Timonium Personal Trainer

Cholesterol is not bad! Cholesterol is a structural component of cell membranes Cholesterol is necessary for the production of bile (which aids in the digestion of fat) Cholesterol is used to make vitamin D and certain hormones, like estrogen and testosterone More that 80% of the cholesterol currently in your bloodstream was made by your liver. Your body needs about 1000 mg of cholesterol a day. When you eat 200 mg of cholesterol (that's about 1 egg's worth), your body will produce another 800 mg or so. In short, your body prefers to stay within a small range. When you ingest more cholesterol, your liver slows down it's production of cholesterol. For most people, there is NO correlation between the amount of cholesterol that you eat versus the total cholesterol in your blood. However ... About 40% of people will have some small increase in both LDL and HDL (hence an increase in Total Chol.) that has been shown to have no influence on heart health. Some extremely

How to Get Toned Part of what's going on with what most women call "tone" is a thickening of connective tissue. Get just a little geeky with me for a sec and take a look at the above diagram of a cross-section of a muscle. Think of each "-mysium" as a sausage with a casing on the outside of it. (I can sense my physiology prof cringing right now.) Muscle fibers alone are soft and squishy like a chunk of ground beef. It's the casing (endomysium, perimysium, and epimysium) that makes muscles feel firm. Lifting weights is by far the most effective way to thicken and firm this casing. That's what makes your muscles look and feel "toned." Even more important ... Research shows that it takes a minimum weight of around 20RM for this "toning" to occur to any appreciable degree. 20RM is fancy strength coach talk for "20 Rep Max" or the amount of weight you could lift for exactly 20 (and no more) repetitions of a given exercis

Well of course this is an optical illusion. And, of course, the black circles are the same size. But how can this illusion help you lose as much as 18 pounds? Studies by professor Brian Wansink at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab show we tend to to serve ourselves in proportion to the plate size we're given. And because of the Delboeuf illusion (illustrated above), an appropriate serving of food that should be filling looks like it's not enough for you when it's served on a larger plate. So, you naturally eat more. Reducing plate size from 12 inches to 10 inches typically resulted in 22% fewer calories served. [Note, however, that once plate size dropped below 9.5 inches "people begin to realize they're tricking themselves and go back for seconds and thirds." - Wansink] The study predicted that using a 10 inch plate for a year could lead to a weight loss of 18 pounds for the average adult. Simple, huh? Give it a shot and let me know how you do. - St