Review: 6 Week Body Makeover

Review: 6 Week Body Makeover

The 6 Week Body Makeover is a weight loss program that was developed by the “Extreme Makeover” star, Michael Thurmond. He has labeled himself as an expert in losing weight and has called himself a “master body sculptor”, to boot. That said, the primary reason that he has held any place in the spotlight is as a result of the use of some of his methods on the reality TV show.

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Review: Jenny Craig Diet

Review: Jenny Craig Diet

The Jenny Craig Diet is an extremely well-known program as it has had a massive marketing strategy that has included celebrity presences in television commercials for many years. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the odds are that you’ve seen at least one of those ads.

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Review: The Traditional Asian Diet

Review: The Traditional Asian Diet

The Traditional Asian Diet is a lifestyle-based eating strategy based mainly on eating plant-based foods as is popular in several Asian countries. That massive continent is home for many countries, each of which boasts its own rich cultures and eating traditions. For this particular diet, there is a main focus on Japanese and certain Chinese diets.

Why Are Forms of the Traditional Asian Diet Praised?

The reason is that those cultures typically see strong health and considerable longevity throughout their populations. That said, they also typically consume about 25 percent more calories than the average American and yet still maintain leaner bodies on the whole. When eating the traditional Asian Diet as a part of a lifestyle, obesity is quite rare. That said, it has become commonplace among people who follow the traditional western and American diet high in processed foods.

How to Eat According to These Type of Diets

The diet involves eating a lot of rice as well as vegetables which have typically been cooked. Also included in the diet are a number of pulses, particularly soy-based foods. Soy provides one of the primary protein sources, to the point that it is even more commonplace than animal-based protein sources. Sweets and red meat are considered to be indulgences to be enjoyed on a rare occasion, not a regular basis.

Protein, Healthy Fats, Fruits and Veggies

In following with the Japanese tradition, seafood is also a regular protein source. As is the case in many parts of China, rice wine is often used in cooking, but this is still used only in moderation as alcohol is not meant to be a regular component of the lifestyle.

The Traditional Asian Diet leans on the eastern food pyramid. That food pyramid is extremely different from the one with which the western world is familiar. Instead, meat is at the very top of the Asian pyramid because it is eaten only occasionally and in small amounts. Poultry is eaten more, while eggs are consumed much more frequently. Vegetables, fruits, seeds, nuts and legumes are eaten quite a bit on this diet.

Lots of Rice

That said, the food eaten the most is rice, followed by certain millets and corn. The preferred type of rice when following this diet is white rice, not brown unpolished rice. The reason is that rice bran can be difficult to digest and it is believed to slow the metabolism.

High in Carbs

While the Traditional Asian Diet may be high in carbohydrates, the foods are consumed in their healthy, natural forms, meaning that they don’t cause people who eat them to become overweight or obese. These foods are not processed and don’t contain unhealthy additives. Their nutrient density helps to keep weight and health more naturally under control.

At the same time, there isn’t a great deal of scientific evidence to support adopting this diet outside of living within the actual culture that created it. As there isn’t any food tracking, specific restrictions or calorie counting, it can be difficult to adopt in a natural way that reflects the way the diet is consumed in the Asian countries on which the diet was based.

Interesting Strategies for Following a Traditional Asian Diet

To follow a traditional Asian diet in general, there are certain strategies that you can add to your habits. Indeed, every eating habit in Asia is unique to its region, but there are some points that most have in common

Avoid Cold Drinks with Meals

In the United States, it is extremely commonplace to have a cold beverage along with your meal. This can include anything from a cold glass of water to milk, soda, white wine, beer, or other drinks.  That said, this is not the habit of people following a traditional Asian Diet. Many people believe that changing this habit is a healthy move.  Reducing the intake of fluids with meals helps to avoid watering down your digestive enzymes and acids which are critical to ideal nutrient absorption.

That said, room temperature or, more commonly, warm beverages such as green tea help to support digestive enzymatic activity.  This helps you to stay hydrated and potentially improve your digestion at the same time.  That said, enjoy your green tea a half hour before or after eating, not during your meal, according to a typical traditional Asian diet.

Make Soup a Regular Meal

Soup is a hydrating food that helps to fill you up without packing yourself with calories. Many traditional Asian diet habits include soup with many if not most meals. They should be a broth-based, not cream-based soup. Like green tea, many of these meals support the digestive process.

Use Chopsticks and Small Plates

Serving the dishes that make up your meals on small plates is a fantastic way to eat smaller portions.  Choose one smaller plate for your whole meal or use very small plates to contain your portion of each part of the meal. Chopsticks are also a great way to eat because they help to ensure you take a reasonable sized bite instead of shoveling huge amounts into your mouth. This slows down the pace of your eating and gives your stomach the chance to register to your brain that it’s full before you overeat.

Review: Mayo Clinic diet

Review: Mayo Clinic diet

The Mayo Clinic Diet is a lifestyle strategy designed to help to remove the complexity involved in trying to lose weight in a healthy way. While healthy weight loss may sound as though it’s a pretty straightforward effort, once you get started, the amount of information available can easily become overwhelming. From food groups to macronutrients and from cardio to strength training, there are many details to consider.

The goal of this strategy is to make it easier for people to live a healthy lifestyle.  The Mayo Clinic Diet is meant to provide people with confidence in knowing that the recommendations are made from experts at a reputable medical and health organization.  Through this strategy, people can avoid fads and crash diets while improving the relationship they have with what they eat and with their regular activity level.

Why Was the Mayo Clinic Diet Developed?

Interestingly, while the Mayo Clinic Diet was designed to get right to the heart of the matter and provide people with directions to lose weight while living a healthy lifestyle, the timing of the creation of the diet was not necessarily chosen by the organization. Instead, there were so many unofficial versions of the diet already circulating under that name, they decided it was time to create a legitimate, official one that people could trust.

What is the Mayo Clinic?

The Mayo Clinic, the prestigious Minnesota-based organization.  It is a not-for-profit organization focused on bringing health education, research and clinical practice together.  It currently employs over 4,500 physicians and scientists in addition to 58,400 allied health staff and admin staff.

Publishing a Book for Common Sense Recommendations

The organization created a diet and published a book under its name in order to provide a common sense, practical and healthy way to eat nutritiously, get in shape and lose weight. It is highly user friendly and features a range of tips, recipes, pictures, graphics and additional support information to simplify weight management.

Replacing a Fad Diet with an Official Weight Management Strategy

According to the diet’s medical editor, Donald Hensrud, MD, the fad diet bearing the Mayo Clinic’s name had been circulating for years and they decided it was time to put things right with an actual healthy weight loss plan that people can actually use.

The unofficial, phony version of the diet involves consuming a low-carb, high-fat eating strategy. It promises that following this and eating grapefruit, which it claims to have nearly miraculous powers for fat burning, will skyrocket weight loss. The plan is followed for twelve days before there are two days off and then back on again. This is repeated ten times for what the diet claims will bring 50 to 55 pounds of weight loss.

On the other hand, the legitimate Mayo Clinic Diet provides a medically reviewed, scientifically sound long term weight loss strategy. The focus on building healthy eating and fitness habits that will be maintained for a lifetime in order to provide weight management as a lifestyle and not just over the short term. The goal isn’t to choose certain foods or food groups as being better or worse than others. Instead, it promotes overall wellness and understand how to incorporate health into a real person’s lifestyle.

What does the Mayo Clinic Diet Recommend?

It has a nutrition component, a fitness component as well as a preventive medicine component. That way, it’s not just focusing on getting the pounds off. Certainly, that’s a factor, but the aim is to do so healthfully so that it helps with overall health. Reducing weight in a healthy way is an important path to preventing many types of chronic disease and illness. This diet recommends eating according to the Mayo Clinic’s Healthy Weight Pyramid, boosting physical activity, keeping up healthy lifestyle habits, defining and achieving realistic goals and keeping up motivation levels.

Overall, the Mayo Clinic Diet is based on the foundation recommendations that are already being made by doctors and other health experts.  It uses government data and solid research to back up its recommendations.  That said, what makes it different is that it applies this data in a practical way. It provides people with ways they can use that information in their real life.

Over time, people following this strategy are meant to regularly improve their choices for nutrition, exercise and overall wellness.

Review: SlimFast Diet

Review: SlimFast Diet

The SlimFast Diet is a plan that has withstood the test of time. It has been around for decades. That said, it should be noted that while the diet does still exist, it has evolved over time so that it doesn’t necessarily look the same as it did when it was first launched in 1977. The SlimFast Diet was originally created by the Thompson Medical Company, which was founded in the 1940s. In 2000, it was purchased by Unilever which sold it to Kainos Capital in 2014.

What is the SlimFast Diet?

This diet is based on the use of meal replacement products including shakes, smoothies, and bars, among other branded items such as 100-calorie snacks. The premise is that it allows the dieter to replace his or her usual meals and snacks with pre-packaged foods that will automatically control caloric intake.

This diet is sometimes known as the 3-2-1 Plan, as the dieters who follow it are permitted 3 snacks, 2 meal replacements and one low calorie meal per day. Of all those snacks and meals, only the “1” is made of actual whole foods. The rest are required to be SlimFast products.

How to Supply Yourself to Follow this Diet

The official SlimFast website lists meal replacements in the form of four different shake flavors (creamy milk chocolate, strawberries and cream, rich chocolate royale, cappuccino delight, and French vanilla), three smoothies (creamy chocolate, vanilla cream, and mixed berry yogurt), two bars (chocolaty crispy cookie dough and chocolaty peanut butter pie), and two cookies (peanut butter chocolate chip and double chocolate chip).

On the other hand, there are also SlimFast brand snacks from which to choose. There are two of them listed on the official website. They include mesquite BBQ baked chips, sour cream and onion baked chips.

These products are all that can be consumed for the three snacks and two meal replacements that must be eaten per day. For the remaining meal, the SlimFast website offers a number of different recipes that can be followed in order to stay within the small calorie limit. On the whole , the recommendation is to make sure half the plate is filled with veggies, one quarter contains a lean protein and the remaining should consist of a whole grain.

Why Do Some Dieters Choose the SlimFast Diet?

Dieters who are looking for a quick and easy way to control calories without much counting or food prep might find SlimFast convenient as everything is already prepared aside from one meal per day. This type of structure is quite straightforward and doesn’t leave much room for confusion. When followed as directed, many people are more than likely to lose weight by using this strategy. Overall, the reviews regarding the taste of the SlimFast products have been quite positive and the products are sold both online as well as at several large retail chains.

Drawbacks of This Type of Dieting

On the other hand, as convenient as this type of dieting may be, following this type of strategy doesn’t teach the dieter how to build the right habits for keeping the weight off over time. After all, if eating is at the core of why a dieter has gained the weight in the first place, then replacing his or her meals with bars and shakes will only help over the short term.

Once the weight is lost, it is unlikely that the dieter will want to keep eating shakes and bars instead of meals. Unfortunately, as the diet does not teach the individual how to eat in a way that supports weight control, the result can be that he or she regains the pounds in a relatively short period of time.

Another drawback to the SlimFast Diet is that the products aren’t cheap. Therefore, following this diet for any length of time can become quite costly when compared to a standard grocery bill. This is another reason that this is often considered a short-term or fad diet instead of something dieters can keep up over the long term.

It’s very important to speak with your doctor before starting a meal replacement eating strategy such as the SlimFast Diet.  This can help you to make sure you won’t be harming your nutrition or bringing on unwanted side effects that could risk your results or even your health.

Review: TLC Diet

Review: TLC Diet

The TLC diet stands for Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes. It is a type of eating strategy created to help people to be able to effectively reduce their cholesterol levels. The claim is that by keeping up this diet over the long term, you will be able to lower your bad cholesterol (LDL) in a meaningful way. In fact, it states that if you follow it to the letter for six weeks, you are likely to reduce your LDL cholesterol by between 8 and 10 percent.

Who Created the TLC Diet?

The TLC diet was first created by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Cholesterol Education Program. It is also endorsed by the American Heart Association as being a heart-healthy way to eat in order to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The main component of this diet is to significantly reduce fat intake, particularly in the case of saturated fat. Saturated fats are the type of dietary fat found in heavy meats, fried foods and full-fat dairy products such as whole milk. Eating more than just a tiny amount of saturated fat has been associated with elevated cholesterol levels. When LDL cholesterol levels are too high, it increases the risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke.

What Do You Do on This Diet?

The TLC diet typically requires a follower to have to greatly reduce their saturated fat intake while boosting their fiber intake and limiting the amount of dietary cholesterol they consume. According to top medical organizations (mentioned earlier), this can make a considerable difference in reducing high cholesterol levels, even without having to resort to the use of prescription medications in some cases.

In order to follow the TLC diet properly, the first thing you will need to do is find out how many calories you should be eating every day. A doctor or dietician can often provide that advice. From there, it’s important to learn about the types of foods you should be eating and how you should be preparing them in order to enjoy your meals and still stay within your daily calorie range.

How Many Calories Will You Eat?

Most women will need around 1,800 calories depending on age, activity level, weight, height and other factors. Women trying to lose weight may need as few as 1,200 calories. On the other hand, men will need around 2,500 calories based on the same factors, but will need only 1,600 when weight loss is the goal.

The types of foods you will typically eat on the TLC diet include skinless poultry, very small amounts of reduced fat cheese and dairy, very little to no processed or cured meats, lots of veggies, lots of fruits, whole grains and very little – if any – processed foods.

Two Key Guidelines

As the main focus of the TLC diet is to be healthy and keep cholesterol levels where they should be, the foods you eat are low in both saturated fat and natural cholesterol.  That said, this is not a low-fat diet.  Instead, it also requires dieters to eat an appropriate amount of good fats.  These good fats include monounsaturated fats.

Also included among the types of foods you’ll focus on eating with this diet include those high in fiber.  Research has shown that diets high in fiber help to promote better heart health and support healthy cholesterol levels.

Overall, there are two key guidelines that TLC diet followers will need to stick to each day.  This includes:

  • Eating less than 7 percent of your total daily calories in the form of saturated fat.
  • Eating less than 200 milligrams of dietary cholesterol.

It’s a good idea to speak with a doctor before starting the TLC diet, particularly if the goal is cholesterol control. If you are taking medication to lower your cholesterol levels, don’t stop taking it just because you are following this diet, unless you have been directed to do so by your doctor.

Are There Banned Foods?

There are no specific foods that must be consumed in order to follow the TLC diet, but many people find that they need to change what they purchase at the grocery store. Depending on the choices that are made, this could mean that you pay more or less once you get to the checkout counter.

While this diet was designed for cholesterol reduction and heart health, some people do lose weight by following it due to the improvements to their overall nutrition.