If you’re trying to lose weight or just eat a healthier diet, cutting down on sugar is a great place to start. The average American consumes about three pounds of sugar every week, about six times the maximum recommended allowance.

3. Instead of soda and juice, drink water. One can of soda contains 9-10 tablespoons of sugar! Even 100% fruit juice contains a lot of sugar, without the fiber of the whole fruit. Switch to water or skim milk instead. Instead of drinking juice, eat fresh fruit.

4. Read the nutrition labels and ingredients lists. Watch out for hidden sugars. Honey, molasses, corn syrup and maple syrup all contribute sugar. Look for words ending in “ose” like fructose and dextrose – these are other forms of sugar. And many “sugar-free” products contain sugar alcohols like xylitol, sorbitol, and mannitol. These contain just as many (if not more!) calories as sugar and can cause you diarrhea, too.

Also remember to divide your carbohydrate “budget” up over the day – try to eat three meals and two to four snacks. This will keep your blood sugar levels more even and provide more continuous energy.

Chilled Garlic and Onion Soup

1 1/2 cups cubed whole-wheat Italian bread, without crust
1 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 Tbsp. canola oil
3 cups chopped onions
6 large garlic cloves, chopped
4 cups fat-free, reduced sodium chicken broth
4 parsley sprigs (see note)
4 fresh thyme sprigs, or 1 tsp. dried
1 bay leaf
1 cup whole milk
Salt and ground pepper, preferably white
1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley, for garnish

Source: American Institute for Cancer Research (AICR)

Today I want to take a few minutes to talk about how to lose weight.

The formula is very simple – burn more calories than you take in.

That’s it.

However, if it was just that simple, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic on our hands, would we?

You see, reducing calories does work to help lose weight, and many diets are based around this simple fact. Most of them add a lot of extra window dressing to their programs so they can sell more books, but if you’re burning more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight.

However, as many people can attest to, just reducing your calories loses its effectiveness over time. You see, your body is smart. If it thinks that you’re trying to starve it, it’s not going to use as many calories. You see, way back before we had cell phones, TVs, and even the wheel, having three square meals a day wasn’t a certainty. In fact, some days our ancestors would have to go without eating, and sometimes it was many days at a time.

To keep our bodies from withering away into nothing, our metabolisms reacted by burning fewer calories each day. In this way, we can go survive for a prolonged period of time with no or limited amounts of food (as long as water is available). So while the eat nothing method of weight loss, may seem like it’d be the quickest method to lose weight, that isn’t the case.

As you now know, not eating causes your metabolism to go into survival mode, so while you may not be getting many calories, your body will also not use many calories. To make matters worse, instead of burning off fat reserves, your body will start burning extra muscles (protein) since muscles require more function on a daily basis. What ultimately happens is that when you start eating again, you may weight less, but you’ll actually have a higher ratio of fat to muscle than when you started, and that’s not a good thing. To make matters worse, since your metabolism has been slowed, if you go back to eating normally, you’ll gain any weight you lost back quickly since your body just doesn’t use as many calories as it used to – it will adapt back, but that will take some time and in the meantime you’ll be gaining the weight your so desperately tried to lose back.

Fortunately most diets don’t require that you stop eating, so you metabolism won’t come to a screeching halt. However, your body will eventually adapt to even small reductions in calories. For example, say you’re reducing your calorie intake by 500 calories a day. Based on that, you should burn up about 3500 extra calories a week, resulting in about a pound of weight loss a week (1 lb of fat = 3600 calories). And at first you will.
But sooner or later your body will adapt and start to function off those 500 calories and your weight loss will again come to a halt. At this point, most people simply reduce their calories even further, and the weight loss starts again.

However, as you’ve probably already figured out, this reducing of calories can become a viscous downward spiral especially if you have a lot of weight to lose. There are only so many calories you can cut out of your diet, and the more calories you cut out, the more likely you are to have nutritional deficiencies since you’re get as many nutrients from food since you’re eating so much less of it.

Are you depressed yet?

I had to learn this the hard way, and it seems whenever I explain how your body adapts, they get a little depressed – after all, who wants to be fat forever with no hope of losing weight and keeping it off?

Fortunately, there is a simple solution – it’s called exercise. And any weight loss program worth anything will have you exercising. If a weight loss program doesn’t call for exercise, it’s setting you up for a lifetime of yo-yo dieting.

Here’s what exercise will do for you:

Exercise raises your metabolism. Yes, that’s right, exercising will give your metabolism a boost.

Exercising burns calories.

Obvious? Yes.

But important to say anyway. So when you’re planning your diet, make sure you plan time for exercise. How often? Well, it’d be irresponsible for me to give advice without knowing what kind of shape you’re currently in, but most people can get away with exercising six days a week. Some people, myself included, will exercise everyday.

So if you want a simple guide to losing weight, here it is:
1) Reduce your calories. 500 calories is usually a good number.
2) Exercise several times a week for at least 20 minutes – 40 minutes is better. (if you burn 500 calories with your workouts everyday, that’s another pound a week you can lose)

That’s it. There’s more that you can do to lose weight than just those two things, and I’ll be providing more details about more advanced weight loss concepts in the future, but those two things right there can help you get started losing weight right now.

Note: If you want to lose fat, and not muscle (and who wants to lose muscle?), then it’s important that you don’t try to lose more than 2lbs/week. Your body can only use so much fat each week, so don’t fall for ridiculous sales gimmicks that promise you can lose 10lbs in one weekend. If you do manage to lose that weight, it’s going to be water weight, which you’ll gain back just as quickly as you lost it.

It hasnt been too long since the American Medical Association officially announced that Americans needed to start taking vitamin supplements to maintain their health. While there are probably many reasons for this, one of the most glaring is the fact that our general food supply sucks.

This announcement harkens a very sad fact, in my opinion: Americans can no longer get the essential nutrients we need from the food we eat. I suppose it’s easier to get millions of Americans to start taking supplements than it is to make a billion dollar industry change its practices.

Although I have much to say about most facets of the American food supply, for the purposes of this article I want to discuss the most vital food component on the planet: raw vegetables. It’s the most vital food component because, with rare exceptions, every organism on Earth either eats raw vegetables or eats animals that eat raw vegetables. Basically speaking, without raw vegetable consumption, the planet would die.

Giving the American population the benefit of the doubt, very few people are apparently aware of how desperately our bodies are craving the nutrients found in raw vegetables.
If the general population really is aware of this and still doesn’t eat more raw vegetables, that fact is sadder than the announcement from the AMA.

Raw vegetables are extremely rich in minerals, vitamins, trace elements, enzymes and natural sugars. All of these are things that your body needs to function properly and the raw veggies will help stabilize and normalize your natural bodily functions. They actually help pretty much ALL of your natural bodily functions operate.

Enzymes are especially essential for our overall health because they aid in digestion. This is why people frequently refer to green vegetables as a natural laxative; they get the stomach working properly. Thanks to the overall condition of the food supply in this country, our system needs as much help as it can get with regards to digestion.

So, with the explanation of the general benefits regarding vegetables in front of you, you may be wondering why it is I’ve been advocating eating them raw. The explanation for that is contains three points which are incredibly disturbing to me:

1. Scientific studies have shown that the commercially produced vegetables today aren’t nearly as nutritious as they were 50 years ago. One of the likely causes for this is the fact that farming has been “advanced” to the point that it doesn’t take nearly as long for a vegetable to be full grown…though that doesn’t mean that they are nutritiously mature. They don’t lay underground as long as they used to, so they don’t have the same opportunity to fully develop.

2. Most Americans purchase their vegetables in the produce section of the local grocery story. However, the local grocery store has its vegetables shipped in from all over the country. Since vegetables naturally begin to lose their nutritional value the moment they are harvested, the travel time between the production farm and the produce department allows for significant nutrient loss.

3. All forms of cooking vegetables reduce their nutritional content. Even steaming, which is by far the healthiest form of cooking, still makes the vegetables less nutritious than they would be if eaten raw.

So, you put it all together and the picture is pretty scary. Our commercially available vegetables aren’t as nutritious as they used to be when they are harvested; they start losing the nutritious value that they do have at harvest; they continue losing it all along the route to your local grocery store; and then you cook them which reduces the nutritional value even further.

We may be better off coloring cardboard green and eating it.

Seriously, this is a sincere problem for the general health of America. I’m advocating eating raw vegetables in an attempt to salvage their incredibly reduced nutritional value. To really combat this problem you need to start growing your own vegetables organically or, barring that, purchase them at the local farmer’s market.

Or, as the AMA suggests, you can just start popping supplements and continue eating cardboard. Mmmmmm, cardboard.

Trans fats, or Trans Fatty Acids, are a vegetable-based fat that is made when vegetable oils are hardened for use in shortening or margarine. Trans fats are found in baked and fried foods, such as cookies, fried fish or chicken and donuts, which are prepared using the hardened vegetable oil.

The problem with eating Trans fats is that it contributes to clogging of the arteries, increases the presence of low density lipoprotein (LDL), which is the “bad” cholesterol, reduces the presence of high density lipoprotein (HDL), “good” cholesterol and also contributes to other serious health conditions including heart disease and Type II diabetes.

Food manufacturers use Trans fats instead of healthier oils because it is less expensive, imparts a better flavor, and increases the shelf life of the products that contain them.
Up until recently, food manufacturers were not required to list Trans fats on the product labels. As a result, consumers did not know how much of the Trans fats the products contained so they were not able to make healthy decisions.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently enacted a rule which requires food manufacturers to list the presence of Trans fats on the nutrition labels. Although the FDA did not set any limits as to the percentage of Trans fats that are allowed to be present, they did say that it should be “as low as possible. These labels first started appearing in 2006.

Experts believe that there are nearly 50,000 products on the market that contain Trans fatty acids. While the term “Trans fats” might not specifically appear on the nutrition label, you will see terms such as shortening and hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil. The closer to the top of the nutrition label these Trans fats appear, the higher the percentage that are present.  Also, the FDA allows food manufacturers to state 0 grams of trans fat if there are less than .5 grams of trans fat per serving.  For this reason, it’s important to read the ingredients on the label.    If you see hydrogenated or partially hydrogenate oils on the label, it has trans fats, no matter what the label says.

Sometimes in an effort to eat healthier, we end up digesting Trans fat without realizing it. Stick margarine is a good example. Many people switch to margarine to reduce the quantities of real butter that they consume. Stick margarine, however, is as close to 100% Trans fat as you’ll find in a food product. The end result is that we think we are doing our body a favor by “eating healthy” when, in truth, we are treating it worse than if we continued eating butter.Consumer health groups have begun to pressure food manufacturers to remove Trans fats from their products altogether. Some have gone so far as to file law suits demanding that a particular product be removed from the shelves unless trans fats are eliminated from the ingredients.

As awareness levels rise, you can expect to see Trans fats all but disappear from the list of ingredients in any product where the manufacturer wants to avoid the potential legal problems and negative publicity of cooking with Trans fats. Food giants Kraft and Frito Lay, major users of Trans fats, have already publicly committed to reducing the level of Trans fats in their products.

For you part, you can refuse to buy any products containing trans fats, and refuse to eat at restaurants where the food has trans fats.  Write letters to companies whose products you like, but won’t purchase again until they stop using trans fats.

Here’s a list of foods that almost always have trans fats in them.

Examples of Foods Containing Trans Fats:

• French Fries
• Margarine and Shortening
• Cake Mixes
• Ramen Noodles and Soup Cups
• Fast Food (If it’s fried, it probably has Trans fat)
• Frozen Food
• Commercial Baked Goods – Donuts are particularly bad
• Cream Filled items, such as cookies and cupcakes.
• Pound Cake
• Potato Chips and Crackers
• Many Breakfast Cereals – Be Sure to Read the label
• Cookies and Candies
• Dips and Salad Dressings

Everyone loves basking in the warm sun, especially if it is lying on a beautiful sandy beach. While the sun has many benefits, too much sun without proper protection can be harmful. Being sunburned not only hurts, but also damages skin and promotes wrinkles and cancer. If you are going to spend any time in the sun, even 10 minutes, protect your skin with sunscreen for both UVA and UVB rays.

With today’s breakthroughs, there are many innovative ways to fight cancer. Although you may find this difficult to believe, the American Institute for Cancer Research has come up with a surprising way to fight cancer. After conducting thorough studies, researchers found that drinking tea, which contains antioxidants to help neutralize “free radicals” helps to fight cancer. While it is not a cure-all, if cancer runs in your family, it certainly will not hurt to add tea to your daily consumption.

A negative attitude can have a negative impact on your health just as a positive attitude can affect your health in a positive manner. Living well has a direct correlation with a positive outlook. Keep smiling and try to find the good in life, even when things are tough.

Often the care of teeth and gums is overlooked as potential health risks. However, with the oral cavity being the main way in which parasites, bacteria, yeast, and fungus get into the body, taking time to thoroughly brush and floss your teeth is important. Keeping your mouth clean is a great way to benefit your health.

Get into a habit of reading the labels on food. While they may have messages such as “Low Fat” or “Reduced Calorie” written all over the front of the package or can, when you read the label and understand what you are looking for, you will probably be surprised. Regardless of what the claim may be, the label may tell another story. The FDA provides these important guidelines, therefore, should be what you look for. If the message and label do not jive, move on to a different product.