If you are worried about your weight, or even just concerned about your BMI, you are certainly not alone.  Recent surveys have shown that over seventy percent of Americans are struggling with their weight.

One question that has been posed time and again still has researchers puzzled.  What is it that causes our population to have such a widespread problem with achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight, and how can it be overcome?

There are many pieces to this perplexing problem.   DNA can certainly play a part in an individual’s metabolism – if your ancestors struggled with weight loss, chances are high that you will, also.  Recent research has focused on the process of Mutagenesis, or changing the structure of DNA to assist individuals who have the genetic markers for inherited obesity and the associated problems that come with it.  Is it possible to change the body’s code for the better?  Scientists are hard at work to find the answer.  In the meantime, there are real breakthroughs that can help break the cycle of persistent weight loss and weight gain that such a large percentage of the population battles.

Some of the best tools for weight loss involve simple knowledge about how the body works and what to do to optimize the body’s energy balance.  One thing you can do is use a BMR Calculator to evaluate your body’s basic caloric need.  A Basal Metabolic Rate Calculator (BMR Calculator) uses information you provide to determine how many calories you would need to maintain your current weight even if you did nothing all day.  The second tool is knowledge about your BMI (Body Mass Index).   Using a BMI Calculator, you can determine the fat to lean ratio that makes up your body.  Standard BMI Calculators can help you to determine whether you are underweight, at a healthy weight for your height, if you are overweight, or if you are obese.  The knowledge you can gain from using these two important tools is enough to get you started down the path of healthy weight loss.

It is important to feed your body properly while losing weight.  When you decrease the amount of calories that you are taking in, it is essential to use high quality nutritional supplements to ensure that your body’s vitamin and mineral needs are met.  If the body is not receiving quality nutrition, it will fight to retain fat – again, that tricky DNA comes into play.  Centuries of struggle to find adequate nutrition have programmed our genetic codes to be thrifty and store fat.  Taking a quality supplement along with plenty of water can help to speed weight loss and restore balance to your body.

Healthy exercise is also important for weight loss.  Remember that if you have not exercised in a long time, you should start out slowly and work your way up to a more active lifestyle.  A high quality weight loss supplement can help you with exercise as well, giving you more stamina and helping your body’s cells to convert more easily.  Fat cells will shrink rapidly and muscle cells will show increased growth as long as they are fed properly – cells need micronutrients to operate efficiently.   So, remember that a body is a sum of parts and DNA is ultimately the key.  Until the mysteries are solved, a BMR Calculator, knowledge about your BMI, and a healthy diet and exercise plan paired with supportive supplementation remain the best tools for healthy weight loss.

The experts, who decide what we are and are not eating for good health this year, agree (for once) that eating a diet that incorporates all of the colors of the rainbow has the most health advantages. Now, before you trot off to the candy machine to get a bag of colorful fruit flavored candy and call it a day, what they are referring to are fruits and vegetables.

If you are eating for health, for weight loss, or preferably for both; you should definitely pay attention to this advice. Eating at least one item of every color will ensure that you get all of the vital vitamins and nutrients that you need, especially the all important antioxidants.

Antioxidants are important in the ever growing battle against free radicals. Both antioxidants and free radicals are found naturally in our own bodies; the problem is that we may not always produce enough of them for a beneficial balance.

Free radicals are harmful byproducts that are created by our body’s own systems, like the ashes after a big fire. Highly unstable and dangerous, free radicals roam around the body trying to steal electrons from other cells. This electron theft causes cell damage and in some cases cell death. Slowing and preventing this damage is the main goal of the antioxidants. Poor food choices and bad habits can cause the free radicals to grow and develop out of control.

Free radicals that are found in the heart and blood vessels can cause especially devastating damage making it harder for the heart to work correctly. Free radicals can increase LDL cholesterol, which is particularly dangerous news. Antioxidants like vitamins A, C and E can help by protecting the heart against these free radical assaults.

Vitamin A is made by the body from beta carotene which can be found in the deep orange and dark green items in the produce section. Food sources include: sweet potatoes, carrots, apricots, and spinach. Vitamin A, unlike many other nutrients is stored in your body fat, so if you miss a day of these foods, you will still have some on hand.

Vitamin C, on the other hand is not stored in the body, so you need to have a daily dose of it for it to be beneficial. Vitamin C’s food sources include: oranges, tomatoes, cantaloupe, grapefruit and broccoli. These foods help to fight free radical damage and lower cholesterol, and may also help to lower blood pressure. Finally, vitamin C keeps small blood vessels from becoming stiff and brittle.

Vitamin E works its magic by preventing the formation of foam cells that can gum up and clog the arteries. Free radicals start the chain reaction by attacking LDL cholesterol. Your body joins the fracas next by activating the immune system. The white blood cells released by the immune system and the cholesterol then form the foam cells. Vitamin E acts as a “de-foamer” preventing this from happening. Good food sources for Vitamin E are: olive oil, canola oil, wheat germ, peanuts, sweet potatoes, and sunflower seeds. There are also many other compounds that have great antioxidant properties. Some of the most effective and potent are actually CLA and green tea!

Our body is a very efficient machine for the most part, but even the best maintained machine has its issues from time to time. For the body, this issue is free radicals. Free radicals are molecules that are responsible for tissue damage, again and certain diseases as well.

Our body relies on oxygen for every function that it carries out, from the smallest and most mundane to the most complex. It also relies on fuel in the form of calories from the foods that we eat, to have the energy to transport this oxygen to every cell. The entire process is carried out by thermogenesis which is a fancy term for heat generation.

Heat is created when we digest food and when we process oxygen. Of course, just like with other actions or processes, there are reactions or by-products. In this case, the byproducts are known as free radicals.

While some free radicals are generated by our natural processes and therefore can never be one hundred percent prevented, there are other, unnatural causes of free radicals that contribute to their build up in our body. Some examples of these unnatural causes are cigarette smoke, pollution, poor food choices, overexposure to the sun, and certain chemicals. Free radicals, even when they are generated from within our own bodies are dangerous and can be very damaging.

Free radicals are unstable molecules because they are missing an electron. Their goal is to seek a replacement for this electron and they do not care where they scavenge it from. Free radicals steal their missing electron from DNA, enzymes, protein, and from any other cell type that happens to be around them. They can damage the cell membrane in search of their electron. Cells sustain up to ten thousand free radical hits each and every day.

To prevent or at least lessen some of the damages caused by the unstable free radicals, it is necessary to incorporate antioxidants into the body’s line of defense. Antioxidants give up one of their own electrons to stabilize and neutralize the dangerous effects of the free radical.

Our body produces some antioxidants, but this natural production is often inadequate to handle the free radicals that have accumulated. This is especially true if we are at risk from external sources like our own environments, bad habits, and bad food choices. The more free radicals we have to deal with, the more antioxidants we will need to incorporate to handle them.

There are beneficial antioxidants in some foods as well as in some supplements such as vitamins. Natural foods are a good source of antioxidants, especially fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Hopefully, the antioxidants in the good foods that we eat, in addition to those our body naturally produces will be enough to help us win the ongoing battle against free radicals and their cell damage.

Asking your body to work without food is like asking your car to keep running once its gauge says “empty”. It is just not going to happen. Your car needs fuel in the form of gasoline to work properly; your body needs fuel in the form of calories to run properly as well. Giving your body good fuel will allow it to work properly and will allow you to achieve not only better health, but the slow and steady weight loss that is actually sustainable and realistic. Starvation diets do not work for weight loss because starvation throws everything in the body out of balance, everything including your metabolism

Your metabolism is the rate at which your body uses the fuel that it gets for energy. In simpler terms, metabolism is how fast your body burns calories. Nearly everything that you eat or drink has calories. Calories are the unit used to measure the amount of energy that it takes to convert and use food for energy. If you eat more calories than your body needs to maintain its systems and to move around, you will store what is left in your fat cells; you will gain weight.

If you burn off too many calories and do not replace them, your body will seek energy from other sources which could include your own lean muscle tissues. While you do want to burn your fat for energy, you do not want to destroy muscle in the process. Weight loss then becomes a delicate balancing act of learning what is and what is not the right amount of calories to take in each day.

Starvation is not a normal state for your body to be in. To survive, the body will sense that it is in danger and will start shutting down the metabolism – it will not burn any fuel for energy. What will happen instead is simple: the body will hold on to every single calorie it receives, and when you do eat, your body will continue holding on. If you slow or stall your metabolism for long enough, you may find it very difficult to get it started again.

While your body is busy storing all of the new calories it is taking in, the cells will still need energy, but will be getting it from other sources. Again, the muscle tissue will be in danger of being burned off to use as fuel. Consider it this way: You buy a home and fill one room with beautiful furniture and another room with firewood. When winter comes you are cold, but you do not want to have to buy more firewood so you burn your furniture instead. It does not make sense, does it? Starving yourself is the same thing. You have your beautiful and strong muscles that enable you to move and be active, but you are trying to lose weight as well. So, instead of feeding your muscles and moving around more, you starve yourself, and just like in the house with the fuel and the furniture, you burn off what you need to keep, and keep what you need to burn off.

Now we all know that’s not right, so….

No more starvation!!

BMR stands for basal metabolic rate and is the rate at which you burn calories while doing nothing at all. That’s right; you burn calories just by sitting there on the couch watching television. Of course, you are not really “just” sitting there, are you? You are blinking, which involves moving tiny muscles in your eyelids to open and close. You are breathing, which means that your lungs are inflating and deflating, your diaphragm is moving up and down. Your heart is beating, contracting and expanding, beat after beat after beat. And all of these complex processes are happening because your brain is sending out billions of electrical impulses, neurons interacting via synapses making it all happen. All of this major activity, whether you realize it or not, is going on or not, takes energy. Your BMR is the amount of calories that you burn to simply maintain life.

But, why, you might ask, is it important to know your BMR in the first place? First, you must know this number so that you have a baseline to work with, when you are trying to decide how many calories you need to eliminate from your diet each day. Too few and you will never lose any weight. Too many and you will never lose any weight. It is a game won and lost by inches, and too often people just blast for the bleachers when all they need is an in-field bunt to get the job done.

If you cut too many calories out of your daily diet, your body will become convinced that it is starving to death and will send up the panic flags. All non-essential systems will be slowed or stopped. The metabolism will slow to a crawl- all fuel that is being brought in now will be considered essential and will be immediately stored to protect against impending doom.

On the other hand, if you are eating too many calories, the body will be overwhelmed. Storage systems will be overwhelmed with all of the food that is being brought in- the body will start storing everything for future sorting. Sadly, the body is not so great at file retrieving and new foods just keep coming in every day. Keep flooding the body this way and your metabolism will walk off the job in utter frustration.

Trying to lose weight requires a lot of information. You need to know how much your maintenance is costing you in terms of total calories. Once you know what your BMR is you can experiment by reducing your total daily calories by 500 for a week or two. If you do not lose any weight at all, you can go up to 1000 calories. At no point should you drop more than 1200 calories per day without a doctor’s express notice to do so. Steady weight loss is what you are aiming for, not dangerous weight loss. The faster you lose it, the faster you will regain it is the old adage – aim for a slow and steady weight loss of two pounds the first week and then one pound every week thereafter.

Every new diet program, book or weight-loss guru eventually mentions water, but only after touting their program, book or own personal fabulousness. They have the order backwards, I am afraid. Water is important to your weight-loss efforts, no matter what you are using, eating or doing. In fact, water should be mentioned at the start, middle and end of every diet book and program, regardless of who wrote them or what they are suggesting. Yes, water is that important.

Quick! What is the difference between feeling thirsty and feeling hungry? It may be harder to tell than you think and you may be reaching for a snack when all you need is a nice, big glass of water. The feelings of thirst and hunger may be similar because they are similar signals; they are both ways for the body to tell the brain that there is a need. If you cannot tell the difference between the two, stop and ask yourself a few questions.  When was the last time that I ate something? Did I eat enough then? Have I been exceptionally active between that meal and now? Should I really be hungry?  If you cannot say yes to most of those questions, start with some water and see if you still feel the same way.

Not drinking enough water will slow the digestion. In turn, the slower digestion will slow down the metabolism, which leads to stalled weight loss efforts. The body is in a constant state of searching for a very delicate balance called homeostasis. One thing thrown off kilter could put an entire system out of whack.

Digestion starts in the mouth. We chew our food, moistening it with saliva as we do. If you are not drinking enough water, you will not make enough saliva to lubricate your food and the result will be more work for the stomach to do. The stomach receives the food and churns up the stomach acid to further break down the food. The more work it must do, the more stomach acid must be produced and the longer it will stay in the stomach which could lead to heart burn and acid reflux. Not drinking enough water could lead to heartburn? Who knew?

If you are trying any kind of weight loss program, you do not want to do anything that will slow or stall your metabolism. Your body will take longer to digest the foods that you have already eaten. Your brain will not receive a signal for new food (hunger) for a while, so the fat burning furnace known as metabolism will be shut down. You will not lose weight at all, and in fact, you may gain as your body strives to hold onto every single calorie that comes through. A slowed metabolism is a dieter’s worst enemy, far worse than that chocolate cake you feared.

Drinking water keeps the body’s systems working in proper rhythm, including digestion and metabolism. In fact, consider this: you burn calories just by drinking water. Not a lot of calories mind you, but you do get the action started as your body works to use the water. If you drink ice cold water, you increase this calorie burn because your body must first work to warm the water before it can use it. The more you rev up your metabolism, the more efficiently your body will burn those calories, regardless of where they came from.

Did you know that Women between the ages of 20-55 have nearly double the Iron requirement as their male counterparts! While the daily requirement for males is 8mg/day, this can be as high as 18mg/day for women.

Another important fact is that the absorption of dietary iron is influenced by many factors – namely whether the iron is bound to hemoglobin, the concentration of iron and/or the presence of cofactors which can enhance or hinder iron absorption.

What do you think the best sources of iron are?

Environmental conditions and harmful diets can cause DNA damage and mutations that have been linked to many diseases including cancer. This damage is commonly caused by excited electrons knownas “free radical”. Individuals cannot alter their DNA, but diseases can be prevented and DNA can be protected with a proper, nutritious diet containing antioxidants and vitamins along with a healthy lifestyle including regular exercise.

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