Your health blog !

Do you have an unwelcome reminder of the past holiday season?

A person’s average weight gain from the end of October through the New Year is 8 pounds. Because of this, many people want to start the year with new habits and new ways to look at controlling their weight.

While staying indoors and indulging in holiday goodies can result in a few extra pounds, for most people, weight gain occurs slowly and unknowingly. Gradual increases in daily calorie intake combined with decreases in exercise result in accumulation of weight and loss of muscle.

Losing weight does not have to mean following a drastic weight loss program or buying expensive diet products. Simple changes in diet habits and increased exercise can be a much more successful way to lose those extra pounds and make sure they don’t return.

The first step in making realistic weight loss goals is understanding your personal body makeup and diet habits. One way to assess your personal body shape is by calculating your waist-to-hip ratio, also called the Apple and Pear Method. To calculate this ratio, divide the measurement of your waist by that of your hips. Men with a ratio greater than 1 and women with a ratio greater than .8 should consider losing weight to benefit their health.

A good eating schedule should include times and portions that utilize the body’s metabolism. This means eating small meals and light snacks throughout the day instead of eating fewer, but larger, meals. In addition, a healthy diet pattern should fit recommended daily food requirements from the food guide pyramid. This includes 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice or pasta; 3 to 5 of vegetables; 2 to 4 of fruit; 2 to 3 of milk, cheese or yogurt; and 2 to 3 servings of meat, poultry, fish, beans, eggs or nuts.

Important to following these requirements is understanding what constitutes a standard serving size. One ounce of cheese, for example, is equal in size to a matchbox. And a standard 3 oz. serving of poultry is approximately the size of a deck of cards. Reading food packages can help in determining serving sizes.

Hire a romanian private investigator

The days are getting longer and that means two important things. One, summer is coming; and two, the rush is on to get that great body in time for bathing suit season.

But here’s the problem: Who’s got time to exercise? With our lives so busy these days work, school, kids, household chores there’s no time left for relaxation, much less exercise.

For many people, exercise means big time, money and commitment. It might mean joining a gym, buying special clothes, and signing up for classes that don’t quite work into the right schedule.

It might mean running for miles every morning. It might mean trying to play those sports on a regular basis that you’d much rather watch on TV.

If none of those definitions of exercise seem to quite fit your lifestyle, maybe you’ll like this definition better. Websters Dictionary defines exercise as “use of limbs for health.” Translation: MOVE! That is something we all do every day.

Now that you can feel good about “exercising” every day, you need to ask yourself a few questions, such as:

1. How much do I already move each day?
2. Is that amount enough for me to stay healthy and fit?
3. If I need to, how can I move a little more each day?

How much do I already move each day? How much movement, or exercise, you get each day is easy to measure. This can be done with the use of a simple tool called a pedometer. Pedometers are inexpensive and can be bought at any sporting goods store. They are easy to set and easy to use.

Pedometers measure both time and distance, so you’ll know how far you went and the amount of time you spent exercising. Just follow the directions for setting up your pedometer and you’ll be ready to measure how much you move, or exercise, each day.

Now, use your pedometer and take one 30-minute walk, or three 10-minute walks, one day. How far did you go? Once you have that number, then you’ll know how far you need to go each day, in distance, to equal the 30-minute goal.

Do you need to get in a little more exercise? Increasing the amount of movement you get each day isn’t hard, but it does take effort. Make yourself park a few more stalls away from the front of the mall each time you go. The next time you have to go up or down one floor, take the stairs instead of the elevator or escalator. At home, walk upstairs each time you have something to put away instead of saving up your items for one trip. And lose that remote control. Walk to the TV to change channels, or take lots of steps searching the house for your remote. Don’t forget to wear your pedometer to measure activity when doing heavy gardening and housework, too.

Remember to be proud of yourself. You do exercise every day, and every extra step you take counts!

The secret to reducing fat in your diet is getting the fat out of your kitchen. Get started by taking fatty foods out of your grocery cart, your kitchen cabinets and the way you prepare food with these tips and techniques:

1. Stop adding fat to other foods. Oily dressings on salad, butter or margarine on bread and greasy gravy on mashed potatoes are common examples of how we load healthy foods with too much fat.

2. Develop fear of frying. Frying makes any food a fatty food, and heating oils to the smoking point is believed to cause rampant free radical production. In addition, there’s evidence that cancer-causing chemicals form when food is charred. So donate your deep-fryer to the neighborhood rummage sale and don’t look back. Instead, look to the many fat-moderating cooking techniques you have to choose from (numbers 3 through 8).

3. Steaming. This is especially good for guaranteeing bright, slightly crunchy vegetables, and it leaves the bulk of their vitamins intact. Fish may be steamed as well.

4. Oven-”frying” for breaded foods. Place your breaded food on a nonstick cookie sheet and bake (at about 400°F for most things), turning if necessary for even browning.

5. Stir-frying. Use a small amount of oil the way skilled Asian chefs do and stir nonstop so the food is quickly seared.

6. Pseudo-sautéing. This is similar to stir-frying but takes a bit longer, as you’re depending on the foods’ natural moisture to assist in the cooking process. Begin with the tiniest quantity of oil and add water as needed — about 2 tablespoons at a time — to provide additional moisture.

7. Oven-sautéing. Set your oven at 400° to 425°F and place vegetables in a pan covered with nonstick cooking spray (use the spray even if you’re using a nonstick pan; it will give the veggies more of a sautéed quality). Remove from the oven when they’re softened.

8. Water-sautéing. The technical term for this is steeping. Heat water first unless you’re doing onions, which get tender faster when started in cold water. The more thinly you chop your veggies, the more quickly and evenly they’ll cook. Make a water sauté zingier by adding the juice of a lime and some high-quality tamari soy sauce. Experiment with the following oil-free sauté liquids (numbers 9 through 15) and discover your favorites. The stronger-flavored items need to be added to water; the others can stand on their own.

9. Vegetable broth. Save broth from cooking vegetables, mix from instant broth powder or make your own homemade stock.

10. Tomato or blended vegetable juice is a flavorful, no-fat sauté item.

11. Lemon juice. Add tangy taste to sautéed food with this flavorizer.

12. Vinegar. Try using balsamic, rice wine and apple cider vinegar when you sauté.

13. Sherry or another red or white wine is an excellent sauté base.

14. Barbecue sauce gives food a smoky flavor without the fat.

15. Fruit juice. Apple, orange and grape juice are especially appropriate for sautéing onions and garlic for use in lentil or rice dishes.

16. Use a lower heat setting when sautéing with less oil.

17. Stir. Let elbow grease replace cooking with grease.

18. Watch the pot. Since water, broth and juice evaporate quickly during cooking, use enough liquid and keep a close watch as you cook.

19. Pureed starches thicken just about anything from pâtés to soups to sauces. You can puree cooked dried beans or pasta, or use mashed potatoes for this purpose.

20. Experiment with chopping and slicing techniques. Cooking with less fat provides the opportunity to learn how the thickness or thinness of various foods affect a dish.

The best exercise for burning calories is aerobic, the sort that makes you feel winded and increases the efficiency with which your heart sends oxygenated blood to your muscles. But weight lifting is also good because it builds calorie-burning muscle. And stretching promotes flexibility and prevents injury. The perennial question is, how much of all of this do you need to do in order to slim down and stay that way? The Surgeon General’s “exercise-lite” prescription — 30 minutes of moderate exercise most days of the week — has its benefits, not least among them lowering the risk of heart disease and osteoporosis. But researchers are finding that on the road to fitness, exercise lite is your granny’s Model T. Those who want a noticeably trimmer body will have to exercise either longer or more intensely.

This is not necessarily as daunting as it sounds. You don’t have to perform herculean feats to trim your waist. You can do something as easy as walking, as long as you do enough of it. Walking, like swimming, running, bicycling, and any number of other activities that get you winded, is aerobic. Not so very long ago our ancestors lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, roaming hundreds of miles a month in search of food and shelter. Evolution shaped our legs for walking. Interestingly, of the successful dieters listed with the National Weight Control Registry — a database that tracks people who have lost 30 pounds or more and kept them off for at least a year — 49 out of every 50 follow a regular walking routine. The advantages of walking can be irresistible: Not only does it burn calories but it’s cheap, convenient, easy on the joints, and almost anyone can do it, either alone or in sociable groups. No definitive study has established exactly how many minutes of walking a day will keep you trim. But ask researchers for their commonsense advice, and over and over you’ll hear 45 minutes a day.

For aspiring exercisers who find three-quarters of an hour a long stretch, it helps to know that breaking up the time — say, into three 15-minute walks — burns calories just as effectively as taking one 45-minute walk. And you can get the same results walking five rather than seven days a week, as long as you make up for the no-exercise days with longer walks of an hour a day. Or you can take a vigorous three-hour hike on Saturday and polish off your week’s total with 45-minute walks on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Exercise, thank goodness, can be sliced and diced any number of ways to fit busy lives.

If you opt for a 45-minute program, how fast will you lose? That depends. A 150-pound person walking 15-minute miles may burn up to 300 calories in 45 minutes. About 3,500 calories equals one pound of body fat. In theory that means this person could lose a pound every 11 to 13 days. Of course, there is no typical 150-pounder, and how fast you lose will depend on your age, starting weight, diet, and metabolism. One person might take months to shed the first five pounds, then lose 20 pounds in six months. Another might lose two pounds a month from the get go.