Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Getting Off the Weight-Gain, Weight-Loss Rollercoaster

According to the latest statistics from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 97 million Americans are overweight or obese. There are an estimated 300 million people in the United States, resulting in a relative number of one in three Americans being overweight or obese.

Excess weight is often accompanied by high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, certain types of cancer, stroke, arthritis, breathing problems, and psychological disorders, such as depression not to mention other health problems. The total costs attributed to obesity-related disease surpass $100 billion annually in the United States.

Weight loss is not just a matter of wanting to look and feel better, it is a necessity if you want to get and stay healthy and let’s face it, who doesn’t?

The prevalence of obesity in children has increased markedly, with approximately 20%-25 % of children either overweight or obese. An estimated 25.6% of adults in the United States reported being obese in 2007, an increase of nearly 2 percent since 2005 according to the Office of the Surgeon General.

• What if you learned how your body responds to food intake of various types and amounts so you understand why you keep gaining that weight back?
• What if you knew how much water you need to get and stay healthy?
• And what if you knew some essential supplements that you need to take every day to get and stay healthy and to make your hair and skin softer from the inside out the way it’s supposed to happen?
• What if you could lose weight without having to go hungry or eat rice cakes for six months because you understood how it actually worked; the science behind weight loss?

Once you understand why you gain the weight back after the diet is over and realize a better way to accomplish your goals, you will be able to lose your excess weight and keep it off for the rest of your life. Don’t blame metabolism or genetics. Only a very small percentage of Americans fall into this category. Chances are, you are not one of them. Much of the medical industry that is concerned with weightloss tries to convince patients that there is a genetic factor or factors causing them to be overweight. This way they can prescribe a medication to help you lose the weight. Maybe there’s a better way than to add another prescription medication to the medicine cabinet.

Remember, losing weight is not magic and if you eat and drink the same amount of calories (or more) than what you burn throughout the day in your daily activities, you will not lose weight. You do need to be aware of how many calories the food you eat has and how to keep it from causing weight gain. You do not have to continually count calories, only a little bit at the beginning to increase your awareness of what is actually causing the weight gain or at least causing you to not be able to lose the excess you’re carrying around.

Your metabolism is essentially the sum total of all the calories you consume and burn throughout the day. Your BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate is simply the energy you would expend if you laid around all day not moving or doing anything. Everyone’s BMR is different and everyone’s metabolism is different but there are a few elements that are the same. That is, we all process our food in the same biochemical way. This is providing, of course, that you do not have some debilitating illness which alters these processes. If this is the case consult your doctor before you begin any weight loss program. Assuming you are not one of these people let’s continue.

In order to get a handle on your metabolism you need to get familiar with the amount of calories you are consuming each day and the amount you are burning each day also. After all it is the difference between these two numbers that determine whether you gain weight, lose weight or maintain your current weight. Counting calories is a drag so plan to do it only for a short time. After that you will begin to develop more of a “feel” for calories. You will know before you look up a particular food item whether it is high in calories or not. You will also be able to tell when you eat something whether it is high in calories or not. You will begin to associate the high calorie foods with that bloated, sluggish feeling accompanied by indigestion and gas and the low calorie foods with being alert, healthy and energetic.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

The “Popular” Diets & Why They May Not Have Worked For You

Well here comes the holidays and the extra pounds for most Americans. We continue to see diets advertised on television allowing participants food like hamburgers and french fries not to mention chocolate cake. One nutritionist has an infomercial claiming that you can eat all the foods you love including pasta, chocolate cake, cheeseburgers, french fries, candy and brownies and you can still lose weight with his program. If you get up close to the television during this infomercial you see the disclaimer in small print at the very bottom of the screen,

“Results are not typical.”

My response, “Then what good is it?”

If you truly want to lose weight you first need to be realistic. If you still think you can lose weight by eating chocolate cake, pasta, hamburgers and french fries then you are not being realistic, in my opinion.

The bottom line with these diets is that they don’t work for most people. The main reason is that the hardest thing to do when you are wanting to diet is to go hungry. I remember when I was in wrestling in high school and I had to lose weight by Friday in order to wrestle in an upcoming meet. I would starve myself for two or three days, lose 10 or 11 pounds and wrestle for six minutes on Friday. First of all, let me be the first to say, if I tried to do that today it would probably kill me. It is amazing what your body can take when you are young and healthy.

The most difficult part of this whole dieting thing, which is the point of all this, was going hungry. It affected how I slept, my ability to concentrate, my mood and energy levels and my overall ability to think and react. There was nothing in my life that was not affected by the hunger, and all in a negative way I might add.

Most diets predispose you to failure for two different reasons. One type of diet gives you great tasting, fattening foods but only small tiny, tiny little portions. The other type of diet lets you have as much celery and rice cakes as you want. Guess how much celery and rice cakes I want? If you said none, you already know me pretty well. Even if I haven’t eaten all day I still don’t think a rice cake is tasty or satisfying. I couldn’t care less that I can have as much of that crap as I want. I don’t want any of it!

If you get on one of these diets where you have to buy all your food from some company, then how are you ever going to eat at a restaurant? What are you going to do on holidays? What are you going to do when someone invites you over to their house for dinner? You certainly cannot bring your little microwave diet dinner with you. People would think you were nuts.

All of these situations occur in all of our lives and in all of these cases we have to go off the diet for these meals if we are on one of the diets where we buy special food. These diets do not teach you how to eat healthy in the real world and as soon as you quit buying this special, expensive food, you begin to gain back all the weight you lost.

Even though most diets don’t generally work in the long run, you continue to search for the one that will. Because of the extra stress that most “diets” cause in your life, you tend to not just gain back the weight you lost in the short time you were on the diet, but as a result of the added stress of being on the diet you gain a little extra so now you have a little more weight you want to lose and you feel like a failure. You wait a while and then you hear about or read about a diet that the stars in Hollywood are having great success with. Now it’s time to try another fad diet and drop another few temporary pounds.

If this cycle has been repeating over and over throughout your life, you’re not alone. Most people with a weight problem have it for many years and in many cases they die overweight having never succeeded in their life long desire to lose the excess pounds. Gaining and losing and then gaining and losing again and then again is extremely unhealthy and causes loads of stress on your organs and your body as a whole.


This information is compiled into a book entitled, Lose Weight Without Dieting For additional information or to purchase the e-book  or paperback, please visit our web site at http://www.OptimalHealthProtocools.com.

Get started understanding why you can’t seem to lose that excess weight and keep it off. Knowledge is truly power. Once you have the knowledge of “How” and “Why” the weight won’t come off and stay off you will be well on your way to permanent elimination of your excess weight: