Where has the time gone?

It is 8 days since I last wrote anything on my blog. I have had a very nasty chest
infection, which resulted in me taking to my bed. My visits to the computer were very infrequent. fortunately I am now back to health and ready to start again.
My weight in the meantime hasn't done as well as I had hoped for. Still it is understandable really because when you feel poorly, you just eat what you can without thinking diet, plus of course there are the calorific values of the lozenges, cough medicine, etc.
Today however, I have spent time researching various types of diets available, quite amazing really. I will endeavour to do more investigating before I add anything to this blog.

About the Rosemary Conley Diet.

Rosemary Conley is the UK's leading diet and fitness expert with over 30 years' experience of helping people lose weight and get fit.

In the recent BBC (UK) Diet Trials programme, which followed 300 volunteers over a 6-month period, Rosemary Conley’s Eat Yourself Slim low fat diet and exercise came out top.

It was the most effective in reducing body fat and in retaining lean muscle tissue. It also proved the most effective in increasing fitness levels and, equal with Weight Watchers, in reducing harmful cholesterol thus preventing heart complications.

Rosemary Conley offers you 3 ways to lose weight - at a slimming club, slim online or slim by post plus diet books, fitness dvd's, cookware and great recipes.

Exercise.

Today I wanted to talk about exercising because it is so important to your slimming regime. A year ago I didn't do any exercising at all,I don't think I could have managed following my chemotherapy treatment. When I joined Weight Watchers, I knew it was essential to exercise in order to increase my metabolism.
I decided to check out some videos and exercise DVD at Amazon, I really like the Rosemary Conley selection. She has a slimming club in the UK and her exercise DVD's are in great demand.
I decide to order her Salsacise and Fat burning DVD along with her 7 day workout. They were delivered in a few days, so I was able to start.

Why Weight Watchers?

Weight Watchers does not just provide you with a diet sheet and tell you what you can and can't eat, but provides you with the information and advice necessary to make the best decisions about your diet.

Further, and very importantly, the Weight Watchers plan gives you a level of support and motivation that is essential to your success and that is lacking in so many other weight loss plans.

More on Weight Watchers.

Another week gone!

I can’t believe it is a week ago that I sat here telling you about my WW meeting. There were a lot of new members there today, I love to see new and old face, and I don’t mean old in years but those that are really committed and come back week after week. We are able to encourage each other to keep going, sharing our highs and lows. We all go through those times, luckily I come out of them quickly.

Although I keep losing the weight, it seems that at the moment, it is coming off very slowly, I need to lose 1.4 kilos, approx 3 pounds to reach my goal. I will do it regardless of how long it is going to take me. I was advised by Annette, my leader, to do a habit audit, I couldn’t believe the result told me that I wasn’t spending enough time planning my meals. Since I am heavily involved with running my websites and blog, it is very true. I seem to spend hours a day working on the computer. Maybe I should put aside some time to plan my shopping and menus.

Historical approaches to weight loss and healthy eating

George Foreman Recipes

Even if you don’t own the grill, you will find George Foreman recipes useful. They were created to be healthy and delicious, and who doesn’t want that?
You won’t find greasy burgers or steaks smothered in fat in George Foreman recipes! Instead, you will find foods like salmon, sea bass and chicken in fine form. The dishes are deliciously prepared using a grill, which is ideal for hot summer days when cooking on the patio just seems like the best idea.
So many fat-free dishes turn out lacklustre and just plain boring. But not these.
Obviously the George Foreman recipes are meant to be used with the same brand name grill, but it isn’t a necessity. The advantage of using his grills is that they are electric and specifically designed to get rid of the fat that is already in the food you are cooking.
George Foreman recipes are actually available in video form. Just tune in to watch him cook the food and follow his steps exactly for perfect meals without fat. The videos are on his website, but they can also be bought separately.

Fat Free cooking using grillers.

During this slimming journey with Weight Watchers, I needed to find a way of cooking with the least fat possible. As an owner of a George Foreman Grill I decided to research as many grilling methods as possible.

The George Foreman grill line has become known for its healthy aspect, with grills specially designed to reduce the amount of fat used in cooking. They come in outdoor as well as indoor models, and have basically changed the face of grilling! Because of their non stick surfaces the grills require no extra grease for cooking and the best feature is that every George Foreman grill is designed for “run-off” so that the fat cooking out of the burger or steak you are grilling, just runs right out of the grill instead of soaking back into the food. The innovative design and dozens of useful features outshine other models on the market. The wide variety of accessories is a big plus as well.

For more information on cooking using various grillers visit http://www.homegrilling.com

How to deal with a lapse in your weight loss efforts

If you've had a bad day on your diet (or a bad binge or even a bad week) don't despair.

I know it's all too easy to beat yourself up over it. You feel guilty for breaking your promises to yourself and sabotaging your diet and more than a little angry and depressed at your lack of control.

But before you get too gloomy and reach for the Ben and Jerry's which somehow escaped you last night, stop and think for a moment.

A bad day or even a bad week is not enough to "break your diet" unless you let it get you down. It's what you eat over the long run that counts. It's eating more calories than you need day after day after day that makes you fat not a one-off over-indulgence.

But what can you do if you really did go mad last night? What can you do today to get back on track after you've come off the rails?

1. Whatever you do don't weigh yourself unless you love being miserable. Chances are you had a load of sugar and/or salt last night and you'll be retaining more water than a camel embarking on a trek across the Sahara. Consequently, you'll have gained more pounds than you possibly could from the extra calories you ate. So don't even think about stepping on the scales for 2 days.
2. Every day, but especially today you should aim for eating modest portions of healthy foods whenever you are hungry, stopping when you are satisfied rather than stuffed. More than ever today you need to feel in control. So no starvation rations or you'll only set yourself up for a hunger-induced "clear out the cupboard" binge later on.
   
   
3. Normally it's best not to skip breakfast but if you are still full from the previous day, it can wait. Just make sure you have a healthy snack ready for when hunger does strike.
   
   
4. Take time to enjoy your food today. Sometimes we hardly taste the food when we are eating too much, we eat it so quickly, trying to stop ourselves thinking too much as we shovel it in. Actually taste everything which passes your lips today and put yourself back in control.
   
   
5. Spend a few moments thinking about why you temporarily blew your weight loss plans. What thoughts were running through your head? What situation had you put yourself in? What can you learn from that? How will you deal with those thoughts, those situations next time because as sure as eggs are eggs they, or something similar, will happen again. Be prepared.
   
   
6. Stay positive. Relax a little. Tell yourself "Yes, I broke my diet but that's OK. I'm human. I'm not meant to be perfect. I'm going to treat myself well, eating healthily as much as I can. If I have the odd lapse it doesn't change my determination to keep going." Build yourself up. Give yourself a little (non-food) present. You deserve the best and you can do whatever you set your mind to.

The best way to get over a lapse is to treat it like the insignificant blip it is and just get right back on track!



Copyright 2005, Janice Elizabeth Small

Janice Elizabeth is a successful weight loss coach, slimming club owner and author of "The Diet Exit Plan", an 8 week coaching program for automatic permanent weight loss. Request her FREE 15 page report "How to lose weight without dieting - 7 secrets the diet industry doesn't want you to know" at http://www.simplyslimming.com today.

Metabolism?

Many people make the mistake when slimming to reduce their calorie intake. This is a big mistake. Your body will respond by lowering your metabolism and slowing your weight loss.

Add regular exercise to your plan, this leads to increases in your basic metabolic rate,so you’ll burn more calories even at rest. It is very important to choose exercises that you enjoy, like swimming, walking, cycling, aerobics. I enjoy, swimming, the pool is too cold during the winter months so I listen to aerobic DVD’s and try to do 30 minutes a day.

Check this out

Weight loss secrets

My meeting.

Today was my visit to the Weight Watchers weekly meeting. Fortunately I had lost a small amount of weight, considering it was a week where we had visitors, I was very pleased. I have 3 pounds to go before reaching my target weight. It seems this is the hardest of my whole journey. My determination this time will get me to my goal. The advice from Annette my leader, was to re-evaluate my habit audit. I will do this in the next day or two.

Annette announced that the class as a whole (approximately 32 members) had lost an accumulative 17.5 stone, 114 kilograms or 250 pounds in 6 weeks, seems an incredible amount, but also shows the commitment of every member. When you attend these meetings regularly, you just keep being motivated.

A very useful quote by Harry Truman – “ A Pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.” If you think positively about your slimming journey you can’t fail.

What is a balanced diet for losing weight and good health?

If you want to lose weight then knowing how many calories you eat and burn will be important. Here are some guidelines you can use.

The total calories that you should be consuming depend on whether you are a women or a man. It depends on your body structure and your activity level. So you need to make some adjustment on the numbers I present.

If you have been eating around 1800 calories per day you can slowly move your intake down to 1600. Work down from this level over a month's period to 1400 calories. Don't go below 1200 calories per day. Otherwise you can over stress your body.

If you have just started out and are eating 2400 calories, decrease your calories to 2000 or 2100. If you don't lose weight in 2-3 weeks reduce your calories lower. Over a month's time you can move down to 1600 calories and see if you start to lose weight. If you do, stay at this level.

It's not a good idea to make a drastic shift in your consumption of food since your body can react and get into a "starving mode." In this mode your body will store more fat making it difficult for you to lose weight.

Remember not to eat junk food. When you eat quality food, it takes less food for you to become satisfied as compared to eating junk food.

Protein, Carbohydrates, and Fat

There are many ideas about what combination or percentages you should eat of the various nutrients - protein, carbohydrates, and fat. I don't believe that exact percentages exist, which will provide weight loss and good health for all individuals. Each one of you will require different percentages depending on your weight, health, body structure, emotional make-up and a variety of other conditions. For this reason some diet programs work with some people and not with others.

One of best eating habit programs that will help you to lose weight is to eat:

* quality protein

* low glycemic carbohydrates

* quality fats

* high fiber

* high water consumption

Quality Protein - is essential for the body to survive. There 8 essential amino acids and 14 non-essential. Protein is used to regulate certain body processes by contributing to various chemical reactions and by creating a number of body chemicals.

Eating excess protein results in an acid body, which favors disease. Protein eaten alone causes a 25% increase in your metabolism. When combined with fat and carbohydrates there is only a 10% increase. What this means is that eating more protein and less fat and carbohydrates gives you a boost in metabolism.

It is recommended that around 30% - 35% of your eating habits consist of protein.

Carbohydrates - consist of simple and complex sugars. When carbohydrates are eaten they are broken down into sucrose, which is readily accepted by your cells. Sucrose is converted into energy in your cells. If you eat a lot of high glycemic carbohydrates, your bloodstream becomes overwhelm with sucrose. The excess sucrose in your cells will be converted to fat and stored.

Because most people have been adding weight eating high glycemic carbohydrates, it best to change your eating habits and decrease your intake of these carbohydrates. In general people have been eating 80% high glycemic foods (HighGF) and 20% low glycemic foods (LowGF.) You need to change that to 80% LowGF and 20% HighGF.

This means that you should limit eating foods like potatoes, bread, corn, pasta, muffins, and any flour products. HighGF encourages the storage of fat since the more sucrose you have in your blood, the more sucrose is escorted into your cells by insulin.

You need to concentrate on foods, which are LowGF. Many of these foods are vegetables with small amounts of carbohydrates and high fiber content.

LowGF discourages the storage of fat since less sucrose is in the blood and less is escorted into your cells.

Quality Fats - which are eaten with your meals, prevent sugars from moving quickly into your blood stream.

You need to eat more of the good fats. It's these fats that will help you lose weight. The good fats are omega 3, omega 6, and medium chain fatty acids, MCFA.

Here is the breakdown on the quantity of each type of fat that you should be eating. These percentages are what you should be working towards so that fats provide you with good health and help you keep your weight down.

* saturated fats 10%

* polyunsaturated fats 20%

* monounsaturated fats 60%

There you have it, the numbers and percentages of protein, carbohydrates, and fats that give you a balanced diet so that you can lose weight.

Rudy Silva has a degree in Physics and is a Natural Nutritionist. He writes a newsletter call “Natural Remedies Thatwork.com.” For more information the on the essential fatty acids, visit his web site at www.fatty-acid-remedies.for--you.info

Healthy Eating for Kids

Yo - Yo dieting.

Being healthy is really about being at a weight that is right for you. Is it easy to lose weight? Is there such a thing as a secret to easy weight loss?

Over the years I have heard so much about Yo-Yo dieting. This is usually caused by fad diets, when you gain back all and sometimes more of the pounds you’ve lost, because you haven't changed your eating habits. It's so easy to pile the weight back on as soon as you start eating normally, making it necessary to lose weight once again the secret is to find a slimming regime that really suits you. I have found the “No Count” diet plan from Weight Watchers really suits me. I have found it extremely easy to stay on course with this because throughout my time with Weight Watchers, I never felt I was on a diet, I was eating foods I really enjoyed, and yes I did have treats, I did go out to restaurants for meals, this time making sensible choices.

Mouth watering Low carb recipes

Weight Loss - Keep it simple.

An increasing trend over the last few years has been for diet books to make things complex.

I expect it's because each one vies with the other to come out with some brand new theory or other about why we gain weight and why their diet plan is the only one to help us lose it. And the low fat, low calorie stuff has already been covered!

My problem with this new trend is that the diets all involve more counting and while basic maths was never a problem at school I don't want to use it at the dinner table to know what I can eat. And while counting calories is one thing (most of us are probably walking encyclopaedias by now with how many calories our usual choices contain) the new diets are so much more complex.

With the new diets we need to know carbohydrate counts and fat grams, GI index and all sorts. And sometimes it's not enough to have a straight count we have to work out our percentage of carbohydrates, proteins and fat (yes, follow one particular diet and you have to balance these at EVERY meal).

Somehow I think food was not meant to be eaten like this. It was meant to be enjoyed. Most of us know what is healthy and what is not. Most of us know we'd be better with an apple than a cream cake. Most of us know we need a good variety of all types of food to feel great.

The new diets will not last. More complex stuff will come along and it's sad because we could all lose weight with a few SIMPLE changes.

1. Make healthy choices for most of the food you eat
2. Vary your choices
3. Occasionally enjoy a small portion of whatever it is you love even if it's high in fat or sugar or whatever
4. Eat only when you're physically hungry
5. Stop when you're just satisfied, not stuffed
6. Fill half your plate at lunch and dinner with vegetables or salad, quarter carbs and a quarter protein.

If everyone who wanted to lose weight just followed these simple guidelines there would be many more successful dieters around and a lot less hassle in losing weight.

Why not start today?

Copyright 2005 Janice Elizabeth Small

About The Author:

Janice Elizabeth is a weight loss coach and author of "The Diet Exit Plan". Request her F.REE 15 page report "How to lose weight without dieting - 7 secrets the diet industry doesn't want you to know" at www.SimplySlimming.com TODAY!

My commitment

I made a commitment to myself, that I would attend as many weekly meetings that I could. This I knew would be one way of continuing with the slimming regime of Weight Watchers. I also decided to start planning my weekly shopping and menus, making sure that some low points treats were included. I really didn’t want to feel deprived!!

Week on week I found I was losing weight, small amounts but I really didn’t worry as long as it was coming off. My thoughts were if I could lose just half a pound a week eating the food that I was eating, I was more than pleased. After all that would be a total of 26 pounds in a year.

The Weight Loss answer.

Weight Watchers

I had always associated Weight Watchers as being a slimming club where members spent their time weighing and measuring the points value of all the food they consumed. How wrong was I! Since my last visit to Weight Watchers 13 years earlier, the plan had totally changed. Yes they did have a plan where different foods had points value, but now they had the wonderful “No Count” system. This really suited me, I knew if I had to live my life weighing my food the results would be short lived.

On the “No Count Slimming Plan” I could eat anything on the list of the “No Count” foods. This included foods such as, potatoes, rice, pasta, etc, a whole range of good carbohydrates.

This suited my personality well, I loved my food, however if I could eat foods from the large list, cut down on my portion sizes, eat my 5 fruit and vegetables a day, I knew I would be fine.

Easy Weight Loss like you won't believe!

The start of my slimming journey.

The first meeting was on March 18^th, 2 years to the day after my mastectomy. A new chapter, a new life. I was determined to lose this weight that had slowly crept on over the past few years. To my delight it was the first meeting ever at this venue, great since it was only about half a mile from my home. It turned out that it was the first meeting for us all. There must have been about 30 of us, all shapes and sizes. Annette our leader was great, she put us at easy immediately. She had just reached her slimming goal herself, she would understand our challenges and difficulties.

I listened to her discuss the “new” plan. It didn’t take me long to know which one would suit me. I went home armed with all the Slimming books and tools I could get.

At this stage I felt very excited because I knew I would be able to cope with this kind of diet. It was brilliant.

Burn the fat!

Let the slimming begin!

Previously as I mentioned I had been to Slimming World, it was a great regime and I was able to eat almost anything. Since I had quite a large appetite this diet suited me really well.

I already had many Slimming World books including recipe books. This was it, I would attempt to do the Slimming World diet following the books that I had. It wasn’t difficult, I knew I wanted to lose about 28 pounds. I was very disappointed that there were no Slimming World classes nearby.

The Slimming World diet was going quite well, I felt it would have been better if only I could attend classes. I met a few people who had lost a lot of weight since we last met. Of course my first question was, how did you do it? To my delight they informed me that there were some Weight Watchers classes started in the area, especially for the English speaking community which we lived in.

For hints and tips click here

More tomorrow………………