Why Do Aerobic Exercise?

Aerobic exercises are named as they use oxygen from your body and will increase your heart rate. If your heart is not beating faster, then you cannot say that you are doing an aerobic activity. Cardio exercise is an alternate name for aerobic activities.

Aerobics are designed to not only do the above, but also to get you to stretch and do some strength training.

What you want to achieve when you do aerobic exercise is to increase the fitness of your heart. The good points about having a strong heart are pretty endless, but one is that it will need less beats per minute when resting, or exercising, in order to pump blood around the body. Monitoring your heart rate can help when you do cardio work-outs.

Aerobic activity also increases lung capacity. Basically, the little air sacs in the lungs will have more volume and the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide when breathing will be far more efficient. When you have well-working lungs exercising will make you less out of breath and you will be getting a good amount of oxygen in to your blood stream at all times.

As you are moving so much during aerobic exercise you are using up some of your energy stores, and so burning calories which may be converted to fat if not burnt off. For this reason aerobic exercise is one of the best calorie burners. After aerobic exercise is also a good time to eat a small meal as you will temporarily speed up your metabolism and so burn food at a faster rate than usual.

You may build or tone muscle depending on the type of exercise you do. If you do things such as rowing (whether real or on a rowing machine) you could build arm strength, whereas running and cycling will tone and strengthen legs and bums. One good overall aerobic exercise is swimming, as this works all the muscles.
When we exercise there is what is known as a ‘training zone’, which is when your heart is at 60 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate. This needs to be achieved for exercise to be deemed cardiovascular.

If you are relatively unfit, you can feel the benefit with even a little cardio exercise, but you will need to increase the amount that you do the fitter you get. To gain optimum benefits, try doing some cardio 3-5 times a week for at least half an hour.

Aerobics can take the form of aerobic classes; but any activity such as running, swimming, cycling, dancing and rowing can also be classed in this category. For an overall tone up try swimming or dancing, or for more specific areas of the body choose another activity to suit. To get the most out of running why not carry or use some weights to tone up your arms too?

Aerobic, or cardio activity, is extremely beneficial to overall health and helps to prevent heart problems in later life, try and get as much in as possible, even if it is just a brisk walk every day.

Traffic Light Your Diet

A great way to start losing weight is to use a system of 'traffic lights' which divides your food into green, amber and red foods. With this system the green 'go' foods can be eaten as much as you want, the red 'stop' ones are occassional treats and eamber ones are the foods you should limit but can have on a fairly regular basis.

One traffic light system that has been created in the past goes as follows:
• Green Foods: Fruit and Vegetables (frozen or fresh but not dried apart from apricots and prunes), whole-grains, whole-wheat pasta, wholemeal bread, whole-grain cereals, kidney beans, lentils, chickpeas, butter beans, fish, shellfish, low-fat dairy products, fromage-frais, poultry and game, vegetarian meat substitutes e.g. tofu.

• Amber Foods: White bread, cooking oil, dried fruit, full-fat dairy products and medium fat cheese, eggs, lean red meat, nuts and seeds (not salted or roasted), processed meat, low-fat spreads, fruits juice, alcoholic drinks.

• Red Foods: Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, sweets, butter, margarine, lard, cream, pastry, salt, full fat cheese, meat with fat, sugary drinks, deep-fat-fried foods, chips, ice cream.

Make a list like this for yourself and print it out, pin it up in your kitchen or in the food cupboards and take note of it when you go to eat anything. You can refer to it when making meals so that you make sure you get a good balance in your diet.

If you regularly go for a biscuit, or any typically 'bad' food, when you are hungry between meals then why not prepare some cut up raw fruit and vegetables and store them in the biscuit cupboard? That way you see them alongside each other, and with the chart in mind, as well as wanting to lose weight, you can think about whether you really want to use up one of your helpings of the red foods.

If you really want to make a plan for yourself then decide how many red and amber foods you will allow yourself an dmake a tally chart so you cross off one of your allowance when you eat something from that group. This will help you lose weight a lot easier as you have basically made yourself a progress chart. If you really want to lose weight then why not try cutting the red foods out altogether, although you need to think about whether not allowing yourself the odd treat will just lead to you craving it and breaking your diet because of this.

Plan your shopping lists around the traffic light plan and making sure that proportionately you buy many more ‘green products’ than amber, and more amber than red. To take it a step further try labelling your food with little red, amber and green dots, this helps you stay organised and not make any mistakes.

Remember that even though green foods are not restricted, you should not consume them excessively as, even though they are low in calories, they can still add up and mean that you go over you calorie allowance without even realising it.

Use a plan like this along with a good exercise regime so that you lose weight in an easier and healthy way.

Don’t get too drawn in to the plan and make sure you do allow yourself some ‘bad’ foods as everyone needs some fats. But by organising your foods similarly to this you will feel more in control and be able to monitor more closely what goes in to your stomach.

Home Remedies to Keep You Healthy

Many new diseases have come about in the last few years due to the increasing levels of pollution, and the growth in population. The demand for food crops has forced the farmers to use artificial fertilizers for getting more production from the field. This makes the environment itself unhealthy, and thus has a knock on effect on the population who will start to suffer various ailments. The allopathic medicines that you take contain chemicals that will add to the toxins in the body. To minimize the toxin accumulation try home remedies instead, these can be used every day just to maintain general health.


With home remedies, various complaints can be cured. Though they produce slow results, the effects are long standing and there will be no adverse side effects. The remedies are mostly available in your kitchen cupboards, so they are easy to get hold of.

Home remedies make use of vegetables, fruits and herbs. Every body part can be taken care of by using home remedies. These will work from the inside of your body and will provide best results in the due course of time. Because the cost of drugs to treat illnesses is rising, the general population may start to make a swig towards home remedies anyway. This is especially true due to the fact some drugs have negative side effects, that are sometimes irreversible.


The antibiotics you take will defeat your immune system along with killing bacteria and viruses. As a result of this, your body will take more time to recover from illness. Home remedies make use of the chemicals that are present naturally in herbs, fruit and vegetables for curing illness. Instead of pumping your body full of strong chemicals, you can use natural ones instead that will help your body to improve it’s capacity to fight off illnesses.


The human system has a self repair process that is activated automatically when you have an illness. Home remedies will stimulate the repair process and will provide you natural cure rather than relying on other means. Conventional drugs, on the other hand, will fight against the illness and weaken your body further.


Some problems that cannot be medically cured, for example hair loss, have herbal, home remedies that can be used to try and prevent or counter them. Many products are available in the market with herbal extracts and you can use them if you are an ardent supporter of drugs for curing diseases.


Many problems relating specifically to women can be cured via home remedies, and there are some excellent concoctions out there.

However, certain severe and serious problems cannot be cured by home remedies alone. In such cases you can use the home remedies along with the drugs so that you take less drugs and in turn reduce the toxin accumulation in your body.

If you want to drastically improve health then look out for warning signs that an illness will strike, and treat it with a home remedy before it starts. If you constantly nourish your body then you will be healthier in the long term and be more ready to take on life.