Taking a look at some common sense approaches to eating healthily, taking exercise, diet supplementation and weight regulation. With a high and ever increasing rate of obesity, it’s time to stop, take a look back at times when obesity wasn’t such an issue, and see what changed….what happened!

Once we can see the negative changes we can start to correct them and improve our health and well being.

Weight Loss – lets start at the beginning

The issue of obesity in Western society is not a new issue, but it has steadily gone from something on the fringe of society to a full-fledged pandemic. So lets step through some of the contributing factors and try to understand how they impact our health and how they might be contributing to the deterioration in our general health.

I’m really more interested in looking at some of the social factors initially, then taking a look at diet and nutrition.

In terms of our social behavior, we lead our lives very differently now than we did just two or three decades ago. If you think about this in basic terms it seems that our recreational habits have become focused on pursuits which have us sitting at a TV screen or computer monitor for many hours each day without having to leave the house to socialize with others.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Game Consoles etc have each replaced something important from past generations. We used to ‘work out’ as a side effect of conducting recreational and social activities. Nowadays the recreational activities that we partake in, involve little or no physical activity, so we must now proactively seek to exercise as an addition to our social/recreational agenda, which for many people creates a motivational issue and also a time constraint. Kids suffer most from this change. They’re being conditioned from an early age and it’s more difficult to undo those habits when they’re ingrained into you as a child.

So we need to shut down, or at least limit the time we spend using these ‘artificial’ forms of recreation, and get away from our computer monitors and out of the house for our leisure and recreational activity. In most cases, doing so will provide all of the exercise one needs to stay fit and healthy without having to resort to going to a gym. When you have an online community of friends, you’re sitting in a chair and using software tools to create your leisure and recreation. When you have physical contact with your social group you introduce activity to enhance your interaction – you play sports, you go swimming together, you golf…..all activities involving a degree of exercise.The next issue is again a social one, and that is stress. Stress can have a debilitating effect on our lives, leaving us with a frame of mind where our own physical and mental well being are overlooked in preference to an unhealthy preoccupation with identifying and trying to deal with the cause of the stress. If it’s workplace stress, we try to counter it by working harder, working more hours etc. If it’s marital or relationship stress we might seek avoidance, to shut down and hide. Whatever the source of the stress we often respond in ways which only perpetuate the problem and can often take us down a path which can be very hard to recover from.

They key to this situation is identifying it early enough before it becomes a real issue in our lives. Once we realize that things are going pear-shaped for us we need to take corrective action quickly. Seek help initially from friends and family, seek professional counseling and stop the rot before it’s too late. Of course one of the key ways we can help ourselves deal with stress is through exercise. This is ironic in a sense since the first thing to suffer as a consequence of dealing with stress is our physical health. We stop or cut back on recreational activities that promote exercise, we turn to unhealthy eating habits to try and make us feel good, then we gain unwanted weight which just makes us feel more stressed.

So basically, if you’re having family or work issues or some other extraneous factor is causing you stress, get out and exercise. You’ll feel better, your brains will be more energized and you’ll have a better capacity for clear and rational thought.

Let’s Take a Look at Nutrition

So we’ve looked at ways in which modern society and culture contributes to a ‘not so healthy’ lifestyle in many of us, but what about food and our eating habits.

Well the subject of TV dinners and fast food has been flogged to death. If you still do not understand that eating hamburger or pizza 5 times a week is unhealthy, then you really need to get back to the basics and this information may not be for you.

The problem with fast foods, as we all know, is that it isn’t nutritionally fulfilling yet it’s high in calories and unhealthy types of fat. So our body is unable to extract the nutrients it needs and we load it up with fat forming substances. When we exercise we burn calories. When we eat we take on board calories. If we take on board more calories than we burn, they get stored as fat. It’s that simple. Buying whacky weight loss supplements to try and unnaturally trick your body into doing something differently with the calories you consume is clearly not an effective way of trying to manage your weight. Why is this “clear”? well look around you. If there were an artificial way of managing your calories and weight, there wouldn’t be so many obese people walking around. It’s just common sense.

So where do you start to make a change?

Well, calorie counting is certainly the first step towards awareness, if you don’t know how many calories you should be ingesting and you don’t know how many calories you ARE ingesting then you can’t have a frame of reference on which to make a change.

So why not Google “body mass index calculator”. This will led you to basic (free) tools to help you figure out what your daily calorie consumption should be, inline with your age, height, gender and other determining factors.Then once you know what your ideal is, you can start to look at your actual consumption by monitoring what you eat and drink over a typical week. Look at the labels and record the calories then at the end of the week do the simple math and see where you’re at. If calories going in is greater than calories being used, you have two options and two only. Cut back on calories or increase the rate at which they are burned through exercise.

Let’s take a quick look at cutting back on calories. If you’ve monitored your food labeling for a week you’ll know where the culprits lay and I don’t really need to spell them out here since I think you probably already know without having to look at labels for a week! Don’t starve yourself so that you can keep on eating those candies and drinking the beer. It’s not the right way to manage your eating habits and your health. Seek out foods which you know are more nutritionally supportive and less calorie dense. Eat more fruits, veggies and fibers and eat less fats and sugars. I don’t recommend the types of diets that have you cutting out all carbs or proteins or whatever. Sure, you’ll lose some weight but it isn’t sustainable, none of them are teaching your body new tricks based on a healthy set of basics. You need the balance of varied types of nutrition you just need to moderate that rate at which you take them into your system.

Also, get more passionate about cooking at home. You just don’t have the control over what you’re eating when you dine out. Most places could care less about your health, they cook with fats, with high levels of sodium….it’s all about making you feel good for an hour without consideration for the longer term consequences. When you cook at home you can regulate and control your food intake. You can seek out healthy recipes, substitute not-so-healthy items for those which you’ve learned are more beneficial to your health. You can have fun doing this, involve all the family, your wife/husband, the kids, make it a real lifestyle change and it will stick, I promise you that.

Diet Supplementation

So far I’ve recommended making lifestyle changes to help you get more exercise and combat the unhealthy effects of stress. I’ve recommended making changes to your diet and even growing your own produce. But what about supplementation? By this I mean taking pills to supposedly enhance your well being and perhaps even lose some weight.

If you are eating healthily and have a high intake of nutrients through healthy and nutritionally dense foods, then you really shouldn’t need supplementation unless you have a specific condition that you’re trying to improve (with input from your healthcare practitioner). But some of us take vitamins anyway, perhaps as a precautionary measure. I’m fine with that and I take supplements also, primarily bee pollen and royal jelly.

I recommend that you include your healthcare practitioner in your decision making process when it comes to vitamin supplementation. If you go it alone and perhaps end up taking an expensive multivitamin, you could be wasting your money.

If you’re own Doctor is 40 years old or less, the chances are that he/she might make some natural alternative medicine recommendations to you. I’m not prejudiced against practitioners aged 40+, I just get a feeling that the younger generation are more conversant with the benefits of natural health products.

Recently my Doctor recommended I take a fish oil supplement to promote heart health. The same Doctor also endorsed my taking royal jelly and bee pollen supplements. I went to him with the latter suggestions and he actually took the time to do his own investigation into their health properties and OK’d they’re use.

I take bee pollen because it has a low glycemic index and because it contains a substance called lecithin, which has shown to help with weight regulation. Having a high nutrient content and a low GI means my body can benefit from bee pollen without piling on unwanted body fat.

The same is true of royal jelly. It’s high in vitamins and minerals and essential amino acids, which I know are the cornerstone of a healthy immune system.

Beyond those three products I do not take anything else. I’d much rather adopt a ‘sniper’ approach and home in on substances with a targeted range of benefits that throw money into a generic multivitamin where I’m not really sure of any need or benefit.

Your mileage may vary, so always do your homework and involve your GP.

What is your perfect weight and can you keep it in check as you naturally age? Carlos Hruzamann is a trained nutritional consultant and has many useful tips for you at his website Natural Weight Loss

Carlos Hruzamann is a trained nutritionist and operates a leading health portal at http://thenaturalshopper.org

Author Bio: What is your perfect weight and can you keep it in check as you naturally age? Carlos Hruzamann is a trained nutritional consultant and has many useful tips for you at his website Natural Weight Loss

Category: Medicines and Remedies
Keywords: Natural Health Remedies,weight loss