7 Day Diet

Holiday alert! Need to lose a few pounds? The 7 day diet plan that works!

With the holiday season fast approaching, plenty of people are looking to lose a few pounds in order to look their best for the round of parties, holiday photo ops and encounters with family and friends you may not have seen for a while. Women seem to be particularly sensitive. Men’s clothing tends to hide a lot of flaws, but your LBD does not. If you need to lose 5-7 pounds to look trim and svelte in your party dress, give this 7 day diet a shot. It works, is healthy and requires minimal discipline and is relatively easy to muddle through for fast results. Interested? Let’s see how you can succeed.

The biggest advantage you can gain is to indulge in daily exercise. Yes, indulge! When you think ‘exercise’, a boring, strenuous routine probably comes to mind. It doesn’t need to be any of these things. You can fit in exercise on a daily basis, that burns significant calories, in four 8-minute stints you’ll hardly notice. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Park far from the grocery or work entrance and walk briskly. You won’t waste time looking for the closest parking spot, while indulging in a little weight loss. Trim your tummy and thighs with a dozen sit ups in the morning before showering.

Now for the food: remember, this is only a 7 day diet. Instead of a cup of coffee and a pastry for breakfast, make a fruit smoothie with your favorite fruits, juices and yogurt. This is a low-calorie meal, full of antioxidants, fiber and vitamins that fills you up. If you need a mid-morning snack, munch on a bran muffin washed down with a glass of juice.

If you normally stop in for lunch at the fast food place for a burger and fries, treat yourself to a salad (the fast food places have caught on to their health-conscious customers) or, better yet, make your own salad at home. Supermarkets now stock plastic containers of spring greens, mescalin, spinach and other healthy and tasty dark green leafy lettuces. A large container runs about $5 and contains sufficient greens for about 4 large salads. Add one sliced, hard-boiled egg, slices of fresh mushrooms, wedges of tomato, grated cheese and some lean meat, such as shrimp or chicken, douse it with a balsamic vinaigrette and you’ve got a filling lunch, full of fiber, protein, more antioxidants and an array of vitamins and trace minerals your body needs, enjoys and is easy on the calories, paving the way to your 7 day diet success and a nicely fitting LBD.

Dinner usually presents more temptations than breakfast and lunch. While the rest of the family is chowing down on meatloaf with gravy, a baked potato and a serving of buttered corn, you want to treat yourself to a piece of fish garnished with salsa or marinated in ginger and sesame. Indulge in a piece of garlic bread and a dinner salad. Feel superior! Alternative dinners which help you reach your goal include a plate of whole grain pasta and high-fiber veggies, marinated chicken breast, pork tenderloin (the ‘other white meat’) and a giant chef’s salad. Your 7 day diet regime will pay off. Besides, with a menu like this, you can hardly feel deprived! Fix a fruit cup with non-dairy whipped topping as the dessert for the whole family.

The success of your 7 day diet plan requires a calorie counter. Plan your menus in advance and calculate your daily calorie intake. With foods like these, counting your calories will be a pleasure!

Following these guidelines, your 7 day diet plan will be a success. In fact, you may find you want to continue with this eating plan and lose yet more weight. Make lean meats, high fiber foods and whole grains the centerpiece of each meal. By the time you’re hosting and attending holiday events, you’ll be the picture of health, full of energy and a great complexion. Try the 7-day diet. It works!

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!

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.

Home | About | Contact | Privacy | Sitemap

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.

Home | About | Contact | Privacy | Sitemap

What Causes High Cholesterol?

People now seem to understand that high cholesterol is a bad thing, and take steps to eliminate cholesterol. Sort of. The information about cholesterol can be hard to understand. It is complicated: there is good and bad cholesterol, and people don’t seem to understand what causes high cholesterol. There are a couple of things that causes high cholesterol, and hopefully, with a few of these tips, you can avoid food that causes high cholesterol, and enjoy a happier and healthier life.

First of all, there is such a thing as good and bad cholesterol. Bad cholesterol sticks to the walls of your blood vessels (arteries) and make it difficult to pump blood throughout your body. This is why cholesterol leads to other diseases and conditions, such as heart attacks and strokes; the blood is unable to bring oxygen to certain organs, resulting in failures. When people speak with concern about what causes high cholesterol, they specifically mean what causes bad cholesterol.

Bad cholesterol causes high cholesterol, and this is found almost exclusively in trans fat and saturated fat foods. It is these foods that cause high cholesterol. Some examples of foods that are high in saturated fat (and therefore, high in bad cholesterol) include red meat and dairy (specifically, butter and whole milk and cream). Trans fats are even worse, and these are found in the variety of hydrogenated oils in packaged foods, such as cookies and frozen dinners, as well as fried foods, such as french fries and chicken fingers.

Good cholesterol, on the other hand, helps your body remove bad cholesterol from your arteries. Good cholesterol can be found in such foods as nuts and legumes (think beans), as well as avocados and egg whites. In addition to good cholesterol, regular exercise is imperative to keeping your arteries free from bad cholesterol. For this regular exercise to have a positive effect on your arteries, you should exercise for thirty to forty minutes, three or four times a week. This exercise should be at least a light jog, anything to build a light sweat, for a continuous period of time. This causes your blood to pump a little harder, clearing out the bad cholesterol from clogging up your arteries.

Fatty foods and a lack of exercise are what causes high cholesterol, but it is simple and easy with to avoid bad cholesterol, as well as simple to begin an exercise today to help your arteries stay healthy.

Home | About | Contact | Privacy | Sitemap

The Secret to Beautiful Skin

Any woman can have beautiful skin, with the right care, the right lifestyle, and the right skin-care products. It’s simply not true that some women are born with beautiful skin and some are not, that some are destined to look radiant and fresh while others will never achieve that. It’s not a matter of genetics or of luck. Everyone’s skin can look great.

Beautiful skin starts from the inside. The vast majority of skin problems, from dryness to redness, from acne to wrinkles, start from the inside. The bad skin conditions are the symptoms, and they cannot be treated until you treat the cause. So start with good nutrition. To have the glowing, lovely skin you want, you’ve got to eat right. Stay away from sugary and greasy foods. Eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, especially those that are high in anti-oxidants like blueberries and tomatoes. And drink lots and lots of water. Every woman who boasts beautiful skin knows this secret. You must drink at least 8 glasses of water a day to keep your skin looking soft and healthy.

Keeping your skin beautiful means that you must take care of it! You can easily ruin your beautiful skin if you don’t treat it gently and take good care of it. First of all, wash your skin with a gentle cleanser daily. But don’t wash too often. Over-washing will dry out skin. Your skin produces natural oils which it needs to stay healthy. So only wash your skin once or twice a day. Also, make sure to moisturize. Even if you have oily skin, you should apply moisturizer. Make sure you use a moisturizing product that is appropriately balanced for your skin type. Moisturizers with aloe and avocado oil are especially beneficial. Lastly, you must protect your skin if you want it to be and remain beautiful. Wear sunscreen every day. Moisturizers which also contain sunscreen are just fine. But if you do not wear a cream of at least SPF 15, you will subject your skin to irreparable sun damage, including wrinkles and dark spots. You simply cannot and will not have beautiful skin if you don’t protect your skin from the sun.

Home | About | Contact | Privacy | Sitemap

When it comes to skin care products, choose carefully. If you’re already eating right and caring for your skin, you should be noticing that your complexion is clearer, smoother and brighter than before. Don’t ruin this with products which promise beautiful skin but which are really packed with pore-clogging oils or waxes. Stick with products containing natural ingredients. And don’t over-do the cosmetics. Beautiful skin should be allowed to speak for itself. Don’t cover it up and try to hide it with makeup.

Any woman can eat right, drink lots of water, and take care of her skin. And that’s why any woman can have healthy, glowing, radiant, beautiful skin.

What is a Balanced Diet?

I have often heard that the key to good health and fitness is combining regular exercise with a balanced diet. Sounds easy enough, but when I stop and think about it, what exactly is a balanced diet?

When I was a child, they told me there were four food groups. Eating well meant eating an equal amount from each food group, I suppose. Actually, they were never very clear about that. The food groups seemed to be more about categorizing food items than about eating a balanced diet. But four is such a balanced number, so somehow it made sense, at the time.

By the time I became an adult and actually had to start caring about nutrition and a balanced diet, the four food groups were a thing of the past. Instead, we had the food pyramid, again a very balanced graphic representation of food. Pyramids don’t fall over, after all. They are well balanced. The food pyramid indicated that bread and other carbohydrates should make up the bulk of our diet. Hence it was at the bottom of the pyramid. Above carbohydrates on the pyramid were proteins, then at the top were fats and sugars. So instead of eating the same amount of each food group, now we were to understand that a balanced diet demanded that we favor breads, cereals, pasta and rice.

Of course, that notion of the balanced diet went out the window pretty quickly, when we were told by diet experts that carbs were the enemy. Eating all those starches would make us fat, the new wisdom dictated. We wanted to eat protein and fat, and lots of it. At least, that’s what the Atkins diet recommended. On the other hand, some experts claimed that we should eat a diet made up of 40% carbs, 30% protein and 30% fat. Sounds quite balanced, doesn’s it? Then the South Beach Diet came out, and insisted that not all carbs are equal. We must eat only low glycemic carbs, whatever that means! According to that approach, the balance in a balanced diet has nothing to do with food groups and everything to do with something called the glycemic index. It was getting too complicated for me.

After years of experimenting with every kind of balance, I’ve discovered that eating a balanced diet is not complicated at all. It just means that you don’t eat too much of any one thing, and you don’t completely cut out any one thing. You know that wisdom your mother and grandmother taught you, so many years ago? Eat your vegetables. Don’t snack between meals. Don’t pig out. Skip dessert most of the time. Next thing you know, you find that your’e eating a balanced diet after all.

Home | About | Contact | Privacy | Sitemap