Tag: Obesity

Getting to Know the General Motors Diet

Have you been to the grocery store lately? What did you notice? Perhaps you saw a recently added aisle displaying organic fruits and vegetables. Did you ever wonder why that aisle is there? Why wasn’t it there years ago?

According to recent studies, obesity is one of the top two killer conditions in America today (next to diabetes). Obesity leads to other serious health problems, such as heart failures and cancer. One way to avoid obesity is to engage in regular exercise and to eat a balanced meal. This is the reason why grocery stores nowadays have special sections for all natural products, including fruits and vegetables.

Without a balanced diet, regular exercise will not be as effective as you would have hoped. But then again, with all the diet plans and programs followed by people these days, how do you know if one is effective? How do you choose diets that work?

The GM Diet Plan

There is one way to tell if a diet program is effective or not, and that is its longevity. If a one diet program was able to carry its name for several years, it means a lot of people has tried it and that it has worked for them. There are only a few health programs that pass this criteria, and one of them is the GM diet plan.

The GM diet plan or the General Motors diet is perhaps one of the oldest diet programs in the world. Initiated by the General Motors company for their employees, this diet plan has already helped thousands of people all over the world for several years.

Basically, the GM diet requires eating fruits and vegetables for one full week or for seven days straight. There are specific instructions and portion advisory from day one to day seven, but the entire diet program aims to cut between 10 to 17 pounds from your original weight.

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10 Things You Can Do To Deal With Childhood Obesity

Childhood obesity is a frightening reality these days. One out of every 3 kids has the potential to be an obese adult. According to researchers, with every 20 percent of body weight increase, a child needs to put in 18 months of weight maintenance to revert to normal weight. The best gift you can give your child is the gift of health. Begin today with these 10 tips.

  1. Do Your Homework

To be forewarned is to be forearmed. When you become a parent, find out everything you can about childhood obesity and how to fight it. Understand the risks of an unhealthy lifestyle. Know that what might be a cute chubby child today could just as well grow into an obese adult with an unmanageable life. When you’re dealing with a killer like obesity, information can be king. The more you know, the more ways you can find to help your child beat obesity.

  1. Bring In Early Intervention

While childhood is a time to grow, learn about the world and experience different tastes, moderate your child’s intake with healthy choices. Be on the watch and tackle the obesity issue quickly, before it spirals out of control. It’s easier to inculcate healthy eating patterns and exercise in childhood than it is when the child is grown.

  1. Get Your Child’s Obesity Level Checked

It’s not easy to measure childhood obesity. Children grow in unpredictable spurts, both in height and weight.  If you suspect that your child may have a weight problem, contact your pediatrician immediately. The doctor can validate if your child’s weight corresponds to his or her age and height.

  1. Educate Your Child

Explain to your child that you want him or her to be healthy. While buying groceries or while cooking, highlight the positive and negative aspects of food. Explain what fat does, how the body metabolizes food, how much energy the body needs and so on. Perhaps a very small child cannot understand this much, but a child of 8 and above can be made to understand.

  1. Be Supportive Of Your Child

Don’t victimize your child or make the child feel responsible for his or her burgeoning weight. Don’t tie the child’s obesity to his or her looks; this will damage your child’s self esteem, which may cause long term implications worse than obesity. Let your child know that you love him or her unconditionally and that you want to make sure they’re healthy forever.

  1. Don’t Make Your Obese Child Your Sole Focus

Only your child might have obesity issues while you, your partner and other family members are fine. However, it’s best not to serve regular food to others and special diet food only to your obese child. This singles out your child as the odd one in the family and will make him or her feel inadequate. Instead, change your entire family’s food patterns to the healthy side.

  1. Encourage Your Family To Exercise

Get your entire family involved in an exercise family. Go for weekend swims, early morning walks, gym together, play family squash and basketball games. When you make it a fun family event, your child will just follow suit and bloom under all that attention. If your kids are becoming couch potatoes, restrict both TV and computer time.

  1. Start Small And Be Patient

If you want results overnight, it’s not going to happen. Work closely with your doctor and slowly change your child’s eating and lifestyle patterns. You need to work out a long-term plan to fight childhood obesity along with your doctor. Identify a few areas for improvement first; this way, both your child and your family will put up lesser resistance to your efforts.

  1. Put Away Unhealthy Snacks

Children love snacks and sweets, especially fried food. If your child loves eating this kind of stuff, it might not be easy to wean him or her off it immediately. However, you can freeze unhealthy food at home. Make sure no one buys fried foods in the family and cook only healthy snacks for your kid. Restrict your kid’s allowance and keep an eye on what he or she eats. Allow your child to eat at fast food restaurants, but control portions.

  1. Allow Your Child To Assume Responsibility

You want your child to score well in tests. In the same way, you want your child to score well in health as well. Explain this to your child and put up the optimum weight score as the desired grade. Let your child work up to it. Encourage your child every time he or she earns a C grade. Reward your child for B, B+ and A grades. Soon your child will race to win the game against obesity.

Marina is a freelance writer and writes for specialty products like designer clocks, decorative wall mirrors and a lot more.

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Eat Clean to Lose Weight and Keep it Off

Today, obesity is considered an epidemic not just among adults but children as well. Obesity-related diseases such as heart attacks, diabetes and high cholesterol are at an all-time high. Yet, there are numerous weight loss strategies and techniques that seemingly make it easy to lose weight and keep it off, right? Wrong! The problem is that many of these so-called ‘diet’ foods contain so many chemicals and harmful ingredients that they actually have the opposite effect, making you gain even more weight. Your body simply doesn’t know what to do with all of those foreign ingredients and stores them as fat. This is what causes the roller coaster of gaining and losing weight.

So, what is the answer? Eat clean! No, this doesn’t mean washing all of your food with Pine Sol or Mr. Clean before you eat it; it simply means that you cut out the overly-processed foods that wreak havoc on your body and your immune system. Here is a good rule of thumb: if you can’t pronounce the ingredients listed on the package, it’s probably best left on the shelf. Chances are the product is made in a factory or in a lab. Some have coined these foods as ‘franken-foods.’

There are several principles of eating clean that involve not only what you eat, but when you eat. First, in order to increase your metabolism you must eat more often. Instead of three large meals per day, break up your food portions and eat five or six times per day. This will train your metabolism to know that it is getting food in a just a few hours, so it can dispose of the food it already has.

Next, combine lean protein with complex carbohydrates at every meal. Some examples are chicken with sweet potatoes or tuna and whole grain bread. Include water with every meal, so you are getting at least six glasses of water in per day. Water will help flush out fat and toxins from your system.

The most important aspect of eating clean is to eat whole, fresh foods like fruits and vegetables that grow naturally. If nature made it, it is good for you: it’s that simple. Fresh foods from the farm (or better yet from your garden) will help keep you healthy and living a vibrant life for years to come.

Have you ever noticed the layout of your local grocery store? Take a long look the next time you go; you’ll no doubt notice that the perimeter of the store contains the fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products, eggs, meats and breads. The rest of store is filled with your processed foods: chips, candy, boxed and packaged goods, etc. This is the section you need to stay away from.

Don’t think that eating clean needs to be boring or bland; there are hundreds of recipes you can find online that will incorporate the fresh foods and herbs that you purchase. All it takes is a bit of planning and self-discipline. You will notice the pounds drop off almost effortlessly, while you enjoy a more vibrant, healthy life.

 

Johnny Guyzer is a responsible husband and father of three kids, which is why he really understands the importance of cutting down monthly expenses and saving money for the long term. He was able to cut down his family’s monthly expenses by finding the best rates for affordable health insurance rates through an online comparison website to compare quotes.

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The Best Way to Lose Weight Fast – Is There Such a Thing?

The alarming rates of obesity today are prompting a lot of people to get up and exercise. If people will not make changes, they will be spending more than $300 billion dollars on treatments for people who have illnesses related to obesity. Today, there is a surge in the weight loss industry. You will see weight loss products and diet programs being advertised everywhere, on the newspaper, on the radio and of course, on television. A lot of these products advertise and promise that they can help people lose weight very fast. Each of the products says that they are the best way to lose weight fast. But, is there any truth to their promises? 

A lot of people want to lose weight fast, especially if there is an event which is near and they want to attend it and look their best. However, according to experts, rapid weight loss, although possible, is not healthy at all. The “wonder diets” you see today are mostly temporary fixes and some of them even have side effects to your health. Scientists and doctors alike, say that there is no such thing as a rapid weight loss product or program which is healthy and long-term.

A lot of these diets tell you to fast and refrain from eating. This is not healthy. No matter how much your desire is to lose weight, you should not sacrifice your health.  Eat less diets are everywhere today and a lot of people have also tried these diets. Although manufacturers advertise their products in different ways, they all have one message, lose weight fast.  They tell people to lose weight by consuming nothing but liquids, skipping meals and other ways.

The correct way of losing weight is healthy and it does not have any side effects, it also has long-term benefits. The correct weight0-loss diet will not ask you to skip meals and will not ask you to cut out a particular food group from your diet. The best fast weight loss tips will tell you that you should be patient and determined if you want to lose weight.

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How to lose stubborn belly fat – what you need to know

Many of us commit what’s called “cognitive dissonance” when it comes to our expanding girth.  We’ve spent most of a lifetime steadily becoming overweight and even obese, yet many of us are searching for the miracle diet plan that will take those pounds away in a matter of weeks.  And many of us think that modern technology should be on the verge of figuring out a magic solution that allows us to lose weight without modifying any of the lifestyle habits that we’ve come to love, such as our high-carbohydrate, high-sugar diet and our sedentary jobs and recreation such as channel-surfing.  That’s just not going to happen.

Fortunately, it turns out that the only effective way to learn how to reduce weight and fat levels is also very quick.  It comes from diet changes, not exercise (which is surprising, I know), though I should warn you in advance:  this is not news you’re going to enjoy.

If you’re one of the obese or overweight 1/3 of Americans, your problem is inevitably caused by hyperinsulinism.  As the name implies, this the chronic state of having too much insulin floating around in your bloodstream on a regular basis.  Insulin is triggered by certain foods, and instructs the cells in your muscles and organs to utilize glucose (blood sugar) for energy instead of the fatty acids that they’d prefer to utilize for energy.  Insulin also commands your fat cells to store fatty acids in the form of triglycerides, which become the bulge around your midsection.

If you’re trying to learn how to how to lose stubborn belly fat, you shouldn’t try to discriminate just against your belly fat.  You should just figure out how to lose excess fat in general, and let your body take care of the distribution.  You can’t spot-reduce, but you can easily lower your overall fat amount.

Here comes the difficult part: in order to reduce blood insulin levels, you’re going to have to stop consuming sugar and starch.  Sorry, but there is no other way to lose fat.  Say adios to bread, rice, potatoes, sweet potatoes, potato chips, cereals, pastas, and grains – even those “healthy” whole grains, which are not healthy in the least. Sugar (“white death”) also has to go.

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Losing Weight with the Help of Medical Clinics

Losing weight is a major issue right now. A lot of people has set it their sights on it yet we still see more and more of the population each year becoming overweight. With the kind of diet that most people have nowadays that is really not surprising. Add the fact that we are leading lazy lifestyles and we are doing nothing about it. Our fathers and grandfathers were used to manual labor or at least to some form of physical activity, we on the other hand, we’re stuck on our sofa or our office chairs staring into TV or computer screens.

If you are one of those who suffer from being overweight you might want to try getting the help of a medical weight loss clinic. This kind of clinic is set up with the aim of proving proper weight loss programs with medical supervision all throughout. Weight loss programs from a gym may boast of being scientifically backed and with trainers there to help you could really get some results from them, but medical weight loss clinics goes even better by having a trained medical practitioner available to help you all throughout the program. This is by far the safest way to lose weight. You can be sure that they would not let you try any cheap short cuts just to get rid of a few extra pounds. Anything that they tell you to do, you can be sure that it’s safe and effective, because no medical doctor would put their name and reputation on the line by making you try something that has not been proven yet.

So if you are overweight or even obese, stop checking those weight loss ads just go to the nearest weight loss clinic and get fit and trim in the healthy way.

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