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You might have heard of the GI diet and wondered if it had anything to do with the nation’s military forces. Actually, this meal plan is not connected with any branch of the armed services. But it is definitely an important part of the war on fat. By following the GI diet, you might be able to successfully fight the battle of the bulge.

To begin with, it is important to define our terms. GI refers to glycemic index. The GI measures just how quickly the body breaks apart food in order to develop glucose, which has been referred to as a major energy source for the body. The GI was the brainchild of Dr. David Jenkins, a nutritional expert at the University of Toronto.

If food ranks high on the GI scale, it means that the food breaks down quickly. As a result, the body is not satiated and goes looking elsewhere for food. However, food that is low-glucose breaks down less quickly, which means that it makes you feel satiated. The GI diet, therefore, is made up of food that is low on the GI barometer. If you follow this food plan, you will be eating lean meat and fish, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and fruits and vegetables. In addition, you can partake of dairy, as long as it is low-fat. However, you’ll be passing up cake, cookies, bread, and other foods that are comprised of white flour and therefore high on the GI.

Those who support the GI diet maintain that the vast majority of diets are unsuccessful because dieters do not feel satiated. Dieters may also feel fatigued, causing them to binge. In addition, many diets are complex, requiring individuals to do complicated calculations in order to determine how much they should eat.

Following the GI diet is as easy as following a traffic light. Red means stop—in other words, don’t eat that particular item. Yellow means proceed to eat with caution—and moderation. Green means go ahead and eat the item—it’s good for you. There are numerous advantages to the GI diet. To begin with, it provides proper nutrition, which means that it is heart-healthy. Also, you can eat as much as you want—if the foods have been given the green light. Chances are you won’t feel as if you’re running on empty with this diet, since it’s designed to keep you feeling satiated. It is believed that the diet can reduce the likelihood that you will be afflicted with heart disease, diabetes, stroke, colon cancer and prostate cancer. The GI diet is easy to maintain and equally easy to follow.

You might believe that the GI diet is like Atkins; however, there are notable differences. For example, the Atkins approach stresses high protein and animal fat while curbing carbohydrates. Atkins is based on the philosophy that, if the body does not receive carbs, it will end up breaking down fat instead. Over the long term, Atkins has been linked to kidney damage, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.

But the GI diet is based on carbs such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and encourages dieters to eliminate saturated fat, winning it the endorsement of a number of nutritionists. Still, it should be noted that the GI diet is not perfect. If you have spent a lifetime eating foods in the red category, you might find the diet quite challenging. Also, during the initial stage of the diet, the dieter’s weight may rise until the body makes an adjustment.

The GI diet may not be as popular as other diet programs, but it has a number of qualities to recommend it. It is not complicated, so it may not lead to as much frustration as other diets. The traffic light system might appeal to even the most unsophisticated of dieters. It encourages the consumption of good carbohydrates which are nutrient-rich. It is also sure to eliminate an individual’s reliance on junk food. While the adjustment to the diet may be difficult at first, a number of dieters maintain that it is well worth the effort. You may actually be surprised to learn exactly how much weight you can lose following the GI system.

A number of misconceptions persist about weight loss. These are quite serious, because they could affect not only an individual’s weight, but also his or her general health as well. The more you know about the misconceptions about weight loss, the more likely it is that you will end up following a suitable weight reduction plan.

One popular misconception is that any product that has been labeled “natural” is safe. In fact, you should be aware of the fact that these products often do not undergo vigorous scientific tests. For instance, ephedra, which has been included in some weight loss products has been banned by federal authorities because it has been determined to be unhealthy. Even those products that do not contain ephedra can be dangerous because they have components that are like ephedra. As a result, you should consult your doctor before using herbal weight loss products. Your physician is in the best position to know whether a weight loss pill or other product is appropriate in your case.

Another misconception is that you can still lose weight, even if you eat whatever you choose. Actually, you need to be careful about how many calories you consume and increase your exercise in order to ensure that you burn more fat than you take in. Also, it is important that you limit portions in order to ensure that you do not add extra weight. If you select low-calorie foods and you eat smaller portions, while enhancing your physical activity, you should be able to lose weight. However, you may still be able to eat some of the food you like best—provided you eat it in moderation or, if high in calories, only sparingly.

Yet another misconception is that, because a food item is labeled low-fat, it has no calories to speak of. While low-fat foods may indeed be low-cal, some processed low-fat food products have just as many calories as the high-fat types. In fact, they may be loaded in sugar or flour, increasing the total calorie count. As a result, it is important for you to check the nutrition labels on food packages in order to determine the exact amount of calories per serving. It is also imperative that you find out what constitutes a serving size so that you will not be tempted to overeat.

Some individuals believe that fast food is inherently bad and cannot be eaten while following a diet program. However, if you are knowledgeable, you can actually eat at fast food restaurants and still lose weight. It’s best, for instance, if you do not indulge in supersize combo meals. You might, however, consider splitting a combo with your spouse or friend. Avoid soft drinks and drink water instead. Consider eating a salad or a grilled chicken breast sandwich. Keep the condiments—such as mayonnaise and salad dressings—to a minimum. Ask the restaurant not to put bacon or cheese on your sandwich, and avoid eating French fries or fried chicken. If you go to a Mexican restaurant, try a taco that is made with salsa rather than cheese or sauce. Following these simple recommendations can make your visit to a fast food outlet worthwhile—and non-fattening.

Some people operate under the misconception that dining after 8 p.m. always leads to weight gain. No doubt it is possible, but what matters most is how many calories you consume and how much fat you burn off. While it is a good idea to avoid snacking in front of the television, you might be able to have a nightly snack, if you haven’t consumed that much high-calorie food during the course of the day.

Other individuals believe that lifting weights is harmful because it will cause you to add weight to your frame. In actuality, weightlifting can enable you to lose weight. This is because lifting weights assists you in building muscle, which burns more calories than fat. Engaging in strength training twice or three times a week can be an effective part of your overall weight loss program.

Obviously, misconceptions about dieting are plentiful. That is why it is so critically important that you consult a registered dietician or other health professional before beginning any major weight loss program.

Counting calories may seem old-fashioned today, given the proliferation of low-carb and high protein diets. However, a number of dieticians maintain that the low calorie approach is actually the best approach to weight loss. While it may seem trite, lowering the number of calories we consume can have a marked effect on our waistlines.

The majority of diets offer dieters 1,000 to 1,500 calories each day. Still, it would be wrong to assume that everyone who needs to lose weight should be on a 1,000 calorie diet. In fact, the amount of calories you need is a function of your current weight, your metabolism, and the amount of exercise you do. Diets recommended by doctors, as well as many of the meal programs found in diet books, are based upon a low-calorie model.

When dieting, you should assume that you will lose only about a pound a week. However, during the initial stages of your diet, you may find that you are actually losing more weight than that because you are losing water. While you can use a standardized diet, it is perhaps best to work with a dietician in order to fine-tune the diet to meet your individual needs.

Still, even if you are curbing your calorie count, you’ll need to make sure that what you eat is nutritious. By paying close attention to nutrition labels, you can determine the vitamin and mineral count of much of what you consume. There are certain general requirements for a healthy diet. For instance, you’ll need to make sure that you are getting enough protein. For the typical woman, this would amount to 50 grams per day; for the typical man, 63 grams per day. Protein is vitally important for strengthening your muscles and teeth and maintaining good skin tone. Protein sources can include lean meat, fish, chicken, eggs, beans, and nuts. Experts recommend that you have at least two servings of protein a day.

While low carb diets may be all the rage, a number of dieticians say you need as many as 100 grams of carbohydrates a day. This means consuming as many as eleven servings of pasta, cereal, and bread in order to maintain a healthy energy level. You should also eat at least 20 grams of fiber each day to aid your digestion. Less than a third of your calories should come from fat in order to enable you to keep the pounds off. Only about one-tenth of your calories should be derived from saturated fat. Also, keep your cholesterol count under control in order to keep heart disease at bay.

An important aspect of good nutrition that many individuals forget is water. This might be surprising, however, given the fact that most of our body is made up of H20. Medical experts by and large agree that you should drink at least eight glasses of water everyday. Exercise, however, could make you yearn for additional water. Water is often considered the secret weapon of weight loss, enabling people to shed pounds more easily.

Although it may be tempting, you should not skip meals. This only serves to decrease your metabolism, causing you to burn fat more slowly. Even a small meal is better than no meal at all. Weight loss experts, however, differ about the number of meals you should eat each day. Some recommend the standard three meals with a couple of snacks, while others recommend five or six small meals each day. You should probably check with your physician to see which approach is appropriate for you.

Losing weight can be a difficult challenge, no matter what your age. There are so many temptations around, so many opportunities to boost your calorie count. Also, you might try to follow one diet, only to find that it is difficult to sustain. As a result, the low-calorie diet may be the best method around for consistent weight loss. While you might not be able to lose weight quickly, you can shed pounds eventually. By being patient and committed to your weight loss program, you can ultimately lose the weight you need to.

Think about the number one reasons why people are overweight nowadays. Overweight people fall into one of two different categories. Either they have an unhealthy lifestyle – working long hours, eating out all the time, not getting enough exercise – or they simply eat too much, often in a compulsive way. This type of eating – eating when one isn’t hungry, for example, or eating for emotional reasons rather than physical hunger – is really a type of addiction.

It should be understood as an addiction, and it often is. For example, the group Overeaters Anonymous functions on many of the same principles as AA or other twelve step programs. Excessive eating is treated like an addiction because that’s exactly what it is.

But if that’s the case, it’s easy to see why this addiction might be harder to treat than some others. The way to deal with an addiction is to stay away from the behaviour that’s out of control – alcoholics can’t touch alcohol, for example. The idea is to not do it at all until the addiction becomes a thing of the past – in fact, for many addicts, they can never indulge in their addictive behavior again, not even once.

With food addiction, though, that’s obviously impossible. People have to eat – there’s no getting away from it. That’s why food addiction, though it’s an addiction to a non-lethal substance, may be the hardest of all to deal with. And that’s also why companies such as Slim-fast, who produce and market meal replacements for people to use while dieting to lose weight, actually do succeed in helping some people.

The idea behind meal replacements is that you don’t really eat at all for a good part of the day – instead, you have a special shake or other product that gives you all the nutrients you need, and stops you from feeling hungry. This works in two ways: first, it controls the calories you take in, because the meal replacements are quite low calorie. Second, it breaks the cycle of addictive behavior because you’re not really eating. You can get away from the behavior much as an alcoholic can (and must) get away from alcohol, and that gives you a better chance of breaking the addictive process.

Though most meal replacement plans do recommend that you eat one ‘normal’ meal per day, some people who are serious about losing weight don’t do even that. That’s precisely how Oprah Winfrey once lost a lot of weight – about fifty pounds. She said that she found it easier not to eat at all (subsisting on meal replacement shakes and bars) than to control her eating. When you know that you won’t be eating ‘real food’ at all for a while, it takes the guesswork out of it. Everything becomes very straightforward, and it’s a fact that many people have lost weight using this method of weight loss.

There are drawbacks, though. For one thing, while a weight loss program is supposed to teach you about how to eat for the rest of your life – to establish healthy habits, in other words – using meal replacements clearly doesn’t do so. Once you go back to eating real food, you might find that your problems with controlling your food intake are still there. Though you will have lost weight, you are more likely to gain it back if you haven’t learned healthy eating habits.

Because of our society’s obsession with thinness, losing weight is a primary concern for many individuals, particularly women. Sometimes it’s an obsession that goes too far. Many women with perfectly normal body weight consider themselves overweight, and this applies to young girls as well. It’s very sad to see girls as young as eleven or twelve anxiously watching their weight. Over time, for many of us, it’s just too much pressure.

Geneen Roth, an author who has written many books about self-regulated eating, says “for every diet there is an equal and opposite binge”. That is, over time dieting and obsessing about your weight can actually create a weight problem. Nobody can deal with the pressure of deprivation forever – sooner or later, something’s got to give. When it does, the result may be that you lose control of your eating – or, as the tragic stories of many anorexic girls will attest to, you lose control of your dieting. Geneen Roth isn’t alone in this way of thinking, either. Many experts are coming to believe that dieting just doesn’t work.

But if not dieting, then what? Self-regulated eating is one alternative that Roth and others recommend. If, like many women in our society, you have spent literally years of your life on a diet, you have probably lost track of what it feels like to eat for the most natural reason of all – because you happen to be hungry. This approach to weight loss aims at making eating natural again. It’s very simple: if you’re hungry, eat. If you’re not hungry, don’t eat. And when you’re eating, as soon as you feel full, stop.

That’s all there is to it. For many of us, accustomed to restrictive diets, this may sound like the most unlikely way in the world to lose weight. As a matter of fact, it isn’t. It may not make you lose weight quickly – in fact, some people even gain a little before they start to lose. But over the long term, because this is a natural way of eating, it will get your body back to its natural healthy weight.

Of course, the weight that’s natural and healthy for you may not bear any resemblance to the fashion models we see in magazines. In fact, studies have shown that less than 1% of women naturally have bodies that are proportioned like a fashion model’s, so maybe it’s time for us all to make peace with the bodies that we do have.

And that’s exactly what the natural approach to eating can help you achieve. It’s not a diet – in fact, it’s even been called an anti-diet. You may assume, that if you eat whatever you want whenever you’re hungry, that you’ll end up eating only unhealthy, high-fat foods. That may be true at first, but those who have gone through this process will attest to the fact that over time, your eating habits naturally become healthier. The first week or so, you may end up eating a lot of cookies or chips. Chances are that, after that, you’ll crave vegetables or protein. It will all even out over time.

In fact, scientific studies done with children have proven this very thing. The children in the study were allowed to select the foods they wanted to eat from a wide selection. At first, they all gravitated toward cake, chips and candy, probably because these were the foods that their parents restricted at home. After a day or so, however, they naturally switched to healthier foods. Over the span of a week, even though they were never told what to eat and what not to eat, virtually all the children ended up eating a nutritious, balanced diet.

That’s why the self-regulated eating plan does not have any forbidden foods. The thinking goes like this: if a food is forbidden, that will make you want it even more. When you finally get hold of it, you won’t be able to stop. But if all foods are allowed, there’s no need to obsess about any of them. You can just give your body whatever you feel it needs, and over time, this will lead to easy, natural weight loss.