By Lucinda Reynolds
Struggling to lose that extra weight. This article will reveal to you some very useful tips for losing weight. These tips can be implemented right away to get you started on your weight loss journey.

Obesity has become an epidemic in the world today. Our poor diets and poor exercise habits are really taking their toll on our bodies and waistlines. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Just by making a few changes in your life, you can lose weight and keep it off. Read on to discover a few very valuable weight loss tips. These tips may be the key to changing your life forever!

The very first weight loss tip that I am going to share with you is so simple that anyone can implement this one right away. Slow down. Instead of shoveling the food into your mouth and finishing your meal in just a few minutes, slow it down. Chew each bite thoroughly, savoring the taste of the food. Watch the clock and make it a point to have your meal last for at least 15 minutes. The longer it takes you to eat a meal, the more time your stomach will have to signal the brain that you are getting full. Try this at your next meal.

The next weight loss tip is to stop eating before you are full. I don’t mean to still feel hungry, just stop when you start to feel satisfied. We all have the tendency to want to clean our plates. No doubt, this comes from hearing our mothers tell us time and time again how horrible it was to waste food. But now I am telling you to not mind the voice of your mother or grandmother and don’t clean your plate. When you start getting that satisfied feeling, push away from your plate. Get up and walk away or take your plate into the kitchen. Do whatever it takes to keep you from being tempted to clean your plate.

By John Barban
www.eatstopeat.com

A commonly held belief about food is that you need to eat frequent meals to keep your metabolism going and to keep burning calories. I’m not exactly sure where this idea came from but it makes absolutely no sense to me.

In fact, to me it sounds like this nonsense about eating food to keep your metabolism going is a clever myth that only supports the food and nutritional supplement industry. The latest fad in nutrition is eating 6 small meals per day instead of 3. That is 3 more meals the food industry can sell you products for! It won’t be long until you will be told to eat 9 small meals per day.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve read the research and there is a small increase in metabolism that happens whenever you eat. However, the little effect food does have on your metabolism cannot overcome the weight gain you would experience from eating too many calories overall.

If you apply this idea to the calories you are eating, then eating a 100 calories might make you burn an extra 15 calories, but you still have an another 85 extra calories that you haven’t burned off.

So does this mean eating at an all you can eat buffet is the best way to ‘rev up’ your metabolism and burn lots of calories? Not likely! That just sounds ridiculous.

Let’s look at this in a real life scenario to see how far off this logic is.

By Pat Barone
www.patbarone.com
10 Reasons Diets Fail

For every 100 dieters, one will maintain their weight loss after 5 years, which is the marker determining permanent weight loss to the medical community. Research indicates diets actually add pounds in the long run.

Why are diets so destructive to our weight and health? Here are some of the reasons.

1. Severe food restriction causes real hunger.

It's a fact that most diets last less than 72 hours. Hunger is a basic human urge. Man continues to survive (and has for thousands of years) because of the ability to cope with famine and scarcity of food. Hunger has been the powerful motivator for that survival.

2. A diet is an artificial plan which is different from your lifestyle.

Your new diet book has pages and pages of special recipes but you don't like to cook. Your diet says you must prepare all your food, but your job requires you to entertain clients. Only you can set the boundaries around eating and make them work within your lifestyle.

3. A diet is a temporary solution to a permanent problem.

The diet industry makes billions (yes! over $42 billion a year) by convincing people to follow a diet for a few weeks or months to solve lifelong problems of emotional eating, eating for the wrong reasons or eating food that is nutrition-less. Once a diet ends, the weight comes back because the problems and behaviors are still there. Maybe you squeezed yourself into the bridesmaid's dress in time for the wedding, but you still have the rest of your life ahead of you.

A first step toward success is to accept that there is no free ride. If you lose weight on a strict diet, you will always pay for it later.

By Harry Jackson Jr.
www.stltoday.com
Alli -- Safety of New Weight-Loss Drug is Questioned

A new over-the-counter weight-loss drug called Alli may give people with eating disorders another tool to harm themselves, local therapists fear.

Alli — pronounced "AL-eye" — is the only weight-loss medicine on the market approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration. It's half the dose of the prescription drug orlistat, trade name Xenical, which is used to fight morbid obesity.

Dr. Randall Flanery, head of the Eating Disorders Program for the St. Louis Behavioral Medicine Institute, says the new drug is ripe for abuse because young people with eating disorders find the side effects of intense diarrhea and other gastrointestinal problems that empty the digestive system inviting.

People who use diet products to bolster their eating disorders "… tend to take them at much higher dosages than recommended, as much as 10 times," Flanery says. "It's analogous to laxatives. People with eating disorders take 10 to 50 (laxative pills) at a time. They become dependent and take higher and and higher dosages."

Another danger is that the medicine is approved by the FDA "… and people will believe that because it's over-the-counter and FDA-approved, it must be safe," Flanery says. "It's not."

The drug should be kept behind counters and monitored for distribution to make sure that at least teens don't have access to it, Flanery says.

By HARRY JACKSON JR.
www.chron.com
Supplements Shouldn't Be Substitutes For A Healthy Diet
We hear about them all the time, but how many of us really know what we are putting in our bodies?

Vitamins are actually a group of chemicals that the body needs in very small quantities. Their job is not to actually do anything but rather to help other chemicals do their jobs.

The misconceptions of what vitamins should or shouldn't be expected to do are rampant, and professionals fear their misuse. Experts are especially nervous about the megadoses available on store shelves. Megadoses of some vitamins can actually be poisonous.

WHAT ARE VITAMINS?

Picture a machine that needs 1,000 chains to work. A vitamin would be one tiny link that helps the whole machine work better. Scientists lettered and then numbered vitamins for reference because their real names often were long and complicated. For example, vitamin B12 is cyanocobalamin.

When several vitamins are under one letter, that means they're closely related. Dr. James Shoemaker, a professor and nutritionist with St. Louis University School of Medicine, says vitamins are part of a group of nutrients that the body generally doesn't make. So you have to eat your vitamins every day.

The human body makes only one vitamin, vitamin D, and that's with the help of sunlight. But even most of that needs to come from your diet, he says.

Shoemaker says the need to eat vitamins appears to come from the primitive feast-orfamine days of human evolution. The body interprets a lack of vitamins as famine and slows down its metabolism, the chemical processes in your body.

That's why the American Medical Association recommends vitamin supplements when someone is on a low-calorie or restricted diet. The presence of vitamins helps to keep the metabolism moving.