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Many commercial and restaurant breakfast options are calorie overloads that will kill your weight loss goals every single day. Take some time to make good food choices about breakfast.

No time?? Lay it out the night before. It doesn’t take much to make a mini bagel with a vegetarian sausage slice and a fat free cheese slice. Balanced and around 200 calories. Pair it with a ready to drink muscle milk light or a skinny latte to boost it up to around 300 calories and you have a nice filling breakfast that beats an egg mcmuffin any day of the week!!!

Hitting a plateau? There are a few things that cause this and you need to understand that all of them can be fixed.

First, are you keeping a food diary?? This is the first question I ask everyone complaining about not losing weight. How can you get where you are going if you don’t know where you are?

Next, are you overestimating your exercise? Are you calling yourself active when you really are not all that active? Using apps like Tap and Track for the Iphone are AWESOME to track your food and activity but you need to be honest. Most people work SEDENTARY jobs.

While we are on that — are you active? A couple times a week is not really going to cut it. Are you doing something active every single day?

Once you are actually doing all of these, then you can start to look at any more remote options.

A study done at UCLA found that people with more muscle were better at managing their diabetes. People with the lowest muscle mass in the study were found to be more likely to be insulin resistant than those who had more muscle. Ask your doctor about your diabetes and working out.

According to the CDC, 9 in 10 Americans get too much sodium on a daily basis. Are we salt-a-holics ? Maybe. But most likely it is caused by our love of restaurant and processed food. Spend a day counting your sodium to see, bet you will be blown away.

Does your office have a dishwasher where you wash your mug nightly? If not, you should be bringing your mug home daily and running it through the dishwasher (be sure it goes through the dry cycle at the end to kill everything) Office coffee mugs hold thousands of bacteria spores and 20% of them can contain fecal matter — ewww GROSS. That said they are healthier than drinking from plastic cups with all the chemicals and environment destruction, just be sure it is thoroughly washed.

A British Study done by the Medical Research Council found that seniors who can still give a firm handshake and walk at a brisk pace are likely to live longer than those who cannot. These were found regardless of sex, age and body size. It looked at mortality from ALL causes and measured the following in people more than 70 years of age:

- grip strength
- walking speed
- time to get up from a chair
- ability to balance on one leg

These may seem simple and well, they are. They are also huge quality of life measurements. If you don’t know where to start – go for a walk. DO SOMETHING!!

I hear the “I have no time” excuse a lot and very very rarely it can be true for some and for others for a very short period of time.

Be honest and check if you have time for the following — I am betting most of the people claiming they have no time do !

- Do you sit for most of your lunch hour? Yes social time is nice but if it is coming at the expense of your health, try walking during your lunch break instead.

- Do you watch more than an hour of TV? Really no time? Take that TV watching to the treadmill or play with your kids or walk with your spouse. Your time is better spent elsewhere!

- Do you put your feet up on your desk when you talk on the phone? Yes I know this sound smalls but STAND UP, WALK AROUND.

- Is your house a mess? Spending an hour cleaning house can burn a lot of calories and all that clutter can make you exhausted not to mention sick.

So if you honestly are at a crazy period of time (new mom, new job, etc) learn to multitask and realize it will get better. If you are just feeding yourself and everyone else a line – GET OVER IT and GET MOVING!

South African researchers have quantified exactly how much various types of nuts can lower your LDL cholesterol. The four winners:

Peanuts
Walnuts
Almonds
Pecans