Seaweeds are found to be a great asset in the weight loss treatment being able to reduce the body’s fat absorption by up to 75%.

Not much is known about seaweed except for its random appearance in cosmetic and hair care products. Japanese are believed to have such lustrous covetable black hair due to their staple diet of seaweeds like arame. Some varieties of sea vegetables are seen to be great purifiers which can purge the body of toxic pollutants. Seaweeds are also proven to have enrich the bloodstream, regulate hormones and promote youthfulness of the skin.

Seaweed was already seen as a supporter of metabolism from ancient times. Recently, the world of science claimed that Alginate, a fibre extracted from common seaweed, can inhibit weight gain. Alginates are thick fibrous substances that can prevent fat absorption in plenty. Hence scientists are experimenting their effectiveness by adding alginates to bread and other food items to see how beneficial they are to the obese and the overweight.

Alginates or alginic acid is also useful in detoxifying the body as their gummy form enables themselves to stick to the heavy metals in the intestines preventing the absorption of the latter to the body and by further enabling their elimination.

Seaweed is otherwise a nature’s gift with lots of inexpensive nutrition. It contains minerals from calcium, sodium, potassium, iodine, iron and zinc while also containing Vitamins B1, B2, B3,niacin, vitamins c and folic acid.

• Researchers point out that many people tend to eat more after exercise and believe that they can eat more because they have worked out or do work out regularly. I have run for 5 miles and I can certainly eat a few more cookies. It is true that exercise increases your appetite and hunger. But eating more would only cause you to put on more weight than help you shed any. Check your diet for weight loss even if you can’t exercise to lose weight realistically.
• All calories count no matter what they are. Stopping just junk foods would not help in this context. All calories, even if they are from healthy foods are calories adding up to your weight. Find out the required amount of calories for the healthy functioning of your body depending on your age, height and weight and the number of pounds you want to lose. If you have been eating more calories than this estimate you can certainly get on with your weight loss plan. So control your calorie intake while keeping an eye on the nutrition.
• Eat in a balanced way 24/7. It is in our blood to gorge on a lot when we are hungry and skip meals when we are not. When we say thank God it’s a Friday,  our tummy says oh no. Weekends are spent out in favourite restaurants while we starve rest of the week.

I do not say that weight loss without exercise is efficient because it can be short lived. Yet, it is possible! Long term weight loss may be gained only through regular exercise and an altered diet.

Bottom line: Eat a balanced diet, count your calories in all foods and don’t eat more only because you exercise.

The benefits of increased metabolism include the ability to stay fit with lesser physical activity, lesser effort to do the activities, lesser chances of weight gain and the ability to enjoy most of your favourite foods.

Needless to say that metabolism of a person is influenced by his or her age, sex, gender, temperature, his or her built, family history, hormonal changes and more. His or hers metabolic rate may also see a decline due to the changes in his or her lifestyle.

Your metabolic rate refers to the rate the at which your body burns energy during physical activity and the rate at which it uses energy during the digestion of food. To make it easier, you can say that your metabolic rate is the rate at which the body burns up calories. Ironically, you metabolize certain amount of fat even when you sit idle.

Always be on the move to increase your metabolism:-

1. Swing your legs when you sit idly
2. Drum your fingers on your desk
3. Stand up and stretch a couple of times as you work
4. Move your head from side to side
5. Change your sitting position
6. Pace up and down the room
7. Clench and release your muscles (any muscles)
8. Tap your feet to the rhythm of music
9. Climb the stairs

But do this when people aren’t noticing!

According to experts, a few other changes in your lifestyle can affect your metabolic rate and burn calories.

• Eat breakfast
• Take more of lean protein
• Eat six small meals a day
• Include fish, dark green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, fruits and whole grains
• Drink recommended quantity of water without fail
• Do some aerobics regularly. They keep burning your fat for hours after you stop your work out.

1. The best way is not to buy stuff like cakes, cookies and fries. But what if you already have the tastiest and unhealthiest of foods at home? You have spend green paper on them and they look delicious in your cabinets. You slowly reach for them one by one! You think, I can’t control. If you can’t, you throw them out. Give yourself a pat on your back after squeezing them or smashing them and throwing them in to the garbage bin. It is better to lose those easy pounds than spend eons in losing body pounds.
2. You’ve learnt your lesson by losing some money. Stop buying calories. Next is to change your diet patterns. If you have noticed, the more you eat foods the more you develop taste and long for them. So change what you have been eating. You are not tempted if you hear the name Yokan or see it in a plate because you don’t know that it is a Japanese sweet and what it tastes like. But if you see a piece of cheese cake your brows go up and your fingers reach out to the fork. So if you want to stick on to your weight loss plan eliminate those tempters from your diet and include healthier ones for you to get attuned to. It may be difficult but not impossible.
3. If you feel that relentless craving for cookies or ice cream throw some nuts in to your mouth. A combination of water, nuts and 20 mnts time would be sufficient to curb your appetite and throw water on your cravings.
4. Experts say that cravings are short lived. They may last only for about 10 or 15 mnts. If you can recognize your cravings then you succeed in steering past them. The wisest method is to distract your mind off the tempter. Eat your nuts, watch TV, read a book, call a friend or exercise!
5. One of the main culprits behind weight gain and hunger is stress. If you can deal with the chap then no worries in getting through. Learn to divert your mind off stressful things. Know when your hunger is induced by stress and tension. Understand that not everything is in your control and that you have to let things go.

Let us go back again to explore the hidden wisdom and kindle our memories to rediscover the forgotten secrets of weight loss.

•   Sip some Rooibos tea in the morning. Rooibos tea is anti-mutagenic, anti-carcinogenic, anti-inflammatory and anti-viral. Next to the other numerous health benefits, rooibos tea may also play a role in your weight loss by inhibiting your appetite. Also, rooibos tea is calorie free.
• Be flexible! A bit of twisting up in the morning in the name of yoga would enhance your weight loss process. Yoga would help you to build your muscles, have a low BMI and speed up your metabolism.
• Always, always eat your breakfast no matter how late you are.
• Have your own vegetables. My best friend, the skinniest, has her own little garden in which she cultivates everything from papaya to pepper. This way she knows what manure she uses and how she grows her veggies and fruits. A vegetable garden of your own  would give you some physical activity, sense of satisfaction and a nutritious weight loss diet.
• Use turmeric in your daily diet as a habit. Curcumin in turmeric is a natural antiseptic and antibacterial with lots of health benefits. It is known to metabolise fat and help in weight management.
• Have your pickles and spice it up. Vinegar in pickles with its acetic acid, helps to reduce blood pressure and blood sugar levels. Spices like hot pepper are known to metabolism encouraging weight loss. They also kill your appetite making you feel full and enough. Next time you go to Subway, do not omit the pickles.
• Stop eating out. The reason is simple. You have grown your vegetables and you know what to throw in them while cooking. Then why eat out just to spill money and earn calories?
• Eat it all during lunch. Have a nice full meal in the afternoon instead of eating a lot of fatty calories in the night. This way you eat less in the night after a mild snack in the evening and wake up for a nice little breakfast.
• Chat, chat and chat as you eat! A long family meal would necessarily encourage slow and less eating. When you eat slowly you realize when you get full. But stay away from laughing and chocking!
• Take a good nap to de stress and lose weight. A siesta would keep your brain alert and enable you to know when you are hungry and when you are not.

Which of these would you try to lose weight?

1. Know that your gender plays a role in weight loss. The physiology of male and female are different from each other and the rate at which they can lose weight also differs. Women have a lot more fat than men and hence they are seen to lose fat in a slower rate than their lucky male counterparts. So if spouses or partners are in the same weight loss programme together they should have separate goals.
2. Never try to overdo your weight loss strategy. Respect your body and give it time to adjust. A change in the lifestyle will require some time to get adapted to and pushing things too far may crash your dreams. Overdoing exercise or over dieting will not only cause a wastage of time and energy it will also end in health problems and disappointments.
3. Get help from the right people only! You may need the help of a dietician, a physical trainer and medical practitioner. But just qualifications wouldn’t suffice. I would rather talk to my slim cousin who works out daily than to my plump doctor who has hardly seen the insides of a gym. Talk to your cousin about her eating patterns and her dualism as to how she is able to manage her family, her work and her exercise regimen. Talking to people who have succeeded in weight loss and how they are doing it matter even if you are not interested in following them.
4. Even weight loss have priorities. Eat and drink only what is needed to keep you healthy. What is more important, the meal or the dessert? Does the dessert give anything more than momentary enjoyment and calories that are difficult to burn? Keep holding to your priorities to keep the weight loss bouncers at bay.
5. Vitamin supplements are some good things available in the market. Use them when you need them. With a diet plan and a rigorous exercise routine you will need the support of multivitamins or essential fatty acids. With the help of a medical practioner choose your vitamin supplements or minerals for the weight loss period. Do not overstock them or overuse them. Even too much of nectar is poison.
6. Set only realistic goals without going overboard. You should try to lose at least one pound a week and not aim of losing three. If you cannot reach your weekly goals then your weight loss is not working well. You need not weight a month to see the results.
7. Finally, stop comparing. No two men are the same You may not lose weight like your father or brother did even while following their same routine and lifestyle. Know what can make you lose weight than hanging on to somebody else’s lifestyle.

Weight loss is simply not easy. You have to try hard and keep at it for long playing catch-up with your body until you succeed.

  Yes and no. By saying YES I mean is that you can definitely to get rid of belly fat and the NO means that there is no a single way to do it but a combination of ways as fat burning cannot be restricted to belly area alone.

Abdominal fat is a curse to many restricting their mobility and day to day activities to a point that they need help on cutting even their toe nails. Needless to mention the health hazards a fat middle may bring out during the process of aging. So if you are thinking of getting rid of your abdominal fat Kudos to you. You have stepped on to Awareness and Proactivity.

1. Since fat burning cannot be restricted to your belly alone you have to work on the body as a whole to see favourable results. The cardinal rule of fat burning or belly fat burning is to remain active.  Aerobic exercises like walking, jogging and the like will get the whole of your body the desired activity level to lose fat. At least 20 minutes of aerobic physical activity is recommended in a day at a stretch or in bits. Take deep breaths through your nose and deeply exhale through your mouth as often as possible to ensure good oxygen supply.
2. Try abdominal hollowing exercise which is simple and easy to do. The same thing can be done for fatty butts too. Pelvic lifts are also great!
3. Eat less of salty foods and more of calcium rich ones. Researchers have found that low fat diets along with calcium rich dairy products have boosted weight loss and belly fat burning. Dairy calcium successfully slowed down the fat burning process of the body leading to a trimmer middle without allowing any muscle loss. This study reaffirmed the importance of consuming dairy products even while on a diet for weight loss to ensure bone density, muscle mass maintenance and to help fat loss. Calcium supplements do not work as good as dairy calcium.
4. Keeping your eyes and mouths open for mono-unsaturated fats like nuts and seeds will help a great deal. These are good fats that will prevent the bad guys from taking control while also keeping your cholesterol levels.
5. Know the glycemic index of foods and eat four small meals (400 cal) a day. And munch something healthy every three or four hours to regulate your blood sugar level.
6. Drink 8-12 glasses of water everyday to prevent weight gain due to water retention.
7. Say good bye to desserts and processed foods for a smarter belly in and out.

• What is your ideal weight? Find out your ideal weight according to your age, sex and body type before forcing a new routine on yourself. Set a weight loss goal with a few kilos higher as weight calculations may vary. There is no harm in being a couple of kilos above your recommended weight.
• The importance of exercise. You may have hit the blog after reading many other blogs or after having tried and failed many other tactics to lose weight. By now, you might know that only a dietary revolution or just some kind of physical activity introduced in to your life is not going to yield the results you want to see. You have to identify an exercise that is congenial to your liking and which you’ll want to do everyday without getting bored of it. It could be a stationary exercise or an outdoor activity like walking, jogging and so on.
• Do not diet. I haven’t gone mad when I say that. Wikipedia says, “In nutrition, the diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat.” But, here, diet is a change of dietary style we adopt to lose weight, gain weight, for health reasons and more. So when you are on a diet for weight loss it means that it is a temporary change in your eating pattern which will be changed back once the goal is achieved. And once you go back to your normal diet which Wikipedia refers to, you have every chance of gaining back all that you have lost. So, instead of dieting, bring about a permanent change in your dietary pattern that will provide a favourable environment for weight loss and weight management.
• Set a routine that you like. As you choose your favourite exercise for weight loss choose a routine too that you will never get wary of. If you start on a programme that you are not comfortable with there is every chance that you will slowly find excuses not to continue with it pouring water over all your weight loss dreams. For example: don’t start walking early in the morning if you are a late riser. Bottom line: It is not necessary that weight loss has to hurt!
• Sleep enough! Weight loss doesn’t mean torturing your body by starving it, making work hard and depriving it of sleep. For healthy results, it need 8 hours of sleep and rest. Lack of sleep means lack of alertness, energy and interest. You wouldn’t want to doze off in your gym.
• No live telecasts work! It is a very bad idea to start exercising according to a TV programme. Risks: Procrastination, channel surfing, disappointments if they call off the programme. Get a video, if you like the feeling of working out with a group at home.

Weight loss is all about burning calories, eating less fats, taking right nutrition and leading a healthy lifestyle. You can see effective weight loss without compromising energy and nutrition by eating a whole variety of fresh fruits of the current season.

Fresh fruits don’t need introduction as the storehouses of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. See how they can help you to lose weight in an ideal way.

• Consuming a serving of fresh fruits would help you get the nutrition, adequate fibre and a whole lot of other goodies. It is recommended that you eat at least five pieces of fruit a day for effective weight loss.
• They also help your body to detoxify and purge itself of all waste materials.
• Fresh fruits are low in sodium and eating them prevents weight gain from water retention.
• Another good thing about having fruits is that the more you eat them the more you crave for them preventing you from eating all artificial and unhealthy foods. But, if you idle away from eating them they don’t attract you towards them with their healthy pigments or their natural aroma.
• Eating fruits will also supply you with more energy for exercise and thereby increase your metabolism.
• Additionally, fruits help you to regulate your cholesterol, blood sugar (type II diabetes) and blood pressure, reduce the risk of cancers, delay aging and maintain a good cardiovascular health.

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