Tag Archive for: #wonderfullyfit

Why Our Diets Are Badly Failing Us and What We Can Do About It

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Right now, there’s a good chance that your diet is woefully inadequate when it comes to ensuring you are in the best possible health. In fact, there’s a good chance that your diet may be killing you.

And what is the culprit here? The answer is empty calories and processed foods.

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These days, a huge proportion of what we eat is ready prepared and ‘processed’. That means that it has spent a lot of time in a factory and thus bears little resemblance to what the ingredients originally looked like.

A good example is a bag of crisps, which doesn’t tend to have much potato left in it at all. Chocolate is made from a cocoa bean but the rest is purely processed. And ready made lasagne will have had all the goodness fried out of it and a ton of salt, sugar and bad fats added to try and keep it preserved.

All this means that you’re getting calories from your diet – calories that will provide you with energy and make you gain weight – but no nutrition.

Why We Need Nutrition

It is a mistake to think of food as fuel. Calories are fuel and they happen to be in our food. But food is more than that.

Apart from also being a social event and a hobby, food should also be a source of raw materials. The saying that you ‘are what you eat’ is literally true and when you eat any meal, your body will break it down into its constituent parts and then reassemble those parts in order to build your muscle, create enzymes and hormones and even produce neurotransmitters (the chemicals that make our brain work).

When you don’t get these things, you’ll find yourself feeling considerably worse. If you don’t get enough vitamin C for example, then your immune system won’t be able to perform at its best and you’ll be much more likely to get ill. Worse, vitamin C is also crucial for helping you to produce serotonin. Take that away and your mood will plummet. It also helps us sleep!

Similarly, when you don’t get enough omega 3 fatty acid, it can cause inflammation – this makes your joints hurt, it creates brain fog and it can lead to illness.

A lack of amino acid will mean that your muscles are weaker and smaller. And it will result in your skin looking grey and your nails being brittle.

The short term issues are worthy of a lot of concern but more worrying still is what this does to your health in the long term. The damage here is cumulative and in the end you will be more likely to suffer with a range of diseases.

What to do About It

The answer is to stop thinking of food as fuel and to instead think about the quality of the raw materials you’re putting into your system. Find ways to get more nutrition food in your diet -even if that means just adding a smoothie into your routine!

How Fear Stops You From Achieving Greatness

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To achieve greatness, you have to be willing to grow as an individual and improve yourself. In order to grow as an individual and improve yourself, you must be willing to expand your skill set and be willing to have many experiences that can improve this skill set.

This means that you cannot be afraid to challenge yourself, take reasonable risks, and stepping outside of your “comfort zone.” If you are fearful, you will not reach the greatness you are capable of achieving.

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Many people are fearful and hesitant to step outside of their “comfort zones,” preferring to do things that they are familiar with. They prefer to do activities and stay in fields that they are comfortable in, that they know they do well in. Few people prefer to step outside of those zones to try something new, handle new, etc. for a few reasons. One reason is because they fear they will not do well with the new activity or challenge.

A second reason is fear of embarrassment because other people may see them struggle with this new activity or challenge. A third reason is that they fear ridicule from people because they struggle with this new activity or challenge.

Fearing taking on new challenges or activities for any of the above reasons or any similar reasons only keeps you from achieving the greatness you are capable of achieving. By not challenging yourself with new tasks and challenges, you will be unable to grow as an individual because you will not learn any new skills to add your skill set. You will continue to excel and be productive in the skills you know, but you won’t expand your skill set to grow as an individual and possibly be even more productive and capable than you currently realize.

This is a key reason why you won’t achieve the greatness you are capable of; you won’t even know if you’ll find a better skill you can use to achieve greater goals and accomplishments if you don’t take on new tasks and challenges.

Therefore, fear can stop you from achieving greatness because it hinders your growth as an individual and prevents you from learning more about yourself and increasing your skill set and abilities to handle various tasks and challenges. By being willing to overcome that fear and challenging yourself with new tasks and challenges that get you out of your “comfort zone,” you can grow as an individual and be able to achieve the greatness you are capable of achieving.

 

10 Super Foods to Help You Quickly Build Muscle and Lose Weight

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In order to build muscle and lose weight you need a variety of veggies, carbs, fruits, proteins, and healthy fats.

In order to quickly build muscle and lose weight you need 10 super foods.

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1. Whole Eggs 

Eggs are one of the cheapest super foods offering you an excellent source of protein. The cholesterol that we hear so much about isn’t a problem. If you have cholesterol problems lower your body fat not the eggs you consume.

2. Flax Seeds 

Here’s an excellent source of fiber, omega 3, and protein. Grind the flax seeds and sprinkle on your berries or yogurt. Don’t use flax oil as it’s unstable and has no fiber benefits.

3. Quinoa 

In South America Quinoa is considered the king of grains. The fiber and protein in Quinoa is higher than that in oats and rice, plus its gluten free.

4. Mixed Nuts 

Nuts are packed with mono and polyunsaturated fats, fiber, proteins, Vitamin e, potassium, zinc, and magnesium. Nuts are dense in calories so if you are skinny and looking to put on a few pounds these will do it.

5. Wild Salmon 

Omega 3 fatty acids are found in salmon, as well as providing 20 grams of protein per 100 gram serving.

6. Fish Oil 

Taking fish oil can reduce inflammation in the body, increase testosterone levels, and lower body fat. Take 900mg per day. It’s hard to get this level eating fish.

7. Berries 

Fresh berries are a powerful antioxidant keeping you healthy and helping you to improve your weight loss.

8. Green Tea 

Another strong antioxidant and a powerful natural diuretic. It can speed up fat loss, improve blood sugar, and prevent cancer.

9. Water 

Something as simple water is considered a super food and vital to your weight loss program, muscle development, and health. You should drink at least 8 glasses a day.

10. Tomatoes 

High in lycopene they are an excellent cancer preventer and a benefit in your strength training. You can’t eat too many tomatoes!

These 10 super foods combined with an overall healthy diet, a cardiac workout, and some strength training and in no time you’ll be pounds lighter. Super foods can help you to quickly build muscles and lose weight.

Being overweight is hazardous to your health and to your self-esteem. Why not set your goals and get motivated? You’ll be feeling better about your weight in no time at all.

How to Pave Your Future With Healthy Eating

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So many of us stop believing that the choices that we make on a daily basis will have any impact on us whatsoever. Humans in general have a tendency to be shortsighted, and do not have good skills when it comes to planning for the future.

However, if you are a forward thinking person who wants to truly make a difference in the world, or at least achieve specific goals in life, then you are going to have to begin to view the future as something that you can actively mold to suit your needs.

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If your goals are very lofty, then you are going to quickly realize that you need to be completely and 100% at your best if you are going to achieve those goals. Everybody wants to become the best version of themselves possible, and if you are not taking care of your most fundamental needs, then you are going to be struggling for the majority of your life with issues that do not need to be issues.

When you are not nourishing your body, you are depriving your brain of the capability of concentrating and retaining information. You are working against the most valuable machine that you have at your disposal in achieving whatever it is that you want to achieve. Your dreams cannot become a reality if you are not first and foremost respectful of the gift that you were given by birth.

Our bodies need maintained, much like any other machine would. If you don’t give it the proper nutrients it needs to survive, you will be performing at your lowest possible capacity.

Not only that, but when you are not caring for your body, and eating healthy foods, you are practically inviting disease to come upon you later in life. Nobody realizes just how important their health is until it is already deteriorating. And by then, it is often too late to implement the changes that you need to make in order to avoid further damage from occurring.

Fortunately, you can start today in making your future a priority. Begin by getting rid of all the junk food in your house, perhaps by giving it away to food drives or two relatives who might appreciate it. Make small changes to your diet, gradually implementing days where you cook meals that are completely healthy and conscientious of your body’s need for nutrition.

It is never too late to begin making good changes in your life, even if you are already dealing from lasting impact from bad choices. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you are willing to forgive yourself and continue to stay forward focused, then you are well on your way to becoming the master of your domain and making your life work in your favor. Everybody wants to achieve their goals, so take the first step you need to make today and actively choose a lifestyle that is healthy and rewarding both mentally and physically!

How Learning From Failures Can Boost Your Self-Esteem

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Learning from failures can boost your self-esteem because you realize that you can rebound from tough challenges, plus learn valuable skills that can aid you in overcoming future tough challenges more easily.

Virtually everyone faces challenges in life; no one has it easy all the time, which means there will be things in your life that will not go as planned. At times, it will seem that the whole world is against you and nothing goes in your favor, nothing turns out as planned.

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Times like these are bound to bring down your self-esteem and make you question whether you are able to do high-quality work, achieve your goals, etc. It is at times like these that you need to reflect back upon past failures so that you recognize that you have gone through challenging periods before and have the capability and skill set needed to go through them again and be able to come out stronger than ever before.

That is the other key element you must learn when reflecting on your past failures: Learning from them so that you don’t make the same or similar mistakes in the future. When you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world; on the contrary, you have a learning opportunity to learn what you did wrong or not as well as you could have, then learn how to do the situation better if the same or similar situation arises again.

Learning from your past mistakes can show weaknesses in your skill set that you can strengthen over time through learning from the experience and gaining insight into what you can do better. By learning what you can do better, you can feel more confident in handling the same or similar situations in the future, which can boost your self-esteem.

Therefore, you should not look upon making a mistake as the end of the world, and you should not allow it to bring down your self-esteem either. Everyone makes mistakes; the key is learning from those mistakes so that you don’t make the same or similar ones in the future, plus you improve your skill set so that you can handle the same or similar situations with more confidence and ability in the future.

This will allow yourself to gain more self-esteem through analyzing and learning from your past mistakes so that you make fewer mistakes and achieve more in the future.

From Fat to Slim In 5 Easy Steps

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Weight loss programs always seem to generate controversy and this one is likely no different. If you’re like most of us you don’t really care about the science, you just want to lose the pounds.

Let’s look at how you can go from fat to slim in 5 easy steps and with only 10 to 15 minutes a day

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1. Start Slow 

You may be surprised to learn this is one of the most important things you can do because if your enthusiasm gets the better of you, you’ll find yourself burnt out. It’s easier to add more exercise than it is to take away.

2. Choosing the Type of Cardio Exercise 

You’ll be much more successful if you choose exercise that you enjoy or at least think you’ll enjoy. For example, if you never liked riding bike in the past, taking up cycling is likely a bad choice with a short outcome. You have many options. You can join a gym and circuit train or strength strain, but you can also lose those pounds without spending a dime. Walk…walk…walk some more – get your heart rate up but not so much that you can’t hold a conversation.

3. Add Some Strength Exercises

Add a little strength training at home using cans or anything else you can find with a bit of weight. And of course, for just a few bucks you can buy dumbbells. Crunches, pushups, and squats require no equipment whatsoever and they are very good at toning and slimming. While they may sound too simple to be effective, that’s not the case. They work fast and they work well.

4. Exercise Every Day 

You hear all kinds of instructions about when and how you should exercise. The bottom line is just do it. The shorter the period of time the more likely you are to do it but the more often you’ll need to do it. So if you are going to workout for 10 to 15 minutes a day you need to do it every day to be successful.

5. Just get moving 

Don’t plan, don’t spend weeks trying to figure out the best plan of action, just put on your shoes and get out there and go for a walk or start doing jumping jacks in the middle of your living room. Just get moving, because when you are moving you are building muscle and when you are toning and building muscle you are burning fat.

There you have it – from fat to slim in 5 easy steps. Now that you know how to lose weight and build muscle fast, so get busy.

How to Change a Habit for Healthy Eating

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Healthy eating is something that takes a lot of discipline and practice. Especially if you were not raised eating right, or if you have found yourself falling into patterns of unhealthy eating. Fortunately, changing a habit is a lot more simple than it might appear at first glance. If you are ready and willing to make a change that is lasting, then you will be able to change your habits and enjoy a healthy lifestyle from here on out.

First of all, you have to identify your unhealthy habits before you can begin to break them. This can be difficult for many people, but it can help to keep journals of your regular activities and habits, that way you can begin to identify patterns that are self-destructive. Once you have identified these self-destructive patterns, then you will find that you are able to predict when you may begin to act self-destructive we.

healthy eating

A lot of the time, self-destructive actions have trigger points that you can identify. If you know what causes you to act out and want to do things that will sabotage your efforts, then you can more easily avoid them or realize what is happening before you give up and lose your progress.

Next, after you have identified your negative habits, it is time to try some intervention. Instead of allowing yourself to run on autopilot so that your brain is doing whatever it wants to do whenever it wants to do it and your body is forced to follow suit, you have to start to take control over your mind. If you do not control your mind, then you do not control anything about yourself.

If need be, you may want to enlist the help of a qualified professional who may be able to help you to identify your negative patterns and address them in a healthy way. Regardless, you have the power to change your habits. Once you have identified them, and you know that you are going down a negative thought spiral, you can interrupt your thoughts and redirect them toward something more positive.

For example, if you find yourself thinking about how wonderful it would be to eat at a fast food restaurant, instead of brainwashing yourself with memories of the chemically induced flavors of fast food, instead, do some research and make a list of all the reasons why fast food is unhealthy and addictive and chemically terrible for your body. Whenever you start to have a craving for the bad food, interrupt those positive thoughts with the negative reality.

That will help to dissuade you from eating foods that are terrible for you and encourage you to seek out better sources of nourishment. Being able to identify these negative thought patterns and addressing them through a physical change in your neurons by interrupting them with positive thoughts instead is a way to physically rewire your brain so that you are no longer a slave to your impulses. And that is how healthy eating begins!

How To Keep A Positive Frame Of Mind

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Keeping a positive frame of mind is key to doing your best work and overcoming life’s difficult periods when things don’t go as well as planned or some unexpected challenge pops up during the course of our lives. However, it’s not always easy to keep that positive frame of mind in the most difficult of times. Learn how you can keep a positive frame of mind below.

Keeping a positive frame of mind means thinking positively, even when things don’t go as planned or when things seem to be at their worst possible outcome. It’s the “glass half-full” versus “glass half-empty” that many people seem to look at when it comes to various aspects of life.

positive

For instance, a person with a positive frame of mind may look upon losing his/her house to a fire as where he/she and his/her family were fortunate because they all survived and can rebuild. A person with a negative frame of mind may look upon losing his/her house to a fire as an unrecoverable disaster because all of his/her possessions are gone and that starting over is “too hard.”

It’s really one’s frame of mind that influences one’s outlook of events, as the example above shows. However, even the most positive person can suffer periods where he/she is in despair because everything in a situation turns out for the worst and/or a bunch of negative circumstances occur repeatedly right after another.

For even the most positive person to overcome such difficult periods in life, he/she needs to step back from the situation, take a deep breath, and recall earlier instances in his/her life where everything seems to turn out wrong or for the worst. Then he/she needs to recall that things did eventually turn around and that he/she survived that hard period. Recalling that sequence of events can calm the person and show that that same pattern will occur again, that this current hard period of events will also turn around for the positive; the person just needs to be strong enough to “weather the storm” and work toward a more positive period of events.

Therefore, it’s important to keep a positive frame of mind at all times, but that can be difficult for even the most positive person when many negative events occur at one time in a person’s life. It’s important for a person to step back, take a deep breath, realize that even these dark periods in life turn around for the better, then work toward bringing around that happier period as soon as possible.

Build Muscle Lose Fat Fast and Feel Great

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Whether this is the first time you’ve decided to lose weight or your hundredth attempt you can do this. You can build muscle, lose fat fast, and feel great. So how do you go about doing this? Glad you asked!

It all begins with building muscle. Now don’t worry you’re not going to turn yourself into the incredible hulk. Women in particular worry that they’ll become too muscular and that just doesn’t happen without some very specialized work.

muscle

As you build muscle, your weight may actually increase. Don’t worry; this is okay, because muscle actually weighs more than fat. As your muscles develop, your body will begin to burn fat faster. Your weight training is really quite simple – squats, pushups, and free weights are all the equipment you need.

You’re going to that weight training with cardio exercises to burn fat. Either 30 minutes a day or two 15 minute sessions will be enough cardio to enjoy the benefits. Cardio is as simple as a brisk walk. Of course, there are all kinds of cardio exercises including jogging, cycling, circuit training, and tons of other excellent aerobic exercises. A treadmill can be a great investment because of the convenience of that walk indoors no matter what the weather. Your cardio should raise your heart rate but not make you out of breath.

You will also need to look at your diet. To build muscle you need to make sure you are taking 25% to 30% of your calories in protein. You’ll want to avoid fats, and add plenty of fiber to your diet. Fiber is filling and so you’ll eat less. Avoid eating all processed and packaged foods, which contain little nutrition. Instead, stick to fresh fruits and vegetables, poultry, fish, and lean meat cuts.

For many of us, belly fat is our biggest enemy. It’s also the hardest to lose. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that as long as you do hundreds of crunches will do the job. All that will happen is the muscle under the fat will develop and your belly will look larger. Cardio exercises are needed to burn belly fat!

Great, we’ve covered how to build muscle and lose fat fast, but there’s more to it than exercise and caloric intake. One of the biggest reasons why weight loss fails is failing to have a plan, so get your plan in place.

Finally, don’t wait to get motivated. Set goals, reward yourself, get up, and get moving. Before you know it, you’ll have shed those extra pounds.

You Deserve to Eat Well

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A lot of people seem to want to eat well, but tend to fall back into the same destructive habits. While it may be confusing at times as to why this may be, the truth is that no matter how much we want to do things right for ourselves, it is difficult, if not impossible, if you do not fully believe you deserve to be taken care of.

Whether it is being taken care of by yourself or someone else, you do deserve to eat well. All of us have self doubts at times, and some of them are so deeply rooted within us that it can lead us to act in destructive ways, whether we want to or not. However, if we are willing to consider the fact that our self-perceptions are flawed, we can take the steps necessary toward healing those broken pieces of ourselves that make us stop believing we are worthy of being taken care of.

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However, nothing that is injured within us is necessarily going to be broken forever. We can take the steps necessary to heal ourselves. Even though that is difficult at times. You have to be devoted to a path of self-healing before you can ever dedicate yourself to eating a nourishing diet if food is one of the things you use to punish yourself.

One thing you can do to help yourself develop the self-love you need to believe you are worth a future full of healthy foods and free of disease that is caused by the easy to access processed foods that are so abundant is speaking with someone who is qualified in helping you to identify self-destructive thoughts and patterns that are holding you back.

You can also practice other types of self-love, using methods such as mindfulness, journaling, and meditation. If you start a gratitude journal, you begin to take a close look at your life and see the things that you have to be grateful about. When you are able to look at the positive things in your life, it can make it that much easier to see positive patterns and good things about yourself and the people you care about. Not only that, but developing that mind-body connection is an essential part of learning to believe that you truly do deserve to eat healthy, nourishing foods.

You can also attempt meditation as a way to get centered within yourself and utilize mindfulness as a way of seeing the opportunities and beauty in every new day. Mindfulness meditations help us to get closer to ourselves both inside and out and align with our true needs and desires, such as the need to be nourished and healthy and safe.

However you choose to enhance your mind-body connection, all of these are bound to help you to learn how to value yourself more deeply. When you value yourself, you make decisions based on what truly fulfils you and you will allow your body to thrive!