When the topic of weight loss is raised, most people think of counting calories, calculating carbohydrates, eliminating sugar, reducing fat intake, and starting an exercise program – and all of these factors are important. Yet one obvious feature most people and health-care professionals overlook is an assessment of how well the digestive system is functioning.
Unless your digestive system is operating optimally, you cannot expect to reach and maintain your ideal body weight.
Think about that statement for a moment. If your digestive system isn’t operating as it should – if you are not metabolizing your food properly, burning fat efficiently, deriving the nutrients you need from your food, and generating enough energy so you will feel like exercising – then your attempts to lose weight and keep it off will likely fail. That’s because the digestive system plays a critical role in metabolism and energy production, two factors that are responsible for weight-loss and body-weight maintenance.
Monica, a forty-three-year-old mother of three, a part-time florist, and a self proclaimed “full-time dieter,” was skeptical about what she called “yet another diet scheme,” but she knew she needed help.
“I’ve tried so many diets and diet plans, read so many diet books, that I should have made a career out of it,” she said. “I’m an example of the classic story: I’ve lost the same twenty-five pounds many times, and it keeps coming back. One thing that doesn’t keep coming back is my energy. I’m beginning to worry that all this yo-yo dieting is also damaging my health.”
Monica has a right to be worried. Yo-yo dieting causes the body to reduce it’s metabolic rate, which means, although you think you’ll lose weight by starving yourself or eating very few calories, the body recognizes the reduction in food input as starvation, and so tries to rescue you by reducing the rate at which it burns calories. Also, when you lose weight you lose both fat and muscle. Although muscle burns calories, fat does not. Therefore, when you stop dieting and begin to eat more normally again, your body will burn fewer calories than it did previously, because your metabolic rate is slower, and you will have less muscle to burn calories. Yo-yo dieting also increases your risk of coronary heart disease.
For Monica and millions of other people, the “secret” to weight loss and keeping it off is threefold:
Take probiotics and their helpers on a daily basis; adopt a nutritious eating plan you can live with for life; and eliminate (or seriously curtail) factors that contribute to weight gain.
We tell you all about the easy-to-follow probiotic program for weight loss and maintenance at the end of this chapter. But what about the factors associated with weight gain?
The Wonder of Probiotics
The above excerpt is taken from the book, The Wonder of Probiotics, written by John R. Taylor and Deborah Mitchell, pages 150-151. To get your signed copy of the book, order online at NWCnaturals.com or TheWonderofProbiotics. com.
How do Probiotics Plus® by NWC Naturals® compare to the rest? Click here for a probitoic comparison chart.