Yuma Jenkins | | Cheap Weight Loss, My Way

How to Dress for Flatter Abs

You try your best to control weight in order to look good, but you don’t need to wait to look good before you achieve your goal. You can look good while you ARE TRYING to lose weight. Here are some tips.

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Attaining flat abs isn’t just a matter of diet and exercise. Here are some of the best wardrobe tips for hiding not-so-flat abs:
Avoid clingy fabrics. Anything shiny or stretchy will just draw attention to the fact that your stomach isn’t flat. Look for denim, cotton, or wool instead of satin and jersey.
Skip cuts that add unflattering volume. These include baby-doll or Empire-cut dresses, which won’t work unless you have great legs and a small chest. Try a cut that narrows at the waist or cinch your middle with a belt. For skirts, look for pencil cuts and avoid pleats.
When shopping for pants, look for a fit that hits about an inch beneath your belly button. Don’t go so low that your stomach spills over your pants’ waistband.
Top it off with something that draws attention to your shoulders, such as a narrow single-breasted jacket cropped at the waist. Tops that fall below the hips and float over the stomach also offer the best camouflage. These include peasant shirts or tunics that aren’t too billowy.
Control-top tights under dresses and pants can be great body sculptors.
And lastly, whether you‘re sitting or standing, keep it straight. Suck your stomach toward your backbone.

Surviving the Holidays Without Weight Gain

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In between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year, most of us spend our time hopping from one party to another. The holiday season seems like such a booby trap for people conscious about weight control. After all, it’s the time of year to eat, drink and be merry. Is it possible for one to enjoy the bounty of the holidays without gaining unwanted pounds? If yes, how can one go about accomplish that goal? Below are some of the tips and tricks gleaned from health magazines.
• Have a low-calorie snack before the party to take the edge of your hunger off. Good choices are an apple, a piece of whole-grain bread, a small bowl of cereal, or soup. When you are already filled up somewhat, you are less likely to lose control at the party.
• At the party, serve yourself instead of letting the host or hostess to heap your plate full.
• Eat healthier foods, such as fruits and veggies, first. When you are not that ravenous, you won’t overindulge in the other stuff.
• In a restaurant setting, ask the waiter not to put bread on the table. Leave more room for your other favorite holiday treats instead.
• Choose foods that leave evidence of how much you have eaten. Keep the chicken wing bones and shrimp tails. When you see how much you already had, you’re less likely to eat more.
• Avoid wolfing down. Talk to fellow party-goers or make a habit of taking a sip of water every bite or two. When you go slow, you minimize the chances of going for seconds.
• Use a small plate. The smaller the dish, the less likely you’re going to take more than you want to.
• Instead of butter and cheese, use unsweetened fruit jam or low-fat yogurt to dress things up.
• Watch the alcohol, which not only packs a lot of calories but also slow down metabolism. Since overdrinking affects judgment, the more you drink, the more likely you’re to overeat.
• Have only a few bites of dessert. The first bite always tastes best, any way.
• Take a stroll afterwards. My husband and I like to do some window-shopping after a full meal because walking not only burns calories but also prevents bloating and heartburn.

10 Minute Solution Yoga DVD Review

Most public libraries offer a great resource of instructional materials on physical fitness and yoga. Best of all, it costs nothing to loan these materials. I, for one, often go to my local library to check out their DVD collection. However, not all yoga is created equal. Many yoga practices focus on stretching and flexibility, and will not necessarily burn fat. And a lot of the yoga postures are hard to accomplish for someone with no prior experience with yoga. Most of the yoga DVDs at my local library, to be frank, are not very effective in weight loss. On more than once, I’ve gone through a yoga practice with a big yawn on my face and have not sweated at all.
In my experience, I find one DVD–the 10 Minute Solution Yoga–to be particularly helpful in weight loss. This DVD consists of 5 ten-minute segments. They are:
1) Yoga Basics, which focuses on basic yoga postures, breathing, and techniques,
2) Yoga for Buns and Thighs, which is specifically targeted for those lower-body problem areas,
3) Yoga for Abs, specially designed for a flat belly,
4) Yoga Burn, which turns up the burn-factor on yoga with the use of dynamic movements,
5) and last, Yoga for Flexibility and Relaxation, which provides a great way to wind down your yoga workout.
You can use each set individually, mix and match them, or put all five together for a 50-minute total body workout.
With this DVD, you will find no excuse for not exercising. For even if you are one of those people who claim that they are too busy to exercise, surely you can find at least ten minutes in your day to do these segments.
Except for a couple of postures which seem hard to simulate, I find most of the workouts in this DVD humanly possible. It does take hard work and strong willpower, however. In the process of working hard and keeping it up, I sweat a lot. And that’s how you can shed those extra pounds with this DVD.

Natural Flavor Enhancers for Healthy Eating

Although many variables influence how much you eat, flavor matters most. When trying to lose weight, we should take advantage of what flavor has to offer and make sure it works for us, instead of against us. In earliest posts, I talked about ways in which the taste of vegetables can be improved by cooking them with canola oil or with meat. If you incorporate the following ingredients in your cooking, you can further cut down on the amount of cooking oil or meat needed to flavor up your vegetable dishes. All of these ingredients are fat-free, cholesterol-free, and rich in anti-toxicants and nutrients.

Green Scallion is a young onion with a white base (not yet a bulb) and long green leaves. Available in Asian grocery stores, it is perfect for sautes and soups. When preparing green scallions, first cut them into halves lengthwise and then chop the halves up into half-an-inch long strips. Since they overcook easily, green onions should be added last, about 1 minute away from the completion of the cooking, to preserve their green color and crispy texture.

Garlic is most suitable for salads and stir-fries. For Salads, I like to use minced garlic. For stir-fries, I like to use sliced garlic. At our house, we consume large amounts of stir-fried leafy vegetables, almost all of which are seasoned with garlic. I generally add 2 cloves worth of sliced garlic to each dish. Garlic, when picked in salt, also tastes wonderful.

Ginger is yet another spice that I use frequently in my cooking. I seldom peel it although some people do. Ginger can get rid of the fishy smell of seafood so I use it a lot when preparing seafood dishes.

The struggle for weight loss does not have to be tedious or joyless. By tapping into the flavor factor, you can make sure you stay on the right foods and at the same time keep on enjoying delicious food.

How to Optimize Flavors in Healthy Eating

A great many factors influence how much humans eat—and overeat. Social, environmental, psychological, economic, and biological factors can all trigger our appetites to behave badly. Among those pressures, flavor ranks as the most important: we tend to eat more of that which tastes good to us.
In our struggle with our weight, we often find that willpower alone is not enough to overcome the addictiveness of the foods that surround—and tempt—us day in and day out. We may be able to put up with the tedium of a low fat, low carb diet for a day or two, or for several weeks even; over time, however, our willpower weakens, and we backslide into unhealthy eating habits again. We need a more powerful weapon that can sustain us in our fight against weight gain. Flavor is such a weapon.
We all know that foods high in volume, such as vegetables, fruits, soups and stews, fill one up with fewer calories. These wholesome foods are also generally rich in nutrients. Making them a regular part of a healthful diet, on the other hand, can be difficult because most people don’t like the taste of vegetables.
Is there a way to flavor up the veggies to make them more palatable? The answer is yes.
In my experience, we can arrive at a happy compromise between flavor and wholesomeness by mixing veggies with meats or stir-frying veggies in small amounts of oil.
Have you noticed that sweet foods taste even sweeter when they are made with oil? This is because fat can serve as a vehicle for flavors. Even though it may not add a specific flavor to food, it enhances the potency of other added flavors. In the case of sugared foods, the oil distributes the sweetness throughout the mouth. Similarly, when we add oil to veggies, it can bring out all the hidden flavors in them and make them more delicious.
We have two picky eaters at our house. Both abhor veggies and wouldn’t touch veggies regardless of my best efforts to persuade them to. One day, I tried a recipe I got from a friend of mine. When stewing pork spare ribs, I put in some carrot and turnip cubes. The dish turned out to be a big success. Both of my children asked for seconds—something that never happened before.
Another favorite dish of ours is sesame tofu. Tofu, as we all know, is rich in protein and calcium. A lot of people are aware of its nutritional value but shy away from it because of its drab and slightly bitter taste. The next time you eat tofu, try adding one drop of sesame oil and some soy sauce to taste. You will find that the whole thing tastes different.

Hypnosis and Weight Loss

Self-imposed restrictive diets that produce quick and dramatic results have a tendency to boomerang with a subsequent weight gain. Instead of merely a diet or exercise plan for a set number of weeks, permanent weight loss occurs only with long-term lifestyle changes. According to many people, hypnosis can help you make those changes, quickly and more easily than you ever imagined possible.

Hypnosis refers to a procedure that induces a sleep like state in which the subject acts only on external suggestions. The rationale behind hypnotherapy is that the mind and body are intimately interlinked and influencing one never fails to affect the other. If you suggest to the subconscious mind that the body is free of pain or disease, it will actually bring about that change. In a hypnotic state, you are awake and alert, but you tune out most of the stimuli around you and focus intently on the subject at hand, to the near exclusion of any other thought.

Overeating often occurs because of the cravings and impulses we have about certain foods, on certain occasions. By reeducating the part of your brain responsible for creating cravings and impulses, hypnosis is believed to give you back choice in what you eat.

In a typical hypnotherapy weight loss session, you are first put into a relaxed state. You feel that tingly feeling like you are floating on air. It doesn’t feel heavy, and you feel like you can’t even move because you can’t even lift your finger all the way. This is also where you will start moving into the hypnotic trance progressively using imagery, non-verbal induction, or verbal induction, depending on which training the therapist actually has. Then you go through a deep breathing technique which allows you to go into a deeper level of trance. The next thing after that is what is known as the suggestion phase. That is where the therapist tunes into the food trap that gets in the way of your weight loss, be it sugar, comfort eating, boredom eating, or TV snacks (“Imagine your favorite apple pie covered with flies.”) The final step is awakening, where you will be brought out of hypnosis slowly.

Since hypnotism does not involve drugs, it is touted as natural and risk-free by many advertisers on the Internet. Critics argue, however, that many of the claims about weight loss through hypnosis are overly optimistic at best and openly deceptive at worst.

How to Cook for the Ideal Body Weight

Nowadays, even a kindergartener can tell you that healthy eating comes in the form of a pyramid.

source: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/pyramid/

According to the Healthy Eating Pyramid, you should eat a variety of foods. A balanced diet is one that includes all the food groups. More importantly, the Pyramid shows that not all foods are created equal. You should eat more foods from the bottom part of the pyramid (vegetables, whole grains) than the top (red meat, refined grains).

In general, home-cooked meals are preferred over processed foods because with the former, you have more control over what’s put into your mouth. For many people trying to eat a healthy diet, this presents special challenges. How can you eat home-cooked meals when you don’t particularly enjoy cooking yourself? What options do you have rather than to hire someone to do the cooking for you?

I am not much of a cook myself. But over the years, I have found ways to make the cooking experience more pleasant. Cooking home-made meals doesn’t have to involve long hours of slaving away in the kitchen, as I found out.

First, you need to make sure you’re properly equipped. Three cooking utensils are indispensable to a kitchen and worth every penny you spend on them: a deep stainless pot that is sturdy enough for daily stir-frying, a slow cooker, and a pressure cooker.

Vegetables are probably the only food group in the pyramid that you can take in as much as you want. Many people know that vegetables are good for them, but they shy away from vegetables simply because they don’t like the taste. Nutritionists will tell you that the most healthy way to prepare veggies is to steam them, but those seldom taste very good. Is there a way to make veggies more appetizing and still relatively healthy to eat? The answer is yes. You can, for instance, stir-fry them with canola oil. At our house, we serve 2 kinds of stir-fried veggies at every meal.

By the way, eating veggies in the form of a salad isn’t necessarily the best practice for weight control, contrary to popular belief. Unless you prepare the salad dressing yourself, you have no control over what goes into your mouth.

A slow cooker is a big help to people running hectic lives. It is convenient in that you can just throw in the ingredients, set the timer, and walk way. You don’t need to watch it cook—it will cook on its own. Using a slow cooker, you can stew veggies with meats. When cooked this way, veggies will take on the flavor of the meats and appeal to the pickiest eater around.

A pressure cooker can also come in handy when you are into healthy eating and cooking. Foods such as beans and brown rice are excellent food choices, but the sheer amount of time it takes to cook them can turn people away. Do not worry. If you pre-soak them in advance, and cook them with a pressure cooker, you can whip up a meal in no time at all.

Losing Weight the Right Way

The Ideal Body Weight

There are many ways to determine one’s ideal body weight. Without going into complicated mathematics, the ideal weight can be calculated using the following method:

100 lbs (for the first 5 feet) + 5lbs for each additional inch for women

110 lbs (for the first 5 feet) + 5 lbs for each additional inch for men.

The ideal weight for a woman at 5 feet 5.5 inches, for example, would be

100 lbs + 5.5 * 5 lbs = 127.5 lbs.

Myths

When it comes to maintaining an ideal weight, myths abound. Many people believe in sweating their pants off in a gym, others starving themselves with purely low fat, low carb menus. Still others swear by fad diet plans. Maintaining an ideal weight isn’t about any of the above. It is about making relatively healthy choices in life, with the focus on relative. Often, the choices come at low or no cost to you.

You are what you eat. If you eat a lot of junk food, fat will creep up on you. There is no mistake about that. Does that mean, though, that you should strictly adhere to a low fat, low calorie, low carb diet and cut everything else out? Not necessarily.

Red meat, such as beef, has a high content of saturated fat, which is associated with cardiovascular diseases. Regular consumption of red meat can be unhealthy. However, those trying to eat a leaner diet should also keep in mind that red meat is a good source of complete protein and iron. Abstaining from it could cause serious conditions such as iron deficiency and anemia.

The trick then, is not to fight the “absolute” evil, but rather, to pick the relatively less evil option whenever you can.

Your weight is influenced by how active you are throughout the day. Generally, the more active you are, the less likely you are overweight. Finding an exercise routine that works for you—one you can stick to long term—is vital. Obviously, if you signed up for power work-outs in a gym but pushed yourself so hard that you got fed up with it and never went there again, gym membership is not going to do you any good. If you find it easier to commit to a brisk 20-minute walk in your neighborhood, by all means do just that. You may actually end up losing more weight if you can do it every day.

Again, there is no absolute right. You just pick whatever is the lesser evil, as long as it comes natural to you: when you can sit, do not lie; when you can stand, do not sit; when you can walk around, do not sit still; when you can take the stairs, do not use the escalator or elevator. The list goes on and on.

Thirdly, losing weight and/or maintaining a healthy diet does not have to be costly. You can, for instance, cut down on your food costs by making it a habit to never buy meat except when it’s on sale. Every grocery chain will have weekly meat sales to draw people into the store. Watch the ad circulars for sales. If sales info is not available, talk to the meat clerk and ask if he knows what cuts will be on sale the following week and what time they mark down the day’s meat. Stop by at that time. And finally, when you can get a good deal on lean cuts of meat, buy in bulk, and freeze what you won’t be using right away.

More tips on eating healthy later.