Men: Change Your Environment to Lose Weight Easier

In a new study led by Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, it was proven that the best way to make sure you stick to your diet is by changing your environment. I’m not talking about going on a weight loss vacation. You still get to live in your home. So what is the difference?
Every day we get bombarded with lots of weight loss tips. These weight loss tips are usually telling you to change your eating behavior, which is tough, or to change the foods you eat, which is challenging also. Few weight loss tips tell you to do simple environmental changes around you that will help you stick to your diet.
Changing your habits is hard, eating only tasteless food isn’t appealing but eating your meals from a smaller plate is easy to do. And by eating form a smaller plate you are going to eat a whole lot less food. You can also make sure you don’t eat in front of the TV or computer, thus reducing the chance of overeating. You can also rearrange the way food is stashed around the house so you will be more inclined to eat healthier food. These are all environmental changes that will help you lose weight a lot easier.
The study proved that if a person was able to follow a weight loss tip for 20 days a month changes would start to appear. This ties in with the fact that if you want to create a new habit you have to consciously force yourself to do the new behavior for 21 days and you will get a new habit. Since environmental changes are so easy to do, dieters are more likely to stick with them for a longer period of time.
In light of the new study, a smart thing to do would be to start any weight loss plan by implementing all the environmental changes first. This will make it a lot easier for you to do the other changes required for faster weight loss and weight maintenance.


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Improve Your Mental Health by Doing 5 Minute Nature Exercises

A new study done Drs Jo Barton and Professor Jules Pretty from the University of Essex revealed the significant positive impact that 5 minutes of nature exercising can have on the human mind. It helps raise their self-esteem and change their mood.
After pooling the data from more than 1 study on the effects of exercising in nature, they discovered that you don’t have to do a whole lot of exercising to benefit. In fact 5 minutes is the sweet spot. Any more or any less and you get diminishing returns. This is great because anybody can take the time for a 5 minute walk through the park.
If you are more ambitious you don’t need to stick just with walking. You can do some gardening, fishing, boating, cycling, farming, horse riding, mountain climbing… Any physical activity done in the bosom of Mother Nature is good.
The study also revealed that the best places to do the exercises were those that contained water. The combination of green and blue seemed to have the best healthy effects on the human mind.
Doing some form of nature exercises is great if you want to lose weight. On one hand you get to exercise and burn some calories. On the other hand you get to boost your self-esteem. This will make it less likely that you will devour a full chocolate cake or a bucket of ice-cream because someone hurt your feelings. Having a good healthy self-esteem is very important to losing weight.
Many start losing weight because they want to boost their self-esteem. I say you should go the other way around. Get a rock solid self-esteem and then you will lose weight fast. Think about it, you keep all your valuable stuff in good safe places. If you raise your self-esteem you will want to lose weight and be very motivated to do so.


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Vitamin D Helps You Lose Weight (part of your Men Weight Loss Program)

It seems that vitamin D and weight loss are liked pretty tight according to a recent study done at the University of Minnesota by Dr. Shalamar Sibley. During the study 38 obese women and men were given the same each day. The only difference was that some of them were getting vitamin D supplements.
At the end of the study those that took the vitamin D supplements were lighter than those that didn’t. On average the volunteers that took vitamin D lost about half a pound more weight than those that didn’t.
The study revealed that by combining a low calorie diet with vitamin D supplements you can get a lot better weight loss results. In fact the more vitamin D you take the more you lose weight. There hasn’t been yet established a maximum admitted threshold but for every nanogram per milliliter increase in vitamin D precursor in the blood stream the volunteers lose an extra half a pound of fat.
Another study revealed that around 75%, even more of the population of the USA suffers from vitamin D deficiency. This might explain the rise in obesity levels all around the country. But we shouldn’t jump to conclusions because scientists haven’t yet established if the lack of vitamin D lead to obesity or if it is the other way around.
One thing is certain. Vitamin D deficiency is liked to more health problems than obesity and weight loss. Vitamin D deficiency is linked to various cancers, heart diseases and diabetes. All of them health problems that are aggravated by excess body fat.
Vitamin D, calcium and sunlight all work together and help your body regulate your blood sugar levels and assimilate the nutrients form food. More often than not the lack of calcium in the human body is linked to the lack of vitamin D. This forces your body to increase its production of synthase, a fatty acid responsible for the conversion of calories into fat. The more synthase you have flowing through your body the more likely is for your excess calories to be turned into fat deposits. A lack of calcium in the human body can lead to an increased production of synthase of 500%. This might explain the correlation between the lack of vitamin D and obesity.
According to the current guidelines the daily recommended dose of Vitamin D is of 400 to 600 UI. These guidelines are on the verge of being changed. To get any form of benefit from your vitamin D intake, some studies show that you must take a dose of vitamin D ranged between 4000 and 10000 UI. That way you have a chance to improve your health and avoid diseases.
For more information on vitamin D check out:
Vitamin D: the health benefits of vitamin DVitamin D Foods and the Health Benefits of Vitamin D

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Even for Men to Lose Wieght: The Importance of Managing the Emotions Behind Your Eating Sprees

It is very common for people to eat in a desperate need to fill an emotional void. Unfortunately that void cannot be filled regardless how much food you pour in it. All you manage to do is get fatter and fatter. Your emotions play an important role in driving your eating behavior towards healthy or not so healthy food.
Finding other ways of coping with your emotion instead of running to the fridge is a must if you want to achieve long-term weight loss and health. If you don’t get rid of your emotional demons or funnel them in a more productive way, you can’t expect to win against them using just your willpower. For a time you will be able to follow your weight loss plan but eventually you will crack under the pressure.
A new weight loss study funded by NIH and done by the researchers at Temple's Center for Obesity Research is trying to figure out the best way to help people to cope with their emotions and emotional eating.
Edie Goldbacher, one of the researchers said "The problem that we're trying to address is that the success rates for long-term weight loss are not as good as we would like them to be. Emotional eating may be one reason why people don't do as well in behavioral weight loss groups, because these groups don't address emotional eating or any of its contributing factors. " So it seems you have to put an end to your emotional eating if you want to be able to lose weight forever.
The participant from the first wave of the study succeed to lose weight in a relative short period of time. What is more interesting is that the participants that continued to use the techniques that help prevent emotional eating suffered the least weight fluctuations. Some just kept their new weight without a problem. The future of this study sounds promising already.
You should also check out:
How to Stop Emotional Eating: breaking free from emotional eatingEmotional eating: the relation between your mood and eating

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Mens Weight Loss Program: Cure Sleep Apnea by Losing Weight

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal demonstrated that losing weight can in fact cure sleep apnea. It isn’t a 100% cure. In fact only 20% of all the participants got rid of sleep apnea. What is really interesting is the fact that all the participants reported a lower incidence of sleep apnea after losing weight.
Sleep apnea is a condition in which your airways get blocked or collapsed while you sleep. This can even prove fatal. That is why most of the persons suffering of sleep apnea must use a continuous positive airway pressure or CPAP machine. That way they make sure their airway passages stay open while sleeping.
The recent study seems to prove that there is a better way to cure sleep apnea. Instead of using the CPAP machine just lose weight. According to the study the participants that benefited the most form losing weight were those that suffered the most sleep apnea episodes during their sleep.
What is really interesting to me is the fact that sleep apnea is almost an inexistent health problems in countries less developed. And what do we have that under developed don’t have? Well many things, and obesity is one of them. It can’t be pure coincidence the fact that the country with the biggest obesity problem on the face of the world also has the most frequent cases of sleep apnea.
Our modern high tech lifestyle is killing us slowly. Being fat comes with lots of health risks, from cardiovascular diseases , diabetes even cancer to sleep apnea it seems. All of them deadly. You have to lose weight and the only way to do it for the long haul is by changing your lifestyle.
Stop working at the desk so much, get more physically active and eat much more healthy food. Don’t just trust what you read on the label. In my opinion anything that has a label is not healthy food. Eat more fruits and vegetables. They don’t have labels and they are healthy. You might even lose some weight by doing so and get rid of sleep apnea.


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Tip for Men to Lose Weight: A Hectic Eating Schedule Makes You Fat and Diabetic

A recent study made by the researchers from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies proved that a hectic eating schedule can in fact make you gain weight and diabetic. The whole study started from the observations that shift workers, especially those that work at night, are more likely to suffer from metabolic syndrome.
The metabolic syndrome is a health problem that creates insulin resistance in people and pre-diabetic conditions. It also favors high cholesterol levels and gaining fat on the belly. A truly unpleasant health problem to have.
Researchers were intrigued to find out if by disrupting the circadian clock was the cause of the problem. The circadian clock is your internal clock that is set by light exposure. They were amazed to discover that the circadian clock had nothing to do with gaining weight if you were a night shift worker. The researchers also analyzed the possibility of constant snacking to stay awake as being responsible for gaining weight. This too was a dead end.
By doing research on mice, varying their eating schedule they were able to get to the root of the problem. What makes night shift workers gain weight and have an increased risk of diabetes isn’t working at night. What makes them gain weight is the fact that they have to work a day shift also. You see they don’t have a set eating schedule to which their body can get used. The study leader study's leader Satchidananda Panda, Ph.D. said the following "We believe that it is not shift work per se that wreaks havoc with the body's metabolism but changing shifts and weekends, when workers switch back to a regular day-night cycle,"
Your liver is your metabolic clearinghouse. It dictates how fast you burn calories or how much fat you store. Satchidananda Panda said "If feeding time determines the activity of a large number of genes completely independent of the circadian clock, when you eat and fast each day will have a huge impact on your metabolism".
By putting the mice on a strict schedule of feeding for a while the scientists were able to observe an increased activity on the part of the genes that control the enzymes that break down sugar after each meal. The mice were feed for 8 hours and were on a fast for 16 hours each day. During the 16 hour fasting period the researchers could measure an increased activity on the part of the genes that control the enzymes that break down fat.
Here is what Dr Panda said: "The liver oscillator in particular helps the organism to adapt to a daily pattern of food availability by temporally tuning the activity of thousands of genes regulating metabolism and physiology. This regulation is very important, since the absence of a robust circadian clock predisposes the organism to various metabolic dysfunctions and diseases."
The conclusion of the study is the more robust and set in stone eating schedule you have to more likely you are to lose weight and be healthy. You can try setting an interval of time in which you will eat and another in which you will fast. For example try eating only between 8 am and 8pm, and nothing after that. Dr Panda said he tried it and even lost some weight. In his words Dr Panda said "I even lost weight, although I eat whatever I want during the day". What more can you ask for? Just give it a try and write down in the comment below how it went.


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Obese Men Have A Low Testosterone Level

Studies show that . Diabetic men have even a lower testosterone level and it is pretty common for an obese man to suffer from diabetes too. The bad part about having a low testosterone level and being obese is that you get man boobs. No man wants man boobs.
In a Hypogonadism in Males study conducted at the University of Buffalo researchers were able to notice that 40% of all . In the case of diabetic obese men the percentage rose up to 50%.
According to the results there is an inversely proportional link between a man’s BMI and his testosterone level. The higher a man’s BMI is the lower its testosterone level is going to be.
Dr Sandeep Dhindsa said "The effect of diabetes on lowering testosterone levels was similar to that of a weight gain of approximately 20 pounds." So a man that is overweight and diabetic should start losing weight as soon as possible.
The testosterone level influences a man’s health in many diverse ways. From its sex drive to getting man boos, testosterone is at the heart of a man’s health. Some might say that testosterone is what makes men men. If are a man and you want to increase your testosterone level lose weight.


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