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Do you enjoy a nice long soak in a hot tub full of water hot enough to blister your skin?

Who doesn’t? How about spending time in a steamy sauna with sweat pouring off your body?

Maybe you like turning your thermostat down in the winter till it’s so cold you can see your breath in the house when you talk? If these activities appeal to you then slap yourself on the back (yes that will burn calories too) because heating yourself up and chilling yourself down have been shown to boost your metabolism by about 20%. Speaking of heat, add a bit of spice to your life and your food.

Studies have shown that eating spicy foods, those with cayenne pepper, or jalapeños or chili peppers will give a boost to your metabolism as well. Ole!

Sleep

You thought that getting a good night’s rest was just to avoid getting those matching bags under your eyes, didn’t’ you? Well, think again. Research has shown that if you get enough sleep at night, up to 8 hours or more (if you need more) it will keep you from gaining weight.

People who do not get enough rest are more prone to gaining weight. So get some rest. While you’re resting, you’re avoiding stress. Stress is known to increase your chances of gaining weight.

Stress releases a steroid called cortisol which depresses your metabolism, thereby encouraging your little soldiers to conserve calories as fat. Avoid stress at all costs.

In the battle of the bulge and the fight against fat, boosting your metabolism is one of the best weapons you can have in your arsenal.

Learn that increasing your metabolism means not starving yourself, it means getting out there and putting on some lean muscle mass, eating small meals throughout the day to keep your blood sugar level and it even means avoiding stress.

Getting your internal fire burning will help you lose weight and feel better about yourself. Who could ask for more?

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If you want to boost your metabolism, the very best thing you can do is to start moving your body.

Some exercise is good for building muscle and some is good for just plain sweating and giving you a good cardio workout. While aerobic exercises like running, jogging, playing tennis or riding a bike will help you tone your body and maintain your weight, they don’t do a whole lot to increase your muscle mass, which is what you need to do in order to boost your metabolism.

Weight training and strength training help build muscle tissue and this is a good thing. Think of your body, again, in terms of an army.

Too much fat means too many soldiers are weak and wounded, not able to carry on the fight.

Body: “Sir! Our numbers have been depleted! We’re not efficiently fighting the incoming calories, I mean missiles!”

Metabolism: “Recruit new soldiers, FRESH soldiers! Put them on the front lines and let them take on the calories! I mean missiles!

Body: “Sir, yes Sir! Commence lifting weights NOW!”

As you increase your muscle mass, and decrease your fat stores, your metabolism speeds up.

It burns more of what you eat. Your body will require more calories to maintain itself, so if you increase your soldiers, I mean muscle mass, through weight training and strength training, and consume a lower calorie amount, you will lose weight.

Just don’t lower your calories so drastically that it sends your army into survival and hoard mode again.

Boosting your metabolism through exercise is just one way to light up those calorie burning fires within you.

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Love this story sent to me by a friend.

The Law of the Garbage Truck
by David J. Pollay

How often do you let other people’s nonsense change your mood? Do you let a bad driver, rude waiter, curt boss, or an insensitive employee ruin your day? Unless you’re the Terminator, for an instant you’re probably set back on your heels. However, the mark of a successful person is how quickly he/she can get back her focus on what’s important.

Sixteen years ago I learned this lesson. I learned it in the back of a New York City taxi cab. Here’s what happened.

I hopped in a taxi, and we took off for Grand Central Station. We were driving in the right lane when, all of a sudden, a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his breaks, skidded, and missed the other car’s back end by just inches!

The driver of the other car, the guy who almost caused a big accident, whipped his head around and he started yelling bad words at us.

My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was friendly. So, I said, ‘Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!’

And this is when my taxi driver told me what I now call, ‘The Law of the Garbage Truck.’

Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it. And if you let them, they’ll dump it on you. When someone wants to dump on you, don’t take it personally.

You just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. You’ll be happy you did.

So this was it: The ‘Law of the Garbage Truck.’ I started thinking, how often do I let Garbage Trucks run right over me? And how often do I take their garbage and spread it to other people: at work, at home, on the streets?

It was that day I said, ‘I’m not going to do it anymore.’ I began to see garbage trucks. I see the load they’re carrying. I see them coming to drop it off. And like my Taxi Driver, I don’t make it a personal thing; I just smile, wave, wish them well, and I move on.

One of my favorite football players of all time, Walter Payton, did this every day on the football field. He would jump up as quickly as he hit the ground after being tackled. He never dwelled on a hit. Payton was ready to make the next play his best.

Good leaders know they have to be ready for their next meeting. Good parents know that they have to welcome their children home from school with hugs and kisses. Teachers and parents know that they have to be fully present, and at their best for the people they care about.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let Garbage Trucks take over their day. What about you? What would happen in your life, starting today, if you let more garbage trucks pass you by?

Here’s my bet. You’ll be happier.

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Your metabolism is the amount of energy in calories that your body burns in order to maintain its weight.

Whether you’re sleeping, running, sitting, standing, riding in a car or eating a bowl of chocolate fudge ice cream, your body is constantly burning calories in order to keep you going.

Think of it as a fire within you, burning your fat and food away. No, sorry but you won’t burn enough calories chewing your chocolate fudge ice cream to cancel out the calories you just took in by eating that bowl of ice cream.

It would be nice if it worked that way, but it doesn’t.

Get any group of women together, and even some men, get them talking on the topic of their metabolism and you’ll hear moaning and groaning and complaining about how their metabolism is so slow, that when they were younger they could eat anything they wanted to and not gain weight but now if they simply think about a piece of cheesecake they put five pounds on.

It’s a sad but true fact of life that as we age our metabolism slows down.  It doesn’t stop (although at times we might feel as though it has) but it does change.

The reason for this is because we have more lean muscle mass at 20 than we do at 70, and lean muscle mass is what helps burn calories.

Some people have higher metabolisms than others and are able to burn off the calories they eat and never gain an ounce.  Others have metabolisms slower than a slug and everything they eat seems to stick with them and not get burned off. No two people are alike in the calories they burn and the rate of their metabolism.

Having said that, is it possible to boost your metabolism in order to burn more calories and be able to lose weight?

Evidence suggests that there are a number of ways to help maximize our metabolism in order to more efficiently consume the food we eat, whether we’re walking, reading or even sleeping.  Boosting your metabolic rate is possible and I’ll show you how.

When we see beautiful models in magazines and svelte actresses in movies, we are tempted to cut down on our eating in order to lose weight and look more like them.

We decide to stop eating as much so we can drops some pounds.  Less food taken in should mean you’ll lose weight quickly, right?

Not necessarily.  Our bodies are very efficient at storing food as fat as a defense against starvation.  When you cut your calories, and if you do it drastically enough, your body panics.

Think of it in terms of an army and its rations.

Body: “Danger! Danger!  There’s not enough food!  We’re starving!”

Metabolism: “Cut down on production men, we’re going into survival mode! Slow and steady! Emphasis on the slow!”

Body: “Just make sure we have enough fat stores to get through this famine”

Metabolism: “Aye Aye Captain!”

Orders have been given and voila’, thunder thighs are born.  Or Jelly Bellies, saggy arms, double chins, saddle bags and any number of fat stores are created in order to make sure that your body doesn’t starve.

Think of it as the general of an army, laying in stores for a very long winter. When your body is in survival mode, it takes fewer calories to sustain itself, to maintain its current weight.

Excess calories are stored as fat and the stores are parceled out to the soldiers reluctantly and very s l o w l y in order to make sure the resources last as long as possible.

Severe restriction of calories is a sure fire way to cause your metabolism to slow down to a crawl.  If you’ve been crash dieting for years without exercising then your metabolism has been affected.

Dieting like this burns muscle and the less muscle mass you have, the less calories you burn and the slower your metabolism. You will now need fewer calories to maintain your current weight.  This means that if you consume more calories, your body won’t need to use them for energy and will store them.  Helloooo belly fat.

When you put the weight back on, and you will if you’ve been crash dieting, then it will be put back on as fat.  This means that your metabolic rate has probably dropped a little bit each time that you’ve crash dieted.

Putting on more fat and losing muscle will cause your metabolism to slow down even more. It seems like a cycle of doom, doesn’t i?  It can be if you don’t break that cycle.

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I love their Abs, and biceps!!! My idols who do not procrastinate..not when they have a dream and passion to fulfill.

Do you procrastinate often, when it comes to working out?

Everyone does it, including you and me.

You have things to do, important things or mundane things, and you put off doing them until the last minute. If Procrastination were an Olympic event you might be in the running for a gold medal, you’re that good at it.

You make jokes about being a world class procrastinator with your friends, telling them that sure, you could finish that project right now if you wanted to but (yawn) you’re just going to do it tomorrow.
Procrastination is putting something off until later, either due to carelessness or habitual laziness.

It’s putting off till tomorrow what you just as easily could have finished up today.  A procrastinator postpones or needlessly delays accomplishing something –just because.

Students are notorious for engaging in this behavior.  Papers need to be researched and written, tests must be studied for but none of this is done or even started until the very last minute.

Students who procrastinate generally spend a great deal of time pulling all –nighters in order to catch up to where they need to be or to cram for the big test in the morning.

A person who is habitually late to everything, from weddings to dates, is someone who procrastinates getting ready to leave.

Maybe they don’t start getting ready until it’s nearly time to leave or they move so slowly that by the time they should leave for the event, they’re still way behind schedule.

Why do we let things slide until we’re in a time crunch and the deadline is looming and we’re not even CLOSE to being finished?

Why do we procrastinate?

The behavior of procrastination affects almost everyone at one time or another in their life.

For some it is a continuous habit, part of who they are, a not-so-endearing character trait; for others it may be a situational thing and doesn’t affect too many events in their life.

For whatever reason, people put off things they don’t want to do.

1. Because You Are Afraid.

No one likes to admit that they fear something, but fear might just be the reason you put off doing what you know you should do.  Whether it’s fear of failure or fear of success, it’s still fear.  Fear is a paralyzing emotion.

It has the ability to stop us in our tracks-literally.  Some writers fear failure so they never write that epic novel they have churning around inside of them; some fear success and the result is the same.

If you procrastinate compulsively, and who doesn’t enjoy doing that, then you may fear that once you’re successful at something you’ll suffer the compulsion to continually be successful.

This will require you to work and finish what you’ve started and that will cut into your compulsion to procrastinate.  It’s a never ending cycle.  Fear can cause us to procrastinate.

2. Because You Don’t Think it’s Important Enough.

You don’t place a high enough priority on the task at hand, it’s not vital and so it’s not worthy of you beginning it.

You know the task needs to be done and you may already have decided that you’re the one who must do it.

However, there is always something else more important on your to-do list that keeps bumping that particular job back to the bottom.

Let’s say you know that that the dishwasher needs to be unloaded.  You’ll get to it later, after you go grocery shopping.  Grocery shopping is more important because if you don’t have food you’ll starve to death.  Besides, no one can see that the dishwasher is full of clean dishes.

After grocery shopping you need to eat, because you’re hungry.  Besides, you can just take a plate out of the dishwasher and use that.  That’s sort of unloading it, isn’t it? Unloading the dishwasher isn’t a priority and that’s why you procrastinate doing it.

3. You Don’t Know Enough to do the Task.

You may procrastinate beginning a project because you simply don’t know everything you need to know in order to complete the task.  You may not have consciously admitted this to yourself, but deep down you know it and it’s coming out as an aversion to starting the project.

You need to determine whether or not this is because you haven’t collected all the data on what you have to do, or simply because you want to stall for more time.

4. Because You’re Too Busy.

Life is busy.  We have jobs and commitments and sometimes, just sometimes, we can’t get to a particular task because we’ve run out of time in our busy day to complete one more thing.

5. Because It Works.

Unfortunately, procrastination can reinforce itself. If we avoid something we don’t want to do (like cleaning out the rain gutters) by engaging in behavior that we want to engage in (like hanging out with friends) then getting to it later, we can say that putting it off wasn’t that bad after all.

And besides, we had fun while we procrastinated.

6. You Haven’t Committed To the Job.

You may think the job should belong to someone else, it’s not really your job to do and the job is a waste of time.  If this is how you’re looking at this particular task, then you need to ask yourself what will happen to you if you don’t complete the job.

7. You Just Don’t Want To Do It.

Everyone is faced with jobs in life that they simply don’t want to do.  They’re either disgusting, like having to clean toilets, or they’re dangerous, like climbing up on the roof and cleaning the leaves out from the rain gutters.

We put off doing the task at hand because we simply do not want to do it.

Period.

There is no underlying psychological reason for putting it off.  It’s that recalcitrant two-year old in us coming out to say “I don’t wanna and I’m not gonna”.

8. You Could Just Be Lazy.

Yes, that’s what I said. I know it’s not an easy thing to hear about yourself, but sometimes facing the truth about ourselves can help us overcome bad habits and succeed where we otherwise may have failed.

You need to find a way to motivate yourself out of your habit of being lazy in order to stop procrastinating.

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