Target Heart Rate Calculator

Knowing your target heart rate is vital when exercising so that you know that you are working out at the right intensity and getting the best results that you can.

Maximum heart rate MHR,  is the highest number of times your heart can contract in one minute. The average adult heart beats about 60 to 100 times a minute at rest. The resting heart rate usually increases with age, and is generally lower in physically fit people.

Maximum heart rate is used to determine your training target heart rate. There are many calculations that can be used to determine this but luckily there is also a cool tool that does all this for you and then gives you a range that you should work out in. This is great because it ensures that you are not working out too hard, but also, just as important it ensures that you are not cheating yourself and are not working hard enough!

To use this tool please click here Please let me know what you think below.

Sugar the new fat?

No Added Sugar!

 

So your goal today is to avoid any foods with ADDED sugar. That means no “yogurt-with-added-fruit-and-sugar”, no sodas, no processed carbs from a bag or a box, no peanut butter with added sugar, no protein bars flavored with sugar. No ketchup. No BBQ sauces with added sugar.

For those of you that have a sweet tooth I know that this will be challenging, but just try it for one day. So NO added sugar today. Period. Experts Read more

Where do you fit on the graph?

 

  This is taken from a post written by registered dietician Mike Rousell. This is really important in determining your starting point when beginning your fat loss journey. “This graph represents what I call the Stages of Nutrition. Your diet (like many things) consists of a progression and you need to master one step before you move to the next. I’m going to steal my buddy Alwyn Cosgrove’s martial arts metaphor to illustrate my point. If you want to learn Karate you can’t start out training with Jet Li. You need to know how a certain number of basic moves, master those, and progress from there to more advance tactics. Your diet is no different. If you can’t master certain basic components then you have now business progressing to more complicated nutritional approaches.

The Stages of Nutrition:

• Nutritional Freestyling: You eat whatever you want whenever you want.
• Proper Food Choices Varying Compliance: You try to eat the right stuff but

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A common food that boosts your metabolism

Fat loss specialist Mike Geary wrote this article about this secret food:

**How Your Spice Cabinet Can Boost Your Metabolism** “I’ve written before about the power of certain herbs and spices in terms of antioxidant capacity and other health benefits. If you remember, I wrote a couple months ago about the super-food status of cinnamon and how powerful a health food (or rather spice) that it can be. The next super-spice — Chili! I was just reading about a recent Australian study that documented how you can burn more calories, increase your metabolism slightly, and help control your blood sugar and insulin levels by including chili peppers and chili spice (or cayenne) in your foods. Keep in mind, this may be a minor “detail”, but when you add up a lot of these types of “details”, you can make significant changes to your body over time. As you’ve probably heard in the past, the active ingredient in chili pepper (capsaicin) can cause slight increases in your metabolic rate and calorie burning from a meal. This has been reported many times in both animal and human studies. However, in this Australian study, Madeleine J. Ball, MD, one of the researchers from the study, sought to find out how chili pepper affected blood sugar and insulin response after a meal. As you know, chronically high insulin levels in your body can not only cause deposition of excess body fat, but also can lead to diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. The study was split into groups of subjects that ate meals without chili spice, and other groups of subjects that ate meals with chili pepper. As it turned out, the chili pepper eating groups had lower insulin levels and more stable blood sugar after the meals than the groups that ate the same food without chile.  According to Dr. Ball, “the chili is probably having some effect on the ability of the body to clear — or remove — insulin from the bloodstream”. Aside from the temporary calorie burning boost and insulin controlling response, apparently chili pepper also has significant antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties… So if you can handle a bit of spicyness, go ahead and enjoy adding some extra cayenne or chili pepper to your pot of meat & bean chili, your morning eggs, meat dishes, and other meals, knowing it’s possibly giving you a slight edge in the fat burning department.”

So know you know!  Let me know how you get on, incorporating chilis into your diet