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For many years, Nutrisystem has been providing many thousands of people each year with the means to lose weight through a nutritionally balanced, calorie and portion controlled diet that is both time saving and convenient. Their special brand of weight loss diet program that delivers all the meals a customer requires to their home has proved both popular and highly successful. So how is it faring in 2012?

The program has gone from strength to strength in recent years. You can read about the program overall in our own Nutrisystem Reviews article published on this website. But here’s an update on what has been happening recently.

Although 2011 saw a slight drop in popularity that could be attributed to their marketing strategy change. That saw them drop the famous celebrity spokespeople Marie Osmond and Dan Mareno in favor of ordinary, “real” people who were successful customers to promote their brand. It backfired in a small way as it seems the American public responds more readily to being sold on a product by a big name celebrity over a “nobody”.

Nutrisystem Celebrity Spokesperson

So late in December 2011, the company made a big change to their marketing and promotion machine bringing on board a very big celebrity spokesperson, Janet Jackson. Its a little early to say how much of an impact this change of strategy has had on sales, but the early signs are very good.

But aside from promoting the product, what has Nutrisystem got to offer its customers by way of a better way to lose weight in 2012?

Nutrisystem Success™ 2012

The diet program has changed somewhat from last year’s setup in that there are more meal options to choose from and they have included high protein diet shakes into the menu. They have branded the new diet program Nutrisystem Success™ and there are high hopes from both the company and customers that this latest incarnation of the popular diet food delivery program will be a huge success.

The standard plans all incorporate around 30 percent fresh frozen meals which are delivered separately from the main package. They actually originate from Schwann’s who create the special meals under license and do not sell them separately or as part of their own diet frozen meal range. The Select™ plan is still available if you want a fully fresh frozen meal diet plan. The overall menu has been improved, although most of the improvements went in last year when they enlisted the services of several celebrity chefs to create new meal options and better quality choices.

Losing Weight With Nutrisystem

The bottom line for any diet is how successfully a person can lose weight using the program. You first have to remember that this program is mainly designed for use by people who don’t have time to spend working on a regular diet. That’s where they have to go buy all the ingredients at the store, then prepare and cook the meals themselves making sure they adhere to calorie counts, portion sizes and nutritional requirements.

This is a diet that does all the work for you and you just take each meal as you need it, heat it up and eat. It appeals to people who can’t or won’t cook and those who have busy lives and don’t want to spend any time in the kitchen cooking special meals for themselves and different ones for the rest of the family. As such, the customer can’t realistically expect the meals to be of the same quality as those they home cook themselves.

The meals are what they are, which are creations by a diet company who know how to make low calorie, nutritional meals that help people lose weight. They work as long as you work with the program. They work even better when you put some time and effort into your own well being by getting some exercise each day to help boost your metabolism and turbo charge the effectiveness of the diet itself.

Its all about losing weight and how much you really want to lose it! You get out of it what you put into it!

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So you think you eat a healthy diet, do you? Well, if you can place your hand on your heart and say in all honesty that you are at your correct weight and you are healthy, fit and feel good, then we can believe you. But… if you are overweight and not so fit or healthy, there might be some underlying cause. That cause is more often than not diet related. So let’s look at what you might need to be avoiding in your diet even if you think its okay to include it.

Soda is Bad for You

It is quite amazing how many people go to great lengths to ensure they eat lots of fresh, healthy food, then go ahead and wreck all their good work by pouring what amounts to fizzy poison down their throats to quench their thirst. If you thought that its okay to drink soda as long as you eat right, then you could be doing your health a disservice. There are some really compelling reasons why soda is bad for you, not least of all it will add several inches to your waistline even if what you are eating does not.

There are the two main varieties of soda from our viewpoint. One has copious amounts of refined sugars and the other uses artificial sweeteners. Dieters will be quick to point out that the sugar-laden variety are definite no-no’s when it comes to losing weight. But what they may not realize is that even the so-called diet sodas are just as bad, if not worse than their sugar toting counterparts.

It is common knowledge that sugar is just empty calories and the body will store them as fat if it can’t use them right away, which is often the case. Recent medical research has linked a high intake of refined sugar to cell damage leading to more rapid aging, as well as uncovering links to the formation of cancer cells.

So what about the artificially sweetened variety of soda?

The chief artificial sweetener of choice is aspartame, which is many times sweeter than refined sugar, cheaper to manufacture and therefore a cheap alternative that has the benefit if creating a low calorie drink for dieters. You might think that this is the solution, but you would be wrong. Very wrong. The first thing dieters need to know about aspartame is that it has been shown in studies to stimulate hunger and cravings for high calorie or high carb snacks. This can lead to snacking on things that will bust your carefully crafted diet when you are between meals.

But it gets worse. Aspartame is made up of three main components, none of which are good foryou. About 10% of aspartame is methanol, better known as wood alcohol that is a poison. It is the substance that was responsible for killing or blinding skid-row alcoholics. Methanol becomes unstable at temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit to form free methanol that is easily absorbed by the body. Free methanol breaks down in the body to form formic acid and formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is a neurotoxin and is carcinogenic, causes retinal damage, interferes with DNA replication and causes birth defects. You can read more about the “dangers of Aspartame” by Googling that term, or visiting http://aspartame.mercola.com/.

What about the fizz itself?

The carbonated water that characterizes soda is also detrimental to health in a number of ways, especially dental health. Excessive amounts of the carbonic acid in soda can corrode the enamel protection of teeth, which will gradually dissolve them overtime. This damage cannot be reversed. There have been scares about bone density loss and stomach excessive lining wear, but these have been debunked by more recent studies. however, if you suffer from a gastric ulcer, your doctor will probably recommend that you do not drink soda as this can inflame it.

Still want that cold, refreshing can of soda?

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In my last post The Health of Our Meat, I took the meat industry by the horns and spoke a few home truths! Well, now its the turn of the dairy industry, as if you aren’t still reeling from all this stunning knowledge!

Most of us in the West have grown up on cow’s milk and its derivatives such as yoghurt, cream, butter and cheese, but is it as good for you as the so-called experts keep telling us? Well, not to deflate you any more after learning that meat and vegetables are not up to scratch, but there are one or two thing you need to know about cow’s milk and what use it is in our daily diet. After reading this, you might change your own views on the need to even continue consuming dairy produce in adulthood.

First out of the gate is the well documented fact that we humans, as adults actually can’t metabolize cow’s milk and the lactose it contains very well. In fact many of us are actually lactose intolerant, meaning those people can’t metabolize it at all and when they consume it, they suffer with quite debilitating symptoms.

But we hear from the industry that promotes it that it is necessary to enrich our diet with much needed calcium.

The fact that we need calcium for strong healthy teeth and bones is true, but we don’t get it from cow’s milk, because we can’t metabolize it very well, remember? The truth is that we derive most of our calcium from green leafy vegetables. We can metabolize them perfectly well and get all the nutrients we need easily, because that’s the way our bodies are designed to work.

It gets worse. If you’re squeamish, look away now…

The cows that provide the milk are pumped full of steroids, growth hormones and antibiotics, as you will have gleaned from my last post. Well, those nasties find their way into the cow’s milk, and are not destroyed during the pasteurization process. So we get to consume these hormones and antibiotics which of course reduce the effectiveness of our own natural immune system’s defenses.

So there are just a few reasons not to consume dairy products, or at least cut down on them drastically. A glimmer of hope lies in the organic food industry as organically reared dairy cows are not fed all these antibiotics and hormones, but access to organic dairy produce is still not as widespread as it could be, but it is improving.

Remember, one billion Chinese have practically no dairy produce in their diets and they’re pretty healthy despite its absence!

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The last post here, The Health of Our Crops, looked at the crop farming industry and how organic farming can turn things around with regards our health and wellness. So here, I’ll look at the benefits of eating organically produced meat and poultry.

First, let’s look at what we already know about intensively farmed livestock. Knowing exactly what is in your food can make a big difference to your overall health. Cows and pigs, which are herbivores, are fed with protein rich feed that can also contain ground up flesh and bones of dead farmyard animals. If this isn’t bad enough, they are also regularly fed a diet rich in growth hormones and antibiotics which make the animals reach maturity much faster than they would naturally.

These force-grown animals see little of the beautiful fields that we associate with grazing animals. They spend nearly all of their miserable and thankfully short lives in small pens where their movements are restricted to prevent them from harming themselves and others. For this read to avoid damaging the supermarket shrink wrapped and neatly packaged meat they will become. Poultry are kept in tiny cages for similar reasons and are also fed steroids, growth hormones and a cocktail of antibiotics to prevent the infections that would surely wipe out so many birds kept in such close quarters.

Ok, if this is staring to sound like an animal rights tirade, I apologize. It’s just the plain old truth. And no one likes to hear that, do they!

Well guess what their organically raised cousins get. Yep, they get to roam around the farmyard and graze in those fields, at least having a life before being shipped off to the abattoir. They also are not pumped full of hormones and antibiotics as they lead a more healthy lifestyle.

Now which meat would you rather take home from the supermarket and feed to your family? The cheaper stuff that still contains residues of all those hormones and antibiotics, knowing how those animals were treated before their miserable existences were snuffed out? Or the more expensive organic stuff that is just meat?

Not only that, but which do you imagine might be the more healthy choice for your family’s diet?

Oh yeah, no contest! In my next post I’ll ruffle a few more feathers with a look at how healthy the dairy industry is.

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The last post, Healthy Despite It All, took a swipe at what is wrong with the farming industry and the food that is produced for our tables. It also looked at solutions that are available in organic farming practices. So in this post, let’s carry this subject further here.

With better soil to grow in and far fewer chemicals to leech into their flesh, organically grown vegetables herald in an era where slowly but surely, farmers are realizing that they can return to traditional farming methods whilst still employing modern technology to make it all easier.

Transforming previously intensively farmed land back to organic methods takes time and several years may need to pass before it can certified organic. This is because chemicals that used to be sprayed on the crops and were therefore dissolved into the soil have to dissipate either with rainfall or being naturally broken down by the re-introduction of organic matter and good bacteria and fauna. But in the interim, the farmer can still work the soil and gradually produce better and healthier crops year upon year.

Organically grown fruit and vegetables not only contain more nutrients than their starved intensively grown cousins, but they also taste better as there is no chemical residue to taint the flavor. That makes them better for us and our general health. Of course, the agriculture industry are swift to counter any claims that their produce does contain any chemical residues, but come on, we are intelligent human beings and we know what our own common sense tells us. We know that organic food is far healthier for us and our families, there can be no argument about that!

But there is also organically farmed meat and poultry to consider in this healthy equation, and it is that which I’ll be looking at in my next post.

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It is an aspect of modern life that many people want to take the easy way out whatever the task at hand may be. When it is a case of having to lose weight, then they look for the simplest diet they can find and look upon exercise as something that they will avoid at all costs. So they turn to what are often referred to as convenience diets, or those diets where a company makes all your food and ships it to your home.

There are several different weight loss diet companies that provide their customers with convenience diets that are designed to make the dieters’ lives as easy as it is possible to be. At least as easy as life can be when you are on a calorie controlled and often portion restricted diet that is designed to help you lose weight. Which you choose is often down to either personal preference or in many cases as far as your bank or credit card account will allow you to spend on one.

There are several benefits to making use of this kind of diet. They are mainly aimed at people who lead busy lifestyles, often working long hours or spending little time at home. Having to mess around with preparing and then cooking specially measured and proportioned meals is something that people with this kind of lifestyle simply do not have the time to devote to. So the lure of having all your meals prepared and delivered to your door is a tempting option, especially when the alternative is to have pizza or another high calorie, weight gaining meal delivered to your home.

So the likes of Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, Bistro MD, eDiets and Diet-to-Go (among others) are all queuing up for the business of the busy person who needs to lose weight but doesn’t have the time to lose it in the conventional way. This is a perfect solution for them, but they are not the only people who turn to these diet meal delivery programs to help them achieve their weight loss goals.

These diets also attract the attention of people who cannot (or will not) cook, busy moms who don’t seem to have the time to cook and people who just want an easy life. Funny how it gets back to wanting that easy life and being prepared to pay a little extra to get it. It’s not that we’re opposed to people trying to get it as easy as they can, as an easy life is often a desirable situation to be in. The bottom line is that if this kind of diet helps you to lose weight, then it has done its job and you have gained what you set out to do.

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