January 21, 2012 is World Swap Day. Originally started as a way to reinvent shopping, it’s a movement that’s gaining national attention and seeing activity across the country. World Swap Day encourages all to share goods, food, clothes, toys, or many other items verses buying them new. Swapping will turn any unused items into things you actually need. Therefore, you don’t spend money and you don’t compile unused stuff around your house.

In celebration of World Swap Day, why not do some personal swapping for your health. Big results have come from small changes. For example, swapping fries for a medium baked potato saves you over 250 calories in your lunch and you avoid all unhealthy oils. Swapping is easy, and good for everybody.

Check out 10 easy swaps you can do to celebrate World Swap Day, and your health.
Read Full Post >

We’ve all heard there is no quick fix for weight loss. From diet pills to diet books, making drastic dietary changes typically only results in short-term weight loss success. Much can be said about the habits you pick up in the midst of following a new eating plan, diet or not, and although changing the way you eat often results in weight loss, only focusing on this outcome can often also result in disappointment, discouragement, and even failure. Instead, focusing on developing healthy habits as opposed to losing weight can help you feel great about your accomplishments and result in long-lasting health benefits.

For example, following a weight loss plan for four to six months as part of your New Years resolution often results in improved cholesterol levels, decreased inflammatory tone, and decreased heart disease risk even if you don’t keep off the weight. Although initial weight loss may play a role, the healthy habits you learn while making those dietary changes may be just as important, if not more so, in achieving long-term health success.

Focus on these positive changes instead of the numbers on the scale to ensure successfully fulfilling your New Years resolution.

Read Full Post >

By Abra Pappa for NutritiousAmerica.com

For great abs you do sit-ups and for stronger legs you do lunges, but when you are looking to adapt a habit like consistent healthy eating you snap your fingers and hope everything will change over night. Sure change can temporarily occur when you are on a short term “diet”, but what about when the diet is over? Are you sticking to those healthy eating habits? Or do you go right back to your “old, unhealthy” habits?

One of the biggest obstacles in weight loss is creating life-long, sustainable healthy eating practices. So let’s exercise those habit muscles, medically called habitious muscularous healthivious (just kidding), so you can get in the healthy groove without having to execute brute force or willpower. It’s as simple as 1-2-3-4-5. In the same way you squat to get the best butt in town you can follow these five simple steps to exercise the habit muscle and create sustainable healthy habits.
Read Full Post >

When you say your vows in marriage, maybe the most famous part is “in sickness and in health”… Unfortunately, there may be a little more sickness than health, since research shows that we married types don’t exercise as much as people who are single.

A poll commissioned by the UK Department of Health found that married couples are much less likely to get in the two and half hours of weekly physical activity recommended by UK health experts than singles are.

Twenty-seven percent of the adults who were questioned met exercise guidelines. Women beat the men by 10 percent as more likely than men to stay fit. When you considered those people who were married, 76 percent of the men and 63 percent of the women did not meet the recommended fitness level.
Read Full Post >

By Melissa Breyer for Care2.com

In a new paper by USC researchers, bad eating habits were shown to persist even when the food didn’t taste very good; but the best nugget of the study, perhaps, is the revelation of a surprisingly easy way in which to counter bad eating habits.

Researchers gave people entering a movie theater a bucket of either just-popped popcorn or week-old popcorn. People who don’t generally eat popcorn during movies ate much less of the stale popcorn, but moviegoers who indicated that they typically had popcorn at the movies ate about the same amount of popcorn whether it was fresh or stale. The conclusion: for people accustomed to eating popcorn at the movies, it made no difference whether the popcorn tasted good or not.

“When we’ve repeatedly eaten a particular food in a particular environment, our brain comes to associate the food with that environment and make us keep eating as long as those environmental cues are present,” said lead author David Neal, who was a psychology professor at USC when the research was conducted.

Read Full Post >