You might be right. While experts say weight loss can always be reduced to the simple “calories in, calories out” mantra—meaning if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you’ll lose weight—a host of oft-hidden saboteurs may be meddling with the balance. Here’s a smattering of them:

1. Treating healthy foods as low-calorie foods. “A lot of times they’re not consistent,” says Scott Kahan, co-director of the George Washington University Weight Management Program in Washington, D.C. So while whole grains, avocados, and nuts might be kind to your heart or cholesterol levels, dieters who binge on such foods can, before they know it, add hundreds of calories to the day’s total. Enjoy calorie-rich healthy foods, dietitians urge, but ration them out: a quarter of an avocado on a salad or a small handful of almonds for a snack.

2. Shunning shuteye. Some research has linked shorter sleep duration to a higher body mass index (a measure of body fat) and increased hunger and appetite. Additionally, if you’re tired, you might be prone to grab a sugar-laden treat for a midday boost, skip the gym, and have takeout for dinner to avoid cooking. It’s a vicious cycle. Aim for seven or eight hours a night.

3. Underestimating calories eaten. Quick—how many calories have you had today? No idea? Calorie ignorance is common and fueled by quite a few factors, dietitians say. First is a warped understanding of portion sizes. “People will tell me, ‘Oh, I eat a half teaspoon of butter and I spread that on a piece of toast,’ ” says Ellen Liskov, a registered dietitian and nutrition specialist at Yale-New Haven Hospital. “I don’t think you can do that mechanically.” (People typically use a tablespoon or more.) You’re going to have to recalibrate: Measure everything for a few days and work from recipes that calculate calories per serving or do it yourself. And be diligent about checking serving sizes. One sleeve of PopTarts, for example, is two servings. Also, be wary of seemingly innocent things like fruit, juice, trail mix, and dips. It’s particularly easy to go overboard here.

Forgetfulness magnifies calorie ignorance. With all the to-do’s jammed into your brain, you probably don’t want to add a food diary. Too bad—your selective food memory is going to continue to sabotage you “until you start to pay attention every time you put something in your mouth,” says Madelyn Fernstrom, founding director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Weight Management Center and author of The Real You Diet. Also, while a couple healthy snacks strategically spread throughout the day is a good hunger-control tactic, Liskov warns of “random” snacking. You’ll almost certainly lose track of all those calories.

4. Overestimating calories burned. “We tend to reward ourselves with too many calories of food for the amount of calories we burned exercising,” says Kahan. Suppose you go for a 30-minute jog. The University of Maryland Medical Center’s “calories burned calculator” estimates a 150-pound person would burn about 370 calories. Eat a few cookies later that day and you’ve just canceled it out.

5. Feeding your thirst. If you’re not sure whether you’re hungry or thirsty, assume it’s the latter. Drink a water or tea and see how you feel. Some research even suggests drinking two 8-ounce glasses of water before breakfast, lunch, and dinner may help you manage hunger and eat less.

6. The food environment. Commercials on TV hawk junk food. Billboards for fast-food restaurants bombard you on the road. “We’re in a society that really lends itself to eating a lot,” says Kahan. Without addressing these saboteurs, he says, it’s “almost overwhelmingly difficult” to lost weight. His solution: “Engineer your environment.” At home, do a junk-food purge. At work, avoid the treats in the kitchen and lobby your coworkers to hide the Hershey’s Kisses and go on a healthy-eating kick with you.

7. Saving up calories to eat junk. A couple hundred calories a day for an indulgence is OK, but don’t get carried away. “You could eat a bag of chips ’til the cows come home, but that’s not going to make you satisfied,” says Marilyn Tanner-Blasiar, a dietitian at the  Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Without enough protein and fiber, you’ll be ravenous an hour later and blow your calorie limit.

8. Medications you take. It’s worth a check with your doctor if you don’t know whether weight gain is a side effect of a medicine you’re on. Psychiatric medications to treat bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression, along with heart medications like beta blockers, commonly cause weight gain. While treating the primary condition is most important, says Kahan, you may be able to find a substitute sans the side effect.

9. Your family and friends. This can manifest in many ways. Maybe it’s too heartbreaking to turn down grandma when she insists you have a third helping of her double-fried chicken. Or the rest of the family isn’t on a diet, meaning some junk foods linger to tempt you. Perhaps your nights out with friends always revolve around food-and-drink binges. No wonder a 2007 report in the New England Journal of Medicine found that one’s chance of becoming obese increase by 57 percent if a close friend becomes obese.

10. Yourself. Don’t be overly restrictive. “If you set too many limits on yourself, you get bored and resentful. And that, mentally, will hinder your weight loss,” says Tanner-Blasiar. Aim for slow and steady, shedding maybe a couple pounds a week, and don’t obsess over the scale. You didn’t gain the weight over the course of a couple weeks; likewise, it’ll take more than that to lose it.

Above all, remember: “You can’t be perfect. You can’t be perfect in your relationships, in your job, in your life—certainly not in your weight-loss attempts,” says Kahan. “There’s nothing wrong with having a piece of cake on your birthday. There’s nothing wrong with trying to aim for moderation.”

By Kurtis Hiatt

For many however, keeping the weight down is not so much as important as looking good. Weight loss therefore becomes the means rather than the end. For such folks, news from a recent release would easily register as research shows that most folks are more concerned about wearing clothing that made them feel great rather than losing weight in itself.

With a whopping 70% of women admitting that getting back into old fitted clothing would be an achievement, it appears that weight scales are gradually getting out of favor hence leading to the Achieva mantra “Get off the scale and into your jeans” became our mantra as stated by Jeff Lefkowitz, spokesman for Achieva™.

And that’s what was discovered in a recent research conducted by Succeed Laboratories LLC – a Nutraceutical company wholly given to developing only those products offering life-long benefits based on best practices in wellness and nutrition.

Achieva is an African-Hoodia based appetite suppressant that was formulated in pursuance of this goal .It works by making people feel full on eating less.

With the discovery than women always feel great in those clothes that reminded of their slim days. This therefore meant that rather than using the weight scales, just getting back into those old clothes could be a more practical method of weight watch than the traditional scale method.

Author: janicekraft

To get the most benefit from your cardiovascular workouts, you need to know where your pulse rate should be while doing the exercises. You should reach your target training pace while doing aerobic exercises. When you monitor your heartbeats per minute with an electronic device, you can accurately predict when you have reached that speed.

Your target training scale depends on several factors. It is primarily based on your age. A person in his twenties would have a target training scale between 150 and 130 beats per minute. A person in his forties would have a target training scale ranging between 110 and 90 beats a minute.

For every twenty years you age, your ideal pulse scale will drop by twenty contractions a minute. The cardiac muscle of a young child contracts almost 200 times a minute when he is running.

Your ideal pulse scale is a general guideline. Where you fall in your age scale is strongly influenced by how healthy your cardiovascular system is. If you are a veteran exerciser, you will have a stronger cardiovascular system that will not need to work as hard. If you are just beginning your first exercise program, your heart will contract more often every minute.

When you are new to working out, you should not try to go too fast to strengthen your cardiovascular system. Trying to sustain a fast pace can result in breathing problems or stop your heart. If you ignore how quickly your heart is contracting, you will feel winded and ill while exercising.

Not making your cardiac muscle work hard enough is almost as bad as working it too hard. If you do not speed up your cardiovascular pace sufficiently during aerobic exercise, you will not fully benefit from it. If you keep track of your pulse with a monitor, you can quickly tell if you need to exercise harder to stay in your ideal pulse scale.

You can try to check your cardiac muscle contraction speed at your carotid artery or on your wrist while you are working out. It can be difficult to find your pulse and count the beats while exercising. To instantly access your cardiac muscle contraction rate, use a device that does it for you. When you can see a digital readout of your pulse, you can quickly modify your workout if need be to maintain it in the ideal training pace. Knowing how to train properly with a heart rate monitor will help you get the most out of every workout.

Written by Travis Brown

You drink eight glasses of water a day.

Why you can shed it:

- Eight glasses is a general recommendation and doesn’t take into  account different lifestyles. You’re probably consuming water from other sources  without even knowing it, such as in your morning tea.

Do instead:

- Have a glass of water right when you wake up in the morning, because  you’re bound to be dehydrated after a night of sleep.

- If you find yourself forgetting to drink enough water, fill a  half-gallon jug with water and aim to finish it by the end of the day.

You weigh yourself every day.

Why you can shed it:

- A focus on shedding pounds can cause anxiety about weight and also  increase the risk of gaining weight back over time. Weight scales don’t always tell the  whole story.

Do instead:

- Focus on body composition and how much energy you have on a daily  basis.

- Pick a goal that’s measurable but gives you higher self-esteem once  you accomplish it, like fitting into an old pair of pants or getting your blood  pressure down.

You spend 45 minutes on the elliptical machine at the gym.

Why you can shed it:

- Steady-state cardio has its drawbacks. Your body gets used to the  routine and stops responding, meaning weight loss will plateau if you don’t mix  it up.

Do instead:

- On cardio days use the treadmill on an incline or the  stairstepper.

- Mix interval training into your cardio routine to challenge your  muscles and burn more fat.

You try not to eat after 8 p.m.

Why you can shed it:

- There’s no study out there that says eating after 8 p.m. will make you  gain weight. The harm is that you might be tempted to eat more at dinner so you  can make it through the night.

Do instead:

- Certain types of foods may be more difficult to break down at  different times of day. Stick to something lighter and easier to digest if  you’re going to eat a late meal.

You’ve eliminated fat from your diet.

Why you can shed it:

- When eaten in moderation, fat is an essential part of your diet and  can actually slow down the digestion process, which makes you feel fuller,  faster and longer.

- Fat also helps you absorb more nutrients found in your food because  it’s processed slower in the body.

Do instead:

- Fill up on healthy fats: avocados, nuts, seeds, olive oil, and nut  butters.

Source: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/03/21/3491600/spring-clean-your-weight-loss.html

What makes up a “good or ideal” body fat percentage?

The answer is different for both men and women and largely depends on your age and how healthy you want to be.

MEN

25% body fat or less is considered to be an acceptable rate in terms of health for the male population.

18% to 25% means that you are far from lean.

14% to 18% is considered very healthy.

14% or less is when you are considered to be in athletic shape.

10% is when your six pack starts to show.

2% to 4% is considered to be the essential amount of body fat for men.

2% or less is considered to be unhealthy.

WOMEN

25% to 31% is an acceptable range of body fat for a woman.

31% or more is obese.

20% to 24% is considered to be “fit” for women.

20% or less makes you appear very lean.

10% to 12% is considered to be the essential amount of body fat for women.

10% or less is considered to be unhealthy.

Getting yourself Tested

The American College of Sports Medicine, says that when performed by a skilled tester, a skin fold caliper body fat measurement, has the accuracy rate of 98%.

By Tilman von der Linde

The close ties between the members of a family are important in making your personality. In the world of today these ties are even more important. Thus you must try to retain this structure. The family unit must be preserved and you should play your role in developing your family ties with the other family members. There are certain things which you should do to promote the love and affection you feel for each other. It is important to do so. If you pay due importance to the family structure you will be able to have a very close bonding with the other members of your family.

If you want to feel closer to somebody, feeling the emotion of love for that person is not enough. Creating understanding between you and that person is very important. The same goes within a family. If you want to retain your family ties and if you want your family unit to become even closer, you have to understand each other. Everyone in this world needs love and care. You must give your family members all the love and care which you can give them. You must also try to understand their needs. Some of your family members may need a lot of space for themselves. If you want to have a close family you need to understand these requirements of the other members of the family. If the family members understand, there will be no problem for any one and the relationships will become even stronger.

Give your family members a margin to be wrong sometimes. This is very important as the psychologists say that it is a right of everyone to be wrong sometimes. If this is the situation, you must discuss the problem with your family member but give him or her surety that your love for him or her is unconditional. This is very important. People feel closer to each other due to the bond of love that exists between them. Understanding between two people leads them to a growing love.

Although understanding each other is very important but loving your siblings, your kids and your parents are the actual key to success. Thus, make them know for sure that you love them. Feel the bonds within your heart. You will definitely help your family in becoming happier, and your family life will become a better experience for you.