The problem with restricting your calories too much is the fact that it slows down your metabolism and in doing so it makes it all the more difficult to sustain weight loss.

This is one of the reasons why it is suggested that you don’t reduce your calories by an excessive amount on a daily basis if you want to keep reducing weight over the long-term.

On the other hand when you have excess calories over and above the energy needs of your body then these calories will be stored as fat.

You can see by the last two sentences that it is crucially important for you to get your calorie intake levels correct if you are to lose weight.

Your daily calorie requirement depends on a number of different factors including your weight, your age, gender and your lifestyle as a more active person will need more calories due to the fact that they will be burning more in the course of the day.

On average every pound of your body weight represents approximately 3500 calories.  Based on this average, to lose 1 pound you will need to reduce your calorie intake by 3500 calories.
On diet alone, you can see how it won’t be possible to lose a pound a day unless of course you already have a considerable calorie intake and the reduction will still leave you with sufficient food and nutrition to remain healthy.

Supplements can certainly help to make up for any nutrition deficiencies a lot of the time.

By reducing your calories by only 100 calories per day over the course of the year you would have consumed 36,500 less calories and that converts to a weight reduction of almost 10 1/2 pounds.

That is an easily accomplished weight reduction with very little change to your lifestyle and habits.

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Are You Ready to Succeed at Weght Loss

Losing weight can be compared in a lot of cases to somebody trying to give up smoking particularly for a person who has been overweight for a long time and who has had bad eating habits for much of their life.

Like smoking, over eating is a habit that is quite difficult to break for the majority of people.

It is for this reason why many people spend the majority of their life going from one weight-loss program to another in the search for the Magic answer that will get them in the shape that they desire.

Once again by likening this to giving up smoking, a person who is trying to lose weight will have a considerably better chance of success if they have made up their mind completely that this is what they want.

If you start a weight-loss program without the intention of following through to the ultimate outcome then the doubt that is always in the back of your mind will make it so much easier for you to fail.

For many people it is more about what goes on in the mind than what they are putting into their stomach and you might have to deal with these issues first before you have any opportunity to lose weight and get in shape.

Mind power is a very powerful thing that can work for or against you and by eliminating habits from your life you will be retraining your mind to accept the new lifestyle as your natural state whereby you will be able to maintain a good healthy body weight for the long-term.

We do most things in life subconsciously including good and bad habits and by turning those bad habits into positive lifestyle changes your bodyweight won’t be something that is constantly the focus of your life.

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If there’s one thing that you need to understand it’s the fact that changing your diet to a better more balanced one that will help you to lose weight and eventually live longer doesn’t have to be a struggle.

It takes most people years to get to the stage of being obese, and even to the stage where they are carrying just a little too much body weight so you can’t expect to reverse any long term habits overnight.

Even making a few small changes to your diet can have a dramatic effect on your weight when viewed over a longer period of time.

Just the reduction of a hundred or so calories a day will amount to a very large reduction in calories over the term of one year and that will also amount to a sizeable decrease in body fat.

This can be done by simply removing a small portion of the amount of food you consume with each meal.

If you find that this is causing more than normal hunger then have a glass of water a half hour or so before each meal and you will be less inclined to feel like you require more food.

You can replace a similar quantity of low value food with good food and this will also reduce hunger and will help to lose weight.

By doing it in this manner you will find that you will begin to enjoy the ‘new’ foods in your diet just as you learnt to enjoy the poor foods that you have been eating up to this stage of your life.

Many people find it hard to accept that they will be able to get the same enjoyment out of the food that they know they should be eating but that is only because they have been accustomed to the tastes of the food they eat at the current time.

A good example of this is the reaction people have to drinking a cup of tea with sugar in it after they have stopped having sugar for a while. Most people find it difficult to drink as it seems too sweet after having been without it for some time.

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While we can’t compare ourselves with animals we can begin to understand eating habits and the reason why humans become over weight.

Consider how many animals you will see that are over weight. In the wild you wouldn’t find any and it is not because of a lack of food - although that certainly will cause a wild animal to be under weight.

No; even where there is abundance of food animals in the wild don’t get obese like humans do and it is not because of their metabolism or digestive systems.
It is because they are eating the correct foods that nature designed their systems to eat to ensure that they are getting the correct nutrition to maintain good health and obesity certainly isn’t a good healthy state to be in.

I doubt you will find any animals that are obese other than those that we keep as pets and that is because humans not only eat the wrong foods themselves but they also feed their pets the wrong foods.

We feed our pet’s processed pet food that has all sorts of colors, additives and other rubbish that they were never designed to have.
And the result of feeding them a poor diet is the high and ever increasing incidence of diabetes in domestic animals.

We are not only making ourselves sick with poor food choices but we are also reducing the chances our pets have of living long and healthy lives.

Just like the food we buy for ourselves, the food we buy for our pets is often determined by the quality of the marketing campaigns that promote those foods.

So the only living beings that seem to make the wrong choices in food consumption are humans and we are supposed to be the most intelligent!

And the only other living beings that are affected by poor food consumption are pets because they have to rely on the poor decisions that are made by humans.

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There’s no doubt about the fact that the body changes as we age and fat is stored in places that we didn’t have to worry about when we were younger.

The metabolism slows and the digestive system doesn’t work as well as it once did.

Hormonal changes in the body can also affect the shape that you are in but there is one thing that always remains the same at all ages - If you eat too much food and drink too much alcohol you will gain weight.

Many people use their age as an excuse for being over weight but this is not acceptable. Consider how many elderly people there are who are still slim, fit and healthy and you will see that age is not an excuse.

Lifestyles create the body we have to live with and the effects of poor lifestyle choices are multiplied as we age because the abuse that we have been giving our body through poor food choices throughout our life accumulates with fat and other health related problems due to poor nutrition.

You can and should expect to keep your fat percentage at an optimum level throughout your life. The health benefits from doing so will pay dividends with a better quality of life and reduced dependence on medication and other health related expenditure as you age.

At any stage in your life, no matter how old you are you can benefit from improved nutrition and exercise.

Anything that will reduce the excess levels in your body fat will assist in helping you to live longer and to enjoy that time more.

Starting on an exercise program and taking care to improve your nutrition is the best way to turn back the body clock and it is never too late to start winding back the years. Obviously the sooner you start the better but starting is the essential ingredient that you need right now.

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Many people don’t realize that a lack of sleep can have a detrimental effect on your weight.

When you are constantly over tired your energy levels are naturally lacking and the first thing that most people do to boost their energy levels is to eat more food.

Naturally eating more food is going to cause you to increase weight and the digestion of the food will burn up even more energy so you get into a vicious circle of tiredness eating and more tiredness.

The constant tiredness also affects the way that your body functions where it becomes less efficient and in doing so you will tend to store more fat and gain weight.

Simply getting a bit more sleep at regular times at night can boost your energy levels and in doing so reduce your dependence upon food for energy and help you to lose weight without having to go on any diets.

If there are no alternatives to your lack of sleep due to circumstances in your life then you need to concentrate on increasing your intake of water as this will help you to get more energy and make you feel less hungry due to your tiredness.

Shift workers in particular have a difficult time in maintaining their weight because not only are they getting a lack of sleep but they will also be sleeping at various different times of the day and night and that affects your eating habits and your digestion.

Long-term lack of sleep will result in the body storing additional fat so it is essential to do all you can where possible to get a regular night’s sleep at reasonable hours to maintain good health and a reasonable body fat percentage.

Obviously taking this to the other extreme where you are sleeping all hours of the day and not getting any exercise will also cause you to retain more body fat and increase weight.

Once again lifestyle has a huge bearing on whether you are at your optimum body weight or not.

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Most successful people find that setting goals is one of the most important parts of achieving those goals and this applies to almost everything in life including your ability to be successful with weight loss.

What you do have to realize however is these goals need to be realistic and you need to believe that you can achieve them or you will be starting off on the wrong foot and failure will be imminent.

To make your goal achievable you need to look at it over an extended period of time rather than believing that you can lose 15 pounds in a couple of weeks.

While this might be possible it is certainly a lot harder to achieve than to expect to lose that weight over the course of several months.

Keeping a diary helps a lot of people to achieve their goals as it helps to enforce the actions that are required to meet those goals on a daily basis.

In your diary you can record your body weight, the foods you’ve been eating, any supplements you have been taking and the results that you have been getting from these actions.

This helps you to readjust your goals and make changes to your fitness and nutrition as things change in the course of your weight loss program.

Within your major goal you should also have short-term goals and once again these need to be realistic to keep you motivated.

These short-term goals will change from time to time as during the course of your weight loss program you will probably find that progress accelerates after certain stages of your plan.

Sometimes you will also plateau for a while where your weight loss will tend to slow down and by having a diary you will be able to look at those areas that you might be able to change to get over that plateau and continue to progress.

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This is such a broad subject that it is impossible to answer it in any one article.

To create a healthy, balanced diet menu, it may be good to focus on individual food items first and determining whether they are a good candidate to be included.

This time we will focus our attention on eggs.

Eggs Nutritional Value  

People love them and people hate them. They have been praised and maligned and praised again. Some experts say egg must be a part of any healthy diet.
Others would ban them altogether.

You will probably agree that this is quite confusing. Who is right? Is it the chicken farmer and the egg industry or the doctors who believe that no cholesterol in food is the best choice?

We are not making any rash judgments. The jury is still at least partially out. Some studies of free range chicken eggs seem to point out that along with the cholesterol inside the eggs there are compounds to neutralize it.

The issue of how chicken are raised, fed and their living environment is a matter that needs to be dealt with elsewhere.

The point on which all experts agree is that eggs contain a variety of indispensable nutrients. So the only issue with eggs seems to be that they contain some cholesterol.

 Eggs have a lot of cholesterol, so for a long time it was considered unhealthy to eat too many. However, advice is changing on this as more research comes out. To my knowledge, no evidence shows that eggs are in any way harmful to our health. In fact, some studies show an improvement in blood lipids from eating eggs. It seems that this high-cholesterol food raises our "good" cholesterol rather than the "bad

But cholesterol is absolutely necessary for the body. That there are at least two kinds of cholesterol one good and one bad is becoming quite well known now. A new school of thought on cholesterol says that if the body has no intake of cholesterol it will manufacture it.

It seems that no definitive conclusion about eggs being healthy or not has been reached by science because of the controversial cholesterol issue. Otherwise, from a nutritional point of view eggs are a super food fit for any balanced diet menu.

Unless you are a vegetarian or have other moral objections to eating eggs you may want to consider including them sparingly in your diet plan.

Authored by http://healthydietweightloss.org

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The headline is not news but this article puts a quantitative face on the truth of it.

Today we would like to share with you some sobering news from Heathday News a publication that often provides us with valuable information regarding our better self care.

TUESDAY, March 17 (HealthDay News) — Being obese can shorten your life, a new study shows.

"Moderate obesity typically shortens life span by about three years," said researcher Gary Whitlock, from the Clinical Trial Service Unit at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. "By moderate obesity, I mean weighing about a third more than is ideal, which for most people would mean being about 50 or 60 pounds overweight."

More than one in three middle-aged Americans are now in this category, Whitlock said. "By contrast, weighing twice your ideal weight — say, an extra 150 pounds — shortens life span by about 10 years," he added.

This obesity level is still not common, but it equals the known 10-year reduction in life span caused by smoking. "So, smoking is about as dangerous as being severely obese, and about three times as dangerous as being moderately obese," he said.

The report is published in the March 18 online edition of The Lancet.

For the study, Whitlock and other members of the Prospective Studies Collaboration collected data on 894,576 men and women who participated in 57 studies. The people in these studies came primarily from western Europe and North America. Their average body-mass index (BMI) was 25.

BMI is a calculation that expresses a relationship between height and weight. People are considered underweight if their BMI is less than 18.5, normal weight when the BMI is between 18.5 and 24.9, overweight when BMI is between 25 and 29.9, and obese when BMI is 30 or more, according to the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

The researchers found that men and women whose BMI was between 22.5 and 25 lived the longest. For a person 5 feet 7 inches tall, his or her optimum weight would be about 154 pounds, they noted.

For those with a BMI over 25, every 10 to 12 pound increase translated to about a 30 percent increased risk of dying. In addition, there was a 40 percent increase in the risk for heart disease, stroke and other vascular disease, a 60 percent to 120 percent increased risk of diabetes, liver disease or kidney disease, a 10 percent increased risk of cancer, and a 20 percent increased risk for lung disease, the researchers reported.

"Obesity causes kidney disease, liver disease and several types of cancer, but the most common way it kills is by causing stroke and, most importantly, heart disease. Obesity causes heart disease by pushing up blood pressure, by interfering with blood cholesterol levels, and by bringing on diabetes," Whitlock said.

People who are moderately obese with a BMI in the 30 to 35 range reduced their life span by two and four years. For those who are severely obese with BMIs between 40 and 45, their life span was reduced by eight to 10 years. That’s comparable to the effects of smoking, Whitlock said.

In fact, people whose weight was below normal also died earlier, due mainly to smoking-related diseases, the researchers noted.

"If you are obese and smoke, then, above all else, quit smoking," Whitlock said. "If you are obese and don’t smoke, then don’t start, and do what you can to avoid further weight gain. By avoiding further weight gain, you may well live a few years longer than you otherwise would do. By quitting smoking, a smoker can expect to gain several extra years of life — about as many as a severely obese person might gain by shedding half of his or her body weight."

Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said this study confirms that the obesity epidemic is "the clear and present danger many of us knew it to be."

The association between BMI and mortality has been challenged in the scientific community, due in part to uncertainty about weight estimates and debate about measurement methods. "Here we have an emphatic reaffirmation of the fundamental issue: Overweight and obesity take years from life," Katz said.

"We know that, in many ways, BMI is a crude measure of the health risks associated with obesity, since not all excess body fat is created equal," he said. "Weight gained around the middle tends to be most dangerous, so for those subject to this pattern, risks may indeed be higher than this study suggests. For those with lower body weight gain, risks may be lower."

A study published in the Nov. 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine also found that where weight is centered is a risk factor. Men with the largest waist circumference had more than double the risk of death, and women with the largest waist circumference increased their risk of death by 78 percent.

SOURCES: Gary Whitlock, Ph.D., Clinical Trial Service Unit, University of Oxford, U.K.; David L. Katz, M.D., M.P.H., director, Prevention Research Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, Conn.; March 18, 2009, The Lancet, online 
 

Technorati Tags: moderate obesity, obesity causes, obesity death rate, Tags: effects of obesity

"Dear Friend,

News just in from the Department of the Obvious: turns out that exercise may not be a cure-all for obesity. Instead, researchers at the Loyola University Health system claim that it’s your diet that plays the key role in losing weight and avoiding obesity.

Wow. Stop the presses!

This was yet another case of "breakthrough" research conclusions based on a shoddy study premise and science that was both sloppy and lazy.

In the case of this study, researchers compared African American women from Chicago with women from rural Nigeria. The average weight of the American women was 184 pounds, compared to 127 for the Nigerians. But it turned out both groups burned about the same amount of calories each day.

The researchers concluded that, "Decreased physical activity may not be the primary driver of the obesity epidemic."

Who ever said that decreased physical activity was the "primary driver" of the obesity epidemic? Of course a sedentary lifestyle is a factor in obesity, but a "primary driver?"

But if that was the case, they were really headed off in the wrong direction when they headed over to Nigeria. Because it seems that they based this ENTIRE study on the idiotic notion that that Nigerian women are more active than their American counterparts.

Why would the researchers have made this assumption? Surely this was based solely on typical American naivety about life in the Third World. "Hey, it’s Nigeria – these women must be hunting and gathering all day just to survive." Nonsense. They should’ve confirmed this premise first. Instead, they admitted they were "surprised" to discover that this assumption turned out not to be true.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I were conducting research and found that my control group wasn’t really working as a control group … well, I’d know that my entire study had just gone ka-blooey.

Not Loyola. They bravely forged ahead and had the unmitigated gall to issue study results and conclusions anyway. They concluded that the American women were heavier due to the type of amount and type of diet that those women consumed. Uh… no kidding.

Study co-author Richard Cooper, chairman of Loyola University’s Department of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology said, "We would love to say that physical activity has a positive effect on weight control, but that does not appear to be the case."

I could’ve told the researchers that would be the case … and saved them the airfare to Nigeria. There’s no magic formula; if you eat healthier foods and less of them, you’ll lose weight."

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