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If your goal is to thin your waistline and have a nice flat stomach, the first thing you need to do is decrease / eliminate the layers of fat that are on top of your abs. The most effective way of flattening your stomach is a combination of strength training (with a extra focus on mid-section), cardiovascular exercise (short, hard workouts), and stable blood sugar (keeps you from adding additional fat and makes it easier for the body to use body fat for fuel).
1. You must do some form of progressive strength training
The primary function of the ab muscle is to flex your torso forward. However, there are also muscles that flex your torso to the side and muscles that rotate your torso. Often times you see people on their ab roller every day doing hundreds of crunches or sit-ups.If you want to effectively strengthen your stomach you need to incorporate the following types of exercises:1-2 forward flexion exercises (crunch, sit-up, etc.)1-2 side flexion exercises (side bends, side crunches, etc.)1-2 rotational exercises (trunk rotations, standing twists, etc.)The abs, are muscles just like any other and should be worked at most 3 times per week.
* You also want to make sure you are training them progressively, working them harder each time.
2. Use short, hard cardio workouts to increase metabolism
Cardio workouts are important because they CAN, if done correctly, increase your metabolism for 4-24 hours or more! This means you are less likely to store any excess calories as body fat because they are more likely to be used by your elevated metabolism. Plus, you are more likely to burn off some excess body fat.Below is a sample interval workout that can be done with just about any activity (walking, bicycling, swimming, stair climbing, etc.).Warm up at easy pace 2-5 minutes then:
* perform 30 seconds of hard work (almost as hard as possible)
* perform 1 minute of moderate work (recovery time-catch breath)
* repeat this process 6-10 times ¿ Cool down at an easy pace for 2-5 minutes
3. Stable blood sugar is the key
And most importantly, you must stabilize your blood sugar! This is by far the most important factor when it comes to burning away that excess body fat and keeping it off! To effectively stabilize your blood sugar you must feed your body frequently; like every 2-3 hours. The key is to give your body only what it needs at that time. Your body burns calories 24 hours a day, so, why would you only feed it once or twice a day? Give your body the fuel it needs: vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries, whole grains, and lean proteins (chicken, fish, lean beef, eggs, etc.).
Many people are too hung up on how much fat is in food, or how healthy of a choice it is. Calories are calories and it doesn't matter where they come from. If there's extra. where's it going? Yup, you guessed it, body fat!
This is not to say that what you eat is not important because it is, it just doesn't have that much of an affect when it comes to fat loss. Try to make healthy choices whenever possible, but don't feel like if you eat a cheeseburger it is guaranteed to be stored as fat.
4. Get the help of a professional
Unfortunately, most people don't know enough about the human body, nutrition, or effective exercise to meet their health and fitness goals. Ask yourself this one question, "Am I happy with my current progress or condition?" If you're not, you should consider getting the help of a qualified personal fitness professional. Don't depend on the information you get from magazines or from your local gym/ health club. A qualified fitness professional can help you achieve your health and fitness goals, and in less time than you would imagine. If you are serious about your health and fitness goals, and you are ready for that flat stomach, I recommend you start implementing the 4 strategies listed in this article. These 4 strategies can help you take control of your metabolism and burn off that excess body fat and having you looking and feeling great!
See: http://menshealth.about.com/cs/fitness/a/flat_stomach_2.htm
Six Things Not To Do!SIT UPS:
Sit ups, especially when your feet are anchored and you do the exercise rapidly, heavily recruit the hip flexor muscles, making sit ups mediocre at best, and dangerous at worst. The pull on the lumbar spine can aggravate an existing back injury or even create a new one.
AB ROLLERS:
These gizmos are pitched as a safe way to “protect your neck” and improve your form. The irony is that supporting your neck and head ultimately causes the opposite - your neck muscles never get used, so you get weaker and more prone to a painful and debilitating cervical injury.
INFOMERCIAL ABDOMINAL MACHINES:
Every time a new ab contraption comes out, I get bombarded with emails… “This one looks different… What about this one David?” Just Fuggetaboudit! No ab machine has EVER been proven more effective than exercises you can perform with your own body. Ab machines simply do not work your muscles in a functional manner and they do NOTHING to remove fat from your stomach (THAT is achieved through diet and a small dose of cardio).
ENDLESS REPETITIONS OF FLOOR CRUNCHES:
The crunch is a decent, but totally overused exercise. If crunches are your primary exercise, you’re settling for mediocre results. Excessive floor crunching can shorten your abdominal wall, pull your head forward and encourage poor posture. Unless you like the hunchbacked Neanderthal look, you must integrate crunches into a more complete abdominal program.STARVATION DIETS:
Forget about starvation and crash diets… Flat abs come from proper nutrition as a lifestyle. And remember, nutrition goes hand in hand with exercise like two wheels on a bicycle. If one wheel is flat, the other wheel won’t take you anywhere. Although FIRM AND FLATTEN YOUR ABS is not a “Diet” it will teach you how to combine exercise with nutrition to get the waistline you’ve only dreamed of before.FAT BURNING PILLS:
How much money have you flushed down the toilet on these “miracles in a bottle?’ If you’re like most people, your tab is well into the hundreds or thousands of dollars. The entire concept of taking pills to “burn fat” is misguided because pills only treat symptoms – they don’t remove causes. Without lifestyle changes, even the most powerful fat loss drug on the planet can’t help you in the long run…Eventually, you’ll always gain back what you lost, plus interest.
Ornish Lifestyle Program
The Programs from Web Md. http://www.webmd.com/content/pages/9/3068_9408.htm
What It Is
Unlike other diet books that make big promises, Eat More, Weigh Less, by Dean Ornish, MD, soft-pedals the health claims for this diet for the masses, adapted from his regimen to reverse heart disease. Ornish is well known in the medical community because of his success in reversing blockages to the heart, once thought impossible without surgery or drugs. Ornish also runs his own health and diet site here at WebMD which can give you additional details about his plan.
Unlike other books that are full of scientific-sounding theories and explanations without clinical studies to back them up, Ornish's explanations are simple and well supported. His main point is that eating a high-fiber, low-fat vegetarian diet will not only help you stay healthy, or get you there, but also will help you lose weight.
This is accomplished, according to Ornish, by a combination of diet and exercise that allows the body's fat-burning mechanism to work most effectively.
What You Can Eat
Ornish counsels that we will find success not by restricting calories, but by watching the ones we eat. He breaks this down into foods that should be eaten all of the time, some of the time, and none of the time.
The following can be eaten whenever you are hungry, until you are full:
These should be eaten in moderation:
These should be avoided:
That's it. If you stick to this plan, you will meet Ornish's recommendation of less than 10% of your calories from fat, without the need to count fat grams or calories. Ornish suggests eating a lot of little meals because this diet makes you feel hungry more often. You will feel full faster, and you'll eat more food without increasing the number of calories.
Ornish's regimen is more than mere diet, he claims. He is a stickler about incorporating at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day, or an hour three times a week, and using some kind of stress-management technique, which might include meditation, massage, psychotherapy, or yoga.
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How It Works
Ornish suggests that our metabolism was set back in Fred Flintstone's era, when we didn't know where our next meal was coming from and there were times when little food was available. The body naturally wanted to hang onto all the energy it could and would try to store any extra energy as fat. Nowadays, most of us have almost continuous access to food, but our bodies haven't adapted to this new way of living.
Because the rate at which you are burning calories can decrease when you consume fewer calories, you may hit a plateau soon after you began a new, lower-calorie diet. For most of us, the pounds seem to melt away for a delightful week or two, but then that scale doesn't budge. Our weight stays the same, sometimes for a week, sometimes much longer.
But Ornish argues that with this eat-all-you-want, eat-as-often-as-you-are-hungry routine, your metabolism stays the same, or better yet, even increases. The high-fiber content also slows down the absorption of food into the digestive system, so you feel full longer with small portions than you would eating calorie-restricted small portions. The complex carbohydrates don't cause your blood sugar, the level of glucose in the blood, to yo-yo. It remains more stable, and so do you.
Ornish gives more than a passing nod to physical activity, encouraging long, slow exercise that uses body fat as fuel. Moderate exercise done on a regular basis revs up your resting metabolism, while some have suggested that short periods of intense exercise decrease metabolism.
Although he doesn't claim that meditation will make the pounds dissolve, his regimen incorporates it as a way of quieting your mind, increasing self-awareness, and coping with stress. He calls it food for the soul. "When your soul is fed, you have less need to overeat," he writes in Eat More, Weigh Less. "When you directly experience the fullness of life, then you have less need to fill the void with food."
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What the Experts Say
Mostly, Ornish gets kudos from the medical community for his highly restricted diet and healthy lifestyle routine. His documented studies showing a reversal of coronary blockage are indeed impressive. Neal Barnard, MD, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says: "His diet is one of the only popular diet plans that is firmly rooted in science. It not only brings weight loss without counting calories, but it also brings good overall health. It reverses heart disease, cuts the risk of cancer, makes diabetes and hypertension more manageable, and sometimes even makes them go away."
The drawback is that the plan requires learning completely new eating habits, which many consider drastic. Barnard, the author of Food for Life and several other books on health, adds, "But after the first week or two, the plan becomes self-rewarding, because the weight loss is virtually automatic. People have better energy and they just want to stick to it."
On the other hand, Robert H. Eckel, MD, chair of the nutrition committee of the American Heart Association and a professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, is doubtful. He suggests that only the most committed will stick to Ornish's routine: "Because it is so rigid and doesn't allow a lot of food choices for those used to the Western diet, not many people will stay on it for the long term. Many people get tired of eating food with such a low fat content."
Frank Hu, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the Harvard School of Public Health, is critical of how severely fat is limited on the diet. "The data from numerous studies show that it is the type of fat, rather than the total amount, which is related to cardiovascular health," he says. "Polyunsaturated and monounsaturated oils actually protect against cardiovascular incidents, but Ornish doesn't distinguish the good fats from the bad fats -- such as trans fats, which come from margarine sticks and cookies and crackers, and animal fats." For example, Hu says, Ornish advocates limiting the consumption of fish and nuts, and Hu adds, "There is strong evidence that the fat in them is protective against coronary heart disease in both epidemiological studies and clinical trials."
Food for Thought
Vegetarians, or those willing to become so for the long term, may be the only dieters who will find success with this plan. The recommendation to eat smaller, more frequent meals requires that dieters change their eating schedules, which could be difficult for some. Other than that, this plan has what it takes to lose weight and keep it off, and receives high marks from nutrition experts.
The mind has been dealing with parallel universes for some time. Early man in many parts of the world believed in a dream world that was just as real as the conscious world. Many wonderful things happen there, especially for those who realized how to live in it.
Most of our stories and beliefs come from the world of the imagination, except revelation which discernment and the virtues allow us to come to understand better. Our myths of creation, and how to live the good life come from our understanding of all the realities.
Ed Witten's M-theory says that there are eleven dimensions. The eleventh resolves the other five string theories and also gives us the parallel universes and another spacial dimension that can be called a membrane, which can be as small as a vibrating string of as big as the universe. Perhaps there were a couple membranes as large as the universe that came close to each other that caused a big bang?
Maybe there are dense particles that can prove a supersymmetry to M- theory and that we will soon discover these "sparticles" with the atom smashers?
For more information see Nova "The Elegant Universe" Part Three: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3014_elegant.html
CERN Courier: Supersymmetry physics etc.. http://www.cerncourier.com/main/article/40/10/19
Alternative Health is not the same as Alternative Medicine
Resources: http://www.zhealthinfo.com/
Vitamin Coach: http://www.drmartingallagher.com/main.html
Pain Release Clinic: http://www.painreleaseclinic.com/
Alternatives: http://www.pitt.edu/~cbw/altm.html
The computer has many uses. It can help you with your work, your play and every part of your life. Holistics is a way of getting the most out of life and sharing it with others. When we learn how to better improve ourselve, we become better and are better able to help others make a better world.
There are many ways we can improve. It is probably easiest to start with our body. Everyone can learn how to exercise and to eat properly. Physical fitness is the place to start, because without our health we would not feel well enough to improve our mind or our spirit. When we are healthy, our mind wants to learn and create something better and something new. Our soul wants to deal with the problems of good and evil and learn the truth about war and peace.
When all the many aspects of our life work together for the common good, new dimensions come into view. The transpersonal and the self-transcendent levels come alive with serendipitous events and synergistic results.
There are countless aspects of the human being. A person is not just a body, mind, soul, and spirit; because there are many more dimensions to life. We all need the world to survive, and we also need other human beings to exist. No one can live a life alone. Introversion leads to narcissistic perversions and extreme fanaticism. There is no power in nightmares and terrorists will never rule a free society.
When we learn how to get the most out of our computer, we are on the way that leads to wisdom, creativity, contentment, productivity, and cooperation with every other person in the world, and every other creature.
It is remarkable how much a holistic human being can accomplish in a day! It does not take much planning to enjoy every minute of it. The sun does not have to be shining to talk to someone on the other side of the world. No human being is detached from another more than six degrees of separation. No one is a stranger, if you learn how to communicate effectively. Those who are close minded to what is good, beautiful, or true will never be able to become fulfilled.
The more ways we use our computer, the better we will develop. The science of learning is built upon using all of our senses to become better students of life. A liberal arts educated citizen is one of the most precious resources our nation possesses, because that individual can fit in where ever he or she is needed. You do not need to endlessly hunt for a place to work, if you know how to create your own job. Everyone needs help to do something. All you need to know is what it is and how to lend them a hand.
It should not be hard to find a job or someone to love. It should not be difficult to be healthy, wealthy or wise. Life needs not to be lived in "quiet desperation," for it is fill with hope and promises for a bright future.
The World Wide Web is filled with overflowing generosity. Take a tour of any subject and you will soon proceed to advance knowledge and understanding. Yet, you need to have the strength of discernment to know who are the authorities of the subject matter and the strength to stay away from sites that are a danger to your transformation.
The Internet has many sites that offer public domain multimedia: books, movies, information content databases on every subject, and freeware software of every type. There are also many people that write shareware and many companies that offer demos of their software products that you can download from the net. The search engines will help you find them, and also help you learn what other have to say about them. They will tell you if is worth the effort to even try them out!
Computer Science can be learned on the Internet for free. Some of the better computer clubs have an extensive Information Technology library that is used by its members so well that it is kept current with the latest texts. Although the Internet completely changes just about every five years, if you know how to keep informed about the latest technologies, you will also learn how to understand them, and use them to improve yourself and help create a better world.