There are many cheap travel destinations out there, but these few are exceptionally cheap family vacations. Don’t be afraid, though – they have all the beauty of an expensive trip. Costa Rica is the second smallest country in Central America.  This makes it very easy to see most or all of the country in just under a few weeks.

There is no part of the country that has a greater travel time than 10 hours by car.  While in Costa Rica, visiting the beautiful capitol San Jose is super easy due to its great bus service.

Also while in Costa Rica, make it a point to see all of the breathtaking mountain views, sunsets over the beach, and sparkling rivers.  You can see Costa Rica in all of its beauty at absolutely no cost to you!

Another priceless tourist attraction is the Montverde cloud forest. Sleeping over is at no great cost, either.  You can find hostels as cheap as $8 per night and hotel rooms as inexpensive as $15 per night in San Jose.

Margarita Island, Venezuela is another cheap travel destination and yes, the name of it is foreshadowing what’s to come. If you’re looking for a great margarita at the price of a cola, then you’ve come to the right place.  Speaking of drinks, a beer in beautiful Margarita Island generally goes for about $1.

Nightlife on Margarita Island just may be your deciding factor.  They have great discos which feature authentic Latin/Western music.  A lot of local clubs feature live music that you can swing your hips to.

Hostels are modestly priced here as well. They’re not as cheap as Costa Rica, but they generally go as low at $13 a night. Meals here might as well be free.  A fresh seafood meal goes for around $7.00 and is delicious.

Another great thing about Margarita Island is its infamous 320 sunny days out of the year.  Being so beautiful, it’s suggested you take in a little scuba diving, fishing, tanning, or riding horseback as daytime fun.  Here, you can buy authentic souvenirs such as wicker items from the natives at local markets.

Cheap travel destinations like these make your quick getaway as enjoyable as possible.  It’s always great to be able to go away for a week or two and not have to worry about it burning a hole in your pocket.  Enjoy your well-earned vacation!

1. Variety is the spice of life: This is true not only of foods but also workouts. If you want to gain the maximum benefit out of exercises, you should do a variety of workouts so as to keep your body guessing. When you do the same old workout each and every day, your body gets accustomed to it and consequently burns fewer calories than before.

Think about it this way: if you eat the same old food time and again your tongue would get used to its taste and then you would no longer be as interested in that food as before. The same holds true for workouts as well.

So one day you may do some jogging, another day, indulge in swimming, then basketball, cycling, etc. If you are doing intense workouts you should alternate between the various types of intense workouts available.

2. Replace long boring cardios with interval training: The days of long boring cardios are gone. Why would you spend four hours on cardios when you could gain the same benefit within just five minutes?

Interval training is the new craze among weight loss aspirants. You only need to spend five minutes on it in order to lose weight quickly and easily. Apart from being a huge time saver, another advantage of interval training over cardios is that it helps you burn fat even at rest. Just imagine, won’t it be nice if you could burn fat simply by sitting on your couch and watching your favorite movie? If you want that then you need to start doing interval training.

3. Snack before exercising: Who said snacking before exercising is not good? If you snack one-and-a-half hour before starting the workout, you have nothing to worry about. When working out, many people become fatigued half-way. This won’t happen to you if you snack before hitting the gym.
The best kind of snack for this purpose is a low-carbohydrate protein bar. You should also drink plenty of water before, during and after exercising. The more hydrated your body is, the easier it will be for you to sustain the intensity of workouts.

Unfortunately there are a lot of studies that show that this does not work long term. A study published in the American Journal of Nutrition, for instance, showed that a group of individuals on a low calorie diet, who lost an average of 26 percent of their body weight during the course of the study, were not able to keep that weight off.

Many people do find however that the fat loss for idiots diet is great for short term weight loss

EVERYONE  in the study regained almost 75 percent of their lost weight within three years of completing the study. And many studies show even worse results than that.  If weight loss were as simple as “consume no more than 1000 calories a day” or “consume no more than 1500 calories a day” then everybody would be skinny

There are a number of reasons why a low calorie diet won’t lead to long term weight loss.

Part of it has to do with biology and how our ancestors evolved to survive the feast and famine lifestyle.

We need a certain amount of calories to stay alive. Since humans and other animals evolved in the days when we had to hunt and gather our food, and food supplies were never predictable, our bodies developed in a way that allows us to survive times of famine.

When little or no food is available, our metabolism simply slows down and we burn less calories. Unfortunately this is just one of the many survival mechanisms that our bodies developed that worked to keep us alive thousands of years ago, but that don’t work so well in the modern world where there’s a Dunkin Donuts on every corner.

Our natural tendencies to crave foods that are bad for us, like fat and sweets – foods that would help us survive a famine thousands of years ago but now just pile on more fat cells – don’t help much either.

A study in the Journal of American Medicine showed that a group of people put on a very low calorie diet experienced a 20 percent decline in their metabolism in the first month and their metabolism continued to fall for three months straight after that.

What a nightmare! Going on a low calorie diet means that you have to eat less….and less…and less…in order to lose weight, and you will very quickly reach a point where you are struggling simply to maintain your weight.

Every dieter out there who has ever struggled to lose weight by drastically cutting calories knows this is true.

The first few days or even the first week or two of the diet, the weight crashes off. You’re constantly starving and can’t concentrate because you’re so hungry and you’re irritable and dizzy,  but hey, at least the weight is falling away, right?

But unfortunately, that doesn’t last very long. The weight loss slows down, and then it stops. No matter how much you starve yourself you’re seeing no reward.

That’s the other reason that low calorie diets fail – because most people can’t last very long on a diet where they are constantly starving.

And if you start eating normally – if you even start increasing your calories a little bit…the pounds come piling back on, undoing all of your hard work.

This sounds like terribly discouraging news, but it really doesn’t need to be. It simply means that low calorie diets do not work well for maintaining weight loss.

In fact, it’s good news – it means that you never have to starve yourself again! Instead, you need to select a healthy diet that has been proven to work and that allows you to eat a normal amount of food every day.