Intro to your Health & Fitness

A healthy diet is the cornerstone of a healthy body. The simplest way to stay healthy is to eat a good diet and get regular exercise. By having a healthy diet it is easier to make any adjustments needed whatever the ultimate goal. If you want to lose weight you can cut your carbohydrate intake slightly, if you want to gain weight you raise your carbohydrate levels. The other key to maintaining a healthy lifestyle is to not be afraid of eating bad food. It is recommended by many professionals that you have one day per week where you forget about your diet and eat anything you want. It should be the same day each week for consistency, but what you eat depends entirely on what you feel like.

What is sometimes the hardest thing to convince yourself, especially if you have been overweight in the past and are now looking to maintain your new figure is that eating a chocolate bar or bag of crisps won’t make you fat. It is when you eat 6 bars or bags that you get fat.

Three square meals a day, each one containing carbohydrates from vegetables and potatoes or pasta, protein and some fat. People are too quick to remove fat from their diets in a bit to loose weight, with many of them not realising that fat is necessary to maintain your healthy body.

The public conception of dieting has been dramatically changed over recent years with the emergence of the ‘FAD’ diet, from Jenny Craig to Atkins, from the juice to the cabbage diet, they all promised and delivered the same thing. Instant results, with little or no thought being given to the damage being done, the stresses we were placing on our organs.

All it takes is 30 minutes of sweat producing exercise a day to improve your physical condition, this is the opening statement to many health and fitness based magazines and literature, and this is the truth. Contrary to current popular belief, working out with weights will not result in you developing the bulk of a strongman, and similarly with cardio training, you will not become as wiry as a marathon runner. Unless this is your goal.

For someone who is just looking to give their bodies a fine tune and improve their general health and condition, the best thing is to train with weights 3 times a week and try to get 30 – 45 minutes of cardio exercise a day. This may sound like a large commitment, but this does not mean that you will have to drag yourself to the gym every day, you can easily take your daily routine and turn it into a cardio workout. Rather than playing inside with your children, take them out for a bike ride, or take the dog along and go for a nature walk. If your children attend a school nearby, you could simply just walk them there every day, the two trips you will make each day will count as your cardio workout for that day, and by involving your children in these activities you are setting a better example for them as to how to live a healthy life without going to the extremes that are seemingly encouraged in modern society.