If you want your kids to suffer a lower risk of obesity, one of the major things to remember is to stick with low carb drinks, low sugar drinks that won’t equal out to tons of liquid calories.  This sets them up for future bad habits, and it adds to obesity now.  Frankly, as healthy as those pedialyte drinks may seem, they are a classic example of what not to give your kids.  Likewise, stay away from juices unless they are actually 100% juice.  Most juices are maybe 10% juice and the rest of it is sugar.  Instead, you can try water for example. 

Water is obviously great, and if you make your own juice or just look for 100% juice at the store, that is definitely an option.  Some also use strawberry dacquiris as an occasional treat.  Likewise, you can try sweet tea.  Sweet tea doesn’t have the caffeine of many other iced teas, and yet it still has that taste and low amounts of sugar at most.  It can be found in most grocery stores along with various restaurants, and quite frankly this is one of your best choices in some ways.  Either way, you want to stay away from the sugar laden drinks and help your kids to learn early on about much better options.  Soda is definitely not a good option by the way.

I was never a fast food junkie as a kid.  I skipped class, went out with my friends to a local place to eat, and all.  But it was generally one particular smoothie shop that we used to like and has since shut its doors for other reasons outside its food.  The food was great, other parts were not.  However, if your kids are the average teens now showing up in the United States, they are not quite like I was, they like their fast food and they tend to skip class or just drive around during lunch break to get fast food specifically.  They visit vending machines at school, maybe they choose the fattiest foods the school has to offer, and they largely lack nutritional benefits. 

The problem is it’s not just their weight that suffers from these particular habits.  Their thinking also suffers. They don’t do as well in school because their mind is not as sharp as it would be with a healthy diet and exercise plan going.  They may be constantly fatigued, and emotionally they won’t be as well off.  And obviously earlier obesity rates lead to earlier obesity related problems whether in the heart or other areas of the body.

The elliptical machine is my favorite.  I actually want to have one in my house.  But of course, they’re expensive machines, and frankly you can easily find them in your gym for an easy fee every month while not having to keep up the maintenance yourself, which is without question extremely helpful in general terms.  They can really help you to work your body in general.  For example, you think about the fact that you are not actually running, so it’s low impact just keeping your feet on them, and you are still moving in that kind of motion. 

But you are also incorporating your arms into the movement for a whole body workout. You are definitely not missing out on anything to say the least.  It can be used with a trainer or by yourself, and oftentimes I actually find myself going longer and harder on it to some degree, because it’s not bearing down on my joints as much.  So that’s really helpful.  My arms get more toned with that as obviously does the rest of my body while burning more fat through the cardio methods.  But it definitely helps you to get better results, and it definitely is a machine to at least consider when you are looking for realistic weight loss results.

One of the big keys to losing weight is known generally speaking as grazing.  You should eat smaller meals throughout the day, and this will help you to lose more weight and achieve greater general results.  This will help your metabolism, because if you eat a big meal all at once, it will try to burn those calories off, but it can only burn them off so fast before they start storing in the body and turning into fat. 

On the other hand, if you’re eating every few hours in smaller amounts, it has fewer calories to burn in that time, and yet it is constantly going because as soon as it finishes burning one storage, you are onto another bit.  This results oftentimes in you actually actively eating more while losing weight in a way because of it.  It controls portion sizes and has various other benefits, and with grazing, you can obviously see various other benefits depending entirely in some ways on how you do it.  In addition, you can have your exercise like this. 

We all know that you don’t necessarily have all the time in the world to devote to exercise all at one time.  You should break a sweat in any given workout.  But if you need to break it into 30 minutes or 40 minutes in the morning and then again at night, that can also give you a chance to get in the time you need while fitting it into your busy schedule.

I heard of a diet my friend went on.  Her doctor actually discovered a hormonal abnormality, which apparently was responsible for her actually being really tall, taller than her relatively tall parents as well as actually gaining quite significant amounts of weight in a short period of time.  But then one day, it was actually a good while after she started taking medication for it, she suddenly started losing massive amounts of weight.  We of course had to give her crap about it, asking how she did it, pinching her sides telling her how skinny she was and of course she enjoyed it with how jealous we were.  But it was just simple changes.

She actually started on a diet with both her parents that basically amounted to she could eat as many fruits and vegetables as she wanted all day, and she ate quite a few just to keep up satiety levels.  But they would calculate out one or two meals per day that actually counted toward a smaller number of allowable calories and then divide it up between the 3 family members, and honestly I wouldn’t doubt that she was losing more than 1 pound per day.  Now usually speaking, this is not healthy. 

But frankly it obviously was sustainable as she’s kept it up for years now and maintained weight loss.  But also, she mentioned that she was walking more just in between classes at school, not even going to the gym.  So there are little things or diets that can make a big difference if you use them right.

I’ve heard it before, you use a body wrap and you lose significant amounts of weight.  You melt away the fat inside of you and then you pee it out, which is the same logic behind lunchtime lipo.  Of course there have been cases of something collecting and collecting bacteria in one spot and then causing serious complications with lunchtime lipo to say the least, one woman being completely horrified because when she called to complain about a lump sticking out of her stomach, they said it was a good thing. 

That being said, there are some people who would believe in fat burning body wraps.  They heat up your body, and at higher temperatures at least theoretically your body burns more calories and more fat.  The problem is more that while you may be losing weight, you have to question what kind of weight it is.  It’s fairly quick yes, but all the weight is water weight.  Your body is heating up and water weight is being eliminated naturally speaking. 

So in so many ways it’s like a diuretic.  The weight will come back once you drink more water, it’s really quite simple.  Still, if your problem is a buildup of water weight that is actually unhealthy and unnecessary, you could drink more water.  That’s the healthiest way to flush it out.  But there are various options in general.

I think I’ve worked with the same trainer now for the past 2 years, that’s a long time for me to stay with anything.  I don’t live in a house for that long, I don’t stay with partners for that long.  Obviously I have friends I’ve had for longer than that, but I’m just bigger on change.  My doctor and dentists don’t last that long, though my chiropractor has. 

 But my trainer is a gem.  He knows how I work now after it’s been so long the same way my hairdresser knows the complete history of my hair since I was a kid, I know sad thing.  But frankly, I have my weaknesses, and he knows this.  I have my strengths, I respond to certain motivations better than others, and all of this he has learned through trial and error, trial and error that would have to start all over if I were to actually go through another process of change, which is why I don’t think I ever will. 

When you have a good thing, don’t let it go right.  I let him know when I want to lose weight, maintain, build more muscle, tone up, tone down, and he adjusts my routine.  So frankly, finding a good trainer is vital.  It gives you such better results as a whole.

Short workouts are not recognized anymore like they used to be.  It used to be the idea that 30 minute workouts would give you the maximum results for your time and after that it just plateaued off or something.  They are now finding that especially if you are obese, longer workouts burn more calories and frankly you should only be using longer workouts, period, end of story, that’s how it is. 

 But that doesn’t mean by any means that you shouldn’t use any kind of short workout at all and they’re completely useless.  Quite the opposite.  If you break up your workouts throughout the day, it’s actually quite a good thing and it will help you in general terms to get the results you want.  However, you have to make sure that you are putting the right intensity into those workouts.  Even in a 10-15 minute workout you should be breaking a sweat and you should be helping yourself out in that way. 

It’s just a simple fact of life.  You have to know yourself in general terms.  But short workouts if you are using the right velocity among other things are believe it or not, still a good thing.

Protein bars, they’re a tricky one to know about and many wonder whether or not to eat them when dieting.  To some degree they’re good.  They can fill you up fairly quickly, and realistically speaking, many have used them successfully.  They make a quick and convenient snack that is generally recognized as being better than chips.  But you should be eating a few small meals per day if you are going to use this rather than 3 big ones or even 2 big ones. 

Realistically speaking they differ.  You have to choose the right one to be sure.  Some are high in sugar, some almost eliminate sugar.  But they are all high in calories, which is part of what makes them so quickly filling.  The long of the short is that not all energy bars are created equal, not all protein bars are created equal.  So you have to actually look at the nutritional facts and choose accordingly.  You also have to look at your existing program and see how many calories you can actually handle from them and how many you are actually burning off in general terms.  So it depends on you and the energy bar combined in so many ways.

You may have found that though you know your abs are strong and frankly you know you have a 6 pack somewhere in there, you seem to have ab fat covering it up.  There are some diet pills that in the past, before the FTC suit, claimed that it was because of high cortisol levels that are actually only connected to a severe and rather uncommon medical condition.  It’s in a way like thyroid disorders.  Diet pills play off them, but they have no basis in reality. 

Cortisol to their credit is actually a stress hormone, so they did get that right.  Some people have a higher tendency toward greater ab fat than other areas.  It definitely does happen.  So measure your abdominal area to find out.  It should be a 35 inch waistline or less ideally speaking.  Don’t do crunches to burn it.  They build muscle, but they don’t burn fat.  Just participate in more cardio workouts and the fat will come off in every area, including the abs to get rid of fat in general and reveal muscles and otherwise in general for the look you actually want.  This will give you the ultimate results that you can really like.