5 Things to Get Rid of for a Healthier Life

Health is our most important asset. It's only natural that we have to try to keep it and let go of the unhealthy habits. Some people might not notice that some of these habits are not supposed to be preserved. In this post, I will share some of the unhealthy habits that can really ruin our health.

image credit to workingwritersclubdotcom

1. Smoking
Smoking is the main cause for lung cancer and other kinds of diseases. The best thing you can do is by stop doing it. But still, one does not simple stop smoking, especially when they've became addicted to nicotine. However, the simplest thing you can do to reduce your smoking habit is exercising, until you're used to not smoking any more.

2. Drinking
Binge drinking is clearly ruining your health, as fun as it might be. This habit can cause alcohol poisoning, brain damage, and can also damage the cardiovascular system. To prevent those dangerous side effects, you can also substitute your white wine with red wine, considering red wine have some health merits with the right amount.

3. Eating Junk Food
Those food really live up to their name: they're junk food, literally. It contains loads of saturated fat, which can clog your artery, not to mention obesity. If you want to order these foods, choose places that provide healthier food, adding some salad to make it healthier. Try to not eat it too often.

4. Stress
Coping with stress is not an easy thing. As humans, we have many causes of stress that sometimes complicates things. The right thing to do is managing it. Pick the right way and strategy that can help you cope with your stress. Some people do their hobby, but workout can be really helpful. Doing simple exercises, yoga, pilates, or meditation can help a lot.

5. Lack of Exercise
Need I say more? Working out clearly increase your health. Cardio training can improve your cardiovascular system, while weight training can strengthen your body. The most common problem has always been with laziness. Doing some workout regularly and making it your routine can really solve this problem.

Let's face it, all five habits above are generally known as bad habits. I don't even think my explanation is really needed, right?

Watch Out, We Got a Fat Belly Over Here! (Part 2)

After the reading the previous article, you know what caused the fat belly. In this post, we will explore more about the health risk of having a fat belly.

- Cancer
Fat belly is associated with many risks of cancers, including endometrial (cancer in uterus layer), colon, gall bladder, prostate, kidney, and post-menopausal breast cancer. Women who gain weight more than 10 kg since they're 18 until they are middle-aged increased the risk of post-menopausal breast cancer twice than women with stable weight.

-  Fatty Liver
The main cause of fatty liver for non-alcoholic people is insulin resistance, a metabolic interference where the cells are not sensitive to the effects of insulin. One of the most common risk factors for insulin resistance is obesity, especially central obesity. Study shows there are close association from obesity and the degree of liver damage.

- Breathing Problem
Obstructive sleep apnea (breathing disruption whilst sleeping) generally occurs to overweight people. Obesity is related to the increase of asthma risks and severe bronchitis, and also obesity hypoventilation syndrome, and breathing insufficiency.

- Arthritis
Musculoskeletal disorders, including osteoarthritis, generally occurs to obesity patients, especially patients diagnosed with chronic obesity. Health research indicates that obesity is a strong predictor for osteoarthritis disorders, especially in the knee. The risk of osteoarthritis increase with every 1 kg of weight increase.

- Social and Psychological Impact of Obesity
Emotional impact might be one of the hurtful fact of being obese. Our society these days emphasize on physical appearance which is close to being thin (or skinny), especially on women. This will make overweight people feel like they are not attractive.

image credit to fat2abs.org

Preventing instead of Curing
After knowing the health risk of the accumulation of visceral fat in a fat belly, it's only natural if you want to prevent it before it risks your health. Therefore, if you still have a fat belly right now, or have no problem having a fat belly and still want to prevent it, start doing these steps regularly:

- Do 30 to 45 minutes of cardio 4 to 5 times a week
- Consider to start lifting some weight. Lifting some weight regularly will increase your muscle mass, and the more muscle you have more fat will be burn, lowering the risk of fat accumulation in your belly.
- Adjust your diet. It's better to not consume high fat and high calorie food to prevent the accumulation of new fat. Eat more veggies and fruits.

Therefore, if you want a six-packs abs, you have to get rid of all the fat in your belly. The abs muscle won't show up as long as there are some fat layering your belly. Aside from that, avoid central obesity earlier by working out regularly and eat healthier food to have optimal health quality.

Why You're Not Getting the Results from Your Workout

If you've been following my posts since the very beginning (and I hope you do), and yet still don't get the results, this is the post that will answer your question. Don't even think about supplements to get faster results  before you read this post first.

Before asking which supplements to use, we have to realize that there are many factors that involves in body-building efforts. Even stress can thin out your body. Here I will share few factors that you may have to reevaluate when you don't get the results from your workout or your training.

image credit to thelegalcommune.com

1. Rest
Have you have enough rest? How long do you sleep in a day? Of course, every person is different in terms of sleeping needs, but the standard sleeping time is 7 to 9 hours a day. When we sleep, our body produces growth hormones that can repair the broken cells. Besides the sleeps at night, you also have to pay attention to the resting time between each training. You won't build your chest muscles when you train it everyday. Give at least two or three days gap before you train it again in the next workout.

2. Train Hard for the Designated Muscles
Let's say you want to build your biceps, and you don't get the results. Reevaluate your training: was it "hard" enough? Some say that it was hard enough, but they do the same pattern with the same weight every time (and didn't do the overload principal). Add more weight over time because your muscles will get used to the same weight you're using every time, making your training pointless. It's like when we were in school in 1st to 6th grade, the lessons get harder everytime, right?

3. Variations
Use some variations in your training so that your muscles don't get bored. When you do the same training pattern every time, your body will adapt, and won't respond much to your training. Use different order when you train, different weights, different resting time between each set, and different sets to "surprise" your muscles and triggers them to adapt and develop.

4. Did you do cardio before your weight training?
What usually happens is people do cardio before their weight training. They thought that it was just a warm up. You do have to do a little cardio before you train for a warm up, but what people usually did is that they did it too hard, and sometimes, too long. You don't have to run in the treadmill for 30 minutes as a warm up. This will tire you in your weight training, and will significantly hamper your effort to build your body. Do your cardio after your weight training.

And that's the four basic things that you have to reevaluate when you reach a plateau (no progress) in your training. If you do them all right, then reevaluate your nutrition. Did you consume enough nutrition your body needs to build your body? It doesn't matter if you want to lose weight or want to gain some, your daily nutrition needs is important.

Wrong Confidences to Burn Fat

For some time, going to Gyms has become a new trend for teenagers and adults, men and women, in their effort to get a better, ideal body. Some want to gain weight, some want a toned body, and lots of them want to lose weight. However, too much information creates some "myths" about training and workout to burn fat.

Some of them are:
1. Going to gym, do the cardio for 30 to 45 minutes, then lift some weight.
First and foremost is to do cardio to burn fat, thus do it first while I got the energy, for 30 to 45 minutes. Get some rest, and lift some weight so I can get a "bonus" of a well-shaped body.

The above statements are 99% of what people think when they want to lose some weight. But the truth is, cardio in the beginning of the workout won't burn fat as much as we thought it should be. Think what you want, but that's just not what happens.

Fact is, cardio in the beginning of the workout burns our blood-sugar until it almost run out if we do it for 30 to 45 minutes. The weight-lifting afterwards only needs blood-sugar, thus make us feel limp and out of energy. If the weight-lifting needs sugar, but the sugar is used up on the cardio, what will happen? Our body will take the proteins as the "new sugar" for energy supply. Problem is, protein are taken from your muscle. Shaping your muscles by taking the protein from your muscles is like destroying your own body.

Lift some weight first, then do the cardio for an optimal fat-burn. You'll get hungry after the first 10-15 minutes of cardio. This is good, because it means your body is burning the fat as you do it.

2. Running in treadmill can burn fat.
If cardio can burn fat, then the harder we train then more fat will be burn. Fact is, running doesn't burn much fat. The faster we run, our body needs "fast energy", which is the blood sugar. The fat-burning process (which converts fat into energy) is a timely process, but running needs energy fast. Our body automatically ignores the fat and burn the blood-sugar instead. If we run out of blood-sugar, yet still runs, then our body will take more protein from the muscles for its energy.

To burn fat in treadmill, you only need to power-walk, with the target heart rate of 65%. Do it about 45 minutes everyday, and you'll lose some weight gradually.

3. The sweatier we get, more fat will be burn.
This myth are engraved in the minds of those who want to lose some weight. They think that workout can burn fat, and working out so hard can make them sweat more. This is why some people just do anything to get sweaty.

Well that's just ridiculous isn't it? If burning fat is that easy, then we can just lying around at a park in the middle of the afternoon when the sun is at its highest. I'm sure we'll get sweaty in 10 minutes or so, right?

Sweat are produced by the glands under our skin to keep our body temperature. It's not a standard fat-burning results, because when we workout in a really cold place, we don't sweat, and yet we will burn some fat. Working out until you get sweaty can be very satisfying, but don't make it a benchmark of how much you burn your fat.

4. Weight-lifting only trains the muscles and are not necessary to lose some weight.
You can ask the women around you who ignores their weight-lifting training when they want to lose some weight. Fact is, the fat-burning process actually occurs in our muscle cells. The more we train our muscles, it's faster to burn the fat. If you want to lose weight, either you're a man or a woman, it's better to get used to weight-lifting.

Fact is, to lift some weight our body needs the energy inside our muscle cells called the ATP. The ATP will run out when we train, thus we feel exhausted. After the training, when we're resting, our body will produce more ATP. This process uses fat as its fuel. Turns out, weight-lifting can burn more fat - not only when you train, but after the training too.

5. Sit-up can thin down the belly (I don't do much sit-up, that's why my belly is plumpy)
I heard people say things like doing sit-ups 100 times a day, but their belly is not getting thinner. Seriously, a sit-up is a training to train your abdominal muscles, and got no relations whatsoever to burn some fat in your belly. Muscles and fat are two different things, thus sit up won't burn the fat in that region. Imagine a fat person who manages to lose a lot of weight. You'll see that their plump cheeks get thinned down too. But that doesn't mean that he/she trains her cheeks, right?

6. Signing-up and coming to gym is burning my fat (I don't know I'm still fat)
When you pay attention to some friends who want to get thin, losing a few kg of fat in their body, the first thing they do is going to a gym, sign-up, and start working-out. Without a clear goal, they train their body by cycling or running in a treadmill, then walk around to try out the equipments. After 3 to 4 weeks, they won't feel any changes in their body. They insist that they've trained, burn some fat because they've "worked-out" in a fancy gym.

Well, yeah, they do workout (and it's better than just sleeping and lying around all day), but what they do is not enough. They don't try hard enough in lifting those weights. Some even say that they're old and not as strong as the youngsters. Whatever it is, there's always a reason that stands in the way of their effort to lift heavier weight, or training more intensely.

You have to decide on a goal. Three to fours weeks in a gym without any changes means what you do is wrong. Find an instructor, a personal trainer, anything to fix that. Try to make some effort to get the results! You can also check this post for some tips to start losing some weight.