Jelly Belly Be Gone

For many, exercise can be overwhelming. To think of week after week of dieting and exercising just seems too demanding.  So instead of thinking of a healthy lifestyle as a program, regimen, or challenging routine, simply think of exercise as a part of your life! Try adding these basics for health and wellness to your lifestyle and you’re certain to reap the rewards.

1:  Add at least ten or more minutes of cardiovascular exercise to your day. EVERY DAY! Take a ten minute walk. Walk the stairs at your job. Dance at home for ten minutes. Get on the treadmill. Take an aerobics class at your gym.  Put in one of your exercise videos. Remember, it’s only 10 MINUTES.

2: Keep track of what you eat and limit your cheat meal to one per week. Eat small meals consistently throughout the day. No more skipped breakfasts, oversized lunches, and late dinners. Then cut off your eating at least two hours before bedtime.

3: Add water to your day. Keep a bottle on your desk and one in your car. Sip water throughout the day for energy, hydration and to rid your body of toxins.

Remember, a healthy lifestyle doesn’t have to feel like drudgery. You can make fitness a lifestyle and not an arduous regimen by adding these simple things to your day.

A new study shows that the naringenin found in citrus fruits is effective in promoting weight loss and controlling type-2 diabetes.

According to a study published in Diabetes, this flavonoid found in citrus fruits reprograms the liver to burn unwanted fat instead of storing it after meals, lowering triglyceride and cholesterol levels.

Naringenin, known for its antioxidant activity, is reported to have insulin-like properties as well.

Rather than suppressing the appetite and reducing food intake, naringenin causes weight loss through correcting metabolic disturbances.

Naringenin has also shown promising results in tackling metabolic syndrome by preventing the development of insulin resistance and stabilizing glucose metabolism in the body.

Scientists added that the flavonid, which is commonly found in grapefruit, can also lower the risk of developing cardiovascular disease particularly in diabetics.

Snacking can be an important part of any diet-when done right.

Balanced snacks keep you feeling fuller, longer, and can prevent you from over-indulging by the time you finally sit down for dinner. But when between-meal bites turn into mindless munching throughout the day, those extra calories can be disastrous for your diet, resulting in unwanted stomach fat.

It doesn’t help that between 1977 and 1996, a simple snack of a bag of chips and a Coke increased by a whopping 142 calories. Sure, it’s the same snack as 30 years ago, but eat it just two or three times a week and you’ll gain up to 6 more pounds this year than you would have back then.

Even if you skip the chips and soda, seemingly “healthy” snacks can get you into trouble, too. Cornell University researchers found that people tend to eat an average of 28 percent more calories when snacking on low-fat foods. After all, flavor has to come from somewhere, and when food marketers eliminate the fat, they often make up for it with sugar (translation: added calories).

The good news is that it’s possible to munch away pounds, as long as you avoid snack traps like these.

Don’t let your hard work in the gym go to waste. The food you eat doesn’t just give you energy - it fuels your muscles, helps you burn fat, and even boosts your cardiovascular health. Try consuming Green Tea, for example, before and after your workouts, and you’ll see results in no time.

Brazilian scientists found that participants who consumed three cups of green tea every day for a week had fewer markers of the cell damage caused by resistance to exercise. So drinking a few cups every day may help your muscles recover faster after an intense workout.

One of the reasons why Italians eat so well is that every last one of them believes it is their fundamental right to walk out of the market with the very best ingredients. They won’t settle for a wrinkled eggplant, a withering artichoke, or an apple that tastes like Styrofoam. And neither should you. Problem is, finding the best, ripest, most jaw-droppingly tasty fruits and vegetables isn’t as intuitive as you might think. It’s a task that requires the attention of all five senses in order to pick up on the ultimate ripeness and utmost quality.

Regardless of what you’re shopping for, start with these three rules.

1. Beautiful doesn’t mean delicious. Sub-par conventional produce is bred to look waxy, glistening, and perfectly symmetrical, while prime fruits and vegetables are often irregularly shaped, with slight visual imperfections outside but a world of flavor waiting inside.

2. Use your hands. You can learn more about a fruit or vegetable from picking it up than you can from staring it down. Heavy, sturdy fruits and vegetables with taut skin and peels are telltale signs of freshness.

3. Shop with the seasons. Sure, sometimes you just need a tomato, but there are three persuasive reasons to shop in season: It’s cheaper, it’s better, and it’s better for you.

Choose wisely and you’ll bring home the best fruits and vegetables every time, just like an Italian grandma.

An area of frustration for the beginner to exercise, is energy level. Most people expect to exercise the first few weeks and experience a shot of energy. In actuality, the opposite often occurs. Your body isn’t used to the added stress, which causes you to feel fatigued and even drained, especially if you overdo it. Don’t get discouraged; it’s natural to feel this way until your body adapts. As your body acclimates itself, your cardiovascular system will become more conditioned, causing you to have more energy and focus throughout the day. Your efforts will pay off.

Overexertion will trigger stiffness and soreness, causing many people to give up on exercise completely. If you do overdo it, there are a few things you can do to feel better. Exercise actually breaks your muscles down – sleep, nutrition, and hydration play a vital role in their recovery. Proper rest, refueling your body with healthy food, and drinking plenty of water will help you recover much more quickly. In the days that follow, doing a low impact exercise at a low to moderate intensity and stretching will deliver more oxygen and blood to help clean out the waste and bring more nutrients to your muscles.

Beginning an exercise program can be very overwhelming and painful if you aren’t careful. Warming your body up and stretching prior to exercise is very important for your health and will allow you to see better results, as well as to enjoy the workout more. Warming up and stretching raise your body and muscle temperatures, along with preparing your cardiovascular, respiratory, and nervous systems for the demands of exercise by slowly increasing the blood circulation.

Warming up will allow all of your connective tissues that haven’t been stretched recently to handle the stress put on during exercise, limiting your chances for injury. Connective tissue is similar to hard plastic; if you don’t warm-up plastic it won’t be flexible, and is much more likely to break.

Putting in extra hours at the job can help you stack the dollars, but it can also cause you to pack on some unwanted stomach fat. Sitting at a desk all day can also have an effect on your butt. Try these easy adjustments, so you can work a 9 to 5 without gaining 10 to 20.

1. Stand and Deliver:- Get an adjustable-height workstation so you can stand for part of the day. Your posture will improve, and you’ll burn a third more calories.

2. Dial “C” for Calorie:- Get a headset and walk while you take calls. An extra 500 steps a day burns 25 extra calories–in a year, you could drop two pounds without changing your diet.

3. Schedule Snacks:- A survey found that 75 percent of workers eat lunch at their desks while working, at least two to three times per week. Step away from work and enjoy your food. If you’re aware of what you eat, you’ll be less likely to nibble all day.

4. Go Green:- Fill your mug with green tea. People who drank oolong tea fortified with green tea extract every day for three months lose 2.4 more pounds than people who drank plain oolong tea. Antioxidants found in green tea, may stimulate the body to burn calories and decrease fat.

5. Put a Lid on it:- Keep candy in an opaque dish. It was found that workers dipped into chocolates 71 percent more often when they were in transparent containers. Or switch to hard candies: They’re lower in calories than bonbons, and they last longer.

6. Place Your Bets:- Strike up a weight-loss competition with your coworkers. Who lose the most wins a prize. Sometimes it pays to lose.

When cholesterol-clogged plaque narrows an artery that feeds the heart, the body responds by trying to bulk up tiny blood vessels in the heart.

As these so-called collateral vessels grow more muscular and interconnected, they begin to reroute some of the blood flow around the blockage. Scientists have been trying for years to nudge collateral blood vessels to develop and prosper, but without great success. However, you can do it at home without anything more high-tech than a comfortable pair of exercise shoes.

Exercise dramatically increases blood flow through the coronary arteries. The inner lining of the arteries responds to this “stress” much as it does to the stress of atherosclerosis, by stimulating collateral blood vessels to elongate, widen, and form new connections.

Experts declare that a little bit of exercise won’t do the trick. You need to push your heart. If you aren’t used to exercising, that may mean brisk walking. Any activity that gets your heart beating faster will do as long as you keep it up for 20 to 30 minutes at a time and do it several times a week.

Why not give yourself a natural bypass before you need a surgeon to perform a more painful and hazardous one?

Every time you pick up a health magazine, you get a lecture on eating healthier. It is general knowledge that eating healthier can make you more beautiful, give you more energy, and even lengthen your life; but not many people know what to eat that will activate such pleasurable results. Use the following  nutrients as a starting point to building a healthier diet regime.

• Eat plenty of dark green vegetables and orange vegetables and fruits (papaya, mango) weekly to meet your vitamin A needs and potential antioxidant benefits.
• B12:- B12 is bound to protein, so foods like meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products like yogurt and milk are the principal sources.
• Chromium:- Grain breads and cereals, meat, nuts, prunes, raisins, beer and wine.
• Vitamin K:- Kale, spinach, broccoli, asparagus, arugula, green leaf lettuce, soybean oil, canola oil, olive oil and tomatoes.
• Potassium:- Choose whole, unprocessed foods as often as possible, especially fruits and vegetables, low-fat dairy products, whole grains, fish and lean meats.
• Magnesium:- Avocados, nuts, and leafy greens including acorn squash, kiwi, and almonds.
• Vitamin C:- Oranges, green bell peppers, strawberries, broccoli, cantaloupe and tomatoes, turnip greens, sweet potatoes and okra has a high concentration of vitamin C.
• Vitamin D:- We rely on fortified milk and breakfast cereals to get most of our dietary vitamin D. Apart from a few kinds of fish, including herring and sardines; there aren’t many natural food sources, which leave Bolds supplements and direct sunlight.
• Folate/Folic Acid:- Liver, dried beans, peas, spinach, leafy greens, asparagus and fortified cereals.
• Vitamin E:- Wheat germ oil. Sunflower seeds, cooked spinach, almonds, safflower oil and hazelnuts.