Starting your day with a glass of lemon water is one of the latest nutritions trends out there. Supporters claim that drinking lemon water can help you lose weight, improve digestion, improve your skin, detoxify your body and have 'alkalising' effects on the body.

The effects of lemon water, however, will remain the same regardless of the time you drink it, and although there is no evidence to suggest that lemon water has an 'alkalising' effect on the body, there are many other ways your body may benefit from lemon water.

Hydration

Although water is the best beverage for hydration, many of us don't like the taste of it on its own. Some people find drinking lemon water easier than plain water, which helps us stay hydrated and comply with NHS recommendations - drinking 6 to 8 glass of fluids, preferably water, a day. Drinking water first thing in the morning can also help you battle early morning dehydration, particularly after drinking alcohol or eating salty meals the evening before.

Vitamin C

Lemons, like other citrus fruits, are high in vitamin C, which is a primary antioxidant that is used to prevent and treat scurvy and the common cold. Vitamin C helps protect cells from damaging free radicals. This antioxidant is also an essential nutrient that helps to repair the tissue and enzymatic production of neurotransmitters, and may reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases and strokes.

Weight loss

The lemon water hype started back in 2008 when a Japanese study linked lemon's polyphenol antioxidants to less weight gain and improved fat metabolism in mice who were overfed with a high-fat diet in order to induce obesity. Although this could work in humans, there's no current research that can make that claim directly. Another issue is that while lemon uses the juice instead of the rind, mice in the study were eating the lemon rind, where most of the polyphenols can be found.

Drinking lemon water, however, can promote weight loss in humans indirectly. People tend to mistake thirst for hunger, and if they don't like water, they might end up overeating or drinking sugary drinks that can lead to weight loss. If people substitute these drinks and snacks with lemon water, they will more likely stay hydrated and reduce the empty calories they consume throughout the day. Dehydration, in turn, can also slow down metabolism, which can lead to weight gain. Drinking lemon water or citrus fruits can also have a satiating effect and help suppress appetite.

It helps digestion

Although there's no research that can back this up, some people find that drinking a glass of lemon, particularly first thing in the morning, aids in digestion. This may be due to the acid in lemons which help supplement stomach acid levels, which helps break down food.

While indigestion can make you feel bloated and constipated, some people believe that drinking lemon water in the morning acts as a laxative. Others also claim that drinking hot lemon water helps you jump-start your digestive system, facilitating the digestion of food and preventing the buildup of toxins.

Improves your skin

Lemon water keeps you hydrated, which helps to keep your skin moisturized, and the vitamin C found in lemons may help reduce skin wrinkling, dry skin from aging, and damage from the sun.

It keeps your breath fresh

Drinking hot lemon water after a meal can help remedy bad breath, particularly after a meal rich in garlic, onions, or fish. Apart from its freshness, lemon stimulates saliva and helps prevent a dry mouth, which can cause bad breath due to bacteria.

It helps prevent kidney stones

Citrate, a component of citric acid which is found in lemons, makes urine less acidic and may break up small stones. Lemon water is also a source of liquid that can help you flush out stones.

Drink it hot or cold

Squeeze half a lemon into 8 ounces of warm or cold water. If you'd like to add more flavour, add mint, honey, ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, cucumber, or slices of other citrus fruits like orange.

The downside of drinking lemon water is that the citric acid may erode tooth enamel. The damage is not dramatic as it's already diluted in water, but if you want to reduce the risk, drink lemon water through a straw, and rinse your mouth afterwards.

While most exercises can help you lose weight by merely allowing you to burn calories, such as walking, running, cycling, swimming or jogging, other exercises help you boost your weight loss efforts by helping you keep burning calories and target fat even after the workout is complete.

Pull-ups

As this exercise makes you use all the muscles in the body, particularly in the core, back, and arms, it helps you burn more fat. These exercises can be particularly difficult for beginners, but it’ll get easier with practice. And remember that even the assisted ones can help burn calories.

Push-ups

This exercise also engages your core and legs, and helps you burn fat quickly. Just like pull-ups, push-ups are particularly difficult for beginners, but unlike the former, you can do push-ups from your knees or from your feet as you push off a wall or table, which also helps you burn calories and strengthen your muscles. Once you’ve mastered the modified version of the push-ups, you can use objects that are closer to the ground until you can push yourself off the floor.

Swimming

If it’s done well, swimming is a great weight to burn calories and practice resistance-training, particularly for people who suffer from painful joints. As you push against the water in order to move, you are exercising your muscles and burning calories.

Running

This is one of the best cardio exercises for weight loss. If you want to see the effects more quickly, try running outside rather than on a treadmill - this will engage more muscles as you push yourself forward. Running uphill, however, is the most effective form of this exercise as it helps you strengthen your legs and abdominals more than when you run on a flat surface.

Kettlebell swings

This is one of the most effective exercises to target fat as you’ll use your glutes, hips and quads to propel the kettlebell upwards, while you exercise your abs which will help you keep your core stable. The way to do this exercise correctly is by bending your hips and holding a kettlebell with both hands at arms’ length in front of you. Squeeze your glutes, move your hips forward, and power the kettlebell upwards.

Skipping

Whether it’s part of a warm-up or programmed into your main exercise routine, skipping can be a full-body workout that benefits your overall fitness. This comprehensive workout requires you to use your shoulders and arms to turn the rope at a quick pace, at the same time your legs and calves will be propelling your body upwards, and your core and abs remain engaged. Some of its benefits include cardiovascular fitness, leg strength, stamina, balance, flexibility, endurance, and coordination.

Burpees

Whether you use programme it into your strength training or aerobic routine, Burpee is a full-body exercise that can rev your metabolism as much as a 30-second sprint and works your arms, back, chest, core, glutes and legs. All of these translates into burning more calories, improving your cardiovascular fitness, while testing your balance and coordination. This is one of the reasons burpees are usually integrated into the high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Another advantage of this exercise is that you can enjoy all of its benefits without the need of a machine; you can do it anywhere, anytime.

Dumbbell Goblet Squat

Although the traditional squat is one of the most basic exercises for building lower body strength and preventing injuries, due to the load’s position, it can put you at risk for a back injury. A dumbbell goblet squat, however, removes that tension and it targets the quads and glutes. This is because, while a traditional squat place the tension on your upper and lower back, a dumbbell goblet squat brings the load to the front as a counterbalance. The position of the load also makes your core work harder, and it will encourage your core, shoulders, glutes, legs and core to work. It also helps improve your mobility. As it engages many muscles, it’s great for burning calories and fat.

Rowing

Although most gym-goers are likely to give the rowing machine a miss, some claim that each stroke on the machine uses 85 percent of your muscles across the nine major muscle groups. Apart from being a full-body workout, it will also spike your heartrate, blast fat, and burn about 150 calories in just 15 minutes. For best results, avoid long stints in the seat, and try, instead, sharp intervals sessions.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is all the rage these days. High intensity interval training during COVID pandemic is safe and effective in improving physical function and quality of life. One of the reasons this is so is because it helps burn more calories and blast fat faster than other exercises. In truth, these exercises are efficient and effective, which means you'll need less time to achieve the same results you would achieve with traditional exercises. Basically, HIIT helps you burn large amounts of calories in a short amount of time.

But what is HIIT? It stands for High Intensity Interval Training, and it translates into short, intense bursts of close to maximum effort that can last from 10 seconds to 3 minutes in an exercise routine. These intervals are periodically repeated during the exercise and its intensity can vary depending on the workout. Just as well, some of these routines can use different muscles of the body, while there are also comprehensive routines that target every muscle.

To feel the greatest benefits of this training, exercises should be performed at a high intensity for around 30 seconds or less followed by a period of rest, and repetitions. To make the most of your workout session, it should be preceded by a five- to seven-minute warm-up period to get your heart rate up. Here are some of the reasons why you can spend less time exercising with high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and still get great results:

You burn calories during and after the workout. Due to something called the excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC), you will not only burn calories during the workout, but you will also burn calories during the hours that follow the workout because your body will need to replace energy and repair muscle proteins which were damaged during the workout. Therefore, HIIT training works in two ways, it helps you use the body's reserves of energy during the workout, and it speeds up your metabolism rate and helps you burn calories after exercise.

It can help you lose fat. As this exercise requires an effort from your body, it targets fat stores for the energy during and after the exercise. During the exercise, it will metabolize fat for fuel, and after the exercise, it will make use of fat stores to restore to its normal resting state and repair damaged muscle proteins.

HIIT can help improve oxygen consumption. Exercise increases your oxygen expenditure during and after the workout. As your body burns 5 calories per liter of oxygen consumed, HIIT increases your caloric expenditure simply by increasing the amount of oxygen you consume. This is more so as short intervals of extremely high-intensity training involving a lot of muscle mass require vast amounts of oxygen during and after the exercise.

HIIT improves metabolic waste removal. While high-intensity training produces a great amount of metabolic waste, such as hydrogen ions and lactic acid, the recovery interval helps to remove these waste products. HIIT's metabolic waste removal aims at helping the muscles perform the next high-intensity exercise. Therefore, this type of workout trains your body to cope with and swiftly recover from high-intensity exercise.

Health benefits. HIIT can help reduce blood pressure and sugar, and helps to keep a healthy heart. While normal training can make it hard to push yourself into an anaerobic state where you find yourself out of breath and your heart starts beating out of your chest, HIIT helps you push yourself to that level thanks to the rest interval that follows the heart pounding point. This process keeps your blood flowing through your body and keeps your heart healthy.

Simple. Since HIIT is based on raising your heart rate rather than toning your muscles, it doesn't require machines, and it's versatile. All you need is an open space and a timer since the purpose of the exercise is to get your heart rate up quickly. Since they only require a short amount of time, you can easily combine HIIT training with other fitness regimes. Therefore, it's efficient and effective.

Some of the HIIT exercises that are easy to incorporate into a fitness routine are mountain climbers, star jumps, lunges, jumping squats, skipping, burpees, high knees, sprints, press ups, and planks.

As a result, HIIT is a way to work out smarter. It's recommended for beginners to see results fast, lose weight and build endurance.

Dry body brushing is said to invigorate the body, builds course and blood stream, and animates waste from the lymphatic framework to smooth skin's surface, clear away chips and dry fixes, and even out irregularities and knocks, including cellulite. Well what else can we do stuck in the bathroom for 6 months corona lockdown... OMG.

So, you've mastered your diet, become a lycra-clad goddess at the gym, drink your own bodyweight in water every day and take enough vitamins and supplements that your immune system laughs in the face of corona / flu season. Errr or… you are reaching for the third slice of pizza, haven't removed your running shoes from their box since you bought them, drink your body weight in carbonated soda plus alcohol and you've taken a multivitamin before. Accidentally.

Either way, read on, as body brushing will serve either those looking for the cherry on top of their already healthy lifestyle, or those who are looking for an immediate benefit which will perhaps encourage a healthier lifestyle. Or perhaps not. It will give good results either way.

So what the heck is body brushing? Body brushing is the therapeutic routine of taking a soft-bristled dry brush and gently brushing the skin in swift strokes towards the heart. The reason why we always brush in the direction of the heart is because the main benefits of body brushing are happening underneath the skin: increasing circulation.

Whilst the process may be likened to that of brushing a dog or a cat to maintain their fur, and if you feel slightly silly to start with, that's okay. Instead of removing knots, insects, spores, and many other weird and wonderful things, as you would with domestic pets, you are encouraging the blood vessels underneath the skin to be stimulated and a greater flow of blood to pass through them. This accelerates the process of breaking down fat cells, and even improves the appearance of cellulite, along with removing lingering toxins.

Nothing can compare to a healthy diet and exercise for weight maintenance, but body brushing is a fantastic way to add a beautiful glow to your skin, whatever your fitness level. An added bonus is that it also exfoliates the top layer of your skin by removing the dead skin cells and clearing the way for the newer, healthier skin to be on display instead.

The best time to body brush is before you shower. Your skin will not be over sensitive from the moisture and it's a great chance to wash away any dead cells that may remain on the surface. Work from the bottom to the top and always follow your circulation pattern so that whatever residue that is being cleared out by your blood is encouraged to move in the same direction.

Be sure to moisturise after your shower to protect the newer skin, and of course to really bring out that new glow.