If you are like most people, you probably have resolved to try to eat better and lose weight. Good for you!

Unfortunately, most people fail. And fail over and over.

I have been in the health and fitness business since 1993, and in that time I have assembled a list of the top 5 reasons why people fail in their attempts to permanently lose weight.

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Are you a sugar addict? Beating Sugar Addiction For Dummies provides you a safe and healthy path to overcome your addiction, eliminate stress eating, and upgrade your nutrition for a healthier lifestyle.

Sugar addiction is a rapidly growing epidemic that can lead to obesity, chronic fatigue, diabetes, and a host of other medical and psychological problems. Beating Sugar Addiction For Dummies helps those who are affected by this commonly overlooked addiction to outsmart their sugar cravings and overcome their addiction. The tips in this book will help you:

• Learn to stop stress eating and perform a nutrition makeover that makes the low-sugar lifestyle easy!
• Stop the frustration of yo-yo dieting, and finally find an eating plan that works.
• Free yourself from the grip of sugar addiction and regain control over your life.

Beating Sugar Addiction For Dummies contains everything you need to start your journey down the road to wellness:

• Four common types of sugar addicts – which one are you?
• Finally understand carbs, protein, and fat with a simple nutrition system for weight loss and healthy eating, including what to choose and what to stay away from
• Detoxing from sugar and performing a kitchen makeover
• Eating mindfully – making purposeful decisions instead of stress eating
• How to survive holidays, restaurants, and special occasions
• Building a support system
• Exercise programs for energy and weight loss
• Speedy low-sugar recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and desserts
• Staying on track and breaking the cycle of failure – including a step-by-step list of exactly what to do when a sugar craving strikes!

If you’re one of the millions of people worldwide who relies too much on sugar for energy, comfort, or convenience, Beating Sugar Addiction For Dummies is your no-nonsense guide to decreasing your sugar intake, losing weight, and changing your life for the better!

Beating Sugar Addiction For Dummies is now available!

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“I cannot see any advantage or reason for a person to be using an exercise ball as an office chair,” says Jack P. Callaghan, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Spine Biomechanics and Injury Prevention at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

Although you might expect that sitting on the ball would demand extra exertion to keep you upright and stable, when Dr. Callaghan and his colleagues had healthy young volunteers sit alternately on a ball, an office chair and a backless stool while machines measured muscle activity in their abdomens and lower backs, they found no meaningful differences in the seating options.

Ball chairs do not improve posture, either. Research by Dr. Callaghan and others have shown that people generally slump just as much on a ball as in a normal chair and that back pain is not reduced.

If you’re concerned about sitting too much, a better solution is probably to stand up periodically throughout the workday, which has been found to improve health and reduce stiffness. Stand up and pace during phone calls. Set your desktop timer to ding every 30 minutes so you can stand up and stretch for a few seconds. Go up and down a few flights of stairs in between meetings. Do ankle circles and Kegel exercises if you have to sit for long periods of time.

1. Drink mineral water instead of soda. Mineral water flavored with citrus will give you the fizz and the flavor that you love without the sugar and chemicals that come with soda. Staying hydrated can help stave off sugar cravings, too!
2. Use stevia instead of sugar or artificial sweeteners. Stevia is a plant whose powder is used as a natural, no-calorie sweetener. Since stevia has a negligible effect on your blood sugar, it is an excellent substitute for diabetics to use instead of chemical sweeteners (which come with possible health hazards).
3. Snack on raw veggies instead of junk food. Keeping a tray of fresh raw veggies ready to snack on will make it easy for you to make the smart choice when you need to nibble. Crunching on low-calorie, high-nutrient vegetables will satisfy your hunger, add valuable nutrition to your daily diet, and make it easier to steer clear of sugary junk food.
4. Choose organic whole grains like oats, rice, and spelt instead of white flour. Whole grains are chock-full of B vitamins and minerals. The fiber from whole grains helps you feel full, and helps keep your blood sugar and insulin levels from spiking too fast. White flour digests quickly and causes a more rapid rise in blood sugar, followed by a sugar crash that leads to hunger and cravings.
5. Buy pasture-raised eggs and meat instead of feedlot products. Animals that are raised in commercial feedlots (also known as concentrated animal feeding operations or confined feeding operations) are kept in overcrowded conditions and are fed industrial feed containing chemicals, hormones, and antibiotics. Meat, dairy, and eggs from these animals contain these contaminants. Pasture-raised animals are treated more humanely and have access to their healthy, natural diet, yielding healthier food.

Here’s the study about diet drinks and diabetes.

You can read more about the health problems from artificial sweeteners here.

For example, suppose your normal caloric intake (your set point) is 1,600 calories each day. You decide you want to lose weight quickly, so you go on some goofy banana-peel-and-beetle-soup diet that limits you to 800 calories a day. You’re hungry at first, but you stick with the diet for a few weeks and you successfully lose some weight. Congratulations! But by losing weight with this method, you’ve now lowered your set point to 800 calories. When the goofy diet becomes unbearable, you go back to your normal eating patterns (1,600 calories). Because your metabolism has been reset for only 800 calories, your body stores the “extra” 800 calories as fat, and within a few weeks, you’re right back to the weight you started at.

More bad news about yo-yo diets: When you lose weight quickly, a lot of the weight lost is lean muscle tissue. When you put the weight back on, it’s fat, not muscle. After a few yo-yo cycles, you have less muscle and more fat than you did when you started, even though you may weigh the same on the scale. Less muscle means a lower metabolism, so even though you weigh the same, your set point is now lower, making it even easier to overeat and store even more fat!

The key to defeating the yo-yo cycle is to make small nutrition changes over long periods of time — no drastic diets — and to exercise with weights regularly to keep your metabolism elevated. When you make some basic nutrition improvements and work out consistently, you can easily trim a few pounds every month without starving yourself or driving yourself crazy with gimmicky diets.

When you do not eat often enough during the day, by the time you get home from work, your brain realizes that you have not eaten enough calories, and turns on your appetite. Then you eat whatever you can get your hands on quickly, and way too much of it.

You should eat for what you’re going to do for the next three hours. If all you plan to do after dinner is to sit on the couch and watch TV before you go to bed, you don’t need many calories. Most people who struggle with their weight do not eat enough during the day, then eat most of their calories at night before bed. This is a very harmful habit – in fact, that’s how they make Sumo wrestlers!

If you eat more regularly throughout the day, you will not be as hungry at night. By the time you sit down for dinner, most of your eating should done for the day. Do not fall into the habit of starving yourself by day, stuffing yourself at night, then going to sleep. Remember, eat to fuel what you’re going to do for the next three hours.

2. Be conscious of what you’re actually eating.

When it’s time to eat, put it on a plate, look at it, and decide if that is a good meal for you. Where’s your protein? Is it mostly plants on your plate? Do you really need the starch too?

Try this for portion control – after you fill your plate, put 1/3 of it aside as leftovers before you begin eating. You’ll be surprised that you’ll be just as full with 2/3 of the amount.

Speaking of portions, be sure to portion your food before you start eating. Never eat out of a bag or out of a serving dish!

3. Try these easy eating tips:

• Eat vegetables first, then protein, then starches last (if you still want them).
• Slow down! Remember that it takes approximately 20 minutes for your brain
  and stomach to realize you’ve had enough.
• Chew thoroughly.
• Put your fork down between bites.

4. Plan your next meal before it’s time to eat.

People tend to stay so busy all day that one of the last things that they think about is feeding themselves. When they finally do eat something, they grab what is handy, not what is best. Eating often enough, and eating on purpose will keep you from making frantic, foolish choices. Plan ahead!

5. Don’t drink your calories.

Saying goodbye to most of your soda, alcohol, and fruit juice can make a nice dent in your calorie goals. Drink mostly distilled water and tea instead. Diet sodas have no calories but a host of other problems – see Dangers of Artificial Sweeteners at http://www.gettingfit.com/sweeteners.html

• Move your focus away from food. This is a time for family, friends, and goodwill towards mankind. It’s not about stuffing your face every chance you get.
• Be sure to eat vegetables with every meal. The extra fiber will help you stay full, and you may be less tempted to overeat sweets.
• Try to get in a few workouts each week, even if you’re traveling. You don’t have to work hard, but do something besides sit around all day!
• To cut back on alcohol intake, drink a glass of water in between glasses of alcoholic beverages.
• Plan ahead. Know when there will be special high-calorie food in store for you, and plan for it when you’re putting together the rest of your day’s food plan.
• Wait on seconds. Just because someone gives it to you doesn’t mean you have to eat it.

This article is excerpted from Beating Sugar Addiction for Dummies, by Dan DeFigio.

• Farmed fish are typically raised in crowded commercial tanks and pens, and are therefore prone to disease and parasites. Fish farmers add antibiotics and pesticides to their food, and even vaccinate them!
• Farmed fish contain less beneficial omega-3 fats than wild fish, but have a much higher fat content by weight.
• Farmed fish meat contains far higher concentrations of dangerous chemicals like PCBs and dioxins.
• Farm-raised fish contain much higher amounts of pro-inflammatory omega-6 fats than wild fish.
• Fish farming can have drastic effects on wild fish – 95% of wild fish will die if they contact water infested with a fish farm’s sea lice.
• Wild salmon are an average of 20% higher in protein – they are not artificially fattened like farmed salmon.
• Farmed salmon are fed a pink-colored dye to change the color of their flesh. Seriously.

Some contaminants in fish can be drastically reduced by cutting off the skin and fat before cooking. Broil or grill fish on a rack so the fat drips off the fish, and don’t use fish drippings for sauces. Do not eat fish organs or the dark patches of fish meat, because more contaminants collect there.

To reduce consumption of mercury in fish, avoid eating large predatory fish like shark, swordfish, or king mackerel. White tuna (larger fish) generally has more mercury than light tuna, although levels vary widely.

These tips are published in Beating Sugar Addiction for Dummies, by Dan DeFigio.