Fitness & Wellness

If you’re like many people, you dread dieting and think it has to cost a fortune. Here’s a news flash! It can be far cheaper than fast food, better for you and even more rewarding. In fact, dieting on a budget can save you a lot of money! How can that be? First, consider what you’re presently eating. If you’re eating at a “cheap” fast food joint, one meal can cost $10 or more. If you purchase a week’s worth of groceries for one when you meal plan, it can cost as little as $35, depending on what you’re eating. That’s half the cost and you’ll get a healthier meal.

Food doesn’t have to be right out of the garden.

You can use frozen and canned fruits and vegetables when you make your own meals. Canned or frozen food not only saves you money but be fresher. Frozen food is picked and immediately processed and frozen, unlike the produce in groceries that are picked early, transported to market and been on the shelf for a while. Canned food has slightly fewer nutrients but is still a good option. Always read ingredients to make sure there are no additives.

When you plan meals ahead, you reap savings.

Meal planning is a huge benefit for your budget. There’s no waste. Are chicken breasts on the menu? Buy a whole chicken and use the rest of the parts for other meals, like tasty healthy wings, chicken salad or soup. Soup is the great budget saver. You can use the extra parts from the chicken for the broth and chicken bits and any leftover veggies from the week for a delicious, just add salad meal. You also can double up the recipe and freeze for later, using the stove less.

Find less expensive types of protein.

Sure, steak is delicious, but eating it every night can be expensive and isn’t really that healthy. Use plant-based sources of protein to save money. A meatless Monday can include brown rice and red beans for a complete protein. Canned tuna is also another savings that’s healthy. Always read the label and make sure it’s just tuna and water. It’s a healthy option that’s versatile. Eggs, turkey, chicken, cottage cheese, hard cheese and yogurt are also good protein sources. Buy a whole chicken and cut it yourself for various meals during the week or freeze part of it for another week.

• One rewarding way people save money is by growing some of their own food. You don’t have to have a lot of land, just a sunny area for a container. Container gardening can provide many ingredients for pennies.
• Find in-season bargains on fruits and vegetables on the grocery shelves, since many local farmers sell to local grocers. If you drive through a country area with roadside stands, stop and shop for bargains.
• Choosing organic can help prevent ingesting toxic chemicals and pesticides, but not all produce needs to be organic. Choose non-organic food from the Clean 15 list created by the EWG. It’s the list of non-organic produce with little or no pesticides.
• Buy in bulk and freeze the extra. You’ll be amazed at what can be frozen, including butter and nuts. You can also spend a morning with the family at a You-Pick farm for more savings and get a good workout at the same time.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

If you’re trying to lose fat and doing nothing but running, you may be sabotaging yourself. While cardio training, like running, burns tons of calories, some of which come from fat, some also come from muscle tissue. You can do strength training and also burn tons of calories to lose weight, but you’ll be building muscle at the same time. So does cardio or strength-training burn more fat? Both are good for weight loss, but for fat loss, in some ways, strength-training is better.

You need a variety of workouts for the best results.

Cardio is important for more than just its calorie burning ability. It improves your endurance, so you can workout longer and harder. Strength training, however, builds muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn, since muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat does. Strength training gets most of the calories from fat. You also need flexibility and balance training to prevent injury.

Strength training continues burning calories even after it’s finished.

Afterburn is a term used to describe the extra calories burned after a tough strength-training workout. It occurs because the body is trying to get back to its normal state. It’s not a huge amount, but it does raise your metabolism for several days after a workout, burning approximately and extra 10 calories every hour, even with a relatively moderate workout. If you multiply that by just 30 hours, it’s 300 calories. Over the long haul, that can really add up on a monthly basis. Cardio does the same thing, but the amount of calories burned in after burn is lower and doesn’t last as long, unless you’re sprinting at a high rate. With strength training, like weightlifting.

Weight training also helps shape your body and tone it.

Even if you lose a lot of weight, if you aren’t toned, you won’t look nearly as good. When you use strength training to help burn fat, you’ll also build muscles and get the toned, attractive appearance. Cardio may help you lose calories, but it’s just shrinking your body and making it narrower, not sculpting the body for a toned lean appearance. In fact, the more muscle tissue you have, the slimmer you look even if your weight doesn’t change.

• To burn fat, you also need to make sure you have a healthy diet that contains fewer calories and adequate protein to build muscle tissue.
• HIIT workouts—high intensity interval training—isn’t a specific workout, but a way of doing exercises where you vary the intensity. Whether you do HIIT strength-training or cardio, it burns more calories.
• You need to vary your workout to burn more fat. Your body becomes efficient at specific movements and uses fewer calories. It can cause fewer calories to be burned.
• Some types of strength-training, like kettlebells, burn tons of calories, build muscles, provide a full body workout and improves strength, flexibility, balance and cardio.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

One of the latest diet crazes isn’t really new and actually works. It’s intermittent fasting—IF. There are all types of IF. Some require you fast for a day or two and then eat normally. Other types, the more popular type, is eating all your meals in a specific 6-8 hour window and fast the other 16-18 hours. Fasting has been around for centuries. It was used as part of religious ceremonies and even an early treatment for epilepsy before medications. Fasting was part of early man’s normal life. Food wasn’t always available. Then it became part of religious ceremonies for centuries. Today it’s being popularized for weight loss.

Early animal studies in the 30s and 40s showed fasting may slow aging.

Animal studies in the 1930s and 40s focused on mice and the effect of fasting by eating just once a day, 30% calorie restricted feeding twice a day and on demand food. Mice that fasted lived longer, had a darker coat compared to their counterparts as they aged and remained more active and youthful. The calorie restricted mice lived 11% longer than those on demand and the fasting group increased their life span by 28%.

IF health benefits, besides looking younger.

IF not only helps you lose weight, it helps you lose fat around your middle. It can boost insulin sensitivity, increase HGH—human growth hormone, boost your metabolic rate and reduce inflammation. Chronic inflammation is a major cause of serious illness. During those fasting times, it allows for cellular repair and waste removal, which is known as autophagy. The body removes old cells and replaces them with new ones. However, this normally occurs after 24 hours, so it requires the type of fasting where you eat one day and not the next. IF helps reduce the risk of cancer and improves brain health and concentration.

Does intermittent fasting work for you and your body?

That all depends on you. If you have diabetes, intermittent fasting isn’t an option without a doctor’s supervision. People with reactive hypoglycemia should be careful when trying It can interrupt your sleep cycle if you eat too early, so beware if you have insomnia. People with eating disorders shouldn’t use it, neither should pregnant and lactating individuals. If you’re working out hard at the gym, don’t fast that day. People with digestive issues may have more problems on the days or times they eat. People with a compromised immune system or those who take meds that require food first should also avoid fasting.

• One mice study showed fasting caused the body to produce Beta-hydroxybutyrate, a molecule that reversed vascular aging, while building more cells to line the interior of blood vessels.
• When you do eat on an IF program, make it healthy. Even though it’s all about timing, it doesn’t give a license to consume junk food either.
• One reason IF may work for weight loss is that it restricts the time you eat to a smaller window, which means you’ll normally consume fewer calories than you would in a full day. It also boosts your metabolism.
• Some more recent research shows IF can boost the fat burning of a keto diet and speed up ketosis for maximum weight loss.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym

Part of our program is educating you in all areas of fitness, including nutrition, so you can make the best possible decisions yourself. One of most often asked questions is whether all fats are unhealthy and the difference between types of fats, such as saturated and unsaturated fat. First, fat has a place in your diet. You need fat for many of your bodily functions, including weight loss. The unhealthy fats are trans fats, which are often found in baked goods or fried foods.

The key to knowing which fat is saturated and which is unsaturated is right before your eyes.

Check out the fat at room temperatures. Saturated fats are solid, but unsaturated fats are normally liquid. Fats are in four classes, saturated, unsaturated, monounsaturated and trans fats. As mentioned earlier, the trans fats are bad for you. The type of bonding with hydrogen makes a difference whether the fat is solid or liquid at room temperature.

There’s a myth about saturated fat being unhealthy.

If you consume the right amounts of saturated fat, it’s perfectly healthy. In fact, one study that was published in 2019 showed that decreasing the amount of saturated fat in your diet offered no health benefits. The reduction in saturated fat didn’t even reduce heart disease. So why is it so vilified? It’s all about one mega-study done in the 1960s that was paid for by the sugar industry. They bribed the three Harvard scientists that did the study with an extra $50,000 each, which is more like getting $470,000 today. They ask them to ignore the studies that pointed to sugar as the culprit and focus only on those that said saturated fat was the cause of heart disease.

You need saturated fat in your diet.

Each type of fat does something different. There are basically four types of saturated fat that are normally in diets, stearic found in foods with animal fat, lauric from foods like coconut oil, palmitic that’s in palm oil, dairy and animal products and myristic acid that’s in dairy and coconut oil. For instance, the body can’t build cell membranes without saturated fat. Cell membranes are 50% saturated fat. Myristic acid boosts the immune system and aids in fighting tumors. Lauric acid has antimicrobial properties. You need saturated fats to absorb fat soluble vitamins and saturated fats for healthy bones, proper growth and to prevent colon cancer and multiple sclerosis.

You also need unsaturated fat.

Unsaturated fat lowers inflammation and aids in preventing heart disease. There are basically two types of unsaturated fat, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. The polyunsaturated contain omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. They both play a role in heart health, building better skin, hair bone and reproductive health. Unsaturated fat is important for both the nervous system and metabolism. It increases the good cholesterol and reduces the bad cholesterol. Monounsaturated fat also helps control blood sugar levels.

• You’ll get polyunsaturated fat when you eat salmon, Brazil nuts, walnuts, flaxseed, poppy seed and chia seeds. Monounsaturated fats are found in pecans, cashews, Brazil nuts, avocado and olive oil.
• Fat free foods, foods where the fat is removed, are often unhealthier than the full fat originals. That’s because the fat is replaced with sugar to give it flavor.
• You need about 20 to 35% of your caloric intake to come from fat. It should include 15 to 20% of caloric intake from monounsaturated fat, 5 to 10% from polyunsaturated, 10% from saturated and 0% from trans fats.
• Coconut oil, butter and dairy from grass fed cows, yogurt and fish. Many of these foods also provide heart healthy benefits.

For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym