How To Shape Your Body

Top 5 Slim-Down Strategies

How many times have you abandoned your New Year's resolution to shed pounds for good? If the thought of an unfulfilled weight loss goal sets you back a few emotional steps, be sure to read my tips below to give your body the jump-start it needs.

1. Set Mini-Goals:

Let's say you want to lose 10 pounds in the next two months. If this is the case, try setting short-term or "mini" goals to help you achieve your goal of shedding the excess weight.

Keep in mind that your mini goals should be specific and realistic, and they should have a measurable outcome. For example, say, "I'm going to eat two servings of fruit each day," or, "I'm going to walk briskly for 30 minutes during my lunch break on Mondays through Fridays," instead of, "I'm going to increase my fruit intake and exercise."

Setting your target in specific, measurable terms will increase your chances of accomplishing your long-term goal of losing those unwanted pounds. In addition, remember to be realistic. If you've been consuming over 2,000 calories, don't try cutting back to 1,400 overnight. And if you haven't exercised all year, don't aim to run three miles each day.

2. Budget Your Foods:

If you can budget your money, you can budget your foods. Aim to have a specific amount of fruits, vegetables, starches, proteins and fats throughout the day, or for each meal. For example, let's say you want to limit your starches to six per day, or two per meal.

Your starches for each meal may include:

1/2 cup of cereal and 1 slice of toast for breakfast (each of these servings is equal to one starch)
2 slices of whole wheat bread for lunch (one slice of bread is equal to one starch)
1 cup of pasta for dinner (1/2 cup of pasta is equal to one starch)
You can also limit your fats to one fat per meal. For example:
Low-fat peanut butter on a 1/2 bagel with a banana and 4 ounces of orange juice for breakfast (the peanut butter is the main source of fat)
Salad with sliced chicken breast, pears, goat cheese, balsamic vinaigrette dressing, with an apple and iced tea for lunch (the goat cheese is the main source of fat)
Shrimp with vegetables and fettuccini noodles sauteed in olive oil for dinner (the olive oil is the main source of fat)

By limiting the amounts of each type of food, you will be able to stay within a calorie level that will enable you to lose weight.

3. Keep a Food Journal:

Keeping a food journal helps you to avoid what I call "unconscious eating" -- eating that leads to consumption of excess calories, beyond what you may have ever intended to consume. In fact, research actually shows that keeping a food journal will help you to lose weight!

If emotional eating is a big sticking point for you, then journaling your moods, such as stress, boredom or anger can help you pinpoint problem areas during your day, which in some cases may serve as triggers to overeating. Once you understand the problem, you can find a solution that does not involve opening the box of cookies or the jar of jellybeans.

4. Get Moving:

If you don't have time to get to the gym or to your aerobics class, be sure to engage in some physical activity at some point during the day. Believe it or not, even light physical activity can help you shed excess pounds and get into shape.

Take a look at the calorie-burning potential of the following physical activities:

Gardening for just 20 minutes burns 100 calories
Pulling weeds for 20 minutes burns 120 calories
Mowing the lawn for 30 minutes burns 150 calories
Washing the car for 1 hour burns 300 calories

Burning an extra 500 calories each day will help you to lose one pound per week. So, be sure to take advantage of the longer days with outside walks and outdoor activates In addition to burning excess calories, getting out of the house to get your body moving will keep you away from the refrigerator.

5. Drink Lots of Water:

Water will help to curb your appetite; it will also keep you hydrated during the hot months ahead. And here's an added bonus: Cold water helps you to burn calories! That's right -- the process of bringing cold water to your body's own temperature involves expending energy, or calories. So carry a water bottle with you at all times, and aim for at least eight 8-ounce glasses each day (or 10 if you exercise). If you are a fan of bottled water, try a bottled water delivery service, which is less expensive than buying bottled water in the stores.

Arthritis Diet Eating the Right Foods

Dietary practices have a major impact on arthritis. Among the offenders are saturated fats (which occur in cooking oils and fried foods), white flour and sugar, red meat, chemical additives, yeast, and milk and dairy products. These foods can increase inflammation, invoke allergies, and interfere with hormone production, cellular integrity, and the function and mobility of the joints.

Changing the way you eat will change the way you feel. The right foods can keep you free of stiff joints, swelling, and fatigue while also promoting longevity and overall health. Choose to eat right by eliminating problematic foods and increasing your daily intake of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.

What we call the "Arthritis Diet" is primarily a vegetarian, whole foods diet consisting of fruits and vegetables, raw seeds and nuts and their butters, fermented bean products, fish, and grains -- all considered "arthritis-friendly" foods.

These foods are high in dietary fiber, which helps move food and wastes through the digestive tract before they have a chance to form toxic substances. Many degenerative illnesses, including arthritis, are related to a diet low in fiber.

Whole (unprocessed) foods are rich in the nutrients needed to fight destructive free radicals, promote skin and tissue health, repair bones, muscles, and tendons, and promote regularity.

In addition, being more nutrient-dense, whole foods are more filling and decrease the likelihood of overeating and subsequent weight gain; losing weight and reducing the stress on weight-bearing joints are crucial steps to recovering from arthritis.

Whole foods also put less overall stress on the body, because they are more easily digested and contain fewer toxic substances than processed foods.

Dietary fats are an important consideration for anyone with arthritis. The wrong kind of fats can increase inflammation in joints, while the "good" fats will help keep inflammation in check.

As a percentage of calories, most vegetables contain less than 10% fat and most grains contain 16%-20% fat. By comparison, whole milk and cheeses contain 74% fat (even low-fat milk contains 38% fat on a percentage-of-calories basis). Most animal foods contain large quantities of fat, mostly saturated fats, which raise levels of inflammatory compounds in the body and increase arthritic symptoms.

Commercially produced, corn-fed meat and dairy products and shellfish are also high in arachidonic acid which is converted by the body into powerful pro-inflammatory compounds.

Arachidonic acid is a fatty acid found primarily in animal foods such as meat, poultry, and dairy products, and to a lesser extent in fish and vegetables. When the diet is abundant with arachidonic acids, these are stored in cell membranes: an enzyme transforms these stored acids into chemical messengers called prostaglandins and leukotrienes with instigate inflammation.

Whole foods, however, are typically high in healthy fats, including the essential fatty acids, which research has proven help decrease inflammation and improve the health of people with rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, and osteoarthritis.

Arthritis sufferers commonly have a high level of acidity (a urine pH that is lower than 6.3), which increases the potential for developing inflammatory conditions. The term pH represents a scale for the relative acidity or alkalinity of a solution. Acidity is measured as a pH of 0.1 to 6.9. alkalinity is 7.1 to 14, and neutral pH is 7.0. The numbers refer to how many hydrogen atoms are present compared to an ideal or standard solution. Normally, blood is slightly alkaline, at 7.35 to 7.45; urine pH can range from 4.8 to 8.0, but is usually somewhat acidic, with a normal reading between 5.0 and 6.0.

Acidity can be decreased by reducing your intake of acid-forming foods and increasing intake of alkaline-forming foods in the diet. The most acid-forming foods are sugar, alcohol, vinegar, coffee, meat, and dairy products.

Foods known to increase the alkalinity of the body include all vegetables (except tomatoes), aloe vera, and green foods, such as chlorella, barley grass, wheat grass, chlorophyll, parsley, and alfalfa. As a general rule of thumb, the greener the vegetable, the more it will help increase alkalinity in the body.

Tips to Ease the Shift to Healthier Foods
1. Begin by changing one meal a day to healthful eating. This makes shopping and cooking more manageable while you adjust to the new lifestyle. Maintain this for about a month until you tackle the next meal. Within three months, your habits will be transformed.

2. Stop buying snack foods such as sodas, chips, and cookies. Substitute trail mix, popcorn, and herb teas as an interim step.

3. Cook large quantities of main dish recipes so there will be leftovers for lunch or the next day's dinner. Avoid freezing foods as this process may kill important nutrients.

4. Do not insist that children or other family members eat your diet. Simply serve an increasing number of healthful choices with each meal. This, combined with weaning them from sugar and refined flour products, will produce a hunger for good food.

5. When dining at other people's homes, eat lightly, focus on what you can have, and pass up the allergenic foods. Avoid debates about diet. Soon your improved health may prompt a great deal of positive interest in your diet.

6. Choose restaurants where there are healthful choices. Ask if the chef will modify a dish (skip the cream sauce, for example) to make it fit your new diet. If that is not possible, you can eat beforehand at home and just sip a beverage while enjoying the social contact. Be positive, keep the focus off your diet, and, above all, do not be self-righteous

Busting fitness myths

Calm down. Women who lift weights don't get bulky muscles. Pain is not necessary to achieve gain. A huge time commitment is not required for health and fitness.

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) is helping us sort through what we’ve heard about health and fitness – the myths vs the truth.
Make no mistake, walking gets brownie points. “If anything, walking is probably underrated,” says physiologist and ACE.

What’s written about walking does hold water. “If America began to walk even a minimal amount – 30 minutes a day – it would turn around the epidemic of heart disease and obesity.”

But here are the myths:
Women who lift weights will get bulky muscles. Women don’t have enough testosterone to develop large, bulky muscles, says physiologist and ACE. Strength training will not cause women to build muscles, although steroids might.

Spot reducing is possible.
Guess again. It’s simply not possible to “burn off” fat in one specific body part by exercising that area, says physiologist and ACE. Numerous studies have tried to refute this claim. But only regular exercise – aerobic and strength – and a sensible diet can melt body fat.

No pain, no gain.
Yikes! Exercising to the point of pain can harm you, not help. It’s OK to push yourself a bit, to tax your heart, lungs, muscles and bones – but be reasonable. Don’t risk an injury.

If you exercise, you can eat whatever you want.
You’re joking, right? A healthy diet goes hand-in-hand with a sound exercise regimen, says physiologist and ACE. For weight loss, eat more fruits and veggies, far fewer sugary foods, and EAT LESS.

Exercise requires a hefty time commitment.
As little as 30 minutes a day works when you’re in health-and-fitness maintenance mode, and 60 minutes a day will help you lose weight.

There’s a magic bullet out there.
Yet another joke. There is no quick fix, says physiologist and ACE. Those nutritional supplements often use “deceptive, misleading, or fraudulent advertising,”.

Here is a few more health and fitness myths to the list:
Muscle weighs more than fat. “In simple terms, a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat, The difference is that muscle is much more dense than body fat.

Therefore, a pound of muscle will take up much less room in your body than a pound of fat. Another benefit of muscle, it is significantly more vascular [better blood supply] than body fat and will cause you to burn more calories at rest than body fat.”

Exercising at low intensity burns more fat.
“This is a particularly confusing topic for some people, Many people have thought that lower intensity is the fat-burning zone. But in reality, you’re burning a greater percentage of total calories – including fat calories – when you exercise at a higher intensity.”

What puts health and fitness myths in our minds? It’s those get-skinny-quick product ads, “People want to know what’s the easiest possible way to get from here to there.” When it comes to health and fitness, “there’s no magic bullet.

Top 10 Fitness Mistakes

Not regularly changing your fitness regime

Getting stuck in a training rut is probably the most common training error of all. Yes, 20 minutes on the treadmill and three sets of 10 reps with 5kg weights might be fine when you start out � but if you fail to increase either the length or intensity of the run, and the weight or number of repetitions that you do, the improvements will plateau out. In fact, one study found that in beginners, aerobic fitness began to plateau in as little as three weeks when the training load was not increased. So, to continue making progress in fitness, you have to keep raising the bar every it gets close enough to touch � every six weeks at least, but ideally more often.

Using weights that are too light

If you want to increase the size of your muscles, adopting a �low weights, high reps� strategy will be a waste of time. Surprised? Well, it�s all down to muscle physiology. Muscles consist of long, thin fibres which come in two principal varieties: �type 1� fibres, which are highly resistant to fatigue and recruited mainly at low level effort; and thicker, more powerful �type 2� fibres, which only kick in when the going gets tough. The fibres within a muscle are always recruited in the same order � type 1 first, then type 2. So, if you only ever lift a bottle of Evian (no matter how many times), you will never work the muscle in its entirety, nor engage the type 2 fibres. What will happen, however, is that as the fibres within the muscle grow bigger, they will fill some of the empty space within the muscle sheath (an untrained muscle contains lots of space between fibres). The result? The muscle will become firmer and denser, but not bigger.

Overdoing the refuelling after exercise

Exercise burns lots of calories, and if you intend to get up and do it all again the next day, then you will need to ensure your glycogen stores are replenished post-workout. But given that many of us take up exercise to shed excess fat and don�t work out daily, there isn�t a pressing need to scoff down two energy bars and a gallon of energy drink after your gym session! In fact, many people consume more calories in the half hour following their workout than they burned during it � and then they go home and have dinner, too! So, be sparing with your refuelling.

Exercising on an empty stomach

A few years back, the idea of �running on empty (exercising on an empty stomach) was all the rage in weight loss training. But although the science stands up, this strategy will ultimately backfire. �If you perform cardiovascular exercise first thing in the morning before you�ve eaten, insulin levels are at their lowest, while another hormone, glucagon, is at its peak,� explains sports nutritionist Anita Bean. �This encourages your body to draw on its fat reserves for fuel.But since fat metabolism is dependent on the availability of carbohydrate, when carb stores are low, fat metabolism is compromised.This makes exercise feel much harder, so you may tire sooner, or slack off and end up burning fewer calories � and less body fat � overall explains Bean. �Worse still, you could end up losing hard-earned muscle as you start burning protein � as well as fat � for fuel.� So always make sure you�ve eaten something before you exercise!

Working in the �fat-burning zone
Despite what those little charts � or green, amber and red light displays � on the machines at the gym say,the idea that you only burn fat when you are exercising in a particular �zone� of intensity � usually between 60 and 70 per cent of your maximum rate � is actually wrong. The fact is, we burn fat 24 hours a day � it�s just that the percentage of overall energy that comes from fat changes at different levels of intensity. A greater proportion of fat is burned during low-intensity exercise, which is where the idea came from that we should exercise more gently � but here�s the thing: while the percentage of fat contributing to energy expenditure may be lower during more vigorous activity, it is the overall number of calories burned that really counts when it comes to fat loss. That means working as hard as you can, for as long as you can, as often as you can! We�re not suggesting you won�t gain any benefit from working in tthe so-called �fat-burning zone�, of course � just that you will benefit more by increasing the intensity.

Not bothering to warm up before exercise

You may think you are saving time, but by skipping a warm-up you are actually making things harder for yourself. Research has demonstrated quite clearly that warming up reduces the risk of injury � and improves performance. A study from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, for example, found that performing a warm-up reduced the accumulation of lactic acid in the muscles, while research at Manhattan College in New York found that just five minutes of warming up enabled runners to exercise for longer than those who launched straight into their workout. You only need spend 5 to 10 minutes mobilising your joints gently, getting your heart rate up and gearing up to your activity.

Neglecting stretching before exercise

While the �Should we, shouldn�t we?� debate about stretching before exercise rages on, many people continue to neglect stretching at any time at all. This is a big mistake. Natural flexibility begins to decline from when you�re as young as 25, so even if you don�t care much about extending your range of motion and suppleness, you need to hold on to what you�ve already got! Stretching isn�t about lengthening muscles � it�s about restoring them to their natural length after all the shortening involved in exercise. Stretching is also about putting joints through their full range of motion, which is important for keeping cartilage nourished and healthy, reducing stiffness, and maintaining correct alignment between the muscles and the skeleton. Stretch muscles when they are warm, holding for 30 seconds � and do it after every workout.

Failing to keep tabs on your fitness progress

Every elite athlete keeps a training log, which enables them to keep track of what each session entailed and how they felt after a particular workout, and to monitor whether they are getting stronger, faster, and/or higher. Now, you may not have your sights on the Olympics, but you should be keeping tabs on your fitness regime � otherwise there�s no way of knowing whether something is working or not, or whether you are getting fitter. Keeping a training log is also a great way of staying motivated.

Pushing through pain and ignoring niggles

How�s your knee? �Oh, it�s a bit sore. I did a 10k race last night and I�m going to see how it holds up in circuit training tonigh� If this is you, stop! Pain is your body�s way of saying that something is wrong. Ignore it at your peril. Injuries don�t go away when you ignore them � they simply get worse! Equally, if you just have a niggle or an ache, keep an eye on it � and if necessary take a day or two off, and perhaps have a sports massage, rather than pretending the niggle isn�t there. In the long run, respecting your body will enable you to get and stay fitter and healthier.

Doing sit-ups to improve core stability

Even gym trainers are guilty of talking about building core stability and then giving clients exercises to do such as curls, crunches and sit-ups, which do nothing more than work the superficial layer of the abs � the rectus abdominis (your six-pack muscle). Unfortunately, even a rock-hard six-pack won�t do anything to improve your core strength and stability. For that, you need to dig deeper � targeting the transversus abdominis muscle. Strengthening it will not only create a strong, flat stomach; it will also give support and stability to the lower back.Pilates is one of the best exercise techniques for honing the deep abdominals � or you can get a personal trainer to show you some core exercises, such as the plank, the side bridge and a seated balance on a fit ball.

A NJUM