The holidays are over. They are just a faint memory of family and festivities. Well, not quite. You have a blatant, extremely rude reminder hanging around your hips. How horrible! Well, fear not, this article can help you get back in shape after the holidays.

Holiday Aftermath – How To Get Back In Shape After The Holidays

Now that the holidays are over, when you look in the mirror your waistline may seem a bit larger than it was before the holidays started. Whether it was the silky-smooth egg nog, the deliciously-decadent chocolate cake, or mama’s home-made fruit cake, you may have only gained a few extra pounds from your holiday indulgences but the effect it will have on your health may be far-reaching.

Studies indicate that during the holiday season, most people may only gain about a pound during the season between November and January. This study may come as a surprise to a number of people since most people believe that they gain between five and ten pounds over the holidays. In a study, researchers found that volunteers overestimated their holiday weight gain by about 5 pounds. However, in reality, only a small percentage of people actually gained more than 5 pounds over the holidays.

This is good news for most people. However, the bad news is that any extra weight that is gained over the holidays is not lost during the rest of the year. Researchers say that although the weight that most people gain during the holidays is small, it will usually accumulate from year to year and can lead to serious health problems including obesity later in life.

This study underscores the importance of developing a plan to deal with the extra weight that you may gain during the holiday. Deciding today to lose holiday pounds by eating healthy and exercising is the first step to getting in shape after the holidays.

The first thing you may want to do is to take small but consistent steps to gain control over your weight and take charge of your health. For example, if you were not very active during the holidays, then don’t train like an Olympic athlete now. If you try to do too much too fast you may be setting yourself up for failure. The best approach is to begin every step that you take slowly and increase your efforts from there.

One great strategy that will help you lose weight and improve your health is to add more fruits and vegetables to your diet. Not only are fruits and vegetables low in calories but they also supply your body with much needed vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidants.

Another strategy you can employ is to cut about 800 calories a week from your diet by either eating less or exercising more. The best solution, of course, is to eat less and exercise. When combined with exercise, eating smaller, healthier portions of food is a sure-fire method of losing weight and getting in shape.

Just 20 to 30 minutes of exercise performed 3 to 4 days per week is sufficient to achieve noticeable improvements in your health. Moreover, if you don’t have a lot of time, those 30 minutes of exercise do not have to be performed all at once. If you’re short on time, try breaking up your fitness routine into small segments of 10 to 15 minutes each throughout the day. Then, when you have more time, you can schedule in more physical fitness into your routine.

If you gained a few extra pounds over the holiday, the result of not taking action can have serious implications on your health. Deciding today to take a proactive approach to your health and your weight is the most important first step you can make to optimum health and a healthier new you.

Patricia is a health focused content author and wants to help you lose your holiday pounds. For the latest Diet, Fitness and Weight Loss Tipsthat work please visit Patricia’s site at http://www.squidoo.com/weightloss-dieting-fitness/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Patricia_Zelkovsky

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By ALICIA CHANG, AP Science Writer – Thu Feb 26, 4:15 AM PST

Debbie Mayer, who was part of the clinical trial, poses at her home in Brockton, Mass. Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009. Low-fat or low-carb, as long as your diet lowers calories and you stick with it, you can lose weight, finds a federal study that followed people for two years – one of the longest such comparisons. (AP Photo/Lisa Poole)

LOS ANGELES – Low-fat, low-carb or high-protein? The kind of diet doesn’t matter, scientists say. All that really counts is cutting calories and sticking with it, according to a federal study that followed people for two years. However, participants had trouble staying with a single approach that long and the weight loss was modest for most.

As the world grapples with rising obesity, millions have turned to popular diets like Atkins, Zone and Ornish that tout the benefits of one nutrient over another.

Some previous studies have found that low carbohydrate diets like Atkins work better than a traditional low-fat diet. But the new research found that the key to losing weight boiled down to a basic rule — calories in, calories out.

“The hidden secret is it doesn’t matter if you focus on low-fat or low-carb,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which funded the research.

Limiting the calories you consume and burning off more calories with exercise is key, she said.

The study, which appears in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, was led by Harvard School of Public Health and Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana.

Researchers randomly assigned 811 overweight adults to one of four diets, each of which contained different levels of fat, protein and carbohydrates.

Though the diets were twists on commercial plans, the study did not directly compare popular diets. The four diets contained healthy fats, were high in whole grains, fruits and vegetables and were low in cholesterol.

Nearly two-thirds of the participants were women. Each dieter was encouraged to slash 750 calories a day from their diet, exercise 90 minutes a week, keep an online food diary and meet regularly with diet counselors to chart their progress.

There was no winner among the different diets; reduction in weight and waist size were similar in all groups.

People lost 13 pounds on average at six months, but all groups saw their weight creep back up after a year. At two years, the average weight loss was about 9 pounds while waistlines shrank an average of 2 inches. Only 15 percent of dieters achieved a weight-loss reduction of 10 percent or more of their starting weight.

Dieters who got regular counseling saw better results. Those who attended most meetings shed more pounds than those who did not — 22 pounds compared with the average 9 pound loss.

Lead researcher Dr. Frank Sacks of Harvard said a restricted calorie diet gives people greater food choices, making the diet less monotonous.

“They just need to focus on how much they’re eating,” he said.

Sacks said the trick is finding a healthy diet that is tasty and that people will stick with over time.

Before Debbie Mayer, 52, enrolled in the study, she was a “stress eater” who would snack all day and had no sense of portion control. Mayer used to run marathons in her 30s, but health problems prevented her from doing much exercise in recent years.

Mayer tinkered with different diets — Weight Watchers, Atkins, South Beach — with little success.

“I’ve been battling my weight all my life. I just needed more structure,” said Mayer, of Brockton, Mass., who works with the elderly.

Mayer was assigned to a low-fat, high-protein diet with 1,400 calories a day. She started measuring her food and went back to the gym. The 5-foot Mayer started at 179 pounds and dropped 50 pounds to 129 pounds by the end of the study. She now weighs 132 and wants to shed a few more pounds.

Another study volunteer, Rudy Termini, a 69-year-old retiree from Cambridge, Mass., credits keeping a food diary for his 22-pound success. Termini said before participating in the study he would wolf down 2,500 calories a day. But sticking to an 1,800-calorie high-fat, average protein diet meant no longer eating an entire T-bone steak for dinner. Instead, he now eats only a 4-ounce steak.

“I was just oblivious to how many calories I was having,” said the 5-foot-11-inch Termini, who dropped from 195 to 173 pounds. “I really used to just eat everything and anything in sight.”

Dr. David Katz of the Yale Prevention Research Center and author of several weight control books, said the results should not be viewed as an endorsement of fad diets that promote one nutrient over another.

The study compared high quality, heart healthy diets and “not the gimmicky popular versions,” said Katz, who had no role in the study. Some popular low-carb diets tend to be low in fiber and have a relatively high intake of saturated fat, he said.

Other experts were bothered that the dieters couldn’t keep the weight off even with close monitoring and a support system.

“Even these highly motivated, intelligent participants who were coached by expert professionals could not achieve the weight losses needed to reverse the obesity epidemic,” Martijn Katan of Amsterdam’s Free University wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Cutting calories key to weight loss: study

Overweight patients cast a shadow at a weight reduction clinic. A new study has found that eating heart-healthy, low-calorie foods and exercising is the key to losing weight regardless of levels of protein, fat or carbohydrates.(AFP/File/Frederic J. Brown)

The research, funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, seems to argue against blanket use of diets that do not necessarily limit calories but call for eating certain foods such as vegetables or proteins, at the expense of others.

The NIH study of 811 volunteers, 38 percent of them men and 62 percent women, aged 30-70 and either overweight or obese, looked at diets that have been popular in the United States in recent years, even as the number of obese Americans has soared.

The “Preventing Overweight Using Novel Dietary Strategies (POUNDS LOST) study found similar weight loss after six months and two years among participants assigned to four diets that differed in their proportions of these three major nutrients,” said researchers.

“The diets were low or high in total fat (20 or 40 percent of calories) with average or high protein (15 or 25 percent of calories). Carbohydrate content ranged from 35 to 65 percent of calories.

“The diets all used the same calorie reduction goals and were heart-healthy low in saturated fat and cholesterol while high in dietary fibre,” said researchers, whose study is published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Participants lost an average 13 pounds (5.9 kilos) at six months and maintained a nine-pound (four-kilo) loss at two years.

“These results show that, as long as people follow a heart-healthy, reduced-calorie diet, there is more than one nutritional approach to achieving and maintaining a healthy weight,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director at NHLBI.

“This provides people who need to lose weight with the flexibility to choose an approach that they’re most likely to sustain: one that is most suited to their personal preferences and health needs,” she stressed.

Sixty-six percent of US adults are overweight and of those, 32 percent are obese, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show.

By AFP – Thu Feb 26, 8:42 AM PST

By Dave Ryan
Note: As you read through this, consider that it may be time to update your food program and review what really works.

If your body doesn’t get all the nutrients it needs, both macro- and micronutrients, it can easily perceive that as the start of a famine. Once the body perceives the possibility of a famine, it produces chemicals that are not present in a well-fed body. The job of these new chemicals is to convert food into fat to prepare for the famine.

How does any of this apply to you, or anyone else that you know? Since close to 80% of adult Americans are overweight, and since the ‘famine zone response’ is the primary cause of fat, it applies to a whole lot of folks!!

America starving?!?! Almost sounds ludicrous since the consensus is that most Americans are overfed. But overfed with what? Nutritious, health-building foods that are as close to nature as possible? Not on your life, and that’s the saddest part of all this – it is your life, and the quality of your life, that’s at stake!

Why does the body turn food into fat? The prevailing theory is ‘because heavy people eat too much.’ And at the same time they say that, scientists are discovering ‘new’ (weren’t they always there?) chemicals that affect how much food is converted into fat. They tell us that if one chemical is present, more of the food is made into fat. If another chemical is absent, more of the food is made into fat. And if there is another chemical present, there is actually fat loss; all while the same amount of food is being eaten in the different trial groups. Doesn’t that tell us right there that it’s not a matter of how much we eat, but the chemistry of the body that determines whether food is used for energy and to build health, or whether it’s stored as fat. If the ‘calorie-in, calorie-out’ theory is true, why can’t we just eat 1200 calories of anything we want, like Twinkies and Twizzlers?!?!? We all know that won’t work!

Then consider this. Each of the macronutrients, carbs, protein and fats, are assigned a caloric value. Every packaged product has the calories listed no matter what’s in the food. A calorie is a measurement of energy released when a substance is burned, even things like paper and coal. (Now those are calories to avoid!) The key here is that it has to be burned, and protein, even though it can be burned and used as energy, is not supposed to be burned. It’s supposed to be used to rebuild the body. Protein is to our body what wood is to building a home. If you burn the wood for heat, you don’t have anything to build the house with. If we burn protein as energy, we don’t have anything to build the body with! So protein eaten and used to rebuild the body does not release calories, which means it has zero calories! So one 500-calorie meal of chocolate cake and another 500-calorie meal of chicken over salad are not the same! The calorie theory is bogus! It’s the body’s chemistry that determines whether food is turned into fat or not.

So why in the world would the body make fat on purpose? It’s easy to understand. It wasn’t that long ago that getting enough food was hard to do. (And we have to remember, even if we’re only talking about a hundred or two hundred years ago, the vast majority of ‘food’ was natural, organic, and unprocessed.) The primary use of fat in the body is to keep us alive. Every cell of the body has to use fuel to maintain life, just like your car engine idling at a light. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s using fuel. Of course, in a car, the engine can be turned off so it uses no fuel. The only time the body uses no fuel is when it’s dead! And 70% of the fuel used at rest, to keep us alive, is fat!

So, the body has this tremendous ability to convert food into fat so there is always enough to at least survive. This is controlled by one of the most powerful genetic programs we have – the genetic program that made it possible for the human species to survive times when food was scarce – the perception of the possibility of a famine.

But how can this apply to our modern day when food is so plentiful? Easily! If even the quality of the food is poor and doesn’t give the body what it needs, this can be perceived as the ‘famine zone!’ If you skip meals or eat too infrequently, that can trigger the famine zone. And frankly, so much of what is called food today is so over-processed and lacking in value that it can’t give the body what it needs. Proof? Again, near 80% of adult Americans is overweight!

“But I have friends that lost weight restricting calories. Doesn’t that prove it works?”

Sometimes, if they ate natural foods in a quantity that met their body’s needs, but the vast majority of those losing weight from dieting are losing both fat and lean body mass. The loss of lean triggers the famine zone, which leads to the cravings so many have to battle, and even the slightest deviation, let alone going back to ‘the American way of eating,’ will cause fat gain, because they are in a chemical fat making mode – the famine zone.

So what’s the answer? Feed the body everything it needs. Convince it that there is no reason to carry lots of fat because there is no famine. If the body isn’t in a chemical fat making mode, you can eat anything you want on occasion, and it won’t make a large amount of fat.

That’s what Living Lean and Healthy is all about. We make every effort to accurately calculate how much food it takes to pull you out of the famine zone and convince the body to release the fat. That part is easy. Understanding how the body works and how much food you need is the easy part. It may be time to call and make an appointment to update your food program and review all this, and that will help.

Understanding all of what it takes is easy; implementing it consistently enough may not be simple. We tend to do what we have always done, and we tend to do what others are doing. The vast majority of the information we have about food has come from advertising and from the diet industry. We have been brain washed to reach for certain things based on criteria, thoughts, which have nothing to do with health and feeding the body properly. Our response to hunger and other stimulus is controlled by the thoughts and images implanted in our brains by decades of advertising and observing what everyone else is doing.

To make it easy, we need to replace those ‘hard-wired’ patterns with new responses that make it easier to choose wisely and lean. That’s where Directed Mental Dynamics comes in. You can learn how to beat those impulses and change the way you react. An individualized CD can be made using guided imagery and relaxation response training, similar to hypnosis, to gently retrain how you respond to food stimuli.

Living Lean and Healthy, 19355 SW Teton Ave, Tualatin, OR 97062
Dave Ryan (503) 516-5590