Weight Loss Programs Kannapolis NC

Does your diet need a makeover?

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Whether you want to drop a few pounds, lower your risk of heart disease, or decrease pain and inflammation in your body, certain foods can help you reach these goals. Here are the ones to add to your shopping list.

Shopping List
You already know the basics of healthy eating: Shop the perimeter of the store and eat minimal processed foods and fats. But are you buying the foods that will help you reach your specific health goals? To help you do this, we paired three integrative practitioners with three readers who have different health concerns. One is trying to lose weight, another wants to lower her cholesterol without drugs, and another hopes to ease his osteoarthritis pain. Here’s what their grocery shopping lists looked like before they worked with our experts—and what they’re shopping for now.

Ambere St. Denis, 32
Home: San Francisco
Goal: Weight loss
Challenges: Cravings for sugar and bread, low energy, bloating

The Background
Being single in San Francisco with a demanding job in sales means Ambere does a lot of “grab-and-go” eating and dining out. While she knows she needs a hearty breakfast to keep her energy high all day, she often picks up an egg sandwich or a scone and coffee at a deli near her office and then goes out again for lunch. “It’s pretty typical for me to eat all three meals out at least a few times a week,” she says. “It’s just easier—and oftentimes, I’ll have client dinners.” When her energy flags, she typically reaches for something sweet or carb-heavy. Although these snacks give her a quick pick-me-up, Ambere knows they’re not helping her energy in the long run.

Ambere’s Typical Shopping List	Ambere’s Typical Meals
White bread White rice Noodles Eggs Oil-packed tuna Catfish Salmon Chicken	Pizza Cheese (occasionally) Cream Vegetable oil Butter Olive oil Scones Chocolate Coffee	Breakfast Eggs, potatoes, toast Lunch Tuna melt, french fries, fried chicken sandwich Dinner Fried catfish or curry chicken with white rice, pot stickers, bread Snacks Scones, chocolate, or other sweets

Nutrition Analysis
The first thing that jumped out at me is that Ambere is consuming wheat at almost every meal—in part because she craves it. Often, we crave the foods we have a hidden sensitivity to—and a food sensitivity can actually prevent weight loss. Why? When the body isn’t able to digest a food like it should, the immune system kicks into gear, essentially considering that food a foreign body that needs to be “fought.” This makes the immune system too busy to focus on the low-grade inflammation that happens as a result of stress, environmental toxins, and processed foods—and the result is illness and an inability to lose weight. By cutting wheat, Ambere should immediately see a change for the better in her energy level and digestion (read: no more bloating!). What’s more, in order to feel full, she’ll have to replace that bread, white rice, and pasta with fiber-filled whole grain...

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Winning at Losing

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By Michael Castleman

In the 1990s, health experts told us something we knew all too well: Losing weight for the long haul is hard. The National Institutes of Health‘‘s Nutrition Coordinating Committee declared that the typical dieter regained two-thirds of lost weight within one year, and only 3 percent of dieters kept weight off for five years. Jane Brody, the New York Times‘‘ influential health columnist, interviewed a dozen weight-loss experts and concluded, "More than 90 percent of dieters are destined to regain all they lose and then some." Just the type of encouragement we needed.

But two researchers wondered if the situation was actually that grim. Rena Wing, PhD, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown Medical School, and James Hill, PhD, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, each knew people who‘‘d lost significant weight and kept it off. They decided to investigate the fraction of folks who dropped their excess pounds for good. "We figured it made more sense to study success than failure," Hill explains.

In 1994, they began collecting success stories about long-term weight loss, hoping to find patterns that might help others succeed. Their collection evolved into the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), a database of people who‘‘ve lost at least 30 pounds and not regained them for at least one year. The NWCR now boasts more than 6,000 stories, most from the US and Canada. The average registrant has lost 70 pounds and kept it off six years. Annual update questionnaires show some of the registrants regain weight, but most maintain substantial weight loss over the long term.

One database champion, Michal Eakin had been chubby since childhood and would continually binge, diet, binge. "I tried everything," she says, "fad diets, Optifast, NutriSystem, you name it. Every time I regained weight, I felt such emotional despair." In her mid-20s, weighing 200 pounds and with a family history of heart disease, Eakin made her health a non-negotiable priority: "I decided I wanted to live," she says. Eakin started eating fewer calories and walking around the countryside in Vermont. "I still don‘‘t like exercise that much," she admits, but "we do many things in life we don‘‘t relish because we know we have to—going to work, changing our kids‘‘ diapers." And now the 130-pound Eakin has exercised almost every morning for the past 23 years. "I had an eating disorder. I felt enslaved to food," she says. "But I broke free, and I celebrate my freedom every day."

Though everyone in the database has different stories and has lost weight in various ways, several patterns have emerged, says Suzanne Phelan, PhD, an NWCR researcher at Brown. Their secrets?

• Stop dieting. "Dieting involves major eating changes for the short term that are virtually impossible to maintain long term," Hill explains. "People who succeed at weight loss generally make small-to-moderate die...

Copyright 1999-2009 Natural Solutions: Vibrant Health, Balanced Living/Alternative Medicine/InnoVisi...

Click here to read more from Natural Solutions