Healthy Room

There’s a trap for those who write about dieting. To get the maximum coverage, authors like to assume everyone is the same. That way, they can state general rules supposed to apply regardless of age or sex. To see the truth of this, you only have to look at the fad diet books. There you see only positive news about how much weight everyone will lose by following a few simple rules. If book marketers were bound by the same rules as drug marketers, there would have to be several pages explaining who might be at risk if they only eat grapefruits for three months. Think of television ads for drugs: ten seconds of marketing, thirty seconds listing adverse side effects. So, to show how it should be done, here’s an article written for the older woman. Continue Reading »

The whole question of body weight is a balancing act – and that’s not on the bathroom scales. Ignore all those fad suggestions you should count those carbs or eat small mountains of grapefruit or cabbage. The simple reality is it all comes down to those pesky calories. You have to burn more than you eat. This means either seriously cutting down the number of calories you eat or significantly increasing the amount of exercise you take (or both). Once you accept this, you can start making sensible plans. First, remember you don’t have to do this alone. There’s your family, all those friends and, if you’re really desperate, your regular doctor who may recommend a dietician or nutritionist to give you the basics of healthy eating.
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You’re home from work and have the house to yourself. You’ve been very disciplined during the day. Just plenty of water to drink and a few biscuits. The scales show those pounds yielding to the diet. And then you find yourself opening the kitchen door. There’s a tub of ice cream in the freezer that’s got your name on it. When that’s gone, there’s that piece of cheesecake and a peanut butter sandwich or two to round things off. By the time you’ve finished, the good work of the day has been undone with an intake of calories sufficient to keep a small army going for a week. But, and here comes the sad truth, you have to support being overweight with your lifestyle. If you have a little self-discipline, there’s no reason to carry all that extra weight around. It’s the boom and bust approach to dieting that does the most harm, with binge eating one of the most common of the eating disorders. Why do we do it?
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