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You are What You Eat

6 Eating Habits That Could Make You Gain Some Weight

You’ve been exercising regularly and you’ve been steering clear from every high-calorie that you see, but you’re still not shedding those extra pounds away. We know it’s frustrating, but before you turn your anger on your weighing scale, you might want to check and re-evaluate some of your eating habits that could be causing you to gain weight.

Failing to Eat Enough Every Meal

It may come as a shocker, but not eating enough actually forces your body to go into starvation mode. This is where your metabolism slows down, making it more difficult for you to burn calories even if you’re eating healthy meals and working out regularly.

Eating Rapidly

If our body has one huge flaw, it would be this: it takes your stomach about 20 minutes to inform your brain that you already ate enough. One study found that slow eater consumed 66 fewer calories each meal, but compared to their fast-eating counterparts, they felt fuller after each meal. Well, what’s 66 calories you ask? It simply means losing more than 20 pounds a year if you eat 66 fewer calories on your meals.

Missing Nutrients That Your Body Needs

Did you know that failing to give your body enough iron, magnesium or vitamin D saps your energy? And if you’re already feeling deflated, you’ll likely end up snacking on sweet, high-carb foods to compensate for the energy that you lost – which in return, causes you gain some weight.

Drinking High-Calorie Drinks

If your diet and exercise aren’t working, then perhaps that because you’re drinking your calories. Remember, juices and sodas are often loaded with hundreds of calories per serving, which could quickly add up to your weight without you noticing.

Being Tricked By Food Labels

Not everything that’s labelled fat-free is good for you. When fat is completely removed from a food, it ends up becoming flavourless, a problem that most food manufacturer remedied by adding tons of salt and sugar to the product.

Focusing Too Much on Your Workout

Here’s a secret: hitting the gym won’t really burn that much calories. According fitness experts, a person weight 155 pounds only burns 112 calories for every 30 minutes of weightlifting exercise – which you can easily counter if you mistakenly drink a soda after working out.

Shedding off some weight isn’t just about exercising regularly, it’s also about cleaning up your eating habits. Because as they say, a well-toned body is often made in the kitchen and not in the gym.

8 Must-Know Tips to Achieve Your Dream Body

Everyone wants a healthier, stronger and leaner body, but not everyone knows the real thing behind exercise, diet and fitness. If you’re one of the majorities who wishes to get leaner, keep these tips and strategies in mind as you journey towards achieving the body you’ve always dreamed of.

1. Change up your routine every two weeks
If motivation is a big factor, keep your routine as interesting as possible by changing it up every two weeks. Boredom can be your biggest enemy when working out. According to experts, people find variety much more enjoyable.

2. Fuel up after workout
For someone trying to be fit, breakfast is not exactly the most important meal, but the post-workout meal. While you may be tempted to skip refueling, thinking that you might undo the burnt calories, a combo of 15 grams of protein and 30 grams of carb will help restore your energy, promote muscle recovery and help build a leaner physique.

3. Hang on tight instead of pulling up
Can’t do a single pull up? No worries. Simply hanging on the monkey bar for as long as you can is enough to slowly improve your upper-body strength. Keeping your body still will naturally engage your core, hips and lower back, as well as your arms. If you want to bring it up a notch, slowly move your legs up and down.

4. Put on your bikini every so often
Do not pack away your bikinis even if it’s rainy season. Doing so may lead to potential surprises of ‘how did I get these extra love handles?” or “why does this fit awfully now?” Keep your two-piece handy so you can put it on every now and then and make sure you still like what you see in the mirror.

5. Proper execution matters—a lot!
50 push-ups won’t matter if you are not executing the exercise correctly. Before adding more weight or increasing your speed, perfect your form and technique first. This is especially important if your routine requires you to perform as many reps as possible during a certain amount of time.

6. Give your ropes some love
The best exercise tool available is a jump rope. It may seem juvenile until you see perfectly-toned-bodied boxing pros doing jumping ropes every time they train. Not only is this workout equipment inexpensive, they are also compact and portable. Who would’ve thought that this children’s toy can help you burn 200 calories in 20 minutes?

7. Sweat out to your own tunes
Listening to your favorite upbeat music will help you power through an arduous workout. In fact, studies show that people who exercise on machines designed to play music based on their speed and effort exert more energy (without being aware of it) than those who exercise without music.

These are just a few tips to hopefully help you achieve your fitness goals. Now that you’re armed with the right knowledge, you already have a good idea of how you should tackle the quest for better health and fitness.

Avoiding Weight Gain on Holidays

The holidays are the most exciting time of the year for most of us who spend our time at work. It’s the right time to get together with friends and family to party, eat, drink, and catch up with conversations. It’s also the most stressful time for people who are trying to keep their weight manageable, because holidays are the perfect excuse to eat.

What can you do to avoid gaining weight during the holidays?

Don’t Skip Your Fitness Routine
If a gym membership is a hassle for you, motivate yourself to spend between ten to twenty minutes daily to do exercises, especially in the morning just before breakfast. Although that’s not going to make a lot of difference when it comes to burning those fats, at least you’re on the right track to keeping yourself fit because you’ll notice the differences in how heavy your body is whenever you move.

Try Different Activities
Partying isn’t the only event that’s common during the holidays, but it’s also the perfect time to participate in office or family activities, such as; teambuilding, recreation, holiday programs, and reunions. It’s also a great time to catch up on your cleaning duties at home or to travel and check out places in Singapore that are ready for the holidays. Ask your friends to go on hiking or biking or schedule a sports tournament with your co-workers during the weekends instead of going to the club.

Avoid Unnecessary Snacks
Food is plenty during the holidays, making it easy to grab the nearest snacks you can find even if you’re not hungry. If you do feel hungry in between meals, stick to healthier snacks, such as fruits, seeds, and nuts instead of the cookies, candies, cakes, and pastries. Don’t eat large portions either even if you’re trying to justify your eating habits by not wanting the excess food to spoil. Limit your food to smaller portions, after all, there are portion size recommendations on the food labels for that purpose.

Do Not Skip Meals
Start each day right by eating a full, healthy breakfast, because skipping meals can lead to binging as you, whether consciously or not, compensate for your hunger. High-protein meals such as beans, roasted chicken, and lentils, for example, can make you feel full for hours, making it easy to avoid having small snacks. For snacks in between meals, stick to high-fiber food such as vegetables, so you don’t keep coming back to the table for an extra serving.

Use Strategies to Trick Your Mind
Chew slowly to avoid consuming more food than you can burn, because you’re giving your mind time to assume that your tummy is full. When dining with your family at home, make sure to serve the food restaurant-style using serving plates instead of placing the entire meal course on the table. Then use smaller plates for dining to trick your mind that you require only small portions of the food; and thin, tall glasses to serve alcoholic drinks, so you don’t end up getting drunk.

6 Benefits of Yoga  

 

We hear about yoga but we do not give it a chance to change our lives. It is time that we give yoga a chance. There are many fitness centres here in Singapore that offers yoga. Patrons saw how yoga changed their lives.

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Here are the benefits of yoga:

  1. All around fitness: Patrons say that being truly healthy is not only physical but it should also be mental and emotional. Yoga helps balance these things. In other words, yoga is the holistic package.
  1. Weight loss: Many Singaporeans want weight loss but they haven’t tried yoga. Yoga presents an excellent opportunity because it can train the body to seek the right kind of food and when.

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  1. Stress relief: Exercises and other form of activities can relieve stress. Yoga can also serve as our stress reliever. Through its postures, we get rid of stress that is accumulated every day.
  1. Inner peace: Yoga is a promoter of inner peace. Whenever we are troubled, we seek for peaceful and serene spots hoping to appease our spirits but little do we know that inner peace is within us. Yoga can help calm disturbed mind or spirit. It is cheap and we can do it any time of the day.
  1. Increased energy: Yoga can help increase our energy level. Things can be exhausting at the end of the day but yoga can give us that extra stamina or endurance to finish few more tasks. Yoga is not only for inner peace, it also includes body strengthening.
  1. Improved flexibility and posture: Regular practice of yoga makes our body strong and flexible. It can stretch and tone the muscles in our body. Not only that, it can also improve our postures when standing, sitting and walking.

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App-Grade Your Weight Loss Routine

7 Free Weight Loss Apps to Help You Drop Your Pounds

If you’re someone who constantly checks her phone, tweets, texts, emails, and snaps pictures for Instagram, then why not make your phone time a little more productive by helping you slim down? With tons of iPhone and smartphone weight loss applications available, achieving your weight loss goal has never been this easy.

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  1. Lose It! – Just by keying in your current weight and weight goal, this app can already provide you with a fairly accurate estimate of the number of calories that you should consume each day to achieve your weight loss goals. It also keeps track of the calories that you consume daily, as well as the number of calories you lose through exercising.
  1. Fooducate – This weight loss app works by helping you spot the tricky non-health foods by cutting your research time in half. All you’ve got to do is scan product’s barcode in your phone and Fooducate will give you a rating of the food scanned based on its calorie counts preserving, amount of excess sugar, and processing techniques.
  1. CalorieKing Food Search – Counting calories in food will only work if you have accurate amounts. Just use this app to key in any type of food and find out the amount of calories it’s costing you.
  1. Endomondo – If you’re a biker, runner, or even a walker, Endomondo is the perfect app to track not just your route in Google Maps, but also your workout history for future comparisons. You can also create an account, and be motivated by your fellow exercisers each time you break a mile.

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  1. My Fitness Pal – Before giving you any weight loss recommendations, My Fitness Pal first takes your height, weight, weight goal and lifestyle into account first. After that, it automatically breaks down your goal into smaller parts, such as a monthly or weekly goal. This app also allows its users to access nutritional information and calorie counts from any local Singapore restaurants, removing the guesswork of dining out.
  1. EaTipster – This app is perfect for you if want to start your weight loss plan by cleaning up your eating habits. EaTipster provides a practical nutrition tip daily, which could help you in choosing the healthiest sandwich bread, as well as in figuring out which fast-food fruit smoothies have the highest sugar content.
  1. Weight Recorder – Simple and straightforward. All you’ve got to do to start using this app is to key in your current weight, whether you weigh yourself daily or weekly, and it will chart your progress starting day one.

Your smartphone can serve as an excellent tool for getting and staying in shape. Just install the weight loss app that’s right for you, and see how it makes tracking your weight loss progress a lot easier for you.

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