Why Weight

Effective Weight Loss Programs

By Tom Cruz

The most effective weight loss programs are ones that are realistic in their goals. They don't specify "lose 40 points in 40 days" or similar things, they advocate a real life style change. And, good weight loss programs, ones that will keep you healthy and keep you on them, don't make promises that can't be kept.

Most modern weight are trying to tie into the hunger centers of your brain. Your brain feels satiated when certain cues are met. Most of those cues are tied not just to feeling full, but to the ratio of fats, protein and carbohydrates you eat. Carbohydrates are the food source your body craves for peak activity and high burst, high energy activity – the sort of activity you do when running away from a leopard, or leaping from tree to tree. Your taste buds and brains have been programmed to seek out sources of these high carbohydrate foods – that's why most people have a craving for sweets, because sugar is one of the most easily digested high-energy foods, and your brain still isn't convinced that you won't have to climb a tree to avoid a predator.

Good dietary practice boils down to regulating your carbohydrate intake as well as regulating your calories as a whole. This is the core of the South Beach, Zone and Atkins diets, going in ascending order of the ascetic nature of their carbohydrate restrictions.

Prior generation dietary practice was all about counting calories, whether it's from weighing your food, watching your portion size, or buying pre-packaged diet meals. The purpose of caloric restriction is to slowly starve your body, so it will burn off the fat reserves. While this is good theory, the problem with it is that unless you meet certain trigger types in the food, all you're going to do is convince your body that you're in the midst of a famine. Oddly enough, one of the ways to make sure your body doesn't do this is to make sure that your low calorie meals have exceptionally rich flavors. Examples of caloric restriction weight loss programs include Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and Deal-A-Meal.

And finally, we come to the "just plain nuts" diets. These are the diets that demand you eat nothing but okra for three weeks, or soak everything in vinegar before eating it, or wash everything down with a specially formulated nutritional drink, or that you replace one or two meals a day with a high nutrition shake. The Hollywood Diet, and the Slim-Fast program are the two big mainstays of this kind of nutritional idiocy, but every year, there's always another one – be it the grape fruit diet, the whole fruit diet, the raw egg diet, or the seaweed diet, someone is trying to sell you on the idea that by giving your body some miracle food, you'll melt the pounds away, without having to sweat, without having to suffer, etc.

Listening to your body, and working with it, are the keys to succeeding in any weight loss program.

An effective weight loss program that works is the Medifast weight loss program . To find out more about this unique program visit Quick Effective Diet at www.quickeffectivediet.com

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posted by Cheryl Levesque @ 10:01 AM