The 3 Secrets to Healthy Weight Loss

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weight loss photoIf you’re interested in knowing how to achieve healthy weight loss, you sure are not alone. In today’s world, everything seems to center on our appearance. How we look on dating apps, how we look on social media, how we look in FaceTime and such video calls… this has taken over the nation. And of course a big part of this is the size of our bodies.

Yet at the same time, the majority of people in the US, and in the whole of the developed world, are overweight. A big proportion are obese. So it’s not surprising that there’s a whole industry suriviving off of telling people how to lose weight. Some of their advice is good… and some is not so good.

So before you leap in and pay for the next crazy crash diet plan, stop a moment and consider whether the way you plan to lose weight is actually healthy. Because if not, you could just end up being thin and sick. Or worse, you could be propelled into a massive binge that would make you bigger than you are now, and sick too.

What you need to know is all the secrets to healthy weight loss.

Secret #1 – Keep Right On Eating…

The first point is: don’t stop eating. Don’t try to skip meals or reduce calories to the extent that you are trying to live on a lettuce leaf and half of a tomato for lunch. Seriously, there are people who do this, and when they persist they usually fall into an eating disorder.

If you are overweight right now, you may think – “Eating disorder? Cool, just what I need.” But aside from the possibility of it killing you, eating disorders don’t necessarily mean anorexia. You could develop binge eating disorder, where people starve themselves for a while and then eat a huge amount of junk food. Usually this means they consume MORE calories than if they hadn’t tried to restrict their diet at all. So you probably won’t lose weight. More likely you’ll gain.

Binge eating disorder (BED) is a lot more common in the population than anorexia. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, more Americans have BED than anorexia and bulimia combined.

Secret #2 – …But Change WHAT You Eat…

This is the biggie, the major secret to healthy weight loss… but not so much of a secret really. You probably know it already. What you need to do is believe it and go for it.

It consists of three lists:

List 1 – Eat As Much As You Want of These

All fresh vegetables, raw or cooked without sugar, including potatoes and beans, but make sure you have some greens at least once a day

All fresh fruit, eaten raw or lightly cooked, without sugar or other sweeteners

All whole grains – brown rice, quinoa, barley, bulgar, millet

All fish

All lean meats – cut off visible fats before cooking

All herbs and spices, vinegar

Tea, coffee, herbal teas with no sugar and only low-fat milk

Don’t miss List 2 and most important of all, Secret #3 in our next post!

Weight Loss Food Lists

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This post continues the point we started setting out in The 3 Secrets To Healthy Weight Loss. Visit that page first if you’re new!

List 2 – Eat These If You Want, But Go Easy

breakfast oatmealOats (cook with low-fat milk)
Whole wheat pasta, couscous, bread and other products made with whole wheat flour (but not containing sugar or fats)
Oils and fats for cooking and salad dressings
Avocado
Nuts

What does “go easy” mean? It means don’t have more than the amount that a slim person would consider to be a portion. That could be one teaspoon of oil per person in a recipe, or maybe 10 nuts. And if you have a salad, have only either avocado or an oil-based dressing or nuts, not two or three of them.

List 3 – Don’t Eat These

Alcohol
White rice, pasta, couscous, bread and other products made with refined flour
Anything containing added sugar (which means most chemicals ending -ose: glucose, dextrose, fructose)

Why is it better not to eat these foods? First because they are not healthy. Alcohol is a poison that our bodies can learn to adapt to (known as “getting a taste for it”), but it still damages us. Flour and sugar are not poison but they are too fast digested, they produce a blood sugar rush that leads to a crash later and makes you want to snack on more sugary, floury foods.

Second because these things add calories but very little nutrition, so we can pile on weight consuming these things.

Secret #3 – …And WHEN You Eat…

Eat three meals a day and a maximum of two snacks. A snack would be like a banana plus a few nuts, or a couple of slices of cold cooked chicken with cucumber and tomato.

If you are hungry between meals or between dinner and bedtime, that’s when to plan your snacks. If not, if you stay full on three meals, you don’t need to have the snacks.

Plan your meals at the same time each day if you possibly can. A good plan is breakfast at 8, lunch at 12.30, a snack in the afternoon, and dinner at 7. Or dinner at 6 with a snack before bed. You get the idea.

Why? Well, having set times for your meals is good for two reasons. First, your body gets to trust that food is coming at certain intervals so it doesn’t feel a need to hang onto every last calorie and store it as fat. This is especially important if you have been on lots of restrictive diets in the past. Your body stops trusting you to feed it, so it stashes all the food it can. Result: belly fat.

Second, if you always eat lunch at 1 or whatever time suits you, you won’t be constantly thinking “Should I have lunch now or is it too early? Am I hungry? I’ll wait… no, I think I’m too hungry…” and on and on like this for possibly hours. In short, if you don’t have set mealtimes, it’s easy to become totally obsessed with what and when you’re going to eat.

So that’s what I suggest most people should do if they want to lose weight and keep it off. Just check with your doctor, of course, if you have any health issues or concerns. But for most people, if you follow these three secrets to healthy weight loss, you will never need to worry about calories or grams again.

Are You Struggling to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?

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Affiliate marketing is, by far, one of the most accessible ways for entrepreneurs to make money using only a computer and the Internet. In many ways, it sounds almost too easy to make money with affiliate marketing. Unlike many other types of business, you do not need to keep products in stock or deal with customers and you don’t need the expense of maintaining office space and, in many cases, you do not even need a website. All you need in order to make money with affiliate marketing is access to the Internet and a little knowledge of how the systems are designed and function.

Unfortunately, many people find that it can be quite difficult to actually turn a profit with affiliate marketing. So why exactly is it not working for you and thousands of other people?

Many affiliate programs are often promoted as a free way to begin making money. It truly sounds simple, you simply place an affiliate link and the money will start to roll in. Right? Wrong. In many cases, there are often costs to operating this type of business just like any business. Many people find they spend the money they make when they begin and because of this many simply abandon the system and move on to other systems requiring them to start over. However, you can certainly find a lot of helpful information online for free.

Man with money
For example, using many of the free services such as ezinearticles.com to place links you will find that you are simply not allowed to insert your affiliate link. This can leave you wondering where to place your link so it gets seen. While it’s true you can easily setup a free blog or site using services such as Blogger or Hub Pages, but there are more stories than you can count of users who lost their accounts for a variety of reasons causing them to lose their income in an instant. Utilizing completely free sources to make money with affiliate marketing can be a difficult task to say the least.

Costs of Affiliate Marketing

With a little research, you will quickly discover that in order to maximize your earning potential you should create a website. This brings the cost of creating and hosting a website to the forefront and you must also take the time to research the best options. You must also maintain that website and continually add new content in order to ensure that your traffic not only increases but at least remains constant.

Building an email list is one of the best ways to increase your affiliate sales and make money with affiliate marketing. In order to do this, you must use a service to help you build and maintain your list and, of course, craft regular emails to your subscribers that is engaging with your links included so they will be more likely to purchase the items which you are marketing.

Take Control of Your Business

These costs can be expensive and eat up any of your profits quickly and you will find you will be spending a great deal of time crafting this experience for your potential customers. All Internet Marketers have been in this position at one time or another. If you have found that you are losing and not making money, there are several ways you can pull back and get your costs under control so you can become successful.

1. Cut your costs.

If you try to grow your business too quickly, you can quickly find yourself in over your head with expenses. Start slow and build gradually and steadily. Stop paying for expensive services that aren’t really helping you and truly try to use only free outlets to grow your business. While it will take longer to grow a profitable business, you will be free from many of the expenses that are causing you stress. When you are ready, you can always implement the services again as you grow.

2. Keep a close eye on your profits.

You may be tempted to invest a significant amount of money into your business. Resist this temptation and only spend what you have made in profits. This will ensure that you don’t over extend yourself as you are building your business. Follow this plan each and every month and gradually invest more as your business grows.

3. If you have other income, make an investment strategy.

If you have a normal day job or other means of income, plan a strategy over six months to a year and steadily invest a little extra money into your business. Stick to the plan and don’t invest too much.

The way to make money with affiliate marketing is not unlike any other business. You simply cannot approach it haphazardly and hope to earn millions. You need to formulate a clear plan and stick to it based on your income and desired growth. Watching your expenses is half the battle when building an affiliate marketing business and is one of the most important keys to success in the business. Formulate a strategy to gradually build your business while you work and in time your profits will grow allowing you to further expand so one day you can make your business your full time job and free yourself from your day job.

How to Make Money With PLR Ebooks

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An increasing number of PLR ebooks have been available to buy on the internet in the last few years. They are just like the normal traditional electronic texts in many ways. The big difference of course is that, when you purchase them, you have the legal right to add your name as the author of the ebook and edit it however you want including changing the title. You can even sell it at whatever price you choose. When used properly, private label rights or PLR ebooks have the potential to make you a boat load of money!

How Can You Harness The Power of PLR and Make Money?

The business of selling ebooks is really a big business these days and people are eager to pay for ebooks despite the fact that they are generally more expensive than physical books. Sometimes it’s because they get instant access, but it’s often because ebooks are written in such a way that they focus on a particular problem and provide solutions to those nagging problems. For example you can get health PLR ebooks that address a number of annoying health issues.

Ebooks are also a means through which information is passed across very quickly to those seek it: as soon as the buyer’s payment goes through, their ebook is already available to be downloaded.

Woman holding British banknotes
The whole idea of private label rights is that someone writes an ebook and offers it up for purchase to a number of people. You enjoy all the benefits of hiring a ghost writer at a very reduced price, since these PLR ebooks are usually sold at a significantly low price because they can be offered to more than one buyer. You get all your research and writing done for you at a price as low as a dollar per page of quality content!

In this respect, you don’t have to do any of the hard work upfront – although you can edit if you want, and it’s often a good idea to put your own stamp on something. But you’re not obliged to do a thing.  In any case, you have all of the research done for you, which takes care of all the stress involved in researching and writing a product to sell. Some even come complete with the sales page too! It makes the whole process a breeze!

Places to Buy PLR Ebooks

Several places exist online where vendors offer up their PLR ebooks for sale but you have to keep in mind the risk of buying low quality and over-circulated ones. Hence, the need to do a thorough research in order to ensure that you’re buying from a vendor you can trust.

It is always advisable to ask if you could see a sample of the ebook. This is because since ebooks are generally longer pieces of text, they would cost more than a standard article and you want to know exactly what you are paying for. This way you will also find out if there is a real person on the other side of that customer support email address!

More often than not, paying a little more upfront for an original ebook from a high quality writer is always better than paying less for an ebook that has already been resold a million times. This helps to ensure that your content is fresh for your customer base. You would also discover that dealing with individual PLR writers means that the information being sold is fresh and up-to-date, not cheap Ebooks that have been in circulation over the years.

Ebook and Graphic Packages

If you desire to save yourself more time and extra effort, you could purchase PLR ebooks along with graphics for your website. These may include the ebook cover graphics, banner ads to promote your site, and even the full site design. You can expect to pay more for this kind of service and not all PLR sellers offer this package.

You might also want to consider extending your repertoire to make money from affiliate marketing.

Organized and Easy Gift Shopping Tips

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Even if you have the best intentions to start the year, it’s better to get to the month of December without the need of buying gifts for your loved ones. This is mainly because it isn’t good to go shopping this month because you will be battling with a lot of shopping customers or big crowds and you will experience out-of-stock items. To avoid this happening, here are some organized and easy gift shopping tips so that you can have a relaxing month of December – and think about the food!

Great Ideas for Easy Gift Shopping

1. Start Listening and Make a List

One of the first things that you should do is to make a list of every person who you need to give gifts on Christmas. You can start making a list a month or even a few months before December so that you can easily add someone whom you might have forgotten to write on the list. You can try making list through your computer because it is easier and faster to do.

Other than listing the people whom you need to give gifts, you can also start to listen to them as to what they want for Christmas and jot them down. You don’t need to ask them about this because they may tell you hints during a casual conversation and these hints will help you on what to give them.

2. Budgeting

Now that you have the list of people whom you should give gifts, the next thing to do is to figure out how much you have to spend for the gifts. One good idea for this is to think of the highest amount of money that you will be able to save for the gifts and divide it according to the number of people in your list just to be fair to everyone. Doing this ahead of time will keep everything organized and hassle free.

3. Making a Shopping Plan

Since you now have a plan to buy Christmas gifts in advance, you can just buy the gifts one by one when get the chance to go out buy other things. For those people who prefer not to do this, you can just make a plan when you can spend a day or a week of shopping for Christmas gifts. You can aim to finish buying the gifts on this date. By doing these tips, you can make sure that you will not be wasting any time especially when you have an extra time to do other stuff.

Woman Shopping

4. Update Your List

That list that you’ve made on the first tip should always be updated if you want to maintain your Christmas holiday to be stress-free and organized. Every time you have bought a gift for someone, make sure to cross that person off the list. Aside from that, you can also keep track of the money that you have spent to organize your finances.

5. Safe Storing of Gifts

Since you will be buying gifts in advance, you should make sure to have a hidden and safe place where you could store the gifts with ease. You should also label each one of them so that you won’t forget which gift is for a certain person. You can wrap them as soon as you have bought them to save time and effort in the future. Lastly, you should keep the receipt of the gifts in case you need to return or exchange them.