The Diet Plan Checklist

How to Choose Diet Plan that works

Countless books have been written on different diet plans that promise faster and faster weight lost if the prescribed diet plan is followed; each one with its own recent scientific finding to back up its claims. More and more books on the topic will be published in the future, but how do we know if any of these diets will work for us. There is no one plan fits all when it comes to dieting. What works for you may not work for me and vice versa, but diet plans must pass certain standards for it to be effective. Check your current plan if it fulfills the requirements in this check list and find out if it will last or if it will fail just like the ones before it.

Your Plan Must: 

1. Be Affordable and Available

                The best diet plans have lists of recipes of their suggested food group to be consumed in every meal. The ingredients of these recipes must be both affordable to the average Joes and Jane’s and available in common sources of food like supermarkets and restaurants. A diet plan with a regular need for lobster for example, is not very flexible to the budget or available in certain locations. Successful diet plans must take availability of every ingredient in certain regions in to consideration. If one item is not available in some places, a substitute must be provided without compromising the quality and the taste of the food.

2. Be a Lifetime Plan

                Diet plans must be easy to maintain for a lifetime. They must not be seasonal. Searches on the web for crash diets and popular diet fads trend upward just before bikini seasons; like summer vacations and spring breaks. This paradigm towards diet must be changed. Most diet plans give too much attention to weight loss that the minds behind the plan fail to equally emphasize on what should be done next after the enough weight have been lost. For a diet plan to be successful, it must have a maintenance stage. At this stage food intake must be kept at a level where we do not gain or lose weight and where we are kept active throughout the day.

3. Be Safe and Healthy

                The last thing you want to be is a guinea pig of nutritionist wannabes and end up seriously ill because of taking their experimental diet plan challenge. Only start diets that have good names and credentials to back up their claims. Use more reliable sources than “some guy on the net.” Don’t rely on testimonials too much because they are easy to fabricate. Read and take time to learn the principle behind the plan before starting. If you’re worried about the technical stuff, don’t be. The best diet plans are easy to understand. Just remember: if you can’t understand it, it won’t work. If you can understand the principle behind the plan and you are still not sure if it’s healthy for you or if you think the plan will radically change your usual diet, consult a physician first.

4. Not Include Hunger

                If you’ve started a diet plan and you’re always hungry, chances are you are starving yourself with that plan. This can be avoided by eating frequently in small amounts. The amount of calories consumed will be the same but eating small snacks in between meals help prevent having very low blood sugar levels making us less likely to over eat on the next big meal. Keep in mind though to include snacks in the calorie count. This is easy to do because most snack foods have calories/serving in their packaging labels. I personally limit my snacking calories to 100-150 calories per snack. I snack twice a day.

5. Have No Banned Food

In most diet plans, the foods that are often banned are those that we love to eat. This is the reason why they are banned; because we love them so much we are often tempted to have a second serving or more. Totally blocking out certain foods from our system makes us more vulnerable to temptation and lapse from our diet plan. This can lead to the total failure of the diet plan. Successful diet plans aim to achieve a balance on the food that can be eaten frequently and those that should be eaten scarcely.  

There is no perfect diet plan. The most successful diets today will be challenged over and over again until it will be made obsolete by more recent findings in nutritional science. Knowing how to judge a diet plan will arm us in dealing with the constant change in the landscape of diet and nutrition. Hope this helps. Enjoy fitness.

Tips on developing a fitness mindset

Start Young       

The sooner we condition our bodies for fitness, the easier it is for us to continue being fit as we grow older. In past generations, physical activities tend to decrease as a child starts formal schooling at age 7 or below. In the start of formal education, children begin to spend long hours sitting in the classroom and less time playing outdoors. Nowadays the age where children’s activities are decreased becomes younger and younger. The emergence of numerous technology based entertainment and labor saving devices promote sedentary lifestyle in the present and future generations. At home, hours spent climbing trees and running in the yard have been replaced by longer hours sitting in a desk in front of a screen with a mouse and keyboard in hand, or even worse laying in a couch in front of a large screen with a bowl of chips an arm length away.

                For most of us, this tip is no longer applicable. A great portion of our youth have been spent, but we can still promote fitness among the younger generation by encouraging and supporting child friendly fitness experiences like sports and martial arts for kids. For those who haven’t started a fit lifestyle, its betters to begin sooner than later.

Create Your Own Fitness Blog

                This tip is based on personal experience. I’ve created this blog for exactly this purpose. It doesn’t need to be a professional looking blog. The more personal your blog is the better. A blog has many advantages; first it allows you to tell the world what you aim to achieve. Let’s say you aim to lose 10 pounds before your next birthday, write about it in your blog and share it with your family and friends. A lot of management and self help books suggest that goals must be declared to the world to make sure that we will achieve it. After declaring it, use your blog to record your progress. People following your blog will be a great part of your success.

Other fitness advantages of creating a fitness Blog

Influence others to be fit

                There is no greater feeling than having someone embrace a fit and healthy lifestyle because of your influence, but this is easier said than done.  I’ve personally experienced how difficult this is with my mom. She has been living a sedentary lifestyle for so many years that walking long distances in moderate pace gives her shortness of breath. She’s a school nurse so information is not a problem.

At first there was denial. I had trouble convincing her to work out because she believed there is nothing wrong with her and she doesn’t need to do it. Then there are all the reasons; “I have menstruation this week”, “I haven’t eaten yet”, “I just ate.” The list goes on. Then there is her negative mindset towards exercising. She thinks that exercising is something vain people do and she is not a part of that group. No matter how many times I try to remind her of the importance of exercise, she would just shrug it off and change the topic.

                It wasn’t until she blacked out in a supermarket one sunny day and more recently a terrible pain in both of her legs which restricted her from standing up that her attitude towards fitness changed. Luckily these health attacks haven’t occurred again and it also scared her into working out (sadly at her own slow pace.) I am there continuing to encourage her to improve, she is not overweight so improving does not take a lot of effort. Slowly but surely she is making progress.

Different people respond differently to an invitation of working out or starting a healthier diet challenge. Only they themselves can change their paradigm towards fitness. No amount of lectures or scare tactics will change the flow of an adamant mind, but when they do change; when their fitness paradigm has shifted, we must be there to cultivate and to support their new found way of seeing things.

How Blogging can Improve Your Health

      Creating a fitness blog can go a long way in improving your fitness. I’ve created a blog specifically for this purpose. It doesn’t need to be a professional looking blog. The more personal your blog is the better. It can be monetized or it may be done for this purpose alone, but regardless of you true motivation, I suggest monetizing it to prevent you from abandoning the blog in the rough roads of your fitness journey.

      First it allows you to tell the world what you aim to achieve. Let’s say I aimed to lose 10 pounds before my next birthday, I will write about it in my blog and share it with my family and friends. A lot of management and self help books suggest that goals must be declared to the world to make sure that it will be achieved. After declaring it, use your blog to record your progress. Your blog becomes your medium of declaring what you want, and every time you opened your blog, you are reminded of your goal.

      Second, declaring goals to a watchful public has another upside. It makes backing out from that goal more difficult. In working out, laziness procrastination and other negative behavior can break the mindset of the less experienced. Even I, who have been working out for many years, sometimes give in especially on bad days. In dieting, temptation of gluttony in unplanned occasions can ruin your diet. A surprise party and a spontaneous get together with high school friends are among the few situations where I let my guard down and failed to follow my diet plan.

                It is in these situations where I find blogging to be most useful in motivating myself. Even after minor setbacks in my fitness journey, blogging makes getting back on track easier. In a few instances, people who follow my blog remind me of the goals that I set for myself.

      Third blogging gives us a chance to learn new information about fitness. As a blogger, part of promoting blogs is reading other people’s blog and commenting intelligently in their pages. This will not only promote your own blog and create new relationships (because great bloggers always reply to comments) but also makes us learn what problems other people are encountering in their fitness journey. We can apply their solutions to ourselves or give advice if we are well versed with the topic.  Reading blogs also keeps us updated on the latest fitness trends. It’s like having a free magazine subscription where we have the freedom to praise or criticize the content. 

      Lastly, blogging lets us meet other fitness enthusiast. Other bloggers are more than just sources for inbound links. Successful fitness bloggers are mostly heath buffs themselves. Some manage blogs for personal purposes while others have monetary reasons. Regardless of their motivational sources, beginner bloggers can learn a lot from them, from technical blogging skills to detecting fitness trends. Joining communities of other bloggers and interacting with them are fun ways of learning and building your community at the same time.

Fitness for kids: 7 Rules of Child Fitness Activities

Rule 1: The Rule of Readiness

      A child must be assessed well before being introduced to any new physical activity. As in learning there is a right time to teach specific thing depending on the readiness of the child’s body and mind. A child’s nervous system and muscular development must be taken into consideration when choosing a fitness activity for children. Just like in learning to walk, the first steps happen on the terms of the child’s body and can’t be forced to happen.

Photo from http://findmeacure.com/page/43/

Rule 2: The Rule of Uniqueness

      A child’s physical and mental progress must not be compared with other children’s progress. Remember that each child is unique and no two children are exactly alike. Even a twin’s body development may vary because of slight physical and chemical differences. Twins or not, children develop physically and mentally at different rates and this may reflect on their compliance of the requirements of fitness activities. So don’t compare your child’s skills with the skills of your neighbor’s kids instead concentrate on his or her development and improvement.

Rule 3: The Rule of Exercise

      Constant correct practice is the key to perfection. In training a child’s skills remember to begin with simple skills. A child’s inexperience and lack of patience may lead him or her to skip the basics if he or she is left on his or her own to learn. This may lead to frustration and possibly the habit of giving up easily. A child must first learn to walk before he could run. Guide the child to learn and master simple and more basic skills first before introducing him or her to more complex skills. This will lead to constant successes and slowly but surely to growing self confidence.

Rule 4: The Rule of Enjoyment

      Practice and scheduled routines make most children bored. Involve games, goals and rewards while learning and practicing skills to make the experience more enjoyable. This is why sports are best introduced while a person is young. It teaches the child to be goal oriented and disciplined. Memories of fun fitness activities in youth give the child a more positive mindset towards working out and staying fit in adolescence and adulthood. As the child grows, gradually replace the positive reinforce (rewards) with the knowledge of principles of good health and self improvement that he or she will carry on through life.

Rule 5: Rule of Underdeveloped Systems

      While training or playing sports with a child, remember that no matter how active a child is, his or her organ systems that may be important in conditioning (like the muscular, respiratory, cardiovascular, and skeletal system), are still developing. This is particularly true with children 10 years and below. As children, their bodies are dividing energy supply between growth and development and daily activities. They require more sleep than an adult and do not have the endurance for long hard runs or swims. So don’t expect a child to keep up with you when running around the track. As they grow older progression should be gradual.

Rule 6: Rule of Imitation

      Most children learn by imitation. Encourage group playing especially with slightly older kids. They are more likely to learn skills this way from children 2 to 3 years older than they are. As this happens, your role as a parent or guardian is to guide his learning by making sure that he or she learns correct principles together with skills.

Rule 7: The Rule of Holistic Development

      Understand that physical development is only a part of a child’s total personal development. Equal emphasis and time must be given to his or her emotional, social and spiritual development. The child must also understand this so that as he or she moves into adolescence, he or she will also pursue holistic improvement.

Run or Walk for Life: How to Start Improving Endurance for Beginners

Run  for Life

The fact that the most successful athletes today do rigorous training to improve their endurance is a testament on how important cardio-respiratory exercises are. In the NBA, even large athletes like Dwight Howard and Kevin Love must run to keep up with smaller and faster guys. In boxing and mixed martial arts, it’s sad to see a fighter being beaten by their own laziness. As a fighter your worst enemy is your own bad habits in training. A winded fighter can’t blame anyone but himself. Professionals outside sports also know the importance of cardio-respiratory endurance. Professionals like the French legionnaires or west point cadets are required to walk and march long distances but they are more likely to complain of blisters on their feet than over exhaustion. Cardio-respiratory endurance can be the big difference that separates a winner from a dead guy in war.

                You may say: “I don’t need to do what they do. I’m not a professional. I’m not paid to do that.” The fact is you do need to do at least a fraction of what they do, at endurance training that is. You’re not paid to do it; but you will pay in the later part of your life if you don’t shape up now. So train like a professional now and reap the benefits for the rest of your life.

Do It Yourself

Athletes pay thousands of dollars for conditioning coaches to help them improve their cardio-respiratory endurance but I offer you a do-it-yourself approach. No gyms, no special equipments, no one shouting at you to motivate you; just you and your want and need to improve. Doing it yourself makes the results more permanent. The habits that you will develop will last longer than any gym membership. Your motivational sources are internal and will not vanish on a monthly period and the best part is it can be free or very cheap, depending if you want to buy those expensive running shoes.

The Benefits

Now that you’re all psyched up, let’s begin with the fruits that come with undergoing endurance training:

·         Lung Efficiency

·         Blood vessel and heart efficiency

·         Increased vigor

·         The ability to work efficiently under stress

·         Decreased chances of heart attack and stroke

·         Improved physical appearance

Do the Step Up Test

Do the Step-up Test!

Now that you know how to take your heart rate you can begin your pretraining test. This will serve as a reference in measuring your progress later.

The items required are:

• Wrist watch(to time and take your pulse)
•    Heart rate monitor(if available)

• A  sturdy chair or bench(15-18 inches high, and must be able to hold your weight

• A clean piece of paper to record your results on. (You might want the type of paper that you want to keep for a long time)

The Step Up Test

Purpose: to determine and record the following:

• Resting heart rate

• Approximate rate of recovery

Step 1: Take your heart rate at rest. Record result labeled as resting heart rate(RHR).

                To be certain that your resting heart rate is consistent throughout the test, see to it that conditions are similar every time the test is taken.

Step 2: Perform the step-up routine

                Do 30 repetitions/minute for 2 minutes.

Step 3: Immediately after the routine take your heart rate. Record result labeled as “HR immediately after exercise.”

Step 4: Rest for 2 minutes then take your heart rate. Record result labeled as “HR 2min.s after exercise.”

Step 5: Rest for 1 minute then take your heart rate again. Record result labeled as “HR 3min.s after exercise.”

Step 6: Rest for another minute then take your heart rate again. Record result labeled as “HR 4min.s after exercise.”

Aim

The present result by itself means very little. Take the test every 2 weeks and aim for the following:

• Lower RHR

The lower your resting heart rate, the more efficient is your heart in pumping blood.

•  Faster Rate of Recovery

The less time for your heart rate to return to normal, the better. Faster rate of recovery translates to better cardio-respiratory efficiency.

How To Do It

                Both goals can be achieved by regular cardio exercises like jogging, walking, running, cycling, etc. Among these exercises, swimming is the most effective but very few people swim well enough to maintain a pace that will significantly contribute to cardio-respiratory improvement. A 150 pound person must swim 50 yards/minute in freestyle to burn 10 calories per minute. Choose a cardio exercise that you are good at or that you are interested in or choose one that you can do regularly for the rest of your life. If you can’t choose any, start by walking vigorously 30 mins every day then gradually improve by alternating walking and running.

Start Running!

The Beginner’s 5 Minute Cardio Routine

Here’s a beginner cardio respiratory routine that I tried myself when I was too out of shape to try what others offered. Just like for all exercise routines I advice that you consult your physician if this routine would be appropriate for you.

               
                        Routine:

                                1^st Minute: Run at a comfortable pace

                                2^nd Minute: vigorous walking

                                3^rd minute: Run at a comfortable pace

                                4^th minute: vigorous walking

                                5^th minute: sprint until the minute is done or until you’re winded

It’s easy to follow, so no more excuses. Do it for one week. Your aim in this routine is to start running and be consistent. Set a schedule to make it regular. If you promised yourself to do the routine 3 times of 5 times a week, keep it. Start by working on keeping your self-commitment and over all fitness will follow.

The Beginner Health Buff: Back to Basics

There are three factors that we must apply to ourselves to obtain a balanced fitness. These are:

1. Proper Diet
     Proper diet doesn't mean cutting down your food intake, it merely means eating the right kinds of food at the right amount. Physical activity alone will not lead to shedding off excess fat, it must be partnered with the proper nutrition to be effective. Preparing your own food helps but in times when it is too inconvenient, we must learn to choose the proper food that do not have more than the calories we wish to take in.

2. Regular Exercise
     Working out is as much as a need as eating and sleeping. The common belief is it is okay not to exercise if we move around a lot at work of if we regularly engage in sports. Actual work and household chores does not normally burn enough calories to be of any significant impact to our fitness. If we rely on daily physical activity alone means that we must wash floors for more than 42 hours to drop 1 pound. As for sports; some do provide a whole body work out but no sport is comprehensive and effective enough to develop all our primary muscle groups. Scheduling a fifteen minute calisthenics work out once a day can go a long way in developing these muscle groups. Add a 30 minute run or vigorous walking and your on your way to becoming your new fit self.

3. Regular Rest
      Rest is the most often disregarded factor in physical fitness because many think it comes naturally to everyone. But monitoring your hours of sleep and your common sleeping habits is just as important a monitoring your weight and eating habits. We must learn when to take a break at working out to give our bodies a time to regenerate but also know when to go back to working out as not to break our exercise routine.

Fitness is as simple as balancing these three factors in our lifestyle but the diet fads and work out equipments' promotional gimmicks we are so often exposed to seem to obscure this simple concept. Get back to the basics of working out and achieve your fitness goals by relying on yourself and your will.

Measuring Fitness By Numbers

1. BMI (Body Mass Index)

       Body mass index is used to estimate what the ideal body weight is based on the person's height. It is the most widely used tool for determining weight problems because of it is very simple to use and to understand. It is defined as the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters (kg/m²). A person may either be underweight, normal weight, overweight or obese depending on his BMI.




Note:
Limitation(s): BMI may not correspond to the same degree of fatness in different populations due to different body fat distribution and different proportions of body compositions.

Compute Your BMI now

2. RHR (Resting Heart Rate)

To monitor your heart beat, merely take your pulse by placing the tips of one or two fingers on the radial artery, which is on the thumb size of your wrist. Count your pulse for ten seconds and multiply by six to get your heart rate per minute. Do this while resting and you get your RHR.

Typical healthy resting heart rate in adults is 60–80 bpm, with rates below 60 bpm referred to as bradycardia and rates above 100 bpm referred to as tachycardia. Conditioned athletes however have lower RHR. Most endurance athletes such as cyclists and marathon runners have RHR below 50 bpm. It is not unusual for people doing regular exercise to get below 50 bpm

Note:
Many factors can influence heart rate, including:

• Activity level
• Fitness level
• Air temperature
• Body position (standing up or lying down, for example)
• Emotions
• Body size
• Medication use

3. WHR (Waist-Hip Ratio)

Do I need to explain what this is? WHR is a good tool to measure obesity, body fat distribution and some medical conditions like diabetes, prostate and testicular cancer.

Here is a chart on the health risk chart based on a person's WHR

Waist to Hip Ratio Chart
Male	Female	Health Risk Based Solely on WHR
0.95 or below	0.80 or below	Low Risk
0.96 to 1.0	0.81 to 0.85	Moderate Risk
1.0+	0.85+	High Risk

The Beginner Health Buff

Do you envy your friends are always healthy? Those people you know who seem to have everything figured out when it comes to being fit? Well it's never too late to be one of them. I offer you a chance to learn how to become a health buff. The best part is you don't have to pay anything or subscribe to any magazine. All you need is the will to make continued self improvement a part of your daily routine, the will to strive to become better and better every day.

To begin, we will assume that you are at the beginner's level (you don't exercise regularly, you have a sedentary lifestyle and you have no dietary plan.) If this is not true good for you and keep it up, but if you are like majority of the people reading this, don't worry, that's where everyone begins.


We start off with the positive things that you will gain if you follow the program that I use.

1. Weight control
      This is a challenge for everyone who does not plan for their health, but controlling your weight is a must if you want to be healthy. It is not just a matter of appearance; obesity has been a growing trend in the last three decades, and it kills.

2. Flexibility
      Flexibility is the ability to move a joint to its normal range of motion. In other words, it is allowing your body to move in the way it was designed to move. Improving your flexibility aims to avoid joint injuries, back pains, poor posture, and ordinary muscular soreness.

3. Muscular strength and endurance
      The former is our ability to exert maximal force at one time while the latter is the ability to exert moderate force over and over again. Both are muscular abilities but training for one must be separated from training for the other.

4. Cardio-respiratory efficiency
      This is most important in keeping us alive and kicking. It is having our lungs, heart, and blood vessels working in the most efficient way. If this system fails we end up with a heart attack and 50% of heart attacks end up in sudden death or paralysis.

How to be fit?

The Do-It-Yourself Fitness Checklist

• Deciding to do something

It may be to lose weight, to maintain low sugar levels or to trim down after the holiday binge eating; what ever your reason is, the fact that you are reading this is already a decision to explore the options on how to pursue fitness. Continue learning and take the step by step process to great health.

• Determine your present fitness status

A physician is required to accurately assess your health status, but to get a rough estimate of how fit you are; here are some do-it-yourself procedures to follow:

1. Measure by numbers
2. Measure by prefomance