The Alternative Health Gazette

Obesity and Weight Loss

You may or may not know this, but Americans are fat. Grossly fat in many cases - and let’s not pull any punches here, “obese” means grossly fat. And the problem just keeps getting worse from one day to the next.

Having a lot of extra fat on your body causes a huge number of health problems. In fact, it’s more than reasonable to say that being fat causes most of the health problems we know about today, and many others we’re not even aware of yet. Obesity is an epidemic that grows for both children and adults each and every day. And that epidemic keeps leading us further and further down the road to serious health problems.

Obesity is such a problem in today’s society in fact, that it’s now common place to see weight loss reality shows on tv. And the sad thing is, kids and adults alike will sit and watch those shows instead of getting up and doing something about their own weight problems.

There are though, many ways to lose body fat. All of the approaches work well, but they all take time, effort, commitment, and sacrafice. And that’s where some of the major obesity problems of today come from unfortunately… Everyone wants instant gratification. So they eat microwaved meals, or buy a burger and fries at a fast food stop. They wolf down ready made cakes and pies that come in little celophane wrappers while watching TV, or they munch on candy and drink sodas like there is no tomorrow.

Everything most people eat today is “ready made”, or “instant”. And those conveniences are putting on pounds faster than we can even see.

The growing problems with obesity in today’s society stem from many things though. One major problem of course is the convenience foods we already mentioned, and another is mis-information. Decades ago for instance, the general public was told to stop eating foods which were high in fat. So they complied. The problem though, is they started supplementing their diets with empty calories instead. You can go to the store and look in the candy isle for instance, and you’ll find many sugar laden sweets which advertise in big bold letters on the packaging: “No Fat!” or “Low Fat!”. As if somehow that means the candy is healthy for you.

Another problem of course is being satiated from the meals and snacks we eat. When you cut fat drastically low or eliminate it all together from your diet, you’ll find yourself hungrier more often throughout the day. This is because fat actually helps fill us up and keeps us satisfied for longer periods of time. That doesn’t mean you should go the opposite directions and eat all high fat foods either though, because there are both good and bad fats.

Now another source of mis-understanding or mis-information is the generally accepted FDA food pyramid that most people grew up with. This pyramid was designed with the best intentions, but it was interpreted badly over the years. Carbohydrates in the form of bread products was said to be the primary types of foods we should eat. Now, back in the 1940’s or 1950’s and earlier, this may have been quite true. But back then “bread” was a lot different than it is now, and back then people did a lot more manual labor than they do today. Manual labor equates to exercise and muscle building. And when you have a lot of physical activity in your life, your body needs and uses those carbohydrates.

Today though, “bread” has nothing like grains or fiber in it. In fact, what most people call bread doesn’t even have any vitamins or nutrition in it unless something has been added. This is because manufacturers strip out all of the good nutrition, then they add fake synthetic stuff back in.

Activity levels are also quite different today than they were 50 or more years ago too. Instead of working our bodies each day, we work our minds instead. There is nothing wrong with working the mind of course, but due to the lifestyle changes we now have, we need to work harder at exercising our bodies or we need to change our eating styles. Ideally we should be doing both.

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