Guest Post by Janet Hardcastle

DO YOU KNOW.. The difference between margarine and butter?

Margarine was originally manufactured to fatten turkeys. When it killed the turkeys, the people who had put all the money into the research wanted a payback so they put their heads together to figure out what to do with this product to get their money back. It was a white substance with no food appeal so they added the yellow coloring and sold it to people to use in place of butter..

Read on to the end…gets very interesting!

Both have the same amount of calories.

Butter is slightly higher in saturated fats at 8 grams; compared to 5 grams for margarine.

Eating margarine can increase heart disease in women by 53% over eating the same amount of butter, according to a recent Harvard Medical Study.

Eating butter increases the absorption of many other nutrients in other foods.

Butter has many nutritional benefits where margarine has a few and only because they are added!

Butter tastes much better than margarine and it can enhance the flavors of other foods.

Butter has been around for centuries where margarine has been around for less than 100 years.

And now, for Margarine..

• Very High in Trans fatty acids.
• Triples risk of coronary heart disease ..
• Increases total cholesterol and LDL (this is the bad cholesterol) and lowers HDL cholesterol, (the good cholesterol)
• Increases the risk of cancers up to five times..
• Lowers quality of breast milk.
• Decreases immune response.
• Decreases insulin response.

And here’s the most disturbing fact…. HERE IS THE PART THAT IS VERY INTERESTING!

Margarine is but ONE MOLECULE away from being PLASTIC… and shares 27 ingredients with PAINT.

These facts alone were enough to have me avoiding margarine for life and anything else that is hydrogenated (this means hydrogen is added, changing the molecular structure of the substance)..

You can try this yourself: Purchase a tub of margarine and leave it open in your garage or shaded area. Within a couple of days you will notice a couple of things:  no flies, not even those pesky fruit flies will go near it (that should tell you something).

It does not rot or smell differently because it has no nutritional value ; nothing will grow on it. Even those teeny weeny micro-organisms will not a find a home to grow. Why? Because it is nearly plastic . Would you melt your Tupperware and spread that on your toast?

Share This With Your Friends…..(If you want to butter them up’)!

Chinese Proverb: When someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others…

Pass the BUTTER PLEASE

Janet is a contributor the HealthScape, a fitness and weight loss forum.

Guest Post by Donna Smith

Let’s face it.  None of us like to do it.  Some of us don’t know how to do it. Some of us know how, but aren’t any good at it … all those numbers and conversions and deciding when to add, subtract, multiply or divide!  Some of us are pretty good at it, but get really tired of all the time it takes to count everything that goes into our mouths every day.  To overcome this kind of bad calorie karma, there must be a very strong “why” behind the need to do it.  Fortunately, there are several, very good whys.

Like any other goal we want to achieve, the outcomes are strongly tied to what we put into it.  Our pets’ social behavior is much enhanced if we put time and effort into training them.  That big project at work is more successful if we put in the right amount of time, research and energy to get it done.  Our cars run better if we spare the expense to maintain them properly.  Similarly, our bodies become more fit if we make smart choices about what we feed ourselves, and the only way to make really smart choices about what we eat, is to become very familiar with the nutritional content of the food we prepare.  Sure, we can read the nutrition facts on the package and we can read books about nutrition and all that is very worthwhile, but to take it to the next level, to be able to determine exactly what all this means in terms of our daily intake of food, we have to turn that microscope on ourselves and what goes into our mouths.

For years, we have associated “good food” with what tastes good.  It’s mostly about what we like to eat, which is strongly driven by the types of food to which we are exposed.  I’m not going to go into how food can be tied up with all kinds of psychological aspects of our lives, but it is, and therefore our lifetime of experiences with food very much drives the choices we make today.  In order to change those choices, we must first understand what it is we’re eating and what it is we can eat that will help us be more fit.

The good news is that we don’t have to count calories forever.  Once you’ve done it long enough to be aware of the basic nutritional content of the things you typically eat, and once you’ve made enough smart choices about food to know what to eat to achieve the daily caloric intake that works for you, then the daily counting is no longer necessary.  You will be able to think back over the day and mentally assess both the quantity and quality of your food intake and decide what if anything you should add to it.

How long does this take?  That depends on you and how much work is needed to boost you over the learning curve.  I can tell you that it takes real commitment initially.  I counted and charted calories for about 2 years, charting daily intake for stretches of six weeks to 4 months, with breaks between, before I reached the point where I can do this without charting.  That’s not to say that I won’t ever chart again, but by being fully aware of everything I eat, stopping to choose whether to eat it or not, and looking up the nutritional value of new foods, I can effectively keep myself at or under my daily goal.

Here are some tips for counting calories.

• Find a good, go-to source for nutrition facts.  This can be a book or a web site or a phone app, or a combination of several such things, but it’s important to know where you can go to find the information you need.  I have found that putting “(food name) nutrition facts” into a search engine will do the trick most times.
• Decide whether you want to count your intake in calories or grams.  There will always be the need to convert grams to calories to get the full picture, but on your chart, you can choose to record in calories or grams.  I like calories.  You’ll notice that nutrition facts typically give you total calories, fat calories, and then everything else in grams.  This isn’t really enough information.  I convert the grams into calories and count calories from fat, carbs, protein and total calories.

• Decide your method for keeping track of calories.  There are a number of web-based methods for tracking your calories.  If this is for you, find a site with nutrition information you trust and then sign up to track your daily intake.  Most of these are free.  Excel spread sheets are good for tracking as well as you can put in formulas to do the calculations.  If you’re comfortable using Excel, this method may work for you.  It’s my preferred method and I have a set of spread sheets that will help you calculate what your daily intake should be as well as chart your daily intake for free at http://groups.google.com/group/health-scape.  There’s also nothing wrong with a pen and pad.  Put it somewhere handy and just jot down what you’ve eaten, look up the caloric content and keep a running total each day.  The method is only important to the extent that it works for you.  Find one and stick with it.
• Be honest with your tracking.  You don’t have to show this information to anyone else if you don’t want to, but you must be honest with yourself.  It’s not okay to leave out that mocha frappuccino you grabbed after lunch just because you don’t usually do that.  You need to know what you were putting into your body when you drank it and therefore you will be able to decide whether you want to do it again and how often.  It’s not about taking away the things you really like; it’s about learning how to manage the things you really like so that they don’t interfere with your over-all fitness.  (BTW, 16 ounces of Mocha Frappuccino Light with no whipped cream from Starbucks is 167 total calories, with only 18 fat calories.  Not a bad thing to know, huh?)

I’m not trying to tell you that counting calories is easy, but I am trying to tell you that it is necessary.  Understanding and regulating our daily nutrition is not a skill set that most people have.  If we really want to get fit and maintain that fitness, it is a skill set we need to learn.  Counting calories is how it’s done.  Give it a try and I think you will be surprised at what you discover!

Donna has been a client of mine since 2006 and is the moderator of a health and fitness forum. Click here to visit the site.

If you searched for this exact phrase on Google and found this article, I have some bad news…..it ain’t gonna happen.

I am sooooo fed up with everyone looking for a quick fix when it comes to weight loss. Billions of dollars are spent each year buying weight loss products and the country is getting fatter. Let’s be real clear here…DIETS DON’T WORK, not long-term anyway. People are paying thousands of dollars for ‘specialized’ diet plans which are nothing more than low calorie diets in disguise. Let’s see, I can join the local wellness center, pay $1,500 for a 12 week liquid diet plan (which consists of 1,200 calories or less per day) and lose 25 pounds (of which most of the weight loss will be from water and muscle) or I can realize that there is NO quick solution to permanent fat loss and change my lifestyle.

Too many folks are focused on weight loss, when in fact, they should be concerned with fat loss. Losing 40 pounds is a great achievement, but when it’s lost through under eating (READ: Low calories diets), there is an extremely high change that most, if not all of the weight will return.

It truly amazes me that people will plunk down their hard earned dollars on so called quick fix pills, shakes, exercise devices, and supplements before they will look at  how to make a healthy lifestyle change. The vast majority of these products have zero scientific research behind them and the companies selling them are just preying on desperate people.

Are there products out there that are helping people lose weight correctly, yes. I’m not saying that all weight loss products are ineffective, just most of them!

Many popular and extremely profitable diets out there  are based on the low calorie philosophy. Cutting calories should result in weight loss, right? It’s not quite that simple.

Why Low-Calorie Diets Don’t Work

• When your body is in a calorie deficit, it will need to get its fuel from somewhere. Than somewhere is often your much needed muscle tissue. More lean muscle = faster metabolism.
• Your metabolism is basically how many calories you burn at rest. When you are eating too little, your body begins to slow down its processes to conserve energy. Your body cannot discriminate between dieting and starving.
• Low calories diets result in lower energy. Makes sense. Low energy is not conducive to an exercise program. Hopefully you are exercising  as well…
• Cravings increase because you are hungry! If you have the willpower of a Tibetan monk in a brothel, good for you, but the rest of us probably don’t have that kind of discipline.
• Once you go off of your low calorie diet and begin introducing additional calories and eating sensibly, your metabolism is now slower due to muscle lost during the diet. Now the calories you used to eat to maintain becomes a surplus and results in weight gain. This is why so many people end up heavier than prior to their diet. Welcome to the yo-yo.