This Is How Princess Diana Threw Lavish Dinner Parties and Still Stayed Slim

When you think of a royal dinner party, you probably think of all kinds of opulence—beef Wellington, roasted quail, lobster mousse. Things were no different for Princess Diana, who would throw dinner parties in her home even after she and Prince Charles divorced. (Read all the details about their relationship.) Yet she somehow managed to keep healthy.

After getting treated for bulimia, Princess Diana was determined to stick with a healthy diet. (Learn how to tell if you have a silent eating disorder.) She hired Darren McGrady, who’d previously been Royal Chef for Queen Elizabeth II, to cook for her in Kensington Palace.

Instead of making the rich food he cooked in Buckingham Palace, McGrady had a new mission: Keep it healthy. “She said, ‘You take care of the fats, and I’ll take care of the carbs at the gym,’” he says. That meant no red meat, and eating nutritious dishes like stuffed eggplant instead. (Find out what happens if you follow her lead and give up red meat.)

Princess Diana would treat herself to favorites, like bread and butter pudding, every now and then, but in general she kept up a strict diet, says McGrady. Even during parties, she’d manage to stick with light meals when serving a spread of indulgent dishes.

But it’s not like she’d nibble on a salad while her guests dug into steaks. Diana’s plate would look just like everyone else’s, even though they wouldn’t leave her bloated. So what was her secret?

“There were times where guests came for meals, and they would be eating full-fat versions but she would have the fat-free version,” says McGrady. So if she wanted to serve tomato mousse, he’d make hers with fat-free mayonnaise but dish everyone else the traditional recipe. (Try these healthy versions of junk food so you can indulge without guilt, too.) But the guests had no idea there were two versions. It looked like she was indulging just as much as they were, but her portion was way lower in calories. Sneaky!

To learn more Royal diet secrets, learn the foods Queen Elizabeth II never eats.

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16 Health Benefits of Cinnamon

Daily use of cinnamon gives health advantages for human life. It controls blood sugar, reduce body weight, good for cholesterol and works as a powerful antioxidant. Due to coumarin related side effects, Ceylon cinnamon is recommended for daily use.

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Dental Care Cost Doesn't Have to Be Out of Reach As You Get Older

Retiring is a wonderful time to relax and to enjoy life to the fullest. Yet for many, it also means health care benefits come to an end. While there are government programs for medical care, there is very little offered for dental care.

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12 Sneaky Ways to Stay Fit When You’re Too Busy to Workout

Check your mindset

Too busy to exercise? Or not motivated enough? A recent U.K. study analyzed what happened when healthy people took a break from physical activity for two weeks (they reduced their daily step count from 10,000 a day to 1,500 per day). They discovered that their new sedentary habits lead to a loss of muscle, more fat, and reduced cardio fitness. But it doesn’t have to be that way. One way to minimize fitness losses when you can’t exercise as much is to adopt the right mindset, says Cris Dobrosielski, spokesperson for the American Council on Exercise and owner of Monumental Results in San Diego. Forget the “all or nothing” approach that keeps you thinking that one or two days a week isn’t good enough—so you might not get in any activity at all. “That’s an unfortunate cognitive approach that leads to destructive behavior,” he says.

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Walking Could Burn More Fat Than Running—but Don’t Get Too Excited

If you’ve ever hopped on a treadmill and selected the “fat-burn” setting, you might realize something weird: The option aimed at weight loss is actually easier than the other settings. Instead of an intense cardio session, it uses a more relaxed pace. Seem too good to be true? Unfortunately, it is.

Your body gets its energy from calories, which come in the form of fat and carbohydrates. Typically, your body is burning a combination of both. Weirdly enough, the harder you work out, the more of those calories will be coming from carbs instead of calories. For instance, one study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research found that you’ll burn the most fat over carbs working at about 50 percent of your max heart rate. That level is a moderate pace that’s easy to hold a conversation at—far from the all-out sprint you’d normally associate with the biggest burn.

Sounds backwards that a more intense sweat session would actually blast less fat, but to your body it makes perfect sense. “Carbs are more easily converted to energy,” says certified personal trainer and fitness nutrition specialist Dani Singer, fitness director of Fit2Go Personal Training. “Fat you have to break down and use different components.” Shredding through carbs instead of wasting energy converting fat makes it easier to push through that tough workout. (So should you carboload? Science just figured out if you should eat before a workout or not.)

Because light cardio actually digs more into your fat stores to burn calories, it might seem like you’d be better off going for a long walk than working up a sweat running. But don’t get too excited—you don’t actually have an excuse to give up cardio.

Burning fat during a workout doesn’t necessarily mean you’re melting fat from your belly. “Fat loss is not based on percent of fat vs. carbs,” says Singer. “It’s based on calories.” So the workouts that burn the most calories will actually be better for weight loss. After all, you’re burning the highest percentage of calories from fat when you’re at rest, he says. If optimizing fat burn was the most important thing, we could all lie on the couch and expect results.

Just because you’re burning carbs instead of fat during your workout doesn’t mean that fat is destined to stick around. In fact, just the opposite is true. Forcing your body to work through its carb stores during an intense workout means it needs to dip into those fat stores later, so you’ll actually burn more fat in the long run.

And that calorie burning will be more effective, too. After an intense workout, your body needs to recover from the oxygen it lost, which is why you don’t stop panting as soon as you step foot off the treadmill. That recovery process lasts for hours, so your metabolism stays kicked into gear even hours after your breath is back to normal. With a higher metabolism, you can burn through those fat calories quicker than ever. Studies have even pegged exactly how many minutes you need to work out to burn fat all day.

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The thing is, you wouldn’t get that boost from a leisurely stroll. “If you walk at a snails pace for an hour, your body can keep up with it,” says Singer. When your body doesn’t need to recover, it doesn’t need to pump up its metabolism either. Though you can still try these tricks for speeding up your metabolism.

Plus, regardless of the fat-to-carb ratio of calories you’re burning, you’ll probably blast more fat during an intense workout anyway, says Singer. “It doesn’t matter if the ratio is different—the total amount of fat calories is more than it would be at a steady pace,” says Singer. A tough workout requires so many more calories than an easy one that even though a lower percentage comes from fat, you’ll actually burn more fat calories on the whole.

For an effective weight-loss program, try high intensity interval training (HIIT), suggests Singer. You’ll give some form of cardio—whether running, dancing, or jumping rope—your all for 30 seconds, then recover for a minute and a half. Putting your body through that recovery period actually helps you blast more calories. (Learn more about the benefits of HIIT.)

But the single best program you can do? Whatever you love most. If you look forward to your daily walk but dread the sprint circuit you’ve tried committing too, you’ll fall off the wagon fast. “Find what you enjoy, and that’s what you’ll stick with,” says Singer. Borrow more tips from women who work out every day.

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The One Exercise That Will Flatten Your Stomach in 10 Minutes

Moms everywhere know the struggle of post-baby bulge, or that extra bit of flab that leaves their bellies wiggly and jiggly. It seems like all of the crunches in the world can’t flatten their stomachs again.

Still, few know the scientific term behind this common complaint. Also called diastasis recti, it occurs during pregnancy as the growing fetus pushes the mother’s abdominal muscles apart around her belly button. Although the gap sometimes closes on its own, it often stays open after birth. As a result, it leaves a spot in the belly that lets the organs and overlying tissue bulge out, causing the “mummy tummy.”

Simply realigning those abdominal muscles will cause the stomach to flatten again, experts say. These flat-belly exercises are certainly worth a shot. But to get results fast, there’s one simple, 10-minute exercise for a slimmer waistline—and you won’t even need to leave your home to do it. (You can also try these science-backed foods for a flatter stomach.)

First, sit cross-legged on the floor with your hands on your belly and take a deep breath, letting your stomach fully expand. Then, as you exhale, suck in your belly muscles as far back as you can toward the ground.

With your stomach flattened against your spine, start taking deep breaths and push your stomach back further and further with each exhale. Do so for 10 minutes.

Done! Until tomorrow, at least. And so far, the exercise has shown incredible results. A small pilot study conducted by developers Leah Keller, a personal trainer, and Dr. Geeta Sharma, an OB-GYN at Weill Cornell Medical Center-New York Presbyterian Hospital, tracked the progress of 63 women with “jelly belly.” After 12 weeks of doing the exercise for 10 minutes per day, all of the women had fixed their diastasis recti. Some even lost a few inches to their waistlines, too.

“We had patients that were even one year out from giving birth, and they still had such great benefit from the exercises,” Sharma says. “We love to see that there is something we can do to help women.”

No gym membership? No problem. These tricks will flatten your belly without a lick of exercise.

Source: NPR

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15 Easy Ways to Make Your Drinks Diet-Friendly

Use evaporated milk

Lighten your coffee with evaporated non-fat milk instead of 2 tablespoons of French vanilla, nondairy creamer.

Calories saved: 55

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