Archive for February, 2011

Best Foods To Cook With And Burn Fat

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

If you want to lose weight and keep it off, it’s good to know about some fat burning foods. Diet is the number one controller of how much fat your body stores or burns, although there are other factors including exercise, how well you handle stress (especially if you’re a female), and even mental activity. All of those things are important, and there’s even a small amount attributable to genetics, but without eating the right foods–and avoiding the wrong foods–you’re still going to be overweight, at least eventually.

Let’s look at some foods that are known fat burners, especially some that have gotten a bad rap for purely mythological (that is, false) reasons. In fact, let’s look at some things that people don’t eat directly, but cook with, that are real fat burners that most people don’t think of as such.

1) Coconut oil. Now, because coconut oil contains fats, people today love to assume that it must be unhealthy to eat (cook with), at least on a regular basis. The opposite is true. There are only certain kinds of saturated fats that are unhealthy for you and are found in cooking oils. Partially hydrogenated oils (which are lab creations) are such kinds of bad fats. So are vegetable oils (which is why french-fries get hated on all the time; if you make home-made french-fries and use olive oil or seed oil they are not bad for you at all well, unless you are already overweight). Coconut oil’s saturated fat is unique in that it’s a medium-chain fatty acid (MCFA). Your body metabolizes MCFAs easily compared even with other healthy fats, and their chemical nutrients are then sent straight to your liver and immediately transformed into energy. Higher energy levels mean higher metabolic levels and more ability to do physical exercise which also burns off more fat. Coconut oil is also rich in lauric acid, which is well known for helping the body ward off fungal growth, bacterial infection, and viral infection.

2) Butter. This means real butter. Margarine is evil. Margarine is unhealthy with its lab-created fats and But margarine was created in the wake of the myths about cholesterol and all saturated fats being bad for you and causing weight gain and heart disease. Butter is high in cholesterol–but it’s the good cholesterol that your heart lives on! Since butter feeds your heart, this gives you more energy and helps raise your metabolism and thus allows you to burn off more calories and more fat faster.

3) Olive oil. Olive oil provides a very healthy fat that is only found in select foods called Omega 9. Omega 9 is also found in sesame oil, but in lesser quantities. Omega 9 is proven to: lower bad cholesterol levels; help more efficiently metabolize good cholesterol (like butter); enhance the immune system; reduce insulin resistance (which allows faster and more efficient metabolism of glucose, thus preventing diabetes and helping reduce weight); and reduce the risk of atherosclerosis.

When you cook or bake, use the above substances instead of margarine or vegetable oils or corn oils or that Crisco stuff. And you can have french-fries just as long as you make them yourself, just to be sure!

Top Three Fat Burning Exercises

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

What’s the best way to burn off unwanted fat through exercising and working out? What’s the best way to lose weight efficiently and as rapidly as possible while remaining healthy and not becoming scrawny, weak, and lacking energy? There are a few highly efficient but healthy ways to achieve these ends that. Yet, for many people, these methods will be surprising. At least, some of them will be.

You’ll find that you can just forget about aerobic exercises. That might be the first surprise. The second surprise may be that much of what you can do with exercises to lose weight only takes you less than 15 minutes per day. Yes, that’s right.

So, let’s look at the top fat burning exercises that you can do to lose weight fast but in a healthy way. And remember, you have to eat right when you get into these exercises. That means high protein, healthy fats, only complex carbs (and eaten moderately), low sugar, and no refined grains or other empty carbs. And don’t under-eat. You want about 2,000 healthy calories per day (even more if you are a naturally larger person; just listen to your body).

1) Middle and long distance running. If you’ve never done serious running before, you have to start off rather slowly. Eight-minute miles are okay and you can even go as little as 15 minutes per run at first. But soon enough you need to get up to 30 to 60 minutes of running at a time. Your pace will naturally increase over time. Remember, this is not jogging, so you do want to push yourself. At the same time, it’s not sprinting. It is imperative that you have a good pair of running shoes with excellent cushioning so that you protect your knees from the impacting of running. You may want to look into taking some joint lubrication supplements. And don’t neglect stretching thoroughly after you run. Go for five days per week.

2) Tabata Training. This is a type of what is known as interval training, named for Dr. Izumi Tabata at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo. Believe it or not, after a brief warm-up which can include something like a few minutes skipping rope, you can do your daily Tabata workout in just four minutes! But here’s the deal: this will be the most intense and physically exhausting four minutes of your workout life. You select an exercise that works your whole body (so this won’t be just running or cycling, or even just sprinting), and then push yourself as hard as you can for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, and repeat this 8 times.

3) The PACE workout. Created by Dr. Alan Sears, PACE is another regimen of interval training. A PACE workout takes you 12 to 15 minutes per day. PACE was carefully designed to give you the same fat burning and conditioning you get from distance running but with less chance of injury from too much impacting or getting burned out from too much distance.

These are three of the very best workout regimens you can do to lose weight fast in a healthy way. The best thing to do is combine all three, doing a different one each day six days per week, or doing one for a week and then switching off to a different one for another week.

Five Super Foods To Burn Fat

Monday, February 14th, 2011

Your health and whether or not you are overweight depend heavily upon how you eat. In fact, your diet is even more important to your weight maintenance than exercise. But what foods should you be eating to help you stay slender while also not compromising your health by causing you to under-eat and becoming weak? There are some healthy foods you can eat to get your weight under control and keep it that way and they taste great!

1) Apples. Apples are abundant with pectin, which lowers the bad cholesterol levels in your blood and keeps your glucose levels balanced. Apples really are one of the superfoods of the world. Another reason apples help you lose weight and maintain healthy weight is that they provide you with plenty of dietary fiber that cleans you out. And still another reason is that eating them instead of candy satisfies your craving for something sweet without filling you with empty calories from refined sugars.

2) Black beans. Beans are good, but black beans are the super-bean for losing weight. They are loaded with fiber like apples are. They are also so high in protein that they count as a meat as well as a bean! When you get plenty of protein in your diet you feel energized and satisfied without needing to resort to eating empty sugars or fatty foods to feel satiated. Furthermore, high protein foods fuel your exercise program and feed your muscles–two more ways of burning away unwanted fat pounds.

3) Grass fed beef. Yes, beef is a food that helps you lose weight–as long as it’s not loaded up with toxins and corn by-products. Grass fed beef is a complete protein, meaning you get all of the essential amino acids that you need when you eat it. Grass fed beef also contains high amounts of creatine, which is the best muscle-building chemical to be found. Again, all this protein gives you energy, builds muscle (which burns off calories way faster than fat tissue does), and leaves you feeling satisfied without needing to resort to eating sugars and saturated fats.

4) Salmon. Salmon is super-rich in Omega-3 fatty acids. A great deal of the problem of excess weight today in the US has to do not with too much fat per se, but with a terrible imbalance of the types of fats in the typical person’s diet. Omega-3 fatty acids should account for about one-third of a person’s fat intake. Instead, it’s usually more like 1/10th ! Eating salmon just twice per week can increase your energy levels and, yes, enhance your mental clarity.

5) Sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes help reduce inflammation in the body. Besides being the root cause of all cancer, inflammation also causes you to put on weight as the body creates fat stores around the inflamed tissues to try to protect them.

You have probably heard of other amazing weight-reduction and weight-control foods. Add the five listed here to that list.

Fast Fat Loss – Good or Bad?

Sunday, February 13th, 2011

Many people who are overweight want to experience fast fat loss. Well, who can blame them? They are sick of being fat and blubbery and want to be lean and healthy–or, presumably healthy. How fast is fast fat loss? How fast is it supposed to be, if it is done in a healthy way? Is there any such thing as losing weight too fast? And if there is, what are the consequences to your health?

The healthy way to rapid or fast fat loss is through a change in the diet and, probably, an enhanced workout program. The way to change your diet is to start eating differently. If you are overweight, you must be eating foods that are not the best for you insofar as your weight goes. But you are likely also not getting enough physical exercise. These two conditions and bad habits typically go hand in hand, with one playing into the other in a vicious circle of staying fat and perhaps gaining more weight.

When you start eating different foods than normal, you alter your body’s metabolic rate. Foods that require more energy to digest raise the metabolic rate. Eating more calories also raises the metabolic rate–but the important point here is that eating additional calories must give you healthy calories, not the empty ones that have led you to being fat. And of course, when you start exercising more you place greater demand on your body and this in turn burns off more of your fat stores.

But, what if you decide you want to quickly lose weight by simply going without eating as much? And, what if you eat as little as possible plus add more exercise? Won’t that really get you the best results in the least amount of time? Isn’t it all just about discipline and will power?

Seeking fast fat loss in the above way is not healthy. For one thing, it really doesn’t work for most people for very long. Going on a semi-fast feels great for a few days or even a week, and you may feel light and giddy, but soon the need for nourishment of the body returns in great force. You will find yourself eating like a glutton to make up for the days when you ate little.

And as far as exercising more while eating little does help, you may as well be trying to kill yourself. Rapid weight loss through non-eating almost always leads to muscle loss. People who try rapid weight loss diets eat very little fats and proteins, and so the body begins eating itself to survive. You need plenty of muscle and fat to burn for hard exercise.

Other negative side effects of rapid weight loss include hair loss (hair needs protein to grow), dehydration (your body flushes itself out as it loses water-rich muscle), chills, loss of sex drive, and ugly loose skin (your skin cannot re-shape itself to your sudden muscle loss fast enough). You want to lose weight by trimming fat, not by losing muscle. And the way to do this is to get on a diet and exercise plan that has you losing just one to three pounds (of fat) per week. That’s authentic fast weight loss.