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Cooler weather is starting to make its way in and the lazier, hot days are waning. Now is the time to rejuvenate your body, mind and soul. Take advantage of the cool, crisp autumn air.

When the cooler weather arrives, our first instinct is to cuddle under a blanket with a warm snack. Our slim summer bodies hide under the clothes so we almost don’t see those pounds as they start piling on. This fall, take five easy step to better fitness so you’re not scrambling to lose weight next spring.

Feast On Fall Harvest Fruits and Vegetables

Fresh fruits and vegetables last way beyond the hot summer months. Fill up on yummy fall fruits and vegetables including cranberries, apples, pears, pomegranates, pumpkins and tangerines. Feast on flavorful fall vegetables including eggplant, cauliflower, snow peas, sweet potatoes and winter squash. Step up your fitness routine even more by going to harvest your own fresh fruits and veggies. You’ll get plenty of fresh air and exercise while you hand-pick the finest selections fresh from the fields.

Roast Instead Of Raw

During the summer months, many people get accustomed to eating refreshingly raw fruits and vegetables. A major benefit of eating raw rather than cooked veggies is the nutrients aren’t boiled away. As the weather gets cooler, our bodies automatically crave warmer foods. Why not roast your vegetables instead of consuming them raw? Roasting retains all the vitamins and provides the hot food your body wants. Just drizzle olive oil and a dash of pepper and salt over your vegetables and roast in a 350 degree oven until lightly browned.

Get Moving In The Cool Air

During the summer months, our bodies get stagnant in the heat. We exercise but excessive exhaustion and perspiration take over. Test your true endurance in the cooler fall days. Fall is a great time to build endurance because you aren’t struggling against oppressive heat. Whether you’re raking leaves, bicycling, hiking or jogging, get up and get moving in the cool fall air.

Stay Away From Comfort Foods

As the fall weather sets in, everyone is already talking about holidays. Feast foods appear at home, in office break rooms and at friends’ homes. Learn which comfort foods to avoid so you won’t pack on the pounds before the winter even arrives. Avoid sweets, goodies and tempting treats with hundreds of sugary or salty calories your body doesn’t need. Arrive to parties armed with a personal artillery of healthy alternatives. Carry a nutritious snack in your handbag or briefcase to avoid office snacking. Bring low calories choices to snack on when you go visiting. When you are well-prepared, it’s easier to avoid comfort foods and snacking pitfalls.

Get Ready To Get Back To Business

During the summer, many people enjoy a more relaxed pace. Students, teachers and people taking time off for scheduled summer vacations often fall into a pattern of laziness and snacking. If you were away from work for the summer, create a new routine as work starts again. Office employees can stretch during breaks or take a short local walk. Even fitting in a few minutes of movement during the day does wonders for your circulation. Fit fitness into your daily routine for increased energy and a healthier body.

Most Americans have been trained since childhood that leaving food on your plate at the end of a meal is impolite; we are admonished repeatedly to “clean your plate”.

Only, far too often, there is far too much food on our plates. Based on current recommended health guidelines, a plate of food served in a restaurant is statistically between 4 and 6 times larger than necessary. Eating half that much at home is still 2 to 4 times more than a recommended, healthy portion. The simple fact of it is: our portions are too big.

Researchers call the “clean your plate” phenomenon the “completion compulsion”, which views foods in units that need to be consumed in their entirety in order for us to experience fullness. It’s what leads us to eat a whole candy bar instead of a bite, or an entire bag of potato chips (the small “snack” size you’d get in a vending machine) instead of a small handful of chips.

The completion compulsion was validated in a test that showed people given a smaller plate of food reporting feeling just as full as people given a larger plate of food, showing that people gauged their sense of fullness not on the amount of food they ate but on the emptiness of their plates.

But if we’re so conditioned to view food as units, we already have a healthy unit of food in place, and it’s called a ‘serving’. A single serving of any food is ordinarily somewhere from 90 to 160 calories. This means a food dense in calories will have a small portion size relative to foods light in calories.

The nutritional labeling on packaged foods includes the recommended number of servings. In many cases, however, we eat the entire package without noticing realizing we’ve just eaten 2, 3, 4, or more servings at once. That means if there are 250 calories in a serving and 3 servings in the package, eating all of it at once would give you 750 calories.

The intention of denoting a serving on the label is to help you devise the right portions for your meals. One serving ought to be one portion, but how often do we do it that way?

Tips for reducing your portion sizes overall include serving your food on smaller plates and serving food in the kitchen rather than at the table where the leftovers are sitting in front of you so temptingly.

Healthy dieting to lose weight need not involve depriving yourself of any of the foods you enjoy – not one – if you resolve yourself to reducing the amount of everything that you eat into healthier portions. This way, you can eat any food you like, if you eat a responsible portion of it.

This also means you don’t have to reduce your portions of all that you eat uniformly; you don’t have to starve yourself. To compensate for the hunger you may feel after reducing portion sizes of your favorite decadent, calorie-rich foods, you can eat a sizable portion of a food light in calories and feel just as full. And by having allowed yourself at least some of the calorie-dense yummy, your taste buds will be just as happy as your waistline.

It is common knowledge that 7 out of 10 people have been on a diet of one sort or another more than once in their lives.
It is also known that people that go on diets do not necessarily loose weight, and if they do the majority put the weight back on and will actually weigh more than they did within five years.

It is highly recommended that instead of starting a diet as such, that you just eat sensibly and exercise for at least half an hour 3-4 times a week. If you do this you will find that you will loose weight slowly, but are much more likely to keep the weight off and unlike some diets, you will be able to maintain the healthy eating.

Before you start any diet however it is always recommended you consult with your doctor first, especially if you have any prior health problems.

Before starting on a diet, think it out and don’t just rely on what you are told. Some diets have been spun by advertising companies and although they may not lie to you, they don’t usually tell the full story.

In spite of the pretty advertising that ran some time ago grape juice does not cause you to lose weight. All food is fattening, you know—and there’s nothing in grape juice that even helps reduction in any way. It contains sugar—and sugar is fattening. It is pleasant to drink, not at all harmful, and can be substituted for any other fruit drink. If you count the calories, and take grape juice as part of your fruit calories, you’ll do very well with it.

To think that, per se, it will reduce you, is just part of the Fool’s Paradise of advertising.

The baked potato and skimmed milk diet is another flimsy diet that you can omit with pleasure. A baked potato is fine, occasionally. It contains minerals and some proteins, along with starch, and, if eaten with enough meat, is good for you. Skimmed milk is a fine, well balanced food—and is included in most diets. But together they do not form a balanced diet. For a few days, if you want to feel like a martyr, it won’t hurt you—and you’ll certainly lose weight on it.

Tomatoes and hard boiled eggs constitute another two-piece diet that has its enthusiastic followers. It is fairly well balanced, and high in proteins and the nutrients you need, and you’re supposed to lose your appetite on it—another way to get thin—but like all diets of this sort, it is monotonous.

Grapefruit and steak is one of the better tasting of these two-piece affairs. With steak at the price it is today, the grapefruit and steak adherents have the advantage of feeling luxurious while they are half starved. Try it if you like. Like the other two-piece meals, it won’t hurt you. Not as long as you’ll stay on it, I’m sure.

The bread and butter diet is one of the least satisfactory of these limited regimes. However, if you get starved for fresh bread—and often, on a diet, bread-hunger does develop, you may enjoy this bread and butter eating for a few days. The bread can be fresh or toasted, the butter sweet or salted. Nothing else! Just bread and butter! You break the charm and spoil the results if you add to it.

The banana and skimmed milk diet is still popular. Curiously enough, it was actually invented by Dr. George A. Harrop, of Johns Hopkins University, and was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and then taken up by the United Fruit Company. This diet has two parts, each running from ten days to two weeks.

The first part consists of four to six ripe bananas, and from three to four glasses of skimmed milk, with enough vegetables to prevent constipation, each day. The second half adds lean meat, eggs and fish. You’re likely to lose on the first half, but not much
on the second, and you can then repeat the process under your doctor’s strict supervision.

You can find various forms of liquid diets in nearly every diet book—and they are recommended by dozens of people. These usually consist of fruit juices and milk, drunk alternately. These liquid diets are given various names by their sponsors.

They aren’t at all bad—and a liquid diet, one day each week, is recommended by many doctors. Grapefruit juice, pineapple juice, orange juice, tomato juice and milk are usually the recommended liquids. You choose your own, and drink about eight glasses of the liquids during the day, at any intervals you find convenient. If your doctor recommends them, you might try liquid diets occasionally.

Diet and Health With Key to the Calories, by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters, with revisions by Eloise Davison, Director of the New York Herald Tribune Home Institute, is a good book on reduction and contains some helpful and amusing reading matter. My chief objection to this book is that the calories are chosen without much reference to whether they are protein, fat or carbohydrate. But you’ll lose—and you’ll lose sensibly enough on these diets—and I think you’ll find the book interesting.

Sensible Dieting, by Dr. William Engel, with the Engel vital calorie diets, published by Alfred Knopf, is one of the better diet books. The diets are well balanced and arranged in detail according to the seasons, and the chapters devoted to a discussion of foods are well and sensibly written. I think you’ll enjoy this especially if you want more diet lists.

Everyone wants to boost their metabolism, but unfortunately most resort to diet pills and other diet products which can be harmful. You can however, easily boost your metabolism naturally and safely.

The process of metabolism (otherwise known as the metabolic process) is the method the body uses to produce its needed energy by combining calories from food (carbohydrates, proteins, and fats) with oxygen. A person’s metabolic rate is a measurement of how fast their body burns calories which are, in turn, a measurement of energy.

Burn more calories than your body consumes and you lose weight; burn more calories than your body consumes and you gain weight. Another way to say that is this: consume less calories than your body burns and you lose weight; consume more calories than your body burns and you gain weight.

The way to use your body’s metabolism to lose weight, then, is twofold:
• Consume less calories than you burn (as in dieting);
• Burn more calories than you consume (as in exercising);

The average body’s metabolic rate, and the rate at which the Percentage Daily Values of the nutrients on a food’s nutrition label are based, is 2000 calories per day.

Your body burns a certain number of calories per day just by virtue of you being alive – I other words, no exercise necessary. The process of breathing, for example, burns calories. As does the circulating of blood.

All forms of burning calories based on nothing other than the act of being alive make up what’s called you Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Interestingly enough, a person’s BMR makes up about 60% of the calories their bodies burn in a given day.

The remaining 10% of the calories burned in a day are burned by what’s called Dietary Thermongenesis, comprising the heat-producing acts of eating and internally processing food.

It is entirely possible to boost your body’s natural metabolism, in other words: burn more calories in a shorter period of time, or burn calories faster. Strength training (as in lifting weights) is one way to achieve remarkable effects.

When you lift weights, the muscles tear and must be repaired by the body’s natural healing processes. Those processes require the body burn more calories. The body with a bigger muscle mass burns more at rest calories in any given span of time. As a general rule, we burn 50 extra calories a day for each extra pound of muscle.

Beyond weight training, the other tried-and-true method for boosting your metabolism is simply remaining active. The mere act of moving around burns calories, so logically the more you move around the more calories you burn.

Take walks on your breaks at work. Park one or two streets over. Tidy up around the house while you chat on the phone. None of these require a gym membership or a specific amount of time.
A little bit over a long time adds up to a lot.

Lastly, there are dietary measures you can take to help boost your metabolism. Caffeinated beverages (green tea being one of the healthier choices) and spicy foods have both been shown to increase the body’s metabolic rate.

Also, if you start having more frequent smaller meals rather than just 2 or 3 large ones (“grazing” throughout the day, so to speak), your metabolism will be in a constant state of activity breaking down and processing your many small meals.

Do you find yourself confused every time your trainer tells you to make sure you do anaerobic exercise this weekend? You aren’t the only one confused by the different types. There are many differences between aerobic exercise and anaerobic exercise.

The scientific definition of aerobic is “with oxygen,” and anaerobic means without oxygen.
Don’t take these definitions literally and stop holding your breath! When doing an anaerobic exercise, your body must rely on energy-creating repetitions of exercise that don’t need extreme quantities of oxygen.
This makes anaerobic exercise very brief and very fast.

Aerobic exercise tones muscles and burns fat.
Aerobic exercise gives you a stronger heart, which reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.
It makes your legs and calves more toned, which will make you look great in your little black dress.
It also makes that size 6 polka-dot bikini you’ve been trying to squeeze into obtainable.

Anaerobic exercise makes your bones stronger.
Anaerobic exercise also increases your speed and power, as well as giving you increased muscle mass and strength (for all you body builders out there).

It’s crucial that you know the difference between aerobic exercise and anaerobic exercise. This way, when your trainer asks what aerobic exercise workouts you did over the weekend, you can tell him – but more important, you’ll know that you’re giving your body exactly what it needs to achieve optimal health!

Examples of aerobic exercise are running, skiing, rowing, swimming, or even doing an exercise video. Some great examples of anaerobic exercise are tennis, lifting weights, jumping (jumping jacks count), and/or sprinting.