Weight Loss Goddess

But of course, the suggestion to eat six times a day to boost your metabolism assumes that you are eating a sensible diet, a big assumption to make in this day and age when we are surrounded by convenience foods.
So when we say small smeals frequently. this does not mean you can go out and have a Mcbreakfast meal in the morning, a steak and fries two hours later, five Twinkies and a ho-ho next, then tacos with sour cream and guacamole for your next meal, BBQ ribs with mashed potatoes for your fifth meal and a trip to that all-you-can-stuff-into-yourself-buffet at the mall for your sixth and final meal of the day.
Sure, you might be boosting your metabolism a bit, but you’re overcompensating with too many calories and losing the Battle of the Bulge in a BIG way.  Your soldiers will be so over-run with calories that they will be forced to store them as fat.
Break down your meals into six smaller and HEALTHIER meals during the day.  Lower your caloric intake in a healthy manner, and your little soldiers will not only win the battle, you’ve given them the right weapons to win the entire war.
Also, avoid white in your diet. Simple sugars, rice and refined flour are all absorbed quickly by your body and are turned into fat stores.  Eat more complex carbohydrates, such as those found in wholemeal bread and grains.  They take a longer time to be absorbed into your body and this enables your blood sugar to remain level.  Try eating brown rice instead of white rice, whole grains in your breads and pasta made from wheat flour instead of white refined flours.
Avoid caffeine and drink green tea instead. Caffeine is known to block absorption of vitamin C, create unhealthy acid in your system and stimulate sugar cravings.  If there’s one thing you don’t need when you’re trying to lose weight, it is sugar cravings.  Green tea has antioxidants also, and doesn’t tend to have all those nasty side effects that caffeine can give you, though it does have some.
Drink at least 8 glasses of water a day.  While recent studies have not proved its benefits conclusively, it does help you feel full if nothing else. Water also flushes out all the toxins that are set free when you’re losing weight.  If you are dehydrated, your metabolism slows down.
Try drinking very cold water too, when you’re drinking water.   Your body has to remain at a constant temperature,  and needs to burn calories to do so.  Cold water will boost your metabolism a bit each time it has to warm up after your glass of ice water.

This may seem like an odd piece of advice considering your goal is to lose weight.

But the fact is, you have to eat in order to keep your metabolism running in an optimal manner. Are you skipping breakfast in order to cut back on calories and lose weight? Bad battle plan, soldier.

Let’s work out a better plan of attack together, and we can show you just why you need to eat, when you should eat, and what you should eat.
Remember that not eating sends your body into survival mode, right? It believes you are starving and so slows down your metabolism in order to conserve its stores.
So let’s say you’ve been asleep for 8 hours. You didn’t have anything to eat for two to three or more hours before you went to bed last night. Now your body has been without food for about 11 or 12 hours.
If you skip breakfast, you’re adding more time to the starvation mode, and your body is starting to whimper and wonder where its fuel is, and if it’s ever going to get fed again. It will wonder if it should start conserving stores because starvation is just around the corner?
You’ve got your whole metabolism all in an uproar, and that’s NOT a good thing.
Now, what happens if you go to bed, get up and eat a healthy breakfast? You have, in essence, broken your fast. You’ve been fasting for ten or more hours, and now it’s over. Your little soldiers can relax and get back to their normal duty, which is burning calories instead of storing them.
So to keep your metabolism purring along at a good rate, eat small meals and eat them often during the day. Research has shown that breaking down the traditional three meals a day into six smaller meals, spaced evenly throughout the day, will result in a boost to your metabolism.

Yes, it’s true. If you want to boost your metabolism, the very best thing you can do is to start moving your body. Some exercise is good for building muscle, while other exercise is good for just plain sweating and giving you a good cardio workout.
While aerobic exercises like running, jogging, playing tennis or riding a bike will help you tone your body and maintain your weight, they don’t do a whole lot to increase your muscle mass-which is what you need to do in order to really boost your metabolism.
Weight training and strength training help build muscle, and this is a good thing. Think of your body in terms of an army. Too much fat means too many soldiers are weak and wounded, not able to carry on the fight.
Body: “Sir! Our numbers have been depleted! We’re not efficiently fighting the incoming calories, I mean missiles!”
Metabolism: “Recruit new soldiers, FRESH soldiers! Put them on the front lines and let them take on the calories! I mean missiles!
Body: “Sir, yes Sir! Commence lifting weights NOW!”

As you increase your muscle mass, and decrease your fat stores, your metabolism speeds up. It burns more of what you eat.
Your body will require more calories to maintain itself, so if you increase your soldiers, I mean muscle mass, through weight training and strength training, and consume a lower calorie amount, you will lose weight. Just don’t lower your calories so drastically that it sends your army into survival and hoarding calories and fat mode again.
Boosting your metabolism through exercise is just one way to light up those calorie-burning fires within you.

When we see beautiful models in magazines and svelte actresses in movies, we are tempted to cut down on our eating in order to lose weight and look more like them.  We decide to stop eating as much so we can drops some pounds.  Less food taken in should mean you’ll lose weight quickly, right?
Not necessarily.  Our bodies are very efficient at storing food as fat as a defense against starvation.  When you cut your calories, and if you do it drastically enough, your body panics.  Think of it in terms of an army and its rations.
Body:          “Danger! Danger!  There’s not enough food!  We’re starving!”
Metabolism:    “Cut down on production, we’re going into survival mode! Slow and steady! Emphasis on the slow!”
Body:          “Just make sure we have enough fat stores to get through this famine.”
Metabolism:    “Aye Aye, Captain!”
Orders have been given and the next thing you know, you have are miserable because you have not only NOT lost weight on your diet,  you have rebounded and GAINED.  You have also gained any number of unattractive fat stores which get created in order to make sure that your body doesn’t starve.
Think of it as the general of an army, laying in stores for a very long winter. When your body is in survival mode, it takes fewer calories to sustain itself, to maintain its current weight.
Excess calories are stored as fat, and the rations are parceled out to the soldiers reluctantly and very slowly in order to make sure the resources last as long as possible.
Severe restriction of calories is a sure fire way to cause your metabolism to slow down to a crawl.  So if you’ve been crash dieting for years without exercising, then your metabolism most likely has been affected.
Dieting like this burns muscle, and the less muscle mass you have, the less calories you burn, and the slower your metabolism. You will now need fewer calories to maintain your current weight.  This means that if you consume more calories, your body won’t need to use them for energy and will store them.  You will actually rebound and gain weight, and it will be that much harder to lose it.  Remember, it only takes 2000 calories to gain a pound, but 3,500 to lose one.
When you put the weight back on, and you will if you’ve been crash dieting, then it will be put back on as fat.  This means that your metabolic rate has probably dropped a little bit each time that you’ve crash dieted.
Putting on more fat and losing muscle will cause your metabolism to slow down even more. It seems like a cycle of doom, doesn’t it?
It can be if you don’t break that feast or famine cycle.  But you can learn how to increase your metabolism in order to burn the most calories possible, even when you’re sleeping.

Your metabolism is the amount of energy in calories that your body burns in order to maintain its weight.  Whether you’re sleeping, running, sitting, standing, riding in a car or eating a bowl ice cream, your body is constantly burning calories in order to keep you going.  Think of it as a fire within you, burning your fat and food away.
However, unless you have a very fast metabolism, you won’t burn enough calories chewing and swallowing your ice cream to cancel out the calories you just consumed.  So you need to perform physical activities which will help you burn those calories so you don’t gain weight.
Get any group of women together, and even some men, and mention the word metabolism, and most of them will start to complain that their metabolism is slow. Many of us suffer the same problem. When we were younger, it seemed we could eat anything and not gain weight. Once we’re past 30, if we simply *think* about a piece of cheesecake we seem to put on five pounds.
It’s a sad but true fact of life that as we age our metabolism slows down.  It doesn’t stop (although at times we might feel as though it has) but it does change.  The reason for this is because we have more lean muscle mass at 20 than we do at 70, and lean muscle mass is what helps burn calories and keep our metabolism fast. It uses fuel more efficiently and does not try to store the calories we consume as fat on our body.
Some people have a higher metabolic rate naturally than others,  and are able to burn off the calories they eat and never gain an ounce.  Others have metabolisms which seem slower than a slug, and everything they eat seems to stick with them and not get burned off.
No two people are alike in the calories they burn and the rate of their metabolism, but there are some things we all have in common, that lean muscle burns calories, and that the extra calories and fat we consume is stored as fat.
It possible to boost your metabolism in order to burn more calories and be able to lose weight?  Evidence suggests that there are a number of ways to help maximize our metabolism in order to more efficiently consume the food we eat, whether we’re walking, reading or even sleeping.  Boosting your metabolic rate is possible and in this series of articles we will show you how.

Did you know that one key to successful weight loss is by boosting your metabolism? Metabolism is the process of burning calories in your body. You burn calories naturally even if you are not exerting any effort, when you are at rest, and even when you are sleeping.

The recommended safe weight loss level of  1 to 2 pounds per week is really possible if you learn to work with your body and boost your metabolism.  Your first five pounds or so of weight loss will always be mostly water weight. After that, if you increase your protein and limit your carbs and fat, which tend to get stored by the body, your metabolism should kick in to operate more efficiently.

Another way to boost your metabolism is through exercise. In many cases, if you perform the right exercises, you might not even have to think about trimming down your calorie intake.

The trouble with most diets is that they are only a short-term plan.  What you want to achieve is permanent weight loss. This can only be achieved through increasing metabolism, but in such a way that it is sustainable, and not too difficult to incorporate into our daily lives.

Researchers have recently discovered, for example, that three or four short ten minute sessions of exercise per day, was actually more effective than one sustained forty minute burst of activity.  Jane Fonda, whose workout put exercise on the map in the USA, was exercising up to three hours at a time at one stage. When she cut down to a more normal level, she never changed dress sizes.

So even if you are a busy person, incorporating a brisk walk at least twice a day for fifteen minutes will help kick-start your metabolism easily, and give you more energy.  It will burn calories, and give you a positive outlook and change of scenery too.

Increasing your metabolism is a far better strategy than dieting because it will give you better long-term results, and will not increase your possibilities of gaining weight again, or of  “rebound weight gain,” where you actually end up weighing more than before you started dieting.

Simple calorie cutting here and there, by making smarter overall choices, will also help you boost your metabolism.  Going from whole milk to fat-free or 1% percent not only cuts calories, it cuts your intake of fat, which the body tends to store as energy.

Believe it or not, you are actually born with every single fat cell you will ever have in your body.  They plump up or down depending on how much fat they are provided with to store—that’s right, the fat and other calories in your diet.  But if you burn your calories you consume efficiently, there will be no chance to store them.

With a boost in metabolism through moderate exercise and watching what you eat, these small changes can add up to big results when it comes to feeling more fit and trim and losing weight.  This in turn will contribute to your overall health and wellbeing, and positive mental attitude. Best of all, it is a long-term health and weight control strategy you can use for life.

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Makes 8 Servings
INGREDIENTS:
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can black beans
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can dark red kidney beans
• 1 (15 ounce) can garbanzo beans (chick peas)
• 1 (14.5 ounce) can pinto beans
• 1 (10 ounce) package frozen corn kernels, thawed
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 2 tablespoons chili powder
• 1 teaspoon lime juice
• 1 (8 ounce) jar chunky salsa
• 1 pinch dried parsley
DIRECTIONS:
Rinse the beans well, drain and pour into a large bowl.
Add corn. oil, cumin, chili powder, lime juice, and salsa. Sprinkle with parsley, cover, and chill for about 1 hour before serving. Goes great with a bit of sour cream and cheese on the side, and can be made into a wrap. Just watch your calories from fat with the dairy products.
Calories: 260
Total Fat: 3.8g
Cholesterol: 0mg
Sodium: 827mg
Total Carbs: 46.9g
Dietary Fiber: 13.6g
Protein: 12.7g

Save Time And Money By Planning Your Meals

A light lunch will help you:

- Keep your energy levels up in the afternoon
- Stop you from feeling sluggish or sleepy
- Keep your blood sugar levels even and keep your metabolism up
- Be able better cope with stress
- Consume less calories throughout the rest of the day
- Set a healthy example for loved ones and friends
- Stop you from bingeing on unhealthy foods, especially if your salad includes high quality, lean protein.

Save Time And Money By Planning Your Meals

Cucumber Salad
Makes 8 Servings
INGREDIENTS:
• Cucumbers, thinly sliced
• 1 small white onion, thinly sliced
• 1 cup white vinegar
• 1/2 cup water
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 tablespoon dried dill, or to taste
DIRECTIONS:
Combine cucumbers and onion in a large bowl. Add the vinegar, water and sugar to a saucepan and cook over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, and pour over the cucumber and onions. Stir in dill, cover, and chill at least 30 min. Makes a great side dish with burgers or a sandwich too.
Calories: 77
Total Fat: 0g
Cholesterol: 0mg
Sodium: 2mg
Total Carbs: 19.7g
Dietary Fiber: 0.2g
Protein: 0.2g

Save Time And Money By Planning Your Meals

Lunch can be a tricky meal. You know you should be eating something to keep your blood sugar levels even and your metabolism running high. At the same time, you can’t eat anything too heavy or you will start dozing off shortly after lunch.

Salads are the perfect solution to this dilemma. They are nutrient dense, filling meals that don’t weigh you down at work or at the weekends when you are running around getting all your chores done and seeing friends and family. . Best of all, salads are healthy and mostly low in calories, provided you make smart choices about any dressing you might put on them.

Salads can also save you money. The brown bag lunch is far cheaper than eating out every day. You can get a huge tub of restaurant-quality organic mixed greens at Costco these days for about half the price as one sandwich in your local deli. We are talking enough salad for a week for lunch and/or dinner, or several meals for the whole family.
You can prepare many salads ahead of time and take them with you anywhere, including a picnic.

Best of all, salads fill you up, and leave you feeling satisfied after you eat, especially if you include lean protein with your meal, like chicken, shrimp, or some lowfat cheese.
Just think of some of the best meals you’ve ever had in a restaurant. You usually have soup and salad, right?

If you’re struggling with your weight, why not plan a three-course meal for yourself every day, with a light, non-cream based soup, and a large salad with a vinegar-based dressing? By the time you ever get to the main course, most of the edge will have been taken off your hunger, and you’ll be much less likely to try to stuff yourself, always a danger when you are too hungry.

If you start eating salad for a couple of lunches per week, you’re sure to see your food cravings go down, and your weight too. Not to mention what you spend on food every week.

Not only will you be losing weight, you’ll also save money by bringing your own lunch to work. So salads are a winner all around for anyone interested in healthy eating.

This website will be publishing a number of tasty salad recipes that will help get you started on the road to better lunches so you can eat right, watch your weight, and save money all at the same time.

Save Time And Money By Planning Your Meals