The "How to keep your new years resolution.com" website gives us some good insights to the news year's resolution tradition.
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Which diet will you chose: Atkins, Fit for Life, The Zone, Weight Watchers, Raw Foods, Juicing, Cabbage Soup?
Usually our declaration that we are going on a diet is accompanied by an anguished moan. But weight loss doesn't have to be a chore. We can make it much easier to lose weight and keep it off if we shift our perceptions of dieting. The most important shift is the realization that dieting doesn't have to be about deprivation. You don't have to live on bland salads, only eating soups or prepackaged diet plan meals, or go on controversial induction or crash diets to lose weight. In fact, Oriental Medicine advises quite the opposite. Even western nutritionists agree with the Oriental viewpoint.
Balance, not deprivation
Balance, not deprivation, is the best way to achieve and maintain a healthy body. Dr. Dean Ornish, author of Eat More, Weigh Less comments on risky high protein diets, "You can lose weight from fen-phen, too, but that doesn't mean it's good for you." Likewise, Katherine Tallmadge, nutritionist and author of Diet Simple states "I've found the biggest cause of overeating is under-eating."
Planning to succeed
Most overeating is due to poor planning. It is amazing what a well-stocked refrigerator full of delicious prepared foods does for preventing that stop to the fast food joint. Most of your cravings and uncontrolled overeating will be conquered when you feed your body what it needs regularly during the day and have the food at your fingertips when you need it. Studies show that you are most likely to eat whatever is in your environment. If you surround yourself with delicious, healthy, wholesome foods, that's what you'll end up eating.
Avoid the binge effect
Many people skip breakfast and wait until late in the day to eat lunch or even miss it, blaming a busy day at work. Then when they finally eat, they gorge on whatever is fastest. But what happens physiologically when we regularly deprive our bodies of food and then finally binge? Our body goes into a state of emergency and thinks that it has to store the calories we ate for future use. So it stores these calories as fat, an efficient fuel because it is hard to burn.
Massive amounts of sugar
And what if we eat a quick sugary "pick me up" like a candy bar or Powerbar instead of a meal? The American Heart Association's Committee on Nutrition recently informed healthcare professionals that sugar consumption promotes obesity and raises triglycerides (blood fats). Any extra calories are converted into body fat for storage, and sugar is a fuel that delivers calories with great efficiency. Extra fat on the body usually produces extra fat in the blood along with added body weight. But if we eat regularly and avoid massive amounts of sugar consumption, our bodies won't need to store as much. The body will use or burn most of the calories instead of storing them.
Sugar is hard to give up because we love and crave the sweets present in many of the products we want to eat, even in some brands of bread!
Our sugar cravings date back two million years when we would seek out sweet foods dense with energy, like ripe mangos hanging from the tree, berries clustered on the vine and honey seeping from the comb. Thousands of years later, that primitive impulse, in a land of overabundant processed foods and sedentary lifestyles, works against easy weight control and healthy energy balance. Our sedentary lifestyle is one of the reasons that people should combine an exercise program with the dietary change. There is just no evading exercise if you want to achieve and maintain weight loss.
The USDA RDA for sugar
The USDA recommended daily allowance (RDA) of sugar is 40 grams, but the average American over the age of two eats two times that quantity. Sugar addiction is a real and important concern. If you eat lots of sugar, it is best to reduce your intake rather than go cold turkey. Sugar stimulates the brain to produce the opioid chemicals which in turn stimulates elevated dopamine levels. Elevated dopamine levels cause us to seek out more sweets. This urge is the same chemical process that a morphine or heroin addict's brain experiences. Fortunately for sugar addicts, it is not as hard to quit. Although there is a theory that it is harder for people who are in recovery from drugs or alcohol to quit sugar, but it can be done. Try to reduce your intake by half for a few weeks, then by half again for a week, then in half again until you reach at least the USDA recommended allowance (or less).
Cutting down
When you decide to eat sweets, you may go by to a local bakery, gourmet or specialty chocolate shop. This way instead of buying a whole pie or cake, you can buy one slice, or just two or three chocolate raspberry truffles instead of a whole box of cheap chocolate from the drug store. The result is that you lower the potential sugar and caloric intake and the superior quality chocolate or baked delicacy more substantially satisfies your craving than low quality grocery store or quickie-mart junk food. So basically, you don't have to eat sweets as much or as often.
Progress not perfection
As you embark on a new way of eating, be kind to yourself if you slip into an old habit. Just acknowledge the awareness that you slipped and explore why. Don't beat yourself up. Instead ask yourself questions like: Was it because you had no food in the house so you went to a fast food joint? How can you stock your refrigerator to avoid fast food? Was your feeling emotionally vulnerable when you ate that entire box of cookies? What else can you do to feel better in the future?
Source: How to keep
