Health Image

Following my last post here at Health Image which was all about healthy ways to beauty, I think it would be remiss of me not to include some timely weight loss tips as part of keeping up a fit and healthy body.

Well, this is where I stand on the whole idea of the many weight loss programs and procedures that are around. Most of them simply don’t work. Why is that? Well, its not so much they are useless, far from it. The majority of these types of procedures are actually perfect for losing weight – as long as the person doing them adheres to their regime. That’s where most of these weight loss programs fall down.

Most weight loss programs are designed for people who can stay the distance and keep with them indefinitely. Then they work just fine. Problem is, most people simply do not stick to them.

So how can you lose weight without having to stick with a horrible diet or nasty exercise regime that takes it all out of you and leaves you seriously wanting? Well, one school of thought says you can’t (great). But a better one says you can lose weight enough to achieve your ideal weight (I’ll come back to that in a minute). The main train of thought here is that you make better use of your mind to overcome many of the ingrained fears and prejudices you may have collected throughout your life about your weight and body shape. It also promotes using your mind to get into a positive frame of thought, thereby giving you added impetus to do the things you need to do in order to achieve that weight loss.

But a lot of it boils down to how you perceive your own body and what your ideal weight really is.

Your ideal weight is individual to you. No glossy magazine or fancy weight to height ratio calculation is going to be accurate when it comes down to your own personal ideal weight. That ideal weight will not be the same for other people, because let’s face it, we’re all different! Your ideal weight is therefore the weight that ideal for you!

Once you can assimilate that idea into your way of thinking, you’re already halfway there!

The rest is made a lot easier then, when you’re not striving to achieve the unachievable. It may be that while a magazine has told you that you need to lose 20 pounds (9 kilos), the truth is that to attain your ideal weight and body shape, you only need to lose 10 pounds (4.5 kilos). Or whatever is right for you.

Also, when it comes to losing weight, its no good just dieting alone. This will not work in the long term and will do you more harm than good. You need to exercise as well as eat properly as the two go hand in hand. In the next article, I’ll tell you why it is necessary to exercise as well as eat properly and how it can all be done without a great deal of sacrifice or tough workouts! In the meantime, you can have a look at our specialised page that is dedicated just to weight loss tips. This is a page that has only just started happening but it will soon grow into a highly valuable resource for anyone looking for some great and easy ways to lose weight!

See you soon…

5 Comments »

Following the last post here at Health Image, in which I continued the theme on using exercise to improve your overall health and fitness levels, I’m going to move into a slightly different facet to a person’s health and look at the beauty side of health. That’s right, I’m actually going to change tack to have a look atone of the healthy ways to beauty tips that you can employ to take advantage of that better looking body!

This is going to cover some very simple healthy ways to beauty here and none of them involve any products that you buy in the stores or online. Nope, not a bit of it. Its all natural, in fact, so anyone can do it!

The first of our healthy ways to beauty that absolutely everyone can use is getting sufficient sleep! That’s right, they don’t call it beauty sleep for nothing.

Getting sufficient sleep every night works wonders for your skin’s complexion and reduces your chances of getting wrinkles sooner than you ought! When you’re young, it’s considered normal to burn the candle at both ends and stay up late at night and then get up late next day, but that is the way you’ll end up looking ten years older than you would when you get to middle age.

Sure, no one listens when they’re in their twenties because they think they know it all and why should they care about healthy ways to beauty and what they’ll look like in twenty years time? That’s a lifetime away so who cares, right?

Wrong.

You’ll get to your forties and seriously regret all those late nights you spent squandering your future good looks in your younger years. You’ll look in the mirror and see an old person staring back at you with a face full of lines and deep dark bags under your eyes if you don’t believe me.

None of that needs to happen, by the way. By taking some simple healthy options, like getting to bed earlier at least during the week and if you have to stay up late, just do it at the weekends.

The old saying, “early to bed and early to rise make a man healthy, wealthy and wise” has many elements of truth to it.

Our body clocks are set to the rising and setting of the sun, so it’s natural for us to be tired and want to sleep once the sun has set and then get a good eight hours sleep and wake up feeling refreshed at dawn. There is s more scientific fact that we get the best sleep before midnight – in fact it’s been proven that one hour’s sleep before midnight is as beneficial two hours sleep after midnight. It’s all to do with the sun, the tides and the rotation of the earth.

So by staying up after midnight every night your whole life will age you quicker than if you’d gotten a couple hours sleep in before midnight at least a few times a week.

And don’t forget, I’m talking about solar time here, not necessarily the time on your watch. If your country has daylight saving, then you are an hour ahead of the sun, so you can still go to bed at eleven pm and get two hours of pre-midnight sleep!

Here in Spain, in the province of Malaga our clocks are one hour ahead of GMT even though on the earth’s timeline we are actually a few minutes behind thanks to being only 4º west of Greenwich. So that means in summer when we have daylight saving, our clocks are almost two hours ahead of the sun, so solar noon actually occurs at just before two o’clock pm, and of course solar midnight is just before two o’clock am.

So when it comes to healthy ways to beauty, every little helps, right?

4 Comments »

Lets get straight on with the follow-up from the last article here at Health Image and continue talking about healthy exercise in this second part as we carry on with some more great fitness ideas to get your body moving and those fat cells burned off!

We’ll assume you found some Tai Chi classes and have given that a go and we’ll also assume you surprised yourself by actually enjoying it! If not, then at least you’re keeping up with the daily walks and getting your limbs moving. If that’s the case, then you’ll need to start thinking about doing some more light exercise to start burning off the excess fat.

There’s nothing like aerobic type exercises for fat-busting, so either join an aerobics class for beginners, or you can set yourself up some simple aerobic exercises you can do at home.

The main thing to be aware of is that you should always start slow and build up little by little. One of the best forms of simple aerobic exercise is running up and down stairs. Now this is something you can do at home and not look like a jerk, right?

Simply start at the bottom of your home’s staircase (assuming you have one, of course) and then run up to the top. If that gets you out of breath, then stop and rest until you have your breath back, then turn around and run down again. Not too fast, just at a doable pace that is comfortable for you. If you can handle repeating that, then do it. If you feel all wobbly legged and fatigued, then rest and don’t try it again until tomorrow.

If you still have some energy and want to do something else, then take a fairly heavy chair in your sitting room and push it a few feet in one direction and then push it back again. That will force muscles in both your arms, legs and torso to fire up and do some strenuous work in short, manageable bursts. Only do that as many times as you’re comfortable with, then take a rest.

That’s it for starters.

By the way, one important thing you must remember to do whenever you exercise and get out of breath is to relax afterwards and drink some water. Any strenuous exercise will begin to dehydrate you as you sweat, so you MUST replace it with straight water – NOT fizzy soda or coke or anything like that – not even those sugary isotonic sports drinks – it has to be pure still water.

The reason for that is a whole article on its own! I’ll cover that soon.

2 Comments »

Here at Health Image I’m going to follow up from my last article where I looked at how eating the right foods is of huge importance to getting and remaining healthy. In this article I’ll look at the benefits of healthy exercise as a means of not only getting healthy but also aiding any weight loss program you might either be on or may be thinking about.

To enjoy a healthy lifestyle then we need to look at some healthy fitness tips to get you into good condition, especially if you’ve been neglecting yourself a little!

You have to start somewhere, so start slow and gradually build yourself up over a period of time, because if you try to go too fast too soon, you’ll end up doing more harm than good.

So start your daily exercise routine by getting out of bed and stretching! If you don’t already do that – and many of us don’t – then spend a minute or two just stretching your arms into the air taking a few deep breaths and stretch!

That kick-starts your cardiovascular system and loosens up your muscles after the inactivity of your nights sleep. Then once you’re dressed and ready, instead of heading for the sofa with the TV remote and a box of chocolates or whatever, go outside and walk somewhere.

Doesn’t matter where you go, just walk around the block or if there is a park nearby take a walk around that. It doesn’t have to be for a long time either, just whatever you are comfortable with in order to get yourself moving.

That’s it for starters.

Do that every day and you’ll start feeling better already. Your walks will begin to get a little longer each day and you’ll find your step picking up as you get used to it.

Well, I never said I was going to be a slave driver! The whole way to fitness is to take it slow and steady and build up to the harder stuff as your body gets ready for it.

So lets move on a little and assume you’ve been at this for a little while now.

Now that you’re walking out more and your muscles are beginning to tone up through this light form of exercise, you can begin to compound the effect by deliberately walking faster, so that the initial stroll becomes a more determined walk.

Let’s face it, for someone for whom regular exercise doesn’t hold any excitement, the thought of doing regular gym-like repetitions of things is simply something for other people to do. So what can you do to tone your muscles up that doesn’t involve throwing weights around or doing those horrible sit-ups?

Well more sedate options are available and one of the best and most relaxing forms of exercise is Tai Chi. This oriental form of exercise involves little more than slowly moving through a series of body movements that has the double effect of toning your muscles, improving your balance and relaxing you all at the same time.

If you check out the local Yellow Pages or your local sports centre, you’ll most likely find some Tai Chi classes locally that you can attend as little or as often as you like. Give it a try – it beats pumping iron in a gym – unless you want to do that of course!

That’s it for this instalment. I’ll continue in a similar vein in the next post.

1 Comment »