Health, Nutrition and Weight Loss

The goal of this hub is to guide your efforts at finding safe and natural ways to maintain (or regain) your health, feel good and achieve your ideal weight. Losing weight is an important goal for many people, but it should not be considered an end in itself. Your main goal should be to feel good and be healthy. At least, that seems like a reasonable premise to me :)

If losing weight were all that mattered, you could focus on extremely low calorie diets and/or diet pills. Both of these methods can help you to lose weight, but neither are natural and can cause side effects and health problems down the road.

It's one thing to go on a short term fast, but the goal of this is really to detox your body rather than to lose weight. You do lose weight when fasting, but this is normally gained back as you resume eating regular meals. Attempting to starve your body over a long period of time robs it of essential nutrients and is likely to make you feel tired, depressed and can even make you ill.

The best way to look at health and weight loss is to see them as long term goals that you are willing to make permanent lifestyle changes to achieve. So you don't have to worry so much about "losing 10 pounds in two weeks" or some other arbitrary short term goal. What you really want is to start living a healthier lifestyle, which you can do right now. Every action you take, whether it's eating a healthy meal, going for a long walk or practicing deep breathing exercises (this can really help your overall health!), will bring you more into balance and further towards your health and weight loss goals.

Nutrition is a key factor in any natural health and weight loss plan. There is no one perfect diet for everyone. While there are some foods, such as refined sugar and unhealthy fats, that everyone should avoid, some people seem to do better on vegetarian diets, while others seem to require some animal products to feel their best. This is only one example of how different people do better on different diets.

There is one theory that it depends on your blood type. The ayurvedic tradition of India divides people into three basic types and advocates eating based on your type. We will explore such theories on this site, but the point is that you have to pay attention to what your body and intuition tell you!