Healthy Dieting

To obesity drugs, fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine, promised to revolutionize weight loss when either was prescribed with another drug, phentermine. Instead, the combination, known as Fen-Phen, ended up terrifying thousands of users when their potential for causing serious, even life-threatening, heart defects was revealed. Approximately 30 per cent of users were shown to have abnormal echocardiograms. Read the rest of this entry »

Steady sellers in the weight-loss industry are meal-replacement drinks. They come in liquid form or in powders that you mix with milk or water. Their low-fat protein sources (such as soya) combined with high-fibre ingredients, vitamins and minerals give you a balanced meal with a controlled number of kilojoules. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve heard it a thousand times—fad diets are bad for you. The fact is, they don’t even work; they rarely, if ever, yield a weight loss that lasts for long. What’s worse, they can wreck your health. Read the rest of this entry »

Losing weight is easy. A lot of people do it every day. What’s tough is keeping it off. Restrictive diets may work in the short term. So may some diet aids. But soonthe weight returns.

There is only one proven way to lose weight and keep it off: make basic, simple changes in what you eat, how much you eat and how much you exercise. These changes should become part of your everyday life, so think ahead: Could you take a walk and eat an apple daily for the next year? Yes? Read the rest of this entry »

Did you ever begin a weight loss diet only to discover you were overcome by chronic fatigue and constant hunger? This is probably because you were following a low-fat regime. Low-fat diets are notorious for being virtually impossible to keep to for long, since low- fat foods just do not satisfy. These diets can also be dangerous. Since so many of your body’s tissues, hormones and all of its cells are dependent on a good supply of essential fats, a low-fat regime undermines your overall health. And it doesn’t enhance your good looks – those fatty acid deficiencies also cause your body to age prematurely. Read the rest of this entry »

Isn’t fresh or frozen food better for you than canned? Not necessarily. In many cases canned foods are every bit as nutritious—or even more so. Consider these pantry staples:

• Canned apricots in fruit juice and canned mangoes have more vitamin A than fresh varieties. Why? They’re picked at their peak and processed immediately.
• Canned tomatoes contain less lycopene than fresh ones, but this cancer-protective carotenoid seems to be more readily available in the cooked tomatoes.
• Canned pilchards and sardines have edible bones that are rich in calcium.
• Foods stored in cans do have drawbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

Carbohydrates, or “carbs,” are the fuels your body runs on. Whether you eat whole-wheat bread or sweets, your body turns the carbohydrates in those foods into blood sugar or glucose. Does that mean both foods are equally good sources of energy? Hardly. The bread is the better value, supplying fuel to your body over a longer period of time. The sweets short-change your body, providing energy only for a short time. Read the rest of this entry »

Days 1 and 2

Eat only fresh fruits and vegetables. Choose any six of the following fruits:

Apples, grapes, pineapples, cherries, raspberries, apricots, nectarines, plums, pears, strawberries, bananas, peaches, oranges, grapefruit Read the rest of this entry »

Good nutrition is essential for good health. Everything we eat is broken down into its basic nutrients: carbohydrates into glucose, protein into amino acids and fats into fatty acids and glycerol. Read the rest of this entry »

Unfailingly popular with children, including picky eaters, this recipe uses brown basmati rice, which has the least starch of all the rice types, keeping the GL low to make sure blood sugar and energy stay balanced. Read the rest of this entry »

This filling soup gets its wonderfully creamy, thick consistency from the blended butterbeans rather than adding any flour or cream. Its orange colour shows that it is packed with beta-carotene, a vitamin that helps ward off colds and keeps skin healthy. Serve with a piece of bread or a couple of rough oatcakes. Read the rest of this entry »

Sweet potatoes mash clown to a naturally creamy consistency without the need to add extra butter or milk. They are also more nutritious than white potatoes as the orange flesh contains lots of antioxidant vitamins like beta-carotene and vitamin E, although normal spuds can be used instead. Read the rest of this entry »

Bring out chopsticks one day; blindfold them for a ‘guess what’s for supper’ food-tasting test another time; make them eat the different foods on their plate in alphabetical order — there are all kinds of games you can play to encourage your child to eat and to deflect attention from battles over whether they like a food or not. 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 »

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 »

Rather than watching fat intake all day, there may be key times to be more conscious of what you eat. Research at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland in the United States shows that fat intake varies across the course of a day. Read the rest of this entry »

The term ‘natural‘ is often used as a marketing tool—as if manufacturers are doing us a favour by allowing food to remain in its normal state. Yet ‘natural‘ doesn’t always imply `better‘, particularly when it comes to high-energy foods. Read the rest of this entry »

Grains were the first food which man cultivated, and they have formed a major staple ever since. They are not strongly eliminative but they are well-balanced foods which contain the nutrients needed for good health — particularly the B-complex vitamins. Read the rest of this entry »

There is no necessity to eat flesh foods at all on the raw energy food combining diet: you will get a full complement of proteins from the mixes of your sprouted seeds and grains, nuts, the occasional egg and low-fat cheese. Read the rest of this entry »

Yogurt-making is really a lot easier than most people think. You don’t need fancy yogurt-makers, thermometers, sterilizing fluids, etc. All you need is some milk, a container, a warm place and a ‘starter‘. Read the rest of this entry »