Source: http://www.sonima.com/food/bread-and-weight-loss/

Last week Oprah set the twittersphere (and Wall Street) on fire with a video announcing that since starting the Weight Watchers program this fall she has lost 26 pounds and she eats bread every day. This is not a new concept, especially for Weight Watchers where members have been eating bread and losing weight since they first opened their doors in the spring of 1963.

You may be thinking, “But don’t I hear weight-loss experts tell me to cut out bread?” Yes, you hear that all the time, as cutting out or reducing the amount of starches and grains that you are eating (especially the refined grains) is a simple strategy for reducing both the total calorie and carbohydrate content of your daily diet—but is isn’t the only strategy.

There Are Many Ways to Lose a Pound

If there is one thing that you can learn from research on weight loss it is that there are a lot of different dietary strategies that you can use to lose weight. One of the most famous examples of this was the A to Z Study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005. This study was heralded as the heavyweight (or lightweight?) championship fight between the Atkins diet, Ornish diet, Zone diet, and Weight Watchers. These diets spanned the carbohydrate spectrum with the Atkins diets restricting carbohydrates the most allowing room for only carbohydrates containing foods like asparagus and broccoli. On the high side, the Ornish diet nearly insisted th…

Source: http://www.nerdfitness.com/blog/2016/02/01/from-skinny-fat-to-ripped-jaspers-journey-to-real-life-superhero/

Meet Jasper, a 30-year-old sports teacher (and basketball coach) living in the Netherlands. At the start of Jasper’s hero’s journey, he found himself in a place many Rebels can relate to:

Jasper wasn’t hundreds of pounds overweight, but he certainly wouldn’t describe himself as active or in shape.

He was just sort of… stuck. Stuck with a bad back from ignoring a problem for several years. Stuck avoiding everyday activities, and constantly making excuses. Stuck feeling lazy and never really knowing where to get the motivation or a plan to make a change.

And the most relatable part? He let one setback, one barrier in his life slowly become an excuse to live a sedentary existence. For Jasper, that was his back.

Everybody knew I had ‘a bad back’. I was in bad shape, because of my back. Coach, you want to play? Hmm… I’d better not. Carrying groceries? Careful! Run up the stairs? Better not! My best friend jokingly referred to me as an “old man.”

But enough was enough – after doing some research Jasper found the Nerd Fitness Academy, and was thrown into a pre-designed plan. He built momentum, found workouts he loved, and all of a sudden what seemed like an endless climb to the top of a mountain felt different. Instead he had the momentum he needed and found his groove, his path to a leveled up life.

Let’s hear from Jasper about how exactly …

Source: http://tonygentilcore.com/2016/02/top-3-female-push-up-mistakes/

Having a novice female perform a push-up for the first time is like watching someone drive a stick shift for the first time. It looks super simple however, in order to succeed at it you must have both quality, technique and practice.

The push-up is a fantastic exercise with a list of numerous benefits from activating your core and glutes to molding your shoulders and triceps.

I find myself programming multiple push-up variations for almost every female I coach, regardless of their current level of strength or experience. Over time it transforms them into a hard core bad ass who’s able to crank out multiple repetitions in any number push-up variations.

The media today is saturated with an array of techniques that females specifically “should follow” in order to perform a push-up. For example, several magazines will tell women to resort to performing push-ups from their knees because women are not strong enough to do one from the floor.

Wake up call! If you do push- ups from the floor on your knees, you will only get better at doing push-ups on the floor from you knees!

Here are the top three female push-up mistakes I encounte…

Source: http://zenhabits.net/review/

By Leo Babauta

I talked about the Year-End Reflection as a way to look back on your year, realize your accomplishments, solidify your learning … but that can take a lot of work, because we forget a lot of what we’ve done.

Enter the Monthly Review.

I just started doing this, actually, after realizing that my Year-End Reflection took a lot more work than it needs to. If I do a quick journal entry reflecting on every month, once a month, then it makes everything easier. Things are fresh in my mind. It doesn’t take that long.

So what I’ve done is just set a reminder for the beginning of every month to do my Monthly Review. Then I spend about 10 minutes that day looking over my past month:

Work I got done
Projects I’ve moved forward
Personal learning I’ve been working on
Health and fitness challenges I’ve been doing
Other big life events (some of them unexpected)
Things I’ve learned and want to remember
Hopes for the next month

I look through my calendar and notes and to-do lists and stuff like that, and it doesn’t take long. I highly recommend it!

This review helps me feel like I’ve accomplished something in just a month, and it lets me take a big-picture look at my life, something I might not be doing often enough. I can correct my course, refocus myself, or simply feel good about what I’m doing. And I love how whatever I learned doesn’t feel as fleeting anymore, becau…

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/oZaer5XetIk/

“Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.” ~Natalie Babbitt

My former life as a diamond dealer was not as glamorous as one would think. I wound up spending many months traversing barren lands and boarding rickety aircrafts. If you can imagine the life of Indiana Jones, it wasn’t all that different with the exception that no one was chasing me.

My travels customarily took me to the many diamond deposits laden throughout Africa. The majority of the “puddle jumper” planes I routinely flew on should’ve been retired decades ago, but miraculously, the ingenuity of the Africans kept them in working order.

One morning I woke up with a sense of uneasiness, as a voice inside my head was saying, “Don’t take this flight.”

Despite the intense feeling of anxiety, I began mentally preparing for the long day ahead.

Boarding the plane, the anxiousness only increased as thoughts of my parents and six-year old daughter inundated my mind. I chose to ignore the sickening feeling in my gut, telling myself to pull it together for the forty-five-minute flight.

The plane took off, ascending above the endless landscape of the African jungle. The familiar hum of the propellers, …

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/yZ5QTf58g4I/

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“The future is completely open, and we are writing it moment to moment.” ~Pema Chodron

My family recently drove from Michigan to North Carolina—twenty hours roundtrip. To entertain themselves, my five-year-old daughter Willow taught my three-year-old son Miller to play rock-paper-scissors in the backseat.

Miller learned the hand signals and got the overall concept pretty quickly, but he had a hard time with the fast speed of the game. Willow narrated, “Rock-paper-scissors…go! Okay, next round!” But Miller wanted to linger.

When he chose paper and Willow chose scissors, he’d see her scissors and quickly try to change to rock so that he could win the round.

Or if he chose rock and she chose scissors, he’d want to stop and hang out in his win for a while. He’d celebrate, gloat, and become frustrated when she was already on to the next round.

My husband and I tried to explain to Miller that it was a quick game with no time to hold on to what was already done. There’s also no need to hold on—each round brings a brand new chance to win or lose.

While we tried to teach him that it made more sense to leave …

Source: http://www.fannetasticfood.com/2016/02/02/early-morning-run-and-unique-steak-tacos/

Hey friends! I was up early this morning for the first time in awhile to meet up with my track group! Yay for it starting to get slightly brighter in the mornings again – the end of winter is (kind of) in sight!

The track looks clear of snow, right? Well, it was, finally, and we were excited – but then we realized it was covered in a sheet of ice – guess the rain yesterday can be blamed for that. Womp, womp.

So instead, we took our workout to the parking garage next door and used the covered lower level as our track. Not my favorite – it’s loud and kind of gross in there – but we made it work. There’s a loop that’s almost exactly 0.25 miles, although it has the added challenge of multiple on/off ramps (hills). The coaches had us do six 800’s (a half mile, or two laps) with a minute or two of rest in between each. 3 miles later, we were done. It felt really tough today – not sure if it was because of the surroundings, or the added ramp hills, or the fact that I have been slacking on the running since the Charleston Half Marathon – but either way it was good t…

Source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/02/02/464764078/new-orleans-a-city-in-the-grip-of-king-cake-madness?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=thesalt

A few weeks ago, I ate three pieces of cake on a single day. All in the name of research, of course.

You see, it was Jan. 6, otherwise known as Epiphany or Kings Day — and in New Orleans, that signals the start of Carnival season. And that means we eat king cake.

Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, is, of course, a single day: Feb. 9 this year. But in New Orleans, Carnival is a season that starts with Kings Day and ends in ashes — on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 10). In between, the entire city is gripped with king cake madness, its diet and culture dominated by the colorful cakes.

King cakes are most prominently featured in a kind of ritual exchange tradition in workplaces. One person brings a cake to the office to start off the cycle.

…

Source: http://summertomato.com/iron-willpower/

Photo by Kalexanderson

“I need to get motivated.”

“I need to stop being so lazy.”

“I wish I had her determination.”

“I need to just DO IT.”

I constantly hear people saying these things when they talk about eating better, exercising, or losing weight.

It’s also ingrained in the psyche of our culture. “No pain, no gain.”

Of course, these are all just different ways of saying you wish you had more willpower.

I get it. Willpower is an amazing thing sometimes. And having a strong reserve of it certainly has its advantages.

But there are also serious disadvantages.

I spend a lot of time here on Summer Tomato talking about how willpower doesn’t work for long-term goals. That our brains are built to run on habits, and that self-control should be used sparingly since it takes up so much mental energy.

Whether you agree with this premise or not (apparently this guy doesn’t), today I want to show you that even if you could get healthy through the strength of your iron will, you shouldn’t want to.

I know, because I have really strong willpower. And I used it ruthlessly for 15 years.

When all the other ki…

Source: http://www.theminimalists.com/006/

By Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus · Follow: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram

In this episode of The Minimalists Podcast, Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus share a live Q&A event at which they wrestled with audience questions about minimalism, decluttering, passion, families, children, pets, clothes, finances, debt, mortgages, and much more.

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Mentioned in This Episode

Book: 10% Happier
Book: Everything That Remains
Book: Garner’s Modern American Usage
Book: Grammatically Correct
Book: So Good They Can’t Ignore You
Contribution: The Hope Effect
Essay: 90/90 Minimalism Rule
Essay: A Minimalist Approach to Technology
Essay: Alone Time
Essay: Debt Free
Essay: Favorite Clothes of a Minimalist
Essay: Fighting the Voice in Your Head
Essay: Financial Freedom
Essay: “Follow Your Passion” Is Crappy Advice
Essay: Goodbye Fake Friends
Essay: How to Start a Successful Blog
Essay: I Got Rid of 2,000 Books and Started Reading More
Essay: Killing Home Internet
Essay: Life Is an Acquired Taste
Essay: Most Emergencies Aren’t
Essay: Need, Want, Like
Essay: Photo-Scanning Party
Essay: Retirement Planning
Essay: Who the Hell Reads Your Blog Anyway?
Event…