5 Helpful Tips!

"Variety is the spice of life!"

This post will not focus on one topic like "motivation" or "commitment" but rather a variety of tips.  When it comes to realizing your health and fitness goals, it's very rare that changing one behavior will make all the difference.  The Law of Thermodynamics simply states, "burn of more calories than you take in."  Here are some suggestions on how to make that a reality...

1.  Drink more water!  According to the National Academy of Sports Medicine the daily recommendation for water consumption is 96 oz.  Many of us drink a few bottles of water per day and figure that's enough-start keeping track and shot for a full 96 oz.

2.  Sleep more!  More and more studies are linking sleep to weight loss and building immunity.  This month's issue of Glamour Magazine featured an article where a group of women aimed for 7.5 hours of sleep per night for 10 weeks and the results were weight loss of four to 15 lbs across the group.  Two main reasons why this works:

*People tend to not only eat more, but junkier food when tired

*How many people have said, "I'd spend more time exercising if I only had the energy"? Well, more sleep = more energy!

3.  Portion control!  Next time you go to the grocery store take a look around and notice how many foods come in "100 calorie" packs.  It's not that the foods are much healthier (in some cases they may reduce the fat or sugar) they just come in small packages!  There's no reason to pay Nabisco or those little Keebler elves any extra to do this for us when it only takes a few extra seconds to do it at home.

While it may take a little more time to actually read food labels-you'd be surprised how many extra calories we ingest because we don't both measuring the serving size.  This is especially helpful with carbohydrates like pasta, cereal and rice.  Try it out!

4.  Pack your lunch, dinner or both!  This is a calorie saver and a money saver :) You can choose healthier options if you put a meal together yourself rather than relying on stores/restaurants/food chains to provide healthy options that are often not as healthy as we presume.  (For those of you who live or work in NYC, we learned this the hard way when they started posting calories in all our favorite food chains and some of the salads/sandwiches/wraps we all enjoyed telling ourselves "weren't so bad" were listed at 700-1000 calories each, what??!!)

and finally my personal favorite...

5.  Laugh more!  For year's I've joked that I'll never be fat because I laugh too much-but there is some truth in that statement.  Laughing burns calories and engages your core muscles...So go ahead...laugh until your tummy hurts, it's good for you :)!!