Few weeks ago I read an article about quick weight loss; I read it twice then I went to get a coffee. When I came back – I read it once more. Why did I read it three times?

“Articles, books, adds about dieting…”

What I saw inside was indeed related to dieting and weight loss. It also contained links to various articles concerning weight loss, fitness and general wellness programs as expected. The fact that infuriated me and made me write this post was that everything inside was said to be easy and free: free dieting, free weight loss programs, easy way to lose fat, east way to get fit and be healthy and it went on and on.

“Real knowledge – the key to dieting success”

Judging for my dieting experiences so far – it was never easy, never! Long ago I lost track of the number of diets, weight loss programs and fitness regimes that I have tried. Every time I did one these …programs, it took away something from me.

My frustration made me recall many of the diets I did – my failures or successes and how I understood the truth about things. Don’t get me wrong – there is no universal truth; you need to find out your own – your own truth about your way of eating, your way to stay healthy, to be thin, slim, fit and all that.

“How can I stay fit? How can I lose weight? How can stay fit always?

At that point the right question is “how”. The answer to it is as simple as it gets. The only important thing is that the answer is different to different people.

My answer to the “how” was trial and error. That is “how” I did it, how I lost 22 kg and become the man closest to the one I saw in my mind’s eye.

It was not easy – everything else but easy! And the fact is you all know how it is done. You have the knowledge for it

How to do it?

1. First – find your healthy food – which foods are healthy for you, what agrees with your body and what does notI used combination to find out which foods are most suited. In simple words what agrees with body and what does not. Then I cut off the bad foods from my diet. By the way, now there is a blood test that can give you the results more quickly than me.
2. Second – eat more often. The second step was to break your eating in at least 4 times a day. That was the most difficult part for me. For years I was used to eat one or two times a day (rarely three). And I ate in huge quantities with full disregard for quality.
3. Third - exercise. We are meant to move. Walk if you cannot do anything else. The fitness is important. Exercise makes you feel more alive, grants you better sleep at night and more stamina during the day.

To be continued…

Trying to follow all the studies on vitamins and health can make your head swirl. But, when it’s all boiled down, the take–home message is actually pretty simple: A daily multivitamin, and maybe an extra vitamin D supplement, is a great way to make sure you’re getting all the nutrients you need to be healthy. The folic acid in most multivitamins helps prevent neural tube defects in newborns; it may lower the risk of heart disease, colon cancer, and breast cancer. Vitamin D from a multivitamin or single supplement can lower the risk of colon and possibly many other cancers.

Of course, there can be too much of a good thing. It’s important not to go overboard with vitamins. While a multivitamin and a vitamin D supplement can help fill some of the gaps in a less than optimal diet, too much can be harmful. In general, stick close to standard recommended doses.

Learn more about some of the vitamins with newly recognized or suspected roles in health and disease:

What It Is

If eating a bottomless bowl of cabbage soup, along with a few other low-calorie foods, for a solid week appeals to you, the Cabbage Soup Diet is sure to lead to quick weight loss. However, since the food choices are so limited and the calories so low, boredom and inadequate nutrition — are inevitable.

Versions of this very restrictive diet have been buzzing through fax machines and circulating around water coolers for years. A few books have documented different variations of this simple, anonymously written diet plan, which surprisingly has survived the test of time

The Cabbage Soup Diet plan is not in any way individualized. There are no recommendations about exercise, no behavioral tips, no advice on changing bad habits – just a strict list of what to eat each day of the week. And meals need to be eaten at home, because these foods won’t be found on most restaurant menus.

The Cabbage Soup Diet plan promises a 10-pound weight loss in one week, and dieters are restricted to one week at a time on the plan. If they want to lose more, they are advised to wait awhile before commencing another week on this super-low-calorie diet.

What You Can Eat

The 7-day Cabbage Soup Diet plan promises all you can eat — as long as you stick to the small list of allowed foods on alternate days, along with two daily bowls of fat-free cabbage soup. Other specific foods that must be eaten including fruit, vegetables, skim milk, and meat. Dieters are also advised to drink plenty of water and avoid alcohol.

Here’s a sample Cabbage Soup Diet plan:

Day 1: Cabbage soup and all the fruit you want except bananas. Drink unsweetened tea, black coffee, cranberry juice, or water.

Day 2: Cabbage soup, all the low-calorie vegetables you want (except beans, peas, or corn), and a baked potato with butter.

Day 3: Cabbage soup and a mixture of the above fruit and vegetables.

Day 4: Cabbage soup, up to eight bananas, and two glasses of skim milk.

Day 5: Cabbage soup, up to 20 ounces of beef, chicken or fish, up to six fresh tomatoes, and at least 6-8 glasses of water.

Day 6: Cabbage soup, up to 3 beef steaks, and unlimited vegetables.

Day 7: Cabbage soup, up to 2 cups of brown rice, unsweetened fruit juices, and unlimited vegetables.

The recipe for the cabbage soup varies slightly among different versions of the diet. But it basically includes cabbage and assorted low-calorie vegetables such as onions and tomatoes, and is flavored with onion soup mix, bouillon, and tomato juice.

Here’s a typical recipe:

1 package dry onion soup mix

2 bouillon cubes, either chicken or beef

1 celery stick (not the whole stalk), diced

1/2 head green cabbage, diced

3 carrots, sliced

2 bell peppers, sliced

6 large green onions, or 1 large yellow, white or purple onion, diced

2 cans of tomatoes, diced or whole

Cooking spray

Salt, pepper, parsley, garlic powder, soy sauce to taste (or any other seasoning you like)

Spray a large pot with cooking spray and saute all vegetables except cabbage and tomatoes until tender. Add cabbage and about 12 cups of water. Toss in bouillon cubes, soup mix, and seasonings. Cook until soup reaches desired tenderness; add tomatoes.

Dieters beware; you may encounter some gastrointestinal discomfort from the highly sulfurous cabbage and other gassy vegetables.

How It Works

The Cabbage Soup Diet is essentially a modified fast, containing so few calories that dieters will lose weight rapidly during the weeklong regimen. There is nothing magical about cabbage or cabbage soup that fosters weight loss. It’s the low-calorie nature of the diet plan that does the trick.

The diet makes no scientific claims on how it works. While several versions exist, common to all is the premise that if you eat lots of cabbage soup when you’re hungry, it will keep you satisfied enough to sustain this very low-calorie diet for a week.

Dieters may very well lose the promised 10-15 pounds, but the problem is that most of the weight lost will be primarily from fluids, not fat, and will return once the dieter resumes eating normally.

Factor in the monotony of eating virtually the same foods every day for a week, and dieters may tend to eat even fewer than the already dangerously low (approximately 800-1,050) calories per day.

Experts agree that any diet under 1,200 calories per day is unsafe unless you’re under a doctor’s care. It’s almost impossible to get all the nutrients you need and satisfy hunger in so few calories. A bottomless bowl of cabbage soup, along with a restricted list of allowed foods, provides a mere skeleton of the nourishment your body needs each day.

What the Experts Say

There is little debate as to whether this is a sound diet plan. Indeed, it has all the components of a diet disaster.

“It is a monotonous, short-term fix, severely lacking in nutrients, which will result in a weight loss that is primarily water and not the essential fat loss that is so important to improving health,” says Connie Diekman, MEd, RD,president-elect of the American Dietetic Association.

Diekman worries that diets like the Cabbage Soup Diet perpetuate feelings of failure for most dieters.

“People who go on and off diets get so discouraged when they lose weight only to gain it back, and these feelings make so many people think that diets don’t work,” she says.

As a registered dietitian, she urges dieters to find another plan that is balanced, varied, and includes regular physical activity. The only positive aspect of the Cabbage Soup Diet plan is that it may get people to eat more vegetables, Diekman says.

Food for Thought

If you want to give this modified fast a try, check with your doctor first. Some people have reported feeling lightheaded while on the plan.

If you get the go-ahead, head to the grocery store, buy all the ingredients for the soup, stock up on fruit, vegetables, skim milk, fish, chicken, or meat (depending on which plan you follow) — and plan on staying home. Consuming mass quantities of cabbage soup may cause you to be too gassy to go out in public.

You will lose weight on the Cabbage Soup Diet, but you can plan on seeing those pounds return. This diet plan that is nothing more than a quick fix that does nothing to help change the behaviors that lead to weight gain.

The bottom line? Keep looking for a program that contains all the components of a healthy lifestyle, including regular physical activity, and is suitable for long-term weight loss.

Published January 2007.

Our Stone Age ancestors certainly roughed themselves for food. They butchered the kill during the marathon hunt that lasted for days. They wandered for miles to gather wild fruits, grains and nuts. If they wanted to eat something sweet, beehive was smoked out of the bees to get the honey. This was done by climbing up a tree or chopping it down. Hard way to food!

Studies indicate that human beings come into the world with hundreds of genes and associated hormones that regulate the energy-balance equation. Calories consumed by us on one side and calories burned, through physical activity and calories needed to keep the body healthy on the other. Anything left over transforms into body fat.

As a society we are in a state of nutritional crisis and in need of thorough remedies. Today more than 60% of adults in the U.S. are classified as overweight or obese.

Many children have become so heavy that pediatricians are now facing an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes and hypertension—diseases that are closely associated with the overweight and that were unheard of among youngsters just a generation ago.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Yale University Center for Eating and Weight Disorders says “Physical activities have been engineered out of day-to-day life, and the food environment grows worse by the day”.

For those who are overweight, or who have diabetes, the low-calorie and low-fat diets recommended do not work well. In fact, for diabetics, they can actually worsen the condition. The only diet that strikes at the real cause of obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, hypoglycaemia, and type 2 diabetes is a low-carbohydrate diet.

Low carb diets are based on the principle that a diet low in carbohydrates leads to decreased production of body’s insulin, resulting in consumption of fat stores as energy source.

When fat stores in a body are used as main energy source, Ketones (a by-product) are excreted in the urine. Characterized by nail varnish (acetone), smelling breath and causes side effects such as nausea, fatigue and loss of appetite.

There are many different versions of the low carb diet, such as Dr. Atkins New Diet Revolution, Protein Power, Neanderthin, The Carbohydrate Addict’s Lifestyle Plan, Life Without Bread, and others. All of them, however, have one thing in common – a very strict reduction in the consumption of carbohydrates. Most low carb diets replace carbohydrates with fats and proteins. Although diets vary in their recommendations, as a general rule, a low carb diet is synonymous with a high-fat and moderate protein diet. Those on a low carb diet should get at least 60 to 70 percent of their daily calorie intake from fat. Carbohydrates should make up less than 10 percent, and in some cases, less than 5 percent of daily calorie intake.

What’s Involved in Low Carb Diet?

A cut on all carbohydrate from the diet and increased protein and fat intake. Cut on things like pasta, bread, rice and alcohol, yet unlimited amounts of meat, cheese and butter are suggested to eat. That’s why sometimes Low Carb Diets claim to be luxurious diets.

You feel the requirement to sort yourself out so you can live with the discomfort that is coming your way. Commitment is the order of the day plus you will be requiring all the help possible to drop a dress size.

At last the time comes – you begin the diet – however within a short while you’ve quit. All that preparation for so little an increase in fitness.

What’s the cause?

The easy answer , you might have guessed, is that something happened. Something you think of as a higher priority than your weight loss. Something like a dinner party or a virus and it’s as though you never commenced.

Lots of dieters plan to arrange the start of a weight loss plan to try and avert times where hurdles such as this could crop up. For example they aim to begin a low calorie diet to match a colleague from work or alternatively when they are away from normal temptations to try and ensure they stick with their low calorie diet. Anybody would suggest it’s a smart idea, in almost 100% of cases the truth can be quite a shock.

The reason for this is easy – you may well stay out of trouble for a little while however when one of the dozens of hurdles you get hit with all the time appears, you’re not prepared to deal with it and so we make the most of it to go back to consuming chocolate or quitting cardio (or both).

Far more help when starting out of your low calorie diet to have a hiccup, and then to keep fighting. These tiny ups and downs will eventually help to prepare you and get you used to coping with the stuff you will experience and will mean you can come out the other side an even thinner individual.

Use the problems . Feel the pride of each beaten and you will become ever more disciplined. All of a sudden glitches have turned into great things not things to avoid.

Here’s a further vitally important chapter to what you hope for with weight loss – and one that I have only just experienced for myself by accident.

Honestly think about how many low calorie diets or exercise programs have you started and stopped? How often have you failed? At the time that you failed, with the exception of feeling a bit bad for a while what else happened? Not a huge amount. Your spouse didn’t dump you. Your company didn’t shut down. Your head didn’t fall off.

So you’re used to going back to your old ways, and it’s no shock that nothing bad is going to come about if you do.

But let’s pretend that it actually did happen? Consider if quitting was simply not an option? What if a medical practitioner told you that you must lose 25lb in the next 6 months or you’d better say goodbye to your family? Image if your loved one says they will only marry you if you lose that weight?

When you look at things in that way, it gets wonderfully easy to succeed.

For some time my goal has been to go on a low calorie diet, then when I achieved this to find a spouse. Unbelievably I discover that part way to my aim I have been fortunate enough to find a stunning person plus I am finding it quite hassle free to stay motivated because of wanting them to feel proud of me.

Exactly what could you do in order to make sure quitting is impossible for you? Could you organize a beach trip? Or else just make a bet with a friend.

Do whatever it takes to make you think twice twice before dropping your low calorie diet. Do what it takes to make it happen. It’ll be the most amazing thing you’ve ever done.