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Archive for the ‘Nutrition’ Category

There are three kinds of nutrients: carbohydrate, protein, and fat. We need to eat a diet that provides an optimal balance of these nutrients. Carbohydrate is a general term for a wide range of foods, vegetables, fruits, grains, and legumes. Carbohydrates are an excellent source of energy. Between 60 and 70 percent of your daily intake should be in some form of carbohydrate. Protein found in meat, fish, dairy, and plant foods such as beans. Protein is essential to build, maintain, and repair body tissue. About 15 to 20 percent of your daily intake should be in the form of protein. Fat is found in meat, dairy products, nuts, and oils. It is essential for energy and hormone production. About 15 percent of your daily food intake should be in the form of fat.

It is recommended to focus on eating the right kind of carbohydrates. There are two types of carbohydrates: complex and simple, or refined. Some carbohydrates accelerate the aging process. Some are powerful rejuvenators. Understanding the difference between the two types is the key to restoring youthful metabolism. Simple carbohydrates are age accelerators. They include sugary snack foods, junk food such as potato chips, white bread, white rice, white pasta, pre-sweetened breakfast cereals, snack foods, and most cookies and cakes.

The problem with simple carbohydrates is that they break down very rapidly in the bloodstream, causing a sharp rise in our blood sugar levels. These foods can actually cause a greater surge in blood sugar than that resulting from eating sugar straight from the box. Eating these bad carbohydrates can wreak havoc on our metabolism. These foods can cause surges in blood sugar tat not only exacerbate the problem of insulin resistance but also cause food cravings and constant hunger. This often leads to eating more bad carbohydrates, causing the cycle to repeat. Eating simple carbohydrates will put on extra weight and age us before our time.

Complex carbohydrates are rejuvenators. These include fruits and vegetables, whole- grain, unrefined products such as multigrain breads and cereals, pastas made from whole wheat or vegetable flours, beans such as lentils, black beans, and navy beans. Although complex carbohydrates are good for us, they are not all the same, and we must limit the amounts we eat. With few exceptions, most breads and cereals tend to cause a sharper rise in blood sugar than do vegetables. Eating too much of these foods can result in a sugar crash, leaving you feeling hungry and depleted. To avoid the sugar highs and lows, limit servings of bread, cereal, and pasta to no more than three or four a day.

Starchy vegetables such as corn and potatoes should also be eaten in limited quantities. Limit servings of potatoes and corn to no more than two to three a week. Although potatoes and corn are basically healthy and contain important vitamins and minerals, they too, are broken down very rapidly and can cause a sudden blood sugar surge. Eliminate white bread, sugary breakfast foods, snack foods, and junk food completely from your life. Replace them with whole grains. Seven- or nine-grain breads that are sold in most supermarkets are good choices. Rye or pumpernickel bread and crackers are also fine.

Rid your pantry of pre-sweetened ready-to-eat breakfast cereals and switch to unsweetened cereals made from unprotected grains. Oatmeal, rye flakes, barley flakes, and 100 percent bran flakes are good choices. It is also recommended that you try breads made with sprouted grains because they are broken down by the body at a slower and steadier pace than breads made with flour and are often easier to digest. Sprouted breads, rolls, and even bagels are sold at health food stores and supermarkets, such as those made by Shiloh Farms, Food for Life, and Alvarado Street Bakery. Remember, these breads are not made with preservatives and must be refrigerated.

Ever wonder why some guys eat almost anything yet never put on weight, while you check food labels for low-fat stuff, deprive yourself of burger rolls and beer, but just can’t budge that spare tire? Perhaps you eat more than you think you do. Or maybe all you need is to walk, tap your toes, swing a racket, chase a ball, clean out your garage or lift some weights to build muscle and boost your metabolism.

This is how your metabolism works: all the food you eat is converted into energy. The term ‘metabolism’ refers to the way your body processes carbohydrates, proteins and fats to release the energy it needs for various processes. Your metabolic rate is the speed at which this energy release occurs.

Is it true to say that some people have a naturally high metabolism rate? Not really. Over nearly 20 years of research, the Medical Research Council Nutrition Unit at Cambridge, in the UK, never found anyone who had a ’slow’ metabolic rate. In fact, their studies show that lean and obese men burn exactly the same number of kilojoules per kilogram of body weight. In other words, obese guys actually burn more kilojoules in a day than leaner guys with the same activity pattern. The simple fact is that people who eat less are thinner than those who eat more.

Your metabolic rate is the sum total of three types of metabolism: your basal metabolic rate (BMR), your physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) and the thermic effect of food (TEF).

BMR is the amount of energy you need to support basic body functions, even if you lie watching TV all day. It accounts for 60 to 65 percent of the kilojoules (kJ) you eat daily. About 25 percent of the kilojoules you eat goes to the physical activity you expend above your BMR. This is your PAEE, and it varies according to how much you move in the course of the day. So it would be high on the day you run a marathon, but quite low the next day, when you veg out and recover.

About 10 percent of the kilojoules you eat is used to fuel the process of digesting, absorbing and storing. This is the TEF. So if you eat 12 000kJ a day, you burn 1 200kJ simply chewing and digesting.

The TEF accounts for 10 percent of your metabolism rate, but don’t go thinking you can eat more to lose weight. The average TEF is only equivalent to about two slices of bread and honey, without butter or marge. Despite what some people think, you can’t increase the TEF significantly by eating certain types of food. Even caffeine causes such a small rise in the metabolic rate that it has no effect on weight loss or gain.

Some research claims you can increase your TEF by replacing some refined, high-glycaemic-index (GI) carbohydrates, like bread and potatoes, with lean protein in a meal. Even if protein does increase the TEF, this is such a tiny percentage of your total daily energy expenditure that it can’t make you lose weight.

Your metabolic rate dictates how many kilo-joules you burn and is determined by your age, weight, height, gender, state of health and activity level. You can’t control genetics or age, but you can change your diet and activity levels.

As a rule, if you eat the exact number of kilojoules you expend when you combine your BMR, TAEE and TEF, your weight will remain constant. To lose weight, then, you either have to reduce the number of kilojoules you take in, or increase the number of kilojoules you expend on physical activity.

Ideally, you would do both. To illustrate: An average 70kg male who runs slowly for 60 minutes expends approximately 2 500 to 3 000kJ of energy. Since there are 38 000k J in a kilogram of fat, he’d need to do about 15 hours of extra exercise per week to lose one kilogram of fat. Clearly, it’s difficult to lose excess weight by exercising alone. You need to reduce your kilojoule intake as well.

So isn’t there anything you can do to hurry things along by boosting your metabolic rate? Sure there is. These metabolism boosters can help you along, but ultimately, when it comes to weight management, there is no substitute for eating less and moving more in a sustained, ongoing fashion. That said, read on…

You’ve heard it before, a million times. But when it comes to optimizing your metabolism, what does it really mean to ‘eat sensibly’?

1. Maintain your balance. Make sure your diet contains the correct balance of protein and carbs. Fifteen to 20 percent of your kilojoules should come from protein (make sure they’re low-fat sources, like skinless chicken, skim milk or low-fat yoghurt), while around 55 percent should come from carbohydrates (again, low-fat options like rye bread, lentils, chickpeas or baked beans are preferable to high-fat carbs like croissants or bagels).

As a rule, keep fat intake low because any excess will increase your body fat. Studies show that the body uses a lot less energy to store fat than it does to store excess proteins and carbs, which require more energy to be converted into fat.

Avoid butter, margarine, chicken skin and visible fat on meat. Keep your fat intake low while still making sure that 20 to 30 percent of your daily kilojoules comes from unsaturated fats like sunflower and olive oils, fatty fish (salmon, sardines, pilchards), avocadoes, nuts and seeds.

2. Eat little, more often. Aim to eat three to five small meals containing low-GI carbs throughout the day to keep your blood sugar stable and provide a steady source of energy to fuel your metabolism. Any excess kilo-joules you take in during large, bulky meals will only get stored as fat.

3. Don’t skip breakfast. If you do, your body will think it’s starving – it’s had nothing for eight to 10 hours – which means your blood sugar will plummet, making it more likely that you will overeat at lunch or supper. Which brings us to the next point…

4. Don’t starve yourself. Dropping your kilojoule intake to less than 6 000kj a day will signal to your body that you’re in starvation mode, which will temporarily slow down your metabolism. If you fast for 24 hours, your daily energy expenditure will decrease very quickly. The good news: This is temporary. When you start to eat again, it will come back up.

There’s no permanent damage to your metabolic rate. But neither is there any benefit to sacrificing yourself at the altar of nutritional deprivation.

5. Don’t shovel it in at dinner. Make the last meal of the day your lightest. Depending on your weight and age, your body burns a specific number of kilojoules per kilogram per hour while you’re sleeping. If you take in 2 500kJ or less at dinner, there’s enough time to use up all the kilojoules while you sleep. However, a 5 000kJ dinner may mean the kilojoules that are left over will go to your fat stores.

6. Drink like a fish. Dehydration can contribute to an inefficient metabolism and cause fatigue. When you’re dehydrated, your body’s ability to convert carbohydrates into energy plummets. If you exercise regularly, you need to take in around 30ml of water for every kilogram you weigh. So if you weigh 70kg, you need a minimum of 2.1 liters of fluid daily. At least 1.5 liters of this should be water. High-GI drinks (see below) should make up the balance during and immediately after exercise. Low-GI drinks are suitable before a. workout.

Remember to weigh yourself before and after a strenuous exercise session. If your weight changes by more than 0.5kg, then you need to drink more during exercise.

You could try boosting your PAEE through aerobic exercise, which increases your heart rate and can raise your metabolic rate while you’re working out (and possibly some hours after), but those extra kilojoules spent are a small percentage of the total energy expended in a day, and not enough to allow for an extra beer.

What kind of exercise are we talking about? It depends on your starting point. Linear-pattern cardiovascular training (cycling, running, swimming) can be an effective initial weight-loss strategy in an untrained person. The problem is, your body adapts to training in about three months, becoming more efficient at utilizing smaller amounts of fuel for the duration of the workout.

A better idea: cardio workouts that engage the nervous system, and thus the brain. These are more effective as weight-loss aids (than linear-pattern cardiovascular training alone) since the brain can use up to 30 percent more kilojoules when it’s ‘in gear’. So in addition to muscle-building moves, do ‘brain exercises’ that require balance and skill, such as sports, dance and aerobics classes two to three times a week for 20 minutes or more, depending on the intensity.

You can increase the number of kilojoules you burn each minute, even when you’re at rest, by building more muscle. Because muscle cells are eight times more metabolically active than fat cells, muscle burns more kilojoules than fat. The greater the proportion of lean muscle mass, then, the higher your metabolic rate will be.

Consider two guys, each weighing 75kg. The first guy has 20 percent body fat, which means that 15kg is fat and the remaining 60kg is lean body mass. The second guy, however, has 10 percent body fat, which means his lean muscle mass increases to 67.5kg.

Overall, the second guy will burn more kilojoules in a day and be able to eat more to maintain his weight because his metabolic rate has increased due to the greater muscle mass.

Resistance training (like weightlifting, or working with exercise bands) is one way to build muscle and boost your metabolism. But it isn’t the only way. Going one step further would be to engage in functional resistance training, or weight training that resembles everyday life, rather than linear-patterned weight training, such as biceps curls or tricep push-downs.

Functional weight training incorporates movement patterns – for example, a backward-pulling action of the arm that incorporates a twisting of the torso, coupled with a step backwards – which engage the nervous system to stimulate greater use of fuel, so you’re effectively getting a double metabolic benefit.

The seven basic functional movement patterns used for everyday tasks since the days of the cavemen are pulling, pushing, lunging, squatting, bending, rotating and gait. Any resistance training exercise should use two or more of these movement patterns for maximum benefit. Aim to do resistance training – either linear or functional – three to six times a week.

Being overweight definitely presents us with several important health issues such as increased chances diabetes, heart attack, hypertension and stroke. It is amazing how we can break down our body and make it unhealthy with food or we can build up our body and make it healthy with food. Not feeding our bodies will not accomplish anything. 

EODD Reviews: Cycling Lean

With the EODD calorie cycling method we can have a body that is lean, healthy and strong and achieve that special sense of freedom where you are in control. With the EODD diet Calorie Cycling we can learn to have a lifelong healthy relationship with food.  Traditional low calorie diets do not give you this.  With a low calorie diet all you get is weight loss as long as you stick with it, but after you are done the weight will come back because you have really learned nothing new.  The Every Other Day or EODD diet cycling plan can restore the pleasure of enjoying your meals and the loved ones you share them with.  In short when you use calorie cycling like that employed in the EODD diet you will have a great feeling of peace within yourself!  Don’t get me wrong The EODD diet is not the only diet that can benefit you in this way, but it is an example of the revolutionary new ways people are learning to control their eating and healing their bodies with food instead of simply trying to starve them into submission.

EODD Reviews: Why Low Calorie Doesn’t Work

Low Calorie Diets, on the other hand simply don’t work because the focus is solely on weight loss and therefore even if you do succeed in losing the weight you wanted to, what have you learned or changed in your lifestyle that will keep the weight off.  How have you changed you relationship to food.  The EODD diet and others like it are more food education programs than they are simple diets.  EODD calorie cycling teaches you how to eat lean proteins to lose weight and then punctuate this program with high calorie feed days.  This makes EODD fun and keeps your metabolism high.  You can employ this method to keep the fat off your body, your blood pressure down, decrease your chances of a heart attack or stroke, and improve your overall health.

EODD Reviews: Why did you quit your last diet?

“I lost interest faster than I lost weight!” “I felt trapped, as if every meal was a chore.” “I could not stand the thought of dieting like that for the rest of my life!” “I had serious food cravings that drove me nuts!” “I didn’t like the feeling of not fitting in socially!”

Low calorie diets seem to assume that we are like robots designed to live in the kitchen making low calorie meals or salad eaters loving every last bit of bitter leaves choked down with a little lemon juice.  How boring and horrible.  It is no wonder you quit!  If we don’t like what we eat we will not stay with it fir the rest of our lives.  Diets like EODD understand this and have designed ways such as caloric cycling to help us cycle our way to health.  Using things like the EODD SNAPP system instead of calorie counting are things that make the new type of diets doable and doable diets produce healthy results.

EODD Reviews: Research

Research caloric cycling and intermittent fasting and see how these new approaches to weight loss can help you achieve a healthy vibrant body.

Are you wondering why some diet plans are effective on other people but are not so much on you? This is because each of us is genetically different. According to Dr. Peter D’Adamo, author and creator of the Genotype Diet, by taking the measurements of your body, you can determine which of the six different lifestyle groups you belong. The Genotype Diet is based on the research that the environment in which a person lives can change 70% of their genes.

The Genotype Diet is backed up by scientific research, not to mention that Dr. Peter D’Adamo is a much respected nutritionist for many years. Like most diet plans, the Genotype Diet will require you to replace meals, avoid food, or do some exercise. What makes the Genotype Diet unique, though, is that the diet and healthy plan it will give you is custom-fit to your individual needs, which depend on your body type. The Genotype Diet claims that each person is unique and so their diet plans should be different from one another other too. Exercise is also encouraged by the Genotype Diet. But, just as diet should be unique for every type of person, exercise plans and routines should also be specifically fit for each person.

The Genotype Diet uses family history, blood type, fingerprint analysis, measurement of jaw angle, and many more simple diagnostic tools to get your specific and unique genetic makeup which will determine which of the six genotype plans is fit for you. Here are the six genotypes to which you can belong:

* Hunter – tall, thin, and intense, with an overabundance of adrenaline and a fierce, nervous energy that winds down with age, the Hunter was originally the success story of the human species. Vulnerable to systemic burnout when overstressed, the Hunter’s modern challenge is to conserve energy for the long haul.

* Gatherer – full-figured, even when not overweight, the Gatherer struggles with body image in a culture where thin is “in.” An unsuccessful crash dieter with a host of metabolic challenges, the Gatherer becomes a glowing example of health when properly nourished.

* Teacher – strong, sinewy, and stable, with great chemical synchronicity and stamina, the Teacher is built for longevity – given the right diet and lifestyle. This is the genotype of balance, blessed with a tremendous capacity for growth and fulfillment.

* Explorer – muscular and adventurous, the Explorer is a biological problem solver, with an impressive ability to adapt to environmental changes, and a better than average capacity for gene repair. The Explorer’s vulnerability to hormonal imbalances and chemical sensitivities can be overcome with a balanced diet and lifestyle.

* Warrior – long, lean, and healthy in youth, the Warrior is subject to a bodily rebellion in midlife. With the optimal diet and lifestyle, the Warrior can overcome the quick-aging metabolic genes and experience a second “silver” age of health.

* Nomad – a Genotype of extremes, with a great sensitivity to environmental conditions especially changes in altitude and barometric pressure, the Nomad is vulnerable to neuromuscular and immune problems. Yet a well-conditioned Nomad has the enviable gift of controlling caloric intake and aging gracefully.

Calorie Shifting techniques

Fact most low calorie diets don’t work because of the bodies in built survival mechanism which compels the body to adjust to famine conditions – real or manufactured.

The simple theory of weight If your calorie intake is < energy output your body will be forced to burn stored fat to make up the deficient.

Thus the low calorie diet is born. Unfortunately there is one fatal flaw in this theory.

After a few days on a low calorie diet your body start thinking famine. Once it’s in famine it takes emergency measures to protect itself by matching energy output with calorie intake.

After a few days on a low calorie diet your body slows your metabolism reducing energy output and trigger food craving just to make sure your doing what ever it take to secure every available calorie.

Even if you fight off the food cravings weight loss will begin to slow and then stop as the body adjusts to new intake levels.

All this will make you feel pretty crappy your energy levels with be low and your enthusiasm waning. Constant fatigue makes exercise a mere fantasy. Within a couple of weeks you give up and give in your cravings.

Depression and self pity kick in and you go on a food binge your body starts laying fat like crazy, its hoarding calories now to protect itself against future famines. Soon you’re heavier than when you started

If this sound familiar don’t worry with the revolutionary calorie shifting method or body shock technique pioneered by the weight loss control centre’s best selling "Fat Loss for Idiots" can change everything.

This is where calorie shifting comes in.

Calorie shifting works like this.

Take any reasonably sound low calorie diet that can be sustained over a period of time

Calculate the total recommended calorie intake for an 11 day cycle.

For example 1500* calories x 11 == 16500 calories.

*This number will vary from person to person

You then eat a different amount of calories everyday but reaching the total of 16500 on the last day.  For example

Day 1 1000 calories total 1000

Day 2 2000 calories total 3000

Day 3 1500 calories total 4500

Day 4 500 calories total 5000

Day 5 2000 calories total 7000

Day 6 1000 calories total 8000

I am sure you get the idea.

Faced with this seesawing calorific intake your body won’t know if it’s coming or going whether it’s feast or famine. This will prevent any of the normal problems associated with low calorie diets.

Combined with all the usual metabolism boosting tricks like exercising, having smaller more frequent meals, and high metabolism  foods this technique is one of the best weight loss programs available.

You can start today with the information here or find out more get your diet generator and cycle

calculator at Fat loss for idiots. If you would like to check it out indepth  go to the FatLoss for idiots review at gocomparediets.com