Tag Archives: diet

The Pros and Cons of Doing a Juice Cleanse

I’ve never done a juice cleanse before, but I’ve been seriously thinking about it for the last few months. When making all major life decisions, it’s always important to weigh the pros and cons. As a young professional in New York, my life is crazy so it’s not always easy to eat healthy. Therefore, I’ve become very interested in the juice cleanse craze. But, wonder if it’s really the diet phenomenon it’s made out to be or just a silly fad.

Pros:

  • Cold-Pressed Nutrients: Many of the juices used in juice cleanses are cold pressed so they are packed with nutrients. There are many benefits to cold-pressing juices, but the most significant is that the pressing action won’t oxidize the fruit and vegetables like grinders often do keeping the nutrients and enzymes intact. Not boiling the juice also keeps in the optimal amount of nutrients that your body craves. These nutrients are also said to give you extra energy.  
  • Weight Loss: Since permanent and healthy weight loss is based on a lifestyle of exercising and making the right food choices, you shouldn’t do a juice cleanse just to lose weight. However, immediate weight loss is a pleasant side effect.
  • Healthy Eating Reset: All of my friends who love juice cleanses always say that introducing raw foods somehow resets your body into craving healthy nutrient rich foods rather than high-calorie splurges. So once the cleanse is complete it’s easy to continue eating well and losing weight.
  • No Cooking: I don’t know about you, but I’m not a huge fan of cooking. I usually don’t make anything that can’t be prepared in the microwave. So doing a juice cleanse would eliminate cooking altogether giving me a preset menu of delicious juices.

Cons:

  • Hunger: Though the juices used in most juice cleanses are rich in amazing nutrients, I can only imagine that days of being on a liquid diet can often leave you hungary.  
  • No Drinking: Not only can you not eat on a juice cleanse, drinking anything, but water also must be given up. Like any socialite, I’m going to miss my champagne. Though I love a good cocktail, I think the drink that I would miss the most is coffee.
  • Lack of a social life: Eating isn’t only necessary for survival, it’s also a major social activity. When you’re invited to go out to eat with your friends or co-workers, it’s not going to be fun drinking your juice while everyone else orders rounds of drinks to go with their favorite dishes.
  • Super Expensive: At an average of $65 a day, a juice cleanse is a major investment.

Conclusion:

After taking a look at the pros and cons, I’m still very interested in trying a juice cleanse. Diet fad or not, I love the idea of resetting your system with raw cold-pressed nutrients from fruits and vegetables. Since I don’t think I could handle not eating for more than 3 days, I’m looking to do one of the 3-day cleanses from either BluePrintCleanse or Liquiteria. Before committing to a juice cleanse, it’s important to try all the juices first to make sure they taste good. I’ve tried both BluePrintCleanse and Liquiteria and can tell you that they are both delicious.

In order to avoid the temptation to break my cleanse early, I’m going to pick a weekend to do it where I don’t have anything going on. As long as you time the cleanse well avoiding holidays, birthdays, or vacation getaways, a juice cleanse is absolutely worth trying. Though a juice cleanse isn’t good to do during a wedding or vacation it’s great to do one before to give you some extra energy and a slimmer look. Even if you decided that a full juice cleanse isn’t for you, you can still be part of the juice craze by drinking a juice as a meal replacement or with a healthy meal to take in the nutrients.

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4 Smartphone Apps to Get You in Socialite Shape

4 Smartphone Apps to Get You in Socialite Shape

It’s not too late to get into serious shape for summer! If you have a smartphone, then you already have a health coach in your pocket. Your smartphone is always with you, can track how you are doing, and can make recommendations as to how to improve your health. If it gets too annoying, there is always the power button.

A 2013 study published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research found most people are open to using personal health apps on their phones, since they offer good information about users’ current health and provide ways to track progress.

Additionally, the design and manufacturing of medical equipment is an expensive task. Smartphones can be a platform on which new medical technology can be implemented and used at a much lower cost than normal. Inexpensive, disposable sensors can be developed that plug into a smartphone to monitor everything from heart rate to blood glucose levels, according to Newsfactor. This means everyone can have a personal health-monitoring machine in their pockets.

Current personal health apps focus on recording your state of health and tracking trends. You can watch these trends to reward yourself for positive progress and make adjustments to your lifestyle to improve your long-range health outlook. Of course, these apps can also tell you how poorly you’re doing. You still have the choice of staying with your fitness program or not.

Here are some personal health apps to help you get started with your own pocket health coach, whether you’re a loyal iPhone user or love your phone with bluetooth from T-mobile.

1. Nike Training Club

This app will get your heart rate up with a set of your choice from 90 cardio workouts. You can set your own personal goals and track your progress toward them, making adjustments so you’ll see steady improvement. Once set up, several 30-45 minute sessions are created to get you to your goal. You still have to do the work, but this app takes the planning and tracking off of you. This app is free and available on the iTunes Store for iOS or Google Play for Android devices.

2. Moves

This app turns your smartphone into a device that tracks your footsteps throughout the day. It can also record miles cycled on your bicycle. This app helps you analyze your daily movement patterns and tells you where you can make adjustments for better health. After a couple weeks of collecting data, you may discover that Wednesday is normally a day of little activity for you, so you can build in a walk at lunch to balance the day out. This app is free for iOS devices.

3. UP by Jawbone

UP looks at your entire life to understand your health. Sure, you’re faithful to your circuit training, but if you’re angry all the time, your health will suffer. Using a wristband to monitor movement and sleep, this app also lets you record your eating habits and moods. The app is free, but you’ll have to buy a wristband at $129.99. The app is available for iOS and Android

4. Fooducate

Learn more about the food you eat with this app. It helps you understand food labels and tells you what is “good” and “bad” about the food. This is a free app for iOS and Android.

What health app is your favorite? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Cover photo: the yoga studio at Blue Sprit from Flickr user Amanda Hirsch / creativedc.

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Kelly Bensimon on Her New Book “I Can Make You Hot!” & Being a Socialite


On my path to being a member of the upper crust, there’s nothing more inspiring than meeting and getting advice from actual socialites living the dream.  At a recent meet and greet with former Real Housewife of New York, Kelly Bensimon, celebrating her new diet and lifestyle book, I Can Make You Hot!, the insight I gained on living a healthy and happy socialite life was impeccable. In the book, the model and mother of two reveals how real models eat, live, and keep their bodies beautiful with healthy foods, sleep, and exercise.  Basically, treat your body right and it will love you back.  

This philosophy makes I Can Make You Hot! one of the most optimistic diet books on the market showing the world that skinny people don’t starve themselves, they just eat the right things and make an effort to always treat their bodies like gold.  There’s even room to splurge.  For Kelly, Sunday is the “Day of Rest” where she is free to eat whatever she desires.  When I asked Kelly about being a vegetarian, she suggested I start eating meat again because lean proteins are an important part of a diet that promotes weight loss.  Though I know I should be eating a better variety of foods, I’m not sure if I’m quite ready yet to add meat into the mix.  But, if a supermodel says it will make me hot, I might consider it.

To win a signed copy of I Can Make You Hot! by the lovely Kelly Killoren Bensimon, comment on this post with the name of your favorite food.   The winner will be chosen at random and contacted by email.  

“If you want to be a socialite, do what you love and always wear high heels,” – Wise words from Kelly Bensimon on achieving the socialite life.

Find a New B.F.F. with Gaiam TV: A Fitness Buddy at your Fingertips


When I meditate, I can be a very spiritual person.  Finding your inner socialite means doing more than just going on intense shopping sprees and being seen at the hottest clubs.  It also involves a certain amount of spirituality and constant self-reflection.  That’s why I’m so excited to introduce a new website that gives me personal access to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.  Gaiam TV is the first online streaming video subscription service designed to reach those interested in health, wellness, yoga, fitness, and personal development.  With over 2,000 titles, Gaiam TV, is like a netflix for health and fitness delivering hundreds of hours of online yoga, pilates and cardio classes. Gaiam TV viewers can practice with top instructors like Rodney Yee, Seane Corn, Jillian Michaels, Mari Winsor and Kathryn Budig.  Every socialite needs to keep their mind and body in check and Gaiam TV is the easiest most convenient way to do so in the privacy of your own home free from the constant glare of the paparazzi.

Gaiam TV’s yoga and fitness studios are flexible and simple to use.  Viewers can customize workouts for weight loss, total body sculpting, or increased energy and narrow down their options based on level, style, instructor and amount of available time. With Gaiam TV, viewers can easily search for videos, make playlists and preview selections.  Plus, subscribers to Gaiam TV are offered the chance to rate and review Gaiam TV titles.  Gaiam TV’s entire library of award-winning videos is available anytime, anywhere. Streaming capabilities for Gaiam TV include personal computers, iPads and smartphones.  Gaiam TV offers a free 10-day trial to prospective subscribers.  You can join the Gaiam TV community for just $9.95 per month (the cost of one fitness DVD) the subscription fee allows subscribers to stream unlimited content and connect on a higher level with your mind and body.  The subscription to Gaiam TV is no strings attached; there is no commitment, and members can cancel at anytime.  Once you’ve found total self actualization, you can continue on your journey to socialite greatness.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post, but the opinions are all my own. 

 

New Year’s Resolution #1: Tip the dating scales in your favor!

If you’re a single socialite looking for love in the big city or just seeking an even hotter red carpet body, The Fresh Diet is the perfect 2012 New Year’s Resolution for you. The Fresh Diet is an incredibly convenient home delivery diet plan that involves no cooking, counting, or cleanup giving you tons of time to shop for new skinny clothes and read about the latest fashions/society trends on the Internet. Here’s how it works: Once you choose a plan and select your meal preferences, your meals are cooked fresh by expert healthy gourmet chefs using premium ingredients and delivered directly to your door daily. It’s almost like having a personal chef. Seeing that socialites are always eating out or ordering in and cooking for yourself went out of style in the mid 1960s, this is the perfect diet for the Aspiring Socialite lifestyle.

Start today and tip the dating scales in your favor simply by eating fresh made to order meals and delicious snacks.  The 31 Day Slim Solution Plan ($29.99 per day) includes 3 days of free food, a free 6-day supply of Hint Premium Essence Water, and a free fitness DVD from Jessica Smith.  If you’re not ready to commit to 31 days of The Fresh Diet, they also offer a 14 Day Quick Start Plan for $32.99 per day and a 21 Day Habit Changer for 30.99 per day.  For those like me who are always on the run and/or hate to cook, The Fresh Diet makes eating and preparing the right foods the easiest part of your weight loss routine.  We’ve all been on those pesky diet plans where you have to count points or write everything down that you ate.  To me, that sounds more like balancing your checkbook than dieting.  Lucky for you, it doesn’t get any easier than The Fresh Diet.  Now, if only it were possible for someone to work out for you.

It’s time sexy socialite singles everywhere hit the dating scene renewed and refreshed with America’s favorite home diet delivery service.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post, but the opinions are all my own.