BENEFITS OF DARK CHOCOLATE

Hi again fitfam! Hope you had an amazing morning full of energy and positivism! Are you ready to discover something new today?

A few days ago my dearest friends and blog colleague Ema, dedicated a post on the benefits of drinking green tea. (If you haven´t read it yet I strongly recommend you to do so! I guarantee that within 5 minutes you will be going to the nearest store to buy some.) Today, I am coming back to you to talk about the benefits of the best product that Mother Nature gifts us with, used in cakes, sweets and desserts…what is this mysterious food? DARK CHOCOLATE!

Chocolate is our top 1 comfort food, a sure–fire stand-by in times of stress, a reliable source of consolation when life has let us down, and a mood-enhancer and romance-inducer in more positive circumstances. But it is really healthy? It really depends on the kind of chocolate you choose and the quantity you eat; forget about white chocolate and the ones filled with cookies, nuts or any other caloric substances, and eat only one or two ounces per serving. The pure, dark chocolate, with a cocoa percentage of around seventy per cent or more is the one which is really good for us, being beneficial for the heart, circulation and brain and an extra help to fight against autism, obesity and diabetes.

Dark chocolate is packed with beneficial minerals such as potassium, zinc and selenium, and a 100g bar of dark chocolate provides 67% of the RDA of iron. It has also been shown that consuming cocoa reduces levels of “bad” cholesterol and raises the levels of the “good” one lowering the risk of a cardiovascular disease. Moreover, and even though hard to believe, it has been proofed that chocolate can help you loose weight. A recent studio showed that a small square of good chocolate melted on the tongue 20 minutes before a meal triggers the hormones in the brain that say “I´m full”, decreasing the amount of food you will subsequently consume. The same happens when you eat a small piece after your meal, it will make you feel satiated and even reduce subsequent snacking.

Here comes the final and best benefit of all! Chocolate contains phenylethylamine, (PEA), which is the same chemical substance that your body releases when you´re falling in love, so PEA encourages your brain to release feel-good endorphins. In other words, you will feel happier and more cheerful!

So now you know my dear readers, never feel guilty when eating dark chocolate, as long as you do it with moderation, as it will benefit your body and soul in many ways. I hope you enjoyed reading the post as much as I did writing it, have an amazing day and never forget to visit our site and see what news your 2 beloved fit brunettes have to tell you.

Photo by: Clean Indulgence

Juliet

3 ELECTRONIC DEVICES YOU CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT DURING YOUR WORKOUT

Good morning my dear readers! Hope you are all enjoying your Saturday morning with a warm cup of coffee and an amazingly tasty and nutritious breakfast!

Today I will continue with the topic we discussed on my last post; technology and fitness. On Thursday´s post I talked to you about the apps you could use to optimize your diet and workouts, today on the contrary, I will advise you and talk about the technology items I use whilst training or practising sports.

If you are curious to know what devices cannot miss in my gym bag keep on reading!

Number 1 and most important electronic device without which I simply cannot workout is my phone. Now you will ask yourself, is Juliet one of those girls that goes to the gym to sit on the bicycle and text for 1 hour? The answer is clearly NO! The only reason why I need my phone during my sport sessions is for music, under no circumstance I can train without music. The truth is that until 1 year ago I was still using my Ipod as a music device when I was practising sport, it was small and easy to carry. Unfortunately it got broken so I had to move on and use my smartphone instead. I use an app called Souncloud where I have different playlists of gym music that help me to keep motivated and never loose the rhythm while exercising. The down part about using this app is that as long as it is reproducing music it will require internet connection, so it will consume a lot of the phone´s power and capacity. Another way of getting music in your phone is downloading it, there are apps which allow you to do it, some examples are Mp3 Download, BitTorrent, Download Music 4Shared…

The second device I always take with me to my workouts is the heart rate monitor. For those of you who have never heard of this item, it is an electronic device that allows us to measure our heart rate in real time, in other words, how many beats per minute our heart is producing. The device consists of two parts: a watch that you will wear on your wrist where you will be able to read all the information about your body when this one is in movement: your heart rate, consume of calories per hour and minute, the amount of grams of fat you have burnt, the duration of your activity…and a kind of elastic belt that you place under your chest. This elastic belt is what, in contact with your heartbeat, sends all the information about the body activity to the screen of the watch. The only thing you need to do before starting to use it is place each thing on its corresponding place and introduce your age, weight, height and gender on the watch, it is the only way of guaranteeing an accurate result as everybody is different and so there performance while practising sport. The heart rate monitor I use is a very simple and cheap model bought in Decathlon from the brand Domyos. It only costs 20eur and works perfectly fine, I strongly recommend you to try it!

The last item that always comes with me is my wireless headphones. This year for Christmas my parents gave me a pair of Monster iSport Freedom, and now I can´t live without them! Trust me, practising sport with wireless headphones is the best thing ever! You don´t have to worry about always having the phone near you to keep the headphones connected and most importantly you will not have to waist time untying the annoying knots. You will also be able to move freely and the headphones won´t move from their place. The price of my headphones is around 120 to 200eur, but their comfort and sound in value for what they cost could not be better.

Hope you enjoyed today´s post and above all found it useful! Have a lovely Saturday and weekend.

Photo by: The Technews

Juliet.

 

HEALTH & FITNESS APPS

Hi again my dear readers!

Today I am bringing you a new article on a theme we have never discussed before on the blog, today´s theme is: Technology and Fitness! Keep reading if you are curious on what I have to tell you!

Nowadays our smartphone has become a basic and fundamental object in our lives; we don´t use it only as a communication tool, but for entertainment, to organize our daily tasks, to know what´s going on around the world…Also mobile apps play an important role in our day – to day life, we use them to catch the bus in time, to check-in at the airport, to look at the weather…there are even women who use an app to control their menstrual cycle! So, the question here is, why don´t we also take advantage of apps to control and beneficiate our health and wellness?

It is no longer than 2 years that I have been seeing people using apps to control their daily nutrition and/or workouts, so the truth is that this is a fairly new concept. However, I believe that we can be grateful to whoever had the amazing idea of creating an app that could control your health; they are really helpful for you to keep track of your daily progress and results.

The first app I ever used to control my diet and exercise is called My Fitness Pal. This is an app initially released in 2005 which you can also find and use in your computer. MyFitnessPal is a great ally for those who follow a diet and want to control their caloric and nutrients intake of every meal. Not only it allows you to control nutrition, but also workouts, as you can type the kind of sport and duration of the activity you practised and it will tell you how many calories your burnt depending on your height, weight and age.

If I had to remark something good about the app, it is that it gives you the possibility of choosing how many Kg per week you want to loose. Day after day the app is calculating all the calories you ate and substracting the ones you burnt exercising, and depending on your values it will tell you if you have achieved your goals and lost or gained weight that day.

However, we cannot rely 100% on the app as this one has no acknowledgement of what is going on in our body, for example when we have the period, that for no reason we gain from 1 to 3 kilos of weight.

Another amazing app I sometimes use when I cannot go to the gym is 7 Minute Workout. So…yes! Just as you are guessing this is an app that provides you with a million different workouts of only 7 minutes of duration! No excuses count here…who doesn´t have 7 minutes to train? All of the workouts are guided by professionals in fitness and health who will get your heart pumping in no more than two minutes using only your body weight and a chair. The workouts are divided depending on the body part you want to work on; arms, chest, booty, legs… and you can choose between cardio, toning, or cardio + toning workouts.

I truly recommend this app to all of you; it is extremely useful for those days in which you cannot go to the gym or simply feel lazy to move from home. My advice is to do 2-3 workouts of 7 minutes. However, if you feel lazy or tired don´t torture yourself during the 1^st workout thinking that you have two more workouts to get over with, start with one and then keep on going! 7 minutes pass really fast!

This is all for today my dear friends. Hope you enjoyed the post and download these apps to try them out!

Keep tuned, on Saturday a new post coming on Technology and Fitness!

Photo by : OurTuts

Juliet.

Benefits of Green Tea

Green tea is considered one of the healthiest beverages on the planet,Composed by antioxidant and elements that give powerful energies to your body.Green tea improves brain function and fat loss, lowers risk of cancer and many other benefits.Many bioactive elements in the tealeaves contains large amounts of important nutrients as Polyphenols and Catechise with its function as a powerful antioxidants.Another element is the increase of fat burning and the improvement of physical performance.

If you have a look of any list for fat burning, supplement green tea will be always present, because green tea has shown the increases of fat burning boosting the metabolic rate in human controlled rates.The tea contains a small quantity of caffeine itself, which has also been shown to improve physical performance by mobilizing fatty acids from the fat issue and making them available for us as energy.Several studies shoed that this beverage leads to decreases body fat especially in the abdominal area.

A study showed in a randomized controlled trial of 240 men and women that went on for 12 weeks that they had a decrease in body fat percentage, body weight, waist circumference and abdominal fat.We also have to consider the natural antibacterial property of green tea, capable to fights bacterium of the mouth, Streptococcus mutant, helping to avoid tooth problems.Finally Green Tea takes part of one of the most frequent problem of modern life :It controls the cholesterol blood levels, preventing heart diseases.I suggest you all to insert these beverages in your daily routine, not only for all this positive aspects, but also for having a nice pit stop in your journey.

Emma.

Photo by 30 Wonderful Health and Beauty Benefits of Green Tea

 

How to accelarate your metabolism

Metabolism is the first thing which influences our body weight, the term indicates a multiple chemical processes that happen into our body, finalized to our digestion.We can talk about slow and fast metabolism.Slow metabolism involves a long digestion which come with some physical stress and the consequence of gain weight.Most of the time this situation is connected to a no balanced and a lazy style of life.How can you help your metabolism?There are few simple tricks, which can help your metabolism to go faster such as eating slowly. Eating slowly makes your stomach feel more full, so you will eat less quantity of food.In the process of eating slow you will taste food better and give a change to your body to feel satiazed faster.

The second advice I can give you is about having small quantity of food divided in snacks during the day like having breakfast, lunch then a snack in the middle of the afternoon which can be a yogurt with fruits, then having a light dinner.Extremely important is not miss meals because stimulates the metabolism of insulin and bring you to have a big dinner with the consequence of a abnormal assimilation.There are even some types of food which can helps your metabolism such as:Pepper and spices , cereals, broccoli, green tea, apples and pears.Peppers is very positive for out metabolism it can makes run our metabolism the 25 % more than the usual, it even helps to decrease sensation of hungry.Cereals like oat makes work better our organism. Broccoli are one of the elements most detoxing in the food chain because contains vitamin C , Vitamin A and even Vitamin K .Green tea is a drink which contains many fundamental elements for metabolism such as detoxing and anti-oxidant and makes our metabolism more efficient .There is a study about apples and pears made from the Rio’s university .

They tested a percentage of woman who consumed more than three pears or apples a day. Results say they loose more weight and faster than other woman’s which do not follow this healthy routine. Pears and apples are both considered two fruits, which wakes up metabolism and helps to loose weight.Therefore my suggestion is to introduce all these elements.

Emma.

Photo by Kerry Madgwick – Health and Lifestyle

Diets NOT to do

 

Most of us think more or less in what a diet consist: not eatingMost of the diets consist in control of fats, carbohydrates, and all kind of sugar.The biggest mistake that we tend to do usually is putting ourselves in diets, which make us loose weight faster in a short period of time.Usually these diets are the unhealthiest for our body and our health.They will probably give the fastest results but they are affecting our body in a negative way, for then gain more than the kilos that we have lost doing that diet.As soon as you finish your diet, most of the people tend to return to bad habits,Gaining soon weight.

For a real result, it is necessary to keep a healthy life at table with a dynamic sport journey for a medium period.The worst two diets you can do are: Dukan diet, and eating only smoothies.Dukan diet consists in eating only proteins like meat, fish and yoghurt.With this diet you can see fast results but you can also have this negative side effects:Costipartion,bad breath, induction flu, fatigue, vitamins deficiency.This is the worst thing that you can do for your kidneys!!

For having a complete and healthy diet, is fundamental to mix proteins with vegetables and fruits, which have vitamins. Smoothie, another famous diet, made by many models, is a diet, which consists in only fruits, which contain mainly sugar!Fruits are important for a diet but need to be eaten with other elements.Best way to keep in good shape your body is definitely the choice to eat a Mediterranean diet with control of carbohydrates.

So try not to put yourself in strange diets as Dukan or based only on a few chain element, but eats various food in a small quantity.

Emma.

Photo by Flat belly diet