Learn the World's Best Fitness and Weight Loss Information Without Spending a Dime

Books:

Believe it or not, the best fitness and health information does not grow obsolete. That means that all of those older books from the 80's that are free at your local library are still just as good, provide that the info they had was decent. If it worked 30 years ago, it will still work today.

So hit up your local library and start devouring books on the topic of your choice.

Another tactic I use is to brows the books at your local book shop. In all honesty you can get the real meat of what a book is talking about in the first few pages. The rest of the book is simply filler for support for that idea and various case studies or exercises. So you can read the introduction understand that the book is about eating ever 3 hours or working out in a certain way and then put the book back. You already have 90% of what you need to know to make changes.

Videos:

Internet sites are packed with loads of free videos that are often just as good as or even better than what you might buy in the store.

If you are considering buying a DVD on Yoga or Belly dancing hit up the net and search for similar videos or even the same video you are considering buying. The quality might not be the same, but the information you gain will be just as potent at changing your body.

Newsletters:

Every internet fitness guru (Like yours truly) has some sort of weekly or monthly newsletter with loads of free info that you can use.

Best yet, it's delivered right to your inbox so once you sign up you don't have to do anything to keep new information coming in.

Do be aware though that many internet fitness marketers will use their newsletter only as a marketing ploy and hardly dispense any worth while info to you. So if you sign up for a newsletter but you don't get any info you can really use after a month or two, simply unsubscribe through the link at the bottom of the page.

Pod casts:

There are loads of Free pod casts out there (Again also from yours truly) that can be very specific towards your fitness goals. Getting ready for a beauty pageant? Trying to improve your 5K time? I'll bet anything there are pod casts dedicated to just those topics.

Google Alerts:

The final quality source for free information is something called Google Alerts.

Simply head to Google and click on Alerts in the MORE categories. Basically what an alert does is it scours the internet for the key words you look enter in and then delivers links to relevant blogs, web pages and reports that come up.

It's a great way to keep fresh information coming in. I have an alert called "Fitness myths" and each week I receive an E-mail with links and descriptions of various web pages where people have talked about different fitness myths.

It's internet searching done for you!

Be fit and Live free,

Matt Schifferle

Best Diet For Weight-Loss

Have you ever wondered why certain people don't have to worry about losing weight? They just have a beautiful, glowing, and fit body, while enjoying boundless energy?

Well, their secret lies in what they do and do not eat!

The foods you put into your body ultimately determines how you look, feel, and function. Most people attribute getting sick or lacking energy to "external" factors such as the latest "bug" or the aging process, respectively, but fail to realize that what's happening inside their body at a cellular level is much more important.

Your body (your blood specifically) is constantly working to maintain a slightly alkaline pH in order to function properly. When this pH gets out of balance (ie. becomes acidic), your energy is depleted, you more readily pack on weight, and you experience problems such as fatigue, stress, depression, and various diseases.

Unfortunately, the modern Western lifestyle and diet has led most people to live in an overly acidic state. This has led to numerous health problems.

Acid-Forming Foods Are...

Ideally, we should be following a healthy diet that is 80% alkaline and 20% acidic. Obviously, this is not the case for most people. In fact, it's the complete opposite. Unfortunately, our society enjoys the most acid forming foods such as milk and dairy products, meat and animal products, and refined grains. At the same time, the vast majority of North Americans consume less than the recommended amount of alkalizing fruits and vegetables.

The following are just two of the numerous consequences of eating a nutrient void, acid-forming diet.

Acidosis and Weight Loss

When your blood becomes too acidic, your body goes to great lengths to protect its vital organs and tisues by storing the excess acid into your fat cells. More acid, means more storage needed. Therefore, your fat stores grow in size to accommodate the extra acid.

To lose weight for good, then, you should adopt an alkaline diet that will cleanse your body of acid.

Cancer Cannot Grow in an Alkaline Environment

Alkalinity increases the oxygen in your body. The Nobel Prize winning work (1931) of Dr. Otto Warburg showed that cells weaken, mutate, or die in the absence of oxygen. Several years later, 2-time Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling was the first to show that cancer cells are unable grow in an oxygen-rich, alkaline environment.

When your body is alkaline, you create an environment for it to thrive, to feel energized, and to prevent disease.

How to Alkalize Your Body to Lose Weight For Good!

1. Minimize your intake of acid-forming foods such as refined sugars, dairy, meat, and most other animal products.

2. Eat more greens. Green vegetables are your greatest source of alkalinity!
Challenge yourself to eat one green salad and/or one green juice each day. After just a few days, see how you look and feel! Some ideas include wheat or barley grass shots, and fresh juice made from kale, parsley, celery, cucumber, apple, lemon, and ginger.

3. Start your day with a glass of lemon water. Contrary to what you might think, lemon is actually alkalizing once metabolized. Adding fresh-squeezed lemon to a tall glass of water is one of the easiest ways to immediately add alkalinity to your body.

The Little-Known Secret to Successful Optimal Health and Weight Loss

Do you verbally beat yourself up with negative talk and thoughts? Do you treat others better than you treat yourself? It is the answers to questions like these that will shed light on the perceived health, enjoyment and success you experience in life. The way you see yourself and the world is a strong determinant in how much enjoyment you extract from your life.

Do you know that your personal beliefs eventually create the reality you live? If you believe you are not worthy, guess what? Your health and life will reflect that perception. Your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes will determine the quality of not only your health...but your relationships with family, friends, career, and essentially every area of your life.

What is the first step to creating a healthy life you love? Appreciating and valuing your inherent self-worth. Selling yourself on you is typically a challenging task for most because of the years of programmed negative messages in many varieties and on many levels. Your childhood and upbringing have a significant and meaningful impact on how you view the person you are now. But accepting yourself and your imperfections is a key component to creating better health. People, who focus on their positive qualities, love themselves despite, for example, what the fleeting cultural trends toward beauty or weight may currently be.

Self-compassion is key here because this means less anxiety and depression - in fact, people who see themselves in a more positive light actually tend to be happier and more optimistic as well and this leads to making healthier lifestyle choices, such as the foods they choose, how much they eat, the weight they lose and the exercise they incorporate into their lives.

Your key to health success or any success lies in the thoughts you think. As it says in the bible, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

When you change how you think about yourself, your whole world will change, in fact, when you start from the premise that you are inherently loveable and worthwhile, you can then make diet and lifestyle choices that reflect this belief. You deserve it. Your choices made from a place of self-acceptance, self-compassion and worthiness, will provide you with the strength, eagerness and drive to take you right to a quality life of health and well-being.

Identifying your negative thoughts and then detaching from them will rewire your brain - change your brain. If you live with the mind-set that you are not worthy enough, you are programming your brain for more of the same. By taking an active role in changing the beliefs you have about yourself and your world, you are literally changing the way your neurons fire.

Remember, "Most facts are pure fiction in disguise, especially those you have adopted about yourself." ~Dr. Walter Staples

If Diets and Weight Loss Programs Leave You Cold - Start Your Own!

Anything that I write on the subject of weight loss has GOT to include facts. Not supposition. Not opinion. Not argument. Not pie-in-the sky. None of that. I said "facts", and I am talking about proven facts on the subject of diets and weight loss.

Fact #1: Diets are not a permanent weight loss solution.

Fact #2: Even a "good" diet is usually mis-handled. (Okay, one opinion.)

Fact #3: You won't get there without exercise.

Fact #4: In place of a "diet" you need to substitute good nutrition.

Fact #5: Almost everything else is a helper or a hindrance.

Fact #6: You need your own weight loss program, not somebody else's.

A DIET IS NOT A PERMANENT WEIGHT LOSS SOLUTION

It is well documented that dieting, that is removing certain things from you normal list of foods you eat or eating only certain foods, does not work as a permanent weight loss solution. The explanation of this could be the subject of a book itself, but to make it short, you get bored, it's hard to stay on the diet, dieting produces changes in your body that encourage weight gain, you lose energy, it just isn't fun and so on. Pick any diet you want. Are you prepared to spend the rest of your life eating that way? Probably not. The only real solution to a lifetime problem is a change in lifestyle and behavior.

DIETS ARE COMMONLY MISUNDERSTOOD AND MISHANDLED

Here's a classic example: The Atkins diet! Ask almost anybody you know what the Atkins diet is, and they will say it's a diet that lets you eat lots of things like steak, bacon...you know, the fun stuff, without worrying about those nasty old veggies and carbohydrates. That's why it's called "low carbohydrate", right? Shows how far most people read. A few pages into the Atkins diet plan, you learn that eating like that is only supposed to be done for about the first two weeks, to shift your body into the proper mode for the next three phases. In each of those phases, Dr. Atkins actually instructed people to begin adding certain foods, including carbohydrates, back in because it is not healthy to remain on a straight diet of chicken-fried steak or whatever for the rest of your life.

Just to drive the point home, I have a friend who went on the Atkins diet over two years ago. After a couple of years, he was still eating the from the list of foods that were recommended for the first two weeks! He lost weight at first, he's gaining it back now, and then some, and has no idea why the Atkins diet doesn't work any more.

It's interesting to note that the Atkins diet, and almost any other weight loss program, diet drink, diet pill, fitness coach, you name it, includes exercise as being important to their product being effective.

YOU HAVE GOT TO EXERCISE FOR WEIGHT LOSS

In fact, many people could lose most of the weight they need to lose just by getting into the right exercise program and staying with it! That's half the problem. Our bodies are designed by Mother Nature to DO THINGS! Clicking the remote doesn't count. Again, this topic is broader than the scope of this article, but the facts are that if you want to improve your overall health, defeat or at least delay dozens of mental and physical conditions, get more enjoyment out of life, live longer, live better, AND lose weight, you need to exercise.

The basic rule of weight loss and weight gain is that if you eat more calories than you burn you gain weight. If you burn more calories than you burn, you lose weight. That simple.

For most people it really seems simple. If they eat less, they will lose weight!

IN PLACE OF A DIET YOU NEED TO SUBSTITUTE GOOD NUTRITION

As pointed out above, simply cutting foods out of your diet is not the answer. However, the solution is simple - just eat sensibly. Nobody ever said you can't eat chocolate cake, just that you shouldn't eat two or three pieces a day, and the piece you DO eat should be a normal size. We all have at least a vague idea of what foods we SHOULD be eating, and we have a good idea of what we shouldn't be eating, or at least eating a lot of. This is an active process. Most people drive up to the window and say, "Give me your 99 cent greaseburger and a cup of water with sugar." When asked if they want to "supersize" it, they agree. Even the good restaurants serve a lot more food than it is healthy to eat, but most people go ahead and eat it anyway because they have no idea of how much they should be eating, because it tastes so good, or because they were taught to clean their plates.

DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE FRILLS

You see a lot of diet and weight loss products that claim that they have found THE SOLUTION to your weight loss problem. Hardly anybody gets overfat (Arnold Schwarzenegger is "overweight") because of one single thing. Mostly, it will occur over a period of time because of a combination of factors. While nutrition and exercise are two of the absolute MOST important factors, simply changing one without the other doesn't work as well as putting both into action. Little things like an electric exercise belt, a pill made out of grapefruit, or a secret drink from Tahiti might help your weight loss program, but if you aren't already doing the two most important things, don't expect to see much in the way of results. That's why so many of these diet and weight loss products have a remark on the label that says something like "...when used in conjunction with a proper diet and regular exercise."

There is good scientific evidence that things like cortisol and caffeine can influence weight gain and weight loss, for example, but if you were to try to control your weight over a lifetime by controlling these factors, you probably would not notice any real results. If, however, you were to begin eating sensibly and getting more exercise, taking cortisol blockers or cutting caffeine out of your diet MIGHT contribute a few extra pounds of weight loss, but it is weight you will probably lose eventually if you stay on your weight loss program.

YOUR WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM, THAT'S THE GOAL

You are not your brother, your sister, or your mother no matter how closely you are tied to them genetically. What works for one of them might not be what you need. While there is scientific fact to back up the exercise equations outlined above each person is going to react in their own unique way. You need to exercise, but maybe not as much as your friend. You need to eat less chocolate ice cream, but maybe you can't eat as much as your friend does. You need to make any weight loss program work for you by designing it around you. Do the exercises you like to do, just make sure you are doing enough. What's enough? Well, you will have to experiment and see. Eat the foods you like, just eat them in sensible quantities and eat primarily foods that have a lot of real nutrition in them. What foods? Again, you will have to find your way, probably by trial and error, although there are many excellent books to give you guidance.

Speaking of goals, your goal is to be healthy and happy. Wanting to weigh a given weight because somebody else weighs that amount is senseless. You shouldn't even be trying to weigh what you weighed in high school, because, physically speaking, that was a different person. He or she was someone with a different metabolism, lifestyle, and tastes. Concentrate on getting your exercise and eating properly and let your body figure out how much it needs to weigh.

Trying to tailor a weight loss program on someone else's results is just asking for trouble as far as weight loss is concerned. They may be able to run faster than you. They may have a higher metabolic rate than you. They may have a different bone structure. They may have fewer obstacles than you. Let's face it, somebody like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie can have the best equipment, the finest personal trainer, and can make the opportunity to sculpt a beautiful body. Plus they have the incentive of knowing that their multimillion dollar salaries depend on their maintaining the basic equipment their genetic makeup endowed them with. You and I have an old set of barbells, a cracked sidewalk, sneakers that are falling apart, live paycheck to paycheck, and the kids are going to be home in two hours. You and I are not going to look like Brad, Angelina, or Arnold. Just do the best you can with what you've got, and you will not regret the outcome, trust me.

Weight Loss, Singapore

Feeling and looking has been like how it has evolved through the past few years. The world of beauty has provided so many standards that a lot of people now would like to look good. That is the reason why the market found so many reasons to attract more people into the industry of looking good with a lot of innovations on beauty products, whitening and skin enhancement, and one big part of looking good, which is weight loss.

The best possible way to look good will always include looking fit and trim. And not only this, concerns on health and well-being have propelled the fitness and weight loss industry to be more active with finding ways to solve weight problems, the most controversial of which are diet pills and surgical procedures.

Health experts and professionals agree that a sedentary life and unhealthy eating habits could lead to serious illnesses and other health risks. And now, cardiovascular diseases are among the leading causes of deaths in the US and even Singapore. In fact just recently, health officials and health care professionals in Singapore have declared cardiovascular illness as the number 2 killer of Singaporeans. This is the reason why weight loss has been one of the top activities of Singaporeans. TV programs, advertisements and other public media announcements all have magnified weight loss Singapore to be a top priority aiming for a healthier and more fit Singapore.

With recent efforts from health experts and officials in Singapore, the country remains to be the only one in the world as of the present that successfully took the cudgels of bringing down health issues to the grassroots such as tackling childhood obesity. With these efforts, the country was able to bring down the level of obesity among children through successful campaigns such as school nutrition and physical activity programs. One of the drastic measures undertaken is to regulate food available in schools for consumption of the students and a very strict exercise regime in the schools.

People in Singapore did realize that losing weight could never be an overnight thing that is why they came up with a program that will instill in the young the benefits of proper diet and nutrition and sufficient exercise. Good nutrition is seen as the very foundation of good health. The adage "We are what we eat" holds so much truth that is why Singaporean people have become so watchful of their food intake to make sure that they only have a balanced diet to provide essential nutrients that the body needs to function and fight diseases.

Exercise has also been magnified as an essential part of weight loss for a better health that is why gyms and fitness centers are all over the country. Some people might take the shortest possible means to lose weigh and achieve that ideal physically fit physique but more people in Singapore follow the healthy and safe means to achieve better health. More so, because of the success of the health programs maintained in schools around the country, it is expected that the next generation of Singaporeans will be healthier and more disease-free.

3 Sure-Fire Tips For Weight Loss

Is your goal in life to be skinny, healthy, beautiful and happy? I think most of us would answer an astounding "YES" to that question. So many of us, men and women, aspire to having a better beautiful body and radiant shining health.

What do you think your chances are of ever reaching this goal of being skinny, healthy, beautiful and happy? Most of us will answer that question with a "Slim and None." I hope when your finish reading this and start putting these 3 Sure-Fire Tips into your daily lifestyle, your attitude about these goals and weight loss will make a complete turn around and you will be on your way to reaching all of your goals for a happy, long and healthy life.

Sure-Fire Tip 1 Positive Attitude Affirmation With a Happy Fun Lifestyle

Being happy, having a winning smile and a beautiful body to match can be achieved no matter what situation in life you are facing. This positive attitude must take place in our minds before our bodies can react in a positive way to our new way of eating and new healthy life style practices.

The first thing you need to do is take off all your clothes and stand in front of a full-length mirror. Study your body from all angles. Do you like what your see? If not, using a notebook, write down all the things you see that you want to change. Is your tummy too large? Are your buttocks too large? Put that along with anything else that you can change on your own in your notebook. These are the things that you can change yourself through diet and exercise. Now, close your eyes and make an affirmation that you are going to change these things. Make this affirmation about 3 times. By doing these affirmations daily, you have started a positive attitude toward losing weight and you are telling your body that it can be done.

Take some time each and every day to be happy; laugh, dance, play and have a good time even if you are alone when you do it. Turn your music on high and dance your heart out. If your problems are bothering you, get out of the house and go to the beach for a while. Make a mental note of all the bodies you see on the beach whether they are slim or chubby. Remember, we are all beautiful creatures made by God no matter what our physical body looks like. If you can't make it to the beach, just go outside and walk around viewing all the beautiful things in nature that God has given us to view. If you don't feel like walking, just sit in the sun for a few minutes and soak in that wonderful free vitamin D. Tune your ears to hear all of nature's amazing sounds. Do you hear a bluebird singing? Do you see the redbird taking care of her babies? Just get your mind off your problems for a while. They will all be there waiting for you when you get back home, and you can deal with them in a more positive way.

Being happy with a positive attitude, music, dancing, walking, going to the beach is going to be your first step in your successful weight loss program. Getting your mind in shape to tell your body what to do is going to be your quest now and for the rest of your life. The mind is a powerful tool that we so often neglect in our quest for a beautiful slim body that is glowing with health and happiness. So let us get into training our minds to rule over our bodies, and we will be on our way to a successful weight loss and healthy bodies.

Sure-Fire Tip #2 Learning All About Nutrition

Before we start on any weight loss plan, we need to take the time to learn everything we can about nutrition. Nutrition is the study of food at work in our bodies, thus since we are going to be dieting, this study is going to be very important for us. We need to learn what foods are good for us, and what foods are bad for us. It is just that simple.

One of the most important parts of our study in nutrition is to learn to read labels on every food you buy very carefully. You don't ever want to buy a product that has names in it that your can't pronounce. You don't ever want to buy a product in it that has sugar or fructose as the first ingredient. You will be checking the labels for any type of fat that isn't good for you.

There are 6 Food groups that we will be making our daily diets from. We need to know all these food groups, how much we need each day from each group and learn how to adjust the serving size to still be able to get all the nutrition we need for the day. The 6 Food groups are:

Meat and Bean group-lean meats, chicken, turkey, eggs, beans, lentils, legumes, etc.

Grain group 100 % Whole grain bread and products made from it, oatmeal, rice and etc.

Milk and Dairy group Low fat milk, cheese products, yogurt and etc.

Vegetable group All veggies

Fruit Group All fruits

Oil group Extra Virgin Olive oil, Cold pressed veggie oils, butter and etc.

Meat and Bean group will consists of eating a certain amount of either lean meat or beans to get good protein into your body. If you choose beans, you will have to combine it with a whole grain to make it into a complete protein.

The FDA recommends the following amounts of proteins for us to consume daily:

Women 19-30 years old 5 ½ ounce equivalents

Women 31-50 years old5 ounce equivalents

Women 51+ years old 6½-ounce equivalents

Men 19-30 years old 6½-ounce equivalents

Men 31-50 years old 6-ounce equivalents

Men 51+ years old 5½-ounce equivalents

Most of us eat this amount of protein daily, but we need to make leaner choices and use more of a variety in our daily choices. Also we need to take into consideration of our age and activity in planning our diets.

Get a good book on nutrition or take a course and learn all you can about it.

Sure-Fire Tip #3 Eat 3 Nutritious Meals a Day with 2 Snacks and Lose Weight Slowly

Plan your meals around the nutritious and delicious array of foods we have in our markets today and cook what you and your family really enjoy enjoying eating. Plan to have 3 healthy meals daily and have a morning and evening snack. Don't skip meals and think you are going to lose weight faster by not eating. If you start doing this you will get on what I call the "yo-yo" syndrome. The "yo-yo" syndrome is where you fast or don't eat much to lose weight quickly, but then you get so hungry you devour every thing in site when you start eating. Your weight will go up and down like a yo-yo. This type of dieting may work for a while, but soon your health will start declining and you will get sick. Remember the turtle and the hare? The turtle showed us that by being slow and consistent, he was successful. Slow and easy is the answer to permanent weight loss. Always, and I mean always, have three meals a day along with 2 healthy snacks. If you don't like breakfast, at least have a bite of something such as a piece of fruit or toast.

Meals don't always have to be large to be good for you. Study the food pyramid at the FDA site and plan your meals out of these food groups daily, using portion control at all times.

Eat freely of the vegetable group and cut back on the grains and carbohydrates. We need some of these in our diet, but use them sparingly. Drink water with a little lemon all day long and cut out any types of sodas. Don't think you can drink those diet sodas all day long and still be healthy. Artificial sweeteners are bad for you. Sugar only has 16 calories per teaspoon so use a little sugar or no sweetener at all. Use the good oils in your diet such as extra virgin olive oil. Oil is very important for our overall radiant health, so make sure to get some good oils in your diet daily. Nuts and seeds make good snacks and also give us some good oil in our diet. Don't forget your healthy snacks. Plan ahead and have them ready to eat when snack time rolls around.

Get some good cookbooks and learn to make delicious meals with mouth-watering recipes daily. When you cook, your house should smell like a gourmet cook is in the kitchen. Use lots of onions, peppers, garlic and etc. and the smells coming out of your house will bring the family running to your kitchen with great big smiles on their beautiful faces. Learn to bake your own bread. The bread makers today take the work right out of bread making and the smells from the baking of fresh bread are heavenly.

Summary

The 3 Sure-Fire Tips for losing weight are 3 steps we can use to be successful in our weight loss goals. Being happy, have a positive attitude, learning things we can do to take our minds off of our problems, learning all about nutrition and planning our 3 meals a day with 2 snacks and losing our weight slowly but surely are 3 Sure-Fire Tips for permanent weight loss. So, put a big smile on your face, turn the music up loud, get out your nutrition and cookbooks, and start planning your weight loss strategies today and good luck to you!

Weight Loss Vacations for Body and Spirit

Everyone knows that a healthy lifestyle is full of active living, food eating, and a healthy mind and body. While most people feel that they have it down, there are many of us that need a little help to get back on the right track with our health, spirituality, and weight. A weight loss fitness vacation is the perfect solution for those of us that want to come away feeling refreshed, mind, body, and spirit.

Most weight loss vacations are not all about hard, physical labor like the popular television show "Biggest Loser." While there is a weight loss component to your vacation, as well as a fitness component, it is not going to be the focus of your vacation. Your fitness and weight loss program will be designed as a whole. It is not enough to nourish the body without feeding the soul. This is why you will get fantastic cuisine food, fitness, but adventure, spiritual wellness, and fantastic accommodations.

Luxury spa services allow you to be pampered the way you wish you could at home. Enjoy a massage, facial, manicure and salt scrub. This will help you feel beautiful on the outside as well as the inside. Your skin is the largest cell on your body, neglecting it could be perilous and a fitness destination vacation would all about how to properly care for the skin's fitness.

Weight loss resorts are becoming more popular in America. Europe has always had several weight loss retreats for the past 30 years. The health component involved with a fitness resort is a holistic approach that allows you to develop a new relationship with fitness and diet so that you can be in the best shape that you should be. You can learn to eat healthy, and deal with your own weight management when at home, fitness that suits your needs while at work, home, on the go, and spiritual wellness that suits your needs to bring you inner peace of mind that you may have been missing.

If personal development is where you feel like you are lacking, you can sign up for a personal wellness program that will help you figure out where you want to be in life and how you can get there. Most people have a vague idea but there are many that feel unsure of the path to take and need a little more structure and direction. If this sounds like you, then you can rest assured that a fitness vacation will help you with your "life fitness" and get you back on the right track that you have derailed from.

Overall, no matter what area of your life you feel could use a little improving, weight loss retreats can help you lose some of that baggage that has been holding you back. Whether it is physical baggage, emotional baggage, or just a personal uneasiness that you feel, a weight loss vacation can help you feel healthier all around. Not only will you get where you want to be, but you can feel like luxury while it happens.