Fast Food Health Risks

Posted on August 31, 2011 by tip

A lot of people blame fast food as the main cause of the increasing prevalence of obesity. However, there isn’t any direct linking between fast food and obesity. Some people can eat fast food and yet not gaining weight because they burn as much calories. Some even lose weight because of the amount of calories they burn exceeds the amount of fast food that they consume.

Of course, fast food had been taking a lot of blame these days because of what they contained, such as Trans fat, high amount of calorie and sugar in the sodas. Fast food also comes in big portions, which means that those “bad ingredients” will double or even triple in amount. However, eating fast food will not cause people to be obese; it’s just increasing their risk of becoming obese.

The main cause to blame for obesity is none other than the lifestyle of the people nowadays. Now, more and more people living sedentary lives, while putting in the same or in some cases even more calories than they burn. Also, people who are prone to eat fast food usually eat less amount of healthy food, such as vegetable or fruit.

Therefore, in order to decrease the risk of obesity, there are two things that people can do. It’s either choosing to eat healthier food or burn more calories in the daily life. The choice is yours.

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Ways to Prevent Obesity

Posted on August 29, 2011 by tip

Obesity as one of the most serious health problems to this day is not supposed to be taken lightly. It affects other aspects of health as well as decreasing life expectancy. Fortunately, we can prevent obesity before it happens. Also, this prevention for obesity is easy enough to do.

Basically, obesity is a condition that happened because our calorie intake is more than the amount needed to do our daily activities.  Our body is programmed to store the excess calories as body fat for our future use. Therefore, the easiest prevention for obesity that we can do is to make sure that our calorie intake didn’t exceed the amount of calorie for our daily activities by much.

Each person needs a different amount of calorie each day. The amount of calories that we need may vary based on our age, medication that we take, medical conditions, and most importantly, our activity levels. The only thing from these factors that we can have control over is only our activity level. As a result, we need to do more physical activities every day.

If you don’t have enough motivation to do major change, you can always start with simple steps. For example:

  • If you usually park as close as possible to the store, try parking farther away instead
  • If you used to take the elevator to your floor, try take the stairs instead
  • If you prefer to relax while watching your children play, try to get involved in their activities instead

There are many small things that you can do to add more physical activity to your day. Always remember, more physical activities means less obesity risk for you.

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Why can’t I Lose Weight ?

Posted on August 27, 2011 by tip

Why can’t I lose weight ? If you have put in too much weight than what you would like, here is a series of weight loss tip that you can try to implement. Since these tips focused on changing your eating and exercising habit, you might not see an immediate decrease in your weight. However, if you are persistent and willing to change, you will see a constant weight loss every week.

  1. Less Fat means Less Fat

If you want to at least maintain your present weight and not gaining any, this weight loss tip is essential. Start reading your food labels and eat food with less fat in the ingredients. If your food contains fat, it should always be the saturated fat.

  1. Less sweet for my sweets

Everything sweet always tasted better, but have you ever noticed that the more you eat something sweet, the more you want to eat everything else? To lose weight, change your ice tea with iced water and stick to it with every meal. Sounds easy? Wait until you try it out.

  1. Choose your fat blaster

To lose more fat faster, it’s important to add physical exercise to the mix. Rather than doing exercises that you don’t like (and odds are you will be too lazy to do it on a daily basis) choose something that you like to do. If you like to swim, no need to force yourself to jog.

These tips might sounds easy, but you need to be motivated to be able to stick to it. Just remember, it’s always better to lose weight than finding some “quick fix” that will take care of your problem for only a short time.

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Does Walking Help You Lose Weight

Posted on August 26, 2011 by tip

Does walking help you lose weight ? The way to lose weight is reducing your calories and increasing your physical activity. One of the popular physical activity is walking.

People who lose weight gradually are more likely to keep the weight off. Make sure your weight loss is in the healthy rate (around on to two pounds per week). To lose one pound of body fat per week, you need to get rid of 500 calories a day by eating less and exercising more. For example, to lose one pound per week, you can burn 250 calories per day by walking about an hour and reduce your calorie intake by 250 calories per day (equal to one 20 oz. soft drink).

Recommend Start

Get a comfortable, supportive pair of walking shoes and head out the door. Need some suggestions to get you started?

  • Park a few blocks from work and walk the rest of the way.
  • Walk to the coffee shop on the weekends for your morning cup.
  • Get off the train or bus one stop early and walk the remainder.
  • Use stairs rather than elevators (especially for one or two flights).
  • When the weather is bad, put on your shoes and walk the local mall, or use a treadmill.
  • If you are wondering how fast is fast enough, simply use the “talking rule”.
  • Move at a comfortably quick pace that is fast enough to increase your heart rate and causes you to take deeper breaths.
  • However, your pace should not be so fast that you are left out of breath. You should be able to carry on a conversation while walking.

Start walking today. You will reap the benefits immediately.

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Does Running Help You Lose Weight ?

Posted on August 25, 2011 by tip

When people hear the word “Exercise”, all they can visualize is someone sweating on a treadmill or lifting weight in the gym. No, exercise is easier than you think and can be as simple as  jogging or running.  Now the question is : does running help you lose weight ?

Running burns more calories per minute than most any other training program. A pound of fat contains 3500 calories, either by running or walking you can burn about 100 calories per mile. The 100 calories per mile is not valid to everyone, but you can find out your own number by just doing some quick math.

If you knew how much calories you are burning each session, you will be able to keep track of your weight loss goals. And as you burn off more and more calories, you will start dropping pounds like crazy. This certainly will not only boost your fitness level and give you a more sculpted body, but it will also enhance your confidence and your overall sense of being.

The standard formula to count how much calories burned per mile when running is : 0.75 multiplied by your body weight in pounds. Or we can say :

Calories burned (calories) = 0.75 x weight (pounds)

Let say if your weight is 200 pounds, when you’re running for one mile you’ll burn 0.75 x 200 = 150 calories. From this, you can calculate the amount of calories you should consume each day to reduce your body fat.

 

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Causes of Obesity

Posted on August 23, 2011 by tip

Obesity is a term used for people who have an excessive amount of body fat in their body. It is gaining its popularity as one of the leading preventable cause of death in the world.

There are several causes of obesity and also several factors that contributed to the increasing the risk of obesity. However, the underlying main factor is usually because there is an imbalance between the calorie intake and outtake. People eat to store calories to be used for their daily activities, but if they didn’t do many activities in a day and they eat too much, the excess calorie will become body fat.

While most people think that genetics, medicines, and diseases are causes of obesity, they are actually factors that increase the risk of obesity. However, having these factors doesn’t always mean that the person will be obese. Take genetics for example. Some people can eat whatever they want without gaining weight. These people have the genetic codes that programmed their body to have a quick metabolism. Whereas with people who don’t have this privilege, they have to really take care of the amount of food going inside their body to avoid being obese. This is why the basic cause of obesity is only because people eat more calories than they can burn.

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Does Green Tea Help You Lose Weight ?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by tip

Does green tea help you lose weight ? If you’re trying to lose weight, I bet you have heard about the myth of weight loss teas; that when you drink a special kind of tea (or a mixture of several types) in a day, you will lose weight. You might already have tried it out yourself! Does this myth ring true?

Before we can judge that this is just another scam from the tea sellers to sell more tea, we should understand first what makes us gain weight in the first place. It’s always because we put in more calories into our body than what we burn by doing physical activities. Therefore, most of the easy or the quick weight loss solutions are suggesting the same thing; do more physical activities or eat less calories.

All kinds of tea have almost similar effects on the human body. The Chinese has been drinking tea to help them to maintain their health. Tea helps the body to dissolve excess fat in foods so that it won’t be accumulated inside human body. Tea also contains antioxidant, a substance known to decrease the risk of getting cancer, some type of tea contain more than the others. Tea has quite a list of benefit when taken daily.

However, to say that drinking tea will help you to lose weight is really stretching it very thin. Tea is good to reduce the level of fat in your blood that increases your risk to have high cholesterol, but tea doesn’t burn the fat that is already stored in your body. Physical activities and controlled diet will do that for you. Regardless of its effect on weight loss, if you feel that drinking tea will make you feel healthier, why should you stop?

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Child Obesity Facts

Posted on August 22, 2011 by tip

The cases of children with obesity in the world seemed to be overlooked over the outbreak in cases of adult with obesity. Here are child obesity facts, according to CDC’s report in 2005, the prevalence of overweight or obese children had tripled since the 1960s; from 5% to 15%. What changes in the society since 1960s?

There are several supporting factors to the rising prevalence; one of them is the changes in children’s lifestyle. Flinders University did a study about obese children and found out these shocking numbers. It turns out that:

  • 20% of those children didn’t get their 60 minutes exercise
  • 65% of the obese children tested watches TV for over two hours a day; and
  • 75% of these children eat zero to two servings of vegetables every day!

Several studies had shown that there is a very close relation between the technology development and the rising prevalence of child obesity. Children nowadays live sedentary lives, unlike their parents. Now as the electronic entertainment becomes an inseparable part of children lives, more and more children opted to sit and play basketball rather than shooting balls in their driveway.

This is not a simple matter that can be overlooked easily. With this child obesity facts as our future, what will the future of our nation be?

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Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight?

Posted on August 22, 2011 by tip

One of the popular sports to lose weight among the celebrities nowadays is yoga. Yoga is a kind of sports that focused mostly about synchronizing your body and your mind.  But does yoga help you lose weight ?

There is only one key to lose your weight successfully and maintain the healthy weight, which is to change your habit. It means you change your exercising habit, your eating habit; some even change their sleeping habit. The purpose of exercising is mainly to increase the amount of the calories burn every day. Therefore, it is advised to choose some types of exercises that you like to do so that you will be motivated to do it daily.

People who do yoga claimed that they feel several changes in their body. Some say that they feel relaxed, some say that they can focus better and therefore they are more aware of what they eat; and also, they feel that they can actually lose weight. However, to really lose weight with yoga, you need to analyze the underlying cause of your weight gain.

If you eat because you feel anxious or stressed, try the relaxing yoga type. It’s good to synchronize your brain and your mind so that when your stomach feels full, they can tell the brain to stop eating. Combining this type of relaxing yoga with 60 to 90 minutes of intense Power Yoga can also do the trick. Power Yoga will act as cardio exercise whereas any type of relaxing yoga makes you aware of your condition and fixing it from the inside. Just make sure you choose the right type of yoga for weight loss and do it daily, you will see the result in no time.

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Body Mass Index (BMI)

Posted on August 22, 2011 by tip

As definitions of overweight have varied widely, health experts have struggled to develop a useful definition of healthy weight. Their recommendations have evolved from weight-for-height standards to sex-specific references. The most recent proposal is to use a single number, the body mass index (BMI) that is applied to all adults. Yes, whenever we look for BMI calculator for female either BMI calculator for men, we can use this BMI formula :

BMI = weight (lb)/[height (in)] 2 × 703     or     BMI = weight (kg)/[height (m)] 2

Example:

If someone’s weight is 150 pounds and height is 5’5” (65”), the BMI is calculated as:

[150 ÷ (65) 2] × 703 = 24.96

If someone’s weight is 68 kgs and height is 165 centimeters (1.65 meters), the BMI is calculated as:

68 ÷ (1.65) 2 = 24.98

According to studies done by the National Center for Health Statistics in the United States:

  • BMI of 18.5 or less is considered underweight.
  • BMI in the range of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal.
  • BMI values between 25.0 and 29.0 indicate being overweight – with a BMI of 25 kg/m2 generally indicating being overweight by approximately 10%.
  • BMI of 30.0 or more indicates obesity.
  • BMI of 40.0 or more indicates morbid obesity.
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