Good Supplements

Are you continually dieting off and on with your weight roller-coasting up and down?

I’ve met a number of women who have been dieting for decades, yes decades! And when I sit down with each one and ask her what particular program has helped keep the weight off the answer is always “none.” And so the next obvious question is – “why have you dieted now for 3-4 decades?

That is a lot of time spent focusing on counting points, calories and fat grams with little long term progress to show for it.” When something isn’t working it’s time to either try something else out or figure out why it isn’t working. But, more importantly, my goal is to make these women (and for some reason it’s always women who are the perpetual dieters) think about life as a whole and not about food. Because sometimes the act of dieting has very little to do with weight and food.

Some people diet in an attempt to control one area of their life because other areas are so out of control. I’ve met women who are hooked on dieting and weighing everyday because their husband is an alcoholic, son has a drug habit, they take care of their elderly parents, they have a boss who reprimands them daily about anything and everything and various other issues.  If you are a perpetual dieter, and it isn’t working, take a step back and look at your life. Is there anything you would like to change but feel you have little control over? If the answer is yes, start chipping away at that part of your life. Drop dieting for now, fix those areas of your life that need fixing and I bet some of the weight will drop off.

Ditch Dieting and Still Lose Weight
Dieting isn’t the only way to lose weight, and in fact the word diet has a negative connotation to it. To keep the weight off and keep it off permanently, you need to make changes you can live with for life. And, if you eat for non-food reasons and do so often (all of us do at some point), it’s time to take a more intuitive approach to eating. Intuitive eating means paying attention to your hunger and satiety cues and feeding your body when you are physiologically hungry. It also means feeding your body emotionally when that is what you need – crying, getting mad, asking for a hug or any other expression of emotion.

How do you eat intuitively? Give yourself permission to eat when your stomach is growling or you feel unfocused due to lack of food. And stop when you are full. Start paying attention to when you reach for food and food isn’t the answer. Using a food mood journal can help. In a food mood journal you record what you eat, your hunger level and how you felt at the time (mad, sad, glad, bored etc.). By keeping this journal, and you can do so in a spiral notebook, you’ll see patterns – when you are eating but you aren’t really hungry.

For more information on intuitive eating see: www.intuitiveeating.org

Taking vitamin D and calcium supplements can help in maintaining a healthy weight.  Vitamin D levels in the body at the start of a low-calorie diet predict weight loss success, a new study found. The results, which suggest a possible role for vitamin D in weight loss, were presented at The Endocrine Society's 91st Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C