10 Steps on Improving Your Metabolism

By Karen Sessions NSCA-CPT
MsFit

Are you sluggish and low on energy? Do you feel like you work and work toward your weight loss goal and never seem to make any dramatic improvement?

You could be suffering from a slow metabolism. Even though you may have a slow metabolism, it does not have to destroy your weight loss efforts. You can dramatically improve your metabolism, and boost your energy levels without taking supplements.

Your metabolism simply refers to the conversion of food to usable energy by the body. It is the biological process, by which energy is extracted from food, and the net result is how fast or slowly the body burns those calories.

A few steps you can take to improve your metabolism naturally are:

1. Drink Water for Improving Your Metabolism - Water is great to drink and you should be drinking a minimum of 8 to 10, glasses daily, of course, more is better. It will help increase your metabolism and flush out sodium, toxins, and fat. Drinking water before meals will fill your stomach so you feel full and prevent overeating. Avoid excess colas, coffee, teas, and sugary juices. Caffeine will dehydrate you, and the sugar will do more damage than good in the long-run.
   
2. Eat Every Three Hours for Improving Your Metabolism - Eat a small balanced meal every three hours, including snacks. Meals and snacks should be balanced, meaning they should contain a complete protein, carbohydrates, as well as natural fat. Failure to eat consistently can lead to a slower metabolism and fat storage. Also, skipping meals slows down your metabolism. To ignite fat loss you need to be consuming the right foods in a balanced manner throughout the day.
   
3. Don't Skip Breakfast for Improving Your Metabolism - Breakfast is the most important meal of the day because it gets your metabolism running in high gear. You wouldn't drive your car to work on an empty tank, and you shouldn't start your day without adequate nourishment. Your first meal sets your metabolism for the day and keeps it going, as long as you eat every three hours. If you get up early and eat a late breakfast, you miss out on several hours of burning calories.
   
4. Don't Fear Fat for Improving Your Metabolism - Fat has developed a bad reputation. Many people think fat makes you fat. This is false. The type of fat and how much fat you eat impacts your body fat composition. Fat is needed by the body. Those who follow a very low-fat diet have a harder time ridding their body of fat. Choose natural healthy fats such as olive oil, avocados, various nuts, flax, and natural peanut butter to receive your necessary fats.
   
5. Omit Trans Fat for Improving Your Metabolism - Trans fat is the bad fat, the cause of weight gain, low energy, depression, cancer, and heart disease. You will never get the body you desire by eating "healthy" fast food, frozen dinners, and other processed choices. If it's man-made, it's not the best choice and will halt fat loss endeavors. Eat the foods Mother Nature has provided to meet your fat loss goals.
   
6. Be Active Daily for Improving Your Metabolism - Stay active at least six days a week. Take the stairs when possible or park further out to get that little bit of extra movement to keep the heart and lungs working optimally. The more movement you get daily, the better you will feel overall.
   
7. Do Cardiovascular Exercise for Improving Your Metabolism - Cardio exercise is necessary for heart and lung health. It also burns calories. Doing cardio first thing in the morning on an empty stomach can tap into fat stores, and keep your body burning calories at a high rate for about an hour after cardio is finished. If you fail to eat adequately daily, first morning cardio on an empty stomach can work against you. Doing morning cardio on very low calorie diet can burn muscle. Another good time to incorporate cardio is in the evening after your last meal. This allows you to burn calories so you are not sleeping on them. You do not have to implement a morning and evening session, choose one or the other or cycle between the two to prevent staleness and boredom.
   
8. HIIT It for Improving Your Metabolism - Blend some High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) into your cardiovascular program from time to time to give your body and metabolism a good shock. The body is programmed for adaptation Therefore, doing the same cardio format day in and day out can become stale really fast. Take one or two days a week and implement some HIIT to give the body an added shock.
   
   HIIT is basically alternating low intensity and moderate to high intensity cardio training. For example, a 20 minute HIIT session would look similar to this: Minute 1 and 2 - Low Intensity (Walking)
   Minute 3 and 4 - High Intensity (Light jogging or running)
   Minute 5 and 6 - Low Intensity
   Minute 7 and 8 - High Intensity
   and so on.
9. Weight Train for Improving Your Metabolism - Resistance training builds muscle, which is metabolically active tissue. The more muscle you acquire, the faster your metabolism will be. Adding more lean muscle tissue to your body will put curves in the right places and allow you to eat more calories a day.
   
10. Listen to Your Body for Improving Your Metabolism - Killing yourself with workouts is just as dangerous as not working out at all. Listen to your body and get proper rest. Don't train if you are ill, still sore from the previous workout, or just simply too tired. Training in such a state can cause more problems than it solves.

If any of the above fail to prove results in 4 to 6 weeks, there could be an underlying problem, such as a food allergy, sluggish thyroid, hormonal imbalance, toxins, parasites, etc. If so, I recommend searching for a natural healer in your area to determine the cause and work from there. For the most part, proper diet, detoxifying, and herbs can correct any ailments.

Fitfully Yours,
Karen Sessions NSCA-CPT
aka: MsFit

P.S. Want even MORE weight loss secrets? Stop running around in circles and get the facts that will shed the fat in How to Lose Weight Forever!

Thanks Karen -

Daryl

How to Avoid A Yo-Yo Diet In Simple To Follow Steps

There are certain characteristics that differentiate healthy diets and unhealthy diets. The less effective diets are the usually the ones that promise rapid weight loss and only last for a month or so. The healthier diet programs give more of a focus on losing weight over a longer period. These diet plans are tailored for the individual so are easier to stick to for a long time.

Something that is common with people looking for a weight loss solution is that they don’t have the right knowledge about what healthy eating really consists of. Many people are attracted to fad diets that promise them fast results. These diets are usually temporary solutions.

Many people have good success with such diets, but being as they don’t know what a healthy diet really consists of, they return to their old eating patterns soon after and start piling all that weight back on.

There is nothing wrong with trying out a fad diet, and they may well work. The problem is that many people don’t have a plan B for when the diet finishes. There’s no real use in eating healthily for 30 days and then returning to your usual unhealthy diet.

These diets are sometimes referred to as ‘yo-yo’ diets. Sometimes the dieter will regain twice as much weight as they lost after returning to their old eating habits. This is because of the effects that these eating changes have on their metabolism.

Here are some of the characteristics that fad diets often possess. If you spot things like this then you know that they are most likely not a diet with sustainable long term benefits:

They focus on just one or two nutrients - There are several dieting plans around that focus on drastically reducing carbohydrates. These once popular diets have begun fading away, which hopefully reflects the new awareness people are gaining regarding long term healthy eating practices.

For long term health benefits, your body needs a good variety of nutrients, including carbohydrates and fats. Balance is the key.

They promise fast weight loss results - While they may make you lose weight quickly, they are just temporary diets. This means that when the diet is over there’s a good chance you’ll pile that weight back on. You could even put on more weight than you lost.

They focus on magic foods - A big trend with diets these days is claiming that a certain food like lemon, grapefruit, cinnamon, celery etc. will burn fat fast. While certain can foods can have a positive effect on the metabolism, they should not be considered the solution to long term weight loss.

They come in supplement form - There’s all sorts of magic diet pills and supplements doing the rounds. Remember, they are called a ‘supplement’ for a reason. They are intended to supplement an overall healthy eating plan. There’s nothing wrong with taking supplements, but they should not be solely relied on in order to lose weight.

There is no exercise involved - Yes some fad diets even claim that no exercise is required and that the special diet alone will make you lose weight. Exercise is a vital practice regardless of your diet. If a dieting product attempts to sell you on the fact you don’t need to exercise, stay well away.

As you may have noticed after reading the above, fad diets are unbalanced and focus on miraculous and rapid changes. Truly healthy diet plans a like a reality check. The best way to be healthy and lose weight is to eat well consistently in the longer term.

There are many healthy diet programs out there that promote long term health in order to lose weight. While they don’t promise success in just a few weeks, they give the groundwork for eating healthily in the long term. Stick to a sustainable plan like this and you body will naturally form its optimum weight over time.

Because a true healthy diet is stuck to for the long term, there is no danger of sudden weight gain as the diet does not end. So the way to spot a healthy diet among all the unhealthy diets out there is to focus more on long term health, rather than overnight weight loss.

In addition, a healthy diet plan focuses on proper eating practices. This includes the frequency and size of meals, which is an important factor which many dieters overlook.
Here are the common features of a healthy diet plan:

Ensure You Consume Enough Calories - Many fad diets can contain a drastically low amount of calories. Starving your body of calories is not the best way to lose weight – you need to reduce calories gradually.
A healthy plan will be tailored the your current calorie intake. Seeing a nutritionist can be helpful to calculate your average weekly calorie intake. A major decrease in your average intake will not serve you well if trying to lose weight properly.

Allowing Snacking Between Meals - Rather than just eating your 3 main meals a day, it is better to have a slightly smaller breakfast, lunch and dinner, and then eat some small healthy snacks in between. This increases metabolism and fills your body with energy. It also settles your appetite and prevents overeating.

Contains a Wide Selection of Foods - You shouldn’t be confined to eating just one kind of food. A healthy diet plan will contain a good mixture of vegetables, fruits, nuts, beans and lean meat.

Sustainable & Flexible - A healthy diet is designed to last for a long time. This is why the best diet plans can be tailored to your own eating habits and your lifestyle. An effective eating plan will include all your favourite foods to some extent – as long as you don’t overindulge. This makes the diet more effective as you will have more will-power to stick to it.

When you search for a healthy diet plan, evaluate the plans you see and try to identify the above elements. Doing this can help you separate the genuinely healthy diet plans for the fads.
Look for a sustainable diet plan that you know you will be able to stick to for a long time. Find a suitable plan and it will make achieving your health goals a lot easier.

The Lunch Box Diet by Simon Lovell reached acclaim because it’s one of the few diets that causes yo-yo dieting as it’s more of a healthy lifestyle plan. Voted ‘the best diet’ by Elle Magazine they said it became ‘a way of life’ – very few diets offer that kind of benefit. Click here to find out more…

Chat Soon

Daryl

How Can A Healthy Diet Give You A Healthy Heart?

We live in a world where people are seduced by fat food every day. So many people choose the taste of greasy and fatty sausages or burgers over the nutritional value of healthy fresh salad. It is pure madness, but it shows how addicted people have become to the taste of junk. These people have a total disregard for what it is doing to their hearts.

Alarmingly, more and more medical related deaths have been recorded in the last few decades that are related to heart related problems and cardiac arrests. It is no secret that fast food has played a big part in this.

Studies have shown us that around 80% of heart disease can be prevented through healthy eating. A staggering figure I’m sure you’ll agree. To have a healthy heart, all it takes is the willingness to learn new habits.


While learning new eating habits may seem like a massive step, don’t worry, you don’t have to make 100 drastic changes all at once. You won’t need to turn into a rabbit and only eat vegetables and nothing else for the rest of your life.

If you want a healthy heart, you can start by changing how you cook your favourite non-vegetarian foods. Adding spice to non-veg foods like sage, dry mustard, dill, tarragon, marjoram or oregano can reduce fat saturation and cholesterol. If you like to eat lots of meat, stick to lean red meat and white meat.

Pure vegetarian foods however need to become a large part of your diet. Start gradually eating more and more fresh vegetables. Veggies still contain fats, but not as much. Foods like cucumber, tomatoes, carrots and leafy vegetables are very healthy and don’t add cholesterol to your body. The Lunch Box Diet is a great healthy diet based on the popular grazing principle that boosts your metabolism through eating small regular meals.

Red and green fruits, low fat milk, olive oil and wholegrain foods are also good vegetarian foods you should have a lot of in your diet if you want a healthy heart.

When you buy foods from the supermarkets, be careful and don’t always trust the labels when they say the product is low cholesterol. Always avoid Low Density Lipoprotein (LDL) – this is bad cholesterol, which can cause heart complexities. In contrast, High Density Lipoprotein is good cholesterol – this can help to protect against cardio-vascular risks.

Unhealthy non-food related habits are also important to eradicate. If you smoke or drink lots of caffeine and alcohol, this is something you should cut back on. Exercise is also good for strengthening you cardio-vascular system. So if you’re a bit of a couch potato, now is the time to hit the gym.

The Lunch Box Diet

Chat soon, stay healthy!
Daryl

3 Fattening Habits - You Must ELIMINATE Now!

By Karen Sessions NSCA-CPT
MsFit

In today’s society, eating is completely out of control. Food convenience has led to a nation of overfed and undernourished people, and the statistics and waistlines are growing by the day! I often wonder if people actually understand the dramatic impact food has on the human body.

There is mass confusion in regards to dietary guidelines and healthy eating. With the overwhelming amount of information about health and fitness at hand, people’s health and waistlines are suffering more and more.

The more confused people are about dietary guidelines, the more likely they are to jump from one fad diet to the next with a nice mix of yo-yo dieting in between. This is hardly healthy or effective.

Today, people are literally obsessed with weight loss and extreme dieting. People spend billions of dollars each year on expensive gadgets, lotions, and pills for that quick weight-loss fix – that never works. Your dream body can’t be bought; you must earn it through educating yourself on nutrition and exercise. Only then will you see results that are lasting.

If you want to win the battle of the bulge, then you need to make some healthy changes that turn into lasting healthy habits.

It’s now time to discuss the fattening habits you must eliminate now!

Fattening Habit #1 – Feeding your thirst with colas

Generally, when someone is thirsty he or she grabs a soda. Sure, a soda is a wonderful thirst quencher, but it is void of nutrients. The principle of food and water it to provide nutrition to the body for fuel or building purposes.

Water is the basic element of life, not cola. Colas are packed with sugar and carbonation.

Sugar promotes tooth decay, interferes with the absorption of protein as well as the absorption of calcium and magnesium, contributes to osteoporosis, causes water retention; the list goes on and on.

Don’t let the diet sodas fool you. You may find many health and fitness “experts” promote diet sodas, but there is nothing healthy or that promotes fat loss with diet colas.

Diet colas can actually cause fat gain! Aspartame can cause an insulin reaction in the body. It’s not due to the carbs because diet drinks don’t contain any. The insulin spike is in response to the sweetness of aspartame. The sweet taste sets off a chemical reaction in the body, the same as it does in the presence of carbs. A constant high insulin level equals fat gain.

Be weary of the "expert" that claims aspartame is okay.

Stop the weight-loss roller coaster and start losing fat NOW!

Fattening Habit #2 – Lack of essential fat

When the low-fat era hit in the late 1980s, the consumption of essential fat dramatically dropped. Whole eggs were shunned for the highly popular egg white, and red meat was tossed aside for its low-fat counterpart chicken and turkey choices.

With the low-fat movement, we have become fatter and on top of that, undernourished.

Your body requires fat to function. Essential fat is necessary for your metabolism, brain function, hormone production, absorption and transportation of vitamins and minerals; all important facts when it comes to fat loss.

If you eliminate essential fat from your diet, you are eliminating an important element!

If you are worried about cholesterol, don’t. Cholesterol is actually a building material in the body and a protector. Cholesterol build hormones and essential for normal brain function.

Fattening Habit #3– Eating boxed “healthy foods”

Commercially prepackaged meals and food items contain more chemicals than nutrients. What can your body do with chemicals? Lodge them in your fat cells to be come toxic and cause illness and disease, cellulite, and prevent fat loss.

Just for the fun of it I went to the market and read the side of a boxed food item that appeared healthy to the average person. The food item was Morning Star Veggie Bites. I counted over 40 ingredients, and some of those ingredients were broken down even more.

Understand that it’s not 40 ingredients of nutrients for energy or building materials. It’s over 40 chemicals! Even the spinach was genetically modified. If your body can’t use the ingredients you put into it, how can it burn fat? It can’t.

Fattening Habits Conclusion

Your body needs to be able to process what is put into it. If your body cannot use what you eat, it will store it as fat and/or toxins.

To lose fat, stop drinking colas and diet colas and start drinking more pure and filtered water. Don’t be afraid to eat fat. Your body needs it to function and lose fat. Stop eating boxed (processed) foods, even if they read “healthy,” “low-carb,” “low-sugar,” etc.

Nothing is as good for your body and waistline as nature’s God given food supply.

Learn the FACTS about weight loss and never be fat again!

Fitfully Yours,
Karen Sessions NSCA-CPT
aka: MsFit

Having A Baby? An Important Article On Nutrition

There’s never a more vital time to eat healthily than when you are pregnant. The things you eat have a huge impact on the health of your baby. You are directly responsible for the well-bring of your child. It could not be more vital that you stick to dietary advice given to you by a doctor, and that you stay disciplined and make all the right dietary choices.

Just like at any point in life, it’s important to eat a diet that is balanced. Try to avoid the weight gain fear trap, so don’t overeat or not eat enough.

It’s important to stick to a structured diet plan. Eat after 2 hour intervals, and be sure to get a good breakfast including cereal, fruit, milk and other nutritious foods. It’s best to reduce the size of your meals and eat snacks in between. Ensure you take in plenty of green vegetables, and try to eat things like fish, beans, chicken, dried fruit, soups, juices, skimmed milk and other dairy products.

If you have a tendency to snack on junk food, you will really have to be disciplined – remember, this is you child’s health that is at risk, not just your own. You may have lots of cravings for food when you are pregnant, but this is no reason to intentionally overeat. Keep in tune with your bodies food cravings and only eat what you need to.

Ensure there are not large gaps between your meals, as your baby is going to need a constant inflow of healthy nutrients to ensure their strong health. Choose your meals wisely and ensure there is a good balance.
You should also make sure to do light exercises while you are pregnant.

Don’t worry – this doesn’t mean you have to pound away at the gym every day! Just follow the advice of your doctor and go for gentle walks every now and then. If you are motionless and stiff too often it may result in difficulties at the time of delivery.

Drinking water and staying hydrated is another vital step. Drinking water flushes toxins from the body. As well as drinking glasses of water, you can get water from liquids like fruit juices, protein shakes and soups.
The importance of a healthy diet is really emphasized during pregnancy.

Being as you are eating for your baby too, you have a big responsibility to ensure that you are eating properly. I can’t claim that pregnancy is an easy process, but you can make it a whole lot smoother by choosing to eat healthily and eating all the right foods.

When your beautiful baby is born in good health, you’ll be glad you put their well-being first. A great healthy diet for losing weight while being safe with your baby is The Lunch Box Diet – loved by mums because it’s so flexible and easy. Click here to find out more.

all the best
Daryl

Weight Loss Exercise Program Week 6

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Here you go everyone, last one and you have made it all the way. Well done.
If you missed any or all of these videos check them out on the right hand side further down in the Archives

All the best
Daryl