Tips for Healthy Living

We’ve partnered with Lite for Life, a local weight loss company, to share tips with you about taking a healthy approach to eating and weight management that will help you achieve and maintain control for life. – Carmelo Sigona

We’d like to introduce to you to Lite for Life, a new partner for our Tips for Healthy Living column. Lite for Life is a weight loss company that takes a healthy approach to weight loss through the use of private counselors who teach clients how to lose and keep off weight in a natural, healthy way to achieve and maintain control…for life. They do this through a series of four phases: preparation, reduction, stabilization and maintenance.

The key to the program is controlling blood sugar and eliminating cravings. In the last five years I’ve focused on these elements in my diet and feel much better than before.I’m a fan of this program.

Look for these Lite for Life health tips in upcoming issues:

1. The Starting Line: Ditch the Sugar
2. Meals: To Skip or not to Skip
3. Love your Fruit
4. Proteins: Lean, Mean (and critical!) Building Machines

Lite for Life Health Tip #1: The Starting Line: Ditch the Sugar

Refined, processed, artificial, even “natural” sugars are physiologically addictive, affecting your blood sugar in ways that make your body try to store extra fat and also make it harder to resist future cravings.

You know those times you feel like you could eat everything in sight? That’s because you’re blood sugar levels are off kilter. What’d you have for breakfast? Was it really sugary and now you’ve got the “hunger shakes?” Reducing and ditching sugar intake helps eliminate those highs and lows and gives your pancreas a break. (The Pancreas produces insulin – the hormone that helps the body use glucose for energy, and also stores excess energy as fat.) Replacing those sugars with the right foods can also help keep energy constant during the day.

Try to limit sweets overall, and when you do indulge, choose treats sweetened from natural, low-glycemic index (GI) sources: fruits and/or fruit juice, honey, stevia and agave. Low GI foods produce only small fluctuations in blood glucose (blood sugar) and insulin levels. This change to your diet is one of the top secrets to long-term health and weight loss, not to mention a way to help assure yourself that you won’t become one of the 25.8 million American children and adults who have diabetes (this statistic is based on data from the 2011 National Diabetes Fact Sheet, released Jan. 26, 2011).

Look for tip #2, Meals: To Skip or not to Skip, in our next e-newsletter. Not signed up for our e-newsletter? Sign up on our website or in the store.