By Mindy Walker

Find out how to tap into your inner workout drive (yes, you do have one!) with our customized get-up-and-go plan.

Related: 10 New Rules of Fitness

1. You've been exercising...
A. Only since your sister-in-law was diagnosed with heart disease -- at 40. That's way too close to your age!
B. Regularly, since you tried your gym's popular boot camp class.
C. Like crazy before swimsuit season, intermittently the rest of the year.
D. Forever. Exercise has always been a part of your life.

2. Which situation most closely describes your ideal workout?
A. A session on the elliptical or treadmill, during which you monitor your heart rate, miles covered, and calories burned.
B. Playing soccer on a Saturday morning or walking with a friend.
C. Alone in your living room, doing a body-sculpting DVD.
D. Kickboxing class, to release stress and tension.

3. Warming up for your routine, you...
A. Sneak a peek at the Pilates class at the gym. You've heard that core-strengthening can help you

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by Greg Presto

All of the gift buying, wrapping, and party hopping can be overwhelming. Don't let your magical memories get lost in a fog of exhaustion. Recharge and reinvigorate your holidays with these one-minute tips so you're at your festive finest all winter long. (Bonus benefit: They'll help you slip a little fat-fighting exercise into this season of gym-skipping indulgence.)

1. Step away from the shopping to walk taller: If a day of holiday shopping makes you feel slumped over, it's not just because all those bags are filled with goodies that aren't for you. Lugging sacks of gifts around can roll your shoulders forward, making your chest tighten and close, says Chrissy Carter, a yoga teacher and trainer at YogaWorks in New York. Instead of looking and feeling defeated-and not getting optimal breath while you stride around-take a break from the card-swiping grind and try this shoulder and heart opener.

RELATED: Stay Fit on the Fly! The 12-Minute Do-Anywhere Workout

To do it, s

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Erin Cox, author of One Hot Mama, struggled with her weight after having three kids - until she discovered this sneaky weight-loss secret. Find out what it is, and how to incorporate it into your life. By Holly Corbett, REDBOOK.

The happy weight formula
If you're like most women, you've probably been beating yourself up for years trying to perfect the whole "calories in, calories out" notion, but in reality, there are four pillars to sustaining your goal weight: adequate sleep, exercise, healthy eating, and joy - and many fail to incorporate number four into their lives. "If you aren't living a joyful life - despite getting enough rest, watching what you eat, and exercising regularly - you won't be able to reach or sustain your happy weight," says Cox. It's not just a nice notion. Worms given a boost of serotonin, a chemical linked to improved mood, cut their fat levels by up to 50 percent, finds a study in Cell Metabolism. Researchers speculate that serotonin signals the brain to s

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Although love can make you do some pretty stupid things, turns out, it can also help you make wiser choices when you're craving a snack.

That's the finding from a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour.

In an effort to uncover how subtle messages can make us opt for healthier snacks, researchers at Northern Kentucky University set out to see whether people were influenced by reminders of love or sex.

To do so, they showed 97 college students one of two food menus. Each menu contained a list of typical snacks including an apple, an orange, raisins, a cereal bar, Hershey's chocolate, Skittles and a Snickers bar. The only difference between the two menus was a subtle background image of either hearts or kisses across the page.

MORE: How Restaurants Get You to Eat More

Based on a pre-test with participants, the hearts insinuated companionate love-the type of intimate, heart-warming, long-term relationship where sex does not play the dominant role (as

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Winter cold got you down? Well, here's some news that might make you feel a bit better: Researchers in the U.K. found that chocolate may be a natural cough suppressant.

By Natasha Burton

After looking at 300 patients that had chronic coughs, scientists at the Hull Cough Clinic discovered that 60 percent of them stopped hacking when they were given theobromine, a substance that's found in cocoa. These findings fit with a recent study performed by London's National Heart and Lung Institute, which showed that theobromine is actually a more effective than codeine, the common ingredient in cough medicine.

Related: How Chocolate Protects You From The Sun

According to the study, patients were given 1,000 mg of theobromine, which equals about two ounces of unsweetened dark chocolate (or 16 ounces of milk chocolate).

There's no word on whether or not eating chocolate (and not just having theobromine) can preemptively stave off a cough, but we'd like to think that having a hunk or two-you kn

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