Archive for September, 2008
Slim-Fast: Drinking Your Way to Weight Loss
You may have seen one of the ever-present cans in the grocery store and been tempted to pick it up. Yet, you’re not sure whether Slim-Fast will be effective in helping you to lose weight. You should know that the Slim-Fast program is considered quite successful in the fight against fat—although not everyone is sold on the plan.
Nearly thirty years ago, S. Daniel Abraham revolutionized weight loss programs with the Slim-Fast drink. According to the company website, Slim-Fast represents a sensible way to slim down. In fact, more than two dozen medical studies indicate that the diet program is a winning formula for losing weight. Slim-Fast is considered to be a nutritionally-balanced plan, offering dieters proteins, carbohydrates, and a healthy amount of fat.
One of the recommendations of the Slim-Fast program is its convenience. You can drink on the run, enabling you to fit nutrition into your busy day. In addition, the program is considered far less expensive than other diet plans, particularly pre-packaged diet plans such as NutriSystem and Jenny Craig. Slim-Fast also now offers more variety. In addition to all the different flavors of shakes it offers, Slim-Fast also provides dieters with soup, pasta, and nutrition bars. In all, Slim-Fast now features more than a hundred different products. If you follow the Slim-Fast plan, you will need to eat three meals each day, along with three snacks made up of fruits and vegetables. Two of the meals and one snack must be made up of Slim-Fast products. Because of the frequency with which you’ll be eating, you shouldn’t suffer from hunger pains. One study actually showed that individuals who used Slim-Fast over a period of a decade were 33 pounds lighter than dieters who did not use Slim-Fast products.
Another advantage to the Slim-Fast program is that you don’t have to worry about counting calories, cooking meals, or figuring out portion sizes. Slim-Fast has, in essence, done the work for you. Also, you can now choose between two different Slim-Fast programs: the Optima Diet and the Plan for a Low-Carb Lifestyle.
The company’s website contends that the program is a proven weight loss tool. Dieters have had success in maintaining their weight over one to five years’ duration. A spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association has called the website “user-friendly.” By visiting the site, you can be put in touch with registered dieticians who can answer your concerns. The website also offers a support group, which can be a critical factor in maintaining weight loss over the long term.
Slim-Fast’s goals as far as weight loss is concerned follow government guidelines. The idea is to lose ten percent of one’s weight over six months, meaning that one would shed no more than two pounds a week. Slim-Fast’s plan calls for only 30 minutes of exercise a day, which seems entirely doable. Dieters may also be inspired by the success stories posted on the company’s website.
However, there are disadvantages to the Slim-Fast program. For instance, if you don’t like the taste of the shakes or food, you could find it difficult to continue with the meal plan. Also, some people report feeling hungry, despite eating the recommended portions of food. Slim-Fast, in essence, does the thinking for you, so, for the most part, you do not get the experience of shopping for wholesome food for yourself. You might also tire of the program quickly, causing you to gain back the weight you initially lost. While Slim-Fast may be effective for the short-term, it is a difficult program to maintain for life.
As a result, Slim-Fast gets mixed reviews—even from members of the medical community. While some dieticians are fans of meal replacement programs, others see them as potentially harmful and nutritionally inadequate. Whether you can effectively lose weight with Slim-Fast depends upon whether you have the discipline and desire to remain with the program for the long-term. If you start to use Slim-Fast for a while, then stop, you will likely gain back the weight you initially lost. However, for decades now, Slim-Fast has been winning the hearts of dieters and the company shows no signs of slowing down in the near future. Slim-Fast may be one way that you can drink yourself to optimum weight loss.
Tags: slim fast, weight loss
Why Vitamins Are So Good For You
Not long ago an astonishing pair of full-page advertisements appeared in leading newspapers of the country. The advertisers were two of our most popular, huge-circulation magazines.
Both ads were headed by amazing statements. One proclaimed that "You can’t photograph a vitamin," and drew the analogy that you couldn’t photograph the intangible virtues of the magazine either. The other declared that "Nobody has ever seen a vitamin" and that neither could anyone see the vitamins of editorial quality that made the magazine distinctive.
What’s wrong with these statements? Merely the fact that vitamins can be seen and photographed as easily as you take a snapshot of the baby. You can hold pure crystalline vitamins in your hand, taste them, study them just as you can ordinary table salt.
If advertisements costing thousands of dollars, carefully checked by dozens of high-salaried executives, can be so far wrong about vitamins, it is high time that the
mystery be cleared away just as it has been in the laboratories.
To a chemist a vitamin has no more glamour than a keg of whitewash. A vitamin is a definite chemical entity whose individual atoms, as distinctive as human fingerprints, can be drawn on paper with every atom in its proper place. Not only are the functions of important vitamins well understood, but it is now possible to count the amounts of them in your daily diet just as you can count calories.
If vitamins occurred in foods in substantial quantities, they would be no more mysterious than the white crystals in your sugar bowl. But it happens that they are present in inconceivably small amounts. A level teaspoon containing a mixture of all the known vitamins in purified form would be sufficient to keep you functioning at top efficiency for two months!
Many mysteries about vitamins do remain, of course. Not all the vitamins have been discovered. In very recent months the functions of at least three newcomers have become better understood—pyridoxine, pantothenic acid, paraaminobenzoic acid. Vitamins were originally named after letters of the alphabet because nobody knew what they were. Now the tendency is to substitute their accurate chemical names for the ABC’s.
The miracles in vitamins are real enough. You can’t win a war without them, which is one reason why governmerits, including our own, are fortifying foods with vitamins. Lack of Vitamin Bi makes whole populations easy victims of a "war of nerves," and extreme lack of Vitamin A would dull a soldier’s eyes so he couldn’t see to sight a rifle.
In your personal war, the one you are waging to wrest a living from the world, to forestall ill health, to make the most of your talents, vitamins are no less important.
Vitamins put a chip on your shoulder, keep you on the outside of mental hospitals, give you a skin you love to touch, preserve your vision, enable you to grow and have children.
None of these desirable ends is achieved by vitamins alone. They are only part of the story of nutrition; they build no tissues, give no energy except by acting as catalysts that enable other food elements to do their work. If you are already getting plenty of vitamins, your health will not be improved in the slightest by increasing your intake. But the disturbing discovery of recent advances in nutrition is that unless you are an exceptional citizen indeed you probably are not getting enough vitamins.
This does not mean that you are very likely to be a victim of acute deficiency diseases such as rickets, pellagra, xerophthalmia, beriberi, or scurvy, which arise, respectively, from lack of Vitamins D, nicotinic acid, A, Bi, and C.
It does mean that in all probability you don’t get enough vitamins to assure you of energetic, supercharged, positive health that is your birthright.
Practically all authorities agree that mild vitamin deficiencies are distressingly common in this country. Symptoms are often so vague that diagnosis is difficult, but such extremely common complaints as listlessness, lack of pep, dragged-out feeling, poor appetite, faulty elimination, very often disappear when diets are balanced with vitamin-rich foods.
Tags: healthy diet
