Whether you spend your days in front of a computer or can’t move around much in your daily life, your sedentary schedule may be impacting you more than you realize. Or, perhaps you understand that your inactivity during your workday is causing you to not look or feel your best, yet you don’t know what to do about it.

Either way, you do have options that will help you improve your fitness levels despite being desk or office bound.  But first, you need to understand why making changes to your sedentary job is important and needs to happen right away.

The Health Consequences of a Sedentary Job

According to the National Center on Health, Physical Activity, and Disability, living a sedentary lifestyle is detrimental to your health. For instance, they report that physically inactive people have a 40% higher risk of developing cancer in the colon or breasts and a 50% higher rate of dementia. Being sedentary also increases the rate at which you lose muscle and bone strength, as well as raises the possibility that you’ll suffer from depression.

(This is Part 3 in our three-part series: How 3 Ancient Alternative Methods Can Help You Lose Weight. CLICK HERE to read Part 1, Acupuncture. CLICK HERE to read Part 2, Can Hypnosis Help You Lose Weight?)

Meditation is part of our earliest recorded history. Long ago, it was used mostly in conjunction with religious practices. Some say that meditation is the oldest form of mental, spiritual and physical health and wellness practice in existence.

The earliest known root of meditation is with the Hindus in India who used forms of meditation to discern the true nature of Brahman. Buddha reached “enlightenment” while he was meditating under a Bodhi Tree. Those that followed Buddha, however, did not believe that mediation was a way to understand a higher being but rather a way of sensing ones connection to all things. Forms of meditation are present in all major religions.

There are many lessons to be learned when we study the ways that ancient groups of people acted. We can learn about art, architecture, food, family, religion, languages and health. Much of our current system of doing things is rooted in some very old, but wise, cultures.

Some very old ways of preventing and treating illness are still practiced in many parts of the world today.

America is just learning. We have been completely focused on putting our trust in doctors and pharmaceutical companies that we’re not accustomed to alternative ways to approach health. We have been conditioned to not consider alternative ways of treating our health.

However, many dedicated people are using ancient and alternative methods of healing and preventing disease. These people believe that what was done so very long ago, and is still being used today, has great value and can help in many ways.

It’s that time, yet again!  Is weight loss one of your resolutions for the New Year? If you’re like most people, this resolution is high on your list year after year – to get healthy and lose weight. Would you like 2014 to be the last time you make a weight loss resolution?

While it may seem like losing your love handles and jiggly thighs is a resolution that just keeps repeating itself, that doesn’t have to be the case. You can reach your weight loss goal this year, and here are our best suggestions to help you reach those goals, once and for all:

Define why you want to lose weight. You can’t go after something and expect to get it if you don’t have a clear understanding of why you want it. Take some time and think about why weight loss is important to you. Make a list of the positive ways your life will change once you reach a lower, healthier weight, and keep that vision in front of you at all times.

Holidays are full of wonderful celebrations and memorable moments. You get to spend precious time with family and friends, creating memories you’ll cherish for a lifetime. However, the holidays aren’t all candy canes and sparkly lights. Dealing with the stress that comes from several directions can lead to emotional eating and often leaves a sense of fatigue and regret.

Because most people engage in gift giving during the holiday season, there is an added financial burden that can make it harder than ever to pay your regular bills while still bringing smiles to the faces you love with presents wrapped in pretty bows. In fact, even if you don’t hand out a lot of gifts, the costs can still add up if you entertain or buy food or wine to take to holiday parties.

If you ask most any weight loss expert about how easy their program is to follow, they’ll tell you that it is very easy. But are they just trying to make a sale or is it true that their plan is simple to follow? What’s the answer? It depends.

The Plan vs. The Mindset

Generally when someone wants to know if the diet plan is easy, they think they are asking about the mechanics of it, or how the plan works. For instance, eating every three hours or adding certain foods into your menu would fall under this umbrella of information and certainly help you lose weight.

However, in reality, the person posing the question is more than likely asking about how easy it is to change their mindset to properly work the plan. This is a completely different question.

There are lots of diet programs available that will help you lose weight, but nothing beats the ones that offer you results at lightning speed. You realize that achieving weight loss is a process, but that doesn’t mean that the process has to be slow.

So, if you want to lose weight at the fastest rate possible, without sacrificing your health, here are the diets you’re going to want to consider:

Finding a diet is easy. Finding a diet that works for you - not so much. So what can you do to increase the chances that you’ll achieve weight loss success on the diet that you choose to follow? It starts with selecting a diet that will work for you, which is easy to do if you follow these seven simple steps:

Tip #1: Examine your readiness

No diet in the world is going to work for you if you aren’t ready to lose weight. How do you know if you are ready? Ask yourself if you are willing to commit to making changes no matter how hard they are? Will you choose to make failure not an option on your route to weight loss success? If your answer is yes to both of those questions, then you are probably ready to kick butt on your weight loss journey.

Tip #2: Define your goal

There is nothing more frustrating than trying to get your body to burn fat and having it defy you. It’s like trying to force a young child to share their favorite toy with a sibling. It doesn’t matter how much you beg and plead, sometimes you just have to physically remove the toy from their hands to get them to let go.

The same is true with body fat. You can talk to your jiggly thighs or round tummy until you are blue in the face, but sometimes you have to do things that make your body burn the fat because it isn’t going to do it on its own. What are those things? Here are seven of them:

When it comes to choosing which weight loss program is best for you, you can become barraged with hundreds of different options. While every health professional has their own ideas as to how to lose weight, there are some common similarities in some of the best programs available. Here are the top three:

Quality #1 – They involve a lifestyle change

You can’t expect to ever go back to your old eating habits without expecting to gain back all of the weight you’ve lost because it isn’t going to happen. If you return to living in the exact same way that you do right now, you’re also going to return to the body that you have right now. To lose weight and keep it off, you have to make changes for the rest of your life.

Stay away from any program that you go “on” and “off” and look for programs that you can sustain from this day forward. Some programs have stages of changes, and those are okay. It is the ones that have a diet phase and an eat-whatever-you-want phase that you’ll want to avoid as they offer only short term results – and short term happiness.