Contributed By Sandy | Published: May 19, 2005
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By Grace M. Navarro
http://EZeDiets.com
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Once the dust and cookie crumbs from the holidays were
swept clean, many people made some resolutions regarding
their health, planning to shed some weight and get into
better shape. By now, some are still carrying on with their
good intentions, while others got derailed and are looking
to get back on track. For both cases, here is some
information and encouragement.
You've got lots of company if you are presently dieting or
preparing to start. At any point in time, there are nearly
60 million US residents on a weight loss program. Given a
population of around 300 million, one out of five of the
people you meet today are likely to be in the midst of
dieting, whether it's necessary for them or not. Data from
previous years indicate that during the course of this
year, at least half of the population will go on a diet,
meaning that half of the people you meet today are probably
going to try to lose weight some time in 2005. Since three
out of four women think they need to lose weight, a greater
number of those dieters will be female.
As you can see, the weight loss industry has an abundance
of potential customers. Many companies and individuals are
competing for a piece of that lucrative financial pie - and
while there are good products and good advice available,
there is also the well-known fact that some diet products
don't work, and some actually prevent weight loss.
Understanding a few nutritional principles would help many
people avoid the mistake of starting a diet plan that is
destined to fail. Oftentimes, it is the flawed diet plan
that fails the dieter, not the other way around. According
to numerous studies, the average dieter stands a 97% chance
of regaining all the weight they struggled and suffered to
lose, plus an extra pound or two. Therefore, the single
most important thing to understand if you are contemplating
a diet is this: research is conclusive - traditional
dieting methods based on restricting calorie intake do not
work. Period.
In a nutshell, here's why simply reducing calories will
not ever work. Our bodies are programmed in miraculous ways
for survival, and the part of our brain that does the work
to keep us alive couldn't care less about fitting into a
smaller sized pair of jeans. Faced with a radical reduction
of food, the alarms go off and our bodies set to work:
conserving energy, creating more fat, slowing down
metabolism, and engaging in a battery of survival
mechanisms that keep us from starving. In the process of
restricting calories, people inadvertently trigger these
"starvation responses," which make weight loss very
difficult and which guarantee that when the diet is over,
all the lost weight will be regained.
Why do we fall for diet programs that defy common sense?
Partly because there is so much conflicting information,
and also because there is powerful marketing competing for
our purchases. Another reason for nonsensical dieting, in
truth, is that we want to believe it can be quick, easy,
and effective - promises that are made to us by many diet
plans and products. However, good research and information
is out there if you know where to look, and it shows that
simplistic, unnatural concepts like low-calorie, no-fat,
high-protein, and low-carb do not, by themselves, have
staying power. They are fads, not lifetime ways to eat
healthfully and pleasurably.
What does really work then? It's deceptively simple. Eat
the foods our bodies have evolved to eat, in proper
proportions and in proper combinations. Those combinations
are not common knowledge in today's culture of convenience
food, but they are known and proven through many sound
research studies. A recommended resource is a short and
direct book by Dr. Phillip Lipetz called "The Good Calorie
Diet." Written in 1994, the principles it details of which
foods we should eat in what combination are as old as
humankind. The studies on which the book is based are
sound.
The book is brief, easy to understand, and the plan is
readily applied. The basic principles are few. I'll share a
couple here so you can get the idea of proper food
combinations and get started on the pleasant journey of
changing your eating habits for permanent weight loss. The
first principle is to eat whole food, and avoid processed
foods such as those that come in packages, boxes and cans.
Another principle is never to combine animal protein with
fruit or with starchy carbohydrates (rice, bread, pasta,
potatoes). All of the principles of food combination are
aligned with the way our ancestors ate, and it just makes
sense to eat according to the diet humans were designed to
thrive upon.
Grace M. Navarro is a contributing author to News about Diets the leading
resource for diet information. Visit Grace's archive of
articles at http://www.ezediets.com/
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