Abhishek Agarwal asked:


Each of your family member’s well being is equally important to you just like it is your own. This is exactly the reason why a lot of people read about family fitness and family health related articles when they get the chance. There are several books, articles, magazines, emails, e-books and also newspapers about fitness and health. Most of the reading materials seem to be confusing, too much in depth, too long, too serious and sometimes too complicated. However, these materials contain just what you should know.

Information that lies unused is not as good as being worthless. This means, no matter the number of books you find on fitness and health, it is of no good unless used productively. All information you need on fitness and health is available. Various writers, experts or even trainers have differing things being said. Hence you can start sooner by working upon your family health and fitness straight away.

Below are few simple ways which would assist you in your battle to attain a fit and healthy family life.

1. Eat only healthy diet.

You need to know what exactly is meant by a healthy diet. Parents must set apt examples to their children about intake of healthy food. If your kids see you taking healthy food, they would undoubtedly follow a similar eating pattern. It is not required that you become technical about your food preparation. With little creativity in cooking and some information on different kind of food, you can give healthy food to your family every day.

2. Include proteins

Right from breakfast till dinner, ensure to have meals rich in proteins. It could include turkey, red meat, eggs, chicken, fish or cottage cheese. Proteins are essential in your body as they maintain your muscle mass. This again is required for excellent health and fitness; as it is the key.

3. Avoid excess saturated fat

Fats could be harmful to the body. However, if good fats are included in your meal, then you are on the way towards a fit and healthy body. Always stay at a little distance from saturated fat as it could prove to be harmful.

4. Daily exercise

One needs to know the significance of exercising daily. You could also work out on preparing your family exercise plan, encouraging children to join the same so that they would know the goodness of daily exercise. Start with a plan which would go for five days having 2 hours of workout each day. Try many exercise crunches possible and ensure to do it in a right manner. Teach few simple crunches to your children so that they can try them out on their own as you try a few of the strenuous ones.

5. Talk the walk

Talk to your children in specific and your family in general. All need to know the right intentions of working out and carrying specific goals. As your family gets convinced about your intentions seeing that you are serious and determined, they would sooner or later support you.

The key is to involve all your family members in your fitness regimen. The secret would be realized only when all work out together. You don’t have to brood too much over books, articles etc as you essentially have information about the required fitness activities. Act immediately and you would notice your family living a fit and healthy lifestyle. Your efforts could avoid health problems to your family in the future.



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Gary Matthews asked:


It never fails but as soon as I wrote all my Weight Loss, Weight Gain, Fitness and Nutrition type of tips I had a few left over that couldn’t really be placed into these categories.

But as you will see they are right on the money for your general health and fitness and can be used in your everyday activities.

Lets take a peek:

What Is A Healthy Diet – A healthy diet satisfies two criteria: It contains enough fibre and a number of micronutrients including vitamins and minerals to maintain a healthy body. It is balanced in forms of fat, protein, and carbohydrates and micronutrients.

Don’t Train With The Flu – This is one of the biggest exercise blunders you can make A number of temperature raising viruses, including the flu can affect the muscles.

People often forget that the heart is also a muscle and can be weakened by the flu virus. Normally our hearts can cope with the strain of this, but exercising on top of an already weakened heart is potentially fatal. After a bout of the flu, you should wait at least 48 hours before exercising again.

Cool Down – When you do a strenuous workout the blood vessels in your muscles dilate to deliver more blood for the muscles to operate. The skin vessels also dilate to increase the heat loss from your body, which is why you get flushed after exercise.

If you don’t give your blood and skin vessels enough time to recover, and jump straight under hot water your skin vessels will dilate even further. Then your heart goes into overdrive trying to pump blood throughout the body.

Ultimately you might notice symptoms like faintness, dizziness or at worst, you could even collapse.

Don’t Eat Before Exercising – Always try to eat two or three hours before your exercise and not after that. If you do eat before exercise you can develop what is known as “dumping syndrome’ where the blood supply that normally goes to your muscles during exercise is diverted to your gut.

This means that you’re not getting enough blood to your muscles, which can cause you to become lethargic and faint.

Try to Give Up Smoking – the best and easiest way to give up smoking is to replace it with another habit. Unfortunately, quitting has been associated with weight gain if you replace your cigarette habit with a candy or snack food habit.

So replace the smoking with the habit of exercise!! Nothing tough or painful at first and build up to it. A five minute walk instead of a cigarette and aim to build it up slowly and easily.

Before, you will be fitter, you will be healthier and your body will be more you realize tight and toned.

You will feel better in the morning, your breath will be worth being near again and fingernails, hair and skin will take on a much younger fresher look!! Of the people who die from lung cancer, 95% of them smoke.

Protein Power – Carbohydrates supply the sort of calories easily burned during cardiovascular exercise, but protein plays an important part in building muscle mass – or rather in not storing food as fat. “This is largely because the bulk of protein that is eaten will be used to build muscle”.

Further the average male will lose 500gms of muscle – not fat – every year once he stops regular exercise. While older men and women are usually touted as the beneficiaries of strength training so to are the young.

Planned Exercise – I suggest you start with 100 minutes per week of mildly puffing exercise be it 2×50 mins, 3×35 mins, 4×25 mins, 5×20 mins all of which produce the same results.

Mix up your aerobic activities in the gym; use the treadmill, bike, climber or any other training gear available to you.

Keep A Training Log – Keep a training log for all your fitness requirements, keeping account of the reps you are using, how many sets, what weights you are using and also the date, time and where the workout took place is imperative for gauging your day to day progress.

Also recording all cardio- vascular activities is just as important.

In conclusion, these general health and fitness might have been left to last but the are still right up there as far as your health and fitness is concerned.



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Damian Miles asked:


Two weeks ago today I dramatically pushed back the limits of my running. In one morning I went from a best distance of 12km in an hour and fifteen minutes (done on a treadmill in my gym), to running 12 miles round a Welsh lake, at a better pace than I have done in the gym, and without stopping.

To achieve this is used several personal development techniques, that are often used by Powerfully Positive People to achieve difficult goals. How did I do this, and what are these techniques? And how can you use these same techniques to achieve your exercise goal?

Inspiring Health and Fitness

Keeping me going was my overall inspiring health and fitness goal. This goal is to run the London Marathon 2010. I realized if I could not run the 12 miles, how could I run 26? I also realized that if I could achieve this leap in distance then the marathon should be mine. It was my desire to cross the line in April 2010 that kept me going every step of the way. Besides, twice round the lake would be a marathon! If I could do one lap, surely I could do two laps?

To Do: You need to have a health and fitness goal that you believe is achievable, but sufficiently high to excite and stretch you.

Mentoring and Encouragement

One of the biggest things that helped me to achieve this breakthrough was the encouragement and advice of an experienced marathon runner (my mentor for the run). But above all my mentor ran every step of the way with me. Having someone tell you that you can do something that you previously thought impossible, and the person telling you this being qualified to do so is very powerful. You have no excuse for not pushing your boundaries. When this person then goes every step of the way with you, advising and encouraging you it is even more powerful. Having a mentor can be one of the most powerful tools for personal development you can use.

To Do: Find someone who is qualified to take you one step further towards you health and fitness goal, and ask them to take that step with you.

Score Keeping

I kept score at regular intervals along the run by checking my heart rate on my heart rate monitor. One of my aims was to run the distance within a set heart rate range. I congratulated myself every time my watch showed I was within that range. In this way I was scoring myself to achieve a regular pace. I am glad to say I got a perfect score by the finish line.

To Do: Decide on a way to score yourself, and stick to it. Celebrate every time you win!.

Goal Setting and Rewards

Throughout the run I kept setting goals such as “get to the castle” or “make it to the dam” or near the end I was saying “just to the next lamppost.” In this way I broke the 12 miles down into manageable chunks, and would celebrate each time I achieved my goal. I also had the overriding goals of running all the way round (no walking or stopping) and setting a good pace, all of which I achieved.

To Do: Break you next exercise session into tiny goals, and reward yourself every time you achieve these mini goals.

Distraction

Running for 2 hours and 10 minutes was just as much a mental challenge as physical. My mind was full of doubts and my body full of aches, and part of it was just plain boring. So how did I cope? One way was by distracting myself. I remembered wonderful holidays, focused on a particular lamb or tree that I was running towards, or visualized the Power of Intention falling from the sky and filling me with great energy and endurance. Anything to take my mind off how I felt and how much more there was to go.

To Do: Plan in advance to remember something exciting, and remember it in vivid detail.

Power of Intention

I have been listening to at CD set in my car called The Power of Intention by Wayne W Dyer. The CDs talk of us being made out of and part of a universal energy. That universal energy is always available for us to use. I am still not quite sure what to make of this yet, but while running I called upon this energy to fill me. I finished, so it worked didn’t it? Perhaps, but at the very least it worked as a mental distraction.

To Do: Find a cassette or CD to listen to that will give you a more positive outlook for your activity.

Peer Pressure

From deciding to do the run on the Friday, to actually doing it on the Sunday, I made sure I told every one of the 55 people I was camping with that weekend, that I would “run the lake.” This set up a huge amount of peer pressure for me. If I failed the run I would painfully and publicly fail BIG. This created a powerful incentive for me to succeed in the run. Also as a result of succeeding the run after telling everyone, a lot of respect was generated which translated into a large number of sponsorships for the charity I am running for at a race later this year.

To Do: Increase peer pressure on yourself by telling everyone what you plan to do, and ask them to check up on you later to make sure you have done it.

As you can see I was able to use many personal development techniques, that Powerfully Positive People use, in order to take me from the initial challenge to run the lake, to actually running it and running it well. Without the use of the above techniques I would have been less likely to finish. The techniques dramatically increased my chance of success, and I’ll continue to use them until I cross that London Marathon finish line (and beyond). Make sure you use these techniques too.



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Tracie Johanson asked:


Remember the old Food Pyramid that we were all taught in school? You know, the one that told us to eat more ‘grains and carbohydrates’ than anything else? Last January the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a new symbol and interactive food guidance system called “MyPyramid”. This picture, which replaces the Food Guide Pyramid introduced in 1992, is part of an overall system that emphasizes the need for a more individualized approach to improving diet and lifestyle. The system embodies the recommendations of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which advise how proper dietary habits can promote health and reduce the risk of major chronic diseases for people two years of age and older.

True health and fitness professionals are not huge fans of ‘one size fits all’ nutritional programs. As a matter of fact, the reasons most diets fail is that they try to fit you (an individual) into a program designed for everyone. Honestly, did we ever believe that one dietary recommendation (the old Food Guide Pyramid) was valid for everyone in the USA?

This strong aversion to the ‘one size fits all’ dietary guideline is exactly why we like the new MyPyramid so much. Take for example this quote copied directly from the MyPyramid website: “One size doesn’t fit all. MyPyramid Plan can help you choose the foods and amounts that are right for you. For a quick estimate of what and how much you need to eat, enter your age, sex, and activity level in the MyPyramid Plan box. For a detailed assessment of your food intake and physical activity level, click on MyPyramid Tracker.” (Source: mypyramid.gov)

What We Like About The New Guidelines:

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has done a fine job of updating the Food Guide Pyramid and adding specifics that we find helpful. For example:

1) MyPyramid make a distinction between ‘grains’ and ‘whole grains’, which is critical for life-long health and fitness.

2) Rather than just suggesting we ‘eat fruits and vegetables’ (which may prompt some to drink fruit juice and think they’re being healthy), MyPyramid encourages the consumption of a broad range of fresh fruits and vegetables while at the same time discouraging fruit juices (which are often lacking in nutrition and full of empty calories).

3) MyPyramid suggests that we consume low-fat dairy products, rather than just dairy products. Some milk, and most cheeses, are FULL of saturated fat and may be harmful. The new recommendations take this into account and prompt us to look for healthy dairy choices.

4) Just like it does with the dairy category, MyPyramid tells us to search out low-fat protein choices like fish and nuts. The new guidelines even teach us about healthy oils vs. harmful fats.

5) Finally, and most importantly, MyPyramid actually discusses exercise. Finally! The guidelines demonstrate the difference between moderate and vigorous activity, and provide broad recommendations targeted towards the average American.

What We Don’t Like About The New Guidelines:

1) The MyPyramid website (mypyramid.gov) has a section called ‘My Pyramid Plan’ that estimates BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). In other words, this site estimates how many calories we should consume each day. The problem is that they (the USDA) use only our age, *** and physical activity level to determine our caloric goal. No mention is made of height differences or the amount of lean muscle mass we have on our frame. Lean muscle mass is a huge factor in determining caloric needs, so we were disappointed to see that it’s not included in these calculations. Broad generalizations like this fail to take into account individual differences, and thus are almost always sure to be inaccurate for many of us.

2) The ‘Physical Activity’ section of MyPyramid fails miserably in that it doesn’t provide the exercise education we need in order to be successful. No mention is made of the differences between aerobic and anaerobic exercise, or the role of resistance exercise in a healthy lifestyle.

While the new USDA guidelines are certainly much better than the old Food Guide Pyramid, we were still discouraged to see that MyPyramid does not fully address exercise. Until we as a nation understand the basic facts about exercise, we will continue to struggle with fat and weight issues.



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