Weight Loss, Diet and Fitness Program

What you don’t know could be undermining all of your hard work.

You take a multivitamin and a calcium supplement and have cut back on chocolate. You’ve even started counting fat grams and reading food labels, setting yourself well on your way to being the picture of good nutrition. But is your diet really as perfect as you think it is? Check out these 50 common slip ups and the easy fixes that will improve your waistline-and your health.

1. You traded in your morning bagel for a fruit smoothie.
Both have roughly the same calories. Read more!

Continued From What’s Your Yoga Style? - Iyengar

5. Asthanga
Who it’s for:
Runners, cyclists and others looking to break a sweat while improving balance and flexibility.

Mind-body benefits:
Ashtanga, often called power yoga, emphasizes stamina and strength. “It’s popular with athletes or anyone looking for a demanding practice to develop focus and discipline,” says Beryl Bender Birch, director of the Hard & Soft Ashtanga Yoga Institute in New York City.
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Continued From What’s Your Yoga Style? - Bikram

4. Iyengar
Who it’s for:
Active types wanting to increase flexibility (especially- if they’re recovering from an injury).

Mind-body benefits:
“iyengar is known for its focus on proper alignment and attention to detail.” says Leslie Peters, director of the BKS Iyengar Yoga Institute of Los Angeles. Props such as belts. blocks and blankets help you deepen a pose while emphasizing precision. Poses are sometimes held for a minute or more to work on skeletal and muscular alignment.
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Continued From What’s Your Yoga Style?

2. KUNDALINI
Who it’s for:
Those looking to relieve stress and focus inward.

Mind-body benefits:
“The word kundalini literally means energy. The practice uses breath, poses and chanting to stimulate the nervous system as well as certain organs to improve clarity and create a sense of calm,” says director of Universal Force Yoga Healing Center in New York City. Read more!

The pleasures of using a stair-climbing machine:
Many exercisers enjoy using these machines; no wonder there are long lines to use them at the health club! This activity builds muscles in your hips, butt and legs. The machine is easier than actually climbing stairs because this gadget helps support your weight. An exerciser also does not have to worry about where to put her feet, which can be a concern with a treadmill.

The perils of using a stair-climbing machine:
There is a risk of tendon damage in the elbows from supporting your body weight on them, as many exercisers do. Leaning also can lead to improperly worked back muscles. If you’re going to regularly work out on this piece of equipment, it’s smart to adopt a lowfat diet as well; some experts warn that not doing so could bulk up your hips, thighs and butt instead of slimming them down.
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The pleasures of stationary cycling:
This piece of equipment offers a challenging aerobic workout. This type of bike also provides a tough tone-up to the quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes and calves. You’ll unpack those saddlebags (outer thighs) in a hurry!

Special pleasures of riding a recumbent bike:
These low-to-the-ground cycles offer a low-impact exercise that enhances muscle strength and muscular endurance levels of the abdominals and lower back as well as lower body muscle groups like the hips, gluteals, quadriceps, hamstrings and calves. The “full recumbent” position, in which legs are elevated to the same level as the heart, improves blood circulation and reduces blood pressure and stress on the heart more effectively than an upright bike.
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Treadmills, stationary cycles and stairclimbing machines are the three most popular machines at health clubs and at home. Here are a few tips that can help you decide which is the best for your fitness needs.

TREADMILL
The pleasures of treadmill walking:
Just imagine being able to take a safe walk any time of the day or night, in any kind of weather. That’s the bliss that awaits when you own a treadmill. Walking on this machine is a great workout for your cardiovascular system and provides all-over calorie burning; you’ll also build strength and endurance in your legs as you stroll along. Recent studies suggest that people who use treadmills burn 40 percent more calories per hour than while using other cardiovascular machines. Read more!

When it comes to building a better body, a firm, flat stomach is a must! Not only do taut, trim abs look great in barely-there blouses and slim skirts, but they also help protect you from developing potentially debilitating back problems. You don’t have to work out for hours to have a better belly. It’s possible to play your way to a sleek, slim stomach when you regularly participate in aerobic activities like in-line skating, running, swimming, biking and walking. Your entire lower body can benefit from these sports, and you’ll also give your body the cardiovascular shape-up it needs to keep your heart healthy.
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Big portions and little exercise have made over half of adult Amerians overweight: Make the switch to small serving sizes and large helpings of exercise, and the weight will come off-like magic!

The secret to losing weight and keeping it off can be summed up in four little words:
Eat less, walk more.
But how much less? And how much more? Doctors Jim Hill and John Peters believe they have the answers, or at least the formula to help people figure out the answers for themselves. They’ve put it all in The Step Diet Book, which comes packaged with a pedometer to make sure you make every step count.
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Keeping your weight down to a good level is something that seems to be beyond a lot of people. There are dozens of methods out there that supposedly help you cut down on your weight, ranging from crash diets involving quirky food, to medications designed to burn off fat, to radical new age psychic methods of self hypnosis for fat burning.

Okay, fine. Reality check… you can’t wish and vibrate fat away, and miracle pills might work, but they generally have unhealthy side effects. If you really want to keep your weight down and do it in a healthy fashion, you have to work for it. And that involves the one weight loss method that is actually the most effective but the one that a vast majority of people dread: Exercise!
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Many studies have been published in the last couple of decades showing that breastfed babies usually were happier and healthier than formula fed babies. The reasons for this weren’t clear at first, but as more studies were done and science gained a better understanding of how the human body processes food, some reasons became clear and once again Nature showed that her wisdom was, as usual, more advanced than man’s mental capabilities.

This thing called formula was developed during the Second World War to help free young mothers a little more, for many of them were involved on the home front at helping with the war effort and this formula was touted as containing every - thing baby would need to grow up healthy. Read more!

Have you ever thought of eating seaweed as a healthy nutritious food? Probably not. Grocery store isles are not exactly brimming with shelves stocked with seaweed. Quite the contrary, you would be lucky to find any seaweed product there. So it would be no wonder if this item were missing from your kitchen cupboard at home, and how many recipes in your cookbook are there that calls for seaweed as an ingredient. You won’t find it in your average menu plan. It is not something people usually consider when thinking about food unless they are into sushi, which is often served with seaweed.

Statistics show that the people of Japan have better health than people living in the United States. Seaweed is a staple food of the island country of Japan and diet is often the factor determining good health and longevity. Read more!

There are many fitness regimes that incorporate breathing techniques, yoga being one of them. However, while other exercise programs, especially those which involve high impact and strenuous workouts depend on the fitness level of the individual Tai Chi is generally suitable for persons of all fitness levels. Of course the speed and intensity of Tai Chi routines can be adjusted for fitness levels so as to maximize the benefit to each individual. Tai Chi Chuan or Tai Chi for short is best known these days for its health benefits but its origin is as a form of martial art. This may be hard to reconcile with the gentle routines and dance like movements followed by its practitioners. Tai Chi is an “Internal Martial art” - one which concentrates on building inner strength as opposed to demonstration of external brute force.

Tai Chi operates on 4 levels - Physical, intellectual, spiritual and as a form of combat.
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This week reported that Britney Spears celebrated her weight loss in Malibu on a shopping spree for a wardrobe for her new slender frame. It was five weeks after giving birth to son Sutton Pierce, Spears has reportedly dropped 26 pounds (12 kilograms) - without a trainer, diet pills or a nutritionist. The singer reportedly wants to lose a further 4kg in time for the October 31 launch party for her husband Kevin Federline’s debut rap album Playing With Fire.

A spokesperson for Spears said she had dropped her pregnancy weight without a trainer, diet pills or a nutritionist. Just by doing one-hour training sessions twice a day and sticking to a diet of six small meals a day, basically cut out on carbohydrate intake and exercised. Read more!

Beginning a workout regime at the gym can be overwhelming in many different ways. If you haven’t been before (or haven’t been for a long time) it can seem as though everyone knows what they’re doing but you. You worry about looking stupid, or about what people will think about your body, or about whether you’ll remember everything you’ve been told.

The first day is usually okay (because most gyms provide an introductory session on how to operate the machines) - but the second day can be confusing and even embarrassing, unless you’ve signed up with a personal trainer. You’re quite likely to find that you can’t remember which machines you’re supposed to use, or even how they work.
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