iTrainer Weight Loss Guide

Drink water

There are different opinions on the exact amount of water you need to consume for optimal health. But fitness experts all agree, you need to drink a lot of water and that’s that. Most experts would recommend at least seven glasses a day. If you are more active you need to increase this amount.

Points to keep in mind about water:

• Even MILD dehydration will slow down one’s metabolism as much as 3%
• One glass of water will shut down midnight hunger pangs for almost 100% of the dieters studied in a U-Washington study
• Lack of water is the #1 trigger of daytime fatigue
• Preliminary research indicates that 8-10 glasses of water a day could significantly ease back and joint pain for up to 80% of sufferers

Get some more sleep

Everyone knows sleep is of crucial importance when it comes to maintaining a healthy body and mind. If you maintain an incredibly healthy diet you may be able to get away with a little less sleep then a person who has a poor diet which is high in sugar and other preservatives. Experts recommend about 8 hours of sleep per night to ensure you wake refreshed and ready to start the day.

Here are some tips to increase the quality of your sleep:

• Avoid watching TV before bed…especially in bed!- Research shows that those who experienced the most sleep disturbances had televisions in their bedrooms and used the TV to fall asleep
• Try a different pillow or mattress. Does your mattress provide the support you like? Do you wake with your back aching? Is there enough room for you and your sleep partner? Do you sleep better, or worse, when you sleep away from home? These are all things to ask yourself to determine if your mattress could be the “sabotage r” of your good night’s sleep. Or more simply, just replacing your pillow with a new, fresh, higher quality version could be all that you need.
• Avoid caffeine late in the day. Did you know that even a small amount of caffeine even 10-12 hours before bedtime can cause problems falling asleep!
• Listen to relaxing music. Establishing a relaxing bedtime routine, such as listening to music, could be just the thing you need to signal your body it is time to sleep.
• Try mind- body techniques. After an action-packed day, your brain and body need to unwind and detox before sleep can occur (a.k.a. you need to chill!) Create a “ritual” for bedtime – take a bath, meditate, do some easy stretches or yoga.

Walk

Walking in today’s society is often overlooked as an effective means of health and fitness.

Taking the lift and the escalator instead of the stairs is common practice and is now a normal part of life. Its time to replace those lazy habits with some simple walking that will improve your health and well-being.

So take the stairs all the time, park the car in the furthest spot and walk the extra hundred meters, carry the shopping to the car instead of pushing it in a trolley.

Here are some important things to keep in mind regarding walking:

• Try and wear comfortable clothing
• Ensure suitable footwear is worn
• Walk steadily, concentrating on a steady heel to toe action, letting your arms swing freely by your sides
• Get in a rhythm and stick to the same stride
• Have a drink of water before you start walking and take a bottle with you
• Have fun, use the walk to de stress and relax

By drinking more water, getting a better quality of sleep and going for a walk you can rid yourself of common health problems associated with poor lifestyle choices. continually having late nights and filling up on sugar are in no way going to enhance your life and longevity.

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What are some of the least effective steps people take when they try to turn their life around? What are some of the things that seem helpful but may actually be harmful to your health and to your efforts to improve it? Just as with the last list, this one will consist of an initial post with the topics and some general information about each, and then follow up posts with more information on each item. So without further ado, here’s the list of things not to do when youíre trying to lose weight, get in shape and be healthy.

1. Fad Diets – You’ve heard of them, you might have even tried them. The diet with nothing but fruit, the diet with nothing but bacon, the Atkins diet, the North Beach diet, the diet with nothing but shrimp or even the diet where you fast for three days to detoxify. All of these are fad diets. They might show some initial weightloss but are difficult to maintain and, in some cases, bad for your health. Youíre much better off living a better lifestyle with healthy eating habits than you are trying one of these fad diets.

2. Do No Exercise – This is particularly bad among women. The belief here is that weightloss and health is something that is directly related to eating habits and nothing else. Exercise and physical activity is seen as unnecessary, which is why you often see women engaging in some diet but seeing little in the way of results. Yes, physical activity is absolutely necessary if you want to be healthy and lose weight.

3. Do No Research – And before the men get too cocky, here’s the common failing of most men. Rather than do research, they simply do what they think is right, what their friend Bob the mechanic thinks is right, what they remember from that show they saw on the Discovery Channel two years ago and what they think that girl they dated two years ago did to lose weight. Many men will do absolutely no research before engaging in life changing projects.

4. Cardio Too Soon – While cardio is a vital part of any healthy life, try it too soon, when youíre still overweight and out of shape, and youíll find yourself out of breath, demoralized and discouraged. Even worse, you could actually damage your health by pushing cardio too fast and too hard before youíre ready for it. Take it easy. It took you years to get your body into the doughy shape itís in now and it will take some time to fix that damage. So start out slow and work your way up.

5. Weight training too hard - This is another one for the guys. We tend to work out too hard when we first get to the gym, especially when it comes to weights. Itís as though we think the whole world is judging us and laughing at the fact that we canít bench press more than 50lbs. So we try too hard and we lift too much and two days later weíre in the most intense pain of our lives. And sometimes, this makes us never come back to the gym. Start out slow and with a low weight, then work your way up.

6. Treat little setback as complete failures – This one is common to both men and women and itís one I wrestled with when I first started recovering from my health meltdown. Itís the tendency to blow up any little setback into a major failure and then self destruct. You wake up in the morning and the scale tells you something you donít want to hear, so you get frustrated and spend the whole day binging on chocolate. You try to walk up two flights of stairs but are out of breath by the second one, so you get demoralized and stop walking altogether. You give in to temptation and eat a donut in the morning and then you beat yourself up and binge on steak and cheesecake in the evening. We tend to think that one small failure means all our efforts mean nothing. Even worse, we use that one small setback as an excuse to leap headlong into failure. After all, if we already had one little failure, then the rest of the dayís worth of major failures doesnít count, right? Wrong. It all counts. Stop using your little failures as justifications for bigger ones. So you made a mistake, so what? Itís not the end of the world.

7. Do it yourself, with no support – Human beings are social creatures. What we do and how we act depends in large part on the people around us. Our eating habits and physical activities are reflections of our upbringing, family, social circle and professional life. A change of health and fitness involves changing all of these things. Therefore, itís much easier to do if you donít try to do it alone. Get your family engaged in your project, get your friends involved. At the very least, keep people informed so they know what youíre trying to do and why. Youíll find that your family and friends can be very supportive of your efforts to live a healthier life and youíll find that your health can greatly benefit from their support.

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Fish oil can help people to lose weight without dieting, according to new research.

Scientists said that fish oil containing Omega 3 fatty acids, plus a little exercise, helped overweight people to shed pounds – even if their diet remained unchanged.

Researcher Alison Hill said: “We were very surprised to see it was so effective, especially since these people were still eating whatever they wanted.”

The Australian team fed daily fish-oil doses to obese people and told them to take moderate exercise.

Another group was given sunflower oil and told to take the same 45-minute walk or run three times a week. Other test subjects received either fish oil or sunflower oil, but took no exercise.

The study found that those who took the doses of fish oil and exercised lost an average of 2kg (4.5lb) over a three- month period. The other groups, including the one which took sunflower oil, which does not contain Omega 3, lost no weight.

Ms Hill said: “The Omega 3 increases fat-burning ability by improving the flow of blood to muscles.”

Source: The Scotsman

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The skin can reflect the general health and well being of the person.

The beauty industry spends a small fortune on the development of products aimed at giving men and women a youthful glowing complexion.

There is no doubt that many products do have a place in the well being of the skin but the easiest and the best way to keep your looks is to take up an exercise regime.

This is now medically proven

Regular workouts are now part of the medical professionsí formula for keeping the skin supple and youthful looking.

The skin is the largest organ of the body and should not be forgotten when exercising.

When you start your workout you should warm up to get the circulation moving around the body and that includes the skin as well as the muscles. Warm ups prevent possible injury from strains.

You will probably have noticed that when you exercise hard your face turns more and more rosy.

This is caused by the heart rate rising and the circulation increasing. This draws the blood to the surface of the body taking nutrients to the skin cells and helping to rid the body of toxins.

Health experts agree that stress levels are reduced significantly by exercise. The adrenal glands start working to produce less testosterone hormones such as DHEA and DHT. And that in turn will have a less adverse impact on the skin.

People who are prone to stress related spots and pimples will find that when they adopt an exercise program, the overall benefits will be a clearer complexion as the pores become unclogged due to the increase in sweat produced.

This will also help to control acne flare-ups, which affect many young people today.

Don’t just take up exercise for the sake of your body.

Take a look in the mirror after a long day walking in the mountains or just a good hike or maybe a long bike ride.

The fresh air and stimulating exercise will make your complexion glow with good health. You will look and feel much better than you did before you started out that morning.

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Unfortunately, spending time sitting in a chair and hunched over a computer is no way to keep yourself in shape. The same goes for an office. Here’s a few discreet ways around this problem which faces lots an’ lots of us daily. They’re quiet and will have a very small impact on your time at work.

1) Push-ups: Pushups are one of the best ways to strengthen your chest, shoulders, arms, abdomen and lower back. That’s half of your body. I’ve been told many times that if you only have time to do one thing and you want a workout, then do push-ups.
Lie face down.

• Place your hands on either side of your shoulders, with your thumbs at the middle of your chest with you feet about shoulder width apart
• Push yourself up off of the floor. Pause for a moment at the top and then exhale as you lower your body back down
• Bring your chest about two inches from the floor, not all the way down
• Repeat

2) Stretch: The benefits of a good stretch are many. It can improv your posture and help promote muscle symmetry. Basically, if you sit slumped in an office chair all day working at a computer you can significantly add to the natural slumping fo the shoulders that occurs with age. This is just one example of many, but you get the idea. Stretching also feels good and promotes a short term increase in circulation and alertness simpley because you are moving. There’s a great primer here on how to stretch effectively and safely in your cube or office.

3) Drink Some Water: Try and always have water near you to drink. Most people don’t know what they’re missing because they walk around dehydrated all the time and they become normalized to operating in this condition. If you’re hydrated you can think clearer, your skin will look and feel better and your mood will generally improve. Skip the soda machine and bring a water bottle to work.

4) Sit on an Exercise Ball Instead of a Chair: This will look silly, but it will also provide your core with a great ìpassiveî sort of workout throughout the day. You see, lots of little muscles we rarely use will get used in order to keep you balanced while you work. It’s not even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it, but it’s there. Improved core strength is great for many reasons. It improves your balance as well as helps protect all your important bits in your torso when you’re doing strenuous activities like playing a sport.

5) Sit-ups: Oh, man doing sit-ups sucks. The reason it sucks is because you’re working a part of your body that rarely gets attention. Doing Sit-ups will help strengthen your abs which can ease back pain. Having nice abs or maybe, just not having that beer gut, can go a long way to help getting you laid as well. (And the health bennies of that are numerous.)

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