Posts Tagged ‘fitness’

Bowling And Weight Control

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

Bowling is a sport that can become quite emotional and because of that, it can also be used to relieve stress and tension. It is a good way to let off steam for people who lead a stressful life and have a high pressured job. Aside from these benefits, bowling can be a useful element in your weight loss program.

After all, you get to move a lot of your body muscles in bowling. It keeps you physically active, so you burn calories as well. Therefore, not only are you getting some physical activity, but you will be getting rid of some excess fat too. It will help keep your back, leg and arm joints supple, particularly if you are over 50.

If you take part in this sport, you will be almost assured to keep your body in top condition. Depending on how much weight you have to lose and how often you play bowls, you may be able to give up your other weight control exercises.

That would suit most dieters as it is the exercising that bothers most people. It would also save you money as you will not have to pay to use a fitness center and buy work out clothes and track suits. The best thing to do would probably be to join a neighborhood team. These teams usually have local competitions, so you might be required to play twice a week.

The weight control advantages of bowling fall into the following categories.

Light muscle toning is achieved by normal bowling activities like walking, bending and swinging your arm in order to loose the ball. This is just like when you exercise by walking, which is one of the best physical exercises. Bending and swinging your arm to bowl is also good for your joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Moreover, it also promotes good blood circulation. So, overall, bowling is a fun way of exercising and losing weight in the process.

Mild fat burning will be achieved by the actions of walking, flexing, stretching, and swinging. If you play often you will be losing weight on a regular basis too. It can be extended by walking to and from the venue of parking your car half a mile away from the club. Walk up and down any stairs involved, do not take the lift

Depression can be avoided by mixing with your friends and fellow team members. Many dieters do become depressed when dieting. This can be for several reasons. Your weight loss might be slower than you hoped for or it could be chemical. A sudden drop in calories could leave you feeling down.

Bowling can help here by helping you build friendships. You get to create good social relationships, which are known to promote better heart performance and good heart performance is a good match with weight loss or control.

So, you see, bowling is not just a great, fun game, it also helps build strength and helps you expend energy, which means calories, and gives you some exercise that you would not otherwise have had.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with how to lose weight online. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight?

Disappointment and Rapid Weight

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

It is a good idea to set yourself targets, if you want to achieve a goal. However, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this. For instance, if you are a size 14 and you spend a fair bit of money on some beautiful size 8 dresses as motivation, you will probably feel quite cheesed off if you are not wearing them a month later.

It is not a good idea to make yourself feel awful, so the right way to have done this would have been to set smaller, more easily attainable, less expensive goals. A consequence of disappointing yourself like that could be depression or / and desperation and desperation to meet your targets can lead to stupid decisions.

Foolish decisions like following a fad diet, because it promises you rapid weight loss. There is no such thing as sustainable rapid weight loss without a change of lifestyle. Yes, you can go for surgery and have lumps cut off yourself or you can pump yourself full of diuretics and squeeze the water out of yourself, but the weight will come back, unless you change the way you live.

Any diet that promises rapid weight loss without recommending a healthier, more active lifestyle is doubtful. Many of these types of diet are fad diets. The organizers of these diets are only interested in selling you magic potion drinks or powders as meal substitutes. I have even seen one company selling magnetic earrings which were ‘guaranteed’ to make you lose weight, if you dieted and did more exercise!

Of course you will lose weight if you diet and exercise, but carrying the earrings around with you is not helping. It just adds to the depression when you read in the newspaper that the guru you have been following is outed as a charlatan.

Here are a few tell-tale signs to help you spot a phony diet:

Any diet that tells you to miss meals should start red lights flashing. If you stop eating, you are reducing the number of calories you are consuming, so you can expect to lose weight. That is not rocket science. You do not need to pay for advice like that.

However, this approach does not necessarily work either. If you miss a meal, your blood/sugar levels will drop and that has different consequences for different people, but none of them are advantageous. It will also increase the likelihood that you will overeat at the next meal. It would be better to eat a salad, an apple or a banana instead.

Any weight loss program that says you can lose weight without exercising or without dieting is definitely dodgy too, because exercise is necessary for good blood circulation and metabolism, which are vital to your losing weight and living healthily.

However, exercise alone will not guarantee good health, you have to diet too. In this context ‘dieting’ just means eating healthily.

You do not have to wear anything special to lose weight either. Electric vibrating belts, magnetic earrings, sweat-inducing cummerbunds and the like, do not work. Full stop. They do not work and in a similar vein, powder and liquid substitutes are not worth it either. Get a liquidizer and make your own or just eat properly.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with losing weight quicklys. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight?

Belly Fat Diets

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The method of getting rid of the unsightly and potentially dangerous fat deposit around the waist cannot be undertaken seriously without a satisfactory belly fat diet, because the procedure has to start with a proper diet, if it is going to work. You must have the right mental approach too, but it is not enough on its own.

You need to analyze your eating habits carefully, identify the good and bad foods that help or impede the weight loss process and eliminate the bad ones. There are many choices of belly fat diets to be had online and most of them emphasize the importance of adhering to a low-calorie routine.

Everybody knows these days that wholemeal, unprocessed or brown grains, seeds, certain vegetables, fruits, lean meat and fish should be the main ingredients of any diet and it is the same for a belly fat diet too. Another useful strategy to use against that obstinate layer of fat around the waist is the use of good fats or oils in your cooking and the best examples here are olive oil, soy and flax oil as well as monounsaturated fats from avocado pears and seeds. Nutrients like these control the appetite, which means that they reduce the pangs of hunger by inducing a feeling of satiety.

One advantage of a belly fat diet is that it creates excellent benefits for the whole digestive system, which means that constipation and bloating will be eliminated, thereby permitting your body to purge itself of toxins. Toxins can also be flushed away more easily if you drink plenty of water, fruit juice and green tea for instance.

Furthermore, a good night’s sleep of approximately eight hour’s sleep, together with moderate physical exercise will encourage the effectiveness of any belly fat diet that you may choose.

Some of the belly fat diets provide suggestions for different breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks, so that the dieter does not have to count calories – a sort of pick-n-mix approach. But it is far better to find lists of foodstuffs with portion sizes and their calorie count, so that you have enough flexibility to take pleasure in a wider variety of food.

It is not important for this article, which line of attack you want to take: high fibre, low carbohydrate, high protein, vegetarian, or fruit only, it is always a good idea for you be conscious of what you are putting on your table, because this will enable you to make a clearer identification of what works and what does not work for the loss of belly fat in your own individual case.

The main goal of any belly fat diet is to burn more calories than you consume. If you do not achieve this, no positive results will appear even after all the dietary changes you have implemented.

Whether you choose to go for calorie control or you prefer to continue with a slightly adjusted variety of your normal diet combined with more physical exercise, it is up to you, but you have to make certain that you avoid any dangers and excesses of any kind and try to take a mid-course approach to weight loss, so that you might enjoy your accomplishments in a healthy condition.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with losing weight quickly. If you have an interest in losing weight, too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight?

Menopause And Weight Increase

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Studies of women aged fifty and over show that most women in this age group are positive that their weight increase is connected with the menopause in their judgment. If you take into account the fact that some people might be using this as an excuse and that others may not have made allowances in their diet for decreased levels of activity due to lifestyle changes, it is still hard to explain why women in this age group tend to put excess weight on different areas of the body, especially the stomach, whereas any weight gained in younger women tends to be on the hips.

In fact, the truth is that hormonal changes do have a part to play in this phenomenon, although the method is not completely understood. At menopause a woman stops ovulating, her monthly menstruation periods end, and her body produces much lower levels of the female hormone estrogen, which is responsible for the ovulation process.

Low estrogen has been shown to cause weight gain in animals and it is almost certainly the reason why women’s bodies change shape. While women of childbearing age accumulate fat in the lower body, after the menopause they store it on the abdomen instead, like men. This leads to a greater risk of heart disease.

At the same time, both men and women tend to find muscle turning to fat as they grow older and the metabolism slows down. This means that if you do not adjust your eating behavior, you will most likely find that your weight increases. A person of 60 just does not need as many calories as a person of 40.

Hormonal therapy with estrogen is sometimes prescribed to control menopausal symptoms. Many women will be astonished to hear that studies have shown that hormonal therapy does not result in weight increase. Some women experience bloating and water retention in the early stages of hormonal therapy but this is usually temporary.

Hormonal therapy can diminish the risk of heart disease by preventing the changes in storage of body fat around the abdomen and lowering cholesterol. On the other hand, hormonal therapy has been linked with an increased risk of breast cancer in some studies.

If you find that you are gaining weight around the menopause, there are several things you can do.

Firstly, you should eat a healthy, low fat diet with plenty of fibre and avoid sugar.

Secondly, you have to take regular exercise. As people get older their physical activity levels naturally go down. Work frequently becomes less physically demanding, there are no kids to run around after, we take less active holidays and do things more slowly. Thirty minutes of reasonable physical activity every day will help to balance out the effect of this.

Thirdly. you must maintain your muscle strength and mass. Use weights for arm muscles and walking or cycling for your legs.

Fourthly, try not to get worried about the changes to the shape of your body. If you are not too overweight, but simply have a thicker waist and slimmer legs, then don’t worry.

As customary, you ought to seek advice from your doctor before commencing any exercise program, if you have any medical conditions or if your fitness levels are low. Your doctor can also help with symptoms of the menopause and weight gain.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with how to lose weight online. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight? Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

How To Keep To Your Resolution To Lose Weight.

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Without a shadow of a doubt, the most common New Year’s resolution in the West is to lose weight. However, it is also the first New Year’s resolution most apt to be broken! Losing weight is not difficult in theory, but practice is oh, so different. This is because it involves lifestyle changes.

Our bodies change as we get older and typically our level of activity decreases too. Maybe, we get an office job with a promotion, whereas we used to work ‘in the field’. But people in general, do not regulate their diet to match their change in circumstances. We sit behind our desks or in retirement and think we can still eat and drink like we did twenty years ago. Big mistake!

Luckily, there are dozens of diets available to help us attain our weight loss goals. There are the traditional calorie counting diets, as advocated by Weight Watchers; there are the ‘new era’ diets like Atkins, which have us counting carbohydrates and there are no end of fad diets which are frankly not worth wasting time talking about.

The choice of which diet you would like to follow is all yours, of course, but it is well worth exploring the main types of diet to see which one will suit you. Then you must determine whether you will require the help and encouragement of a weekly visit to a club or not, or whether you can get that companionship from an online club of slimmers, where you talk to fellow slimmers in the club forum online.

It is also worth fixing in your mind, why you want to diet. Is it to look better? Or to feel more at ease in yourself? Or is it for health reasons? Or all three? Have a think about your reasons and let them motivate you. Whenever, you feel like packing it all in, remember your motivation. Get a book and journal your progress, but first write your motivation in bold capitals on the front page or cover. Keep it in front of you and read it out loud to yourself every day.

Consult some of the slimming sites online and work out a few key metrics like the average weight people are for your height, sex and body type and your BMI or body mass index. Write these figures on the first page of your book too and use them as the ultimate goals.

You could produce a graph and plot your weekly weight to see how you are doing. Set realistic goals and targets. You can get heaps of free information from the Weight Watchers and Atkins websites or / and go to see your doctor for advice and leaflets.

Aim to shed something like 10-20 pounds in the first month and eight to ten per month after that. Go slowly and aim to go slowly, because then you will hit your targets and you won’t feel like giving up. When you get within five to ten pounds of your target weight, assuming that you have lost a lot of weight, throttle back a little and allow yourself a little more leeway. Drop your target to one pound a week, so that you will get a feel for ‘eating normally’.

The dreaded exercise; you have to face it, you will have to do more exercise, but two times thirty minute walks a day is usually enough. You could swim once a week too or get an exercise machine, if you are tied to the house by family.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with how to lose weight online. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight? You can get a unique content version of this article from the Uber Article Directory.