Though we’re just a week into the new year, you might already be feeling your enthusiasm starting to lag when it comes to your health and fitness goals. Eating better and moving more aren’t yet habits for you, and you might find them boring or you’re not yet seeing any results.
Dr. Lawrence J. Cheskin, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center, says that most people fail at diets for these reasons, as well as an
that means one slip up has ruined your diet forever.
Cheskin says people need to understand that losing weight is hard and it’s not just the kinds of foods we eat that need to change, but the behaviors surrounding why we eat. He says eating too much is not really a hunger issue, it’s more about that food is such a central part of life: we eat to celebrate, when we’re bored, and just about any other time.
To make weight loss and healthy living easier he says people should eat more small meals through the day so they never get hungry. Different diet plans work for different people, and you don’t always know which one will work for you, but the clinic tends to recommend a low-carb diet that’s high in fruits, vegetables and protein.
Whatever you do, don’t call it a diet
Making healthy changes is always a good idea, but author Linda Bacon says that it seems like dieting is the
. Depriving your body of calories slows your body down and decreases the amount of leptin in your bloodstream, which makes you feel hungrier.
Bacon’s book,
, suggests that everyone has a healthy weight set point, which may be higher for some people than others. Dieting to try to get below your set point will just lead to failure and inevitable weight regain, she says. Instead, people should eat foods they love, just not too much of them, have more frequent meals and not get too caught up in whether they have a culturally acceptable body size.
Instead of focusing on a number on the scale, why not pick a simple
to focus on each month for the next six months? In January you can learn more about how your current weight may be setting you up for future health problems, as well as measuring your waist and starting to monitor your food intake. Cut cholesterol intake in February and start walking in March, for example.
Coming up with your own healthy goals for each month can keep you more focused on day-to-day progress and remind you to check in with your health every month, even if you didn’t meet your goal for those few weeks.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making healthy changes. In fact, the Eat, Drink and Be Healthy column from the
.
Experts say people need to plan their meals and snacks and only shop for and eat the healthy things on their meal plan. We should all try to eat more slowly and mindfully, really paying attention to what we are eating and where it came from.
We should choose more whole foods, think about making Monday (or some other day of the week) completely meatless and read product labels to see if the hype lives up to the true nutritional information. Here’s to a healthy 2009!
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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‘Flat Belly Diet’: a review of the hot new diet book–will it be your ticket to weight loss in 2009?
Well, well, well; it’s December 31st and people all across the fruited plain are engaging in a time-honored American tradition –making resolutions to lose weight.
Every year sees its own crop of hip new diet plans (remember Atkins? The South Beach Diet? The Zone?); this year’s frontrunner looks Liz Vaccariello’s
, delightfully subtitled
A Flat Belly is About Food & Attitude. Period. (Not a Single Crunch Required).
Now, if you’re like me, you’ve got food and plenty of attitude and wouldn’t know a crunch if came to your door selling Girl Scout cookies, so this one sounds like a fit. Let’s take a look at what this diet, that scintillatingly promises to get you to lose up to 15 lbs in 32 days, entails.
1. The whole shebang begins with a Four-Day Anti-Bloat Jumpstart that consists of 96 hours of mental preparation (a sort of dipping-your-toe-in-the-Flat-Belly-Diet if you will) designed to get you into the dieting mindset and to spark your enthusiasm with a loss of up to 5 3/4 inches before the end of the four days. 5 3/4 inches?! you snort. According to Vaccariello,
We tested the entire Flat Belly Diet — including the Jumpstart — on women just like you, holding weigh-ins on a biweekly basis. You’re reading their stories throughout this book, and you can find more by visiting flatbellydiet.com. More than half of your test panel lost at least 1 full inch from their bellies during the Jumpstart period.
2. Next, we get down to the nitty gritty — the Four-Week Plan, 28 days of meals and recipes that can be mixed and matched to your heart’s desire. You are allowed four meals of 400 calories per day; a MUFA is included at every meal.
What the hell is a MUFA? A MUFA is a monounsaturated fatty acid; foods containing these fatty acids have long been known to be beneficial to the body in a number of ways, including preventing heart disease, cancer, and decreasing the risk of dementia in old age. The Flat Belly Diet categorizes MUFAs into five categories: oils, olives, nuts and seeds, avocados, and dark chocolate. At least one of these is included in each recipe and meal plan in the diet.
3. The third, and optional, part of the diet is the Exercise Program, which includes instructions for fat-burning walks, and two sets of exercise instructions (complete with helpful pictures and diagrams) called the Metabolism Boost and the Belly Routine. There are weekly schedules for each of the exercise sets, a four-week walking plan, and a seven-day plan for people like me who want to do the whole thing but are too terminally lazy to keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing when.
Overall, the Flat Belly Diet has all the hallmarks of a diet fad getting ready to take off: it is simple to follow and provides enough detailed instructions to allow busy people to follow it without undue effort; it encourages eating healthy, low-fat foods; it includes inspirational true stories of real-looking people (not size 0 supermodels) who have succeeded on the plan; it emphasizes a positive attitude and includes journal sections for dieters to include their progress as well as their feelings about the whole thing.
In another lifetime, I took graduate courses at UC Davis in Nutrition, and, based on thatknowlege, frankly, I’d be surprised if anyone following this diet faithfully didNOTlose weight since it incorporates all three of the Holy Trinity of Weight loss: Eat less, eat better, exercise.
The only part of the Flat Belly Diet that gives me pause is its assertion that eating monounsaturated fatty acids specifically targets belly fat; unfortunately, many peoplemay purchase this book under the false impression that the exercises and meals in it are designed
for decreasing their tummy girth. A good deal of research has gone into stomach-shrinking methods, and they universally find that, while eating less and exercising decreases the fat in your body OVERALL, you can’t just target one area alone. You’ll lose weight and inches from your stomach, in other words, but you’ll lose it from everywhere else too, and possibly not quite in the proportions you had wished. And no amount of stomach crunches will burn fat only in your stomach. You’ll develop some kicking stomach muscles and burn fat all over your body, but not just in your stomach.
That said, however, the Flat Belly Diet is definitely one to give a fling if you are so inclined. If you do, best of luck!