Terry Edwards asked:


There are several keys to experiencing weight loss success with any diet program, but one of the biggest is avoiding those nasty food cravings. Here are some tips to help you in this all important area.

There is certainly no shortage of diet and weight loss programs that will help you lose weight, but 99% of them make it difficult, if not impossible to stay on for any length of time. This is mainly due to the fact that they leave you feeling even hungrier after eating and even worse, leave you with food cravings throughout the day.

One of the main problems with food cravings is that when you succumb to them you will always eat far too much of whatever you were craving. For example, I can remember one time I was craving Pringles potato chips. What happened? You guessed it, I ate the entire can! And you know how destructive that can be on any weight loss plan.

Why do we get cravings? Believe it or not, most always it’s because we need water. Our body requires 6 ingredients to run right; protein, fat, minerals, carbs and water. So, when your body isn’t getting enough of one of these ingredients, it causes a craving for it. Think of when you were really thirsty the last time. You wanted a drink of water in the worst way. It’s the same way for all 6 of these food ingredients.

How does this apply to weight loss plans and diets? Well, when a particular diet program completely eliminates a food group, it leads to you getting cravings. Your body rebels so to speak and you begin feeling miserable. Shortly after that, most everyone ends their diet.

How can you prevent food cravings? As you can probably tell by now, the only way to get rid of cravings is by eating foods from all six groups. With that said though, the key to weight loss success is eating the “good” foods from these six groups and not the junk foods.

A good diet plan will include these “good” foods in all food categories. When you find this type of weight loss program, you’ll most likely begin to see success, and more importantly, eliminate the cravings.

Mike True asked:


If you had to have one or the other which would you take? You may or should be making that decision. As you probably know, health care costs are through the roof.

It can and does put a lot of folks in a pinch. They can’t pay them even if they have insurance sometimes. Medical bill can easily lead to bad credit and financial disaster.

Also, I just heard on the news the other night how some emergency rooms are having to turn people away. They send them to other hospitals and people are having to wait hours in emergency rooms for care, or even a bed or place to sit. They don’t expect that to improve any time soon in most cities.

The best plan is preventative medicine. Stay as healthy as you can so you won’t have to worry about medical bills or waiting to see a doctor. Just like you plan for retirement, you should be planning for good health for your “Golden Years”.

You may not be able to tell that you are slowly killing yourself or working your way up to future health problems now, but unless you are paying attention to what you are eating and getting some kind of physical activities you will probably not be able to enjoy a lot of things later in life or sooner.

Being able to travel, play with your grandkids, or even breath, or walk might just not happen.

Eating the right foods and avoiding the wrong foods is not costly or difficult. You just need to take a little time and with a little help you can have excellent health for years. Add some daily fitness to your routine and improve your health even more.

You don’t have to be overweight to start a diet, or weight loss program. Those are the best places to learn proper nutrition and good foods from the bad foods, and also how to exercise.

After studying nutrition and weight loss for many years now, I have to caution you on some of the ridiculous diets I have seen though. I almost want to laugh at some of them, but it is not really funny, it is mostly scary. If you see a diet or weight loss plan that says something like, you will lose 20 pounds in 2 weeks, don’t do it. That is worse for your health than not going on a diet at all. You will suffer through something it and it will more than likely cause health problems later. If it sounds to good to be true it probably is.

A good healthy, nutritional diet or weight loss plan will have a good balance of proteins, carbohydrates (the complex ones, not simple carbs), fibers, and fats (the good ones, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated). Your body does need all of these things. It needs to be nourished all day to keep your metabolism up and burning off calories and fats. Study after study has proven this, but still people seem to want to try to change mother nature. I don’t understand. They do starvation diets, cut out carbohydrates, try living on just one kind of food, and all sorts of crazy things that just don’ t work. Sure, maybe short term, you might lose a lot of weight for a short time, but why just short term. Learn how to eat the proper nutrition and it is easy to do it for the rest of your life. You can actually eat a “bad food” every now and then and live through it with any good diet or weight loss plan. I found it is best to enjoy a “bad food” every now and then and not make eating healthy a torturous thing.

One bad meal doesn’t mean you won’t lose weight that week if you are dieting. It’s all about knowing and teaching yourself what bad foods and drinks do to your body and then keeping them to a bare minimal, or stop consuming them completely. There are so many good alternatives that I am sure you will enjoy. Like dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate. It’s that simple.

The other important part of good health is physical activities. Your body starts losing muscle with age. Of coarse you need all your muscles for a lot of reasons. A toned body will burn fat and calories quickly, and it will protect your joints and just plain keep you fit and feeling that way. Aerobic exercise is good, but strength exercises I do believe is much better. A mixture of both is best.

You don’t have to devote all of your time and your life to diet, nutrition, & exercise. Just a very small part of it and that hour or two a day that you spend cooking healthy, eating healthy, and exercise will pay off greatly in the coming years. Think of it this way, it is like paying yourself thousands of dollars a day for spending the time, because that is what you will be saving in medical bills later on if you don’t. Not to mention all the things you won’t be able to do because of bad health.

One last thing. Don’t procrastinate. Start now! There is no reason to put it off. If you say you are going to wait till after Christmas, or New Years, why? Like I said earlier, you can still have a “bad food” or a “bad meal” and then just start back eating the right way afterwards. Learn about good nutrition now and get started. Just think, the better your health and food intake is now, then it won’t be as bad by Christmas or New Years. You will be able to easily drop the extra calories you gain then. Also the better your nutrition is, the less likely it is that you will catch a cold or the flu. Get and stay healthy starting today.