Obesity is the top cause of preventable illness and death in North America. In last decade, the number of people with overweight in industrialized countries has increased significantly. This serious problem is now like an “epidemic”. In the United States 33% of people suffers of weight problems; about 60 millions persons are overweight in Canada The big questions is ” What are the best methods to improve your weight loss, Diets or Exercises?”

What you need to know about diets pills and natural medicine

Many of us have heard horror stories about the ‘diet pills’ that became very popular a generation or so ago. These pills, available with a medical prescription, were basically ’speed’ - which, in a slightly different form, was sold as a street drug. These pills did make women lose weight - sometimes a great deal of weight. This weight loss came at hight price, though. A lot of people became addicted to diet pills. Others took them for so long, or at such heavy doses, that finished by ruining their health.

Nowadays, those diet pills still exist, but they are not prescribed or used nearly as often as they used to be. In general, people today are more aware of the importance of good health and doing things more naturally. All the same, losing weight is still a going concern, and there many people looking for a shortcut, so to speak. That’s where natural medicine comes in.

Natural or herbal medicine has been around for hundred of years - before western medicine or modern pharmaceuticals. It has also undergone a bit of a revival of late. People are disenchanted with the mainstream medical system, and looking for answers through an older system of medicine, one that is based on herbs and vitamins.

In fact, you can see how true that statement is just by browsing the shelves of your local drug store. Chances are, there will be almost as many herbal medicines available on your drugstore as there are conventional medicines. Even doctors are accepting the role that natural medicine has to play. Even if they don’t out and out endorse it, many doctors will concede that natural medicine does no harm, at any rate.

What you need to know about physical exercises

It’s wise to make exercise a part of your weight-loss program. Exercise has a positive psychological impact in our mind, people who are trying to lose weight and have included an exercise plan to loose weight may take advantage psychologically and experience less hunger.

Hunger as most of us know is the major cause behind obesity. Most of the persons who suffers from obesity is because they can not control the appetite. This insatiable situation for eating make people gain weight uncontrollably.

A Few Of The Best Exercises For Weight Loss

- Swimming can be a great weight loss exercise if you swing in cool water is even better because your body burns calories heating itself.

- Walking is maybe a better alternative to running or jogging. It’s easier and delivers about the same results for the same distance traveled. It’s also more enjoyable for many of us.

- Climbing up and down stairs is a very good exercise. It burns almost as many calories as jogging.

- Stationary bicycles are very effective, you can feel more motivated watching your favorite television show while pedaling.

- Parking your car far away from every place you visit can mean a lot of extra walking. Once you do it enough, it will become an almost unconscious habit.

- Walking the dog can be good exercise for you and the dog

- Getting a part-time job that requires physical exercise can be a way to guarantee you’ll get enough exercise. Just be sure it’s something you can handle and enjoy.

Finally, exercising is by far the best Method to improve your weight loss. Sometimes you will not reach your goal, but you will still have done your body good.

To learn more, please visit http://www.XtremeFatBurn.com

To learn more tips and secrets about weight loss, please visit Jason Filsaime’s website at http://www.XtremeFatBurn.com

Regular exercise and good nutrition are at the heart of staying healthy, reducing the risk of heart disease, diabetes and obesity. But eating right can be a challenge in today’s fast-paced world.

With a bit of creativity and professional-style equipment, preparing healthy, delicious food is faster and easier than it may seem. Here are tips for using blenders in the Vita-Mix Professional Series to easily create flavorful, nutritious meals and snacks:

* Fresh fruits are an essential part of a healthy diet, and they’re easy to incorporate into your daily routine. Make a fresh fruit smoothie for breakfast instead of a sweet roll, or try a smoothie for an evening snack instead of ice cream, cookies or chips.

* Soup made with fresh ingredients can make a light but satisfying entrée. Using a commercial-grade blender, you can create a variety of recipes in minutes - from a heart-healthy tomato soup to a delicious squash soup - and add more vegetables to your diet.

* The USDA food pyramid recommends 5 to 8 ounces of grains per day, with an emphasis on whole grains. The Vita-Mix Professional Series cracks whole grains into flour for creating delicious cereals, pancakes and healthy homemade breads.

* With childhood obesity a growing concern, parents can prepare baby food at home using fresh, flavorful and healthy ingredients. When you make it yourself, you know exactly what is in it.

* Offer fresh and healthy appetizer options at a party. Salsa or red pepper hummus on summer squash rounds are tasty ways to celebrate any occasion.

Visit www.theprofessionalseries.com for more information and healthy recipes, such as Cherry Peach Velvet Smoothie, Cream of Yellow Squash Soup and Hot Spice Apple Barley Cereal.

In fact, an eye-opening 70 percent of Americans are getting less than eight hours of sleep at night, according to a national survey sponsored by the Better Sleep Council (BSC). And unfortunately, these restless people are far less likely to engage in high-intensity physical activity, such as running or lifting weights, than those who get eight or more hours of shut-eye.

“Sleep deprivation impacts us physically, which can negatively affect our coordination, agility, mood and energy,” says Dr. Bert Jacobson, professor and head of the School of Educational Studies at Oklahoma State University. “Research shows that quality and adequate quantity of sleep leads to improvements in athletic performance, including better endurance, energy and even mood.”

Studies also show that sleeping on a newer mattress may be the key to better sleep and increased physical endurance. According to the BSC survey, adults sleeping on newer (one to four years old) mattresses are more likely to participate in physical activities, as compared to adults whose mattresses are eight to 10 years old.

To improve the quality of your sleep, and in turn the quality of your life, try these tips from the BSC:

Exercise regularly. A regular exercise regimen helps keep you fit and also helps you sleep better at night. But avoid really strenuous exercise right before bedtime.

- Avoid alcohol, caffeine and nicotine (e.g., coffee, cigarettes) close to bedtime. These can lead to poor sleep, keep you awake or disrupt sleep later in the night.
- Watch what you eat. Finish eating at least two hours before your regular bedtime, and avoid heavy or late meals.
- Evaluate your sleep equipment. Just as we need the proper equipment to get the best workout, we also need the proper sleeping equipment to get the best night’s sleep. If your mattress is five to seven years old, or if you wake up with stiffness, aches or pains, it’s time to evaluate your mattress and see whether a new one could provide you with better comfort and support.

For more information on how to evaluate your mattress and get a better night’s sleep to improve your physical activity and overall well-being, visit www.bettersleep.org.

Increase lean body mass through strength training. This is the most effective way of increasing your metabolism. The amount of muscle you have is a strong indicator of your body’s ability to burn calories and shed fat. Build strength by working out at least twice a week. If you don’t have weights you can use your own body’s weight for resistance. Examples of using your body’s weight for resistance training include push ups and chin ups. Start out slowly and increase the amount of repetitions each week. With weights you should try to slightly increase the amount of weight each week.

Increase the amount of daily activity you get. Simple things like walking the dog or using stairs instead of an elevator can help take off calories. Though cardio exercise like walking is not as effective as strength training, if you have been inactive just adding 30 minutes a day of walking, working in the garden, or anything else that get you up and moving can have huge health benefits.

In part one of this article, I talked about how avoiding diets is one of the best things you can do for your long term health and fitness success, especially if you want to burn fat. In this second part, I’ll show you how you can start to transition from your current lifestyle to one that creates a lean, strong body and lasting health.

From a nutritional standpoint, you need a healthy balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats in your diet to keep your metabolism firing on all cylinders, constantly burning fat. Fad diets have a coolness factor to them that sometimes makes them irresistible at first. But in the long run I’ve found it best to go back to the basics of what your body craves. Let’s talk about that…

Complex Carbs (whole grains, breads, cereals, etc.) are vital to maintaining your energy throughout the day and do a host of other things within your body including keeping you feeling full. I’ll also lump fruits in with complex carbs, because of their high fiber content and slow absorption into the blood stream, keeping our insulin level in check, which is important for less fat storage and a higher chance of burning stored fat.

Simple Carbs, or sugars (candy, soda pop, white processed baked goods, etc) are to be avoided and kept to a minimum for the most part. They provide little nutritional value to you and are what I often refer to as empty calories. They just add calories to your body with little or no nutritional value that are going to end up in your fat stores if you’re not careful with how much you ingest. Forget about maximum fat burning here. Of course, many people are aware of the blood sugar and insulin connection with eating too many simple carbs. Our insulin regulates are blood sugar level and takes any excess sugars and stores them as fat. We then are stuck getting tired and hungry, making repeating this cycle far too easy. The best way to avoid this, I’ve found, is eating a sensible amounts of complex carbohydrates instead.

Proteins (lean meats, fish, poultry, soy, beans and legumes, etc.) are important to maintain the cellular structures in your body and provide the building blocks for the lean muscle you’re after, which is vital if you want to burn fat fast. But with anything else, don’t go overboard with protein. Some fitness experts claim that you’ll need a minimum 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight each day. There is no real proof that this is the case, and ingesting more protein than your body needs ends up going to your fat stores…plus it doesn’t do your kidneys or liver any good either. I’ve found that keeping protein to around 0.5 grams per pound of bodyweight each day more than sufficient in feeding the lean muscle growth that my Fat Burning Furnace students stimulate with their properly performed resistance exercise.

Another important aspect of protein involves whether or not you’re getting your protein from animal or plant based sources. While the traditional American diet recommends most animal based proteins, recent data suggests that too heavy a reliance on animal proteins increases risks for disease. On top of that, animal proteins contain almost no fiber, which doesn’t go very far in keeping you feeling full, and negatively effects your ability to burn fat. When choosing your protein sources, make sure you eat a good portion of your protein from plant sources (soy, beans, legumes, etc.). You don’t have to be a vegetarian, but I recommend keeping your animal proteins on the low side.

Fats (found in many proteins, nuts, oils, etc.) are essential to maintain certain bodily processes like hair, nail, and skin regeneration. There is a lot of confusion with fats out there, some recommending extremely low fat diets and others even recommending a very high fat diet. If you are focusing on lean protein choices in your meals, and including small amounts of healthy oils, nuts, and seeds in your diet, your fat intake will be in order.

So how much of each of these macro nutrients should you be eating to maximize fat burning and get that lean fit body you’re after? It’s easy to get caught up in the percentages and counting calories, but the easiest way I’ve found is to count portions instead of calories. An easy way to ensure that this happens is to make sure you eat both a portion or two of complex carbs and a portion of protein at each meal. Add as many green veggies as you can eat, as they’re super low in calories and provide more fiber, enzymes that aid in digestion, and vitamins and minerals that will be more than adequate for most people. Remember, focus on nutrient rich foods and you’ll find that burning fat and getting healthy will seem like a natural.

How many times per day should we be eating to burn the most fat? I can tell you that three meals a day is not going to cut it when trying to burn fat fast and get lean, at least not in my experience. In fact, if you wanted to get as fat as possible, you should eat all of your daily calories in one meal. Eating smaller more frequent meals throughout the day is the fastest way to fat loss. It fires up your metabolism, as every time you eat something, the metabolism kicks it up a notch. Try and eat 5-6 smaller meals per day, spaced about 3 hours apart.

Now, I know many people don’t want to be taken out of their breakfast, lunch, and dinner routine…so you can still eat at those traditional meal times, but try cutting back a bit on how much food you eat at those meals and add those calories into 2 or 3 snack meals in between. A snack meal could be a protein/energy bar or maybe even a piece of fruit and a slice of whole grain bread.

So you see, eating for a lean, strong, and healthy body isn’t so difficult…and it doesn’t require you to eliminate essential foods like complex carbohydrates from your diet. In fact, doing so will put you into the cycle of confusion of fad diets that is all too prevalent in fitness today. And that’s a cycle that’s tough to break out of. Focus on foods your body craves naturally instead, and the rest of the details will be easy to implement into your lifestyle. Before long you’ll start to burn fat faster than you might have thought possible.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

Rob Poulos is a celebrated fitness author, fat loss expert, and the founder and CEO of Zero to Hero Fitness. Rob created the world’s most efficient method for fast and permanent fat loss with his “Fat Burning Furnace” system to help those looking to put an end to restrictive fad diets, long boring cardio workouts, and the need for super-human willpower for good.

Fad diets, they all have one thing in common. They’re diets. They are like a pair of bell bottom pants. They are in for a couple of years and they’re gone. Then they find they’re way back just when the fitness professionals know we are ready to eat ‘em up again…no pun intended. When you’re trying to burn fat, you really should avoid these things like the plague.

Now, realistically many of these diets will provide some initial fat loss for many people. So you get some weight loss initially, but you could also lose some muscle on these programs too, and you know that losing muscle can spell disaster to your fat burning efforts. But the bigger problem with these diets is that most who follow outlandish diets gain back the fat they lost, and then some! On top of that, they often recommend focusing too much on one type of food, which can lead to unhealthy eating habits. I’ve found they are too strict to be realistically followed, especially for a long period of time, and they’re no fun. And anything you can’t follow as a lifestyle will not burn fat in the long run.

You see, the very concept of a diet is doomed to fail. Why? Diets are based in a temporary mindset. The fact that someone goes on a diet means they will have to come off of the diet. This is temporary…why force yourself to lose 10 pounds when you’re just going to gain it back and then some when you go off of the diet? That may sound simple, but most people just don’t get it…they look to diets as the answer to their weight and health problems. But they’re not the answer, and they actually create more problems for you. People who are regular dieters don’t burn fat over the long haul.

If you seek life long fat burning, health and fitness in a lean body, you should take some advice from my mom, and probably your mom too. When I think about it, probably the best base of nutritional knowledge I received was from my mom. For the most part, my mom was right. She didn’t know anything about fat burning, but she made sure I got nutritious foods growing up. She especially made a point to make sure I ate my vegetables, especially the green ones. She limited sugary stuff and other junk, but didn’t totally eliminate it, making it a special treat for me on occasion. She tried to provide a balanced offering of the different food groups throughout the day. Thanks, Mom. Mom’s diet was actually quite sound, and I’ve found that heeding some of this advice in the pursuit of maximum fat burning and a lean healthy body for the rest of your life is a smart way to go.

You see, your body naturally craves foods rich in nutrients (antioxidants, phyto nutrients, fiber, vitamins, minerals, etc.) When you eat most of your meals from foods rich in important nutrients, your body will body will be satisfied and overeating won’t be much of a problem. You then begin to burn fat as a natural result of giving your body what it thrives on. On top of that, you’re lowering your risk for disease by promoting a natural alkaline environment in your body with these types of foods.

If you do the opposite and eat most of your meals from foods lacking in nutrients, you’ll keep eating and eating and eating to satisfy your nutrient needs. This leads to too many calories and a person who will just keep getting fatter and more prone to develop increased risk for disease with an acidic environment in the body. When this happens, you can just kiss fat burning goodbye.

So nutrition for fat loss, fitness, and health really all do go hand in hand. My Fat Burning Furnace students have changed their lives permanently, by simply altering what they put in their bodies…and you can do it to. Focus on foods rich in nutrients. In part two of this article, I’ll get more specific in helping you make the transition from your current lifestyle to the one you desire. One where your body seemingly burns fat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with little effort.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

Rob Poulos is a celebrated fitness author, fat loss expert, and the founder and CEO of Zero to Hero Fitness. Rob created the world’s most efficient method for fast and permanent fat loss with his “Fat Burning Furnace” system to help those looking to put an end to restrictive fad diets, long boring cardio workouts, and the need for super-human willpower for good.

In order to reap the benefits from the intense exercise I recommend to my Fat Burning Furnace students, you must get adequate rest. I can’t stress this fact enough. In fact, rest is just as important, if not more important that the actual exercise. During the high intensity resistance exercise that my students perform, the muscles experience tiny injuries or tears. The body’s response is to adapt and repair, getting stronger and larger muscles, which of course leads to burning more fat and a leaner body.

But this growth and repair process won’t take place if the body is not allowed the time to do its job. Too often, people rush back into the gym, as many have been inundated with the “more is better” axiom when it comes to exercise. But if we don’t get out of the body’s way and let it do its magic, we will experience poor results. We won’t burn fat like we want to, and we will just end up demotivated or possibly give up our efforts altogether.

If you don’t get enough rest or sleep, you’ll have a very difficult time building the fat-burning muscle that will transform your body. And you’ll also have a tough time burning fat off too! That’s why we can’t work out too long or too often when using a sufficient intensity level. When giving the body an intense stimulus, such as proper weight training, you can’t keep hammering it into the ground. If you did this, you’d quickly over train your muscles and negate your body’s ability to recover from exercise. Your immune system could become so worn down in fact, that you might even get sick…this happened to me a few times in the past when I wasn’t paying attention to getting adequate rest and sleep.

And this repair and recover process doesn’t happen overnight, it usually takes 2 days or more, So make sure to keep between 1-3 days of rest between your properly conducted resistance training workouts, or you will be short-circuiting your chances of success to burn fat and build lean, strong, muscle.

Now that we know how important rest is to burning fat and building muscle, we also must understand the most important component of rest…otherwise know as sleep. Sleep is the ultimate recovery tool, and not only for recovery from exercise. It’s a recovery tool from any stress you take in throughout the day. Whether it’s from family pressures, work issues, or finances, etc., increased stress can be dissolved by adequate sleep. And don’t think you can burn fat maximally when you’re over-stressed by other things in your life. A high stress level can shut down the effectiveness of your ability to burn fat, among other things.

So make sure to get adequate sleep. What’s ideal? I would recommend no less than seven or more than nine hours. In fact, seven and half hours per night might be the perfect amount! Research has shown that we sleep in cycles of 90 minutes or so. It has been suggested that if we wake up too far before or after one of these 90 minute cycles, you will probably feel groggy for a good part of the day. So try the 5 90 minutes sleep cycles, or 7 and a half hours…you’ll most likely wake up feeling well-rested and energized, and your fat burning furnace will show it’s appreciation, allowing you to burn more fat faster.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

Rob Poulos is a celebrated fitness author, fat loss expert, and the founder and CEO of Zero to Hero Fitness. Rob created the world’s most efficient method for fast and permanent fat loss with his “Fat Burning Furnace” system to help those looking to put an end to restrictive fad diets, long boring cardio workouts, and the need for super-human willpower for good.

By now, most people realize that adding lean muscle mass to your body does wonders for your metabolism and fat loss, as well as a host of other benefits that allow you to live out your life as healthy as possible. Unfortunately, most people I see performing weight training or resistance training at the gym are spending too much time with the exercise and not working hard enough. They’re not going to burn very much fat this way. The secret I’ve found is that training for lean muscle and strength requires the proper application of three vital elements that are often ignored by those who attempt it. Those three elements are:

-Intensity

-Volume & Frequency

-Progression

The intensity is how hard it is to perform for you, given your current condition. The volume and frequency are how much and how often you perform the exercise. The progression is related to how much the demands increase from workout to workout. Most times, weight training, is carried on for too long and performed too many times per week. It is unfortunately treated much the same way as so-called fat burning aerobic exercise. But they are vastly different forms of exercise. In fact, they’re complete opposites.

Aerobic exercise typically is characterized by low to moderate intensity, high volume and frequency, and little progression. Anaerobic exercise, or weight training, must be performed at a high intensity, lower volume and frequency, and with progression to be as effective as possible. No amount of weight training performed at a low or moderate intensity will provide significant muscle or strength building benefit beyond the first few weeks. On a high level view, it is simply the combination of sufficient intensity, coupled with attempting to increase either the number of repetitions of a weight training exercise or the amount of weight used each and every workout that will keep your body evolving into the ultimate fat burning machine!

You also have to pay attention to other details when creating an effective and efficient routine to maximize your workout and minimize your time spent in the gym. Why? Because perhaps even more important that the workout itself is the rest period that follows. You’re not going to get stronger or more muscular if you don’t rest.

You see, when you strength train properly, you are creating tiny injuries to your muscles. You then have to let the body repair itself, and then overcompensate and build upon the already existing amount of muscle mass you have. If you workout again before that process in completed, you’ll experience lackluster, if any, muscle building or fat burning results. So make sure to get proper rest between workouts, which typically means a minimum of 1 to 3 full days of rest between properly executed resistance workouts.

Now upon hearing the idea that you’ve got add muscle to your body to ensure the maximum fat burning environment, a lot of people, women especially, start thinking, “But I don’t want to get bigger, I want to lose weight!” But this is such a shame, because it’s very unlikely to happen, and countless women are losing out on these fat burning benefits because of it. You see, most men and almost all women simply lack the necessary genetic traits required to produce such muscle gains that would cause them to look bulky or overly-developed to most people. These traits include testosterone levels, muscle fiber makeup, muscle belly length, and others.

Those competitive bodybuilders you’ve seen on TV and in the magazines are the genetic cream of the crop for muscle development and they are typically on heavy doses of anabolic steroids, growth hormone, and other bodybuilding drugs. Don’t be fooled by these images, or those that scare you into thinking this way. Also, lean muscle is more compact that fat, as it takes up less space in your body, so you will actually be getting smaller when replacing the fat on your body with lean muscle.

Please understand that you’re putting yourself in the best position to succeed with your fat loss and fitness goals when you perform properly conducted intense resistance training, no matter who you are. But make sure you understand and apply the three critical principles I discussed above. If you don’t, you’ll ultimately be unhappy with your results, both in your ability to burn fat and realize the lean, strong, and healthy body you deserve.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

Rob Poulos is a celebrated fitness author, fat loss expert, and the founder and CEO of Zero to Hero Fitness. Rob created the world’s most efficient method for fast and permanent fat loss with his “Fat Burning Furnace” system to help those looking to put an end to restrictive fad diets, long boring cardio workouts, and the need for super-human willpower for good.

Ask ten people what type of exercise they should be doing to burn fat and fire up their metabolism and they’ll all probably tell you the same thing. They’ll tell you that you need to do 30-40 minutes of moderately-paced aerobic exercise on a treadmill, elliptical machine, stair climber, etc. for 3-5 times per week. They’ll probably also tell you that more is better…4 times per week would be better than 3, and 5 times per week would be even better.

People will tell you this because that’s been and continues to be the mainstream recommendation for fat burning by many fitness professionals. Get in a certain target heart rate and stay at that heart rate for 30 minutes or so, several times per week. I am here to tell you there is a better way. Sure, you’ll burn some calories while you’re running to nowhere on a treadmill, but you won’t make a complete physique transformation with this type of exercise alone.

In fact, this type of exercise can actually be counterproductive to burning fat. Here are just a couple of reasons:

Long duration, lower intensity aerobics calls upon your stored body fat for energy during the sessions. While this may sound good, this can actually cause your body to create more body fat in reserve after the workout is over to have ready for your next workout. Yikes!

What’s worse, this type of exercise when done frequently as typically suggested, trains your cardiovascular system to be efficient. Again, while this sounds good, your heart and lungs can actually reduce their capacity for work as they are getting more efficient at doing easy work (your long duration, low intensity aerobic workouts), which reduces their ability to handle stress. This can lead to a host of other problems including higher change of heart attack. You are only working within your current aerobic capacity because you’re never challenging it to go beyond what it’s capable of. And anything that is easy will not yield results even close to what’s challenging for the body to accomplish. Instead, you should be challenging the body to increase its capacity, so that it is stronger and able to deal with stress more easily. How is this done?

The fastest and most efficient way to rev up your metabolism, burn fat faster, and develop lifelong health and fitness is to add lean muscle to your body through resistance training - period. You want life changing results in the quickest possible time? Get stronger and build some muscle. When you add lean muscle to your body you’ll be literally turning your body into a fat burning machine!

Let’s say that you were eating the amount of calories that allow you to maintain your current bodyweight, but began to add lean muscle to your body through proper resistance training…you’ll need to use some of those calories you’re eating to feed the new muscle, creating a calorie deficit in your body.

In addition, when you stimulate your body with proper resistance training like I teach my students, the repair and growth process will call upon your stored body fat for energy. This calorie deficit combined with the repair and growth process will allow you to burn fat all day long, every day. You’ll even get these fat burning effects when you’re sitting around doing nothing at all.

Also, properly conducted resistance training actually increases your heart and lung’s capacity for work. By placing intense demands on your body, it is forced into being ready for anything you throw at it. This makes you more resistant to cardiovascular health problems that plague most people…even those that exercise with aerobics frequently.

And the beauty is I’ve discovered that you don’t have to spend much time working out to get the fat loss effects, and strength and muscle gains that will create this environment…you can actually get it done with 2 or 3 weekly workouts that last between 20 and 30 minutes, and even less time at an advanced level. And it’s easy to make this type of exercise part of your life because of its efficiency…and it will help keep you lean and healthy for the rest of it…muscle is the stuff that fat burning furnaces are made of! That I can promise you.

Claim your free copy of Rob Poulos’s “7 Secrets Of Permanent Fat Loss & Fitness” at his website: http://www.fatburningfurnace.com

Rob Poulos is a celebrated fitness author, fat loss expert, and the founder and CEO of Zero to Hero Fitness. Rob created the world’s most efficient method for fast and permanent fat loss with his “Fat Burning Furnace” system to help those looking to put an end to restrictive fad diets, long boring cardio workouts, and the need for super-human willpower for good.

There is a dizzying array of things that you can eat these days. Truly, a trip to the grocery store can be an adventure. Everywhere you turn, there’s yet another food promising you healthy this or weight loss that.

Added to this confusion is that there are some foods that are beneficial for metabolic boosting, and some that aren’t; and the differences aren’t always well-known. Fortunately, we’re going to tackle this problem right now and describe the three basic food groups/types that are indeed good for a speedy metabolism.

In terms of protein, studies have shown that having enough protein in your system can actually increase the speed of your metabolism. This is because protein is difficult to break down. Or rather, it requires more energy to break down. It’s like feeding the body a knot; it needs a bit of time to unravel it.

And, as you know, when your body spends time on something, it spends energy (calories). And so the more time it can spend breaking down protein, the more calories that it uses.

Different people will require different amounts of protein on a daily basis. Those who exercise and build muscle will typically need more than the average amount, too. The USFDA Food Guide suggests around 50 grams of protein a day for a reasonably active adult.

Keep in mind (not that you don’t already have enough to remember, but…) that there are different sources of protein: some lean, and some high in fat. Fast food burgers may deliver up to 20 grams of protein (sometimes more), but they also deliver a great deal of fat; which makes them almost nutritionally worthless.

The benefits you enjoy from the protein are far outweighed by the immense fat intake; which, for some fast food burgers, can exceed 40 grams! And that’s not including the fries (we won’t even go there!).

So the thing to do is ensure that your source of protein derives from lean protein. Typically, protein from some fish and chicken is lean; though not all of it.

If you’re a vegetarian, or simply looking for non-meat lean protein alternatives, low-fat cheese, legumes (lentils), and yogurt are all good sources. Simply check the food labels to determine if the source of protein is lean (doesn’t deliver high fat content), or fatty. In terms of carbohydrates, there probably isn’t a more battered around micronutrient than this. It’s gone from being the greatest thing in weight loss history, to one of the most reviled.

And really, it’s not the fault of the innocent carbohydrate! It’s really just a matter of information and knowledge, instead of speculation.

The thing to remember is that when carbohydrates are refined, such as white bread and potatoes, they are what the diabetic world refers to as high glycemic index (GI) foods, because they require spikes in insulin in order to be digested.

As you may know, when insulin is released into the system, it promotes the storage of fat; and some experts believe that it also pushes down metabolic speed (which makes sense).

Therefore, the good kinds of carbohydrate to consume are those that are high in fiber, and those from fruit and vegetable sources. Why? Because these sources of carbohydrates don’t score high on the glycemic index. In other words, they don’t cause a spike in insulin levels, and therefore, they don’t promote fat storage.