Tag Archives: Heart rate

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15 Hidden Reasons You’re Not Losing Weight


 Reblogged:from Shine                                                                                                               15 Hidden Reasons You’re Not Losing Weight

   
Scale not moving? Avoid these common roadblocks to weight loss
Reason #1: You Don’t Realize That Sugar Lurks Everywhere
Many foods that we don’t think of as sweet, like pasta, soups, cereal, salad dressings and sauces, contain sugar and often it goes by another name like agave nectar, high-fructose corn syrup, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice concentrate(s), glucose, dextrose, sucrose, honey, malt syrup or molasses — just to name a few!. If your diet is high in sugar you may be missing out on important nutrients and overeating more often than you realize since sugar stimulates taste. A high-sugar diet can also cause a rapid rise and fall in blood sugar, which can zap your energy and make you feel hungry again.
Solution: Read nutrition labels and steer clear of cereals and sauces that have more than 8 grams of sugar per serving. If you need a sweet fix, choose fresh fruit as often as possible. Skip sodas in favor of water (plain or flavored with a bit of lemon, lime or juice essence) and unsweetened teas.
Reason #2: You Choose “Healthy” Processed Food Foods labeled “low sugar,” “low sodium,” “multi grain,” “organic,” “natural,” “vitamin-enriched,” “high fiber,” or “sweetened with honey or agave” may be high in calories or hidden sweeteners or unhealthy additives. And if you assume it’s healthy, you may eat more of it.
Solution: Switch to whole foods like fresh produce, fish and meat and beans and legumes and limit consumption of processed foods.Reason
#3: You Snack On Nutrition Bars How often do you eat a nutrition bar as a snack rather than to fuel a workout? If it’s often, you could be downing 400 or more calories without realizing it. Although touted as healthy, many nutrition bars are no better than a candy bar. If you use them for fuel, choose carb-loaded bars for aerobic exercise and protein bars for weight training. If you eat them in the normal course of your day, choose 100-calorie bars for a snack and 350-calorie bars for a meal (and don’t combine with them other high-calorie foods) and avoid bars with trans fats.
Solution: Eat whole food snacks, like sliced apple and peanut butter, and reserve bars for emergencies.
Reason #4: You Exercise Too Leisurely
If you rely on the calorie counts on machines or the numbers of calories you’ll burn promised to you by instructors you could be exerting too little effort to jumpstart weight loss. To burn 100 calories an hour, you need to maintain a high level of aerobic activity the entire hour.
Solution: Determine your target heart rate for optimal exercise then check your pulse several times during workouts (or wear a heart-rate monitor) to make sure you’re consistently in that calorie-burning zone. Try interval training (a mix of fast and slow pace), fun classes (Zumba anyone?) or outdoor exercise to keep you engaged and burning calories at maximal capacity. Choose exercises that offer a challenge or cross train on different equipment to push your body out of weight-loss plateaus.
Reason #5: You Ignore Fiber
Fiber-rich foods are good for weight-loss in two ways: They require more calorie-burning effort during digestion and they are filling and satisfying, which helps curb cravings.
Solution: Aim for 30 grams of fiber a day. Good sources include fruits, vegetables, unprocessed whole grains, beans and legumes and unprocessed nuts.
Click here for 10 more hidden reasons you’re not losing weight              

Calorie, Cook, diet, Diet food, Dietary fiber, Dieting, dieting programs, Eating, Fitness, Food, Health, Healthy Ways to Lose Weight, Heart rate, High-fructose corn syrup, Human nutrition, Juice, Nutrition, Physical exercise, Portion Control, Portion control (dieting), Top Weightloss, Weight, weight loss, Weight Loss Tips, weight tips
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Your Heart-Smart Fitness Routine


push ups
push ups (Photo credit: sun dazed)

Do this workout at least 3 times a week:

Thirty minutes of any type of exercise is good for your health, but what you do with that time really makes a difference when it comes to protecting your heart. We asked Johnny Lee, MD, cardiologist and spokesperson for the American Heart Association, to map out the ideal routine. Big bonus: It’ll also help you slim down and tone up.Stretching before you start any activity will help prevent an injury. Hold each stretch for 20 seconds. Read on for a few of Dr. Lee’s favorites.1)Sit with your legs spread and reach hands to one foot. Hold, than reach toward your other foot.2)Lie on your stomach with palms face down. Push your upper body up, arch your back and look up at the ceiling.3)Bring one arm across your chest, pulling it close to your body with the other. Hold, then switch arms.4)Now some Push ups These moves get blood flowing to your muscles as well as build them up, which helps you burn more calories. For each, do 3 sets of 8 reps, then move to the next one.5)Lie on your back with knees bent, arms crossed over chest.6) Sit up until your back is off the floor, then lower down.7)Get in push-up position with knees on floor. Lower down a few inches, then push back up.This is the most important part! You want to get your heart pumping to reach your target heart rate zone and stay there,Choose any activity you enjoy. Like a jog,or Bundle up and go for a brisk walk outside. (Bonus: Your body actually burns more calories when it’s cold out.)Have a Wii or Kinectin the house? Pop in a game that has a cardio component (like tennis) and go!Or you could Put on some music and take laps around your house. Add stair trips or do 10 jumping jacks every 5 minutes.Then Gradually slow down your cardio, take deep breaths and do some more light stretching.

American Heart Association, Calorie, diet, Dieting, dieting programs, Fitness, Health, Heart rate, Human nutrition, Johnny Lee, Loss Weight, Nutrition, Physical exercise, Push-up, Top Weight loss, Weight, Weight Loss Tips, weight tips, Wii
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How to Find (and Use) Your Fat-Burning Zone


Using the diagonal sled-type leg press machine.
Image via Wikipedia

Reblogged: from Huffington Post                                                                                                                           Your body’s most efficient energy source is fat.

Just one pound of stored fat can provide about 3,600 calories of energy, which is far more than most people actually burn in a single day. In comparison, a pound of storage protein or carbohydrate provides less than half that much energy.

Since it’s so efficient to use as energy, your body relies primarily on fat during rest and during relatively slow and easy physical activity. But once you begin moving quickly, your body begins to burn more carbohydrates, since fat doesn’t provide energy as quickly as carbohydrates. When you need to get from point A to point B quickly (like a running race), or need to hoist a heavy object overhead (like weight training), your body needs more immediate energy, and that’s where carbohydrates come in. They don’t provide as much energy, but they certainly provide it far faster than fat.

So when you move from a standstill to a walk to a jog to an all-out sprint, your body begins to tap into carbohydrates more and more, while gradually reducing reliance on fat as a fuel.

Of course, it’s important to remember that as you move faster, you’re burning more overall calories, too — so while the percentage of fat used as a fuel is decreasing, the total fat calories you burn might still be increasing since your overall calorie burn is significantly increasing. And this is where the “maximum fat-burning zone” comes in.

If you burn 200 calories per hour while walking, and get 60 percent of those calories from fat, then you burn 120 fat calories per hour. But if you burn 600 calories per hour while jogging, and only burn 40 percent fat during that time, you burn 240 calories of fat per hour, twice as many as when you were walking. You’re burning more overall fat calories, but using less fat as a percentage of your overall fuel utilization. Using this concept, you can approximate the point at which fat burning peaks during exercise — aka, your “maximum fat-burning zone.”

The maximum fat-burning zone typically occurs at 45-65 percent of your maximum heart rate, and that is the calculation ordinarily used by personal trainers or gym machines. They’ll take the number 220, subtract your age to find your maximum heart rate, and then take 45-65 percent of that number to find your maximum fat-burning zone.

But the result you get from this method is highly variable and tends to be inaccurate, primarily because your maximum heart rate is highly variable, and that 220 equation doesn’t pinpoint it very well. So here is a better way to find your maximum fat-burning zone:

Warm up on a bicycle for 10 minutes. An indoor bicycle is better, since there’s no traffic, hills, etc.

  1. Pedal at your maximum sustainable pace for 20 minutes. You should be breathing hard and your legs should be burning, but you should be able to maintain the same intensity for the full 20 minutes. If you’re looking at RPM, go for about 70-90 pedal turns per minute.
  • Record your average heart rate during those 20 minutes by using a heart rate monitor or the handles on an exercise machine.
  • Subtract 20 beats from that heart rate. Add and subtract three beats from the resulting number to get a range, and that is your maximum fat burning zone.

For example, if your average heart rate was 160, 160-20 is 140, 140+3 is 143, 140-3 is 137, and so your maximum fat-burning zone is when you have a heart rate of 137-143 beats per minute.

Compared to the results that I have obtained from hundreds of individuals in a professional exercise physiology lab with all sorts of gas masks and gadgets, this method obtains very similar results.

Finally, remember that the maximum fat-burning doesn’t necessarily burn a high number of calories; and if you do all your exercise in that zone, you won’t necessarily develop strong lungs or muscles, or much fitness or athleticism. As a matter of fact, because they burn so many calories and boost your metabolism so much, hard cardio bursts and weight training help you lose fat much faster than exercising in your maximum fat-burning zone.

So your ideal workout program should combine cardiovascular exercise in your maximum fat-burning zone (for example, in the morning or on easier, recovery days) with a combination of resistance training and cardio intervals that go above the fat-burning zone (for example, on afternoons or alternate days). Here is a sample workout week that incorporates the fat-burning zone:

  • Day 1: Strength training — 30-60 minutes
  • Day 2: Peak fat-burning zone cardio — 30-60 minutes
  • Day 3: Cardio intervals — 30-60 minutes
  • Day 4: Off
  • Day 5: Strength training — 30-60 minutes
  • Day 6: Peak fat-burning zone cardio — 30-60 minutes
  • Day 7: Cardio intervals — 30-60 minutes

With the workout above, you give your body a chance to burn fat fast with the resistance training and cardio intervals, but you also get to utilize easier days to burn fat in your maximum fat-burning zone, without quite as much strain on the body.

So now that you know how to find your maximum fat-burning zone, it’s time to head to the gym and do your test!

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