Archive for October, 2008

Have you put on extra pounds after giving birth? Like most mothers of newborns, weight control is a major concern, as there is no quick fix to regain one’s original body shape.

However, if you consider that it takes nine months to get to full-term size; it makes sense that getting back your original size will take almost as long.

All it requires is a little patience, realistic weight loss goals and conscientious monitoring. Apart from small changes in routine, make sure you drink enough water of about 10 glasses or more, eat low-calorie foods, get sleep of about 7 to 8 hours and avoid stressful situations.

1. Eat for yourself!

When you are pregnant, you tend to eat more to provide better support for your baby’s growth and development. 

However, after delivery, you have to learn to eat for just yourself again. Try to control the size and amount of portions you eat and try not to exceed them.

If you are a breast-feeding mother, proper nutrition is also vitally important. So, to reach your weight loss goals, you have to make effective food choices that can promote healthy weight loss after your pregnancy.

True or false: You’ll get fat if you eat at night, high fructose corn syrup makes you gain weight, and caffeine is bad for you.

Those are all diet myths that got busted in Chicago at the American Dietetic Association’s annual meeting.

Here are 10 diet myths:

Myth: Eating at night makes you fat.

Reality: Calories count, whenever you eat them.

There’s no proof for this myth. Some small studies with mixed results, tests on animals, and a belief that because eating breakfast is linked to lower BMI, eating at night isn’t as good. But all in all, it’s your calorie total that matters, day or night.

Myth: Avoid foods with a high glycemic index.

Reality: You could use the glycemic index to adjust your food choices, but don’t make it your sole strategy for losing weight or controlling blood sugar.

For those people that are already counting carbs, this can be a way for them to fine-tune their food choices, but it isn’t the be-all, end-all for weight loss.

Read more at WebMD

Do you want to look better in swim suit this summer? Are you concerned with your body shape? You don’t have to starve yourself or reduce your food intake to look in better shape.

All that you need to do is to make healthy food choices that can help you to lose unwanted fat from your body.

If you have no idea about how to make healthy food choices, then here are certain foods that can be helpful for you to lose extra pounds of your body.

Watermelon!

This is the best food that you can include in your normal diet in summer. Half of the water melon is truly filled with water. It doesn’t have much calories and acts as best water source for your body.

Watermelon can act as sure energizer after returning from a long hot ride and it also satisfies your thirst in much better way.

So, instead of chilled beer or soda, you can have a watermelon. Even, you can use this wonderful fruit for satisfying your sugar cravings.

Vegetable salads!

Danish researchers said people taking NeuroSearch A/S’s obesity pill tesofensine lost twice as much weight as men and women using approved weight loss drugs.

Obesity, which raises the risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart problems, is increasingly a problem as more people adopt a Western lifestyle.

The World Health Organization classifies around 400 million people around the world as obese, representing an increasingly lucrative market for drug makers.

The study suggest the experimental drug is safe because it had no effect on blood pressure and only raised heart rate slightly, said Arne Astrup of the University of Copenhagen, who led the study published in the journal Lancet.

“It is quite solid from this study that it seems to produce a weight loss that is twice … what we see from existing compounds on the market,” Astrup said in a telephone interview.

The company hopes to take tesofensine to Phase III clinical trials early next year — the last stage of human testing before a company can seek regulatory approval for a drug.

Astrup and his team compared tesofensine against the Sanofi-Aventis SA obesity-fighting drug Acomplia and Abbott Laboratories’ Reductil, known as Meridia in the United States.

The most important aspect of maintaining a healthy diet is your ability to stick to it, rather than the type of diet you choose. Before starting the diet, decide whether you think you can stick to the diet or not.

If you focus on this particular aspect, it will be easier for you to follow a healthy diet successfully.

Whether you are trying to lose excess weight or simply trying to maintain your current body weight, sticking to a healthy diet can become a great challenge for you. Here are certain tips that can help you to maintain a healthy body weight:

1. Choose a diet you can live with

A diet that suits your lifestyle and tastes is, as already mentioned, of essential importance. So, how do you go about choosing the best diet to suit you?  No matter what kind of diet you choose, it is essential to monitor your portion intake, count the number of calories, carbohydrates and other nutrients. Try to choose the easiest and effective one for you.

A new study shows that a low-carbohydrate diet changes hepatic energy metabolism.

When carbohydrates are restricted, the liver relies more on substances like lactate and amino acids to form glucose, instead of glycerol.

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. population has reduced its fat intake, and increased its consumption of carbohydrates.

During the same time period, obesity has been rising along with the prevalence of metabolic liver disease in which fatty deposits in the liver can lead to inflammation, fibrosis and cirrhosis.

Some evidence has suggested that a high carbohydrate diet leads to fat formation in the liver, although confirming the association has been difficult.

To better understand hepatic energy production and glucose formation among various types of diets, researchers led by Jeffery Browning of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center measured the sources of hepatic glucose and TCA cycle flux in weight-stable subjects, and in subjects following carbohydrate- or calorie-restricted diets.

They recruited 14 subjects whose BMI [Body Mass Index] fell between 25 and 35, and divided them into two groups of seven, matching them for age, BMI, gender and ethnicity.

According to Japanese researchers, people who eat quickly until full are three times more likely to be overweight, a problem exacerbated by the availability of fast food and the decline of orderly dining habits.

The findings highlight how eating styles, and not just what or how much is eaten, can contribute to an obesity epidemic fueled by the spread of Western-style affluence in many parts of the world.

The World Health Organization classifies around 400 million people as obese, 20 million of them under the age of five. The condition raises the risk of diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart problems.

For their study, Hiroyasu Iso and colleagues at Osaka University asked more 3,000 Japanese volunteers aged 30 to 69 about their eating.

About half of the men and a little more than half of the women said they ate until full. About 45 percent of the men and 36 percent of the women said they ate quickly.

Those who said they ate until full and ate quickly were three times more likely to be fat than people in the “not eating until full and not eating quickly” group, the researchers found.

Some high-profile celebrities are unabashedly hitting the bottle.

No, not hitting the bottle as in they need to check into detox — hitting the bottle as in it’s their way of detoxing.

They are juice fasting to cleanse their insides, which presumably improves their outsides by helping them lose weight.

The latest juice-cleanse delivery diets — such as those from Blueprint Cleanse and Organic Avenue — with their potent blends of fresh vegetables, fruits, and spices, promise a renewed vitality and better health.

Last winter, when Gwyneth Paltrow was briefly in a New York hospital, she reportedly took delivery of Organic Avenue’s LOVEfast, which is mainly juice with perhaps a side of seaweed salad.

Last summer, Oprah Winfrey blogged about her 21-day cleanse, although — as you might expect of a woman who has publicly regretted going on a drastic four-month-long liquid weight-loss diet 20 years ago — her regimen included solid foods.

These new cleanses are a marked improvement on the older detox diets, like the “master cleanse,” which offered minimal nutrition and rapid weight loss.

Surprisingly, most cleanses aren’t touted as weight-loss programs.

Read more at MSNBC

Do you feel that your favorite foods are forbidden in your weight loss diet plan? While this is often true, there are many low-calorie foods that provide good nutrition and also taste great.

Maintaining a weight-loss diet doesn’t mean that you have to stay away from all your favorite foods; rather try to eat them in moderate and acceptable portions.

Here is a sample of diet-friendly foods that also taste great:

Green and brightly colored vegetables

Green and brightly colored vegetables provide you with numerous vitamins and minerals that are essential for your body.

Fresh vegetables not only help you to maintain a healthy, nutritious diet, they also add flavor and taste to your food. If you add these vegetables to your list of favorite foods, you will find weight loss much easier.

Sea food

Spice up seafood with condiments. Low-fat or fat-free salsa serves as a good topping and adds great flavor to your food. If seafood doesn’t appeal to your appetite, try poultry instead. Instead of fish, go for a skinless chicken breast.

For the first time, surgeons have linked internal hernia with excessive and rapid weight loss after undergoing minimally invasive surgical treatment of morbid obesity.

Internal hernia is a defect in the abdominal cavity that allows abdominal structures, such as the intestines, to move out of their natural position.

However, the condition can be corrected surgically before it leads to potentially serious bowel obstruction.

Based on findings from a study presented at the 2008 Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons, the surgeons are encouraging physicians who see patients after bariatric surgery to evaluate or refer those who have lost more weight than expected for a surgical consultation if they also have intermittent or persistent abdominal pain.

“Surgeons who perform this kind of procedure should be aware that patients who are rapidly losing weight may be at higher risk for internal hernia, and they should monitor them for signs of the condition.

This is also the case for general surgeons who see patients in an emergency department. It’s our job to educate general surgeons who see patients who have abdominal pain and have lost a tremendous amount of weight in a quicker than expected period of time to be on the lookout for internal hernia as a possible cause of the symptoms,” according to Eric S. Bour, MD.