Inner Circle Women

Archive for June, 2011

Your abdomen (or ‘abs’) is important to you. It is a big muscle that contains your stomach, liver and intestines, your kidneys and bladder, and your reproductive organs, and helps to protect them all. Keeping it in good shape can help you to look toned (it’s a good way to get a six-pack, in other words), and also to feel better in yourself.

Luckily, ab exercises are easy to do. The most popular is probably the ab crunch, which is when you lie flat on the floor, bend your legs and then touch your knees with your elbows. You can also try the simpler sit-up, which is the same thing, only putting your head between your knees each time instead. Which one you find easier will depend on your body – but it’s probably better for you if you practice whichever one you find the most difficult! This way you will tone-up your less-used muscles instead of focusing on ones that are already just fine.

You can also get various machines and gadgets that will help you in your ab exercises – the number is increasing every day, in fact. Some of these are good, while others are just expensive rubbish. As a rule, don’t buy anything that you haven’t tried out for yourself – which means that you can’t get that special deal from the shopping channel, unfortunately. Go to a shop and insist that you need to try out a few different ones before you make your decision, and if they refuse, just leave.

One last thing: it is important to realise that ab exercises are no good at all for losing weight. What you are doing is building muscle, not so much burning fat – although some fat is burned, the effect is negligible, and ab exercises certainly have no special effect on an overweight stomach.

There are few subjects in the world that have had more written about them than how to lose weight. Sad, but true. People are simply obsessed with their weight, and are willing to try any ridiculous fad if it promises to help them shed those pounds and lose those unsightly inches.

At the moment, the fashion is for restricted-carbohydrate diets, like Atkins, the South Beach Diet and the GI Diet. These diets make foods like pasta and rice out to be the root of all evil, instead encouraging you to eat high-fat, high-protein foods like meat and dairy products. While this approach does result in weight loss for many people, its long-term health effects are, at best, unknown, with most nutritionists agreeing that such a diet would most probably be harmful if it was kept to for a long time.

In the end, the reason that people go so far to find ways of losing weight is that the one method that works is so difficult. You simply have to eat less food, and find time to exercise. Unfortunately for us, our bodies are ‘addicted’ to food, and will do everything they can to manipulate us into eating more, not less – it’s like trying to give up smoking, only there’s no such thing as a food patch. More traditional weight-loss plans like diet clubs and slimming milkshakes can be effective at beating these urges, but only if you stick to them strictly.

One of the best non-fad ways to lose weight is to take up a sport as a hobby. Whether it’s running, football, tennis or whatever doesn’t matter, as long as it gets you physically active regularly. Active people can eat huge amounts and still not get fat, as they are using all the energy every day – and it only takes a surprisingly small amount of extra exercise to tip you from putting on a tiny amount of weight each day to losing a tiny amount of weight each day. Remember, the little things all add up over time.