pro Health blog

Time to Ditch This Blog

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:55:53 -0500

I've just about had enough of this blog. Over the past 4 months I've been trying to get something together here and it's been fun, yet lately things are really starting to annoy me. This will be my last post at pro health blog.

So what's the deal? Why did I quit this blog?

First of all, I'm not quiting the blogging game. I decided to stop updating this blog because of the Content Management System (CMS). Most bloggers use a blogging platform such as WordPress or Typepad. I on the other hand blog on a Joomla based system. Joomla isn't made for blogging but for regular website management. It has decent features, but it lacks several very important blogging tools and that pisses me off big time!

Things I can't do with Joomla:

No tags, no technorati
Difficult permanent url structure
No pinging of other blogs
No trackback
You have to pay for comment software & it has limited possibilities (eg. no commentluv, no email notifications,...)
No decent archive
No "related posts" feature at the end of every post,...
Making new categories takes FOREVER
No possbility of branding my feed which disallows me to publish full feeds ...
Limited blog style templates (none really, I had to customize an existing template to make it look like a blog ...)
etc ...

So what's next? Well I'm not giving up blogging,... and I still love learning more everyday about the healthy lifestyle topic. I don't have the patience or knowledge to transfer this blog from Joomla to WordPress so there's only one option left, which is to start all over again.

I've registered a New domain, installed a wordpress script and as I'm checking things out I'm absolutely amazed. Wordpress is sexy and I'm glad I made the switch now and didn't wait another 4 months.

The launch of my new blog will take place in about two weeks. I hope to see you then!

Best and Worst Diet Plans According to Consumers

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:49:53 -0500

This is a guest post by Kim from the Weight Loser Blog.

For those that don’t know, Consumer Reports is a large, independent, and nonprofit publication that reviews and compares a wide range of consumer products and services. Consumer Reports also has their own testing labs and millions of dollars to spend each year testing and getting real feedback from real consumers.

Consumer Reports is probably best known for their reviews and testing of automobiles, but they also test loads of other products and services. Let’s take a look at a recent study they did on the best and worst diet plans. Here is their list of the top diet plans available:

Generally Good Diet Plans:

The Volumetrics Eating Plan – Maximizes amount of food per calorie.
Weight Watchers – Good for long term dieting.
Jenny Craig's – High dropout percentage, but good results.
Slim-Fast – Great for people that can’t cook and have little time.
eDiets.com – Tons of customizable plans.

Generally Not So Good Diet Plans:

The Zone Diet – Requires a lot of math and average weight loss was low.
Ornish Diet – Very low fat vegetarian diet with had an extremely high dropout percentage.
The Atkins Diet – Too restrictive for most, however many are less hungry on this diet.

If you are interested in losing weight and want to try out a diet plan, things can get complicated in a hurry. Hopefully these two lists will help you find the diet that is right for you and help you to shed some pounds!

For more information about these and other diet plans, check out WeightLoserBlog.com.

Omega 6 Fat Ain't Always Pretty

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:45:45 -0500

Balancing omega 3 and omega 6 fatty acids in your diet is crucial. Too much omega 6 can lead to irregular heart beats, blood clots, and it can even promote certain types of cancer.

Ain't a pretty picture, is it? Just when you tought you had the whole healthy and bad fatty acid mumbo jumbo down, you read this. Even more discomforting might be the fact that omega 6 is extremely overabundant in the Western diet. The primary contributors of omega 6 to our diet are corn, sunflower oil and sesame oil, and as you may know, corn is king in the United States.

An excellent post further explaining the omega 6 issue was written by Lisa Nelson, registered dietitian, at eNutritionServices.

Stop Constant Food Cravings in 5 Steps

Tue, 27 May 2008 16:14:50 -0500

image by mrlerone

Keeping constant food cravings under control is essential when trying to learn a healthy lifestyle or on a fat loss program. If cravings can't be curbed your evening might just end up in a binge eating frenzy, and we all know that's not good.

But why do you crave certain foods, mostly junk food, in the first place? Is it because it tastes good? Or just because you're bored and want to kill time? All those things could definitely play a role, though I think the real answer is to be found inside the body. I'm talking about the blood glucose or blood sugar level. This medical term indicates how much energy you've got readily available for use. If your blood sugar is too low, a hunger signal will go to the brain initiating food cravings.

To help keep your blood sugar from dropping to an all time low and prevent huge cravings, I'll share these 5 tips I've been using in the past years. Hopefully they're of any use.

My 6 Word Memoir: Your Body Is Your Temple

Tue, 20 May 2008 11:00:00 -0500

image by 10019841@N00

Don't ever take your body for granted. To me, body is synomous for health. How you treat your body influences how you feel and in what way you eventually present yourself as a person. Don't be afraid of being superficial once in a while. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

By respecting your body, you respect yourself. When you respect yourself, others will follow lead and show respect for you as well. To further clarify my point about this whole Your Body Is Your Temple thing, which isn't quite the most original catchprase I must admit, I've listed 5 reasons as to why you should treat your body as your temple:

1. Many people, if not most, are very superficial (I am no exception, neither are you).

A healthy appearance will open many doors in life. Way more then you could ever even imagine! It's a nasty and horrible thing to say, but it's the truth.

2. A healthy and fit body will increase your confidence.

Being confident about yourself is considered very sexy. You'll increase the chances of a healthy love life by 120% by following the "your body is your temple" train of thought.

3. With a healthy body comes a clear mind and a happy spirit

Our mental health is not only determined by the psychology of our brain. We got a whole nerve system running through our arms, legs and torso. Every nerve in our body sends information to the brain about how we feel at any time of the day. If you smash your thumb with a hammer, the nerves will make sure your brain gets the message. That's why we often scream when such things happen.

Oh really?

Yeah, really. And the same thing goes for food and exercise. Visit Burger King everyday and your mind will suffer. This is quite unnoticable for the occasional sinner. For the hedonist in heart and soul, however, the mental strain will be quite considerable. You don't believe me? That's because you've probably been on the dark side of the moon your whole life and have no idea what a healthy mind really feels like. If you want to prove me wrong on this point, quit burger king for one year and we'll talk again.

4. You will live longer.

While this is not certain for everyone, (eg, you could get hit by lightning, or something), the odds are definitely in your favor when opting for the healthier lifestyle choices.

5. You will enjoy life longer

Why become 80 years old when you can only enjoy life half that time? Unlike many people think, the fun does not stop at the age of 40 or 50. Respect your body and life will be more enjoyable in many different ways!

8 Things That Could Make or Break a Fat Loss Plan

Sat, 17 May 2008 11:00:00 -0500

It's so frustrating! A friend of mine is dealing with some serious weight issues. Nearly passing the 350 lbs mark he's really trying to turn things around, yet he doesn't really seem to be getting anywhere. He has tried changing his lifestyle several times, yet never really accomplished any long term results.

Last month I tried convincing him to give it another try. I offered my personal support during his entire journey, I even proposed a bet in which I promised a large chunk of change when he reaches his initial 100 pounds weight loss goal. This deal was a 100% win - win situation. But this has all been to no use.

"What's going on? Why aren't you getting anywhere?" I asked. "I'm just not motivated", he replied. He's probably right, but there's a lot more going on besides this motivational thing. I know he has attempted a healthier lifestyle in the past, I know he can be motivated. There are other forces at hand preventing him from reaching his fat loss goal. Social forces, psychological forces, cultural forces and maybe even political forces which are hard to influence.

There's a lot more that concerns fat loss besides a healthy diet and regular exercise. Even a comprehensive 16 Fat Loss Tips article could leave you desperate and clueless when you're faced with a 100 pounds or more fat loss journey.

Let me quickly touch some of the often underestimated aspects in life that can really make or break any fat loss plan.

How to Learn a Healthy Lifestyle: Think for Yourself!

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:00:00 -0500

Walter Willett
Eat, Drink and be Healthy

Weight Watchers, The Soup Diet, Grapefruit Diet, Low Carb Diet, Glycemic Index Diet, Alkaline Diet, Abs Diet, High Protein Diet, Low Protein Diet, South Beach Diet, Blood Type Diet, Gluten Free Diet, Atkins Diet, Mediterranean Diet and the Zone Diet.

The authors of all these diet programs have one thing in common: they all claim to know the secret for long term weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. How do they say you can achieve this? By doing what they tell you to do! They say what you must eat, what you can't eat and how much you should eat. It's as if these authors think you are too dumb to make these decisions on your own.

Why let these so called "experts" decide what you eat? Did we not go to school and learn to think for ourselves?

Find out yourself if counting calories is necessary. Find out yourself if fat is good or bad. Don't let others tell you what ends up on your plate! It's time to take matters in your own hands and start drawing your own conclusions!

Healthy Link Love: No More No Follow

Wed, 07 May 2008 02:08:02 -0500

U COMMENT

I FOLLOW

So what's been going on at pro Health Blog? Not much, really, but still quite a few things. Having posted only about 2 updates in the last month, it seemed as if I might've abandoned things here. Yet, nothing's further from the truth!

Even though real life things have been keeping me busy for quite a few weeks, I managed to get my 16 Fat Loss Tips article up and running. It has gotten some big time traffic from StumbleUpon in the past few days with nearly as much visitors in 3 days as I got in the whole month of april!

With this article I even broke my All Time number of Comments per post Record which was previously set at 7 comments, and now moved up to a whopping 8 comments, of which only 2 were mine! Do I hear a Yipee!? *grins*

As a way of saying thank you I decided to join the Do Follow Blog Movement. I have removed all the "No Follow" tags from my comments, which means Google will now love your link in my comments to it's fullest. I also changed my comment layout (read: I selected another comment template), so now the URL will match the Anchor Text. You can set this under the "Name" field. (An Anchor Text is the Text which is assigned to your URL. Anchors Texts are important to consider if you want to do well in the Google search results. An example of an Anchor Text is the 16 Fat Loss Tips earlier in this post. "16 Fat Loss Tips" was in this case my Anchor Text).

16 Straight To The Point Fat Loss Lessons

Thu, 01 May 2008 11:00:00 -0500

image by antmoose

Something that has been left untouched for quite some time now at pro health blog is the subject of Weight Loss. With over half of the US population overweight and just about a gazillion different diets available on the market, I'm sure this is something some of you might be interested in.

But before continuing, let me just correct myself and all the others out there using the term Weight Loss. A lot more accurate would be to use the term Fat Loss. Why is that, you ask? Our body weight consists of muscle, organs, water and fat. From those four things you can lose muscle, fat and water. When it comes to losing weight, all we really want to lose is fat. Muscles give us that healthy look, while water plays an important role in several of our bodily functions.

There are many different goals you can set when considering a fat loss plan. Some people still see themselves with a long road ahead of them, while others have already reached a healthy fat percentage but don't mind losing a little more. Whatever your fat loss goal is at this moment, I'm sure there are several lessons still left to be learned.

I'm not going to suggest a certain quick fix diet, neither am I laying out a 16 rules do-not-break-or-fail program. The concepts I'm about to suggest work mostly by themselves. They can be incorporated step by step while still learning more and more each day about a healthy lifestyle. Some of the lessons are very basic guidelines, while others are more advanced and are aimed for those trying to reach fat percentages within the single digit area. It's important to experiment and see what works for YOU and stick to that. If something does not work, evaluate and change. As you'll soon learn, everybody responds differently to different things.

Beyond the Labels: Scary Stuff that’s in Our Food

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:00:00 -0500

“You are what you eat." We hear this over and over again, but it doesn’t really register with most of us because it is so cliché. If this old adage is true, you might be thinking to yourself, “Hmmmm… Well, if I am what I eat, then today I am a bowl of cereal, some Rice-A-Roni, some chicken, and a sugar-free ice-cream sandwich!” This all sounds very cute, until you take a closer look at the back of the cereal box, or the Rice-a-Roni box, or the ice-cream sandwich package.

While reading the labels, you might discover that you are actually made of a lot of things that you might not expect, or may not even be able to pronounce. Now you might be saying something like, “Today I am high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, monosodium glutamate and aspartame!” Not so cute-sounding anymore, is it.

Not only are the ingredients we find in many foods unappetizing and hard to pronounce, but some of these things are the leading causes of obesity and disease today. Food industry leaders are always trying to find ways to sell more products, and make it more cheaply in order to raise profits, as all large companies are. While these ingredients might have been deemed “safe” by the FDA, they are not necessarily the healthiest, nor are they necessarily harmless.

Thankfully, these companies are required to list all the ingredients on the labels. If you take the time to make yourself aware of what’s in your food, you might find out that you are made of things that are a little less scary-sounding, not to mention your pants might start to fit a little better.