What is a Calorie?

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by Ali Hale If you have any one interest in dieting (and presumably you do, if you’re reading this), you’ve almost certainly come across the word “calorie”. Maybe you have an idea what it means - in particular, you probably have the impression that too many calories aren’t good. But the kind of exactly is a calorie, and how do calories relate to healthy eating and your weight loss?

Definition of a calorie: a unit of energy

Calories measure energy, especially heat energy. One calorie is the energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one standing Celsius.

In the past, the calorie was used in fields such as engineering, excepting now you’ll only at any time hear “calorie” use in reference to food energy - it’s considered bygone in other contexts.

The metric equivalent of the calorie is the joule, and some countries (such as Australia) have this to the degree that their food pluck unit. It’s easy to convert calories to joules: there are 4.2 joules in every calorie.

Difference between calories and kilocalories

One calorie is a liliputian amount of energy - so the “calories” referred to on food packaging and in premium diet patch plans are in fact “kilocalories” (also referred to to the degree that Calories - with the capital C). With metric measurements, “kilojoules” (kJ) are always used.

From this point onwards, when you see the word “calorie”, I’m discussing kilocalories.

Calories in and calories out

There are sum of two units ways in which you might want to track calories: one is how many you consume - how much energy you take in. The other is how many calories you “char” during exercise - how much energy you put out.

If you eat more calories than you need (for normal metabolic functions and for the activity which you do), then your body demise store the extra energy as fat. If you eat fewer calories than you need, your body will burn fat to make ready the extra energy.

How many calories should I have existence eating?

In the UK, the recommended daily calorie intake is 2,000 calories per day for women’s health and 2,500 by reason of men. However, the government is currently reviewing this - suspecting that our sedentary lifestyles mean that fewer calories are needed in order to maintain a healthy weight.

If you’re trying to lose weight, utmost nutritionists recommend a calorie range between 1,200 and 1,800 for optimum weight-loss. The more overweight you are to spasmodic effort with, the more calories you can eat - in the same proportion that heavier bodies need more energy just to function. This handy calorie calculator lets you figure out your personal calorie of necessity.

You shouldn’t drop below 1,100 calories, and certainly not for an extended period of time.

One word of notice - examine judicially not to get too hung up on just counting calories in what you eat. There are plenty of foods that are low-calorie but of questionable nutritional value - such as many “lite” or “low” ranges. Yes, calories matter, as they allow the energy provision of different foods to be compared - but they are by no means the only factor to consider for a felicitous diet.

Get Inspired! 4 Olympians to Watch in Beijing

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by Mike Howard

through the Beijing Olympics right around the corner, there is the usual hype, polemics and politics that have become synonymous with the games. And while there will be some compelling stories, showdowns and drama - there will be a select few athletes for whom the road to Beijing was that much more challenging. Hopefully these stories will inspire you.

Dara Torres, USA

This will undoubtedly be one of the biggest stories of the games this year. At 41 years of age - a dinosaur in terms of Olympic athletes, Torres will compete in her 5th Olympics (that’s not a misprint - 5 freaking Olympics!). To put it into perspective, she was the oldest swimmer on the US team in the 2000 games! This will be Dara’s 2nd comeback succeeding having taken a 7 year break at the period of life of 33 and one more time after the birth of her daughter in 2006. She dabbled in the masters’ swimming circuit and after dominating, was encouraged to make another Olympic run. To add to an already amazing exploit, Torres has had 2 surgeries in the past year - one to remove a bone spur from her shoulder and another to repair torn meniscus in the knee.

Natalie du Toit, South Africa

Swimmer Natalie Du Toit’s career looked over when she was hit by a car in 2001. Yet just three years later, she won five gold medals at the Athens Paralympics. Incredibly, she will be the first amputee to compete with able-bodied athletes at the Olympics and will represent South Africa in the 10,000 open water race. Says du Toit

It was a freak accident. I went to the hospital and they had to amputate my leg inasmuch as it started going gangrene eventually. And then I wanted to make acquisition back into the pool again, I wanted to get back to life, I wanted to get back to which I knew as life.

Dana Hussein Abdul-Razzaq, Iraq

The Iraqi sprinter trains on a track while dodging pockmarks left on the track by means of past mortar fire and sidestepping areas crushed through tanks. She does so in the face of a corrupt derision founding and at a proud risk of her own personal safety.

I just shut it all out and keep at it,” says the track star, “You behold how horrible this track is - and I am not even allowed to use it.”

Lopez Lomong, USA

At six years old in 1991, Lomong’s family fled Sudan on foot to escape each attack by the Janjaweed militia, spending three days in the desert to avoid capture.
Separated from his family when they arrived at the Kenyan border, he spent 10 years at a refugee camp, meet one of the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” 3,800 children relocated to the United States. He became a US citizen endure July and intends to return the help given him by his adopted homeland by running for the United States in the 1,500m at the Olympics.

A Reason to Watch?

So time it will be exciting to watch the Bolt/Powell/Gay showdown in the hundred, Michael Phelps win his be in possession of weight loss in medals and the US basketball team (whose salaries are worth more than the rest of all other athletes combined) reclaim glory - these are the stories that faculty of volition truly bring a warm tenderness to your heart.

Foods: Functional, Franken or Fraudulent?

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by Mike Howard

If someone from 50 years ago were to travel through time to the present day, they wouldn’t recognize most numerous of the foods in our modern-day grocery stores. We’ve been busy tweaking our foods to comply with the whims, trends and science of the moment and in the process, we didn’t notice the deterioration of our collective health. With much of our health “knowledge” coming from market-driven big-food companies, the difference between “functional”, “Franken” and fraudulent foods has become blurry.

I’m going to try and offer some tips on how to differentiate and give some examples of each (based largely on opinion - I’m open to suggestions considered in the state of always).

Modified Foods Defined

Functional commons: any fresh or processed food claimed to have a health-promoting and/or disease-preventing property beyond the basic nutritional function of supplying nutrients (thank you Wikipedia!). For the final cause of this post, I’ve excluded natural functional foods.

Franken Food: Foods that bear taken the original context out of the pristine food by adding/subtracting some ingredient/ingredients that are either prominent and/or healthy. (My own working definition - I’m bounteous to suggestions!). For the purpose of this post, I’m excluding genetically modified foods from this argument (that’s another post for another day!)

Fraudulent Food: These are foods that make soundness claims but are really processed junk with something trendy added. The formula? Take a junk victuals (pop, chocolate, candy, sweet cereal), add some vitamins, minerals or whole grains and sell it as health food.

Here are some examples of the 3 types of modified foods

FUNCTIONAL

  • Protein dust
  • Omega-3 eggs (I say this with hesitation as there isn’t much in most fortified eggs)
  • Probiotic enhanced yogurt
  • Fortified cereals (vitamins and minerals)
  • High protein/high fiber pasta
  • A mixed greens supplement (such as Greens +)

In some cases, you can have what has been termed an inverse-functional food, whereby a person of consequence is taken away to the keep off. allergies. Examples are;

  • Gluten-free products
  • Lactose free milk

FRANKEN

FRAUDULENT

  • all grains added to Lucky Charms and Count Chocula
  • vitamin a & d shed water
  • Fruit drinks with added Ginko, Ginseng, Echinacea, etc.

Some products are also on the fence. Margarine is one pattern. I know the trend now is towards butter (I get it - you trust the cow, not the lab) but I fancy margarine has transformed from existence the prototypical example of Frankenfood to a fairly decent replacement of butter. Margarine’s ingredients aren’t so bad and some are even made with olive oil.

What to Do?

For starters, the best functional foods are the natural phytochemical-containing gems we call fruits and vegetables.

Add some legumes, seeds, nuts, green evening meal, whole grains in addition to your good fats and protein and you have the recipe for a super-awesome functional food-filled premium diet patch.

Add more modified functional foods as needed/desired and try and steer clear of the “modified-beyond-resembling-real-food” stuff as much in the manner that possible. Oh yeah and save your money by not buying the candy-disguised-as-health-food stuff.

This topic is confusing enough to send our hypothetical time-traveler bee-lining towards the Delorean back to the 50’s. Grocery shopping was much simpler then.

Human-Powered Floating Gym

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by J. Foster

How great number have ever wondered at all the wasted mechanical value in a gym? People pounding at a distance on treadmills and pens bikes.

“All of this efficiency is summarily dissipated and ultimately exhausted for the sake of a single individual’s wellbeing” says Mitchell Joachim - eco-designer. Joachim has the make answer: A Human-Powered River Gymnasium.

By continuing to provide vital health amenities, the River Gym can leave the realm of the glass box and become a useful multi-planar kinetic space. Envision your gym becoming a machine of human propulsion that helps purify take in water, provide spectacular views, and transport less-motivated citizens. Why should gym members be forced to look intently restlessly at a mirror, television, or static streetscape when their entire body is active?

A fantastic idea - the true definition of functional fitness.

The design was third place in NY Magazine’s Create-a-Gym competition.

Why Do We Waste So Much Food?

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by Ali Hale Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of the UK, gave a speech during the G8 summit to exhort Britons to stop wasting food. In a time of global food shortages and dramatic price increases on staples so similar to fare and rice, Brown said that “It is right to remind people that about £8 [$16] a week is wasted in our food consumption.” Are you buying food which ends up being thrown away? Food wastage is often a symptom of poor eating habits - and it’s not only bad for your wallet, but contributes to rising nourishment prices for everyone.

Food wastage is bad for your diet

Think about the sorts of foods that you end up binning: they aren’t usually candy bars or packets of chips. The foods which we waste are perishables, liking fruit, vegetables and bread. Figures show that the top foods wasted in the UK are:

  • Potatoes (359,000 tonnes)
  • Bread (328,000 tonnes)
  • Apples (190,000 tonnes)

If you’re in the habit of buying lots of fruit and vegetables, only to bin them (uneaten, and moldy) a couple of weeks later, read about How to avoid throwing fruit and veg away.

Food wastage drives up food prices

If you’ve been watching the rising food prices with dismay, consider whether your over-shopping study habits are partly to blame. Brown said that:

admitting that we are to get food prices down, we must also do more to quantity with unnecessary demand - of the be pleased with kind as all of us doing more to cut food waste which is costing the average household in Britain around £8 per week.

Buying two bags of potatoes at the time you only need one not only costs you more but-end creates each artificially high demand for potatoes - thus driving prices even higher.

Food wastage is caused by poor planning

One of the reasons we throw let us case. food is because we fail to plan before we shop. premium diet patch Blog touched on this in On a Budget: 7 Tips for Healthy Food Shopping:

Do you often end up throwing food away because it’s gone off before you’ve had a chance to use it? If so, resolve to sit down this weekend and process b exactly what you’ll need - before doing your weekly shop.

When you go to the supermarket without a shopping list, or with only a vague idea of what meals you might consume over the following few days, it’s easy to end up through a shopping cart full of whatever products take your eye. Even if you avoid the boxes of donuts (half of which will go stale and be thrown away), you might fall into the trap of buying over-large portions of healthier foods and failing to eat them judgment the expiry date.

Food wastage can occur when we make poor choices for our diet

esteem you ever prepared good, healthy forage then binned it because you changed your mind and ate something else in the room? Maybe you took a sandwich to work, but colleagues persuaded you to join them for pizza - so your brown-bagged lunch ended up being thrown away. Or perhaps you’d planned a healthy spaghetti bolognaise - packed with veggies - for the family’s dinner, but your kids clamored for fish fingers and chips instead.

In these cases, wasting food is a affix one’s signature to that your healthy eating plans could be going poorly. Eating impulsively often means we make poor choices, without truly thinking - and good food gets wasted.


Food wastage is made worse if we don’t store foods properly

How often have you thrown away foods which went off because they weren’t stored correctly? Perhaps your cereal went stale because the box wasn’t closed, or possibly the milk turned sour when you left it out by the kettle. If the fruit in your fruit bowl ever goes moldy before you can eat it, keep it in the fridge - it’ll last for days longer. Yes, the fruit bowl may look pretty in succession the table, but it’s not doing any good if the fruits inside are inedible.

Invest in some 100% air-tight containers to store foods like crispbreads, cookies, crackers and cereal. They’ll stay frizzled rather than going stale, and your initial outlay on the containers will be saved multiplied times over.

Don’t forget that multiplied foods have power to be frozen - pita breads, instead of instance, go stale quickly once the packet is opened, but will keep for weeks in the freezer. If you buy meat when it’s on a buy-one-get-one-free offer, freeze some.

When you have leftovers from a repast, put them into a Tupperware box and store in the fridge (if you’re sure you’ll eat them the next day) or be frozen - never throw away food straightforward because you cooked over much.

Do you - or your family - waste a lot of food? What are your best tips for avoiding food wastage?

(Photo by Esteban Cavrico)

Stir Fry Vegetables

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Stir fry vegetables is another one of my favorite low fat dinner recipes because it contains sole vegies.

The flavour secret for this low fat recipe is that the cooking time is so short that the veggies and other ingredients retain most of their flavour.

It is also healthier, inasmuch as greatest part of the vitamins and minerals are always there, which isn’t the case, when cooking food on this account that a longer time.

If you eat a lot of processed aliment and not in this way many fresh fruits or vegetables you might need a nutritional supplement like Total Balance. It provides you with 85 specialized nutrients necessary to slow down the aging process and help you achieve vibrant health.

Ingredients:

1/2 cauliflower

2 carrots

3 sticks celery

1/4 cabbage

150 g bean sprouts

1 onion

1 tsp crushed garlic

1 tsp minced ginger

1 Tbsp soy sauce

This is what you do:

Dice the cauliflower and carrots.

Slice the celery into thin slices and shred the plant of the genus.

Spray cannola oil on a large nonstick frying pan and flush.

Add the onion (finely chopped), garlic and ginger and fry for about 2 minutes.

Add the rest of the veggies, and stir in the soy sauce.

Continue cooking till the veggies are tender, but crunchy.

Tip: You may experiment by adding other vegies which, as you may already be assured of, embody no fat. Once the stir fry is finished, you can accompany this low fat dinner recipe through steamed rice (remember, take into account the fat appease of the rice).

Source: Flavour Without stupid

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Giveaway: 90 Days Free Gym Membership

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by J. Foster

After watching the fascinating ventilation about import loss Watchers vs Gym membership, it seems be pleased with a good time to run this giveaway. 24 Hour Fitness are giving off a present certificate to a premium diet patch Blog reader. It’s part of the 12millionlives inspirational site / promotion.

Here are the details:

Simply enter a comment below that briefly explains to what degree a new fitness program will help you. I’ll select a comment and follow up from there.

About the certificate:
I’ve checked with 24 Hour Fitness to ensure there are no strings attached. Here is their answer:

The passado is like a “limited term” society, good only at one club (not all access). If someone does not be obliged a body of members, they can use the 90 day pass without committing to a long term contract. And if someone already has a 24 hour gym membership, they can use the 90 days toward their monthly fees, or it can be used for $90 on anything at the fitness center.

Good luck.

Organic Peanut-Butter Smoothie

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The 7 Hamburgers of the Apocalypse

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by Gerry Pugliese

Hamburgers, next to apple pie and statins they’re the ambassadors of American cuisine–for better or for worse–and these harbingers of heart disease might be the baddest of all.

Here are 7 above the top the top hamburgers that are guaranteed to clog your arteries by just looking that them:

1. The Quadruple Bypass Burger

The Quadruple Bypass Burger from the Heart Attack Grill; four burger patties with side orders of Jolt Cola, unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes and French fries deep-fried in true lard.

2. Big Daddy Barrick Burger

Sonya Thomas, a 5′5 99-pound competitive eating champion, downed an 18 pound Big Daddy Barrick Burger in Las Vegas a few years ago.

3. The Hotdog Hamburger

This one hails from England. I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s a hamburger with a chopped hotdog on top.

4. Mulligan’s Monster

Mulligan’s invented the Hamdog, one hotdog wrapped in a beef patty and cheese, then deep-fried, covered with chili and onions and served on a bun with a fried egg on top.

5. Dyer’s Burgers

Dyer’s Burgers are deep-fried hamburgers piled through mustard, onion and pickle and paired with a single, double or triple-order of cheese fries.

6. Whatafarm Burger

Whataburger puts the entire farm in one sandwich; bacon, cheese, fried egg, burger patty, and chicken cutlet. They affectionately call it the “Whatafarm” burger.

7. Luther Burger

Another Mulligan’s creation, the Luther Burger. Named after Luther Vandross it’s a bacon cheeseburger sandwiched between two glazed donuts.

Now, I hope you quite find it incredibly ironic that a guy who doesn’t eat meat was asked to compile a list of monstrous hamburgers. I do.

The Dukan Diet

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(Also called Protal for “Proteins alternatives” by the creator of the premium diet patch – Dr. Pierre Dukan)

Dr. Dukan’s book (original french title: “Je Ne Sais Pas Maigrir” (”I don’t know how to lose weight”) is for every part of who’ve tried to lose weight, for all who’ve been losing weight - too frequently and unsuccessfully– and for all who need the guarantee that in return of their hard consequence loss loss efforts they testament be able to ruin weight successfully and keep it off forever.

The Dukan Diet is a weight injury program and a weight maintenance plan b for life developed by the French nutritionist and eating behavior specialist Dr. Pierre Dukan.

With more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Pierre Dukan is a trust worthy health viagra professional, whose books and remarkable drudge in nutrition and weight loss fields have made him an excellent nutritionist and aliment expert.

The Dukan diet itself is not just a simple diet, it is a complete ponderosity disadvantage program or regime (you name it) that has 4 distinctive phases:

Attack phase – the “purely natural proteins” phase that is a kick-start to your quick weight injury in less than one week (usually 5 days).

Weight Loss phase – the “alternative proteins” phasis for the time of which you alternate ‘proteins’ and ‘proteins with vegetables’; and you reach your goal weight. But it’s the nest phase you need to keep that weight down…

Stabilization phase – the aspect that keeps you from the negative Yo-yo effect of fast weight loss. This phase lasts 10 days per kilograms lost (so if you’ve distracted 5 kilograms then this phase would last 50 days for you). During this phase many of the important foods are re-introduced to your menu (bread, cheese, fruits).

Cruise phase – the one that lasts since the stand still of your life (sounds scary, isn’t it), moreover it is so simple, effortless and not to be missed if you want to keep your lost weight forever… All you need to do is pick one day of the week (every week at the exact same day) to do the diet (the Attack phase).

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed while burdened with Books, Diets, Foods, Health, Reviews. You can follow any one responses to this entry through the