Weight Loss

An Apple a Day Takes on a New Meaning If You’re Dieting

I have to admit, I have a love/hate relationship with apples.  I usually have to be in a very specific mood to actually want to consume an apple.  When I am, they taste delicious, and nothing else but their taut, firm skin and juicy inside will do to suppress your hunger.  However, if I’m not in the mood, and more specifically, if the apple is nor organic and of a variety that I really like, then I pretty much have to force myself to gag the apple down, knowing that it’s one of the healthiest, most portable snacks I can possibly put in my body.

That’s why it’s so challenging to eat healthy all the time though. Our bodies naturally crave crap, to put it simply. And, when we’ve been on a crap bender, eating whatever we want for days or weeks at a time, and then have to get back in the habit of eating healthy snacks like apples instead of something like say, chips and dip, then our bodies naturally rebel. Quite simply, we have grown used to the chemicals, the fats and sugars in all the processed and fattening foods, and our bodies go through nothing other than what I can describe as withdrawal.

These are the times when it’s all the much more important to reaquaint yourself with the apple. Not only does it help cleanse out all the bad stuff you were eating, but it gradually gets your body used to the natural sugars again, and how wonderful they can taste once you’ve gotten all the processed cravings out of your system.

Apples contain so many good things for you body, but I will tell you that I only recommend the organic variety. Apples are sprayed with chemical pesticides a lot if they are not organic. They are also irradiated to preserve freshness longer. I can tell you that both of these processes not only rob the apple of some of it’s nutrients, but they also completely ruin it’s flavor, in my opinion. If you don’t believe me, try a fresh, organic apple as opposed to a regular old grocery store produce section non organic apple, and you tell me.  You should notice quite a difference in texture and flavor that will leave you appreciation the apples’ naturally light sweetness and delicate flavor much more fervently!

Apples contain tons of fiber. Wanna get regular?  Eat apples!  They contain a special fiber called pectin that has been thought to really help dieters even more because it is so filling and cleansing to the digestive tract.  Apples have actually been pegged as an excellent food to eat in the morning because they supposedly help you to wake up!  They are low calorie, with a larger apple clocking in at about 60 to 80 calories, every bit usable and beneficial to your body.

Apples also contain some powerful antioxidants that not only help to fight free radicals but also help in the anti aging fight by keeping cells healthy longer and tissues more supple and healthy.  They also contain flavanoids, which are excellent for the body.  I like them most because they are super filling. I can eat a half an apple after dinner and it totally makes me full for hours longer than if I had just eaten dinner with no apple “dessert”.  They are truly the dieters friend – and the person who watches their weight would be smart to add these to their repertoire.

In Dieting, It’s Better to Have a Partner

I’m writing this, thinking about how much easier it is for me, personally, to diet and lose weight, when my husband is 100% on board with me.  The reason is that I do a lot of the cooking in the house, but we both do the grocery shopping, and it’s awfully hard to keep the cupboards free of non weight friendly items like tons of processed, starchy, sugary and fatty foods, when your partner is not on the same wavelength as you, and you find yourself staring at the fruits of his shopping endeavors, drooling and tempted to take a cookie instead of an apple, or something like that.

I find that when we’re both on board, we foster almost a friendly competition as well, and although when he is laser focused on losing weight, since he’s a man, he tends to drop the weight a lot quicker than I do (damn him!), I find it really fun when we are comparing notes on what the scale said and whether or not we worked out that day, and having that little bit of friendly competition going on, especially when I’m winning – hey  didn’t say I was always the best sport, did I!?

At any rate, it’s so easy to fall prey to the group mentality. For example, if he says “oh screw it, let’s order pizza for dinner”, I’m apt to think the same way and dismiss it as “well, if he’s willing to not lose the weight as quickly, then it’s ok if I do the same”.  I mean, after all, we’re married, and I suppose that growing heavier or thinner together is ok, but that’s not really what my mind tells me, it tells me that we should both be healthy and live as long as we can for eachother.  However, as we all know, your belly’s cravings can often win out over your mind’s power of persuasion.

However, don’t let me fool you into thinking I’m always the angel. There are plenty of times where I just don’t feel like cooking, or maybe I’ve been PMS’ing and really want McDonalds and chocolate, and so I bring that home or suggest it. And he rarely refuses me either, so there we are both setting eachother back. But when we’re on a real weightloss jag, we spur eachother on, and we don’t let the other one go when they’ve screwed up, so it’s kind of an incentive to not screw up and to lose the weight quickly, otherwise, you are kind of embarrassed at getting reprimanded about messing up and eating the wrong thing or falling off the wagon. See, marriage is good for dieting – but you both have to be on the same page with the goals!

Can a “Cheat Day” Help You Attain Weight Loss Goals?

More and more diet plans and weight loss programs are calling for the infamous “one day cheat” allowance, which allows the dieter to have one single day where they can cheat and eat whatever they want. Many people choose to make this day a Saturday or Sunday, simply because that may have been their worst eating day to begin with.

I know that the Body for Life plan calls for a cheat day, and I’ve been hearing more and more of the diet plans that are out there allowing this as well, most notably in my recent diet book history being the Fat Smash Diet, where you eat a lot of whole grains and a little bit of protein during the week with lots of veggies and fiber, and then you get your one cheat day on the weekend.

I remember how much my then boyfriend, now husband, and I used to look forward to those once a week luxuries. We reveled in it actually. The funny thing is, you’d think we would stuff ourselves to the gills and sabotage our weight loss goals, but we really didn’t over do it, we just made sure we got to eat what we really felt like eating.

So say if I had a nasty craving for pizza with the works, or maybe for a big greasy cheeseburger and french fries or onion rings, I would make sure I had that on my one cheat day, and that made me feel like I could always go for one week – heck, what’s one week – before I got to eat what my heart’s desire was for that previous week. When you think about it that way, dieting feels less like deprivation and more like something that mere mortals are not only perfectly capable of, but that in the end, we actually may enjoy our bad food even more.

As long as you don’t totally go overboard and consume five thousand calories or something like that, and you make sure you don’t let the bad eating spill over into the next day, or that nex and the next and so on and so forth, then you are perfectly ok to do one cheat day a week when following a diet. I think it actually helps you stick to the diet more readily, and it definitely makes life a little more interesting on the weekends.

The really cool part is that you almost forget how good really tasty, fattening or sugar foods taste, and when you do finally taste them again, it’s like a flavor explosion in your mouth, it’s like tasting food for the first time again, and that gives you a whole new appreciation for good food.

Regrouping After Pig Outs

Man, is it hard to get back into the swing of things after you go on vacation, when considering your diet. My now husband and I typically eat a pretty healthy diet, but we also enjoy a little gluttony in fattening, salty and sugary foods that are a diet no no as well. Hey, what can I say?

We love food in general, and we find that eating a variety of foods is fun and makes life more interesting instead of always denying yourself the pleasure of indulgence. While that may not be the best attitude for our waistlines, and admittedly we do tend to fluctuate between certain weights a lot, it’s a simple fact of life for us.

As long as you can always reign it back in after you have a bad day or a bad couple of days is the key to maintaining a somewhat healthy weight and maintaining that weight. If you start going on multi-week or month pig out periods though, that’s when you know, you have some serious recalibrations to do when it comes to your mental state and also to the foods that you’ve become chemically accustomed too.

After all, it’s not just all psychological, when you pig out for a period of time, your body becomes accustomed to heavier tastes, and when you begin to eat healthy again, it can naturally rebel against what tastes like more bland food, craving things that have more flavor, and resulting in a misstep or two.

One of the ways I like to get back in the groove is listen to one of the self hypnosis cd’s for weightloss that I have. These can really dig into your subconscious mind and help you to overcome those cravings and desires for fattening and weight gaining foods. They attack the desires at a level where you don’t even necessarily understand what’s happening.

After I listen to these cd’s, I have a renewed commitment to myself and to my body, and it makes me understand again, on a deeper level, that eating badly is actually an act of contrition against my body, which is my “temple” so to speak. It really reinforces being kind to yourself and treating your body right on a deep, subconscious level that cannot be easily altered.

I also like to try to focus on things in my life other than food. I try to laser focus on my outside interests and my job, for instance, so that food takes a backseat to the truly more important things in life, and I actually find myself being more productive. You’d be amazed with what just taking the focus off food can do for your creativity and productivity, that alone is a huge incentive to get off the pigout wagon and get back on the track of eating right for your body and mind.

The Lean Cuisine Diet

I must say that I wasn’t really always a fan of promoting prepackaged meals, with what I felt was inferior nutrition, tiny microscopic portions, and high sodium. However, when you add some healthy sides to a Lean Cuisine, or other prepackaged frozen premade meal that is low in calories and fat, you have a perfectly potioned meal that is ideal if you are trying to lose weight.

My fiance and I have lost a lot of weight together eating this way when we’re dieting to actively lose weight, and you can too, but it does take discipline, as you are a bit hungry when you’re done, especially after dinner, when it’s most important that you don’t pig out, but this is also many times the time of day we choose to eat the most, and it’s hard to break that habit.

If you can break that habit, and eat a healthy breakfast of your choice, and just eat Lean Cuisines, Healthy Choice frozen entrees, or Smart Ones or some other comparable weight watching frozen meal, and add foods to it so that the meals total around 500 calories, you’d be surprised how fulfilling they can be. It’s especially nice because you can still eat foods that feel “naughty” like lasagna and eggrolls, just be aware that you need to pick the most filling foods for their nutrition and calorie content to be successful with this method of dieting so you stick to it without starving yourself.

When we follow this easy, somewhat inexpensive diet, we usually will steam some broccoli or asparagus to go with the meals for lunch and dinner. If you try to eat them without supplementing with yoru own steamed veggies, you won’t be full, I can almost guarantee that. My fiance also uses the trick of filling up more with a diet soda. I’m not crazy about the health aspect of diet soda, but the bubbles do fill you up more, so you could even try a seltzer water if you’re concerned with the artificial sweeteners.

Like I mentioned earlier, the key to success with this kind of diet is to supplement with plenty of fibrous veggies, to fill you up and add the much needed nutrition and vitamins and fiber that I feel most frozen meals are lacking. I always load up at breakfast and eat about a 450-500 calorie breakfast to prepare me for a day of eating low calorie meals, and that seems to set the stage well for eating a low-fuel diet all day.

This kind of diet is highly successful as long as you follow the rules and also don’t yield to the temptation of overeating at dinner. Fill up on water at dinner to help maintain satiety until you go to bed. You’ll feel pounds lighter in the morning, I can assure you! It’s easy, it’s quick, and minimum hassle, especially if you work two jobs like me!

High Fiber Diet Key to Permanent Weight Loss

Did you know that on average, most Americans are almost a full ten grams short of getting the recommended daily allowance of dietary fiber in their diet? That’s really alarming, considering that fiber is what fills us up and what makes foods whole and satisfying to eat. It’s also a huge key to regulating your blood sugar and making sure that you “stay regular”, which helps you to regulate your weight and keep the pounds off after you lose initial weight. I know I myself probably come up short during the day in my fiber intake, so if I do, I really try to make sure I make up for it with dinner by eating mostly vegetables, a little bit of meat, and a big salad with dark leaves, like spinach instead of iceberg lettuce.

Studies have actually proven that people with high fiber diets keep weight off longer and also lose more weight initially when they are going through the weight loss process. To the tune of 2 to 3 more pounds, which is nothing to sneeze at! I read once that we are actually subconsciously drawn to high fiber foods because nature has made them brightly colored, like fruits and veggies that are high in vitamins, antioxidants and fiber such as blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and grapes.

Also, whole grains are tasty, giving us that hankering we get for refined carbs, without all that refined sugar, and with a lot of dietary fiber to boot, which – you guessed it, fills the belly and helps regulate the blood sugar for a longer period of time than those foods without the fiber content. They also are easier for the body to get rid of the food – as in to not clog up the colon and the intestines, which can add pounds on and build up toxins in the body.

The reason that it’s called “roughage” or bulk is because it actually acts as a bulking agent for your waste (ie bowel movements), and makes it easier for the body to process and get rid of it. Foods that have zero fiber need to be counteracted by a lot of water and by eating other foods with a high fiber content in between so that your body can process and eliminate these foods, as well as digest them properly, which helps you to absorb nutrients and vitamins better and contributes to your overall health and well being.

Is Grapefruit Really a Good Diet Food?

I remember being a small child and even hearing about the wonders of grapefruit when it came to weight loss. It was all the rage. Dieters went to the stores and bought grapefruits by the droves. There were diets dedicated to grapefruit, where all the dieter ate was grapefruit for several consecutive days, supposedly boosting their fat burning capabilities and flushing toxins out of the bodies. There was also a particular diet that was used in hospitals where a person drank grapefruit juice with their protein in the morning, supposedly helping to enhance their fat burning abilities for the rest of the day.

So, is grapefruit really some miracle weight loss food, or is this all a bunch of hype, like a lot of other things in the diet and weight loss arena? Well, it turns out that grapefruit is really good for you, and may be a great diet food as well. The reason is a natural compound/chemical found in grapefruit (but also found in other fruits, it’s just in grapefruit in a fairly high concentration), called pectin. Pectin is believe to enhance the fat burning capability of the body, hence the diet craze over grapefruit.

If you’ll notice, grapefruit’s reputation as a great diet food has largely gone over the hill now, being replaced by other food fads such as the acai berry, which by the way has very little evidence of being anything other than a very powerful antioxidant, which is great, but how great for weight loss? Other foods that have replaced the grapefruit as a great diet food are almonds, which contain protein and omega 3’s and are touted as a great natural appetite suppressant since they lead to a greater sense of fullness and satiety.

Also in the good diet food arena today are foods like spinach, kale, low fat dairy products like yogurt, egg whites, and lettuce, all of which contain whole nutrients that help you keep full, whether by way of protein or fiber. Grapefruit is still a very healthful food to eat, I just wouldn’t count on it as a weight loss method.

Jillian Michaels Master Your Metabolism Book Is Out

Jillian Michaels, who seems to become more and more popular as time goes by, has come out with another book on blasting away fat and helping people lose weight who have not responded to their liking when dieting and eating healthier. The book, Master Your Metabolism, is all about how the current American diet, which is rich in processed foods and a lot of chemical additives, is mostly about going organic and eating unprocessed, whole foods in order that your body may restore it’s natural hormone balance that helps it to achieve it’s ideal weight and weight maintenance.

She really advocates an organic diet that is high in unprocessed foods like organic fruits and veggies, and stresses the importance of vitamin C since it is a powerful antidote against a stress hormone called cortisol, which has been strongly linked to weight gain. She also talks about how getting enough sleep every night is extremely important because of the hormones it helps to both stimulate helpful hormones and supress the unhealthful ones that are counterproductive to your weight goals.

She says that when you sleep at night you produce the most HGH, which is human growth hormone, the hormone that keeps us lean and healthy in our younger years and tails off toward our later years, which accounts for more body fat and less muscle tone. Using HGH to lose weight is to your advantage because it helps to build muscle while helping to suppress fat production.

For example, she says that sleeping helps you produce a hormone called leptin which helps you feel fuller. The reason you feel ravenous all day after not sleeping enough is because your body has not produced enough of this natural chemical. Also she says sleep helps you to supress the production of cortisol, which helps in your weight goals as well. However, although she points out a lot of helpful and educational anecdotes and facts about why certain things are important in your diet and other things are counterproductive, she really advocates the organic, whole foods and seems to feel that processed foods are majorly responsible for a lot of the obesity and inadequate metabolisms.

I love to be educated on things like this, so this would be a book for me. I think it says a lot of things that some people may not know, but someone who is savvy in how to eat for optimum health may feel that some of it is repetitive. As always, her book is competitively priced, just like her workout dvd’s, which is always appreciated, and something that I feel is really important because she is making this information available to people who really need it. She’s extremely motivational, and I still love her workout videos too.

Celsius Soft Drink Increase Metabolism?

There are TONS of diet products, fat loss supplements (fat burners), appetite suppressants and weight loss supplements on the market today. There are also now beverages that claim they can help you to lose weight by helping to boost the metabolism and energy levels.

One of the newer products on the market today to help ramp up your metabolism and burn more calories is the Celsius beverages. Celsius is a flavored, calorie burning sparkling beverage. Through clinical studies, it was found that a 12 oz. serving of Celsius raised metabolism and burned calories faster and increased levels of alertness and energy.

According to these studies, one serving of Celsius raised metabolism by 12%, on average and burned up to 100 calories. Celsius is designed for people who like the taste of a soft drink and want the energy boost of coffee and energy drinks.

Celsius will not give you the nervousness associated with coffee and energy drinks. Celsius ingredients include green tea, ginger, calcium, chromium, B and C vitamins and caffeine from the guarana seed. Celsius does not contain preservatives, sugar, aspartame or carbs.

Scientifically, Celsius is loaded with thermogenic agents to boost your metabolism. thermogenesis is the creation of heat, which is how we burn calories. In a series of clinical trials, Celsius consistently raised metabolisms. One of the studies looked at prolonged use of Celsius and found no negative health indicators and continuous boosting of calorie burning ability.

Celsius comes in a variety of flavors including lemon-lime, ginger-ale, cola, orange, wild berry, green tea rasberry acai and green tea peach mango. The Celsius recipe includes a blend of nutrients, vitamins, minerals and botanicals. Celsius sells online for a price of about $48.00 for a case of 24, or an average of about $2.00 per 12 oz. can.

Watch Those Coffee Calories

It occurred to  me, when I started dieting about three months ago to take off about ten to fifteen excess pounds that had been haunting me after the loooong holiday season I’d indulged in for 2008, that my morning coffee may be packing more calories than I thought, or at least that my morning coffee, which only consisted of one cup, may be setting me up for a day of diet sabotage right from the beginning, not just because of any additional sugars or carbs I was taking in that had no nutritional or “burn off” value, but also because of a little know fact about coffee and caffeinated products that may sabotage a lot of people’s weight loss efforts, especially if you drink a lot of it.

My initial concern though, was that the extra sugar and calorie intake may b ehurting my diet and weight loss endeavors.  I thought that even though they say coffee is a natural appetite suppressant for some, even though it may slightly suppress the appetite WHILE you’re drinking it, it may actually increase you appetite immediately afterwards, even more so than if you hadn’t drank it at all, making you want bad foods, and lots of calories all day long.  Turns out I’m sort of right about that, but it really depends on the person .

And  by the way,  I still have my one cup many times in the morning, but I do skip it a few days a week, in interest of saving my skin which doesn’t react well to lots of caffeine, and I’ve still lost ten pounds, although I do wonder if I may have lost more if I hadn’t indulged in that cup several times a week, it seems petty to worry about every single little life pleasure if it isn’t impacting you too terribly.

Coffee, and other caffeinated products, it turns out, actually raise the levels of cortisol in the blood stream.  Actually, most stimulant type products do this.  This raising level of cortisol is counterproductive to weight loss, since cortisol is a major reason behind fat storage and additional calorie intake, since this stress hormone actually makes us more hungry believe it or not.  So, the sugar and extra calories really have less bearing on your weight than the cortisol content and the effects on the stress hormones that coffee may have.

However, if you’re one of those people who loves to load up your morning coffee with sweet syrups, lots of sugar, or full fat heavy creams that contain a lot of fat content as well as calorie density due their richness and thickness.  Also beware those “lattes” and foofoo coffee drinks.  Many of those machiatoes and other sugary drinks that you see that taste fantastic and like a dessert at Starbucks or your other local coffee shop can pack up to 500 calories and lots of fat and sugar.  I can think of a lot of actual food items I’d rather eat than drinking 500 calories, I know that!