Total Health Breakthroughs: Free Natural Health Newsletter and Alternative Health Articles

Do you think more about good food to eat or more about what you are supposed to avoid? The first way of thinking leads to fulfillment and satisfaction, making you likely to eat less. The other leads to guilt and regret and the likelihood to eat more — something all of us want to avoid.

Today I want to tell you about one of the most exciting new “super foods” I’ve come across in years… It comes from the African plant, Irvingia.

Turns out Irvingia, as part of a diet and exercise program, can help you lose weight — and more.

Researchers in Cameroon recruited over 100 volunteers for a ten-week clinical trial. Some were healthy, some were overweight, and some were obese.

Just as there are many “miracle” exercise products which deceptively promise an Atlas-like body in just a few minutes a day, in the food world there are promises of weight loss from super foods or “miracle” juices (think acai berry).

Unfortunately, there is no one food that will magically melt away unwanted pounds. However, the overall quality of our diet IS crucial to our success with weight management, and can make or break our fitness level.

So what dietary measures should you to take to support weight loss and overall fitness?

You probably know someone who’s always on a diet. I used to be that person myself. In fact, I was born fat, was a fat child, a fat teen and yo-yoed as a young adult. I became a lifetime member of Weight Watchers at age 13. I was Dr. Atkins’ model in all his print advertising a number of years ago. I’m a NutriSystem expert and also a lifetime member of Jenny Craig…

One thing I’ve noticed in my experience as a yo-yo dieter is that when I had a few extra pounds on me, it made me look “matronly.” And that’s not just my opinion. The reactions I’d get from strangers confirmed my “theory.” As a size eight at only 5′3,” people tended to guess my age as older than I really was. Now, at a size 4, I’m 50 and I still get asked for I.D. to buy wine.

If you’ve ever vacationed in the tropics, you’ve probably seen people drinking from what looks like peeled coconuts with straws inserted. Now I’m finding more and more skinned coconuts in the fruit and vegetable section of grocery stores. Chop off the top, insert a straw and drink up. Coconut water is becoming so popular that there is now a whole bunch of canned coconut water drinks on the market.

So what’s the deal with coconut water?

Well, I can’t speak to the dozens of pre-packaged products that are showing up (usually sold in cans), but I can tell you what’s found inside the actual coconut. And it’s a nutritional bonanza that could easily be a boon to people trying to control their weight.

Here in South Florida the weather is warming up. Yesterday’s high was 92 degrees! The whole practice is talking about getting our bodies back in beach shape. A bunch of us are doing PACE, plus we’ve got a secret weapon to curb our cravings.

In fact, it makes losing that extra “insulation” that we all tend to pack on in the winter as easy as 1, 2, 3. Three natural supplements that I’ll explain in this article can help you:

• Achieve a leaner physique
• Stop being a slave to food and start creating a healthy relationship with it
• Keep blood sugar levels that are already within the normal range consistent to maintain ideal body functions

The first one is Garcinia cambogia, a pumpkin-shaped fruit from Asia. It has been used for centuries in places like Indonesia and India to make small meals seem more filling.

Garcinia’s rind contains hydroxycitric acid (HCA), a natural appetite-suppressing compound. In a Georgetown University Medical Center study, individuals taking HCA supplements decreased their appetite, lost a significant amount of weight, and helped maintain healthy cholesterol levels that were already within the normal range in just 8 weeks.¹

And Garcinia does more than recondition your body to eat less. It also helps you lose weight by blocking the action of an enzyme called citrate lyase, which turns excess carbs into fat. So, instead of putting on the pounds, your body ends up using carbs more efficiently.

There are no short cuts to weight loss. In my experience, I still find that the most effective way to help people lose weight is with the combination of a healthier diet and exercise along with addressing underlying metabolic imbalances — such as insulin resistance, thyroid gland function and stress levels (because stress hormones impact both insulin resistance and thyroid hormones).

However, there have been recent discoveries, and much discussion¹ about the role that so-called brown fat may play in weight loss. Brown adipose tissue — brown fat — is common to many mammals. It’s different from our blobby yellow fat in that it has a very high metabolic rate and contains a protein that converts calories directly to heat. That helps it do its job, which is to keep mammals warm in cold weather. Even when brown fat isn’t kicking in to raise body temperature, its high metabolic rate also helps keep those animals lean.

As humans, we are born with some brown fat, but it was thought that we lose all of it as we age. However, recent research in the New England Journal of Medicine² has discovered that adults do retain some brown fat, and that brown fat is inversely proportional to body mass index (BMI). Researchers now think that increasing our brown fat activity may help us lose weight.

Since the primary trigger for brown fat thermogenesis (burning) is having adequate levels of T3 thyroid hormone,³ metabolic balance and optimization is the most important factor in keeping brown fat as active as it should be.

However, I did some research and there are ways to enhance brown fat activity.

In a world where we are taught that the way to control our weight is to eat less and exercise more, the only thing that matters in our food choices is how many calories they contain. With this method you will see some shocking food comparisons which can make some very healthy food choices seem bad. Such food comparison bits have been on TV a lot lately with the recent release of book called, Eat This, Not That.

In traditional approaches to dieting, one of the tools that seems to improve weight loss is food journaling, writing down everything you eat. This method works because it helps control the mindless eating that people do — just popping something in your mouth even if you aren’t hungry. In fact, one study found that food journaling every day led to twice as much weight loss among dieters.¹

We have only six short weeks left until Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer — and bathing suit season for most people. If your New Year’s resolution to lose weight hasn’t worked as well as you had hoped, don’t despair. There’s still time to look better at the beach. And I can tell you how to do it.

Several studies comparing different methods of weight loss give the scientific evidence that supports what I’ve been telling you all along: low-carb eating plans are the best way to lose weight.

The first study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association,¹compared the weight-loss results for 311 overweight and obese women who were assigned to follow either the Atkins (very low-carb), Ornish (very low-fat vegetarian), Zone (40% carbs) or LEARN (calorie-controlled, low-fat) diets. Those on the Atkins diet lost 10.3 lb compared to an average of 4.6 lbs in the other groups, and interestingly, far fewer people dropped out on the low-carb diet compared to the other diets.

Study two, from the Journal of the American Dietetic Association² looked at how a low-carbohydrate/high-protein diet compared with a high-carbohydrate/low-fat diet on ratings of hunger and eating restraint. Both groups ate less, but the low-carb group was significantly less hungry. Not surprisingly, they also lost more weight.

Study three is from the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.³ This study of 53 obese women compared a very low-carbohydrate diet to a calorie-restricted diet with 30% of the calories as fat. The very low carbohydrate diet group lost almost 16 lb in 3 months, and more of the weight lost was actual body fat compared to a 9-lb weight loss in the calorie- and fat-restricted diet.

There you have it. In all three studies, low-carb diets led to the greatest weight loss. End of story, right?