Food Calorie Chart ... Do You Believe Calorie Restiction Is The Best Way to Lose Weight ?
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Many people want to know if counting calories with a Food Calorie Chart is the best way to lose weight. The reason they ask this question is because we have all been brain-washed by the media to believe that counting calories or "energy in = energy out" is the only way to lose weight. This is a "one-size-fits-all" mentality! It may be true that using a Food Calorie Chart to count calories works for some people, but for the vast majority of people, it doesn't. Why? Mainly because these diets do not take into account your metabolism, nor do they take into account how your body processes food if you suffer from hormonal imbalances like Insulin Resistance & Diabetes, Estrogen Dominance and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). I have included below an excerpt from the "Diet Free ... At Last!" Weight Loss Program e-book to help to explain this in more detail.
For years, the main reason why people used a Food Calorie Chart to count calories was that if you burn more calories than you eat, your body would burn the excess body fat. In theory it sounds logical, but the body’s physiology is more complicated than that.It’s not only how many calories you eat, but also what you eat and in what proportions that makes all the difference. Let’s take an in-depth look at how the body really works... First, let’s look at the effect metabolism has on your weight...
Metabolism is the name given to the burning of
energy in order to run all the involuntary systems of the body.
The energy required keeping bodily functions running smoothly accounts
for over 70% of the calories we eat in a well-balanced healthy diet.
This energy is burnt in the muscles in a similar way that fuel is burnt
in a furnace.
Given
that muscles burn the majority of calories we take in, it stands to reason
that the more lean muscle tissue we have, the faster our metabolism and the
more energy we burn off. Yo-yo
dieting and low calorie diets have a tremendous effect on metabolism because each time you lose
weight on a restrictive low calorie diet, you lose muscle and when you gain the weight
back, you gain it back as fat, not muscle.
As time goes on, the more muscle you lose, the slower your
metabolism ... the slower your metabolism, the harder it is to lose weight and
the easier it is to gain weight! When you use a food calorie
chart to count and restrict calories, calorie intake is often much lower than it should be. Restricted
low calorie
diets don’t work because the body adjusts its
metabolism to match the lower calorie intake, thereby conserving energy.
So even though
Keep in mind that even though I don't recommend following low calorie diets, I am not advocating eating food without restriction because eating too much of any food, including healthy food, does inhibit weight loss. Even if you find that you don’t gain much weight, you won’t lose any either. This is especially true when eating some very innocent looking "low-fat" snack foods.
I truly believe that a great part of the obesity problems we are facing as a nation has to do with the tremendous increase of "low-fat" snack foods available to us. Research shows that we are eating a much higher percentage of low-fat food than we were 20 to 30 years ago, and yet obesity is increasing at an amazing rate. Why?
3 Reasons why diet "low-fat" foods cause weight gain:
Many people think that snacking on low fat diet food is the best way to lose weight. As a matter of fact, many of these low fat diet foods actually trigger food cravings. On top of that, it is easy to overeat these foods because we mistakenly think that "low fat" equals "calorie free" ...
4 Reasons Why Using a Food Calorie Chart to Restrict Calories Is Not Effective...Using a Food Calorie Chart for Calorie counting and calculating the optimal number of daily calories is not an exact science because every person is unique and has a different metabolism. There are many different Food Calorie Charts, calorie calculators and formulas on the market for calculating our optimal daily caloric intake, and they usually produce very different results. There are a few reasons why a food calorie chart or calorie formula may not produce the results you are hoping for:
Rather than using food calorie charts to count calories, the "Diet Free ... At Last!" Weight Loss Program teaches you how to plan meals that will be directly targeted to supporting your specific hormonal situation. As you correct your hormonal imbalances, you will notice that your body will start to re-balance itself, and part of the re-balancing process includes losing weight and losing fat. If you try to lose weight by counting calories with a food calorie chart without taking into consideration the part your hormones play, you will not only find it very hard to lose weight, but you will be plagued with intense food cravings and when you give in to these cravings, the weight will come right back on. This is especially true if, by following these restrictive low calorie diets, you lose muscle instead of fat. In contrast, following this program will stop food cravings and help your body to re-establish it's natural state of health and fitness. My personal opinion is that rather than counting calories with a food calorie chart, it would be better to just keep track of your level of body fat % and watch your body fat % decrease as you lose weight. Previously, calculating fat % was quite difficult and costly, using various methods like fat calipers and Hydrostatic Weighing (submerging yourself in water). Thanks to technological advances, calculating body fat % is now easy, relatively inexpensive and can be done in the privacy of your own home.
... And what is Leptin Resistance?
Leptin Resistance is something that not many people have heard about, even though it has been in the research papers since about 1994. At that time, researchers thought that this was the answer to obesity. They thought this because studies had been done with rats where if they gave leptin to obese rats, the rats started to lose weight. That made them think that that if they put leptin in a tablet and gave it to overweight people, they would lose weight, but unfortunately this has not been the case. As usual, human biology is too complicated for such a simplistic solution! When leptin works properly, when we gain weight, our own fat tissues release the hormone leptin which suppresses our appetite and speeds up our metabolism to burn off the fat so that we return to our original weight. Can you believe it? Our fat actually regulates itself and returns us to our optimal weight or set-point! Leptin also helps us to feel full and satisfied after eating and reduces sugar and food cravings. Basically, it tells us when to eat and when to stop. This is why you will often see healthy slim people who eat amazing amounts of food, but they burn it all off. We enviously attribute this to their incredible fast metabolisms. And this is perfectly correct. They do have fast metabolisms. But the interesting thing is that this is the natural order of things. This is how our bodies were created and all human beings have this capability … until we unbalance our body’s natural weight-regulation system. Yes, that’s right … if our bodies were working as nature intended, then if you gained a few pounds, your body’s natural weight-regulation system would burn them off automatically. Simply put, leptin is the hormone that regulates our appetites and our metabolism. It also regulates how much fat we are going to store and how much fat we are going to burn. It is the hormone that regulates our body’s set-point, that is, the weight that our body naturally wants to settle at. Quite obviously, this is an incredibly important hormone! When leptin is working properly in a healthy body, it perpetuates a delicate balance of speeding up and slowing down metabolism, storing and burning fat and suppressing and triggering appetite in order to keep your weight balanced. When this mechanism is tampered with, it doesn’t work properly and you develop leptin resistance. Once this happens, that delicate balance is destroyed and we are caught in an endless loop of slow metabolism, fat-storage, increased food cravings, hunger and increased appetite and of course the end result of this is endless weight gain. On top of that, the body will develop various annoying symptoms, including low serotonin levels. Low Serotonin Levels can trigger many different symptoms including painful symptoms like fibromyalgia, muscle aches and pain, burning sensations, sleep disorders and even hot flashes! There is a very strong correlation between leptin resistance and low serotonin levels. Leptin is a hormone and you will often find that people with low serotonin levels have many different hormonal imbalances including leptin resistance, impaired thyroid, exhausted adrenal glands and insulin resistance. All these different hormones are inter-connected and rely on a healthy hormonal system to work efficiently and often when one is imbalanced, others will be imbalanced as well, triggering a vicious cycle that seems never-ending. This is why weight gain is a symptom of each of the above-mentioned hormonal imbalances, as well as one of the symptoms of low serotonin levels. Leptin Resistance is the key-pin hormone that starts the vicious cycle ... and then perpetuates it. So if using a Food Calorie Chart to count calories isn't the best way to lose weight, what should you use to track your progress?... Introducing Tanita's Body Fat Scales: The Easy Way to Keep Track of Your Body Fat % ... (and your Body Fat % is actually more important than your weight)! Normal weight scales are fine if you are only interested in your overall weight, but weight is made up of water, muscle, bones and fat and when we say we want to lose weight, what we really mean is we want to lose fat. But how do we know how much fat we have and how do we keep track of it to see if we really are losing fat or if it is muscle and water we are losing. That's where the Tanita Body Fat Scale comes in. The Tanita Body Fat Scale successfully monitors both your body fat and your overall weight and is ideal for tracking your weight loss / fat loss and making sure you are on track with your personal fitness goals. Detoxifying your Liver Stops Food Cravings and Fatty Liver Symptoms! Introducing the NEW and Improved "Stop Food Cravings!" Detox Liver Program... You will find this new Detox Liver Program so easy to follow because food cravings will be eliminated and you will not be hungry. Why? Because the more nutrients you eat, the more your brain chemistry will be balanced, which in turn causes food cravings and hunger to disappear. And this detox program is also very effective in reversing Fatty Liver Symptoms and supporting the liver so that you can detoxify your body in a healthy and natural way, which in turn stabilises your weight! 
Exciting NEW Liver Detox Program Not Only Improves Your Health, But It "Kick-Starts" Your Liver To Burn Fat More Efficiently!
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