Appetite

Avoid the Winter Pattern of Over Eating

The winter is upon us. You know what that means. I know I sure do, because I’m already experiencing it in full force for some reason.  It’s an increased appetite. I guess that when the weather starts to grow cold, the leaves start to fall, the days get shorter, and the sky turns mostly grey, we look to food as comfort and as sort of an entertainment.

Let’s face it. Food adds “color” and spice to our lives. Its rich tastes, different textures and experiences, and scent, really add interest to our lives.  That’s why so many people have a hard time watching what they eat in the winter time. For those of us that live in cooler climates or areas where the weather change is pretty apparent, when the winter time kicks in, so does our appetite for bad foods.

Many times, starting with Halloween, we begin on a binge that tends to last all the way through to New Years. Not coincidentally, Halloween is also the time that most states turn their clocks back and the days become shorter.  This does mess with our circadian rhythm, or sleep patterns, which can also throw off our appetite and eating habits.

One of the ways you can help with this winter time tendency to eat more and to eat bad foods is to get light therapy in your life. You can either visit a tanning bed (only safely, no burning and no over doing it whatsoever, and yes I realize this is controversial), get some sort of a bed that emits UV light without tanning you.

Simply getting this light therapy can help lift the spirits and dampen the appetite. Studies have shown in many ways that SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, is largely due to inadequate sun exposure, which includes the actual light received by the eyes. Something about this light helps trip our positive feelings.

You can also supplement your diet with a good herbal appetite suppressant such as Hoodia or green tea. Both offer natural appetite suppression that can help you get the help you need to suppress the ravenous beast within from constantly sabotaging your weight maintenance goals.

Another way to suppress your appetite in the winter time is good old fashioned exercise. Exercising helps suppress the hunger hormones that are released more in the winter by elevating the feel good chemicals in the body.

Obese May Have More Brain Limitation in Limiting Cravings

Studies have recently shown that those that have more tendencies toward obesity or are already obese may actually have built-in brain limitations that thin people do not have. In other words, you may have genetic predispositions into being heavy if you are heavy and find it harder to control your cravings.

In recent research studies, brain scans show that when thin people are presented with images of high fat, tempting “naughty” foods, they actually activate a center of their brain that is associate with willpower and impulse control.

Contrary to this, heavy or obese people switched on the areas of their brain that are turned on when something presents itself that it high fat, sugary or otherwise tempting as far as food goes.  The conclusion is that heavy or obese people actually have a detriment when it comes to controlling their weight.

What isn’t clear is whether the cart comes before the horse in this case. For example, do people who are heavy aquire this inability to control their cravings over years of indulging in these fatty foods?  Maybe this indulgence actually causes a chemical change in the brain that reduces the ability to control one’s impulses.

Thin people on the other hand, especially thin people who have been thin for years or for the majority of their lives, may have always had their controls turned on. Through years of using these controls and not wavering from them, they may have maintained them.

It’s just like anything else – you don’t use it and you lose it. This may be the case with those who have willpower and impulse control, and those that have either never mastered it, or have let it go. 

Obese people may have a lesser ability to control their food cravings from the get go, making it harder for them to maintain a healthy weight from an early age. The ongoing misuse, or no use at all, of these built in controls, may result in a lifetime of obesity.

A Vaccine for Weight Loss?

It seems that all vaccinations and other human medications start with research in mice, and this new potential “vaccine for obesity” could be the next big breakthrough that was borne out of research on mice. You heard that right, there may be a vaccine that helps to control weight in humans!

This interesting concept is to inject people with a concoction of hormones that helps to control a hunger hormone in the body that often stimulates our appetite and makes us eat copious amounts of food, even after we have stuffed ourselves silly.

Ghrelin is the hormone that this vaccination hopes to suppress, and by suppressing this elusive hormone, it could help those that have weight problems to control their weight more easily and lose weight by eating a lot less.

The mice that were injected with this concoction not only ate less than the mice that were not, but they also burned more calories than the mice that did not get the vaccine. What does this mean?

Well, that either the vaccine itself helps to stimulate some sort of fat or calorie burning mechanism in our body or that simply eating less is the factor that makes our bodies burn more calories. I’ll go with option B, since this has been proven that our body burns stored calories more when we reduce our caloric intake.

What is definitely intriguing about this vaccination against obesity is that the effects didn’t just wear off like any other drug. The effects appeared to stay with the mice for years after they were injected.  Not sure if they did this research over several years, but I would hope they did to be able to support that type of sensational claim!

Even more intriguing is how they developed the vaccine. They developed a way to help the body make its own antibodies against the hunger hormone ghrelin. That way, when the body makes more of the hunger producing hormone, the body’s vaccine-made antibodies would attack it and neutralize it, therefore making it powerless.

The translation? Reduced hunger, way less appetite and a much trimmer belly, waistline and all that other good stuff that goes with the ideal body type.  If this worked and did not have any serious side effects, it could definitley blast its way through the weight loss market and become a top seller…

Anorexia Not a Disease of the Mind?

Anorexia nervosa, the disease by which mostly women, very few men, starve their bodies of food, has long been though to be a disorder that is psychiatric in nature. From what I’ve observed, I believe this to be true.  However, there is a new theory that anorexia may not really be phsychologically motivated or intiated, but it may actually be more like a disease such as diabetes.

The controversial theory is that people with anorexia may actually be hard to convince that there is anything wrong with them psychologically because there really isn’t. The contention for this theory is more that it is a metabolic disorder, by which the body does not actually send the signals to the brain that it is hungry.

The motivation of the patient not to eat enough food, or to not eat at all, is not because of some sort of perfectionism or deeply seated psychological issue, but rather from a genuine lack of need for food. I disagree with this, because if this were the case, why don’t we have any anorexic children?

Anorexia always comes into play in adulthood, when we are able to develop psychoses about things, feel insecurities, and to feel the pressure to be perfect, whether it be from ourselves or from others around us.

If you watch a documentary on anorexia, most of the women afflicted with it started off looking very healthy when they were younger. It is only when they developed psychoses for one reason or another, that they stopped eating or greatly reduced the amount of food or even water that they took in.

I highly doubt that anorexia and bulimia were a big deal back when no one cared about weight and the media wasn’t constantly flashing pictures of beautiful, seemingly in control models and actresses in women’s faces 24/7.  In the olden days when your whole body was covered in clothes from head to toe and the only women you may have felt competitive with lived a hundred miles away, it was probably a lot easier to disregard these things about your own body image.

New Appetite Suppressant Patch Info

So, I just wanted to let you know that we have a new page dedicated to an exciting appetite suppression technology that uses the same type of science behind nicotine patches to help you suppress your appetite when dieting.

Nicotine patches work by continuously releasing nicotine into the blood stream, thereby taking away cravings for carcinogenic cigarettes from addicted smokers. This new appetite suppressant patch uses the same principle, only it releases a bunch of herbs and bio-active ingredients into the blood stream on a constant, even basis to reduce your appetite all day long.

The cool thing is, you just put the patch on and go about your day, instead of having to take pills every few hours so that your appetite doesn’t come roaring back twofold, as it often can when you forget to take a dose when you are taking pills.

So, see our new page on the patch for appetite suppression and see if it might be the right weightloss tool for you.

Will SAD Make You Eat More?

I live on the East coast, in northeastern Ohio, and it’s coming to that time of the year where you rarely see sunlight and the temperatures dip down in to the frigid range. When I leave in the morning, it’s dark, when I get home in the evening from work, it’s pitch black already, even thought it’s only dinner time.

This darkness and lack of sunlight exposure and natural light therapy gives rise to what doctors have termed “SAD” or Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is a mild depression and moodiness that is linked to the lack of natural sunlight exposure. We really don’t realize how much the sun does for us until this time of year.

Just to look around, everything is more drab, less appealing to look at. We don’t get the levels of vitamin D in our system from sunlight (UV) exposure either, unless we visit sunbeds in the winter either, and it is thought that lack of vitamin D also adds to this disorder.

There are a few things that go with this mild depression in the winter time. We feel more moody, less upbeat, and usually have less energy if we are affected by SAD. We alos often times tend to want to eat more. We tend to crave things like sweets and carbs, because most likely our seratonin levels are affected.

Seratonin is the natural “feel good” chemical, and when we eat things like chocolate, simple carbs and sugars, we get a temporary boost in our feel good chemicals in our body, only to be let down even harder later on due to the intake of this temporary boost. It also results in a loss of energy after it wear off, giving you that sort of “drop off” that caffeine and other stimulants give when they wear off.

So, what are some of the ways we can keep from stuffing our mouths with every piece of junk food we see, and keep those cravings for pound-adding foods away? Well, first off, you can try a mild, natural appetite suppressant of course. Thinks like hoodia gordonii and other natural appetite killers will do the trick.

You may want to try light therapy, which is said to help cure the moodiness and elevate the mood that is affected by SAD as well. You can try mild natural antidepressants like St. Johns Wort, and use them only according to their label, but those do take a while to kick in.

One of the best ways to kick SAD is to work out. My favorite thing to kick the winter blues is to do an intense workout then get in our infrared sauna afterward. The sauna gives me that affect of being in the warmth of the sun, and it does boost my mood, for whatever reason I’m not sure, but it does!

Happy Thanksgiving One and All!

Well, it’s here. One of the few days of  the year where we can eat with reckless abandon and not feel too guilty about it. Enjoy it while you can, because before you know it, we’ll all be hitting up the appetite suppressants and diet pills and trying to get “back in the saddle” after we inevitably pig out for a month straight during the holidays!

But seriously, enjoy this special time with your family and friends and remember to give thanks for all of the incredible blessings in your life. We are all blessed in different ways, and it’s important to remember that at least once a year – more is better of course!

So enjoy the delicious foods that are laid before you today and remember, there’s always tomorrow to get back into the healthy eating, it’s ok to jump off the wagon for special occasions!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!!!

Chewing Gum as an Appetite Suppressant?

I use chewing gum all the time to distract myself from eating. The reason is, chewing gum helps me get that part of eating out of the way that’s so hard for so many people to control which is this sort of “oral fixation” to be chewing on something. It’s almost like a pastime, chewing is.  I suppose that chewing is soothing somehow, it occupies the mind and the stomach, at least for a bit, and it doesn’t hurt your concentration, in fact, the really silly part is that half the reason I chew gum is so that I can concentrate better!

It’s as if they rhythm and momentum of my chewing gum helps me to make my thoughts and focus more rhythmic. Sounds crazy, but this is why I’m truly a chewing gum addict -especially at work. But I do always chew sugar free gum. I find that it stays soft much longer, whereas the sugary stuff gets stiff and has to be thrown away sooner. Plus sugar free is better for your teeth and gums instead of pounding sugar into it over and over and over.

And what of these appetite suppressing gums that use hoodia to help suppress hunger?  They’re great!  Not only do you get to enjoy the focus-intensive side benefits of chewing gum, but you also get the benefit of a slowly and evenly released dose of hoodia, which is a powerful natural appetite suppressant that helps you to avoid food and minimize your portions.

It can be extremely helpful to losing weight if you’re looking to lose some pounds, or it can also be helpful if you’ve already lost weight and are looking to maintain your svelte figure, and you don’t want to start over doing it on the sweets, salty fatty foods and other diet temptations that hoodia gums can help to ward off.

I like the fact that it’s portable as well, you don’t have to carry around a big bottle of diet pills and have this awkward sort of pause in your day where you have to get your pills out, instead you just pop a piece of gum out and no one even knows that you’re dieting.

Sceletium Tortuosum New Appetite Zapper?

There have been a few natural appetite suppressant sensations over the past decade or so that have caused mass marketing of products containing the “wonder ingredients”.  Hoodia Gordonii and caralluma are two that come to mind. Another which is actually laughable, because although it’s an excellent antioxidant, it has absolutely no merit as a weight loss aid, is acai berry. 

Hoodia definitely helps to dull the appetite though, I’ve actually tried that one.  You have to make sure you buy the right formula and a pure product, but it really can take the edge off of a large appetite.  The latest “wonder ingredient” may be less than a year away from being approved as a dietary supplement. It’s called sceletium tortuosum, quite a mouth full, huh!?

This is a plant that, like hoodia, is found in the remote African desert areas where the San people, who are natives of Africa, live. These same people use this plant as a natural mood elevating remedy as well as a natural appetite suppressant and anxiety relief agent. 

And therein lies the potential edge this particular plant may have over other natural hunger suppressants like hoodia.  Depression, anxiety and constant hunger (which leads to obesity) are some of the biggest challenges we face here in the US today. If a natural substance can address those with any degree of success, then is surely may enjoy great marketing success as well.

Word travels fast about these things. There are millions and millions of people who would love to be able to reduce their appetite naturally, without taking diet drugs, which often come with unsavory side effects. In fact, there were three major disappointments lately in drug company offerings for new and improved weight loss aids. 

They didn’t pass muster with the FDA because their side effects far outweighed the effects they had on any weightloss efforts.  So, if this new plant sceletium tortuosum shows any degree of success in weight loss and appetite suppression efforts in further studies, it’s sure to be an instant hit if it really works on the customers that buy it. 

More to come on this interesting new plant remedy that may address two of the biggest problems we have today. The supplement may be marketed as early as next year, although there is one supplement out there I found, but I’m not sure of it’s purity of effectiveness since there’s so little written on it thus far.

Overcoming Binge Eating

As I sit here writing this, I’ve just crammed a fatty philly steak sub down my throat, along with a few strips of a cheesy garlic bread. It’s football sunday, and although I don’t watch football per se, it’s fun to get together and stuff my face with fattening salty snacks and an indulgently fattening lunch (actually it’s more like lunch/dinner time). 

We all do it once in a while. We’re only human. The key is that you do NOT eat like this most of the time.  It’s only expected that people indulge in their most fattening fantasies once in a while, but the problem with indulging too often is that your body becomes used to the explosive flavor and addictive qualities of a lot of fat, salt and sugar.

Once it becomes used to this, it’s almost like beating an addiction, because once you stop eating like this, your body literally screams for it.  A salad with oil and vinegar dressing? Your body will scream at you an hour after eating for something more “filling”.  A scoop of tuna with a side of asparagus? No way, your body will be asking you for a deluxe pizza after that one. 

Eating indulgently all of the time only begets more eating badly.  It’s a no win situation.  So, it’s important to keep your binges down to a minimum, this way it’s not so hard to get back on the wagon the next day.  You’ve all have  periods where you just kept on going and going with your binge eating.  This is exactly how people suddenly look at the scale one day and realize they are way over their ideal weight.

At that point, it’s usually harder to get it off because you are older and more likely to retain weight in the first place. Oh yes, you cannot binge like you used to when you were younger and keep it off, it just doesn’t work that way. 

If you’ve binged really badly on the weekend.  Try to start off your day on Monday with a great natural appetite suppressant so that you have an extra “oomph” behind your willpower to eat right that day.  Some natural appetite suppressants will also help you with cravings for sugar, fat and salt as well, so they are a great way to start the day right after your body has become accustomed, albeit short termed, to eating such rich and fattening fare.