7 Day Diet

Pros and Cons of a Raw Food Diet

If you follow dieting trends at all, then you probably know that a new weight loss method crops up every few months or so. From cabbage soup to green tea, Atkins, and South Beach, there’s a different approach for everyone. The raw food diet is one of the latest health fads going around, so I thought it would be a good idea to examine what this method is all about prior to trying it out. Here’s what I learned.

The basic principle of the raw food diet is that we lose too many essential enzymes and nutrients during the cooking process. Foods in their natural state are most beneficial to our bodies, so we should avoid heating anything to more than 116 degrees F. (I’m not exactly sure where that temperature comes from, but many different raw food diet websites mentioned it, so I decided to repeat it here.) When we eat naturally like this, we’ll be healthier as a result. People following a strict raw food diet generally eat things like fresh fruits and vegetables, uncooked meat, fish, or eggs, nuts, seeds, beans, and anything else that is organic and unprocessed.

The proponents of this type of raw food diet believe that there are many benefits associated with it. For instance, they say you’ll have more energy, will lose weight, and will rejuvenate your skin as a result of not consuming processed sugar or refined white flour, both of which have been blamed for Americans’ bulging waistlines. In addition, followers of the raw food diet will decrease their risk of heart disease and improve bodily functions such as digestion. In other words, you’re essentially eliminating a bunch of toxins from your body when you stop eating processed foods, so all of these positive changes should follow.

But there are some drawbacks to the raw food diet as well. For one thing, eating uncooked meat and eggs carries a significant risk of bacteria-related illness if you don’t store or handle the items properly. Salmonella, E. coli, and listeria can all come into play from handling some uncooked foods. In addition, it can be difficult to get the recommended daily levels of calcium, iron, or protein from strictly following this weight loss method, so your health could suffer in other ways or you might have to take supplements to make up for any deficiencies.

After reading about the raw food diet, I’m still on the fence about whether or not this approach is for me. While I certainly agree with some of the potential benefits, especially the part about cutting out sugar and flour, I can’t imagine eating uncooked eggs or meat, so I would be a partial follower at best. Would I still see good results that way? Maybe I should give it a try for a while and see how it works out!

Teens Losing Weight

Teens losing weight need an understanding of good nutrition and plenty of common sense!

Teens are particularly sensitive about their weight. If you’ve indulged in too many sweets, junk foods, soda and fried foods as a child and pre-teen, you may now be looking with dismay at some legitimately extra pounds that you don’t want! On the other hand, you may be of a normal weight, but be of the ’skinnier-the-better’ mind set. In either case, you’ll first want to consult your physician to see how much, if any, weight you need. Often, teens losing weight simply embark on a program of their own making, lacking an understanding of basic nutritional concepts and also, perhaps some common sense.

Surely your Mom has pushed the balanced diet theory on you, fixing nutritious meals, ‘for your own good’. However, the snacks of candy bars and soda at school and maybe a bag of fries on the way home, have caught up to you now. Young kids burn a lot more energy, riding their bikes, playing at the playground and other strenuous activities you no longer do on a regular basis. So, if your physician agrees that you should lose 10 pounds, it’s probably sound advice. Getting and staying fit and trim is far easier to do when you’re young than it is once those pounds are firmly entrenched! So teens losing weight under responsible guidance can give you an advantage for life.

On the other hand, some teens should not be trying to lose weight. Let’s say that you’re 5′6″ tall and weight 120 pounds, but the image you see in the mirror says ‘You’re overweight.’ This is a psychological misconception. If your doc tells you that your weight is normal, believe it. Dieting will only rob your body of nutrition required to keep you developing normally. If you nonetheless continue feeling ‘fat’, let your doctor or Mom know. You might need to adjust your perceptions of your physical image through counseling.

Sometimes, as an adolescent, your rate of metabolism may change, slowing down from what it was as a kid. This is another reason for a seemingly sudden gain in weight. This means that when you were a kid, you could get away with the candy, sodas and fries, never gaining a pound. Teens losing weight so often take a radical approach, cutting their calories dramatically, thinking this is the only answer. In this instance, a better approach might be to simply cut out the junk foods, for the most part, and instead load up on the healthy foods to your hearts content. You may shed all the weight necessary, using the less sugar, less fat strategy.

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Low Carb Recipes

Have you ever noticed how different eating habits affect what you can buy in a supermarket? When the eating habits are wide spread different choices also appear on menus in the major restaurants. When the trend was to eat lower fat foods there were suddenly little hearts next to menu choices that were lower fat. When the Aitkin’s and south beach diets became popular there were suddenly lower carbohydrate choices on menus. Many restaurants now offer Weight Watchers selections complete with point values and exchanges. The main reason for this is that restaurant owners do not want people to stop eating out because they are dieting.

When the Aitkin’s diet was first out my husband and I started following it. At that time there were no low carbohydrate choices in the restaurants or grocery stores. It was hard to find cookbooks that included low carb recipes. There were a few recipes in the Aitkin’s book, but they tended to use ingredients that were not readily available or were quite expensive. I was always looking for low carb recipes because we were getting bored with the same dinner of a salad and lean meat. A friend of mine is a dietitian. She was not thrilled that we were following the Aitkin’s diet because she feels that too much protein is not good for you, however she did have a book of low carb recipes that she let me borrow. My husband and I were both craving crunchy foods as well as sweets. At this time Splenda was not yet available in the United States and we did not like the after taste from the artificial sweeteners. My sister’s husband went on a fishing trip to Canada and he brought back some Splenda for us. When I was looking through the low carb recipes I saw a recipe for cheese cake. The cake did not have a crust but it had all the other things that we were allowed, cream cheese, sour cream, butter and whipping cream. The recipe included artificial sweeteners but I used the Splenda instead. The cheese cake turned out wonderfully. It was so good that I made it for guests when we had a dinner party. We found that it was easy to have people over for dinner when we were on the diet. We would grill meat and make a nice big salad. For the guests I would have bread or a potato.

We were both successful at losing weight on the low carb diet. We slowly added carbs back in when we reached our goal weights. I find that if I over eat and need to drop a few pounds I can successfully do this be following the restrictive first two weeks of the diet.

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Finding An Easy Diet Plan

There are diet plans everywhere you look. There are advertisements on television a few times an hour, all over the Internet, and you find them in your magazines as well. You probably hear about diet plans from your friends and neighbors who are trying them out or who have tried them and then moved on to something else. There are some diet plans that work, but the problem with many of them is that they are just too complicated and they do not work well for a real person living in the real world. If you want to succeed with your diet, find an easy diet plan that truly works with your life.

What happens with many diet programs is that they are made to work, but only work for a few people. Why is this? Most of the time this happens because in order for that particular diet to be successful you have to do a lot of planning, cooking, or shopping. This can work for some people for a few weeks, but they soon tire of all the extra work and they find they are missing out on their life. This leads them to quit the diet plan. Instead of this happening to you, start out with an easy diet plan so you have a better chance of following through with it.

What is an simple diet plan for you may not be an easy diet plan for someone else. How can you tell what is going to work for you and what will not? You have to think about your life and what you do each day and each week. If you have time and love to cook, you may find that an easy diet plan for them is one that requires a lot of cooking time but is every easy to do in all other aspects. On the other hand, someone with limited time to cook, and even limited cooking skills, is going to find a diet that is much simpler in presentation to be what works for them.

You may think that an easy diet plan for you would be one that delivers full meals to your house each week. That does sound easy, but is that all that you have to think about? Do you have room in your home to store all the meals you need for a week or even a month? Do you really want to stick to eating what they have and that is it? Also, do you like the food? You may not know until you try the meals, and by then, you have already spent a lot of money to buy something you are not going to eat. If you want to try such a plan thinking it’ll be a simple diet plan for you, look for something with a free trial so you can decide if you can stick with their particular food.

If you want to buy a book for a diet plan, which can be a great idea, have a quick look through the book before you decide that this would be an easy diet plan for you. Is the book really thick? If so, it may have too many rules and exceptions that you have to remember. You could be very confused. On the other hand, a really thick book could include an easier diet plan, it just comes with many great recipes that you can try. A thin book could denote an easy plan for a diet, but make sure it is not too easy. That may mean it does not work at all.

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