When looking for a weight loss diet, health is one of the primary considerations. And that applies not only to the consequences for your health if you don’t go on a diet, but also to how healthy your planned diet actually it. It is easy to become confused, as we are constantly bombarded with different viewpoints on which weight loss diet is best, and many of those views are contradictory. Low carb, low calorie, low fat, high protein, low protein – and so it continues. And if weight loss diets actually work, why is there a constant need for new ones? And why do so many people who try them fail, often ending up putting on more weight than they lost?

If you are seriously overweight, your health will eventually suffer, in fact, you may already be experiencing some of the unpleasant side effects of carrying too much weight. If you continue to overeat, these can only get worse, putting you at risk of diabetes, which can also affect your eyes and kidneys, heart attack, cancer, liver disease and a whole range of other conditions. In fact, obesity is the second major cause of preventable deaths in the US. Not only that, obesity is limiting life expectancy to the extent that many of today’s young people are expected to die before their parents, which is a chilling thought.

However, embarking on an over-strict diet is not the answer, as quick weight loss can have serious side effects, not least being the effect it has on your metabolism. If you restrict your calorific intake too drastically you may lose weight quickly at first, but eventually your body will adjust and your basal metabolic rate will drop. So you’ll need to eat even less to lose weight. It is unlikely that you’ll be able to keep this up for long and so you’ll end up putting the weight back on. However, if you do keep up a very low calorie diet for an extended period, your body will be malnourished and thus open to another set of problems related to malnutrition. Yes, an increasing number of people in the West are suffering from malnutrition, not because they don’t get enough to eat, but because they are not getting the nutrients they require. This can be the result of eating only junk food or it can stem from following a weight loss diet which does not encourage eating balanced meals.

So if you need a weight loss diet health must be a primary consideration. It is therefore important that you seek the advice of a doctor or dietician.

© Waller Jamison 2007

Kick start your weight loss with a New Weight Loss Strategy every week. No time for exercise? Here are some Fat Burning Moves You Can Do at Your Desk

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The question most asked, “What should I eat for weight loss, optimum health, and energy?

Eat everything you love, as long as it has a “Bright Color”!

Instead of focusing on what you should NOT eat, focus on all the fabulous things you CAN eat that are good for you! My patients ask me “what is the best thing to do for weight loss, optimum health, and energy?” When I tell them to stop eating wheat, wheat products, dairy, and all refined sugar and sugar products, they look at me and ask, “What should I eat then?”

This question needs to be asked, “What are my needs, goals and what is realistic for my lifestyle?” Most people’s goals are more energy, weight loss, and optimum health. The best foods are simple foods that have the most color. I tell all my patients to go to a great health food store or farmers market and look at the huge amount and variety of foods that are green, orange, yellow, red, and purple. Foods with lots of color indicate lots of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and anti-oxidants. They are fabulous tasting and naturally sweet.

Fruit is an easy, on the go snack that can be found anywhere. Vegetables are great raw, steamed, stir fried, and baked. You can eat tons of them at one time with minimal caloric intake. They keep for days in the refrigerator, reheat easily, and make great snacks that truly satisfy hunger. Once you try regularly eating, fresh fruits and vegetables, 4 to 5 times a day, they will become your new potato chips with more health benefits.

My favorites are:

Broccoli: It’s so flavorful that you don’t have to do much to it. Marinate it in olive oil, salt, pepper, and fresh lemon. Barbeque, steam, or sauté it and then add a little more lemon. Make a large batch as it keeps for days in the refrigerator. It is great served cold as a big afternoon snack or it can be added to salad as a salad green.

Artichokes: They are delicious hot or cold. Make low calorie aolies sauces for dipping. Lemon and basil are amazing with this vegetable. They are so filling and delicious you feel like you ate an entire meal.

Asparagus: Absolute gift of the gods!!! This is another one great for barbequing. Baste with olive oil, salt, and pepper. The oil will keep more moisture in the asparagus. Steam and then add light sesame oil, shaved Asiago cheese, salt, and pepper

Summer squash: Lightly steam or sauté, add fresh tomatoes and kalamata olives. Add fresh basil, green onions at the very end to kick up the flavor. Sprinkle shaved Parmesan on top.

Sweet potatoes: Sweet potatoes are great baked and sautéed. Try drizzling olive oil over cooled diced potatoes. Add arugala, cilantro, chopped tomatoes, green onions, and feta cheese. Think of this as a very vitamin enriched potato salad.

Tomatoes: Use the cherry tomatoes. Lots of olive oil, small balls of mozzarella or feta cheese. Add salt, pepper, chopped Napa cabbage and 2 to 3 cups of chopped basil and a little green onion.

Cherries, blueberries, raspberries, and most melons are very low in calories and sugars. Mix these with plain non-fat yogurt and natural sweeteners, like Stevia; you have a low calorie, anti-oxidant, delicious dessert, snack, or light meal. Add a little fresh mint as an accent flavor.

As humans we have lots of predictable habits and patterns. For instance, every morning when we wake up we stumble over to the coffee machine. For optimum health and energy, we need to change our habits into new healthy choices that are satisfying and supportive to the body. The benefits are many. The body is an exhaustible energy field and has amazing regenerative ability. So make fruit and vegetables your new health snacks and see how much better you look and feel.

I hope you enjoy making some of my favorite recipes. In my series of articles I will be writing about “How To Keep your Brain Happy and Healthy”; “Super Foods What they are and How to Use them”; ” Why You Need Antioxidants”; Natural Supplements and Herbs That Boost Energy and Fight Fatigue”; and ” Your Immune System and How to Help It”. So stay tuned.

Dr. Barbara Custer L.A.C, O.M.D., runs a clinic in Mill Valley, California combining natural and western medical techniques. To effectively do this she uses Western Medical testing, nutritional programs, Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine. If you are interested in optimizing your health, energy and happiness, please visit Dr. Custer’s website http://www.drbcuster.com

Dr. Barbara Custer, runs a clinic in Mill Valley, California combining natural and western medical techniques. To effectively do this she uses Western Medical Testing, nutritional programs, Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine

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Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as the world’s greatest diet. Allow me to explain.

First of all, what would be the attributes of the world’s greatest diet?

1. It would be comprised of easily available foods.

2. It would NOT require any fancy measuring or fixing.

3. It would be easy to follow at a friend’s dinner party, a fine restaurant, or Mickey Dee’s (McDonald’s to old fuddy-duddies like me).

4. It would not just help with weight loss and weight management, but with health in general.

5. It would be made up of our favorite foods.

HMMMMMMM! TEACHER! I SEE A PROBLEM!

Okay, you can put your hand down. I see it too. It’s that “favorite foods” thing, isn’t it?

Everybody has different “favorite foods”, and we won’t even get into gourmet, regional, or ethnic cooking. I’ll leave that to my daughter and her husband. (Psst! Seen the pictures of my grandkids?)

Anyway, let’s see if we can put together the world’s greatest diet for health and weight loss…for you!

You see, there’s the rub, as my good friend, though somewhat older than me, Billy Shakespeare would say.

We are all different. We are different ethnically, environmentally, educationally, genetically (ran out of e’s), and, dare I say it, sexually. All of these things are important, because they exercise an influence on the results of any diet that anybody tries out.

Hey, there’s a good word, “try”. How many people do you know who actually stay on a diet…especially for the rest of their lives? I guess we need to add another attribute. The world’s greatest diet would have to be one:

6. You could and would stay on for the rest of your life.

WHY THE REST OF MY LIFE?

Simple. I don’t care what diet you go on and how well it works. If it does work and you stop eating according to that diet, over time you will find yourself right back where you are now and wondering where you put this article.

So, to build your “world’s greatest diet” we have to go back to the title of this article, “The World’s Greatest Diet For Weight Loss And Health”. I put “weight loss” AND “health” in there for a reason. There are diets that don’t really help you lose weight, there are diets that are not good for your health, and weight loss does not automatically equal health…particularly if that weight loss is accomplished thru dieting.

Here we go. It doesn’t really matter what foods you eat. You like apple pie, have some apple pie. You like popcorn, have some popcorn. Filet Mignon? Sure, why not.

Let’s back up for a minute. A “diet” is simply a list of the foods you eat. In the last few decades, the word has gotten loaded down with all kinds of extra stuff like the pancakes at IHOP. A doctor can give you a “diet” to help you avoid hives, get over a stomach upset, or even to gain weight if that is what is needed for your health.

If that doctor gives you a “diet” that says you can only eat seven foods, he or she would be doing you a grave (pun intended) disservice. In order to get the nutrients your body needs for health AND for weight loss, you need a diversity of foods…and that diversity can range from soup to nuts…or Filet Mignon! You don’t have to JUST eat cabbage. You NEED to eat cabbage, hamburgers, biscuits, broccoli, apples, apple pie, chicken, fish, carrots…you get the idea. You can deny yourself a lot of the foods you like, take a lot of enjoyment out of your life, and even damage your health without even losing any weight by trying weird fad diets and strange pills that cause your body to act in an unnatural manner.

Your personal “greatest diet in the world” is going to be the foods you normally eat and enjoy eating.

THERE’S GOT TO BE A “BUT” HANGING AROUND SOMEWHERE!

Absolutely. It’s not about WHAT you eat. It’s about two other things:

1. How MUCH you eat, and

2. How you live the rest of your life.

You see, weight loss and health is about balance. The weight loss balance has been known for years. Eat more calories than you use, the excess gets stored as fat. Attempt to use more calories than you eat, your body burns the available fat and abracadabra you have weight loss. However, simply cutting calories down to the bone denies your body nutrients necessary to health and does not allow for the activity that helps keep a body healthy. Exercising (the way we most commonly burn extra calories) while continuing to eat excess calories not only makes it harder to lose weight, but still creates a condition in which our health can be threatened by that excess anyway.

A balanced program for health and weight loss does not deny you the foods you like to eat, it merely tasks you to realize what you are doing to your body and use some self control and limit yourself when food is offered or available. As far as the exercise side of the equation is concerned, “exercise” scares people, so let’s just talk about activity. Your exercise program can be gardening, swimming, bicycle riding, yoga, tai-chi; or gardening on Monday, swimming on Tuesday, bicycle riding on Wednesday, yoga on Thursday, and tai-chi on Friday!

There is an old saying: Keep doing what you have been doing, and you will keep getting what you have been getting.

Makers of diet pills and sellers of diet books know that you realize this, so they offer you something that seems to change that no-win equation. The problem is that without actually creating an actual change of the manner in which you eat and exercise, these diet pills and fad diets at best will only temporarily seem to change the actual equation and allow you to lose weight for a short time if at all. They will not make a permanent change in your life or your health, and their “weight loss” effects, if any, will wear out quickly, often leaving you in a worse situation than when you started.

An article such as this is much too short to get into all the various aspects of weight loss, diets, exercise, and health, but the basic equations are simple. Too much weight can adversely affect your health in a multitude of ways. Losing weight in an unhealthy manner may leave you in as bad a state as you were in when you started…or even worse. Combining formal exercise or enjoyable physical activity with a sensible enjoyment of food so that calorie intake and calorie use can be balanced will result in weight loss, health and a lifestyle that will continue to bring benefits for years.

Donovan Baldwin is a Texas writer and a University of West Florida alumnus. He is a member of Mensa and is retired from the U. S. Army after 21 years of service. In his career, he has held many managerial and supervisory positions. However, his main pleasures have long been writing, nature, and fitness. In the last few years, he has been able to combine these pleasures by writing poetry and articles on subjects such as health, fitness, the environment, happiness, self improvement, and weight loss. He occasionally blogs on subjects related to health at http://nodiet4me.blogspot.com and has a website on the subject of weight loss and health at http://informationclickdepot.com/health/ .

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If you are sick of trying diets and exercise plans with very little success and you want a slimmer, tighter body A.S.A.P, then you need to do some things that you haven’t tried yet. After all, you can’t expect a different result from doing the same things over and over. That’s called INSANITY!

What makes sense to you?

Do you think you should:

a. believe that you will lose weight even if your body is in a toxic state

b. believe that you could try a natural parasite cleanse to make sure your body is not full of toxin-producing parasites.

You may not be aware of the effects a parasite infection can have on your body without you even noticing. Over 50% of the U.S. population has some form of parasite infection and over 75% of these sufferers are not even aware of any symptoms.

I say, go for option b.

Which one sounds more effective?

a. Doing one hour of cardiovascular exercise each day

b. Doing 10 minutes of High Intensity Interval Training each day

This might surprise you, but scientific studies have actually concluded that HIIT is more effective than regular “fat-burning-zone” cardio in every way. It was found to:

1. Increase aerobic capacity more than regular cardio

2. Increase metabolic speed more than regular cardio

3. Increase VO2Max more than regular cardio

This is good news! It means that you can spend less time doing cardiovascular exercise and effectively get better results with your own health, fitness and weight loss!

There really is a way that you can make weight loss easy.

Click http://www.sexyabslab.com to get your FREE 7 DAY GUIDE on “How To Burn Belly Fat… Super Fast!”. Anyone who visits my website in the next 3 days can also download a FREE METABOLISM CALCULATOR and a FREE EBOOK on “7 Ways To Boost Your Metabolism”.

Follow my simple, FREE 7 DAY GUIDE and you could easily lose 7 pounds within the next week! Just click the link http://www.sexyabslab.com

Chris Taeni

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Anyone who needs to go on a diet to lose weight wants to do it fast. People always ask the question, how to lose weight fast? It is possible to lose weight fast, depending on your age and general health, but is it really the best solution? Very low calorie (VLC) diets can help you lose weight as quickly as is possible for your body type, but they are usually unhealthy and can cause damage if they are followed for more than three to seven days.

If you are planning to go on a VLC diet, consult your doctor first and make sure you do not have any reason not to do it. If it is all right, you need to follow some simple advice for this type of diet, so you do not make yourself worse than simply overweight. Crash diets can cause gallstones. There is medicine to prevent this, which is one reason to talk to your doctor first. Also, VLC diets are usually focused on one low calorie food so you do not get a balanced nutrition. This is how to lose weight fast, but you need to be ready to slow down and start eating again.

The way you will lose weight is to burn more calories that you eat. Usually, this means you need to do more exercise than you normally do. If you are on a VLC diet, it is not advisable to exert yourself. It will be too stressful on your muscles because they are not getting any nutrition to burn, and it will exhaust you. Save your exercise for when you start a more balanced diet, after you have finished the starvation regimen. Now that you know how to lose weight fast, you can be sensible how you do it.

One suggestion that will help you understand how to lose weight fast is to drink water. You may get a craving for ice cream or a cheeseburger and you are trying to convince yourself not to give in. If you drink a glass of plain water it will fill you up for a few minutes and help you get past your cravings. By the time the full feeling is gone you will have gotten control of your desire and have will power to continue. You could also suck ice chips to give your mouth something to chew on.

When you ask the question, how to lose weight fast, remember, you need to do this alone or with someone losing weight as well. It will help you to change your eating habits temporarily. After all, this VLC diet will only be for a few days, so plan those days as quiet ones, not during the Christmas party season or Thanksgiving with your family. Once the diet is finished and you have lost some weight, regard it as a head start to a longer race. Now is the time you need to try to lose weight with a carefully balanced diet, albeit low calorie, and some exercise.

Being overweight is not much fun and affects every single area of your life… To register for our great advises for weight loss, to learn more about diets and get your FREE eBook “9 Simple Steps to Get The Body You Desire”, click here >>>>>> http://StayFitLoseWeight.com/

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