5 Fad Diets to Avoid

by: W. Messruther

There are so many fad diets out there these days that attract people with there fast weight loss and celebrity lifestyle image. The fact is that nearly all of these diets only really offer short-term weight loss solutions and can be extremely unhealthy. Iv'e put together a list of 5 popular fad diets - along with reasons NOT to try them!

Detox Diet
Claims to lose a stone in 10 days, defeat cellulite, give glowing skin and no more bloating. This diet is meant to compliment other detox methods such as massages, colonic irrigation, saunas, fasting etc. Food such as fish, meat, eggs, dairy, wheat, salt, sugar etc are banned, while fruit, veg, beans, seeds, nuts are allowed. This results in a lack of nutrients, lowered immune system, a temporary weight loss, mainly water. It can lead to yo-yo dieting, nausea, sickness and headaches. It is said to causes food cravings, resulting in eventually giving up! It can also cause eating disorders and there is no good evidence of it actually working!

Low Carb / Atkins Die
The aim of low carb diets is to force the body to use its own fat as its main energy source. This produces something called ketone bodies to fuel body parts that can not use fat as an energy source such as the brain and red blood cells. This puts you in a state of ketosis - resulting in smelly breath and side effects like fatigue and nausea. These diets do produce short term results, which actually come from loss of muscle tissue and water. They are not a long term weight loss solution and are unhealthy if sustained.

Starvation Diet
Starving yourself is one of the worst diets that you could try. Ok, you may initially lose a lot of weight but the effect this has on your body is drastic! You will be extremely lacking much needed nutrition and this will lead to fatigue, lack of sex drive and hormones, sleep loss, possible hypothermia, poor concentration and judgement, depression, anxiety, personality changes, social withdrawal, your metabolism will dramatically slow down, you will lose organ tissue and muscles, you can get shakes, feel the cold more, and feel very week. Low calorie intakes actually slow down weight loss.

Hollywood Diet
This is basically a 24 or 48 hour 'Juice Fast' where you eat no food in this time. This diet has the same cons as the starvation diet. You are really just losing excess water in the body with this diet and it does'nt last long, you will soon put that weight back on. It is expensive to buy the juice, around $25! You will get no protein or iron in the body, and will be taking lots of sugar and carbs. Tastes good at first but soon turns very sickly.

Cabbage Soup Diet
This is a 7 day diet plan which supposedly offers a fast weight loss solution. This is a very short term solution and is not sustainable so is'nt a viable option for long term weight loss. There are a few benefits to this diet which include fast weight loss, a healthy beneficial change from eating junk food, and research has shown that cabbage helps to prevent cancer. However, the drawbacks do outweigh these benefits somewhat significantly. The soup is high in salt, lacking in good overall nutrition - low in protein, calcium, essential fatty acids, high in sodium and MSG, requires much will power as the soup tastes very bland and is extremely repetitive, gives you gas!, and most of all this is not a healthy sustainable solution to long-term weight loss. This diet will most probably make you GAIN weight as it has a very low calorie intake and you can get bloated!


There really is no substitute for a healthy diet and regular exercise if you want to lose weight and live an overall healthier and more active lifestyle.
If you found this article useful, head on over to www.simpledietreview.com for my personal Reviews on the top online diet programs. W. Messruther, Dieting Consultant.

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Relieve Hormonal Symptoms of Menopause with a natural food diet

Looking for more natural ways to help with the symptoms of menopause? Many herbal remedies can relieve and even eliminate the common symptoms of these conditions.

During menopause, women often experience uncomfortable symptoms. Hot flashes, night sweats, mood swings, irregular, changes in bleeding and loss of sexual desire are some of the most common. Recently, studies have shown that hormone replacement therapy is not as safe as originally believed, so many women are looking to natural remedies with a great deal of success.

Black cohosh has been used for centuries to help women with menopausal symptoms, and is most effective in treating hot flashes. It seems to have some ability to mimic estrogen in the body, relieving the hot flashes and mood swings that plague so many women.

Limiting caffeine will help with your symptoms as well. Herbal teas, and using onion, garlic and lemon instead of salt should help as well. One study at UCLA noted that garlic halted the advance of heart disease in post-menopausal women.

Soy, shown to be beneficial in so many areas, helps with menopausal symptoms as well. Soy has a natural estrogen-like compound that helps balance hormones. Chickpeas, lentils and tofu will provide the same benefits. Complex carbohydrates like brown rice will also help regulate the amount of estrogen in your system.

Ensuring that you are receiving a sufficient amount of essential fatty acids by eating oils, nuts, seeds and oily fish will help relieve vaginal dryness and keep the skin supple.

More and more women are seeking alternative therapies for symptoms of menopause. Try these simple and natural food remedies today.

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How Diet affects the Hair

Philip Nicosia

There’s more to healthy hair than putting products on your head; you also have to watch what you put in your mouth. You need a nutritious diet so that your body can create healthy cells and tissue—exactly the stuff that hair is made of. Poor nutrition, erratic meals, even crash diets can all lead to thinning, dullness, and dryness.
First of all, you need to have the right amounts of proteins. Proteins build cells, and they also contain amino acids that are particularly crucial to hair growth. These include cystine, cysteine, methionine, arginine and lysine. These can be found in meats, fish, poultry dairy and eggs. If you are vegetarian, you can also get it from soy, nuts, grains and seeds (although you may need a protein supplement). Dieticians believe that at least 15% of your calories must come from food that is rich in protein.
Many of today’s low-carb diets may lead to steady weight loss, but it may come at the price of the health of your hair. Carbs help in the growth of body tissues, and they are also the body’s primary source of B vitamins, which your body needs. That’s why it’s not recommended to stay on carb-free diets for long periods of time; even South Beach recommends that the First Phase be limited to three weeks. Instead, opt for smart carbs, meaning you cut out sugars and white flour, and get healthy carbs from vegetables, fruits, whole grains, brown rice and potatoes.
Too much fat is bad for you, but you need a little fat in your diet to stay healthy—and to keep your hair healthy, too. To avoid health risks associated with a fat-heavy diet, get it from lean meat that is grilled or braised rather than fried. Needless to say, eating that hamburger is not a healthy option.
Why does diet play such a role in healthy hair? For one thing, your body will need the right amounts of vitamins and minerals to be able to create strong cells. People who go on crash diets will often report hair loss. Strands may be brittle and easily damaged, and will look dull despite all efforts to condition and style. This means your body is unable to replace cell properly, or that the cells it manufactures is unable to withstand the damage it takes from daily environmental abuse: brushing, hair drying, or even the UV rays in the sun. It’s the same principle why skipping meals can cause your face to look blotchy and pale. If it can affect the color in your cheeks, it will also affect whether your hair is thick and shiny, or limp and lifeless.
Crash dieting can also affect the body’s chemical balance. Many people will go through natural hair loss cycles, such as during pregnancy or right after childbirth, as the body adjusts to shifts in hormones. A lack of nutrition can set off a hormonal nightmare, sending wrong signals to the hair glands like a fuse gone wrong. Severe stress can also do this.
Thus, for healthy hair, you need to invest in good hair care products and a good lifestyle. Eat right, and find ways to relax after a long day at work to minimize the effects of stress. Of course, a good shampoo never hurt.
Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of Resources.eu.com an online resource centre covering many topics including hair care.

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Drinking Water Scams Revealed

by: Stan Howard

(free to publish) Read this article before you consider paying for your drinking water. Wouldn't it be nice to stop poisoning ourselves with polluted or unhealthy drinking water? I, for one, felt that I would love to find a source of safe inexpensive drinking water. (Ideally, I'd love to turn on the tap, and out it would flow!) Whether it's curing cancer with magnets or herbal wonder-remedies or Vioxx, we've all seen the fantastic claims people make about their health products AND about how your whole life will be changed! I can tell you right now that 90% are frauds. You may even have fallen prey to some of these scams, selling you the latest fad. Me too. I've bought so many kinds of drinking water, I can't recall. (If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes "the truth"). Finally, after many disappointments I got FED UP. I decided to get to the bottom of this desire we all have to make sure that our most basic nutrient -- water -- will keep us healthy, not make us sick. I checked out endless commercial websites and a number of university and government sites; and I was dismayed at what I repeatedly found: --Outdated information or info repeated from other websites --Wild and sensational claims --No research --No refunds, etc. I already knew that we can't trust our tap water because of the presence of up to 2000 contaminants. Specifically, I found: a) Bottled Water: a real mish-mash of quality, often no more than filtered tap water sold at outrageous mark-ups, and at quite an environmental cost. b) Reverse-osmosis and distilled water: completely ignored the medical evidence of the dangers in the ongoing drinking of water that is void of minerals, acid in nature and oxidizing. I quickly realized that these products were either useless, overpriced or potentially harmful long-term. And the companies were smiling all the way to the bank. Nevertheless I was able to find products that were well-researched and legitimate: water ionizers and certain filters. I found two websites providing comparisons of reliable water purifiers: Water Filter Comparisons and Water Purifier 101 (While the first of these sites does not address the problem of acidity in drinking water, it is straightforward in its assessment of what various water filters do.) I hope that you're not misled by false claims, and take a look at objective comparisons, for the sake of your health.
Stan Howard is a researcher with Best Water, which offers a free report comparing all types of water purification, and other vital information on drinking water quality. Receive your free report here: Water Purifiers

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Yoga For Children And Kids

Children are exposed to a lot of stress factors nowadays.

There is homework that they do daily...
the competition with other children...
TV and computer games...
and even over-scheduling.

And just like adults these kids need something relaxing to turn into and that could be: Yoga.

Yoga for kids helps then develop better body awareness, it also delivers to them a total self control, flexibility and coordination.

All of these they could carry not just on their class but this exercises can help them with their daily routines.

Yoga for kids has shown to help children who are hyper active to tone down and to brighten up those attention deficit ones. Children today crave movement and sensory motor stimuli that can help then balance out their inner souls flow.

Yoga for kids helps them channel out this impulses in a positive way.

The main Yoga for kids poses that seem to work perfectly with kids are the warrior pose and the tree pose. These two yoga for kids poses helps instill in them calm, confidence and balance.

The trick to get them to do Yoga for kids is to go beyond just doing the proper poses, you should have to get them think about what the real posture means.

Let them think that they are really what the poses are symbolizing, let them be the postures – strong and confident like a warrior.

Yoga for kids with partners is also a good way to build up trust with you children. It develops their team skills and fosters a closer bonding.

Some kids when it comes to relaxation have a big trouble closing their eyes and having them focus on their exercises. One thing that encourages a child to relax is visualization. Let them think of something that they really like and let them imagine being like these things. 

 You may also have them focus out on belly breathing first and have them listen to soothing and relaxing music.

Then ask them to imagine their favorite spot in the house or let them think that they are in outer space floating, or let them visualize that they are at the beach, playing their favorite sport or doing the best activity that they like.

Sometimes for boys letting them think of a favorite girlfriend helps them relax, but this is sometimes hard to do because they become shy and intolerable when this kind of issues are discussed. Just stick to the visualization thing if this technique is quite complicated for you.

Every day at the end of each relaxation exercises, encourage the children to share their own experiences. Ask them to tell to the group what it was like to be in their visualized surroundings. Ask them also to share what place have they imagined they where in.

Another approach is to create a guided imagination by telling them a story with a calming theme of some sort.

As you know children have the most active imagination, they imagine all sorts of things. And at this point of imagination it makes them feel calm. So when doing yoga for kids let them think that they are walking on a green pasture.

You can even let them think that they are butterflies in a beautiful garden. The main idea in here is to instill a sense of peace and feeling of oneness with nature.

Yoga for kids should be taught more often and in different places. It is important to teach children the meaning of union of mind, body and spirit.

There is such a wealth of knowledge we can offer our children with the practice of Yoga.

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California Self Employed Health Insurance

by: Dennis Anthem

Self employed residents of California looking for health insurance have largest selection of options from any other state. Whether you are a sole proprietor or the owner or a multi-million dollar company with hundreds of employees there are many California health insurance options for you to consider.
The direction that you decide to take depends largely on the goals that you have for your business. For example, if you are a small one-man shop and you (and your dependents or family) are healthy as can be then most likely an individual California health insurance plan makes sense for you. Individual policy will be cheaper than a comparable group health insurance policy because there are much more stringent health criteria that must be met on individual underwriting side.
If you are a small one to two man operation and plan on aggressively expanding your business very soon then there are a few other things to consider rather than just purchasing a California individual health insurance policy. The two most common approaches for California small business owners in this situation is to either set up a medical reimbursement type plan where you allocate a set amount to each employee/worker being careful not to discriminate (this then allows the employee/worker to purchase their own individual coverage using the set dollar amount provided) or to set up a California small business (group) health plan. When setting up medical reimbursement plan consider that if you hire some one that medically cannot qualify for individual health plan, that person can sue you. All of the employees must be treated the same and have same options available to them. If one employee cannot get health coverage on their own and everyone else in the company has a health plans that could cause problems.
On a side note, be sure and seek the advice of a qualified tax professional that is familiar in assisting self employed business owners in California. As you long as you have some net schedule C income then you will be able to deduct 100% of your health insurance premiums paid (for you - and your whole family if applicable) all the way up to your net Schedule C income minus 1/2 of your self employed taxes paid. From a tax standpoint this is much better than the deduction that all taxpayers (whether self employed or not) get if they itemize. If a non self employed person itemizes (their schedule A deduction is greater than their standard deduction) than they are able to deduct their health insurance premiums as a medical expense on schedule A but only the amount that exceed 7.5% of the adjusted gross income (AGI).
Maybe you are a self employed Californian but you have a somewhat large company - you probably will want a straightforward group health plan. Group plans once implemented are much easier to manage then having separate individual health plans for everyone. Health insurance and other employee benefits can be a great way to attract, reward and retain employees and of course take care of your health and security. Be sure to compare California health insurance quotes from multiple CA companies.

Dennis Anthem leading authority in individual and group healthcare industry. Consultant for Blue Cross health insurance that provides individuals, families and small groups with health insurance for California.

To find other free health content see e-healtharticles.com

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Natural Foot Care For Diabetics

Because of the disease diabetes, damage can be caused to blood vessels and nerves in the feet, then circulation may be impaired and infections can form on the feet without the person realizing. This can ultimately cause major complications and even amputation. Diabetes also impairs the immune system so diabetics are more prone to infection. Those who suffer from the disease should have regular foot examinations by their doctor and should know whether or not they have nerve damage.

To prevent and check whether there is injury to the feet you should get into a routine of checking and caring for your feet, this is especially important if you already have nerve or blood vessel damage or current foot problems. Here are twenty important natural tips for keeping your feet healthy:

1. Inspect your feet thoroughly every day.

2. Clean your feet daily in lukewarm water (test this with your hands) with a natural soap, dry them thoroughly to prevent fungal infection.

3. Protect your feet constantly by wearing well fitted, comfortable but sturdy shoes.

4. Never walk around without some kind of footwear to protect your feet.

5. Clean, dry cotton or wool socks are also a good way to protect your feet from pressure points and bacteria caused by sweat.

6. Always apply a little amount of a natural foot cream that contains antibacterial agents to the soles of your feet after bathing, avoiding the skin between the toes. Diabetics can find that the skin on their feet dries and cracks easily which can potentially leave them open to infection.

7. When cutting toenails always soak the feet in a good foot soak that has antibacterial properties in it to soften the nails and cleanse away any bacteria and grime from the nails. Remember to cut the nail straight across with a nail clipper, since curved nails are more likely to become ingrown. <

8. Using a gentle natural foot scrub can smooth any small rough areas before they become a problem.

9. Exercise promotes good circulation so walk daily and don't sit in one spot for too long. An easy exercise is to make circle with your feet ten times in each direction, keeping your leg as still as possible.

10. Sitting with your feet elevated for 10 minutes will also help your circulation.

11. Regularly massage your feet, this will also stimulate the circulation.

12. If you do notice a sore or any type of infection, see your doctor for treatment.

13. Stop smoking. It's awful for the circulation and your health generally.

14. Have any bunions and corns removed by a professional to avoid infection.

15. Regularly clean the shower with a natural cleaner and spray a little diluted tea tree oil around the drain.

16. To keep your feet warm in bed wear loose, comfortable cotton or wool socks.

17. Always make sure your feet are kept at a comfortable temperature, avoiding cold feet.

18. If you have any pain in your feet see a podiatrist or your doctor immediately.

19. Use foot powder.

20. Follow a healthy diet and lifestyle; this will help prevent problems and complications.

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