Healthy Dieting

For convalescents, soups are a favourite food. They are quick to prepare, packed with nutrients and help to rehydrate the body. Include soup on your day-after menu. Read the rest of this entry »

If you can face it, a full-protein breakfast — eggs, bacon, sausages, hash browns and the like— is a tried and tested hangover cure that many hangover sufferers swear by. Read the rest of this entry »

If your ‘craving menu’ revolves mainly around sugar, salt and fat or any combination of them, start practising behaviour modification. For instance, if you usually crave crisps, start eating less of them and replace some with (say) low-salt, low-fat pretzels. If you like creamy dips with your crispy starches, start using fat-free cottage cheese and yoghurt to prepare the dip, instead of cream cheese and cream. Reduce the usual (salty) brown onion soup powder in your dip and start livening up your dip with things that are much nicer anyway: herbs, garlic, chilli, tomato paste and gherkins, to name but a few. Read the rest of this entry »

The danger of eating too much fat is compounded by the fact that we take in too little of the good fats that actively assist our bodies towards health and leanness, Unfortunately it is true that we avoid the good fats found in avocados, nuts, oily fish and seeds such as sesame-, linseed and sunflower, because we deem them too fattening. Many of us don’t even use raw virgin olive oil in our cooking. Read the rest of this entry »

Many experts claim that in order to maintain a constant weight, one’s intake of kilojoules from fat should not exceed 30% of your total kilojoule intake, I find this impossible to implement in everyday life, because it would entail counting all the consumed kilojoules as well as the fat kilojoules in order to arrive at the percentage fat intake. Which would mean carrying with you a calculator and using it every time you eat a meal or even a morsel, all day long. Read the rest of this entry »

The body starts resisting the effects of insulin because:

The insulin produced by the body is not fully accepted or utilised, or the body simply does not manufacture enough insulin. Read the rest of this entry »

Why do sugar and starch evoke such heated debates about their effects on our bodies? Most dieticians will argue this issue passionately: starch is not the food group that causes obesity; fat is. Read the rest of this entry »

List, with as much detail as you can, how it benefits you to be in control of your addictive eating and what it costs you to be out of control. Put the emphasis on health and wellbeing, rather than appearance. Keep the list somewhere safe, private and easily accessible, like a Filofax, diary or jewellery box. Refer to it often, adding to it as you go along. These are notes to yourself in the future, if you forget. Read the rest of this entry »

Yo-yo Dieting

When weight loss is all you care about, it makes sense to follow a weight-loss diet. But whenever you go on a diet, it’s inevitable you’ll go off it sooner or later. A diet may help you lose weight, but it’s only a temporary solution to a permanent problem: your potential for overeating. Read the rest of this entry »

Yet, being exposed to stress is normal and to be expected. After all, we’re living in a modern, pressurised and fast-paced society. The ‘fight-or-flight’ syndrome is a natural process, part of our innate physical survival skills when in a physical crisis. The health and weight troubles start in everyday life when we are exposed to pressure and stress and our emotional responses to those situations are so intense that our bodies register them as life threatening. Remember the internal dialogue mentioned earlier, the “It’s a matter of life and death that I reach my sales target this week”? Or the “Stress is killing me!” that we use so often? Well, these statements are reflections of our emotions; emotions to which the pituitary gland responds by calling on those hormones for physical assistance. Read the rest of this entry »

What we call ’suffering from stress‘ is in reality suffering from a potentially dangerous overload of our own bodies’ chemicals: those excessively high levels of relentless stress hormones that are so constantly released in our everyday lives, plus the other chemicals that follow. How this causes obesity is a relatively logical sequence of events. Since you are not physically fighting or fleeing during the normal course of your day, your body does not utilise the excess glucose in your blood, caused by the extra adrenaline. Now the question is what happens to all that superfluous sugar (glucose) in your blood? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s about the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. The damage starts with too much adrenaline, too often, which is eventually followed by cortisol, which perpetuates and aggravates the damage. Normally the release of extra adrenaline is triggered as a response to our emotional fight-or-flight mode. This is how it works: Read the rest of this entry »

Choose your foods for two reasons: because they are irresistibly delicious and because they can supply you with the highest possible support biochemically and energetically for beauty and health. Read the rest of this entry »