So you want to lose weight fast? Well, join the club! But how do you do it?

Losing weight in the best of times is not easy. But aiming for rapid weight loss adds the extra burden of doing it with a deadline. Asking for more means you have to put more into it. On the mental side, you’ll need determination, specific targets, a detailed plan, and extra discipline to stick to the plan. On the physical side, you’ll have to do even more exercise than you would if there was no hurry. You’ll also need to make changes in what you eat. (Note: Be sure to talk to your doctor before starting any weight loss program.)

First the mental items. Determination and discipline. If you want to achieve your weight loss goal in a limited time, you have to make up your mind that there will be no backsliding. Either you consistently do what it takes to get the weight off, or the weight stays on. You won’t have time to catch up if you let yourself slip. Success will be your only reward. Read the rest of this entry »

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Well it is that time of year again, you are a little pale and the spare tire is a little bit bigger than it was in the fall and now you want to lose some weight and look better in those skin showing summer clothes. What you need is a plan and a bit of a change in schedule.

Here is a simple list of things that you can do starting today to make sure that you are buff and ready as the summer and summer activities come in a couple of months.

Eat Smarter

The key to a healthy diet plan is to eat smarter than before. Over the winter you may have been eating a little badly, keeping on track but cheating. Now is the time to start eating in a very structured and focused way.

No matter how you have been eating you must now start eating every couple or three hours. Really this just means toad snacks, good for you snacks. Let’s say that you eat breakfast at 8, lunch at 12, dinner at 6. Now all you have to do is add snacks (really just smaller meals) at 10 am, 3 pm and 8 pm. Now you must be wondering, what you should be eating.

The next important thing is to be sure to eat smaller meals and small snacks. The idea of eating so often is that your body will be better able to use the food that you are eating and a side effect of this is that it will raise your metabolism.

Raise the protein, drop the carbohydrates

What you eat is the next thing that is important. You should get a good idea of what is a carb based food and what is a protein based food and we all know what is fatty and these high fat foods should be avoided when you are trying to lose weight.

I said that you need to eat small meals but most importantly you need to make sure that you have lots of protein and less carbohydrates than you are used to. This may be initially harder than you expect but in the end this adjustment will pay great dividends in having a healthy diet plan for summer.

Stay hydrated when you exercise

When you are working out you will want to of course drink water and sports drinks so that you can keep not only your liquids up but the magic of sports drinks like Gatorade is that they bring back the electrolytes that you are losing by sweating. Getting dehydrated will drop your energy and in the end will stop your body from functioning normally.

These steps to a healthy diet plan will make a big difference this spring and summer to make you healthier and more fit.

I am not too sure how good a 10 day miracle diet is but thought I would post this diet that seems to be making it’s rounds on the internet. What do you think? Has this or anything like it worked for you in the past?

Just a note from me is that I think that this is a very short term diet, very high in veggie type vitamins and high water foods and very low calories. As they say in the end this is more like fasting more often then not and one more thing, I am not sure about so much coffee. Coffee screws with your metabolism.

The 10 Day Miracle Diet

Here, is the swiftest safe slimming program that is scientifically sound-a diet that wages lightning warfare against fat in true blitzkrieg fashion. It is a low-calorie, high-protein diet with sufficient carbohydrate to burn up fat but it contains an absolute minimum of foods furnishing fat calories since your object is to consume these from your ample corporeal reserve.

Lose 10 pounds in 10 days

The fatter you are, the more you can expect to lose on this diet. The average overweight person who is reasonably active physically can anticipate an actual fat loss of about 5 pounds in 10 days. Total loss of weight should be even greater and immensely gratifying. An average loss of a pound a day, or a total of 10 pounds at the end of the io-day period is not too much to hope for as the readjusting tissues begin to eliminate surplus water. Your actual weight loss will depend upon physical activity, previous caloric diet level, rate of metabolism, tendency of tissues to retain water, and other factors. In rare cases of extreme water retention it may take four or five more days to show maximum weight loss, but when it does show up it often does so with pleasing suddenness. If you don’t get results on this diet-we hate to say it -the suspicion is in order that you’re doing between-meal “piecing” or sneaking in an extra snack here and there. At its level of approximately 750 calories, weight loss is inevitable. Read the rest of this entry »

Your chest workout is probably one of your favorites. As you get stronger your chest starts to fill out and your upper body begins to get a “V” shape to it which is helpful in making your midsection look tighter and your waist look thinner.

So now that you know why you want to Build huge pecs and you probably already knew this. The next question is how do you Build huge pecs?

OK there are a few things that you need to know. To build up your chest you need to have a very focused workout for your chest.

Here are those keys to build huge pecs

Lift big to get big - This means that you need to train with heavy weights to get stronger. As you get a bigger bench press you will get a bigger chest. Read the rest of this entry »

With the switch back to Weight Watchers for my wife we have also added a new twist to our daily eating, no eating after 7:00 PM.

I didn’t want to mention this until after we had done it for a few days but what started out as a joke has become a great change in our lives. We started on Wednesday night not eating after an hour or so after dinner and over the last three or four nights I have missed snacking less and less.

The first two evenings of not eating I found that I was hungry when I went to sleep and my stomach was a little unsettled for some unknown reason but in the mornings I have not felt any different then I did before, not too hungry.

I have spoken to a few people that have done the exact same thing and found that they have lost weight wityhin the first week or two just from making the cahnge to no evening snacking.

What do you eat at night? Is it good or bad food or nothing at all? I know that I was not eating any really bad foods although I was eating some not very great food. I was eating fruit as well as trail mix and other kinda salty food.

There is one drawback that I am concerned about and that is the really long time between meals and what it will do to my muscle mass and my metabolism. I am a bit of a graser usually and eat throughout the day so my body never has to get nervous about me starving and because of this my metabolism is always pretty high and good.

Next of course is the whole catabolic balance. If your body is looking for energy it will use the energy within your muscles but if your muscles and the rest of your body can not find any energy it will go into a catobolic state where your body eats away at the protein and fat in your body. I know that this is what we are really looking for when we try to lose fat but the problem is that with any prolonged fast that you will lose the muscle that you really want to keep at as great a pace as you are losing fat.

Time will tell if this experiment with not eating at night will be a great method of cutting some calories and maybe even helping improve sleep cycles.

I have never mentioned what I do for a living but I am a computer geek. I do application support for a big transport company in Canada and have spent my share of hours over the years in server rooms, at desktops, buried in code on my laptop and now deploying software.

One thing that I think that all computer guys have in common is a pretty sedentary lifestyle. The stereotype tends to fit. I know this because I stare into my laptop most of the day everyday. So in keeping with the idea that one of the big two new years resolutions is to lose weight I will appeal to my geek friends and colleagues to make these changes along with me.

1. Make sure that you get away from your desk once an hour. I know that this can be difficult but it is important. The more time that we spend at our desks the more we get done but there is a couple of downsides. First your concentration tends to drop after an hour dug into a problem looking for a solution, second of all as time goes on your posture gets worse and you will find your shoulders falling and your body will start to hate you for it. The aches and pains in your shoulders and upper back are directly caused from this bad posture. Read the rest of this entry »

Often things take a bit of time to take affect. Sometimes you do all the right things but see no results and change tactics, don’t do that ride it out instead.

When people start a new diet they get excited do all the right things and then in the first week they lose 5 pounds or so and are very excited with the results, then the next week comes and the only lose a pound or nothing at all and discouragement sets in.

You hear a lot about yoyo dieting, gaining and losing weight only to gain it back again and often this will happen because people become discouraged and don’t let the changes that they are making to take affect and change to a different type of diet. Although our bodies are complex and in many ways can change very very quickly, losing weight does not tend to be one of these things

If you eat all of the right foods and get the exercise that you need and then at the end of the week you have not lost any weight is it becasue the diet and exercise are not working? probably not. Often when you make big changes your body will start a bit of a backlash. You will retain water, your metabolism will slow down in fear of starvation or your body will just not have caught up with the changes. Often the diet and exercise changes that you make will not show up for a couple or even three weeks. Many of the bog diet companies know this. Jenny Craig only has you weigh in once a week as does Weight Watchers and Weight Watchers cautions people not to weigh themselves at all during the week. As you have probably noticed beofre your weight will fluctuate all over the place during a single day so any changes that you see are very hard to predict from week to week even.

Stay on a course doing the right things and give yourself at least a few months to see if you are tending in the right direction. Do not just take the scale into account but also look at how you feel, how your health is, how your energy is and how well you are sleeping. What you want out of any diet and exercise program is to improve all areas of your life, not just the bathroom scale

I have recently stopped watching the TV show Survivor but I was definitly hooked on Survivor for years. I remember when I first started watching Survivor I used to say that I would be voted off in the first week, don’t know how true that is but anyway.

I have always enjoyed watching the people on Survivor do dumbe things and lose weight until the almost disappeared and then in a metamorphosis they would appear to get fat in front of our eyes during the last episode when the show gave away the million dollars.

So two questions, why do they lose so much weight and why do they gain it all back.

Well first of all everyone knows that if you do not eat enough food and still have to get exercise you will lose weight. Look what happens as the show goes on though, people get lazy, sluggish and make bad decisions. The real problem with the contensents on Survivor is that their metabolism slows, they start lacking in sleep and nutrients and finally near the end they seethe end in sight and just push a little while longer. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of those kind of crazy questions but interesting at the same time. If you are very overweight how would you go about losing 100 pounds in one year? Well I have never had to lose 100 pounds but am up for the challenge of how it can be done.

Can you lose 100 pounds in a year?

First of all lets all be aware that losing 100 pounds in one year is certainly possible. Many people have achieved this feat and many will lose 100 pounds in a year in the future.

First of all I think that it is imperative for you to know all of the basics of how to get healthy and the cornerstones of this are in my email fitness series. If you have not signed up for the free emails then for sure sign up now and get started.

The math of losing 100 pounds in a year

To lose 100 pounds in one year you would need to lose eight pounds a month for a year which is about 2 pounds for week. Losing two pounds per week is certainly possible but the problem is that it is hard to keep this rate up for an entire year. You will find that you will lose far more than 10 pounds in your first month and then your weight loss will slow down after a couple of months only to pick up again in the last few months.

Now As we all know there are two sides to the weight loss question: input and output that is caloric intake in eating and output when your metabolism is burning calories. This sounds easy and in fact it is an easy idea to understand and implement but it is very difficult to act on for any length of time.

Lose 100 pounds in a year plan

OK here it goes for how to lose 100 pounds in a year.. First thing is to drop your caloric intake. For many people this may be really obvious but for most people it is a real education to find out what they are eating wrong and changing it. First you will need to drop your calories that you take in probably significantly but take out some calories each week and watch how your body and energy react. Remember you are in this for the long haul not just a few weeks this time.

Your diet should get 30 percent of its calories from protein, 50 percent of its calories from carbohydrates and 20 percent of calories from fats remember fats contain twice the calories per pound that protein or carbohydrates contain so the fat level is actually quite low. Next is to make sure that you are splitting your three main meals into six meals during the day to properly nourish your body and stop it from thinking that you are starving.

Drink lots of water. You will find that drinking a lot of water will help you lose up to 10 pounds all by itself in the first couple of weeks as your body stops being bloated and your equilibrium is reset.

Read the rest of this entry »

Taking a day of your diet is good. A diet is a great example of having commitment to what you want and I applaud anyone and everyone that does a good job of committing themselves to staying healthy with a good diet. The trouble is trying to stay on a diet every day for months or years on end. This is what people aspire to but it is not very easy to do.

A few diets seem to say that you should try to confuse your body by staying on your diet for a few days or a couple of weeks at most and then getting off your diet for anywhere from one to three days. What do you think of this? Well the idea behind the days off on a diet is that you need to confuse your body so that it does not just adjust to lower caloric intake or just lower your metabolism to maintain fat levels.

Would you like to know examples of off day diets? There is a Weight Watchers diet adjustment that involves changing the amount of points you eat a day and cycling though these. You could do a kind of day off on this plan. The Body for life plan is that you do diet and exercise six days a week and eat whatever you want for one day a week. And finally there is the fat loss for idiots program that has you do the diet for 11 days and then take 3 days off before you do it again. This is the most confusing for your body (this is good) and easiest for you to manage.

The best way that I see people doing there diet with days off is to have rules still for your days off. Try to follow the following rules:

The idea is to eat what you want but do not overdo it.

1. First of all you need a good regimen for your diet days and then for your days off the rules should be about how you cheat.

2. Try to make sure that you are not being ridiculous because it is your day off. Do not eat a whole large pizza or a gallon of ice cream.

3. Do not binge, no huge meals just meals that make you comfortably full

4. This is the day that you go to a restaurant if you want.

5. Do not eat three days worth of food in one day. The idea is that you can cheat but you don�t want to spend the whole week just catching up.

I hope that this plan for days off helps. I know that I have struggled with this in the past but the best thing is to just expand on your regular diet and at the same time make sure that get to eat those things that you are craving, in small measures of course.