faster. A major advice most professionals can give you is to eat 5 meals a day. That’s three nutritious meals and two light snacks. This will help you feel full throughout the day and diminish those sudden food cravings and eating impulses. Just make sure you fit your daily caloric intake within those 5 meals. That should be a cinch for you, now that you know how to count calories!