Common Sense Approach Pays Off!!

NEW JERSEY (WABC) -- Spring and summer are always an inspiring time in terms of starting new plans or making good changes.

It's particularly a good time to make some "healthy" changes.

One woman did just that two years ago and got healthier by losing 137 pounds.

Karen MacNamara of Edison, New Jersey weighed over 300 pounds two years ago, and then she made a commitment to her health.

She joined a weight loss program, "Weight Watchers," and she started walking.

Walking for heavy people who cannot bear the thought of going to the gym, is the perfect thing to get started doing right about now when we are starting to have some good weather.
"I was a size 3x, which is like about a 26 in women's clothes," explained Karen MacNamera.

Now, this 53-year-old wife and working mother is a trim size 12.

Walking for exercise is now a way of life for Karen.

She began walking after joining a "Weight Watchers" group and really wanting to take off her weight.

She's lost 137 pounds in the last two years.

She began to eat differently, and she began to walk.

"No one wanted to walk with me, because I was a very slow walker, in the beginning two years ago," said Karen.

But slowly, sometimes trailing behind her husband, she kept walking.

"And then, Weight Watchers had a thing called the 'walk it challenge', and some of the members, and me, we got together a little group, about five of us, and we started walking on the weekends," explained Karen.

While participating in the walking challenge, Karen continued to watch what she ate.

"You wouldn't have seen healthy snacks before. We didn't have much fruit in the house before or vegetables," said Karen.

Eventually she added a morning exercise program, right in her TV, doing it everyday before work.

She's now even completed a 5K run with her husband.

But still, she continues walking, and credits a lot to having the goal of the "Walk it Challenge".
"Absolutely! Weight just melts off when you walk. I'm telling you, you have to eat healthy, but you have to move, and the walking has really changed my life," said Karen.

All you need is a good pair of walking shoes and patience.

As for weight loss, it goes with eating healthy and using portion control.

If you need a goal, a "Walk it challenge" is coming up.

Oprah also has a walk coming up.

Both are very good goals for anyone who wants to start walking to get healthier.

Karen began her weight loss efforts when her very dear friend confessed she saw Karen living so unhealthy and was afraid to lose her.
www.weightwatchers.com/walkit

The Weight Watchers Walk-It Challenge starts April 4, 2010.

The Challenge will be held on June 6, 2010.

Members will train to walk a 5K in just 6 weeks with a step-by-step training plan which will also include info on how to form walking groups, and help finding an official Weight Watchers 5K or other 5Ks in local communities.

Copyright ©2010 WABC-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.) 

More Sanity vs Insanity.

As many a diet plan has stated (when describing the competition), "rapid weight loss tricks your body into thinking you're starving and overwhelming you with hunger."


We've watched ourselves and others try this thing or that, only to balloon out again as soon as the goal is reached...or before. I, for one, am saying it's time to stop all the diet programs and live the way we already know is healthy.

There is a rational, common sense, dare I say, simple way to reach our optimum weight and stay there.

Diet Pills, Plans, Programs And Publications exist for one reason...to sell you something. You can follow the plan in any of the ads next to this article and lose weight. Your doctor is probably the best judge of which program is best for your specific health condition.

Most doctors I've spoken to say the same thing that the diet products say, "A healthy, well-balanced diet with lots of vegetables is necessary to lose weight." Now, the plans may differ on what the right balance is but they all say balance is required. Even the ones guaranteeing you fast weight loss by "starving" your body of something (carbs, fats, etc.) caution you to transition back to, what...a well-balanced diet?

So, why don't we transition ourselves without the expensive pills, plans, programs or publications? With a doctor's advice, it should be easy to transition to a healthy diet a little at a time, without shocking our system into starvation.

Eat A Little Less: Our common sense diet begins with a gradual transition to eating less. Not that anyone in the diet industry will tell you, but, if you are overweight, you're probably eating too much...at least that's the way it works with me.

One person told me, "Glen, to lose weight, you don't need to do push-ups, just push-backs."

Pushing back from the dinner table is the concept behind gradually eating less. We don't need that second serving...and certainly not that dessert. So, transition to eating less by taking smaller servings for a month (while transitioning to at least 3 meals per day).

Then, in a few weekly meals, eat only one serving...then 10 meals...then all of them. When offered another serving, get used to smiling while saying, "No, thank you! I've had enough!" Since most of us eat foods that are unhealthy, our common sense diet needs to do more than eat less. We need to slowly transition to more healthy foods.

Eat Unhealthy Less Often: It isn't that we can't ever eat pie, ice cream, cake, pizza, ribs, etc...It's that we can't eat something like that every day. Probably not even every week. We'll get into how to transition away from these things in the next section, but first, let's accept that they are not healthy foods.

We all know this even while we're chewing on that last tasty bite. Common sense says, you can't stay on a diet that rules these things out or replaces the real thing with those imitations that taste like cardboard. Eating is about more than nutrition! So, have them! If someone serves you a piece of pie, enjoy it! Go out to eat less than once a month but enjoy it when you do. Christmas party...have fun! Instead of imprisoning yourself, empower yourself by making those things a special treat.

Do you have a favorite dessert or meal? Agree with yourself that you can have that as a reward, once you reach your goal weight. That way you'll make room for eating healthier.

Eat A Little Healthier: Just like eating less, what makes this diet work is a gradual change to healthier foods. Begin by developing a taste for fresh green and yellow vegetables. While adding salad and lots of veggies to main meals, cut the carbs back to only one serving. Then, a month or so later, replace dessert with fresh fruit. A month later, replace chips with light crackers. Then, ice cream with sugar-free pudding, for instance. Replace beef, lamb and pork with chicken, turkey and fish for 35 % of your meals, then 60%, 80 %, 95%. Add fiber and fiber foods to your diet a little at a time. Add plain water to your diet, gradually working up to 10-12 8oz. glasses a day. By eating little healthier gradually, our bodies adjust without going into shock.

Shop Healthy: It's difficult to eat healthy when there are so many unhealthy things around the house to eat. As we gradually move from unhealthy foods, the supermarket becomes a very tempting place.

By following this one rule, we can eliminate 90 % of the temptation to abandon our new diet. Here's the rule:

If you don't buy it, you can't eat it.

We started this article with the idea that you can lose weight on all diet plans. That's the easy part! The hard part is staying trim and healthy without the diet plan.

That's impossible unless we've developed the habits of eating a healthy, well-balanced diet. It's the weakness of every diet that, after you reach your goal you have to learn how to live without the diet program.

Isn't it just good common sense to reach your goal weight by eating a healthy, well-balanced diet in the first place? 

That's why it's called the common sense diet!

Glen Williams is Webmaster for http://www.e-health-fitness.com, founder and CEO of EHF, Inc. He has done extensive research on personal and family health and fitness issues and has been helping and advising people on health since 1987. You can comment on his articles at Health And Fitness Forums.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Glen_D._Williams

Are All Carbs Bad?

The Common Sense Diet

We've entered the Twilight Zone when it comes to the multitude of diets being promoted today. Starting with the Atkins Diet, then the South Beach Diet.

Both higher in protein, lower in carbs, but the distinction should be quality of carbs, not singling out one nutrient entirely. If you are on the Atkins Diet or South Beach Diet simply adjust from eating low quality carbs like refined flour and sugar products (think comes in a box) to eating more whole food products like fresh vegetables and fruits - yes fruits.

Apples vs. Apple Jacks - You be the Judge
I know the traditional Atkins Diet doesn't advocate much fruit (too high in sugar) but think about that for one minute. My strong belief is that an apple is a good food, a bowl of Apple Jacks cereal may not be on an equal level. One is highly processed sweetened by added white sugar and corn syrup, and one is natural, plucked from a tree and sweetened by the sun. Which would you choose? Don't shun fresh fruit for the sake of following your low carb diet to the letter.

Eliminating healthy, wholesome foods is not the best way to learn to eat better, but severely cutting back on the frequency of eating highly processed foods is. I saw a site which called it GM or MM: God Made or Man Made. If you think of those terms when you go to choose your foods, it starts to make more sense. No one says you shouldn't eat chips, or whatever strikes your fancy, but make them a treat - and eat the GM foods more often.

Common Sense Diet
Common sense will answer the question about what to eat. If you are on Atkins, South Beach or any variation of low carb diet, avoid processed foods, not natural foods. Stop using "instant" breakfast, and cook whole rolled oats for instance. Sure you might have to get up 10 minutes earlier, oh well. You're worth it! 

You can still stay on a higher protein food plan, but this one minor adjustment will allow you to continue with your eating plan for a lifetime, rather than a short-time. I'd go insane if I couldn't eat my daily apple, banana or other fruit. I love fruit. I think there's a very good reason humans desire sweet foods - Vitamin C, and other nutrients, including bioflavonoids.

Addicted to Fruit?
I heard someone complain they were "addicted to fruit" and I had to wonder, what do they eat? The person who refuses to eat fruit because they believe it is too high in sugar, probably does eat cookies, crackers and sugary cereals. They might even drink artificially flavored and sweetened drinks, but they refuse to eat a natural food, grown from our earth? That makes no sense, if you think about it. 

Did our planet develop and thrive based on processed foods? No, of course not. They are very recent in the evolution of our world. Very recent. In fact, we've had processed foods less than 200 years while our planet is millions of years old.

With the high incidence of obesity, and our high consumption of processed foods, it's hard not to draw the conclusion that one causes the other. You won't hear big industry stating that case because our economy depends on us buying the products being produced by the companies that employ us. 

You'll never see it reported that "scientists discovered refined flour kills," even if it were proven true because it doesn't support our way of life. We need industry.

Witnessing the epidemic of food illnesses such as Mad Cow, and now Bird Flu, I can envision a society without the mass produced meat industry. It will come to pass—nothing but your local farm will be allowed to sell meat, because the big farm industry cannot guarantee safety of the food supply.

Meat will become much more expensive because when they can no longer mass produce it, there is nowhere for prices to go but up.

So, do we whine and cry and moan about our misfortune or do we start to think of meat as something to savor and enjoy like the Sunday roasts we had years ago? Most families never ate meat every day then - and we weren't so fat either. We simply didn't eat as much processed foods.


Yes, progress marches on, but when it comes to your body, common sense rules the day. The Common Sense Diet!

Try it on for size today.

---

About the Author...
Kathryn Martyn is a master NLP and EFT Practitioner and has developed an 8-step process for ending the emotional struggle with weight loss. She is the owner of http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com and runs a successful practice in Vancouver, Washington.

Common Sense Dieting!!

 I found an article by a writer named Mark Kantrowitz and edited it some......Nothing alarming here but it makes more sense than another silly fad diet....basic, good common sense!!!

There are many diets, and most don't work. Some try to get you to lose weight too quickly, leading to a yo-yo effect as you regain all the weight you lost (and maybe a bit more). Others encourage you to eat an unbalanced and unhealthy mix of foods. There are also magic diet pills and herbal supplements that perhaps put your health at risk.

Many of these diets try to convince you of their power through pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo about "good" and "bad" nutrients and unproven claims to change your metabolism to burn more fat. 

But the real goal of these diets is to produce income for their creators.

The key to dieting is not losing weight -- most diets will allow you to shed pounds -- but in keeping the weight off after you've lost it. Fad diets that require major changes in behavior won't succeed in the long run. Diets that make only minor changes in behavior can be continued long-term, making it easier to maintain the weight loss.

The simple diet described below is based on sound principles of weight control. It is just plain common sense that if you eat less and exercise more, you'll lose weight. The diet described below helps you achieve this by gradually changing your habits, leading to sustainable lasting results. It won't be as easy as popping a few pills, but you can do it. Judge for yourself whether you think this diet will work for you. 

Cutting 100 calories a day from your diet will let you lose about 10 pounds a year. That's just one can of soda a day. (The mathematics is straightforward. 100 calories per day multiplied by 365 days in a year is 36,500 calories in a year. To lose a pound, you have to burn about 3,500 calories. So that means that a can of soda a day is the equivalent of 36,500 calories divided by 3,500 calories per pound, or 10.4 pounds.) 

Take it Slow

It took you a long time to gain all that weight. It is going to take you just as long to lose it. If you try to lose it overnight, you will end up regaining it just as quickly. Starving yourself doesn't work on a long-term basis. Your goal should be to find a way to lose the weight in a slow but steady manner. Such a diet will be sustainable, allowing you to keep the weight off permanently.

Generally, if you want to lose weight, you should aim to have the difference between your calorie consumption and the calories you burn be around 1,500 calories a day. But a lot depends on the level at which you are starting.

Trying to lose several pounds a week may be overdoing it. A better goal is half a pound to a pound a week. This is achievable and sustainable. It may take you more than a year to get back to a healthier weight, but you will reach it if you take it slow. 

Small changes are the key to sustainability. Take the dieting one small step at a time. Make a small change, get used to the change, and then make further changes, instead of trying to get from point A to point B all at once. 

You should also plan on using a combination of diet and exercise to control your weight. Doing one without the other is unlikely to be successful. 

Track your Weight

Weigh yourself on a daily basis, and keep a log of your weight. One of the best ways to do this is in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel, where you can graph the results and see trends.
Tracking your weight gives you feedback. It makes you aware of how much you weigh, and whether you are gaining or losing. Just awareness of your weight may make it easier to control your weight. If you see that you're continuing to gain weight, you can make further small changes. 

Use Portion Control

Counting calories can help you lose weight, but most people find portion control to be more effective. Portion control allows you to eat the foods you like, just a little less of them.

You know how much food you usually put on your plate, and whether you go back for second and third helpings. Just try to cut back the amount of food you eat by a little each time. If you help yourself to multiple servings, try eliminating one of the helpings, or reducing the amount of food you put on your plate each time. 

For example, instead of eating a whole sandwich, try eating a half sandwich, and save the rest for tomorrow's meal. (Or toss it. It may seem like a waste to throw away food, but it's better for it to go to waste than for it to go to your waist.) Eat just a single bowl of cereal, instead of two or three. Eat that calorie-rich dessert every other day, instead of every day. Instead of a 20-ounce bottle of soda, drink a 12-ounce can.

Some people find it helpful to serve themselves on a smaller size plate, such as a salad plate instead of a dinner plate. Most people have a tendency to fill up their plate with food, treating it as a target, so if you use a smaller plate, there'll be less food on your plate.

Don't eat out of the package or with the refrigerator door open. Mindless grazing like this makes it difficult for you to appreciate just how much you are eating. Often, you'll be eating for the sake of eating and not because you are hungry. Instead, put the food you want to eat on a plate, and sit down at the table to eat it

By seeing the total amount of food you are consuming all at once, instead of in small impromptu snacks, you will naturally inhibit your consumption, eating a little less.

Remember, your stomach is about the size of your first. If you eat more than two fistfuls of food at each meal, you're probably eating too much.

When you start to use portion control, start slow. Don't eliminate too much at once. Cut back a little once a week, and then try to maintain that level for a while before you cut something else. Try to reduce your calorie intake gradually, not suddenly.

Some people find it helpful to have two small planned snacks a day, in between the meals. 

Make Substitutions for Calorie-Rich Food

Portion control can only work so far. If you're eating creme-filled donuts, inhaling ice cream sundaes and drinking soda every day, you may be reaching your calorie limit in just one little snack. 

It helps if you keep a diary for a day or two of everything you normally consume. Then, review the diary to see how many calories are associated with each item. Don't forget that the nutritional information is given in terms of servings, and consuming the entire package often represents several servings. So multiply the calorie count per serving with the actual number of servings. 

Reviewing the list, you'll see several items with very high calorie counts. Try substituting alternatives that have lower calorie counts and are more filling, such as fruits and vegetables. Substitute pretzels for potato chips, fruit for candy bars, fish or chicken for red meat, a small cookie or two for a creme-filled donut and ice cream, skim milk instead of 2% milk and 2% milk instead of whole milk, and a glass of water for a can of soda. (Frozen yogurt is not a good substitute for ice cream, because frozen yogurt is almost as bad these days.) 

Also make substitutions for your condiments: mustard instead of mayo, jam or cream cheese instead of butter or margarine, salsa instead of cheese dip, and fat-free dressing instead of creamy dressing. 

Try to avoid fried foods, since such foods stimulate appetite and make it harder to stop eating when you are full. 

Drink Water

Water has no calories. When you feel the urge to eat a snack or drink a can of soda, drink a glass of water first. Often you eat when you don't really feel hungry, but have gotten in the habit of snacking. If you drink a glass of water first, you'll start to substitute a new and healthier habit. Eventually, the glass of water will be enough. 

Water will cause your stomach to feel full sooner without any calories or carbohydrates. Drinking a full glass of water at least 15 minutes before any meal can help you lose weight. 

When eating a meal, take frequent sips of water. The water will make you feel full, causing you to eat less. 

Exercise

The experts encourage you to exercise for half an hour three times a week. It is actually better to exercise for half an hour to an hour a day. But most people don't exercise for even an hour a week, so something is better than nothing. It is especially important to exercise if you have a sedentary lifestyle. 

Just as you are cutting your calorie consumption gradually, you should start exercising gradually. If you overexert yourself, you won't be willing to continue with the exercise regimen. 

A key to exercising is to find something enjoyable about the exercise. This can range from a type of exercise you enjoy (e.g., walking your dog) to exercising with a friend (e.g., taking a walk with your spouse). Some people find it helpful to exercise in front of the TV, since that will distract you from the fact that you're exercising. 

For example, I have an exercise bike and treadmill in front of the TV, and watch one or two DVDs each time I exercise. I currently exercise 2-3 hours a night. I started off with just 15 minutes of exercise per night, and built up to my current level over the course of three years. As soon as I stopped exercising, I would pause the DVD player. I only watch TV when I'm exercising, so if I want to watch TV I have to exercise. 

Eat a Balanced Diet

Most people eat too much meat, eggs, salt, cookies, cake and ice cream, and too little fruit, vegetables and whole grains like rice. While you gradually cut calories, you should also try gradually shifting yourself into a more balanced, healthier diet. The key, of course, is to make the changes gradually through portion control. Cutting out the foods you love suddenly will cause you to drop the diet. You don't need to eliminate them entirely, just eat a little less of them.
Often it helps to focus on adding more fruit and vegetables to your diet, and to eat them before the rest of your meal. Substitute an apple or orange for one of your snacks. This will gradually cause you to eat less of the less healthy foods, by filling your stomach.
If you don't particularly like apples or oranges, try other fruits. I happen to like pears and mandarin oranges. Organic fruit and vegetables that aren't force-ripened also taste better.
Don't try to make excuses that a slice of apple pie or fruit cake is a serving of fruit. Pies and cakes are mostly sugar.
If your diet is unbalanced, you should take a daily multivitamin in addition to gradually restoring balance to your diet.

Control When You Eat

Put together a schedule of when you will eat. This can include the times of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and one snack in between each meal. Try sticking to the schedule. If you get the urge to eat at an unscheduled moment, look to see how long it is until the next snack or meal, and try waiting until then. (A good schedule is 7:00 am breakfast, 9:30 am snack, 12:00 pm lunch, 3:00 pm snack, 6:30 pm dinner.)
Whatever you do, do not snack after dinner.
When you eat, eat more slowly, savoring the flavor. It takes about 20 minutes for you to feel full after eating, so if you eat more slowly, you will end up eating less food. Try to avoid inhaling your food. Chew your food thoroughly, instead of swallowing it whole.