When you think about how other cultures manage to stay thin, you may chalk it up to them being from another country and practicing different lifestyle habits. However, Americans may be able to benefit from learning what people do in other countries to stay thin. One Parisian native sat down with Shape Magazine to share her favorite diet, exercise, and healthy-living tips.
If you’ve been dedicating the last several months or years to shedding excess weight, you’re probably already well aware of how difficult the journey can be. Making major lifestyle changes such as cutting out soda, exercising regularly, drinking more water, and eating more fruits and vegetables requires hard work and dedication. Even after overhauling your entire lifestyle, you may still find yourself hitting a weight-loss plateau, or even gaining back some of the weight you’ve lost.
If you are an individual who struggles with your weight, it’s understandable that you might feel irritated or resentful from time to time when you watch skinny people do the same things you do without experiencing the same difficulties. For example, why does it seem like all skinny people eat to live, instead of live to eat? Where do they get their energy? How are they able to exercise intensely without feeling like dying afterwards? If you ask skinny people how these things are possible, they’ll tell you that no magic is involved; it’s simply due to their lifestyle habits.
The sleep hormone known as melatonin may have the ability to help you lose weight, according to a new study conducted by researchers in Texas and Spain. Melatonin has been found to speed up the production of a type of fat in the body that helps burn energy — resulting in a higher metabolism.
Obstructive sleep apnea is a dangerous condition that, when left untreated, can lead to loud snoring, cessations in breathing, irregular heartbeat, and low blood oxygen levels. Sleep apnea is a common comorbidity of obesity, and is believed by experts in the healthcare industry to be caused by fat deposits in the neck that obstruct the airway while sleeping.
Studies have shown that people with poor sleep habits (known as sleep hygiene) have a harder time losing weight. When people are sleep deprived, they tend to consume more calories than when they are well rested, and most of those calories come from junk food. Disruptions to the sleep cycle may also trigger the release of a hormone that stimulates the appetite.
