Fitness Through Fasting Blog

Here in the technology and information age, we have more knowledge and advancements than ever before in history. Sixty years ago, who would have ever thought that you could send an instant message over a phone, let alone take a picture with it? Sixty years ago, who would have thought we would be capable of sending a man to the moon, but fail the war on obesity and cancer?

Isn’t it oddly shocking that America is so well-advanced in everything except health and fitness? While the fitness industry tells us to count calories and exercise for fat loss, we grow fatter and fatter as a nation.

Running parallel to the fitness industry is the fast food chains, doing their best to keep on the top of “healthy eating” trend. It seems the fast-food industry can tailor to anyone’s dieting needs with “fat-free,” “low-calorie,” and “low-carb” menu items.

Today, fast food is considered a normal eating venture among the average person. People aren’t just eating out on special occasions or weekends anymore; they are eating out all the time. But is it the calories in fast food that’s so destructive to the body and waistline or does the problem lie deeper?

Fast Food and Obesity

Fast food is simply tasty, ready-cooked meals packed to go. Fast food has been around since the early 1900′s, but its popularity sparked and grew in the 1940′s with the birth of good ole’ Mickey D’s; quick food priced cheaply. Within a few years similar fast-food operations popped up everywhere in the blink of an eye.

With the compelling rise in fast-food restaurants since the 1940′s, oddly, too, started the rise in obesity and cancer during that same time period. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to do the math and link fast food to the obesity and cancer crisis.

Fast Food and its Nutritional Value

To say fast food has a “nutritional value” is an oxymoron. There is absolutely nothing nutritional about fast food. Fast food simply feeds hunger and/or your immediate craving. Fast food does not feed your body in the form of usable lasting energy or building materials, the essence your body thrives on for life itself.

Fast food is highly processed with a wide array of additives. The concept of fast food is obviously, food ready-to-eat and served quickly. To ensure fast food’s low cost to the consumer, the fast food products are made with highly-processed ingredients to give it shelf-life, to hold consistency, and to enhance flavor. Fast food is altered from its original healthy form it was meant to nourish the body with, to a denatured form that lacks any nutritional value whatsoever.

According to Diana Schwarzbein, M.D., “The FDA Total Diet Study found that fast-food hamburgers, across the board, contained 113 different pesticide residues.” So my question is why does the FDA want to regulate the sale of vitamins, minerals, and herbs that are actually beneficial for the body when there’s a linking fast-food / cancer / obesity crisis on our hands?

Why Fast Food is Fattening and Dangerous

Wake up people. It’s not the calories in fast food that’s damaging to your health and waistline, it’s the chemical additives such as aspartame and MSG (monosodium glutamate). These chemical additives are approved by the FDA and studies show that they lead to weight and disease issues.

Synthetic chemicals added to processed food, including fast food, damage your body’s cells. Your body is made up of nutrients found in plants and animals you eat. Man-made food items loaded with pesticides, as well as aspartame, margarine, and other man-made chemicals do not nourish your body. If your body can’t use what you put into it you will gain fat and decrease health.

Since we can’t visually see what actually happens at the molecular level when we eat processed food, we discount it and rely on the FDA to do our thinking for us. After all, if its FDA approved, it MUST be okay to eat, right? Not at all.

Nutrients from the food we eat allow us to burn fat and be healthy. Your body cannot process synthetic chemicals. If a food item can’t be processed, it will end up lodged in areas of your body, primarily fatty areas and tissues, creating an acidic pH.

A simple fast-food chicken breast can contain everything from modified corn starch to hydrolyzed corn gluten. Hello? Chicken comprised of corn? A fast-food chicken nugget is nearly 60% corn, and corn is what farmers use to fatten up cattle.

Michael Pollan, author of, The Omnivore’s Dilemma says it perfectly – “How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalist to tell us where our food comes from?”

A good visual that Dr. Mark A. Gustafson found is that it takes fifty-one days to digest fast food chicken nuggets or French fries. FIFTY-ONE DAYS! Does that sound healthy? I could care less about the caloric, fat, or carbohydrate content. That’s not the problem, people. The problem with fast food is that it’s void of nutrients and loaded with chemicals not recognized by the body.

What’s even more devastating is the book The Fast Food Diet written by Stephan Sinatra, M.D. This is a sad state when a doctor promotes eating chemically-altered food with addictive chemicals and damaged fats that scars the artery walls and contribute to total metabolic damage.

Eating Good and Avoiding the Hidden Dangers

Granted, calories do count to an extent, but what counts more is the quality of the calorie. If you want to lose fat then you have to change your eating habits. This doesn’t mean opt for Healthy Choice® and Smart One’s® frozen meals because they appear to be healthy. Food manufacturers use deceptive marking tactics to create an illusion to make people buy their product.

To lose fat and keep it off you should choose foods in their natural state, such as fresh organic cuts of meat, fresh organic fruits and vegetables, essential fats, and plenty of filtered water. It’s vital that you go back to the basics.

Make eating fresh and organic food choices the bulk of your diet. If you do that, you will never have to count calories again. The quality of food outweighs the quantity every time.

References: Schwarbein, Diana M.D. The Schwarzbein Principle. 1999. 287 Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma. 2006. 1

Karen Sessions has been in the fitness industry since 1988. She is a nationally qualified bodybuilder and holds two personal training certifications. She has written 6 ebooks on fitness and has helped hundreds of clients transform their bodies. http://www.theelitephysique.com “Use of this article is authorized provided it is reproduced in full, and all web URLS are active hyperlinks directed to the author”

Tags: Stephan Sinatra, Diana Schwarzbein, Hospitality Recreation, investigative journalist, average person

What is this that I keep seeing about fast food diets? I do a ton of internet research day in and day out, and I keep seeing articles and web-sites containing information in regards to fast food diets that can still keep you thin and healthy. What can I say? I suppose that I can understand the point of view of the fast food industry to reflect this opinion; it’s in the interest of their self-preservation. However, I can only speculate as to why anyone else of any other affiliation would even think about justifying a fast food diet as being healthy.

The term fast food diet is an oxymoron! True, if you eat fast food regularly, you are in fact surviving on a diet that consists of fast food. However, you are not, in fact, on a fast food diet. A diet, in every sense of the modern meaning as it applies to weight loss or healthy eating, cannot come even close to being in the same family as fast food. We are not even talking about distant cousins, twice removed, re-instated through marriage… We are talking about the fact that there is no such thing as a fast food diet. Fast food can be utilized occasionally to replace healthy food because you are on the go and have no access to food that you have prepared yourself. It is a temporary fix for the problem of not having access to healthy food. However, it is not meant to be eaten solely in a “fast food diet”.

We as Americans have grown lazy and dependent upon the fast food industry. They know this, and prey upon us because of this. The concept or term “fast food diet”, I am sure, was even invented by one of the fast food conglomerates in order to try to gain leverage upon the health conscious Americans who have begun to educate themselves upon the dangers of eating fast food on a regular basis. You are smiling at my comment and thinking to yourself, “this guy is crazy”, or “that would be funny if it were true”. However, if it is true, is it truly funny? How else do you think that the fast food diet came to be? You come up with a better idea and let me know.

Business is business, and money is money. Fast food is a business and needs money to survive. If you were to suddenly decide not to eat fast food anymore because it was unhealthy for you to do so, then they have lost their business and they have lost their money. So, let’s create a term “fast food diet” and let Americans think that it means that they can lose weight, and eat our food while doing so! I swear, there was a moment of silence in my mind after writing that… because I know that a ton of us fell for it! The fast food diet caught on faster than a California brush fire during a drought!

Do not be suckered into thinking that counting calories and eating healthy is the same thing! Yes, they are listing fast food diets that you can partake in which list items off of the various fast food establishments’ menus in order to eat a less than two-thousand calorie “fast food diet” daily. This can give you some quick results in weight loss due to your body burning more calories in a day than you are taking into it with you shiny new fast food diet. However, while it is getting thinner, is it getting better? What attributes and vitamins and minerals is your body getting from these menu items? Are you truly getting healthier, or do you feel yourself drained of energy and getting sick more often?

The fact of the matter is that your body does not get anything healthy from these menu items which will enable you to maintain the weight loss that you accomplished from the fast food diet. Your fast food diet has forced your body to actually break down muscle tissue as well as fat in order to get the necessary proteins and vitamins that the food is lacking. So, why eat a fast food diet?

The best fast food diet is the one that refrains from eating any fast food at all. You can watch your calories, and still get all of the vitamins and minerals that your body needs. You can eat negative calorie items that are full of anti-oxidants and anti-carcinogens which will actually prolong your health and your life on this planet. The truth is that the fast food diet is simply a way to keep you coming back to get your fix from the fast food pushers. As I said, the fast food industry serves their purpose. However, do not let yourself be fooled into thinking that eating a fast food diet on a regular basis is going to lead to any long-term positive results.

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Tags: food conglomerates, food diets, Weight loss, term fast food diet, Healthy diet

Fasting can dramatically reduce your weight and if done correctly will be very healthy and beneficial to your body.

Unfortunately some fasts are very hard to do because when we fast we are depriving our bodies of foods, proteins and complex carbohydrates. When this happens our bodies kind of go on strike, they give us pain like withdrawal symptoms.

Once our bodies realize they do not need so much food to sustain themselves then the pain stops and they get to work at revitalizing our bodies by taking away fats, toxins, bacteria, viruses and they start to repair anything which needs repairing.

So the fastest way to lose weight is with fasting because our bodies get right down to business with getting rid of our unwanted weight. We need to do the right kind of fast though otherwise we can do more harm than good.

We do not want to starve ourselves, this would not be good, but we do want to help our bodies use most of their energy and resources for losing weight and getting rid of toxins, so with this said here are some of the best fasts we can do.

The best fasts are the types which help our bodies use the most amount of energy to do their work and at the same time do not let us starve. These types of fasts are best because we still get to eat and give our bodies’ nutrients, vitamins and minerals they need.

One of the easiest fasts is a fruit fast because fruit is 80% water and 20% meat. This allows us to feel full when we eat fruit and at the same time it lets our bodies use most of our energy for other things besides digestion.

This fruit fast is a great one to try, it is called the melon fast because most of the fruit you eat are melons. The fast consists of eating cantaloupe, watermelon, papaya and lemon and honey water.

The melon fast helps us lose weight very quickly and also helps high blood pressure, kidney and bladder disorders, poor complexion and stomach and intestine disorders.

Another great fast is called the yogurt fast, or lassi fast, this fast is a little more intense at first, but it works very well for losing weight. When I did the lassi fast I blended up some yogurt, water and a bunch of hot spices to help with digestion, after that fast everything I ate tasted ten times better.

One more great fast for losing weight is called the grains fast, this is where we stop eating grains for a while, letting our bodies digest everything and clean themselves out. Grains can be very hard to digest at times.

Then there is the juice fast, which is a great fast for losing weight and gaining many needed vitamins and minerals. A juice fast is an easier fast to do because all you do is drink fruit and vegetable juices.

Make sure when you do a juice or fruit fast, or any fast for that matter that you use only the highest quality foods because we want our bodies to digest everything.

The fastest way to lose weight is with fasting because our bodies do not have anything else to do except lose weight, by fasting we get our bodies to focus on burning unwanted fat and we shed those pounds fast and easily.

The best part of this fasting is that we are doing it 100% naturally with our bodies, so when we lose weight and we go back to normal eating with high quality foods, we keep our weight down, we stay thin and healthy.

Doing exercise is one of the fastest way to lose weight, but fasting is something we can do which does not involve sweating and working hard to lose pounds. A good combination would be exercise on the days you are not fasting and then no exercise when you fast.

If you did exercise while you were fasting you would lose weight too quickly and would greatly suffer. We want this weight loss to be quick but healthy for us as well and the only way to do that is to support our bodies by helping them lose weight.

Acharya D Hargreaves, is a published author of two health books, Digest Alive Lose Weight and build a great body Naturally, Digest Alive The Natural Cure to Heartburn and the owner of http://www.natural-way-to-lose-weight-fast.com a website dedicated to helping overweight and obese people with their weight problems.

“Obesity and Overweight issues are signs that our bodies are unbalanced, to naturally Lose weight quickly and keep it off, we need to make our bodies feel the need to balance themselves out, when this happens we will lose weight fast and keep it off,” he says. In his spare time he likes to do 3D modeling and work with Art and writing, Acharya D Hargreaves lives on an Organic fruit orchard with his wonderful family.

Personal email sight800@yahoo.com

Tags: vitamins and minerals, bacteria viruses, Hospitality Recreation, fastest way to lose weight, honey water

If we control our appetite, our weight is automatically controlled and that’s exactly what fasting will teach you – How to control your appetite.

95% of people who start dieting give up and put on weight.

This is due to being unable to control appetite – Learn to control your appetite through fasting and you succeed in healthy weight control.

Let’s look how fasting can help you lose weight.

As we have said only 5% of people who go on a diet and lose weight keep the weight off for five years or more.

What happens to the other 95%? They remain fat or get fatter.

Is it that the diets don’t work? Yes and no.

The diets work, we don’t.

We lack the discipline to control our diets and eventually slip back to old habit patterns.

There was plenty of dieting in the Bible. It was called fasting.

Fasting is simply the restriction of our usual eating.

Whether a fruit fast or a water fast or a fast from meat, or beef or sweets, fasting is a restriction of our food, a diet.

People have had the same temptations and weaknesses throughout recorded history.

Food has always been one of those weaknesses and fasting is a way to overcome the weakness for food.

The benefit of fasting is not just in weight loss.

A water fast will result in an average of 1 to 2 pounds per day of weight loss. But that is not the benefit of fasting for weight loss.

“I think that will benefit me,” you may say, especially if you are overweight. But that is not the main reason for fasting.

Fasting can actually make you fatter.

The power of fasting is not in losing weight during the fast, but in gaining control of your appetite, which is the REAL problem to healthy weight control.

During a fast, the body burns its own fat.

As the body burns fat, it eliminates toxins and cleanses itself.

First, after several days, your metabolism slows down.

The body slows its metabolism approximately 20% after several days on a fast.

Medical science describes this as a survival mechanism. If the body is not getting food, then it slows down so that it needs less food.

This way, you can live much longer with no food if your body slows down.

Second, your digestive system is cleaner.

The villi in the intestines are cleaner, the stomach lining is cleaner, and the colon is cleaner.

If the lungs are clogged, the intestines coated with filth, the colon stopped up, the blood thick and sluggish, fat surrounding the heart and in the arteries, the body is running inefficiently.

A fast simply cleans up the body.

When you combine those two elements, a cleaner more efficient body with a slower metabolism, you need less food for the same level of activity.

Food is absorbed and utilized better in a clean digestive system.

Fasting will allow you to gain control of your appetite and you will gain the power of self-control after you have completed a long fast.

You may not get the self-control that you seek on your first fast.

But, do you master anything else on your first try?

Fasting on a periodic basis allows a person to gradually gain control over their appetite and this is the key to healthy weight control.

You will find that you are not hungry when you end your fast (after three days, hunger usually abates).

You are as not hungry and have control over what you eat and that is the main benefit of fasting.

You will no longer comfort eat or eat for the sake of eating. Your appetite will be controlled and you will eat less and not be hungry and gain control over your weight.

MORE FREE INFO

On all aspects of health and more on fasting for weight loss visit our website for a huge resource of articles, features and downloads and at http://www.net-planet.org/index.html

Tags: Hospitality Recreation, getting food, Weight loss, Food and drink, fasting for weight loss

Latin Name: Hoodia gordonii
Other Names: hoodia, xhooba, !khoba, Ghaap, hoodia cactus, South African desert cactus

Hoodia (pronounced HOO-dee-ah) is a cactus-like plant that grows primarily in the semi-deserts of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Angola.

In the last few years, hoodia has been heavily marketed for weight loss and has become immensely popular.

Although there has always been a demand for diet pills, after the ban on the herb ephedra, the market was particularly ripe for the next new diet pill.

Much of hoodia’s popularity stems from claims that the San Bushmen of the Kalahari desert relied on hoodia for thousands of years to ward off hunger and thirst during long hunting trips. They were said to have cut off the stem and eat the bitter-tasting plant.

Hoodia gordonii grows in clumps of green upright stems. Although it is often called a cactus because it resembles one, hoodia is actually a succulent plant.

It takes about five years before hoodia gordonii’s pale purple flowers appear and the plant can be harvested.

There are over 13 types of hoodia. The only active ingredient identified so far is a steroidal glycoside that has been called “p57″. Currently, only hoodia gordonii is thought to contain p57.

In 1937, a Dutch anthropologist studying the San Bushmen noted that they used hoodia gordonii to suppress appetite. In 1963, scientists at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa’s national laboratory, began studying hoodia. They claimed that lab animals lost weight after they were given hoodia gordonii.

The South African scientists, working with a British company named Phytopharm, isolated what they believed to be an active ingredient in hoodia gordonii, a steroidal glycoside, which they named p57. After obtaining a patent in 1995, they licensed p57 to Phytopharm. Phytopharm has spent more than $20 million on hoodia research.

Eventually pharmaceutical giant Pfizer learned about hoodia and expressed interest in developing a hoodia drug. In 1998, Phytopharm sub-licensed the rights to develop p57 to Pfizer for $21 million. Pfizer returned the rights to hoodia to Phytopharm, who is now working with Unilever.

Much of the hype about hoodia started after 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl and crew traveled to Africa to try hoodia. They hired a local Bushman to go with them into the desert and track down some hoodia. Stahl ate it, describing it as “cucumbery in texture, but not bad.” She reported that she lost the desire to eat or drink the entire day. She also said she didn’t experience any immediate side effects, such as indigestion or heart palpitations.

Hoodia gordonii is sold in capsule, powder, liquid, or tea form in health food stores and on the Internet. Hoodia is also found in the popular diet pill Trimspa.

Despite its popularity, there are no published randomized controlled trials in humans to show hoodia is safe or effective in pill form.

One study published in the September 2004 issue of Brain Research found that injections of p57 into the appetite center of rat brains resulted in altered levels of ATP, an energy molecule that may affect hunger. The animals receiving the P57 injections also ate less than rats that received placebo injections. However, this was an animal study and injections in the brain are different from oral consumption, so it cannot be used to show that oral hoodia can suppress appetite in humans.

The manufacturer Phytopharm cites a clinical trial involving 18 human volunteers that found hoodia consumption reduced food intake by about 1000 calories per day compared to a placebo group. Although intriguing, the study wasn’t published or subjected to a peer-review process, so the quality of the study cannot be evaluated.

There are some potential side effects of hoodia that you should be aware of. What are Hoodia’s Side Effects and Safety Concerns?

There are widespread reports of counterfeit hoodia products. Mike Adams of News Target, estimates that 80% of hoodia products are contaminated or counterfeit. It’s impossible to know if a hoodia product contains pure hoodia and the active ingredient, unless it has been tested by an independent laboratory.

After looking at hoodia buyer’s guides, hoodia ratings, and hoodia comparisons on the Internet, my advice is that you be very cautious. Most of these sites have been secretly created by companies selling hoodia. They explain why the hoodia in other products is inferior, even though there are no published reports showing that one is more effective. Q&A: How Do I Know if it’s Pure Hoodia or a Fake?

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Tags: kalahari desert, Weight loss, pharmaceutical giant pfizer, Health Medical Pharma, energy molecule

Q: What are the side effects of hoodia, if any? Most articles I’ve read about hoodia say it’s a gentle and safe and I can’t seem to find any information about side effects anywhere.

Hoodia gordonii is often touted as a herbal diet pill without side effects, although there’s a lack of published studies on the safety of hoodia in humans.

Hoodia marketers often claim that hoodia has no side effects because the San Bushmen in the Kalahari desert of Africa have been using hoodia for thousands of years. But hoodia simply hasn’t been around for long enough in North America and it hasn’t been subjected to safety testing to uncover any possible side effects, drug interactions, and safety concerns.

Jasjit S. Bindra, PhD, former researcher for hoodia at Pfizer (the pharmaceutical giant that licensed the rights to develop hoodia for $21 million but later returned the rights), stated in a letter to The New York Times that although hoodia did appear to suppress appetite, there were indications of unwanted effects on the liver caused by components other than the active ingredient p57 that could not easily be removed during processing.

Bindra added, “Clearly, hoodia has a long way to go before it can earn approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Until safer formulations are developed, dieters should be wary of using it”.

If hoodia does affect liver function, it may also interact with other medications a person is taking. The San Bushmen are a tribe of hunter-gatherers, and probably did not take same pills for blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, depression, and other diseases, that we do, another reason why unconfirmed reports of safe use by the San should not be relied on.

People with diabetes should be cautious about using hoodia. One of the theories about how hoodia works is that it tricks the brain into thinking that it has enough blood sugar. Without proper feedback regulation, it’s possible that a person’s blood sugar could drop dangerously low while taking hoodia. And with the regular hunger mechanism turned off, the normal warning signs may be suppressed, until it’s too late.

Hoodia is believed to suppress not only appetite but thirst. There have been unconfirmed reports of shepherds in Africa who took hoodia to take the edge off hunger pains, but died of dehydration because they didn’t feel thirsty.

And as a general precaution, because the safety in pregnant or nursing women, children, or people with liver or kidney disease hasn’t been established, these people in particular should avoid hoodia.

More: Sources
Bindra, Jasjit. “A Popular Pill’s Hidden Danger”. New York Times. 26 Apr 2005.

Morris, Joan. “Little research behind claims that hoodia is safe, effective for losing weight”. Seattle Times. 9 Mar 2006.

Tags: North America, Hoodia gordonii, Seattle Times, san bushmen, Weight loss

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