Weight Loss, Diet and Fitness Program

Continued From 50 Diet Mistakes Even Smart Women Make Part 8

38. You expect to lose about four pounds a week on your diet.
That may happen in the first week, but it’s an unrealistic goal because it’s too difficult to maintain in the long term. A healthy, sustainable weight loss is one to two pounds a week. Plus, studies show that people who lose weight slowly tend to keep it off longer.

39. You’re on a juice fast to “clean out” your system.
In fact, this will rid you of two things you need most: water (which keeps you hydrated) and lean body mass (which helps you burn more calories), according to Stopler. Read more!

What you don’t know could be undermining all of your hard work.

You take a multivitamin and a calcium supplement and have cut back on chocolate. You’ve even started counting fat grams and reading food labels, setting yourself well on your way to being the picture of good nutrition. But is your diet really as perfect as you think it is? Check out these 50 common slip ups and the easy fixes that will improve your waistline-and your health.

1. You traded in your morning bagel for a fruit smoothie.
Both have roughly the same calories. Read more!

Can’t stand diets that tell you exactly what to eat at every meal? Then this plan is sure to please!

Are you tired of being told what to eat? Are you sick of spending a small fortune buying the foods called for on a hot new diet plan, only to get sick of it within weeks? Are you bored beyond words with weight-loss plans that call for cooking elaborate dishes every day, only to drop next to no pounds, or no pounds at all?

Take heart-you’re not alone. Diet boredom is one of the biggest reasons weight-loss programs fail. The following plan assures that you’ll be a weight-loss winner this time around, by letting you choose the foods that will make up your daily meals. Read more!

Some food for thought about the hottest diet plans around. No rice, no pasta, no bread-no problem. With low-carb menus all the rage, dieters may think they know everything there is to know about regimens like Atkins and South Beach.
“One of the real benefits of the increase in low-carbohydrate diets is that the population is more informed,” said Richard Feinman, a biochemistry professor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Scientists, including Feinman, who met in late June in Brooklyn for a two-day conference on low-carb diets, said followers might be surprised to learn a few things:

1. “Net Carb” doesn’t mean “No Carb.” Read more!

Most people are already aware that their diet should be balanced. After all, we’re taught about food groups and pyramids from a very early age. The question for many becomes how, rather than whether to eat a balanced diet. While there are many theoretical ways to accomplish balance, putting ideas into practice and taking action often proves difficult.

One way to accomplish this balancing act is to do some planning. Ask yourself what types of foods you and your family like to eat. Make a list of as many foods as possible. Next, take the list and assign each food to a category. The categories you choose should be closely aligned with the standard groups identified on the food pyramid. Read more!

Keeping your weight down to a good level is something that seems to be beyond a lot of people. There are dozens of methods out there that supposedly help you cut down on your weight, ranging from crash diets involving quirky food, to medications designed to burn off fat, to radical new age psychic methods of self hypnosis for fat burning.

Okay, fine. Reality check… you can’t wish and vibrate fat away, and miracle pills might work, but they generally have unhealthy side effects. If you really want to keep your weight down and do it in a healthy fashion, you have to work for it. And that involves the one weight loss method that is actually the most effective but the one that a vast majority of people dread: Exercise!
Read more!

Many studies have been published in the last couple of decades showing that breastfed babies usually were happier and healthier than formula fed babies. The reasons for this weren’t clear at first, but as more studies were done and science gained a better understanding of how the human body processes food, some reasons became clear and once again Nature showed that her wisdom was, as usual, more advanced than man’s mental capabilities.

This thing called formula was developed during the Second World War to help free young mothers a little more, for many of them were involved on the home front at helping with the war effort and this formula was touted as containing every - thing baby would need to grow up healthy. Read more!

Taking off some weight is a goal that almost everyone has right now. The holidays and long winters that most of us endure also add some pounds that need to be removed.

When you are trying to take off a few pounds, you must eat regularly to “fuel the furnace”. To put it another way, eating small meals throughout the day helps to keep the “furnace” of your digestion and metabolism going strong and enables you to use the fat in your body rather than protein to fuel your body. Think of the old coal furnaces that had to be tended by adding fuel and not letting the fire die out. Read more!

Have you ever thought of eating seaweed as a healthy nutritious food? Probably not. Grocery store isles are not exactly brimming with shelves stocked with seaweed. Quite the contrary, you would be lucky to find any seaweed product there. So it would be no wonder if this item were missing from your kitchen cupboard at home, and how many recipes in your cookbook are there that calls for seaweed as an ingredient. You won’t find it in your average menu plan. It is not something people usually consider when thinking about food unless they are into sushi, which is often served with seaweed.

Statistics show that the people of Japan have better health than people living in the United States. Seaweed is a staple food of the island country of Japan and diet is often the factor determining good health and longevity. Read more!

This week reported that Britney Spears celebrated her weight loss in Malibu on a shopping spree for a wardrobe for her new slender frame. It was five weeks after giving birth to son Sutton Pierce, Spears has reportedly dropped 26 pounds (12 kilograms) - without a trainer, diet pills or a nutritionist. The singer reportedly wants to lose a further 4kg in time for the October 31 launch party for her husband Kevin Federline’s debut rap album Playing With Fire.

A spokesperson for Spears said she had dropped her pregnancy weight without a trainer, diet pills or a nutritionist. Just by doing one-hour training sessions twice a day and sticking to a diet of six small meals a day, basically cut out on carbohydrate intake and exercised. Read more!

Glyconutrients are being hailed by many researchers as the most important natural health discovery since vitamins and minerals were discovered in the 1930s.
The word glyco is Greek for sweet, so glyconutrient means sweet nutrient. Researchers have discovered that as cells throughout the body touch each other, they communicate their needs (nutrition, waste removal, hormones, etc.) through glyconutrients. The 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for this discovery!

There are more than 200 known monosaccharides (simple sugars) existing in nature and eight of these are essential for this cellular communication. The problem is that our modern diet is seriously deficient in all but two of these sugars.
Read more!

As time goes by the typical western diet seems to increasingly contain more fatty processed foods and less natural plant based foods than ever before. The results of this disturbing trend can be seen in the alarming statistics on cancer, heart disease, stroke and many other degenerative diseases.

Aside from the obvious dietary problems of high fat, protein and simple carbohydrate intake is the considerably inadequate intake of plant based foods and all the health giving benefits they bring with them.

Enter Phytochemicals Read more!

Most of us have heard about fasting and know what it means, but very few have experienced it and the health benefits it can provide.
We are not recommending that you do a fast - that is up to you. We are just providing information gathered from other’s experiences on this subject to encourage you to research and make your own fact-based decisions.

Many of us have heard of fasting in religious or spiritual connotations. People in ancient times fasted to clear their thinking and seek inspiration and enlightenment on important life issues and many who do fast report feeling more spiritual and farther removed from the physical reality. However, one should be armed with good info and a strong sense of purpose - mental attitude is half the battle.
Read more!

For some people being on a diet means being tired and lethargic. It’s times like these that some people may be more likely to reach for chips, chocolate or soda. However, these types of foods are absorbed so quickly by the body that it causes your body to think that it has run out of fuel soon after eating them and it’s not long before you begin to crave more of these snacks again. Often these foods offer a quick rush of energy, however they don’t help the body deal with the cause of energy deprivation.

The key, therefore, in dealing with the lack of energy that many people experience when they are dieting is to provide the body with all of the right elements needed to support the body and give it the energy that it needs.
Read more!

With all the talk of high protein diets, you could be forgiven for believing we need to eat four eggs for breakfast, a large can of tuna for lunch and a whole chicken or side of beef for dinner. We do need protein for development and growth, and repair and maintenance of muscles and other tissues. But it is easy to meet your daily protein requirements. All you need is 0.75g per kg of your body weight.
So, if you weight 65kg you need 49g – that’s only five foods daily from the list below. Children and teenagers need one gram per kilogram of body weight. Strength and endurance athletes need around double that. Pregnant and breastfeeding women need 6g and 16g respectively.
Read more!