There are plenty of diets on the market today. Some of them have been merely fads and others have survived but lost their original luster. All of them could work if only the humans could stick to the program. So what does that tell you?

You have developed some bad habits and your body craves nutrients in one form or another. I’m not sure about the nutrients in chocolate but I’m sure a debate could be fought to find something nutritionally valuable there. Actually a craving for chocolate is a metallic deficiency. So your body is telling you correctly. Are you interpreting the message correctly. Are you really hungry or are you thirsty?

I have studied a few diets mainly the Zone diet and the Atkins diet. Both have their merits and successes. There are difficulties with each. The Zone diet has a lot of calculations that you need to understand in order to be successful. The Atkins diet in my opinion throws the body into shock by carb deprivation in the first phase. I don’ t think that is healthy. You will lose weight, but you will turn into something like the Tasmanian devil. How can that be good for you or anyone around you?

What you need to learn is what to eat and when to eat. I have taken some ideas from the best of the best and employed them as my lifestyle. I know what is good for me and I focus on the good stuff. Mainly I stay away from empty calories. Calories deficient of nutritional good. That would be anything with bleached flour or sugar. Lots of calories but that’s about it as far as your body is concerned. And your body says feed me more when you eat that stuff because it got nothing out of it the first time. So flour products and the sweet stuff will not satisfy you for very long. The other part of that is it causes a glycemic bump which leads to an insulin spike. That excess insulin rushing to meet the blood sugar demands gets stored as fat. Utt oh! So learning to eat better foods is point one.

Secondly, you need to eat more often.  Eat a healthy snack in between breakfast and lunch and  dinner. A healthy snack meaning a piece of fruit or vegetable. Soy nuts, almonds, turkey, roast beef, lean meats, protein bar (watch for sugars), protein shakes, etc. Eating snacks in between meals also means reducing your meal portions. So no more gorging at meal time. Eat until satisfied. That doesn’t mean until you can’t eat another thing.

The third key is to eat a protein with every carb. Never eat a carb on it’s own. That will keep you glycemic level low and even. That will reduce insulin surges and extra fat storage.

Another method I’ve been researching has to do with calorie shifting. It’s very interesting how the body reacts to this. What typically happens to dieters is they cut back on their calorie intake. Sure they begin to lose weight but they get to a certain point and plateau. They can’t drop any more weight. They have cut back from a 2500 calorie a day intake to 1000 calories a day with no more weight loss. They are practically staving themselves and they are  not losing weight. Usually they get tired of the limited calories and figure what’s the use and go back to their old eating ways and put all the weight back on and more.

Calorie shifting gets you past the sticking point. It is a proven method of deliberately altering your daily intake of calories. Over time that allows the plateau to be broken and more weight is lost. I read this information in an ebook called “Fat loss for Idiots.” It is a well worth while read to help you lose weight and get you past the plateau.

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