Fitness & Wellness

Losing weight takes more than just eating or drinking a magic formula. It takes adjusting your diet so it’s healthier and exercising regularly. However, there’s a new fad in weight loss called detox water. Some of my clients in Irvine, CA even use detox water recipes for weight loss. Does it work? The answer is yes and no. Detox water is water that’s been infused with fresh herbs, fruits and vegetables to add flavor and even a few extra nutrients. If you’re drinking it instead of a soft drink or even fruit juice, you’ll be cutting calories by drinking detox water and cutting sugar. So, yes, in that way it can be exceptional for aiding in weight loss.

Detox or any water can help you lose weight.

There are a number of studies that show that drinking water can indeed help you lose weight. One study showed that drinking cold water can raise your metabolism could rise about % for an hour. Another study shows that if you drink the recommended amount of water, you’d have better results for weight loss than if you didn’t. Drinking any type of water before a meal boosts weight loss, too. It fills you up, so you eat less, but doesn’t contain calories.

Water, including detox water offers other health benefits.

Constipation shouldn’t be a problem when you drink adequate water. Dehydration can cause constipation, so sipping on detox water frequently can help relieve it and cut out that bloating it can cause. You’ll also get a jumpstart on your mood and focus when you drink water. I call water my “quicker picker upper.” As much as I enjoy a cup of coffee, when I’m tired, I grab a bottle of cold water and immediately have more energy. It also can boost my concentration and help relieve some headaches. enough, increasing your water intake could improve your mood and give you more energy.

Here are some flavorful recipes I thoroughly enjoy.

It doesn’t take much to make detox water, which means I thoroughly enjoy making these recipes. You put the fruit, spice, herb or vegetable inside the carafe and then add water. After about an hour, the water will be infused with flavor. For weight loss, some people turn to the old favorite found in finer restaurants, lemon water. While there’s minimal lemon juice, even if you squeeze the lemon into it, it still adds a little more vitamin C to your system, plus all that great thirst quenching water. If you want to get fancy, add some mint to the mix. Apple slices, cinnamon and a touch of apple cider vinegar to a carafe of water can also fill you up while infusing a few extra healthy nutrients without extra calories.

• Consider how elegant you’ll feel when you pour yourself a tall glass of water that’s been infused with sliced strawberries, blueberries and a few slices of lemon. You’ll be amazed at how it quenches both your thirst and appeases your appetite.
• While I tend to focus on the fruit-flavored detox water recipes, don’t forget those with vegetables. Cucumber infused water is also good for weight loss. In fact, some people even mix it with lemon.
• Just because there’s no direct evidence that drinking specially infused water will help you lose weight, it doesn’t mean that it can’t make weight loss easier. That little bit of flavor can help you drink more water and the more often you drink the recommended 8 eight ounce glasses, the better you are.
• Detox water, water infused with flavor from herbs, fruits, vegetables and spices, isn’t new. Think tea, especially herbal tea.

For more information, contact us today at Next Level Fitness

You probably notice when you don’t brush your teeth in the morning before you leave for work. In fact, if you forgot, you may even stop at a store to buy a toothbrush and toothpaste to brush when you get there. That’s because it’s become a habit to brush before you leave and if occasionally you forget you simply don’t feel right. You can follow a quick morning routine to help you get into shape, lose weight and stay fit. Don’t try to do everything at once.

Start your day with a big glass of water.

If you want to ensure you drink at least eight glasses of water a day, start early and spread them throughout the day. You’ll get your system percolating when you drink a glass or two every morning. Cold water can actually burn extra calories. One study involving women who were overweight found that when one group increased their water intake by about one liter, they lost over four pounds in a year, without doing anything else. Can you imagine how that could boost your results if you’re eating healthy and working out?

Eat plenty of protein for breakfast.

Eating your Wheaties or some other cereal may be what you’re used to doing, but you won’t get very far on those nutrients. Most are just carbohydrates that you burn quickly. Instead, make protein a big part of your morning. It can actually fill you up longer and keep you feeling satisfied enough to avoid snacking in the morning and afternoon even if you eat a light lunch. Studies show that a high-protein breakfast can help you lose weight and avoid weight gain.

Workout in the morning.

Maybe you don’t have time for a full workout, but just doing a few exercises can help. For those that workout in the morning, they find it’s an easy way to get into the workout habit and the activities, emergencies and business of the day doesn’t get them sidetracked. It can get your blood circulating and boost your energy getting your ready for the stress of the day.

• Take a minute of gratitude and mindfulness. Take five minutes in the morning and first be thankful for all you have. Next just sit in quiet contemplation getting in touch with your senses. Mindfulness can help you lose weight by being more aware of what you’re eating. It’s one reason yoga helps.
• Pack a healthy lunch in the morning. If you’re just starting a program of healthy eating, why not make sure you make your lunch healthy, too. It can improve the nutritional value and reduce caloric intake.
• Go to bed a little earlier than you normally do. Not only can that extra sleep help keep your hunger hormones in line, it gives you more time to do a morning routine.
• If you’re not sure of the foods you need to prepare a healthy sack lunch, what food to include in your breakfast or just want a place to workout that provides guidance, we welcome you to try out, we welcome you to try our one week free trial.

Contact us today for more information:  nextlevelfitness.net

It’s hard enough to lose weight, but nearly impossible to prevent pounds from returning. Keeping pounds off is especially difficult if you dieted. Dieting doesn’t work because it always ends. At that point people go back to the eating habits that put on the weight in the first place. Rather than dieting to lose weight, people need to make lifestyle changes to not only take off pounds but keep them off permanently.

What are the lifestyle changes you need to make?

Healthy eating and regular exercise are two of the changes, but they are the two with the top priority for weight loss and weight loss maintenance. Eating healthy doesn’t mean you can never indulge in a gooey, sugary dessert. It means you can do it occasionally, but also using portion control. Eating healthy means eating more whole foods and fewer processed foods. Once you start, you’ll find that after a while, those gooey desserts don’t taste nearly as good as they once did.

A healthy lifestyle includes a program of regular exercise.

It doesn’t have to be a formal program. It can mean going to the gym or just walking more and becoming more active. It means taking a break from sitting every fifty minutes and spending five minutes moving around by walking or even doing a few jumping jacks. Even though it doesn’t mean you have to have a formal program, it must become part of your life. That means it must become a habit. Exercise helps boost the immune system and keeps you younger at a cellular level.

Eating the right foods not only tastes good and keeps weight off, it boosts your energy.

When you have the right types of food filled with nutrients, it keeps your blood sugar level. That means you’ll be less likely to snack. Cutting out sugar is a huge boost to maintaining level blood sugar and overall good health. Cutting out processed foods helps prevent additives like high fructose corn syrup—HFCS. Studies show that HFCS not only affects your blood sugar levels, it messes with your satiety and hunger hormones, reducing those that make you feel full and boosting the hunger hormones. Make it a habit to read labels and avoid foods containing it.

• Drink more water. Even though diet and exercise are habits that help you both lose and maintain weight, so does increasing your water intake. Often people eat, when they’re actually hungry, plus when taken with a meal makes you feel full sooner.
• Watching what you eat helps you lose and maintain weight loss. There are calories in those soft drinks and even diet drinks take their toll on your body by increasing visceral fat—belly fat.
• Exercise helps you build muscles and muscle tissue burns more calories than fat tissue does. The more you have, the higher your metabolism will be to help you keep weight off permanently.
• Your exercise program should be well balanced with exercises to boost endurance, balance, strength and flexibility. You need fitness in all these areas. Strength building will also help you lose weight faster.

People in Irvine, CA, who are the most successful at weight loss choose veggies to dominate their menu. One reason for that is their fiber to calorie ratio. They’re high in filling fiber compared to their relatively low calorie count. They also have more water compared to lower sugar. That means they fill you up before you’ve consumed enough calories to gain weight.

Some vegetables qualify more as a starch than a vegetable.

There are also some vegetables that are better for weight loss. Vegetables like legumes—chickpeas, lentils, peas, kidney, pinto, navy and black beans—potatoes and corn should be considered starchy food, rather than vegetables. Unlike foods considered vegetables, you can’t consume them as freely as you can the rest of the vegetable family. While all vegetables contain fiber, including starchy vegetables, and all vegetables contain nutrients, starchy vegetables are higher in calories, so you may limit the amount you eat if you want to lose weight.

Both fruit and vegetables should be part of your diet.

Vegetables and fruits should play a prominent role in your diet. Because of the higher sugar content in fruit, rather than eating 2 to 2 ½ cups as you would vegetables, you should limit your fruit intake to 1 ½ to 2 cups a day. Both fruits and vegetables are high in fiber, which can lower blood cholesterol. Consuming fruits and vegetables can lower your risk of some types of cancer and heart disease, reduce the potential for type 2 diabetes and both fruits and vegetables provide phytonutrients and chemicals that help keep you younger and delay illness.

Fill up on veggies, but don’t forget fats and protein foods.

Choosing to put more veggies on your plate and eating those first will certainly help you live healthier and be healthier, but you also need protein and fat. Whether you’re a vegetarian or an omni Varian, you still need the building blocks to create a healthy body. Lean chicken, beans, eggs, cottage cheese and seafood are a few sources of protein. Healthy fat comes from avocados, cheese, fatty fish and nuts, just to name a few sources. Some of the protein sources and fat sources overlap other categories, including vegetables.

• Eating more vegetables means getting more fiber. Fiber not only helps keep you regular, it also helps you eat less, live longer, keep blood sugar regulated and lower cholesterol.
• Women of childbearing ages should definitely eat more fruits and vegetables to benefit from the folic acid they contain. Folate helps prevent birth defects.
• Eating whole veggies and fruit, as opposed to taking a pill or consuming processed foods, provide a spectrum of nutrients that act in synergy to boost good health at the cellular level.
• Creating a colorful plate of fruits and vegetables can provide most of the nutrients the body needs, since each color represents different vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients.

No matter where you live, if you’re working out, you probably want to burn fat and build muscle tissue. Clients in Irvine, CA, who want to lose weight, often use a personal trainer to learn lean muscle workouts that help them do both. While doing any type of workout will help you lose weight, not all workouts will help you build muscles at the same time. Building muscle tissue is important. The more muscle tissue you have, the easier it is to keep weight from returning in the future. Muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance than muscle tissue does.

It all starts with a good strength building program.

Cardio workouts do burn calories, but those calories come from both fat and muscle tissue. It actually can reduce the amount of muscle tissue you have and lower your metabolism. Strength building exercises, like lifting weights also burns calories, but it builds muscle tissue at the same time. The effects of workout increase your metabolism for hours after the workout, too. What are the best lean muscle tissue building exercises? The best ones are the ones you do consistently. Do weight training two to three times a week. Don’t do strength training every day. Give yourself a day or two rest in between strength training sessions.

Strength training can include pumping iron, resistance bands, HIIT workouts, bodyweight exercises or even power yoga.

While pumping iron is often what people initially identify as strength training, lifting weights is just one way to build lean muscle mass. HIIT workouts can give you an aerobic workout, while you’re building muscle tissue, too. You can even vary it to include flexibility training. Bodyweight exercises are excellent for muscle building, particularly for those who can’t make it to the gym. Resistance bands are also an inexpensive, easy to store addition to anyone’s at home workout. They’re great if you travel frequently.

Strength training should include both isometric and isotonic exercises.

Isometric exercises include the plank or a glute bridge. Isotonic workouts are squats, crunches and pushups. In isotonic exercises the muscles change length, while in isometric exercises, they don’t change length as they work against a force, think plank where you hold the position. Alternate your workout based on how you feel. If your joints are feeling stiff and sore, choose the isometric workouts where you get into position and hold.

• Don’t worry about increasing weights, increasing reps works just as well. You can get results from either increasing weight and doing the same number of reps or increasing reps. Both methods provide the same results.
• When you do compound workouts, you’re burning more calories, while building lean muscle tissue for several muscle groups. Think squats, pushups and deadlift.
• If you can’t do the exercise yet, modify it until you’re stronger. If you haven’t worked out in a long time, some of the best workouts for lean muscle mass might be too difficult. Work your way up to them. Do modified, bent-knee pushups until you can do regular ones or step ups before box jumps.
• Improve your diet. Eating a healthy diet is important to build lean muscle mass. You need extra protein, but also all the nutrients necessary for building muscle tissue. That means plenty of vegetables and fruits.