PJ's Fitness Blog – Page 23 – A blog about a fitter you. Come find out what is on the cutting edge of fitness science and be a part of the ongoing conversation.

Lose Your Belly, Expand Your Brain

How would you like to lose your belly and expand your brain at the same time?

A new study has revealed that meditation may enhance key structures in the brain responsible for learning, memory, and emotion control. This adds gray matter, but also reduces the belly due to an increase in willpower and a resulting improved ability to resist cravings normally caused by emotional eating.

One of the key structures referred to above is a part in the front of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC). I have talked about this part of the brain before in older posts, because it is vital to your ability to control emotional eating and your ability to stop eating when you should. The PFC is the part of the brain that is used for:

7 Tricks to Sleep Better

Did you know that getting 7-8 hours of sleep per night is a vital part of your fitness program? In fact, not getting enough sleep is downright fattening.

I know of someone who put his sleeping habits aside to get through finals and gained 5 pounds in about 9 days. He didn’t change any other lifestyle factors or habits either. He stuck with his schedule for exercise, his same eating routine, same foods and amounts. A drastic reduction in sleep was the only variable that was changed. Because of this, he was at the mercy of his hormones.

When we don’t get our sleep, our hormones get all out of whack and our metabolism changes drastically. This goes for your quality of sleep as well as getting enough of it. Here are some tips on how to get yours.

1.) Go to bed early. No matter when you have to get up in the morning, see if you can get to bed before 10 pm (or earlier if you get up before 6 am). Most people stay up late when they think they can count on sleeping in, but that doesn’t always happen and even if it does,

7 Rules For Eating Right

Eating to be lean, healthy and strong really isn’t that hard to figure out. In fact, it can be done by following 7 rules. Even if you just follow the first 4 you will be doing better than 90% of the population in this country. Try just one new rule to start and when you get that one down, add another and so on until you are eating right out of habit without the need for forced willpower.

Rule 1: Drink enough filtered water. How much is enough? Take your bodyweight in pounds, divide by two and that’s how many ounces you should be drinking (for those who weigh between 70 and 250 lbs.). This will detox you and keep you hydrated which will free up your liver to do all of its more than 400 metabolic functions.

Rule 2: Try to overeat organic vegetables all day. In fact, get obsessive over them. If you are filling up all the time on these foods (raw is best), then you will quite literally be turning back the

Givers are Stronger

Tis the season to give indeed, but did you know that this act can also help your workout? Scientists have discovered that your endurance will increase about 20%, right after doing something nice for someone.

Scientists looked at whether doing good deeds affects willpower and physical endurance. Volunteers were given a dollar and told to keep it or donate it to charity. The decision made, they were asked to hold a weight for as long as they could. To the surprise of the Harvard University researchers, those who had done a good deed were able to bear the load for almost ten seconds longer than the others.

In a 2006 study, Jorge Moll and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health found that when

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