Previously by Margaret Durst: Enzymes – Take These To Recover From Thanksgiving
Fat – A great after Thanksgiving topic. Fat is that horrible stuff that hangs in all the wrong places on your body. I’m not even sure that there is a “right” place for the stuff. Americans in general have been getting fat for some time and it seems to have gotten worse lately. Why?
The function of fat on the body is to protect us. We need it for padding, but it also functions like a pocket or purse. Our bodies get overloaded with the wrong kinds of food, with toxins from the chemicals that are used to process our food and from environmental toxins such as cleaning products, pesticides and synthetic fragrances.
When our body is overloaded with “stuff” it can’t handle, it must put it somewhere – so it stores it as fat. The body means to come back and deal with the “stuff” later, but we feed it more bad food and chemicals and so it never catches up, but continues to stash the “stuff”.
Most people with excess body fat are very toxic and tend to have congested or sluggish livers. The liver is one of our major organs of detoxification. When it gets overwhelmed, our metabolism gets slow, we gain more weight and we have difficulty losing weight.
The good news is that there are a couple of diets that deal with detoxifying the body while stopping the onslaught of new “stuff”. These can really melt that toxic fat right off your body.
The easy one is called The Fast Track One-Day Detox Diet. Now before you get too excited, this is really not a “one day” program. It is an eleven day program that involves one day of fasting. This is a great diet. It involves mostly food changes that are simple and available almost everywhere. I tried it and lost about 10 pounds by doing it two times – and the weight has stayed off. The “fast track” program is a really good way to kick off a longer term weight loss program because it detoxifies the body and revs up metabolism.
The most effective diet I have ever used is called The Fat Flush Plan. This is one of the hardest plans I have ever followed, but it really works. It was designed as a woman’s diet to help balance hormones – and it really does. It works for men too. The Fat Flush Plan is a true regimen. It is a scheduled plan of eating and taking specific supplements. It works by detoxifying the liver and boosting metabolism. It also restricts intake of the wrong kinds of foods that slow down metabolism. I lost 15 pounds in three weeks by following this plan. The Fat Flush Plan is the diet to try when nothing else has worked. It also tends to help with some of the “uncurable” issues such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.
Both The Fat Flush Plan and The Fast Track One-Day Detox Diet are books. They are both by Ann Louise Gittleman who was the chief nutritionist at the Pritikin Institute for several years. You may remember Pritikin as the pioneer of low fat diets. Ms. Gittleman developed her programs after seeing the failure of the low fat programs.
If you are having trouble with weight loss, look into these programs. They might just work for you and help teach you how to be healthier at the same time.
Margaret Durst owns The Green House, a vitamin, herb and health food store in Mason, Texas.
