Happy Tuesday! Today I have a drink to share with you: green tea “lemonade”. It is a wonderful alternative to sodas and sugar-laden sweet tea. I like to bring it to school in my backpack and enjoy it for a refreshing afternoon drink.

You’ll need:

1 cup boiling water

1 bag of green tea (preferably organic)

2 packets stevia or 1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon powdered stevia or 10 – 12 drops liquid stevia

1 – 2 tablespoons (a large splash) of lemon juice

In a small glass bowl pour boiling water over teabag and let steep for 6-10 minutes. Press tea bag to extract as much flavor as possible and discard. Add the stevia and lemon juice, stirring well. Add a few ice cubes to cool the mixture.

In a glass or a large water bottle (I use a 32-oz Nalgene), fill about halfway with ice cubes. The more ice you use, the longer it will stay cold. Pour tea in bottle or glass and shake or stir several time until thoroughly mixed, ice cold, and a bit frothy. Enjoy!

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So if being overweight is a serious problem in America and most short-term diets don’t work, what can be done to solve it? What is the healthy and long term solution to weight loss? It can be summarized in 3 simple words: change your lifestyle. This is the only answer for long term, lifelong weight loss success. “Change your lifestyle” means changing how much you eat, what you eat, and exercising more. The mantra “eat less, eat smart, move more” is a simple yet accurate summary of a lifestyle to promote weight reduction for good.

Do you remember the cheese fries I mentioned earlier? One serving contains 2,862 calories. Now let’s compare that to the same number of calories in fresh raw foods. You could eat a gigantic meal of 5 cups of beans, 5 cups of rice, 20 cups of spinach and 6 whole carrots. EVEN THEN, if you ate all that food, you would not be eating as many calories as are in those cheese fries. Let’s think about this. What would fill you up more: 10 cups of beans and rice with over 23 cups of vegetables or a single serving of an appetizer? Enough said. You will find again and again that fueling your body by eating foods in their natural state in three balanced meals daily, you can eat more and feel more full and mantain a healthy weight.

Exercise and nutrition go hand in hand for weight loss success. According to the KC Craichy, if a person takes 30-45 minutes each day to walk, run, bike, swim, or do any form of exercise where the heart rate is elevated, the benefits are lifelong. In addition to lowering the risk of many diseases, including those associated with aging, exercise boosts your metabolism for hours afterward. (Craichy 369)

Strength training, also known as weight lifting, is crucial to losing and maintaining weight. When a person is 20-30 years old, he starts to slowly lose muscle, and he will continue to lose muscle as he gets older. Fat accumulates and muscle deteriorates as a person ages. By losing muscle, your metabolism slows down, burning fewer calories. Did you know that muscle tissue burns a lot of calories? An article published by Super Health Diet clearly shows just how helpful muscle is for weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight. This study concluded that by replacing only five pounds of fat with 5 pounds of muscle tissue, a person will burn an extra 175 calories every day, which is almost 64,000 calories or 18 pounds every year! (Craichy 362 11/14)

As I close, I would like to say that the benefits of making these changes in your daily lifestyle will not only impact you significantly but also can affect generations that come after you. You can be fit and healthy and have more strength and energy to enjoy your life more fully. So the next time you see an advertisement for losing 30 pounds in 30 days, smile to yourself and ignore the temptation to consider this weight loss plan which promises those kinds of unhealthy and short term results. Now you know better. :)

Source: Craichy, KC. Super Health Diet. Florida: Living Fuel Publishing, 2011.

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Fad diets are on the rise these days. According to the Boston Medical Center, about 45 million Americans diet every year. Let’s take a brief look at some common fad diets and why they are not such a great idea. You’ve probably heard of at least some of these- the Lemonade Diet, the Twinkie Diet, and the Cabbage Soup Diet. These diets are pretty self-explanatory. They all have you eating a few types of foods in weird and irregular quantities.

For example, take the Cabbage Soup Diet. It has you make a concoction of cabbage and other vegetables and then you can eat as much of this as you want. Stuff yourself, even. You can eat any fruit you want on the first day, EXCEPT BANANAS. NO BANANAS. On the forth day, however, you may eat up to eight bananas. And don’t forget to eat your cabbage soup! This is only one example of many diets people are using to lose weight. No one wants to eat like this! (Faddiet.com)

Many diets allow for processed foods and lack nutrients essential for health. The main problem with dieting in the ways that I’ve just talked about is that most diets do not teach people to eat right for long term health benefits and weight loss success. Even though these types of diets may cause people to lose weight initially, they do not provide them with a plan to actually maintain their weight goal after its reached.

How about those expensive “magic weight-loss pills” that guarentee major weight loss in a short period of time? Many of these pills are diuretics, meaning that they have a dehydrating effect on the body. Water is heavy, these pills pull water from the tissues and eliminate it, and volia!, it causes weight loss. Very temporary weight loss. When taking a dieting pill, people know that they’re losing weight, but they don’t know what they’re losing. Fat? No. Muscle? Probably not. Water? Very likely. Extensive dehydration can lead to internal damage and health complications.

Remember the advertisement for losing 30 pounds in 30 days? Sure! A person will certainly lose weight following a food restricted diet. But what happens when a weight goal is reached using these kinds of diets? According to KC Craichy in his book Super Health Diet, a shocking 95% of these of all dieters end up gaining all their weight back again.

Why does this happen? Why do so many people gain back all that weight they lost while dieting? A common characteristic of all fad diets is the use of severe calorie restriction with unbalanced nutrition. When majorly restricting calories by dieting, you just pushed you body’s survival mode button. It cannot discern the difference between a diet and a full-fledged famine. Your body attempts to make up for this lack of fuel by slowing your metabolism waaaay down, which in turn burns fewer calories. After a grueling several weeks or months of dieting, you may find yourself lighter in weight and even smaller in size. Of course, you simply cannot eat like this forever. When you finally return to your normal eating habits, your body grabs all that extra food and quickly converts it to fat, trying to prepare for the next “famine” you assault it with. This is NOT what you intended for your body to do, but nevertheless, all of the weight that you “lost” is found again. (Craichy 127-129) Ugh! How utterly frustrating is that?! Diets of this nature simply do not work for sustainable weight loss and health.

Sources: Craichy, KC. Super Health Diet. Florida: Living Fuel Publishing, 2011.

Faddiet.com “The Cabbage Soup Diet and Recipe.” Faddiet.com (2011). Accessed 11/14/11 from [http://www.faddiet.com/cabsoupdiet.html]