A diet is basically a change in lifestyle for a certain period of time. Most people define it as temporary, maybe a few months, maybe a little over a year. But basically you make the adjustments to lose weight, and then after that you can go back to certain other ways, because you have lost that weight and achieved your general goal. This leads to many fad diets, because frankly to really lose weight, you have to be able to sustain that diet for the rest of your life. This is why the HCG diet doesn’t work. I met with my dad’s friend the other day, and he looks amazing. He looks tired to say the least, but he looks really skinny, and he basically told me he is within 10 pounds of his goal weight, which I told him is great. But it basically requires a 500 calorie diet, which we discussed is obviously something that would help you to lose weight anyway, and realistically it should actually be helping you to lose more than a pound a day, while it’s not particularly healthy. He said the idea was that you wouldn’t be hungry while you were doing it. But I thought about it, and honestly they also put in the stipulation that you basically only eat certain nutrient dense foods. So if you are following the diet they recommend, you wouldn’t actually be hungry, because the ones they recommend are extremely filling while being extremely low in calories. It’s a scam, and frankly the HCG hormone slows down the weight loss they really should be achieving. But my biggest worry is what happens when he stop using the diet. I mean he’s a smart guy, a lot of people using the HCG diet are smart, that’s what blows my mind, that they can’t think about this for themselves.

Now this is an original one. They are now saying that you can lose weight through prayer. This sounds like the Bible diet or whatever it’s called where you apparently follow the diet that Jesus used or something like that. But they describe your body as a temple that you have defiled by eating junk food, overeating, etc. That part is a good idea for greater motivation among other things. But they mostly talk about overeating and all the damage it does. So how are they going to help you to reduce this habit? Apparently they start you out with fasting. Fasting is actually healthy every once in a while. You don’t eat for a day, drink a lot of water, and it cleans out your body to some degree. Then you go into healthier eating habits after that. But where does prayer come in? Apparently, it helps you to relax and focus instead on your divine purpose and your body how it should be. I am skeptical for reasons I’m sure most people can understand to say the least. I mean yoga has been used for relaxation, but it hasn’t really been used by many successful people for weight loss. Prayer doesn’t even really exert any energy, or at least not with most people I’ve yet seen. So what do you really do with that.

There are so many fruits and vegetables out there, but some of them are just not that great.  Avocados are great.  There are some diets that eliminate them.  But with all the good fats, vitamins, and minerals that they have, you should never actually eliminate something like avocados.  Likewise, things like strawberries and cantaloupe should likewise never actually be eliminated.  They are extremely good for your body and will give you various benefits that you really want.  However, on the other hand, iceberg lettuce for one is completely useless.  It is completely devoid of nutrients, and while it is low in calories, those nutrients are what make a vegetable or fruit really good for you.  Otherwise, you are just really wasting your time and efforts on empty calories.  This is obviously something you never want to do.  But the biggest thing is to focus on actually actively finding those fruits and vegetables that actually have the nutrients, that aren’t giving you empty calories.  Just because it’s a fruit or vegetable does not make it automatically healthy, this is just something to remember when adjusting your diet.  Otherwise, you will obviously be in a bigger mess than you otherwise would be.

I am disappointed in some ways in a close friend who has decided to push a family member on the idea that they have to lose weight.  That family member is short, just under 5 feet and she weighs about 110, which really is not bad, it’s healthy.  But at the same point in time, he has challenged her to drop under 100 pounds.  Now it is plausible.  At her height, she could without question drop under that weight and realistically be fine.  But does she really need to?  I mean she’s honestly fine right now.  But she has been using the slimfast diet to do it, because apparently she’s decided it’s a good idea.  She drinks only those, and she ends up losing weight, because when you only drink your calories, you will lose weight, it’s a simple fact of life.  But the question is what happens when she stops buying Slimfast drinks, when she actually starts eating regular food again.  We’ve tried to tell her that she should just follow a healthy diet plan and it will come off slower, but it will stay off and it’s a lot healthier, as we saw with Oprah on one of her diet things.  But realistically speaking, she won’t listen.  So I guess it’s a matter of wait and see.

Staying healthy is extremely inexpensive.  Unless you are buying blueberries for every meal, frankly fruits and vegetables are not that expensive, and the energy breakdown is much smaller.  So you actually get a greater amount of energy from the same sized piece of fruit than you would from a piece of meat for example, especially red meat.  Red meat is also full of other fat and calories in general, and it can cause other problems.  When foods are processed as much as they are in many sections you think you pay less for but actually pay more for, you end up eating more, because many of the nutrients are lost, much of the energy content is lost, etc.  And of course, all the medical bills you pay later on for not keeping up your health can be quite detrimental to say the least.  Bu tall in all, you have to remember that staying healthy is actually significantly cheaper.  And even if it’s just because you are eating fruits and vegetables rather than paying for prepackaged foods in general, you will be able to lose more weight and your grocery bill will be significantly smaller.  You don’t have to have an expensive gym membership, go to the whole foods stores that charge you a bundle, etc.  There are various options available to you.

Now I recommended to my sister in law the other day that if she wanted to lose a few pounds, she just do a fruit detox.  It’s basically a week of eating unlimited fruit, but nothing else.  It cleanses out your body, but it should only be done for a week.  It was then said that I’m not enabling him to get energy drinks, because she has been bugging him to get off them anyway, and they’re unhealthy either way.  But at the same point in time, he’s now upset that he only gets to eat fruit for the next week.  They were originally going to go on a long term diet of only fruits, vegetables, and lean protein anyway.  So it’s just one week before that.  But I knew that he would try to cheat anyway.  So I personally think it’s funny.  Actually, I already caught him drinking an energy drink.  But the way I figure it, in terms of motivation, you have to want it for yourself.  He says he wants to diet from time to time, but he doesn’t really care, and therefore whatever people say to him, he’s not going to extremes whereas if somebody says things to certain other people, they might go to extremes.  But I will be interested to be sure if she can actually make him diet in some ways, though I’m not sure how it will work out exactly speaking.

In theory at least, skin is elastic.  But it loses its elasticity of course as you age.  So if you are losing significant amounts of weight, usually 100 pounds or more, your skin is going to sag to some degree.  And if you are older when you do it, your skin is far more likely not to bounce back in general terms.  Unfortunately, this is obviously not too appealing to women and men who want to lose weight, but they don’t want to look like their skin is falling off of them.  A small amount of sag is not exactly acceptable, but you can handle it.  But a large amount of sag is obviously something different.  People tend to have a harder time with this concept.  If you want to avoid it, the best thing to do is to use a lotion that increases elasticity as you actually lose weight so it has time to work gradually along the way instead of having to treat a later existing problem.  However, otherwise, you will just be counting your luck and trying your hand at things in general.  Frankly, I wouldn’t particularly suggest testing your luck.  Its chances of coming out negatively are relatively considerable.  However, you can definitely find something that is more of a sure bet.

Now if you have a serious stomach virus, I can guarantee that you are going to lose weight.  In one case, and this was a really extreme case, over the course of a few hours, he actually lost about 35 pounds.  He gained it all back within a couple weeks, because basically he was on the toilet and otherwise throwing up simultaneously for a few hours strait, which severely dehydrated him among other things, and it is not a healthy way to go or a substantial way to go in terms of actually keeping the weight off, not that it wasn’t scary to look at him.  He didn’t need to lose weight and really couldn’t afford to lose weight in the first place.  But it’s truly amazing how much he actually had stored up in his body to lose at that point as far as things that he could lose in that way rather than having to burn off fat or otherwise.  The body is made up mostly of water and there’s stored options, so it really shouldn’t be that big of a surprise.  But that is something that I thought about the other way, and I realized that there are actually people out there desperate enough to lose even temporary weight that they would actually consider putting themselves through something like that to get it.