Weight Loss Max

While we’re on the subject of TV and weight loss, E! The entertainment channel recently did a special on the one hundred greatest celebrity slim downs. Hear from Jessica Alba on weight maintenance after an eating disorder, what are Oprah’s greatest weight loss secrets, how does Angelina Jolie maintain her curvy figure? Dieting secrets from Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Garner, Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst and over 90 more! Catch it again on Wednesday September 6th on E! or go to E! Online to discover more before then.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that exercise is no fun. Oh sure, sports are fun, tennis, roller blading, swimming, they’re even more fun to do with a friend but seriously, how often are you actually going to find time for that? Most days you either exercise at home or the gym or not at all and that treadmill/exercise bike can get pretty monotonous. Pretty soon you’re focused more on the clock than the calories burned or pace maintained. You get down to 15 minutes on good days, 10, those last 5 are never ending! What you need is a distraction, what you need is some music, or a really good TV show to get your mind off of the work out, get you into the zone where your aching muscles are just background noise.

While the ideal solution would be to find an mp3 player or DVD player that runs on pedal power, that’d be fantastic as you’d be obligated to keep to your work out time goal or you’d miss the end of your show. In lieu of one of those, your show or CD will just have to be a good distraction. Fast paced music like pop or simply music with a steady beat will keep you in a rhythm, and on pace better than simply jogging or pedaling on your own will. TV Shows that are thrilling like LOST or 24 will get your adrenaline pumping, comedies might not be a good idea as laughing will distract you too much, and if you’re watching for inspiration you should turn on Grey’s Anatomy or America’s Next Top Model and stare at all the waif thin figures while being enthralled by the drama. This works best if you only watch the show or listen to the music while exercising so you build up positive associations with exercising as well as providing yourself with incentive to work out more if you get hooked on the stories. The fall TV season is starting soon, get ready to lose some weight!

So you want to lose some weight. You think you’d look better if that favorite pair of jeans didn’t hug you so snugly. How much weight is healthy for you to lose? Are you in the weight range you should be in for your height? How about for your height, age and sex? Are you getting enough exercise? Do you need to cut down on fats in your diet? How many calories should you, specifically, be consuming each day given your activity level and body type. What’s your target heart rate? Are you exceeding it in your exercise, is that what’s tiring you out so quickly? All these questions and more can be answered by the Health Calculator right down to how many calories you burn just sitting around reading this website.

Have you ever cooked a meal and wondered how many calories were in it total, not just guestimating using the nutritional info on the individual packaging? Does your favorite snack food ‘forget’ to list its nutritional facts on the back of the package? You’re in luck as you’ve just stumbled across a Nutrition Calculator that can give you answers at the touch of a button! Just type in the food, for example spaghetti, select the closest option to your meal and hit go! Isn’t the internet great? Nutrition Calculator

Ever wonder how many calories you burn doing the dishes, brushing your teeth, or watching television? This excellent online calculator will individualize your weight with the time spent completing the activity and give you a personalized estimate of how many calories you burn doing these activities every day, from making the bed to climbing the stairs. Calorie Calculator

The September issue of Bazaar is available starting today and features Gwyneth Paltrow on the cover. Inside she tells beauty and weightloss strageties. CBSNews, The ShowBuzz has a preview of some of the things she shared with the magazine.

“The first time (you are pregnant), you are horrified,” she says. “It’s all lovely when you are pregnant; but when you are not pregnant and you haven’t been for a couple of months and you are still carrying tons of extra weight and everything’s all hanging and sagging, you think, How is this ever going to go back? But it does. If you do a lot of working out.”

I can’t really imagine the svelte Gwyneth hanging and sagging but I’m sure she has fantastic personal trainers to whip her back into shape. She does share one interesting tidbit: she’s not really dieting but mainly relying on exercise to get rid of the sags.

Ever wondered what you were trying all these diets and doing all this exercise for? Ever felt frustrated at losing those extra pounds around your waist, or simply fed up? Then someone compliments you on your new pants and mentions you look slimmer and it’s like a break in the clouds and a special spotlight falls just on you.

You can picture how you must look to others and are encouraged to become a trimmer, more healthier you so you can enjoy those compliments more often in admiring looks from passers by.

It’s not always easy to envision yourself as you will be when you are a lean, mean, fighting machine in tip top shape but here is a product for you. There’s a company out there that offers Slim Photo.

That’s right, pictures of you as you would love to be, as you are striving to be. You can look at the person in the mirror and assure him or her that they will match that picture some day. You will have a definite goal to strive for, with the Slim Photo showing you what you will gain (or lose rather). This is not your head positioned on someone else’s body but actually what YOU would look like exactly as you are now if you were fifty pounds lighter. This is an excellent talisman against plopping on the couch and watching an hour of tv instead of working out for an hour, or that midnight ice cream binge, especially if it’s taped to the freezer. You are always beautiful in the eyes of those who love you, but if you want to change, really want to change for YOURSELF, then go for it and use the Slim Photo to help.

There are hundreds of ‘miracle diets’ and ‘magic pills’ out there that purport to help you lose weight in an effortless fashion. The vast majority of these have no scientific basis for their claims and are in fact proven false in most scientific arenas when put to the test. Here are a few of the most common place weight loss scam products.

Gadgets

– Appetite Suppressing Glasses

These glasses claim to project an image on the retina of your eye that will decrease your desire to eat. They don’t work.

– Weight Loss Earrings

Specially designed magnetic earrings that are supposed to press upon acupuncture points to control hunger. They don’t work.

– Electrical Muscle Stimulators

Initially designed for physical therapy uses, there were once dozens of different brands of these available on the market. They send an electrical current to your muscle which causes it to contract as it would during exercise, however the FDA banned them because when used improperly they can cause electrical shock and burns. If you’ve ever watched “Dead Like Me” you know what I’m talking about. If you own one, throw it out, it’s of no use to you.

Diet Pills

– Starch Blockers.

Starch is turned into glucose and stored in the body as sugar and then fat. Starch Blocker pills have only been proven to cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pains. Not the way you want to lose weight.

– Magnet Diet Pills.

Purported to literally pull fat from your body, flush it clean. The FTC recently took legal action against the marketers of these pills.

– Diet Patches.

Worn directly on the skin like nicotine patches, these are designed to curb your appetite by releasing a chemical into your system slowly throughout the day. The FDA has seized millions of these being produced illegally from dozens of companies.

– Fillers

Fiber based weight loss products that absorb liquids in your stomach and swell, making you feel full. Guar Gum is often used in these ‘filler’ products, if consumed in too large quantities can cause blockages in the esophagus, stomach and intestines.

Building muscle to burn fat isn’t as hard as it sounds and doesn’t need to involve working out at the gym three days a week for an hour. There are hundreds of little things you can do to build muscle.

Standing while waiting at the DMV instead of sitting in the chairs provided is a small inconvenience but even standing still will help you to build more muscle than sitting will.

Parking in a spot furthest away from the store in the mall you’re going into will give you a good excuse to do a little power walking, ditto for the grocery store. When you’re leaving the super market, carrying your groceries to your car by hand instead of pushing them in a cart. Better yet, grab a basket instead of a cart and carry the groceries around in the store as well, be sure to switch arms when one tires so they both get a work out. Carrying around your groceries will make you aware of how much everything you eat weighs as well.

Hoofing it to appointments that are in walking distance is an easy way to get exercise (and gives you an excuse to leave work a little earlier than you would otherwise).

Taking the stairs is a good way to build the muscles in your thighs and calves as well as your abs, it doesn’t have to be all fourteen flights but at least the first two or three.

And of course, the best inspiration you can have is to do this with a friend or family member, having company takes your mind off what you’re doing so find a friend and even if you don’t join a gym, you can still spot each other in the attempt to build muscle. Nothing feels as good as when you realize your pants are too loose from all the muscle you’ve built during this exercise that you barely even realized you were getting. Then you can organize a shopping trip to buy new pants and get even more exercise!

Ever wonder why your new no-carb/no-fat/no-whatever diet works so well in the first two weeks? You lose 2,3,5 pounds and it really feels like you’re doing something! And then it all stops. It’s frustrating and aggravating and you can’t figure out what you’re doing wrong so you give up. What’s happening is when faced with a shortage of calories your body doesn’t automatically start attacking your fat reserves, instead it turns to your protein reserves, your muscles. True a pound of muscle and a pound of fat weighs the same amount, but losing muscle weight will not help you stay trim. Protein when broken down turns into nitrogen which is quickly flushed from your system as too much nitrogen can be harmful to your body. Basically, you’re losing water weight and muscle at this time. Water weight is easily regained by having something to drink and muscle mass is what you need to burn fat so this is certainly not an accomplishment.

Why do you need muscle to lose fat? Muscle requires a certain number of calories a day simply to sustain itself, not to work out, not to move, but just to continue to be there! Imagine, just sitting around burns calories. Let’s say one pound of muscle burns 50 calories a day, just sitting there, 10 pounds would burn 500 calories a day, and you were going to throw it all away by starving yourself. Seems ridiculous doesn’t it! Muscle is what will help you lose the weight you want to, and exercise is the way to build more muscle, this is why dieting works best when combined with exercise.

As for the diet part of your diet/exercise regime, try cutting back on at most 15% of the calories you consume per day, this isn’t a drastic decrease and will help protect your muscles as well as your metabolic rate. Splitting your meals up into smaller meals will help also, so instead of two or three big meals a day, have four or six small ones, keeping your metabolism working to digest these foods all day long, thus increasing your metabolic rate.