A common excuse is lack of time. We tend to get lost in the bustle of everyday life and start complaining that we never have enough time to eat fruits. If you are someone who feels the same, this article is the perfect fit for you. It discusses some easy steps you can apply to your life right away so you can start eating more fruits and embrace a healthier lifestyle.

1. Build a plan

Before you dive right into your new habit of eating fruit every day, build a plan for the week ahead. When you go grocery shopping the next time, buy several different varieties of fruits and plan which fruit you are going to eat when. 

You can even print the chart out and paste it to your refrigerator. This will help you have a concrete vision of exactly what you need to consume and will make sticking to your goal easier.

2. Keep track

When you have your plan for the week printed and stuck in a place you can see it daily, mark each day you successfully managed to stick to it off the calendar.

You can also get a habit tracker and mark each day on the calendar where you successfully stuck to your new goal of eating fruit daily. Gamifying your habits can be a helpful way to get the most of this challenge and adopting a healthier lifestyle.

3. Try frozen

If the reason why you never get to have enough fruit is that you don’t find enough fruit in your local grocery store, you can try frozen. Nutrition-wise, frozen fruits have the same health benefits as fresh fruits. They are picked at the peak season and then frozen, so all of their goodness is preserved.

This can also be a great way of reducing spoilage as fresh fruits tend to go bad if you forget to eat them on time. But frozen fruits don’t have that same issue. You can keep a few cans of frozen fruit in your home and eat them as and when you wish without worrying they might go bad if you neglect them for long.

4. Explore the seasonal varieties  

Frozen fruit might not offer much variety. But if you stick to fresh fruits, every season brings with it a brand new fruit, which in turn implies a brand new flavor you can savor and enjoy.

You can make it a weekly habit of visiting a local farmer’s market, picking the fruits of your choice, and then loading your refrigerator with them. You can then fit these new and interesting varieties of local produce into your weekly plan and enjoy your way to good health.

5. Make it tastier by exploring different options

You can cut up all your fruits into small chunks and prepare a fruit salad you can consume every day. To spice it up and add that extra zing of flavor, you can also add the following additives to make your fruit salad even tastier:

• olives or sesame oil
• nuts and dried fruits: chopped or toasted 
• Any variety of cheese, but parmesan or feta cheese taste the best
• fresh herbs: minced or diced
• dried herb and a tasty spice blend.

6. Get an accountability partner

Get help from people who have experience dealing with your new goal of eating fruit every day and embracing a healthier lifestyle. You can hire an accountability coach who will share helpful tips and tricks and also hold you accountable for your promise of eating more fruit. They can act as your cheerleaders and help you get back on track if you ever fall off the wagon for some reason.

So, what are you waiting for? Find a life coach from the world’s best coaching directory to unlock the next level in your life today!

This article discusses a detailed step-by-step guide to starting intermittent fasting. But before that, let’s discuss the types of intermittent fasting you can adopt.

Benefits of intermittent fasting

According to science, here are the benefits of intermittent fasting:

• It makes your day simpler. You don’t have to keep planning meals and can relax while having bigger portions as you’ll be fasting later anyway.
• It helps you live longer.
• It can reduce the risk of cancer.
• It’s easier than dieting or restricting calories with each meal.

Ways to do intermittent fasting 

1. The 16/8 method

This is the simplest way for beginners to include intermittent fasting into their lifestyle. The rules are simple: eat all your daily calorie requirements in 8 hours, while keeping the 16-hour window completely for fasting.

2. The 5:2 diet

Eat normally for 5 days of the week, but for the remaining 2 days, restrict your calorie intake to 500 daily calories for women and 600 daily calories for men.

3. Eat Stop Eat

This is another popular method to incorporate intermittent fasting into your lifestyle by eating normally for 5 days a week while fasting for the other 2 days. The two 24-hour fasts each week help regulate your hormones and cleanse your body of impurities.

4. Alternate-day fasting

As the name suggests, this method consists of eating normally on one day and fasting on the next. On your fasting day, you can either eat nothing or restrict your intake to a few hundred calories.

5. The Warrior Diet

This form of intermittent fasting involves eating on raw fruits during the rest of the day and having one big meal in the evenings. Basically, you fast all day and complete all your calorie requirements in a four-hour window.

6. Spontaneous meal skipping

This form of intermittent fasting doesn’t require any planning. When you feel full, skip meals. Your body will adjust to this rhythm after a while and this habit will also help you get rid of your tendency to overeat when not hungry.

Getting started with intermittent fasting

As mentioned earlier, the easiest way to adopt intermittent fasting in your life is by starting the 16/8 intermittent fasting method. Here are a few ideas how you can go about it:

• Start by skipping breakfast or dinner.
• Avoid midnight snacking. In fact, avoid eating anything after dinner.
• Maintain your daily eating habits in a habit tracker and keep track of your progress.
• Hire an accountability coach to help you stick to your goals and make sure you don’t miss a day even when you’re tempted.
• Learn from the experts at Better Humans. They write the most detailed tutorials on self-improvement.

How To Lose Weight Healthily and Sustainably by Intermittent Fasting
I sustainably lost 70 lbs with intermittent fasting through understanding the science, finding the right fasting…betterhumans.pub

Fasting for 3 days every 3 months gives me clarity-but there’s a right way to go about it.
Going without food for a few days helps me reset my emotional eating, but I had to learn from some mistakes along the…betterhumans.pub

Intermittent Fasting, the 5:2 Way
I have fasted regularly for 7 years, and this is why I recommend itbetterhumans.pub

Junk food is addictive. The delicious flavors and the savory texture make it almost impossible to stop munching on the fries, chips, burgers, and pizzas. But it’s been scientifically proven that junk food is not good for health. There’s a reason it’s called junk food — it’s trash for your body.

It’s difficult for most people to be strong enough not to succumb to the cravings for fast food, but here are seven powerful ways you can control your desire to eat more fast food and adopt healthy eating habits into your life.

1. Plan your meals

Plan your meals in advance so you aren’t assailed by the last-minute impulse to order some junk food. When you have your meals planned, you’ll know what you’ll be eating and when. You won’t have to order in at the last minute. This will not only bring more routine into your life, but it will also help you stick to your goals of eating healthy. 

2. Make a shopping list

When you go into a grocery store, you might be tempted to stock up on unhealthy food items. To make sure this doesn’t happen, make a shopping list and strictly adhere to it while going shopping.

Another great way to avoid buying junk is to stick to the perimeter of your grocery store. Usually, all grocery stores are designed in such a way that vegetables and other healthy alternatives are stocked at the perimeter while the junk food is kept at the center. If you want to eat healthily, keep yourself away from the temptation.

3. Eat enough protein 

Research has shown that protein makes you feel full. If you feel full throughout the day, you’ll not feel the desire to order and eat junk food.

Here are some examples of healthy protein-rich foods you can include in your diet to beat your cravings for fast food:

• Fish
• Beans
• Vegetables
• Nuts

4. Incorporate different food items into your diet

Try different alternatives. Widen up your food choices and experiment with the taste so you don’t feel the urge to seek solace in junk food. Here are some examples of the kinds of food you can now incorporate into your diet:

• Fruit: it has sugar, but it also contains antioxidants, vitamins, fiber, and water. It’s a great addition to your diet plan.
• Green salad.
• New types of fish, like tuna.
• Red beets, orange carrots, green kale — eat the literal rainbow to satisfy your cravings and make an Instagram-worthy meal.

5. Change your mindset

When you start seeing junk food in a different light, you can stop craving for it. A great way to go about it is not to focus on the taste but the effect it will have on your body. Your mind is much more powerful than your body. Think differently and watch how your habits change.

You can also take a leaf out of the pages of our experts at Better Humans. They write the most detailed pieces on how to be the best version of yourselves:Making the Switch to Completely Healthy Home-Cooked Food
The detailed plan that cut my food costs in half, cleared my skin, and helped me lose weight sustainablybetterhumans.pub

6. Manage stress better

Stress-eating — or the habit of eating too much food mindlessly while you are stressed out — is a common reason why so many people end up binging on junk food. To handles stress better, you need to get into the mindset of managing your stress before your stress gets the better of you.

Here are some healthy stress-management tools, according to scientists:

• taking a walk or run
• yoga
• meditating for a few minutes
• taking some deep breaths
• talking to a trusted friend or family member
• doing something creative like painting
• journaling

7. Get more sleep

Sleeping more is always a good idea when it comes to having a healthy lifestyle. But scientists have recently found out that if you sleep less, you’ll feel hungrier and have less ability to control the quality of the food you consume.

Bonus: Get help from those who matter

Get help from people who have experience dealing with your problem of eating too much fast food. You can hire an accountability coach who will share helpful tips and tricks and also hold you accountable for your promise of eating less junk food.

You can also get a habit tracker and mark each day on the calendar where you successfully refrained from eating fast food. Gamifying your habits can be a helpful way to get the most of this challenge and adopting a healthier lifestyle. 

Rader provides that knowledge and support by offering coaching services, her blog, and in the Coach.me community. Rader is a popular coach and author of the 25 in 25 December Fitness Challenge and 10 by 10 challenge. She shared her daily routine with us along with some of her best tips for habit change that works.

How do you start your own day? Do you have any daily rituals or routines?

I wake up and check my heart rate variability for three minutes, drink at least 8 ounces of water and then straight to exercise. Even if I have plans to exercise in the afternoon or evening, I still do something in the morning. Exercise is like brushing my teeth. I don’t feel like I can get on with my day without it. I feel more productive and energized. After, I meditate using calm.com or a mindfulness meditation for 2-20 minutes. Sometimes I’ll eat breakfast right away or I may wait until my husband wakes up, in which case I start on my most thought-intensive task for work. As many mornings as I can, I sit with my husband and have our bulletproof coffee before we go on with our day. It’s an important ritual that I miss when I can’t do it.

What are your eating habits like? Do you follow any specific program of eating?

I was a vegetarian for about 20 years. In January of 2014 I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Disease, adrenal fatigue, leaky gut and hypothalamic amenorrhea. It was a gut-puncher but really changed the way I eat and view my health. Being a gluten-free, soy-free, almost bean-free vegetarian was more difficult than I wanted it to be, so I started eating some meat again. I eat maybe one serving of grass-fed beef, organic chicken, turkey or wild fish a day, but my diet is largely plant-based. I eat 1-2 servings a day of a grain, typically rice, quinoa, corn or buckwheat—but most of my carbs are from vegetables. I don’t eat a lot of dairy—mainly Greek yogurt and kefir. I eat a 40-50% fat diet with about 20% protein and 30% carbs. This is VERY different than what I used to eat, but works well for me with my Hashimoto’s disease and the amount of activity I do. What we (including me!) used to think about fat isn’t true! I even had my cholesterol checked recently and my already stellar levels were even better after 10 months of eating this way.

There’s so much research being done and advice being published, how do you tell what’s real and what’s fake? How do you decide what’s relevant and what isn’t?

Being diagnosed with these conditions led me to research so much more, from a scientific journal perspective and not just what was popular. It has really opened my eyes how much misinformation is out there and won’t seem to go away. I enrolled in the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and will be an Integrative Nutrition Health Coach by June 2015. By the time this article is published I will also have my National Academy of Sports Medicine Fitness Nutrition Specialist Certification as well. I now look at the research that is being cited, how large the sample is and what the flaws or bias is in the study. Having been a vegetarian, I know that I was biased towards that diet so it was easy for me to find only the positives. I think that it happens in research as well. Looking at the whole picture is important. Vegans will always reference the China Study but there were flaws in that study. Paleos will advocate their studies but there are flaws there too. You can be a horrible Vegan eating a bunch of processed soy products and you can be a horrible Paleo eating a bunch of hormone-filled bacon. You can also be great at either with careful and conscious planning. Bioindividuality is what’s important. One person’s potion is another person’s poison. What works for me may not work for you. In the end, there is always going to be a commonality between any healthy nutrition plan that works: no or little refined white flour, no or little sugar and lots of vegetables. If you move toward that, you will succeed!

Is there any current thinking about diet and fitness that needs to be challenged?

That there is one sure-fire way of eating that works best for everyone. That to train for endurance or ultra-endurance events, you have to do an insane amount of hours (which is what I used to do).

Is there anything new you’ve started doing recently, or anything you’ve quit?

I started drinking a tapered-down version of bulletproof coffee with only half the oil and butter. This is new for my husband and I. It is delicious and satiating. I rarely drink coffee in cafes anymore because I prefer our version at home. I quit eating gluten this year due to Hashimoto’s Disease. It was hard for about three weeks, but now it’s fine except at restaurants and when visiting my family. That takes more planning. I can’t go without doing research first or just taking my own food.

How do you make adjustments to your workout? It’a hard to know what to do when you’re tired or having a bad workout.

I’ve had to make a LOT of adjustments to my training this year. I used to compete in ultra-endurance events up to 30 hours. This year was a wash while figuring out my thyroid but I plan to be back in business in 2015 now that things are steady. I don’t know if I’ll ever compete at that level again but I’ll still compete. My biggest realization is that I can stay fit with a lot less hours. I’m taking a more ancestral approach to training which gives me much more time to work on growing my business. I’m also a lot more flexible with my workout schedule and change it up based on my heart rate variability. This was a game changer for me. I bought a heart rate monitor and check my HRV every morning using the Sweetbeat App. Heart rate variability is different than heart rate. It is a measurement of your autonomic nervous system. If my HRV is low, I need to do a lower intensity workout. If it’s high, I can get to movin’!

Can you share some of the specific things you notice your top clients doing differently than the average client?

Consistency is key. People will make excuses for everything. Finding a trigger is important. That trigger can be waking up (like mine) or anything that you do before you move or exercise. I coach my clients to think of exercise as opportunities instead of workouts. The word workout insinuates putting on specific clothes, going to a gym or some other kind of setting, and getting sweaty. I have a hairdresser for a client who I gave five minute opportunities—exercises she can do in a skirt without getting sweaty. After two months of just 1-2 opportunities a day she sent me a text telling me her butt was a little higher, just from opportunities! Now that’s the kind of text I love to get

[Tweet “”Think of exercise as opportunities instead of workouts.” ~@marceyrader, How I Train”]

Coach.me provides everything you need to improve performance in diet, fitness, productivity, and life. Improve yoru fitness habits by adding these plans to your dashboard:

• 25 in 25 Holiday Exercise Challenge: Rader’s challenge for staying fit through the holidays, December 1-25. You can read about last year’s challenge: 25 in 25 Challenge
• 10 By 10 Exercise Challenge: getting just ten minutes of exercise before 10am can have a huge impact on your health and productivity. Beginner to advanced plan. It doesn’t matter what you do. Just do it!

Bad Coffee Habit: Adding too much sugar

Sugar consumption has skyrocketed in the United States. We’re eating 100 pounds of sugar per year per person, which is more than the 10 pounds of sugar per year we consumed 200 years ago. Sugar consumption is tied to many health ailments and studies are starting to reveal it’s addictive properties.

How to break it: Cut your sugar down gradually. Try reducing it by one spoon every couple of weeks.

Bad Coffee Habit: Using processed/packaged creamers

Vanilla spice coffee may taste great but if the flavor is coming from a ready-made store bought creamer, then it probably isn’t a healthy choice. You might want to buy a coffee machine yourself, so you know exactly what’s in your coffee. If you’re not sure which machine to buy, check out Coffee-Works.com. Buying the right machine can be the difference between a good and a bad cup of coffee. Luckily, there are plenty of websites which can help you make the right decision when you’re considering buying a new coffee machine. For example, Helix Coffee sells the Baratza Encore coffee grinder so if you’re looking for a coffee grinder, it might be worth checking them out!

How to break it: Replace your store bought creamer with a natural alternative. Creamer or half and half will give your coffee a rich flavor. If you’re trying to trim down fat, use skim or low-fat milk instead. Almond, soy, rice, and coconut milk are great non-dairy alternatives. If you miss the flavoring, try adding cinnamon or a tiny dash of real vanilla extract to your cup.

Bad Coffee Habit: Drinking your calories

Your body interprets liquid calories differently than food calories, so you might be taking in more calories through coffee than you realize. A grande cappuccino at Starbucks has 140 calories while a mocha has close to 300 calories.

How to break it: Lower the sugar and switch to a low-calorie creamer. When you can, choose regular coffee (5 calories) or cappuccinos over lattes and frozen or specialty drinks, which have more milk and sugar.

Bad Coffee Habit: Drinking late in the day

Coffee is the perfect morning pick me up, but drinking it later in the day can lead to trouble falling or staying asleep. Caffeine’s half-life is 4-6 hours, so traces of caffeine can remain in your system even 12 hours after drinking a cup, depending on how quickly you metabolize caffeine.

How to break it: Give yourself a coffee curfew if you think coffee is causing your sleeping troubles. A good place to start is to stop drinking coffee after lunch.

Bad Coffee Habit: Drinking too much coffee

Yes, there really is such a thing as drinking too much coffee. Ingesting too much caffeine can have scary side effects such as restlessness, sweating, anxiety, and even heart palpitations. 1-2 cups of coffee per day is usually plenty.

How to break the habit: Reduce your coffee intake by one cup every couple of weeks, or until you feel ready to reduce it further. You can try drinking tea instead of coffee during times when you would normally grab another cup.

Bad Coffee Habit: Brushing your teeth right after drinking coffee

The acid in coffee erodes the enamel in your teeth. Brushing your teeth right after eating or drinking something acidic, like coffee, worsens the damage.

How to break it: Wait at least one hour before brushing your teeth after drinking coffee. If you need to freshen up, rinse with water only or chew gum.

Bad Coffee Habit: Grabbing a cookie with your cuppa

Do you buy a pastry with your afternoon cup of coffee? Over the course of the year that bad habit adds up to a lot of junk food in your diet.

How to break it: Visit coffee shops without baked goods selections (or with really bad pastries, so you’re less tempted) and only bring enough cash with you to coffee shops to purchase your coffee.

1. Paleo: eat like a caveman, mostly veggies, meats, nuts. Advised by Paleohacks and Nerd Fitness.
2. Slow-Carb: lean meat, beans, and veggies; abstain from white foods like sugar, pasta, bread, cheese. Based on Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Body.
3. Vegetarian: vegetables, but no meat. Cheese and eggs are optional.
4. Whole foods: eat only recognizable foods and avoid processed ones. Advised by Summer Tomato.
5. Gluten-free: no wheat, rye, barley or wheat-based foods.
6. No sweets: a simple diet change that affects your insulin swings.
7. DASH: USDA’s current recomendation.
8. Calorie counting: the old standard.
9. Sleep more: the science says this should work. Advised by: Swan Sleep Solutions.
10. Mindful eating: learn mindfulness to recognize when you’re full. Advised by ZenHabits.

Join by signing up here. ]]> https://blog.lift.do/how-to-succeed-at-the-4-hour-body/ Tue, 18 Dec 2012 08:27:00 +0000 http://blog.coach.me/how-to-succeed-at-the-4-hour-body/ Read ]]> We just finished a very successful four-week trial of the the 4-Hour Body diet with several thousand participants.

84% of people who stuck to the program lost weight and the average weight loss was 8.6 pounds. These numbers are very strong.

The diet is based on developing a few key habits: Slow-carb diet (no processed carbs or dairy), taking cold showers, eating 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up, exercising, and measuring your weight, body fat and total inches.

Below are the results and insights we found around what 4-Hour Body Diet habits led to success. We’re planning to do a lot more diet research and have included a section below about future directions. Even so, this initial trial was very informative.

The data we used comes from a large pool of Lift usage data (3,500 participants) and responses from a follow-up survey to Lift users in which 200 people participated.

Summary: 4-Hour Body Works

Not only did 84% of people who stuck to the diet for four weeks lose weight, 14% of people lost more than 15 pounds. That’s a lot of success for such a short amount of time.

Two habits correlated strongly with weight loss: eating a lot of eggs and eating veggies.

Two habits correlated with failure: heavy alcohol consumption and giving up on cold showers.

Defining Success: Lost Weight vs. Stasis

Across all our data, 16% of people didn’t lose weight. Let’s call this the baseline stasis rate. The margin of error on this survey is 5%.  We can use this to claim a correlation between sub-behaviors on this diet and success.

Eat eggs and veggies.

People who reported either eating two dozen eggs per week or “too many!” eggs had a stasis rate of 10% and 11%. That correlates with greater success on the diet (i.e. the data suggests you should be aggressively eating eggs for the purposes of this diet).

We saw a much bigger signal from people who weren’t including veggies in their daily meals. Their stasis rate was 25%. Your mom was right: eat your veggies.

Be consistent.

We asked a couple of questions that touched upon how consistently people stuck to their diet habits.

28% of people scrambled to find acceptable meals each day (presumably meaning that many meals weren’t strictly appropriate for the diet).

21% of Lifters maintained their regular, social drinking habits on the diet.  Tim recommends limiting alcohol and sticking to wine.

29% tried, but gave up on, cold showers.

You probably aren’t surprised that heavy drinking (25% stasis rate) didn’t help with weight loss. Haphazard eating also leaned that way (19% stasis). But what’s up with the cold showers?

Not taking cold showers and taking cold showers showed up evenly. It didn’t matter which one you chose as long as you stayed consistent.

But people who tried the cold showers and then gave up? They had a 29% stasis rate. This was the highest correlation of anything in the survey. Maybe it’s an indicator of weak wills or failure in other aspects of the diet. I’m one of them, although I managed to lose weight. I tried cold showers four times and then decided I didn’t have the heart to keep going.

Enjoy Cheat Day

I have good news: cheat day eating habits didn’t have any effect on success rate. It didn’t matter what you craved (61% of you crave sweets) or if you ate in excess (combining beer, cheese, frieds, and sugars).  So keep eating whatever you’d like on your day off.

However, I saw enough people who anecdotally reported massive weight gains on cheat day, that I’d recommend you to measure this for yourself.

Future Research

This was our first in-depth investigation into a goal and it’s associated habits.  There are a lot of ways we can strengthen our research, but I’m unapologetically excited to share these early results with you. As far as I can tell, this is already the most in-depth research into the Four Hour Body diet. Our plan is to do a lot more of this but better:

#1. How much weight will these people have kept off in a year or two years? We’re going to try to find out, although some of the best anecdotal stories were from people who’d been on the diet for several years.

#2. How does the 4-Hour Body compare to other diets? There’s definitely a bias in the Lift community toward high achievement. We can help control for that by running this sort of research across multiple diets.

#3. How does this diet affect other health markers like blood pressure and cholesterol levels? Muscle gain?

Thanks for reading and participating in the challenge. Even though the challenge is over, you can still sign up for Lift and search for 4HB.

Tony & the Lift Team