Most experts would tell you that there is no other way to lose weight except by starving for days! Now if you have ever starved you know only too well that it is easier said than done! Even if you are able to keep up with the hunger pangs, your body won’t tolerate it.

If your body notices that it is not getting enough nutrition, it will store existing fat (instead of burning it) for the purpose of energy production! This is the reason that you don’t lose much weight with starving, and you gain back whatever you have lost once you get back to your normal eating habits!

Fortunately however, you don’t need to starve at all in order to lose weight. There are five special foods out there that can help you lose weight easily and quickly! If you can lose weight by eating, then why starve? 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: energy level, energy production, green tea, heart diseases, metabolic rate, metabolism booster, protein, speeding up your metabolism, Turkey, whole grains

Losing weight has gotten a bad reputation. People avoid it, dread having to do it, try it and give up, and generally approach it with the idea in mind of how hard it is! But it can be much easier than that. The trick is to approach it gradually.

Don’t try to make huge changes all at once.

Make one small change at a time and give yourself some time – maybe a week or more – to get used to it. Then add on another small change. If you keep it up, which is not very hard to do, after only a few weeks you will start to notice changes in your energy, your strength, and how your clothes fit.

What kinds of things can you change? Well, we can start by remembering that weight loss or gain come from the foods you put into your body and the exercise you do with it. That gives us a lot of possibilities. One week you can add a short walk after dinner or lunch. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: calories, energy, food processing, food products, healthier food, losing weight, portion sizes, protein, small changes

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.

Tags: carbohydrates, drink water, energy, food, healthy diet plan, metabolism, protein, sports drinks, summer clothes

A couple of days ago my son was not eating his dinner and my daughter piped in

“Jaiden eat the chicken, it has protein, it will give you energy”

I cringed a little but this myth has gotten legs over the years. If you are tired and need energy nothing can beat a big steak.

In fact this idea is not at all true. Carbohydrates are the choice of energy sources in the body the fact is that the simpler the carb the more likely your body is to break it down and use it. The way that I look at energy sources your body will use the following in order; glycogen stores in your muscles, sugar, starch, and then equally protein and fat.

Many people on a diet will try to cut down on all of their carbs and will try to lose weight. This works initially because the body uses up all of the easy to get carbs and then will then move on to eating away at fat and protein. After a while you will get tired as your body will be really craving some kind of simple carbs for energy and it is a struggle for your body to use protein and fat as quick energy sources. This problem is even more of a problem when you exercise as there are no easy ways to get energy for your workouts.

So now you see why I am always writing about how important it is to get protein in your diet, not for the energy but more to counteract your body eating away at the protein in your muscles as well as the fat on your body when trying to lose weight. Your goal should be to look healthy not to look starved and muscleless.

So yes your body can use protein for energy buy mostly as a last resort. The problem is that when losing weight your body will use the protein in your muscles for energy as well as the fat in your body. But it will not use that steak right away.

Tags: carbohydrates, energy, energy buy, energy sources, losing weight, myth, need energy, protein

Theoretically, you could get adequate protein from a strictly vegetarian diet, but practically it would be extremely difficult. For one thing, it would require the eating of huge amounts of food. Most vegetarian diets make excellent use of eggs, milk, and cheese, and to that extent are only partly vegetarian.

Animal proteins are stressed in your reducing diet for another reason. Recent knowledge indicates that Vitamin A is not always well absorbed in the form in which it occurs in green plants. Such plants, normally rated as excellent sources of the vitamin, contain it in yellow pigments of which the chief is carotene.

This does not become the vitamin until it is altered in your liver. It has been found that some persons absorb as little as 5% of available carotene; hence, though their food contains plenty of Vitamin A units, they derive no benefit from it.
Animal foods, however—eggs, butter, liver, milk, cheese —contain the true vitamin. The animal has done all the work of converting the carotene into Vitamin A, saving you the trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: animal foods, animal products, cheese, Dairy product, dairy products, food, green plants, health, itchiness, milk, Mineral oil, mineral oil dressings, nutrients, nutrition, protein, reducing diets, vegetarian diet, vegetarian diets, Vitamin, vitamin a, Vitamin D

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.

Tags: bad food, eating, energy, food, kinda salty food, metabolism, muscle mass, muscles, protein, snacking, weight watchers

What is a low carb diet?

I realized that I have mentioned a bunch of times about how people should lower the amount of carbs in their diet and increase the amount of protein in their diet. This is sometimes called carb depleting but the way I look at it if you drop your carbs somewhat and increase protein you are going to be in better shape. Just so not drop the carbs too far.

Low-carbohydrate diets for weight control have been very popular. Anyone who is considering losing weight has heard about low carb diets. Key questions you may have are: What are low carb diets? Are they safe? How do they work? Can low carb diets have any negative side effects to my health in the long term?

As the number of overweight and obese people has increased, calls to overweight people encouraging them to lose weight have also increased. As a result, there are more searches for diets that can help people lose weight and keep it off.

Today, more people who are deformed and overweight are engaging in the low carb dieting for their better health and vitality; and also to prolong their lives. It is noteworthy that low carb diets have also been followed by even those who are healthy and who are not overweight; bust would like to maintain their well-being, energy, vitality and health by following the basics of the low carb diet. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Atkins New Diet Revolution, carbs, constipation, diabetes, dizziness, energy, fatigue, food manufacturers, headaches, heart disease, high blood pressure, hypoglycemia, lose weight, low carb diet, low carb diets, low carb food, low fat diets, nausea, obesity, protein

Every weightlifter looks at two different numbers, their max on their bench and the max on their squat. The max on the bench is what people are always asking about and everyone knows that if you were to gain 100 pounds on your bench press that you would have a lot bigger chest.There are four pieces of the puzzle to increasing your bench press by 100 pounds. These four are the planning, the eating, the workouts and the rest.

The Planning

Planning is something that very few weightlifters do. When you go to the gym you workout as hard as you can but very seldom do people working out ever have an idea of what they will be doing in a month. Plan your workouts, plan your eating, and plan when you are going to be taking breaks. This is pretty easy but often we will forget what is the most important part of the workouts and just do the stuff we like best.

Eating your way to gain 100 pounds on your bench press

We all like to eat and the faster metabolism that you get from working out allows you to eat even more then other people do. When you are trying to make big strength gains you are going to want to do the kind of eating that is considered bulking up. You want to do the following Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: bench press, carbs, energy, gain 100 pounds on your bench press, Massage, protein, working out, workouts

Information abounds. I was looking around for some tips to offer about increasing protein in your diet when I ran across this article by David Monyer on increasing protein in your diet. As you should really be aware most people do not get enough protein in their diet and if you are doing any weight lifting (also known as resistance training) you need a little more protein in your diet anyway. Read through this and see just how much it helps you learn more about protein.

One problem that I do have though is with the myth that you need 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight per day. I could not stomach 300 or 400 grams of protein a day and think that 150 to 200 grams is the max that anyone should take in per day.

The first thing every bodybuilder needs to know is the importance of getting enough protein in your daily diet. Although plenty of protein can be consumed in the form of whole foods, bodybuilders typically use a combination of beef, foul (chicken, turkey), fish and protein supplements in powder or liquid form.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 3g, Cytosport, David Monyer, protein, protein powders, quality protein, supplements, Turkey

Years ago when I first met my wife I was doing a lot of weightlifting but always had trouble getting enough protein into my diet. One of the things that I learned from her was to eat canned tuna. Although I had grown up on the west coast and had eaten a fair amount of seafood I had not ever eaten a can of tuna before, this was about to change. My wife made me a simple meal of cheddar macaroni and cheese (the white instead of the orange) mixed with a can of tuna and topped with chopped pickles. To say that this crazy sounding meal changed my life is an understatement. Once I moved out of my parents house and struggled to make ends meet I would always turn to tuna as a very cheap meal and a great source of protein.

Why is Tuna a good meal?

So what is it about canned tuna that makes it great as a food for anyone interested in fitness? Well there are a few things that swim in it’s favor:

- High in protein, one can of tuna has enough protein for a meal
- Not fat or carbs, if you buy canned tuna in water it is basically all protein
- High in Omega 3 vitamins
- Cheap, you can buy a can of tuna for under a dollar and get really good Albacore tuna for under $3.00 if you chop around

One of the things that you should do and that may seem a little strange is to rinse your tuna. To rinse your tuna you open the can and drain the water and then,while leaving the tin lid on top, rinse the tuna with cold water for 30 seconds or so. This action will get rid of the salt and sodium but will not affect the taste at all.

Tags: albacore tuna, canned tuna, diet, food, protein, USD, west coast