As someone who is very dedicated in their weight training, you always aim to broaden your knowledge on the field to achieve the best possible results for yourself.  This means you will no doubt come across the mention of supplements, to take alongside your training.   The other recurring thing you will see is the importance of protein in your diet.  This is where whey protein comes in.

Whey is a natural product (a bi-product of cheese) and is available in the bodybuilding world as whey protein powder.  This powder is then mixed with water or milk to take as a supplement.  A common question, certainly one I thought to myself when I first started, is when to take it?  Whey powder can be taken at various times, on workout days and also rest days.  On workout days it can be taken twice, both pre and post workout.  Pre workout is usually a lower dose, roughly around 10 grams.  This dose can prolong muscle activity whilst training.  The larger dose, approximately 40 grams is taken post workout.  Here, it begins to help muscle repair and growth, as it does when taken on rest days.  The rest day dose is around 20g grams.

Approximately 30% of your daily food intake take should be protein and whey is a great source for this and is quickly absorbed into the body, which is another reason why it is so effective pre and post workout.  Whey protein then however is not the best source of protein to take for overnight benefits as it is quickly absorbed and short acting.  A slower absorbed protein, for instance Casein Protein, would be better for this.  Whey should also not be used as a replacement source of protein, just an extra alongside natural sources.

Supplements are very important with weight lifting or training, if you are looking for muscular hypertrophy (or muscle growth).  Do your research though and do always check manufacturer’s labels for special dietary advice and for how much protein is being delivered per scoop.  This is important, as brands can vary, as can the delivery method i.e. there will be more protein available if it is taken with milk rather than water.

I wish you all successful training and hope you reach your goals.

Now is the month of July. How far are you from for achieving your weight loss goal?

Since this is the half of your way if you have set your weight loss goal early of the year, you must review back your goal and results.

Start asking yourself, what is my initial REASON for losing weight? What is my initial GOAL of losing weight? What ACTION/STRATEGY I have used for me to achieve it?

If you still have not achieve what you want. Take some times to think back and reset what you have decided before to make a drastic improvement.

All the best for you!

In weight loss cases, some of the people will feel they are fat despite the fact that they have been extremely thin. Besides, they do not feel like eating eventhough they feel hungry. It medical term, we called this Anorexia Nervosa.

Anorexia Nervosa is a psychiatric diagnosis that describes an eating disorder characterized by low body weight and body image distortion with an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Individuals with anorexia are known to commonly control body weight through the means of voluntary starvation, purging, vomiting, excessive exercise, or other weight control measures, such as diet pills or diuretic drugs. To put it in a nutshell, anorexia nervosa is a complex condition, involving psychological, neurobiological, and socialogical components.

Therefore, eventhough you have the intention and planning to lose your weight, do not force yourself untill the extent of becoming anorexia nervosa. 

An alternative way to determine obesity is to access percent body fat. Doctors and scientists generally agree that men with more than 25% body fat and women with more than 30% body fat are obese. However, it is difficult to measure body fat precisely.

One of the simple method for measuring body fat are the skinfold test, in which a pinch of skin is precisely measured to determine the thickness of the subcutaneous fat layer.

It is important to know whether you are obese or not by using these few indicators. Measure your obesity level and you will know how is your weight loss going.

Yesterday I discussed about Body Mass Index (BMI). As promised, today I am going to discuss about waist circumference.

Waist Circumference

BMI does not take into account differing ratios of adipose to lean tissues; nor does it distinguish between differing forms of adiposity, some of which may correlate more closely with cardiovascular risk. Increasing understanding of the biology of different forms of adipose tissue has shown that visceral fat or central obesity (male-type or apple-type obesity, also known as “belly fat”) has a much stronger correlation, particularly with cardiovascular disease, than the BMI alone.

The absolute waist circumference (>102 cm in men and >88 cm in women) or waist-hip ratio (>0.9 for men and >0.85 for women) are both used as measures of central obesity.

In a cohort of almost 15,000 subjects from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) III study, waist circumference explained obesity-related health risk significantly better than BMI when metabolic syndrome was taken as an outcome measure.

We have been discuss about weight loss in past. Today, I am going to discuss about obesity.

Obesity is normally termed as body condition that exceeds healthy limits. How to know whether you obesed? There is one indicator named body mass index. Body mass index is calculated as weight in kg divided by height in metre square. Obesity is termed as BMI of more than 30 kg/m2. You can calculate your body mass index right now! Easy right?

Body Mass Index (BMI) is classified as followed:

A BMI less than 18.5 is underweight.

A BMI of 18.5 - 24.9 is normal weight.

A BMI of 25.0 - 29.9 is overweight

A BMI of 30.0 - 39.9 is obese.

A BMI of 40.0 or higher is severe (or morbidly) obese.

A BMI of 35.0 or higher in the presence of at least one another significant comorbidity is also classified by some bodies as morbid obesity.

In a clinical setting, physicians take into account race, ethnicity, lean mass (muscularity), age, sex, and other factors which can affect the interpretation of BMI. BMI overestimates body fat in persons who are very muscular, and it can underestimate body fat in persons who have lost body mass (e.g. many elderly). Mild obesity as defined by BMI alone is not a cardiac risk factor, and hence BMI cannot be used as a sole clinical and epidemiological predictor of cardiovascular health. The others indicators for obesity included waist circumference and body fat measurement.

Tomorrow, I am going to discuss about others indicator. Do not forget to visit this post again!

You must be shocked by reading the title of this post. So why should you spend so much money joining the weight loss program, buying the weight loss book, medication or everything related to it? It is up to your decision but let’s see what is the theory behind this statement.

As we know, more than 70% of our body consists of water. Our blood is made up of water, our cells need  water to survive. But how many volume of water have you consumed a day? There are several suggestin for water consumption. One said that you must consume at least 8 glasses of water per day. Another one said  average person should drink about one-half their body weight - in ounces - of water each day. For example, if you weigh 200-pounds, you would drink 100-ounces of water - about 3-liters. It is up to you to judge.

After reading the statement above, look back on what you eat for a day. Do you consume enough water in your diet? I bet 90% say no! Because most of the foods we consumed made up of carbohydrate, proteins and fat, but very less vegetables and fruits which is the source of water-rich foods. That’s why you are building your fat in your body and that’s why you cannot lose your weight!

In conclusion, if you want to lose weight, look at your diet and decide how many fats you want to build in your body or how many water you want to consumed by taking this diet. Then, your goal for weight loss will be achieved.

Overweight is always a problem in people who craving for food. Do you have an experience that when some advertisements shown on the TV with some picture of nice foods, you immediately smell the nice aroma of the foods, imagine the feeling of the foods melting in your mouth and there is a crave to get the foods immediately!

This is the power of mind. What the advertisements do is to dig the crave in your mind by presenting the nice foods pictures to you. Then your mind will start bring in all the feeling you have with the foods before and BOOM! You will have the feeling to get it NOW!

So what you can do to avoid this? Stop thinking about it is the best way. And now you will ask: Do you want me to stop watching movie or advertisement?! No, no, this is not what I mean. You can look at it but you don’t think about it. Once you think about it, your brain will start bring in all the information about the thing you are thinking of.

The example I shown is the power of hypnosis. Hypnosis sound to be dangerous as it always termed as ways to influence people and make people do whatever you want to do. Yes, hypnosis is very powerful. In fact, you can hypnosis yourself too in achieving the target to reducing weight. Simple, just think of you becoming smart and energitic and be able to fit in the perfect shirt you dreaming of. Think about it and make ways to implement it. Later or sooner, you will achieve it.

If you wear a size 14 and you blow a bundle on designer size 8 dresses as motivation, you will probably end up feeling guilty, frustrated, and angry if you are not slinking around in it a month later.

In reality, you will do much better setting smaller, achievable targets for yourself. If you must try the new-clothes strategy, go down a size at a time, and do not buy anything you have to take out a second mortgage to pay for.

Because, if you continue to remorse on losing weight fast, you will end up incorporating fad diets or those that offer quick weight loss.

For most people who are not aware of this fact, there are no such things as quick weight loss diets and there is no nippy weight loss for people who want to be slimmer than what their body can provide.

The problem with most people is that they tend to opt for nippy fixes wherein fact these things are not effective at all.

What Does Not Work

Today, there are plenty of weight-loss strategies that are guaranteed to backfire. This is because these nippy fixes instilled on certain diet plans are, in reality, not efficient because it does not employ the right principle and the right attitude in losing weight.

These quick weight loss diet plans are known as fad diets because that is exactly what they are, just a fad. In time, when fashion is over and popularity wanes down, people will realize that the diet they have depended on is not reliable at all.

To know more about these fad diets that are selling like hotcakes in the market today, here is a list of some telltale signs that would tell you not to try it even once.

Here they are:

1. Skipping meals

Does your diet plan require you to skip meals? If it does, then, it is a fad diet.

Abstain from food completely is not a healthy habit. It may even cause some serious complications or problems especially for people who are sick with diabetes.

Skipping meals will only cause a hypoglycemia, or the condition wherein your blood sugar is really low, and will probably only be effective in making you eat twice as much at the next meal.

2. Dieting without exercise, or vice versa

Exercise is crucial to the human body. It is important in the proper blood circulation and other activities of the human body system.

Therefore, diet plans that do not require you to exercise are nuisances. People are born to move.

But then again, exercise alone is not sufficient. Hence, it would be better if diet and exercise will go hand-in-hand.

3. Continuous dawdling

There is no better time to start losing weight. If you want to really lose those excess fats, you have to lose weight now.

Delaying tactics will not get you anywhere and will only make the problem worse. So, if your diet plan suggests a certain timeframe for you start losing weight, chances are, you are following the trend of fad diets.

Boiled down, it is best to rely more on the way you feel than the tale of the tape. This means that if the weighing scale tells you that you are losing weight even if it is slower than you would like, but you are feeling energetic and positive about your weight-loss efforts, then, you are just doing fine.

As mentioned and is worth mentioning all over again, weight loss is not a quick process.

There are a lot of people who are crazy about yoga. The reason why most people do yoga is that it makes them feel better and in shape. The different poses and postures make their body healthy. Yoga for most is the best way to relax and unwind. If you want to keep your body in shape, this might be the best exercise for you.

Did you know that yoga is good to fight certain illness that may come? There had been researches which proved that yoga helps you to control anxiety, reduces asthma, arthritis, blood pressure, back pain, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue, epilepsy, diabetes, headaches, stress and many more.

Yoga has a lot of benefits and advantages. All in a day’s work, it can reduce tension and stress. Of course after a heavy day, you will feel that your muscles have been stuck up and you will feel wasted.

If you do yoga, your self esteem will be higher. It is important to gain more confidence inside and out so that you can face people with no worries.

Yoga is good for the body in increasing your muscle tone, strength, stamina and flexibility.
If you are too fat and conscious about your body figure, yoga can help you lower your fat and keep your body in shape. Yoga exercises can burn excess fat and give you the desired figure that you want.

If you need time to relax and forget your responsibilities, yoga will be good to improve your concentration and enhance your creativity. Yoga helps you to think more positively away from all anxieties. If you have a fresh mind, you can think of good things and apply it easily.

Your body needs to relax once in a while. Sometimes, work can leave us wasted and exhausted. During the heavy days, we may not find time to unwind because work is still on our tail. Yoga can help you create a sense of calmness and well being.

Yoga exercise helps you improve a good circulation. Your organs and veins need to be exercised for it to function properly.
Yoga can help stimulate your immune system and keep you away from diseases. If you have a good immune system, you can be sure that you are free from sickness.

Some people do yoga to be enlightened. They believe that yoga will help them bring up their spirit and keep them relieved. Yoga works differently for people be it spiritual, emotional, psychological, mental and physical.

People think that yoga is only for spiritual people. But that belief is wrong. Even if you are not that religious, you can do yoga. You will see and feel the difference at the same time find out how it works for you. 

Due to the pressure and demands of life, we become stressed out and we forget the essence of life. We tend to lose touch with the ones we used to spend time with, even ourselves.

We find ourselves rushing most of the time with the deadlines and hassles we need to keep up with. This leaves us a small time to wander and have that physical awareness.

These are the few things that yoga can provide. Once in a while, find time to dedicate a part of it to yourself to relax and unwind which only yoga can give.

As I mentioned before, you need to practise consistently in order to get the last long benefits of whatever you plan to do. Remember, never give up until you achieve the desired result you want!

Get a copy of Beginner’s Guide To Yoga here!