3 Secrets Your Diet Book Won’t Tell You

3 Secrets Your Diet Book Won't Tell You By: Amy Grant

Are you wondering why you're not losing weight? If you're like me, you've tried every fad diet imaginable, and nothing seems to work – at least not long-term. I've personally tried Weight Watchers (that worked great until my schedule changed and I was no longer able to attend meetings), Atkins (not easy to follow for someone who travels a lot and loves to dine out), and crazy fad diets like the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet, juice fasts, and countless others. I was hungry all the time, and I wasn't able to sustain any substantial weight loss because there are three secrets that NONE of those diets told me. First, diets don't work, PERIOD. Any plan that's highly restrictive, structured or specialized is unrealistic for long-term maintenance. Plus, any diet that requires you to totally eliminate foods from your diet is a recipe for disaster. Personally, I don't care for chocolate. However, when someone tells me I can't or shouldn't have chocolate, it's amazing how I suddenly crave it! When someone takes away a choice, the average person wants that choice back – even if it didn't mean much when the option was available in the first place. Additionally, most diets don't work for everyone, and you won't know if a diet works unless you try it. Trying many diets without seeing results can lead to "dieter's frustration" which, in many cases, just packs on more pounds. The second point that most diets fail to mention is that you must eat frequently to regulate your metabolism and burn fat. Extreme low-calorie and tiny "portion-control" diets put your body into starvation mode, which means your body clings to food because it doesn't know when its next meal is coming. This explains how you can actually eat less food and consume less calories, and still not lose any weight. If your diet makes you feel hungry all the time, that's definitely not a good sign. The best nutrition plans require that you eat five or six small meals per day, no more than four hours apart. Finally, diets are lying to you when they say you must be "patient" and expect to lose only one to two pounds per week. For someone like me, who had fifty pounds to lose, this information was devastating. If you have a lot of weight to lose (50 pounds or more), it is not unhealthy to drop three to five pounds per week, particularly in the beginning. In my experience, the greatest motivator is early results. When you can see the fruit of your efforts, you are much more likely to press onward when the going gets tough. Early results can help you maintain focus and keep your determination alive. An excellent all-natural supplement such as NiteTrim (http://www.NiteTrimDirect.com" target=_blank>http://www.NiteTrimDirect.com) can jump-start your results from other weight-loss efforts. Supplements such as NiteTrim can also help you break through the dreaded "plateaus." Once I discovered these three secrets, I realized that the best way to get in shape and maintain a healthy body is through proper nutrition, regular exercise and appropriate supplementation. By far the best program I've found is a combination of Bill Phillips' Body for LIFE (http://www.BodyForLife.com"

"Cookie Cutter" Low Carb Diet Plans Explained

by Jenny Mathers

Most diet plans, including low carb diet plans are best taken with a grain of salt, because although one may work for your best friend, it may not work for you. For those with serious weight problems and have co-existing issues such as hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar levels) or like some of us hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar levels) etc., the popular diet plans usually will not be able to cater to individual needs.

We are all individuals and as such we need to feed ourselves as individuals, having said this some diet plans will be more beneficial for the general population that others.
To assess which particular diet plan will be beneficial, you can follow these guidelines. They are very much common sense points, and provide a good framework which many nutrition professionals would broadly follow, and within which you can divide the scammy diet plans from those that can offer you safe and healthy diet ideas.

1. Diet offers sufficient balance and a variety of carbohydrates, protein and fats.
   
2. Diet does not exclude one particular food group, and encourage excessive consumption of another.
   
3. Diet encourages exercise to complement sensible eating habits.
   
4. Diet encourages awareness of portion sizes.
   
5. Diet does not encourage unrealistic quick weight loss.
   
6. Diet is backed up with medical research data.
   

In addition to these points, I've broadly outlined the low carb diet plans, which seem to be occupying the minds of dieters and researchers alike, as well as the research for and against pertinent to the low carb diet plans.

Low Carb Diets

A lot of the diet plans these days center around the low carb diet plans. These low carb diet plans are considered by some diet fads, others consider it the new wave in healthy eating. Diets such as The New Atkins Diet Revolution maintain that obese people are insulin sensitive and carbohydrates make them gain weight. Low carb diet plans such as The Zone lay down specific proportion of carbohydrates, protein and fats that should be consumed in order to lose weight and while fats are reduced, the main source of energy comes from the consumption of protein.

Low carb diet plans such as Sugar Busters, believe that sugar is your body's most heinous weight loss enemy and since carbohydrates are the foods that are processed into sugars – carbohydrates should be limited. The Scarsdale Diet also is a low carb, high protein diet and offers a 2 week crash dieting plan.

Popular diets such as the South Beach Diet and the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet are also low carb diet plans that have become popular with dieters who have tried and failed at the Atkins diet. All these diets see themselves as the worlds answer to the obesity problem.

To be fair, there are significant and many research papers that support and argue against the low carb revolution, as yet the wider medical community has not fully made it's mind up as to whether the diets are something that is favourable in the long term.

Recent research by Layman et. al., and Saris have found that the low carb and high protein diets provide little benefit to dieters. Researchers found that when protein was moderately increased and carbohydrates proportionately decreased, insulin levels stabilised but no significant weight was lost. Saris in his review concluded that it is probable that a low carb, high fat diet will increase the likelihood of weight gain.

While there is a lot of evidence against the low carb philosophy, there is also a lot of evidence to support it. Research published in May, 2004, found that when patients on a low carb diet were compared with patients on a low fat diet, those patients who had consumed a low carb diet had a greater weight loss, decreased triglyceride levels and increased levels of HDL's - in other words their cholesterol levels had improved. To put the icing on the cake research has just been published to support the www.savvy-fat-burning-food.com low-carb.html?>http://www.savvy-fat-burning-food.com/low-carb.html">long term efficacy of eating a low carb diet.

Despite the evidence to support low carb diet plans, mainstream medicine still does not recommend them. The main points of contention with the low carb, high protein diets is that they don't offer balance and variety and could prove dangerous for people at risk of heart disease. Particularly with low carb diet plans such as the scarsdale diet, they are not realistic and cannot be maintained in the long term causing yo-yo dieting and no one wants that !

References:

Wim HM Saris Sugars, energy metabolism, and body weight control Am J Clin Nutr 78: 850S-857S

Donald K. Layman, Harn Shiue, Carl Sather, Donna J. Erickson and Jamie Baum Increased Dietary Protein Modifies Glucose and Insulin Homeostasis in Adult Women during Weight Loss www.nutrition.org