When NOT to Trust a Food Label?

The FDA recently shut down Clifton N.J.-based Butterfly Bakery “for unlawfully distributing mislabeled food products, such as muffins and snack cakes.” The action was based on findings that samples of Butterfly Bakery products labeled as “sugar free” contained sugar. Additionally the fat content of the samples was also significantly higher than what the label claimed. The bakery had been previously warned by FDA about problems with mislabeled products in May of 2011.

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Alternate Day & Intermittent Fasting—Magic for Weight Loss or Just Another Fad?

There has been an explosion of diet books (The Fast Diet, The 5:2 Diet, The 8-Hour Diet, etc.) suggesting that manipulating the time frames you (allow yourself to) eat within can create metabolic-magic leading to easier and/or greater success with weight loss.

There are multiple possible time frame variances among these protocols, including:
a) limiting eating to the same 8-hours daily,
b) an alternating pattern of under- and over-eating days,
c) having two fasting days per week and eating normally the other 5 days,
d) having regular splurge days (in the middle of stretches of calorie restriction), and on and on.

Some authors even suggest you can splurge and eat as much as you want of whatever you want, on the non-fasting days and still lose weight. That’s the kind of promise that causes diet books to fly off shelves!

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Weight Loss Plateaus: How to reignite your weight loss

A common development after a few weeks of losing weight is that your weight loss stalls, or stops. The scale isn’t budging. This situation—a weight loss plateau—has all kinds of mythology attributed to it.

When you start a diet, you reduce your intake of calories and a big part of that reduction is from carbohydrates. The reduction in carbohydrates leads to the depletion of glycogen (how your body stores sugar) from both your muscles and liver. Each gram of stored glycogen normally holds 3- to 4-grams of water with it.^[i],[ii]

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Want Success With Your Weight? Fix Your Thinking

The biggest obstacle between you and success with weight management probably isn’t eating better or even exercising—it’s very likely negative thinking and sabotaging self-talk. It may never have occurred to you that your most problematic habit might be faulty thinking, or that long term success with weight management ultimately hinges on fixing your thinking.

“We all talk to ourselves. We may not want to admit it, but all thinking human beings have a constant stream-of-consciousness chatter going on,” says psychologist Stephen Gullo PhD. That stream-of-chatter essentially programs you for either success or failure.

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Pick Your Approach to Weight Loss Carefully...

It's January, and many of you are thinking about losing weight, and you want some kind of plan to follow... but what? And how can you weed out scams and shams from the programs that can successfully guide you to your goals? Read on to learn how to spot a sham diet.

While a sham diet will likely deliver on some early weight loss it won’t be because of the reasons claimed in the diets’ marketing literature or book cover. The real disservice to you however is the misinformation that you’re fed that actually ends up being an impediment to any long-term success with weight control.

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