Border Line Purge To Fitness

How do you find tranquility and inner-peace? The answer is simple, but for the masses to practice regularly, is another matter. The answer is take a Yoga class.

Yoga contains many physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional, aspects for the holistic health of mankind. Yet, how many real pro-active people do you know? If you visit a Yoga studio, Yoga class, or an ashram, you will meet many people who take care of themselves.

Some of the more well known Yogic techniques are asana, meditation, pranayama, mantras, mudras and bandhas, but there is a lot more to Yoga than techniques. It is the "Yoga off the mat," which causes life changing results. For example: Let's look at meditation a bit closer.

Many people practice meditation in the morning or evening, when the rest of their family is in bed. If you wake up early, the morning should suit you. However, if you go to bed late, then meditate at night.

This is the easiest way to develop a regular routine, create a steady practice, and calm your mind. It will take a few weeks to feel results, but they come from practice. What kind of results can you expect from meditation?

Some of the many Yoga meditation benefits include: happiness, emotional stability, creativity, and clear thought. You can also reduce stress, anxiety, moodiness, and depression, with a regular meditation practice. There are many more benefits from meditation, which can be measured on the physical and mental levels.

When you are not meditating, you can forgive others, give to others, be mindful, avoid judging others, show loving kindness, and do not seek rewards. You will see that rewards will come back to you, which is fine, but do not refuse loving kindness from others.

This is the Law of Karma. You perform an action and the universe responds with a reaction. You accept the reaction. You help people and people help you. We do not have to hoard our possessions, but we have a moral obligation to help those who need us.

Yoga and meditation have sometimes been accused of having self-indulgent practitioners by religious fundamentalists. This is interesting because Yoga and meditation have practitioners from every religion.

Self-indulgent materialism often occurs, when people are spiritually disconnected. Yet, Yoga opens the spiritual connection to God, which will result in the unification of mind, body, and spirit.

So, how do you find tranquility and inner-peace? Forgive the foolish because it will do no good to hate them, and it is a waste of energy. Give to those who need because giving is the greatest reward in life. Become a "fountain" of loving kindness and good things will be magnetized to you.

Some will ask, "Why should you forgive, give, be mindful, or show loving kindness?" The answer is: Because it is right; every religion agrees, and it is too much work to avoid helping those who need it.

© Copyright 2007 – Paul Jerard / Aura Publications

Everyone gets a stiff neck sometimes. Often yoga can help. Of course, before you do anything, it's important to know if your neck pain is the sign of something more serious. Make sure to see your doctor if:

• Your neck pain persists for more than three days or keeps coming back.

• You suffer from neck pain after a fall or accident.

• Pain radiates from your neck down your arms or legs.

• Neck pain is associated with nausea or dizziness.

Yoga Exercises for Neck Pain

If you determine you simply have a stiff neck, specific yoga exercises will help strengthen muscles and increase flexibility in the neck. Even gently exercising your neck helps lubricate and speed nutrients to the area. Here are a few exercises for your neck that are particularly helpful.

Neck Stretches

Follow these steps when practicing neck stretches:

• Start in seated position (cross legged)

• Sit up tall, reaching up through the top of the head

• Draw shoulders back

• Exhale, drop chin towards chest, keeping elbows and shoulders pulled back

• Inhale, raise the head back to center

• Do this five times, then on the last exhale, drop the chin and stay in this position for three breaths, breathing through the nose

• Inhale, raise head back to center

• Exhale, slowly drop right ear towards right shoulder

• Inhale, raise head back to center

• Do this five times, then on the last exhale, drop the ear towards the right shoulder and stay in this position for 3 breaths

• Inhale, raise head back to center

• Repeat on left side

Half-Circles

Rolling your head around in a full circle—as some people do to "loosen" their neck muscles—can actually cause more damage, so avoid it. The neck is not a ball and socket joint and is not meant to move around in circles. However, half circles in the front can be done instead. To do this, first drop your chin to your chest. Move your chin towards the right shoulder then back to your chest. Then move your chin towards the left shoulder and back towards the chest. Repeat this movement three to five times.

Shoulder Moves

Hunch your shoulders as high as possible, then let them relax completely. Repeat this movement 5-6 times. Next, roll your shoulders in a backwards circular motion (lifting shoulders up, squeezing them back, dropping them down and then bringing them forward again). Repeat this motion 5-6 times, then move your shoulders in a forward circular motion. All these shoulder movements help to relax the muscles in your neck and upper back. Many of us hunch our shoulders unconsciously much of the time. Notice how they feel when they are relaxed and try to keep them this way.

Chest Expander

Stand up with your feet close together. Bring your hands behind your back and interlace your fingers. Tuck your tailbone in, so you don't arch your low back too much. As you inhale, lift your hands away from your tailbone. Squeeze your shoulder blades together and you lift your arms and stay in this position for 3-4 breaths. On your next exhale, lower your arms back down. This exercise helps strengthen the muscles in your upper back and relieve tension in your upper back and shoulders.

Arm Lifts

Bring your arms straight out in front of you with your palms facing each other. As you inhale, reach your arms overhead, bringing your arms next to your ears, if you can do so without any pain. As you exhale, bring your arms back down in front of you. Repeat 4-8 times. This helps to relieve tension and build strength in the muscles in the upper back.

Press It

Place the palm of your hand against the back of your head and gently press while resisting with your head. Hold for a count of ten. Repeat with your palm on your forehead. Now place the palm of your right hand against the right side of your head and press, again resisting the movement with your head. Repeat on the left side. This exercise helps to strengthen the muscles in your neck and makes them less prone to strain.

Prevention is the Key

There are many things you can do in your every day life to prevent neck pain in the future.

1) Improve your posture

Sit and stand, so your head is properly aligned over your shoulders. Many of us tend to drop our head to look down at what we are reading or writing or have our computer situated in a way that forces us to tip our head forward. But, poor posture isn't just how you sit and stand. It's how you hold your body when you function—moving, sitting, standing, bending or lifting. It's how you hold your body while you are active or inactive. To maintain good posture: Sit up straight and tall, raise your chest up, relax your shoulders down and pull your head back so that your ears are directly over your shoulders, not in front of them.

2) Hold the phone

Rather than propping the phone between your head and shoulder—which can strain the soft tissues in your neck and the muscles in your upper back—hold the phone in your hand. Or better yet, buy a headset or speaker phone.

3) Check that pillow

The wrong pillow is a common cause of neck pain. But rather than taking someone else's advice, try different ones and find one that works best for you. Any cervical pillow that provides support to the neck ligaments can be very helpful. Avoid pillows that push your head forward. You may also want to try a cervical roll, which is designed to slip under your neck while you're sleeping, reducing strain on neck joints.

4) Make your workspace work for you

When you read or write at a desk, prop your books or papers up so your head doesn't have to tilt down. While typing at your computer, install a copy holder that's flush with the screen. Keep your computer monitor at eye level. At least once an hour, get up and walk around and stretch your neck and back.

5) Manage your stress

Pay attention to your stress level. Excessive stress can lead to tight and knotted muscles, particularly in the neck and shoulders area. Taking a yoga class is a great way to not only relieve stress, but to also learn how to manage your stress levels throughout the day.

Following these simple tips will help to keep your neck and upper back pain-free and functioning well. To learn more tips and exercises to help your neck and upper back feel their best, visit: www.yogatg.com/ys-upperbackneck.html

Trying to lose weight is to struggle in itself. If we inadvertently take in the wrong things, those things could slow down or jeopardize our efforts to lose weight. Let us look at what things you must avoid to help you lose weight faster.

We are bombarded with desires and advertisements that want us to abandon our weight-loss efforts even though it is not in our best interest.

Those promotional efforts that bombard us are usually also trying to sell us the very things that we need to avoid.

The first thing to avoid when trying to lose weight is alcohol. Alcohol is bad for you in more than one way when you're trying to lose weight.

Alcohol is known for diminishing your inhibitions and undermining your willpower. When you have alcohol in your system, you are far more likely to give in and eat the foods that will cause you to gain weight as opposed to lose weight.

In addition to that, certain types of alcohol also contain carbs that are very difficult for your body to convert into energy. These carbs are usually converted straight into fat cells.

The next thing you need to avoid is additional sugar in your diet.

If you add sugar to your diet this additional sugar reduces the sensitivity of your cells to insulin. When that happens the sugar goes to your liver where it is converted into fat, instead of heading to your muscles where it is converted into energy.

Depending on how serious you are about your weight-loss, you also need to avoid fatty foods and oily foods.

These foods jeopardize your weight-loss efforts by giving your body too much fat. Your body does need some fat for functioning at its optimal level.

You do not need to refrain from eating anything that contains fat. You just need to keep it to the moderate and low side.

If you avoid these things your weight-loss effort might still not be easy but it will be a little easier.

Last couple of years so called 3MD diet is gaining on popularity. This diet is also known as 90 day separation diet. It is based on two 90 days dieting periods. Main advantages of this diet should be; clear and easy to follow rules and proven results (weight loss in range of 40 – 55 pounds). Among other results that 3MD diet promises are decreased sensibility on weather and positive changes in metabolism.

Even though many people find it easy to believe those statements, there are really no in-depth explanation in medical of physical terms, how should this diet in fact work. Further more after this 3MD diet is ended, weight gains are returning. Changing from 3MD diet to our previous nutrition patterns makes people gain weight again. 3MD dieting success is built upon following presumptions:

- We are all subject to a daily nutrition cycles (does not explain what that is).

- We need the right combination of foods - following exact rules defined for each day (protein day, carbohydrate day, starch day, fruit day) and every 29th day there is so called "water day" or fasting day.

Following those two presumptions one should lose weight regardless how many calories one takes in daily. Menus prescribed by inventors of 3MD diet are quite strict "2 oranges", "3 pieces of cake"," smaller chicken", "dinner is ½ of lunch",…but not mentioning what kind of cake, how big a piece should be, which parts of chicken, how "carb rich" lunch, nothing about caloric value of foods one should eat.

Many additional rules accompany this diet. There are in fact some healthy advices among them: how one should use olive oil, restriction in salt, advice to consult a doctor. Exercise, which is the corner stone of each serious diet on the world, deserved just an obscure mentioning, not even close to what one should do to lose weight for real. This sad fact makes 3MD diet even more popular with overweight people. Those people become caught in a deadlock of repetitive weight gains after completing this diet. Furthermore this diet offers no explanation what so ever about principles of its effectiveness.

Why is separating foods according to specific days and separating nutrients so important?
How exactly will this make us lose fat?

Daily separation cycle according to 3MD consists of a strict diet from 8pm to midday next day. Within this period only eating fruits and drinking water is allowed. This does not make any sense. Those 16 hours represent 2/3 of the whole day. And one should not starve its body for 16 hours each day. Each body that undergoes such a daily fasting period becomes more sensitive on energy accumulation from each bite we take. Messages our body reports to our brains are to lower energy consumption and leverage the lack of energy with draining energy stored in muscles. We force our body to start dissolving our muscle mass. That is no good news.
Muscles, when in motion, are body's major energy (fat) burner. So we are actually weakening the only "tool" that can help us get rid of fat.

3MD does not give any explanation on why should we eat carbohydrates on one day and proteins on the other. The problem is that "fruit" day and "starch" day are also "carbohydrate" days. Sugar in fruits and complex sugar in starch are just two different sorts of the same thing – carbohydrates. Even if we somehow can understand fruit day (healthy sugar), it is hard to make sense in separation of "starch" day and "carbohydrate" day (complex, refined sugars). And there is a rule where one can take whole-wheat bread together with chicken, which contradicts every sane weight loss program (one should not mix proteins (chicken) with carbohydrates (bread)).
3MD diet does work on a short run. But the weight loss is consequence of water that our body loses with this diet. 3MD is extremely popular as it does not prohibit eating calorie bombs like chocolate. The other short term positive effect of this diet is that it does somehow regulate daily eating habits. People are disciplined by force. That makes it much easier to fall back into old eating patterns as soon as 90 days are over.

Yoga works very well through meditation to gain tranquility and assists the mind to work in harmony with the body. Many times we are not able to complete our daily activities appropriately and in an acceptable manner because agitation and struggles in our mind put a great load on us.

Stress is the greatest factor that affects every single part of our emotional, physical and endocrinal system. Yoga can be used to correct many of these issues.

At the physical stage, the therapeutic practices of yoga have been verified to be very effective for various disorders.

There are many rewards to Yoga.

Rewards of Yoga 1: Your flexibility will increase by using Yoga. The positions that Yoga uses will activate a variety of joints in the body. Many of these joints are not stimulated during regular exercise.

Rewards of Yoga 2: The lubrication of tendons, ligament and joints will be maximized. Studies have proven that the ligaments and tendons get exercised in the body by the Yoga positions.

Your body may have been stiff when you started Yoga but research has shown that amazing flexibility is gained in parts of the body that you did not think was worked.

Rewards of Yoga 3: The organs of the body get a massage. Yoga is probably the single greatest exercise that can thoroughly work on your internal organs, along with the others that seldom are externally stimulated during our whole life.

Rewards of Yoga 4: Yoga is very healthful to many body parts. The organs are aroused and stimulated and this in turn assists us by making disease stay away and giving us a warning of a possible occurrence of the onset of disease or disorder.

A great benefit of Yoga is the remarkable feeling of awareness that it creates in the practitioner of a coming infection or health problem. This will allow the person to take preventive action.

Rewards of Yoga 5: Yoga can totally detoxify the whole body. It massages the different organs as the joints and muscles are stretched. Yoga makes sure the best blood supply is provided throughout the body.

This will ensure the toxins are cleaned out from every small part of your body as well as providing nutrition up to the last point. This will result in more energy, delayed aging and an increased passion for life.

Rewards of Yoga 6: It is a great way to tone your muscles. Muscles which are not firm will need to be excited over and over again to get rid of flaccidity and excess fats.

But these great rewards are just a "side effect" of this wonderful practice. Yoga will synchronize the body with the mind and this results in real benefits.

It is now openly known that the mind's will has helped people to perform incredible physical feats which definitely confirms the body and mind connection.

In fact Yoga = meditation, because they work in harmony to achieve a common goal of peace of body, mind and spirit. This can lead to a very joyful experience that only Yoga can make you feel.

The different techniques used by Yoga will assist in acquiring a balance of your emotions through detachment.

This will create a wonderful peacefulness and a positive attitude, which provides great benefits for the body.

We know that it's really hard to stick to those starving diets when it comes to weight loss and it is more disheartening when over time we fail to lose any significant amount of weight. We run after every possible new dieting idea which comes in the limelight, hoping that this one is going to work finally. Sigh*** no miracle yet! Actually we often ignore certain things and blame diets for not preventing us from losing weight. People often ignore the eatables they eat but fail to record.

Well, no need to worry if you are one of the dieters who are choosy. Just take care of certain important things.

• Know what you are eating and keep a record of that. Make your eating a conscious act. It will keep a check on all temptations.

• At the end of the day, check it out what you have consumed in the whole day. You will be wondered to see whether you are actually dieting. Make a plan for the next day and try to avoid things that are out of your diet plan. But yes, don't forget to note down what you eat. You will improve every day.

• Think not once but twice before eating or drinking anything. Eat only when you are hungry not when you are feeling like especially when you get a sight of the eatable.

• Don't go for snacking or having a soft drink when you don't have anything else to do. Read a book or go for a walk or listen to some good music to pass your time, you can even go for a walk with your walkman. This will help you stay away from those tempting time pass.

• Well, it's good that you stay on your dieting plan strictly but don't ever starve yourself. It will end up hurting your body. And finally you will be forced to go for a binge eating or things that carry high fats.

• Consume at least three meals a day and one or two light snacking. It will help your body remain away from hunger.

• Its fine you are a very good dieter but you need not say just good bye to all your favorite food stuffs. You can treat yourself with moderate snacking after achieving a pre-set goal. Remember, you are not cheating your diet but rewarding yourself for remaining on diet. It definitely keeps your motivation high.

• So, don't get scared by tough dieting and take it in an easy way. It's all in your hand to enjoy your weight loss program, make it fun with healthy food.

These days people are looking for natural weight loss diets that are proven to work. So many crash diets promise so much, but deliver so little. Losing weight has become a craving for average people who may have gotten caught in overeating or just indiscipline in their food intake.

My experience with weight loss diet pills are the temporary results and frustration of having the weight come back after getting off the diet just as quickly since the weight loss tips given are not something that will work with your body.

If you seriously want to lose weight and keep it off, you cannot follow these fad diets and their ridiculous claim of proven weight loss tips.

The ineffectiveness of these diets is always revealed in a short time and people are starting to get wise about these particular diets, and will head off in search of a new craze to satisfy their urge for weight loss success.

The real truth is that people are always searching for new weight loss tips because they want to lose pounds quickly, naturally and safely and they want immediate results.

To lose weight permanently and effectively it may be a rather slow progress for some people depending on metabolic rate and how much weight loss is needed.

Manufacturers today are bridging the gap between fact and fiction and are providing unique and easy ways for consumers to lose weight. One such product is the weight loss patch, which is determined to be safer than most weight loss products and provides a natural way to lose weight.

Weight Loss Tip 1


Never skip breakfast because you will be prone to binge on nonessential foods throughout the day.

Weight Loss Tip 2


Never eat anything for an hour before you go to bed.

Weight Loss Tip 3


Snacking while watching TV is not a healthy choice. This can become a habit and a bad on that will keep the weight on.

Weight Loss Tip 4


Instead of sugary treats like cookies and candy, substitute them with fruits like bananas, apples, watermelon, plums, peaches, and oranges.

Weight Loss Tip 5


Use honey for sweetener instead of sugar, and carob powder for chocolate in all recipes. They taste just as good if not better when used in moderation.

Weight Loss Tip 6


Eat your vegetables. Raw vegetables can take the place of cookies. A raw carrot is a good snack food. Eat a salad for dinner sometimes. This can even be very enjoyable.

Weight Loss Tip 7


Stay away from excessive high calorie foods. Instead of a high calorie salad dressing replace it with cottage cheese or yogurt to improve the salads taste and drop the pounds.

Weight Loss Tip 8


Exercise is the best tip of them all. Make sure you exercise at least twenty minutes each day for three to five days out of the week. Find something you like to do like biking or roller blading.