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 »

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.

Tags: christmas, diabetes, energy, food, junk food, microwave

It is no secret that childhood obesity is on the rise. Truth to be told, obesity has been around for sometime now, but childhood obesity is more of a recent phenomenon. Now let me tell you the root cause behind obesity. Almost everyone would say that you become obese because of following unhealthy eating habits, but WHY do your kids follow unhealthy food habits?

Is it just to satiate their tastebuds? If that would have been the case, then they would be eating those “bad” foods only once in a while and not daily at breakfast, lunch and dinner; also eating moderate amount of fast foods doesn’t make anyone obese. The root cause behind the increasing consumption of junk food is fast lifestyle. As years pass, we become busier than ever. We are so busy that we don’t even have time to cook our own meals.

Under such circumstances, we feel that buying that cool white bread, cake or burger from the local store is far more convenient than trying to cook stuff at home. In other words, we are more or less living a “buy, eat and go” type of lifestyle. Most parents don’t stuff children’s tiffin boxes with home-cooked meals (as used to be the norm at the time of our forefathers); instead they are asked to buy this or that food from the store and as you might have guessed, almost always these foods turn out to be calorie-rich junk foods.

Children learn only from adults; no wonder then that they too have become ‘busy’ as well. They have their school projects to finish, dozens of books to read, video games to watch, etc. So where is time for them either to take a walk outside or indulge in sports?

That said, there are still ways to control your kids’ lifestyle provided that you are willing to implement them. Here I offer you a simple tip you can use to keep them from adding tonnes of extra pounds to their bodies.

Children are habitually accustomed to eating in small quantities. They prefer spending more time on grazing and sucking foods than eating them, and usually favor snacks over large meals. Snacks are one of the best foods for your kids. This doesn’t however mean that you should hand over a huge can of soda or a big box of cookies to them; rather you should take the time to cook healthy snacks which are low on sugar and calories. Remember that these snacks, unlike burgers and French fries, would not only keep your kids full but also help them maintain their normal weight.

Speaking of low-calorie snacks, many people wrongly assume that since they’re low on calorie, it is okay to eat as many of them as you like. That is not true at all. Let me show you a simple example: let’s say that your kid used to have one snack of 100 calories daily. Now you offer him 100 low-calorie snacks in its place, each of which contains an average of 1 calorie. What is the difference?

Even if it is low on calorie, it is still important to snack in small quantities. Since kids are habitual grazers, it shouldn’t be a problem for you to inculcate this eating habit right from their childhood.

Tags: food, junk food, obesity, unhealthy food habits

Obesity is the kind of malady that is spreading fast like epidemic not only among adults but also kids. This is the reason why parents in western countries are getting more and more worried about their kids’ health. As a matter of fact, it is easier to make an adult lose weight than a kid. Nevertheless, with the tips I am going to share with you in this article, you will be able to control obesity at an early stage. If we can eradicate the problem of childhood obesity, our kids will live a healthy and happy life in future.

1. Monitor the calorie intake of your kids: Thanks to the huge number of fast food restaurants that have sprung up in almost all localities, getting hold of junk foods is not a tough task for your kids. Be it in school or at home, you will see your kids eating one type of junk food or the other. Junk foods make your kids overweight. Obesity not only affects your kids’ physiological health, but also affects him psychologically. Obese kids are seldom able to concentrate on their studies properly. Obesity also affects a kid’s social life.

Only parents can make sure that their kids are eating healthy. As a parent, it is your responsibility to provide your kids with healthy, home-cooked meals as often as you can. If your kids are full at all times, they won’t be interested in junk foods. Be it in breakfast or dinner, make them eat as many natural fruits and vegetables as possible. When they go to school, their lunch-box should be packed with healthy meals so that they don’t eat junk foods from their school canteen.

2. Have your kids’ health checked up regularly: Take your kids to a local doctor or your family doctor and have him check up their health. This will keep you informed about whether your kids’ health is in danger or not.

3. Spend quality time with your kids: These days, with both the parents having their respective jobs, they get very little time to spend with their kids. In most households, kids spend the maximum time with their maidservants. Maidservants cannot inculcate good values in your kids in the same way as you can, and naturally, these kids end up developing certain bad habits that make them overweight.

This is why it is essential that as a parent, you spend some quality time with your kids. Make sure that your kids are eating healthy meals, exercising regularly and enjoying life in general.

4. Encourage your kids to exercise: Exercises are one of the surefire ways to lead a healthy life. Encourage your kids to do some simple exercises and workouts. Exercises will help in burning off any extra calories that your kids might have consumed; this way, their weight will be kept in check.

Thanks to the digital revolution, more and more kids are spending their spare time in front of computers and television than on exercises. If your kids are not really willing to workout, let them try out some yoga. You may or may not be aware of the fact that yoga indeed helps in weight loss.

Tags: food restaurants, junk food, obesity

A common mistake most people make is that of trying to lose a lot of weight at once. They think that fast weight loss is possible, thanks to the hyped and empty promises most fad diets make. However, the truth is that even if you are able to lose weight too fast, your body would put back all those ‘lost pounds’ on you as soon as you quit dieting. Remember that if your aim is to get rid of fat once and for all, you should lose weight slowly but steadily!

As a matter of fact, weight loss is not about following this or that fad; weight loss can be achieved only by making certain drastic changes in your lifestyle as well as committing yourself to following a healthy lifestyle for the rest of your life!

That said, it is not possible to get rid of your old habits too fast, as it usually takes one at least two1 days to make or break a habit! Start making small but significant changes in your lifestyle, and don’t stray! Over time you would be successful in replacing all your bad habits one by one with good and healthy habits. However it won’t happen in a day!

For example, most diets would either restrict your junk food intake severely or ask you to discard them altogether! However, if you have been eating junk foods for months, or worse, if those foods have formed integral parts of your diet, it won’t be easy for you to get rid of them so easily!

Once again you can start off by getting rid of one junk food at a time. Alternatively, you can make it a point to keep yourself away from junk foods except on certain ‘cheat days’ when you would be free to indulge yourself the way you want! As your taste buds become more and more accustomed to healthy and natural foods, you would lose your junk food cravings altogether!

The same rule of ’slow and steady weight loss’ applies to exercises too! If you have never exercised before, it is natural for you to panic in fear if someone says that you should run 10 miles per day or do weight lifting for hours in order to lose weight!

But how does the prospect of running only one mile or lifting weights for just five minuets per day sound? I am sure you would be able to manage that much. Over time, as your body grows accustomed to your new active lifestyle, you would be able to increase the intensity of these exercises easily!

To conclude, you needn’t be afraid of either dieting or exercising. Remember that while the journey of a thousand miles begins with one small step at a time, it is important for you to take that ONE step right NOW!

Tags: junk food, junk food cravings, junk food intake

Regardless of the number of fad diet pills and supplements coming up in the market, the rules of weight loss have not changed over the years! The basic rule of weight loss is still the same: follow a healthy, balanced diet and exercise regularly. If you want to do something that breaks this basic rule, you will be in for trouble.

Do you want to lose weight quickly by following a fad diet program? No matter how expensive and popular the diet program is, you won’t be able to lose weight permanently if you try to get rid of fat by any unnatural means.

Diet Pills and Weight Loss?

Some of the diet pills out there will take you through a rapid cycle of weight loss. No sooner have you finished smiling at the dipping scale than you will notice that the scale is going upwards as fast as it had gone downwards. In simple terms, you will gain weight as quickly as you had lost it.

There is a reason why this happens. It is all okay as long as you follow the diet, but there is no fad diet in the world which is not a bit over-the-top in terms of food restrictions,. These fad diets restrict your food intake in such a way that you end up craving for your old, favorite junk foods. You start by binge eating: that is, taking one bit of your junk food everyday. Soon it goes out of your control, and you won’t even realize when you have cheated on your diet program, quit it and got back to your old lifestyle.

Diet change needs to be permanent

As soon as you return to your normal eating habits (that is, eating more and more junk foods), you end up gaining a lot more weight than what you started with. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: eating habits, exercise, fad diet, food, food intake, food restrictions, junk food, metabolic rate

A bit of a generic title but i grew up in BC and I can tell you that years ago there were many people in school who along with me ate a ton of junk food and pop for lunch and snacks. Well it seems that British Columbia has banned junk food in schools which is a really great start to showing young people that they need to find an alternative. The touble is that whenever there is a heavy handed method of banning something everyone wil;l want to find a way around it.

Chocolate bars, salt and vinegar chips and ice cold root beers have been expelled from B.C. schools as the government starts the new school year on a health kick.

Education Minister Shirley Bond says a healthy body really does promote a healthy mind, and B.C. schools will be the healthiest in the country.

Junk food has been banned from all public schools and students from kindergarten through to Grade 12 will be required to complete 30 minutes of physical activity a day, or the equivalent of 150 minutes of exercise a week, she said. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: B.C. Teachers' Federation, banned junk food, British Columbia, Canada, chocolate bars, Education Minister, food, food guidelines, health program, hockey, Irene Lanzinger, junk food, junk food ban, minister, Norm Macdonald, president, province-wide school junk food ban, Shirley Bond, sports teams, the Canada Food Guide, USD, Vancouver, vinegar chips

A teenage life is not an easy one to lead, as I can tell from my experience. If you are a normal teenager, you have the stress of studies, peer pressure, and all that. You have to keep up with the latest gadgets and gizmos, excel at studies, and bear the rules and restrictions of your parents as if you are still a baby. And if you are an overweight teenager, then all hell breaks loose.

People not only laugh and joke about your fat belly behind your back, but also insult and taunt you openly. This in turn lowers your self-esteem and makes you depressed. If you are a teenager suffering from weight gain problems, this article is for you.

Who to blame for child obesity

So far as your obesity issue is concerned, the blame has to be shared equally by you and your parents. Your parents are probably too busy to cook healthy meals for you, and even if they are not busy, they don’t like to cook. Left without choice, you have to eat junk foods from outside. In this case the onus for your obesity lies with your parents, because they failed to offer you with healthy food choices.

But on top of that, if you also eat junk foods when you don’t need to, for example, at a friend’s party, or with your classmates at a school canteen, etc., then you are equally to blame for your present predicament. This additional junk food intake (over and above your regular junk food consumption) makes matters worse for you. Just in case you don’t know, junk foods are one of the primary causes of obesity.

Junk food and teen obesity

Another thing to note is that some of the effects of your junk food consumption would have worn off if you had taken the time to workout a little instead of being a couch potato or a slave to computers and video games. Unhealthy food habits, coupled with sedentary lifestyle, became your undoing. Here again you have no one but yourself to blame.

So now that you have gained weight, you need to lose it anyhow. Consider the following options:

Visit a doctor to make sure that you are really overweight. If you are overweight, then ask about your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate), for it would determine how much you need to workout and by what percentage should you reduce your food intake on a daily basis.

Try to convince your parents to start cooking healthy meals. Tell them how bad obesity is, how it can burden a person with diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary diseases, etc. If you fail to convince them, then learn to cook yourself. Once you start eating healthy meals, half of your extra weight would be gone even before you know it.

Did I tell you that you need to bid goodbye to your junk food buddies.

Stop being a couch potato. Get rid of your addiction to PSPs, TVs and PCs. Instead, do some exercises everyday; it can be in the form of walking, running, jogging, or working out in the gym, whatever you feel most comfortable with.

Just pick up a suitable exercise for yourself and DO it daily. If you lead an active lifestyle, the other half of your ‘extra weight’ would be gone too and you would become the slim and sexy teen you used to be.

Tags: coronary diseases, diabetes, food intake, healthy food choices, high blood pressure, junk food, junk food buddies, junk food consumption, junk food intake, obesity, regular junk food consumption, unhealthy food habits

The New York Times had a story yesterday talking about how unhealthy bloggers lifestyles are. There is no more unhealthy lifestyle than working on a computer all day and for many bloggers this seems to be exaggerated by the crazy hours that people will put in.

I have written before about how Geeks can improve their health from their desk. Here is another contribution for those poor overworked bloggers.

Keep your body healthy so that you mind can work – You need to get some exercise. The 30 to 60 minutes that you spend a day trying to keep yourself in shape with cardio and weights will give you a lot more energy then the time you lost doing it. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: cellular telephone, energy, food, junk food, pain, The New York Times

Research has proven that if we’ve a single objective as our goal, and if we direct all our energies and resources towards the achievement of that objective, we can’t but win the goal. It is really true, and when it comes to weight loss, it is no different either. The very first thing you need to do is to make your weight loss goal your priority, and then enlist all the available resources and time towards achieving it. That is the only way you can lose weight.

I am not telling you to neglect things that are more important than weight loss, but I am pretty sure that the number of such ‘very important things’ is fewer than what you think, and I am also sure that you can, if you want, accommodate your weight loss program in this short list of ‘very important things’.

You see, nothing is more important than your health. If your health goes for a downhill, everything else that you set as ‘important tasks’ will have to stop. Now, how does this relate to weight loss? Well, you might not be aware of the fact that obesity is the forerunner of several harmful diseases such as diabetes, heart related diseases, hypertension, etc. Therefore, the main reason why you should lose weight is not just to look and feel good, but to make sure you live a healthy and long life. There are some ways you can ensure that you always find time for your weight loss program. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: diabetes, exercise, exercises, health, hypertension, junk food, obesity, objective, weight loss goal, workouts

What is the master cleanse Diet?

We all have up days and down days and there are many ways in which we deal with it.

We also usually try to eat well and at other times we eat not so well, but our bodies will take care of us right?

Well for some people that is just not enough. I know that years ago I was the picture of fitness and then through some bad decisions my body started feeling not so great. My wife had to do one of those one day cleanses and I jumped at trying it as well just for a lark on a Sunday.

I can tell you I felt great the next day and for weeks afterwards. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Anxiety, detox diet, Dreamgirls I, eliminating stress, Gary Dell'Abate, Howard Stern, junk food, main cleaning systems, master cleanse, master cleanse detox, Private Parts, Producer, starvation, USD