The holidays are around the corner and it’s very easy to give into temptation and make unhealthy food choices. Dr. Wayne Andersen, co-founder of Take Shape for Life, has provided the following five tips to outline the simple actions we can take to encourage great weight loss before the holidays. Continue reading Nutritionist/Author’s 5 Tips to Encourage Weight Loss before the Holidays
Tag: weight loss
Smartphone Emerges as a Workout Tool
We’ve known for a long time that our smartphone is a great workout accessory, but a market research report released by Lab42 just drives the point home. The agency surveyed 500 social media users currently focused on their health and fitness. Among the respondents, 51 percent use their smartphones during their workout. Of those, 91 percent use their smartphone to listen to music; 43 percent track their pace on their phone; and 33 percent check their email while workout out. Continue reading Smartphone Emerges as a Workout Tool
American Cancer Society Hopes ‘New Year, Choose You!’ Inspires Women’s Resolutions
One-in-three women will get cancer in her lifetime, yet nearly half of all cancer deaths could be prevented if women maintained a healthy weight through diet and regular exercise, avoided tobacco products and got recommended cancer screening tests. To support this practice, the American Cancer Society created the Choose You Movement. This initiative helps women transform their health-related lifestyles through social networking and online support. Continue reading American Cancer Society Hopes ‘New Year, Choose You!’ Inspires Women’s Resolutions
Burn it Up With Your iPad
The holidays are a time for many things, including seeing family, visiting with friends, eating too much and basically blowing off exercise. That’s probably why come January 2 many people vow to “do it right” and pledge to turn over a new leaf. Maybe one way to start the New Year off right is by better managing your food intake.
One problem say experts is that you can easily shed pounds by reducing intake, but as soon as you go back to old habits – which die hard and quickly – you’re likely to regain the weight. Additionally, people who reportedly lose weight more slowly while increasing the exercise tend to keep the pounds off.
Brian Young realized this, and he’s worked to develop an app that helps you track and burn, hence the Tracknburn app for the iPod and iPhone. It incorporates the BMI formula that “is accurate as it gets,” says Young, who further notes that one of the most popular ways to determine how many calories are needed to sustain the same body weight is to use the body mass index (BMI) and current activity level. Subtract 250 calories a day to lose 1/2 pound per week.
Sounds simple, but Young notes that this formula also changes as you lose weight, making it hard to track over time. The Tracknburn essentially picks up on this, and does the weight loss math for you. This app takes a users individual profile, along with weight goal and helps make responsible choices. It can be used a food log with more than 140,000 common foods to choose from, and by tracking what you can eat, you can more easily lose at the same time. Now that sounds like a winning solution.
BodyMedia to Add App
There has been no shortage of devices, gizmos and gadgets to help you lose weight. A lot of these devices, gizmos and gadgets require you to wear something, where the data can be synced to a computer. That’s good, because it lets you see detailed results of your activity and of course helps you set goals, but it’s bad because it requires people to be very proactive. Stop syncing the device one day, and you might not bother wearing it the next. There has to be an easier way to see the results. Continue reading BodyMedia to Add App
Losing Weight with Optical Illusion Dinnerware
As you know, there are various methods of weight loss, including exercising, diets, pills, and hypnosis. Now you can add optical illusion to the mix, with a product called Slimware. Slimware are plates with unique designs that help you maintain portion control with food placement. See those flowers on the plate? In addition to adding aesthetics to your dinnerware, the size of the floral pattern is the size of the amount of a particular food you should have on the plate (the larger flower should contain more vegetables, while smaller flowers contain proteins and carbs). According to Slimware, “We are psychologically and culturally programmed to ‘stay in the lines,’ whether on the highway or at the post office. Slimware applies that mental predisposition to help you become portion conscious.”
Of course, the theory goes that if you eat less, you gain less. But you still have to be concerned with what types of foods you are putting on the plate. It also doesn’t stop you from building mounds of food on the plate as long as you stay within those lines. So, we’re not sure if we buy into the idea, but Slimware does point out the important fact that portion control plays a huge role in weight control.
Slimware lists celebrities like Elisabeth Röhm, Tori Spelling, Judith Light, Kendra Wilkinson, Emily Procter, Kathy Griffin, Rene Russo, Ashlee Simpson, Jennie Garth, Faith Hill, and Kristin Chenoweth as fans. If a celebrity uses it, then it must be good! Right?
The product is available in various designs, all for $36.50 for four plates.
FitClick.com Launches App
Wouldn’t it be grand if you could just click to get on a diet and lose weight? You could click on an app, and see the pounds just fall off. Well, there is NOT an app for that, but there is a new app that will let you keep track of what you’re eating and your workouts. The FitClick Diet and Workout Tracker is the first to offer a full suite of diet and workout features. The app, which is available for the iPhone, works as a calorie counter and food journal, while it can provide customizable diet plans plus workout routines – so you can burn to earn. The tracker portion can calculate calories burned from more than 800 exercise demo videos. Users aren’t tied to one set routine either, and can instead create their own diet plans and workout routines, or if you’re looking to get straight to it, you can use one of the thousands of member-created programs that are already available.
The app further contains a database of 118,000 foods along with 12,000 recipes. Additionally, the FitClick iPhone App can work as a full-service companion to the FitClick website, providing real-time access to diet, fitness and weight loss programs. Users aren’t tied to one set routine either, and can instead create their own diet plans and workout routines, or if you’re looking to get straight to it, you can use one of the thousands of member-created programs that are already available.
The app is available from the Apple App Store now.