Monthly Archives: October 2012

“Out of sight, out of mind,” is the principle that forms the foundation of the need to stock up a fridge with healthy options. If you are embarking on a weight loss programme, barring Chinese food leftovers access to your fridge will help you avoid consuming the same. Ask your family members to cooperate with you in keeping tubs of ice-cream or desserts in lower sections of the fridge, or hidden from view behind a stack of health foods. The working of the mind is such that you reach out for whatever meets your sight first, and keeping undesired foods from view helps keep you salivating for them.

Stock up your fridge with fresh fruits, preferably sourced from farmers’ markets instead of supermarkets. Instead of piling fresh fruits and vegetables in the designated drawer at the bottom of the bridge, pack them into see-through air-tight boxes higher up in the fridge when they are readily visible as this will encourage your children choose healthy foods over cheese sticks during their hourly raids of the ridge.

Stock up your fridge with low fat yogurts to fortify your meals. Low fat yogurts are available in a variety of flavors thereby allowing you to enjoy variety even as you provide your body with essential bacteria and nutrients while keeping out the fat.

The cartons of drinks must be carefully selected. 100% fruit juices and skimmed milk are preferred over full cream milk or diluted fruit juices with little nutritional value. Clean out high caloric or high fat cheese sticks and replace them with low fat cheese. You can choose to use original butter when recipe requires it, but margarine and low fat butter substitutes must make up a better part of the stock in your fridge.

To keep eggs from rotting in a hurry, and to keep them for absorbing odors of their co-habitants, they must be kept in their trays and in lower shelves to keep them from losing moisture or carbon dioxide. This will keep the eggs healthy for use for a long time to come.

Almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, apricots and other nuts and seeds that have been reported to have high levels of essential nutrients must also be clearly visible in the fridge. They make for healthier alternative as snacks, replacing cheese crackers or cheese sticks, boosting the strength of your immune system.

In order to stock up your fridge in a healthy manner, you must learn to plan out your meals for an entire week. This helps you list out the ingredients that you need, apart from allowing you to trick yourself into healthy alternatives. For example, adding salad dressings to your shopping cart will encourage you to toss and experiments with freshly spun salads more frequently.

The most important part of socking up your fridge to make way for a healthier lifestyle is to pack lean meats into your fridge. Lean meats, tuna, chicken and turkey are all meats that make for healthy dietary preferences, and having them spread out before you in your fridge will encourage you to cook healthier meals.

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Hitting the gym is irrefutably among the most important changes one needs to make to balance out the sedentary lifestyles of today. However, sweating it out at a gym at the end of a strenuous day of work or compromising on an extra hour of sleep in the morning may come across as unpleasant ideas. Here are a couple of ways by which you can keep yourself motivated to stay with your gym schedule.

1. Set A Goal

Just as your professional efforts are directed by a deadline or an ambition, setting a goal for your physical fitness can help keep you on the track. Set a desired dress size for yourself, or measure improvement by the stamina to take a flight of stairs to the fifth floor without panting. Break down the bigger goal of being fit into smaller attainable goals to evaluate yourself regularly, and derive motivation from your improvement.

2. Get A Workout Partner

Convince your friend, spouse or neighbour to join the gym with you. Having company takes you mind off the clock and calorie reader, and your sessions are done before you know it. A partner at a gym serves the same purpose as music does – your mind is kept from dwelling on the work load.

3. Reward yourself

Nothing works better than an incentive in motivating you to keep with your gym schedule. For every week of job well done treat yourself to a movie, a spa treatment or a swim. Refrain from rewarding yourself with food, especially high-calorie ones like chocolate. You could make this your reward once a month, but not at lesser intervals as it could be derogatory.

4. Maintain A Log

Keep a record of the workout hours put in, and also keep a record of instances of cheating on your diet or workout. Record the exercise done on your off-days too. This will allow you to review your progress at a glance. Make up for the hours lost or the extra calorie intake (it is nigh impossible for one to never cheat on the diet set) to achieve your goal within the set time frame.

5. Exercise Routine

Often, beginners at a gym fall out of their set schedules because they do not like the exercises charted out for them. If you find the elliptical trainer more appealing than the exercycle, approach your trainer about it and replace one equipment with the other. You may have to invest extra time to derive the same benefit of the original schedule, but you will better like your gym sessions.

6. Body Health

You need to be well rested and hydrated to be able to enjoy your gym session. Lack of sleep, starved mind and body, and dehydration result in fatigue, and you will find your session daunting. Thus, it is important to give your body the rest and nourishment it requires to go full throttle at the gym. A battered body does not respond well to exercise.

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