Dieting: Truth or MythWritten by Versha Chugh
Many people are often willing to try anything that helps them to lose weight because they want to look better and want to feel more comfortable with their family, friends and life. Diet plans rarely has anything to do with losing weight. There are no magic potions or effortless ways to burn off fat. There are thousands and thousands of weight loss web sites, low carb diets, to which many desperate overweight people fall prey. What is a diet? A diet is a combination of a balanced selection of foods. A good diet is one that includes all major food groups. Let's visualize this: People think they're eating right if they are having fruit & tea for breakfast, a plate of salad for lunch, and a bowl of soup for dinner. OR Some people don't eat anything whole day and "save themselves" for a big dinner! These were some examples of Fad Diet. Fad diets become very popular because they do work for a short period of time by helping over weight people lose weight. While dieting, when you stop taking various types of food or start eating some other combination you do not get calories that your body actually needs. The body processes various nutrients differently. It is not necessarily total amount of food eaten that leads to weight loss or gain. It is proportion of various nutrients and shift to fat burning metabolism that is important. Most of percentages of people gains back their weight because they are not able to keep up with choices of food they eat while dieting. Your bodies and their functions are governed by a superbly balanced mechanism called endocrine system which is made up of glands and various hormones. This system governs our metabolic rate and this rate plays a huge role in determining how well we can process calories we eat. When you skip a meal, your body uses stored sugar molecules which have been converted to glycogen. These stores are in liver and muscle tissue. Once these are gone, your body turns to other nutrient sources for its constant energy needs. After skipping a meal under this circumstance, your body shifts into a "fasting" metabolism which leads to protein breakdown.
| | The Need For SupplementationWritten by Dave Saunders
When I began to study nutrition, I too believed that it was possible and even easy to get all nutrition I needed from diet alone. What I discovered was shocking to me. Over past 50 years quality of nutrition, or availability of nutrients in our diets, has steadily decreased. This is even true for people who think that they eat a healthy diet today. Why does this happen? The complete answer is complex but in short, nutrient depletion in our soil, combined with green harvesting (which interrupts natural biology of plant before it has manufactured most of nutrients we should be getting), and new toxins found in our environment result in produce that simply has fewer nutrients available to us than previously found in those same foods. Organically grown products offer some greater benefit however most are still green harvested and are therefore picked before most of nutrients have been manufactured. At least they have lower levels of man-made toxins than some non-organic produce. This problem is further compounded by our fast food diets. All too often we eat food that provides calories but does not provide adequate nutrients. So we are feeding our bodies but we're not nourishing our bodies. Nutrients provide basic building blocks for all of functions of our cells. If we are only providing our bodies with calories we are depriving our bodies of other essential components to good health.
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