Dr. Wayne Andersen on Habit Changing Support28 lbs LOSTso farJuly 15, 2008 by Israel Lagares | 4 comments
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Dr. Wayne Andersen, Medical Director of Medifast, Inc. Learn more about his new book, Habits of Health at DrWayneAndersen.com.
What are the benefits of having some type of support when trying to change a habit?
Building a support system is the single most important thing you can do to incorporate and maintain the “Habits of Health” program, or any program for that matter. Without a support system, your chances of changing your lifestyle go down dramatically. Once you’ve learned how to take control of
the most important health-related areas of your life, which are: eating, motion, and sleep, the thing that will hold all of those together is support.
There are different kinds of support systems, and depending on your personality, you should choose which type works for you. There are three methods that will help you master the program in my upcoming book “Habits of Health.”
1) Studying: which includes attending trainings and using other resources so you can gain knowledge.
2) Doing: or actually making a change in your life that will lead you toward optimal health.
3) Modeling: the people that we hold up as role models can have a great affect on our lives. The people we are close to and emulate are what we become, particularly if they are the same sex.
In my book, I discuss the importance of what I call a bionetwork. This is a type of comprehensive support system. It takes all different kinds of supports and utilizes all of them so that you can get the most out of your new healthy lifestyle. This bionetwork can include a large number of people like a health coach, an Internet-based support, peers, virtual clinic, etc. The bionetwork can also include support systems made up of friends, family, informal group settings, formal settings and online programs.
Have you tried using a support system like this? If so, how did it work for you? What was your best option?
A new book due out this summer, by well-respected physician Dr. Wayne Andersen, seeks to take a revolutionary approach to creating optimal health and weight management by offering common sense advice and direction, supported by proven, medical data. In his book, Habits of Health, Dr. Andersen, a board certified critical care physician, does not advocate fad dieting or a miracle wonder cure; rather, it provides the knowledge and support to help people achieve optimal health. The book seeks to offer an easy guide to establish long-lasting, improved health.
Dr. Andersen graduated from the University for the Health Sciences medical school in Kansas City, where he was valedictorian of his graduating class. Dr. Andersen became the tenth physician Board Certified in Critical Care. For 18 years, Dr. Andersen directed the Surgical Critical Care Program at
Grandview Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, and was Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology. Dr. Andersen is currently Medical Director of Medifast, Inc., an innovative leader in the production, distribution and sale of weight management and health management products. As the chief architect of Take Shape for Life, Dr. Andersen has built an integrated support system that helps people make the necessary changes in their lifestyles to create optimal health. Dr. Andersen provides leading nutritional solutions, medical support and the support of caring individuals, to provide the necessary one-on-one interaction so vital in changing peoples lives. Dr. Andersen resides in Annapolis, Md.
Habits of Health seeks to help people to be the healthiest they can be with what they have. Through his book and the accompanying workbook, Dr. Andersen provides a roadmap and an opportunity for people to choose a better life.
“This book stresses the fact that achieving optimal health is an active process, and it is reminds people that the small things we do every day make all the difference,” Andersen said. “Everyone has the fundamental choice and opportunity to choose a better life for themselves, and in this book I show them how to do that. I want to show people they have the power to create optimal health within themselves.”
The book is available for preorder at the beginning of July and will go on sale in bookstores nationwide end of July.
Visit Dr. Wayne Andersen to learn more and purchase “Habits of Health.”
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Nutrisystem Weight Loss Program28 lbs LOSTso farJanuary 30, 2008 by Israel Lagares | 12 comments
Many of you have seen Nutrisystem commercials. Weight loss while eating has become popular. On their web site you can read about dozens of success stories of people losing 20 to 100+ pounds!
Nutrisystem Weight Loss Program
Nutrisystem is a weight loss diet program where you eat to lose weight! Sounds too good to be true, but it works. To get you started sign-up for their auto-delivery program for two months and get an extra week of food for both months. Two extra weeks of food for free. Everything is delivered to your door.
What’s a huge plus for these programs is that Nutrisystem offers both a Men’s program and a Women’s program. For the men you get “man food” like burgers, pizza, pasta, and chips. You get to chose your own meals. For women they also offer “crave-busting and filling entrees.” The Nutrisystem Program includes low Glycemic index carbs and the right amount of protein and fiber. It gives you the nutrients you need and will help you lose weight without feeling hungry.
Check The Menu
For those curious of your options with Nutrisystem, they provide a complete menu of what they offer.
The menu starts with breakfast, lunch, dinner, then a dessert. The meals are all portioned for you, so there is no weighing, counting, or measuring what you are eating. Just grab the packaged meal and add in some fresh fruit or salad and you’re ready to eat!
Diabetics and Vegetarians
Nutrisystem caters to everyone, even people with different needs.
One of the best things you can do for your diabetes is control your weight. This is for both men and women. The Diabetic Program is a complete diabetic meal plan for women with Type 2 diabetes that lets you easily control your calorie and carbohydrate intake to promote weight loss.
The Vegetarian Program gives you a simple approach to losing weight while maintaining a vegetarian lifestyle. This is the only prepackaged vegetarian diet program available right now.
Try Nutrisystem and get two weeks of food for free.
Where To Get It: Nutrisystem Diet Weight Loss Program
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Diet Bug, the Weight Loss Site for Women28 lbs LOSTso farJanuary 15, 2008 by Israel Lagares | 8 comments
Some of my articles involve lifting and certain workouts that aren’t really specified for women. Ladies, I haven’t forgotten about you. Everyone wants to lose weight and feel good. I found another great website that focuses just on weight loss for women.
Diet Bug
DietBug is a weightloss program designed just for women. The website has over 50,000 members, impressive by anyones standards.
DietBug has some great weight loss tools that can help you out with your diet. The tools have to be what set Dietbug apart from other weight loss website sites. Their tools include:
* 24-7 access to create, personalize and print your own menus.
* Step-by-step instructions for planning each day’s food.
* Access to hundreds of healthy recipes to use in menu planning.
* Search over 40,000 items in our food database, including fast food.
* An online journal to track your eating habits.
* BMI Calculator & Weight Tracker tools.
* A FREE Newsletter & Weekly Tips.
The Food Search
Dietbug offers possibly the most helpful tool for your diet. With their food search, you can find out how many calories are in the food you are eating. With this amazing database of over 40,000 items, it helps you add your favorite foods to your weightloss diet meal plan.
Free Weight Loss Program for Women
They are also offering a free weight loss program for women. All you have to do is fill in the form on this page with your weight, height, age, name, and email. Then you are all set. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Tips and Tricks
As a teaser dietbug offers just a few of their weight loss tips and tricks for free.
Tip #1 is to eat more pizza. Instead of ordering out, go shopping and get a few healthier frozen pizzas.
Tip #2 drink more water. Instead of drinking soda or alcohol with lunch or dinner, try water and lose weight.
Tip #3 snack more for fewer calories.
These tips are given out for free, however for more tips just have to sign-up for their free newsletter. I might even give it a try, might pick up a helpful tip that even I didn’t know.
Where To Get It: DietBug.com
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Medifast Diet: A Quick and Easy Diet Plan28 lbs LOSTso farJanuary 6, 2008 by Israel Lagares | 5 comments
Medifast Diet is a diet plan that emphasizes portion control. Using a mixture of portion control and low calorie food, it makes weight loss quick and easy. This may seem confusing but there is no need to count calories, nor is there a point system that you need to follow. With such an easy diet plan to follow, Medifast can easily become a new longterm diet, not just a short term fix. This will help you maintain your body weight and overall good health.
When starting the Medifast diet, they help you slowly enter their diet with a smooth transition. Their clinically tested 5 & 1 plan will fill your body with the essential nutrients and minerals it has been missing from a healthier diet. Medifast is composed of their famous 5 & 1 plan: 5 meals compiled by Medifast and 1 Green & Lean meal a day. That’s 6 total meals a day. Medifast has several meal options available to chose from. Medifast has over 60 meals that you can choose from for your 5 Medifast meals so it adds variety to your diet. Variety is an essential part of diets because it helps people stay on their diets since it makes it easier to enjoy the meals.
Another way that Medifast helps people stay on track with their diet is that the diet is planned to keep people full and satisfied. They do this by allowing you to eat every 2 - 3 hours. Once you are reaching your diet goal, Medifast will help you maintain your diet. Since you need to adjust your calorie intake from the meals once you have reached your ideal goal, Medifast offers a maintenance guide to help you with it.
Maintenance is crucial if you want to maintain your ideal weight. The problem that most people have with diets is that they are short term, once they reach their goal with their diet, they return back to their old routine and end up gaining back the weight they lost. If you are serious about keeping a healthy weight for the rest of your life, Medifast Diet is the diet for you.
Where to Get It: Medifast Diet
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Renowned Duke Diet Program All Online28 lbs LOSTso farDecember 29, 2007 by Israel Lagares | 3 comments
Duke University’s Diet & Fitness Center is a world-class diet program that is located in Durham, North Carolina, USA. Their popularity and reputation have led them into bringing their diet program onto the internet for people all over the world to join.
The Duke Diet & Fitness Online Weight Loss Program places importance on nutrition, fitness, behavioral health, and medical issues when it comes to a healthy life style. The program will help you perfect all four of these aspects. The program offers hundreds of recipes for nutritious, flavorful recipes for you to apply to your daily meals. The program is easy to follow since they organize your meal plans with everything from covering your daily nutrition to the recipe options you can choose from amongst their database. They can also help you to create your own healthy meal plan.
When it comes to weight loss, fitness is also very important. The Duke Diet program can act as your personal fitness adviser. Exercises such as stretching and cardio are implemented into their fitness program. All of the exercises are taught in the program, making it easy for beginners that have no idea what to do to start off their daily exercise routine.
Behavioral health is very important when sticking to your diet. Many people have different reasons for their weight gain. The program will help you comprehend what steps you need to take in order to persevere in your weight loss goals, including tips on how you can reduce stress and maintain your positive thinking. There are several medical issues that are outlined in the program. When starting the program, you will already be on the road towards a healthier life style and minimizing your risk of certain diseases at the same time.
Where to Get It: The Duke Diet: Duke Diet & Fitness Online Weight Loss Program
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Weight Loss with Flavorful Foods28 lbs LOSTso farDecember 23, 2007 by Israel Lagares | One comment
One of the major problems these days with weight loss diets is that the foods that need to be eaten on a daily basis are usually bland. This is very important because some people fall out of their diet regime due to the fact that they crave tastier foods (which are usually high in calories and fat). When you eat tasty and flavorful food, you get satisfied without needing other foods to satisfy your cravings.
Low calorie and fat content does not always equal bland food. Which diet gives you this? The Sonoma Diet does just that. This diet puts emphasis on flavorful foods, flavorful foods that will help you stick to your diet because they taste great. The diet was written by the Connie Guttersen, PhD. The Sonoma Diet consists of several recipes that will teach you how to create flavor filled meals using fresh, healthy foods. The ingredients were inspired by the Mediterranean diet, which are foods that are healthy for your body, flavorful with few calories, helping you loose weight.
These foods are also filled with nutrients, helping you maintain a healthy body. The Sonoma Diet is mainly based on the Top Ten Power Foods. These power foods include tomatoes, spinach, broccoli, whole grain foods, almonds, blueberries, bell peppers, grapes, olive oil, and strawberries. These ingredients are incorporated into the diet’s meals. The Sonoma Diet is organized into five meals per day: breakfast, lunch, dinner, a snack, and dessert. By the end of the day, all of your meals will cover the nutrients and vitamins your body needs for that day.
The diet is also quite lenient because it allows you to have tasty, healthy snacks and desserts such as apple blueberry tarts. There are organized meal plans when you join that will help you loose weight starting on day one. There are also useful tools on the site such as a meal planner and shopping list that you can use. You can also take advantage of their online community for support and other success stories. Signing up is simple, all you need to do is submit your specifications (weight, target weight, gender, height and age), providing them specific details will help them find what will work best for you.
Where to Get It: The Sonoma Diet Plan Online
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5 Factor Diet Plan Review - Not Just for Celebrities28 lbs LOSTso farDecember 16, 2007 by Israel Lagares | 4 comments
The 5 Factor Diet is an effective diet plan. It was created by Harley, a celebrity trainer who has worked with different celebrities such as Alicia Keys, Jessica Simpson, Kanye West, and Eva Mendes. Harley has brought his diet into an online program. His diet programs are highly beneficial to users who sign up because it is customized to the user which helps them lose weight more efficiently because we all are different.
The weight loss plan is not difficult, 5 Factor Diet is a five-week plan that allows you to see results in just five weeks. Within your diet period, you will be having five meals a day that is customized when you join the site. This helps you feel full throughout the day since you will be eating healthy meals every few hours. Each meal consists of five ingredients. There are literally hundreds of different recipes that you can find on the site (as a member) that only have five ingredients that take five minutes to create. With the meal plans sorted out by Harley’s 5 factor diet site, there are also workouts that are implemented into this diet. The 25 minute work outs have been planned and organized by Harley’s training experiences. Based on results, shorter work outs are beneficial in terms of weight loss than spending several hours working out.
To join and test the site today, click here: Join 5 Factor Diet.
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Jillian Michaels: Ultimate Cyborg Babe28 lbs LOSTso farNovember 26, 2007 by Dennis | 8 comments
Jillian Michaels, the raven haired tough gal who can kick my butt any day has a great site! The site is the perfect complimentary tool to aid you in your weight loss journey. If you need motivation, Jillian delivers. She is big on the mental strength aspect of physical change.
Jillian has put together a three prong attack and a slew of handy tools. The tools to your progress include an interactive weight tracker, a fitness diary, calorie calculator, meal plans/ menus, 120 printable exercises that can break up the monotony, you can even meet buddies in the battle or even ask Jillian herself a question.
If that is not enough to give you the fire to kick into gear Jillian has a new book that creates an ultimatum for change. It is based on a thirty day “no-nonsense program.” The book is titled Making the Cut and Jillian Michaels looks bodacious on the cover. Her conditioning is outstanding! She not only looks “in shape” but down right strong.
Jillian Michael’s site is a solid site with enough tools and inspiration to lead you to the proverbial water. So check out JillianMichaels.com. Get tough people!
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The Liquid Vitamin Shop28 lbs LOSTso farOctober 29, 2007 by Matt | No comments
When I first loaded Liquid Vitamin Shop, it wasn’t very difficult to see what it was that the company was selling. (Good Thing.) However, after that point, it all became incredibly cluttered.
The website itself seems as if it was built in 1997 and hasn’t been updated since, except for the products. As far as the design goes, there are several things I would change that would change the customer experience. First off, as said above, the site is entirely too cluttered. DON’T MAKE PEOPLE THINK. People spend an average of seconds looking at a web page and if they can’t find what they’re looking for they move on. They don’t take the time to look if it’s going to take 10 minutes because they think it’s in a specific site. Secondly, move the navigation to the left side and switch it with the review. I first thought that when I loaded the home page that the four big items in the front were specials, but then when you scroll down, there are other items that are tagged as specials and not these, confusing!
The part where they’re asking “Do you agree with our customers” should be the first thing on the page, explaining what the site is, and that its not an MLM or scheme of any sort. The other problem I have is that when I clicked on gender at the top, I didn’t know Children, Teenagers, and Seniors’ (punctuation error) were a gender.
All in all, I think this website is in dire need of an overhaul with a professional design team that can revamp this company because to be honest, I would have a difficult time buying liquid vitamins from a site that looks like it was designed as a high school portfolio project.
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A Flask For Runners: The Body Bottle28 lbs LOSTso farOctober 15, 2007 by Israel Lagares | 25 comments
A few weeks ago I was in dire need of a water bottle. I was reduced to using a regular cup for the time being. I have been wanting to get one of those big green Gatorade bottles that are used in college and NFL games, but have been too lazy to go buy one. Then John from Body Bottle stopped by the blog and I immediately wanted to test it, so he sent me one.
My first impression was, “Cool, this may work for me.” Some quick facts about it: It holds 10 ounces of water, costs $10.95, and straps on to your arm using Velcro. The cool part about it is that it helps keep your hands free while you are running, which may be more beneficial to some athletes more than others.
Being that I weigh over 300 lbs, it was pretty tough getting the strap to fit around my fat arm, elastic and all. I finally got it on with my wifes help but it was way too tight. I tried wearing it while I ran and felt like the circulation in my arm was being cut off. I eventually took it off. It fit comfortably on my wifes arm, so maybe if the strap was made a bit longer it would work for bigger folks. I like how the bottle is curved and flask-like, fitting the natural curvature of the arm. I also like the texture on the bottle, it helps with gripping. I didn’t like the twist-off cap, but John has stated on the Body Bottle blog that he is working on a new cap. The Velcro was really tough and held the bottle full of water on my bouncing frame with no sign of letting it fall. I did notice that I had to tug on it with some strength to get it off, but that’s just a sign of the strong Velcro.
I like the overall idea of the Body Bottle, but I think it needs a few tweaks. The size of the bottle is good for short distance runners, but 10 ounces may not be enough for some. I am not a long distance runner, the most I run is three miles and it’s enough for me. But then again a big bottle may not be sensible to have on your arm since the increased size may cause excessive bouncing. The strap could be made a bit longer for bigger arms as well. I was left wanting to add ice to my water but couldn’t since the size of the spout was so small. I didn’t remember to leave it in the fridge so my water was warmer than I like. It would also be cool if you could put it on your forearm, but that’s up to the user.
For now I am going to use the bottle, but not on my arm. Once I lose some more fat in my arm I will be able to strap it on without any discomfort. I am also only running on my treadmill for now, but once I am ready to go for runs outside I will be wearing my Body Bottle. Overall, I think the Body Bottle is a cool product. It is useful and sort of a no-brainer. I hate holding stuff in my hands when I run and this helps with that. This is a fine solution for joggers that don’t like carrying stuff on their backs or waists either. I will definitely be using it for going on walks and to the park with the family, especially since my two year old loves using it. She likes twisting the cap and the removable Velcro logo that came with it.
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Review: The Biggest Loser Club28 lbs LOSTso farSeptember 17, 2007 by Israel Lagares | 4 comments
This site is a one stop shop for viewers at home who want to experience NBC’s hit shows benefits. The web site is complete with a free profile which calculates your personal BMI (body mass index), a nice touch to assess and set your goal. To reap the full benefit you have to make a monetary commitment of less than five dollars a week, as per the site.
The program definitely seems beneficial to those seeking weight loss. With tools such as interaction with The Biggest Loser experts, as well as Contestants, and meal plans featuring the food that helped the contestants lose weight and eat healthier. Also, actual shopping lists and recipes are at your disposal.
On the physical side of things the site provides a customized workout program. Detailed demonstrations show you how to perform the exercise properly and effectively. On top of all that the site encourages your involvement on message boards where questions can be asked and answered. Secrets and tips are advertised as being available on the message boards. The goal is motivation and active participation. It is also hinted that Bob Harper himself is reachable through this forum. I wish Jillian Michaels of the black team was reachable! Wait, she is! On her own site: JillianMichaels.com
And if that wasn’t enough folks a “Personal Progress Journal” is an added feature that allows for the sharing of experiences between fellow club members, actual Contestants, and even Trainers.
Hey guys check out what I found on the site, enjoy:
The 10-Day Risk-Free Trial allows you to try the program for yourself at no cost now. If you decide to cancel before your trial period ends, just log-in, call the toll-free customer service number listed within the “My Account” section of the site and your credit card will not be charged.”
To further inspire your change an email newsletter with new tips geared to your success will grace your inbox. The newsletter even boasts a chance to attend the Biggest Loser Season finale.
All this sounds awesome and should be an enjoyable way to lose the fat.
To learn more and/or join, visit The Biggest Loser Club website.
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