Life’s Nutrition

By: Melody Biggar

To lose weight and get healthy we often begin eliminating certain foods in order to jump start our weight-loss. Everyone tells us what we shouldn’t eat. but what about what we should eat? Here is a list I have compiled of what to add to your diet to speed up your weight-loss.

Lemon Juice: Drink lots of water. Add lemon every time. Lemon juice is a natural detoxifier and aids in cleansing and digestion.

Apple Cider Vinegar: You can use it as salad dressing or drink it with water. Apple Cider Vinegar helps detoxify your liver. Take 2 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar mixed in water before every meal to aid in weight loss. If you can’t stand the taste they have it in capsule form as well.

Cayenne Pepper: The spicier the better. Adding cayenne peeper or any kind of spice to your food aids in your digestion, speeds up your metabolism, and suppresses your appetite. This herb is not only beneficial for the entire digestive system, but also for the heart and circulatory system. I encourage you to read up on this amazing nutritional herb.

Coconut Oil: This has gotten a bad rap in recent years; however I encourage you to research the amazing health benefits of virgin coconut oil on your own. Virgin coconut oil can be added to your everyday meals. It improves digestion, promotes weight loss and helps keep skin and hair looking young and healthy.

Green Tea: EGCG, an antioxidant contained in green tea, benefits weight loss by helping the body burn fat. Antioxidants such as vitamins A, C, E, and the polyphenols found in green tea also help your body reduce the time that toxins stay in your system.

Fiber: Fiber keeps your meal moving along your gastrointestinal tract and helps flush your body of metabolic waste. Fiber also keeps your energy levels high, and slows your rate of carbohydrate digestion, which helps you maintain your blood sugar levels.

Stevia: Replace your sugar with stevia. This herb has been used as a sweetener and flavor enhancer for centuries. The best part is that it has no calories and no carbs but will still satisfy your sweet tooth.

Ginger: Ginger tea brewed from the fresh root has been used in India and China for centuries as an after meal drink to aid digestion.

Acai Berry: a berry that grows on the Amazon Palm Trees harvested in the rainforests of Brazil. Acai berries have powerful anti-aging and weight-loss properties and are considered a must-have “superfood.”

By: craig ballantyne

I recently got stuck in an airport due a delayed flight. But I didn’t end up eating junk food. In fact, I have a SECRET that can help you avoid cheating on your diet.

First, you have to be prepared. In fact, here are my meals from that day. My brunch included an omelet with vegetables, some grilled fish & peppers, fruit (pineapple, raspberries, blueberries, watermelon), and a V8.

A late lunch included a grilled chicken salad (2 breasts), jimaca, salsa, black beans, avocado (I substituted the salsa for the dressing). NOTE: Lunch was eaten at a Mexican restaurant. I said “no thanks” to the chips and salsa. So there you go, proof that you can eat healthy when you eat out.

My snacks at the airport included raw cashews, red delicious apple, raw almonds, as well as a banana and more almonds later on my flight.

Without my preparation, I would have been outta luck, and stuck eating M&M’s (the peanut kind, of course) and greasy take out food at the airport. So what’s the secret? Accountability.

I’ve committed to telling the world about my diet and workouts, so I can’t set a bad example or break my promise to you by eating junk food.

I’m holding myself accountable to you. By doing this, I’m going to be more focused on eating healthier than ever, because I don’t want to have to report to YOU that I’m cheating on my diet.

I also need to eat well and research the best options so that I can pass along little insider nutrition tips to you, such as these tips.

1) Most people don’t know that the peanut butter they feed their kids (& themselves!) is filled with two of the nastiest ingredients in the world, and those are Trans fats (the “bad” kind of fat) and sugar. So you should choose Peanut Butter that contains JUST peanuts as the one and only ingredient.

2) My favorite canned food is Amy’s Organic Chili. I usually stick with Medium, but sometimes I go spicy.

3) I add a little of Mrs. Renfro’s Organic Salsa to almost every meal I eat. A little bit with my morning omelet, a little with my chili at lunch, and a little with my BBQ chicken at night.

By the way, you should follow my lead and start posting your daily diet and exercise somewhere for someone who is holding you accountable.

For many people, being ACCOUNTABLE to others is their #1 way to stay motivated and on-track with their diet and exercise program.

You see, I’m committing to you that I’m going to post all of my meals each day, showing you how to eat fast, nutritious foods even when you are traveling or really busy. Accountability is one of the major MOTIVATION SECRETS to success.

By Gregg Gillies

I know, I know, we’ve all heard this one over and over again. But how many of us really drink enough water? I’m talking at least 10 8 ounce glasses of water a day, minimum. You should really try to take in a full gallon of water each day.

Why, you ask? Let me count the ways. First of all, our bodies are over 70% water. That should tell you something right there. And you all know that you can go much longer without food than you can without water.

The body needs a lot of water in order to maintain its daily functions efficiently. In addition, water helps to flush out harmful toxins, as well as prime the body for fat loss.

If your body isn’t getting enough water, it does everything it can to hold on to the water it does have. The problem with this, is the way it holds onto the water. You see, over 70% of your muscle is made up of water. It helps to give your muscles that full, pumped look (along with
glycogen).

However, if your body is not taking in enough water, that water is used for other things, leaving you bloated. And the way to get rid of that excess water, believe it or not, is to take in enough water.

This will rid you of that excess water weigh that bloats you, and begin to help your body run more efficiently and priming it to begin dropping body fat.

Once you begin taking in enough water, your body starts dropping weight, possibly 4 or 5 pounds in the first week. Now, this is mostly water weight. However, doing so does optimizes your bodily functions, allowing it to run more efficiently and start burning stored body fat for energy.

Here’s another little trick you can use. Instead of just drinking water, begin drinking ice cold water. You see, there is a metabolic cost to eating. In other words, the digestion of food, as you’ll read about in the next tip, takes calories. Well, so does drinking ice cold water.

The body needs to heat up this water in order to be able to use it properly and doing so takes energy, i.e., calories. You can burn another 50 to 100 calories a day by drinking one half gallon to a gallon of ice cold water per day.

It doesn’t seem like much. However, in addition to all the other benefits of taking in enough water, by drinking ice cold water, you can drop almost a full pound of fat each month, or 12 pounds per year.

Not too bad, if you ask me.

Greg Gillies writes for Ironman Magazine and has published articles in many national publications and he has just released a new e-book titled “Fit Physique”.

By: Jimmy Smith

Muscle building can be really easy unless you are a skinny fat person. If you have skinny arms and legs but add fat on your stomach easily like I do then you need to listen to these nutrition rules. I have spent years in libraries and seminars to find the secret nutrition methods for skinny fat people like us. Being skinny and fat has everything to do with our nutrition and a lot less with the amount of calories that we eat or the amount of carbohydrates that we eat.

Skinny fat people must primarily eat protein and fat with every meal
I get really mad when I see nutrition coaches recommending that everyone needs to eat protein and carbohydrates with their meals. That just is not true for skinny fat people. You see combining protein and carbohydrates will actually encourage your body to store more fat on your stomach. Instead, by eating protein with healthy fats you encourage your body to burn fat. How?

Regular people can eat moderate amounts of healthy fat and be ok. Skinny fat people need to rely on fat for fuel and as a result need more healthy fats that are found in almonds, cashews, natural peanut butter and fish. This type of healthy fat can actually aid in reducing the waistline. See, omega three fats like I recommend actually help to burn sugar and reduce stress, which is one of the main reasons that skinny fat people add more fat on their stomach.

Skinny fat people must love fish oil
Fish oil is my number one recommended supplement for solving the skinny fat mystery. Fish oil has many important benefits to skinny fat people but none more important than the ability to decrease sugar and stress. When I say decrease sugar and stress, I am implying to the immense benefits that fish oil have on increasing metabolism. The problem that skinny fat people face is the ability to increase their metabolism through training, we just can not raise it the same way that skinny people who walk on the treadmill all day.

Fish oil raises your metabolism while also helping you to build muscle. Fish oil allows you to force your protein and carbohydrates into where you need, your muscle. People that just eat carbohydrates do not have this benefit.

Skinny fat people need to drink green tea
This is another big secret into how skinny fat people can build muscle and burn fat. There really is not anything that green tea can not help you with. Not only does it increase stress which all skinny fat people have but will also raise your metabolism anywhere from five to ten percent according to recent research.

When taken after your workout it can also help to keep your metabolism high for hours after you have left the gym.

Skinny fat people must always eat fibrous carbohydrates

This is another tip that as helped me to reshape countless skinny fat bodies. Carbs with fiber do not raise blood sugar in the same way that foods like pasta and white bread. As a result, you do not increase the ability of your body to store fat. Most skinny fat people have done this countless times and keep shooting themselves in the foot. Eating carbs like oatmeal and sweet potatoes not only keeps your blood sugar stable but it also helps you to use your problem better than if you just ate a high protein diet.

By: Rene Graeber

We all want to have as perfect bodies as those that belong to top models and stars of show business. Still, as we usually have no time and money for such fitness programs they can afford (often supported by plastic surgery), we cannot really expect so marvelous results, even when we exercise hard every day. Still, a proper diet can help us approach to the ideal shape.

The truth is that most of the perfectly shaped bodies w see on covers of magazines are nothing more than products of advanced technologies. Still it is possible to achieve similar effects instead of all these bulges you have without ruining your budget. The key to the success is the right bodybuilding nutrition combined with physical activities. Bodybuilding nutrition is, in fact, the most important factor in building the perfect body. Exercising may often be considered rather as an additional effort.

The most important part of every bodybuilding nutrition program is changing your eating pattern by giving up large and infrequent meals for the benefit of smaller and frequent ones. This increases your metabolism thus allowing you to burn more fat. Stinting yourself of food for many hours and then eating large meal is the best way to gain fat and lose muscle, while body stays for some time in a catabolic state and thus starts to consume lean muscle tissues as the easiest to digest. Light meals every 2-3 hours prevent such situation from happening and are much healthier than eating to heart’s content twice a day.

Proper amounts of carbohydrates, protein and fat in meals are the base of a good bodybuilding nutrition program. These elements should be present in every meal to achieve the best results. Jut remember about the proper ratio of carbohydrates and protein (about 40% of meal) to fat. Of course you do not need to be a dietetic to do this, can find balance sheets of every food you can imagine everywhere. And even if you can’t get them, there are many other methods of composing proper bodybuilding nutrition meal, like the method of two hands, where clenched fist corresponds to amount of carbohydrates and open hand to protein.

There are various nutrition supplements that are good addition to every bodybuilding nutrition program are, which can also be a good choice for one of light meals when you don’t have enough time to prepare something home-made. Bodybuilding supplements which remove excess fat and help to gain more lean muscles are also important although they cannot replace a meal. Still, they will greatly improve your metabolism, so with a good bodybuilding nutrition plan they surely can shorten the time needed for achieving the results you want.

As you see, achieving the perfect body by complying with bodybuilding nutrition program is a time-consuming thing, but surely it is much safer and less invasive than cosmetic surgery. No need to tell you that it is also much cheaper. Of course, some of top stars choose the easier path and for a time they get much better results. However, as the example of Michael Jackson points out, easier and faster does not always mean better and long-lasting.