By Craig Ballantyne, CSCS, MS
Author, Turbulence Training
This is always tough to admit, but nutrition is more important than your workouts when it comes to fat loss.
And since diet is more important than exercise, I’ve decided to spend a lot time sharing nutrition tips this week, starting with these 5 diet secrets:
1) Your nutrition program doesn’t have to be extreme.
Hold up on making any extreme diet changes. Make sure the nutrition plan you’ve chosen is sustainable. Simple diet changes go a lot farther than you might think.
Why not just eat more whole, natural foods rather than trying to go on an impossible-to-stick-to ultra-low carb extreme plan?
2) Get the junk out of the house.
If it’s in your house, you’ll eat it…and trust me, this goes for me too. When I visit a relative’s house for holiday, I always eat the treats they have sitting around. That’s why I keep the junk out of my house.
So whatever your weakness is, keep it out of your home. Success is that simple.
3) Fill in the “diet-killing” gap.
For some folks, the diet-killing gap is between work and dinner. For others, it’s between dinner and bedtime, but for almost everyone, there is a point in the day when we suffer from mindless eating.
So make sure you have alternatives…as soon as you come home from work, cut up vegetables and dip them into hummus. That will keep you full on a small amount of calories.
After dinner, if you need something sweet, stir up chocolate protein powder into a small bit of plain yogurt. That will satisfy you.
4) Chew your food 5-10 times before swallowing.
Most people eat so fast they only about 1-2 times. You’ll really notice a difference and you’ll slow your eating so you feel full.
5) Have a bowl of broth-based vegetable soup before a meal.
American researcher Barbara Roll has published a lot of studies showing that this will help you reduce the food you eat. Surprisingly, consuming just water doesn’t seem to do the same trick.
So those are just 5 of the diet secrets we have for you this year.
Stay tuned for proven secrets to help you lose fat in 2010.
Acne is a common skin disease that results when pores get blocked and bacteria form inside them. It comes in a variety of familiar forms and affects nearly everyone at some stage, particularly in their teen years. The inflamed, red bumps that sometimes form can be painful, and even painless white pimples are unsightly.
In the surface of the skin are pores, tiny openings called a hair follicle. Deeper inside the pore, near the base of the follicle, there are sebaceous glands that produce sebum, a natural type of oil. That oil helps keep the skin flexible and protected. Hair continues to grow through the surface, while oil or sebum oozes out the side and is spread around the area. Skin cells grow and die and are sloughed off through washing, rubbing or spontaneously. But that process can be interrupted when the pores close and when bacteria form inside them. The result is acne.
The white pimples that sometimes form are usually a combination of dead skin cells, white blood cells and bacteria. The trapped pus often creates an inflamed, red area around it. The term ‘pus’ is an adaptation of ‘pustule’, a type of acne that results when the follicle wall bursts and the white blood cells rush into the area as part of a healing process.
When the tiny bumps or spots appear black they’re called blackheads, naturally enough. They’re a non-inflamed form of acne that come from the material having poked through the surface. Their dark color isn’t the result of contact with dirt on the skin. It’s a combination of dead skin cells and sebum that have oxidized. Oxygen in the air causes a chemical reaction that turns them black.
Often, however, the material doesn’t break the skin, but simply pushes it up, forming a small, white bump called whiteheads. One form are known as ‘milia’. Normally dead skin cells will get washed off or simply fall off the surface. But they can get trapped underneath the surface. This type of acne is common among infants, but can affect people at any age. All these variations go by a general medical term called ‘comedones’, and whether that formation is open or closed is part of the clinical difference between them.
As the acne develops it can variously form what are called papules, nodules or cysts. A papule forms when the walls holding the hair follicle burst near the surface. They’re small and don’t contain pus. A nodule is a hardened lump under the skin, resulting from a break at the base of the follicle. A cyst is a larger, reddened bump. They’re soft, but can be very painful.
Naturally, while it’s helpful to know what acne is, the most important thing is to be able to treat it. We turn to that next…
Only in very rare cases can acne represent a serious general health risk. But, its effects can still be severe. The unsightly blemishes, the appearance of having unhealthy skin will almost inevitably lead to mild depression or worse. One important method for keeping that outlook under control is to make reasonable efforts to combat the condition.
Not everyone can readily afford a professional dermatologist on an ongoing basis. But even one visit can provide tons of useful advice and a prescription for acne medication. That’s worth quite a lot. Even though there is a substantial amount of information available on the Internet today, it’s helpful to have someone experienced who can help interpret it.
The medicine itself is important, both to treat the disease and the psychological effects. As the patient lessens the number of lesions, and lengthens the period between outbreaks, the skin will clear. At the same time, even when acne is still present, knowing that one is doing everything possible to combat the condition
promotes a better attitude.
Passivity in the face of acne creates a downward spiral. The person feels bad about having a skin disease. They look in the mirror and don’t want to face the day, which includes other people who will see them. But passively accepting the situation only worsens it. It reinforces the mistaken belief that nothing can be done. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If nothing is done, the condition doesn’t go away or at least lingers much longer, and more severely than need be. That provides false evidence that there’s nothing that can be done to make it go away.
Taking action tends to create a positive spiral. Severe acne won’t normally disappear in a day, even with the best treatment. But fighting it leads to greater confidence as the condition actually improves.
Want to discover how to PERMANENTLY get rid of YOUR acne… Click Here!
It’s Not All About Dieting!
Many people hear the term “weight loss” and immediately think “diet” – so interconnected are the two terms that it is often as though it were impossible to lose weight without a radical change in eating habits. But there are other elements necessary to a successful weight loss plan than just changing your diet – and in fact it may be that you are not eating anything you shouldn’t but rather you are gaining weight due to something you are not doing – exercise, for example.
The most successful weight loss plans, or at least the ones which have the most immediate success, tend to be those which combine a healthy diet with a sensible but rigorous exercise plan. Exercise aids weight loss for a number of reasons – not least the fact that it burns calories and prevents unused energy from converting to fat. Additionally, exercise has a tendency to increase the metabolism. Your metabolism decides how quickly you use the calories that you have consumed. Many of us gain weight more easily because of a problem with our metabolism. This can be caused by an underactive thyroid gland, which may require medication. Some of us just have a naturally slow metabolism, and this is where exercise can help.
If anyone tells you that you need to eat less to lose weight – and you are already cutting out fatty foods left and right – then it could be that they are misleading you. Sometimes it is more of an issue with exercise – and this can easily be fixed.
Take It At Your Own Pace…
One thing that connects a lot of people’s failed exercise regimes is that they find the whole pace of the process a bit too much to take. Having resolved to do a certain amount every day, it is easy to become disheartened when it is either impossible or hugely difficult to stick to the regime. In these cases it is common for people to think it just isn’t going to happen for them, and to abandon the idea altogether. This is a shame, without a doubt. Often in such cases, it is not a matter of exercise being too much; rather, it is a case of too much exercise too soon.
The most important thing about any exercise regime is that it should be enough to make you feel that you have worked hard, but not too much to realistically sustain. If, the day after a trip to the gym, you cannot bend to tie your shoelaces without immense pain, then you have gone too far. However, if you have breezed through it without feeling out of breath, then the chances are that you have done too little cardiovascular exercise to really make any impact at all. Your own pace is somewhere in between these two points, and if you go too far one day you should not feel that it is a reason to stop – rather, a timely lesson in pacing yourself. Once you find your own pace, you will find that you can lift it a few notches in time, and then the results will begin to flow.
Discover how YOU can really lose those extra pounds… Click Here!
Health & Fitness Blogs
Maybe you’ve been told that cardio is the best way to lose fat…but if you’re not getting results with that long, slow, boring program then I have shocking news for you.
Recently, Men’s Health and Women’s Health fitness expert Craig Ballantyne emailed me the top 5 reasons why trainers should stop telling their clients to do cardio.
I was surprised by all of the research that is out there showing just how ineffective cardio is for fat loss.
I know I sure won’t be using it to burn belly fat in the future.
Now sure, cardio is good for endurance athletes and for your health, but when it comes to fat loss, here are the 5 reasons to kick cardio to the curb:
1) Cardio machines over-estimate the number of calories burned by up to 31%. (reported in Mens Health, Feb 2009)
2) One research study found that when men and women did 6 hours of cardio every week for one year, they only lost 6 pounds. (Reference: Obesity 15:1496-1512, 2007. Exercise Effect on Weight and Body Fat in Men and Women. Anne McTiernan*, et al.)
3) When some people start a cardio program, they end up eating more, and may even gain weight because of this. (Reference: International Journal of Obesity 32: 177-184, 2008).
4) Even scientists admit that cardio does not burn as much fat as you’d expect based on the number of calories burned in a workout. (Reference: Br J Sports Med. 2009 Sep 29)
5) And finally, head-to-head research has shown that interval training works better than slow cardio for fat loss – even when diet is not changed. (Reference: Int J Obes 2008 Apr;32(4):684-91).
Wow!
If you’re like me, you would never have known about that research if it wasn’t for experts like Craig Ballantyne exposing the truth about cardio.
Now you might be thinking, if cardio doesn’t work, then WHAT DOES?
Well, don’t panic. Insider experts like Craig have known for years that nutrition, interval training, and resistance training are the 3 most important secrets for helping you lose belly fat.
In fact, Craig’s workout programs have been used by millions of men and women through his articles in Prevention, Men’s Health, and Women’s Health magazine, plus through his Turbulence Training program.
Now I’ll be honest with you, and don’t tell Craig this, but while his workouts in the magazines are good, they aren’t nearly as fun and effective as the workouts in his Turbulence Training System.
In fact, I want you to try my absolute favorite Turbulence Training workout: Click here!
It’s fun, fast, effective…and doesn’t require any long, slow, boring cardio or fancy machines at your commercial gym.
So skip the cardio, because research and results prove that it just isn’t worth your time.
To your success,
Dan.
Body fat is one common phenomenon for teenagers, youths and adults alike.
There have been various ways presented in regards of the best way to fight body fat. Natural and safe weight loss programs are only effective way for reducing body fat for good. Body fat occurs in the deeper areas of the body which is in contrast to subcutaneous fat which accumulates under the skin. Body fat is a serious condition since the fat accumulates around critical organs in the body. There is a resonating concern with high body fat over and fat related diseases such as heart and coronary diseases among other fat related deteriorations such as diabetes.
One of the best ways to lower body fat is to simply eat more frequently. Yes, that’s right, eating 5-6 smaller meals per day will speed up your metabolism. I already hear you saying to yourself “eating more is what got me fat in the first place” well the key is to eat more, frequent meals that are smaller in volume. Having 5-6 meals that are 300-500 calories is much easier for your body to digest then having 3 meals a day that is 1000 calories each. Breaking down your meals makes sure that your body is constantly getting nourished as well, and you will be less likely to binge because your next meal will always be around the corner. The 5-6 meals a day approach is a feasible way of avoiding overeating and enhances as well boosts metabolic processes which will aid in overall fat loss.
Losing body fat naturally requires approaches which have been proved to pay off such as the intake of the kinds of foods that burn fat. Empirical research has proved that foods that have high components of protein and low components of carbohydrates, sugar as well as saturated fats are effective for fighting body fat. In pursuing a diet of such foods like lean meats, vegetables and wholesome grains one must also avoid the kind of refined foods that have fine carbohydrates especially those with white sugar.
Foods which also contain white flour must be avoided or at least minimized in these natural weight loss methods. Fighting belly fat takes a holistic approach which enlists various methods such as drinking recommended fluids and plenty of water, weight lifting and doing some cardio workouts. The main focus in fighting body fat is about burning the calories and doing a lot of exercise in a feasible way in addition to a good diet that is designed for losing body fat.
To wrap up what I’ve been talking about in this article, to lose body fat, one has to apply principles that have been tested and proven to be workable. One of those is taking foods that burn fats. Lots of people have body fats; teenagers, adults, kids and even the aged. You have to study all the methods and plans available to choose the one that will work for you. In summary, natural weight loss measures are the best methods to put up a good fight against belly fats.
Discover more about losing unsightly body fat… Click Here!
