1. Eat twice your body weight in protein.

Note that this tip does not mean the food on your plate should weigh more than you do. It means you should eat twice the amount of protein in grams as your body weighs in pounds. So if you weigh 130 pounds, your protein consumption should be around 260 grams.

2. Eat different types of proteins.

While meat is one of the most common sources of protein, other protein-rich foods are available that you can include in your diet. The more types of proteins you eat, the better because each of the brings something different to the table. So don’t just stick to a diet of pork and beef. Try alternating these foods with fish, soy, beans, cottage cheese, and eggs for more variety.

3. The more active you are, the more protein you need.

People who take part in strenuous and constant physical activities such as sports and aerobics require more protein in their diets. If you fail to consume adequate amounts of protein, your muscles will weaken and become slack. This is why most coaches of football or basketball teams encourage their athletes to eat a high-protein diet especially during the playing season.

4. Drink plenty of water.

Drink eight to ten glasses of water daily if you want to gain muscle as fast as possible. This amount should be enough to replace the fluids you lose during your workouts and while performing other daily activities.

5. Take protein supplements.

Many people these days are not able to get all the vitamins and nutrients they need from their regular meals due to the lack of time to prepare healthy home-cooked food. You can solve this problem by taking protein supplements, which you can buy from most health stores. When taking these supplements, however, make sure that you increase your fluid intake in order to avoid damage to the liver or the kidney, which are possibilities with a high-protein diet. Better yet, talk to your doctor before you start taking protein supplements.

6. Don’t forget to eat your carbs.

A lot of people equate eating carbohydrates with becoming overweight, so they tend to avoid eating carbohydrates whenever they can. Carbohydrates, however, are essential in producing energy in the body. A diet too low in carbs will eventually make you weak and sluggish. Don’t worry about the weight you may gain from eating carbohydrates. If you are following an active exercise routine, you can burn off the extra carbs with just a couple of workouts.

Realize that gaining muscle is not something that can be done overnight. There are no real shortcuts for this process so you should avoid taking steroids and similar substances, as they will only be harmful to your health in the long run.

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The benefits of getting more vegetables in your diet are many. They contain a large amount of fibre and fill you up, so you reduce your desire to consume more high-calories foods than you really need to. They contain vitamins, trace elements and antioxidants that are hard to get from other sources, and some vegetables may have cancer-fighting properties.

The one exception to the “fresh or frozen” rule is tomatoes. Tomatoes are a rich source of the cancer-fighting antioxidant lycopene. Lycopene is made more bio-available by cooking, so tinned tomatoes still have plenty of this property. Even tomato sauce and tomato puree contain lycopene. But tinned tomatoes are better and are less likely to have hidden sugars in them and they haven’t been quite so processed.

Soups, salads and smoothies are the easiest way to get all your vegetables (or fruit, in the case of smoothies) in one go. For a good basic soup, start with fried onions (that’s one vegetable) then tossi in whatever other vegetables you can find – potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, pumpkin, spinach, parsnip, beans… even lettuce (but not eggplant). Boil it, add a splash of vinegar and salt, mash or blend it, then serve topped with grated cheese – it couldn’t be easier! Salads are simple – and they don’t even need to contain lettuce.

But for many busy people, getting more fruit and vegetables into your diet can be hard. If you’re in a rush, it’s easy to fall back on good old standbys like macaroni cheese, scrambled eggs or spaghetti bolognaise if you’re having to prepare a meal and you can’t think of anything or just don’t feel like soups or salads. This is where you need to have some quick and simple ways to “veg it up” and add veggies into these good old favourites.

To be able to add more vegetables to basic staples, then you will need to make sure your pantry, fridge and freezer and well stocked. Frozen vegetables are great – they don’t go off and because they are frozen quickly as soon as possible after harvest, many of the vitamins and antioxidants are preserved, as they do not have time to break down. Good frozen vegetables include peas, sweet corn and green beans, but these days, you can find a huge range of frozen vegetable mixtures. And don’t forget frozen fruits, especially berries! Of course, if you can grow your own vegetables, this is even better. Staples that should always be on hand from the vegetable department include potatoes, onions and carrots, plus a green vegetable or two.

Let’s take some basic favourite meals and see how they can easily have vegetables added in…

Lasagne: If you’re cooking the mince from scratch, add some onion and garlic before browning the meat. Throw in a tin of tomatoes (but you’re probably doing this anyway). You can also add capsicum (bell pepper), fresh oregano, spring onions or zucchini (courgette) to the meat mix. The cheese sauce can also have onion added to it if you haven’t added this already. And you can even leave the lasagne out of lasagne and substitute thin slices of potato (leave the skin on and boil first) or slices of raw zucchini. If you substitute fried eggplant for the lasagne and top the finished dish with natural yoghurt, you have made moussaka.

Macaroni cheese: While the macaroni is boiling, add a few vegetables into the pot to cook alongside them. Suitable vegetables include green beans, peas, diced carrots or even spinach and silver beet (Swiss chard). Add onion to the cheese sauce. After all the cooking is done, sprinkle chopped raw tomatoes, parsley, spring onion and garlic over the top.

Scrambled eggs: This can easily be transformed into a vegetable-rich Spanish omelette (sort of). Fry onions, tomato, zucchini, celery, green beans, herbs and garlic in the pan before adding the eggs and salt. Top with grated cheese and black pepper.

And for dessert….

Custard: Add chopped raw fruit into the cooked custard. Bananas and apples are great, but berries, oranges and fresh apricots are lovely, too.

Spotted dick: Instead (or as well as) using dried fruit like raisins or currants, add frozen berries. Diced apple or rhubarb also works well.

Bread and butter pudding: layer fruit with the bread. Blackcurrants are especially delicious, as are apples, pears and apricots.

Nick Vassilev runs a successful London carpet cleaning firm called CarpetFirst!. Being in the cleaning industry for more than 12 years, Nick has built a substantial knowledge base, which he wants to share with everybody with passion for carpets, cleaning and… guitars. For more info regarding carpet cleaning visit http://www.carpetfirst.co.uk

To find out how to add nutrition from 17 different fruits, vegetables, and grains in convenient and inexpensive capsule form call me today at 224-558-3460!

The prevailing medical model in the US is for us to wait until we become ill, see a doctor and take whatever drugs the doctor prescribes to treat our symptoms. Most people never question how they came to be ill or what might be done to bring them back to health. Instead we blindly do what the doctor tells us to do. This keeps the doctors busy and makes the drug company’s rich but most of the time it does not make us healthy.

What we need to do instead is to first take responsibility for our own health. We need to be proactive. We need to exercise regularly even if walking is the most you can do. We need to continually ask ourselves if we are eating the right foods, drinking the right beverages, taking the right supplements.

Most of us will not become perfectly compliant or healthy overnight. These lifestyle modifications are extremely difficult and take time but small changes made over a long period of time will make a big difference in our health and longevity.

As a practicing pharmacist, I see too many people taking far too many drugs. Customers come to me all day long and ask “What can I take for _______?”. They want a quick fix, not a solution. I try to give them sound advice meant to help them understand what caused the problem, how to treat the symptoms for the short term, but also how make changes to avoid the same problem from occurring in the future.

My goal for this website is to provide education to you, my friends, to help you understand how the body works, what it needs to achieve and maintain optimal health and vitality. Over time I plan to write articles, interview experts and to do whatever else it takes to help you achieve your goals.

For now, in order to provide for my family, I’ll have to keep my job as a pharmacist with a national chain but my goal is to help enough of you to be able to afford to leave that job within the next 2 years and devote full time to helping you. That would make me truly happy.

Please come back to my site regularly, subscribe to the RSS feed, tell your friends and family and let me know what you would like to see, hear and learn by leaving comments about articles and responding to my questions.

Until next time, To Your Good Health!

Marc