Healthy Side of Life

Welcome to the Healthy Side of Life.

This is sort of the sister blog to my poetry-powered other one. Here is where I can write freely about things that relate to my health and the health of those around me in a candid manner without giving away too many family secrets.

Where do I begin? Well, my health is of great importance to me, especially now as I advance in years I want to cling on to the relatively good health that I have enjoyed for most of my life up until this point. What point is that? I’d be lying if I said I was any younger than fifty and I’d be telling the truth if I said I was younger than sixty, so that’s about all you’re going to get.

What makes a guy start to be more concerned about his health as he ages than ever before? Now that’s an interesting concept that I intend to explore in here in later articles that I can post. If anyone ever gets around to reading this thing apart from my own family and maybe my kids’ granny (my wife’s mom), who incidentally was expertly Googling for stuff before I even got my first computer, thy might get an insight into this quite fascinating subject!

Because a person’s health, any person for that matter, is a pretty darn important part of life. Cause if you ain’t got health, you ain’t got much of a life.

I’ll be looking at the things in life that are important to me and I hazard a guess to plenty more guys in my situation and at my point in life’s progression of the decades. The details are taken from real life and put down here in a format that I hope just about anyone will understand. Meaning no tough, long words or undecipherable jargon (except maybe the phrase “undecipherable jargon”).

Thom Asner

Exercise to Lose Weight

One of the most potent ways of losing weight is to combine a balanced, healthy, reduced calorie diet with a daily exercise plan.

The two methods compliment each other because by the one, you can restrict the amount of energy that is being absorbed by your body and by the other, you can ensure that more energy is used up than you are taking in, to create a negative calorie balance that results in the body being forced to make up the difference from its store of fat.

The key to making this work as effectively as possible is by exercising for as long and as hard as you are able to.

The best tips for weight loss will agree with this strategy. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to spend hours in the gym every day working out and pushing yourself to the physical limits of what you are capable of.

Not unless you actually want to do that. What it does mean is that you should try and get as much varied forms of exercise into each day as you can manage with the time you have available and only to the limits of the level of your own fitness and gain some kind of literacy in health.

Finding the Right Balance

This means you should only exercise as much as you fitness will safely allow you to on any given day. If you have not exercised for a long tome, you really should start slowly and only do a small amount of each type of exercise, as well as going for long walks to get things moving.

As soon as you feel yourself getting out of breath, you should stop and take a break. Overdoing things at this stage can potentially be dangerous and people have been known to have heart attacks because of the sudden increase ion physical activity that they simply were not fit enough to cope with.

After a few days of light exercise, you can gradually build up the length of time you spend doing your exercises and also gradually increase the level of resistance you encounter. If you are working with weights, for instance, you can increase the weight you are lifting by a few pounds every few days, or do more repetitions of any discipline.

If you are running, then you can increase the distance a little each day, or even increase your pace a little as well. The trick is to only do what you are physically fit enough to do and then stop.

Exercising Effectively

To make your exercises as effective as possible, you should be aiming to go as far as your physical limits will allow and then stop for a rest. The best way to lose that excess weight is to avoid losing weight fast, but do it at a more measured, gradual pace.

If you feel you can do some more after resting, then by all means do some more, but it is usually a good idea to do a different exercise to that which you were doing before you stopped.

So if you were training with weights, then after resting it might be a good idea to do some treadmill work, skipping, jogging or running, or spend some time on an elliptical machine to get an all over workout. As before, as soon as you feel you are getting out of breath in the early days, then you should stop.

Once you have improved your fitness levels after several weeks, then you will be in a better position to push yourself harder and occasionally extend yourself past your physical limits under supervision.

It will be some time before you are so physically fit that you will be able to train like an athlete, so don’t try and do more than you are capable of doing! You will still see a marked level of weight loss over time.

Losing Weight

Once you get into the full swing of exercising every day at a level that ensures you are burning far more calories in energy than you are consuming through your successful dieting strategy, you will lose weight more rapidly while your body tones up.

As long as you choose the right diet to compliment your physical activity, things will go your way.

This is losing weight for the long term and gaining a great looking figure into the bargain. It’s the best way to lose weight and get a body that you cam be proud of!

Latest Nutrisystem Deal for Successful Dieting

When it comes to making the most of one of the most convenient ways to diet and lose some of that excess weight, there are some great tips that can help.

If you have decided to take action to make a difference to the way you look by changing the way you eat, then these helpful Nutrisystem tips will put you on the right track for making the most of this easy to follow diet plan.

But first, let’s look at how the company is promoting itself coming up to 2020 and what’s on offer for new (or returning) customers.

Buy One Month Get One Free

The latest promotion is called BOGO which is short for Buy One, Get One Free (meaning a month of food) and it’s a great way to attract dieters that are keen to stick to the diet for at least two months by making it very cost effective for them.

You literally pay for the first month shipment of food and then get the second month absolutely free! That’s a pretty awesome deal and makes the diet so crazy affordable there can hardly be any excuse to not go for it and succeed with Nutrisystem!

For some insight into the promotion, here’s a short video that you might like to watch:
 

Smaller Meals

The first thing that tends to surprise a lot of people when they start on one of the several Nutrisystem diet menus is the small size of the meals. Now, that shouldn’t be an obstacle to you as long as you realize that you need to eat small to lose weight.

If you’d been used to eating large meals before you started the diet, then it takes a little adjusting but you can do it. While the company suggests you can add to their meals with some fresh fruits, vegetables or salad items, this may help you to start with, but you should explore how well you can cope with getting used to eating a lot less than before.

It will help you in the long term because you can keep this up long after you finish the right diet plan and keep off the weight that you lost.

Exercise Can Help

Another great tip to increasing the amount of weight you can lose is by doing some light exercises every day. Did you know that simply by going for a long walk for around half an hour or so will burn off around 70 calories?

If you do that every day, you will certainly lose more weight and the great part about that is you will be boosting your metabolism. When you increase your metabolic rate through daily exercise, your body burns even more calories while digesting your food more efficiently and storing less fat.

This is a great way to lose weight naturally by making your body do it for you!

Research and Learn

Lastly, learn all you can about the company and its home delivered meal replacement diet plans by reading the many good reviews of Nutrisystem that are around and you’ll benefit by going into this without being caught out by anything unexpected. It’s an easy and convenient way to lose weight and it works when you stick to it and help things along by putting in some exercise to make it even better.

Choosing the Right Diet Plan

When you make the tough decision that it’s time to lose some weight, you are often faced with so many choices that it can become very difficult to even get started.

That’s because when faced with so much choice, we tend to feel overwhelmed and end up choosing the wrong plan or simply backing off and doing nothing.

This is, of course, not really very helpful to us, so it is important to choose the right diet plan to lose weight if we want to be successful. Here are some pointers to getting things right first time.

Do Your Dieting Research

The first important point is that you are going to want to be doing some research before you get started. Learn and understand what it is about you and your lifestyle that has caused you to become overweight.

That way, you can formulate your own plan to reverse the actions that brought you to this point in the first place. Once you know what you have to do, then you can start looking at what weight loss methods would best suit your personal circumstances.

Call in the Professionals

If a bad diet has been your downfall, then it is a good idea to consult with a professional nutritionist or dietitian to put together a personal diet plan that works and that will best suit your own physical makeup as well as your way of life. This is much better than just grabbing the first diet you see off the shelf, so to speak.

Just any old diet may not be right for you and you could end up wasting your time, money and losing some of your self-esteem in the bargain when it fails you.

Watch what’s in the food you’re going to eat before you eat it by reading the labels on packets. You might want to avoid processed food with added salt or sugar/sugar substitutes along with a lot of other additives that are not healthy in the least.

Change to Good Eating Habits

If your actual diet is OK, but you have simply gotten into the habit of eating too much, then you can see where you need to make the changes that will reverse the situation.

It could go right back to when you were a child and your parents made you clean the plate every meal before you were allowed to leave the table. Or it could be simply a case of feeling the need not to waste any food, so you eat everything on your plate even when you don’t want it.

These two factors create a subconscious situation where you habitually eat everything on your plate no matter how much is on there. The way around this situation is to choose a diet plan that provides you with smaller meals.

That way, you have less food on your plate at every meal. It may seem a little strange at first, but you soon get used to it.

Losing weight through diet should be a simple process for everyone. It can be, as long as you stay positive prepare what you need to know first of all, then choosing what is right for you personally will often bring the best weight loss results of all.

Should We Avoid Salt in a Healthy Diet?

Many people believe that we need to eliminate sodium/salt from our diet to maintain good health. But it is not true in all cases, because right kind of salt should be an integral part of our healthy eating plan.

This applies to everyone, even though people have high blood pressure. Sodium is a necessary element for human health and a well-working body. Here are some facts about salt:

The Salty Reality

The human body cannot survive without salt/sodium (did you ever wonder why you get a saline drip when you are in the hospital?). Sodium is an essential nutrient that the body can’t manufacture on its own. Therefore this ingredient must be consumed through some external way, as an additive to the food we eat for example.

But the problem is this: Most people are consuming wrong kind of salt with their food. The way to receive all the benefits of this ingredient is to eat unrefined sea salt, NOT processed table salt.

Why the Bad Rep?

The reason why salt has gotten such a bad reputation is because 99 percent of the world’s salt research has been done on commercial table salt. Surprisingly, this is often the only type most people know about (which is bad, bad, bad).

One of the major reasons that table salt is so bad for your health is because it has added aluminum (to aid free flowing and prevent clogging when poured from the container). Aluminum is a heavy metal that has been found to inhibit intelligence in the same way the ingestion of lead does (and I’m sure we all know that we should never allow lead into our bodies, right?) so it’s not good for mental health either.

A big problem is that most processed food contains added sodium and the kind that is added is the refined, table variety with its payload of health problems attached. You’ll even find it hidden in some brands of soda. There’s just one more reason to avoid eating processed foods, not just for losing weight!

Some of the best scientific research on the healthy properties of unrefined sea salt are written in languages other than English, such as French, German and Portuguese and because of this, many Americans have not been exposed to them (until now, right?).

Well, not anymore. Unrefined sea salt has worked its magic on the health of many people around the world.

Natural Balancing Agent

When you consider that sea salt:

• Aids in balancing blood sugar levels
• Is needed for the absorption of food particles through the intestinal tract
• Can help prevent muscle cramps
• Is needed to make bones strong
• Regulates and normalizes blood pressure
• Increases energy levels
• Helps regulate the metabolism
• Helps maintain proper electrolyte balance
• Supports the immune system

…how could you not use it?

What Kind Should You Buy?

Look for unprocessed, unrefined sea salt. You can go with your favorite brands available at your location.(but any unprocessed, unrefined brand is great-be careful though, if it doesn’t mention unprocessed and unrefined assume it is not).

Oh, and of course, avoid refined white table salt at all costs (unless you want high blood pressure or to risk contracting Alzheimer’s Disease in later life for some reason). This is the kind of condiment we want to avoid at all costs.

So the next time someone tells you to take it easy on the salt, tell them the above facts and encourage them to make unrefined sea salt a healthy part of their eating plan.

Three Simple Effective Ways to Lose Weight

If you are looking for some help with your own efforts to lose some weight and tone up your body at the same time, then it may be of help to know some basic yet very effective tips. The more you know about what you are doing in terms of improving your health to obtain a great looking body while feeling good as well, the better it must be for you.

Want to know some of the most sensible and surprisingly easy ways of doing it? Here are three of them that just about anyone can follow with relative ease and vastly improve their chances of successfully achieving their own goals.

1. A Healthy Diet

   Everyone knows that you need to eat a healthy diet if you want to maintain a healthy body weight, yet so many people choose to ignore this advice and carry on eating junk food, cakes and cookies, candy bars and washing it all down with soda. But it really is this simple.

   You have to exert some self discipline and change your bad habits for good ones and you’ll be surprised at just how much weight you can lose just by making some simple diet changes. When you take into consideration the cost of and whether meal replacement diets work or not, there is no excuse for not placing yourself on a sensible, easy and convenient eating plan!

2. Daily Exercise

   Exercise is a must of you want to tone up your body, because it is the muscles that will cause this to happen. Muscles don’t tighten up and get stronger on their own, so you have to exercise them for that to happen.

   Exercising boosts your body’s metabolism causing you to burn more calories and reduce your fat store and when you combine it with a healthy diet, you’ll be amazed at the results after only a few short weeks.

3. Be Positive

   A positive state of mind is essential if you are going to have the motivation to carry out the first two important, yet basic weight loss tips such as you’ll find published in articles on many excellent websites, like this one here. When you are positive in mind, your whole attitude changes and you become more eager to do what is necessary and more determined to succeed in losing weight while attaining that great toned and slim body that you want to have.

While these tips are very basic and easy to follow, their very simplicity is what makes them so effective. Losing weight is something that should be made as simple and enjoyable as possible to help people to want to things to make it happen and they’ll be more likely to do things that are simple and hassle free than those that are complex and tough!

The best trick is to know how to lose weight at the right pace for your personal circumstances and when you do that you can be pretty certain you’ll be doing it right. So keep it simple and you may very well surprise yourself at what you are capable of achieving when you really want to get back in shape and have an easy time of it.