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Eva Mendes was spotted jogging with her trainer yesterdy in Los Angeles. Lately, she has been looking thinner than ever, but hopefully she doesn’t take it too far.

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You’ve started off the New Year right by ramping up your exercise routine. Good for you! But are you in fact losing the weight you had hoped to lose?

If the pounds aren’t exactly melting off, it’s probably not the fault of your workouts. Instead, it could be that your more intensive exercise routine is causing you to eat more.

That’s right: Research suggests that women, more so than men, tend to eat more once they start working out regularly.

Why? It may be purely psychological: After we’ve completed our daily exercise routine, we may figure we can afford to splurge a little. Or, perhaps it’s that more exercise increases our natural hunger pangs. (If that’s the case, you still need to make healthy choices.)

It really doesn’t matter what the reason is if you remember the #1 rule of losing weight: Calories burned must exceed calories taken in.

Think about it this way: It is easier to eat more calories than it is to burn off those calories with exercise. For example, a 30-minute walk can burn around 200 calories (depending on your weight and pace). But you can quickly cancel out those 200 calories afterwards by munching down 12 Ritz crackers — in less time than it takes to put on your running shoes.

Exercise should be something you do on most days of the week. But even this level of commitment to exercising doesn’t give you carte blanche to eat whatever you want. If you’ve recently started exercising and you think it’s causing you to gain weight, start by checking out your eating habits.

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Thanks to powerful cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, driving down low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol, has been the primary approach to improving cholesterol levels. But there’s more to the story of cholesterol and cardiovascular risk than LDL alone. Another key player is high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the “good” cholesterol. Higher levels of HDL are associated with lower cardiovascular risk. The good news about this good cholesterol is that simple lifestyle changes can help boost HDL.

HDL removes LDL from artery walls and ferries it to the liver for processing or removal. HDL also fights potentially dangerous inflammation and clot formation. According to a recent review of research on HDL, there’s some evidence that increasing HDL can reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke—even without changes in LDL.

Harvard Women’s Health Watch suggests several things people can do to nudge up HDL levels. Most of these strategies also improve health in other ways.

1. Get aerobic exercise. Moderate to vigorous aerobic exercise can boost HDL by 5% to 10%. Aim for five 30-minute sessions per week.

2. Lose weight if you need to. If you’re overweight or obese, you can boost your HDL level by about 1 mg/dL for every seven pounds lost, although any amount of weight loss will help.

3. If you smoke, quit. HDL levels rise by as much as 15% to 20% after you quit.

4. Eat a healthy diet. Avoid trans fats, which increase bad cholesterol and decrease good cholesterol. Avoid highly refined carbohydrates, such as white-flour products.

Consider medications. Niacin, available over the counter, is the most effective HDL-raising medication available. Niacin can be strong medicine—work with your clinician if you want to try it.

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The votes have been counted, and the results are in. It’s official—pop princess Leona Lewis and red hot chili pepper Anthony Kiedis are the sexiest vegetarian celebrities alive!

Kiedis recently went vegan after learning about the worldwide depletion of fish in the oceans and after a doctor recommended a healthy vegan diet for his son. “Soon after I [went vegan] I saw some documentary footage of what happens in the factory farming of cows …. It sealed the deal,” says Kiedis, who documented his earlier hard-partying ways in his autobiography, Scar Tissue.

By contrast, Lewis—whose album Spirit made her the first British artist to top the U.S. Billboard chart with a debut album—has a squeaky clean history. And when it comes to the dirty business of animal abuse, she’s a woman of action. “I am vegetarian so I don’t have clothes, shoes or bags made from leather or suede or any animal products. … I’m on a mission,” she says.

Celebrities’ reasons for keeping animals off their plates are as diverse and inspiring as their talents—from avoiding the inexcusable cruelty to animals on factory farms and in slaughterhouses to improving their own health and helping the environment by not contributing to factory-farm pollution.

Want to do your part to help animals and become as sexy as our winners? Pledge to Be Veg for 30 days to explore a vegetarian diet for one month, and we’ll e-mail you our favorite recipes as well as tips on the best places to eat out, the tastiest animal-friendly snacks, and the most delicious prepackaged vegetarian meals.

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Marla Maples, 44, enjoyed a run on the beach in Malibu, California on Wednesday. She definitely puts me to shame!

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For some people, merely talking about exercise seemingly causes their muscles to grow. For the rest of us mere mortals, building lean and strong muscle takes a great deal of time and dedicated effort. That’s why preserving even the smallest amount of muscle gain is paramount.

Well, it turns out that keeping all your hard-earned muscle from atrophying doesn’t require taking expensive nutritional supplements or spending your entire life in the gym. In fact, you probably have just what you need in your kitchen right now.

A study from Tufts University in Massachusetts found that older people who consumed the highest amount of potassium also had the most amount of total body muscle. One possible reason for this mineral/muscle link can be the neutralization of acid that causes muscle breakdown as we age.

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How do the French get away with a clean bill of heart health despite a diet loaded with saturated fats? Scientists have long suspected that the answer to the so-called “French paradox” lies in red wine. Now, the results of a new study bring them closer to understanding why.

Writing this week in the online, open-access journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) ONE, researchers from industry and academia, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Florida, report that low doses of resveratrol - a natural constituent of grapes, pomegranates, red wine and other foods - can potentially boost the quality of life by improving heart health in old age.

The scientists included small amounts of resveratrol in the diets of middle-aged mice and found that the compound has a widespread influence on the genetic causes of aging. Specifically, the researchers found that low doses of resveratrol mimic the heart-healthy effects of what is known as caloric restriction, diets with 20 to 30 percent fewer calories than a typical diet. The new study is important because it suggests that resveratrol and caloric restriction, which has been widely studied in animals from spiders to humans, may govern the same master genetic pathways related to aging.

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Lauren Conrad gets fashionable at the gas station before she hit the gym on Wednesday.

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Hello Everyone! My name is Jackie and I am the new owner of Merely-Flawed.com. Isabel has become extremely busy with school and life in general, therefore, she has handed over M-F.com to me.

The site has been dead for a couple of months now, but I plan to turn things around as soon as possible. I’ved added a new layout and I will begin posting updates within the week. I plan to keep the same type of content including regular installments of “Of The Month” as well as the monthly magazine contest. Isabel has informed me a few past winners never received their subscriptions, so I plan to keep the contest so everyone may have another chance.

Also, I wanted to share a little about me. Currently, I attend college in California and I am on a personal weight loss journey as well. Isabel and I became online friends after we shared our desire to lose weight with each other in a chat room. I plan to set up a blog hosted here at M-F.com, so I may update about my weight loss progress. Once it is up, you may all visit to get to know me a little better as well. I hope to continue her efforts to not only help others, but myself as well. Thanks so much and I hope to meet you all here at the site!

M-F.com Webmaster,
Jackie

I’m busy as ever and I thought I had a master plan to update the site as often as I could, but it has just been completely overwhelming. However, I will be back! I’ll try to update tomorrow, but there probably won’t be updates until sometime next week. I’ll be out of town til Sunday. Hopefully Monday, the 10th, is when I’ll announce the new winner of the magazine subscription contest and post a new contest.

Thanks so much for your patience!