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Many people suffer from the same eating problems, but among those eating issues, there is on that stands out. Emotional eating. For most people, it is the leading cause of abnormal weight gain, as you end up compensating for your emotional distress by sitting down for a large snack. Once and a while this is fine, but do it too often and you will find it hard to lose any weight.

Every time you eat anything, you need to write down your state of mind in your food journal. Were you feeling tired, upset, depressed, happy or energetic? Just writing a few words about how you felt at the time you decided to eat can make a world of difference when it comes time to analyze your eating behaviors.

While your emotions are a good starting point, if you want to get even more in depth in your journal, you should go ahead and make that extra effort. At the end of each day, make a note about what happened during that day. Were the events good or bad? Did they lead to you eating more than you normally would have?

Once you analyze your emotions in regard to your hunger levels and how often you eat your meals, you may be able to find a pattern which you can use to become a more proper eater. Maybe you’ll find that you eat more when you’re depressed, even if you do not feel that hungry. Or perhaps you will find that you bolster happy days with food to make you feel even better.

The ultimate goal of any food journal you create is to be able to track your dietary patterns to see what needs to be changed if you hope to lose weight. While the core of your food notebook should be based on what you eat and how much of it you ate, you should also take the time to write about your state of mind, how often you eat, and where you have your meals. While these facts may seem useless at first, they can provide you with a number of interesting observations about what you need to change if you hope to lose weight.

Finaly, eating healthy foods will help with your emotional needs. By eating healthy you can eat all you want. Educate your self on what healthy foods to change your mood. Eating health foods and keep fit on a regular daily bases will help you reduce stress. In addition, drink green tea will help you with your diet and good mood feeling with plenty of healthy nutrition.

When you are ready to lose weight it is easy to run into road blocks that get in your way. Here are 10 weight loss tips that will help you keep going so you will reach your weight loss goal.

Focus

It can be so easy to get distracted by that favorite food of yours that you forget your diet. Then it happens again and before long you have left your diet in the dust. To contour act this you should get very clear in your mind why it is that you want to lose weight. Write down a list of reasons you do not like being your current weight and then what it will be like when you lose the weight. Get clear on what you want to avoid and what you want to gain. By getting clear on why you want to lose weight will give you an excellent head start.

Determination

Using your focus and keeping your reasons for losing weight clearly in mind you will gain determination. As you begin to see some weight loss focus your mind on this and realize what you have done. Praise yourself for your success. This will help keep you determined to keep on losing weight. You will be well on your weight to your goal.

Exercise

So many people want to lose weight without any effort it is crazy yet a reality. The problem is that in all reality weight loss takes some effort. You have to do some thing in order to shed those extra pounds. Starting off by building a better level of fitness into your life can give you more solid foundation for reaching your desired weight.

Diet

After you get some exercise going in your life then you will be ready to start making changes to your diet. This is where you can choose the diet you think will give you the results you want. There are so many options when it comes to diets that it is almost crazy. But in the end select a diet that you will be able to stick with. It may not be the only diet plan you use and switching to another one is not bad. What is bad is if you stop the diet and stop the exercise and lose your determination and focus!

Calorie Shifting

Calorie Shifting is a very successful diet that many people have found to help them achieve the weight loss goals they desire. Get started today and lose the weight with a Calorie Shifting Diet.

Natural, healthy weight loss can occur only by increasing one’s intake of pure, healthy water. Not only the water is the number-one ingredient for a fit and healthy body on the inside; but it also plays the major and lead role in maintaining a youthful and healthy look from the outside.

The quality and the quantity of the water we consume is directly related to the ability of body to metabolize, shed excess fat and maintain the skin.

Weight loss is primarily the result of the liver converting stored fat into usable energy. This process not only requires sufficient water intake, but it can be greatly accelerated by consumption of an abundance of clean, healthy water. Water also suppresses the appetite naturally and helps digest food properly.

Increasing water intake naturally speeds up metabolism and allows the body to better assimilate nutrients from the foods and nutritional supplements we consume, the result being natural and healthy weight loss.
When we do not consume enough water, the upper and lower intestine have a reduced ability to absorb nutrients. The result is that most of the value of our foods and supplements is lost and passes through our body with out being absorbed.

Sugars and carbohydrates are absorbed and processed faster than other nutrients, so without an abundant intake of clean water, we can end up getting all the calories without any of the nutrition. Food cravings are primarily the result of nutrient deficiencies; it’s the body’s way of telling us we need something.

If our food is not properly digested, then nutrient absorption is not sufficient, and the body keeps telling us we need something in the form of food cravings.”Sixty percent of all Americans are over weight. It’s our number one health problem.” -Surgeon General

A good indication of how much water is enough is to notice how much color is in your urine. Any color at all in the urine usually indicates a water deficiency, resulting in reduced nutrient absorption and a slower metabolic rate.

The quality of the water we drink also greatly impacts the body’s ability to achieve or maintain a certain weight. One of the main functions of the liver is to act as a filter and eliminate toxins from the body. The liver performs this vital process using water in a joint effort with the kidneys. If the water we consume contains chemicals like chlorine, lead or agricultural and industrial pollutants, then much of the liver’s energy is spent on filtering contaminants instead of processing fat into energy.

Many recent studies have shown a link between consuming chlorinated water and thyroid dysfunction, which can lead to weight gain.
All weight-loss programs are based on reduced caloric intake and increased metabolic rate, both of which are naturally achieved with an increased intake of clean, healthy water.
 
Water is also the key ingredient to keep the skin moist, subtle and resilient. The best way to moisturize is from the inside.

Drinking more water will result in softer, healthier, younger-looking skin. Try it: drink an extra glass of water in the morning, one before lunch and one an hour before bedtime. You will be shocked at the results!!!
Truly, water is the key ingredient for healthier skin and natural weight loss.

For a diabetic a diabetic diet is very important to managing their condition, and in some cases even working towards reversing it.  Here is more on this type of diet which cuts fat and carbohydrates.

Both types of diabetes can benefit from the diabetic diet. Type I, called juvenile diabetes, is often diagnosed in children while type II usually starts in adulthood and is more common.  Type I diabetics suffer because their bodies don’t produce insulin, while Type II diabetics suffer because their cells don’t absorb insulin.  Both forms of the disease respond well to a diabetic diet, although it is more likely that type II diabetes can actually be avoided or reversed in early stages.

Ideal body weight is a key of the diabetic diet. It’s easy to calculate ideal body weight for men or women. In women add five pounds to 100 for every inch above five feet, and subtract five pounds from 100 for every inch under five feet.  Here’s a quick example – a woman who is 5′4” tall ideally should be 100+20 pounds, in other words 120 pounds.  For men start with 106 pounds for a height of 5 feet than add 6 pounds for every inch about 5 feet. So for a 6 foot tall man ideal weight would be 178 pounds.

The ideal formula for a diabetic diet varies, but there are some common basics. For type I diabetics, the ideal diet includes about 16 calories per pound.  As an example, someone who weighs 170 pounds would eat 2720 calories daily. Type II diabetics eat about 1500 calories per day to lose weight, then differing amounts of calories to maintain ideal weight.

Carbohydrates account for about 50% of the calories consumed in a diabetic diet. Some people consume less carbohydrates, but then they tend to eat more fat.  

But if saturated fats are avoided, a little more fat in the diet is OK.  Also check out these other diets 

low carb diet

Acne Treatment For Acne Vulgaris

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Food Allergies: Why Are we Allergic?

It is pretty strange how some people are allergic to certain foods. There are a few common food allergies which the majority of people are allergic to and this would include peanuts, fish, and milk. If you ever find that you are allergic to any type of food, you should not be alarmed, and certainly don’t think that your life is going to be over.

If you want to burn off fat and keep it off permanently, there are a few things you absolutely must do, and a new study from Wake Forest University has just uncovered another one…

Previous research has concluded without a shred of doubt that high levels of exercise are one of the keys to keeping fat off and maintaining your ideal weight. In this new study just published in the October 2008 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, researchers found for the first time, proof that the drop in physical activity that happens automatically during calorie restriction is directly correlated to weight regain.

We’ve known for some time that when you restrict calories, your level of non exercise physical activity (non exercise activity thermogenesis or NEAT), drops spontaneously, even if you don’t realize it’s happening.

Your physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) also tends to drop when you restrict calories.

Basically, when you cut calories, you get sluggish, you move your body less, you don’t feel like exercising and if you do exercise, you do it with with less “gusto.”

This means that unless you intentionally counter this tendency by pushing yourself to keep active and keep up the intensity, despite your low calorie intake, your weight loss will slow down automatically as you continue with caloric restriction. (can you say, “fat loss plateau?”)

The new twist to this story is that in this latest study the researchers followed up on the subjects through the maintenance period - with 6 month and 12 month checkups.

This is significant, because most fat loss “success stories” are reported immediately after the weight loss phase, but you never know what happened to them afterwards.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t much of a “maintanence” period… almost everyone regained most of the weight.

The surprise was WHY they regained back the weight and WHO regained the most…

The drop in physical activity during the diet was directly related to the weight regain after the diet!

The researchers wrote,
“The greater the decrease in physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) during the energy deficit, the greater the weight gain during the follow up.”

“That won’t happen to me,” you say? Think again. That drop in activity usually happens unconsciously. It’s part of the “starvation response” (or “weight-regulating mechanism” if you prefer). Your body tricks you in countless ways, in order to restore energy balance and stabilize your weight.

If you believe that diet alone is the answer or that you can skimp on the training, you are shooting yourself in the foot and thinking short-term.

When you extend out your time frame to a year or longer, you get a whole new perspective.

For years, I have been imploring my readers and subscribers to “burn the fat” with higher levels of exercise - strength training AND cardio training - while “feeding the muscle” with a higher intake of clean food, instead of simply “starving the fat” with low calorie diets and little or no exercise.

“Eat More, Burn More”… “BURN The fat FEED the muscle.” those are the mottos you want to remember.

Can you lose weight without exercise? Of course. Just be sure you have a dietary-induced calorie deficit. Is it the best way? Not by a long shot.
Bottom line: If you want to MAXIMIZE your fat loss, and keep fat off permanently, it is imperative not only to keep up a high level of energy expenditure (BURN calories not just cut them), but also to make a conscious effort to make sure your activity level does not drop as you lose weight during the calorie deficit.

If you’d like to learn more about this effective and proven approach to fat loss: “eat more, burn more,” then please visit my “Burn The Fat” website at www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

Train hard and expect success,
Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

Hot! #1 Popular Download eBook!

Clearly, we have an obesity problem in America and many other countries across our planet. Yet, I propose that we do not have a weight loss problem today. In case you’re confused at this apparent contradiction, consider these statistics:

According to a study from Oxford University published in the International Journal of Obesity, within 3 to 5 years, about 80 percent of all ‘weight losers’ have regained the lost weight, and often gained back a little extra.

According to research by the National Weight Control Registry, that relapse rate may be as high as 95 percent.

For comparison, relapse rates for drug, alcohol and tobacco dependency have been reported in the range of 50-90%.

This means that lots and lots of people have “successfully” lost weight. But not many have kept it off. Therefore, we don’t have a weight loss problem, we have a weight-relapse problem; we have a “not sticking with it” problem. Wouldn’t you agree?

In fact, the fall and subsequent weight-regain usually doesn’t take years. Many people have abandoned their new year’s resolutions within weeks. By the time the Super Bowl party rolls around, their diet is history!

If this is true, then shouldn’t we put more of our attention onto figuring out why you haven’t been sticking with your program, and what you should do about it?

I put together this new list (below) of the top 8 reasons why you fall off the wagon.

Rather than worrying about the minutiae of your diet plan, like whether you should be on low carb or high carb, Mediterranean or Okinawan, vegetarian or meat eater, I propose that if you simply focus on these 8 issues, you’ll start getting more lasting results.

How? By being able to stick with whichever plan you decided was best for you! After all, even if you have the best nutrition program in the world - on paper - it doesn’t do you much good if you can’t stick with it in practice!

THE 8 REASONS

1. No focus: you didn’t set goals, you didn’t put your goals in writing, and/or you didn’t stay focused on your goals daily (by reading them, affirming them, looking at a vision board, etc.)

2. No priorities: you may have set a goal, but you didn’t put it on or near the top of your priorities list. For example, your goal is six pack abs, but drinking beer and eating fast food on the weekend is higher on your priorities list than having a flat stomach.

3. No support system: you tried to go at it alone; no buddy system, training partners, family, spouse, friends, mentors or coaches to turn to for information and emotional support when the going got tough.

4. No Accountability: you didn’t keep score for your own accountability – with a progress chart, weight record, measurements, food journal, training journal, and you didn’t set up external accountability (ie, report to someone else or show your results to someone else)

5. No patience: you were only thinking short term and had unrealistic expectations. You expected 10 pounds a week or 5 pounds a week or 3 pounds a week, so the first week you lost “only” 1 or 2 pounds or hit a plateau, you gave up.

6. No planning: you winged it. You walked into the gym without having a workout in hand, on paper, you didn’t plan your workouts into your weekly schedule; you didn’t have a menu on paper, you didn’t make time (so instead you made excuses, like “I’m too busy”)

7. No balance: your diet or training program was too extreme. You went the all or nothing, “I want it now” route instead of the moderate, slow-and-steady wins the race route.

8. No personalization: your nutrition or training program was the wrong one for you. It might have worked for someone else, but it didn’t suit your schedule, personality, lifestyle, disposition or body type.

So there you have it – 8 reasons why most people fall off the wagon! Have you been making these mistakes? If so, the solutions are clear and simple: focus, prioritize, get support, be accountable, be patient, plan, balance and personalize.

Train hard and expect success,
Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

Hot! #1 Popular Download eBook!

I have no doubt that a scientist somewhere just read the title of this article and said out loud, “YES! Venuto is right! That little thing in your head – the hypothalamus – it IS the thing that is keeping you fat! By George, that Venuto guy isn’t a dumb bodybuilder after all – he’s been doing his research!” At which moment, I will be shaking my head and thinking, “you need to get out of the laboratory and into the real world, with real people, buddy.” Okay, okay, to be fair, Neuro-endocrine control of appetite and body fat really is quite fascinating. But today, I’m talking about PSYCH-ology, not PHYSI-ology. The little thing in your head that’s keeping you fat is actually just a….

Limiting belief!

Self-limiting beliefs are among the biggest problems that people deal with in their struggles to achieve a healthy ideal weight. They’re also one of the reasons that so many people start to falter or fall off the diet and exercise wagon as early as late January or early February in their New Year’s goal pursuits.

If you’re that science guy I spoke of and you’re about to bail because you’re thinking, “Here we go again… another psycho-babble, self help article,” then think again. A belief is the force behind the placebo effect, which is well known by every scientist and medical professional. A respected doctor gives a patient a pill and is told it’s a powerful drug. The patient gets well immediately, not knowing that the “miraculous” substance was a dummy pill. Inert. Sugar. The miracle was in the mind.

But beliefs are not only involved in the mind-body connection, they are unconscious programs that control your behavior. The most important factor in whether you achieve the body and the health you want is NOT what diet or training program you follow. It’s what makes you follow your diet and training program. And guess what? What you believe controls your behavior - whether you will stick with your program or sabotage it with cheating, bingeing or inconsistency.

What to do about limiting beliefs

Ok, so now you agree that beliefs are psychological factors that affect you physically by controlling your behavior, including your eating, exercising and lifestyle. What now? 3 steps. 2 questions.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY LIMITING BELIEFS

You are fully aware of many of your beliefs. For example, beliefs about spirituality or politics are usually in the front of your conscious mind.

But the beliefs that hold back your health and physical development the most are usually the ones you don’t even know you have. They are like unconscious “brain software,” running silently in the background.

So the first step is to bring those unconscious and potentially damaging beliefs up to the surface so you are aware of them. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know you have one.

2 Quick Questions That Will Help Draw Out Your Beliefs

Beliefs can go back to childhood, but don’t worry, you don’t have to go to a psychotherapist and be regressed back to kindergarten. It’s simpler than that. But it does pay to do this questioning process as a formal “exercise” with serious quiet time, with pen and paper (instead of just thinking about it).

Question #1: What causes me to be overweight (or unhealthy, or not having the body I want)?

Question #2: What’s preventing me from getting leaner? (or healthier?)

Spend some time with it and see how big of a list you can create. Ask yourself whether each belief helps or hurts you. Does it move you forward or backward. Does it empower or disempower you? The ones that hurt you or hold you back will be obvious. You may come up with beliefs such as:

“I’m overweight and I can’t get leaner because”:

I have no time
I’m too old
I can’t stop eating
I hate exercise
You just can’t do it when you have 4 kids
It’s impossible after having a hip replacement

But the million dollar question is: are these beliefs actually true?

Beliefs are not facts. You may hold your beliefs as absolute reality, but when you deconstruct them and challenge them, you may see that they don’t hold any water.

Self limiting beliefs are false interpretations (negative thought patterns) that hold you back. And you keep holding on to them because making excuses and staying the same is a lot more convenient than changing, isn’t it? Change requires hard work, effort and leaving your comfort zone.

Your mission now: weaken the limiting beliefs and get rid of them

STEP 2: CHALLENGE THOSE BELIEFS

How do you challenge a belief? 4 ways:

(A) Challenge it directly: Is the belief even valid at all? See if you can find a “counter example” that disproves your belief. For example; if you think that after you’ve had 3 or 4 kids, it’s impossible to get a nice flat stomach, what will you say after I introduce you to a dozen of my clients and readers who had 3 or 4 kids and went from bulging belly to rock-hard flat stomach? If they did it, then how could your belief be valid? Answer: It WASN’T! You believed something false and inaccurate and it was holding you back!

(B) Challenge the source: Is it your belief, or have you been living what your parents, peers or culture handed down to you? Just the realization that a belief wasn’t yours to begin with is enough to shatter it.

(C) Challenge the usefulness of the belief: Ok, so you believed something when you were younger. Does still believing it has any usefulness today? Does it help you move closer to what you want in your life today? If not, then wouldn’t today be a good time to get rid of it?

(D) Challenging the belief by weighing the consequences: If you keep this belief, what is it going to cost you? What will the pain be like? What will you miss? And what will these consequences be if you don’t change it NOW?

STEP 3: INSTALL A NEW BELIEF

Nature abhors a vacuum, as Spinoza once said. You don’t simply get rid of a belief, you must also replace it. What things would you want and need to believe instead that would create positive behaviors that would move you toward your goal? Write them down, then massage them into an affirmation. For example, if you’ve hung your hat on the belief that you didn’t have time to exercise, could you write a new affirmation of belief similar to this?

“I’m a very busy person, so that means I must set clear priorities and I must keep my health and body on the top of my priority list. I always schedule time for my most important priorities, I am efficient with my training, and I use every minute of my day wisely. And if Barack Obama, the busiest person in the world, can train for 45 minutes a day 6 days a week, there’s no excuse for me. I can do it too.”

Write down your new belief affirmations and read them, right along with your goals, every day.
Then “activate” this affirmation by doing what Olympic and professional athletes do: engaging in mental rehearsal. Visualize yourself carrying out the behaviors that this belief would generate. Think about and feel what it would be like to take those positive actions steps and play mental movies of how your life would change by doing so. Involve all your senses: see it, hear it, feel it.

Keep it up until you start to see your behavior change and your habitual actions come into alignment with your goals/intentions. If you’re diligent, you’ll see changes in attitude and behavior with 21-30 days. It may happen sooner. It may take longer if you’ve carried deep, lifelong limiting beliefs. But in less than a month, the roots of the new belief pattern will be formed.

Then you can update your goals and affirmations to reflect your current priorities and move on to the next goal you want to achieve or the next limiting belief you want to change. Keep THAT up, and pretty soon, you will be LIMIT-LESS!

BELIEVE ME, spending quality time understanding and working on your beliefs is a lot more productive than spending time in forums arguing about whether a low carb program is better than a high carb program… or even whether the cure for obesity is found in the arcuate nucleus of the lower hypothalamus. It’s in your head all right… but most people have been looking in the wrong place.

Train hard and expect success,
Tom Venuto
Fat Loss Coach
www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, independent nutrition researcher, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.burn-the-fat-now.milehightopsites.com

Hot! #1 Popular Download eBook!

If you’ve included a fat-loss diet in your quest to get fit at last, you know that staying on your diet is likely to be hard. It’s going to take plenty of will power to stick with it 100% of the time, and you’re probably already mourning the loss of some of your favorite foods. So this may come as a shock to you, but cheating (on your diet) is sometimes good. At least, it can be when you do it right.

When you’re trying to get your body fat down quickly, you need to work out more, but you also need to control the amount of food you devour. To get really lean, you will have to start eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight. This is where things get tricky.

A key reason that any kind of diet doesn’t work well is because your body adapts. When you consistently cut back on the number of calories you consume, your body takes this as a sign that there isn’t enough food. In short, it acts as if you are in the midst of a famine.

When your body is in starvation mode, it behaves differently. It starts storing every calorie it can as fat, since it thinks there is a famine in progress and it doesn’t know when you’ll get enough food again. It dials down your metabolic rate, leaving you with less energy. Your body puts less effort into maintaining and repairing your joints and muscles, since it is trying to keep you alive until there’s more food. If necessary, it starts burning your muscle tissue as fuel while preserving the fat for an even more dire emergency.

The outcome of this adaptation isn’t pleasant. Because your body is conserving energy, you have little energy to exercise. If you do get up the energy to exercise, your workout will be low quality. You tend to get hurt quickly, and it takes a long time to recover. Any food you do eat seems to instantly turn into blubber around your waist. Your muscles start to fade away. Starvation mode clearly isn’t conducive to working out really hard and building a muscular body. This is where cheating comes in.

Fortunately, your body doesn’t switch into starvation mode quickly. It needs to experience a significant shortage of calories for a number of days straight before it switches over. If you don’t experience that significant shortage of calories for that number of days, your body won’t make the switch to starvation mode. You’ll get the benefits of reduced calories, without the unpleasant side effects of starvation mode.

So, to ensure that your serious fat-loss diet remains effective, you need to break it once in a while. At regular intervals, you need to eat significantly more than you otherwise would, to keep your body from going into starvation mode. That makes life easier, and it gets even better. If you eat your favorite junk food on these cheating days, it becomes that much easier to stick with the plan the other days. There’s a big psychological difference between giving up your favorite foods altogether, and still having them, say, once a week on your cheating days.

The easiest way to do this is to just pig out once a week. But this approach isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to go. If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, without the negative effects of starvation mode, you should get expert advice on all aspects of your diet, including whether and how to go about cheating based on your specific diet, body type and so on.

Are you amongst the many millions of people who look in the mirror daily and say to themselves “I have got to lose that excess weight”? Nearly all of us have done this at some point and in many instances you really do need to shed a bit of weight. This is not however always necessary and so just how do you know whether you really should go on a diet?

A major problem with weight gain is that it often seems to arrive when you are not paying attention and this is being witnessed especially in countries such as the USA where obesity is classed as an epidemic. Because however your weight generally increases only slowly over many months, you usually simply do not notice the increase in terms of changes to your looks and are only conscious of it when you weigh yourself on the bathroom scales. Consequently, it is good practice to get yourself into the habit of weighing yourself regularly (roughly once a month is usually sufficient) and if you find that it has risen appreciably then it is time to go on a diet.

There are differences of opinion about precisely what constitutes obesity but if your weight has increased by more than about thirty pounds then you are probably heading for obesity and a myriad of associated medical problems.

The next sign that you probably should to lose weight is when a friend remarks that you are putting on weight. Now you might well take offense if someone tells you that you need to lose some weight but remember that they probably found it hard to find the courage to say something to you and are also practically always demonstrating a very real concern about your state of health, rather than passing comment about how you look.

Another sign that you have put on too much weight is when you begin to have difficulty with normally easy tasks like climbing the stairs or running to catch a bus and discover yourself getting short of breath all too quickly.

Of course this is not necessarily a consequence of carrying too much weight and can be caused by other health problems, however you would be surprised at how often the cause turns out to be weight. When this happens your body is starting to ring its alarm bells and these should not be ignored.

One final and very common, though often dismissed, sign that you are gaining weight is quite simply discovering that your clothes do not fit like they used to. A bit of a tight waistband following Christmas is normal for a lot of us but when it continues getting tighter and tighter and you find that you are buying bigger and bigger clothes each time you shop then the time has come to go on a diet before your expanding waist stretches not only your clothes but also your store card.

These are of course just a small number of examples of the many indicators that you are overweight and need to take steps to correct the situation. Excess weight has a habit of creeping up on you slowly and it is far too easy to simply not notice it at all. But the secret to both looking and feeling good is quite simple - know what your ideal weight should be and hop on the scales every now and again to ensure that you are not exceeding it by too much.

Obesity in America, and particularly teenage obesity, nowadays is a growing problem and one which has serious medical complications. It is also wise therefore to learn how to calculate BMI which is the medical indicator for obesity.

Many folks need to lose some weight, and lots of people are forever searching for diets that are effective. It’s not really difficult to find weight loss plans that are effective, but finding a program a person can stick to is the issue. The 46.8 billion dollar diet industry (as of 2005) depends not on people staying healthy and keeping off weight, but rather on people taking an endless yo-yo ride between health and fat. Because repeat business brings in the cash, the focus is naturally on the roller coaster reality of bad living followed by short stints of diets and health programs.

Here’s a diet that works. Combine limiting caloric intake to 1000 calories a day with at least 30 minutes of exercise at least five times a week. That diet will result in shedding weight. But there are two issues. #1 cravings will likely ruin the diet. 1000 calories and all that exercise will eventually lead to ruinous hunger and binge eating. First it’s a potato chip or piece of cake, then it’s an extra hot dog and the whole bag of snacks, and then the diet is kaput. The second problem is what happens after the diet ends? What happens when the weight is gone? What, you’ll return to eating the same way you ate prior to the diet? Guess what, then the weight will come back. Next spring, or next time to try on that dress or tuxedo, or next family trip, or simply the next time you glance at a mirror on the way out of the gym it will be once again be diet time.

The best diet is a forever diet. A lifestyle change to healthier eating habits and more physical activity is the best way to lose weight and keep off the weight. The Sonoma Diet, created by Connie Guttersen, discusses 10 “power foods.” These are almonds, bell peppers, blueberries, broccoli, grapes, olive oil, spinach, strawberries, tomatoes and whole grains, combined with the diet of the Sonoma country, which includes Asian, Latin American and Mediterranean foods and dishes. The diet is full of real food, and real portions, combined into enjoyable dishes to help motivate someone to stay with it .

Want a diet that works for healthy weight loss? Move your mind from a short term diet to permanent eating habits that go along with an overall healthy and active lifestyle. That way you won’t put on the pounds in the first place.