How to Lose Pregnancy Weight

Ladies, this one’s for you: If you’ve recently had a baby, you’re probably filled with the joy that a new life brings. Also, you’re probably exhausted and tired of hearing about celebrity moms who seem to lose pregnancy weight at the drop of a hat.

What those celebrities don’t tell you is that they have doctors, nutritionists, personal trainers, private chefs, and – if all else fails – Photoshop experts to help them look their best after pregnancy. What’s a regular mom to do?

There are plenty of things any woman can do to lose pregnancy weight in a healthy and sustainable way. Here are some helpful tips to get you started:

Call for Back-up

Private time is a precious commodity for new moms. To lose pregnancy weight, you’ll need to make time in your busy schedule for grocery shopping and exercise. That’s where friends and family come in.

Don’t try to do everything by yourself. Hand off your grocery list to your spouse, or ask Grandma to watch the baby while you exercise. Many recreation centers and gyms offer babysitting services, even for infants, to give you privacy while you get fit. Use the resources available in your community.

Nourish Your Body

Now is not the time to fill up on junk food, as tempting as it may sound. Pregnancy is hard on the body, but you can speed up your recovery by eating several small, balanced meals per day. Your calories should come from lean protein, green vegetables, high-fiber fruits, dairy products, and whole grains.

If you are breastfeeding, you will require more calories than normal to keep you and the baby healthy. Also, remember to drink plenty of water. New moms could require 64 to 128 ounces a day, especially while nursing.

Get Moving

Sometimes it takes all of a new mom’s energy just to get out of bed. But cardio exercise is important for staying healthy, and it will also help you lose pregnancy weight faster. You don’t have to commit to a gym workout; you could work in the garden while the baby naps in a shady spot, or you could go for a long walk while pushing the baby in a stroller.

Whenever possible, get 30 minutes of cardio 5 times a week. You will notice that your energy level actually goes up, while the scale goes down! A little bit of yoga can also reduce your stress and your weight. Try doing stretches and poses after you wake up for a burst of energy, and do your breathing and meditative exercises before bed for more restful sleep.

Stay Energized

It’s hard when you have a newborn, but it is important to find the time to get an adequate amount of sleep each night. This can be done by enlisting help from others, or by catching naps throughout the day to keep your energy up. Try to sleep when the baby sleeps to maximize your periods of rest.

Sleep helps us function, mentally and physically. Just a small sleep deficit (one to two hours a night) can cause problems such as lack of focus, compromised immune system, and delayed healing ability.

Unfortunately, most people don’t sleep enough – and that’s especially true for new moms!

Take care of your loved ones by taking care of yourself. With a combination of nourishment, the right exercises, and plenty of rest, you’ll be on track to lose pregnancy weight fast.

How to Lose Leg Fat

Our legs carry us through our day, so it’s no wonder they tend to be quite muscular. But legs are also a problem area for many people because fat tends to accumulate there, particularly on the thighs.

If you’ve been wondering how to lose leg fat in a healthy way, you’re in luck! While there are no magic cures, there are plenty of proven strategies you can use to get slender, sexy legs.

Lose Leg Fat with Exercise

Our legs get a workout whenever we walk, but that’s not enough to burn away all the excess fat. To lose leg fat permanently, you’ll need to start a regular cardio routine and follow it up with some strength training.

Cardio exercise increases the heart rate and speeds up our fat-burning metabolism. Consult an online calculator to find your target heart rate for optimal fat burning, and choose an aerobic activity that keeps you in that zone for at least 20 minutes a day, 3 to 5 times a week.

Which exercise is the best? To target your legs, try swimming, cycling, jogging, or walking through sand or along the bottom of a swimming pool. If none of these options appeal to you, try sports or group exercise classes. The key is to find an activity you enjoy so that you will do it regularly without getting bored or feeling tortured.

It doesn’t hurt to start slowly, especially if you’re not accustomed to regular exercise. Choose a fun activity to do for 15 minutes a day, and work your way up to 30 minute sessions.

Strength training exercises can be done at a gym or at home. If you prefer the gym, use machines designed to give your legs a great workout. If you’d rather stay home, try squats, wall-sits, and lunges.

Lose Leg Fat through Diet

A highly thermogenic diet will help you lose leg fat faster. Thermogenic foods are thought to heat up the body’s core temperature, leading to a faster metabolism. While this idea has its share of skeptics, many swear by it. Some of the most thermogenic foods include tropical fruits, peppers, and green tea.

Fill in the rest of your diet with leafy green vegetables, low-fat dairy, whole eggs, lean meat, and whole grain products. Use sugar and salt sparingly, and opt for unsaturated fats instead of dangerous trans fats.

Lose Leg Fat by Losing Stress

Stress causes weight gain. When our bodies feel threatened (by stress, illness, or too-frequent dieting), they cling to their fat stores and start putting away more calories as fat. That’s because of a primal instinct for survival that helped our ancestors make it through times of famine.

Today, since few of us face the threat of famine, we simply accumulate fat. You can reduce your stress level and your body fat by doing yoga. Yoga relaxes the body and the mind, sending stress hormones packing.

For extra leg toning, look for poses that require you to balance on one foot, poses that require you to stand with bent knees, or floor poses that require you to hold your legs away from your body.

Note that you can’t lose leg fat without losing fat from the rest of your body. Take care of yourself by eating right and exercising, and your legs will shape up fast!

How to Lose Calories

Losing weight is very difficult for many of us, but it ultimately boils down to numbers: Eat fewer calories to lose more pounds. If we could figure out how to lose calories, the pounds would quickly follow.

It’s easy to reduce your calorie intake when you know how to do it right. You don’t have to feel deprived, and you don’t have to starve yourself. In fact, you can cut your calories easily and painlessly. These helpful tips will teach you how to lose calories – and weight – starting now.

Lose Calories with Healthy Substitutions

You don’t have to give up your favorite flavors, you just have to make healthier substitutions. Let’s say you’re having a craving for something rich and chocolaty. If you satisfy your craving by downing a pint of chocolate ice cream, you will have added several hundred calories to your daily intake.

But if you pick up a healthier alternative, like a sugar-free fudge pop or some reduced fat chocolate pudding, you will get the chocolate flavor you crave at a low caloric cost.

Other good substitutions include low-fat dairy products instead of whole milk products; lean cuts of meat instead of fattier cuts; air-popped popcorn or rice cakes instead of chips; trans-fat-free margarine instead of butter; and whole fruit instead of fruit juice.

Lose Calories by Eating More

Yes, you read that right! When you consider how to lose calories, eating more isn’t the first strategy that comes to mind. But studies have shown time and again that you can control your appetite by eating smaller, more frequent meals.

This approach reduces your calories in two ways. First, it keeps you from getting too hungry. Excess hunger is the number one reason why people stop dieting, and it is also a leading cause of binging. When you control your hunger, you can control your calorie intake.

Second, small meals keep your metabolism active. You will lose calories as your body burns through them faster. This is a near-effortless way to reduce the number of calories you eat, and burn the rest!

Lose Calories with Daily Tasks

Ever wondered how to lose calories while being productive? Many of us don’t have time to devote to long workouts, but you can burn off extra calories while you run errands and do chores.

Lawn work and gardening burn a surprising number of calories each hour. Depending on what you do and how much you weigh, you could burn up to 700 calories an hour just by working in your yard.

If you have kids or pets, take them to the park! An hour of swinging, sliding, and Frisbee catching will get rid of 300 calories or more.

When you run errands, use the stairs instead of the elevator. Park at the far end of the parking lot when you visit stores. These are small changes that add up to big rewards.

Lose Calories with Yoga

Yoga is a great exercise for beginners. It builds strength, increases flexibility, and helps prevent heart and metabolic diseases.

Yoga is also a fantastic stress reducer. It encourages our bodies to stop hanging on to excess calories in the form of fat. If you make yoga a part of your daily routine, you will notice physical and emotional benefits right away.

Start by doing 15 – 30 minutes of yoga each day. Search online to find a good yoga sequence for beginners. Don’t let the more advanced poses scare you off; even yoga masters had to start somewhere!

Now that you’ve learned how to lose calories without depriving yourself, it’s time to put these ideas into practice. Try to make one small change per week until you’ve grown accustomed to your new lifestyle. After a few weeks, losing calories will be a piece of (low-fat) cake!

How to Get Skinny Legs

Ladies, are your legs starting to look a little thick? Pudgy upper legs and ankles can make a woman’s legs look shorter, making the woman swear off skirts, shorts, and skinny jeans forever. But it doesn’t have to be that way! You can get skinny legs in just a few months by following a few simple rules.

Note: Men can also benefit from these techniques, but ladies tend to store more fat on their legs – which is totally unfair, but true. Just listen to women discuss the dreaded “cankles”, calves that don’t slim down when they reach the ankle. Men don’t typically get fat ankles unless they are significantly overweight, but cankles can happen to women who are within or just above their healthy weight range.

Here’s some advice for anyone of either gender who wants to get skinny legs:

Leg-Slimming Exercises

There are two steps to slimming down your legs. First, you must lose the extra body fat that’s padding them. Second, you must build lean muscle mass and tone your leg muscles.

There’s a proven formula for losing body fat: Get enough exercise to burn off more calories than you eat, and use toning and strengthening exercises to produce lean leg muscles.

The best slimming routine contains a combination of cardio exercise and strength training. Any cardio will do; pick something you like, and keep at it. If you want to get skinny legs fast, go heavy on exercises that target your legs. Ride a bicycle, tread water, or go jogging through sand or water. 

You could also hit the gym and use the treadmill, cross-trainer, or stair-climbing machines.

Try to do 20 to 30 minutes of your chosen exercise every day, with a couple of “break” days to give your body time to recuperate.

To get skinny legs at the gym, use leg machines to work your inner and outer thighs, calves, and hip flexors. At home, try some classic leg exercises like leg lifts, lunges, and wall sits. Start by doing 3 sets of 30 leg lifts with each leg. Side and front leg lifts work different areas of your legs and abdomen, but all are effective. For wall sits, start by holding the sitting position for 15 seconds at a time, and work your way up. Stop when your thighs feel trembly and have difficulty supporting you.

Foods for Skinny Legs

For weight loss, nutrition is just as important as exercise. Some foods, like those containing sugar and corn syrup, can make your body produce too much insulin. The insulin makes you hungry, so you eat more. It’s a disastrous cycle to be in.

Give your diet a makeover by trading out saturated fats for healthier, unsaturated ones that actually help your heart. You don’t have to give up carbs, but you do need to choose healthier ones. Eat complex carbs that come from dark green vegetables, fruits high in water and fiber, and bread and pastas made from whole grains.

And don’t skip the eggs! Recent studies have shown that whole eggs aren’t harmful to your cholesterol, and can actually help you lose weight. Get at least three servings of dairy each day, and swap your morning coffee for green tea. Calcium and green tea leaves are proven fat-busters.

With the right diet and exercise, you’ll get skinny legs by swimsuit season!

How to Get a Firm Belly

It seems that we place a lot of importance on taut, flat stomachs. Every day, advertisements promise to help us “Get a firm belly”, or “Get sculpted abs”. What they don’t tell us is that belly fat isn’t just unattractive, it’s hazardous to your health.

Numerous studies have found a link between belly flab and high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. Measure your waist to see if you have a dangerous level of abdominal fat. For optimal health, men should have a waist circumference below 40 inches. Women should have a waist circumference below 35 inches.

Here are some proven techniques to help you get a firm belly and reduce dangerous abdominal fat:

Move More, Eat Right

Exercise doesn’t have to be done at a gym. You can burn calories while you participate in activities that you consider fun or fulfilling. For example, gardening burns several hundred calories per hour. Team sports, like flag football, burn even more. Swimming is also a great fat-burner, and fun to boot. You could also do volunteer work, or just take long walks down nature trails.

Cardio exercise will kick your fat-burning metabolism into overdrive. All it requires is persistence; if you can find an activity you like, and stick with it, the pounds will melt away. It’s also important to vary your routine for maximum calorie burning, and to ward off boredom.

There are several exercises you can do to get a firm belly. The American Council on Exercise did a study to find out which exercises targeted the abs most effectively. Their findings? Supine bicycle, captain’s chair leg lifts, and vertical leg crunches work the abs harder than any other exercise. 

Twisting crunches and exercise ball crunches were other good ones. Try doing those exercises several times a week to get a firm belly and whittle your waistline. An Internet search will turn up detailed step-by-step tutorials for each exercise.

There are foods that can help you get a firm belly, too. Sugary carbs contribute to belly fat build-up, but foods high in protein and fiber are slenderizing. Look for a diet plan comprised mostly of complex carbs, lean protein sources, and unsaturated fats. South Beach is a classic example, and similar diets have come on the market in recent years.

Learn to Relax

Who would have thought that you could get a firm belly while you relax? It’s possible with the help of yoga. Yoga has a two-fold effect on our bellies. First, it reduces high stress levels that lead to weight gain. Stress-induced weight gain often results in excess belly fat. Reducing your stress level can give you a flatter stomach and lower your risk for many diseases.

Yoga also tones the stomach muscles. Look for a yoga routine that includes supine poses and other postures that work the abdominal muscles. Check out a yoga DVD from your local library, or look for free video tutorials online. You will be able to tell right away if a particular pose targets the stomach area. To get a firm belly faster, design your own routine using the most effective belly-busting poses.

As you can see, it takes a little effort to get a firm belly -- but the rewards are well worth it.