The Secret To Struggle-Free Weight Loss

For many people who are overweight and obese, weight loss is a struggle that is experienced daily, hourly, and even moment to moment. But it doesn't have to be that way! Losing weight permanently can be an enjoyable and very enlightening process if you go about it with the right mindset and attitude.

Determine Your Weight Loss Mindset

When you think about losing weight; what are the first thoughts that come to mind? Do you first think about how great you will look in form-fitting clothing, or about the energy you will have, or maybe about how dynamic your sex life will be? Or do you focus on the foods you won't be able to eat, or the exercise you don't want to do, or the lifestyle changes you will have to make? Your attitude plays a major role in your success or failure at losing weight and keeping weight off.

If your mind automatically leans toward the negative aspects of weight loss, then your experience of weight loss will also be a negative one filled with inner-struggles and feelings of self-deprivation. Who wants that? On the other hand, if your attitude towards losing weight is a positive one, your experience will be an enjoyable one filled with many triumphs and enlightenment.

When assessing your weight loss mindset, be honest with yourself. You cannot find a solution if you are unwilling to identify the true problem. The advice I give to my weight loss clients is to make a list of every thought that they associate with losing weight. If a majority of the thoughts are negative, then their weight loss mindset is negative; but if the majority of thoughts are positive, then their mindset is positive.

Losing Weight without the Struggle

What is the secret to struggle-free weight loss? A healthy belief system that is supportive of living a healthy lifestyle. The reason why you are having such a difficult time with losing weight is because you have a negative belief system that encourages negative habits and behaviors conducive to weight gain.

Symptoms of a negative belief system include:

• low self-esteem
• tarnished self-image
• poor sense of self-empowerment
• feeling helpless when it comes to weight loss
• feeling that losing weight is hopeless for you
• thinking that you are addicted to certain types of food
• feeling powerless against food cravings
• and many more

While those are all symptoms of a negative belief system; they are also consequences of a negative belief system. The danger of harboring a negative belief system is that it spawns negative habits and behaviors. Those habits and behaviors are automatic in nature. Half the time you aren't even aware of what is causing you to over eat, binge, or submit to your cravings!

Changing Your Weight Loss Mindset

If you have assessed that you have a negative mindset about losing weight, there are ways to change it. The first and most important belief you can have when it comes to losing weight is the belief that you can lose weight.

If you are basing your belief about your ability to lose weight on your past struggles or failures, just know that you weren't working with a full deck of cards-so to speak. If you were going into a weight loss journey armed with only diet and exercise, you weren't fully equipped. If you don't also have a positive mindset on board, the journey is going to be a rough one, if not down right impossible.

If you want "this time" to be different, you are going to need three things: healthy eating habits, healthy exercising habits, and a positive mindset.

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3 Ways To Get Into A Weight Loss Mindset

Losing weight is difficult for some people but rarely is it as difficult as many of us make it out to be. While everyone's body is different, we all burn fat and calories essentially the same way. When we burn more calories than we eat, we lose weight. When we eat more calories than we burn, we gain weight. The math isn't very difficult. So why do we have trouble losing weight? Well, for most of us the hurdle is mental, we can't get ourselves motivated to work out and we can't live with the fact that we can't eat all the junk food we normally do. So how do you get in a weight loss mindset? Here are three quick tips.

1. Find a Workout Buddy

Having a workout partner keeps us motivated on a couple levels. First is accountability, it's very easy to blow off the gym because you're too tired, or just don't feel like it, but when you try to explain to your buddy, your reasoning just doesn't carry as much weight (pun partly intended). Second, we are all competitive and we don't like to be embarrassed. If your workout buddy goes to the gym regularly, is losing weight and dropping weight quickly, you will be motivated to try just as hard, won't you?

2. Emphasize Small Victories

We all want to go in to a diet and drop a large amount of weight in a couple days and if we don't we feel like a failure. Well I've got news for you, diets don't work that way. It took you a while to put the extra weight on and it will take just as long to take the weight off. The good news is your body likes being healthy and responds favorably the healthier you get. For now, find happiness in small victories like losing an extra pound, or doing an extra 5 minutes or 20 calories on the treadmill. Stay competitive with yourself and every time you have one of these small victories congratulate yourself. By finding little victories you will be amazed how motivated you will become.

3. Keep a Positive Attitude

We've all heard the phrase 'The Power of Positive Thinking' but what does it really mean? Let's look at it from the opposite side. If you were to go to a job interview telling yourself you will never get the job, how likely are you to get it? Not likely at all. So if you are constantly telling yourself that you can't lose weight do you think you can do it? Stay positive and look on the bright side. You won't lose weight every day and occasionally you may gain back a pound but don't let that knock you off the rails to success. If you put in the work you WILL lose weight. If you happen to gain a pound it is likely water weight and will be gone in a day or two, don't sweat it. Keep your head up, keep trying and never give up. You can do this.

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The Perfect Weight Loss Mindset - 3 Beliefs You Must Have For Weight Loss

In order to be successful with your weight loss goals, you must have a weight loss mindset. This mindset must include include 3 crucial beliefs.

You need to believe:

1. POSSIBILITY: It is possible for you to get a slimmer body.

2. ACHIEVEMENT: You are able to lose weight or to get a slimmer body.

3. WORTHINESS: You deserve to lose weight or to get a slimmer body.

Possibility

Possibility is almost always mistaken for competence. We think that something isn't possible, that we aren't able to lose weight when really we don't know how to do it - we don't have the knowledge or resources to be able to lose weight. This is especially true in people who have tried countless diets with little or no success.

It is possible though, regardless of your situation. You can't prove that it isn't possible - you can only say that you haven't achieved it yet.

Beliefs are not fact.

Beliefs are just our best guess at something and we often sell ourselves short. Do you think you have put a mental ceiling on your achievements? Do you think you have hindered your weight loss success through your beliefs about yourself?

Ability

Most of us tend to make others aware of our short comings, when we can't do something. If you take a day out and observe people and what they say, you should notice how often people say they can't do this or they can't do that. We all think this is being modest, when in fact its not. Modesty is not boasting about what we can do, it isn't boasting about what we can't!

Once you become aware of yourself voicing your inability to lose weight, you can stop yourself voicing it. If you continue to voice your inability to lose weight, it will hold you back from achieving your weight loss goals. If you find it difficult to stop voicing your inability, a good alternative is to add the word "yet" to the end of your statements.

"I haven't been able to lose weight...yet"

"I can't lose weight...yet".

It is also important not to make excuses for your weight loss failures. If you do not have the knowledge to lose weight, go out and get it. Set tasks that you need to do in order to achieve your slimmer figure.

A general belief that you should try to hold is:

You have not yet reached the limit of what you are capable of.

Keeping this in mind will help you to achieve your weight loss goals.

Worthiness

Do you deserve to lose weight? Does it make you feel uncomfortable to say you deserve to? If it does, this should help you figure out any obstacles that are in your way to achieving your goal. List them and work out how you can overcome them.

e.g. I don't have the correct knowledge to lose weight - to overcome this I am going to do some research and find a suitable diet program or expert to help me.

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Benefits Of High Protein Diets

High protein diets are a popular way to lose weight, as researchers have shown that protein satisfies hunger better than fats or carbohydrates. Individuals looking to lose weight and using a diet of protein combined with exercise, improve fat loss and blood levels. High protein diets can also maintain lean tissue and burn fuel without leaving the dieter hungry. Protein may help the produce a lower amount an appetite stimulating hormone, therefore causing the dieter to eat less often due to lack of hunger.

Since protein is needed to build muscle, create and maintain cells and make stronger bones, it is obviously needed in the body. A diet of protein can help build immunity and fight off diseases, another benefit for increasing the amount of protein in a diet. A well-balanced diet should include 10-25% of your daily intake from the protein group. A high protein diet should include 35-45% of protein, with little fats or carbohydrates at all. Most other food should be from the fresh fruit or vegetable category. Some fruit is packed full of natural sugars, which also won't aid in weight loss, but are better than processed sugars.

While there are no inherent dangers to eating a diet of protein, there are some cautions that people should take when doing so. Check with your doctor to make sure that your kidneys and liver are strong enough to handle the high doses of protein that will be entering your body. Also ask your doctor if you should take any vitamins or minerals while consuming a diet high in protein. It is best to start slowly with building up your protein, and you should do it over the course of time. Starting a high protein diet abruptly can cause stomach upset, constipation and headaches.

Eating four to six small high protein meals a day will assist in boosting your metabolism and making you feel fuller. For a diet of protein, you should include lean and low-fat items versus high fat protein items. Also, olive oils, nuts and avocados are great sources of fat, but still very healthy. Protein also comes in the form of beans, soy and low-fat dairy items. The best sources of protein are: fish, poultry, milk, eggs, low-fat yogurt, soy milk, tofu, cottage cheese, kidney beans, lentils, peanut butter and nuts.

Eating a combination of these items, along with a plentiful amount of fruit and vegetables, a lot of water, and healthy fats will aid in weight loss.

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Success Mindset To Avoid Nutritional Stress

When dealing with your life changing situations and intentions, your mindset is the only thing you will have to continually adjust.

For example in order to avoid nutritional stress, you must eat a healthy breakfast. A mindset of skipping breakfast is like trying to get your car to start without fuel. In the case of the car it won't move.

Your mind however, can override such a feeding decision. But your body will succumb to the perils of poor nutrition, with symptoms of accelerated aging. This can show up as central nervous system and vascular diseases, like high blood pressure and heart disease.

I had a relative who was a doctor and she believed in her mindset of "Eating what you Crave," regardless of the content. The idea of balancing nutrients was not high on her list of things to do. She died of breast cancer. Somehow she did not make the connection between food and supporting healthiness.

Here are examples of why you must develop a healthy eating mindset. One success mindset you can adopt is to read labels, if you are not eating fresh food. This Christmas I receive a gift of a box of "mistletoe munch." It was a mixture of peanuts and tiny white "kisses" shaped candy. The taste was so mesmerizing; I read the label for its ingredients. I discovered that the white stuff contained Titanium Dioxide. Doing just a little research on this ingredient I found out that:

"Titanium dioxide dust caused respiratory tract cancer in rats exposed by inhalation and intratracheal instillation"

Titanium dioxide is considered extremely unsafe by supplement companies such as Vitacost, which banned the ingredient from its in-house supplements label (NSI). Soon, products from this company) may even be labeled with a "titanium dioxide free" claim, to better educate health seeking customers.

The wellness lesson to be learned here is - Be vigilant about knowing what is in your food unless it is fresh fare - Read labels of processed foods and seek to learn more about ingredients you do not recognize.

Here is one good reason to do this. Recent research increasingly shows that eating berry fruits can benefit the aging brain. This extends to cellular, animal and human studies on the topic. Berries are antioxidant packed. They help to protect cells from damage by harmful free radicals, prevent inflammation in the brain and enhance the brain activity to help you move, think and remember...

You can't take advantage of this wonderful gift of nature if your mindset says, fresh fruits are not really that important, and they are out of the range of my food budget. I have just enough for fried chicken and fries.

You can however use this information to enhance your motivation to add fresh fruit to your diet in a quest to secure your body with a healthier style of eating.

With your eat fresh attitude you can seek to enhance your knowledge of the relationship between body chemistry and the chemistry of food.

For instance, why is it so important to get vitamin C from fresh fruits and vegetables as no doubt your have been told? With a mindset that is now curious about the association of fresh food to health you will find out that Vitamin C gives major support to your immune system. It keeps it vigilant in repair, and producing substances that support a quick defense, if you are exposed to various viruses and bacteria, which is part of everyday existence. An underfed immune system might not be so responsive to invaders of your body, if it is lacking the ingredient it needs to secure the system.

These ingredients must come from a mindset to develop a well balanced nutrition regimen of mostly fresh food.

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How To Eat Well For Weight Loss

When you want to eat something, it can be easy to just eat it. However, when you are trying to lose weight, you have to really be careful about what you're eating and how you eat. You have to be mindful about what you put in your mouth, and you have to get serious about knowing how the food you eat affects your weight. Here are some ways you can be more mindful about your food, so that you eat in a way that helps you to lose weight.

1. Drink water when you feel hungry. The body doesn't always differentiate between thirst and hunger, so many times, when you feel hungry, you are really thirsty. Have some water when you feel hunger coming on, and then wait about half an hour. If you are still hungry, have a snack or a meal. Eating only when you are truly hungry is a smart way to eat if you want to lose weight.

2. Know what your triggers are. You don't want to deprive yourself from foods you enjoy, but you have to know what you will devour. If you know you love cookies, don't have any in the house if you are serious about losing weight. If you can't eliminate cookies completely, have one or two and put the box back. If you love chips, don't sit with the bag. Just take out a few.

3. Find out how nutritious your food is. What is the vitamin content of the food that you're eating? Remember that you need to give your body the nutrients it needs to function well, not only for your weight but for your overall health as well. Check out the nutrition labels on the food you eat and make sure that it works for you nutritionally, as well as checking to see if it works for you in terms fats, sugar and calories.

4. Make your meals look beautiful. When you start eating in a healthy way, it is important to make your meals look appetizing when you set them out. That will excite you about eating, and you won't feel so deprived because you're eating good foods. Take the time to set your table beautifully and prepare yourself for good nourishment.

5. Don't eat because of your emotions. Think about it: if you have a birthday, you get food. If there is a funeral, people bring food. Food is as much a part of every social event as the event itself, but if you find that you are relying on food in a social way, that can be a problem for your weight. If you have some wine after a good day, or a few beers after a bad day, be cognizant that eating food for all these occasions does have an effect on your weight you don't want it to have.

Eating well will not only help you lose weight, but it will help you feel better physically and mentally. Learning the tips in this article and applying them to your life will be beneficial to your life in a number of ways. Use the tips here so that food works for you on your weight loss journey.

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The Mindset for Healthy Eating | Gillian Riley | TEDxChelmsford

When it comes to eating well, the right mindset will determine your success. Today a video by Gillian Riley will give you great tips for the right mindset.

To your success!

Increase Fat Loss by Nutritional Journaling

Fat loss continues to be one of the most popular topics in health and fitness and people are always looking for new ways to lose weight and improve the way they look. Companies are always promoting new and often untested products such as pills, powders, creams, exercise equipment, and diets to promote fat loss, but the vast majority of these things are marketing gimmicks that are rarely as effective as previously established methods for losing fat. One such proven method for increasing fat loss that often goes overlooked is nutritional journaling.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of nutritional journaling, it is basically just writing down what you eat and drink throughout the day, although there are many different ways to go about keeping a nutrition journal. A journal can be very thorough or much more simplistic, but keeping virtually any type of nutrition journal should increase the amount of fat you lose.

It may not seem as though keeping track of what you eat and drink would significantly affect fat loss, but you can see how powerful nutritional journals are by taking a closer look at the most popular and enduring weight loss businesses. Most popular programs do not necessarily use a journal, but they generally use something to help you keep track of what you eat. This typically involves things like following a point system or eating pre-made meals that have specific calorie contents.

Regardless of what system is used, the real benefits come from making you keep track of what you eat and drink and not from some special characteristic of one particular system. Some people will certainly prefer one system over another, but the specific system is not really all that important. By tracking your eating and drinking habits, you become more aware of everything that you put into your body. As a result, your unconscious eating habits start becoming more conscious eating choices.

In other words, by keeping track of foods, calories, points, etc., you are actually increasing your awareness about how and what you eat. Many people have poor eating habits and they often don't realize how much or how frequently they eat. By following this type of system, you can stop being a slave to poor eating habits and start making more conscious decisions about what you put into your body.

Fortunately, you don't have to sign up for one of those programs, because you can get almost all the same benefits from keeping a nutritional journal on your own. A personal nutrition journal doesn't have to contain every little detail about what you eat and drink, although a journal with more useful information generally results in greater fat loss over time. However, even a simple journal with very basic information may significantly improve your fat loss.

Just the act of writing down the items you eat and drink, along with the time you had them, will make you think more seriously about your nutritional choices. For instance, if you are supposed to be eating healthy and you find yourself writing down a lot of junk food or other empty calories, you will see how much you are straying from the way you are supposed to eat. Then the next time you start to have chips or cookies, you will probably think about having to write it down, which by itself may make you stop and choose something healthier or have a smaller portion instead.

Keeping this type of basic journal is very quick and easy and you do not need any special equipment. You can use a pen and paper, computer, iPhone, or whatever else works for you. The only thing is that you should write down what you eat/drink fairly soon afterwards, because if you wait too long, you may forget some things or the information will otherwise not be as accurate. The more accurate your information, the more it will help you.

If you are willing to put forth a little more effort with your nutritional journal, you can also use it to fine tune your nutrition program and further improve your overall health and fat loss over time. To get more out of your nutritional journal, I still recommend keeping track of what and when you eat and drink, but you will also have to look at more specific components of your food. At the minimum, you should keep track of total calories, calories from fat, calories from protein, calories from carbohydrates, and grams of fiber.

You can go further and break things down even more to include variables such as calories from sugar, calories from trans-fats, calories from saturated fat, etc. In these cases, the important thing is to have the information be in numerical form and have almost every category use the same type of measurement. For example, in the above categories, everything is broken down into number of calories per item/ingredient. You don't have to use calories, but it is probably the easiest.

The issue is that much of this information will not originally be listed in terms of calories, but rather grams. The problem with grams is that all grams are not equal in terms of calories. For instance, one gram of carbohydrate or protein is about 4 calories, alcohol is 7 calories, and fat is 9 calories, so simply writing down everything in terms of grams does not really provide a clear picture of your overall nutritional intake. By converting everything into calories, you can easily compare your intake of each type of ingredient to find out what you need to add or what you should consume less.

On the other hand, fiber does not have any calories, so you should still record it in grams, because you want to eat at least 25 grams per day. Your fiber should ideally come from both soluble and insoluble sources, but most of it will probably be insoluble. In any case, if you see that you are not getting close to the minimum 25 grams of fiber, you should make it a priority to eat more foods that are high in fiber. However, without keeping track of your fiber intake, you may not even realize that you need more fiber. These types of changes are important, because improving fiber intake can cause significant your long-term health and fat loss.

Some people choose to track their nutrition in even greater detail and additionally record their intake of vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients. However, I would not recommend nutritional journaling for anything this involved as it would take way too much time and effort. If you want stats on everything, there are numerous computer programs available to help you keep track of all this information. For most people, a more basic nutritional journal will work just as well.

If you have never tried keeping a nutritional journal, it may sound like more effort than it is worth, but this is certainly not the case. The most basic journals are easy to keep and take very little time and keeping a nutritional journal really does increase your awareness and makes you more accountable for your eating habits. This can be very empowering, but it also makes you take responsibility for how and what you eat, which is probably one of the big reasons why many people are unwilling to try nutritional journaling.

It is certainly easier to follow your regular eating habits without giving them much thought and if you have good nutritional habits, this approach may be fine. Unfortunately, many people do not have the best eating habits and this is problematic, because so much of long-term health and fat loss success is dependent developing good habits. Keeping a nutritional journal will let you identify the problems in your current eating program and help motivate you to replace bad eating habits with good ones over time.

There really are many different ways that keeping a nutritional journal can help improve your nutritional habits and ultimately your fat loss, so I hope you at least give a simple journal a try. Keeping a nutrition journal often results in more significant improvement than people first expect, but it works best when you are honest, accurate, and consistent with your journal. In any case, a nutritional journal will certainly give you better results than the next new miracle pill or similarly gimmicky health and fitness product that promises great results with minimal effort.

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The Essential MyFitnessPal Beginners Tutorial | How To Track & Log Your Macros The Easy Way

Nutrition is really important as we all know, but how do we ensure that we are able to track the important information? MyFitnessPal is a really simple app that allows you to track calories and in this video I share how to start using MyFitnessPal to track your macronutrients.

Now, you may well be thinking that there has got to be an easier way so that you do not have to spend time preparing meals and then having to weight each item and add them to the list? 

This is where you want something that already has a barcode that can measure exactly the information that you require. 

Lucky for you that I have a special gift that is going to save you time. I have put together 10 High Protein Recipes that you can download for free. These recipes give you all the information that you require in order for you to get the amount of protein you need as well as having enjoyable meals. 

Simply click the link to get your >>10 High Protein Recipe Book<< and take the stress out of cooking as well as being able to track your calorie and macro-nutrient information. 

Good Nutrition and Physical Fitness Is Vital to Good Health

Health, nutrition and fitness are the three interrelated areas that determine an individual's sense of happiness and well being.

Health

Health involves the physical, mental and spiritual levels of the individual. A physically healthy person is one who can carry out normal daily physical activities and respond to emergencies with out undo fatigue or pain. The health part of health, nutrition and fitness is achieved through a balanced program of good nutrition, healthy physical activity, continuous education and mental activities, and social and spiritual activities. Your choices of the food you eat and your physical activities affect both your short term and long term health (how you feel now and in the future). You may be getting plenty to eat, but if it is not a proper balance of choices from all five of the basic food groups you may be adding fat to your body without generating the energy to burn the calories and energy to the cells to carry out their functions. Healthy physical activity helps burn off any excess calories you consume, and keeps muscles and joints flexible and strong. Your efforts of continued education (reading, attending seminars, as well as attending formal education classes), and spiritual activities (social activities, attending devotional services, meditation, etc) provides you with a sense of accomplishment and well being. An important part of good health is being physically fit and maintaining proper body weight. Maintaining good health requires following a nutritional diet, and exercising to build and maintain muscles, and to burn of any excess calories.

Nutrition

The nutritional health part of health, nutrition and fitness deals with the food we consume to maintain our health and provide energy to carry on our daily lives. Nutrition is the process of nurturing or being nourished; the total of all the processes that a plant or animal uses to take in and process food substances to maintain a healthy life. A healthy nutrition life style requires a balanced diet of food selected from the five basic food groups, fruits, vegetables, naturally calcium rich dairy products or calcium enriched products, whole grains, and protein (lean meat fish, peas and beans). Other nutritional factors should also be considered. Most fruits and vegetables are better if they are consumed raw because heating destroys some of the healthy nutrients. Steaming and broiling food is better than boiling or frying foods. Preparing fresh fruits and vegetables is better than processed or prepared foods.

The prepared foods generally contain more salt (sodium) than necessary and other flavor enhancing substances. Some of these additives do not add any nutritional value to the food and may even be harmful to your health. More nutritional factors to consider are the variety of the fruits and vegetables in our diet. Nutritional data shows that dark green vegetables (romaine lettuce, kale, broccoli, etc.), and orange vegetables (carrots, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and summer squash) provides more nutritional value than some of the less colorful vegetables. Here are even more nutrition facts. Some foods contribute to burning fat. Green tea contributes to fat burning by increasing the body's metabolism and increasing energy level. Foods high in protein are more difficult to digest so they require more calories in the digestive process. Good nutrition practices may not be sufficient for some people they may require unique supplements such as CoEnzimeQ10 or others.

Physical Fitness

Physical fitness part of fitness, health and nutrition is the ability to carry out daily activities, enjoy leisure activities and have a healthy immune system to resist disease and infection. Developing and maintaining good physical fitness requires a balance of good nutrition and varied physical exercise. There are there elements to physical fitness: specific fitness the ability to perform daily functions related to work or recreation, general fitness the ability to enjoy leisure time and a sense of peace with the environment, preparedness the ability to over come or avoid emergencies.

There also three factors in achieving good physical fitness good nutrition, physical exercise and restful (sleep). The nutrition maintains the health of the cells and provides the energy to perform the exercises. Physical exercise may be used to accomplish work to earn a living, participate in athletic events, develop and maintain healthy cardiovascular system, or control body weight. Physical fitness and how physical fitness is achieved varies depending on individual. If a person is involved in an occupation that requires vigorous activity and has good nutrition possibly no other exercise is needed to maintain a fit body.

However, even people who are who work hard at their occupation may need additional cardiovascular exercise to keep their heart and blood vessels in optimum condition. People whose profession does not require vigorous physical exercise special effort is required to achieve and maintain physical fitness. A good nutritional diet is the obvious starting point. Some easy things are use stairs rather than elevators, park a little farther from the office or store entrance, throw away the television remote, change channels the old fashion way, and walk to near by offices or neighbors rather than using the telephone. These efforts will help, but more vigorous physical exercise is needed for good physical fitness.

For cardiovascular health a routine of physical exercise over a period a minimum of 20 minutes three times per week is required. The best and generally most convenient cardiovascular exercise is walking. Another good cardiovascular exercise is swimming. Swimming will also help in building and toning muscles. The other factor in developing and maintaining physical fitness is strength exercise to build and tone muscle and to burn fat. Strength exercises are good for weight management because they stimulate muscle growth even after the exercise has been completed. This means that the body continues to burn fat for an extended period of time.

Mental Health

Mental health, as it applies to health nutrition and fitness, is the way we think, how we feel and how we act as we interact with our surroundings. Our mental health contributes to our relations with other people, how we make decision, make choices and how we cope with stress. People with good mental health are able to control their emotions, feelings and behavior. Keeping the mind active through reading, playing games, and an active social life contributes to good mental health.

Spiritual Health 

Spirituality can be defined as sensitivity or attachment to religion, or as a state condition of being spiritual. Some people ignore or overlook the importance of spirituality in relation to health nutrition and fitness, because they relate spirituality only to religion. Through out history man has struggled with the concept of spirituality. Basically spirituality is the struggle to become the most perfect person or individual. The path to achieve this goal may be through seeking external help through religion of some form, or internal through meditation and study of both present and past human interactions. The above is based on personal study, experiences and observations through out my life.

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Proper Nutrition for Athletes

Nutrition for Athletes

Proper nutrition is an essential part of living a healthy life; this is even truer when considering nutrition for athletes. Athletes who are more active or are engaged in a sport need to have a well-balanced diet. Including the proper nutrition that the body needs will help you stay healthy and energized. Today, obtaining proper nutrition for an athlete is not difficult to achieve; with the help of scientists and nutritionists, there is a wide variety of nutrition plans and nutrition programs to choose from. Without the adequate nutrition, athletes can develop various diseases, and also run the risk of poor performance on the field, court or athletic event.

Why is proper nutrition for athletes important?

The main reason why athletes should find a nutrition program is so that they can stay healthy and prevent injuries. Recent research reports that injuries are more prevalent during the last 20-30 minutes of a game; this is because during this time the body is more fatigued and the mind becomes less concentrated. A healthy diet can help athletes build endurance not only physically, but mentally as well. Staying focused and energized throughout a game or an event can help prevent injuries.

Another important reason to obtain proper nutrition is to enhance your overall performance. Despite of all the training and skills received, the only way for an athlete to reach his or her full potential is by nourishing and fueling the body. By eating healthy meals full of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, athletes can provide their body with the adequate energy source to perform well.

What should healthy nutrition for athletes include?

Athletes should consider consuming a healthy diet that includes the following;

Carbohydrates - Since they provide up to 50% of the energy source, carbohydrates should definitely be on top of the nutrition plan list. The more active a person is the more carbohydrates the body will use. Including proper amounts of carbohydrates in your diet will aid in your performance and strength.

Water - As most know, water is necessary for life. Being well-hydrated is crucial for all human beings especially athletes. Becoming even slightly dehydrated can be extremely dangerous while you're active. Water is needed to regulate your body temperature and protect your health.

Fats - Like carbohydrates, fats are also a good source of energy. While fat is typically only used after one hour of performance, an adequate amount of fat should be included in an athlete's diet. Lack of fat consumption can highly affect your physical activity.

Protein - Once carbohydrates and fats have been used, the body will search for proteins as an alternative energy source. When extra protein is consumed, the body stores it as fat and uses it when energy is necessary.

Vitamins & Minerals - Riboflavin, thiamin, and niacin are three important vitamins that should be included in an athlete's nutritional regimen. These vitamins are required in order for the body to produce energy.

How can you obtain the proper nutrition?

Most people don't have the time or patience to build their own nutrition plan. That is why special nutrition programs for athletes have been developed. These nutrition plans are made especially to help athletes improve their performance as well as their overall health. Athletes should always be careful to provide their body with the nutrients it needs to succeed.

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The Importance Of Hydration On Your Fitness Goals

The next important aspect for losing weight is that you need to be hydrated because being dehydrated can have the following affects: 

1. Your exercise performance suffers if you are not hydrated sufficiently - 1% dehydration is all it takes for this to happen.

2. Your metabolism can suffer as well being 1% or more dehydrated.

3. Drinking with meals can reduce calorie intake by as much as 75 calories each meal. Over a year that would equate to 27,000 fewer calories ingested.

4. When exercising, if you are doing less than 70 minutes of exercise, then water is better to have rather than a sport drink.

In addition to this it is important to drink sufficiently during the day and especially after exercise to help you on your weight loss journey.

Which of the above points do you need to implement in to your daily routine?

The Importance Of Nutrition On Your Fitness Goals

The third pillar for effective weight loss is going to be your nutrition. Without adequate nutrition you will not be able to achieve the weight loss that you want.

Here is how you can start making small changes that will help your diet:

1. Make small changes that look to increase the amount of fruit and veg as this will increase your satiety.

2. Increase the amount of protein you consume as this will reduce hunger and help you repair muscles from exercise.

3. Aim to reduce calories in by 10 - 20% by tracking them on apps and be consistent.

4. Batch cook so that you save time and money making meals

5. Smaller portions at meal times and drink plenty of water with meals.

Which of the tips are you going to do to improve your weight loss journey? Let me know in the comments.