Weight Loss Guru

Do we know that good fresh food is what we need to be healthy, fit and have plenty of energy?

Please have a look at the short video below about the importance of eating as much fresh and natural food as possible.

A problem human beings share is a tendency to fall for the ‘see food’ diet.  Our primitive genetic coding sometimes tells us when food’s available, just incase there’s a shortage tomorrow – and if crispy, golden, succulent goodies confront us at every street corner, we don’t always stop to ask our stomach if we are genuinely hungry.

Of course this weakness has been fully exploited by the big diet companies and the supermarkets too.  The shops are full of products claiming to be low fat or low calorie, but they aren’t really the slimming solutions that they appear to be.

How do you define slimming food? An orange? An avocado? A chicken salad? Or is it a pre-packaged ready meal with low-fat written all over it that looks very much like high-fat, deep fried product we’d actually prefer to eat? Are we really going to change our eating habits permanently by drinking three imitation chocolate milkshakes everyday for a month? Or are our bodies going to be even more confused when we finally give up the pretend party food and start introducing weird stuff like fish and tomatoes and brown rice?

Another problem with special diet foods is that, in order to make them taste as good as real food, a lot of sugar or chemicals have to be added.  So a low-fat label often means high sugar.  A Sunday Times article in February 1999 by Steve Farrar and Tom Robbins revealed that many leading slimming products (including diet drinks) are simply loaded with sugar which can be addictive as well as harmful; according to the same article, refined sugar consumption could be responsible for the deaths of 3000 British women a year with heart disease.

And for chemicals, well, that’s a controversial subject and the jury is still out on a lot of them.  But in the meantime it’s safer to stick with the simplest and most natural basic ingredients instead of putting stuff in our bodies that we haven’t  learned to deal with.

So, weighing up the evidence, it seems that the best thing about diet meals is that they are much more expensive than real food so you probably can’t afford to buy as many of them.

So Why Do We Keep Doing It

The great thing about banging your head on a brick wall is that it’s so wonderful when you stop.  Of course, you may already have caused yourself a permanent injury…

People with problems are anxious and afraid that things will get worse – so the one thing they are reluctant to do is change, which, of course, is exactly what they most need to do.

In spite of the fact that dieting makes them miserable and doesn’t provide a permanent solution, it’s familiar territory.  It can also be expensive and difficult, and that gives them confidence.  Desperate people will believe anything – and if nothing’s worked in the past it’s reasonable to assume that they have to try harder and spend more money next time round.  Of course, this opens the door to a lot of bizarre and even fake diet plans, as well as the usual calorie cutters.

What do you think?

HIi everyone

Do you ever stop to think about how much sugar you eat on a daily basis?

You might not know this but our bodies need two teaspoons of sugar in the bloodstream at any one time in order to function properly but, again, this is just as easily obtained from digesting complex carbohydrates like brown rice or pasta, or even from protein and fat. We have a limited amount of sugar storage in the body and, when it’s full, the leftover sugar is easily converted to fat for longer term storage. Eating too much refined sugar is thought to be directly linked to diabetes, migraines, low immunity, skin disorders, yeast overgrowth (Candida), tooth decay – and, of course, obesity. Obesity may not be classified officially as an illness, but it is increasingly associated with heart disease, cancer and many other health problems. Although we put less sugar in our tea and on our cereal than we used to, food companies are making up for that by putting more into processed foods.

According to the Department of Health, sugar consumption in Britain has risen by 31 per cent since 1980 and the average person eats between a kilo of it every week. At least when we were spooning it on for ourselves we knew how much of the stuff we were getting. A lot of people nowadays have no idea how much sugar they are actually eating everyday.

Processed and refined foods are not only sweeter (and unusually higher in fat as well as lower in vitamins and minerals), they are also more easily absorbed. When you eat a complex carbohydrate like brown rice, for example, it takes quite a while for the various enzymes in your digestive system to break it down, so it’s absorbed quire slowly. Which is exactly the way it’s supposed to be. But because refined food has already been partly broken down before it even goes into your mouth, it get absorbed into the bloodstream faster than your system is able to deal with it. You get a short energy boost from Mars bar, but the brown rice will give you a much more sustained release of glucose into the bloodstream.

Have a look at this clip from a BBC3 programme, in which presenter Becca Wilcox looks at her daily sugar content.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH

 If you want to find out more about the dangers of sugar and how they can make you fat then have a listen to the great pod-cast called, "Are Carbohydrates Making You Fat with Ben Pratt".

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN

What do you think? Please make a comment below.

Hi there 

The following article was published on the web site Medical News Today

According to a new study accepted for publication in The Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM), eating a meal quickly, as compared to slowly, curtails the release of hormones in the gut that induce feelings of being full. The decreased release of these hormones, can often lead to overeating. 

"Most of us have heard that eating fast can lead to food overconsumption and obesity, and in fact some observational studies have supported this notion," said Alexander Kokkinos, MD, PhD, of Laiko General Hospital in Athens Greece and lead author of the study. "Our study provides a possible explanation for the relationship between speed eating and overeating by showing that the rate at which someone eats may impact the release of gut hormones that signal the brain to stop eating." 

In the last few years, research regarding gut hormones, such as peptide YY (PYY) and glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1), has shown that their release after a meal acts on the brain and induces satiety and meal termination. Until now, concentrations of appetite-regulating hormones have not been examined in the context of different rates of eating. 

In this study, subjects consumed the same test meal, 300ml of ice-cream, at different rates. Researchers took blood samples for the measurement of glucose, insulin, plasma lipids and gut hormones before the meal and at 30 minute intervals after the beginning of eating, until the end of the session, 210 minutes later. Researchers found that subjects who took the full 30 minutes to finish the ice cream had higher concentrations of PYY and GLP-1 and also tended to have a higher fullness rating. 

"Our findings give some insight into an aspect of modern-day food overconsumption, namely the fact that many people, pressed by demanding working and living conditions, eat faster and in greater amounts than in the past," said Kokkinos. "The warning we were given as children that 'wolfing down your food will make you fat,' may in fact have a physiological explanation." 

Other researchers working on the study include Kleopatra Alexiadou, Nicholas Tentolouris, Despoina Kyriaki, Despoina Perrea and Nicholas Katsilambros of Athens University Medical School in Greece; and Carel le Roux, Royce Vincent, Mohammad Ghatei and Stephen Bloom of Imperial College in London, United Kingdom. 

What do you think?

HI everyone 

There can only be one member of the month for this month and that's Mandie. She is an inspiration and goes from strength to strength.

Mandie has done so well on the programme and has given her words of wisdom and support to so many people on our blog weightlossjournals.petecohen.tv/.

You can hear Mandie in her words by listening to a pod-cast I recored with her recently.

Please make any comments for Mandie below

Hi everyone 

Welcome to the third in a series of three pod-casts  with Health and Fitness Professional, Ben Pratt.

The  first pod-cast is called "What is an Exceptional Diet " and  the second is called "Are Carbohydrates Making you  Fat".

The last in the series is called "Is Stress Making You Fat". Here we discuss how stress affects the body and in addition we look at how eating different types of oils can affect your health and well being.

To find out more about Ben and his products and service then have a look at his web site 

www.naturalfoodfinder.co.uk

www.nutritions-playground.com

Please make a comment if you find this pod-cast useful

Hi everyone 

Welcome to the second in a series of three pod-casts  with Health and Fitness Professional, Ben Pratt. In the first pod-cast we discussed "What is an Exceptional" and I highly recommend that you listen to that one before you listen to this on.

In the pod-cast below we discuss why eating certain types of carbohydrates can seriously effect our ability to lose weight and effect out health and well being. 

To find out more about Ben and his products and service then have a look at his web site 

www.naturalfoodfinder.co.uk

www.nutritions-playground.com

Please make a comment if you find this pod-cast useful

Hi there

Click below to read a great article that I wrote with personal trainer Susan Cass, called Dietary Snakes and Ladders.

Snakes and Ladders is a game that we may have  all played. You know where the game starts on the  board and you know where the end is, but there  are many different routes you can take and an infinite number of outcomes. The same can be said for weight loss

Please make a comment below about this article if you find it helpful in any way.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS ARTICLE

Dietary-Snakesladders-petecohen.pdf
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Why the experts agree: Diets just don't work!