Archive for the ‘weight loss’ Category

Canada has been struggling to keep up with a significant increase in obesity related illnesses in recent years.  This problem is causing a great deal of financial strain on the healthcare system that was nationalized some decades ago therein.  Recent information as of 2008 indicates that roughly 4.2 million Canadian adults are now obese.  This is over 17% of the entire population residing in Canada, and represents a serious public health risk.  Many people are thinking about weight loss surgery to tackle these problems, but there are many risks to this sort of treatment.  Even if Canada’s obesity rate is about half the US’s by proportion to their population, it’s still a serious problem that’s harming their healthcare system and straining their resources.  Many provincial governments, however, are now offering to cover weight loss surgeries (such as bariatric treatments) in the hopes it will help people control their weight gain.

Most provinces of Canada, for example, think of obesity as a disease.  Treatment for obesity, as a natural result, is going to be considered to be a necessary thing to treat patients.  Things such as lap band surgery or gastric bypass are very common and typically covered by insurance as mandatory by the health system.  Not every single location will cover these treatments, and these methods are not always the most reliable at producing significant bodily changes that last.  Research on patient outcomes years after such surgeries are not universally positive.  Many people actually (well over 70%) fail to even achieve long term success even after such an expensive and dangerous procedure.  Still, this does offer one of the more effective long term weight loss treatments, though it is very invasive and costly.

Insurance and Medicare Payments for Obesity Surgery

Weight Loss Surgery the Real SkinnyWhen and if your insurance, or Medicare wind up paying for your surgery, you will often be waiting a long time to get into your doctor to have it done.  It can even take several years before a doctor has time to do so.  In Canada, this is a serious problem, much worse than state side.  The Ministry of Health in Ontario for example will pay for gastric bypass, but tries to actually send them to private weight loss facilities instead to cut down on backlogs.  It’s not always possible to do this and varies considerably.  In the USA, typically you can choose your doctor (so long as he’s willing to accept government issued insurances) and they will complete the surgery.  Most private insurance policies in the USA do not cover obesity related surgeries, though in some circumstances they do.  Demand for this procedure is high, and only specialists are able to do it, so typically the costs out of pocket can run into the tens of thousands.

Today more than ever in history, obesity is impacting our nations and our livelihoods.  If you want to go the weight loss surgery route, you will often find support from insurance, the government or otherwise.  However, do realize that this isn’t just a quick fix, you need to make real wholesale changes in your diet as well.  Many people who go through these surgeries fail to achieve long term weight loss results.  It may seem incredible that someone could reduce the size of their stomach by 95% and still gain weight, but it’s possible if people force themselves to eat foods that are poor quality and unhealthy.  The goal here is to cut down on your hunger so that you can sustain a healthier lifestyle.  This is a drastic step as well, you should try other proven obesity treatments as often as possible prior to diving into something invasive like lap band surgery.   It’s very important to consider all of your options and start out with other proven methods like HCG or Garcinia or similar first.

There is a variety of different weight loss methods out there, each with their own advantages and disadvantages.  Though it’s tough to shed the weight you’ve accumulated over the years, it’s still possible to do so.  People may think it’s just a matter of exercising or dieting that will do, and this is certainly a way to do so.  However, recent studies clearly show that people who try to lose weight on their own almost never succeed in keeping it off in the long term.  In fact, a new study on yo-yo dieting found that doing so is actually harmful for people, and almost everyone gains all of the weight they lost back in the end.  There are huge obstacles to overcome, both in metabolism and appetite, that just cannot be accomplished easily on your own.

A new diet has been introduced in recent years, based upon a method Dr. ATW Simeons designed in the 1950s.  It uses the natural HCG hormone, produced by women during their monthly cycles, to enable people to quickly lose weight and get in shape.  Losing weight using this method  is significantly improved over just dieting or exercising.  Recent studies show that a diet involving administration of HCG each day to a user will result in roughly 500% more rapid weight loss than the baseline.  This enables people to avoid crash diets that don’t produce results nearly fast enough.

What Exactly is the HCG Weight Loss Program?

The HCG diet is broken up into three phases, each designed to maximize results.  Most people who go on this method will lose half a pound of weight or more each and every day during phase two.  This is what it’s designed to do.  It helps increase metabolism and decrease appetite naturally, allowing for people to lose weight quickly and safely.

Whenever you start cutting calories out of your daily food intake, your body will attempt to adjust metabolism to compensate.  This is why so many people will lose weight for the first few days or weeks when dieting, but then hit a wall.  Their metabolism has almost completely shut down and they’re struggling to burn stored fat.  This leads to frustration rather rapidly.  The HCG hormone prevents this from occurring entirely.  It naturally boosts activity in the brain’s hypothalamus increase metabolism and decreasing appetite, even with a lower calorie diet.

An HCG Success StoryThe original protocol (and the modern approach) mandate three phases: loading, very low calorie diet, and maintenance phases.  They do vary depending on the diet you choose to work with, as the more modern protocols allow for more leeway in what foods can be eaten and if exercise can be done on the diet.  The loading and maintenance phases are basically the same universally.

The HCG diet is recommended by more physicians and healthcare professionals than any other, because of its rapid results.  However, many people simply cannot deal with daily injections (or in many cases, afford them).  In recent years there’s been a push to introduce natural HCG drops, such as the world renowned hcg drops plus, which offers the same dosage of the hormone but at a much more reasonable price.  Rather than spending several thousand dollars on a treatment using injections, people can start this diet with a PURE product for much less with oral drops.  These products are placed under the user’s tongue and held there until it’s absorbed into the mouth.  People who use this lose just as much weight, so long as what they use is real HCG.

Unfortunately, it’s not always the case that products contain the real hormone.  Many products out there are fake and homeopathic, though they market themselves as if they were the real thing.  Real products will always be alcohol-free, contain at least 150 IUs per day of the hormone, and require refrigeration.  The fakes almost never have these qualities.

 

People have been using coffee to help them lose weight for thousands of years. When it was first discovered by European explorers, it was made into bitter tea style drinks. However, large scale monopolies controlling it quickly developed, as it was found to have potent effects on users, including increased energy and heightened sense of awareness. The substance may have started as a small Ethiopian berry producing bush, but it’s now the most consumed beverage in the world. Though coffee was discovered by Europeans at a much later date, it’s thought to have first been found and used by the Ormo people sometime around one thousand years ago. The process of roasting it wasan’t developed until much later, but eating the raw berries provided many of the same benefits as roasting. However, through the roasting process the caffeine is concentrated significantly for drinking.

Benefits of Unroasted Coffee Beans

Naturally Green Coffee BerriesNew research has actually found that coffee beans, if they are unroasted, possess many unique and beneficial antioxidants and minerals.  During the roasting process, much of this is lost due to the temperatures involved, but as it turns out the natural beans are much more healthy for people to consume.  Green coffee beans cannot really be used for drinks, however, as they don’t work the same way.  The roasting process frees up much of the caffeine and oils allowing them to seep through into water during brewing.  Green coffee doesn’t have this happen as the extract is not able to be brewed in this manner, and the antioxidants are preserved without roasting.  It’s just not possible to eat green coffee itself as it’s unpalatable.

The impact of green coffee on the body has been well studied in recent years.  New research indicates that users are much more likely to lose weight with green coffee than with any other natural oral supplement.  In a recent study out of Birmingham University they found that people who took green coffee supplements every day lost on average 15 pounds per month, without any changes to their diet.  This was far more than 1 to 2 pounds lost by the placebo group.  This was attributed to several different substances found in green coffee.  An appetite suppressant compound known as polyphenols are found in abundance in green coffee beans.  In additional a particular kind of acidic mineral is found in abundance which helps boost metabolism significantly.  These are lost when the coffee is roasted.

Green Coffee is widely available online, but not all supplements are the same as far as quality goes.  It’s imperative to check any products which you take to ensure that they contain a high enough dosage to work.  In studies, at least 500mg two times per day was given for the results to be seen.  This is a good starting place though there’s no clear boundary on how much can be taken each day.  You wouldn’t want to do huge amounts because of the caffeine and other energy boosting minerals in green coffee, but there’s no strict limitation.  Green coffee should be 100% pure typically.  If other things are included this is not usually helpful and can be a detriment to your diet.  It’s also not too expensive generally, so don’t pay over $30 even for high quality ingredients as it’s not that expensive to manufacture the supplement to a high standard.

 

Have you ever managed to actually lose weight and keep it off in the long term?  How long does it last before you’re gaining weight again like there was never any weight loss in the first place? Do you ever achieve any sort of long term success that lasts more than a few months?  If you’re like most dieters you probably answered no to all of these questions.  However, this doesn’t mean that these things are impossible.

In spite of all of the compliments received, or how awesome you felt, the weight just creeps back over time.  It’s horrible, and there’s not much most people are able to do about this on their own.  They need treatments that are both proven to work, but also proven to keep the weight off in the long-term.  Even if you try your best on your own, there are just some mountains you cannot climb.

You want to stay happy and thin because it feels so great, but far too often it feels like a bad dream that you cannot wake up from.  You cannot keep the weight you’ve lost off, you cannot achieve the results you deserve and you cannot stay thin over a long period of time.  You almost need to hypnotize yourself to stay that way.

Long Term Weight LossAfter putting considerable effort into exercise or dieting, you look back on how you achieved it.  You probably felt motivated looking in the mirror every day and weighing yourself.  However, these things are temporary.  When you hate something about yourself, it’s easy to change it with strong motivation to do so.  Once you achieve the results, however, that hatred goes away as does your motivation.  How is it that you cannot stay that way? Well it’s no surprise when your primary motivation disappears.

What you’re doing is ensuring your own failure as soon as you begin thinking about success as this linear approach.  Success is not going from one point to another and once you arrive that point, ignoring how you got there.  You need to design something around your goals that not only lets you get there, but lets you stay there.  You need to generate a long term goal, and maintain a long term strategy.

If it’s possible you gained weight through a type of self hypnosis about being fat, then doesn’t it make sense you could do the same about being thin instead?  There’s certainly evidence to support this approach and enable someone to lose weight and keep it off over long periods of time.

Changing Your Mindset is The Key

Undergoing a type of mental training that is required to achieve these kinds of results isn’t easy.  A lot of research and time has been spent towards this goal in studies and research and it’s difficult in almost all instances to achieve results.  People need to lose weight but also need to change their mindset.  Rather than thinking about the end results, they need to think about the progress and how to get there from the start.  Once they reach their goal, that’s just the start of their work.

Many people have made the claim that you can use hypnosis to help you lose weight and change your mindset to one similar to how “thin” people think. It may be possible for this to work, but what is far more likely is that it will give you a false sense of security.  You need to fundamentally change your underlying motives, and think of yourself as beautiful and a valuable person.  You need to make this attitude a part of yourself, and change your perspective directly.

It’s worth mentioning that that these changes can be made prior to even reaching your weight loss goal.  You can make them early on in your dieting and they will stick with you throughout the program you’re going through.  It’s important to consider a fundamental change based approach to weight loss, so that you lose weight in the long term, and keep it off later than you would otherwise be able to without this change in attitude.

Just like your hatred for your body can be a motivation factor, so can your love of yourself being an equal motivation factor.  If you change the way you view your body and view yourself, you can achieve much more than you could just by making a goal of losing weight.  Losing weight is a challenge, but it’s one that people can overcome on their own with good planning and a good attitude.