Women's Health and Fitness - Reducing Cortisol Levels Can Help You To Lose Weight
It is now known that stress can actually stop you losing weight especially around your middle. Stress can cause your body to secrete high levels of cortisol hormone into your bloodstream, because of your body’s “flight or fight” response to stress. Stress can be either psychological (mental and emotional) or physical.Cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands and is actually important for the regulation of blood pressure, the immune system and many other functions. Cortisol can be good in small amounts but high levels can lead to an increase of abdominal fat, which can lead to heart attacks, strokes and can also increase your bad cholesterol levels and decrease your good cholesterol levels. High levels of cortisol can also decrease your bone density, leading to osteoporosis and loss of muscle tissue, which will also slow down your metabolic rate, and it can also increase your blood pressure along with other problems.Each of you will react differently to stress; some of you will produce more cortisol to a particular stress while others will produce less. It has been found that those of you that produce more cortisol will actually eat more food as well, in particular carbohydrates.What you need to do to combat producing too much cortisol is to learn ways to relax and also to maybe change your lifestyle.Relaxation can be achieved in a number of ways either by exercising, mediation, yoga or breathing to start with.Maybe one of the easiest and simplest ways is breathing. This is done by gently breathing in through the nose, gently expanding your abdomen and then gently expelling the air through your nose pulling in your abdomen at the same time. Whilst breathing out the air you need to focus on that breath. After several breaths in and out you should start to feel yourself relax. You need to practice doing this exercise a few minutes a day to start with building up to five minutes in the end. You can also practice this when you are feeling stressed or when things are getting on top of you. Just a few minutes can slow your body down and help it to feel relax. Life style changes can be like changing your eating habits for a healthier diet, getting enough sleep, or even organizing your time more efficiently so that you do not feel so stressed. Also looking after your body will help your body to cope with stresses that you come across during your day.So if you are exercising frequently and eating properly but still not losing any weight especially from around the middle then maybe you are suffering from high levels of cortisol caused by stress. Look at ways to solve the problem and hopefully then you should see a difference in your weight and around your middle. - - - - - -Gill Webster is dedicated to helping women over 40, learn how to live a healthy beautiful life. To learn more, jump to www.feelinggreatafter40.com and sign up for her free newsletter on health and fitness. Gill Webster is dedicated to helping women over 40, learn how to live a healthy beautiful life. To learn more, jump to http://www.feelinggreatafter40.com and sign up for her free newsletter on health and fitness. (more…)

Is Your Diet Colorblind?
Next time you have a meal, look at your plate - what colors do you see? If its mostly white and brown then your diet might be colorblind! (more…)

Parents Hold the Key to Child’s Healthy Weight (Healthday)
Spanish ID:532551–> (more…)

New Marketing Report Finds Door Is Wide Open For ‘Safe’ Sugar-Free Products
A new report from the marketing research company Mintel found that two-thirds of Americans are concerned about the safety of artificial sweeteners, despite the fact that the sugar-free industry has grown to $6 billion and is still going strong. Also,… (more…)

If you need to lose weight
Today there’re lots of widely advertised methods to narrow your waist (and other problem places) on 2-3 cm almost in a moment. It’s quite another matter that you can also loose your fresh complexion, hair and even teeth. If you have a good intention not just to fit your plumped body to some “European” standard, but to improve your health, don’t put yourself on a fashionable diet or buy a miracle fat burning medicine. It’s really better for you to put on a couple of old jogging shoes, buy stylish sports suit and go to an autumn park.
When the weather is good, you can start from cycling, jogging along and, of course, walking �” the cheapest kind of sport, requiring minimum of your time and equipment. Remember: on average, walking 1 km for 10 minutes, you burn 6 kilocalories in a minute. How to determine an optimal distance for your level of training? It’s not too interesting to walk along a stadium, it’s not useful to walk along the highway, and it’s not economically to walk with a pedometer in a pocket. It’s better to listen to your organism: if you are gasping a little, but feel wonderful at the same time �” this means you’ve chosen a right speed, and now you should constantly increase time of intensive walking till 40-45 minutes every day. Calculate your usual route to work and back home and try to walk although a part of it. Results of investigations say that a course of such exercises during 30 minutes a day will be enough for a constant weight loss and vital energy improvement. And 45 minutes a day will completely guarantee you’ll become slender and healthy by the future spring.
If you cannot afford yourself to waste almost ah hour a day on walking, and have no opportunity to combine it with your business movements, then reduce time of exercises without reducing the loud. This means you should change walking to running. You shouldn’t be galloping, even if you’re full of energy in the beginning of training: your calories won’t burn quicker this way. Choose a steady speed that doesn’t put your breathe out and make your heart thumping since very beginning.

After you choose a well-known and even road, take a “modest” speed and… think of something pleasant. 15-20 minutes of running will fly away insensibly while you’re thinking. And this will be quite enough to set a “mechanism of growing thin” going. You know, our organism passes to an automatic mode of calories burning after 20 minutes of training, and then shakes out store-rooms of fat for another 20 minutes. Even if you have already taken shower and now are lying on the sofa.
When the weather is bad, start exercising with dumb-bells at home or with trainer in a gym (for 25 minutes 3 times a week). Weight-lifting exercises drive fat away slowly, but truly, you’ll feel the result by the end of the first week already. If you’re training without coach, remember that you need light dumb-bells and loud on a trainer, but frequent (till 20-25) repetitions. And work with big loud and small quantity of repetitions (7-10) is necessary to build up muscles. Every month of weight-lifting exercises (even without running, walking and cardinal change of nutrition) you’ll loose a kilogram of fat that will be changed by muscle mass. Weight loss, probably, will be not so great, but your shapes will become more graceful and smarter, and the volumes of problem places �” smaller.

Undoubtedly, aerobics is of benefit when you exercise regularly. However, not every person, who has never done this before, will be able to start doing aerobics in a group. And you know, such exercises exactly bring appreciable use, while exercises alone before TV, as a rule, bring only perspiration. As, in spite of encouraging remarks of a couch, your motions are far from correct and don’t reach the purpose to load some certain groups of muscles.

If you’re still quite sure in your natural gracefulness, you can go in for aerobics successfully. And if you like dancing, replace training in gym by exercises in a dance club, equivalent in time and “perspiration”. Dancing is a wonderful method to make your heart and lungs work dynamically, fix your backbone and “squander” gravel in your kidneys. And, strangely enough, such active way of spending time not only burns your calories efficiently, but also distracts your appetite.

In general, make your life interesting, so that a tasty sandwich wouldn’t become your main pleasure for the day. Books, music, premieres of films, exhibitions �” afford you some pleasure by all available intellectual and secular means. Absence of depression and good mood are necessary factors for psychological tuning of your organism on an appropriate rhythm for you.

However, don’t be carried away by good scale reading gained in the result of simple dehydration. During and after walking, running, dancing or weight-lifting exercises quench your thirst with water (mineral in desired), you can also squeeze a lemon or orange in it.

Still, you shouldn’t think that your way of life and eating won’t “suffer” at all, if you sweat while running or dancing religiously. It’s worth to take control also of thoughtless absorption of buns and sweets during evening hours before TV. You’ll have to quit eating ice-cream, even if the label says it’s “dietetic”. Try to replace butter by vegetable oils. Cook meals using fruits, vegetables, legumes and cereals that are rich in cellulose. And… drink more often. In many cases, your “awaked” stomach hungers for drink, not food. Drink a couple of glasses of mineral water and wait for 5-10 minutes. Probably, thoughts of having an immediate snack will fly away from you and superfluous centimeters of limp fat �” from your waist.Yana Mikheeva is the creator of <a href="http://www.baby-health.net">Baby Health Directory</a> - Pregnancy, Birth, Parenting and Baby Care resources. Are you going to get pregnant? Visit our friendly resource and read information on pregnancy and parenting, painless childbirth, growth and development of a baby, baby health, safety, signs of pregnancy.
She also has <a href="http://www.womanspassions.com">All about women</a> site where you can find articles on various subjects, such as: diets, recipes, health, cellulite, figure, aromatherapy, wholesome food, psychology of relationships, pregnancy, parenting, fashion and many others. (more…)

Why LoneStartNow is different
The LoneStart 21-Day Wellness Initiative is a common-sense, grass-roots program that originated on the outskirts of Austin in Dripping Springs, Texas. It is more than a diet and exercise plan?much more. It provides participants with the opportunity, information, motivation and support to achieve their weight loss and healthy lifestyle goals, to overcome the inertia of inactivity, make better dietary choices and take charge of their personal health. It is a first step, a foothold, a jumpstart, that changes the way participants think about their health and wellness.
This is a home-grown program. It is spreading across the state and country, person by person, through community organizations, hospitals, the corporate workplace, and word of mouth, reaching out to those who want to take the first step back to long-term health and wellness. This initiative is for all of us. (more…)

Missing!
Want to help the planet? Eat a salad Can Changing Your Diet Help Arthritis?KDKA - (KDKA) PITTSBURGH For some people with arthritis, the pain caused by arthritis can be almost too much to endure. Some people believe raisins soaked in gin can help ease the pain. Our expert says thereapos;s no evidence to support that belief. Despite … Lohan isnapos;t the only thin spot in dumb apos;Luckapos;Seattle Post Intelligencer - From the looks of it, it would be easier to find a properly nourished woman at an Anorexics Anonymous meeting than in this new teen-oriented romantic comedy. But it isnapos;t just the actors who lack substance here. This story about a very lucky girl who … Healthy Living WLBT - Sometimes even writing a goal can be a challenge. Here are some terrific goals that you can start reaching for today. What would you do for skin thatapos;s soft, fresh and unblemished? All the expensive skin care products in the world wonapos;t achieve … Want to help the planet? Eat a salad University of Chicago Chronicle - Gidon Eshel (left) and Pamela Martin, both Assistant Professors in Geophysical Sciences and the College, have studied food production to measure how much food production processes burn fossil fuel that creates greenhouse gas emissions. They looked at … (more…)