Great Foods for a Winter Diet

One of the most important ingredients of any diet, particularly a winter diet, is water. With the cold dry air, your body loses more water. Without proper hydration, your cells canít work as well which leaves your looking and feeling bad. Be sure to get at least eight glasses of water a day to keep your body at its best. Plus, being properly hydrated can help you eat less and feel less hungry.

A healthy winter diet needs to include protein, fruits and vegetables at every meal. This will not only provide all the nutrients you need but will help balance it out through the day, giving you energy to get by and keeping you from feeling sluggish.

While it is often more difficult to eat properly during the winter, try to find foods for your family to enjoy rather than meals that or frozen or prepackaged. Just like fast foods from restaurants, fast foods from the grocery store contain higher amounts of fat, preservatives, and other things that can harm your health. You may have to start checking more than one store or supplier, but it will be well worth your family's health.

While we often associate fruits and veggies with spring and summer, there are plenty of options available during the winter. You can find veggies such as carrots, leeks, pumpkin, broccoli, and other greens. And winter is actually the best time to find a variety or citrus fruits, along with certain types of apples. While you may have to pay slightly more because the veggies are being shipped fairly far, the health benefit is definitely worth it.

One reason many people gain weight over the winter is because of depression. We stay inside, get less sunlight, and may feel lonely around the holidays. For many people, this triggers them to eat comfort foods that are high in fat and calories. But while food is the problem, it can also be part of the cure. Instead of grabbing for fatty foods when youíre feeling down this winter, why not grab for foods like fresh fruits and vegetables that will naturally boost your mood. This will help break the cycle instead of fueling it.

A healthy diet is not only about what you eat, but when you eat. While we've been taught to eat three full meals a day, it's often healthier to eat six smaller meals, or to simply supplement yourself with between-meal snacks. This will help keep you fueled throughout the day and will also keep your mood more even to combat depression. Just make sure youíre adding healthy snacks like fruits, veggies, and whole grains.

During the winter, it's easy to forget that a healthy lifestyle includes not only eating right, but also getting plenty of exercise. Many of us slack off when it comes to exercising during the winter. Don't let yourself become lazy; take time every day to get your heart rate up. This will help give you more energy to make it through the winter.

You may have to spend a bit more time and money on winter food shopping, but it's still possible to keep you family healthy all year round.

Getting Around The Weight Loss Plateau

The typical human form is capable of achieving a number of incredible feats that seem to suspend or defy the way science tells us things work. Athletes, through sheer willpower, can end up lifting something that their bodies should not be able to without suffering anything worse than muscle spasms.

People can adapt to extreme physical trauma caused by a car accident and defy predictions that they'll never walk again. While, in general, these amazing feats are useful in a number of situations, there are physical reactions that some people look upon with quite a bit of disfavor. Among these ìdisfavored reactionsî is something known as a ìweight loss plateau.

Essentially, the 'plateau' is a term used to describe a situation where the body has become incapable of losing any further weight, usually due to developing a tolerance for the weight loss pills and methods being used. Essentially, the plateau is hit when the body develops tolerance for the regimen's limitations and practices, thus allowing the metabolic rate of the body to adjust to whatever weight loss pills or techniques were being used.

Most diet books decidedly ignore the existence of the plateau, primarily because it can be seen as negating the purpose of the diet and is, therefore, bad for marketing. There are, however, ways to counteract the human body building a tolerance for training regimens and weight loss pills.

The human metabolism, when presented with a pattern, will eventually adapt to that pattern. It is this natural adaptability of the human body that can cause the weight loss plateau, particularly if the person's diet and eating habits have been altered for weight loss. As such, changing the pattern will, once a sufficient amount of time has passed, allow your diet plan or weight loss pills to become effective again.

This trick essentially involves confusing the human metabolism, and is often taken as a rather drastic way to get the body back in ìdiet mode. There are, of course, several ways to effectively alter that pattern without causing the body permanent harm.

Adding strength and weight training and modifying one's exercise program can also help someone get past the plateau, in most cases. The body will still burn through nutrients during physical activity, though the digestive system's metabolic rate can adapt such that more weight is retained rather than burned during exercise.

Increasing the difficulty of the exercises, or changing the movements to target less-developed muscle areas, can effectively force the body to re-adapt. While the body is busy adapting to the changes, it can also start losing weight again. This method is best used with alterations to the person's diet, however, to maximize the effectiveness.

Another trick used to circumvent the problem of the plateau is to make changes to the time frame between meals. The internal clock that the human body's digestive system operates on can be altered to suit one's purposes, provided one executes the proper alterations to one's diet and eating habits.

A simple action like altering the schedule of the meals, such as adding more meals but reducing the bulk of each, can have an appreciable effect on altering the metabolic rate. The key concept of this method is to fool the body into burning the food faster, thus getting one's weight loss program and diet back on track.

When considering the options, it is helpful to keep in mind that what works for one person may not work for another person. Some slower metabolisms may require combination of diet program and exercise regimen modifications, while others can get by with merely shortening the break between meals. The critical point is to find a method that works and is effective for a specific metabolism, which can be a time-consuming process.

4 Easy Health and Fitness Tips

The US has seen an enormous increase in the mumber of people considered obese by the medical community. In fact many call it an obesity epidemic. To combat this we find all sorts of pharamceutical companies selling the "quick fix" pills, powders, and lotions that do nothing to actually help people take the fat off and keep it off.

Of course the same could be said of the diet industry as well. There are so many different diets going around now you could pick one a month and in a years time still have more to choose from.

What is truely needed are some sensible proven weight loss tips that people can implement no matter what their present physical condition is. That said let's dive right in.

#1 Drink more water. All too often Americans are borderline dehydrated and so their bodies are working on the water starvation reflex and not flushing the toxins and junk out.

#2 Eat more often. I bet you thought I was going to say eat less. While it is true that to lose weight you need to eat less calories than you expend...you need to eat more often to get the metabolic furnace stoked up and burning right. Get it out of starvation mode. So start the day off with breakfast. Even an instant breakfast drink and a piece of fruit as we head out the door in the morning.

#3 Move more. Depending on your physical condition you need to be moving more. Use the stairs rather than the elevator, park farther out from the office or the store, go for a walk around the block, go dancing, play with your kids. Make it fun. Running is not the only way to burn more calories.

#4 Finally, determine your "Why". Decide why you want to discard fat. Make your reason big enough to motivate you through the slumps that invariably happen.

Personally my reason was to be able to live to see my great grandkids graduate college. My youngest kids are 4 and 6 now. Besides I wanted to get out and play with them without being out of breath all the time.

Discover the secret to losing weight from the Far East

To try to lessen the bad feelings of being called fat or overweight, we tend to use lesser dreaded and offensive words such as "larger size" and "big" instead of plain "overweight" and "fat".

But it took just one comment from a buddy friend, a nurse in the local hospital, to bring home a deep truth. She said, " In my entire life working in this hospital, I have yet to see a fat oriental chinese lady", referring to the patients she has seen seeking treatment in the government hospital.

Of course, it is not true that there are no fat oriental chinese ladies in the world, because fat and overweight are universal issues affecting all races and cultures, irrespective of skin and color. But is there a health secret coming from the Orient that makes the chinese lady generally slimer and slender?

Indeed, recent discoveries in Japan showed that a type of chinese tea called the Okuma's Wu Long tea together with a healthy diet and exercise revealed that people who regularly consumed this tea experienced over TWICE the calorie-burning results of those who drank the same amount of authentic Japanese green tea.

Drinking this Wu Long tea 15 minutes before eating carbohydrates also helped blunt the rise in insulin that normally comes after eating food that contained a lot of carbohydrates. As carbohydrates causes weight gain by increasing insulin levels, drinking this tea helps to control weight gain.

Like other teas as well, Japan's Shiga University of Medical Science found that drinking Wu-Long tea also daily dramatically clears up skin eczema within just one month, and helps in reducing free radicals, and lower the risk of infections such as the common cold.

Indeed, in the ancient chinese pharmaceutical book "Bencao Shiyi "(The Compendium of Materia Medica), it is said that tea "will make one live long and stay in good shape."

Tea, particularly the oriental Wu-Long tea that comes from China's Fujian Province has been used by countless generations of ladies to help melt away body fat, boost energy and even clarify the skin, and these newer scientific discoveries in Japan seem to indicate that it is possible to drink away pounds of unwanted body fat and loose inches from the waistline.

Teas are just a form of natural supplements to help in weight management and fat loss. Taking a supplement to assist in weight loss is just one prong in battling weight and fat, but it is necessary to have a healthy diet and to maintain a program of exercise at the same time if we are to continue to keep the extra weight and fat off our bodies.

Therefore, selection of a good supplement, having a balanced diet and having a fitness program will go a long way to getting your weight down.