Health Tips No comments yet

DHEA and Exercise: The Benefits

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This is a guest post by a guest blogger. You’ll find the link to his blog at the bottom of this article. Enjoy!

Dehydroepiandrosterone, or DHEA, is a steroid hormone that is secreted by the adrenal cortex found on the adrenal glands, which are located at the top of each kidney. Ninety percent of DHEA is converted into Dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate, its stable metabolite. DHEA can be converted by the body into other hormones such as testosterone, and estrogen and has been used to boost libido in both men and women.

It is also responsible for the growth of hair in adolescents experiencing puberty. It is most well-known for its role in metabolism, the process of converting food into energy, and bodybuilding. The National Collegiate Athletic Association has banned the use DHEA. Many athletes used the hormone to help build muscle mass because at high doses it can have the same effect as injectable steroids.

DHEA has several health benefits. It decreases the reaction of the body to stress. This lowers cortisol levels which decreases the storage of fat by the body. It also increases fat metabolism by a process called thermogenesis, or the production of heat. It is a significant part of the metabolic process, and can be used to increase energy disbursement and the oxidation of fat cells. This would be beneficial for anyone attempting to lose weight, especially with exercise. Exercise increases DHEA levels, thereby increasing thermogenesis.

DHEA has also been shown to decrease the desire to eat, most likely because of its effects on insulin. It can decrease high levels of insulin by improving its efficiency, and helps burn fat around the belly lowering the risk of type II Diabetes. DHEA supplementation is effective in older individuals since the levels of this natural hormone decline with age. By the age of 70, DHEA levels have decreased to about twenty percent of the typical level in a young adult. Increasing the levels of this hormone has shown to help prevent insulin resistance, the accumulation of belly fat and even Alzheimers disease. It can also decrease HDL cholesterol levels.

Because DHEA is a steroid hormone, it is beneficial for those who suffer from chronic inflammation. This can, in turn, lower high blood pressure and alleviate pain associated with arthritis. Many sufferers of lupus have benefited from DHEA supplementation. Its effect on pain has helped many lupus patients require less medication. For those with osteoporosis, DHEA has been shown to help with calcium absorption.

DHEA amplifies the glucose and lipid-lowering effects of exercise, making it an excellent supplement for those who hit the gym regularly. It may also increase the development of muscle because of its steroid effects, but this has only been shown in animal testing. Anyone considering DHEA supplementation should have their blood levels checked prior to starting the supplement. If DHEA levels are normal, taking a supplement may cause adverse effects such as facial hair growth and acne in women and gynecomastia, growth of the breast tissue, in men since it can be metabolized into estradiol. DHEA supplements should be strictly monitored by a physician and dosages should not exceed 50mg.

 

Sam is a health and fitness blogger who writes about a variety of sports supplements.

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Weight Control: 4 Tips to Help Reduce Fat in Your Snacks

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This article is the second to last segment of weight or fat control articles. These articles aim at helping you control your weight by lowering the amount of fat you eat in your meals – breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, and dessert.

I’ve given you the tips and advice for reducing fat in your breakfast, lunch,and dinner.

In this article, I’ll show you how to control your fat intake by reducing the amount of fat in your snacks.

Now, below are the 4 tips for lowering fat in your snacks. Enjoy!

#1. Avoid high-fat nibbles like potato chips and corn chips, and commercial baked goods

Try Graham crackers, flat bread, rye or whole-wheat crackers, bread sticks, or matzoh. And chunky hard pretzels without salt.

#2. Air popped popcorn – just 46 calories and 1 fat gram in 2 cups – with a glass of tomato or V-8 juice is a splendid mid-afternoon snack.

#3. Make “rabbit food” – like celery, carrot, and cucumber sticks, radishes, or green and red pepper strips – more satisfying by keeping a low-fat dip on hand.

#4. Keep your favorite berries and square of rope cantaloupe and honey dew, already speared on toothpicks, in the fridge.

There you have it. The four tips to help reduce fat in your snacks. Implement these powerful tips into your snacking routine and you’ll record amazing results.

NB: Stay tuned for the last segment of the weight control articles – how to reduce fat in your dessert.

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Weight Control: 5 Simple Ways to Reduce Fat in You Dinner

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This is the continuation of weight control or fat control articles. In the previous articles, I gave you tips to help reduce fat in your breakfast, and lunch.

In this segment, I’m going to give you some tips to lower fat in your dinner.

To reduce fat in your dinner:

#1. Trim as much fat as possible from meat.

#2. Don’t eat the skin of poultry, which doubles that fat content. Ideally, remove it before cooking.

#3. Plan your dinner to include more vegetables and more starchy foods like rice, pasta, and potatoes.

#4. In place of sour cream as a topping for baked potatoes, use a couple of tablespoon of non-fat yogurt with chopped scallions or blenderized low-fat cottage cheese with chives.

#5. If you don’t like low fat salad dressing, try extending your regular dressing with lemon juice or water. Or extend with half low-fat butter milk and lots of flavorful herbs.

That’s all about the tips to reducing fat in your dinner. These tips and advice will help you control the amount of fat you consume daily by reducing the fat content in your dinner.

NB: Watch out for the next article – how to lower fat content in your snacks.

Another great way to reduce the amount of calories you take in is to add fiber to your diet. Fiber helps maintain feelings of fullness, preventing over-eating while stimulating digestion. In higher concentrations, fiber can even make a great colon cleanse for ridding the body of toxins and waste.

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Weight Control: 4 Ways to Lower Fat in Your Lunch

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This is the continuation of the first article – how to reduce fat in your breakfast. Hope you’ve read that segment.

In this article, I’m going to go straight to the point by giving you the tips to lower fat in your lunch.

To lower fat in your lunch:

#1. Stay away from from hot dogs and processed luncheon meats. Go for turkey breast, small amounts of lean roast beef, or chicken breast.

#2. Use water-packed tuna, instead of the kind in oil.

#3. Avoid butter sandwich bread or spreading with mayonnaise; moisten filling by adding tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, and mustard.

#4. If you eat cottage cheese, make it a low-fat one.

That’s it about the tips to lower fat in your lunch. Remember these tips and advice each time you want to have your lunch. These tips are simple but can be very effective if you apply them appropriately.

NB: Stay tuned for the next article – how to reduce fat in your dinner.

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Weight Control: 7 Ways You Can Reduce Fat in Your Breakfast

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Besides exercising, avoiding too much fat in your meals is another important step to weight control or weight loss.

To make the concept of reducing fat in your meals easy and practicable, you need to focus on reducing the fat content in your breakfast first, do the same to your lunch, dinner, snacks, and your dessert.

By focusing on each of these meals, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of fat you consume drastically within a short period of time and that will help control your weight.

Now, the following are the seven easy ways to reduce fat in your breakfast:

#1. Don’t eat eggs more than two or three times a week, and poach or boil rather than fry them.

Since the protein is in the white, try an omelet  made with one yolk, two whites in a non-stick pan using PAM.

#2. Serve breakfast cereal with skim milk, raisins, and bananas or grated apple; the fruit both sweetens and adds fiber.

#3. Use low-fat milk in your coffee.

#4. If you’re going to butter toast or English muffins, use whipped butter and take it out of the refrigerator so it can come to room temperature; that way it will spread more thinly.

#5. Make pan cakes with skim milk and substitute an egg white for one egg. Boost your nutrition by using whole-white or buckwheat flour.

#6. Save croissants for occasional treat; they are made with lots of butter.

#7. Sourdough bread is made without fat and makes fabulous toast.

There you have it. The seven ways to reduce fat in your breakfast. Practice these tips as often as possible and you’ll be amazed at the result within a short period of time.

NB: Stay tuned for the next article – how to reduce fat in your lunch.

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4 Tips and Advice to Help You Make Healthful Food Choices

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It’s very important that you improve your dietary health and reduce your risk of developing heart disease and cancer by implementing the following practices.

(1) Eat more high-fiber foods:

  • Choose dried beans, peas, and lentils more often.
  • Eat-whole grain breads, cereals, and crackers.
  • Eat more vegetables – raw and cooked.
  • Eat whole fruit in place of drinking fruit juice.
  • Try other high-fiber foods, such as oat bran, barely, brown rice, or wild rice.

(2) Eat less sugar:

  • Avoid regular soft drinks. One 12-ounce can contain 9 teaspoons of sugar!
  • Avoid eating table sugar, honey, syrup, jam, jelly, candy, sweet rolls, fruit canned in syrup, regular gelatin desserts, cake with icing, pie or other sweets.
  • Choose fresh fruit or fruit canned in natural juice or water.
  • If desired, use sweeteners that don’t have any calories, such as saccharin or aspartame, instead of sugar.

(3) Use less salt:

  • Reduce the amount of salt you use in cooking.
  • Avoid adding additional salt to food at the table.
  • Eat fewer high-salt foods, such as canned soups, ham, sauerkraut, hot dogs, pickles, and foods that taste salty.
  • Eat fewer convenience and fast foods.

(4) Eat less fat:

  • Eat smaller servings of meat. Eat fish and poultry more often. Choose lean cut of red meat.
  • Prepare all meat by roasting, baking, or broiling. Trim off all fat. Limit addition of sauces or gravy. Remove skin from poultry.
  • Avoid fried foods. Avoid adding fat when cooking.
  • Eat fewer high-fat foods such as cold cuts, bacon, sausage, hot dogs, butter, margarine, nuts, salad dressing, lard and solid shortening.
  • Drink skim or low-fat milk.
  • Eat less ice cream, cheese, sour cream, whole milk, and other high-fat diary products.

There you have it. The 4 tips and advice for making healthful food choices.

Nutrition Guide No comments yet

9 Important Things to Remember When Eating Away from Home

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Today, more than ever before, people eat meals away from home. Many of these will be fast food meals that are characterized by high fat density and excessive use of sweeteners.

It’s possible, however, to eat nutritionally while eating on the run if you follow the suggestions below:

(1) Choose nutritional foods such as salads instead of french fries.

(2) At a salad bar, choose the plain vegetables; avoid mayonnaise-based salads.

(3) Order a plain hamburger without condiments; when you add your own, you control the amounts.

(4) Add lettuce and tomato to hamburgers to add vitamins, not calories.

(5) Order plain chicken; it has fewer calories than beef. Ask that the coat be removed before cooking.

(6) Avoid breaded and fried foods.

(7) Choose milk or juice, not sodas and shakes.

(8) For dessert, bring a piece of fresh fruit with you.

(9) Eat a small snack at 10 am and another at 2 pm. This kind of “grazing” can be healthier than gulping down one big, fat filled meal at noon.

Finally, strive to make healthy food choices when you’re eating away from home by following the above mentioned tips.

Exercise Tips No comments yet

6 Exercise Danger Signs That You Should Know

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The human body is an amazing piece of equipment. It functions well whether or not you’re conscious of its processes. In addition, it delivers clear signal when something goes wrong.

However, you should monitor any sign that seem abnormal during or after your exercise.

The following are some common signs that you should monitor very well:

(1) A delay of over one hour in your body’s return to a fully relaxed, comfortable state after exercise.

(2) Difficulty in your sleep patterns. Although it’s not uncommon for a beginner to experience sleep difficulties during the early stages of fitness development, continued problems may indicate overexertion.

If you experience this, reduce the intensity or frequency of your workouts for a while. And avoid exercising too close to bed.

(3) Any noticeable breathing difficulties or chest pains should be referred to a physician.

(4) Persistent joint and muscle pains. Starting to exercise after years of inactivity will naturally bring on some muscle soreness and joint discomfort.

However, these should be temporary problems. Listen to your body. Any joint or muscle pain might signal a problem.

Seek the help of an athletic trainer, fitness instructor, physical therapist, or your physician.

(5) Unusual changes in urine composition or output. Marked color change in your urine could signal possible kidney or bladder difficulties. Drink water before, during, and after your activities.

(6) Anything of unusual nature that you notice after starting your fitness program.

Some examples are headaches, nosebleeds, fainting, numbness in an extremity, or hemorrhoids.

Such occurrences are extremely unusual. Fear of developing these difficulties should not stop you from starting your fitness exercise program.

These risks are minimal and the benefits of exercise far outnumber the risks.

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Beginners Guide to Abdominal Exercise (Ab Exercise)

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Abdominal exercise or ab exercise is performed to build the abdominal muscles around your stomach. Some people do this type of exercise in order to lose belly fat, most especially new mothers.

Other people also do it in order to look attractive or good in any outfit that they put on.

Besides building the abdominal muscles, ab exercise also helps you improve your performance in certain sports – taking punches as in boxing.

Activities such as Pilate, Yoga, Tai Chi, and jogging can be used to build your abdominal muscles – six pack abs.

However, you can’t build a flat belly overnight, therefore, you need to do your ab exercise bit by bit. You can do your abdominal exercise without any complex equipment. This kind of workout can be done in the comfort of your home.

Below is an ab exercise video that shows how to perform an abdominal exercise on your own. Watch the video carefully and implement the exercise tips today. Enjoy!

Diet Tips 2 comments

Beginners Guide to Low Carb Diet

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Low carb diet or low carbohydrate diet is simply a diet plan that is designed to control the amount of carbohydrate in your meals.

This may be done either for weight loss purpose or for treating an unhealthy health condition such as obesity.

Usually, foods that are high in carbohydrate are substituted for foods that contain a high amounts of protein and fats – peanuts, seeds, fish, eggs, nuts, meat, cheese, shellfish, soy products, and poultry.

The amount of carbohydrate that are allowed in your meals will depend on the diet plan that you’re following.

How to Implement a Low Carb Diet Plan into Your Eating Habits

1. Become aware: Get a reliable source to learn and understand everything about low carbohydrate diets.

This will help you understand exactly what you’re going in for. Also, it will help you prepare mentally about your new diet plan.

2. Take one step at a time: To begin with your new diet plan – low carb dieting – reduce the amount of foods that are high in carbohydrate in your daily meals.

For example, if you eat 20g of carbs food for breakfast, strive to reduce it to 15g for a week. Continue like this for few weeks until it becomes a part of your eating habits.

Remember, carbohydrate plays a significant role in your body – it gives energy for daily activities – so don’t avoid it completely. You still need it in your daily meals but in moderation.

3. Discover what you can eat: It’s very easy to become emotional about what you can’t or shouldn’t eat  because you’ll miss some of your favorite high carb foods.

Instead of worrying about this, try and come up with a list of your favorite foods that have low quantity of carbs in them, and design your favorite recipes out of that. This will help you focus on what you can eat instead of worrying about what you can’t or shouldn’t be eating.

4. Plan ahead: It can be frustrating to adopt a new healthy eating habit – a diet plan program – without knowing what to eat for breakfast, lunch, or supper.

To avoid this, draw a one-week low carb diet plan. In other word, draw a plan that includes a good number of low carb diets for a period of one week or more. Let the diet plan be your reference each time you’re short of ideas of what to eat.

5. Cook for yourself: Eating outside can lead to the consumption of foods that are high in carbohydrate and this can lead to the undesirable health condition – overweight – that you’re trying to avoid in your life. Therefore, cooking at home is a guaranteed way of eating low carb diets regularly.

6. Never give up: There will be times when you’ll be unable to avoid foods that are high in carbohydrates. This may be as a result of an invitation to a party, craving, snacking, etc.

Don’t allow these circumstances to discourage you from your quest for a healthy eating habit. Remember, there are always tomorrows. But don’t make a habit out of that.

Finally, a low carb diet or low carbohydrate diet is a type of diet that contains a low amount of carbohydrate in it. And it’s usually designed for controlling weight or for managing a health condition such as obesity.