The Slim Habit Blog

Getting a good night’s sleep is very important. As your eating habits improve and you continue to work through your exercise program, you may find the thought of an early night increasingly attractive. After a good night’s sleep you’ll feel more alert, better able to deal with the things the coming day will throw at you. Most important of all, it’ll help you in your efforts to lose weight.

How good a sleep do you have? Do you sleep all the way through the night, or do you have an interrupted sleep? It’s important you get a good uninterrupted sleep. Why? Because of the way we sleep. When we go to sleep, we experience five different stages of sleep in what is called a sleep cycle. Each cycle lasts for approximately 1½ hours. In a normal night we will probably go through five cycles. You get most benefit when you can complete five full, uninterrupted cycles. Interrupting a cycle significantly reduces the benefit you get.

Here are some tips to help you have a better sleep.

·        Eat early, not late.

·        Make your evening meal a small one

·        Keep your alcohol consumption low. Alcohol is a stimulant. You might fall asleep easily, but you’ll be wide awake in no time.

·        Don’t have anything to drink that contains caffeine. Caffeine blocks the production of an enzyme that helps to produce the hormone melatonin. Melatonin helps to bring on sleep, and has a positive effect on sleep patterns.

·        Give your brain a rest. Let it stop buzzing before you turn in.  Don’t go straight from the computer screen to the pillow.

·        Try some stretching exercises before you get into bed.

If you want to lose weight permanently and say goodbye to diets, the sleep habit is a very important slim habit to learn. It will help make permanent weight loss a reality.

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When you decide to lose weight there are many other topics that come to mind. You need to think about your behavior and the behaviors that helped you to become overweight in the first place. You need to become aware of all your bad habits and the effect they have on you and those around you.

When you live your life on autopilot, you get out of the habit of noticing. Life passes you by in a blur, and one week fades seamlessly into another. When you stop paying attention to yourself, you put on weight ounce by ounce, pound by pound, until one day you realize your weight is starting to seriously affect your life. By not being aware, you’re unconsciously building up a mass of bad habits. Try to notice your bad habits – particularly in relation to what you eat and your general health. Over the next few days, start to make a ‘bad habit’ list, and take time to study it.

Underline those that you’d most like to do something about.

Learning new habits is all about repetition and practice. You can learn a new habit very easily indeed. It will be of enormous help is you are trying to lose weight permanently

Remember: if you practice your new habit for 10 minutes each day for 21 days, you’ll have completed 3½ hours’ worth of practice! Before you know it, your new habits will become automatic.

Learn new habits that will transform your life and you can say goodbye to diets forever.

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Here’s an alarming fact. We lose between 0.5 and 2% of our muscle mass every year over the age of 40. That means by the time we are 70 we could have lost anything between 15 and 60% of our muscle mass. It’s a pretty amazing statistic.

Can you imagine yourself having lost 60% of your muscle mass? It’s frightening to think how it would be possible to cope with everyday life. Unfortunately, this is what happens to millions of people.

There’s a further problem. Your vanishing muscle mass reduces the effectiveness of your metabolism. Why? Because muscles are very effective at burning calories. Lose muscle and the consequence is weight gain. Couple increased weight with a low muscle mass and you have a recipe for disaster.

Old age for hundreds of millions of people across the world is blighted by being unable to perform some very basic functions without great difficulty. It leads to great unhappiness and puts an enormous strain on health care services. But it needn’t be the case.

Until recently it was thought that it was impossible to reverse the process of age related muscle loss, but recent trials have found that this is not the case. By doing regular resistance exercises you can significantly reduce muscle loss.

There is also an added bonus because it has also been found that having healthy muscles helps to strengthen you bones too. There’s another plus. Healthy, well exercised muscles will keep your metabolism functioning properly and you’ll be able to keep any weight gain in check.

Does this just apply to ‘old’ people? Certainly not, it applies to everybody. It’s essential that we keep our muscles in trim if we are to ‘fire on all six cylinders’, be able to operate to our optimum efficiency look forward to a fun, healthy old age. It’s not difficult, it just takes effort.

If you’re overweight it’s a good idea to tackle this as early as possible. If you carry too much weight with you as you get older, you’ll find it more and more difficult to get rid of it, but get rid of it you must. To lose weight permanently you need to make personal change. The best way to do this is to find a program that will help you to make change by learning new habits – slim habits. Ideally it should also include a personal exercise plan. If you think you need to take action, don’t delay. Look after that body of yours, it’s the only one you’ll ever have!

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What do you imagine Barak Obama’s greatest problem might be when he sits down in the Oval office? Is it going to be the worst financial crisis in 100 years, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Iran, recession….? The list is long and very, very daunting. It’s difficult to know why he ever wanted the job – he’ll probably ask himself the same question frequently over the next four years.

One of his greatest problems probably won’t even feature on his list, and yet it is one of the most pressing problems the nation faces. It is the obesity crisis. Whether he is aware of it or not he has the weight of the nation on his shoulders.

Why should it be such a problem? Why does he need to give it any attention? Surely personal weight is very much a personal thing? Well, it is and it isn’t. The facts though are scary. With over 64% of the population overweight and a third obese, it is shaping up to be the one thing that is going to literally bring the nation to its knees.

A nation that is overweight and unfit is never going to be able to operate at its optimum and in the coming years we’re going to have to step up to the mark as never before. Are we going to be able to do so? It’s questionable.

The tsunami that is going to hit the health care system in the next few years because of  obesity related diseases hitting unprecedented levels, is going to be devastating for the country. It is going to struggle to cope. The misery that this will cause will be enormous and be a huge sap on the morale of the nation.

What can Barak Obama do about it? Well, while he has the nation’s attention he needs to be brave and say a few things that some folks don’t want to hear. He needs to shock the nation into adopting healthier lifestyles. He needs to talk change in personal behavior.

The real way to cure the obesity problem is for people to change. Permanent weight loss can only be achieved by making personal change. New behaviors can be learnt by adopting new habits – slim habits. It’s not about diets, it’s what Barak Obama fought the election on – it’s about change.

Let’s hope the new President can persuade the nation to change its ways!

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