YOU on a diet - You Tips!

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You Tips! Get Over Sticker Shock. You should read food lavels as actively as you read the stock ticker or the horoscopes. Don't eat foods that have any of the following listed as one of the first five ingredients: Simple sugars Enriched, bleached, or refined flour (this means it's stripped of its nutrients) HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup-a four-letter word). Putting themn into your body is like dunking your cell phone in a glass of water. It'll cause your system to short out your hormones and send your body confusing messages about eating. Today's yearly per capita consumption of sugar is 150 pounds, compared to 7.5 pounds consumed on average in the year 1700. That's twenty times as much! When typical slightly overweight people eat sugar, they an average store 5 percent as ready energy to

use later, metabolize 60 percent and store a whopping 35 percent as fat that can be converted to energy later. Any guess as to where 50 percent of sugar we consume cones from? HFCS in fat-free foods like salad dressing and regular soft drinks. Choose Unsaturated over Saturated. Meals high in saturated fat (that's one of the aging fats) produce lowe levels of leptin than low-fat meals with the exact same calories. That indicates you can increase your satiety and decrease hunger levels by avoiding saturated fats found in such sources as high-fat meats (like sausage), baked goods, and whole-milk dairy products. Don't Confuse Thirst with Hunger. The reason some people eat is because their saitety centers are begging for attention. But sometimes, those appetite centers want things to quench thirst, not to fill the stomach. Thirst could be

caused by hormones in the gut, or it could be a chemical response to eating; eating food incresas the thickness of your blood, and your body senses the need to dilute it. A great way to counteract your hormonal reaction to food is to make sure that your response to thirst activation doesn't contain unnecessary, emty calories- like the ones in soft drinks or alcohol. Your thirst center doesn't care whether it's getting zero-calorie water or a mega-calorie frap. You-reka! When you feel hungry, drink a glass or two of water first, to see if that's really what your body wants. Avoid the Alcohol Binge. For weight loss, avoid drinking excessive alcohol-not soley because of its own calories, but also because of the calories it inspires you to consume later. Alcohol lowers your inhibitaion, so you end up feeling like you can eat anything and everything you see. Limiting

yourself to one alcoholic drink a day has a protective effect on your arteries but could still cost you pooundsk, since it inhibits pleptin. Watch Your Carbs.Eating a super-high-carb diet increases NPY, which makes you hungry, so you should ensure that less than 50 percent of your diet comes from carbohydrates. Make sure that most of your carbs are complex, such as whole graines and vegetables Stay-Va-Va-Va- Voom-Satisfied. In any waist management plan, you can stay satisfied. Not in the form of a dripping double cheeseburger but in the form of safe, healthy, monogamous sex. Sex and hunger are regulated through the brainchemical NPY. Some have observed that having healthy sex could help you control your food intake; by satisfying one appetite center, you seem to satisfy the other Manage Your Hormonal

Surges. There will be times when you can't always control your hormone levels; when ghrelin outslugs your leptin, and you feel hungrier than a lion on a bug-only diet. Develop a list of emergency foods to satisfy you when cravings get the best of you-things like V8 juice, a handful of nuts, pieces of fruit, cut-up vegetables, or even a little guacamole. Here's some more YOU TIPS! Slow the Process. Especially before your meal. If you have a little of the right kinds of fat just before you eat, you cantrick your hormonal system by sending the signal to your brain that you're full. If you eat a little fat twenty minutes before your meal (70 calories or so of fat in the form of six walnuts, twelve almonds, or twenty peanuts), you'll stimulate production of CCK, which will both communicate with your brain and slow your stomack from emptying to

keep you feeling full. (CCK release and ghrelin reduction take about twenty minutes to kick in and take about 65 calories of fat to stimulate.) That way, you'll be able to sit down for a meal and eat for pleasure, not for hunger-which is one way to ensure you'll eat less. The average person is finished eating well before his satiety signals kick in, thus counteracting any possiblity that hsi hormones can help him. For the same reason, you should eat slowly. If you down your food faster that a MiniVac, you won't allow your satiety hormones time to kick in. Set the Early Fiber Alarm. Many of us may associate fiber with better health and increased toilet time, but fiber is the speed bump of your GI interstate. It slows everything way down. Technically, it works by slowing the transit of food across the ileocecal valv, keeping your stomach fuller for longer. The result:

a greater feeling of satiety and an increase of appetite-suppressin g CCK-like signals.. While you should aim for around 30 grams of fiver a day, the key is bulking up in the morning. Studies show that consuming biver in the morning(at breakfast) makes you less hungry in late afternoon-a notorious candy-sucking, diet-busting time of day. Great sources of breakfast fiber include oatmeal, cereal, whole grains, and fruit. (You'll note that every breakfast in the YOU Diet-see part 4-has a lot of fiber in it, whether it's the cereal or the vegetables in an egg white omelet or the whole wheat bread. And morning snacks, like an apple, also have fiber.) Besidesw controlling blood sugar levels and decreasing insulin levles, fiber also reduces calorie intake for up to eighteen hours a day. Start with 1 to 2 grames of dietary fiber before meals and at bedtime and slowly increase to 5 grams. (If you add it all at once, you'll

produce more gass than a Saudi oil field.) The supplement konjac root also seems to have a fiber-related effect. One study showed a nealy 6-pound weight loss in eight weeks for those who ate 1 gram of it an hour before their meals. Step Down to the Plate. Monstrous portion sizes are one of our stomach's biggest enemies. Studies show that when you're served bad foods in large containers, you'll eat up to one-third more than if youer served in smaller containers. By getting served in larger popcorn boxes, bigger dishes, and taller cups, we've automatically been trcked into thinking that availability should dictate how much we eat, rather than physical hunger. You don't have to go through drastic changes to make small ones. For starters, change your serving ploates to the nine-inch variety to give yourself the visuall and psychological clue tht you're full when your physical appetite has

been sated. That's imprtant, because studies show visual clues help determinehwo full you are, inthat you may not feel satisfied until your plate is clean, no matter how large the plate is. That's also reason never to eat directly out of a box or carton and always to remember that one serving size of a food is often about the size of a fist. Slow Down. Stomach growling stimulates appetite, but growling doesn't really tell you how hungry you are. It tells you to eat, but not how much to eat. That's why meal size is so important. You're hardwired to eat, but you're not hardwired to eat a lot. Having a big meal quickly won't stop you from wanting to eat a few hours later. So slow down and let your CCK act; it takes about twenty minutes after the nuts to decrease your desire to eat. Add Pepper. Red pepper, when eaten early in the

day, decreases food intake later in the day. Some credit the ingredient capsaicin for being the catalyst for decreasing overall calorie intake and for increasing metabolism. It also appears to work by inhibiting sensoy information that the intestines from reaching the brain, which is particulrly effective in reducing appetite in low-fat diets. Capsaicin works by killing-or at least stunning-the messages that you're hungry. So add red peppers to your egg-white omelet.