Fitness Articles

Another group of botanical dietary supplements containing kava offers to relieve stress, tension, and menopausal symptoms and to promote sleep for those with insomnia. In March 2002 the FDA advised consumers that supplements containing kava, a plant indigenous to the South Pacific, carried the potential risk of severe liver injury.

You should know:

• Products marketed as dietary supplements get little or no pre-market review by the FDA for their safety or effectiveness.
• Safe dosing information or monitoring advice is, therefore, not available.
• Without the knowledge of a given botanical ingredient, a doctor cannot know how to properly treat any adverse reactions it may cause.

Familiarize yourself with the ingredients, their properties and safety concerns before choosing a dietary supplement. Speak to your doctor before beginning to take new supplements. And remember the old adage, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Mental Training - Hot Idea

Tied up on a business trip and can't get away for your usual workout? Injured and unable to keep those muscles in top shape? Want to enhance your sports performance? This could be your answer.

You may have heard about Eastern mystics who use imagery to significantly reduce their heart rate and oxygen consumption or about athletes who improve their game with mental imaging. Powered by your own imagination, you can use the same technique to train purely within your mind and enhance your actual physical performance.

Nerves control your muscles and the nerves are linked to your brain by a massive network of interconnections. Whenever we learn something new, we lay down nerve pathways in our body and brain. As we expand our knowledge we organize, modify, and strengthen existing pathways and continue to add new ones.

When you clearly imagine yourself aiming and shooting a basketball, swinging a golf club or executing a Tae-Bo kick, you exercise the same pathway and part of your brain that would physically co-ordinate the involved muscles. Whether you train physically or mentally, the part of your brain that controls those muscles experiences the physical and imagined inputs similarly. Practicing your ace serve mentally can actually help your real world tennis game.

By creating clear imagery you can slow an action down in your mind and break out the actual segments of a given motion, say swinging a baseball bat. You can feel and see what you might be doing wrong, practice the correct form, and get the "real" feel for it.

Begin today to increase your abilities in ways you might not otherwise have imagined!

Definition

Physical activity is defined as the state of being active, or as energetic action or movement.

Alternative Names

Fitness recommendations; Exercise

Information

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND THE USE OF CALORIES

• Physical activity can increase the basal metabolic rate by approximately 10%. This increase can last for up to 48 hours after the completion of the activity.
• Physical activity helps in the utilization of calories. The number of calories used is dependent on the type and intensity of the activity, and on the body weight of the person performing the physical activity.
• Physical activity assists in reducing the appetite.
• For the purpose of weight loss, physical activity can reduce body fat and is more beneficial in combination with reduced intake of calories.
• Physical activity also helps in the maintenance and control of weight.

The following are some variables when physical activity and calorie expenditure is considered:

• Time: The amount of time spent on physical activity affects the amount of calories that will be expended. For example, walking for 45 minutes will burn more calories than walking for 20 minutes.
• Weight: The body weight of a person doing the physical activity also impacts the amount of calories used. For example, a 250-pound person will expend more energy walking for 30 minutes than a 185-pound person.

More Bad News About Dieting

Deliberate restriction of food intake in order to lose weight or to prevent weight gain, known as dieting, is the path that millions of people all over the world are taking in order to reach a desired body weight or appearance. Preoccupation with body shape, size, and weight creates an unhealthy lifestyle of emotional and physical deprivation. Diets take control away from us.

Many of us who diet get caught in a "yo-yo" cycle that begins with low self-acceptance and results in structured eating and living because we lack trust in our body and are unwilling to listen and adhere to our body's signals of hunger and fullness. On diets, we distrust and ignore internal signs of appetite, hunger, and our need to be physically and psychologically satisfied. Instead, we depend on diet plans, measured portions, and a prescribed frequency for eating.

As a result, many of us have lost the ability to eat in response to our physical needs; we experience feelings of deprivation, then binge, and finally terminate our "health" program. This in turn leads to guilt, defeat, weight gain, low self-esteem, and then we're back to the beginning of the yo-yo diet cycle. Rather than making us feel better about ourselves, diets set us up for failure and erode our self-esteem.

Adhering to diet plans leads to perfectionist tendencies that in turn can result in a loss of control. People with the diet mentality have a perception of foods as either "good" (diet foods) or "bad" (binge foods); they see foods as coming in "good" amounts (small/low-calorie) or "large" amounts (diet-breaking). When we dieters eat "bad" foods or "large" amounts, we tend to believe we have "blown" our diet for the day or the weekend so we might as well binge further and start over the next day.

The Dos and Don'ts of Dieting Don't Do It

Following the list of foods that a diet allows or forbids us is really only feasible in the short term. If we don't change our tastes and preferences so we learn to enjoy foods lower in fat and higher in nutritional value, we will feel more and more restricted. And eventually we will resume our former eating habits because we still have a preference for high-fat foods.

When you diet, a piece of pizza is sinful; eating cake and ice cream makes you a bad person. A missed workout means skipping dinner and doing hundreds of crunches. A planned dinner engagement requires skipping breakfast and having just a piece of fruit for lunch. You refuse a dinner party for fear of being tempted with food you haven't "earned" or calories you haven't "saved."

The attitudes and practices acquired through years of dieting are likely to result in a body weight and size obsession, low self-esteem, poor nutrition and excessive or inadequate exercise. Weight loss from following a rigid diet is usually temporary. Most diets are too drastic to maintain; they are unrealistic and unpleasant; they are physically and emotionally stressful. And most of us just resume our old eating and activity patterns. Diets control us; we are not in control. People who try to live by diet lists and rules learn little or nothing about proper nutrition and how to enjoy their meals, physical activity, and a healthy lifestyle. No one can realistically live in the diet mode for the rest of their life, depriving themselves of the true pleasures of healthy eating and activity.

We Don't Fail Diets; They Fail Us!

Decades of research have shown that diets, both self-initiated and professionally-led, are ineffective at producing long-term health and weight loss (or weight control). When your diet fails to keep the weight off, you may say to yourself, "If only I didn't love food so much . . . If I could just exercise more often . . . If I just had more will power." The problem is not personal weakness or lack of will power. Only 5 percent of people who go on diets are successful. Please understand that we are not failing diets; diets are failing us.

Last Year, More Than 34 Million Americans Tried Diets!

Diets have made us more aware of calories. However, controlling your body weight through calorie-counting is almost impossible. The National Institutes of Health recently completed a 20-year study of traditional low-calorie diets to see if they really helped people lose weight and keep it off. The diet plans studied included Weight Watchers®, Jenny Craig®, The Diet Center® and most other traditional diet programs and diet fads. The study concluded that traditional low-calorie diet plans have a 95 percent failure rate; i.e., 95 percent of the people on the plans gained back all of the weight they had lost within a few years. Most people gained back the weight during the next year! In fact, most people gain an additional five pounds after each dieting cycle.

The reason 95 percent of all traditional diets fail is simple. When you go on a low-calorie diet, your body thinks you are starving; it actually becomes more efficient at storing fat by slowing down your metabolism. When you stop this unrealistic eating plan, your metabolism is still slow and inefficient that you gain the weight back even faster, even though you may still be eating less than you were before you went on the diet.

In addition, low-calorie diets cause you to lose both muscle and fat in equal amounts. However, when you eventually gain back the weight, it is all fat and not muscle, causing your metabolism to slow down even more. Now you have extra weight, a less healthy body composition, and a less attractive physique.