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

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?

A New York Times article this week confirmed my worst fears – stress is sending Americans to candy stores in droves.¹

While at first glance this little headline, “When Economy Sours, Tootsie Rolls Soothe Souls” seems amusing, from my perspective it unwittingly brings up two important issues in healthcare today:

1. The simplistic assertion that to manage our weight, all we have to do is control calories in and calories out.

There are many factors that influence our ability to lose weight and keep it off, and this headline is an example of an important one – stress. Stress from economic crisis is doing what we see over and over again in patients at LMI — reducing serotonin and inducing carbohydrate cravings.

So what’s the harm in eating a little candy if you’re stressed? Nothing if you can stop at “a little,” but if you make that stop at the candy bowl too much of a habit, you can quickly undo weight loss and start to increase health risks.

Stress management is such an important factor for long term weight control, I have made it one of the key components of my approach to weight loss.

What is it that separates folks who can stay disciplined with their eating and exercise from folks who feel they “blow it” every 4 weeks?

Is obesity genetic, or is lifestyle is a bigger factor? Over thousands of years, human genetics haven’t changed much; yet over the past couple of decades there’s been an exponential increase in obesity and its related problems like metabolic syndrome, a group of risk factors that leads to heart disease and diabetes.¹ So, even though it may seem that some people are hard wired to be overweight, the sudden increase in obesity indicates that something more than genetics is playing out.

As it turns out, our genetics can be steered toward obesity, but it is guided by something called our epigenetics, certain behavioral or environmental influences that tell our genes what to do. And guess what? Our epigenetics are heavily influenced by our nutritional intake, including what we eat too much of and what we don’t get enough of.

Let me explain. Everybody is born with a unique set of genes, your hardwired DNA. (That’s called our genome.) Your genes lie there and wait to see if they will be turned on or not as directed by tagging systems that sit on top of genes, called the epigenome. Our genes and epigenetics have been compared to a computer and its software.² Our genes are the hard drive; the epigenetics are the software telling the hard drive what to do.

I have created this checklist out of my personal and professional experience with food addiction.

Having a food addiction does not make you bad or worthless. Food addicts are worthwhile persons who have a problem with food.