Ingredients:

• 1 serving of Cinch Strawberry Shake Mix
• 1 Cup frozen peaches (unsweetened)
• 1 Cup frozen mangos (unsweetened)
• 1 Cup water, almond, rice, or coconut milk

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in blender and blend on low speed until fruit is blended in.  Pour in a tall glass and enjoy!

Tip:

You can substitute the Strawberry Cinch for Vanilla Cinch and the mangos for fresh or frozen strawberries.

Nutritional Information:

Calories: 357    Protein: 18g   Carbohydrate: 70g   Fat: 3g   Fiber: 12g

By: Dr. Stephen Chaney

By now many of you are starting to get really serious about your weight loss program for the new year.

And all of these diets sound so good. They promise weight loss secrets that nobody else knows about. They promise that you won’t even know that you are on a diet. And they make all of those promises sound so scientific.

As I said last week, there is no “magic” diet program. There is no “magic” diet food. There is no “magic” diet pill.

It’s all about calories in and calories out. It’s all about adopting a healthier lifestyle that you can stick to for a lifetime.

But one thing I did not talk about last week was how fast you should plan to lose your weight.

If a diet promises that you will lose 5 or 10 pounds in your first week and 10 to 20 pounds in your first few weeks should you choose it?

On the flip side, if you start a diet and only lose a pound or two a week should you feel frustrated? Should you feel like a failure?

Heck, you probably know the answer to that question already. I’ll bet you’ve heard expert after expert say that a safe, sensible diet should lead to 1 or 2 pounds of weight loss a week.

On an intellectual level you already know that a diet that leads to rapid weight loss may not be safe in the short run and is probably not sustainable in the long run.

But on an emotional level it is so hard to resist the lure of rapid weight loss!

So in this e-health newsletter, I thought it might be important to give you three reasons why you should avoid those diets that promise rapid weight loss.

#1: Rapid weight loss causes your “starvation response” to kick in!

With a fast food restaurant on every corner in today’s world it’s hard to imagine that we even have a ”starvation response”.

But you have to remember that we evolved in a world in which you had to chase down your dinner, hit it over the head with a club and drag in back to your cave.

In that world you might have to go weeks with just a few berries and roots to eat – especially if you were as handy with a club as I am.

Because of our beginnings, we are all hardwired with a starvation response that dramatically reduces our metabolic rate whenever the calories in our daily diet decrease significantly.

The “starvation response” was a lifesaver when we were cavemen (and cave women), but it just causes frustration when you are trying to lose weight.

#2: Rapid weight loss causes you to lose muscle mass.

That’s because your brain needs glucose to function. Fat cannot be metabolized to glucose, but muscle protein can.

Because protein burns calories more rapidly than fat the loss of muscle mass decreases your metabolic rate even more.

When you combine the “starvation response” with the loss of muscle mass your metabolic rate decreases to such a great extent that you often encounter the all too familiar weight loss plateau.

Now, as hard as you try, you just can’t seem to lose any more weight.

#3: Rapid weight loss is almost never sustainable in the long run.

You’ve cut calories so dramatically that you feel hungry all of the time (and probably grumpy as well).

You can’t imagine this as a permanent part of your lifestyle – and it almost never is.

That’s why most experts recommend that you aim for a calorie deficit of just 500 calories per day.

Since 2500 calories is approximately equivalent to one pound, that’s just over one pound of weight loss per week.

If you add a 30 minute/day exercise program to burn off~300 calories/day you will approach 2 pounds of weight loss per week.

So if you want to lose that weight and keep it off, learn to get excited about 1 to 2 pounds of weight loss per week …

…and avoid all of those fad diets that promise more rapid weight loss!

To Your Health!
Dr. Stephen G Chaney
Shaklee Master Coordinator
http://www.chaneyhealth.com

Are you looking to lose weight in 2010?  If you are, you are not alone. More than 65% of American’s are now overweight to obese.  Yet America spends more than 160 Billion dollars a year to combat the growing weight epidemic.  Some of this money may be well spent on gym memberships and other things, but I believe a lot of the problem lies in our individual choices.  Certain things that the average American consumes on a daily basis are greatly contributing to the overall state of our poor health.  Let’s take a look at one of America’s favorite choices that may be costing our waistlines dearly: beverages.

We talk a lot about watching what we eat, but if we gave just as much thought to what we drank each day, we would, on average, save ourselves 450 calories a day!  That’s close to 1/3 of your daily intake of calories!

Read these staggering beverage facts and you decide if “drinking responsibly” should mean more to you than just “don’t drink and drive.”

• American’s drink twice as many calories as we did 30 years ago.
• If you cut back your intake of sweetened beverages by just ONE day a week, you would save enough calories to lose more than 6 1/2 lbs. a year!
• If you cut it by TWO days you would shave off 13 lbs (University of North Carolina)!
• 28% of all drinks we consume are carbonated soft drinks.
• One soda contains 13 teaspoons of sugar (as opposed to the 9 tsp. in Coke 20 years ago–they raised it without anyone knowing or caring!)
• The average American consumes 55 gallons of soda per year.
• Soda makes up 10-15% of teenage girls’ daily caloric intake.
• Families switching to “juice” aren’t doing their children any favors. Juice, on average, contains more sugar than a serving of soda.
• In 4th-6th graders, sweetened juice or other beverages make up 51% of all fluid intake! (research shows that students who drink sweetened beverages take in an extra 337 calories a day on average, and less than half the amount of real fruits than their less sugar saturated peers; Eat This, Not That).

So, let’s do the math to see how all this sugar is hurting not only our waistlines, but our childrens’ waistlines!  Statistics show that 40% of children in the U.S. are now overweight or obese. This number is on the rise.   A Minnesota study found that children were almost three times more likely to drink soda 5 of more times a week when their parents regularly drank soda. So our choices are effecting theirs!

13 teaspoons in one can of soda is alot….and that’s the smallest can. The larger bottles or super sizes are far more!  When converted to calories, 13 teaspoons of sugar is 208 calories.   If you are a regular “drinker,” you just may be defeating your weight loss goals, not by the food you are eating, but by the beverages you are drinking.

Just for fun, I will show you a few of the worst beverages on the market to consume.  If you are trying to watch your weight, run as fast as you can away from these drinks!

1. Snapple Agave Melon Antioxidant water (20 ounce bottle)

Catchy name, lots of “buzz” words. “Agave” = popular, healthy sugar. “Antioxidant” = we all want that, right?  “Water” = how bad could water be?

Well, this “healthy” water has 33g of sugar, the same as consuming 3 bowls of Honey Comb cereal!

2. Sunkist (20 ounces)

This rings in a wopping 88 g of sugar and 325 calories.  The sugar equivalent is 17 Chewy Chips Ahoy! cookies.  I don’t about you, but I would rather eat 17 cookies if I am going to choose to have that much sugar at one time!

3. Naked Protein Zone Banana Chocolate (15.2 Ounces)

Naked is a healthy brand, right?  Better read your labels before you guzzle!  This supposedly healthy drink has 32 g of protein (good, right), but there are 70g of sugar and 480 calories!  You could eat 5 Breyers Oreo Ice Cream Sandwiches for this load of sugar.

So, the moral of the story, lose weight by drinking sensibly.