Extend your life span with these...

I am proud of my nation. Proud of the sports team that we have. And so when I read of the slackness in the National Team. I got mad. Overslept? Smoking in the locker room at half-time? Really mad. Put aside professionalism. I don't care if you don't have that. You are wearing my county's color. So please. Live up to it.
This is the picture of the jetty at Survivor Island Sabah. I loved to sit out on the hammock out on the jetty. It was so relaxing.

What you do has a great impact on who you are. But often times, people make choices out of ignorance. Out of a lack of information. They make choices for all the wrong reasons. Today I'm going to list out some choices and how they can influence your life. These tips can not only help you to loose weight, but be healthy overall, increasing your life span as a result.!

1) Becoming a vegetarian = I have great admiration for vegetarians. How they manage to abstain from meat I have no idea. (But yet again people wonder how I can abstain from coffee & alcohol etc. so may it isn't much of a surprise.) Being a vegan can help reduce your risk of having heart diseases. However, it does not mean you will become slimmer. On the contrary, many vegans tend to put on more weight (An interesting phenomenon, I'll be searching on why this is the case). Here is the thing I want to highlight. Being a vegan can increase your life span by about 1.5 years. Keep this number in mind as we compare other choices and how many years they increase your life span by.

2) Having a normal Body Mass Index (BMI) = Having a normal height to weight ratio would mean that you are keeping your fats under control! So you don't have to worry that you are fat. Achieve this? Add about 2 years to your life!

3) Having and following an exercise program = HAVE and FOLLOW an exercise program. Again~find something that you like to do. Remember. If you want to lose weight, each session must be 30mins long with your HR over 65%.
If you want to be healthy~15minutes, 3 times a week, at least 65% of your HR. Daily, you must walk AT LEAST 10,000 steps. This is the minimum requirement to BE healthy. Really. Minimum. So walk that extra step to the bus stop. Park a little farther from the entrance of the grocery store. Do this, and add 2.5 years to your life.

4) Eating Nuts = I honestly think this is fascinating. There are bad fats, and there are good fats. Nuts are packed with good fats that can stimulate brain activity among other things! Incorporate nuts into your diet. Eat nuts 5 times or more a week and you reduce your chance of getting a heart disease by about 60%. It is found that people who eat nuts tend to become thinner. Eat nuts regularly? Add 2.5 years to your life! AMAZING ain't it? But what then are the best nuts to eat. Research says that almonds are. Almonds are high in protein and heart friendly (: Try getting those natural ones. If you must, roast them. They taste good that way. Make sure your almonds have a low salt content. Why? Read on to find out.

5) Have a normal blood pressure = Maintain a normal blood pressure and add approximately 4 years to your life! How do you do that? Cut back on those salts. Want chips? Get it lightly salted. Cook with less salt. Once you consume salt your blood pressure takes a HUGE jump each time. A high blood pressure means that your heart has to, and is working harder than what it should and that is bad.

6) Do not smoke = Just to keep things even, I'm writing a number 6. If you are not a smoker, you add AT LEAST 2.5 years to your health. Hurray for us Mormons. heh

So it is interesting to note how being a vegan apparently has the least impact on your life. But so lets sum it up. 4 things (I'm not gonna add in being a vegan), and that would add on approx. 13.5years to your life. I hardly need to tell you that 13.5 years is a heck of a long time more that you will be breathing. So start changing your life today. Hope you follow these tips. And as a suggestion, start small. The easiest thing is to ADD things onto your diet so up that nuts intake as a start (: small steps! cheers!
In the next few sections I'll be jumping even deeper, giving more suggestions on nutrition.

p.s. A bodybuilding section is gonna be coming up soon!

you are what you eat...(broken my PR for push-ups and chin-ups)

I think this picture is epic. This is taken in Sabah, Malaysia. It is on an island where they filmed the very first Survivor series. So there is this mud volcano that we visited and the teacher threw out a dare. Who dares to submerge them-self fully in the mud. And so. hah. yar the picture speaks for itself.

So I am rather confused. Psychology ain't helping. I'm supposed to be able to read minds and behaviors but I can't read that person's. I learnt about how to analyze dreams but I REFUSE to accept what my dreams are telling me.

As I said, I will blog a little about weight loss via watching one's diet. I'll go one step further and talk about healthy eating as a whole.
So I think we know by now that the thing that girls do~not eating lunch or wtvr~they call that dieting, I call that starvation~that is really unhealthy and doesnt really do much to help you lose weight. To be healthy, and to lose weight, small, regular balanced meals are the best. Why?

Say you ate dinner, but skipped breakfast the next morning. Do that a few more times and this is what would happen. Your body recognizes that it would not get food in the morning. Thus after dinner, the body automatically moves into "starvation mode". What happens then is that your dinner would not be digested entirely. Instead, the body stores the food as fats so that it can be used the next day when you skip breakfast. So REGULAR MEALS important. This ensures a regular and constant metabolism that will effectively digest the food so that you get enough energy, and the food does not get stored as fats.

So thats a little about healthy eating, much more will be coming up. Tips on HOW to eat, WHAT to eat, and the BENEFITS that you would enjoy.

Yumm yumm CNY...

This is the picture of the campfire in Sabah during class trips. was kinda hot. heh.

so after toying around with various blogskins and messing it up multiple times, I am back to a custom template. BORING! But at least it works. heh.
Went back to Singapore last week and met up with quite a few friends. that was superb. haha. havent seen them all in AGES. haha.
Now CNY is over, I'm back in China, we are all fed to the brim with goodies, time to get the body workin it off. heheh. My next few posts will be targeted specifically at weight lost. Well, briefly at least...I'll target weight lost via exercise first before talking about weight lost via your diet in future posts (:

So I have introduced one workout, push-ups. And honestly, again I stress, it is an awesome exercise. Works a lot of different muscles, gives you a strength and yet a cardiovascular workout, and easy to do anywhere. But this exercise is more of a toning exercise. Won't burn much fat. Why?
When you do push-ups, its a form of resistance exercise (weights etc). Any resistance exercise would naturally work the heart as must pump more blood to those muscles thus increasing the heart-rate. However the burning of fat requires something more.

First condition: The heart must be working at at least 60% of your Resting Heart Rate. Again as a recap, your RHR is number of beats that your heart is Beating Per Minute immediately once you wake up.
Second condition:Your heart must be working at this 60% for at least 30minutes. Any less than that, you are just sweating and not burning fat.

So unless you do push-ups for 30mins, it isn't going to help you burn much fat. An important exercise? YES! But not going to burn much fat.
So does that mean you have to jog/run for 30min to burn fat? Well, just running for that long can be rather dull maybe. So find something that you like to do! Play soccer, uh Ultimate frisbee! Dodgeball! haha. I love that game. Or just go for a cycle at the park. Find something fun but yet challenging for you.
Now there's some magic involved. You don't have to exercise 30min EVERY SINGLE DAY to burn calories. Say today is Monday and you play badminton for 45 minutes and you burned uh 800 calories during that time. The magic is that for the next 24 hours, you will continue burning another 800 calories! Thus from a 45 minutes workout, you burn 1600 calories in all!
Your effort carries forward. A teeeny bit of science now. When you exercise, your metabolism is sped up. It will continue working at that increased rate for the next 24hrs and thus you continue to burn calories. If you continue working out every alternate day, your metabolism would work consistently at that higher rate. If you don't however, your metabolism slows down and you will need to re-crank it up again. It is harder to re-crank it up than to maintain. Therefore, consistency is the best! So find that activity that you wanna do (:

Makes sense? If no, leave a tag or comment and I will get to it.
Don't lie to yourself. haha. laugh