There are no shortcuts to losing weight!

Lose up to 4 lbs per month effortlessly

The true value of exercise to losing weight

The Safest, Most Effective Weight Loss Exercise

An Easy Way to Cut out Calories

Can you guess what percentage of calories Americans consume that come from what they drink? Three percent? Ten? No, try twenty percent! Yes, that's right, one-fifth of the calories we take in come from liquids.
Here is a no-brainer way to begin to cut back on your caloric intake: Stop drinking sodas (even diet), juices, mega-sized "health" smoothies with 120 grams of sugar in them, whipped coffee drinks, iced tea loaded with corn syrup, and all those sport and vitamin drinks that are actually filled with sugar and calories.

What's the magic word? Water. Okay, if you love a cup of java in the morning, then get it. Try to avoid all the extras with it, and if you're looking for a pick-me-up in the middle of the day, have an unsweetened green tea instead of a soda or energy drink.

Otherwise, try your best to stick with the water, and if it gets too boring, add a splash of cranberry juice or a slice of lemon to mix it up. Getting enough water can help us in our quest for better health in so many ways:

Flush out toxins
Reduce your risk of heart attack
Help with joint and muscle pain
Boost your metabolic rate
Improve organ function
Keep you regular
Prevent headaches
Promote healthy skin
Regulate body temperature
Get energized and improve alertness
Wow, you can kill two birds with one stone: Cut out unwanted calories and do something good for yourself in the meantime. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to have a bunch of sugar or calories I want it to be something I have to chew -- preferably chocolate. Waste it on some drink? No way.

By Gabrielle Reece

Weight Loss Advice: Doing Something is Much Better than Doing Nothing

When of the most common excuses people use for not exercising is "I am too busy; I don't have time to exercise as much as I have to in order to lose weight and/or tone my body or build muscle." If you are one of those people who use that kind of excuse for not exercising at all, I would like for you to be aware of two very important facts that might just change this mindselt for you for you:

1. Exercising, weight loss and health us the most important thing in your life. I don't care how many children you have to take care of, what you do for a living, and how many professional and social obligations you have - if you are not healthy, fit and happy, NOTHING else will matter to you and all other achievements will be undermined by this missing fundamental link of a healthy, happy life. Hey, if our President, Secreatary of State, and the Governor have time to exercise with all their headaches, who are we to complain that we don't have time?

2. It's very important to realize and remember that when it comes to exercising, doing something is much better than nothing. Too many people do not take the time to exercise just because they don't have a full hour or more to do that. It is not  necessary, however, to exercise for such a long period of time in order to get the health and the weight loss benefits from physical activity that you need. In fact, a very short but intense exercise can be very effective or just as effective for the purposes of losing weight and becoming stronger. Most people, even if they carry a significant extra weight, can run a mile in under 12 minutes, which is a great workout in itself. Even a couple of sets of 3 minutes of squats and three minutes of rope jumping with a few minutes of jogging to warm up and cool down will jump start and significantly speed up your metabolism, and that should only take around 20 minutes or even less.

So, if you know you should be exercising and you just have a few minutes to do so, don't blow your work-out off copmletely because of lack of time, but instead, use those few minutes to get a great, intense workout.

Are you undereating?

As I observe and work with many people who are eagerly trying to lose weight, I am amazed to find out that when it comes to nutrition, many of them are undereating rather than overeating. Ironically, due to the nature of the metabolic process that allows a human body to burn fat, undereating will hurt your chances of losing weight just as much as overeating.

The reality is that you need fuel to burn fuel! If you are determined to lose weight and you exercise intensely and regularly, your body will not give you the results you want if you are trying to "pull through" the whole day on cereal and a couple of protein bars. It's especially when you exercise, you body craves those essential vitamins and nutrients that will allow it to speed up the metabolism and accelerate the fat burning process during the work-outs and at any other time throughout the day.

Therefore, you must eat an adequate, recommended amount of all the essential vitamins and nutrients every day in order to support your body's needs for energy and in order to maintain high metabolism which is the main catalyst of burning fat. You can easily find the commended daily calorie intake, considering your height, weight, age and body size on the internet and you should follow that recommendation by eating equal or greater amount of food as your exercise routines become longer and / or more intense.

Fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean proteins must be part of your daily diet. You must never find yourself in a position of starving and feeling that you are depriving yourself of food when you being an intense, daily exercise regimen.

The worst thing a person who wants to lose weight can do is skip breakfast and not eat anything until noon or later, like so many people unfortunately do. If I could compare it to operating a car, this kind of start of the day will put your body into "slow rpm" mode - where it will go into starvation mode, so that when you finally feed when, while being extremely hungry, the food will not be processed properly and the body, anticipating that it will be starved again, will attempt to store that energy as fat in the body instead of using it, as it would have, if you ate in the morning one or more small meals before afternoon, and kept your body's metabolism up the whole time.

Undereating will not only slow down your metabolism, but it will also significantly hamper your body's ability to recover form workouts. That in turn, will slow you down and will prevent you from exercising as hard as you want and need in order to achieve your weight loss goals.

So, give your body all the nutritional elements it needs to burn fat, build muslce and feel energized and ready for exercise and other daily tasks.

The importance of getting up early!

Scientific and medical research clearly shows that testosteron is linked to metabolism and a greater production of that hormone has a direct effect on burning calories from fat. Researchers also found that the levels of testosteron prodution in an average adult vary throughout the day, while this process usually peaks between 7 am and 9 am every day.

Being awake during those morning hours is crucial to enhancing the chemical processes in the body that cause testosteron production. During those very hours, our metabolism is at its peak! This means two very important things to anyone who wants to lose weight: (1) Since your metabolism is most intense during those hours, anything you eat between 7 and 9 in the morning will be absorbed, digested and used as energy more efficiently than during any other time of the day. Therefore, this is the time when the smallest amount of energy you consume will be stored as fat. (2) These hours are also the time when your body is at its fastest and strongest (unless you didn't sleep all night, of course). Therefore, exercising during those hours is will allow you to perform better physically while building muslce and losing fat. fat.

So, if you are serious about losing weight and are eager to make it happen sooner, get up at or before 7 am.

Welcome to Powerful Weight Loss!

The most rarely mentioned weight loss secret!

After speaking with and observing hundreds of people of different ages who are in great shape and enjoy a very healthy life and high energy, I couldn't help but notice that very few of them had a specific gym routine that they committed to performing every day.

However, I noticed a very different, strikingly important thing that they all have in common. Their great lean bodies are a "side effect" of an exercise activity they already enjoy and would be involved in regardless of their desire to lose weight. In other words, you will not see those people pumping steel or running on a tredmill for a given number of minutes while looking at their watch every minute and thinking "When is it going to be over? I can't wait to get out of here!" Instead, these very fit people seem to truly enjoy whatever sports activity they are performing - hip hop dancing, martial arts, biking, rock-climbing, tennis, soccer, basketball are only few of the activities that are parts of those people's lives.

Obviously, since those people enjoy their activities, instead of waiting to get their exercise over with, they often lose track of time because they enjoy a game or a dance so much and they end up exercising much longer than they might have planned in the beginning. Thus, motivation for those people is not an issue.

Thus, if you too want to lose weight, you are much more likely to succeed if you try to combine "business" with pleasure - the business of losing weight with the pleasure of choosing an exercise that you enjoy.

Go ahead, try different kinds of sports, take a few different dance / yoga / pilates / martial arts classes. I am sure you will run into one or more kinds of activities that you will truly enjoy, and the weight problem will likely take care of itself as you get involved in the activity that you actually like.

Seeing results helps!

It so happens that we all enjoy seeing results of our work as soon as possible. The work we do in order to lose is no different. We want to see some kind of progress shortly after we start working out and maintaining healthy diet. The good news is that there is a simple, reliable way to see the results of your work relatively quickly - get a digital weight scale. A quality digital scale will show you your weight loss progress in precise measurement of 1 or 1/2 a pound.

Thus, if you weight yourself, lets say, once per week, seeing a drop of 1/2 - 1 pound per week will be a very encouraging news for you and it will further motivate you to work harder and stick with your routine.

I do not like endorsing particular brands, but when it comes to scales, quality matters and Tanita make excellent, precision digital scales. Get one and start monitoring your progress weekly, records your measurements and watch how you drop those pounds of fat.

Your Biggest Weight Loss Enemy

What do you think is the most vicious enemy of losing excess weight for most people? Is it your local McDonald's or a donut shop? Perhaps these venues make people indulge into the guilty culinary pleasures more often than they otherwise would, but... are fast food restaurants really responsible for people's excess weight? Hardly!

There is another, much greater and a much more fundamental cause for gaining weight. Are you ready to hear what it is? - it's BOREDOM.

Boredom is often mentioned as a cause of many problems including depression, anxiety or simply a bad mood. However, boredom is rarely discussed as a leading cause of obesity, but it clearly is.

The main reason that people of all ages and walks of life overeat is because they find themselves too often and for periods of time that are too long without being engaged in an interesting, social activity outside of their home that will keep their mind and their body away from food. Browsing internet, watching TV, playing video games and reading a book are all fun activities, but whenever we engage into any of those "from the comfort of your own home" hobbies, we tend to make many roundtrips to our fridge or even worse - to the snack bar in our kitchen. It so happened that it's more fun to browse our favorite sites or to watch a movie while eating popcorn or chips and consuming thousands of empty calories without even noticing it.

Thus, if you are serious about losing excess weight and maintaining a healthy body size, you absolutely must, must, must get involved in one or more social activities during your free time. Make it fun, make it something different - enroll in a dancing class, take a martial arts course, take a class at a local community college in something you have been interested in for a while but didn't have the opportunity to learn before, volunteer at a local hospital a few hours a week, or join a running / rock climbing / walking club. You would be surprised at the extent of the positive changes that including just one extra social activity will have in your life. It is likely to make you feel much better about yourself and help you raise your self esteem by allowing you to learn a skill which you can be proud of. Being part of a social / sports group will also bring new social / professional networking opportunities that would not have been available to you otherwise. Finally, being away from home and interacting with people will keep you away from being bored and your mind off of that bad stuff you would be binging on had you been home for all those hours.

The best exercise for losing weight!

Both, scientific research and my extensive observation and study prove beyond any doubt that the best kind of exercises, which consistently makes people lose weight faster and more effectively, combines a simultaneous intensive cardio work-out and intensive resistance training which involves a large group of different body parts. This kind of combination of physical activities causes that essential all-encompassing stress on a body that makes your metabolism skyrocket not only during the time you work out but for hours or even for days later.

Although all forms of exercise contribute to increased metabolism and burning fat, the most common exercise - light jogging and lifting weights - are the most ineffective ways of losing weight because they are lacking the above essential elements of an effective weight loss work-out: they are lacking the "all encompassing intensity" - the activity that will put physical stress on different parts of the body simultaneously. Light jogging at a comfortable speed doesn't put serious stress on any part of human body. Simple weight lifting may put great stress but only on one set of muscles, and thus - the essential "all encompassing" part of the work-out is compromised.

One, incredibly effective exercise for weight loss that proves to bring amazing results over and over is climbing stairs. And by "stairs" I surely don't mean that little machine that moves underneath your feet at a gym; I am talking about real stairs - a long set of stairs and much preferrably outdoor stairs. Climbing / running upstairs is a great exercise because it is both a very intense cardio work-out and it also engages several of your major muscle groups - legs, lower back and upper back.

If you want to lose weight and you are serious about achieving your goal, I suggest that you explore your locality, drive around and find a hill or some kind of elevated landmark which has a stair access. The longer the set of stairs is the better.

A 20-minute intense stair skipping in the morning before work / school that can be done in sets of five minutes with 1-2 minutes rest will jump start your metabolism and will raise it to levels that very few other exercises can. As you get in a better shape, you can challenge yourself in all kinds of ways by using that same set of stairs. You got try reaching the top faster, or making your breaks between the sets shorter, or you could make it hard to go up by carrying a backpack or a set of dumbbells in your hands as you go up which will engage yet another group of your muscles and will make your work-out even more intense.

There are two huge advantages to this exercise:

First, it's much more fun to go up the stairs in a nice area outdoors, enjoy fresh air, and see all the different things around you than being stuck at a stuffy gym and pumping steel or stairs while standing in one place and impatiently waiting until it's time to go. And if you enjoy your work out more, you are likely to do it for longer and thus achieve better results.

Secondly, it's hard to find a more intense exercise that would combine both - muscle work and cardio work and that will be as effective when it comes to raising metabolism and burning fat as climing stairs.

So, go - drive around and find one or more stair routes and start using them tomorrow to your great benefit and let me know how it goes!

Arkady Itkin