• Increase Time span of your cardio exercises: Increase the time by  at least fifteen minutes and try to make it a five days a week routine. It will burn your calories and keep your heart healthy. Once you get it into your routine, you won’t find it difficult to stick to the routine.
• Eat Five Times A Day: If you take meals five times a day and into smaller quantities, it will keep your metabolic rate high and you will burn fat faster. Smaller meals over a day will keep the hunger away from you. In the meanwhile plan your five smaller meals intelligently. Try to avoid fried and fatty food. Drink good old plain water instead of soda drinks.  
• Pay Attention to Your Fiber Intake: You have to eat green leafy vegetables, broccoli,cabbage and other wholegrain to make your diet sufficiently filled with fiber. If you diet has sufficient quantity of fiber, you will feel satisfied and filled and tend to eat less.
• Build Muscles: Muscles are metabolically more active compared to fat. So pay attention to build some muscles in your body. Try to have a healthy ratio of fat and muscles according to your body weight. Add some weight training to your exercise. You don’t have to lift weight like a champion. Take load according to your age and stamina.
• Reduce Your Intake of Processed Food: Reduce refined food from your diet. They contained lots of fat, salt and sugar. No don’t carry much nutritive value. Reducing processed food, refined sugar and flour from your diet help you in reducing calorie intake.

Have you ever pondered upon if weight loss can be unhealthy as well? Yes it is true that weight loss can be extremely unhealthy at times. Here we would try to define an unhealthy weight loss and see how we can enforce a healthy weight loss.

A weight loss is termed as unhealthy when it can lead to various heath issues, usually because of method adopted for such weight loss. It is obvious that most of the diet programs that cut out certain foods from our daily intake tend to induce unhealthy weight loss. Cutting out certain items results in a quick drop in the energy levels and other bodily processes. However, as soon as these items are included back in the diet, the weight lost comes back very fast. On gaining the weight back people very often start on a different diet plan that cuts out some other food items and the process goes on like this.

We are all aware that our body tunes to a specific diet that we take and the constant changes in the diet plan confuses our bodies. Especially the diet plans that restrict intake of food items can have the reverse effect on our weight. Our body may feel starved and thus induce us to have more calories than usual resulting in a weight gain. The quick weight fluctuations can cause many other health problems and thus it is considered to be an unhealthy way of losing weight.

Healthy weight loss on the other hand is usually an outcome of including enough physical exercise, a healthy diet plan and a sound sleep pattern in our daily routine. Yes, a sound sleep is as essential as regular exercise and a strict diet for you to healthily lose weight. Because of a sound sleep you tend to feel fresh instead of feeling tired and cut down on restoring to junk food for activeness and to keep your sugar level up.

The lifestyle change is of prime importance to healthy weight loss instead of mere changes in the diet plans. The fact is that many a times you will not need to cut anything out of your diet and still can induce weight loss that is healthy. You will be surprised to find some of the best plans that allow you to eat anything you want to once in a while just to keep you motivated enough.

Setting realistic weight loss goals again helps you to adopt methods that are healthy. You need to be patient with the downtrend of your body weight rather than desiring it to happen in a flash.

Succinctly put, to achieve healthy weight loss you need to be focused on the realistic goals, get enough sleep and exercise regularly. Some may find it difficult but it is worth the pains in the end. 

Have you heard the advice extended to some of the top-notch athletes to gulp an energy drink or a bar as soon as they are done with their workout? Are you also trying to follow the same advice despite you not being an athlete or a sportsperson? If yes, then please stop immediately. The researchers have found that the practice of eating immediately following a workout may not prove to be as smart for you as it does for the athletes.

Barry S. Braun, director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts and the co-author of the study said, "If people are going to go out and exercise to benefit their health, they should not be eating back the calories immediately upon finishing, or within a couple of hours of finishing,". Barry S. Braun added "In order to maintain the benefits, you need to be in this calorie deficit."

"Athletes are always advised to do exactly the opposite," he continued. "That’s great for athletes, but for the other 99.9 percent of the world, that’s probably the wrong thing."

Braun and other researchers authored the papers detailing the findings of their studies that were later published in leading Journals. The studies were carried on ten young volunteers consisting of overweight men and women.

In first study the volunteers walked treadmill for about 30 minutes everyday and burned 500 Kcal every time. 50 percent of the group was advised to have a high carb calorie drink soon after the treadmill walk while the other 50 was not supposed to take anything.

The study noticed that for the people who did not take anything after the exercise, effectiveness for the insulin increased by up to 40%. However the same was missing in the group that took carb-high calorie drink after the workout.

The researchers in the second study tried comparing the impact of different kinds of calories on the insulin efficiency. The volunteers now did cycling for about 75 minutes. After the exercise this time 50 percent were given a diet that was full of carbs while the remaining people were given a low carb diet with the same calories though. Insulin was effective in people who were given low carb diets.

"It seems as though giving people back carbohydrates blunts or diminishes this exercise benefit," Braun said.

In the third study the timing of the post workout snack was changed. After cycling for 75 minutes the volunteers were given the similar meal but at different timings. Some were given the food before the workout, some immediately after the workout, and some were given the meal after a considerable gap of three hours. The study revealed that whatever the time of the meal was, it did not affect the insulin effectiveness in the volunteers.

"That really didn’t make a whole lot of difference, which surprised us," Braun stated. "What did seem to matter was whether you ate back calories, and whether those calories were mostly carbohydrates."

It is important to understand that fat cells once formed in the body stays forever and can never be gotten rid off. It can however reduce in size with diet control and medical treatments but cannot be taken out of the body altogether. Thus to keep a healthy weight, it is paramount to follow a healthy eating habit and keep your body adequately exercised.

Simply put, two components are vital for maintaining healthy weight and those are eating less caloric food and giving the body adequate exercise and activity. Here are some of the tips to developing a structured approach towards weight loss:

Following a customized diet – While trying to lose weight, it is never a good practice to lose so much in too short a span. Usually people start observing strict fast or go on liquids alone and at the end the day feel fatigued and not feel happy for the weight thus lost. Losing beyond 1 to 2 pounds a week is unhealthy. By consuming 500 to 1000 calories less on a daily basis, one can easily reduce about 1 – 2 pounds in a week. When done over a period of time, this weight reduction can help you fight obesity in a healthy way. Reducing caloric food however requires choosing your diet appropriately. Though you have the choice of choosing less caloric and less carbohydrate diet, you need to at the same time ensure that you include healthy fats like monosaturated and polyunsaturated fats to keep yourself healthy.

Keeping your body exercised – Healthy weight demands reasonable physical activity. Exercises should be a part of everyone’s daily routine and people desirous of losing weight should perform moderate intensity exercise for at least an hour every day. Adding some more physical activities like deliberately choosing stairs over lift or getting up often from the desk or sofa to carry out tasks can be highly useful.

Gaining knowledge on diet pills – Many diet pills are sold over the counter and can have greater medical implications if consumed without doctor’s advice. Xenical is a diet pill that contains Orlistat, which has the potential to decrease the dietary fat by 30%. Other prescribed diet pills include amphetamine derivatives and sibutramine (Meridia). These are safe to use in consultation with your doctor. However the effect of such medicines usually stops with discontinuance. Long-term result of these medicines is not fully established so far. Over-the-counter medicines also include pills that contain phenylpropanolamine and such pills should not be consumed. Pills with this ingredient are known for enhancing the risk of blood pressure and stroke. Such pills can precipitate nervousness, high palpitation, and jittery feelings.

Getting surgical treatment for obesity – Depending on the severity of obesity, surgery might be the ultimate remedy. In such situations, the doctors perform a surgical procedure where the intake of food is made to a limited quantity. This is done by gastroplasty also known as stomach stapling, where a large incision is made to create a small pouch in the stomach to allow restricted amount of food for digestion. The same surgery is also done through laparoscopy where making a large incision is avoided and this procedure is popularly called as stomach banding.

Having an idea on the issues related to obesity and by following a systematic plan, obesity can largely be fought against.

Do you know that various exercises that you undertake affect some of the many hormones that influence your appetite? What is interesting is something that is reveled in one of the recent researches. This research at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom reveled that aerobic exercises have affect on two hormones i.e. ghrelin, only hormone that stimulates appetite and peptide YY that actively suppresses appetite. On the other hand resistant exercises have impact on only ghrelin.

The participants in this study, 11 male university students were subjected to three eight-hour sessions. In the first session they were subjected to rigorous 60 minutes on treadmill after which they were rested for remaining seven hours. In the second 90 minutes of weight lifting exercises were involved with the balance 6 and half hour used for resting. The third session did not involve any exercises at all. The participants were given two meals in each of the sessions and along the way the researchers kept noting the ghrelin and peptide YY levels.

The researchers found that the session on treadmill had a dual affect. It caused ghrelin levels to drop and peptide YY levels to go up. Treadmill is a form of aerobic exercise. On the other hand the weight lifting (a type of non-aerobic exercise) session caused changes in ghrelin levels but did not have major effect on the peptide YY levels.

The hunger ratings of the participants indicted to the fact that both aerobic and non-aerobic exercises were successful in curbing appetite. However since aerobic exercises had an impact on two hormones, its effect on suppressing hunger was larger. In any case these changes were short-term changes and stayed for about two hours including exercise time.

“The finding that hunger is suppressed during and immediately after vigorous treadmill running is consistent with previous studies indicating that strenuous aerobic exercise transiently suppresses appetite,” said senior author David J Stensel of Loughborough University. “The findings suggest a similar, although slightly attenuated response, for weight lifting exercise.”

The findings may provide definitive leads to effectively find out solution to obesity and weight management problems.

The next factor that you must keep in mind when it comes to lose weight programs is that an effective regimen that will help you lose weight and that will ensure that you keep the weight off into the future, is a weight loss system that will consist of three essential elements:

• Stretching
• Aerobics
• Strength training

In order to get your body in the best possible condition (which includes losing unwanted and unhealthy weight and then keeping it off) you need to make sure that you embark on a program that incorporates these three vital elements. Your weight loss and healthy weight maintenance objectives can not be met without a system that utilizes each of these three elements appropriately.

Another factor that you need to keep in mind is that your workout and your exercise must be done regularly. You can not approach losing weight through exercise in a hit and miss manner. If you do approach weight loss (and healthy weight maintenance) in a random and undisciplined manner, you will never meet your goals and objectives.

Finally, yet another factor that you need to understand to lose weight is that exercising is only half of the equation. Along with exercise, you need to initiate and then maintain a healthy diet. The reality is that if you exercise but do not eat right, you will not meet your goals. And if you eat right but do not exercise, you will not meet your goals either. You must do both.

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It’s extremely vital to identify the kind of excuses that are likely to hold us from our objective and accordingly we must conquer one excuse after the other, in order to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Following are the commonly identified excuses along with a possible remedy:

No time: By far the most common excuse but doesn’t hold enough conviction. It simply means that your priorities are different. If you prioritize something, you somehow manage time for that particular task no matter how busy or how preoccupied you are. If you still genuinely feel your day is filled with lots of activities, then squeezing in 20 minutes from your sleep can definitely provide you the time required for exercising. Start your day 20 minutes early on a daily basis.

Tried and failed: This is again one of the common excuses often used. Though it is a fact that failing after trying once can de-motivate anybody, but considering the health benefits, this particular task should be given a second chance definitely. Analyze the reasons when you failed the last time and try to avoid those pitfalls in your new endeavor. Try to set realistic goals rather than being overenthusiastic in the beginning only to lose interest subsequently.

Unaffordability: Shedding the myth that only expensive gyms can help you reduce weight is something like giving control of your life to someone else. There are a lot of natural and inexpensive means to keep you fit and healthy. Walking can be a best start to loose weight that is natural and at the same time inexpensive.

I am extremely obese: Unless the doctor has advised against exercising, this excuse is something that should be neglected. With excess weight you may not be able to do exercises that other may easily adapt themselves to. But you sure can start taking baby step to get yourself to a shape where you can take on further exercises to maintain the lost weight. Again walking is the best and easy way to get started.

No exercising equipment in my possession: This is an unacceptable excuse. The amount of exercises people used to do in olden days without even realizing is simply amazing! Walking up the stairs, mopping floors, opting for manual means rather than automatic machines to do tasks in the kitchen (grinding, dish washing, etc) are simple and easy substitutes for expensive exercising equipment.

Other common excuses: “I am too old to get started”, “I don’t know how to exercise”, “I feel tired generally”, “I cannot feel motivated enough” are such excuses which will lead you to experiencing an unhealthy lifestyle. These must be overcome in whatever way if you are truly desirous of leading a peaceful and healthy life.

Intervals are short time periods (about a minute) of rigorous exercise combined with your regular aerobic sessions. For instance, incorporating a faster walk of about a minute after every five minutes of normal walking can intensify the weight loss results significantly.

The pattern will be something like:

1. Start with a normal three to five minute warm up session and then a 5 minute workout.
2. After the first five minutes, do your first interval of one minute rigorous walking or jogging.
3. Before that one minute ends, bring yourself to your normal pace by slowing down.
4. Maintain the slowed down exercise for about four minutes.
5. The next minute i.e. the fifth minute should have a one minute interval of rigorous work out. This cycle should continue throughout your workout session.

You would be amazed at the benefits that intervals provide:

1. You can overcome the weight loss plateau through intervals.
2. Intervals aid you in pushing your body to experience a greater level of aerobic fitness. Incorporating intervals helps you to move from anaerobic threshold to anaerobic metabolism – this conditions your body to get prepared for more intense exercises.
3. Intervals increase the level of body fitness and enable you to perform difficult exercises with greater ease. This in turn will allow you to burn more calories as you will be able to exercise at a greater intensity.
4. Increased fitness not only helps you do better and difficult exercises with ease, it also restrains you from getting fatigued and enables you to feel energetic the entire day.
5. Basal metabolic rates are increase when intervals are incorporated in your regular exercise regime. Once the metabolism is increased it aids in the process of burning calories, even while your body is resting.
6. Intervals are especially beneficial in toning your muscle and toning is best achieved through intervals rather than other aerobic exercises.
7. Intervals during the exercise session can keep you sufficiently motivated as there is a frequent break from the monotonous workout.
8. Intervals best energize our bodies.

If you are intending to add some level of exhilaration to your exercise, give intervals a try is not all a bad option!

Regular exercising, even in small doses keeps your body fit and strengthens and builds up  your crucial muscles.  In addition to exercising should also pay attention to foods that are needed to keep you healthy.  In a hurry to lose weight you should avoid eating foods that your body needs whether you are slim or fat. The study says:

The take-home message is that, even among older people and during a fairly short period of time, exercise produces metabolic changes that require the expenditure of fewer calories during physical activity.

Types of exercises that help in shedding excess calories

Aerobic and anaerobic are the two types of exercise that significantly help in burning excess calories. The word Aerobic means ‘with oxygen’ and doing aerobic exercises (walking, jogging, swimming etc) for an extended period, the oxygen is delivered to the muscles through blood and lungs. The word anaerobic, on the other hand, means ‘without oxygen’ and are often called as fitness regime. Examples of anaerobic exercise is weight lifting, where the body requires only short bursts of energy and are not done over an extended period.

The best out of these two exercises

If you are desirous of burning calories instantly, then doing aerobic exercise is the best. If however, you are trying to have your metabolic rate increased then anaerobic exercise is most suitable. A combination of both works best for an overall weight loss endeavor.

Eating pattern before exercise

Never eat just before starting your exercise. Maintain a gap of 3-4 hours between your food and exercise. Your diet should include rich carbohydrate and low fat meal. Steer clear of fried and fatty food. With foods rich in carbohydrate and low in fat, you will be able to exercise for a longer duration and maximum your calorie burning capacity. Do sip water at frequent intervals and avoid any kind of sports drinks as they normally contain high calories.

Eating pattern after exercise

After exercise, your body needs food to refuel your energy. But do not shift your food choice too much. Maintain the same high carbohydrate content and low fat content in your food. Some people do not feel like eating after a vigorous exercise. This is not an issue unless you are sure of not resuming your exercise in next 12 hours, because the body needs to be replenished with energy stores of enough carbohydrate contents. If your body is nor sufficiently recharged, you will feel fatigued and not be able to do any further exercise. Thus ensure a sumptuous intake of carbohydrate contents in your diet along with plenty of water.