Thursday, October 30, 2008

Trim your Tummy - What's Hot and What's Not

By Teresa Brown

Trimming your tummy doesn't have to include hours of hikes or weeks of just soup. Losing pregnancy weight for new moms can seem impossible but it's easier when you just set up a weekly schedule that works for you. Here is a "heads up" of what's Hot and what's Not when you have to trim your tummy.

1. Cardiovascular Workouts

What's Hot: Interval training is where it's at when you want to strengthen your heart and shed pounds. If you are going for a hike or even a walk, try and speed up your stride every few minutes to increase your heart rate. By always challenging your workout you are able to mix it up enough to trim your tummy.

What's Not: Spending a tireless hour on the treadmill isn't effective if it's a habit. Keeping your workout status quo doesn't trim your tummy. Instead your body adapts to the pace and your heart rate doesn't increase within your cardio. Losing your tummy will be more effective if you have more variety of workouts or if you vary the intensity within a workout.

2. You are what you Eat

What's Hot: The saying, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." really sums up that in order to trim your tummy you must eat a balanced diet. You shouldn't remove any of your food groups instead choose the healthy options. Make sure you avoid snacks with high sugar, salt and saturated and trans fats and try and stay away from starving yourself all day and binging on anything you can find when you burn out at night.

What's Not: Extreme low-calorie diets is like taking one step forward and three steps backward when you are trying to trim your tummy. If you go on a fad diet like cabbage soup for a week, then you are depriving yourself of nutrients causing your body's metabolism to slow down within that week. So when you finally return to eating normally your body stores the food you eat because it thinks it's still in starvation mode. Starvating yourself with a fad diet usually ends up in you gaining more weight back more quickly than it took to lose it and messing up your metabolism.

No matter what is the current pulse of the public, just try and remember that old wives tales dies hard. Being able to trim your tummy isn't a new invention like these fad diets or exercise routines - women have been doing it for centuries and they did it without signing up at that expensive gym or buying into that vogue diet.

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