The 2 Most Dangerous Ingredients For Your Health
When you decide to assume control over your diet habits to lose pounds and body fat, it is vital to avoid two ingredients : high-fructose corn syrup and trans-fats. These two health-robbing chemicals are present in a wide-variety of prepared foods, including baked goods, soft-drinks and salad dressings.
High-fructose corn syrup ( HFCS ) is a common replacement for more expensive cane sugar in a multitude of products. The fact that high-fructose corn syrup is a diet-killer is that it wreaks havoc on blood-sugar levels. High blood-sugar levels are linked to lots of the conditions that plague modern life : pre-diabetes ( diminished fasting blood-sugar levels ) type II diabetes,and coronary heart-disease. One of the primary sources of HFCS in our diets is sodas. Do you know that one 48-oz.”super-size” soda can contain as much as 550 calories, not to mention equivalent to over thirteen big spoons of sugar? If you drink one of these every day for a week without reducing your caloric intake or burning off an equivalent amount of calories through exercise, you can gain a pound a week–a whopping 52 pounds a year! Replace any drinks containing HFCS with cold, refreshing water or unsweetened ice tea as a first step to lose healthy weight. If you are a regular purchaser of soda, you’ll shed weight by following this simple step alone.
Trans-fats are usually found in baked goods like pies, cookies, crackers and also as oil for frying goods like french-fries or potato chips. Trans-fats were created to guarantee a long activelife for these types of products, but their negative health effects were unknown at the time of their development. Trans-fats are created by taking a mono-unsaturated ( liquid ) fat and reacting it with hydrogen gas. The ensuing fat from the reaction is solid at 70 degrees. When we consume trans-fats, they build up in our arteries just as grease clogs a drain. Eventually, this increase of fat in our arteries could cause coronary heart disease and stroke, and is also believed to contribute to dementia in the old.
So how can we avoid all of these deadly ingredients in our foods? Our first and best defensive zone is simply by reading the labels on food products. Both high-fructose corn-syrup and trans-fats are required to be listed on labels. Also, be careful of fast-foods such as fried chicken, fish sandwiches and fried pies. Ask if these foods have been prepared with trans-fat free oils or not. If the eaterie staff can’t tell you if the food is fried in oil containing trans-fat or not, it’s best to avoid it altogether. So educate yourself as a customer and reap the health benefits of your due groundwork.
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Tags: diet, fitness, food, health, Healthy diet, lose weight, weight loss, weightloss
Lose Weight–Stop Emotional Eating
Stop emotional eating by understanding the difference between eating out of habit and eating emotional stress.
Yes, at any given time you can be eating from habit or eating from emotion. How can you tell the difference? And what is habitual eating?
Habitual eating is the habit of being at a certain place or time and eating. For instance, stopping at the fast food joint every morning for coffee and a croissant. Or coming home every afternoon, walking in the front door, through the living room, into the kitchen, and opening the refrigerator.
The old standby technique for dealing with eating from habit is the use of awareness. And quite frankly, for most of history, overeating has been approached strictly from the habitual. The techniques to handle eating out of habit are awareness techniques which could be any of the following:
- Equivalents
- Diets
- Counting Calories
- Putting forks down between bites
- Take a deep breadth before eating
Quite frankly, if we were only habitual eaters, this is all that we’d need. Unfortunately there are no awareness techniques which aid in dealing with eating from emotional stress which is the reason why everyone who uses them experiences some weight loss and eventually gains it all back.
Only recently are we becoming aware of the eating emotional stress component which requires a completely different approach. Back to the main question, how do you tell whether you are a habitual or an emotional eater at any given time? The answer is not totally clear by one’s behavior. Thus the most effective means of handling excessive eating is to go through a quick process of elimination.
The first step is to assume that it’s habitual and use a habitual technique. An awareness technique I suggest using is a shift in thinking (cognition) requiring no more than a few seconds. If it is indeed habitual, with the shift in thinking, the food is left there and food is forgotten. If on the other hand the shift in thinking results in temptation to follow through and eat, then it is clearly eating emotional. Overcoming emotional eating is to learn to embrace the context of the emotion and stop diluting it with food. It’s to first of all acknowledge the specific emotion–no need to justify it or judge it–just notice the emotion and introduce the option of choice. And that is to take the emotion straight or to dilute it with food.
Now here comes the critical part. Being new to the concept of embracing emotion, it’s normal for the individual to continue diluting the emotion with food. The goal is to move to a loving of self from which there is total acceptance (a building of self worth) at which point, the individual is able to say, “I have stopped diluting the feeling of (whatever). I may be uncertain as to how to handle the situation, one thing I know is that I have stopped diluting my feelings.” And this is done one day at a time.
The reality is that once you are aware of the relationship between emotions and food you can never cheat again–it no longer is on your vocabulary.
A progressive approach to lose weight involves asking important questions “What is missing here? Why are you not getting the results you’ve been promised?” It is clearly insane to keep dieting and using techniques to deal with the habit of eating when the results are so poor. It’s more important to gain a grasp on how to stop emotional eating–eating emotional stress than it is to read the scale. Besides focusing on the scale doesn’t empower you to be a better more enlightened person, whereas learning how to overcome emotional eating empowers you in all aspects of your life. If you’re a sales person, you’ll be a better sales person. If you’re an assembly line worker, you’ll be a better assembly line worker. Overall, you’ll build self worth and find that what you really want to eat is far more nutritious and less in quantity than you ever before imagined possible.
Richard Kuhns B.S.Ch.E., NGH certified, a prominent figure in the field of hypnosis with his best selling hypnosis and stress management cds at http://www.DStressDoc.com and http://www.PanicBusters.com. His aim is to make it possible for anyone to manage emotional binge eating. For more information please visit http://www.dstressdoc.com/BingeEatingEbook.htm