6 Common Mistakes That Can Prevent Weight Loss

By Chris Freytag

Spring is around the corner, and it's all about change. You shake off those winter blues and come alive again. You spring clean your house and your get rid of clutter in your closet. See ya, big winter sweaters, it's finally safe to venture outside again. Then you realize there's something else you want to change... your body! If you are on a mission to lose weight and improve your body by summertime, make sure you don't make one of these six common mistakes that prevent weight loss.

1. You don't break up with starchy carbs.
If you want to slim down, one of first things you should do is reduce your intake of starchy carbs. Avoid white breads and white rice, potatoes, fried foods and processed foods. Aim for more healthy fats like avocados and nuts in small quantities, and increase your intake of fruits and veggies. Squeeze fresh lemons into your water, too. Water helps you fill you up and lemons benefit your body in lots of ways! I always start my day with a tall glass of lemon water.

2. You are the queen of the same 'ol routine.
Your body gets used to the same exercise if you do it every day, and weight loss can be much more effective when you surprise your body once in a while. Change up your workout and mix it up by increasing the intensity or duration of your exercise. If you really want to blast fat, try some high intensity interval training. Called HIIT training, it involves shorter cardio workouts at a higher intensity. Getting your heart rate up in bursts revs up your metabolism and burns those calories. Oh, and make sure your workouts involve this sparkly glistening thing called "sweating."

3. You forget it takes two.
If you want to get right to it, you need two things for weight loss -- clean eating and exercise. Period. Not just clean eating. Not just exercise. It takes two to tango, as the saying goes. Try healthy eating and increased exercise to steadily lose weight. For every pound you want to lose, you need a deficit of 3,500 calories, or put another way, you need to burn an extra 3,500 calories. Create the 3,500 deficit with a combination of reduced caloric intake and an increased calorie burn with exercise. Most people have a tendency to overestimate the calories they are burning and underestimate the calories they take in, so keep that in mind! Remember, you can't lose weight for the long term without a combined effort of healthy eating and exercise. You won't be able to lose weight and keep it off if you only choose one method.

4. You live in stress mode.
Often overlooked in weight loss, stress can keep you stuck at a certain weight or cause you to gain, according to the Mayo Clinic. If you are stressed to the max, your body produces a hormone called cortisol, and if not controlled, your body can increase its fat storage. Plus, how often have you turned to a favorite food or snacked endlessly when you are stressed out? Get ahead of your stress and you can watch the numbers go down on the scale. Take a walk, get some fresh air, meditate, do something fun, read a book, laugh, call up a friend or seek some alone time. Find ways to reduce your stress and commit to doing a few of those things each week. Managing your stress effectively is an essential component of weight loss.

5. You love cardio (yeah!) but you ignore your muscles (boo).
Too often people get psyched that they are exercising most days of the week -- with some type of cardio -- and they forget about building and maintaining muscle. The less muscle you have, the lower your metabolism. The more muscle you have, the more calories your bod burns even when you aren't working out! For weight loss and a strong body you need to do some form of weight training. Don't be intimidated by the term, it doesn't mean you have to become a body builder and lift barbells. Grab a set of hand weights or try workouts that combine cardio and strength training. You also can use your own body weight and do planks, push-ups, squats or lunges -- they are all muscle-building exercises.

6. You skimp on sleep.
Straight to the point: Missing sleep increases your stress level and makes you hungrier. With a lack of sleep (less than seven hours a night) your ghrelin level gets off and stimulates your appetite more and your leptin level (responsible for suppressing your appetite) goes down, according to WebMD. If you want to lose more fat, get more sleep! You will be more likely to have mental clarity to make healthier decisions and your body will be able to operate at its best.

If you find yourself stuck on a plateau or not losing weight like you want to, put a little spring in your step and avoid these six things that can sabotage your weight loss! You can successfully push past a plateau and lose weight this spring!

Hair Loss: Not Just a Man's Issue

By Anna Medaris Miller

When Thea Chassin lived in Los Angeles, she liked to treat herself to great haircuts in Beverly Hills. So when she moved to upstate New York in 1992, her hair style took a hit.​ “I said, ‘Oh my Lord, I’ve gone back in time like 20 years,’” she says. “The 80s color palette in LA had come and gone, and it was just arriving in Albany.”

It wasn’t until Chassin moved with her family to Westchester County outside New York City four years later that she looked in a three-way mirror and realized the real problem was her thinning hair. “I said, ‘This is why I can’t style my hair anymore,’” she ​recalls. “I hadn’t seen what was really going on all the way around.”

Chassin, who’s over 50 years old (she requested to keep her age private), is one of about 6.6 million people in the United States with alopecia areata, an autoimmune skin condition that causes hair loss on the body and head, according to the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.

However, androgenetic alopecia, or ​female pattern​ hair loss – the woman’s equivalent to male pattern baldness – is much more common than alopecia areata, affecting about one-third of women who are genetically predisposed to it, according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology.

Such conditions can be especially devastating for women, who have fewer viable treatment options and face more social stigma.

“Male pattern hair loss is something that is much more at the forefront of the societal conscious, but for women, it’s a harder thing to deal with,” says Nicole Rogers​, a dermatologist at Hair Restoration of the South in Metairie, Louisiana. “A lot of times, women don’t feel comfortable talking about it, they don’t feel comfortable asking their doctors about it, they don’t always get a correct diagnosis.”

That’s why Chassin launched​ Bald Girls Do Lunch, a nonprofit that provides women with alopecia areata and other types of hair loss with support and accurate information.

“We want to live our own life and not let [hair loss] keep us from doing things,” Chassin says. “Women stop swimming, women stop playing tennis, women stop going on a bike. Why? Because they haven’t figured out how to do it and be comfortable.”

The Long and Winding Road

Chassin first learned she had alopecia areata in 1978 when a hairdresser ​spotted a bald spot on the back of her head. The condition is characterized by small, round patches of hair loss that come and go unpredictably. At the time, Chassin treated it with cortisone injections – a common short-term treatment for isolated patches – and didn’t think about it again until that moment looking at the three-way mirror. She’s since lost all her head, face and body hair.

For many women with hair loss, however, the path to a diagnosis is more complicated. “I always call it the long and winding road … because there are so many different causes of hair loss in women,” Rogers says. “A lot of times, it’s finding ​a needle in a hay stack.”

In addition to autoimmune conditions like alopecia areata and run-of-the-mill hair loss related to genetics, female hair loss can be triggered by childbirth, extreme stress, fad diets and going on and off hormonal birth control. Sometimes, these and other lifestyle changes prompt more hair follicles than normal to go into a resting state, in which the loss is called telogen effluvium – a temporary and reversible condition.

Other times, hair loss is a sign of a nutritional deficiency or reaction to hair products. It can also be a symptom of rheumatic​ conditions like lupus, androgen disorders like polycystic ovaryian syndrome or endocrine conditions like thyroid disease, ​says Rhoda Cobin,​a clinical professor in the endocrinology division at Mount Sinai Hospital.

But for most women, female pattern hair loss is the culprit, ​though they often cycle through slews of medical providers before realizing it. “The majority of time for women with female pattern thinning, their thyroid is OK, their hormones are OK, their stress is OK – it’s just that it’s in their genes,” Rogers says.

Even in that case, time is of the essence since treatment can help slow the condition's progression. “The sooner they can get ... an accurate diagnosis," Rogers says, "the better they're going to be."

Treatment Options

When women wind up in Rogers’ office, they’re often in tears. “The emotional aspect is a very big deal,” she says. “I can’t tell you how many times I pull out the tissue box when I’m treating female pattern hair loss.”

Many women are so distraught because they believe there’s nothing to do be done. To some extent, that’s true, says ​Spencer Kobren​, founder and president of the American Hair Loss Association and author of “The Truth About Women’s Hair Loss.” "There are a lot of limitations when it comes to treating female pattern hair loss," he says.

US Kids' Diets Put Them on Road to Heart Disease

By Maggie Fox

American kids eat too much sugar and salt, they don't eat enough fruits and vegetables, and far too many are overweight, a new study shows.

The findings may not surprise parents, but they are disturbing to the researchers, who say these children are being set up for early heart disease.

None of the 8,900 children aged 2 to 11 who were surveyed were doing everything right. But even more striking: Most were missing the goal on three out of four measures of healthy living.

"Our findings indicate that, in general, children start with pretty good blood pressure," said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who oversaw the study.

"But if they have a horrible diet, it will drive a worsening body mass index (BMI) and cholesterol levels."

The study comes from a nationally representative group of children, and the researchers say their findings can be translated to U.S. kids as a whole.

Fewer than 1 percent of the children in the study had four or five of the main components of a healthy diet: eating four and a half cups or more of fruits and vegetables each day; three servings of whole grains a day; two servings of fish a week; minimal amounts of sugar; and below 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day.

Just 3 percent of boys and 2 percent of girls ate enough whole grains daily. "More than 50 percent of children consumed more than the recommend amount of sugar-sweetened beverages," the researchers wrote.

Fewer than 10 percent ate the recommended four to five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, the survey found. And 30 percent were overweight or obese, Lloyd-Jones and colleagues reported in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

And these bad habits put many on the road to heart disease. About 40 percent of the kids already had poor or worrying cholesterol levels.

"It seems that children in the United States are losing their ideal cardiovascular health status," the researchers wrote.

Many studies have shown heart disease starts young — with artery-clogging blockages starting sometimes as young as age 3. Ultrasound examinations of children as young as 10 have shown they can have arteries that are already as clogged as those in some middle-aged people.

A study published last year showed that nearly a third of kids screened at pediatric clinics in Houston had unhealthy cholesterol levels by age 9 to 11.

But the studies also show an easy fix. One found young women who had reported eating the most fruits and vegetables in their 20s were 40 percent less likely to have dangerously blocked arteries in their 40s.

Other studies show that eating a diet loaded with fresh fruits and vegetables, low in saturated fats and low on fatty meat, dramatically cuts the risk of heart disease and stroke.

What are the Eight most popular diets?

There are literally hundreds of thousands of diets. Some are for losing weight, others for gaining weight, lowering cholesterol, living a long and healthy life, etc. The Mediterranean Diet, for example, reflects the culinary habits of southern European people.

Here are the eight most popular diets:


Atkins Diet

The Atkins Diet, or Atkins Nutritional Approach, focuses on controlling the levels of insulin in our bodies through diet.1 If we consume large amounts of refined carbohydrates our insulin levels will rise rapidly, and then fall rapidly. Rising insulin levels will trigger our bodies to store as much of the energy we eat as possible - it will also make it less likely that our bodies use stored fat as a source of energy. Most people on the Atkins Diet will consume a higher proportion of proteins than they normally do.


The Zone

Diet The Zone Diet aims for a nutritional balance of 40% carbohydrates, 30% fats, and 30% protein each time we eat. The focus is also on controlling insulin levels, which result in more successful weight loss and body weight control.

The Zone Diet encourages the consumption of good quality carbohydrates - unrefined carbohydrates, and fats, such as olive oil, avocado, and nuts.


Vegetarian Diet

There are various types of vegetarian: Lacto vegetarian, Fruitarian vegetarian, Lacto-ovo-vegetarian, Living food diet vegetarian, Ovo-vegetarian, Pescovegetarian, and Semi-vegetarian. The majority of vegetarians are lacto-ovovegetarians, in other words, they do not eat animal-based foods, except for eggs, dairy, and honey. Studies over the last few years have shown that vegetarians have a lower body weight, suffer less from diseases, and generally have a longer life expectancy than people who eat meat.


Vegan Diet

Veganism is more of a way of life and a philosophy than a diet. A vegan does not eat anything that is animal based, including eggs, dairy, and honey. Vegans do not generally adopt veganism just for health reasons, but also for environmental and ethical/compassionate reasons. Vegans believe that modern intensive farming methods are bad for our environment and unsustainable in the long term. If all our food were plant based our environment would benefit, animals would suffer less, more food would be produced, and people would generally enjoy better physical and mental health, vegans say.


Weight Watchers Diet

Weight Watchers focuses on losing weight through diet, exercise, and a support network. Weight Watchers Inc. was born in the 1960s when a homemaker (housewife) who had lost some weight and was concerned she might put it back on. So, she created a network of friends. Weight Watchers is a huge company, with branches all over the world. Dieters can join either physically, and attend regular meetings, or online. In both cases there is a great deal of support and education available for the dieter.


South Beach Diet

The South Beach Diet was started by a cardiologist, Dr. Agatston, and a nutritionist, Marie Almon. It focuses on the control of insulin levels, and the benefits of unrefined slow carbohydrates versus fast carbs. Dr. Agatston devised the South Beach Diet during the 1990s because he was disappointed with the low-fat, high-carb diet backed by the American Heart Association. He believed and found that low-fat regimes were not effective over the long term.


Raw Food Diet

The Raw Food Diet, or Raw Foodism, involves consuming foods and drinks which are not processed, are completely plant-based, and ideally organic. Raw foodists generally say that at least three-quarters of your food intake should consist of uncooked food. A significant number of raw foodists are also vegans - they do not eat or drink anything which is animal based. There are four main types of raw foodists: raw vegetarians, raw vegans, raw omnivores, and raw carnivores.


Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean Diet is Southern European, and more specifically focuses on the nutritional habits of the people of Crete, Greece, and southern Italy. Nowadays, Spain, southern France, and Portugal are also included; even though Portugal does not touch the Mediterranean Sea. The emphasis is on lots of plant foods, fresh fruits as dessert, beans, nuts, cereals, seeds, olive oil as the main source of dietary fats, cheese and yogurts are the main dairy foods, moderate amounts of fish and poultry, up to about four eggs per week, small amounts of red meat, and low/moderate amounts of wine.  Up to one third of the Mediterranean diet consists of fat, with saturated fats not exceeding 8% of calorie intake

Kathy Bates is spreading Lymphedema Awareness. Watch her interview on The Doctors. March is Lymphedema Awareness Month!

Academy Award-winning actress Kathy Bates sits down with The Doctors to talk about an illness that affects approximately 10 million Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide: lymphedema.

Lymphedema is a condition caused by blockages in the lymphatic system, which prevent fluid from draining well, leading to swelling, usually in the arms and legs.

Bates says that following her double mastectomy for breast and ovarian cancer, she awoke from surgery feeling symptoms immediately.

“I had seen someone with lymphedema who didn’t take care of it, and the toxins were visibly oozing," she says. "This was my experience with lymphedema. I wasn’t educated, and I was terrified this would happen to me.

"Doctors focus on the cancer, and they don’t really talk about lymphedema,” Bates adds.

When lymph nodes are removed following breast cancer, the body’s ability to trap toxins is compromised, and the toxins can seep out and cause a great deal of pain.

Bates admits the pain is something she deals with daily. “I have pain. I have to massage every night," she says. "I have a lot of fatigue, and I need to wear my compression sleeves.”

Her treating physician, Dr. Emily Iker, discusses the need for patients to be seen immediately following surgery.

"Early intervention and diagnosis is critical, especially since lymphedema is a chronic and symptomatic condition,” Dr Iker says.

Bates is proud of her role as both a champion and spokesperson for LE&RN: Lymphatic Education and Research Network.

“I decided to be their spokesperson because I learned that more than 10 million people suffer with this – more than muscular dystrophy, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease and AIDS combined," she says. "My jaw dropped. The strange thing is that many celebrities are suffering with this, but nobody wants to talk about it.”

Bates discusses the need for education to train therapists specifically in lymphatic draining and the need for more research.

You can join Kathy Bates in the LE&RN Network in their first 5K Run on Bates’ birthday, June 28 in Venice, California.

Watch the interview here: http://on.fb.me/1aXfvTf

Treatment allows patients to keep hair during chemotherapy

Read the story here http://bit.ly/1EpXRSE

10 things you might not know about trichotillomania

1. Trich sufferers feel an “overwhelming” urge to pull their hair

2. Symptoms often start at around 11 to 13 years of age

3. Sufferers often have extreme hair loss and bald patches

4. No one’s sure what causes it

5. Treatment can include therapy and hypnosis
6. Sufferers can initially feel quite alone

7. The condition doesn’t often get a great deal of coverage

8. And as for any other mental illness, more coverage can do wonders

10. Most importantly: there is a community out there who knows all about this condition

Need support? The Trichotillomania Learning Centre is one online resource with help and support.

Ready to make a change? Come in for a consultation and we can start you on a path to recovery. Our goal at RNHW is to help give our trich clients the self confidence they need to overcome the disease. We use all types of hair replacement options including: wigs, hair pieces, hair extensions, clip-ons, micro links and bonding. 

Each trich solution is tailored to the individual client and we use creative techniques to arm our trich clients with the courage to conquer the world.