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Originally posted 2009-08-22 17:30:57. Republished by Old Post Promoter
Does a low carb diet actually work or can it potentially be harmful to you? People who have followed a low carb diet have seen successful results. However, these individuals quickly regained their weight after stopping the diet. This should not be surprising to anyone since no specific diet will work for everyone. Let me go into detail on a few facts and difference of opinion with medical experts out there.
When we think about a low carb diet we draw a conclusion that people are eating an unhealthy diet with no fruits or vegetables and people are following a high fat pork and bacon concept since the popular Atkin’s diet was introduced. Most will validate that this is only promoting heart disease and a short life span for everyone. Now, let me address a few points about low carb diets so you can make your own decision.
1. Researchers have stated that a low carb diet has improved people with high blood pressure and individuals who are diabetic.
2. People think that low carb diets discourage people with eating fruits or vegetables. A matter of fact, fruits or vegetables are the carbohydrates eaten when on a low carb diet.
3. Low carb is often considered no carb with most people. However, most authors have never stated to stay on a low carb diet but temporary for 1-2 weeks the most.
4. I believe the carbohydrate intake should be adjusted to that specific person.
5. A low carb diet will include inadequate amount of fiber. On the contrary and there are low carb foods high in fiber.
Foods that are referred to low empty carbs are foods not rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber, and other nutrients to make us healthier. Often people follow the quick results of a successful high fat and low carb plan. However, you will regain the weight quickly after you stop the low carb diet. The sensible choice or an adequate plan should consist of lean meats, low fat, healthy fats such as olives, avocados, nuts, and fatty fish. Results will promote more of a successful weight loss .
My thoughts and beliefs on a low carb diet would conclude it to be healthy or unhealthy depending on that person. What I mean is it depends if that person is selecting the right foods going into their body. Does that suggest we eat all beef, meat, or eggs with no fruits or vegetables in our diet? My approach is that you still need to include vegetables like broccoli, spinach, asparagus, leafy greens that contain phytonutrients or fiber that is important for everyone. When following a low carb diet it should include enriched foods rather than hot dogs, bacon, or pork as your protein intake. Choosing the correct foods is the key and eating reasonably through out the day that includes protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates.
The most important question you need to ask yourself is “am i willing to make a permanent change in my lifestyle”? Making a diet change permanent is following a healthy diet. No diet out there will last if you are not ready to make those changes for yourself. When it comes down to it, the people who are successful or achieving a balanced weight have not only followed a healthy diet but included exercising in their life. So, what kind of exercise routine should I follow? Well lets leave that for another author since its time for me to grab a nutritious meal!
Originally posted 2009-10-20 21:30:25. Republished by Old Post Promoter
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Originally posted 2009-08-22 17:30:57. Republished by Old Post Promoter
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I have struggled with my weight since my early 20’s. I think I have tried just about every diet out there. I hate the word “diet”, I hate the way a diet can consume a person’s life and make them into some sort of animal. I don’t think anyone should diet. I believe a lifestyle change is what is needed. But if a diet plan can help you achieve a new lifestyle than find what works for you and stick with it!
Follow these simple steps and the perfect lifestyle could be right around the corner.
1. Be honest with yourself How much weight do you need to lose? And how far are you willing to go to achieve your goal?
2. Research This may be an overwhelming experience as there are so many options available to you, but it is important to explore your options and find the right diet to suit your lifestyle. I have listed a few popular plans below, but there are many more options available.
a. E-Diets an online diet support site that will help match you up with a diet suited to your lifestyle. This site assists you with a weekly meal plan and shopping list. If you are new to dieting or would like online support this is a valuable resource this is where I found my new lifestyle with the Bill Philips eating for life plan! It has me eating 6 small meals a day, with a free day on Sunday!
b. Weight Watchers Many people have had tremendous success with this diet plan. They have two plans built to suit your lifestyle “flexible points plan” and the “no counting plan”. They also have online support and meetings in most communities.
c. Jenny Craig You have probably seen the commercials advertisements on TV boasting the success of this program. They offer personal coaching both at home over the phone, or in person at your local office. One of the drawbacks of this program is the cost of the food, but if you enjoy having your meals all prepared and pre measured for you this may be the ideal diet for you.
d. Southbeach Diet A 3 phase diet plan that emphasises on weight loss, re-introduction of healthy carbs, and finally a maintenance stage.
e. Atkins The Atkins diet is a low carb diet that consists of four phases, Induction, Ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance, and maintenance. Many people claim fantastic results being on the Atkins diet.
3. Talk to your family doctor Many people forget this step. It is important to speak with your doctor before starting any diet plan, especially if it entails cutting out any food group.
4. Be true to yourself Do not let magazines tell you how to look. If you want to lose weight for yourself or for your health great! But do not let a diet control your life, make you depressed or make you forget who you are.
It is very important while trying to lose weight through dieting that you pick a diet that you can actually live with. Most diets focus purely on eliminating harmful things from your diet, but neglect to address your relationship with certain foods as well. The better you understand yourself, the more sucessfull your weight loss attempt will be.
The truth is, there are certain diets that will definitely cause you to lose a lot of weight. But if the only thing that you are allowed to eat is seaweed soup or crackers, how long are you realistically going to stay on that diet? One of the most common things that causes people to “fall off” a diet are the strict restrictions – things that you are completely not allowed to eat.
If the diet restricts or bans your favorite food, or a food that you crave, it will be a negative thing to be on a diet, not a positive attitue that you get towards food. Even if th diet does cause you to lose weight, you may gain the weight back when you go back to your normal eating habits and behaviors.Your attitude will slip, confidence will be down, and then you will loose steam in your fight to lose weight.
Try to choose a diet that you can integrate into your lifestyle, so that it will not be a temporary facet, but a set of new habits that you will develop for future heatlhy eating.
Another common pitfall is crash dieting. If you decide, suddenly, that you are going to leap into a diet, your body won’t have time to adjust to it. If you’re limiting calories, start gradually. If you are used to consuming a lot of food in a day, you will feel nothing but hungry and cranky if all you allow yourself to eat are a couple of crackers. Everything in moderation. The best way to diet without jumping on a fad is to simply limit your caloric intake, and pair this with exercise to burn more than you take in.
The best way to curb snacking and cheating on a diet is to remove the tempting food items from your house. It is similar to a smoker trying to quit who throws out all his/her cigarettes. If you have a craving or if you are hungry, you should eat or you will only get hungrier and seek junk food. But if your house is filled only with healthy snacks, you can satisfy your hunger without undoing your hard work.
The other thing that you should avoid while dieting is “catching up” dieting. When you say, you have had less food than you are allowed to eat per your diet in a day, it is easy to justify breaking your diet later. Also, if you do binge
There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of diet plans available on the market today. You may even be working on one prescribed by your physician. In my opinion, any sensible diet that does not demand extremes in food limits, such as starvation diets, and emphasizes a well-balanced approach to reducing calorie intake and increasing the expenditure of calories (via exercise), is workable. If you have a specific medical condition, such as hyperthyroidism or diabetes, than of course you need to be working under a doctor’s diet, specifically designed for you and your condition.
The important thing, I believe, is for you to find a diet you are comfortable with, and that you can sustain as a way of life. Jumping from one diet to the next may be good for the booksellers and packaged food diet plans, but it is rarely effective in helping you to actually lose weight. Based on my experience, a whole grain diet is a sensible diet, it is easy to use, and allows a broad range of natural foods recognized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health as essential to a healthy diet.
Here is the skinny on my weight loss, which you may or may not like to hear. Short of a specific medical condition, as I mentioned earlier, weight loss is a function of expending more calories than you consume. You can do this in any one of three ways:
1. Increase the amount of calories your body burns through regular exercise.
2. Decrease the amount of calories you eat.
3. Attack weight loss by both eating less and exercising more.
Every thing else you read or hear about dieting is a variation or elaboration of these three key points.
Additionally, I learned that successful dieters are patient dieters. It took ten years of binge eating and neglect for me to accumulate over 90 pounds in excess weight. But when I started my diet, I wanted the fat off immediatelythat Thursday would have been fine. Sadly, it didn’t happen as I planned. It took 18 months of consistent, deliberate work. On a positive note, however, I felt the difference in my energy level and self-esteem within one week of diligently adhering to my diet. And as you will learn, it’s these small rewards of confidence and new energy that you will begin to feed on as you adapt to a new lifestyle.
There was no magical pill, ointment, food product, or ingenious piece of home exercise equipment that helped me along. In fact, I would still like my $39 back for that abdominal workout gizmo that tightened my love handles, but did not help me to lose a single pound. Make patience the first ingredient in your successful diet recipe book, and forget the gimmicks.
The Atkins diet is one of the most enduring and widespread diet fads in recent memory. Unlike many others though, the Atkins diet has gained a foothold and has become entrenched in our culture, as witnessed by the proliferation of “Low Carb” choices on menus and in supermarkets. But does it work? Over the short and medium term if followed stringently, yes the Atkins diet can produce weight loss. But before adhering to this diet, it’s important to understand the pros and cons of this weight loss program.
The Atkins diet is based on the supposition that carbohydrates are the cause of weight gain, and elimination (or extreme deprivation) of carbohydrates from your diet will cause you to lose weight. Adherents to the diet eat a large amount of meat, dairy, and other high fat yet carbohydrate free foods. But at what cost to their long term health?
Numerous studies have shown links between the intake of fats, saturated fats, and red meat to copious health problems including heart disease, atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries), and other circulatory system ailments. Instead of the Atkins diet (or any diet for that matter), consider focusing on making long term healthy lifestyle changes including a well balanced diet, regular exercise, and moderation.
A well balanced diet should be full of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, high in fiber, and low in fats, processed foods, and fatty meats. Consult the USDA food pyramid (www.mypyramid.gov) for a visual reminder of the proper amounts of servings of each of the food groups. Remember that the suggested daily allowance of meat is 6 ounces, and 3 ounces of beef is about the size of pack of playing cards. Next time you have a 16 ounce steak for dinner, consider that you’re eating almost three days worth of meat!
Regular exercise is also vitally important to good long term health. You should be getting 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity five days a week. This can be easier than you think take a walk on your lunch break, or after work with your spouse/kids, join an adult sports league, join a gym (and use it!), or take up a new outdoor activity like hiking or bicycling.
You can still enjoy fattening decadent things, but do so in moderation. Split that dessert with your dinner companion, have only half a slice of cake, allow yourself some ice cream after you’ve walked three miles. Moderation also should apply to alcohol as well, a drink or two a day is fine, but much more than that is probably excessive.
It’s up to you to decide if you want to hop on the Atkins diet bandwagon, or start making healthy lifestyle changes now, that will involve some sacrifice, but will give you a greater quality of life for many years to come. Ask yourself which makes more intuitive sense- The concept that all carbs are evil and you should eat a diet high in fats, meats, and cheese? Or eating a diet full of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and fiber, while exercising regularly and still enjoying things, only in moderation? Don’t hop on that diet bandwagon, you’re smarter than that.
The Atkins Diet is targeted around a balance of carbohydrates and proteins. The Atkins diet, was developed, based on the premise, that the majority of overweight individuals are so, because they are living on high carbohydrate fast food diets. they eat too much sugar… Basically they are filling their bodies with fast food and are becoming carbohydrate junkies.
The correct balance of proteins and healthy carbs, such as the protein found in chicken, Salmon, mushrooms and avocados and the carbs one finds in dark leafy green vegetables, leads to a decrease in unhealthy sugar cravings. Sugar is essentially dead food and turns to starch in the body, this ’starchy fat’ leads to weight gain. The same that can be said for refined sugar, can be said for refined flour, both foods plump the body up; into unwholesome shapes.
The reason that refined sugars and flours are so deleterious to the human body, is because we have not evolved a digestive system that can handle them. We only started farming late on in our evolution. There is therefore a mismatch between our digestive system and what we now eat. We evolved on the plains as long distance running animals and would eat meat and the occasional berries of trees and just a few wild plants. Refined foods such as flour and sugar are a ‘man-made invention’ that do not exist in nature, we quite simply, have not adapted biologically to handle these food stuffs.
Problems have been associated with the Atkins Diet and claim has been made, that the Atkins Diet is not safe, if not combined with a strict exercise routine. The Atkins Diet has been linked with heart problems. But then again, one could say that a high carbohydrate, junk food ‘diet’ is not particularly safe either.
Another diet, very similar in many ways to the Atkins Diet is The Zone Diet, developed by Dr. Barry Sears. This is considered to be a safer diet than that of Atkins and indeed, Sears, takes a much more scientific approach.
Basically, how both the Atkins Diet and Sears Diets appear to work, is simply because the body cannot digest a lot of protein, without very quickly feeling ‘full-up’. The opposite of course can be said of carbohydrates, indeed, I’m sure everyone reading this has at one time or another, ate a whole packet of cookies in one sitting and still felt hungry afterwords. If you combine a high ratio of protein in your diet, you stomach ‘fills-up’ very quickly and this counters and stops the sugar cravings. This limit on junk foods, leads to weight loss.
Carbohydrates are not unhealthy per se… Indeed, the human body needs a percentage of carbohydrate. But there are good and bad carbs. The healthy carbs are those found in dark leafy vegetables. We have evolved to break down the enzymes within the ‘primitive’ carbohydrates, but the carbs in refined sugars and flours ‘knot’ together and do not easily breakdown in the body, instead an accumulation of starchy fat build up and leads to weight gain.
The main criticism that one can make of the Atkins Diet is that it is not combined with a fitness regime and many scientists do now believe that the Atkins Diet is unsafe, if not combined with a good anaerobic program that gets the heart rate working, such as running or brisk walking. The other minor ‘by-product’ of the Atkins Diet, is that it makes one smell and not a pleasant smell either.
The Paleo Diet takes a look at the history of human nutrition, the factors that caused the major changes in the human diet, and the health effects that have resulted from those changes. The Paleo Diet looks at the hunter-gather stages of human history and the diets that accompanied such Paleolithic / stone age life styles. The Paleo DietxxtccxxJun 27 2006 17:00Been doing this diet for 3 weeks now, anyone else doing it. The Paleo diet contained much more vitamin C, B vitamins, fiber, iron, zinc, folate and essential fatty acids and less sugar, salt and saturated fats than the modern day diet does.
Paleolithic
Today more than 70% of our dietary calories come from foods that our Paleolithic (Stone Age) ancestors rarely, if ever, ate. He greases his Paleolithic pot with canola oil, the kind his elders recommend. And, because he doesn’t have any sugar, he washes down his Paleolithic meal with. In fact, the one thing Paleolithic Peter would never have eaten was a skinless chicken breast. He says that Paleolithic peoples had no carbohydrate foods like grains or starchy root foods-never mind reports of grains found in the fire ashes of some of the earliest human groups, or the widespread use of tubers among primitive peoples, usually fermented or slow cooked. The Paleolithic diet, also known as the caveman diet, paleo diet, prehistoric diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet, is the diet of wild plants and animals that various human species (see Homo (genus)) habitually consumed during the Paleolithic period (the Old Stone Age), a period of about 2 million years duration, ending about 10,000 years ago, when our species, Homo sapiens, invented agriculture.
Carb
As humans became less nomadic and more dependent on high-carbohydrate diets, we left behind the diet we had evolved with, which is based on low-fat proteins and plenty of fruits and vegetables. This is spectacularly wrong-any plant-based diet that centers on dark leafy greens rather than whole grains will provide more of everything (except B12) with fewer calories, more fiber, more good carbohydrate, and less saturated fat, in a way that is more health-promoting, and will result in much better blood lipid profiles and is far more likely to reduce incidence of certain types of cancers. “This trend of ‘carbo-loading’ has caused a detrimental shift away from quality, fresh foods and has had negative consequences on health, an athlete’s capacity for recovery and the subsequent quality
