What I’d like to get across here is my strong conviction that weight loss has to be done with the emphasis on health.

The opposite of “healthy”…

I heard of one woman who lost weight by eating one peach a day and drinking one cup of black coffee. I know of a man who ate mainly baked potatoes and little else for several months.

Both developed serious health problems not surprisingly. Clearly, neither of them was thinking about what was best for their body.

With all the confusing and conflicting information that abounds in the press and on the Internet, I can see why many people are bewildered about what constitutes healthy nutrition.

Healthy basics

However, if you cut through the hype and the sensational press reporting, the core advice coming from nutritionists has been consistent over the years.

Eat lots of fruit and vegetables; eat wholegrains rather than refined foods like white bread; cut down on unhealthy saturated fat from animal products and replace it with the good fats found in oily fish, seeds and nuts. Reduce tea, coffee and sugar, and enjoy alcohol in moderation.

Boring, some people say.

But think about it do you really need to eat kebabs and get drunk every night in order to be an interesting person?! How about living a healthy, energy packed life instead, where you actually do lots of interesting things? Sounds better to me!

5 Ways To Change The Way You Think About Weight Loss

1. Ditch the diet.

Think health rather than weight loss – concentrate on delicious healthy food rather than the latest slimming fad. Fad diets are bad news for your body, are impossible to stick with for any length of time, and are based more on what will make healthy profits for others rather than a healthy body for you. Avoid them.

2. Respect your body.

Realise what a marvellous creation your body is, how hard it works for you – and resolve to treat it with respect, by ditching unnatural and unhealthy eating regimes. Instead, feed it nutritious and delicious food that will help it to function at peak performance. Think of those exciting life goals that you’ve always wanted to do – kayaking, travelling, whatever you want to achieve – and how much easier they will be if you’re slim, fit and bursting with energy.

3. Set realistic goals.

Decide on a target weight and a realistic time scale in which you’ll achieve it. Don’t attempt too much too soon. That just leads to a vicious cycle of yo – yo dieting. You probably took some time to become overweight, and it won’t resolve itself overnight – that’s just not realistic. Take things slowly and steadily for best results, ones that are more likely to be permanent.

4. Learn about nutrition.

Many people know very little about what their bodies need to function well and there’s a lot of misinformation bandied about in magazines and on the Internet. Make sure you know what foods are good for the body and will help you become slim and trim. A good book is Patrick Holford’s “The Optimum Nutrition Bible” . By learning about nutrition, you can set the foundation for healthy eating and weight control…for life.

5. Think long term.

If you’re keen to lose weight, you need to think beyond the need to fit into a bikini on your next holiday, or your wedding dress. Picture yourself as slim and healthy 10, 20, 30 years and more from now and really believe that you can achieve it. If weight loss is to succeed long term, you need to think long term, and that involves changing the way you think about food…for ever.

This article was written by Maggie Nutt , a qualified nutritionist and Health Coach.

Losing weight seems to be the most difficult task anyone can undertake.

Women, for example, can expect to spend more than £150,000 during their lifetime on trying – and failing – to get in shape.

A huge 98 per cent of dieters fail to lose weight in the long term and the average UK female spends £807 per pound of lost weight – only to regain the weight, and then spend another £807 on losing it again!

This might sound overwhelmingly negative, but don’t lose hope because there is an answer – and one that’s so much easier and more pleasant than dieting.

Break Free

If you have problems with controlling what you eat and are stuck on the yo-yo dieting treadmill, there are several things you can do to break free and start looking to a future where you’re mentally and physically healthy, in control of food and feeling good about yourself – at the same time as losing weight.

Here’s how you can begin to let go of dieting and make some real changes in how you think and feel about food and weight.

You don’t have a weight problem: you have an overeating problem

The first step in succeeding at ‘losing weight’ is to look at the real problem, as most people never actually do this. You’ll probably have always measured your success in weight loss but if you are to find a real solution, you will have to understand and acknowledge that being overweight is just a symptom of the real problem. The actual problem itself is the action of overeating.

Most overeaters eat compulsively. Compulsive overeating can’t be dealt with by dieting to lose weight. That’s why so many try and fail.

The only sane and sensible thing to do is to stop concentrating on trying to lose weight and focus your efforts on learning how to stop overeating. Your weight (and your health) will take care of itself.

Paradoxically, dealing with overeating – not weight – is the ONLY way to lose weight in the long term.

Become self responsible

Another problem with dieting is that it takes away your self-responsibility and you end up not making ANY decisions at all. The ‘diet police’ decide what you should eat and how much you should eat and you follow the instructions like a robot.

If you’ve been dieting for a long time, you might have no idea how to choose how to eat for yourself. This means that you’re always looking for instructions from outside about what and how much to eat.

You might have no real idea, for example, when your body needs food, might not even know what hunger feels like or if you are hungry you might feel panicky because your diet says you’re not ‘allowed’ to eat until later.

Whenever you make a choice about anything in your life what do you do? You weigh up the pros and cons. You think: ‘I could do this or that.’

Then you ask yourself: ‘What’s the best outcome for me? Which one of these is better for me?’

Then you decide which one you want to choose based on which one has the most advantages for you.

Imagine if someone else took over all of your other decisions and you couldn’t choose anything without some sort of instruction book or some method that you have to live by.

By the book

Imagine if you took the same amount of self-responsibility as you do about eating when you’re deciding who to marry, for example?

‘Darling, will you marry me?’

‘I don’t know, hold on a minute I’ll have to flick through my copy of the South Beach Lifestyle to find out. Plus, my counsellor says I should abstain from all marriage because once I start I won’t be able to stop.’

That’s how odd it is that we live in this strange ‘diet’ world because all of our decisions about food are taken from something OUTSIDE of us. We are not deciding anything for real.

All real decisions are based on free will and choice. If you don’t act on your own free will, you will continue overeating for the rest of your life, constantly looking for someone else to give you some sort of solution to your problem.

Realise that no amount of wanting weight loss will impact on your overeating and see that compulsive overeating can’t be controlled by a weight loss diet.

A compulsion is exactly what the name suggests it is – you are compelled to overeat against your will, and that comes about as a response to dieting.

2. Replace weight loss as a measure of your success with how happy you feel on a daily basis

This is an instant reward and you don’t have to wait for it like you do with weight loss. If you feel you’ve eaten well and not overeaten, really focus on how this makes you feel in the now.

Future rewards such as weight loss are much less likely to remain strong motivators than immediate ones like daily happiness levels. Make this immediate reward of instant increasing daily happiness your main motivation to stop overeating.

3 Be self responsible and make your own choices

Choices about food must be made based on what’s best for YOU. Not someone else’s diet plan. Cutting out any food because someone else advises you that it’s bad for you or makes you gain weight will only make you crave and you will give into those cravings compulsively.

Compulsive overeaters who try to cut out chocolate, for example, eat more chocolate than people who don’t restrict it. Sometimes chocolate is exactly what’s best for you - because nobody else in the world (apart from dieters) thinks that what’s best for them is only about health.

What’s best for you does actually sometimes include your own pleasure. (And very luckily for us, most healthy food is also pleasurable.)

If you don’t see the reasoning behind this think about a world where you’re forced to eat only chocolate, pies, chips and crisps and all fruit and vegetables are strictly off limits. What foods do you think you would desire the most?

Eating a broad range of foods is essential if you want to stop overeating. Variety and enjoyment of the food that you eat will help you to stop feelings of deprivation and the compulsion to overeat will calm down.

4. Build up self trust

When you get used to making your own choices and listening to your own wants and needs, you can then work on building up evidence that you can be trusted around food.

Every time you make a good decision you are learning to trust yourself, meaning you’re more able to relax around food and not let fear of loss of control take over your mind.

When fear takes over it leaves you feeling stressed and anxious, and this can make you shut down and overeat compulsively. Remaining clear headed around food is the result of self responsibility and self trust, which leads us on to step 5…

5. Eat mindfully

As often as you can, be mindful and focus on the experience of eating. Concentrate on taste and texture and feel how much or how little you’re enjoying the food.

This will give you an indication of whether you want to carry on eating or not or if you really like this food enough to try it again. When overeating compulsively, it’s easy to block out the experience to get the food down as fast as possible.

Remaining aware will help you with the other four steps: focusing on eating and not weight, using happiness as a measure of success, being self responsible and building up self trust around food.

All of which will leave you well on your way out of the overeating trap, and the result of that is inevitable weight loss. Voila!

But one component of that plan often overlooked is health.

How can you expect to find those much-needed extra reserves of energy and to excel with razor sharp focus if you don’t first prime that body for action? In short, you gotta get fit and raise those energy levels.

The “H” Word

I’m always amazed when asked to list the most important areas of life, some folks put areas like career, finance, relationships, etc, ahead of that all important “h” word – health!

It even, on occasion, misses the list altogether!! Yet without good health we simply don’t function. Without being considerate and giving our body exactly what it needs to work at its optimum level how can we expect to get up and go anywhere?

Whatever plans we may have laid will be thwarted by lack of energy, because let’s face it; what “oomph” we need normally is doubled at times of change.

Get Up And Go

But how can you implement health as an important area in your plans to recharge? Firstly by acknowledging that optimum health can exist, but doesn’t just “happen.”

Let’s face it, good health and limitless amounts of energy was something we enjoyed as teenagers, but now even though it’s still possible to feel that same sense of vitality and stamina, nowadays it will usually be the result of a bit of a plan.

“Life leaps like a geyser for those who drill through the rock of inertia.”
Alexis Carrel

Question Time

1. What plan for health do you have at the moment?
2. Are you a member of a health club?
3. Do you swim?
4. What about nutrition?
5. Do you eat your five portions of fruit and veg a day?
6. Do you take supplements?
7. What do you do to improve your work-life balance meditate, practise yoga or tai chi?

And we haven’t even mentioned alternative approaches yet. Take a moment to write down your current physical shape.

Are You a 10 out of 10?

How would you rate your overall level of fitness (between 1 10, where 10 is tops)? Ask yourself:

• What physical exercise have you done during the last week?
• How many hours did you exercise for?
• How would you rate your current diet (1 -10)?
• When did you last eat your five portions of fruit and veg in one day?
• What feelings or thoughts do you attach when thinking about all of the above?

Change The Frame

Richard Bandler, one of the founders of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) suggests that what we associate to something is the defining factor to how we feel about it. For example, if I say “London,” some of you might think “interesting, fun, beautiful,” whereas others might think “dirty, busy, and dangerous.” Yet you’d both be talking about the same place.

The difference would be your interpretation; how you frame London in your mind. So, if I were also to say the word “healthy lifestyle,” some might think “vibrant, sexy, having the ‘wow’ factor,” whilst others would associate “boring, restrictive, or no fun at all.”

Raise Your Game

Looking back to the answers concerning your current levels of fitness, and how you answered and subsequently thought about you and your health, did you feel good, or not so good about it?

How would you feel if you raised your game on what you thought concerning health and fitness in the future?

If you were to start a new fitness regime, or recharge the one you already have, how would you feel about it. Or what would you have to feel about it in order to increase your desire to do it? What frame are you seeing now? Is it the “oh, my God” picture, or one saying “bring it on”?

If the former and the prospect of moving up a gear turns you off, ask yourself what you’d have to think in order to change that belief?

Could you include something along with it that you already like?

For example, if you don’t like the thought of running alone (“boring, lonely” might be your association), what about running with a friend? Imagine the chatter you could get up to.

Accentuate The Positive!

Or maybe you could join a health club and watch Eastenders whilst doing your 10km on the treadmill three times a week as thousands already do.

The thing is, to give whatever you decide to do in life a chance of succeeding, you have to attach as many positive thoughts on to it as possible.

So, in the future when you think “running” you think “best friend, beautiful park, favourite TV soap,” not to mention loads of “newfound energy and enthusiasm,” which soon take over as the primary factors once we’ve got through the first couple of weeks.

Think ditto for eating habits, sleeping, meditating, etc. Healthy equals sexy, fun, friends, interesting, energy – the list really does go on. Stodgy food would also however, equal “heavy, bloated, and lethargic” and I’m sure you don’t wish to feel anymore of that.

“Each one of us has a fire in our heart for something. It’s our goal in life to find it and to keep it lit”
Mary Lou Retton

A B=C

So, why is the subject of health so important, especially when you want to recharge our life? Simply, because to succeed and find that new burst of enthusiasm and energy for life you have to begin with good foundations.

The thing that will get us out of bed in the morning is a good night’s sleep. What gives us energy for the day is optimum nutrition. Yet it’s having a healthy body that will allow both to happen.

You don’t have to be Olympian, just upgrade a few notches from where you are now and believe me; you will feel the difference within a few days. And with that new burst of energy you will see that re-charging the rest of you life is absolutely 100% possible!

Five Tips to Recharge Your Health

1. Do A Health Inventory On Yourself

Go through all the areasof your health from nutrition, to exercise, to energy levels, and see how you shape up. Are your energy levels there already? If not, what is stopping them or dragging them down?

Remember, knowledge is power. Honesty is the watchword here. Give yourself the gift.

2. Switch To Unleaded

…metaphorically speaking, of course. We all know that our cars not only run more easily without that nasty old leaded fuel, but the environment breaths a sigh of relief, too.

So, what can you do to unclog that saggy old energy you’ve been lugging around? Would it be to detox? If so, there’s a huge array to educate and help you on your way, from a Boots home kit, to a weekend at your local Champneys health spa. What would the first step be for you?

3. Good Nutrition Is The New Black

Think vibrancy, a silky new sheen to your skin, think sexy new you. How? Food. Fresh, fresh, fresh and cut down massively on processed anything.

Again, a great source of information is the whole series of “You Are What You Eat” books by the brutally honest Dr Gillian McKeith. Now there’s even the cookbook! I’ve tried it and liked it and yes improving your diet with her suggestions does improve your health and stocks of energy.

If you’re not a reader, get the DVD. If you don’t like Dr Gillian, do the whole food stock-take yourself. From now on when you visualise a fresh, nutritional meal let it be framed with a Hollywood “just won the Oscar, darling” tag. You’ve got the newfound energy; now flaunt it.

4. (S)Exercise!

Well, doctors do say it’s the best form of exercise, uses all the main muscle groups, AND burns the most calories… but apart from that of course, check out your local gym or health club, call your friends and arrange tennis, squash, badminton, jogging, power walking, country walks the list really is endless.

Remember, health need not be a lonely business but a reason to socialise and increase your circle of friends.

5. Set A Target

I know, this last one doesn’t sound sexy at all… but I had to include this one since it’s probably the most important of all. Commit to weekly and monthly targets, keep them listed everywhere around the house, tick them off as you complete each (3 or 4 ticks per week for the gym, etc) – and if you do happen to fall off the wagon get straight back on.

That’s right; even if you fall flat occasionally don’t give health up as a bad job. Just get back up, don’t think too much about it, and don’t beat yourself up as to why you stopped. Simply dust yourself down, put your track shoes back on and off you go again.

Equally, if you splashed out on a big greasy burger, eat a carrot or have a fruit shake it really is as simple as that. You will be sending a very strong signal to yourself:

• “I may have lost that small battle, but I’m winning the war”
• “I mean business!”
• “I’m resolved, andI’m effective”

And with attitudes like that you can do anything!

But many don’t stop to think about putting the same effort into helping their body perform better.

It’s difficult to be all fired up and enthusiastic about new projects if you don’t feed or exercise your body properly, so that it ends up under par and lacking in energy. Now that Spring is here, why not take some time to consider giving your body a bit of a boost?

As a nutritional therapist, I see lots of clients who could benefit from a Spring clean of their bodies they’re suffering with low energy in energy, dull skin, sluggish bowels… not good. Now is an ideal time of year to think about what you can do to help your body spring into better health.

That doesn’t have to mean a proper detox there’s plenty you can do on a regular basis to have an internal Spring clean, and put a spring in your step!

Five Steps To Internal Spring Cleansing

1. Drink lots of water – for healthy skin, guts and mind

Water is vitally important on any plan to spring clean your body – it has to be. When we want to clean the outsides of our bodies, water is involved.

Your insides are no different. Water is needed for your guts to function properly and if they’re not working, you won’t get too far with the rest of your Spring cleaning!

People who drink more water report glowing skin. Furthermore, just a small degree of dehydration can lead to brain fog and lack of energy. Keep a large bottle of water on your desk, and make sure you drink it all!

2. Take a good quality probiotic – keep your insides healthy

Those cute little bacteria that live in everyone’s guts play a vital role in our health. They keep bad bacteria at bay, keep the gut walls healthy and help our immune system, amongst other things.

They can easily come under fire, however, from stress, use of the contraceptive pill, antibiotics, and many other factors. To keep yours working well, consider taking a good quality probiotic supplement for a couple of months.

I don’t mean commercial yoghurt style drinks – they tend to be full of sugar and have the wrong sort of bacteria in. Go to your local health food shop and get a supplement, either in capsule or powder form, which has at least 2 billion of the little critters in. Take it regularly – your insides will thank you for it.

3. Up your intake of fruit, vegetables and fibre–rich foods

Now I know you’ve heard this all before, but it can’t be said often enough – fruit, vegetables and wholegrain foods are where the healthy stuff’s at.

For anyone wanting an internal cleanse, they’re full of fibre, which acts a bit like a broom in your guts, to put it crudely. Low fibre diets lead to constipation – and it’s well nigh impossible to have an internal spring cleanse if you just can’t go to the loo!

Aim for 5 portions of fruit and vegetables per day at the very least, more if you can. Switch to wholegrain bread, rice and pasta – they’re much tastier, and you’ll notice a difference in the toilet! As you increase your fibre intake, up your water intake as well, to keep it all moving along nicely.

4. Make sure you get enough essential fatty acids and other nutrients

There’s no point getting your guts, skin etc all healthy and spring cleaned if your head’s feeling woolly. Many people don’t eat enough essential fatty acids – the good fats found in oily fish, nuts, seeds and green leafy vegetables.

These fats are vital for good brain function, but will also benefit your skin and joints too. B vitamins are essential for energy levels, both mental and physical, and yet are quickly reduced by factors such as stress.

Take a good quality multivitamin and mineral (you get what you pay for here – don’t go for the cheapies) to help boost your energy levels and make you want to leap into Spring!

5. Reduce convenience foods and meat

I know we all lead busy lives, but convenience foods can’t feature heavily on the menu of anyone seriously wanting to give their bodies a Spring clean.

Despite the hype that’s starting to appear on the manufacturers’ packaging (“Low fat!” “Good for you!”) they’re still full of additives and often too high in fat, salt and sugar. Try cooking more meals from scratch – there’s plenty of cookbooks for those who need to cook meals quickly and without fuss. Healthy eating doesn’t have to mean hours in the kitchen, cooking complicated stuff. It’s possible to get a healthy meal, cooked from scratch, on the table in 30 minutes and in many cases in less time than that.

Meat isn’t good for anyone wanting an internal Spring clean either. It’s tough for the body to digest, so takes ages to move through the gut, and there’s no fibre in it – heavy meat eaters often suffer bad constipation. Switch to other protein sources – fish, nuts, Quorn, tofu – or reduce the quantities of meat that you serve up and pile more vegetables on your plate instead. People who reduce their meat intake often report significant improvements in their health.

This article was written by Maggie Nutt , a qualified nutritionist and Health Coach.

Chill out. Take fifteen minutes once a day to do nothing. Genius loves solitude. Give yourself some down time to get in touch with the real you.

Step Two

Enjoy your desire. Identify one of your heart’s desires and allow yourself to want what you want.

Step Three

Lift your spirit. Plan something that you can guarantee will leave you feeling more hopeful, positive and optimistic.

Step Four

Take Flower remedies. Dr Bach formulated Gentian to renew enthusiasm, Wild Oat to sharpen instinct, Larch to enhance confidence and Mimulus to encourage joie de vivre. Take as per the bottle and enjoy the lift – all natural, legal and available at a health store near you!

Step Five

Take a risk. Do something that scares the pants off you. Then give yourself a treat. Make it two!