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This week is National Women’s Health Week. National Women’s Health Week empowers women to make their health a top priority (1).
Nearly half the world’s population is made up of women. Think about the amazing women that have impacted your life: your mother, grandmother, sister, wife, etc. These influential women have molded you into the person you are today. Without women, humanity would be lost. Women are responsible for the continuation of human kind; we make the world go round. We are strong, beautiful, intelligent beings, but statistically speaking, not as healthy as we should be.
An estimated 42 million American women live with heart disease, approximately 9 million have diabetes and nearly 47 million have a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30 (2). Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in the United States (3). In fact, more women die each year from heart disease than men. Women also hold the highest percentage of overweight and obesity in the US. Heart disease, type II diabetes, and obesity are all preventable diseases, yet our numbers continue to escalate. We need to become more aware of what we put in our bodies. For instance, a simple dish, such as Caesar salad, thought to be healthy. As the creamy Caesar dressing enters your mouth and begins the digestion process, the carbohydrates are quickly absorbed. The sodium will then release into the body causing a rise in blood pressure. As the food travels to the stomach, fat will begin to breakdown and enter the blood stream. Once fat has entered the blood stream it can either be stored as energy, or can become a culprit of heart disease. If we do not utilize our stored fat, we will begin to gain unwanted weight. This can lead to obesity which can then lead to type II diabetes. It is a vicious cycle, so choosing your meals wisely is vital to living a healthy life.
Lack of physical activity and poor eating habits are top contributors to an increased risk of disease. We need to honor our health and decrease the prevalence of preventable disease. Let’s make a change! Women need to make health their TOP priority, not just for this week, but forever. Without change women will continue to hold the first place trophy for diseases, such as; obesity and heart disease. I don’t know about you, but I would prefer better statistics than we currently display. Empower women to take action, “It’s YOUR Time”! With increased awareness, proper education, and adequate tools we can start an upward climb towards healthier living. Let’s take a stand for our health.
Here are some tools to utilize for healthier living
If you need assistance with weight loss, or are looking for customized meal plans and exercise programs, order your weight management DNA test kit from GenoVive today.
For more information visit: http://www.genovive.com/
Currently, more than 67% of Americans are overweight and greater than 34% are obese. Nutrition related illnesses have become epidemics. Large portion sizes remain a leading contributor to our heavy lifestyles. Portion distortion is an inaccurate image of what a serving size should be. We have stretched our portions so far from reality it’s like looking though a magnifying glass.
In our society we want our money’s worth, especially when it comes to food. The expected visual consists of towering food, spilling over the edge of our plates. The advertising companies persuade our minds into believing we need more food, but our bodies relay a different message. A factor we don’t realize is the amount of money we will soon be spending on insurance and hospital bills, if we don’t already. The cost of healthcare is high, yet we are still gorging ourselves full of food sending us straight into a healthcare crisis. The leading causes of death in the US, such as; obesity, heart disease, type II diabetes, and certain types of cancer can be preventable, but we must start by understanding portion control. With proper diet and exercise, we could gain control over this outbreak.
Our portions have evolved over the past 100 years. They have grown in size, increased in calories, fat, and sodium. We have supersized every avenue of food. If you go to a restaurant and order a 12 oz. steak, you are getting 3-4 servings of meat. Order a bowl of pasta from an Italian restaurant, and you are looking at roughly 6 portions of starch. If you stop by an ice cream shop, and order a small cone with 2 scoops you are consuming around 4 servings of ice cream. We see these portion distortions at restaurants, grocery stores, and even family meals. When a personal pan pizza has enough to feed 2 or 3 people, we should be alarmed. If we were served a true portion of food it would not satisfy the eye or the stomach. By changing the way we look at portions, it will become acceptable to our individual nature. It might take longer for some individuals, because the human body has different approaches to how we metabolize food. These limitations need to be met, or the endless downward spiral of overweight and obesity will increase the death toll of humanity.
How much is enough? Serving sizes vary from food group to food group. It is recommended, depending on your genetic makeup, to consume 2-4 servings of fruit, 3-5 servings of non-starchy vegetables, 2-3 servings of low fat dairy, choose whole grains over refined grains, eat lean protein, and use fat sparingly. Here are some quick tips for measuring a proper portion.
So what does this look like? Learning to eyeball correct portions of food will benefit your health. Start with measuring your portions. Note what a true portion looks like on a plate. Try not to let portion distortion enter your mind. Once you have measured your food for a week, try to guess the correct portion, then measure to check your judgment. It will soon become second nature.
Visuals:
The true question is how do we peel ourselves away from this lifestyle? If you are struggling with your weight, you can start by making a commitment to yourself. Food is for fuel and enjoyment, but too much food can cause your health to suffer. Once you get the distortion out of your mind, you will be able to portion food appropriately and hopefully it will lead to a healthy life free from disease. The more we continue to live with portion distortion the higher our overweight rate will rise. Be committed to your health and make the change today. Portion control is crucial to eating a healthy well-balanced diet.
This blog has provided you with general guideline to healthy eating and weight loss. If you want a more specific meal plan based on your genetic profile, try a DNA test from GenoVive.
As Americans, we want things bigger, brighter, bolder, better. We want everything to stand out amongst the crowd. We strive for perfection, even when we know perfection is unobtainable. We have brought this mentality into our food industry. Stop and look at the brightly colored food stored at our grocery stores. Electric pineapples, bloodshot meats, neon candies, and florescent cereals. When we walk through and pick up a vibrant orange or a juicy red steak, are we getting just that, or are we really eating synthetic dye or artificial food coloring?
The visual appeal of food seems to determine the price these days. The more eye appeal, the higher the dollar. Should we be worried that our food looks like it jumped out of a High Definition Television? The Florida Department of Citrus confirmed that Red Dye No. 2 is allowed, and used, early in the citrus season when the fall nights aren't as cold as necessary to develop the desired orange color (1). Why are we doing this to our natural food source?
What are these synthetic food enhancers? Artificial food coloring consists of chemicals used to add color to food; it is often added to processed foods, drinks, and condiments. Manufacturers add dye to add color to colorless foods, enhance colors, avoid color loss due to environmental elements, provide consistency when there are variations in the coloring of the food, and add color to "fun" foods. Food colorings are used to maintain or improve the appearance of the food (2).
Artificial coloring has been linked to hyperactivity, changes in metabolism, and even more serious conditions. Yet we still allow this synthetic product to be placed into our food and our children’s food. Europe has banned artificial dyes because they have been linked to behavioral issues. Dr. David Wallinga, from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, stated he believes that the science is there for customers to be concerned, saying that the dyes mess with metabolism. He also added that yellow dyes deplete zinc levels enough in some kids to cause hyperactivity and some of the dyes include petroleum products, which he says have been shown to increase the risk for cancer. Here we are, aware, and still allowing them to be in the majority of our food sources.
Even as a dietitian we are taught that food is “REAL” food. Food that is natural, free from preservatives, antibiotics, hormones, artificial dyes and sweeteners. We assume the food we purchase, is “REAL” food. But it is challenging to find “REAL” food in the US today. Food that has not been altered with chemicals or artificial products.
We know it can be challenging to navigate food labels. Which is why GenoVive is dedicated to providing you with the best quality all-natural foods, free of artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. It’s real food to provide the fuel you need for successful weight loss.
Artificial food dyes are found in thousands of food products. It is going to be challenging to eliminate them, but one way to start is to empower yourself with knowledge. We have other sources to color and enhance our food, such as; caramel coloring, beet juice, and saffron. Yet, we choose not to utilize our natural color sources. As a dietitian, I would like to challenge you to read your nutrition facts and ingredient list. When choosing your food, remember to choose natural, no preservatives, minimally processed, antibiotic/hormone free meats, food free from artificial dyes and sweeteners. Choose “REAL” food, not the material we have created for the sole purpose of marketing and money. By understanding the nutrition facts and ingredient list you have taken another step towards a healthier life. If you can read, understand, and recognize each word as a “REAL” food source and not a chemical or artificial additive, then that food should be safe. If you read the ingredients and you can’t get through the first half of the list, I would advise you to put it back on the shelf. The question will arise, what about produce? We will not know until they start labeling it.
My tips to you are: buy local, organic, grow your own, or know where your food came from, ask questions, it never hurts, and take charge of your health. Pay attention to the food you put into your body and your families bodies.
Food is for fuel, and if we are using artificial fuel, our bodies will not run as efficiently. We need “REAL” natural foods, so choose wisely.
Natural food colorings:
Ingredients to avoid:
References:
Did you know that May is National Strawberry Month? It’s the perfect summer treat to share with your family. Of course you’re watching your macronutrients while on your GenoVive Customized Meal Program, but strawberries make a great healthy treat to enjoy while you lose weight and they’re healthier than you might think.
A cup of strawberries has only 50 calories and is naturally fat, sodium and cholesterol free. A cup of strawberries has more Vitamin C than an average size orange. They’re also delicious and kid-friendly, making strawberries a great alternative to serve the next time your kids ask for cookies or candy.
If you’re on the GenoVive OCC or OFCC customized meal programs, you should save most of your strawberries for an occasional treat or on your free day. A cup of strawberries has 12 grams of carbohydrate but they are also just as tasty when used sparingly, such as one or two berries sliced on your whole grain cereal or a cup of high protein greek yogurt.
Be sure to select strawberries that are bright and plump and include a nice green stem and/or leaves which are a sign of freshness. Have fun and enjoy this all-natural snack and check back soon for more healthy summer treat ideas from GenoVive.
GenoVive is excited to be featured on the award-winning fitness series Get Fit With Leslie with Leslie Hoffman. For years, Leslie has inspired people to look and feel their best with upbeat exercise routines, interviews with medical experts and nutrition segments. On upcoming episodes of Get Fit With Leslie, you'll get an in-depth look at how GenoVive's weight loss program works as Leslie goes inside the lab with Dr. San San Ng to learn why DNA is an important factor in weight loss success and how easy it is to do the cheek swab DNA test. Along with Leslie you'll learn about GenoVive's meal program and the benefits of all-natural foods and see how GenoVive inspired long-term health and fitness goals for one local mom.
You'll also see Leslie's fun weekly workout routines. Watch Get Fit With Leslie weekdays on Cox 4 and twice per week on CST.
Do you ever find yourself roaming aimlessly around the kitchen searching for the unknown? Do you remember coming home from a long day at work heading straight for the refrigerator with no idea why? Have you ever been in a situation knowing the only thing that could comfort you was your grandmothers’ hot apple pie? Understanding physical hunger vs. emotional hunger is an important skill to learn. Boredom, stress, and sorrow are three strong contributors to mindless eating. During these emotional times, we want a quick fix. Food is NOT the answer. It’s only a temporary relief from reality, and when we finally decide to put the spoon down, our problems are still there, staring us in the face. The frequent use of food for love can cause a lot of different health issues, including; overweight, obesity, eating disorders, diabetes, & heart disease.
As Americans, we use food for everything; socializing, entertainment, pleasure, and even comfort. It’s imperative to realize that going long periods of time between meals, without snacks, can also lead to mindless eating. There are no rules saying you have to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, at certain times, each day, with no exceptions. If you decide to eat your favorite ice cream or overeat at your favorite restaurant it doesn’t mean that you have failed a healthy eating plan. Don’t let guilt overpower your thoughts, but most of all, don’t let emotions overpower your eating. Your GenoVive all-natural customized meal program can help you establish a healthy eating routine.
Remember, food is fuel. It has no morals. Food is neither good nor bad. It’s not compassionate or caring. Food is not a friend, a lover, or a therapist. Food is food. We need food to fuel our bodies and our minds. Without it we will not survive, but with too much we can jeopardize our future. A large percentage of people turn to food for comfort. A healthy balanced diet with positive thoughts toward food can be key to a healthy life.
Next time you’re bored, stressed or sad, try to find a coping mechanism other than food. Before you stick your fork in it, ask yourself, am I physically hungry or is my mind hungry? Try taking 10 deep breaths and refocusing your attention to something else, such as; reading a book or magazine, taking a walk, or journaling your thoughts. Motivate yourself to be aware of your body. Mindful eating is an important part of healthy eating. You’re the only you, so be the best you can be and fuel your body well. Every day is a new day; every meal is a new chance.
Tips for mindful eating:
Each morning the coffee pot pulls millions of Americans from the bed and into their kitchens. This is usually followed up by a mid-morning soda, one for lunch, and why not one in the afternoon. We have replaced water, nutrient dense beverages, such as milk, and the most important meal of the day with high caffeine and empty calories.
Is dehydration becoming an epidemic? We have thousands of items to choose from and normally, water is rarely chosen. Consuming water has many purposes, including; transporting nutrients in the blood to working muscles and carrying away metabolic by-products such carbon dioxide and lactic acid. Water can also play a key role in the digestion of food. What happened to all the water fountains? Most likely, a soda machine has replaced the age of water fountains. Even gas stations kept the word "fountain" in their promotion of fountain sodas. Fountain must be one of those thirst quenching words.
Other thirst quenching advertisement comes from that of sports drinks. There are times when high intensity athletes, such as marathon runners, need the fuel of a sports drink. Unfortunately, most of us use sports drinks for their flavor and sugary enjoyment. Although, a sports drink will hydrate the body and is always the smarter choice over a soda. We must remember moderation is key.
Most of us do not get the 8 cups of water a day and probably half of us don’t get 4 cups. Drinking dark soda delivers a double whammy. One is dehydration and the other is phosphoric acid. Phosphoric acid from dark soda pulls the calcium from our bones and puts us at risk for osteoporosis. Research shows that women consuming 3 or more dark sodas per day had almost 4% lower bone mineral density in the hip. Our bodies were not meant for the elusive impact of the dark soda products. It is a threat upon human hydration and what is supposed to be consumed. We should not ingest the chemical components and additional additives from our endless supply of fast refreshments. It disgusts me to know friends drink what other friends use as car battery cleaner. These dark sodas must not be our source of nourishment or more problems shall persist.
As a country, community, and family we must pause to take a drink of water and feel the hydration form. Our addictions to soda and coffee have triggered a new epidemic of dehydration. I think keeping a metal water container close to your side throughout the day is one way of solving the issue. Avoid gas stations and convenience stores except to get gas is a good tip, since rarely anything nutritious comes from the inside of a gas station. I am not sure if we have the power to fully overcome dehydration, but being aware can change our thirst.
Signs of dehydration:
References
1. Soda and Osteoporosis: Is There a connection? By Gina Shaw. (2007). Retrieved July 2011, from http://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/features/soda-osteoporosis?page=2
Exercise would have been a weird concept to people hundreds of years ago. The average life of a worker was very difficult before great advances in industry and technology. Merely staying alive and healthy required an enormous amount of physical effort. Some people barely grew or found enough food to support themselves. Most of us still work just as hard as we did back then, but not in a physical way. Now we have jobs that require enormous amounts of mental energy. We feel just as exhausted at the end of a long day at work, but our bodies don’t burn nearly as many calories as they used to during the day.
This busy but sedentary lifestyle leads to problems when it comes to losing weight. We’re eating the same amount of calories on average as we did many years ago, but we’re moving around a lot less. This leads to a pandemic of weight gain. People who want to maintain a healthy weight really have no choice but to exercise, but since we’re just as busy as we’ve always been, that can be a difficult task. You need to be able to make room in your schedule for exercise while still having time for work, family, household tasks and commuting. There are lots of different ways to do this even though it may require sacrifice.
One of the most popular ways to fit in exercise is to do it right before or after work. This way you can stop off at the gym to or from the office. If you exercise at home like you can on our customized exercise program, fitting in time for exercise can be even easier. You can do your routine while watching the morning news to start your day or listen to your favorite music. Don’t let your busy schedule be an excuse for not staying thin and healthy. Exercise will make you feel great, relieve depression, produce better sleep and help keep your mind focused during the day. Don’t fall into the sedentary trap that modern technology offers you, keep exercising!
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Jenny’s breakfast was wearing off and the thought of lunch was further than she knew. She could feel her hunger pangs coming on strong. On short notice, she was called into a lunch meeting with no lunch; this is when she accepted the fact she wouldn’t eat till home. What she didn’t realize is her body was at risk for hypoglycemia, also known as low blood sugar. Hypoglycemia occurs when your blood sugar is used up too quickly, it is released into the bloodstream too slowly, or too much insulin is released into the bloodstream. In Jenny’s case, she had already used her glucose (blood sugar) from breakfast and was unable to refuel her body.
On Jenny’s ride home from work she could feel her body shaking and her head pounding. With her hunger pangs growing intensely, she knew that missing lunch was not the best choice. Skipping meals is a huge contributor to low blood sugar levels and overeating. Some symptoms of low blood sugar include blurred vision, feelings of nervousness, headaches, unclear thinking, but most of all feelings of aggression.
As Jenny walked in from her long day at work all she could think about was food. She headed straight for the kitchen to eat. Her husband tried to welcome her and she lashed out at him for leaving his shoes by the door. Her children tried to hug her but all she could do was yell at them for not working on their homework. After eating, her feelings of anxiety and shaky hands started to subside. She sat down next to her husband on the couch. She recapped what happened in the short period of time she had been home, and realized how angry and aggressive she was towards her family for an unknown reason.
Hypoglycemia can come on very rapidly or gradually depending on your body, medical conditions, and meal patterns. Skipping meals, waiting to eat your meal, exercising more, and drinking alcohol can contribute to low blood sugar levels. To avoid hypoglycemia, and avoid hunger wars altogether, we must develop a healthy pattern of eating.
Healthy eating patterns may consist of 3 small to medium meals along with a few daily snacks to avoid low blood sugar. Try not to go more than 3-5 hours between meals and snacks. Everyone is unique, so pay close attention to your body’s signs and symptoms of hypoglycemia. Carbohydrates are our main energy source and are found in whole grains/cereal/bread/pasta, starchy vegetables/dried beans, fruit, and dairy products. Carbohydrates help improve our blood sugar levels while proteins and fats help stabilize blood sugar in the body. Eating a variety of foods is very important to maintain a healthy diet.
Next time you feel anxious or cranky, take a step back and ask yourself, “Am I really angry or am I just hungry”?
References:
1. American Diabetes Association. Standards of medical care in diabetes--2011.
2. Hypoglycemia. (2011). Retrieved September 2011, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001423/
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Boredom is one of the leading reasons that people quit their exercise routines. The logic behind this is quite simple. Absent any entertainment or distractions, exercise is boring. Running on a treadmill or using an exercise bike in the same place hour after hour can get very tedious. Thankfully, we live in a technological age where we can bring entertainment with us wherever we go. MP3 players give us access to nearly limitless music while smart phones and tablets let us watch our favorite shows and movies wherever we happen to be. There is simply no excuse in modern times to be bored while exercising.
There are two types of entertainment when it comes to exercising: accompaniment and distraction. Most music can be placed in the category of accompaniment. This is because music can be used to create rhythm and flow during an exercise routine. For example, when you are on a treadmill or elliptical and a good song comes on you often feel the desire to exercise at the same beat as the song. The music also creates a sense of purpose to your workout routine, as if you were Rocky Balboa training to the Eye of the Tiger. Music creates a soundtrack to your routine that gives you the motivation to continue to the end.
Movies and television are in the category of distraction. Rather than becoming integrated in the workout like music does, video has the tendency to distract us from what is going on around us. It forces us to use both our sense of sight and sound to focus on what is happening on screen. Watching a television show or a movie helps us ignore the thumping of a treadmill or our own thoughts of wanting to quit because it’s too hard. Most custom exercise routines can be finished within the scope of a single television episode. You can also break up a movie into three different days of exercise.
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If you’re over a certain age, it’s likely that you haven’t seen a food pyramid in several decades. The food pyramid was a government guide written by the USDA as a guideline for what types of foods Americans should be eating in their daily diet. The pyramid originally focused on a diet heavy in grains, fruits and vegetables while deemphasizing dairy, meat and sweets. This came from a belief that meat and dairy products were a primary cause of the vast increase in heart disease that America was seeing throughout the 1970’s and 80’s.
One of the main criticisms of the food pyramid is that it is difficult to understand. It’s natural for people to read things from top to bottom, so someone reading the classic USDA pyramid may be under the impression that sweets and fats are the most important part of the diet even if the intention is to make them the least important. The pyramid is also bad at conveying exactly how much each type of food should be eaten. People naturally think in terms of percentages and fractions. Figuring out what portions of a pyramid represent certain percentages of a diet requires complex geometric equations that most people aren’t willing to do in their head.
In 2011, the USDA dramatically improved its food recommendations by coming out with a new MyPlate. MyPlate showed recommended food intake through representation on a plate. It showed fruits, vegetables, protein, grain and dairy as roughly equal size on a dinner plate, suggesting how much people should eat of each food group as a proportion of their daily diet. The problem with these suggestions, as was the problem with the pyramid, is that these recommendations still ignore the facts about macronutrients that DNA diets emphasize. They also ignore the fact that we all may have different challenges in metabolizing macronutrients according to our genetic profile.
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In a previous post we discussed how to read the nutrition facts portion of a nutrition label. That information is important for making sure that you are staying within your correct macronutrient balance as detailed in your DNA diet. It’s also important for measuring how many calories you are consuming throughout the day. While the nutrition facts give a nice overview of what is in a single serving of packaged food, the ingredients give you the gritty details. The list of ingredients goes in order from most abundant to least abundant. Specific amounts are not listed.
The ingredient list provides valuable information, but it’s important to realize its limitations. For example, a common ingredient listed for meat products is beef. Cows have lots of parts used for meat and are raised in a variety of different ways. So while the ingredient list may just say beef, we don’t know what part of the cow that beef came from or whether or not the cow was injected with hormones and antibiotics while it was growing. GenoVive uses only antibiotic and hormone free beef in its home delivered meals, but it would be almost impossible to find this information on your average nutrition label in the grocery store.
Ingredient lists are also infamous for including a lot of strange chemicals that most people aren’t really familiar with. Chemical compounds are found in almost all packaged foods. Just because you can’t recognize the name of a certain compound doesn’t mean it is bad for you. For example, some people may not be familiar with folic acid (an ingredient found in GenoVive’s Vegetable Minestrone), which is also known as Vitamin B9. This compound is essential for bodily functions, especially the synthesizing and repairing of DNA. If you are not familiar with a certain compound in the food you are eating, look it up. You may be pleasantly surprised or learn something new.
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All packaged food products sold in the United States are required to have a nutrition label by law, but many people do not know how to interpret the information on this label accurately. There are two main components of a nutrition label: nutrition facts and ingredients. Today’s blog will detail some of the information you will be able to discover in the nutrition facts section.
Serving Size – Pay attention to this closely. This is the weight or volume of a single serving inside a package that may contain multiple servings. Some people mistake the calories and macronutrients listed as a measurement for the whole package. This is rarely the case when it comes to most products from the grocery store. Meals and snacks from GenoVive contain only one serving, making them easy to understand. The following information on a label pertains to amounts that are in only one serving.
Calories – This is a measure of energy per serving. Keeping track of these throughout the day is helpful while you’re watching your weight.
Total Fat – This section lists total fat but also has subsections for saturated fat, monounsaturated fats and trans fat, depending on what the package contains. The percentage of the daily recommended value will also be listed on the right, as it will for all these sections. While you’re on GenoVive’s all-natural meal program which is customized for your DNA, the amount of fat in your program may differ from these recommendations which are general and not based on individual needs. Each gram of fat has 9 calories.
Sodium – Many people can have serious problems with excess sodium intake and there are different schools of thought from leading health organizations about the correct sodium levels. It’s best to consult with your doctor to determine how much salt in your diet is healthy.
Total Carbohydrates and Fiber– As with fat, carbohydrates will have subsections with dietary fiber and sugar. Your GenoVive meal program contains 20-24 grams of fiber each day. Your intake of sugar should be limited as much as possible, but is fine in moderation. Carbohydrates contain 4 calories per gram.
Protein – Great for maintaining and building muscle, protein is an essential macronutrient while dieting. As with the other macronutrients, the percentage of protein you need on your DNA diet will depend on your metabolic needs according to your genetic profile detailed in your GenoVive Weight Management Genetic Profile Report.
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Upon immediate glance the connection between losing weight and getting enough sleep isn’t clear. Sleeping and eating are two different biological functions. We need both to survive, but on the surface the two don’t seem linked in any way. When you look deeper, like many scientists have, there is a very strong connection between how much sleep we get and how big our appetites are. It turns out that the less sleep you get the hungrier you are when awake. This is why getting plenty of sleep on a DNA diet is essential for success.
A recent study by the Neuroscience Department at the University of Uppsala showed that lack of sleep makes the brain hungry. Specifically, the study showed that a specific region of the brain that contributes to a person’s appetite sensation is more activated in response to food images after one night of sleep loss than after one night of normal sleep. This has serious implications for people looking to lose weight on their home delivered meal program. The more a person is enticed by food the more likely they are to cheat and cheat more often. The only way to combat this is to make sure to get a good solid 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night.
Getting enough sleep can be difficult for some people, either due to a busy schedule or from the break in routine that comes from starting a DNA diet. Good sleep patterns depend on stability and a solid routine. The healthiest and most preferred method to getting good sleep is to develop a consistent nightly schedule in which you go to bed at the same time in a darkened and quiet room. Many people like to watch TV as they fall asleep, but such noise can be a detriment to deep sleep patterns. If you find yourself having difficulty falling asleep after using this recommendation, contact a doctor. They may be able to help you find a healthy and natural way to get enough sleep and lose weight successfully.
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Sugar used to be relegated to only special treats and special occasions. It was there for celebrations, for times when a certain food needed a certain kick or character beyond the ordinary. Things have changed with modern agriculture as sugar has invaded almost every aspect of food production. Look at any food label in the grocery store today and examine the ingredients. More likely than not, you will see sugar or its corn derived brother High Fructose Corn Syrup in nearly every packaged food available. The reason why this has happened is complicated and multi-faceted, but the results have been devastating to the health of a nation.
Excess sugar takes on many shapes and disguises in foods throughout the grocery store. Items like candy bars, donuts and ice cream are an obvious source of sugar that most people on diets avoid consciously because they often contain a lot of fat. Items like regular soda, fruit juice and fruit snacks also contain a lot of sugar. Their health effects may not be readily apparent to the uneducated because they are just “liquids” or because they have fruit in the name. Other sugar loaded items are even more devious. Many seemingly unsweetened items like frozen dinners, breaded chicken breasts and bread contain HFCS in order to enhance the flavor of poor quality products. It’s important to pay close attention to labels on foods in order to avoid excess sugar in a diet.
Actually finding items at the store that are low in sugar and HFCS is a challenge all in its own, which is why trying to buy food at the supermarket may not be the best option for finding healthy foods on a diet. A superior option may be to eat through a home delivered meal program like the one offered through GenoVive’s DNA diet. All-natural home meals delivered from GenoVive give you just the right amount of calories, fat, carbohydrates, protein and other nutrients that your body needs for staying healthy and losing weight at the same time. There’s no need to worry about your food being laced with tons of excess sugar and HFCS.
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Before the advent of modern society and mass agriculture, people had to struggle to get enough fuel in their bodies to survive. Sources of food were sometimes sparse and unpredictable. Cavemen and their contemporaries would sometimes have to travel vast distances and face fearsome predators in order to get enough nutrients to keep them and their families/tribes alive. The thought of a pre-historic human counting calories or weighing out just the right amount of bison meat is quite absurd. When food is scarce, you eat as much as you can when the food is available.
Unfortunately, we’ve kept this instinct to over eat into a period of history where food is abundant throughout the modern world. When we mix this abundance with an instinct to eat beyond our immediate needs, a recipe for obesity develops. Many of us can no longer depend on our own body mechanisms to keep a healthy weight. People who find themselves in this situation need a plan of action in order to overcome their evolutionary desires to over consume. Some can do this by pure will alone, but being unable to do so is not necessarily a sign of weakness.
Losing weight in these situations requires a weight loss plan that creates eating habits based on science, not instinct. This requires strict control and the willingness to listen to what the body needs, not necessarily what the body wants. The way that scientists have been able to make this distinction is through the field of study known as nutrigenomics. This field of science is applied to the public through DNA diets, controlling the nutrients we eat which interact with our genes.
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One of the primary ideals of capitalism is the ability of consumers to make choices. This ideal has diffused into a variety of different aspects of life, but none in a more pervasive way than in the food industry. People from only one hundred years ago would be amazed by the amount of choice available in an ordinary supermarket. Consumers are able to choose between large varieties of beef, pork, cereals, oats, frozen dinners, sugar laced sweets, soft drinks and high fat high sugar pastries.
We have been taught from early ages to value choice, but sometimes choice can be our enemy when it comes to weight loss. With almost every product claiming to be healthy in one way or another, we cannot rely on advertising or product labeling to really know what is good for us. Navigating the aisles has become a minefield of products that are anything but healthy. Many can have the complete opposite effects of what we are looking for on a diet. It’s practically impossible to make the right decision in the grocery stores without really knowing what you’re doing with reading nutrition facts and ingredient labels.
Thankfully, the grocery store is not the only option available for food when it comes to dieting. A DNA diet like the one offered through GenoVive offers a home delivered meal program that provides just the right foods in the right portions to help any individual lose weight. What is taken away when it comes to choice is given back in spades through better health, better quality and better results with GenoVive’s all natural foods. GenoVive’s carefully calculated meal program is a teaching tool that helps you learn what to eat, and how much to eat through repetition and developing new tastes for healthier foods over time. Most people on the program will quickly forget about missing choices when they taste the food and start to feel a difference in how great they feel each day.
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Imagine waking up one morning and making the goal to become the President of the United States. If you paid attention to politics or history you would know that you would have to accomplish a lot before this could realistically happen. You’d have to develop positive ties to the community, get elected to local positions, refine your public image, get elected to higher level offices and then eventually get elected as something like a governor or senator, all while establishing a vast network of connections and raising lots of money for campaigns. Only then would you have a realistic chance of being elected president. It’s all about making small victories to form a path to a larger one. It works the same way for losing weight.
Creating smaller goals leads to lots of smaller victories. Let’s say you have a goal of losing 50 pounds on a diet. If that is your only goal, than you will have not accomplished anything until you have lost all 50 pounds. If you, however, create a series of smaller goals to lose 5 pounds, you can accomplish the same end result in the end all the while achieving a bunch of smaller victories. These small victories will provide a tremendous amount of confidence that can snowball into ever greater success.
These small victories are also much more manageable psychologically. The goal of losing 50 or 100 pounds may sound daunting, and that’s because it can be. Losing that amount of weight can take as long as a year or more. Maintaining that kind of motivation over such a long period of time without any goals successfully completed can be draining or depressing. Staying motivated over such a long period of time requires positive thinking and the belief that you can accomplish what you put your mind to on a DNA diet. Achieving a lot of smaller victories is a powerful way to maintain this mentality.
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Up until only a few years ago, I considered fat my worst enemy. Not the type of fat that’s on our body, although I certainly didn’t like that either, but the dietary fat that is present in food. I was one of those people you see in the grocery store intently examining each and every food label and discarding any item that had any more than 2 grams of fat in it. In my mind, every gram of fat I ate would end up as a gram of fat in my body. To eat fat as a food was to become fat as a person. I bought most of the gimmick no fat products that were on the market at the time, even the products that later proved to be very unhealthy.
Even though I was avoiding fat almost entirely in my diet, however, I wasn’t losing weight. Not only that, but I was feeling constantly hungry. No matter how many low fat pasta dinners, snacks, crackers, chips and cookies I ate I felt constantly hungry. What I didn’t realize until much later is that by avoiding fat, I was consuming huge quantities of sugar, which was wreaking havoc on my blood sugar levels. Almost as soon as I finished eating an extremely low fat frozen dinner or snack I was hungry again, leading to almost constant eating. The plan I had put together to lose weight was actually causing me to gain.
This all changed when I finally found someone who knew something about food and they explained to me the magic of olive oil. At first I was put off, because olive oil is nothing but dietary fat. Then I learned that the fat we eat doesn’t just turn to fat in our bodies, it gets converted to energy and we use that energy just like we would from any other food. I also learned that olive oil contains a ton of really healthy molecules like antioxidants, monounsaturated fats and omega-6 fatty acids. These molecules help maintain a healthy body and studies show that they can lead to reduced risk of heart disease.
Even though fat is important to our diet, it’s important to remember that we should consume it in moderation. Fat from sources like fish and olive oil contain a lot of healthy things, but they still contain more than twice as many calories per gram than carbohydrates and protein. I’m glad GenoVive sees the importance of healthy fats and that they include these in their home delivered meals. They also know that these fats should be in the correct balance with the other macronutrient groups according to our unique genetic code. This allows us to reap the maximum amount of rewards from dietary fat without having to worry about gaining weight from it.
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It’s Friday night. And for some people, that means going out with friends for drinks and food at a bar or restaurant. A steady stream of frothing overflowing beer mugs, delectable plumb vodka soaked olives and sweet citrus mixed tequila drinks beckon, but so does the diet plan. “How can I go out and still have a good time without drinking?” we all ask. How many beers fit within my calorie limit for the day, how many margaritas? And it’s not only the drinks we worry about, but the “oh so delicious” greasy bar food: the cheesy potato skins, jalapeno poppers, deep fried artichoke and melted cheese carbohydrate overloads.
Completely abandoning a social life out at bars and restaurants is a significant sacrifice for some, but there are many people that choose to go that route. There are tons of opportunities to socialize and have a great time outside the bar scene. The key to this is finding a social atmosphere that doesn’t revolve around the consumption of alcohol and fatty foods. One of my favorite activities, and one that is becoming increasingly popular for younger people, is movie at home night. This is as simple as it sounds. You get a bunch of friends together at home and watch a movie on the big screen. This allows your friends to drink and eat whatever they want, and for you to enjoy access to your own healthy all-natural foods from your DNA diet.
If you’re serious about weight loss, then you know that you may have to sacrifice certain foods you love in order to reach your weight loss goal. But drinks that contain alcohol are also high in calories and carbohydrates, which may upset the carefully calculated balance of carbohydrates in your meal program. So be sure to let your friends know that you’ve made an important choice to get healthier by losing weight but that you still want to enjoy their company when you go out.
If you’re dedicated to the bar scene and going out, there is still hope. Many establishments nowadays are very conscious of the healthy eater. Some of them go out of their way to offer salads and other light dishes on the menu, so you can enjoy the company of your friends without sacrificing your path to weight loss. On your GenoVive customized meal program, you can have an alcoholic beverage on your “free day”. If you do choose to have alcohol, limit your servings and make the smart choices. If you’re going to have a cocktail, make sure to request diet soda or low sugar juices. Stick to one or two drinks at most. Alcohol not only has calories, but can reduce your inhibition and cause you not to care about breaking the rules of your diet. With good company and sensible snack choices, one drink can be more than enough to enjoy a night out with friends.
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Dessert is one of the most enjoyable parts of life when it comes to eating. During the age of mercantilism in Europe, sweet imports like chocolate and sugar from South America and the Caribbean were some of the most expensive items you could find. Explorers and merchants would traverse huge oceans and combat natives to gain access to value crops and spices to bring back to their royalty and the wealthy elite. Nowadays, any person on the street can buy an ice cream cone or hot chocolate, letting all of us partake in the pleasures of delicious desserts.
With this wide availability of high calorie treats comes a cost. Many of the most popular desserts of our day are loaded with tons of fat and calories: ice cream, milk shakes, pies and cake with frosting. These types of items are ubiquitous in parties, weddings and tons of other celebrations, making them hard to avoid for people who find themselves at these types of functions often. It may sometimes feel like these high calorie treats are the only type of dessert available. This is simply not the truth.
Cultures that do not have ready access to refined sugar or dairy products don’t have the option of making things like ice cream or milk shakes. In many parts of the world, fruit is considered a dessert. Fruit has the benefit of being both very sweet but also relatively low calorie. Many Americans have become desensitized to the presence of sugar in their food and therefore don’t find fruit to be very delectable, but for those of us on a DNA diet that has reduced sugar levels, fruit can be quite the treat. GenoVive’s DNA diet also offers lots of snacks and dessert like items that are both healthy and low in calories like frappes, chocolate chip cookie bars, double chocolate brownie bars and cherry cashew bars.
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Starting a new diet, exercise plan or home delivered meal program can be a huge lifestyle change. It’s not that unusual for some people to feel a wide variety of unpleasant symptoms like hunger or fatigue as their new healthy lifestyle starts to take shape. For some reason, many of our bodies and minds are very resistant to change. You may be one of these people, or you are close to someone who is. One of the fundamental issues with dieting is being able to adapt to new healthy eating habits and make them feel like normal ones. This is easy for some of us, but very challenging for others.
There are a lot of areas of life that offer very important lessons in the area of breaking from old habits. Smokers know all too well the difficulties of quitting an addiction, and let’s face it, some of us really do feel addicted to over eating. Quitting cold turkey is one of the more popular ways for smokers to quit, but quitting eating altogether is obviously not a viable option when it comes to dieting. We can quit eating certain foods cold turkey, especially foods that we know for a fact are very unhealthy: fast food burgers, deep fried starches, foods loaded with fat and sugar. When starting a new weight loss program like a DNA diet, quitting these high calorie unhealthy foods cold turkey is a great way to get used to new eating habits as quickly as possible. Many people make the mistake of trying extremely low calorie diets without the proper nutrients and enough calories to fuel their metabolism, which can lead to feelings of hunger and fatigue. On the GenoVive DNA customized diet, you’ll be eating plenty of real all-natural foods each day at the right calorie level for you.
Another lesson we can learn from people breaking off other addictive habits is that motivation is an extremely important component of success. Smokers find motivation from the knowledge that smoking causes numerous health problems, or that smoking causes stained teeth or a foul odor. Dieters can use the numerous health problems that arise from obesity as motivation to break their bad habits. Many of us respond to positive motivation much better than negative, however, so focusing on future good healthy, feeling thinner, fitter and more attractive are all more powerful than responding to the threat of future illness. Either way, we can incorporate the lessons learned from all different types of addictions to help us succeed in weight loss, ultimately leading us to a far happier and healthier life.
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Jody hated to exercise. Her trainer advised her to work out three days a week, and each of those days proved to be an enormous struggle. She often made excuses not to go, such as not getting enough sleep, not feeling quite right or having too much work to do. While she was able to stick to her routine during the first few weeks, she eventually found herself skipping work outs more and more often before she ended up quitting altogether.
Jody’s problem wasn’t that the exercise was too difficult. In fact, she thrived during the most intense portions of her routine, and afterwards she always said she felt like a million bucks. The problem for her was getting the motivation to go in the first place. This was because she was looking at her exercise routine as if it were a job. She felt as if the gain she was getting out of her routines wasn’t worth the effort that she was putting into it. She needed an additional source of motivation that wasn’t coming from the simple promise to lose weight.
Jody’s trainer advised her to find a workout partner, someone she could enjoy working out with and who she could be accountable too. After talking to several of her friends, she found someone who was not only on a similar type of custom exercise routine, but was trying to exercise through a very similar schedule. Almost immediately Jody started her workout program once again, this time with the company of her friend. Rather than feel the dread of future workouts as if it were a bad job, Jody found herself constantly looking forward to her exercise days. She and her friend often found themselves smiling and laughing throughout their work outs and discussing them fondly after they were over. For the first time she discovered something that not only made her healthier and happier, but something she loved to do as well.
Your GenoVive exercise program has the right level of intensity to match your calorie burning potential according to your genetic profile. The routines are easy to learn from watching the online videos and you can do them at home (with your favorite music or even while you watch TV) or at the gym.
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School lunches have been a big point of concern in the fight against childhood obesity and effort to create healthy kids. Many school lunches of the past were ridiculously unhealthy, containing known sources of fatty foods such as pizza and French fries. Schools sold these products because they were readily available, kids seemed to love them, and they fit within their budgets. For these same reasons, unhealthy and high calorie food has enormous presence in the lunches of everyday working Americans.
Your average office break or lunch room is not much better than the school cafeterias of the recent past. They will often contain a vending machine full of sugar and fat as well as high calorie sodas and fruit drinks. The temptation to purchase these easily accessible treats is sometimes overwhelming on a busy or stress filled day, but when purchasing these items becomes a habit, they can mean a huge obstacle to our weight loss success. That’s why planning ahead and sticking to your home delivered meal program is such a valuable resource in fighting the temptations of the break room.
It’s not only vending machines that are a challenge during lunch, however. Office friends often love to go out to lunch to unhealthy local favorites or big chains that offer burgers, fries and overstuffed sandwiches. But going to these places with your friends doesn’t mean that you have to eat the unhealthy food.
You can bring along the all-natural GenoVive snacks or meals to keep you satisfied, or pick something from the menu that fits within your DNA tested macronutrient balance and has a reasonable amount of calories. Either way, finding a healthy lunch during your busy work day doesn’t have to be difficult. You can also challenge your coworkers to a “bring your own lunch” day and use the time you would have spent traveling to a restaurant to take a walk outside, enjoy conversation, and get some stress relieving fresh air and light exercise.
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You’re probably familiar with all of the popular excuses used by people to quit their diet and exercise plans; maybe because you have used them yourself at one time. I’m too tired. It’s too hard to stick with. The food doesn’t taste good. I’m too busy. We use these excuses because our resistance to change is more powerful than our will to succeed. There is very little truth in them. They are simply rationalizations for our failure of will, something we tell ourselves to alleviate the guilt we feel when we don’t succeed. We can only overcome this problem when we realize that rationalizing against better health is our worst enemy when it comes to losing weight.
A great way to overcome the cycle of excuses is to attack the reasoning behind them head on. The most often used excuse is the claim of being too busy to diet properly. For some reason there is a pervasive myth that it is harder to eat healthy on a busy schedule, or that eating healthy requires an inordinate amount of time. The truth is that eating healthy requires very little time, especially if you are on a home delivered meal program like the one offered through Genovive’s DNA diet. Even after you are done with the full program, cooking healthy meals can take as little as 10 minutes.
The busy excuse is also used to skirt exercise routines. There may be some people trying to lose weight that may not have any time for anything other eating, sleeping, working and taking care of our families. The rest of us, however, spend a lot of time doing things like browsing the Internet, watching TV, drinking coffee, gossiping with friends and other leisure activities that could easily be substituted out for a custom exercise routine. Effective exercise for weight loss can take as little as 30 minutes three times per week, and your custom exercise program will have you doing the routine that is best for your type of body.
Take a few minutes and think about how you are really spending your time each day. You may find more “non-productive” time than you think you have to spend exercising and establishing a routine for better long-term wellness.
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Technology has made our modern lives better in a lot of ways, but in a way it has made things worse. When it comes to the diet world, technology has proven to be both an asset and a detriment. Technology allows us to create vast amounts of food and transport it lots of places, but that makes the ability to over eat much easier. Some of us are especially affected by this, as our bodies tell us to over consume even when there is really no need to. Thankfully, technology has also brought us many tools to help fight our tendencies to gain excess weight.
One of the primary ways that technology has helped the dieting world is through the mapping of the human genome. Thanks to discoveries in molecular biology, we now know more than ever the role that genes play in the processing of food we eat. We also know that individuals metabolize food in different ways. What this means for weight loss and weight management is staggering; because a one size fits all solution to losing weight is no longer viable.
GenoVive is taking advantage of this knowledge in order to construct a diet that is catered to the unique genetic code we all have. Customization is the basis for this comprehensive solution including a home delivered meal program, nutritional supplements and an exercise program. These aspects of the DNA diet will be constructed to help maximize weight loss according to research done in the field of nutrigenomics. Even after you have lost the weight and transition out of the full meal program, you can use the knowledge you have gained about your genetics to maintain a healthy weight and body.
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Dieting is one of those things for people that can be a lifelong problem. This is because eating is an everyday part of life, and thus requires an everyday solution. It is not a problem that can just be ignored most of the time, and only to be caught up with at a later date. Changing eating habits and getting into an exercise routine requires dedication and enough motivation to want to succeed. Without those things, losing weight becomes exponentially more difficult.
Part of the problem for many people is that they simply don’t know what direction to go in. The amount of weight loss foods in grocery stores these days is staggering. They all make fantastic claims like “all natural, zero fat and low carb,” but without context, none of these things mean anything. It’s possible for someone to eat nothing but low fat products in the store and gain weight because of the excess sugar. Losing weight requires more planning than just shopping for products making certain claims.
DNA diets like the one offered by GenoVive try to solve this issue by providing a comprehensive diet plan that includes home delivered meals and a custom exercise program that works with your level of fitness. This plan will provide the focus on a diet that a person needs so that they can focus on staying motivated rather than trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work. This plan will not only work to lose weight, but can be used as a tool far into the future for maintaining a healthy weight and positive eating habits.
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The modern life is a busy one, fully of phone calls, video conferences, driving to and from appointments, meetings, social gatherings, sleep, eat quick meals and all the other ways we’ve adapted to the conditions of modern life. With all of these things going on, it may seem difficult to create time in your schedule for exercise. But just like with most things, when there is a will there is a way. You’ll have to decide whether or not exercise is important enough to push some of the other things out of the way, and if your goal is to lose weight and get healthy, it should be important enough.
The good news is that the GenoVive custom exercise program does not need to take up that much of your time, only up to an hour a day. Most of the exercises can be done in the comfort of your own home by walking in your neighborhood or adapted for use at your gym. Not only that, but they are customized to work at your own level of fitness and designed to teach you about the right intensity of exercise that works best for you. If you have concerns about your ability to do a particular exercise, you should skip it or start slowly with other exercises as you build strength. And always speak with your physician first before starting a new exercise routine.
If you still think that you don’t have the time in your schedule to exercise, it’s time to evaluate the time you spend more carefully. Write down everything that you do in a day on a daily planner or spreadsheet. Evaluate each item and give it a level of importance. Obviously items like sleep, eating, and working are essential, but there are probably some things on there that you simply can do without. Maybe cut out that daily trip to the coffee shop. Or instead of watching your favorite show on the couch, watch it while walking on the treadmill.
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The holidays are used as a major excuse for people to eat more than they normally would and cheat on their weight loss plans. But now that the holidays are over, the cheating is over, right? Not quite, because when it comes to indulging an appetite, some of us will use any excuse possible to over eat and cheat on our DNA diet. Whether it is positive things like birthdays, promotions, graduations, parties or negative events we will sometimes use any excuse we can muster to eat high calorie food and not pay attention to how many calories we are putting into our bodies.
Chastising ourselves for basic human desire, however, is not a good way to go about improving our diet success. The key to battling the cravings we get for “special occasions” is to recognize why we get these cravings and the best way to satisfy them without making things worse. The first step is to recognize that using special occasion excuses to over eat is an emotional issue. Many of us who are overweight have learned to use food to subdue our erratic emotional states. Recognizing the times when we are doing this is essential to being able to stop it.
A DNA diet provides the structure and information to be able to make an informed decision while dieting rather than an emotional one. This is part of the reasoning behind a home delivered meal program. If we have ready to go healthy food already planned out for a meal, we are way less likely to go outside of the plan and overeat than if we just a generic goal of eating healthy. The GenoVive home delivered meal program makes it easier for us to substitute in things like socializing, hobbies and interests to satisfy our emotional states rather than over eating.
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The human body is probably the most complex machine on the planet earth, and like any other machine, it requires energy. But unlike mechanical machines, humans are capable of consuming far more energy than what they actually need. The way the body stores this excess energy is through fat deposits for later use. This was a very useful feature before food was abundant, but now that our food supply is secure in the western world, these fat deposits never go away and just build over time.
Our DNA helps determine how the nutrients we eat turn into energy in our bodies. Each individual can have different challenges in their metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. You probably recognize this in people who can eat pretty much whatever they want but never gain any weight. Other people seem to have the opposite problem, where seemingly every calorie they eat turns into fat cells on their thighs and stomach.
DNA diets work because they account for these variances in our metabolism. This happens when you first join GenoVive and your DNA is analyzed by our lab. GenoVive puts together your gender, age, height and weight plus your individual genetic profile to determine what is going to work best for you on a diet. You’ll quickly find that your diet is quite different than whatever one size fits all programs you’ve seen before. That’s because the diet has been customized just for you. You’ll see and feel the difference with GenoVive.
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For many people on a diet, the goal of losing weight is not just about reaching a certain number, but reaching that number by a certain time. Whether it’s for a school reunion, the beach days of summer, or for a wedding day, many of us use a big event in our lives as a powerful motivator for sticking to a diet. It’s important to realize, however, how realistic our date oriented goals are. This is not to discourage someone from attempting to get healthier by a certain date, but to keep them from being disappointed if they don’t reach a nearly physically impossible goal.
Realistic estimations of how much people can lose during a certain amount of time fluctuate from person to person and on diet to diet. People can lose anywhere from 4 pounds to half a pound in any given week, depending on how much someone needs to lose and how intensely they are dieting. While everyone wants to lose as much as possible and in the shortest amount of time, losing weight too quickly can be unhealthy. A managed diet program like our DNA diet can help you lose weight at a healthy rate that will help you reach your timed goal with far more effectiveness.
A DNA diet is able to do this because the home delivered meal program you get is based on your unique genetic code. Your DNA plays an important role in your metabolism. GenoVive knows just the right amount of calories you need and the correct macronutrient balance for you to effectively lose weight using all-natural foods. They also create a customized exercise program for you that will help you lose weight even faster. People who go on diets on their own often don’t know exactly what will help them lose weight, but with GenoVive, a scientific approach is used to maximize weight loss so that you look great by the day of your big event.
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Even though many people are not aware of it, humans have lots of tiny life forms living inside them that assist with the everyday functioning of the human body. These life forms are bacteria that live in the digestive system and they are known as probiotics. They help with the digestion of essential nutrients and without them our bodies would not be able to process much of the food we eat today. Humans are not the only animals with these probiotics. Cows can eat grass because of them and pandas are able to digest bamboo because of the probiotics in their systems.
Probiotics are highly beneficial to our health, so it’s important that we support their growth, which is where prebiotics come in. Prebiotics are non-digestible substances in foods that benefit the growth of the probiotics. The most popular form of prebiotics is called inulin, which is an insoluble fiber contained in lots of fruits, vegetables, herbs, whole grains and wheat. Prebiotics have the greatest effect when they are ingested with the presence of soluble fibers that the body does digest, meaning they are best taken in the presence of food.
The GenoVive DNA Diet knows how important prebiotics are to people who are trying to burn fat and lose weight. That is why prebiotics are contained in many of the home delivered meals including: Frappes, pasta, and several snack bars such as the Peanut Butter Cookie Bar, Chocolate Chip Cookie Bar, Double Chocolate Brownie Bar, Cherry Cashew Bar, Cocoa Coconut Bar and Cranberry Apple Nut Bar. Eating these items from the program will enable your digestive system to function better and can even decrease the body’s ability to create certain kinds of fats.
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The word natural is thrown all over the place when it comes to food products, but not all foods labeled as being natural are created equally. You may have seen some of these items in the super market. The label says natural but when you look at the ingredient list you see a bunch of chemicals and additives that you know are anything but natural. So why do food companies mislead customers into thinking their foods are all-natural when they aren’t? One reason is because they can. Two is because most customers know that all-natural foods are better for them so they will more likely buy their product.
Before going ahead and showing how GenoVive’s home delivered meals are truly all natural, we’d like to describe what natural actually means. When it comes to food, natural should mean that the ingredients should come directly from nature with as little processing as possible. Food should contain whole grains, fruits and vegetables that are grown with few if any chemicals. The meat in your food should also be all natural, meaning that the animals grown for meat should not be treated with hormones and antibiotics.
The meals in GenoVive’s DNA diet are focused on being all-natural and healthy. Carbohydrate sources come from fruits, vegetables and whole grains that are rich in prebiotics that help stimulate a healthy and active digestive system. Our meals made with meat come from animals that are not treated with hormones and antibiotics. The impact these kinds of natural foods have on a diet are enormous, as the body reacts to natural foods much better than it does to foods laced with hormones and chemicals. A DNA diet is not just about losing weight, but keeping your body in a healthy condition with foods it was evolved to eat straight from nature.
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We live in a rather difficult time for eating healthy. Food advertising is one of the biggest industries on the planet. Ads for unhealthy food are all over television, radio, magazines and the internet. Nearly every food company out there is trying to sell you their greasy burgers or high calories starches. The presence of this advertising can feel overwhelming at times. Every time you walk in a store, turn on the television or even drive to work, you are likely to be barraged by a constant presence of unhealthy food advertising.
Food advertising works by appealing to the very ideals and conditions that their foods will ultimately sabotage. This includes having thin models eating cheeseburgers, surfers and athletes shoveling down French fries and happy groups of friends and lovers eating high sugar candy. The advertising tries to build psychological connections between emotional pleasure and eating high calorie products. It’s no surprise why so many of us have become emotional eaters. Half the battle of combating this advertising is to know that they are doing it in the first place.
Ignoring the messaging of major food companies is a psychological battle that starts with knowledge. Knowing the kind of foods you should be eating and in what proportions will help you realize the dangers of mass marketed foods and provide you with the motivation to avoid them. Joining a home delivered meal program like the one offered through GenoVive’s DNA diet will help you stick to meals that will help you lose weight rather than navigate the minefield of commercial food products.
It’s the holidays; I’ll go back on my diet in the New Year. It’s the weekend; I’ll start eating well again on Monday. I had a bad day today; I’ll make up for it with a big delicious meal. I had a great day today; I’ll celebrate with a huge greasy meal. If you haven’t used one of these excuses before while on a diet, you probably know someone who has. Our brains’ are powerful rationalizing machines, and they will make all the excuses in the world to eat poorly and as much as possible.
Overcoming this phenomenon requires strength, but it also requires a certain amount of preparation. We use excuses to over eat often because we do not have a stable option of healthy meals available to us. A home delivered meal program like the one from GenoVive can provide the stability of healthy meals right at your fingertips, reducing the temptation to eat to excess. In fact, one of the primary excuses we use to eat unhealthy is because we don’t have healthy meals available to us. With the presence of healthy home delivered meals in our lives, this excuse is eliminated.
Since the home delivered meals on GenoVive’s DNA diet are delicious as well as healthy, that reduces the amount of excuses we use to over eat as well. The meals in the GenoVive program are the same delicious meals you often see at restaurants, but with all-natural ingredients and lower calories. This way you can eat the kind of food you want without having to make the excuse to eat unhealthy take out and restaurant items. Our home delivered meals are filling as well, which means your desire to over eat will disappear while you are losing weight.
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Exercise can be fun, and if you don’t believe it, you’ve probably been going about it the wrong way. The reason that exercise can be a chore for many people is because they approach it as a job they hate. They go out to the gym or out for a run and they hate every minute of it, but they keep going because it is helping them lose weight and get in shape. For some people, that is the only motivation they need to keep exercising, but for others, the prospect of losing weight alone isn’t enough to get them through the rigors that exercise often comes with.
The best way to create motivation is to make exercise fun. What makes a fun physical activity is usually pretty unique amongst individuals. For some people, simply doing their custom exercise program with a friend or family member is enough to keep them entertained and motivated. For others, joining an aerobic or cycling class at a gym is a great opportunity to create structure and motivation to keep coming back. Active sports like soccer, tennis and skating can be a powerful motivator through aspects of competition and team camaraderie.
Some people have a hard time staying motivated to exercise because they simply don’t know if they are going in the right direction. This is especially true of many people joining the gym for the first time. With so many exercise machines, weight machines, free weights and other mechanisms around, it’s hard to know where to begin. What works for one person in the gym may not work for another. That is why the customized exercise program from GenoVive is an invaluable tool in helping you on the path of exercise that will actually help you see results.
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Going out to eat at fine restaurants or even neighborhood diners can be a fantastic experience, but it can also be a nightmare for dieters. Eating out allows people to experience the joy of freshly prepared food without having to go through the hassle of prep work, cooking and cleaning at home. It also allows people to enjoy each others company in a friendly and comfortable setting. Unfortunately, restaurant food often has huge portions and is very high in calories due to the types of ingredients often used. Most restaurants, however, offer healthy alternatives that can be just as delicious as their high calorie counterparts.
When you are on a DNA diet like the one from GenoVive, it’s a good idea to be able to pick out foods at restaurants that fit within your macronutrient balance. Because a DNA diet is unique to each individual, this will mean different things for different people. For some people a skinless chicken breast with roasted vegetables will be the best option. For others, maybe a salad with oil and vinegar dressing. When ordering, don’t be afraid to ask any information you might need or want to know about your meal option. In most major chain restaurants they will have ingredients and calories listed for each item. For smaller local places, they may not know the exact calories, but they will probably be willing to tell you what is in each item. The more information you have about the food you are eating at a restaurant, the better your ability will be to pick an item that stays within the guidelines of your DNA diet and keep you on track to losing more weight.
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Somewhere in every human there is a desire for excess. Whether it be in large houses and yards, huge collections of antiques and rare figurines, or in enormous meals, somewhere in us there exists a yearning for plenty and large quantities. For those of use who’ve got that kind of desire for food, maintaining a healthy weight can be a problem. But just because we have the desire to consume large quantities doesn’t mean we have to be a slave to the desire, we just need someone or something to point us in the right direction away from it.
One of the reasons that people eat to excess is because they simply don’t know what correct portion sizing is. This is where a DNA Diet like GenoVive can have an enormous educational impact even after the diet is over. The home delivered meal program that comes with our DNA Diet supplies you with just the right amount of calories and nutrients that you need for maintaining health or losing weight, depending on what your goals are.
The home delivered meal program is also great for tricking your mind into thinking you are eating high calorie delicious foods when you really aren’t. This is because the GenoVive home delivered meals are made to be delicious and all-natural but not high in calories. Not only that, but the meals will give you just the right macronutrient balance to help your body burn fat and lose weight. Part of the challenge in avoiding the temptation to eat to excess is eating the kind of food that will help fill you up. This is why the GenoVive DNA Diet is so valuable. Your daily meal kits with GenoVive contain between 1300 and 1900 calories per day and are high in fiber, with 20-24 grams of fiber each day. Not only will the meals taste delicious and give you just the right amount of calories, they will help you feel satisfied as well.
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Take a moment and feel the skin on your arm. Feel your hair. Go to the mirror and look into your eyes. Notice the shape of your nose, mouth and ears. DNA is what determines all of those features and everything else people see every day. DNA also determines how all of your internal parts work as well. It determines how your brain works, the functioning of your immune system and nervous system. It also determines how you digest food, which means it has a very important role in the dieting process.
DNA helps determine how the food we eat turns into energy, which is studied through a field of science known and nutrigenetics. DNA diets like the one offered by GenoVive are based on this science. They take a DNA sample from you and develop a unique meal and exercise program that will maximize the benefit of food and exercise to help you lose weight faster and more efficiently. This works better than normal diets because most other diets try to create a one size fits all solutions that may be successful for some, but will inevitably leave some behind.
You can learn more about nutrigenomics, the science behind GenoVive by clicking here, but why DNA is important to dieting is apparent through our everyday lives. If you’ve ever met someone who can just eat whatever they want and they never gain weight; it’s due to genetics. The same is true for people with the opposite problem, those who seem to eat very little but stay heavy. Even people who have nearly identical diets can see drastically different effects on their weight. One reason for this is DNA, which is why it is essential to pay attention to genetics when determining a diet plan.
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If you’re like most people, you have probably made New Year’s resolutions in the past. You’ve probably succeeded at a few, and failed at many. The New Year is great a providing a psychological opportunity for replenishment, for fixing your faults and becoming the person you’ve always wished you could be. Many people will make the resolution in the New Year to lose weight. They will join diet programs and gyms and put all of their effort into finally becoming healthy and looking the way they have always wanted to look. But why do they so often fail?
In order to increase the chance of success on the New Year’s resolution of losing weight, it’s a great idea to go on a diet program that has a basis in science. A DNA diet like the one from GenoVive will develop a custom meal and exercise program that is based specifically on your genetic code. This means that what you eat and how you exercise on the plan will have the maximum effect on your weight loss, increasing the chances that you will be successful on your New Year’s resolution.
The time around New Year’s is a great opportunity to find partners in weight loss, as the New Year is a time when lots of people are starting their own diet plan. Look for people in the gym and in online diet communities like Gen-V in order to find partners that will help keep you motivated and increase your chances for success on your home delivered meal program and customized exercise plan.
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What do you think of when you hear “DNA”?
You DNA is more than just a means of identification – it’s like an instruction manual that tells your body how to create all of its cells which have different functions. It’s the key to learning how your body works as an individual. Then you can work with your body’s needs, following a set of instructions made to help you lose weight.
From setting up a new computer to building a piece of furniture – an instruction manual can be difficult to figure out if you’ve never done that task before. You need help to figure out the instructions and have the right tools on hand to finish the project.
GenoVive helps you understand your DNA – your body’s instruction manual - and provides you with the right tools to lose weight more effectively.
Different genes have different functions. Your genes determine your outward physical traits like hair color and eye color, but they play a vital role in your metabolism as well. As individuals, we have different variations of genes that provide valuable insight on how your body reacts to the carbohydrates, fats and proteins in your diet.
For example, different variants of a certain gene can indicate how readily your body stores fat or how efficiently it processes carbohydrates. For you these variants may be different than your friends and even people in your family. GenoVive has carefully selected a series of genes that when put together in our profile, will give us a thorough view of how your body metabolizes different macronutrients (fats, carbohydrates and proteins) and how it responds to exercise.
Your GenoVive profile report identifies your body’s macronutrient needs – the right percentages of fats, carbohydrates and proteins and the right level of exercise for you to lose weight more efficiently, and learn to eat to work with your body’s needs for long term health.
So now that GenoVive has put together the right instruction manual for you, based on your DNA – you need the right tools to put that plan into action. Take a look at what’s included in your GenoVive tool box.
All-natural home delivered meals
6 days per week of everything you need to eat: breakfast, lunch, dinner and 2 snacks per day in convenient daily meal kits. You’ll get the right balance of fats, carbohydrates and proteins each day according to your genetic profile. There are no artificial preservatives, additives, flavors or colors in our foods and all of the meat sources are hormone and antibiotic free. We’ve taken the “noise” out of your foods and removed any substances that could disrupt how your genes function. And by using only all-natural ingredients, your body can more efficiently metabolize what you eat without having to process unnecessary substances. What you will taste is all of the delicious natural flavors of our specially designed menus which you can take with you to work in shelf stable packaging.
The meals are a tool designed to help you re-learn how to eat what’s best for your body’s needs. More than just portion control, you’ll get in the habit of eating the combinations of foods that are right for your meal program. Your palate will change over time and you’ll start to crave the same types of healthy natural foods in your GenoVive customized program.
Premium Nutritional Supplements
The variety of supplements available at your local grocery store can be overwhelming. GenoVive has taken out the guess work by providing you with top quality supplements to support healthy weight loss. You will get a multi-vitamin and mineral supplement that complements the nutrients in your foods. GenoVive also provides an omega-3 supplement that’s sourced from food quality calamari (squid) and has a 2.5 to 1 ratio of DHA to EPA. Omega-3 is important to help maintain healthy cell membranes and help prevent inflammation in the body. GenoVive’s probiotic supplement also includes a digestive enzyme blend which helps your body adjust to your new diet. Probiotics are the beneficial bacteria in your digestive system and we want to make sure you are getting enough each day to keep your system healthy.
Exercise
Like brushing your teeth, exercise is something your body needs on a regular basis for good health. Your genetic profile also tells us about the level of intensity you need to achieve calorie burning results. There are certain gene variants that reveal if you respond well to moderate intensity exercise or that you need more vigorous intensity exercise to assist in weight loss. Our online exercise video programs are designed to help you learn the types of exercises you can do at home or at a gym, to help you build muscle (where your calorie burning furnaces are located) as you lose body fat.
Support
When you have questions along the way, you can turn to GenoVive for support with our online community, blogs and discussion forums designed to keep you motivated.
With a customized “instruction manual” that’s based on your DNA, and the right tools – GenoVive has everything you need to build a healthier new you. It’s time to take the first step and get started today.
We as humans are very social creatures. Any activity we participate in is inherently more entertaining and motivating when we participate in it with others. Exercise is especially affected by this. When we work out with other people who have similar fitness goals to ourselves, it provides the motivation and accountability to keep going through all of the difficult times and instances when we would just rather quit and sit back down on the couch.
Finding a fitness partner can be difficult, however. If you want to play sports, finding a team and being part of a group of people with similar goals is easy, but if you plan on doing traditional exercises in a gym or at home, finding others requires a bit more planning and effort. If you have friends or family who are also trying to lose weight and are going to gym, make arrangements to go together. Having someone you care about and that cares about you while you work out will make the experience fun and will keep you motivated.
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With most things in life, you are held accountable for your performance by a variety of different authority figures: teachers, coaches, bosses and parents. Being held accountable to other people can be a powerful motivator for success, but with a diet, you are accountable to no one but yourself. This phenomenon presents a whole slew of challenges and creates a situation where you have to find motivation beyond external pressure to lose weight. This means you have to be accountable to yourself and yourself alone.
Ask anyone who has had to work for themselves before, and they will tell you that keeping yourself accountable requires a lot of discipline and will power. A diet requires the same amount, if not more, self-accountability. What this means is that you need to hold yourself responsible for staying on track with all the things you need to do on your diet: eating your home delivered meals, working out consistently on your customized exercise program, and making sure not to cheat. When you fail at any one particular goal, no one is going to yell at you or punish you, so you have to hold yourself responsible for any failures.
A good way to help keep accountable is to force yourself to be accountable to others. You can do this in several ways. If you have friends or family who are trying to lose weight, you can become partners in weight loss. You will be extra motivated to succeed if you know that you will have to tell your partner when you haven’t been following your diet. You can also joint an online diet forum like the Gen-V diet community, where you can keep an online log of your progress. People on the forum will be looking forward to hearing your updates and success, and you will not want to disappoint them by not following through with your diet.
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Every dieter seems to have that one food in their lives that remains their one eternal weakness. For some it is sweet things like cookies, ice cream and chocolate. For others it is the salty snacks like chips and other snack foods. Whatever the food may be, it represents an item that can have the power to completely change whether or not we stay successful on a diet. Giving into binging on our favorite foods can deflate our egos and make us feel helpless in the presence of items we crave.
The key to fighting food cravings is to stay occupied with more interesting activities. These activities can be almost anything: reading, playing sports, games or any other hobbies that can take up your interest. If you are too busy having fun and being productive than you won’t have the time to constantly fulfill your food cravings whenever they pop up. Sitting around watching TV or otherwise being bored makes it far too easy to give into cravings.
Staying occupied and busy may work most of the time, but sometimes a craving just becomes too strong. In these situations, it’s a good idea to find healthy substitutes for your favorite foods. The Genovive home delivered meal program has a ton of snacks and meals that are much healthier versions of foods people crave every day. It also has many healthy snacks that would be a perfect substitute for satisfying your cravings. Almost any food craving you can get has a healthy substitute out on the market, you just need to look.
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It’s 1 am, you can’t get back to sleep, and it’s been six hours since your last meal. Your stomach is starting to rumble. Visions of ice cream, leftover pasta and sleeves of cookies twirl through your head. It’s time for late night snacking, the seemingly unavoidable urge to get up late and mindlessly grab whatever looks good. As you shovel the food down standing next to the refrigerator, you barely realize what you’re doing in your late night mental fogginess. By morning you are hungry again, and the extra calories have been absorbed into your system forever.
Late night snacking is a frustrating experience. We sometimes wake up late in the night and find ourselves being hungry, but eating late at night doesn’t fit in with our calorie limits for the day. It would be ideal to just ignore the cravings and go back to sleep, but if that is not possible, it is best to try to limit the damage of late night snacking as much as possible.
There are a few good ways to do this. Be sure to eat enough calories during the day. Your GenoVive meal program may contain between 1300 and 1900 calories per day broken into 5 smaller sized meals and snacks. With GenoVive, you’re getting 20-24 grams of fiber each day to help keep you feeling satisfied, so you should also drink plenty of water which will help with snack cravings. The second is to have healthy low calorie snack foods available only. Good choices for this are snack able vegetables like carrots and celery along with yogurt, cottage cheese and a variety of snacks that come with your home delivered meal program through Genovive.
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The New Year’s resolution to lose weight has practically become a cliché in the diet world. All over the nation people will start to make plans to start their diet on January 1st, declaring once and for all that they will ditch the bad food, start exercising and finally realize their weight loss goals. Gym memberships skyrocket in January, and all over people start buying healthier food. But by March, most of the gyms go down to normal levels and people start to eat as they always have. Why is that? Why do people lose the will to become healthy so quickly?
Part of the problem with New Year’s resolutions is a complete lack of any kind of game plan. This means that people have the goal of losing weight but they don’t know what direction to go in. They go to the store and buy what they think is healthy food, and go to the gym and do the exercises they think are effective, but they don’t really know if what they are doing is working. Being successful with a weight loss resolution requires focus and dedication to a plan that has a real chance to work. Thankfully, DNA diets like the one offered by Genovive provide a diet and exercise program unique to an individuals genetic code in order provide successful weight loss results.
While maintaining the will power to succeed on a diet requires a good plan, it also helps to get motivation from every source available. When you decide to start your New Year’s resolution to lose weight and start a DNA diet, let your friends and family know. They will be thrilled to hear the news, and will help you any way they can to stay focus and keep you motivated. Join an online diet forum like the Gen-V community and get tips, advice and support from other people going through the same process you are. Being able to communicate and share support with other people will be the most powerful source of motivation you can get.
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Keeping track of your weight can be a powerful motivator for staying on track in a diet, but what is the best way to go about doing it? Many people suggest that it is best to weigh once a day, but anybody who does this will notice that weight can fluctuate quite dramatically on a day to day basis. The way to mitigate these fluctuations is to make sure to weigh yourself at the same time and in the same conditions day after day. You will still likely see dramatic ups and downs, but the important thing is to see the general trend.
Other people might suggest that you weigh yourself once a week. Weighing in weekly can hide the daily fluctuations and give you a more general picture of the downward trend in your weight loss. Weekly weigh-ins should have the same consistency that daily ones do. Weight yourself on the same day, same time and in the same conditions week after week. This will help eliminate the variables that often cause weird fluctuations in measurements.
Another effective way to measure weight loss is with a tape measure. While you’re exercising on the GenoVive program, you’ll be gaining muscle as you lose fat – which is great. Your muscle tissue contains the fat burning furnaces that your body needs to fuel your metabolism. So while the number on the scale may start to slow down, you should see the numbers on the tape measure getting smaller. Be sure to take your measurements (such as waist and hip) at the same point each week.
However you decide to measure your weight loss in the long run, the important thing to remember is to see a general downward trend. Keeping track of this can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but one of the best is to make a graph. Graphing can be done through spreadsheet programs, online graphing tools and even by hand on a sheet of paper or poster board. You can make the graph fun and colorful by setting up goals and milestones that help highlight your accomplishments. Tracking your weight loss in this way will not only help you see the progress of your weight loss, but will also be a powerful motivator for staying on track in the long run.
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We all have New Year’s Resolutions. Some of us want to find a better job, or stop smoking, or lose weight. We start the New Year with the best of intentions and then life interrupts and the resolutions fall away. We settle back into that less-than-perfect job, thoughtlessly reach for a cigarette, or give in to that relentless chocolate craving. Soon we’re back where we started, resolutions forgotten and living our old habits.
It doesn’t have to be that way. As a Genovive member, you have already made the very important decision to eat in a more healthy way. You have resolved to live a different life. So rather than making new resolutions, it would be far better to renew the one you are currently living: to stick to your eating plan and continue the success you are finding with the Genovive system. Whether you started to develop your new healthy eating habits last week or six months ago, you still have an investment in your new life. Why not continue to enjoy the benefits?
If you plan on joining us in the journey toward better eating because of a resolution that you are contemplating for the coming new year then you are encouraged to write out exactly what you are hoping to gain from the our revolutionary diet approach, your personalized fitness plan, and an expanded kit of social and emotional coping tools. When you are clear about what your goals are you will be better able to monitor your progress or the lack thereof rather give up your resolution when you experience set backs.
For some of us the coming New Year celebrations will include challenges to indulge in ways that we might later regret. If you have concerns about your ability to remain on plan during the chorus of Auld Lang Syne, then consider a quick inventory of what you have gained from your efforts that far and complete an honest appraisal of what you might lose if you break your momentum.
Future articles in our Planning for Success blog category will explore the tools above in greater detail.
We would love to hear about coming your New Year’s resolutions as well as those from the past that you have been able to learn from. Remember we can learn as much from the "failures" as we can the "successes." Let us know about your experience at the Genovive Forum.
We all know her. She’s the guest who sighs mournfully as she gazes at the dessert table in the restaurant and whines, “I’m not allowed to have that,” making the rest of us feel guilty for being able to indulge. No need to pity her. She has that covered. Rather than order fruit for dessert, she’d rather stare at your plate and ask you if your chocolate mousse is as delectable as it looks. Finally you relent, and ask her if she would like to taste it, but no, no, no, she can’t cheat on her diet. On and on she goes.
Finally, you’ve had enough of her pity party and you’re just about to say something when you stop and think, Did I sound like that when I was starving myself? Did I bore people with my stories of deprivation and self-sacrifice? Maybe she doesn’t realize how she sounds. Maybe I can help.
You smile and tell her that you’ve been in her shoes – too many times to count. And then one day, your attitude changed. You don’t know why and you don’t know how, but one day you realized that you were looking at your diet all wrong. You were concentrating on the negatives instead of the positive things that were happening as you lost weight. Your friend stops you and asks, “You are on a diet? You don’t eat like someone on a diet!” You silently forgive her that little left-handed compliment and continue. “I eat healthy foods and I allow myself small pleasures, such as this chocolate mousse on my free day. You might have noticed that my salad had no dressing and I ordered broiled fish for dinner. It’s the little things that help on my free days to allow for the dessert.”
“How did you do it?” She wants to know. “It’s so hard to stay on a diet!” You proceed to tell her how you got help by going on the GenoVive plan to help relearn healthy eating and lose some initial weight. Now you’re maintaining your target weight by continuing to eat in healthful ways but have remained on the Genovive plan because you really like the food and it makes watching what you eat easy. And you’re enjoying your new way of life. Continuing what you started to say, you proceed to tell her how a plan for physical and emotional fitness helped you to develop a positive outlook when dieting can really help to ensure your success.
Lastly, you share a hard truth: self-pity is for those who really don’t want to succeed. They’re looking for a way to stop whatever it is they are doing, and just waiting for someone to give them a valid reason to do so. Changing your life, even in small ways, can be hard, or it can be easy. It all depends on your attitude!
If you are experiencing sadness about the loss of unrestricted eating rampages since joining the program that is to be expected. You should not feel alarmed because in some ways you are grieving the loss of all the extra food. Counter the potential for slipping from sadness into self-pity by letting support group members know about the times when you feel like you are missing out and make regular entries on your gratitude list.
Let us know, on the GenoVive Forum, how you avoid slipping into self-pity as it may help others to avoid the trap. Self-pity generally leaves us unable to receive real sympathy or empathy from others and they are both very healthy gifts to receive from genuinely caring folks.
Getting enough exercise within a daily routine is a struggle for a lot of people. Between work, chores and errands there is sometimes just not enough time in the day to get a good workout. Thankfully with the rise of modern technology, specifically video, exercising at home has become easier and more fun than ever. Nearly every game console on the market today has fitness games that allow people to get a great workout in the comfort of their own home. Exercise games come in a variety of styles and mechanics.
Video games might offer several solutions to the problems people have with exercise, motivation being the most important. Games give an additional source of motivation that don't exist within traditional modes of exercise. This motivation comes through the excitement within the game, visual tracking and goals within the game universe and immediate rewards that don't directly correspond with weight loss. All of these factors greatly increase the chance that you will be motivated to exercise because you will be losing weight and having fun at the same time.
If video games aren't your thing there are still lots of workout videos on the market to suit your needs. Try to find a program that includes most of the exercises you learned through your customized exercise plan through Genovive. Those particular exercises are optimized to help you get fit and lose weight and will help you see the best results. Exercise video can be used in conjunction with certain equipment or with just yourself, a wall and a floor mat. A good workout video should be entertaining and keep you motivated so that you can stay consistent with your exercise.
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Please consult your physician before beginning any diet or exercise program. The information provided in this blog is not intended to prevent, diagnose or treat any medical condition and should not replace the advice of your physician.
DISCLAIMER
Please consult your physician before beginning any diet or exercise program. The information provided by GenoVive and contained in this website is not intended to prevent, diagnose or treat any medical condition and should not replace the advice of your physician. If you experience pain or physical difficulties while eating a reduced calorie diet or during exercise, please stop and contact your physician immediately. Admin.
