Key Action to Control Your Appetite

There's shrimp, beef, rice, noodles, corn, broccoli, and raspberry pie and chocolate truffle candy.If you're like most everyone, you will wish for try a little of everything. But a broad variety of foods at one meal can lead you to eat more foods. Since each diverse food has its own satiety stage, and you can try to close your hunger switch. The experts have found that appetite is controlled by biochemical signals. Some foods activate the desire to eat more, while others tend to suppress that desire. Here's how to manage the urge to overeat.

1. Don’t skip meals.

People who skip breakfast or lunch lend to overeat in the evening, this is common among chronic dieters. A problem is that during meal, skipping, the body's store of glycogen, used as a fuel, drops. That signals the body to demand food and could make you hungry.

2. Soup it up.

In 2001, Researchers at one University in the United States invited some men to lunch for two weeks. On different days the men received one of three appetizers, tomato soup, cheese and crackers, or fresh fruit. Calories in each appetizer were equal. Then the men ate a main course. Tomato soup beat the other two in reducing the number of entree calories consumed. Soup lowered later calorie intake by 25 percent compared with cheese and crackers. The key may be the large volume of space that soup takes in the stomach.

3. Snack sensibly.

A large meal, especially one that's sugary, stimulates the body to produce insulin over a longer period; this, in turn, removes excess sugars from the bloodstream and encourages fat storage and production. With smaller, more frequent meals, less insulin is released over a shorter period. According to some scientific thinking, this helps in the weight wars by lessening the amount of fat produced and stored. Nutritionists call this small-meal approach grazing, and for it to be effective, you have to munch the right foods. If grazing sounds like too much freedom to eat, schedule it in advance. Plan your day so that you can snack with healthful goodies every two hours or so.

4. Eat more complex carbohydrates.

A few years ago, dieters were encouraged to dine on high-protein, low-carbohydrate foods, a hamburger patty with cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf, for example. Since then, such diets have been criticized as unhealthy and potentially dangerous. Foods high in complex carbohydrates and low in fat-rice, potatoes, corn and pasta-have made a big comeback, thanks in part to their ability to satisfy the appetite with fewer calories.

5. Feast on fiber.

Fibrous foods provide robust mouthful that must be chewed thoroughly. It's a natural way to slow eating, and eating more slowly means eating less. The extra time lets the body know it has received fuel and doesn't need much more.

Soluble fiber in foods such as barley, beans, apples, citrus fruits, beets, carrots and potatoes also dampens insulin response. Normally, after a meal, insulin levels rise to help metabolize sugar and fat. But soluble fiber helps keep insulin levels lower after a meal, says Kenney.

Moreover, foods high in fiber tend to have fewer calories in every bite, which means fewer calories consumed overall.

6. Know your own triggers.

Whether it’s sizzling sausage or crunch popcorn, the smell, sight, sound and even texture of foods are powerful triggers to overeat. First, ask yourself why you want to eat. It may have nothing to do with hunger.  Actually our eating is so dependent on external cues that just seeing foods makes us want to eat.

Emotions are another reason people eat. Eighty-five percent of my patients had psychological reasons for overeating. A major trigger is stress. Before you eat, ask yourself, "Am 1 eating because I'm hungry or because I'm upset?"

Keeping a food record can help identify your strongest cues. For a few days, write down everything you eat and what made you start thinking about food, an advertisement, emotion or aroma. That helps you out-think the next craving.

Everyone experiences food cravings at some time. When one occurs, some researchers suggest, picture it as following a wave pattern, You have to ride that wave till the craving subsides, with a food craving, it’s much easier to ride the wave if you distract yourself. Ideally, do something incompatible with eating, like taking a walk. In 20 minutes, the craving will probably diminish.

Yoga may help keep weight off at mid-life

Researchers found that overweight people in their 50s who regularly practiced yoga lost about five pounds over 10 years, while a group in the same age range gained about 13 1/2 pounds over the same period.

Middle-aged people of normal weight generally put on pounds over 10 years, but those who did yoga gained less weight than those who didn’t practice yoga.

The researchers collected data from 15,500 people between the ages of 53 and 57 who were asked about exercise, weight, health and diet histories. The findings, published in 2008 issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, showed that those who practiced yoga tended to avoid junk food and overeating because they wanted to respect their bodies.

You Can Beat the Odds of Heart Disease—Even If It Runs in Your Family

When a man was only 48, and had a heart attack, the doctor told him that plaques of fat had clogged the spaghetti size arteries that carried oxygen to his heart. In those days, though, no—one knew why this happened. Most doctors thought heart disease was just nature’s way of ploughing under the old crop.

Every two years since 1948, more than 5000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts have had their pulses checked, their diets monitored and their habits watched in an attempt to discover the risk factors of heart disease. Their blood is run through dozens of tests, the fat in their bodies is measured, the rhythm and structure of their hearts are charted.

Every two years since 1948, more than 5000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts have had their pulses checked, their diets monitored and their habits watched in an attempt to discover the risk factors of heart disease. Their blood is run through dozens of tests, the fat in their bodies is measured, the rhythm and structure of their hearts are charted.

Of course there’s a difference between knowing something and acting on it. The citizens of Framingham still eat as many pizzas, chips, doughnuts and sundaes as do people in other towns. I was no exception, even though I know how crucial a healthy diet and regular exercise are. Somehow, there had to be a way to change my habits without taking all the pleasure out of life.

Over the years, I’ve hit upon a number of solutions. I still snack on sweets. I don’t turn up my nose at red meat. And I’m always interested in finding ways to exercise less. But my cholesterol is now below 5.5. Here’s how you can do it too:

1) Think fat, not cholesterol. Many people who believe they’re following a low—cholesterol diet really aren’t. Some types of shell—fish, for example, are relatively high in cholesterol, while many baked foods and potato chips have none. Yet if you eat more crabs and prawns, and less of those prepared foods, your cholesterol count can actually fall. The reason is that prepared foods frequently contain tropical oils (coconut, palm and palm kernel) high in saturated fat. And it’s the saturated fat in the food you eat, more than the cholesterol, that is the problem. (Egg yolks and organ meats, incredibly rich in cholesterol, are exceptions to this rule.)Most cholesterol in your body is produced by your cells, Saturated fat signals your cells to make more cholesterol and acts as the raw material for its manufacture. Trim the saturated fat in your diet and you automatically cut the cholesterol in your blood.

Food labels don’t usually list saturated—fat content, but there’s a way to “guesstimate.” Many labels list total fat content, and, although the amounts of saturated fats vary from product to product, I figure that often about half is saturated fat. Roughly speaking，the saturated fats in beef, pork and other red meats are typically a little less than half the total, while those in dairy products are a little more. Some tropical oils, however, are more than three—quarters saturated fat!

How much fat is too much? A cheeseburger, a large order of chips and a milk shake can contain nearly 28 grams of saturated fat, about as much as the average person, without heart problems, should consume in a day. Yet many of us eat 50 to 75 grams, with frequent binges of 1 00 grams or more.

2) Substitute good ingredients for bad．Most of us don’t need dieting classes; we need cooking classes. The meals we eat come from a short list of unwritten recipes— an “oral cookbook” —passed down from generation to generations: macaroni—and—cheese casseroles, bacon and eggs, hamburgers and chips, lasagna, fried chicken and meat. Many of these recipes originated in an age very different from our own, when people engaged in manual labors 12 hours a day, six days a week. Their bodies required a high—fat diet; ours don’t.

In theory, one family member can change his diet, but in practice almost no-one is willing to prepare two different sets of meals day in and day out. However, you can remove saturated fat from your favourite family recipes.

Diet books frequently suggest that you throw out all the family’s favorite meals. We  could substituted soft diet margarine for butter, skim  milks for whole (saving ten grams of fat for every half a litre! ), egg whites for whole eggs, nonfat yoghurt for sour cream, whole-grain cereal crumbs for bread crumbs and vegetable oils for shortening.

It’s easy to cut down. For dinner, instead of a 250— gram sirloin, fried potatoes, peas and a piece of pie, substitute a 170— gram portion of lean steak, a baked potato topped with soft diet margarine, peas, and low fat oatmeal biscuits. You will have eaten eight grams of saturated fat instead of 37. Yet few of us would finish such a meal feeling deprived.

3) When you eat out，improvise．Many people eat deep-fried foods five lunches a week, and that’s enough to kill anyone. Some fast food restaurants fry foods in highly saturated oils or beef tallow. The result is that chicken and fish get drenched in more fat than the choicest cuts of beef contain. A typical fast—food chicken-patty sandwich has more fat than half a liter of ice cream, and just six chicken nuggets can have over 20 grams of fat. Some fried vegetables absorb even more fat than fish and meat do.

If asked, chefs will usually prepare vegetables without butter, sour cream or cheese sauces and will broil your chicken instead of frying it. On your potato, try cooked chopped broccoli, fresh diced tomatoes or nonfat salad dressing. If no low—fat entrees are offered, improvise.

4) Take a walk．If you exercise, you can diet less. Exercise stimulates the production of a protein called HDL, which removes fat from your blood and may actually scrub plaque deposits off the walls of your arteries.

Most people like jogging, but the problem is finding time to jog, or to swim or play tennis. So we could park on the far end of the car park, climb stairs instead of waiting for a lift and walk to the store to buy newspapers.

Most of the benefit of exercise—whether running, brisk walking, cycling or aerobics—comes from very little effort. So even the most confirmed couch potato, by taking a brisk half—a—hour walk four or five times a week, can cut his odds of dying of a heart attack in half.

5) Know the point spread. Get your cholesterol count checked. Depending on your age, weight and medical history, it should fall below 5.1, with 5.1 to 5.9 a borderline reading. If your total cholesterol is over 5.1, you may have enough HDL to counteract it.

Two months after limiting saturated fats in your diet, have your cholesterol checked again. If it hasn’t dropped to a healthy level, set a lower daily limit and check your cholesterol 60 days later. If the number doesn’t look respectable, ask your doctor for help. You can start to change the odds that you’ll suffer a heart attack or stroke if you take the steps outlined above.