Snickers Cookies

If you are heavier than you want to be, you probably think that you want to lose weight. Think again. If you truly desire to permanently transform your body into a slimmer, more compact vehicle in which to experience life's journey, there's a good chance your real desire isn't to lose weight. It's to weigh less.

One of the most common reasons people seek out the services of a nutritionist is for weight loss. This certainly is true in my holistic nutritional counseling practice, and it's part of what I love best about my work. Helping people take control of their food consumption and release unwanted pounds is a privilege that gives me great satisfaction. However, what I really love best is not helping my clients transform their bodies for the short term, but for the long haul. My aim is to empower my clients with the experience and understanding needed to make lasting changes that bear fruit year after year.

If you are overweight, you are well aware of how the extra pounds you are lugging around place a burden on your body, your health and your self-esteem. Wanting to drop that padding is a sign of wanting to be healthy and love yourself more. But think about this. Is losing weight your ultimate goal? Or is it something else?

Let's put it this way. If you had a choice between losing weight and weighing less, which would you choose?

When I ask my clients this question, it becomes clear that the goal is not simply to succeed at "losing" weight. The goal is to become a different size person altogether, to inhabit a leaner and lighter body for life.

Achieving this goal entails more than going on a diet. Deeper, long-lasting changes are required. These include changes in the daily choices you make about what foods to put into your body, changes in the way you relate to food overall and changes in the level of physical exercise you engage in on a regular basis.

If you make these changes properly, you are guaranteed to lose weight - almost as a side effect, a bonus - whether or not you ever go on a diet again. In fact, going "on" a diet implies that one day you will go "off" it, setting you up to regain the pounds you so diligently shed through hard efforts, once you return to "normal" life. (We've all been there and the jury is in: diets don't work.) You don't need to "go on a diet," you need to transform your diet, as a whole, in order to achieve long-term physical transformation.

Body weight is a direct result of eating and exercise habits. Even if you have a thyroid problem or other medical condition that affects your metabolism, to a large degree your food and fitness choices are still driving the results reflected by the mirror and your waistline. You know this. If you want a lighter body, your eating and exercise habits must change at a fundamental level, individualized to your needs.

A lighter body - YOUR lighter body - is sustained on a different quality and amount of food than your heavier body. Your lighter body also engages in a greater amount of physical activity than your heavier body. That's the bottom line.

Along with moving your body more, if you want to weigh less than you do now, you need to eat differently than you have been up to now. This is the only way your shape and size will change for good. To think otherwise would be insanity. Did you know one definition of insanity is "to keep doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result"? Not going to happen! If you continue your old habits, nothing will change.

The way to weigh less is not to go on a diet but to change your diet. And this means changing your relationship to food. Because ultimately, your weight is not just a function of the kinds of foods you eat, but also a function of the way that you eat them: when and how and in what feeling state of mind. That's where, in my work, the counseling component of "nutritional counseling" takes on a fuller meaning. Helping my weight loss clients understand and heal the roots of their emotional eating is of great benefit in supporting their recovery and transformation. When it comes to weight, emotional factors are at least equally important as biochemical factors.

Addressing the biochemical piece is where cleansing comes in. Cleansing, which entails removing all artificial and processed foods from the diet and replacing them with fresh, water-rich fruits and vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, is different from dieting which focuses on calorie restriction alone. I believe it is critical to remove certain sub-optimal substances (such as food additives, wheat and sugar) from your dietary repertoire for a period of time, in order to break free of physically needing them.

Yes, I said physically needing them. It's not all in your head: many, if not most food cravings and addictions are real, biochemical responses. You're not just "weak" when you can't resist buying and eating that cupcake or pint of ice cream or fast-food burger or entire bag of spicy tortilla chips. These foods contain chemical ingredients and specific combinations of flavors that trip the pleasure pathway in your brain - the dopamine pathway - which is your biological trigger for addiction.

What foods trip the dopamine pathway? Refined sugar, in all forms. Wheat, especially in white flour form, and other grains that contain gluten (rye, barley, spelt). Food combos of fat+sugar (candy bars, cookies, pies) and fat+carb+salt (pizza, french fries, chips). Numerous man-made additives and flavor-enhancers. Human beings are neurochemically wired to respond to these substances with an intense pleasure response, followed by craving for more....and more...and more! The result: substance abuse, presenting as food abuse. Food abuse takes many forms: compulsive eating, bingeing, overeating, eating to soothe emotions, eating to numb stress or unpleasant feelings, continuing eating even when part of you wants to stop, etc.

Food addiction is, perhaps, the most insidious addiction in our society. Because despite the fact that so many people suffer from its consequences, consuming junk food, processed foods and, indeed, overeating on any food (big gulps, big grabs and all-you-can-eat buffet, for example) is accepted, promoted and condoned. After all, we have a food industry to support! And believe me, food scientists are hard at work every day creating new "designer drugs" to keep you hooked for life. Big Macs, Doritos and Snickers bars were only the beginning.

However, take heart and know this: you are not a helpless victim. Far from it. In spite of all the temptation and media messages urging you to succumb, you still get to choose what you put into your mouth every day. With the proper education, information, support and resolve, you can turn your diet, your health and your weight around at any time. Yes, you can!

Doing a cleanse provides a break from old habits and teaches you how to "just say no" to your food addictions. A dietary detox or cleanse re-educates your taste buds, your brain and your entire body, showing you by example how brilliantly fresh, natural foods revitalize your system, give you energy and make you feel good. When you eliminate all processed, fake and industrial foods from your diet and spend a period of time eating only real foods that grow in or on the earth, you will start to see results in just days. After a few weeks, the results will be profound, even life-changing. You will learn by experience that the foods which nourished your ancestors - not just for centuries, but for tens of thousands of years - are the same foods upon which your body is designed to, and will thrive. You will start eating to evolve.

There are plenty of cleanses out there, some more extreme than others. I recommend choosing a program that feels doable to you, because the only cleanse that will work is the one you complete! I suggest that you avoid strict fasts like the Master Cleanse that start and end without safely transitioning you back into eating. Those programs can help you lose weight but usually don't support "weighing less" for the long term.

The program you select may be a juice-rich program like (my new hero) Joe Cross's fabulous reboot, or it may be something that gives you wider food options. I offer my clients two fantastic cleansing programs: the popular four-week Ultimate Detox Diet developed by my mentor, the late Teri Kerr, and my own 21-day Rainbow Cleanse™, which weaves principles of color healing and chakra awareness into a gorgeous diet of fresh, nutrient-dense foods. In addition, I provide coaching for people interested in following the protocols of my friend and colleague Natalia Rose, author of The Raw Food Detox Diet and Detox For Women.

All of the above recommended cleanse programs are geared towards making the lasting changes that ensure permanent results, long after you have left the actual cleanse behind. Like a diet, cleansing will help you to lose weight - most of my clients release ten pounds on average over three to four weeks. But, even more importantly, cleansing will teach you how to practice and embrace new healthy diet-lifestyle behaviors. Reshaping your relationship with food and eating is what takes you to the final goal that lies beyond losing weight: weighing less, for life.

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Weight Watchers meals are all over the internet! Just one search and you'll get almost everything that you need from cookies, frozen meals to recipes and cookbooks. It could be a frantic search for a person does Weight Watchers but do they really work? Let us take a look at these meals closely.

Cooks.com caters resources for different recipes of Weight Watchers meals. It's indeed delectable to find pies, meat loaf, cookies, snickers and brownies on this site. Most of the steps are easy to follow and the ingredients are too easy to purchase. However, if you're going to browse each of them to look closely at the ingredients especially those of the Weight Watchers, some are actually surprisingly of high Glycemic Index (GI) like Grapenuts. They're actually carbohydrates that generate high fluctuations in our insulin levels and blood glucose. Thereby, it gives higher risks for heart disease and diabetes. It's not just an issue of whether these Weight Watchers meals work, after then it becomes more on the issue of health.

Another example's the Weight Watchers cookies. It contains brown sugar and carob chips. According to Calorie King, the plain carob contains 5 cal per gram or 153 cal per ounce. It also contains 8.9 grams of fat for every ounce and nearly 15 grams of sugar. Carob they say, have more sugar than chocolate. Natural brown sugar on the other hand contains 11 calories per 4 grams or 1 teaspoon. Compared to white sugar, brown sugar may be considered healthier but with 11 calories per 4 grams, this ingredient's not to be considered a good meal for a person who wants to avoid diabetes. It's indeed interesting how Weight Watchers meals try to substitute the most favored delicacies like chocolate. However, while looking closely at their substitutes it seems unbelievably convincing that they are healthy. Just consider the 8.9 grams of fats from carob chips - how's that for a diet food?

Weight Watchers meals are always accompanied by calculators and nutrient database. Even USDA knows that such nutrient databases is standard but are simply close estimates of the specific values. It's relative to the estimates of ones walk going to their neighbor's house. Apparently, mathematics and physics could always defend that good solutions come from estimated variables, but that's if all the other factors have specific values. In the Weight Watchers meals, all the computed fats, calories and sugar are simply estimates and from these estimated values are Weight Watchers meal references. Thus, it doesn't sound substantial. From estimates you beget estimates and they consider them good bases for their meals. Isn't that stupendous?

If one's to consider of its viability to be 100% healthy, chances are it isn't. While, if one is to consider if they give you the exact amount of fats, calories and sugar for every meal, the situation is improbable. Since, the question has been answered, try switching course. The "11 pounds for 9 days" is a good offer from Fat Loss for Idiots.

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Glycemic Index - Why you need to know it for the sake of your health and Longevity.

The glycemic index will tell you how fast a particular food is broken down into blood sugar (glucose). For health and longevity reasons this is important for you to know.

Sugar being the fastest is set at 100 and all other foods are measured against it. Therefore when a foods glycemic ranking is close to 100 it is turned to blood sugar rapidly. The closer to zero the slower it is turned to blood sugar.

The breakdown is as follows: Foods which rank between 70 and 100 are considered high, 56 and 69 intermediate and 55 and less is low (and are turned to blood sugar slow).

As an example here are some foods and their glycemic rankings.

High Glycemic Index Foods

Sugar 100

Rice Chex 89

Corn flakes 84

French fries 75

Cheerios 74

White bread 70

Intermediate glycemic ranking

Whole wheat bread 69

Mars bar 68

Beets 64

Hamburger bun 61

Low Glycemic Index foods

Oatmeal cookie 55

Frosted flakes 55

Potato chips 54

Macaroni 47

Spaghetti 42

Snickers bar 41

Ravioli, meat 39

Apple 38

Pear 38

M&Ms peanut 33

Peach 33

Skim milk 32

Whole milk 27

Cherries 22

Peanuts 14

If you are like most people you are amazed by this chart. If you find it riveting don't worry you are normal. It is riveting.

Some of the stuff you might think is a misprint. Skim milk is 32 and whole milk is lower at 27 how can that be? Whole wheat bread is 69 and white bread is only one point higher at 70. Oatmeal cookies, those sweet sugar coated frosted flakes and potato chips all squeak in under the low ranking? You got to be kidding. And if you are pasta lover the great news is pretty much every kind of pasta is in the low ranking.

And perhaps the biggest surprise is a candy bar, Snickers, is only 41, and M&Ms peanuts are only 33 this is impossible we're talking about CANDY here. Well a Snickers bar and M&Ms peanuts both have peanuts in them. Look where peanuts are, 14. If you have candy combined with a protein the protein will actually slow down the rise in blood sugar. Waist watchers take note this is a very important tip for losing weight.

By now you may have gotten the idea that a high glycemic ranking is bad and a low one is good and you would be right.

The high glycemic foods cause "spikes" in the blood sugar. The blood sugar rises rapidly and you may experience a sugar high but then the body responds by pumping out lots of insulin which immediately lowers the blood sugar but it lowers it too far and then you experience the depression and tiredness of the "sugar blues."

Foods in the Low glycemic category release blood sugar slowly so you feel full LONGER and your energy remains steady. You are not as ferociously hungry for your next meal so won't consume as many calories plus you will be less inclined to snack between meals thus lowering your daily caloric intake in an easy effortless way.

The ideal situation for someone trying to lose weight!

There are so many books, articles, theories and opinions on weight loss most of them contradicting each other it is impossible to know which direction to take. It is fantastic to finally have a system devoid of all opinion that ranks foods scientifically according to the glycemic index.

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