Harmonia Health

Archive for February, 2010

Your weight loss does not have to be a grueling experience filled with hungry days and exhausted nights. There are many little things that can be done throughout your day to assist your weight loss efforts. These simple weight loss tips are proven to be effective for nearly everyone. Try instituting them in your daily life and get rid of those unwanted pounds.

1. Try to replace one meal a day with a meal replacement shake. These shakes are great for getting the recommended dosage of vitamins and minerals while providing you with the calories you need for energy. Replacing just one meal a day with one of these shakes can greatly increase your chances of losing weight.

2. Water is one of the most overlooked ingredients in weight loss. Drinking plenty of water will keep you feeling full throughout the day and help cut down on the calories you need to take. Water will help keep your energy levels up so that you can accomplish more throughout your day. Try drinking a glass of water with each meal and snack throughout the day to make sure you are getting enough. Many people suggest that the easiest way to get used to drinking a lot of water per day is to drink a glass of iced fresh water as soon as you wake up.

3. Walk everywhere. In today’s society we tend to take as many shortcuts as possible. Elevators and escalators can be found in nearly every building and are always the most popular choice for transportation. However, taking the stairs can greatly increase the exercise you receive throughout the day and help burn those unwanted pounds. Also, bike riding is a great way to burn extra calories. You can probably cover more area than you think. A bicycle is a great way to run some simple errands or visit friends.

4. Eating smaller meals throughout the day is another tip that will help increase your weight loss. Many people eat three large meals a day and end up taking too many calories for the body to use. They will also generally snack in between these meals and take in extra calories. By eating several smaller meals throughout the day the body is able to use the calories as you take them in and will not need to store them where they could become fat.

5. Mixing up your workouts will help keep you motivated and assist with your weight loss. Many people start an exercise routine but quickly lose interest as they become bored doing the same thing over and over again. It is wise to mix several forms of exercise to keep your interest high. Jogging, walking, and biking can be interchanged every day to mix up your workout.

While these five tips will certainly accelerate your weight loss efforts, you should also understand that losing weight is a process that may last for a long time and will require a lot of willpower and effort. For some people, it will be easy while for others it is not. There are many factors that should be taken into account (age, sex, metabolism, activity levels, eating habits, stress, hours of sleep, etc.), but there is one thing for sure: if you really want to lose weight, you can do it sooner or later.

If you are like me then you may be thinking like I did when I first heard about Yoga and wondering how you are going to bend over backwards or end up looking like a pretzel with a head attached to it. It wasn’t until I tried a very basic routine that I discovered how great Yoga makes me feel. The stretching is a bit difficult at first but you feel so relaxed at the end of a session that you end up wanting to continue learning and remaining consistent with your workouts.

Yoga comes from the East and it is a name for a group of stretching and breathing exercises that can have a tremendous positive effect on your mind and body. You do not need any special equipment except for a mat or a place to work where you will not slip as you move along the exercises. I highly recommend investing a small amount of money for Yoga blocks because the will help you when you have to stretch. A good Yoga kit should not cost you more than twenty dollars and it will include a mat, 2 blocks and a stretching band.

There are many ways that you can learn how to practice. If you enjoy working out in your home then you can buy a book or you can use a DVD to learn how to perform Yoga. You will be able to mimic the moves as well as understand the proper breathing techniques by listening to the instructor. It is very helpful to watch it a few times before you begin to make sure that you are comfortable before attempting the moves because once you begin, you will take your cues from the audio instruction and not the visual since you will be looking up, down or away from the screen. (This took me a few tapes to figure out.) Also, if you belong to a health club, many of them offer Yoga classes and this will help you learn because you will be able to see firsthand what you are supposed to be doing and if the class is small enough, the instructor may be able to correct your posture when you are not getting it right. There are plenty of independent Yoga instructors in most areas but it can be a bit pricey at 10-20 dollars per lesson or about $100 per month for an unlimited membership.

As you progress through your diet and exercise plan, I want you to seriously consider giving Yoga a try. Yoga has been practiced for thousands of years and will continue to be used by people for their health and harmony.

Many people are under the impression that for exercise to be beneficial to our health it has to be strenuous exercise, in fact research has shown that exercise done in a mild to moderate form is actually more beneficial to our health.
In order to determine exactly how much exercise we actually need per week we have to be clear about what we actually want to achieve from our exercise routine, do you want to exercise for fitness or for a healthier you. This may sound confusing for often the terms are used to mean the same thing but they do have very different meanings.

Fitness
Fitness is defined in relation to something called physical work capacity, which in simple terms means how much the body can do. A scientific way of telling how fit a person is to measure how much energy they can produce using a cycle erogmeter when cycling at a specific rate or timing how far the person can run on a track in a given time.
Fitness also relates to endurance, strength, power and flexibility, professional footballers and boxers for instance have to have high levels of fitness and endurance.

Health
Health is a broader concept and to be healthy we have to be not only resilient to diseases but also our spiritual and mental wellbeing plays an important role, usually when we say a person is fit we use the term fit and healthy together but this isn’t necessarily true.
An example of this would be if someone exercised regularly say for example playing football but they suffered from a problem such as alcoholism.

It is important to be able to distinguish between healthy and fit for the amount of exercise differs between the two. You need more exercise to get fit and remain in top shape than you do to be healthy.

Fitness training
Many people need a certain level of fitness to enable them to carry out the job they do, for example a fire-fighter, or if they are chosen for a football or rugby team. In order to achieve fitness of this level and maintain it then you would have to follow a structured training regime.
Training such as this is usually carried out in a gym under the supervision of a trainer; examples of training regimes such as these are track running and weight lifting.
The key point to achieving such a high level of fitness is the intensity of the regime and you will probably do more vigorous training than if you were just working out to be healthier.