By Camille Noe Pagan

If weight loss came in a pill, the list of side effects might include “May cause shortness of cash” and “Some users experience a loss of friendships.” After all, that’s what happens when you spend half a paycheck on healthy food and pass up happy-hour invites so you can avoid the bar snacks. And those side effects aren’t just misery inducing, they’re self-defeating too: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that people who turned these pitfalls into excuses were up to 76 percent less likely to lose weight than those who figured out ways around them. This advice will help you battle the bulge without missing a beat of your life.

Lose Weight, Not Friends

Ever notice that the day you announce you’re starting a new diet, your friends go AWOL? Here’s why: Cutting calories causes your level of serotonin (a feel-good brain chemical) to nosedive, leaving you cranky and unpleasant to be around.

To keep your serotonin levels in check, figure out how many calories your body needs based on your activity level. And make sure those calories are split evenly among protein, whole grains, and produce at every meal.

“Unbalanced meals—made entirely of refined carbs, for example—cause blood-sugar fluctuations that make you irritable,” says Caroline M. Apovian, M.D., director of the Nutrition and Weight Management Center at Boston Medical Center.

Apovian also recommends adding omega-3 fatty acids to your diet, because research shows that they may fight depression and slow digestion, which helps you stay full longer. (Try eating two or three three-ounce servings of salmon a week, or adding a tablespoon of olive oil, canola oil, or flaxseeds into your daily meals.)

Lose Weight, Not Money

When you’re on a diet, you expect your stomach to be on the empty side—not your wallet. But researchers at the University of Washington found that the cost of healthy, nutrient-dense foods like whole grains and lean meats has increased nearly 30 percent in the past four years, while candy and soft drinks have gone up only 15 percent.

One money-saving tactic: Eat less meat. “Meat is one of the priciest items on a grocery bill, and most Americans eat more of it than they should,” says Dawn Jackson Blatner, R.D., a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and the author of The Flexitarian Diet. Plus, meat is a source of excess calories and saturated fat.

Most women can slash around 15 percent of their daily calories by sticking to one or two servings of meat a day, estimates Blatner. Fill the void with fiber-rich foods like beans, oatmeal, and brown rice, plus hearty veggies like portobello mushrooms and eggplant. All of these will fill you up for a fraction of the calories and cash.

Lose Weight, Not Time

In a recent study, 41 percent of women cited “not enough time” as the reason they don’t eat better. Spending just an hour or two on the weekend shopping for a week’s worth of healthy meals and getting a jump-start on the prep work (cutting veggies, making marinades) will save you time and pounds in the long run. A survey by the CDC found that almost 40 percent of people who lost a significant amount of weight and kept it off planned their weekly meals.
“When you don’t map out your meals, you’re too tempted to grab whatever’s nearby, which is often high-calorie junk,” says Elizabeth Ricanati, M.D., founding medical director of the Lifestyle 180 Program at the Cleveland Clinic.

Lose Weight, Not Muscle

If you drop weight without lifting any, you risk shedding muscle tissue instead of fat. Muscle takes more than twice as many calories to maintain, and it keeps your metabolism revving at peak calorie-burning speed, so it’s important to hang on to it, says Donald Hensrud, M.D., an associate professor of preventive medicine and nutrition at the College of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic.
Your best strategy is to eat lots of protein and strength train for 20 to 30 minutes two or three times a week. Protein will fuel those workouts and help you maintain lean muscle, says Hensrud. Eat at least three or four servings of two to three ounces of protein-rich beans, soy, fish, lean meat, poultry, or low-fat dairy every day.

Lose Weight, Not Your Lifestyle

Watching your waistline doesn’t mean you have to become a recluse who spends every spare moment on the elliptical machine. In fact, an all-or-nothing approach is counterproductive. “Many women make changes they’ll never be able to stick with—like eating nothing but raw food or vowing to go for a run at 5 a.m. every day—and set themselves up for failure,” says Hensrud. “Total deprivation doesn’t work.”

He advocates skipping extreme regimens in favor of small changes. When he asked a group of overweight study subjects to make several small lifestyle shifts—such as eating breakfast, having as many veggies as they’d like with each meal, and watching TV for only as long as they’d exercised that day—they dropped an average of eight pounds in two weeks. “When you combine a bunch of little strategies, the cumulative effect can be huge, and you won’t feel as if you’ve given up your entire life to be slim.”

Original Article: http://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss/diet-rules?cm_mmc=Yahoo_Health-_-Your%20Body%20On___%20A%20Detox-_-Article-_-Weight%20Loss%20Tips%20That%20Don’t%20Suck

Decades ago, around the time of Steven Tyler’s last haircut, a completely wrong-headed idea started being passed around America’s dinner tables: Eating fat makes you fat.

Wrong. Eating fat won’t make you fat, any more than eating money will make you rich. Calories make you fat, and most “low-fat” or “fat-free” foods actually have just as many calories as their full-fat versions, because of added sugar and chemicals. And there’s no debate on this one: Since we made “cut down on fat” our favorite food craze roughly 30 years ago, the U.S. obesity rate has doubled. Among children, it has tripled. That’s a failed food policy if ever there was one.

But it’s just one of many “get fat” habits that can be turned into a “slim-down” habit, starting today. All you need is a pinch of resolve and a few new routines. Here are the 20 habits you can replace right now . . .

#1: Eating “low-fat”

It sounds crazy, but stop buying foods marketed as low-fat or fat-free. Typically, they save you only a few calories and, in doing so, they replace harmless fats with low-performing carbohydrates that digest quickly—causing a sugar rush and, immediately afterward, rebound hunger. Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that meals that limited carbohydrates to 43 percent were more filling and had a milder effect on blood sugar than meals with 55 percent carbohydrates. That means you’ll store less body fat and be less likely to eat more later.

#2: Not seeking nutrition advice

Good news here: By reading this, you’re already forming habits that can help you shed pounds. When Canadian researchers sent diet and exercise advice to more than 1,000 people, they found that the recipients began eating smarter and working more physical activity into their daily routines. Not surprisingly, the habits of the non-recipients didn’t budge.

#3: Sleeping too little or too much

According to Wake Forest researchers, dieters who sleep five hours or less put on 2½ times more belly fat, while those who sleep more than eight hours pack on only slightly less than that. Shoot for an average of six to seven hours of sleep per night—the optimal amount for weight control.

#4: Eating free restaurant foods

Breadsticks, biscuits, and chips and salsa may be complimentary at some restaurants, but that doesn’t mean you won’t pay for them. Every time you eat one of Olive Garden’s free breadsticks or Red Lobster’s Cheddar Bay Biscuits, you’re adding an additional 150 calories to your meal. Eat three over the course of dinner and that’s 450 calories. That’s also roughly the number of calories you can expect for every basket of tortilla chips you get at your local Mexican restaurant. What’s worse, none of these calories comes paired with any redeeming nutritional value. Consider them junk food on steroids.

#5: Drinking soda—even diet!

The average American guzzles nearly a full gallon of soda every week. Why is that so bad? Because a 2005 study found that drinking one to two sodas per day increases your chances of being overweight or obese by nearly 33 percent. And diet soda is no better. When researchers in San Antonio tracked a group of elderly subjects for nearly a decade, they found that compared to nondrinkers, those who drank two or more diet sodas a day watched their waistlines increase five times faster. The researchers theorize that the artificial sweeteners trigger appetite cues, causing you to unconsciously eat more at subsequent meals.

#6: Skipping meals

In a 2011 national survey from the Calorie Control Council, 17 percent of Americans admitted to skipping meals to lose weight. The problem is, skipping meals actually increases your odds of obesity, especially when it comes to breakfast. A study from the American Journal of Epidemiology found that people who cut out the morning meal were 4.5 times more likely to be obese. Why? Skipping meals slows your metabolism and boosts your hunger. That puts your body in prime fat-storage mode and increases your odds of overeating at the next meal.

There’s a scene in the 1973 movie Soylent Green where food shortages cause people to riot in the street, and the throng becomes so unruly that front-loading construction machines roll in and begin shoveling people up into big metal buckets. These people are hungry—no, ravenous—for a food called soylent green. But here’s the twist: They know that they love soylent green, but they have no clue what it’s made from.

Sound familiar? It should. That’s basically how we eat today. Okay, we’re not rioting in the streets, but it’s rare that we fully understand what’s in the food we’re eating. Pick up a random package in the supermarket and look at the ingredient list. Chances are you won’t know half the ingredients. Of course, Soylent Green is just a movie, and we eventually learn that the food that people are rioting for is made from dead humans.

Fortunately, no food company has yet to put the deceased into our Cornflakes or Pop-Tarts, but that doesn’t mean we’re completely safe from the dangers of mystery. Take a look at the gross, disturbing, and downright frightening facts Eat This, Not That! 2012 has uncovered. You may never look at food the same way.

1. Your food can legally contain maggots, rodent hair, and insect eggs.

The FDA allows certain “defects” to slide by. Have a look at what your food can carry:

• Canned pineapple can pack in up to 20% moldy fruit.
• Berries can harbor up to 4 larvae per 100 grams.
• Oregano can legally contain up to 1,250 insect fragments per 10 grams.
• Cinnamon can carry up to 1 milligram of animal excrement per pound.
• Ocean perch can harbor small numbers of copepods, parasites that create pus pockets.

2. Nutritious food costs 10 times as much as junk food.

University of Washington researchers calculated the cost discrepancy between healthy food and junk foods and found that 2,000 calories of junk food rings up at a measly $3.52 a day. Yet for 2,000 calories of nutritious grub, the researchers plunked down $36. To add insult to fiscal injury, out of every dollar you spend on food, only 19 cents goes toward the stuff you eat. The other 81 percent goes toward marketing, manufacturing, and packaging. Think about that the next time your grocery bill jumps into triple-digit dollars.

3. Grocers don’t have to tell you where your salad comes from.

With fresh fruits and vegetables, supermarkets must tell you the country of origin, but with dried fruit and mixed produce, the law isn’t so strict. That means a mixed bag of salads isn’t required to disclose its location, and that can create problems if there’s a bacterial outbreak. News reports might warn you about E. Coli-tainted spinach coming from a certain country, but if your spinach is packaged with other greens, you’ll have no way of knowing if it’s in your bag. That’s a huge problem considering leafy greens top the CDC’s list of foods most commonly associated with food borne illness.

4. Fruits and vegetables are losing their nutrients.

According to the USDA, the fruits and vegetables we eat today may contain significantly fewer nutrients than those our grandparents ate. Researchers looked at 43 produce items and discovered drops in protein (6 percent), calcium (16 percent), iron (15 percent), riboflavin (38 percent), and vitamin C (20 percent). Your move: Eat more fruits and vegetables.

5. Calorie counts on nutrition fact labels aren’t accurate.

Researchers at Tufts University recently analyzed 269 food items from 42 national sit-down and fast-food restaurant chains, and they found that nearly 20 percent of samples contained 100 or more calories than reported by the restaurants. Think about it like this: If every meal you eat has 100 more calories than you need, you’ll gain more than 30 pounds this year.

6. Chicken today contains 266 percent more fat than it did 40 years ago.

What’s more, today’s chicken also has 33 percent less protein, according to a study from the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Metropolitan University. The problem is modern farming practices. Cramped environments and unnatural diets produce birds that have the same weight problems as the humans who eat them.

7. Milk contains hormones that may cause cancer.

In 1970, a typical dairy cow could produce about 10,000 pounds of milk per year. Today, that same cow produces roughly 20,000 pounds. So did cows change? Nope. It’s their feed that’s different. Today’s cows are routinely fed a hormone called recombinant bovine somatotropin, or rBST. Problem is, studies have linked rBST to a multitude of cancers, including those of the prostate, breast, and colon. And while milk from rBST-treated cows is ubiquitous in America’s supermarkets, some of the biggest players are getting wise. Stores like Whole Foods, Wal-Mart, and Kroger only carry rBST-free dairy.

8. Conventional supermarket peaches can be coated with as many as nine different pesticides.

Because peaches are prone to bruising, blemishing, and insect takeover, they’re routinely soaked in chemicals in the weeks before being shipped off to the supermarket. That’s why the Environmental Working Group rates peaches among the dirtiest conventional fruits in America. Also on that list: apples, celery, strawberries, and spinach. As a general rule, unless the produce has a thick, impermeable skin, assume it’s soaked in pesticides. Now wash it with water and mild soap before you eat it.

9. You’re probably eating trans fat without knowing it.

Slack FDA regulations allow food processors to claim zero trans fats even if the food contains .49 grams. To be clear, that’s .49 grams per serving. That means by the time you finish, say, an entire bag of Cheetos, you might be ingesting nearly 5 grams of trans fat. Sure the bag says “0 GRAMS TRANS FAT” right on the front, but if you look at the ingredient statement, you’ll see partially hydrogenated oil, the primary source of trans fat.

10. The number of daily calories available to each American has increased by 500 over the last 40 years.

USDA data shows that the food industry supplies 2,700 calories to every man, woman and child in America. In 1970, that number was 2,200. That increase translates into 52 extra pounds of fat per person, per year.

11. Commonly used food dyes can alter your kids’ behavior.

Researchers at the University of Southampton found that colors such as Yellow #5, Yellow #6, and Red #40 could cause hyperactivity in children. Ironically, foods marketed to children are often the most heavily dyed foods in the supermarket.

12. Your stomach bug is likely food poisoning.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that every year, 48,000 Americans receives food poisoning from contaminated food, and that puts a $152 billion strain on the economy. What’s worse, an astonishing 3,000 of those people die. Where’s the problem? Click ahead to find out.

13. Forty-two percent of raw supermarket chicken is contaminated.

In a study by Consumers Union, the driving force behind Consumer Reports, 12 percent of tested chickens were infected with Salmonella, and nearly half carried Campylobacter. Campylobacteriosis is one of the most common causes of food poisoning in America.

14. Gulf Coast oysters carry E. coli.

When researchers from Arizona tested Gulf Shore oysters, they found E. coli in every single sample. As filter-feeders, oysters naturally sift through the pollutants in the water, increasing their risk of contamination by pathogens. If you’re buying oysters from anything less than a highly trusted source, make sure you cook them through.

15. The USDA is allowing your meat to be “cleaned” with ammonia—and they’re hiding it from you.

The typical fast-food burger is made with slaughterhouse trimmings, fatty cuts of beef typically reserved for pet food and cooking oil. What’s more, these burgers contain pieces of hundreds, potentially even thousands, of different cows. This creates an environment where bacteria thrive, so to clean the meat, the USDA allows a company called Beef Products to pipe the raw beef through pipes and expose it to ammonia gas. Never mind that ammonia is a poison or that evidence suggests the process may not be fully effective. The USDA deems it safe enough, and it allows the meat to be sold without any indication that it received the gas treatment.

16. Aluminum cans are lined with a hormone-disrupting toxin.

Bisphenol A, or BPA, is the chemical found in plastic bottles, glass jar lids, and the lining of food-containing tins and cans. In your body, BPA acts similar to estrogen, and it has been linked to behavioral problems, reproductive issues, and obesity. The industry has been slow to find a replacement, so limit exposure by switching to glass containers or plastic bottles labeled BPA-free.

17. Roughly two-thirds of bottled water doesn’t comply with FDA standards.

When the Food and Drug Administration set bottled-water regulations, it left in one gaping loophole: The regulations apply only to bottled waters sold across state or country borders. Bottles packaged and sold within a single state don’t have to comply with national standards. Although many states do have their own set of (nationally unregulated and unrecognized) regulations in place, one in five have none. Furthermore, government and industry estimates figure that 25 percent of water bottles sold in the US contain mere tap water. You should be so lucky as to end up with one of those; the FDA’s rules are far more lax than the tap water standards set by the EPA.

18. We drink twice as many calories today as we did 30 years ago.

The average American drinks 450 liquid calories every day, according to a study from the University of North Carolina. And booze isn’t the problem. Blame the bigger bottles of soda, the sugar-loaded coffee drinks, and the barrel-sized smoothies.

19. Fast food signs alter your behavior

A study published last year in Psychological Science reveals that the mere sight of a fast-food sign on the side of the road is enough to make people feel rushed, which can lead to impulsive decisions—and dangerous nutritional choices. Sidestep your impulses the next time you eat out: Plan your order before you walk through the door and then stick with it.

20. There are crushed bugs in your food.

Carmine, a vibrant red food colorant, is actually the crushed abdomen of the female Dactylopius coccus, a beetle-like African insect. Not only is the thought of eating bug juice gross, but it also poses an ethical issue for some vegetarians and vegans. Look for it in red-colored candies and juices.

Original Article:http://eatthis.menshealth.com/slideshow/20-scariest-food-facts?cm_mmc=Fit_Life-_-ETNT-_-The%207%20Biggest%20Food%20Label%20Lies-_-20%20Scariest%20Food%20Facts