DIET AND WEIGHT LOSS GUIDELINES*

Not really a quiz, the following information may help you understand the truth about dieting and help you with diet and weight loss.

If you weigh more than you would like, or than is healthy, it is sometimes because you ate more food calories than you used. Those extra pounds did not appear overnight but accumulated over many months or years. So you shouldn’t expect to lose them any faster! A healthy weight loss is 1 – 2 pounds per week if you want to keep them off. It’s a funny thing that people keep doing the same old things in the same old ways and expect a different result!! That is my way of saying that you need to change something in order to see a change in weight.

A short course “diet” is not a long term answer to weight loss. There can be many reasons for excess poundage and a thorough analysis is in order. Of course, you should not make any drastic changes without discussing things with your medical doctor. You may want to read the article on this website called Holistica Eight Principles of Optimal Living for further information. For now we are only concerned with actual weight loss. A good person to seek out is a Board Certified nutritional consultant, like Dr Lexis Johnson, PhD available online here.

We all know that exercise is important and so is adequate water intake. Toned muscles actually burn calories more efficiently than untoned muscles. The secret to losing weight and keeping it off is that you must control your hunger or the amount of calories you consume. Any diet that leaves you hungry will not work in the long run. Hunger is a very powerful survival instinct. You must change your lifestyle in order to lose weight and maintain a great body. This may not be that hard to do.

When it comes to water, you may have heard that our bodies are comprised of at least 80% water. Toxins in your system float around in the water, as do our nutrients and body system messengers etc. If you do not get adequate amounts of water, the toxins remain the same and become thicker in the water. For example, when you dissolve salt or sugar in warm water, eventually you cannot add any more and it will no longer dissolve but will sit on the bottom of the container. The same things happen in your body. When you become saturated with toxins, they can no longer float around and instead settle on places to be stored in your body! That is one reason why the body attempts to store these toxins if it cannot process them. The water is also a vehicle for excreting the toxins, so you need lots of pure fresh drinking water. When you diet you lose both body water and fat. Since water is used to transport toxins out of your bodies it only makes sense to replace it often.

Steam bathing is a good way to release toxins through the sweat of your skin, but do not steam if your medical doctor does not give his approval. For example, it is not recommended for pregnant women or people with high blood pressure. There may be reasons your doctor will not want you to raise your body temperature up from steam bathing. However, your medical doctor will most likely approve of some form of exercising, so you should check with that medical professional for advice. A toned muscle burns up more calories than flabby body parts!!!

Before we can expect the nutrients we eat or the supplements we take to be properly utilized by our bodies we must consider whether or not our internal system is working optimally. After years of improper eating, junk food, prescription drugs, and environmental toxins entering our systems, we probably have sludge built up in our digestive tracts and especially our colons. Most North Americans need internal cleansing on a yearly basis. We must have a clean healthy working internal system. If you are overweight, you most certainly have toxins stored in your body. When the body receives toxins from food preservatives, colorings, additives, food enhancers, excitoxins (MSG or aspartame artificial sweeteners), and from the environment, it doesn’t know what to do with them, so it either overreacts and causes diarrhea or IBS, irritable bowel syndrome which swings back and forth between constipation and diarrhea; or your body stores the toxins. This storage takes the form of fat, cellulite, cysts, mucus, tumors, aches and pains in your head, your joints, etc., and many other conditions. Initially when people start to lose weight they sometimes feel worse! This is because toxins stored in their fat are released into their system to be dealt with again. They become more tired because their bodies are constantly digesting and storing the toxins. Your colon, if it is not properly and thoroughly emptied regularly, will continue to reabsorb whatever is in it. So if there are toxins there, that is what is being reabsorbed. So it is a good idea to cleanse internally before starting a weightloss diet and in that way avoid the physical discomforts that sabotage your diet efforts. Sometimes internal cleansing gets us started with weightloss if we are overweight. Internal cleansing often helps those who are too skinny to gain because their bodies become better at digesting their foods. It has been recently reported that when John Wayne died he had 80 pounds of fecal matter in his colon!!! It has been suggested that Elvis Presley had similar problems. When Mae West was in her prime and was interviewed she said the secret to her youthful good looks was her daily colonic routine, which flushed the colon of debris. Although I agree that colonics would probably do the trick, there are more gentle and less invasive ways of cleansing the colon and these natural methods help to rebuild health in the colon, too.

Cleaning the internal organs and digestive system is foremost when contemplating diet changes for weight loss. Use internal cleansing kits for detox, such as those recommended elsewhere on this site. Go to the Internal Cleansing tab at the top of this page or check out the Tahiti Trader Noni products as they also produce a mild cleanse. To get yourself going more efficiently (did you know that we should be having three bowel movements a day? Every time we have a meal we should use the toilet, much like other mammals do!) you need to add fiber to your diet. The best way is with fresh, raw, organic vegetables and fruits. We should be eating five to ten servings a day, and when that isn’t possible with our busy lives we can always drink a greens drink, such as the GreensFirst by Doctors for Nutrition on this site by, but you can only purchase this product after a consultation (see HolisticAnalysis for an online comprehensive nutritional analysis, with email feedback by Dr Johnson, PhD); or anyone can purchase the Holistica Smootheez also on this website. They are 100% fruit and provide lots of fiber in a tasty smoothie just like the ones at your favorite stores, only now you can make them easily and inexpensively at home. There also other fiber products coming soon to this website so please check back often.

I don’t want you to think I’m just pushing my own products and analyses, so I have included all the product ingredients along with the product information so that you can decide for yourself what you want to purchase and where you want to obtain it. Before you diet you really should determine if there are any foods that are causing health problems. I suggest a visit with a holistic nutritional consultant or the HolisticAnalysis on this site. Also there are at-home tests you can take that will determine if you have food allergies, which can sabotage your best diet efforts! On this website you can purchase the FoodScan Food Intolerance Test which you can perform at home to determine over 100 different everyday foods that you may be allergic to.

Sometimes people cannot live without certain foods and they later find out they were actually allergic to them and craved those very foods! Those could be foods that cause weight gain or that don’t allow you to lose weight when you diet and they may be the very foods that you keep in your diet. So finding out for sure is a very important preliminary step. I once knew a lady who tried to diet with just salads and could not lose an ounce! It turned out she was allergic to lettuce! Of course the salad dressings and other items at the salad bar could have contributed to her weight. She was the patient of an environmental allergy doctor. She cleaned up her system and changed her diet and started to lose weight, so I am told. The way in which we become sensitive to certain foods and then start to crave them is often because we harbor parasites and yeasts in our digestive tract and especially our colon. So instead of expensive diet foods, why not invest in what will really help you as an individual. If you take a Candida quiz and discover you have many of the same complaints as suggested on the quiz, you can then head down the right road to eliminate the little critters that are probably stealing the nourishment from the foods you are eating; they may be making you desire to eat foods that they love, because if you don’t eat them, then the little critters die and leave toxins for you to deal with; and also these parasites invade parts of your body and cause aches, pains, swelling and all kinds of complaints!

In my office visits I have helped many people to lose weight simply by eliminating parasites, yeast and by cleaning up their internal organs with detox cleansing. With the same recommendations, people who are too skinny actually gained weight! That is because the recommendations weren’t for the weight but for the complaints; the weight became balanced as the body became healthier. And the individuals became healthier too, because when they were clean inside they could absorb their nutrients more efficiently and their immune systems functioned better. When food is only partially digested in our bodies, the partially digested particles float around and the body perceives them to be foreign invaders. The body then sends the order to fight the invaders and the immune system goes to work. We don’t want our immune systems wasting our energy fighting food particles that could have been better digested in the first place. A nutritional analysis will also determine whether or not you have a deficiency in one or more digestive enzymes. You will find an Enzyme Questionnaire on this website for free! Often adding the right digestive plant enzymes to our system will help us lose weight, just because we no longer store the partially digested food.

It is also a good idea to have a nutritional analysis to determine if you have other problems going on such as insulin resistance. If you do, then that would be the reason you have excess weight. There are solutions to insulin resistance as well, but find out if you have it first and then we’ll deal with what to do, because that is a chapter in itself. Also you could be slightly low on thyroid hormone production which would cause weight gain that is hard to get off. A nutritional consultation would indicate whether your complaints fit with the low thyroid hormone profile and you would be advised to check your temperature at home with a Basal Body Temperature test or an at-home Thyroid function test where you could then take the results to a medical doctor to determine if you require extra hormones by prescription. If it is borderline then your MD would advise you wait and see what happens. However there are natural things you can do in the mean time to boost your system that may kickstart your thyroid to produce more efficiently. (The Basal Body Temperature Guideline is available at the end of this article and the Thyroid At-Home test is also available online here.)

When you deal with parasites or with cleaning up the debris in your digestive tract, you need to put back the good bacteria that is lost or low in your body. These are called Probiotics and they actually help you to digest your food, to keep parasites and yeasts under control and keep the intestinal system healthy.

So what we have learned so far is that when we want to lose weight we should:

• Check for food allergies, sensitivities etc with a nutritional analysis
• Do an Internal Cleansing for our vital organs, digestive tract and colon
• Check for Parasites or Yeast and cleanse for them also
• Supplement with Probiotics to rebuild the system
• Get adequate exercise
• Get adequate clean water to drink
• Steam bathe for toxin release
• Take digestive plant enzymes if we are low in our own digestive enzymes (this can be determined by answering the Enzyme Questionnaire on this site)
• Determine if there are underlying conditions medically that would impact on weightloss or dieting.
• Keep stress low in your life (are you talking to me? Yeah I know I have lots of stress to, however you can control it with lots of walks in the fresh air, yoga, tai chi, meditation, playing golf, etc.)

ow you are ready to start a diet if you still need to! Check this website often for supplements and future weightloss products that are safe and natural: COMING SOON!

To control hunger and eat fewer calories you need to find less calorie dense foods. The object is to eat more but eat fewer calories. This means eating fewer processed foods and more fruits, vegetables and whole grains, excluding any that you may be sensitive to.

Here’s a few tips to get you started:*

• A diet can cause shortages of important nutrients: take a good quality supplement to maintain good health and energy levels.
• Eat very slowly and enjoy.
• Set long term goals.
• Write down your reasons for losing weight.
• Review and update weekly your written reasons for losing weight.
• Keep a food diary. Make notes of how you feel after eating different types of food: whether you feel energetic, sleepy, full, constipated, etc.
• Eat less fat
• Eat water rich foods
• If you are hungry, try having a glass of water and wait 20 minutes. If you’re still hungry, eat.
• Never eat when you are not hungry. Ask yourself, “Am I really hungry?”
• Teach yourself to like healthy foods and avoid unhealthy ones.
• Drink more water. We often think we are hungry when really we are thirsty.
• Plan ahead.
• When eating in a restaurant, decide ahead of time what you are going to eat and stick to it.
• Decide how much you are going to eat before you start. When you are finished wait 20 minutes before deciding you are still hungry and want to eat more.
• Exercise will reduce your hunger and stress, so take a walk!
• Don’t be upset if you are exercising and you feel the weight is not coming off = muscle ways more than fat, but it burns more calories more efficiently than fat, so you’re actually losing more!
• Eat to live, don’t live to eat.
• Soups are filling, tasty and healthy, but stay away from creamed soups.
• Eat fruit 20 minutes before a main meal to reduce appetite.
• Pick a place at home and work that you will do all your eating and never eat in front of the TV or in the car!
• Don’t deprive yourself. Plan to eat your favorite food with a more healthy food. Just don’t do it too often

*Always see your medical doctor before embarking on any diet program.

BASAL BODY TEMPERATURE TEST FOR THYROID

Dr. Barnes felt that this test was a check on the most basic function of the thyroid gland: its ability to regulate the metabolic furnace of the body, and to control temperature. An average of ten days is a very useful indication, therefore, of one's overall thyroid status, and in many people it may well be more accurate than the blood tests. Temperature testing, however, is not infallable, and - like any other test - should never be used alone to rule in or rule out a thyroid condition, or to dictate therapy. This is simply a good piece of information that should be used wisely. I use it with every one of my patients who will do the test, and I recommend to other practitioners to do the same. It would be a welcome addition to many doctor's thyroid management regimen.

Take your temperature under your arm (in the pit area) first thing upon waking for ten days in a row. Menstruating women should start this ten-day period on the third day of their cycle. It is best to use a basal thermometer, which is more accurate than a regular oral thermometer. You may be able to locate non-mercury thermometers, which we recommend as more friendly to the environment. This kind of basal thermometer is actually more accurate for this purpose than any digital electronic thermometer. Do not use the thermometer orally, but instead use it under the arm, with the person lying quietly in bed, and the arm comfortably at the side. The temperature is taken upon awakening, before rising up out of bed for any reason. Do not get out of bed, do not drink anything or eat anything or even go to the bathroom until you have recorded your temperature results.

Many doctors believe that this is much more accurate than the blood tests. The idea is to have your temperature range from 97.8 to 98.2 F. This statement is true for some people, but not true for everyone.

There is considerable evidence that current tests both for the diagnosis of hypothyroidism and for the management of a case under treatment are tests that lack sensitivity and accuracy.

For people who are wondering if their health problems are due totally or in part to an underactive thyroid, basal temperature testing is not the only diagnostic maneuver that can be used, but it is one additional piece of data along with symptoms, family history, related conditions, and signs of abnormality upon physical examination. For those who have already been diagnosed with hypothyroidism, the basal body temperature test is an additional piece of observational measurement that helps determine whether a person is on the right medicine and/or the right dose, along with considering the response to medication, physical signs (especially ankle reflexes and skin temperature), and to utilize this information along with the usual blood test results.
A good book to read on this subject is the 1970s book, Hypothyroidism: The Unsuspected Illness, by Broda Barnes MD. In this compelling volume, Dr. Barnes, the granddaddy of the thyroid field, put his many decades of experience into a succinct and easily-digestible form. It was here that the basal temperature test was first explained in proper detail, with the proper rationale and research. Check your local bookstores for this book.

* All information is intended for your general knowledge only and is not a substitute for medical advice or treatment for specific medical conditions. You should seek prompt medical care for any specific health issues and consult your physician or health practitioner before starting any diet or fitness routine.