The Importance of Making Healthy Food Choices

Nutrition is a huge part of you health and appearance. Some professionals will attest that as much as 70% of your weight loss and fitness results are based on what you eat. The word alone can make people cringe  as the guiltily think of the drive thru lunch that they just ate. Nutrition is a subject that people spend their careers studying and takes volumes of books to explain. My objective is to teach you how to eat a healthy diet that encourages your body to burn fat rather than store it. You dont need overwhelming science to get this.

A healthy diet needs to be well rounded with the proper amount of nutrients, vitamins and minerals. The RDAs recommendation for daily intake of such things is a good place to check your optimal intakes.

The first thing that you need to know about nutrition is this fact: Eating small meals every 3 hours will increase your metabolism and reduce fat storage. This is a proven fact that bodybuilders, models, athletes and lean people in general abide by  and so should you.

Eating right when you wake up is vital to breaking the fast your body enters every night. About 3-4 hours after you eat your body shuts down your metabolism and acts as if it needs to store food. This is a great function to have if a famine breaks out and you dont see food for weeks. After all, if theres famine youre going to want your body to work efficiently by storing fat, and using it slowly.

However, you dont want your body to store fat and burn it slowly now, right? Since there is no food shortage or famine at the moment (and there likely wont be one any time soon) then it is pretty annoying when your body starts packing on the pounds. So, in order to communicate with your body that it is healthy, well fed, and not in need of extra fat storage you need to reprogram your metabolism. Heres how to go about it. Start your day off with a small meal and continue to eat small meals every 3 hours or so.

What should you eat? In this article, I am just going to give you general guidelines  These suggestions are a basic guideline to healthy meals that do not promote fat storage. Protein: 20% Fat: 15% Carbs: 65%

Each meal that you consume needs to have calories coming from protein, carbohydrates and fat. Your body needs each of these in small amounts throughout the day.

What is Dukan Diet and its side-effects?

This article gives pertinent information about Dukan Diet and its side-effects

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Pierre Dukan, a French doctor and nutritionist, challenged with the case of obesity started to look for alternative ways in curing the illness. After 20 years of thorough research he published in the year 2000, a book called, “Je ne sais pas maigrir” or translated as, “I don’t know how to get slimmer.” It gained the best-seller in France after a year it has been published.
It was made a hit in UK when Kate Middleton, now the duchess of Cambridge, tried the Dukan Diet before her marriage to the beloved Prince William, she reportedly claimed a loss of two dress sizes. It also allegedly claimed to help five million French. The book is also gaining fame in the US in the year 2011 when actress/singer, Jennifer Lopez, lost pounds after her pregnancy by following this diet.
Dukan Diet: What is it? How does this work?
Dukan Diet is similar to the famous Atkins diet. Atkins and Dukan are much alike in terms of non-intake of carbs initially and do not require portion control or counting calorie consumptions. In Atkins, it requires net carbohydrate intakes and unlike Dukan, it suggests a daily intake of oats, increase water consumption and 20 minutes of everyday brisk walking. Dukan Diet adopts four phases namely: Attack, Cruise, Consolidation and Stabilization.
Four Phases of the Dukan Diet
Attack: In this starter phase, the dieter is only allowed take protein rich foods that are exquisitely low in fat. Dr. Dukan provided 72-item list of foods to be eaten, it excludes pork, lamb, poultry products and cheeses. Food should always be cooked but without adding any fat to it, it best to cook in grilling or roasting. It also requires you to eat 1 ½ tbsp. oat bran & 1.5 liters of water per day. This phase should be followed around 2-7 days or more. Results from this initial phase within 5 days may result in 4-7 lbs. loss. This phase promotes quick loss of weight since it is strictly based on a protein-only diet.
Cruise: Cruise, the second to the fourth phase of the Dukan diet scheme. During this phase dieters who were only allowed to eat protein-only foods can now alternate a 28-items of non-starchy vegetables. They may take attack phase diet for today and take non-starchy veggie diet for tomorrow, and so this phase must go on by alternating these two types of diet each day. This phase may last long enough as much as you want by reaching your desired weight and assuring 2 pounds per week loss.
Consolidation: As one achieves the desired weight, one has to go the next phase called Consolidation, this is the maintenance phase of this diet scheme where you have to prevent putting back excess pounds. The plan in this phase is less strict compared to the first two phases. During this phase you are permitted to eat protein-only and veggie diet along with a piece of low-sugar fruit, 2 slices of whole grain bread and a portion of hard cheese. In this phase you are allowed to have 1-2 serving of starchy foods and one celebration meal per week. The phase of consolidation does not expect to loss off pounds but rather it is steadily the maintenance process.
Stabilization: Stabilization is the final phase and a life-long phase of the diet scheme. In here maintenance of the life-changing diet may be a challenging and tempting. During this portion of the scheme, one is already permitted to allow any food intake that a person wants and by also sticking to the diet rule in the consolidation phase. As Pierre Dukan suggest, that staying on the phase 1 rule once a week and eat whatever you like for the rest of the week lowers the chances of regaining weight.
Pros and Cons of Dukan Diet
Pros: The fast results of this diet scheme is beneficially rewarding and motivating. It allows you to have protein and veggie meal plan diets and does not require you to count off your calorie intakes.
Cons: It is highly restrictive and can exclude healthy foods. Dieters can experience side-effects such as symptoms of headaches, nausea, lethargy, irritable and loss of concentration. Dieters may acquire halitosis (bad breath), metallic tasting mouth and strong smell in their urines. For those people who have problems with their kidneys and liver are not advised to follow this diet plan. It is not also recommended for pregnant and nursing mothers.

Views and Opinions by Health Experts on the Dukan Diet
There are lots of critics in this diet plan. Due to the restrictive type scheme of this diet, some fruits, grains and nuts which are healthy and have high amounts of vitamins and minerals that are vital to the nutrition of the body are eliminated. Keri Gans of American Dietetic Association, said that the lost amount of multivitamins that should be acquired from those restricted foods are not compensated in the Dukan diet. Experts have also criticized that experiencing such side-effects may not be healthy at all.

How To Forget Dieting So You Lose The Bulges

Almost everyone trying to lose weight will start going on a diet at some point. Unfortunately most dieters are not able to permanently keep weight off. This is because it is often difficult or impossible to commit to a diet and keep up with a weight loss plan. However, there are other options for those who want to lose weight.

Unlike a diet, hypnotherapy will help motivate you to naturally have a healthier diet and get more exercise. Here, I will discuss some popular diet plans, the keys to losing weight, and how you can achieve weight loss using hypnotherapy.

The high numbers of searches for dieting advice and online diet plans indicate that many people are looking to lose weight. Some popular diet plans are:

The Atkins diet, which is a popular low carbohydrate diet, is centered on the limited intake of “refined carb” foods such as sugar and white bread. By restricting carbohydrate consumption, this weight loss program is supposed to make the body switch from burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat (a process called ketosis).

The Ornish diet is a very low fat, vegetarian diet, is an entirely vegetarian diet, and when followed diligently, a scant 10% of total calorie intake will come from fat. The Ornish diet also strongly encourages stress-management and exercise, and has been used successfully to help reverse heart disease in many dieters.

The Suddenly Slim diet program involves taking diet pills and meal replacement shakes with the goal of stimulating the body’s metabolism to use up more calories. The products include many ingredients typically found in diet pills. The Suddenly Slim diet is supposed to work without more exercise or making other major lifestyle changes, although exercise and better eating habits will increase results.

The Zone diet balances carbohydrate, fat, and protein intake, with 30% of calories coming from fat, 40% from carbohydrates, and 30% from protein. Like the Atkins diet, this diet is frequently considered to be “low carb.” The Zone diet pays close attention to calorie intake and physical exercise to deliver results.

The Cabbage soup diet is a component in numerous diet plans and is largely considered to be a fad diet. It consists of eating only low calorie cabbage soup for seven days. Following this diet will usually lead to some weight loss, but when you resume normal eating habits, the weight will usually come back. Furthermore, staying on this unbalanced diet plan for more than a week may lead to poor nutrition and poor health.

There are countless diet programs all promising fast results, but what many of these popular diets claim is not what they actually offer. They are based on meal plans that are unbalanced, unsustainable over a long-term period, or downright unhealthy. The truth is permanent weight loss is rarely achieved through a short, one-time diet session.

Successful dieters know that the keys to success are not in fad diets or even diet programs, but in portion control, selecting nutritious and filling foods, and exercising regularly. This sounds simple to do, but it can be difficult to stay motivated to keep healthy habits and undo a lifetime of bad dietary choices.

We often lose our motivation to exercise and eat right. Hypnosis can be used to change our bad habits and lack of motivation. Hypnosis weight loss programs work by tapping into the power of your unconscious mind to motivate you to exercise and treat your body right.

Even the best free diet plans will fail if they aren’t followed through. Research shows that most diets fail because dieters just can’t stick to them. After years of eating oversized portions, many of us compulsively overeat and our appetites are out of control. This is where hypnotherapy for weight loss is especially effective. Hypnosis weight loss programs are highly successful in helping to control food cravings and control the appetite.

For many people, another component to losing weight is stress management. Many people overeat because of emotions. We eat food in response to our feelings, such as when we are bored or sad. This emotional attachment to food can make it easy to gain weight. We can use hypnotherapy to develop better strategies for coping with stress and to quit associating food with our emotions.

It is easy to learn hypnosis by yourself with a good self-hypnosis program. There are weight loss hypnotherapy programs specifically developed to help you achieve your goal of permanently losing weight. With simple techniques from self hypnosis CD programs, you can quit struggling to lose weight and become naturally enabled to shed pounds.