Wowability Blog

Embarrassing question for me. Lol
Thank you all for your help – so far

Easy hun, just adopt a healthy lifestyle.Eat a good healthy diet and excercise!!!

For a healthy diet, you need to be eating small to medium meals regularly. 4 or even 5 times a day. Each meal (apart from breakfast which should preferably be fibre rich), should contain a balanced ammount of carbohydrates for energy, (from potatoes, rice and pasta, etc) protien (from fish, chicken, occassional red meat is fine, soya is good too) and plenty of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants (simple fresh fruit and veg). Eat like this and make sure you are well hydrated (fruit juice is as good as water, any fluid counts, but some fluids have negative effects too, such as alcohol or caffiene rich drinks.)

You can have a wide range of healthy meals with this, from Thai, Chinese, Italian, British, Indian, etc. Just make sure each meal contains balanced ammounts of these three. On the bright side too, fresh veg and rice and pasta is a lot cheaper than crappy junk food!

This doesn’t mean you cant have chocolate or pizza/takeaway/etc, just save them as very occassional treats.

The big secret to keeping a healthy weight and staying healthy is EXCERCISE, particularly cardio excercise (running, swimming, cycling, etc).

Cardio exercise includes any form of excercise such as running/jogging/swimming/cycling etc that gets your heart rate pumping and you sweating and out of breath. It will not only burn calories and reduce your body fat levels, therefore making you ‘slimmer’ by having less fat on you, but will also improve your resting heart rate and lung function, making you healthier.

Strength training will help you strengthen and tone your muscles. This is done with the use of weights or by free training.

There are essentially (without getting overly complicated) two types of strength excercises based on different types of muscle fibres depending on wether you want to build size, bulk and power, or just ‘tone’ up the lean muscles an get more muscle endurance.

Heavy weights with short reps/sets will build your fast twitch muscle fibres and build size, power and strength. Imagine big guys at the gym lifting heavy weights.

But if you use light to medium weights with lots of reps/sets you will excercise your slow twitch muscle fibres, you wont build size, but you will tone up your body and train muscle endurance. This will obviously make you ‘look’ healthier and more toned, but will also increase your metabolism (as your muscles demand more energy) so you will burn calories faster. These muscles are also excercised a lot with cardio workouts (i.e your leg muscles when running).

As far as excercise goes, you should aim to strike a balance between cardio training and strength training, this way you will build good strong and toned muscle, but also keep your body fat levels down and increase your heart and lung performance, making you much fitter and healthier.

Hope this helps.