Cause Your Health Counts

How many times have you said: “I was bad yesterday, I ate two cookies!”. OK, we all do it but you may be surprised to learn how much you are harming your chances of successful dieting by looking at food this way.

The danger is that you create negative thoughts about food and associate eating the wrong type of food with a type of behavior called ‘being bad’. Now, whenever you feel the urge, you just have to ‘be bad’ and you can sit and eat whatever you like. And you can answer the nagging voice in your head by saying, it’s OK, all you were doing was ‘being bad’.
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Eating out can be a trial but here is how to stop eating out from ruining your diet.

1. Share a meal. Have you noticed how restaurant meals are usually more than enough for two? Rather than eat it all or take the leftovers home why not share the meal with a friend. It will stop you over-eating and do your wallet good, too.

2. Already eaten. A good strategy for formal meals is to arrive having already eaten. This means you can pick and choose just a few things without ruining your diet or appearing rude.
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Have you fallen for one of the many dieting fallacies that sound so plausible yet stop your weight loss program in its tracks? Checkout my top five below:

One. Eat less and lose weight faster.
Sounds very logical and it’s easy to skip breakfast to shed weight quicker but it doesn’t work. Eating too little sends your body into starvation mode causing it to shut down fat loss and burn muscle for energy which is the last thing you want. Know how many calories you need as a minimum and don’t drop below it!
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For those in the West, cancer is seen as a scourge but a few modifications is all it takes to start on the road to a cancer reduced, if not a cancer-free diet.

Western diets consist of large amounts of red or processed meat. Add to these white bread and pasta with French fries and desserts with lashings of sugar, and you are on the way to a recipe for colon cancer.

Yet dietary adjustment is easy and need not be dramatic. All you need is the help of fruit and vegetables to turn this regular diet into a super anti-cancer diet.
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We have always been told that a vegetarian diet is a sliming diet but is this always the case? Or are there fat vegetarians hiding away somewhere?

Firstly, vegetarian based food means, of course, that you cut down on ‘calorie dense’ foods like fat and animal protein but doing this does not automatically make you slim! And the bad news? Yes, there are fat vegetarians.

The amount of fat you have depends on the quantity of calories you eat. That’s it! If you are a vegetarian and you have a good appetite you can easily eat more calories than your body needs. If you do this your body will save the surplus as fat, simple as that.
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These will give you a great base with the flexibility to modify the diet to your own needs.

The majority of people feel clueless when it comes to their daily diet plan. That is one of the main reasons fad diets do so well, people need to be told how to eat. Instead of a detailed meal-to-meal plan, here are five healthy diet guidelines.

1. Drink Enough Water – Most people do not drink enough water, instead they drink way to much coffee, soda, and fake fruit juice. Adequate water intake will help ensure a healthy fat metabolism and higher energy levels.
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Sounds reasonable, if you eat fat you will get fat, so loading up on fat-free or low-fat foods is bound to make you less fat, right?

Wrong! Eat large amounts of fat-free or low-fat food and you will get very fat and this is one thing that seems to be happening. So, what is the skinny on low-fat food?

A few years back, the food industry jumped on the low fat bandwagon and began to produce food that they labelled as ‘low-fat’ or ‘fat-free’ in the sure knowledge that it would sell, pardon the pun, like hot cakes. And it has!
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Antioxidants are in the news lately but what exactly are they and why is it important that you make sure you are eating plenty?

Antioxidants deactivate things called free radicals. Free radicals are molecules formed in the body naturally as a by-product of metabolism and as a result of modern day pollution and tobacco smoking.

Let loose, free radicals cause serious damage to structures in the body and to genetic material inside cells. The end result is ageing and often serious diseases including heart disease and cancer.
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Everyone knows that we should cut hydrogenated or transfats from our diet, so why are most of us still eating them?

Transfats, or fats that are ‘improved’ by chemically altering their structure to make them solid at room temperature, have been a favorite of the food industry for years. They are easier to use and simpler to store and so give products a longer shelf life, thus requiring less refrigeration.
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Fasting can be defined as a set period of time where all food and liquid (except water) is eliminated from the diet.

There is a lot of confusion around the idea and practice of fasting. In today’s society of abundance, fasting seems extreme to many. What they fail to realize though is that fasting has been around for thousands of years. References are made throughout the Bible, Koran, and many ancient medical texts from Asia to the Mediterranean. Not to mention that animals in the wild instinctively fast when ill.

Fasting can be defined as a set period of time where all food and liquid (except water) is eliminated from the diet. However today they’re various modifications to fasting, for example: juice fasting, vegetable fasting, herbal tea fasting, and the list goes on.
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