Healthy, Fit & Fabulous: The “Anti-Diet” Diet ~ 4 Easy Steps to Lose Weight and Get Healthy!

By Larry Deutsch, MD and Jeff Schweitzer, Ph.D. ~

The $40 billion weight loss industry has you hooked. Everywhere you look a weight loss guru is selling a pill or a program. Misinformation abounds. But help is on the way; real advice based on real science made easy.

Down to Calories

Every diet ever sold is nothing but a scheme to fool you into eating fewer calories. But reality is simple.  You just need to eat well, eat less, exercise and restructure your relationship with food.

Let’s go back to basics.  A calorie is a unit of energy. Nothing more.  One calorie of broccoli equals one calorie of chocolate. What matters is how many calories you eat. Whether eating chocolate or carrots, if you eat more calories than what your body needs to maintain itself, you will gain weight.

Let’s say you need 2,500 daily calories to fuel your activities and make the supporting materials your body needs.  Eat 2,500 calories and your weight will remain unchanged.  Chow down 4,000 calories; the excess 1,500 will convert to adipose tissue, stored for future use.  You get fat. Munch only 1,000 calories; your body converts the energy stored in fat reserves to make enough energy to fill the deficit of calories you didn’t eat. You lose weight.

Eat Less

Enjoy each morsel of food.  Put your fork down between bites. Set portion size before each meal.  No more “all you can eat” buffets. Remember to tell yourself, “this is what I have chosen to eat. I might as well extract every atom of pleasure and delight from each bite because when this is gone, I am done until the next meal.”

Plan meals: A good-sized meal, packed with fiber and proteins, can sustain you for hours.

Un-Supersize: Eat more often at home; think small when serving food.  Stop eating before you feel stuffed. Choose restaurants with normal size dishes or share your selection.

Drink water: Between juices, sodas and alcohol you can easily drink yourself fat. Water is the perfect hydrator and zero-calorie beverage. Water helps you nix hunger pains.

Practice mindful eating: If you wolf down your food watching TV, walking, checking your cell phone, reading email or calling friends you are likely to eat far too much.

Choose well

Losing weight means taking in fewer calories than your body needs; doing so in a healthy way requires that you choose well what you eat.

Aim for a balanced diet: Beware any diet emphasizing one food group over another. You need them all to maintain your body’s balance.  Eat foods that primarily come from a garden, an orchard, the ocean, or a farmer’s field.

Boost your fiber: Fiber can help you feel full, before you get fat. Fiber-rich foods like most vegetables and whole grains don’t produce the elevated insulin response, that for some people frustrates fat loss.

Eat low-energy-density foods: Energy-sparse foods like vegetables contain less energy than fried foods and sweets. Eat fruit, not fruit juice.  If you must eat ice cream then focus on control portion size. One small scoop is sufficient.

Eat foods that you enjoy: Eating well doesn’t mean depriving yourself. Eat what you love in moderation. Explore new foods.

Be Active

No magic pills can substitute for exercise. Weight loss depends on calories in versus calories out.  When playing couch potato you must significantly reduce consumption to maintain your weight.  The more we sit watching TV, at our desk, in the car, the more we eat. So we get fat.

Commit to exercise: Do not be ambitious.  Something, anything is better than nothing. Be realistic.  Sticking to your new routine is more important than the rigor of your exercises.  A commitment to do one minute of exercise daily, if you will actually do that one minute, is better than a 30 minute pledge that you don’t do.

Incorporate exercise into your daily routine: Walk every chance you get; exercise at your desk. Burn an extra 75 calories daily by taking stairs; park your car at the far end of the lot. The key is consistency. Consistent activity will keep you trim more effectively than becoming a weekend gym warrior.

Restructure your relationship with food

You are now on the road to a healthy lifestyle. You’ll eat less, choose well and be active. You need just one more final ingredient: restructure your relationship with food.  Life is stressful.  For many of us food is love, security, and reward.  You can learn to eat with pleasure only what you need. Master life without using food as a source of comfort and long-term weight loss becomes realistic.

Do these sound familiar?

• “I’m tired most of the time and I respond to the hit I get from eating the way I would to alcohol.”
• “When I’m bored, I eat.”
• “My kids/spouse/friends don’t eat well and I just go along with that.”
• “I think about food constantly – it’s a struggle not to.”
  

These common pleas feel real and are difficult to overcome, but you can.  Let’s see how.

Beyond will-power

Typical patterns that maintain an unhealthy weight:

• Snacking at night.
• Eating when stressed.
• Using food for reward or comfort.
• Eating when not hungry.

You can wrestle these habits to the ground with some well-proven techniques:

Self-monitoring: Keep an accurate daily food diary; know how many calories you eat.

Visualization: Imagine yourself eating healthy; walking away from a sweet you otherwise would not resist.

Meditation: Regular meditation can help reduce stress levels, minimizing the need to soothe yourself with food.

Hypnosis: Hypnosis can help those who want to lose weight but who alone cannot change their unhealthy eating patterns.

Now you have enough information to take your first step to better life.  Remember: weight loss depends only on reducing total calories in versus total calories you burn. Health depends on the quality of those calories. Eat well, eat less, exercise, and restructure your relationship with food.  Simple!

Jeff Schweitzer is a neuroscientist, former White House senior policy analyst and internationally recognized authority in ethics, conservation and development. For more information, please visit www.jeffschweitzer.com.

Larry Deutsch is a Family Physician and Medical Hypnotherapist with 38 years of experience helping patients lose weight, quit smoking and enhance their lives. For more information, please visit www.drlarry.com.

They are the co-authors of Calorie Wars: Fat, Fact and Fiction.

Healthy, Fit & Fabulous: Fact or Fiction—Is the US the Most Obese Nation in the World?

By Dr. Garry Kim ~

Q:
I recently read an article that said that the United States has the highest rate of obesity in the world. Is that true?

A:

Amongst industrialized nations, the United States leads the world in obesity. However, if we include developing nations into the list, the United States only makes it into the top 10—but it remains the only industrialized nation in the top10.

Currently, the obesity rate in the United States is about 33%. That means that one out of every three people in the United States is obese. Before I go any further, let me define obesity. Obesity is defined not by weight, but by the Body Mass Index or BMI. The BMI is a way to interpret your weight, given your height. For example, if someone were 240 lbs., you would think that person is obese. Yet if he were 6 foot 7 inches tall, that would be much different than if he were 5 foot 6 inches. In fact, at 6 foot 7 inches, he would be considered overweight, but not obese.

The rate of obesity has been increasing in the United States. The International Obesity Task Force predicts that, by the year 2025, the rate of obesity may reach 45-50%. A large part of why this is happening has to do with the fact that Americans are eating much more than 20 years ago, about 250 calories more each day.

This began in the 1970’s because of changes in the U.S. Government’s agricultural policy. This change in policy made it more profitable for farmers to increase production of food staples like corn and soy beans. This made it cheaper for food manufacturers and restaurants to produce food. But instead of reducing the price of their products, they increased the serving sizes. A perfect example of this is the soda can, which started out at 8 oz, and then grew to 12 and then 16 oz. At certain convenience stores you can get 72 oz. of soda.

Beyond a more plentiful food supply and larger portion sizes, Americans have newer reasons to eat as well. First of all, food has become the new sophisticated hobby. With the explosion of the Food Network on television and the fame of celebrity chefs, food and wine have reached a new level as a form of entertainment. Second, with the recent development of the deal-a-day coupon sites like Groupon and Living Social, people are eating out like never before. As you know, these websites offer dining opportunities at steeply discounted prices. People are trying restaurants they normally wouldn’t have tried just because the prices are so low.

These are just a few reasons why the obesity epidemic in the United States has gotten so out of control. There are a host of other reasons and the numbers are only expected to get worse. However, being a member of a weight loss program and attending the clinic on a regular basis is a proven way to keep yourself from being a part of that statistic.

Dr. Garry Kim is a physician who specializes in weight loss and nutrition. After winning his own personal battle with obesity, Dr. Kim founded the American Weight Loss Centers. He has maintained his weight loss for more than 15 years and uses his own experience to support others in their personal health & fitness journeys. His medical weight loss centers offer access to a FDA approved weight loss program, safe appetite suppressants and medical weight loss clinics. For more information and to learn about medical weight loss programs, visit www.AmericanWeightLossCenter.com.

Photo credit: Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Healthy, Fit & Fabulous: The Calorie Test

By Alexander Chernev ~

Below you will see a list of 10 meals from popular fast food chains. Write down your estimate of the calorie content of each meal. No need to come up with a precise number; instead just provide a low and high estimate of each meal’s calorie count.

.

For example, if asked to indicate the calorie content of a Big Mac, you might think that it most likely has somewhere between 300 calories (low estimate) and 600 calories (high estimate).

.

Your goal is to identify high and low estimates such that the right answer falls between the two numbers you write down 90% of the time. In other words, this means that you should get at most one answer (10% of responses) wrong.

.

• Dunkin’ Donuts

• Multigrain bagel with lite cream cheese

• Chili’s citrus fire chicken and shrimp fajitas

• Denny’s smoked sausage scramble

• Krispy Kreme’s whole wheat glazed donut

• McDonald’s Quarter Pounder (without cheese)

• Panera Bread’s broccoli cheddar soup (8oz)

in a sourdough soup bowl

• Romano’s Macaroni Grill grilled salmon teriyaki

• Ruby Tuesday’s turkey burger (with fries)

• Starbucks’ grande 2% white chocolate mocha and

a bran muffin with nuts

• Uno Chicago Grill’s classic deep dish pizza (individual)

Now, let’s find out how you did…

.

Answers

• Dunkin’ Donuts multigrain bagel

with lite cream cheese:  490

• Chili’s citrus fire chicken and

shrimp fajitas:  1,360

• Denny’s smoked sausage scramble:  1,480

• Krispy Kreme’s whole wheat

glazed donut:  180

• McDonald’s Quarter Pounder

(without cheese):  410

• Panera Bread’s broccoli cheddar soup

(8oz) in a sourdough soup bowl:  880

• Romano’s Macaroni Grill grilled

salmon teriyaki:  1,230

• Ruby Tuesday’s turkey burger (with fries):  1,393

• Starbucks’ grande 2% white chocolate

mocha and a bran muffin with nuts:  900

• Uno Chicago Grill’s classic deep dish

pizza (individual):  2,310

.

If you got all answers right or made only one mistake, you are an exception. If you did not — don’t get depressed. Most people don’t. On average only half of the answers to this quiz are correct, significantly below the 90% target.

.

As you might have guessed by now, this was not just a test of your knowledge of calories but also a test of your confidence in your own knowledge. As this quiz shows, most of us are overconfident, thinking that we know more than we actually do.

© 2011 Alexander Chernev, author of The Dieter’s Paradox: Why Dieting Makes Us Fat

.Author Bio

Alexander Chernev, author of The Dieter’s Paradox: Why Dieting Makes Us Fat, is a psychologist who is studying how people make choices. He holds two doctoral degrees: a Ph.D. in Psychology from Sofia University and a second Ph.D. in Business Administration from Duke University. He is a marketing professor at Northwestern University, where he teaches behavioral decision theory, marketing management and strategy, and consumer research.

Dr. Chernev has won numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the Early Career Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association for his contribution to consumer psychology. His research has been published in leading psychology journals, and a recent survey ranked him as the most prolific scholar in the top marketing journals in the past 20 years. He has been widely quoted in the business and popular press, including Scientific American, Business Week, Forbes, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Time Magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Harper’s Magazine.

He is not on a diet but often adds a healthy option to his meals.

For more information please visit http://www.dietersparadox.com/, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

Healthy, Fit & Fabulous: Fact or Fiction — Is Late Night Eating Really Evil?

Q:
Can you put an argument I’m having with my sister to rest. I believe that eating late at night can make you fat. She says that it doesn’t matter. Who is right?

A:

I’m afraid your sister is right. The “eating late at night leads to weight gain” myth has been busted. The idea that people gain weight from eating late at night seemed to make sense. Digestion slows while we’re sleeping. As a result, food tends to stay longer within our digestive tract. Why wouldn’t this lead to weight gain?  Well, this is where science trumps commonly held beliefs. It was also long believed that coffee caused people’s blood pressure to rise. In fact, caffeine is a stimulant that does not cause long term blood pressure elevation. However, a central nervous system depressant, alcohol, does cause blood pressure elevation.

So a number of studies have looked at the effects of meal timing and weight gain. In 1996, a Swedish study published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at normal weight and obese individuals. The study compared eating patterns between both groups. The eating patterns of obese and normal weight individuals were not found to be any different. Both groups were found to have periodic nighttime eating binges. This was confirmed in a 2007 study of more than 2500 patients.

Although nighttime eating does not appear to affect weight gain, eating patterns can influence weight. A 2003 study out of Europe found that people who skip breakfast are more likely to gain weight. This is primarily because people who eat breakfast tend to take in more calories throughout the day. An analysis of caloric intake between those who do and do not skip breakfast showed that those who skipped breakfast took in considerably more calories per meal.

So eating at night is not as bad as we had previously thought. No studies have shown that eating at night leads to weight gain. As long as the number of calories stays consistent, you will not gain weight from late night eating. But please remember that skipping breakfast, or skipping any meal for that matter, can lead to weight problems.

Dr. Garry Kim is a physician who specializes in weight loss and nutrition. After winning his own personal battle with obesity, Dr. Kim founded the American Weight Loss Centers. He has maintained his weight loss for more than 15 years and uses his own experience to support others in their personal health & fitness journeys. His medical weight loss centers offer access to a FDA approved weight loss program, safe appetite suppressants and medical weight loss clinics. For more information and to learn about medical weight loss programs, visit www.AmericanWeightLossCenter.com.

Healthy, Fit & Fabulous: Get Moving!

By Dr. Garry Kim ~

Q: I’ve been exercising a lot lately to help with my weight loss, but I haven’t really noticed much change. How much exercise should I be doing?

– Christine P.

A: This is a question that gets asked frequently. First things first; you don’t need to exercise to lose weight. Cutting back on calories is enough to help you lose weight. Exercise can help you lose weight, but the weight loss returns you get from exercise are not as great as people think. You have to exercise quite a bit to see the weight loss benefits. Does this mean you shouldn’t exercise? Absolutely not. There are other benefits to exercise; among them are improved cardiovascular health and fitness, strengthened bones, improved balance, and many times, an improved sense of well being and confidence.

If you have found it difficult to start an exercise regimen, here are some helpful pointers to get you started. Set a date in the very near future to start your exercise program. You don’t even have to start exercising the first few days. Just set aside some time where you just think about exercise. Or if you have a treadmill at home, just stand on the treadmill for 15 minutes. If you have a bicycle or a stationary bike, just sit on it for 15 minutes while you watch television or make a phone call. Committing time to exercise has become the most difficult part about exercising. Once you overcome that hurdle, it becomes a bit easier to actually start exercising.

Once you have overcome the commitment hurdle, you’re ready to start your routine. For the first week or two, keep your routine as simple as possible. I like to use the example of walking for exercise. I tell people who have chosen walking as their exercise to walk around their block once. Just once. Keep doing that until it becomes routine. Then, when you feel up to it, expand that walk to two, then three blocks. Keep building it up until you have reached your goal. Again, it’s not the actual exercise that people find difficult, it’s the commitment to exercise. Once you start to do it regularly, you will start to miss it if you don’t do it. That’s where you want to be.

Another question that gets asked about exercise is, “What’s the best exercise for me?” The answer I give people is simple: whatever exercise you like to do. When people first start thinking about exercise, many of them will think about jogging. But if you don’t like to jog, don’t do it. Otherwise, you’re only going to do it for a week or two, then you’ll stop and give up on exercise altogether. Whatever exercise you choose, keep it simple and keep it fun.

For your reference I have included some guidelines for exercise. The amount of physical activity to maintain fitness (not to lose weight) can be found in the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.Similar guidelines are also endorsed by the American College of Sports Medicine.

For an average adult, the recommended weekly exercise is 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity aerobic activity. This can include:

Walking fast
Doing water aerobics
Riding a bike on level ground or with few hills
Playing doubles tennis
Pushing a lawn mower

Plus, add two or more days a week of muscle strengthening activities that work all the major muscle groups.

Dr. Garry Kim is a physician who specializes in weight loss and nutrition. After winning his own personal battle with obesity, Dr. Kim founded the American Weight Loss Centers. He has maintained his weight loss for more than 15 years and uses his own experience to support others in their personal health & fitness journeys. His medical weight loss centers offer access to a FDA approved weight loss program, safe appetite suppressants and medical weight loss clinics. For more information and to learn about medical weight loss programs, visit www.AmericanWeightLossCenter.com.

Healthy, Fit & Fabulous: Five Steps to Overcoming a Food Addiction

by Hedley Turk ~

You know the food you’re eating is bad for you—you just can’t stop eating it. You have a food addiction and you’re not alone. Millions of people are suffering as well.

This is the area of health where most of us have our greatest challenge. We want to eat healthier, we want to be healthier, but when it comes to eating right, we just can’t seem to do it.

If We Know Better, Why Do We Still Eat Unhealthy Food?

What we eat has less to do with our intellect and more to do with the associations we have to food. An association is a link in your mind between an emotion and an experience, person, place, or thing.

An example of an association is a fear of dogs. A fear of dogs is often the result of a person having been attacked or frightened severely by a dog. That event creates an association in the person’s mind, linking dogs with fear. Now every time this person sees a dog, even if it’s a friendly one with a big smile on its face, he or she will experience fear.

Food is another area where we’ve created associations. Once upon a time, you ate a food—a cake, a piece of chocolate, ice cream—and you liked the way it tasted. At that moment you created an association in your mind linking this food to feeling good. And each time you ate this food, it continued to make you feel good, further strengthening the association.

The result is you have an association to food that is extremely strong. As strong, if not more so, than the person who has a fear of dogs. If I tell that person that the dog approaching is friendly it won’t matter because associations generally override intellect and that person will still be afraid of the dog. If I tell you that a food is bad for you, it also won’t matter because your associations will override your intellect and you will eat that food anyway.

This is why it’s so hard for you to give up certain foods. Your intellect is telling you that a food is bad for you, but your emotions, which are actually your associations, are telling you this food will make you feel good. How can you give up something that makes you feel good? See the conflict?

How Do We Overcome a Food Addiction?

The first and most important step to overcoming a food addiction is motivation. You have to want to make the change. Your motivation can come from different sources, such as a doctor’s diagnosis of a health condition that will worsen unless you make a change to your weight.

It can come from your family and your desire to be healthy enough to participate with your kids in activities and sports. Your motivation can also come from the fact that you want to be around to see your children graduate high school or college, or to see them have families of their own.

Or maybe your motivation comes from the fact that you deserve it. You deserve to feel good, you deserve to feel healthy, and you deserve to live a long and healthy life.

The second step to overcoming a food addiction is identifying your current associations to the food that you want to stop eating. Answer the following question: Why do I eat this food? Be honest. Does it make you feel good? Does it give you pleasure? Does it satisfy you? Does it relax you?

The third step is to create new powerful negative associations to the food that you want to stop eating. Remember, it’s very difficult to give up something that makes you feel good and gives you pleasure. Therefore, you need to change the way you feel about the food from a positive to a negative.

The fourth step is to create new positive associations to not eating the food. The goal is that every time you resist the urge to eat the unhealthy food, you will feel good and feel pleasure. And each time, thereafter, that you resist the urge, you will feel even more pleasure, thereby reinforcing the association as well as building your strength and confidence.

The fifth and final step to overcoming a food addiction is to anchor your new associations. Anchoring an association is a way of reinforcing it, or making the link in your mind stronger. An association is anchored when a strong emotion is involved, as in the case of the fear of dogs, or through repetition, as is often the case with food.

Keep in mind that you may have to do this process more than once. Overcoming a food addiction is not easy, but if you’re motivated and committed to doing it, it can be done.

Hedley Turk, a former personal trainer, has overcome his food addiction and today is an author and computer consultant. He received his Bachelor of Science from the State University of New York at Albany School of Business and currently lives in Great Neck, NY where he is passionate about helping others overcome their food addictions and lead healthier lives.

Website: www.WhyAreWeOverweight.com