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23
Mar

7 Diet Secrets of Celebrities

Author: Webmaster

Celebrities always look fabulous. Whether appearing in television or films or strutting down the red carpet during movie premiers and awards, they never cease to fascinate us with their larger than life presence. The truth is, it takes a lot of effort to look the way they do, and being the public figures that they are, they cannot afford to slack off when it comes to taking care of their physical appearances. Their livelihood largely depends on how they look. Aside from the clothes, the hair and the makeup, celebrities have to take good care of their bodies.
So it is no surprise that these stars have their own secrets when it comes to staying fit and gorgeous. Their health agenda can range from extreme workouts to well-planned meals. Who doesn’t want to know their secrets in staying absolutely sexy? Here are some of the diet secrets of seven women celebrities.
1. Jennifer AnistonThe star of the phenomenal television show Friends not only mesmerized audiences with her adorable comic sense and her famous hairstyle, she was also known for having one of the sexiest bodies in Hollywood, as she appeared in countless magazine covers. To stay trim, Jennifer follows the 40:30:30 diet method. The diet consists of:
40% Low glycemic carbohydrates-Foods such as beans, fruits and vegetables, legumes
30% lean proteins-Tofu, fish, chicken, turkey, beef and low fat dairy products
30% essential fats-nuts and seeds, fish and olive oils
It is essential that every meal should contain macronutrients to attain the balance of hormones and maximum weight loss.
2. Kate HudsonThe gorgeous daughter of actress Goldie Hawn gained 60 pounds during her pregnancy, which she needed to shed quickly before commencing on her next film. From her previous eating plan, she switched to a higher protein diet. She consumed high protein meals in smaller portions, and she combined this diet with an exercise program that includes weight training and cardiovascular workouts. After getting a lot of flak because of her post-pregnancy figure, Kate removed all that baby weight in only four months and has gained abdominal muscles that gained the envy of many in Hollywood.
3. Oprah WinfreyAs one of the most successful talk-show hosts in the world, there is no question that Oprah needs to maintain her physical appearance for her millions of audiences. Known as one of those celebrities who are constantly battling weight gain, she has recently toned up her figure and has never looked figure in age 50 by combining a regular exercise regime and diet plan. Oprah works out five days a week, spending 30 minutes on the threadmill and doing free weights. Her eating plan consists of legumes, fish, nuts, fruits and vegetables, chicken and dairy products that are lowfat. She limits her consumption of white sugar and flour. Oprah also credits her trim figure to her habit of not eating anything after seven in the evening.
4. Gwyneth PaltrowA lot of people may find it hard to believe that the perpetually slim Academy award-winning actress actually needs to diet. Gwyneth actually follows a healthy eating plan that resembles Oprah’s, avoiding sugar and white flour. She usually follows a macrobiotic diet, eating foods like vegetables, brown rice, and lean meat. She also eliminated dairy from her diet, and does yoga everyday.
5. MadonnaThe pop star known as the Material Girl has always flaunted a body that is to die for, and has become a true fitness paragon over the years. She keeps herself in tip-top shape by having Ashtanga Yoga, and follows a strict diet that mostly shuns junk foods. She adopted a macrobiotic eating plan that includes organic foods rich in lean protein.
6. Claudia SchifferThe bodacious German supermodel eats salad and steamed vegetables for dinner and eats only fruits before the afternoon. While on locations, she prefers to eat black grapes and drinks tomato juice and herbal tea.
7. Christie BrinkleyLong-time supermodel maintains her all-American good looks by being a vegetarian. She does not keep junk foods of any kind inside her home to make sure that she does not eat them when cravings occur. She snacks on sweet potatoes in place of candy bars, and she adopts a liquid juice diet when she needs to slim down fast.
Celebrities are just like ordinary people. They need to maintain their figures just like anyone else, and there is more pressure on their part since they are constantly in the public eye. Ordinary folks can have celebrity-like bodies, too, and by following these diet and fitness plans, they can also look like red-carpet worthy.

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8
Mar

Fad Diets: Why Are They Bad?

Author: Webmaster

It is not surprising that many people wonder why fad diets are bad when they seem to get results. You will find many sites on the internet claiming significant weight loss in just a few days. That type of weight loss is always temporary. It is usually 90% water which will be put straight back on as soon as your body rehydrates, which it must do if you are not going to suffer severe health problems or die. 
Other fad diets are not so obviously crash diets with outrageous claims but they are over hyped diet plans that tend to be fashionable for a while and usually make a lot of money for the inventor in associated product sales. In the best cases these are good nutrition plans which will help you lose weight, but which you could probably have gotten for free from your doctor. In the worst cases they will prove so difficult to follow that you will give up after a week. 
The bad of fad diets
 1. Diets that promise quick and easy weight loss are usually based on eating more of one food type and none of another. These do not give the benefits that you would get from a balanced diet. They may suggest you take supplements but many supplements are not absorbed by the body unless they are taken along with the foods that the diet has banned. After a few weeks, if you stick to it that long, you may begin to develop nutritional deficiencies. 
2. Fad diets are often boring and over restrictive. After the novelty of the first day or two, you will not enjoy your meals. You will then start to crave food constantly and will break the diet. You may even feel guilty, thinking it is your fault that you did not lose weight. 
3. Most fad diets do not follow recommendations of the American Heart Association and similar bodies for fat levels in the diet. Often the diet will recommend high fat foods and low carbs which if taken long term, could result in heart disease. The promoters may tell you that the diet is only intended to be followed for a short time. But you probably will not reach your goal weight in that time, and then what? You either continue with a plan that is not good for your health, or stop and probably gain back what you lost.
 4. Many fad diets do not help you to incorporate enough servings of fruits and vegetables in your weight loss program, or give you the variety of foods that your body needs.
 5. Quick weight loss diets are just a temporary solution and do not help you to make permanent changes to your eating habits. Permanent changes are the only way to remain at your target weight once you reach it. Fad diets encourage yo-yo diet-binge cycles of fast weight loss and equally fast weight gain. This is worse for your health and your self esteem than if you had stayed overweight all the time.
 Whatever the publicity materials may say, these diets will not help you in the long term. The best way to sustain weight loss is to eat a varied and healthy diet, do not overeat, exercise regularly and avoid fad diets.

8
Mar

Even though there is so much information available about weight loss, the same diet mistakes are being made over and over every day. We are not talking here about little slipups where you ate a slice of pie that was not on the plan, but big mistakes that lead to failure to lose the weight that you want to lose. Understanding these errors can help you develop the attitude that will lead to permanent weight loss for you.
1. The All Or Nothing Attitude
All or nothing dieters will often pick out a complicated diet that is almost impossible for them to maintain. Before beginning, they will search the kitchen for anything that does not fit the plan and throw it in the garbage. They are planning to be the perfect dieter, and so they will be, for one day, three days, seven days or even a couple of weeks. Then, inevitably, something happens that means they cannot keep to the diet one time. Immediately the whole thing is ruined in their eyes and the diet is over. They go to the store and buy all the things that went into the garbage last week and proceed to gain back all the weight that they lost, as fast as possible.
If you are this kind of dieter you need to ask yourself some tough questions. Do you really want to lose weight permanently, or just lose a few pounds so that you can enjoy putting them back on again? The way forward is to make small changes to what you eat so that you have a slow but steady weight loss.
2. The Attitude of Sacrifice
Another common mistake is to view your diet as a period of sacrifice. You do not allow yourself the foods that you enjoy most while you are on your way to your target weight. You may have a great diet plan and be very successful in losing weight, but what happens when you reach your goal? You have not learnt to eat ‘bad foods’ in moderation so as soon as you start, you are likely to go out of control. It is better to include a little of everything in your diet and learn to enjoy it in small quantities. Yes, even chocolate!
3. Goal Failure 
Setting achievable goals is vital in any weight loss plan. Goals should be clear, realistic and set out in writing. While you probably do have an ideal weight in your mind, unless you are only very slightly overweight it is probably too distant to be useful. A more useful goal would be to lose two pounds per week for the first five weeks and then one pound per week after that. Some weeks you will lose more and some less, some weeks you may even gain, but if you track your progress on a graph you will see that ups and downs are natural and do not stop you progressing steadily toward your major goal.
If you have been making these mistakes, do not worry. The most important point in dieting as in so many other things is to move on. Learn from your failures as well as your success and do not use a mistake as an excuse for giving up. The only way to achieve your goal permanently is to make a commitment to become a healthier person. Remember that eating normally includes eating more some days and less others. Learn to enjoy food in moderation and you have every chance of avoiding these bad diet mistakes.

5
Dec

If you think that your bones are merely some sort of framework or scaffolding for all the organs in your body, you are getting the wrong impression. The truth is your bones are living tissues, and they need nutrients to make them strong just like your muscles or skin. And if you can only take a look at bones on a cellular level, you will find that these tissues are in a constant process of being worn out and being rebuilt.

As you grow older, your bones wear out faster than they are rebuilt; this gives way to a disease known as osteoporosis. The overall effect of this disease is bone loss and it can turn anybody’s life into a tragedy. In fact, there are over one and a half million bone fractures in America caused by osteoporosis. But the real bad fortune that the victims of these fractures have encountered is the fact that they could have easily prevented or reversed the effects of bone loss. And the best part of it all is that you can beat osteoporosis by eating the right food.

Protein-Rich Food

Protein is important for the bone-building process in your body. And the best sources of protein are meat, fish and poultry. The body needs about two ounces of protein each day; this translates to about six ounces of fish, chicken, or red meat; and the keyword here is lean meat!

But surely you have heard about the bad things that meat can bring to your system. Well, the idea here is moderation. If you consume more than the required amount of meat protein in your diet, there is a big tendency that your body will produce acidic waste products from excess protein in your body. When this happens, your kidneys will have a hard time cleaning up your system.

And here’s the rub, when your kidneys are cleaning up excess acidic protein wastes in your body, they need the help of the mineral calcium to eliminate protein byproducts. The place where your kidneys can request for more calcium is in your bones; after all, your skeletal system is the biggest calcium stockpile in your body! If you do the math in all this, excess protein will give you calcium deficit and weaker bones. So take it easy with those meat products, keep your meat consumption to no more than six ounces a day.

Calcium-Rich Food

Fighting osteoporosis means maintaining a healthy amount of calcium in your bones. Always make sure that calcium is in the black if you do not want to deal with bone loss later in your life. To do this, you need around four servings of calcium-rich vegetables and low-fat dairy products. Cheese, yogurt, spinach and collards are some of the stuffs that are rich in calcium.

However, it is important to note that people who are in their adult years experience rising levels of lactose intolerance; this means, older people have become increasingly unable to digest most dairy products. To compensate, older people can source their calcium needs from food such as soy products, seaweeds, broccoli, salmon and several types of beans. These items can well answer for your daily calcium needs without giving you upset stomach.

Always remember that too much of a good thing can be bad. As for calcium, having large amounts of this mineral in your system, may impede or interfere with the way your body can absorb other important minerals like magnesium and zinc. Instead of attaining strong healthy bones, too much calcium may bring you weaker bones.

It is also important to remember that bone supplements can greatly help you in balancing the amounts of nutrients needed by your bones. You can use products like Osteozyne to complement your diet.

Sharon Bell is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and published author. Many of her insightful articles can be found at the premiere online news magazine http://www.healthnfitnesszone.com

For more details about preventing osteoporosis, visit http://www.osteozyne.com

1
Dec

I wrote this page because of problems I once had, resolved, and I hope to research on this further.

I once heard of a case where doctors had performed an autopsy on someone and found his intestines to be plugged with a cake-hard substance having the smallest pinhole for the faeces to get through. I guess the guy must have had the worst case of the runs during the latter part of his life, and I’d assume that this condition must have been a large reason to do with his death.
I’ve also heard of an Australian Olympic athlete who died shortly before competing, and when they did an autopsy on her, they found her intestines plugged with cheese. She apparently absolutely LOVED cheese pizza.

For me, if you want to hear my gruesome problem, first of all I developed hemorrhoids after riding for 40km a bike I borrowed one day, on a hard bicycle seat and after not riding the bike for well over a decade. I was bleeding in my stool and I guess it took me a while to find and approach the problem with a solution, as it tended to linger for many years (I generally avoid surgery and medication at all costs). For years I would have a bad case of diarrhea and sometimes a scary amount of blood in my stool. One possible reason for this is the bad way in which I terminated one of my fasting periods, leading to an ultimate burning ring of fire. I’ve been eating hot chilies and food all my life, and the way people see me eat they have often commented that I must have “guts of steel”. But I guess with the way I damaged or abused them from two points of attack like this might have weakened them to where they were bleeding so much. On one of my fasts I also regularly did the colon flush, which I was later informed could weaken my intestines. By excessively cleaning it and leaving it empty for a longer period of time (my longest fast was 19.5 days), I might have weakened them, and I later read that it takes a while to heal intestines in general.

I hear of people who have the case of severe diarrhea, or constipation, and for which they might take various medication, but I have found that by proper eating and proper release one can bring their intestines back to a healthy condition, even if this may take a longer time.

If your intestines have become weaker like mine have, then you simply have to be kind to them for a longer period of time until they come back to health. For me, and probably for anyone, this simply meant holding back on the hot stuff until my stool looked regularly healthy. It is always good to examine your poo, and to note the aroma as well. If it really stinks something unhealthy, you should consider the diet you are eating. If it smells really unhealthy and toxic, imagine how many hours and days such unhealthy toxic substances are lying dormant in your intestines.

If you are not relieving yourself properly (taking proper and thorough poos), this toxic and possibly poisonous gunk will probably be seeping through your intestinal walls, into your blood stream and polluting your body. If you eat unhealthy food (possibly laced with dangerous chemicals), your liver (your body’s filter) will try to remove and process the poison, as well as your kidney, your stomach will pass it on while trying to extract only the healthy stuff. The rest then oozes its way slowly through your long (I believe around 25 feet) intestines, and if you are not emptying yourself properly, it will sit there dormant, eating away at and destroying your intestinal walls, weakening them, with the very poisons all the previous organs have worked hard to get rid of to pass out of the system now seeping uncontrollably and directly into your blood stream! A very bad scenario.

Many times I see how people stuff their faces, gorging on anything that suits their fancy (visual and taste of tongue stimulation) without giving any thought to the possible consequences, somehow assuming that their body is expendable, or a wonderful machine that will correctly deal with the garbage they are feeding it. Surviving on plastic covered hot dogs without really investigating what those plastic sleeves are stuffed with - perhaps the guts and entrails and remains from a chicken factory, mixed with some healthy meat, food colouring and chemicals. Yuck.

On the other hand, the same people could spend an immense amount of attention washing and waxing their cars on Sundays. Perhaps buy better quality oil and gas for their beloved cars. Or when they cook, they correctly pour grease from the pan into an emptied pickle jar and not down the drain. For they know that the grease will clog their drain and they will have to clean it, by pouring into it some super toxic chemical which will find its way into nature and our water supply, and possibly pumping their piping with a toilet plunger.
But their kitchen sink piping is made out of thick metal and it can handle this abuse and pressure. Your intestines certainly are not. Yet the same people practically pour grease down their throats with the stuff they eat. Grease and fat is apparently addictive, which is why fast food joints go out of their way to stuff their foods with it. And look at the state of the average American. That immensely obese animal which survives on such fast food more than any other nation.

Changing your diet away from this poison and towards leaner meat, vegetables, and generally healthy food will go a long way towards extending your life and helping you maintain a lean and healthy body. Not to mention of clogged arteries and greatly increasing the chance of cardiac arrest (heart attack) due to such greasy unhealthy eating, especially if you combine that with smoking cigarettes and a stagnant lifestyle without any exercise. What an immense abuse of the body, pounding it with such poisons for a long period of time. When you are young, your body is more able to handle such abuse. But as you get older your metabolism decreases (especially if you do not exercise), and your body simply is not able to process all this toxic waste like it used to. So it is not able to get rid of it properly, and begins to stuff it in this corner and that, swept under the carpet here and there, and you begin to bulge out in a most unhealthy way. Just take your clothes off one day and take a long hard look at yourself in a standup mirror. You can practically see all that unhealthy food bulging out of you, your poor body not able to process the sheer volume of it.

And yet people can think that this is some natural state. Perhaps they don’t care at all, or have resigned to it as the way of life.
Not at all my friends. If you think logically and with simple common sense, simply by putting in healthier food and helping your body a bit, you can reverse this trend, and over the years your body will be able to catch up and slowly get rid of all this junk you were feeding it too fast for it to get rid of.

There are several things you will have to do.

First of all, the more exercise the better. I know, a horrible word and you’ve heard it a thousand times until it’s making you sick just thinking about it. But it really does not have to be painful. The important point is movement. You don’t have to go to the weight room, but walk when you can. Your thighs are your body’s biggest muscles, and exercising them forces your body to pump a lot of blood.

When you increase your blood circulation like this, you are exercising your heart (very good for you), and the increased circulation and higher metabolism means that your body can process any junk within it at a faster pace. Don’t force yourself to do some horribly painful jog, and get all sweaty to the point that you hate the idea and cant possibly motivate yourself to repeat it the next day, or never. But increase your daily activity slowly and at a leisurely pace. If you get off the bus two stops early on the way to work, walk through a nice park, and find yourself panting once you get to your destination, well, keep it to two blocks then, or cut back to one block. But if you do this every day or two, within a week you will not find yourself panting after such a short walk.

Which is when you can increase the distance with ease, until you might get to my point where I like to run up escalators, initially two steps at a time, then walking two steps at a time, to end up at the top (some escalators can be long indeed) walking one step at a time but with both my thighs burning nicely, a very slight film of sweat produced, and my heart pounding a bit. With little quick exercises like this you can keep your body in fairly good shape. I almost never take the elevator. I walk almost everywhere, or jog there, always finding on a map a nice route through tree-lined residential areas or parks, so it is quite a pleasant experience. Many times I will get somewhere walking faster than by public transportation, when you count the time from door to door (average time waiting at the stop, walking to the stop etc.). I can do a half jog, walking intermittently, always to the point before I start to sweat, so that I can arrive at my destination faster than the public transportation system and with almost no sweat at all.

So you can think of ways how to exercise, multi task so to speak, in such a way that it will not consume any extra time during your day, and not be a painful and regretful experience for you. This will increase your body’s metabolism to the point that it will be much better able to process any junk you might eat.

And try to shift your diet away from such junk, for God’s sake. Sure, I like to go to McDonald’s once in a while, or eat an unhealthy hotdog, or a bag of chips with coke etc., but I’m always conscious of whatever I put in my mouth. I read the package. You know, it is not that difficult to find a bag of chips (or snacks - such as a granola bar) that is more healthy.

Once again, if you make a slow transition in this department as well, your shift will not be a painful and torturous experience. The important point is not to go overboard to the point that you abandon your intentions. Go as slow as you need, but be resolute in your shift. And you will find that your tastebuds will change accordingly. When I decided I wanted to go vegetarian, at first I craved for meat, but over time my body almost became repulsed at the idea of meat and looked forward with salivation at the prospect of eating a delicious salad-only dinner. On my pages you will find some simple healthy recipes which work for me. It really is not difficult to eat healthy, cheaply, and it can be a joy to cook and eat such healthy food.

Now if you take care of these two points you will go a long way towards a healthy body, and healthy intestines. It does not really make sense for me to go into great detail about healthy intestines if you are regularly pounding your system with garbage, and if you are inactive.
Once you have attained the above state to some degree, we can proceed to focus on your intestines (although you can certainly focus on everything at the same time).

Your intestines, in a healthy state, apparently maintains some bacterial balance. Like a swamp which helps keep a lake clean. Full of certain types of bugs which eat the bad stuff. In India they are designing swamps which process, in a natural way, a large city’s entire human waste.

Your intestines are similar, and if it is coming out as hard as a brick or as runny as Niagara, it is a sign to you that you are doing something wrong. One way you can regulate the bacteria is by drinking Kefir every day. I think it is supposed to be similar to buttermilk. It introduces a certain bacteria into your system to help maintain your intestinal ecology the way it should be. I bought mine flavoured with strawberries, found it delicious, and enjoyed drinking two small cartons a day.

You should also regulate your faeces. I know, sounds pretty funny doesn’t it? But it makes total sense to examine what comes out. If my faeces smells bad, I always think back to what I ate that day or the day before, and decide to try and avoid it. I also pay attention to how my stomach feels and my body in general after eating unhealthy food. So I gauge my body this way, watching what I put into it, paying attention to how I feel afterwards, and examining what comes out.

Okay, I got some weird friends, and you don’t have to go their extreme by relieving yourselves in the bathtub so that you can rub your faeces between your fingers, examine it close up and smell it. Or perhaps you are not blessed with the toilets they make in the Czech Republic: a little platform which is later washed into a smaller hole. A platform where you can feel the heat of your faeces warming your butt cheeks as you sit, the aroma filling up the entire cabin to the point of tears, and you can examine it as thoroughly as you want to afterwards. Someone told me that they designed those toilets at a time when people had problems with worms in their stool - to give them an opportunity to examine their faeces in greater detail.

Anyway, it’s only your poo, and it is a product of what you eat, so there is no great reason to get all weasy and “ooh, that’s SO gross!” about it. Really, it’s just left-over food that your body did not want, plus dead red blood cells. No great trauma. Unless of course you gorge out regularly on unhealthy food, such that the product coming out the other end is toxic stinky and mighty disgusting looking. I can promise you that my poop practically smells like flowers and has a nice texture, and I do not consider it disgusting to look at.

So do not treat your poo with such disgust. Not as some sort of bad evidence you want to conceal and flush out of your sight as quickly as possible, but as something that you can examine and use to regulate your body and what you put into it.

I’ve been told that pork and beef are generally bad, because, in different ways, they help clog your intestines. So try to cut down those, try to eat only the lean and healthy stuff, and in between it eat stuff that helps flush out your system. Like for example Spinach salad. With a healthy dose of olive oil (very healthy for you), some good vinegar, squeezed lemon, a bit of spice, perhaps grated cheese, maybe even diced apples, and you have a rather delicious and very healthy meal which you can whip up in no time flat. Or use Romaine lettuce. Apparently Boston or Ice salad does not have much nutritional value. Go to your local health food shop and start asking lots of questions. Eat long grain brown rice rather than white processed rice. Sure, it might take 40 to 50 minutes to cook, but if you do it properly it requires no maintenance. Just throw it on the stove, during which time you can do lots of other stuff. I live in a caravan truck and do not have a convenient kitchen at all, yet I eat very healthily. So you have no excuse! Oh yes, and I like to throw sesame seeds on practically everything (soup, salad). There are very easy ways to eat healthy and not spend hours and a thick wallet doing it.

You can also try the intestinal flush once in a while. Like plugging your garden hose into an outdoor faucet and turning it on full blast. Really clean out all the dead leaves accumulated over the winter. Your body works on the same principle as your car and your kitchen sink. So just give it an equal amount of attention, and you will find yourself getting much healthier in ways you might not have dreamed of. Which will allow you to enjoy life much more, and that blasted car, if you really need it.

On my pages I have prepared the stuff I generally like to eat and find easy to make. I don’t have hours to kill a day on cooking either. Living in a truck, I generally like to reserve cooking for the weekends. I’ll allow myself fast food occasionally during the week, but I make an effort to find healthy fast food (not that difficult), and in between that I have my healthy food. And now I can enjoy practically all the hot peppers I want (great joy). My intestines have become healthy again, no more blood, and great texture. For example, for a few years I’d always have painful diarrhea the next morning after eating only a few hot peppers. I guess my diet of beer, hot peppers, bread and sardines wasn’t a healthy combination. But there was not that much else available in the area I was in at the time. The important point is that I noted the problem and experimented with my diet until I found what the problem was and determined a solution. If I get constipated, the next day I’ll eat more green leafy salad stuff. If I get the runs too much, I’ll have some chicken. Just experiment and gauge your poo until you find a good diet that works for you. But think about it and pay attention. And this way you should become a healthy and happy person.

I’m 42 years old and people keep guessing I’m between 24 and 30, so I must be doing something right!

Healthy intestines and healthy eating
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