Category: Lifestyle

Hi there my beautiful lovelies! Hope you guys are doing well and staying safe. Today I will continue to talk to you about my weight loss journey with part three. Hope you enjoy the post.

The focus on Good Carb:

For a long time, I heard about a low-carb diet for weight loss. I just couldn’t get aboard on this fad. I know that would not be able to do that diet. Hence, I instead focused on eating good and healthy carbohydrates. Imagine this: you can lose weight, get healthier and stronger, and feel better—all while still eating carbs. Yes, it’s true. You can lose weight if you just shift your diet from processed to good and healthy carbs. Before knowing about good carbs, let first find out about carbs in general. There are three types of carbohydrates: simple, complex, and fibers.

Simple Carbohydrates:

Simple carbs are simply sugar. They can be found naturally in fruits and vegetables but also in refined grains and processed foods through “added sugar” as in refined (processed) grains, cakes, and other baked goods. Due to the simple and refined nature of this carb, burn up fast, spiking your blood sugar and causing it to crash. This can leave you with a craving for more carbs and can also lead to weight gain long term.

Complex Carbohydrates:

Complex carbs are made up of long chains of sugar molecules. They are simply starches. These carbohydrates keep you full for longer because they take more time for your body to digest and break down for energy. These carbs are also known as healthy carbs. The key to hacking your weight-loss plan is to limit your intake of simple carbohydrates and nourish your body with complex carbohydrates. Complex carbs take longer for your body to break down, which means you’ll spend more energy to burn these than simple sugars.

Examples of complex carbohydrates include:

• Whole grain foods like quinoa, barley, brown rice, and oats
• Whole-grain, processed products like bread, pasta, cereal, and crackers
• Legumes like lentils, chickpeas, kidney beans, green peas, and split peas
• Other starchy vegetables like potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn

Fibers:

Dietary fiber is a long chain of sugar molecules, just like complex carbs, but it’s indigestible—meaning, your body can’t break it down to use for energy. Instead, dietary fiber helps provide bulk to keep your digestion system running as well as help you to feel full. You’ll often find fiber in the same foods that contain complex carbs.

A study published in Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that something as simple as aiming to eat 30 grams of fiber each day can help you lose weight, lower your blood pressure, and improve your body’s response to insulin just as effectively as a more complicated diet. According to Harvard, “In addition to weight control, higher fiber diets can also help to prevent type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Frank Hu, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. But, he cautioned, it’s best to get fiber from food, not from supplements.

Adding fiber to your diet can be easy and delicious. A high-fiber cereal or oatmeal with berries on top is a great way to start the day. For lunch, enjoy a salad sprinkled with chickpeas or kidney beans and some nuts (almonds, peanuts, walnuts, or pecans). Make a stir-fry for dinner using a variety of vegetables, and top with pumpkin or sunflower seeds.

Hence, I make sure that with a high protein breakfast and stress control, I also add complex carbs with high fiber in my diet. This includes brown rice, beans, legumes, peas, quinoa, and avocado. I still eat pasta but just opt for whole-grain pasta. My friends just by making these three changes to my diet (high protein, stress reduction, and complex carbs), I have lost 12 pounds so far. I know I still have a long way to go to lose the 26 pounds I have gained but I feel more energized and less tired than before.

My dear lovelies! I would love to know if you have gained weight during the pandemic. What do you do to control weight? What works for you? What does not? Please leave your response in the comment below.

Please subscribe to this blog or follow me if you have a WordPress account.  Don’t forget to check out my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram @forevernij. Are you on Bloglovin? Also please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Let’s support each other. Please follow me and comment below with your information so that I can follow you back.

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CAUSES CLOSE TO MY HEART

PLEASE DONATE DIRECTLY TO THE ORGANIZATIONS THROUGH MY FUNDRAISING LINKS:

I consider myself fortunate to have good health, a full-time job, and a roof over my head. However, there are still so many people who are struggling to put food on their tables. Please join me to help those who are struggling. If you have good health, full-time jobs, and a roof over your head, please join me to help those who are struggling. Whether you donate $5 or $500, you will make a huge difference in someone’s life.

No Kid Hungry:

America’s kids need us. The coronavirus is closing schools nationwide, and millions of vulnerable children are losing the school meals they depend on. For some, it’s the only food they’ll receive on a given day. We have a plan to feed kids, but we need your help today to continue our work to ensure every kid gets three meals a day. You can click above to donate to my gofundme page donation going directly to the organization, or you can click on the direct link to the site.

Food Bank of Maryland:

PLEASE DONATE ANY AMOUNT YOU CAN AND SHARE THE POST WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

Manna Food Center, a nonprofit organization, strives to eliminate hunger in Montgomery County through food distribution, education, and advocacy. Millions of children go to bed hungry in America every year, sadly it’s worse now! Today, 14 million children regularly miss meals — three times more than during the Great Recession and five times more than before the pandemic.

Many parents have lost their job during the pandemic. Sadly, that shows no sign of stopping. Your donation can bring relief to the millions worried about where their next meal will come from. It’s even worse for Latino and Black families, whose rates of nutrition insecurity have spiked to 25% and 30%. In the world’s wealthiest country, this is unconscionable.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated 37 million people in America struggled with hunger and nutrition. The Centers for Disease Control reports 76% of people killed by COVID-19 had at least one underlying condition, most of which were diet-related. Diet-related diseases also fuel skyrocketing health care costs, which rose from 5% to 28% of the federal budget in the past 50 years.

Let’s make the world better, kinder, brighter. Every dollar you give will create real change. $1 will feed 5 hungry children here in the US, but $1,000 will feed 50,000 starving children overseas. Be the good in the lives of many by giving right now.

SUPPORT ME

Your generous support will help me continue to bring content to you.

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Toms: Get $20 off your first order at TOMS!

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ic0b9 and get a free ride.

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Grubhub: Sign Up and Enjoy. Get $10 off your first order

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Hi there my beautiful lovelies! Hope you guys are doing well and staying safe. Today I want to continue with the second part of the weightloss topic from yesterday.

Stress and Weight:

As I have mentioned to you yesterday, after gaining 26 pounds in a year, I was very much stressed about my weight. As someone who believes and practices mindfulness based meditation I knew that stress will not help me with weightloss just as it does not help me with my alopecia. Mental stress (either in or not in association with impaired sleep) may play a key role in poor sleep, enhanced appetite, cravings and decreased motivation for physical activity. All these factors contribute to weight gain and obesity, possibly via decreasing the efficacy of weightloss interventions. Studies have shown that factors that may pose a risk for weight regain include a history of weight cycling, disinhibited eating, binge eating, more hunger, eating in response to negative emotions and stress, and more passive reactions to problems. Additionally, stress is an important factor in the development of addiction and in addiction relapse, and may contribute to an increased risk for obesity and other metabolic diseases. Furthermore, traumatic stress has pronounced effect on food consumption during the rodent’s active phase, and a prolonged effect on body weight. 

Studies have shown that stress and other negative emotions, such as depression and anxiety, can lead to both decreased and increased food intake. An increasing number of prospective studies have shown that emotional eating predicts subsequent weight gain in adults. Moreover, studies highlighting the relevance of night sleep duration by showing that adults with a combination of shorter sleep and higher emotional eating may be especially vulnerable to weight gain. Emotional eating (i.e. eating in response to negative emotions) has been suggested to be one mechanism linking depression and subsequent development of obesity. Adults with a combination of shorter night sleep duration and higher emotional eating may be particularly vulnerable to weight gain. Another study, confirm a modest weight gain over the first year at university, which was associated with higher levels of perceived stress in women.

Reduce Stress:

Hence, I took the initiative to reduce stress on top of high-protein breakfast. On top of this, my painting helped keep stress at bay. Addtionally, I started practicing mindful eating. We often eat mindlessly and as a result we don’t allow our brain to register that we are full. This in turn lead us to eat more. If you eat too fast, the fullness signal may not arrive until you have already eaten too much. This is very common in binge eating.

Mindful eating is based on mindfulness, a Buddhist concept. Mindful eating is about using mindfulness to reach a state of full attention to your experiences, cravings, and physical cues when eating. Mindful eating helps you distinguish between emotional and physical hunger. It also increases your awareness of food-related triggers and gives you the freedom to choose your response to them. Mindful eating may aid weight loss by changing eating behaviors and reducing the stress associated with eating. In addition, mindful eating can also help prevent binge eating. It can both reduce the frequency of binges and the severity of each binge. It takes pracetice. In order to practice mindful eating try to eat more slowly, chew thoroughly, remove distractions, and stop eating when you’re full.

My dear lovelies! Hope you enjoyed this post. I would love to know how stress effects your weight and how you deal with stress. Please comment below. Please stay tuned for part three of my weightloss journey. If you subscribe, you will get automatic email when I post new posts.

Please subscribe to this blog or follow me if you have a WordPress account.  Don’t forget to check out my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram @forevernij. Are you on Bloglovin? Also please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Let’s support each other. Please follow me and comment below with your information so that I can follow you back.

——————————–   Happy Reading ———————————-

Follow my Instagram page on @forevernij

Follow my Facebook Page on @forevernij

Subscribe to my YouTube channels (two)

Follow my Twitter account @allaboutme3181

Buy From My Closet

Shop from my closet at Poshmark

Shop from my closet at Ebay

CAUSES CLOSE TO MY HEART

PLEASE DONATE DIRECTLY TO THE ORGANIZATIONS THROUGH MY FUNDRAISING LINKS:

I consider myself fortunate to have good health, a full-time job, and a roof over my head. However, there are still so many people who are struggling to put food on their tables. Please join me to help those who are struggling. If you have good health, full-time jobs, and a roof over your head, please join me to help those who are struggling. Whether you donate $5 or $500, you will make a huge difference in someone’s life.

No Kid Hungry:

America’s kids need us. The coronavirus is closing schools nationwide, and millions of vulnerable children are losing the school meals they depend on. For some, it’s the only food they’ll receive on a given day. We have a plan to feed kids, but we need your help today to continue our work to ensure every kid gets three meals a day. You can click above to donate to my gofundme page donation going directly to the organization, or you can click on the direct link to the site.

Food Bank of Maryland:

PLEASE DONATE ANY AMOUNT YOU CAN AND SHARE THE POST WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

Manna Food Center, a nonprofit organization, strives to eliminate hunger in Montgomery County through food distribution, education, and advocacy. Millions of children go to bed hungry in America every year, sadly it’s worse now! Today, 14 million children regularly miss meals — three times more than during the Great Recession and five times more than before the pandemic.

Many parents have lost their job during the pandemic. Sadly, that shows no sign of stopping. Your donation can bring relief to the millions worried about where their next meal will come from. It’s even worse for Latino and Black families, whose rates of nutrition insecurity have spiked to 25% and 30%. In the world’s wealthiest country, this is unconscionable.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated 37 million people in America struggled with hunger and nutrition. The Centers for Disease Control reports 76% of people killed by COVID-19 had at least one underlying condition, most of which were diet-related. Diet-related diseases also fuel skyrocketing health care costs, which rose from 5% to 28% of the federal budget in the past 50 years.

Let’s make the world better, kinder, brighter. Every dollar you give will create real change. $1 will feed 5 hungry children here in the US, but $1,000 will feed 50,000 starving children overseas. Be the good in the lives of many by giving right now.

SUPPORT ME

Your generous support will help me continue to bring content to you.

AFFILIATION LINKS & COUPON

Toms: Get $20 off your first order at TOMS!

Door Dash: Get $30 off ($10 off each of your first 3 orders)

Uber: Sign Up to Ride. Use promo code
ic0b9 and get a free ride.

Lyft: Get your free ride.

Grubhub: Sign Up and Enjoy. Get $10 off your first order

Ipsy: Sign Up to Get Curated Products to Your Door Step

Boxy Charm: Use referral code Munziba-VDPRPCII

Cause Box: Get $10 Off Your First Subscription Box

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Hi there my beautiful lovelies! Hope you guys are doing well and staying safe. You have gained weight after the pandemic? You are not alone. According to the Harvard Health website, an examination of patient data from electronic health records showed that “39% of patients gained weight during the pandemic, with weight gain defined as above the normal fluctuation of 2.5 pounds. Approximately 27% gained less than 12.5 pounds and about 10% gained more than 12.5 pounds, with 2% gaining over 27.5 pounds”. Today, I will share with you part one of my weight loss journey.

I was fortunate enough not to experience freshman 15, mostly because I was severely underweight. However, I wasn’t so lucky this time around. This may be because I am much older now with a much slower metabolism rate. On top of that, I am dealing with chronic health conditions which put on steroid treatment several times. The weight gain was not pretty on my clothing and my mind. For some reason, even with my love of mindful meditation, I just couldn’t deal with the 26 pounds weight gain. If the stress of the pandemic and loss of loved ones weren’t enough, I started dealing with added weight that I was feeling day-to-day.

The Weight Loss Journey

My friends, I have to say that the journey was not easy. At first, I was checking my weight every day, only to make me stress out even more. I started out with light exercise. That would have been easy if I didn’t have exercise intolerance. Hence, I started counting calories and cutting carbs. That did not last long. If I lost 3 pounds, the next week I gained 2 back. As a science person I know that when it comes to weight loss, one shoe does not fit all. I tried the Weight Watcher point system, it does not work. Finally, I decided to do some research for other effective options.

High Protein Breakfast for Weight Loss

One thing that I came across that caught my attention is the use of a high-protein breakfast for weight loss. Weight what? Yes, high-protein breakfast. I started doing some research. A high-protein diet may decrease food intake through regulating satiety and appetite hormones and can be an effective strategy for weight loss. A study looking at Chinese adolescents found that a high-protein breakfast promotes weight loss in obese Chinese adolescents, possibly through its regulation of satiety, subsequent food intake, and appetite hormones. Similarly, acute studies show that the addition of whey protein at breakfast has a glucose-lowering effect through increased incretin and insulin secretion. Whey protein-based breakfast is an important adjuvant in the management of Type 2 diabetes. However, keeping in mind that there is no single best strategy for weight management, I tried this out. I took a protein drink every day followed by frequent small meals. I started to lose weight but very slowly. A month ago I decided to add a weight watcher protein bar on top of my protein drink as my breakfast.

My friends, do keep in mind that months of just protein drink helped me shed 6 pounds. However, it was not steady. Hence, after adding the protein bar with the protein drink I was able to shed another 6 pounds in the past month, with no exercise on top of being on steroid treatment. I don’t give the entire credit to a high protein diet, but it helped a lot. I still follow the motto, everything in moderation. Weight watchers point system may not have helped me this time, however, the moto behind them, “Calories give it the baseline; saturated fat and sugar drive the SmartPoints value up, while protein drives it down. The reason for this is that numerous studies have confirmed the benefits of eating less sugar and saturated fat, and more protein—not just for weight loss, but all sorts of other health reasons”.

My dear lovelies! Please come back tomorrow on the 2nd part of my weight loss journey. If you are going through a weight loss journey, I would love to hear your stories. What worked for you and what didn’t.

Please subscribe to this blog or follow me if you have a WordPress account.  Don’t forget to check out my Facebook Page and follow me on Instagram @forevernij. Are you on Bloglovin? Also please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Let’s support each other. Please follow me and comment below with your information so that I can follow you back.

——————————–   Happy Reading ———————————-

Follow my Instagram page on @forevernij

Follow my Facebook Page on @forevernij

Subscribe to my YouTube channels (two)

Follow my Twitter account @allaboutme3181

Buy From My Closet

Shop from my closet at Poshmark

Shop from my closet at Ebay

CAUSES CLOSE TO MY HEART

PLEASE DONATE DIRECTLY TO THE ORGANIZATIONS THROUGH MY FUNDRAISING LINKS:

I consider myself fortunate to have good health, a full-time job, and a roof over my head. However, there are still so many people who are struggling to put food on their tables. Please join me to help those who are struggling. If you have good health, full-time jobs, and a roof over your head, please join me to help those who are struggling. Whether you donate $5 or $500, you will make a huge difference in someone’s life.

No Kid Hungry:

America’s kids need us. The coronavirus is closing schools nationwide, and millions of vulnerable children are losing the school meals they depend on. For some, it’s the only food they’ll receive on a given day. We have a plan to feed kids, but we need your help today to continue our work to ensure every kid gets three meals a day. You can click above to donate to my gofundme page donation going directly to the organization, or you can click on the direct link to the site.

Food Bank of Maryland:

PLEASE DONATE ANY AMOUNT YOU CAN AND SHARE THE POST WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW.

Manna Food Center, a nonprofit organization, strives to eliminate hunger in Montgomery County through food distribution, education, and advocacy. Millions of children go to bed hungry in America every year, sadly it’s worse now! Today, 14 million children regularly miss meals — three times more than during the Great Recession and five times more than before the pandemic.

Many parents have lost their job during the pandemic. Sadly, that shows no sign of stopping. Your donation can bring relief to the millions worried about where their next meal will come from. It’s even worse for Latino and Black families, whose rates of nutrition insecurity have spiked to 25% and 30%. In the world’s wealthiest country, this is unconscionable.

Even before the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated 37 million people in America struggled with hunger and nutrition. The Centers for Disease Control reports 76% of people killed by COVID-19 had at least one underlying condition, most of which were diet-related. Diet-related diseases also fuel skyrocketing health care costs, which rose from 5% to 28% of the federal budget in the past 50 years.

Let’s make the world better, kinder, brighter. Every dollar you give will create real change. $1 will feed 5 hungry children here in the US, but $1,000 will feed 50,000 starving children overseas. Be the good in the lives of many by giving right now.

SUPPORT ME

Your generous support will help me continue to bring content to you.

AFFILIATION LINKS & COUPON

Toms: Get $20 off your first order at TOMS!

Door Dash: Get $30 off ($10 off each of your first 3 orders)

Uber: Sign Up to Ride. Use promo code
ic0b9 and get a free ride.

Lyft: Get your free ride.

Grubhub: Sign Up and Enjoy. Get $10 off your first order

Ipsy: Sign Up to Get Curated Products to Your Door Step

Boxy Charm: Use referral code Munziba-VDPRPCII

Cause Box: Get $10 Off Your First Subscription Box

Singles Swag: Receive $15 Off Your First Subscription Box

Amazon Store: Check Out My Amazon Store Front with My Favorite Products

Prime Video: Sign Up for Prime Video