Walter Willett
Eat, Drink and be Healthy

Weight Watchers, The Soup Diet, Grapefruit Diet, Low Carb Diet, Glycemic Index Diet, Alkaline Diet, Abs Diet, High Protein Diet, Low Protein Diet, South Beach Diet, Blood Type Diet, Gluten Free Diet, Atkins Diet, Mediterranean Diet and the Zone Diet.

The authors of all these diet programs have one thing in common: they all claim to know the secret for long term weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. How do they say you can achieve this? By doing what they tell you to do! They say what you must eat, what you can't eat and how much you should eat. It's as if these authors think you are to dumb to make these decisions on your own.

Why let these so called "experts" decide what you eat? Did we not go to school and learn to think for ourselves?

Find out yourself if counting calories is necessary. Find out yourself if fat is good or bad. Don't let others tell you what ends up on your plate! It's time to take matters in your own hands and start drawing your own conclusions!

So what's been going on at pro Health Blog? Not much, really, but still quite a few things. Having posted only about 2 updates in the last month, it seemed as if I might've abandoned things here. Yet, nothing's further from the truth!

Even though real life things have been keeping me busy for quite a few weeks, I managed to get my 16 Fat Loss Tips article up and running. It has gotten some big time traffic from StumbleUpon in the past few days with nearly as much visitors in 3 days as I got in the whole month of april!

With this article I even broke my All Time number of Comments per post Record which was previously set at 7 comments, and now moved up to a whopping 8 comments, of which only 2 were mine! Do I hear a Yipee!? *grins*

As a way of saying thank you I decided to join the Do Follow Blog Movement. I have removed all the "No Follow" tags from my comments, which means Google will now love your link in my comments to it's fullest. I also changed my comment layout (read: I selected another comment template), so now the URL will match the Anchor Text. You can set this under the "Name" field. (An Anchor Text is the Text which is assigned to your URL. Anchors Texts are important to consider if you want to do well in the Google search results. An example of an Anchor Text is the 16 Fat Loss Tips earlier in this post. "16 Fat Loss Tips" was in this case my Anchor Text).

image by antmoose

Something that has been left untouched for quite some time now at pro health blog is the subject of Weight Loss. With over half of the US population overweight and just about a gazillion different diets available on the market, I'm sure this is something some of you might be interested in.

But before continuing, let me just correct myself and all the others out there using the term Weight Loss. A lot more accurate would be to use the term Fat Loss. Why is that, you ask? Our body weight consists of muscle, organs, water and fat. From those four things you can lose muscle, fat and water. When it comes to losing weight, all we really want to lose is fat. Muscles give us that healthy look, while water plays an important role in several of our bodily functions.

There are many different goals you can set when considering a fat loss plan. Some people still see themselves with a long road ahead of them, while others have already reached a healthy fat percentage but don't mind losing a little more. Whatever your fat loss goal is at this moment, I'm sure there are several lessons still left to be learned.

I'm not going to suggest a certain quick fix diet, neither am I laying out a 16 rules do-not-break-or-fail program. The concepts I'm about to suggest work mostly by themselves. They can be incorporated step by step while still learning more and more each day about a healthy lifestyle. Some of the lessons are very basic guidelines, while others are more advanced and are aimed for those trying to reach fat percentages within the single digit area. It's important to experiment and see what works for YOU and stick to that. If something does not work, evaluate and change. As you'll soon learn, everybody responds differently to different things.

“You are what you eat." We hear this over and over again, but it doesn’t really register with most of us because it is so cliché. If this old adage is true, you might be thinking to yourself, “Hmmmm… Well, if I am what I eat, then today I am a bowl of cereal, some Rice-A-Roni, some chicken, and a sugar-free ice-cream sandwich!” This all sounds very cute, until you take a closer look at the back of the cereal box, or the Rice-a-Roni box, or the ice-cream sandwich package.

While reading the labels, you might discover that you are actually made of a lot of things that you might not expect, or may not even be able to pronounce. Now you might be saying something like, “Today I am high-fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, monosodium glutamate and aspartame!” Not so cute-sounding anymore, is it.

Not only are the ingredients we find in many foods unappetizing and hard to pronounce, but some of these things are the leading causes of obesity and disease today. Food industry leaders are always trying to find ways to sell more products, and make it more cheaply in order to raise profits, as all large companies are. While these ingredients might have been deemed “safe” by the FDA, they are not necessarily the healthiest, nor are they necessarily harmless.

Thankfully, these companies are required to list all the ingredients on the labels. If you take the time to make yourself aware of what’s in your food, you might find out that you are made of things that are a little less scary-sounding, not to mention your pants might start to fit a little better.

image by Nick Holliday

If you are currently very overweight, chances are good you are frequently experiencing some kind of chronic disease. Allow me to use my personal history as an example.

As a kid I used to live an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, drinking several sodas every day and eating fast food whenever I had the chance. I was so unhealthy and overweight I couldn’t even run a mile without having to take a break several times. I always was that kid in class with the serious immunity problems, sneezing all the time and snorting, annoying just about everybody around me. To think of it, it was actually kind of sad.

Now it's true that a lot of this could be caused by the several allergies which I’ve been carrying with me since my birth, but I am sure there's more to it than just that. You'll soon read why.

image by Joe 13

Childhood obesity trends are horrifying. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have noted that in the 70’s childhood obesity rates were less than 6% while studies done today are showing a trend upwards of around 20%. In other words, in a single classroom, instead of there being just one child picked on for being overweight, we now have two or three kids. When considering the fact that childhood obesity leads to serious health consequences, one starts to wonder why it is steadily increasing and what is being done to slow it down.

While there are many factors affecting the obesity rates in the US, one huge area to be addressed are the school vending machines. In an educational and supposedly safe environment for children, it is difficult to understand why junk food or high calorie yet nutrient deficient foods are allowed into our schools. Some might argue freedom of choice, but for children who often cannot make the right choice; it is up to adults to do something about it.

In understanding the power of tea, we must first start with green tea.

Many historians believe that green tea was first cultivated in China and India before spreading to other Asian countries like Thailand and Japan.

Dried and cured leaves Camellia sinensis are used to make green tea beverages and although there are so many ways to include green tea in your diet, it is historically used by letting the unique healing properties seep out into the boiling water. These healing properties are widely known and some scientific studies are helping to get green tea to be used in medical treatments.

If you’ve ever requested a vegetarian meal on an airplane, then you know that the airline gives you an entirely different meal than everyone else--this is not necessary. While I’m eating bean paste and sprouts without a cookie, I’m salivating over the sandwich, grapes, and chips everyone else is eating. During my 15 years of vegetarianism, there is no question I get asked more frequently than, “What should I feed a vegetarian guest?” To answer the question, prepare whatever dish you normally would, with meat on the side.

Vegetarians are like everyone else, but we just don’t eat meat. I’ve been to many dinner parties where I was forced to choke down bland, poorly-cooked tofu while everyone else ate gourmet. Follow these simple guidelines to please any vegetarian guest. You’ll be surprised how easy it is.