Healthy Life

Eating low fat foods can help us establish a healthy balanced eating plan, which is must for us to stay healthy. We are becoming more and more health conscientious, low fat foods are gaining in popularity. In addition to learn this low fat food list includes most of the more common foods, we are looking for new ways to cook low fat foods, and experimenting with new low fat and healthy diets. Variety is the key to health. Let’s try the following low fat cooking tips to live up our eating and to keep us motivated to stay healthy.

Learning to cook with low fat foods is a very important aspect of eating a low fat diet. Several things to consider include the importance of learning to read and understand the nutritional information on food labels, understanding the difference between healthy fats and unhealthy fats in our food, learning how to make healthy low fat food choices and learning different low-fat cooking methods.

Preparing for low fat cooking

Low fat does not mean we do not need any fat at all, because healthy fats are necessary in our diet, and unsaturated fats are the favorable choice. The first step to tackling low fat food preparation is having the right fats on hand. The following items are very good examples.

• Canola oil
• Olive oil
• Grape seed oil

In addition, please refer to the common low fat food list. Some of them we often use for low fat recipes are as follows.

• Soybean sauce
• Vinegar
• Low fat milk
• Low fat sour cream
• Low fat cheeses
• Low fat yogurt
• Fresh herbs and spices
• Pureed fruit
• Salmon ( for Omega 3 fatty acids, which is good for our heart health)
• chicken breast(for high-protein, low fat)
• vegetables
• fruits

Low fat cooking methods

• Steam or stir or stew or roast or bake instead of frying.
• Stir vegetables in broth instead of oil really cuts down on the fat. Chicken, beef or vegetable broth give vegetables a great flavor.
• Remove the skin from poultry and trim the fat from meats.
• Use red wine, vinegar, soy sauce, crushed garlic, lime and fresh ginger to make a fabulous sauce to cook for juicy and tender lean meat.
• Do not add fat while cooking.
• Avoid butter, lard, palm oil, coconut oil, since they contain about 40% saturated fat.
• Skim milk makes a great low-fat substitution in recipes calling for heavy cream.
• For reducing fat and cholesterol in baking, two egg whites can be substituted for one whole egg.
• Use wine and fruit juice instead of butter
• For a low fat alternative to thick, creamy soup, puree the ingredients with cooked potato instead of cream.
• For a low-fat alternative to sour cream, use non-fat yogurt with just a little sour cream mixed in.
• Instead of frosting a cake, try dusting it with cocoa or confectioner’s sugar.
• Instead of butter, try dipping bread in olive oil for dinner.
• Marinate or baste fish or chicken with concentrated fruit juice, fresh fruit juice or vegetable juices, instead of oils.
• Use salsa or low-fat yogurt for baked potatoes instead of traditional butter and sour cream.
• For salad dressings, vinegar adds a lot of tang without any fat, and skim milk works very well as a base for creamier dressings.
• Get a good low-fat cookbook with a number of recipes and try new low fat spices

Enjoy your cooking and enjoy your Food

Cooking low fat is easy, delicious, healthful and joyful. Whether you are making an appetizer, a main dish, a dressing, a side accompaniment, or a dessert, finding great low fat recipes is refreshing. In addition, experiment with variety ingredients and you’ll be amazed at what you can come up with, and you may find that you really enjoy it!

We are always looking for new ideas. Do you have a low-fat recipe you’d like to share?

We encourage you to refer to a few wonderful Low Fat cookbooks for inspiration.

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Regular exercise is extremely important and beneficial for our health, well-being and quality of life. It provides enormous health benefits including reducing many diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes etc. Regular fitness exercise is also highly beneficial for maintaining a healthy weight, and improving brain chemistry to reduce stress level and depression, which contributes to our mental health. Health studies show that inactivity significantly increases the risk of overweight, obesity, chronic diseases and mental problems. Let’s move and improve our health!

Difference between exercise and physical activity

Physical activity is any type of movement of our body that increases our metabolism and causes our muscles to contract. Examples of physical activity range from playing football to carrying heavy boxes. Exercise itself is actually a subcategory of physical activity. Although works involving in labor do belong to physical activities, they usually use a part of our body over and over again leading to over use that part of our body, which may damage our health. Wile for exercise, we are engaging in a structured program of physical activity intended to help us achieve maximum physical fitness.

Exercise is also called structured physical activity, which is a popular pursuit amongst any person regardless his or her age and sex who wants to stay fit.

Regular exercise

It is recommended to exercise regularly at least a half hour three times per week, which can result in numerous health benefits and improving our work performance and the quality of our life. Just like the old adage ‘use it or lose it’, especially in this modern world, with more and more convenient electronic products and more and more people work at desks, we do need regular exercise to keep us fit.

Healthy exercise routine

Different types of exercise offer different benefits. Aerobic or cardio workouts primarily improve the cardiovascular system such as our heart and lungs, while weight-training or strength-training improves muscular strength and flexibility and stretching exercises improve overall mobility and coordination.

Depending a person’s age and health situation, usually for a person who has a fairly inactive life, an effective, regular exercise routine includes several stretching exercises to warmed up for activity. After stretching, twenty minutes of aerobic activity such as running or walking will burn calories and improve cardiovascular health. Finally, cool down by performing a few more stretches. Adding a few minutes of weight lifting or resistance training to the routine for improving strength and endurance is also very helpful.

The benefits of regular exercise

Lets’ review the benefits of regular exercise together. We sure know there are a lot of benefits; while here we only focus on some of them we think they are top ones, which can improve our life.

1. Strengthens our heart and lungs
The heart and lungs like engine of our body. Regular exercise can improve circulation, resulting in a healthier heart and blood vessels with a more efficient cardiovascular system overall. Exercise delivers oxygen and nutrients to our tissues let our body work more efficiently. When our heart and lungs work more efficiently, we will have more energy to do the things we enjoy.

2. Prevents chronic diseases
Our human body generally responds well to physical exercise and substantial improvements may be anticipated in heart and lung function, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility and one’s ability to respond to stimuli. Therefore in order to combat chronic diseases, age appropriate regular exercising is one of the most efficient ways.

Regular exercise can help us prevent high blood pressure. Our cholesterol will benefit from it as well. Regular exercise boosts high-density lipoprotein (HDL), which is called “good” cholesterol while decreasing low-density lipoprotein (LDL), the “bad,” cholesterol. This keeps our blood flowing smoothly by lowering the buildup of plaques in our arteries. In addition, regular exercise can help us prevent type 2 diabetes by improving our glucose regulation, and obesity by lowering our body fat. By exercising regularly and making positive changes in our diet, we can lower the chances of having a heart attack as well.

3. Increases our self-esteem and confidence
Exercise can build up out heart, lungs and other body parts, increase joint range of motion or flexibility, increase muscular strength and elevating endorphins to reduce our stress, depression and anxiety so that we can sleep better, feel better, work better and enjoy life better. Therefore, regular exercise can increase our physical and mental health, which leads to a better quality of life. We are energized and have better physical and intelligent performance leading to improving our self-esteem and confidence.

4. Increase our mental focus
The latest research shows that exercise helps our brain to re-generate brain cells, which keeps our brain sharp well while aging. Therefore, anything that involves focus and concentration is improved. In another words, we become smarter if we keep regular exercise.

5. Helps us stay our healthy weight
Controlling our healthy body weight is also one of the benefits of exercising. When we exercise, we burn calories. The more intensely we exercise the more calories we burn. The principle is simple if we intake more than consume, we gain weight, on the opposite we lose weight, and if what we intake is equal to the consumption, we keep our weight.

6. Promotes better sleep
Sleep is one of our basic needs. A good night sleep is very essential for us to develop our concentration and efficiency in promoting better things in our personal as well as in our professional life. Healthy exercise contributes to a better sleep. Regular exercise can help us fall asleep faster and deepen our sleep as well.

7. Improve our chances of living longer
As we are aging, a great number of structural and functional transformations occur, which lead to a decline in “optimal” physical capacity. While our level of activity affects some of these changes, others bear little relationship to the quantity of exercise performed. For example age-related changes in skin composition, vision, hair color, hearing, etc. take place irrespective of an individual’s level of physical fitness. However, some factors such as breathing capacity, heart and lung function, muscle strength, etc. are heavily influenced by one’s level of fitness. Exercise promotes re-generate brain cells and other cells of our body, indeed, exercise can have a profound effect upon all of us and increase the chance for us to live longer.

8. Helps us enjoy life
When we are both physical and mental healthy, we sure can enjoy more things and improve the quality of our life. Exercise does not have to be unpleasant. Take your favorite exercise, whatever it is dancing, yoga, cycling, hiking, and football game… what a wonderful life!

In this article we summarized the benefits of regular exercise from preventing chronic health conditions to boosting self-esteem and confidence. Regardless of age, sex or physical ability, there is no doubt we all benefits from regular exercise as long as we use an age appropriate and self health condition tailored exercise routine. Let’s start exercise today and put regular exercise into a part of our everyday life, improve our health and performance and enjoy our life more!

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