Blog Posts by LIVESTRONG.COM

By Susan Faulk

Building Muscle 101

You must stretch and contract muscles while lifting weight to build them up. Marathon runners would have huge muscles if strenuous exercise could enlarge them. Stretching and contracting with weight makes small tears, and while your body heals them, they also build muscle. This is when the food you eat becomes important.

Before Lifting

The faster your body recovers, the faster and more efficiently you can build muscle. You also should be able to sustain energy long enough for a productive lifting workout. Some research suggests that eating protein before lifting helps your body to recover faster. Eat high quality protein, including lean beef, tuna, turkey, whey protein and chicken.

A Little R and R

If you eat carbohydrates and protein after a hard workout, you heal and recover more quickly. After a lifting session, eat a mixed carb and protein meal. An easy meal would be spaghetti with meatballs. Whole grain pasta would be

By Brad Kearns

The modern approach to weight loss, healthy eating and athletic training has some serious problems. I see flawed mentalities and overly stressful approaches to lifestyle goals at every level, from basic fitness enthusiasts to competitive endurance athletes like marathon runners and Iron Man triathletes. The main problem is our rat-race culture that equates success and happiness with superficial results. We tend to avoid looking in the mirror and dealing with the source of our bad habits and failures. Instead we have been socialized to endlessly pursue easy, painless magic potions that alleviate symptoms and ignore the cause.

If you've ever accomplished any fitness or competitive goals, you understand that there are no shortcuts to transforming your metabolism and your body. Adopting a negative, deprivation mentality towards your diet will always create a rebound effect in which you gain back the weight you've lost. Food intake also is an issue. Consuming

By Brad Kearns
Instinctively, your body knows exactly how much to eat and what balance of nutrients to obtain to function at peak levels. Dr. Clara Davis showed this in her noted work with young children. In her studies, children were presented with a variety of foods, both healthy and unhealthy, and allowed to eat whatever they wanted and as much as they wanted. Over time, they naturally and intuitively chose healthy foods in the exact balance of nutrients and amount of calories that they needed for peak function.

All animals, including adult humans, have an innate ability to control appetite and nourish themselves properly. Unfortunately, adult humans happen to be the only beings on the face of the earth that ignore or override natural appetite. Reasons include:

1. Dieting: Natural appetite is displaced in favor of the latest, greatest, best-selling diet. Popular diets invariably ask you to restrict the amount, content, combination or time that you eat your foods. The

By Bailey Vincent Clark

How Calorie Cutting Can Help

Perhaps one of the most essential tools for controlling weight for a lifetime is understanding and becoming aware of the calories within your food. Although calorie counting may seem a taboo practice of the past, it can actually play a crucial role in losing or monitoring weight and size without abiding by a strict diet. Controlling the calories in a diet enables you to eat portions of whatever foods you want (without eliminating entire food groups or weighing foods), while abiding by the timely formula for losing weight: "calories in versus calories out." This equation simply means that by eating fewer calories throughout the day (and burning more via physical activity), anyone can lose or maintain weight.

Monitor Your Intake

The first steps to creating a low-calorie diet are simply to read the nutrition facts of the foods you are eating. For the first week, strive to write down the calorie content of any of

By Anna E. Dyer

1. Dieting No-Nos

Regardless of how much you want to lose weight and how fast you want that weight loss to occur, you should never put your health at risk by dieting. While some crash diets may help you to detoxify your body and lose weight in the process, others are extremely dangerous. It is best to avoid any diet which restricts your vitamin and mineral intake, for example diets which recommend only one or two types of foods. Diets that limit calories below 1,500 a day or that simply make you feel bad are not a good idea.

2. Drink Your Way to Weight Loss

Juice fasting may have a bad rap, but it is simply because many people do not know how to perform a fast correctly. The truth is that a juice fast can help to detoxify your system and help speed weight loss. To perform a juice fast, consume as much fresh pulp-free fruit and vegetable juice as necessary to satisfy hunger; however, do not fast longer than 7 days without doctor supervision, as your

1. Healthy Holiday Barbecue

Nothing makes Father's Day, Independence Day or a weekend pool party more fun than a barbecue--and we here at LIVESTRONG.COM want to share some of our tips and recipes to make your holiday barbecue a healthy one.

Barbecue Your Vegetables
Recipe: Portobello Burgers

Use Leaner Meats
Recipe: Grilled shrimp over arugula corn and tomato

Choose Your Marinades Carefully
Recipe: Susy's Everything Marinade

Watch Your Side Dishes
Recipe: Watermelon and Tomato Salad


Barbecue Your Vegetables
While it may seem odd, you can cook vegetables on your grill along with your meat, which makes barbecues healthier. Cut the vegetables into chunks that will cook evenly. Soak them in water for about half-hour and then lightly coat with oil. Choose from the many different flavored oils available to have some fun with different flavors. Some people wrap vegetables in aluminum foil to keep juices close to the vegetables or put vegetables on a kabob. Kabobs

May 10th is just around the corner, and this year, make Mom a healthy Mother's Day brunch that will delight her taste buds without wrecking her diet. The Daily Plate on LIVESTRONG.COM has compiled some healthy and tasty alternatives to the typical calorie-filled Mother's Day brunch items.

Here's a list of some Mother's Day food and drink favorites below, with delicious alternatives. Recipes for these healthy alternatives can be found at: Healthy Mother's Day Brunch Tips on LIVESTRONG.COM.

• Instead of: Eggs Benedict -- 442 calories and 36 fat grams; have: Mediterranean Eggs Benedict -- 355 calories and 15 fat grams
• Instead of: Traditional French Toast -- 2 slices = 356 calories, 19 fat grams, Add Maple Syrup 2 Tbsp = 100 calories; have: Baked French Toast with Berry Medley-- 2 slices = 270 calories, 6.7 fat grams
• Instead of: Traditional Breakfast Potatoes - 186 calories, 7 fat grams; have: Roasted Sweet Potatoes -- 118 calories, 3.5 fat grams