How to lose weight and improve your health
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| How to lose weight and improve your health |
There is so much pressure on people to lose weight and look good at the moment but
how can you lose weight in way that improves your health and benefits you?
When I was a child growing up there was always a big emphasis on health eating healthily. So eating 5 portions of fruit an veg a day and drinking plenty of water was a normal thing then.
These days though when comes to losing weight and improving health the market tends to contradict itself throwing at us lots of adverts for junk food, junk food and more junk food.
Then on the other side of the coin we are presented with size zero celebrities whose seemingly fast weight loss plans and healthy diets have put the population, young and old into a dieting frenzy with people trying all sorts of things just to try and size themselves down and look good.
This has opened up the floodgates of more and more people being diagnosed with anorexia, bulimia, scurvy and malnutrition all caused by diets and diet aids used to try and speed up the weight loss process.
You read more and more stories about people dieing through overdosing on diet pills or from poor nutrition and these aren't just everyday people one example is American baseball star Steve Bechler, who had reportedly been using the weight loss supplement Xenadrine RFA-1 and overdosed.
Sharlene Hesse-Biber, a sociologist at Boston College really hit the nail on the head when she said: "Thin is really part of what it means to be attractive within this culture, the message is that you have to shape up to the right kind of body. We punish and reward people for having the right or wrong body. We have so much hatred directed toward our bodies that marketers play to fat or the f-word,"
She believes that this has created a "cult of thinness" that leads some people to diet extremes that can be harmful. "It would be better", she says, "to forget what we look like and focus on what we do and being healthy."
So how can you go about losing weight without falling into the same trap as everyone else? How can you lose weight in a way that's not only going to make you look great but feel great also?
