All posts in Diet

The Atkins diet is really called the Atkins nutritional approach. It’s a low-carb diet created by Robert Atkins. He had gained a lot of weight in medical school. A medical Journal had an article about a diet. He built on that diet and eventually made it popular.

Dr. Atkins had rather radical theories about the nature of weight gain as expressed in the Atkins diet. He held that saturated fats weren’t as bad as people claim. Carbohydrates, found in potatoes, and breads, were the real problem. In Atkins theory eating too little fat make things even worse. He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates. That meant people on a diet often ate foods that were worse than they normally ate.

The Atkins diet shifts the focus. He shifts dieters’ metabolism to burn body fats by cutting out carbohydrates from their diets. Lose the fat lose the weight. The goal wasn’t necessarily to take in fewer calories. The diet would work because it burned calories. The Atkins diet supposedly burned an extra 950 calories everyday. That sounded good but it wasn’t true.

The Atkins diet also could help people with type 2 diabetes.. As opposed to type 1 diabetes, type 2 is often closely associated with diet and people who weigh too much. So in general any diet that helps decrease weight will help address type 2 diabetes. But the Atkins diet is also low in carbohydrates, which must be avoided with type 2 diabetes regardless of caloric intake, so by means of this aspect of the diet Atkins claimed those who suffer type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin. But that’s counter to the prevailing medical theories regarding type 2 diabetes which, although recommending that lowered intake of carbohydrates and weight loss help manage diabetes, ascribe no causal relationship between carbohydrates and type 2 diabetes.

What steps does one take to follow the Atkins diet? Induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance are the four necessary phases of the diet. Here are more details of Induction which is the most crucial of the phases.

As the first phase, Induction is the most crucial and most restrictive portion of the Atkins diet. It lasts for about two weeks. Carbohydrates are nearly removed entirely from the diet, only 15-20 grams can be consumed each day. The goal is to enter a fat burning metabolic phase called ketosis when the body, starved of glucose, will begin converting stored fat into fatty acids needed to power the body. Weight loss of 20 pounds over this period isn’t uncommon – that’s a staggering amount.

Learning the ideal carbohydrate levels for weight losing and for day to day intake after the weight loss ends are the purposes of the final three phases in the Atkins diet. Dr. Atkins himself died of complications of increased fat intake in his diet, which is something to keep in mind when choosing this diet.

People live extremely fast paced lives and have little or no time to take care of their health. However, nobody is safe from the poisonous fumes of car engines, cigarette smoke, greasy fast food and easy-to-make processed food that have become such an integral part of lives today.

Living in this world, it is your job to make sure you keep your body free from the toxins present in the air around you and the food you eat. Once you know of the benefits of keeping your body clean, it is very easy to drift from a damaging, dangerous lifestyle into a healthy, long-lived one. People die from obesity, heart attacks, food poisoning, and other illnesses day after day and it is not very easy to imagine that you can be one of them. Try making a change today so that you do not regret your tomorrow.

The initial and most important step towards a lifestyle suited for a longer life expectancy and long term fitness is planning a healthy diet menu for yourself. This does not only mean that you intake good nourishing food stuff, but it also means for you to cut down on the stuff that is harming your body. That means a big no-no for fast food! Once you decide, and are mentally prepared, to make a healthy diet menu, you have to make sure it is lenient enough for you to follow it. You cannot expect yourself to live on vegetables for the rest of your life. Add a variety of flavors and taste so that you do not get bored of the idea and revert to the ‘easy way out’. That path takes you onto a rough road filled with problems, diseases, ailments, and lower life expectancy. Live longer by eating healthier today.

A healthy diet menu consists of various antioxidants that help to detoxify your body, a sufficient amount of clean water, fruits, vegetables, whole grain cereals, etc. It sounds very dull at first, but you can make this work for you. Drinking lots of water should not be a problem. If you really cannot handle drinking several cups a day, you can, and probably should, add some herbal tea to add some flavor to your drink. Herbal tea has antioxidants on its own that help remove toxins from your body. Food rich in fiber and vitamins are considered to be helpful in removing pollutants from your body too. Naturally, this implies natural, organic fruits. With the wide variety of fruits available from all over the world today, your healthy diet menu can have zeal of its own. You can also make different styles of dishes with fruits, or squeeze out the pulp and make yourself some cocktail. Replace your white bread and rice with bran bread and brown rice. These are necessary additions to a healthy diet menu as they contain a lot of fiber that helps cleanse your digestive system.

Not only does this healthy lifestyle clean your body and make it healthier, it also helps you lose weight. You cannot ignore the benefits of a lifestyle that saves you the worry of inflicting damage to your own body. A healthy diet menu should be your first step to a vigorous, flowing personality.

The most important step to a healthier life is the change to a healthy diet. Get more information from the free copy of my e-book report to make better choices!

Tips For Fast Weight Loss

Check out our 10 tips for fast weight loss if you want to lose a few pounds quickly. There’s no need to starve yourself or go hungry. Simply be more aware of what you eat, reduce your intake of fat and sugar, and fill up with vegetables and fruit. Here’s how:

1. Write down everything that you eat or drink that contains calories, even if it’s just a splash of milk in your coffee. You don’t need to count the calories. Simply writing everything down will help you to see when those sneaky high calorie foods are creeping in and sabotaging your fast weight loss.

2. Make your own meals instead of relying on TV dinners and other packaged foods. Food manufacturers add salt and sugar to almost everything to make us want more and more.

3. Include at least two servings of vegetables in every main meal (not counting potatoes), or add a large salad with low fat dressing. Aim to eat more green, leafy vegetables. Fresh vegetables will help you to feel full and satisfy your body’s need for vitamins and minerals, reducing cravings.

4. Cut your fat intake in half. Since you’re not eating packaged foods any more, it’s easy to do this. Measure the oil that you use for cooking and only use half as much. Spread butter very thinly. Switch to low fat milk. Cut visible fat off meat before cooking, and don’t eat the skin.

5. Have sweet treats containing sugar no more than three times a week. If you are a sugar addict you may find this difficult at first but you will soon have much more appreciation for the sweetness in fruits and vegetables, and fast weight loss may be your reward.

6. Indulge yourself with plenty of fresh fruit. Grapes, cherries, berries, apples, mangoes and bananas are delicious replacements for the unhealthy desserts that most of us eat. Try them chopped into low fat sugar-free yogurt.

7. Try grated carrot for a snack. Mix in a chopped apple if you want. Grated carrot takes longer to eat than a whole carrot and because of this, it’s way more satisfying.

8. Choose food that you can chew, and eat it slowly, putting down your fork between bites. Go for brown rice instead of white, whole fruit instead of juice, chunks of whole foods in your soup. The added fiber will fill you up and help the body to eliminate waste, and the act of chewing will make you feel more satisfied with your meal.

9. Plan your meals and your shopping. Think ahead and make a list of what you will need, then stick to it. To make this easier, never go to the grocery store when you are hungry. Or order your shopping online for delivery.

10. When you eat, just eat. Sit at the table, even if it’s just for a snack. Don’t eat while doing something else at the same time (watching TV, driving, reading, checking email). If you eat with others, of course you may talk, but try to avoid bringing up heavy or contentious subjects at meals. Arguments are not good for anybody’s digestion and won’t help your fast weight loss.

Easy To Gain, Hard To Lose. It’s easy to gain pounds, but it can take ten times as much time to lose them. For example, on a long Christmas weekend, you decide you’ll eat whatever you want with the promise that you’ll diet in earnest when the New Year begins. Let’s do the math:

Long weekend: 4 days times 5,000 calories per day promising “I’ll diet after the holidays” = 20,000 calories

Daily energy expenditure = 80 average calories per hour times 24 hours = 1,920 calories per day. 1,920 calories per day times 4 days = 7,680 calories burned.

20,000 7680 = 12,320 calories over what you’ve burned, divided by 3,500 calories per pound = 3.52 pounds gained in 4 days.

To burn off the extra 12,320 calories you must eat at least 500 calories per day less than you burn. Burning 500 calories per day more than you eat should be the minimum goal, otherwise losing the weight can take a very long time. Of course you’ll lose weight faster if you can burn say 1,000 calories per day more than you eat, but for this discussion we’ll set the rate at 500.

At this rate it will take 24.64 days of dieting just to get back to your “before the 4 day eating holiday” event! And this is assuming you only “ate whatever you want” for just four days. Many people eat whatever they want over about a ten day period around Christmas-time. The math on that amount of extra calorie intake can result in months of needed dieting.

This framework is important to understand because in order to become and remain thin you will need to learn how to navigate all the days when you must eat at least 500 calories less than you burn. Now that you know the reality of gaining weight, what can you do to get on a plan where you are burning 500 calories more than you eat?

There are many strategies to do this; those discussed in my book called Diet Motivation Secrets but also in dozens (hundreds) of books from popular online booksellers. One strategy is to prepare all your food ahead using 95% or more whole, single ingredient foods, and have all of your cooked food with you all the time. This strategy can largely eliminate the need for will power.

There are only two ways to have your food with you all the time:

cook all of your food yourself the day before, or

join a diet program where your food is suggested and/or prepared for you.

You will find amazing amounts of motivation to stay on your diet when you prepare all of the food you will need to eat for the entire next day the night before. This one technique alone can make your diet successful! If you can find a way to prepare proper foods ahead of time and keep them with you always, you will lose all the weight you want and you’ll keep it off.