I have been asked before how to gain weight fast. Most people that are weight lifting at one time or another, usually in the winter, try to bulk up and gain a lot of muscle for the summer, of course there is the diet down afterwards but we can deal with that later.

How to gain weight fast is a question that many people that are dieting to lose think is insane but I know from personal experience that many people would like to gain weight but do not really know how. I have a former weightlifting partner who had a really hard time gaining muscle no matter what he tried.

Here are some tips on how to gain weight fast that I think would help almost anyone. Read the rest of this entry »

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Looking to make a change and lose some weight? I have reviewed the top diet on the internet and you can go and read over 200 comments people have made about why this diet has worked well for them, as well as some of the problems.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are my favorite eating days of the year. Thanksgiving dinner is now only a couple of days away in Canada and the Turkeys and Hams have already been bought and are waiting to be eaten. This thanksgiving maybe you can be more careful about your eating and well being and I hope that looking at these tip will keep you feeling better the day after as you get to go on your post Thanksgiving day shopping spree.

1. Decide what you are going to eat each day in the morning before you start. Think about 3 meals and 3 snacks. No one says you can’t have a snack, then dinner a while later and then desert a while after that.

2. Get some exercise right after you get out of bed. This will help you focus on your fitness and make you aware of how your body feels that day.
Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as summer hits, people, especially women, start thinking about weight loss. This is that time of the year when they start working on their body in the hope that by the time Christmas arrives (or maybe even before that), the extra burden of fat would be gone forever and they would be able to flaunt their slimmer and sexier bodies to their friends and beaus. These women usually go for the common route of dieting for weight loss.

At the same time, there is also a section of women who are already dieting. They are in a dilemma over whether to continue dieting or quit it forever, because the results they are getting are either absolutely disappointing or far from what they expected from the diet program.

No matter which group you belong to, if you wish to lose weight this summer with the help of dieting, this article is the answer for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t deprive yourself but control your portions: Many people think that avoiding or depriving themselves completely of their favorite foods is the surefire way to avoid weight gain! If you too think this way you cannot be further from the truth!

If you deprive yourself of your favorite foods, your food cravings would increase all the more and a day will come when you would gorge on junk foods like a hungry wolf, thereby adding several pounds to your body in an instant! So a better option is to eat your favorite foods at least once every week! But at the same time you should monitor your food intake.

A good way to make sure that you don’t gain weight by eating your favorite foods is by exercising the trick of ‘portion control’! When you eat slowly and in small quantities, you would become satiated even by eating very little food. This way you would not only be able to satisfy your junk food cravings but at the same time keep your weight under control!

2. Smash all your beer bottles: Yep, you heard me right: open your cellar and throw out all the beer and soda bottles from there! Then promise yourself never to touch them again! Why would you do so? Quite simply, alcohol is high on calorie and sugar, both of which are bad for your health, especially when you are struggling hard to keep your weight under control! With alcohol and soda out of your way, you will find it easier to keep the pounds away and stay fit during the holiday season!

3. Buy tighter clothes: You might hate me for this advice, or think that I am crazy, but the fact remains that this is a good way of reminding yourself that you need to lose weight urgently! Think about it: how often have you promised yourself that you would lose weight before the next Christmas, and how many times have you failed to keep that promise!

It is no wonder that many people fail to lose weight because they simply don’t make weight loss their number one priority! I know that wearing tight clothes would make you feel uneasy, but it is this very uneasiness which would propel you towards the path of weight loss! The more uneasy you feel, the harder you would try to lose weight and become slimmer! This way you would reach your weight loss goal quite fast!

And by the way, don’t you want to be able to fit yourself in your favorite clothes? Make your dream a reality by doing this right now and eventually you will see that you are able to wear your favorite clothes without any feeling of uneasiness!

And that day would come soon!

Holiday weight gain is almost inevitable! In fact, you would need to be a staunch, self-disciplined, health-conscious individual to be able to avoid the temptations of cookies, candies and alcohol at parties! In fact, the ‘food season’ starts much before Christmas – usually from Thanksgiving Day!

From Thanksgiving Day to New Year, people stuff themselves as much as they can with all of their favorite foods. A bite here, a bite there and then more bites follow!

All this while the individual keeps reminding himself that even if he gains some extra pounds during this time, there is nothing to worry about as he would work very hard after the New Year to lose all that extra weight! Truth to be told, you CAN lose holiday weight within just a few weeks, provided that you make a little effort and are determined to reach your goal!

Continue with your workouts: The first thing you need to keep in mind is that no matter how busy you are, you should continue with your regular workouts! If you haven’t exercised ever, start doing it right now, and continue doing it at least throughout the whole holiday season – up until the New Year, when much of the ‘food craze’ usually dies away and is replaced by a new craze: the craze of weight loss!

If you workout regularly then you would not only be able to lose weight, but also have very little chance of gaining weight either! However, to be on the safe side, I would suggest that you focus on the intense workouts which help you burn a lot of calories within a very short time! On one hand, you would spend very little time on your workout regimen and on the other, these intense exercises would help you burn calories even at rest!

There is no excuse for deferring your workouts or taking a sabbatical from your exercise regimen simply because it is holiday or that you don’t ‘feel’ like working out, or are too busy with shopping and writing and sending out party invitations! Keep in mind that health always comes before everything else, and nothing but your health should always be your number one priority!

Indulge yourself only on the ‘cheat’ day: Just because it is holiday season doesn’t necessarily mean that you would throw all dietary cautions in the wind; but at the same time, you also won’t want to deprive yourself from the fun and enjoyment of this period! What I recommend is that you eat healthy foods for at least six days pf the week and then use the next day as the ‘cheat’ day.

Now how would you choose this ‘cheat’ day? If you have a party to attend to soon, just plan things in such a way that you attend it on your ‘cheat’ day! That way, you would be free to indulge yourself in all the delicacies available to you: candies, cakes, eggnog, you name it!

Keep in mind that one day of indulgence won’t hamper your health or make you excessively overweight, provided that you don’t eat the same bad foods throughout the whole week! Even if you gain weight, it won’t be much and you would easily be able to lose it within a short time!

With so many people taking a resolution to lose weight every New Year, one would think that our world is getting healthier. Reality however, is exactly the opposite. Out of the countless number of people who take the weight loss resolution, only a few are able to stick to it throughout the rest of the year!

Come to think of it, taking a weight loss resolution has become more of a fad than anything else, as most people hardly take their resolutions seriously, or even if they do, they are not prepared to make the extra effort it takes to keep those resolutions! If you really want to make your weight loss resolution iron-clad solid, just follow the two easy steps below.

1: Make your resolution realistic: How far you would be successful in weight loss would be determined on the viability of your resolution. Is it realistic? If not, it is unlikely that you would achieve your weight loss goal ever! The very first thing you need to do is to make sure that you make a very realistic resolution.

Examples of unrealistic resolutions are:

“I want a body like Jessica Alba by next Christmas’.

‘I want to lose all weight before the next Thanksgiving day;

As you can see, these goals lack specifics of any kind, so there is no doubt that they are unrealistic. When your weight loss goal lacks specifics of any kind, your mind would wander aimlessly and you would jump from one diet to another with little or no success.

What happens when you are asked to go on a shopping spree without a list of items you are going to buy? You wander aimlessly and waste money on buying useless stuff. The exact thing would happen if you don’t make your weight loss resolution specific and realistic. Examples of good weight loss resolutions are:

“I want to lose 20 pounds by next year”

“I want my weight to be reduced by 30 pounds at the end of 2009″

Okay these look like ‘baby resolutions’, but I really suggest that you make ‘little’ resolutions like these so that your mind thinks it is ‘easy’ to lose weight. Keep in mind that if you intimidate your mind with a formidable resolution, chances are that you would soon lose the motivation to lose weight!

It is possible that you will outgrow your weight loss resolution and lose more weight than what you promised yourself, but the opposite may also happen! Either way, you WILL lose some weight, that is for sure!

2. Get plenty of support: I would be honest with you: I don’t know anyone who has been able to reach their weight loss goals all by themselves without any kind of external support or guidance! Very often your family would support you, but that is just not enough! You also need to secure the support of your peers – people who are in the same boat as you, struggling to lose weight!

You can find such people at weight loss forums. Most of them are free to join, so make sure you sign up with at least one of them and get involved! Remember that you will also find several experts in these forums who are more than eager to offer free help and advice to wannabe weight loss aspirants!

It is also important that you surround yourself with positive-minded people at all times. Positivity begets positivity and encourages you to lose weight, while negative people would only frustrate and discourage you!

A couple of weeks ago I got my annual Flu Shot. I know that some people do not bother with a flu shot because let’s face it no one wants to get a shot and every year people still get the flu even when they get a shot.

Well let me tell you, the flu shot is worth getting, most of the time out of the multiple strains of the flu out there the scientists get the flu shot just right to stop many of us from getting sick later in the fall and Winter

With flu season on the way, Google unveiled a new tool Tuesday dubbed Google Flu Trends, through the company’s philanthropic wing, Google.org. The new Web tool takes data from search queries and crunches the information to paint a real-time picture of the level of influenza infection in a given area of the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Often when people want to lose weight they will simply think about losing weight instead of actually doing the hard part which is the doing of the weight loss.

The doing of the weight loss is actually two different things. Deciding how much weight and when you want to lose it is the first part to weight loss , and the second part would be developing the plan to lose the weight.

Make it your priority today to lose weight. You are not going to lose any weight today which means that you will need to plan what you will do over the next weeks and months to lose 2 pounds a week, which is a good ambition although definitely doable. Here is exactly how to get that weight loss started. Read the rest of this entry »

Two of my favorite subjects all in one story.

Jillian Michaels from the Biggest Loser TV show is working with a company to come out with a Wii Fit type of game. As we all know Wii Fit has been really popular and I am yet to find one at the stores so apparently there is a big market for more of these games. Kinda reminds me of the fight between “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero”. The game will come out in time for Christmas and I am sure we will see lots of competition at Christmas which can only be good for people to get into better shape in the worst weight gain time of the year.

Game publisher Majesco Entertainment has announced a partnership with celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels for an exercise-themed video game for the Nintendo Wii.

“Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum 2009,” slated for a holiday release, leverages the motion-based Wii system and Balance Board accessory to create a title that combines solid game play with a fitness regimen, advice and exercise techniques provided by Michaels, the strength trainer and life coach on NBC’s “The Biggest Loser.”

“I truly think this type of product will be instrumental in revolutionizing the fitness industry and will help combat the childhood obesity epidemic in this country,” Michaels said.

You will find a free list of negative calorie foods below, but first let’s consider what this means. There is no such thing as a negative calorie – a calorie is a unit of heat and it cannot be negative. So when people talk about negative calorie foods, this just means a food whose calorie level is low enough that it takes more energy to eat and digest it than the food contains.

For example, if you consider water to be a food, then cold water is certainly a negative calorie food. It contains no calories at all and the body has to expend energy to bring it up to blood temperature. So every time we drink a glass of cold water we burn up a couple of calories and lose a little weight. But there are very few foods like this. Most foods that are on the list do not really use more calories than they add, or if they do the effect is negligible … until you remember that at the same time the body expends energy just to keep alive and breathing. Celery for example does not give us enough calories to cover both the energy that it takes to digest it, plus the energy that we expend even when we are doing nothing. So that is why people call it a negative calorie food.

Negative calorie foods are most attractive to anorexics. A negative calorie diet would obviously result in starvation in the long term and nutritional deficiencies can occur surprisingly quickly. The calories burnt usually come from muscle mass, and the result is debility and wasting.

A more healthy way to use a negative calorie diet is as a form of fasting or detox. It is something you can do for one to three days right after the Christmas season or another time when you have been eating a over-rich diet. Provided you are otherwise healthy it can be a great way to clean out the system. However it is still best to take medical advice before attempting this.

If you decide to use a negative calorie detox, keep the following points in mind:

1. It is never a good idea to eat huge quantities of one type of food, especially fruits. A lot of foods contain substances that can be damaging if consumed to excess. For example, the acid in grapefruit and pineapple can damage your stomach lining. Other foods put an excessive burden on the liver or may cause diarrhea. So try to use all the different foods in small quantities.

2. Do not spend all day eating. You will just become bloated and feel sick. If you are only doing this for a couple days, you should not feel too hungry. Plan four or five salad meals each day, and let your digestion rest at other times.

3. You will feel more satisfied if you eat slowly and chew your food thoroughly. You will also use more calories that way. So if the foods can be eaten raw, that will be more effective than cooking them. Foods like carrots and beets will also be more satisfying if you eat them grated.

4. Schedule time when you do not have any important commitments. As with fasting or any kind of detox, you may suffer some uncomfortable symptoms including headaches, tiredness, depression and irritability. If these become severe, stop the diet and see a doctor.

5. When you end the detox, plan a gradual return to normal eating.

If all the above points are checked and passed, let’s move on to the list of foods.

* Apples
* Asparagus
* Beets
* Blueberries
* Broccoli
* Cantaloupes
* Carrot
* Cauliflower
* Celery stalk
* Celery root
* Cranberries
* Cucumbers
* Eggplant
* Endives
* Garden cress
* Garlic
* Grapefruit
* Green beans
* Green cabbage
* Lamb’s lettuce
* Lemons
* Lettuce
* Onions
* Papayas
* Pineapples
* Prunes
* Radishes
* Raspberries
* Spinach
* Strawberries
* Tangerines
* Tomatoes
* Turnips
* Zucchini

Please use this free list of negative calorie foods wisely.