Tips for Moms

Healthy Diet on a Hectic Schedule

Tips for Moms — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:05:14 +0000

A very busy life is sometimes a hindrance to follow a diet. One does not have the time to prepare a proper planned meal as required by the diet and prefers to bung in ingredients into a crock pot or drop in at the pizzeria round the corner and take home some fast food.

What are the ways to resist the temptation on the readily available meals and that what you eat is what the diet plan says you must? Prepare all the meals for a week on the day that you are at home, so that for the rest of the week you have the diet meals ready when you come home. If the entire family participates in the diet you would help them all to get the health that you are aiming for. That is enough motivation for you and the children to stick to your diet.

Get all your meals ready on the one day that you are free and put them all in the freezer. Thaw it out as per the schedule in the morning and cook it once you get home. Thus, whatever is there on the schedule as per your diet adhered to, you will still have a complete meal ready for the family every day at dinnertime.

Make sure that your refrigerator has always a stock of fruits, vegetables and salad makings, all cleaned and dried. You should be always ready to provide the quick salad lunch or fruits for snacks. You need to resist the temptation of opening those packets of processed foods that are detrimental to your diet, so that you can always ensure your 5 meals per day criteria which is vital for the success of your diet.

You should always have some sugar free pudding cups and lots of yogurt containers at hand. They make a good snack when you need some quick sustenance and are very easy to keep on hand. If you are prepared with these items, you may not open those high calories frozen dinners that seems to be a basic meal for many people.

If you are one of those who has too much on the calendar and cannot set aside the time to visit the gym or exercise, look for opportunities to do this during the course of your working day. Avoid the escalator and walk up the stairs as a matter of routine. Park your car as far away from your place of work and walk the rest of the distance. When you need to go to the supermarket and it is not too far from your place, walk down and do your grocery shopping. An added bonus when you do this, is meeting the neighbors along the way. There are many ways that you can make yourself expend the calories during your normal day, you just need to look for them and take advantage of them to give your body the exercise that it needs.

A lack of time should not be an excuse for you to stop the dieting plan that you have started. There are also a number of plans for dieters that already have prepackaged meals as per the diets, available at most well stocked supermarkets. They may be expensive, but will save you all the trouble that you have to get in a meal. On the exercise, you need to have to discipline yourself and take it where you can and whenever you can. Therefore, a lack of time is really not an excuse on not going to a diet plan.

Simple Body Tricks to Lose Weight

Tips for Moms — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:25:37 +0000

Dieting can be frustrating at times, but you need to find some ways to lose your weight faster and your body should be conned into doing this.

What are the ways to trick your body to lose body weight faster?

Your body can start to think that it is starving.

Sounds a little drastic, but it is very necessary. When eating, cut down those carbohydrates which are responsible for giving you energy. When you do that,your body will start producing what are commonly known as starvation hormones. These hormones will free the body fat and will send it to the liver and muscles to be use as energy. Therefore, fat loss is weight loss.

You don’t have to starve yourself too much. You just need to reduce your carbohydrates to about 50-100 grams per day from the 400 grams that you normally consume per day and this should trick your body in consuming your fat for energy.

Fill up with bulky food and let your stomach signals your brain that you are eating more.

When you do your diet, you may think of hunger which may result to inability to deal with it and this causes most people to say goodbye to their diets and weight loss programs. What you need to do is to convince your body that it is getting a lot of food.

Snack up on green leafy vegetables like spinach, kale, lettuce or on more fibrous vegetables like asparagus, Brussels sprouts and the like and a bulk of them will let your stomach feel that you are already full. The body is tricked visually because the plate seems full with all these vegetables and will give you a satisfaction of having eaten them a lot. Once you have eaten these bulky foods, the stomach will senses the volume of food in it (not the calories) and signals to the brain that it is full, thus reducing your desire to eat.

Your body must think that it is time to build some muscles.

If you want to lose weight for a long period of time, you need to increase your body’s metabolic rate. This largely depends on your muscle which is the chief consumer of calories and can keep those pounds off.

If you lose that muscle while dieting, what you are doing is getting that skinny and starved look. You will also be very slow of making your weight to decrease and you will be disincentive to continue with your diet.

You need to increase your protein intake when you are dieting and prevent the muscle loss. This will encourage the amino acids in the proteins to work on the DNA level and stimulate the synthesis of protein to build your muscle. If your body senses that muscles is being built up, it will not try to break it down for energy.

If the muscle stays on, the metabolic rate increases, thus more calories will get burned. And voila! You lose weight.

It is really simple. Stuff yourself on those leafy or fibrous vegetables and stack up on the protein. Eat less carbs and persuade your body to help you in losing those extra pounds. You will be able to surprise your friends and family for the fast result on you losing some of your weight.

Winter Weight Gain

Tips for Moms — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:32:58 +0000

A lot of people get intimidated about the winter and how they will gain weight and in the spring/summer they will be too chubby for bathing suits. Everyone wants to know why gaining weight in the winter occurs and there are various ways to go about answering that question, most of which will be covered in this article.

First off, a lot of people who want to lose weight will tell themselves that they will just eat to maintain their weight and in the spring hit the gym and lose the weight for the summer. However, if you eat the same in the winter as you did in the summer, it could result in a weight gain – we will get into greater detail on this later on in the article.

First thing you have to do is make sure you do not use the winter as an excuse for not getting thinner. You can still drive to or take public transportation to the gym or even exercise at home and changing your eating patterns has nothing to do with the season it is.

In some cases, you could have a harder time losing weight in the winter because of genetics. It is believed that there is a genetic disposition which makes it more difficult in the cold months to lose weight. This is already seen with some animals and there is a chance that it is the same for humans as well.

The more fat layers you are, the more heated you are from the cold. You wouldn’t shave your head bald in the winter but you would in the summer – hair is there to keep you heated just alike fat is.

In the winter months, you are more likely to be stocked up with groceries as trips to the grocery stores are hectic from the cold and around Christmas time means to have a lot of party dinners. The types of foods you prefer in the winter (hot plates) are usually less healthy and mostly processed but in the summer, cold fruits, salads and vegetables can be appealing.

Also, with being stuck inside because of the cold, you may find yourself eating just so you have something to do and when this occurs, you usually eat for the taste.

In the winter, there is less light and more darkness which means the sleeping hours usually change dramatically. If you eat the same as you did when you were up 16 hours a day but you are only up 14 hours a day now, you may notice a bit of a weight gain. It is true that the dark makes you tired faster than daylight does so there is a big chance that you would be drained of energy during the winter months.

A good way of increasing your energy would be to consume high carbohydrate (high sugar) foods which would consist of sugar candies, and other junk. However, they obviously hold the negative effects as well and these just provide the short term sugar rush so it may be a better idea to just get a lot more complex carbohydrates into your system.

If you adapt an unhealthy diet, it is very hard to break it and you may keep telling yourself that as soon as the snow leaves you will start changing things but when the time comes around, it is likely that you will not do so – or you will try for a few weeks and then give up.

If you don’t do something about your weight problem in the winter, you could continue to gain weight and that could lead to depression. If you are depressed, you could then resort to ‘comfort foods’ which would definitely pack in the unhealthy effects to your body very quickly.

If you get rid of all of the junk you typically have (cookies, chocolates, pies, etc) and replace it with healthier stuff (whole grain bread with natural peanut butter, Silhouette yogurt with cottage cheese, egg whites, orange egg frosting), you will definitely see a drastic change. The problem is that all of these junk foods taste so good to you (even though they are processed and filled with junk) but if you can fight the cravings and find something else to fill them, you will do just fine.

Since you are likely to eat a little unhealthily in the winter, it is a good idea that you exercise a little bit more. Most people will exercise less in the winter and do end up gaining weight but if you can keep a high activity level in the winter, you should be okay – maybe start playing hockey? The problem is that not many people enjoy the cold so you might have to find an indoor solution to get your daily exercises in.

All of the excuses that you could think of are probably above but the thing is, no matter what you can come up with to say that the winter is just a time where you have to suck it up, you are wrong. Anyone can keep healthy, active, and even lose weight in the winter but it’s a matter of taking the initiative to do so.

Green Tea Diet

Tips for Moms — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:08:11 +0000

The green tea diet has become rather popular and is always talked about by people who are crazy about keeping healthy. Green tea is very cheap and holds a lot of nutritional value to it. Buying and preparing green tea is easy so there is no difficulty in the whole process. In most cases, you won`t have to add any milk or sweetener to the green tea to drink it but green tea definitely is a drink that needs the specially acquired taste to like it. If you are one who does not like the taste of green tea, you could always try using green tea extract.

It has already been proven that green tea will assist you in losing weight due to the fact that it causes your body to stimulate and start the thermogenesis process. Thermogenesis will cause your body to increase the energy level and the oxidization of your fat will also increase. Most plant compounds are also discovered to have similar effects.

An advantage to drinking green tea is that it will not cause your heart rate to increase and this is the reason that people believe it is a lot safer to drink green tea than to use any type of diet pills as most of them use the method of stimulating thermogenesis – one particular diet pill which would do this is ephedrine.

A lot of overweight and obese people have a much bigger chance of having hypertension and other kinds of cardiovascular problems but since green tea does not affect your heart rate at all, it would make a great choice for your diet.

Going back to ephedrine, it would be a diet pill that is definitely not suggested if you are one that has high blood pressure. With green tea diet, if you have high blood pressure, green tea can still be recommended to you. The goal would definitely be to exercise even more but not affect your heart rate.

There are only two healthy ways to lose weight so you have to make sure you know them.
The first one is to eat less and by doing so, the amount of calories you take in is under the amount needed to maintain and your body would burn some fat.

The second one is to boost your energy level, and therefore be able to exercise even more and lose weight because you are burning more calories than you need to maintain and then you take in.

Green tea works great for the second one because it is capable of boosting your energy level by around 5% so it can definitely be a great help for those who have low energy levels which is particularly common and relates directly with those who have weight problems as well. Green tea holds many other health benefits as well and is very rich in antioxidants and can help strengthen your immune system and secure you from getting diagnosed with diseases that relate to your immune system.

One of the reasons that green tea improves your energy level is that there is caffeine in it so you have to remember that. If you drink a lot of coffee, you may want to cancel that out of your diet and replace it with green tea. There is decaffeinated green tea but in the decaffeination process, it loses some of the nutritional values that it originally holds.

At the same time, you have to make sure you are exercising and making sure you watch what you eat. The green tea diet doesn’t consist of a fast where you just consume green tea, but rather it consists of you add green tea to your diet as it can really help you out a lot.

Green tea could be used as a great replacement drink and even the cold bottled green teas you can get at the convenience store can be an okay replacement for the normal sodas you get. If you are someone who enjoys hot tea from the tea pot, you already have an advantage over everyone else for this particular green tea diet drink.

Green tea is natural and safe for your body and makes a great addition to any kind of diet. You have to make sure you keep the rest of your diet healthy and you exercise regularly as well.

Hypnosis And Weight Loss

Tips for Moms — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:44:22 +0000

A host of health issue can cluster your mind if you are over weight. Losing weight can be the first step towards a healthy life. Successful weight loss can help you avoid diseases like:

1. Diabetes

2. High blood pressure

3. Coronary heart disease

4. Endometrial cancer

5. Obstructive sleep apnea

6. Breast cancer

If you do not exercise a lot then the risk of these diseases just becomes higher for you. And if you have a dangerous medical history then being over weight might make your problems even worse. It is better to be on the safer side and lose some weight. A loss of just 10% of the body weight can result in a much toned body, lower blood pressure as well as cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels. In fact weight loss can be your way of living a healthier life. One innovative way oflosing weight is the known procedure of hypnosis.

Many believe this to be a hoax, but it actually works wonders. The right application of hypnosis can help you lose the desired weight in a healthy way. This way is safe and leads you to the right way of losing weight. This is because there are no medications or surgery involved in this process.

Here are some facts that will give you an insight about what losing weight through hypnosis means for your body:

1. Hypnosis is only a way to facilitate weight loss. If you depend entirely on it then there might not be any results for you to see. This is a way to fasten the process of weight loss but you do need an entire regime to make your weight loss effective.

2. If not done by the right person and in the right way, hypnosis can be risky. This is why it is advised to only consult a trained hypnotherapist for the job.

3. Also you will not get results in just one sitting. You need to pursue hypnosis and give it time to work on you. Hypnosis matched with psychotherapy can show faster results. This is because hypnosis is only a state of deeply relaxing the mind, in which one can still be in control of his or her own body.

4. It is important to understand that through hypnosis you can not achieve an altered state of mind. You can only suggest and in hypnosis the mind is more receptive than usual.

Combined with the right weight loss methods, hypnosis can work wonders in the hands of a good hypnotherapist. However you should not be full of expectations. If you start small you are bound to achieve your goals. But if you have high and lofty goals, you may be disappointed.

In the end you will be gaining much from hypnosis than just weight loss. This is a channel to relax your mind through. After all a healthy mind leads to a healthy body.

15 Best Free Weight Loss Advice

Tips for Moms — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:16:27 +0000

If your goal is to lose weight permanently and not to start a yo-yo diet, then there are some things you would need to know. Sure, you can go and lose 10 pounds in a week or two with those fad diets but those 10 pounds aren’t gone forever. To get rid of 10 pounds, it would take at least a month or two to do it healthily and to keep them off; you need to change your lifestyle ß that is the key to a permanent weight loss, changing your lifestyle.

First off, you will make sure that you monitor what you eat and make sure you are only eating healthy, tasty, fresh snacks which would be good if it were vegetables and fruits and if you can fill yourself up with those, you can save a lot of potential junk intake. However, make sure you don’t eat too many fruits as they are really high on natural sugar – get the majority of your snacks from vegetables.

Here will be some weight loss advice of how you can make a successful weight loss attempt.

Weight Loss Advice 1: Note Book

Whether it be a physical note book or on your computer, write down everything that you eat and drink. You don’t need to count the calories, but just monitor the mass of food that you are eating. After you have enough information to gauge (1-2 weeks), you should read through it and see what you can change to make your diet healthier. One way to monitor what you take in is to use a program like Fit Day (www.fitday.com) where you can write down everything you take in and it will have a rough estimate of all of the nutritional value, which you can edit if you already have that information on hand.

Weight Loss Advice 2 : Fats

You will want to try and get rid of the butter you put on your bread, muffins, potatoes, or whatever it be. Also, mayonnaise is something which is high in bad fats that you would want to try and get out of your diet. Salad dressing should be eliminated too but there are some lighter salad dressings that could be better for you – some vinaigrette dressings actually not that bad. When you make yourself a sandwich, you should use mustard instead of mayonnaise. When you cook, use under half the normal size of oil you use.

Weight Loss Advice 3 : Treats

While it may be obvious, it is very important. Try to limit the junk you consume to none or minimal. Having a treat once or twice a week or having a cheat day once a week can be okay but you do not want to end up treating regularly. While this refers to treats like cookies, donuts, and similar, if you can find an acquired taste in fruits or vegetables, that would be great.

Weight Loss Advice 4 : Try Different Foods

Not everyone likes vegetables and a lot of people think that a healthy diet just consists of vegetables but that is completely wrong. Try different types of healthy, natural, and organic foods and see what you like. There are a lot of different types of foods that many people have not tried but they would like if they did. One that would come to mind is falafels. They are a very healthy type of food but delicious at the same time and could replace the urge for a burger for some people.

Weight Loss Advice 5 : Source of Protein

Make sure that your protein sources don’t contain a lot of fat. Some ideal protein sources would include chicken, tuna, cottage cheese, and eggs. Cottage cheese in particular is best used when you have to make up for missing protein, calories, and other nutritional value during the day – a lot of weight lifters will use it as a bed time snack and sometimes mix it with Silhouette yogurt which is very healthy compared to most yogurts. Some people also eat cottage cheese straight out of the container but it is definitely an acquired taste.

Weight Loss Advice 6 : Meat and Cheese

While people who lift weights usually consume meat a lot for the protein value, there are a lot of disadvantages to eating both meat and cheese alike. While you likely won’t cut meat and cheese out of your diet, you should at least eat it only in proportions. With cheese, if you are capable of eliminating it from your diet, do so – not everyone is a huge fan of cheese anyways.

You should have 3-4 meals a week which consist of meat, cheese, and vegetables but nothing more if possible. These meals can contain whole grains, vegetables, and beans as well which would help reduce the amount of fat you consume and increase the amount of fibre you take in.

Weight Loss Advice 7 : Fat in Dairy Products

Milk, cheese, and most dairy products in general contain a lot of bad nutritional value and in most products there is a lot of fat as well. If you were to just eliminate milk completely from your diet, it would do the similar effects that eliminating regular soda does to your diet. If you need to keep drinking milk, try and get low fat or skim milk and when you are buying cheese, double check that your are buying the particular cheese with the least amount of fat. When you buy yogurt, go with Silhouette yogurt as it has the most advantages in nutritional value.

Weight Loss Advice 8 : Fruits

You should keep the serving size of fruits you consume every day to no more than two. Fruits are good for you but are high in natural sugars. Only buy fruits when they are in season and try to stick away from any fruits that are extremely full of sugar. You could try acai berry juice fruit for best result.

Weight Loss Advice 9 : Replace Your Fluids

Whatever you are drinking that is unhealthy – soda, juice, milk, alcohol, etc, you should try and replace it immediately. If you get hooked on regular soda, it can add a lot of weight to you and just eliminating soda can result in losing quite a bit of weight, even 1-2lbs a week from just taking away the soda.

From getting rid of all of these liquids in your diet and replacing them with water, you will keep yourself more hydrated and save money as well. The health benefits are endless when you replace other fluids with water. Also try to keep from diet soda drinks because they will make you crave sugar even more. Having some hot water with a lemon slice is not only a great way to clean your hands but can be revitalizing in the morning as a drink as well.

Weight Loss Advice 10 : Vegetables

You will want to try to get at least two servings of vegetables at both lunch and dinner every day. If you feel hunger pangs coming on, grab a snack that consists of vegetables and have a large glass of water. Also, drink a tall glass of water before you have lunch and dinner so you don’t need to eat as much to feel full. Before going for seconds of the less healthy foods on your plate, finish up the vegetables so you don’t end up getting full off of the unhealthy stuff instead.

Weight Loss Advice 11 ; Eat Slowly and Chew

You should always chew your food fully and eat it slowly. Your body takes a while to notice and digest any foods you eat and you will likely end up eating too much if you don`t keep it slow. If you chew your food fully and eat slow enough, instead of shovelling it in, your body will notice the food coming into your body and you will know right away if you are full instead of overeating.

Weight Loss Advice 12 : Tasty Vegetable Snacks

One tasty and fulfilling snack would be to grate some carrots up. Most people find that you can get fuller off of grating carrots than eating them full. For a good sugary drink, result to the V8 drinks and if you don`t like them normally, try the ones that they added fruit blends to as they are tastier. The normal V8 drinks consist mainly of tomato juice and carrots so they definitely need the acquired taste but adding a fruit blend can make it a lot tastier for most people. There is also a fair amount of fruit and vegetable servings in every bottle.

Weight Loss Advice 13 : Whole Grain Foods

It`d be best if you can try and get whole grain foods in your diet whenever you are able to. The fibres which are in the whole grain foods will definitely help you feel fuller and help your digestion system work well.

Weight Loss Advice 14 : Chewy Foods

It would be ideal if you can get chewy foods instead of just foods that are one bite, swallow. While this doesn`t mean to stay away from stuff like carrot chips, it just means that chewing your food is essential. Chewy foods help your dietary fibre consumption and help you feel fuller as it takes more time to eat the food and it will send a note to your brain that you are nearly full quicker.

This could also include eating fruits for your fruit servings instead of drinking fruit juice and eating chunky soups if you want to eat soup at all.

Weight Loss Advice 15 : Planning

You should make sure you plan all of your meals and snacks before time so you don`t end up having a spur of the moment decision where you find yourself eating junk instead of healthy foods.

When you go grocery shopping, you should have a list planned out before and you should research everything on the list to make sure that none of the snacks are too unhealthy for your particular diet. You will usually have some type of diet whether you are minimizing the intake of calories, fat, or whatever it may be. As mentioned earlier, a good tool to look up nutritional value of foods is Fit Day (www.fitday.com) and it works great for recording your eating habits as well.

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Should I Lose Weight While I am Pregnant?

Tips for Moms — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 01:01:12 +0000

If you’re a woman, you have one time in your life when a certain amount of weight gain isn’t only inevitable, but it’s also encouraged! That’s, of course, during pregnancy.

Even if you’re overweight, pregnancy isn’t the time to be on any type of weight-loss diet. Pregnant women need more calories and more nutrients than normal. Reducing calories and losing weight while you’re pregnant can be dangerous for the growth and development of the fetus.

If you’re overweight before you get pregnant, chances are you’ll gain more weight than average during the pregnancy and retain more than a normal weight woman after delivery. The best solution is to lose weight before you get pregnant. If that’s impossible, your doctor may put you on a calorie- controlled diet to help prevent excess weight gain during your pregnancy.

Except under certain conditions, such as when a doctor finds evidence of heart disease, cervical or vaginal complications, or a history of miscarriages, low to moderate level exercise is usually encouragedduring pregnancy. The type and amount of exercise you do while you’re pregnant is a decision that has to be made with your doctor.

The delight, a mom of a newborn reduces to the extent when she is able to stand up and look herself in the mirror. Pregnancy, for some women is the period of delight and joy. But this delight sometimes put her on the way of putting on an extra weight. The new moms are sometimes de-motivated when they bring their newly born sweetheart to home from the hospital because she is not in her pre-pregnancy figure. This can contribute to her frustration. Unluckily, fitting a new mom into her pre-pregnancy outfits soon after the delivery is unrealistic.

Average women gains around 30 pounds of weight during pregnancy. The newborn baby is around 6-7 pounds. The mom during delivery only sheds around 12 pounds of weight, of the baby, placenta and amniotic fluids. This leaves her with an extra around 18 pounds of weight. Weight loss after pregnancy is possible but the goals should be practical as it requires a lot of work and patience.

A wonderful news is that if you’re breast-feeding, you can start eating normally again, but the especially good news is that your metabolism will naturally speed up during this process. If you’re breast-feeding only (not supplementing your baby’s diet with formula), you may burn up to 600 calories a day. That’s the equivalent of two aerobic workouts! So although reducing calories and increasing activity is considered safe for breast-feeding mothers, and normally doesn’t affect lactation, you don’t have to challenge yourself, because you’ll belosing weight naturally. And there’s more happy news: A study showed that your naturally speedy metabolism during this time helps the weight come off around your hips and butt!

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