The Road to Good Health

We all want to look good, we all want to be healthy, but we always end up using the wrong method. One year being a Herbalife Distributor exposed me to the reality of how silly and fickle people can be when it comes to their body. And it's a sad fact that many companies (coincidently majority of them are MLMs) are taking advantage on them, offering products that don't work. Sure, the PROMISED remuneration is great, but if the products don't work, you'll end up with a double loss. How is it a double loss? Well, the products don't work, so you don't benefit from it. That's one loss. And since they don't work, people won't buy them, and you might as well say goodbye to your investment in the business. See, a double loss.

As for Herbalife, you might say that I'm biased, since I'm still a Distributor by right. True, I'm a distributor, but I don't do the business. At least not anymore. But here's what I want to share with you. Some lessons on health that I learned from Herbalife.

Basically, if you want to maintain a good health and weight condition, you need to incorporate a good eating habit, a good drinking habit, and a good exercise habit. Now let me elaborate.

When we are eating, the content of our food speaks volumes. Contained in our food are nutritions, fats, and calories. We all know about nutrition (at least we know the meaning), but many of us misunderstood the term "fat" and "calorie". Fat is a component needed for energy, and can be divided into 2 classes: saturated and non-saturated fat. Saturated fat is a fat that is solid at room temperature and comes chiefly from animal food products. Some examples are butter, lard, meat fat, solid shortening, palm oil, and coconut oil. These fats tend to raise the level of cholesterol in the blood. Non-saturated fat/unsaturated fat is a fat that is liquid at room temperature and comes from a plant such as olive, peanut, corn, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, or soybean. Unsaturated fats tend to lower the level of cholesterol in the blood. Calorie, in the other hand, is a unit of food energy. And nutritions provide various benefits to our body, such as providing you energy and keep you vibrant, produce and keep your cells alive, improve your heart condition, repair your body tissue, improve your recuperation rate when you are sick, and assist digestion.

So when we are eating, it's not the form of the food that matters, it's the content: how much nutrition it has, what kind of nutrition, how much fat, what kind of fat, and how much calorie is in it. Those are the questions that we need to ask, and we need to verify as a standard to our eating habit. And here's why; we need an intake of 44 nutritions on a daily basis; we want to have unsaturated fats, rather than saturated, because saturated fats are hazardous to our body; and we don't want to consume excess calories. Arrange an appointment with your physician to check how much calorie you body can burn. If we eat more calories than we can burn, we'll be building more fats in our body.

Next, we need to have a good drinking habit. And by drinking, I don't mean beer, wiski, tequila, champagne, vodka, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, sirap limau, teh tarik, and the likes. I mean plain water, or sky juice. We lose about 1.7 liters of water everyday through breathing, sweating, detoxification, etc. And we need to replenish the amount of water we lose constantly. We our body lack water, we experience tiredness, migraine, constipation, muscle cramps, irregular blood-pressure, kidney problems, dry skin, and if our body is more than 20% dehydrated, you might end up on a journey of no return.

We need to drink at least 3 liters of water throughout the day. Mind you, THROUGHOUT the day. Not on one go. We need that much of water because 75% of our body is made of water. 90% of our brain is water, 80% of our blood is water, and 20% of our bone is water. See how much water we need? A lot.

Last but not least, we need to have a good exercise habit. 20 minutes a day, 3 times a week. And that's a minimum. You can jog, you can walk, you can dance. Be creative, do something that you like and enjoy. As long as you get a good sweat from it, go ahead.

Now, INCORPORATE all three points, and make it your habit and philosophy, you'll find yourself on the road to greater health. As a closing, let me share with you an ancient wisdom:

"When diet is wrong medicine is of no use. When diet is correct medicine is of no need". – Ancient Ayurvedic Proverb

Many diets work about the same, U.S. study finds

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Looking for that perfect diet? Researchers have bad news -- all diets have just about the same result, and none of them are great, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

A typical diet helps people lose an average of 6 percent of their weight, typically 5 to 7 kg, and most people put it all back on after five years.

Weight loss drugs are similarly ineffective in the long run, said Dr. Michael Dansinger of the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston.

"It's disappointing but I am optimistic that we can do better in the future. We are learning some of the factors that improve the effectiveness (of diets)," said Dansinger, whose study is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

The news is bad for those who hoped a gentler approach to dieting might be more effective over the long-term. Programs that made people eat fewer calories worked better, as did those that involved more frequent visits to either diet groups or to a counselor's office.

But there is good news -- even a small, temporary weight loss can benefit health, Dansinger said.

"A modest weight loss of six percent that is partially maintained for five years is likely to have important health benefits such as delaying the onset of diabetes," he said in a telephone interview.

Dansinger and colleagues looked at the results of 46 trials that included nearly 12,000 people.

About half were on diets. Dansinger said it was difficult to find good studies that included a control group not on a diet. It was also hard to find studies that followed people for more than three years.

The only commercial program included in the study was Weight Watchers. Most were government or university-sponsored programs.

No studies that included food or shakes were included because they did not include a non-dieting group for comparison.

"The results we found, 6 percent weight loss after one year, is in the same ballpark as most of the studies of weight loss, including studies of weight loss medications," Dansinger said.

"We also found the weight loss gradually goes away so that about half the weight loss was gone within three years and almost all the weight loss was gone within five years. That is also similar to what has been found with weight loss medications."

Dansinger said some of the studies included exercise, but his analysis was not designed to tell whether exercise helped weight loss last longer.

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, with a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis and cancer.