The colors that surround you have an impact on your mood

The colors that surround you have an impact on your mood. Here’s how.

What’s your favorite color? With blue being the most popular favorite color and yellow people’s least favorite color, the others fall somewhere in between. Maybe you chose your favorite color because it’s the color of your favorite sports team or because it’s most attractive to you. Perhaps, you subconsciously chose it based on how it makes you feel when you see it.

Colors have an effect on your mood, behavior, and feelings. Interior decorators know this and apply this principle when designing spaces. Debating about what color to repaint a room in your home? Maybe this article will help you decide.

Neutrals

White, beige, brown, tan, gray, cream, and black are all neutral colors. These create an impersonal, cold space that’s conservative, safe, and lacks passion. The darker the neutral, the heavier or more oppressive a space may feel. Lighter neutrals brighten a space, making it feel calm and friendly. Middle-ground neutrals may give an earthy, natural feel to a room. Neutrals are popular decorating colors these days, providing a clean, simple slate for accessorizing with other shades of neutral or splashes of color.

Blue

Wonder why blue is the most popular favorite color? Maybe because it’s the color of a beautiful, clear sky, deep ocean waters on a sunny day, or a sapphire gem. Blue is a cool color and is associated with feelings of calmness, peace, trustworthiness, and loyalty. For this reason, it’s often used in bedrooms. However, for some people, blue is a depressing or cold color. If this is you, keep it off your home’s walls.

Red

Red elicits opposite emotions from blue. At the other end of the color spectrum, red is a warm color that’s stimulating and exciting. Being around red can speed your pulse and breathing rate. Anything red in a space gets noticed and attracts attention. It’s a symbol of strength, passion, romance, love, or aggression. Red is often used in restaurants because it stimulates the appetite.

Green

The color of the grass, plants, and trees, green is a symbol of nature. Compared to other colors, green is easiest on your eyes, making it another very popular color. It’s also associated with creativity and productivity, making it an ideal color for offices or studios. Green has a calming, relaxing effect on people. When you see green, you may think of wealth or good luck.

Yellow

It’s bright and sunny, but it’s not a popular decorating color unless used in a kitchen. Because yellow is on the warm end of the color spectrum, it’s known to stimulate the appetite and is good to have in an eating space. And while yellow gets your attention, it’s not the easiest color to look at. Studies show people lose their temper more often in yellow rooms and babies cry more. If you have yellow walls in a home you want to sell, you’d do yourself a favor by repainting the walls a neutral or other non-yellow choice.

Purple

The color of royalty, purple is a symbol of wealth, luxury, and romance. Lighter shades of purple like violet are associated with sophistication. At the end of the rainbow, purple is a cool color that’s calming, restful, passive, and soothing.

Orange

Like red and yellow, orange grabs your attention. Full of energy, bright, energetic, warm, and cheery, orange can also seem a bit overwhelming. You either love or hate the color orange. It may make you think of sunsets, citrus fruit, autumn, pumpkins, or Halloween. Depending on your perspective, this can be good or bad.

© 2009-2010 Empire Systems, Inc. 
Powered by FitPro Magazine™Terms of Service | Legal Disclaimer
The content and information on this site is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent disease. 
Please consult your physician prior to starting any exercise or diet program.

The Risk-Reward of the Keto Diet

The Risk-Reward of the Keto Diet :Say goodbye to sugar with these helpful tips.

It’s a diet with a high success rate for weight loss and improved health. A ketogenic, or keto, diet as it’s called, is similar to the Atkins diet and other low-carb, high-fat diet plans. Contrary to diets of the past, the keto diet requires you to consume high-fat foods and eat as few carbs as possible on the road to weight loss. Sound intriguing?

If you’re wondering how keto diets work, if they’re they safe, and whether they cause any negative side effects or come with any health risks, you’re reading the right article.

Ketosis Defined

Carbohydrates are used by the body for energy. But what happens when you don’t eat carbs, only consume small amounts of protein, and eat a lot of fat instead? The liver turns fat into ketones, molecules that provide energy for the body and brain. In the process, your body goes into ketosis, a metabolic state in which your body begins burning fat stores for energy. (The body will also enter a state of ketosis if you don’t eat any food, but you’d be starving yourself to lose weight.)

A diet like this can be highly beneficial for people with diabetes, as it causes a significant decrease in insulin and blood sugar levels. When insulin levels are low, you can burn a lot more fat stores while keeping your muscle.

What to Eat

Unlike diets that restrict calories, a ketogenic diet allows you to eat plenty of high-fat foods for energy and satiety. The goal is to eat fewer than 50 grams of carbs a day. After three to four days, you should reach ketosis.

Remember: the fewer the carbs, the better. On the keto diet, you’ll fill up on foods such as fish, meat, eggs, vegetables, cheese, olive oil, and butter. Sugar, starch, fruit, bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, beer, and sodas are off limits.

Possible Risks

While studies show the benefits many people experience on a keto diet (weight loss; diabetes control; and a lowered risk for heart disease, certain cancers, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and metabolic syndrome), there are possible risks and negative side effects associated with the diet plan you should know about before going full keto.

The first common issue is known as the “keto flu.” When adhering to the keto diet, as many as one in four people experience fatigue, nausea, and gastrointestinal problems during the first days of reaching ketosis.

Diarrhea is another big complaint among keto dieters. This is the result of increasing the amount of fat in your diet, which causes your gallbladder to work overtime to produce the bile necessary to break down fat. You’ll also be eating fewer whole grains and possibly more dairy or artificial sweeteners, all which can cause diarrhea.

Like so many other such restrictive diets, it’s not easy to live on a keto diet for months or years. Because it’s so restrictive, it can’t be sustained forever. While you’re on the diet you’ll lose weight, but when you return to a normal way of eating, the pounds will pile back on.

While a low-carb, high-fat diet may help you lose weight and improve certain areas of your health, many of the foods people eat on a keto diet aren’t healthy.

Processed meats, high-sodium foods, and foods high in saturated fat are associated with cancer, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Overindulging in these can be a recipe for disaster

A keto diet is particularly risky for nursing mothers. Because ketosis increases your risk of dehydration, breastfeeding women ought to reconsider whether to follow a keto diet.

While most risk factors of a keto diet aren’t too severe, one of them is especially dangerous. The greatest risk of following a ketogenic diet is known as ketoacidosis. This dangerous condition occurs when ketones build up, turning the blood acidic. Untreated, ketoacidosis can damage the liver, kidneys, or brain and can ultimately be fatal. Diabetics on a keto diet are at the greatest risk for ketoacidosis and should therefore keep a close watch on their glucose and ketone levels throughout the day.

Call us at 979-575-7871 to find out which program best fits you!

© 2009-2010 Empire Systems, Inc. 
Powered by FitPro Magazine™Terms of Service | Legal Disclaimer
The content and information on this site is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent disease. 
Please consult your physician prior to starting any exercise or diet program.


A few reasons why you feel hungry all the time.

Eating a few times a day is necessary to provide your body with the energy needed to do the things you need it to do. For some people, however, it seems the hunger pangs never stop, even after eating a full meal.

If this sounds like you, your waistline and overall health are at risk. Since you put a lot of effort into maintaining both, it’s time to find out what’s making you feel hungry all day every day.

Not Eating Enough

The reason you keep eating is because you think you need more calories. In rare cases, this is correct. People who make dramatic increases in their physical fitness efforts may need to increase their calorie intake at the same time. But be careful! Unless you’re burning a crazy amount of calories in the gym or are trying to pack on pounds, eating more can do more damage than good. Talk with your trainer to find out if you’re eating enough and how to adjust your caloric intake to meet your health goals.The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread. – Mother Teresa

Eating the Wrong Stuff

While some people work out so hard and so often that their body needs more calories, others are simply not eating the right foods to maintain feelings of fullness. For the normal person, this is a much more common dilemma. Thankfully, it can be easily overcome by changing what you pick up at the grocery store. To stop feeling hungry all the time, you’re going to need to skip empty carbohydrates and instead look for foods that are packed with protein, healthy fats, and fiber. Each of these ingredients works to fill you up and keep you feeling full for prolonged periods. So eat right and watch the snack machine lose its allure.

You’re Bored

There are a variety of reasons people eat, and boredom is near the top of the list. Leaving the house in 30 minutes and don’t have anything to do until then? Waiting in the carpool lane to pick up your children from school and spy a fruit snack in the back seat? Your stomach calls. If boredom puts you into hunger mode, find something useful to do. Open a book, call a friend, or clean the house. Recognizing boredom-induced hunger will give you a great advantage against unwanted and unexplained weight gain.

The Stress Is Piling On

Along with all the other reasons hunger creeps at your door at all hours, stress can’t be ignored. For many people, stress results in an immediate hunger response. Somehow, the brain suspects that eating will make the stress more bearable, but in reality, eating does nothing to limit stress. And when stress isn’t dealt with properly, you don’t sleep well either, which can also increase your feelings of hunger. So hit the gym and talk to friends to get rid of stress, and ignore your phantom hunger pangs.

You’re Dehydrated

In case you didn’t realize this, you’re probably dehydrated. Sure, you may not be so thirsty that you’re knocking on death’s door, but the vast majority of the world’s population is at least partially dehydrated. One of the indicators of dehydration is that you mistake feelings of thirst for feelings of hunger. As a result, you think you’re hungry all the time, when in reality all your body needs is some fluid. So when you think you’re feeling hungry, go grab a glass of water. Then another. In many cases, this will curb your hunger, all without ingesting a single calorie.

Underlying Illness

In the event you’re not facing one of the previous causes of frequent hunger, there may be an underlying health condition causing your problem. From hyperthyroidism to Graves disease to diabetes, an array of health problems can cause hunger. Check with your physician if you fear something sinister is causing your never-ending hunger.

© 2009-2010 Empire Systems, Inc. 
Powered by FitPro Magazine™Terms of Service | Legal Disclaimer
The content and information on this site is not intended to diagnose, cure, treat or prevent disease. 
Please consult your physician prior to starting any exercise or diet program.