| In: Weight Loss Programs
Is a Brand Name Diet Necessary to Lose Weight?
If you are looking for a way to lose weight, the diet programs you see advertised daily may seem like an appealing solution, giving you structure and focus. They certainly appear to yield fantastic results, judging from the many success stories they show you on TV and on their Web sites.
However, any diet plan, whether it is a brand name and a registered trademark or not will take a great deal of commitment. You must focus on changing your lifestyle and this includes counting calories and choosing proper foods as well as incorporating some exercise to augment the caloric deficit.
Well, this can be overwhelming. So where to start? Here’s something new.
There is a book, “No White at Night” by Dr. Bill Gavin, which reveals that some of the most well known name brand diet programs are sometimes only marginally useful due to the demands they make on your time and your patience that it is difficult to stick with them. Dr. Gavin instead suggests dietary changes that should produce measurable results for many people.
The basic rules of the natural diet change are quite simple in concept. The first rule is: “no white at night”. This is a reference to refined carbohydrates including bread, pasta, rice as well as any kind of dessert with refined sugar. So firstly you must eliminate the high calorie carbs at your night meal before bedtime. This is actually quite an easy way to dump many of your daily calories; cut out the refined carbohydrates which do not contribute nutritionally and lead instead to an accumulation of excess weight. Removing them from your last meal is a good way to make a positive change.
Some people feel that merely skipping meals would be a far better idea: it would be more drastic; and it would make things simpler too. This is actually a bad idea; the natural diet change is for people who are too tempted to raid the fridge from time to time when they are put on a regular name brand diet. With such people, starving and dinner deprivation would only fill them with an irresistible urge for an in-between-meals snack. The idea is to keep yourself regularly fed with three meals a day. Meals or snacks between meals aren’t used the same way by the body as regular meals are. They are considered “extra” by the body, and are turned into fat for storage.
Would you believe that according to Dr. Gavin’s book, three out of four people to come to a weight-loss clinic are skipping breakfast? That alone reveals that skipping meals is a poor weight management strategy. When you do eat your three meals a day, make sure that you include a good deal of protein in it. Proteins are basically the very opposite of carbs. Carbs are quickly digested for a quick burst of energy; proteins take time to digest; they fill you up, and keep you filled up until everything is properly digested. That should take six hours.
The next rule of the natural diet change is to stick with moderation. Cutting down the size of your meals is a great way to lose weight without getting your body all worked up over missing the meals it has come to expect. You may find online tools such as those on Fitday.com will help you keep track of what you eat. You can also do this manually by keeping a notebook, a diary, really of your daily food intake. This enables you to be accountable to yourself for what you eat and to examine whether or not you are really creating a caloric deficit needed to lose weight. In the final analysis, losing weight with an actual diet change like this is easier than anything a name brand type plan could ever do for you.