Read Nutrition Labels For Better Health

In today’s hurried, harried world of food shopping, many people take the claims on the fronts of food packages -”healthy,” “low carb” or “low fat” – as the final word on nutrition.

But by failing to read the small print, particularly the “Nutrition Facts” panel and the ingredients list, consumers may not be aware of what else they are getting, namely added sugars and trans fats. For example, did you know that a chocolate peanut butter PowerBar Performance Bar has 20 grams of sugar? That’s twice the amount of sugar in a Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut.

Reading labels, particularly if you are following a controlled-carbohydrate lifestyle, is one of the best ways to take control of what you buy and eat.

“We believe – and emerging science confirms – that a high- carbohydrate diet, particularly one that includes a significant amount of added sugars in a variety of forms, contributes to many health-related concerns,” said nutritionist Colette Heimowitz, vice president of education and research for Atkins Health & Medical Information Services. “Thus, it’s crucial to read the labels on all packaged foods.”

Always look at the serving size, for instance, to ensure that the portion will be able to satisfy your appetite. In many cases, it is smaller than you might assume. If you don’t read the label, you may never realize that the smoothie you just drank is actually two servings, not one. Also, look for an adequate amount of fats, fiber and protein, all of which assure satiety.

Knowing what ingredients should not be in products is equally crucial. The front of the package may say “no trans fats,” but the ingredients list might reveal trace amounts of hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils. A product that contains less than 1 gram of these oils is not required to include them on the Nutrition Facts panel. The only way you can be sure that a product is free of these unnatural, harmful fats is if there is no mention of them in the detailed ingredients list.

Avoiding added sugars also is important. Natural sugars in milk and fruit are fine, while added processed sugars, such as sucrose (table sugar) or corn syrup, should not be part of any healthy diet. Intake of sugar alcohols, which often are used in low-carb products to replace sugar and add bulk, also should be monitored.

A controlled-carb approach requires strict monitoring of the total carbohydrate content of any product. Atkins products do the work for the consumer, omitting added sugars and trans fats and providing a Net Atkins Count, based on clinical testing, that displays only the number of carbs that will have an impact on blood sugar.

Other products may require carb-conscious consumers to do this work themselves. In this case, subtract fiber, sugar alcohols and glycerin from the total carbohydrate count.

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Useful Tips To Improve Your Diet

We all workout for our own reasons. Some people want to trim down and shed a few pounds, while others workout to compliment a sport such as baseball or hockey. However to get the full benefit of your workouts you need to also focus on your diet. Here are just a few tips to help improve your diet and help you reach your goals.


1.) Fruit with an excellent Thermogenic/Carbohydrate Ratio include: Apples, Blueberries, Grapefruit, Peaches, Strawberries vs. Inferior Thermogenic Effect Fruits: Bananas, Dried Fruit, Raisins, etc., Watermelon.


2.) Good sources of insoluble Fiber:

Whole wheat products

What oat

Corn Bran

Flax seed

Vegetables such as green beans, cauliflowers, and potato skins

Fruit Skins and root vegetable skins.


3.) you should have planned cheat meals and you should cycle carbs. Because if you stay on a to restrictive diet your metabolism slows. You’re body is a furnace and food is the coal. More food means your metabolism goes up (i.e. furnace heats up) but too much “coal” and it starts to collect. So essentially you need to eat to lose weight.

4.) Do not work out on a empty stomach first thing in the morning. Rather eat a piece of fruit. Since a piece of fruit reglycongenates your liver which helps in fat utilization. here is a link about it: http://www.parentsurf.com/p/article…_22/ai_n6170379

5.) Adaptation is your worst enemy when you are cutting as such you should cycle everything including conditioning, lifting, and food by varying intensity, duration, and quantity.

6.) Do not be insanely restrictive, if you are the odds are you will binge and gain the weight right back. the idea is to change your life style.

7.) If you are going to use fat burners do not use them in the beginning. Use them after you have plateaued or stopped losing weight this way you got something up your sleeve for later.

8.) Stay away from sweets and sugars including soda.

9.) Fructose in high amounts can hinder fat and does not get transformed to glycogen, thus doesn't affect the muscles.

10.) You will want to maintain a high protein intake at a level of one gram per pound of lean body mass. Your carb intake should be reduced and come from complex sources.

11.) When cycling your carbs and calories you should be either +/ 900 from your BMR. Adult Male: BMR = 66 + (6.3 x body weight in lbs.) + (12.9 x height in inches) (6.8 x age in years). So M F you get 2,000cals then on sat sun around 2,900 no more though.

12.) 1g of protein= 4 cals, 1 g of carbs= 4 cals, 1g fat= 9 cals, 1g alcohol= 7 cals.

13.) Most people can only lose 1lb 1.5 lbs a week without losing muscle.

14.) In the beginning, you should keep a diet log of what you eat so you can see where you need to improve

15.) Workout wise, you should have reps from 6 10 with about 30 to 1min rest between sets

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Fiber-rich food is the best nutrition for dieting

In this article I will reveal some little known facts about the fibers and the beneficial effect they have over your body.

First of all let me explain what fiber is…

Fiber is an indigestible part of all plant foods. It is found in fruits, vegetables, grains and beans. Your digestive system cannot stomach fiber, so it is excreted undigested. Well, you may think you don’t need fiber, because it’s excreted undigested, but that’s not true.

Let’s imagine the following picture:

You overeat at least once or twice a week, more often at weekends, and your regular menu doesn’t include much fiber. Well, this might be your life style; however you should consider that it may cause you lots of health problems like:

– indigestion
- discomfort stomach aches
- gases in the digestive tract
- constipation
- hemorrhoids
- you got tired faster
- can’t concentrate on what you’re doing

I mean you become less productive at work and more irritable at home. Besides all this, you gain weight and that’s the moment when you realize you have a problem.

In order to solve a problem, you should first find the reason for it. In this case it’s the lowered intake of fiber-rich foods and respectively – the higher intake of foods containing no fiber (like meat). The average amount of fiber intake is about 25-30 grams per day. Unfortunately most people regular diets include less than 10-15 grams daily.

You should start consuming more fiber-rich foods:

- all bran cereal
- beans
- peas
- spinach
- sweet corn
- wholemeal brown bread
- red cabbage
- carrots
- baked potato with skin
- apples, bananas, oranges and all fruits

There are two types of fiber – soluble and insoluble. If you start eating more food rich in fiber, you’ll be amazed of its beneficial effects over your body, health and way of life.

Soluble fiber forms glue like gel in the intestinal tract. The gel softens stools (no more constipation) and improves your digestion (no more indigestion).

Fiber slows down stomach emptying and you feel fuller longer. This effect helps you eat less, your body burns additional calories to digest fiber and you can lose weight.

Insoluble fiber is an excellent natural laxative, because of its abilities to hold onto water and to push waste faster along the intestines – this way fiber decreases the risk of colon cancer.

In conclusion I’d like to tell you that you won’t be sorry if you start eating more fiber-rich foods. Like many other people I used to take not enough fiber, and I suffered stomach aches. Then I started to eat more fruits and fiber-rich foods in my daily menu. I must admit that it really worked for me, and now fiber-rich food is the most important nutritious part of my regular diet.

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A Healthy Guide to Good Nutrition

Whether you are at your ideal weight or striving to reach your weight goal is it simply a matter of burning more calories than you take in? The answer, I suggest, is no! Overall body health improvement as well as weight gain or loss must be factored in to the equation or you could be heading for problems. Correct nutrition can help to reduce the risk of a miriad of health-related problems, the most frightening of which are surely heart disease and cancer. Proper nutrition, however, entails eating many different foods, monitoring your consumption of some food and beverage items, and counting calories. Good diets offer balanced nutrition that reduces cholesterol,blood pressure, and helps with weight control.


To function properly, your body must have the correct combination of nutrients:

Carbohydrates. They are the primary source of ammunition in your diet. The body uses carbohydrates to build glucose which can be used immediately or stored in your body for later. Too much glucose, however, is stored as fat. There are two types of carbohydrates – simple and complex. Sugars are simple carbohydrates. Starches and fibers are complex carbohydrates.

Proteins. Proteins help your body build and maintain muscles and other tissues. They also function in the creation of hormones. Like carbohydrates, excess protein is stored as fat.

Animal and vegetable are the two major types of proteins. Too much animal protein can causehigh cholesterol, as it is high in saturated fat.

Fat. Strange as it may seem; fat is another nutrient your body requires. It comes in both saturated and unsaturated forms. Saturated fat puts you at risk of health problems. Unsaturated fat is healthy, but if it goes through any type of refinement process, it can become saturated fat.

Vitamins. These are also required nutrients. Different vitamins perform different tasks within the body. They can work with the metabolism to help with energy levels for any task you can think of that you need your body to perform. It has also been noted that certain vitamins can prevent disease.

For example, vitamins A, C, and E, also called antioxidants, can assist with the prevention of coronary artery disease by keeping build up from occurring on artery walls. Vitamin B-1 is needed for digestion and proper nervous system function. Vitamin B-2 is needed for normal cell growth.Vitamin B-3 helps to detoxify your body. Folic acid assists with production of red blood cells.Vitamin D assists with the absorption of calcium. Vitamin K helps your blood clot.

Minerals and trace elements. These are another nutrient your body requires. Both are used in many different body processes. Minerals like chlorine help make your digestive juices. Phosphorus helps build strong bones. Both can be found in the foods we consume, but with a trace element, your body just needs a tiny amount. Salt is one final nutrient your body requires. You should not consume more than 2400 milligrams per day, though, as it might raise your blood pressure.

You should follow several guidelines to create a well balanced, nutritional diet. First, try to consume two and one half cups of vegetables and two cups of fruit each day. When making your selections for each day, be sure to choose a good variety. A good rough guide is to eat as many different colors as possible, this will help you to select from all five vegetable subgroups at least four times per week.

You should eat at least three ounces of whole grain products each day. At least half of your grain intake should be whole grain based. Milk should also be part of a healthy diet. Consume at least forty-eight ounces of low fat milk or milk products on a daily basis. Your total fat intake should only be between ten and thirty percent of your calories. Most of the fats you consume should be in the form of unsaturated fats, as saturated fats can do much to damage your health. Meat, poultry, dry beans, and milk or milk products should all be lean, low-fat, or fat-free. Less than ten percent of your calories should come from saturated fats, and you should always try to avoid trans-fatty acid.

Fiber-rich fruits, vegetables and whole grains should be a regular part of your diet as shouldpotassium rich foods. Alcoholic beverages should only be consumed in moderation.

Excellent nutrition is the basis of a healthy diet.

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Beginners Guide To Healthy Nutritional Eating

If you’re currently not eating a healthy diet, it can be difficult to start such a plan. However, healthy eating along with some exercise is very important for maintaining a good bodily function and goes a long way towards living a disease-free life. If you struggle with healthy eating, then you know that breaking unhealthy habits can be the most difficult part of the process. Therefore, if you truly want to live the best lifestyle possible, it is important to follow tips in order to start eating a more healthy diet.

A great first step when you want to start eating your way to a healthy life style is to rid your home of all temptations that will distract you from following better eating habits. Ideally it would be a wise course to keep junk foods and beverages out of your house so as not be tempted to snack during the day. If you’re worried about getting hungry, keep healthy snacks like carrot sticks, yogurt, fresh fruit, or whole-wheat crackers on hand. If you find that you just cannot bear to toss out the sweets, try keeping something tiny on hand, peppermints or barley sugar. Eating a few, (emphasis on few) of these won’t ruin your diet but also will give you that little sugary fix you rave.

Another great step to healthy eating, when you’re first starting the process, is to take a few moments to learn what foods are the healthiest for you and how they work within the body. To start eating healthily we must begin by thinking healthily. Most people understand that fruits, vegetables, and low-fat meats and dairy products are good for you, but few people understand why. The key is learning about nutrients. When you understand how specific nutrients work and why you need them, it becomes more reasonable for you to make healthier choices for your body. Knowledge really is power!

Preparation is a major key in commencing a new healthy diet. You must take into consideration your schedule for meals. If you often eat in a rushed hurry at odd times of day, you probably more inclined to grab a rushed meal which will probably do more harm than good. So plan ahead! Instead of grabbing a fast food lunch on the go, take a bagged lunch to work, complete with a healthy wrap and some fresh fruit and vegetables. Remember not to forget your evening meal, a simple plan to have a meal ready before you get home would be perfect, but in our fast paced life style, sometimes this just can’t be done. One way to solve this problem is to plan out your evening meals for the week, on your days off. Perhaps just before you do your weekly shopping. Another warning: when going to the shops, do not venture their hungry because if you’re anything like me, one or two chocolate bars won’t hurt! That becomes the first break in your healthy eating.

Initially many will find it very difficult to make those necessary changes to healthier eating. Along with the difficulty of change, you may not feel well for a short period of time. Usually this is normal as your body is adjusting to your new and improved life style and is cleansing itself from the unhealthy toxins built up from poor eating habits. However if this feeling continues or you are worried a visit to yourdoctor would be the correct thing to do.

Start with baby steps. Even if you only replace one soda a day with a glass of water, you are really improving your calorie intake. If you eat fast food every day for lunch, try replacing that half of the time with better quality foods. When you start by taking small steps you aren’t cutting out all of the foods you love all at once. By taking your time to learn about your eating habits and slowly replacing them with better meals, by taking the time to learn and understand why you should be doing that and making the necessary changes in an orderly fashion, you will feel much better within yourself physically, mentally and emotionally and well on the road to becoming as healthy as you can be.

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Your Diet And Nutrition Are You An Emotional Eater?

Many people suffer from the same eating problems, but among those eating issues, there is on that stands out. Emotional eating. For mostpeople, it is the leading cause of abnormalweight gain, as you end up compensating for your emotional distress by sitting down for a large snack. Once and a while this is fine, but do it too often and you will find it hard to lose anyweight.

Every time you eat anything, you need to write down your state of mind in your food journal. Were you feeling tired, upset, depressed, happy or energetic? Just writing a few words about how you felt at the time you decided to eat can make a world of difference when it comes time to analyze your eating behaviors.

While your emotions are a good starting point, if you want to get even more in depth in your journal, you should go ahead and make that extra effort. At the end of each day, make a note about what happened during that day. Were the events good or bad? Did they lead to you eating more than you normally would have?

Once you analyze your emotions in regard to your hunger levels and how often you eat your meals, you may be able to find a pattern which you can use to become a more proper eater. Maybe you’ll find that you eat more when you’re depressed, even if you do not feel that hungry. Or perhaps you will find that you bolster happy days with food to make you feel even better.

The ultimate goal of any food journal you create is to be able to track your dietary patterns to see what needs to be changed if you hope to lose weight. While the core of your food notebook should be based on what you eat and how much of it you ate, you should also take the time to write about your state of mind, how often you eat, and where you have your meals. While these facts may seem useless at first, they can provide you with a number of interesting observations about what you need to change if you hope to lose weight.

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Why Late Night Snacking is a Bad Idea

For decades we have been warned that late night eating can lead to weight gain, with the most common explanation being that our will power tends to be lower and we are more likely to consume high calorie junk food in the wee hours of the night. However, scientists have now discovered that late night snacking may increase our obesity risk even if we avoid junk food and worse still, eating before bed can lead to a myriad of harmful health effects.
In 2009 a study done on rats at Northwestern University found that late night eating can lead to significant weight gain, regardless of whether or not that person is counting calories and avoiding junk food. “How or why a person gains weight is very complicated, but it clearly is not just calories in and calories out," said Fred Turek, professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "We think some factors are under circadian control. Better timing of meals, which would require a change in behavior, could be a critical element in slowing the ever-increasing incidence of obesity."

Junk Food at Night
Studies such as this have led scientists to conclude that our body’s internal clock, the one that regulates our sleep-wake cycle, also regulates the way in which our body burns calories and if we eat when we should be sleeping, then our bodies will burn off less of what we consume. The exact reason why our metabolism is less active during the night is unknown however scientist speculates that the genes that control our metabolism are more fully turned “on” during the daytime and therefore able to process energy more effectively.
Recently, Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies conducted another study pertaining to rats and eating hours, and they found that the rats that only had access to food on a regular eight hour schedule weighed 28 percent less than the rats that had access to food around the clock. In addition to an increased risk of obesity, the scientists also found that around-the-clock eating contributed to high blood sugar levels, increased inflammation, elevated cholesterol, liver damage and motor control problems. "What we showed is under daily fasting the body can fight unhealthy food to a significant extent," says study author Megumi Hatori. Megumi warns however, that this finding is not a free pass to forgo counting calories and go on a junk food frenzy during the daytime, stating that “there are bound to be limits."

Counting Calories in Junk Food
It appears that aside from an increased chance for weight gain and obesity, the major drawback of eating late at night is that it lessens the amount of time that you are fasting. If you eat your last meal at 6pm for instance, and you don’t eat again until 8 in the morning than your body is allotted a full 14 hours of fasting on a daily basis. This is important because fasting produces innumerable health benefits including: an increased production of both anti-aging and growth hormones, an increase in fat loss, the ability to detoxify harmful substances, a more powerful immune system, and last but certainly not least, there is mounting evidence that fasting increases your overall lifespan. So next time you have a late night food craving, regardless of whether it is for healthy food or junk food, ask yourself if the short-term gratification is really worth ruining the benefits that you can reap from an extended period of nightly fasting.


Bel Marra Nutritionals provides health advice to its customers. We provide health and well being products and information, and also give access to natural health products which help individuals to recover from different diseases and conditions.

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WHY IT IS ESSENTIAL TO CLEANSE AND DETOX TO GET RID OF TOXINS FROM THE BODY

The initial step of the road to wellness is to grant your body a break from everything toxic; this includes processed foods, food addictive, stimulants, stress, negative folks, radiated foods, chemicals and other environmental toxins. The next step is to try to get rid of any built up toxins that will have accumulated in the main organs like the liver, kidneys, colon, lungs, skin and of course, the Lymphatic system. The method of Fasting will accelerate the cleansing process by permitting the energy the body is saving on digestion to be directed towards repair and regeneration of broken cells in addition to detoxifying poisons stored deep among the bodies organs. A combination of top of the range organic powders and specifically formulated herbs in the correct dosages will truly collate, draw and bind the toxins from the body, the removal method is also assisted by employing a colon cleansing system that flushes the toxic wastes from the complete colon, the process is safe, effective and easy. During the method of detoxification, it is crucial to support the body and enhance the immune system by using organic and natural herbs, vitamins, minerals, holistic supplements and super foods.

Taking part in a holistic practitioner led Detox program is the safest and most effective strategy towards greater health and vitality. Fasting and detoxification programs offer a total body reset, a chance to Detox the system of built up wastes, bacteria, fungus, parasites, excess fat, emotional stress and most vital harmful toxins. 

Amity Wellness is distinctive from other health and fitness programs because our stress is on each aspect that encompasses health and well being, as well as fitness, holistic nutrition, stress management, lifestyle decisions, mind and body, nutritional supplementation, social and cultural influences, positivity and happiness. Our goal is to restore the equilibrium of the body as a whole by cleansing the body physically, spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. Upon completion of a cleansing program you'll not only feel invigorated and rejuvenated but you ought to notice you have adapted a more positive attitude, improved mental focus and a need to continue to adopt a more healthy lifestyle in the future.

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