As an active kid, you climbed trees, played in the sand, and ran around like there was no tomorrow, all the while sweating up a storm and becoming gritty and grimy in the process. To scrub away all that day’s grit and grime, your folks made you take a bath at night before you were ever allowed to touch the covers of your bed. Your parents of course knew the value of a nice hot bath, even if you always fought against them.

As adults now, your parent lessons having sunk in, you always make sure that before hitting the sack at night you scrub your body clean. But there’s one thing that many parents neglected to tell you to clean that is equally if not more so important than taking soap and water to your body, and that is cleaning the inside of your body.

Keeping your innards clean may sound strange, but its benefit are amazing. It promotes a longer and healthier life, more energy and vitality, clearer and fresher looking skin, and much, much more.

So how do you go about cleaning the insides of your body? Well if you haven’t cleaned it out in a couple of years, you should try a cleansing. By performing one, you clean out all those impurities that have been accumulating throughout your entire body. This cleansing is extremely useful to all organs of your body and especially your liver.

Why the liver? Your liver can be viewed as your own personal waste disposal plant. One of its prime responsibilities is collecting and removing from your body toxic substances. Because of the chemicals found in many of the foods your eat and beverages you drink, the efficiency at which it does its job may decrease, so flushing it out helps to restore it back to prime working condition.

On a personal note, I had my first cleansing about a year ago. After which, an acne problem that I’ve suffered through my entire life cleared up and has been gone ever since. Before then I had been taking medication prescribe by my doctor and trying a host of other home remedies.

It’s good to perform a cleansing at least once or twice a year. To give your body a good scrubbing everyday, all you need to do is watch what you eat. Whole foods that are full of fiber are nature’s natural body scrubber, as fiber helps you to easily eliminate waste from your body.

Foods such as whole grain breads, leafy vegetables, and beans are great sources of fiber and of course you have your fruits such as apples, which I believe really do keep the doctor away.

So the next time you take a shower to scrub away all of life’s grit and grime, let that be a reminder to give your innards a good scrubbin’ too. Trust me. Your body will thank your for it.

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Because of the high value most societies place on physical beauty, many are willing to do just about anything to get their body there, including fad dieting. Fad diets are sometimes quirky, but effective. Their promise of quick weight loss is just too tempting for many of you to pass up. Even though they may deliver on their promise, their is a price to pay.

Because many of them have you drastically cut your calories to levels as low as 800, as is the case of the Cabbage Diet, they reek havoc on your metabolism or your metabolic rate. Your basal metabolic rate is a measure of how many calories you would need if you were at rest all day. Whenever your intake of calories is severely low as is the case in most fad diets, your body goes into starvation mode. This is a state where you body slows down in order to conserve energy.

If you can put up with the diet long enough to reach your weight loss goal, you first of course revel in your accomplishment. However, because it’s not realistic to expect to continue to eat such a low amount of calories the rest of your life, you eventually start eating more. Because your metabolism has slowed down, that excess food is stored on your body as fat. When your metabolism catches up with your new eating habits, you’ve found that you have regained all of your weight back and in many cases, more. Undeterred, you say to yourself, “I did it before, I can do it again.” Hopefully the word “yo-yo” is popping into your head, because as long as you participate in this type of fad dieting, you’re going to go back and forth with your results.

So What should you look for in a diet that avoids these pitfalls? There are, at a minimum, just two. First, ask yourself does the diet require you to consume low calories as described above, If they do, run. They are not a long-term solution and are unhealthy to boot. You don’t need to victimize your body to get the look you want.

Second, ask yourself if this diet is something that you could see yourself doing the rest of your life? The reason that you became overweight in the first place was because of a lifetime of poor eating habits. Fad diets do not address this. They just help you lose weight quickly without seriously taking into consideration how to maintain it. A good weight loss program not only helps you to lose weight, but it also helps you to lead a healthier lifestyle. As such, it encourages a lifestyle change, not a quick fix of quickly losing a few pounds.

In closing, because of the sometimes dramatic results, using fad diets for weight loss is tempting. However, if you want to not only lose the weight, but keep it off, go for what’s best for your body long term. Is it slower? Yes. But sometimes it’s worth being the tortoise if it means beating the hare.

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Fad diets promise quick weight loss, but at what cost. The following are some quick tidbits about some well know fad diets that you need to consider before deciding to make a commitment to one.

Atkins Diet This diet allows you to eat meats high in saturated fat and requires you to cut back on foods full of essential nutrients that are naturally found in fruits, grains and vegetables. To compensate, the diet recommends vitamin and mineral supplementation.

Blood Type Diet Depending on your blood type, you could become deficient in protein or carbohydrates. For example, if you are Type AB, you would essentially become a vegetarian, denying you the nutritional benefits of lean meat such as fish and poultry.

Cabbage Soup Diet This diet is extremely low calorie - less than a 1000 calories - and is deficient in proteins and fats with little micronutrients to show for it. Critics site that much of the weight loss is from water, and therefore is not permanent.

Grapefruit Diet Another calorie restrictive diet, which is primarily how you lose the weight. Versions of the diet sometime let you eat anything you want, while others only require you to eliminate certain foods such as starchy carbohydrates. Researchers have theorized that grapefruit may assist people to lose weight by keeping insulin levels low.

Liquid Diets Liquid diets may incorporate partial or complete meal replacement. As such they may have low intakes of fiber, proteins, fats and other nutrients. They are sometimes used to treat extreme obesity, but they do little in promoting proper nutrition. The most appropriate use of liquid diets are prescribed for those who are going into surgery.

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Another study by researchers at the University of Maryland reinforces that exercise is one of the best methods to lose weight. In the study, the researchers suggests that physical activity may help to reduce the risk of obesity in people with a genetic mutation that predisposes them to a high body mass index, BMI. This study is motivated in part by a gene that has been linked to a high body mass index.

In the study using Amish participants, researchers discovered that those with the gene were no more likely to be overweight than those without the gene as long as they exercised 3 to 4 hours every day. This doesn’t mean you have to stay in the gym for that length of time though. In fact the exercises include moderate activities such as housecleaning, gardening and taking a brisk walk.

What makes this more appealing is that British scientists reported last year that more than half of all people of European descent have one or two copies of a variation of this high BMI gene. In the report, those who had two copies of the genes were on average 7 pounds heavier and were 67 percent more likely to be obese than those who didn’t have it.

So if you need further convincing of the importance of exercising to lose weight, this is it. In addition to this fascinating news, those who thought that they could not lose weight because of genetics should now feel encouraged, for as the report suggests, “bad” genetics can be overcome. In addition to proper eating habits, it will take several hours of moderate exercising for you to be successful. And as stated before, this can include structured activities such as walking and even riding a bike, or household activities such as cleaning your house or raking leaves. The important point to remember is that you need to get your blood pumping and your body moving.

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Burn calories. Burn calories. Burn calories. That is what the voice in your head is saying whenever you remind yourself that you need to lose weight. Persistent as this voice may be, sometimes it may not be enough when part of you would like to know exactly how many calories you’re going to burn. After all, you may not always have a treadmill around to tell you that you just burned x-amount of calories. Well here’s some help.

The following is a list of exercises, found in 2008 Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac, that you can do that will burn 150 calories. Some activities take as little as 15 minutes, others take as much as 60. Hopefully, by knowing what you’re going to get from your time spent exercising, you’ll be more motivated to get moving and burn some calories.

Climbing stairs for 15 minutes
Shoveling snow for 15 minutes
Running 1.5 miles (10 minutes/mile) for 15 minutes
Jumping rope for 15 minutes
Bicycling 4 miles for 15 minutes
Playing basketball for 15–20 minutes
Playing wheelchair basketball for 20 minutes
Swimming laps for 20 minutes
Performing water aerobics for 30 minutes
Walking 2 miles (15 minutes/mile) for 30 minutes
Raking leaves for 30 minutes
Pushing a stroller 1.5 miles for 30 minutes
Dancing fast for 30 minutes
Bicycling 5 miles for 30 minutes
Shooting baskets for 30 minutes
Walking 1.75 miles (20 minutes/mile) for 35 minutes
Wheeling oneself in a wheelchair for 30–40 minutes
Gardening (standing) for 30–45 minutes
Playing touch football for 30–45 minutes
Playing volleyball for 45 minutes
Washing windows or floors for 45–60 minutes
Washing and waxing a car or boat for 45–60 minutes

If you are in pretty good shape, you can increase the intensity of the exercise to burn more calories in a shorter period of time or you can exercise for a longer duration to burn even more calories. Good luck and have fun.

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