Isn’t it inspiring to hear someone talk about his or her real life struggle with obesity and how he or she was able to conquer it?

Do you feel that being overweight as well as your emotional eating both get in the way of your relationship to others and to God?

If what you need is a diet program that can give you a constant boost of motivation and spiritual inspiration towards your weight loss goal, you better jump into The Eden Diet.

Before Dr. Rita Hancock, author of the book The Eden Diet, achieved and maintained her ideal weight today, she was an obese teenager just like many today. She weighed 207 pounds and wore size 20 jeans. But she lost 75 pounds before leaving for Cornell University to study nutrition. What did she do to lose all those weight? She was on all low-calorie diet (though she had occasional treats). She ate less and exercised more.  She has successfully maintained her weight since she shed off all the unwanted pounds 25 years ago. If you had to listen to a health expert, it’s far more inspiring to listen to someone who literally understand what you’re going through.

The Eden Diet

Dr. Hancock shares her expertise and Christian views about health and nutrition and more. The Eden Diet is more than your typical off-the-Internet weight loss book or program. It’s a Christian Weight Loss Program.

According to Dr. Hancock’s web site, the Eden Diet teaches the individual of the following:

-         Losing weight while indulging with the sinful food you’ve always eaten (but in moderate portions) so you can still shed off those pounds without feeling deprived

-         Balancing your “fleshy desires for treats with your body’s instinctive call for healthy food”

-         Beating temptation from ads and other media

-         Overcoming emotional eating and self-acting eating habits

-         Drawing willpower from God through prayer

The Eden Diet is about how to lose weight by adjusting and using the power of your hunger as the guide to tell you how much and when you can eat. The Eden Diet will allow you to eat even the food most diet programs tell you to avoid eating. It teaches you how to eat these foods in smaller portions than give them all up.

What’s with the Biblical part of the Eden Diet?

Dr. Hancock states in her web site:

“In the Eden Diet, I teach people to eat when they’re physically (not emotionally) hungry and learn how to eat all foods-even fattening foods occasionally and in moderation.

“”How do I justify this Biblically? In the New Testament, Jesus said, “Don’t worry about what you eat or drink.”"

“What comes out of a man is more important than what goes into him.” In other words, your relationships with God and others are more important than what you eat.”

There are people who come to Dr. Hancock full of anxiety because they believe how they eat is deserving of punishment because gluttony is  considered a sin. Others come with emotional issues which have resulted to obesity and eating disorders. Both these fears can be overcome with “time, prayer, perseverance, and patience” as you go along with the book and the program.

Dr. Hancok wants to share all that she has learned and applied in differentiating physical hunger from emotional hunger.

She shares how the Eden Diet can help a person break free from the bondage of unhealthy eating, freeing the person emotionally and spiritually. That is her ultimate goal and should be yours too. This diet isn’t just about losing weight and looking good. It’s freedom from the negativity associated with your eating.

Extreme moodiness, hyperactivity, irritability, inability to concentrate, heightened creativity are just some of the symptoms of bipolar disorder. According to National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), an estimated 5.7 millions of American adults suffer from it.

Bipolar disorder runs in the family and symptoms may be observed in as early as age 5 but only becomes more evident during big, life-changing events like divorce, death of a loved one, PTSD and other stress related events.

To keep the mood swings (from mania to extreme depression) at bay, drugs like Zyprexa, Depakote, Haldol, Prozac and Paxil are necessary in order to let the person continue with his everyday life. These drugs however, on top of depression, can cause weight gain to most bipolar people; hence, the constant struggle of weight loss.

Exercise and diet are two things most considered to be difficult to put through, let alone for people who have manic depression. It is especially essential to them however as weight gain may cause more anxiety and stress because of how they look and feel about themselves. But even if they need to forever be in these medications and anti-depressant pills, their weight need not be.

• Exercise

Exercise releases feel-good brain chemicals, neurotransmitters and endorphins, which can ease depression, increases body temperature that produce calming effects to your brain and reduces immune system chemicals that aggravates your depression. Aside from these benefits, there are also benefits like looking and feeling great, thus giving you more confidence and more in control of your moods. And lastly, exercise of course, makes you lose the weight your medication might have caused, builds and strengthens  muscles and  even earns you six-pack abs in the process.

Exercise does not need to be performed in the gym; it can even be done in the luxury of your home, in your convenience.

Bottom line is, exercise is not the word people need to be running away from – illness is. (bipolar or not)

• Diet

There are a lot of fat and weight loss pills that promise weight loss, and some of them can, but the last thing you want is to try one of those in your condition as there are a lot of chemicals involved. It can produce conflict with your medication and worsen your condition. The good rule of the thumb here is, if healthy foods (such as organic foods, vegetables and fruits) enter in your body, good things will reflect on the outside so choose wisely which diet to go.

In the end, no matter what kind of fitness regime you follow – be it in the gym or in your house, cardio or yoga – and which kind of diet you choose to pair with your exercise, your condition depends greatly on how you think and what you do about it.

Bipolar disorder is a difficult condition to be in but it’s not the end of the world. It will be, however, when you refuse to fight back and live your life.

For Further Reading

How Exercise Affect Your Moods

Bipolar Treatment

I’ve always been conscious of my weight.  Not because I wanted to get healthy, but others perception of me made me aware of my not- so-slim-figure.  At the age of ten I went on my first diet and lost four pounds.  That was the start of the yo-yo dieting phase of my life that would last for more than 3 decades.  And yes, I know the correct spelling in the title should be genes, but I did that to emphasize the reason why we diet in the first place.  Is it to achieve good health or do we want to fit in those jeans or that dress?  I made some very unwise decisions in my life when it came to my health and I know a lot of others have also.  In this article I will take a look at what makes thin people thin.

Do Thin People have Good Genes?

Answer:  Although some people may have the advantage of a faster functioning metabolism, it’s still all about the choices we make. Those who are slender and

Have fast metabolisms must still watch what they eat and exercise in order to stay slim.  Also, as we age and our metabolism slows, those wanting to stay fit find that they must work a little harder in order to keep that slender physique.

When I was in junior high school I witnessed something that would stick with me my entire life.  As I was in the lunch room at school, I remember observing, in fascination, a teacher as she ate her lunch.  This teacher, although I didn’t know her, was probably the envy of every junior high school girl in the school due to her slender and toned body.  As I watched her eat, I noticed she ate her food very slowly and deliberately.  I had never seen anyone in my life eat as she did and quite frankly I thought she was a little weird. I’ve since learned that she was indeed correct in her eating habits.  Most of us scarf down our foods so fast we don’t even give our brain a chance to decide if we’re full or not.  We usually end up stuffed and weight gain becomes an apparent part of our lives.

I’ve lost 60 pounds since 2008 and I learned and important lesson that requires no effort o at all but has benefited me immensely—chew slowly!  This process won’t help you burn more calories but it does seem to fool the mind and body into thinking you’re fuller a lot faster than if you were eating in a hurry.

I’ve been on many diet plans in my life that resulted in weight loss only to find that I regained the weight faster than I lost it.  In 2008 I was at my heaviest weight ever, 199 pounds and standing all of 5’2 inches tall. I was at a loss to which direction to take in the approach to lose weight.  One day I saw a friend and was in shocked as I noticed the weight she had lost.  She looked amazing and told me she was doing something called the Atkins diet.  Although I had never heard of it before I knew the very next day I would be on my computer eager to find out about this diet was all about that had transformed my friend in such a short period of time.  Here’s what I found:

The Atkins Diet is a low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diet, which means you significantly reduce the amount of carbohydrate consumption resulting in a liver and muscle glycogen loss and a huge but temporary diuretic effect.  The rapid weight loss at the beginning stages is attributed to water weight.  This diet is broken up in four stages with the first stage consisting of a 2 week ‘induction period’. During this period and beyond you eat no more the 15-20 grams of carbohydrates as day. Later, in the maintenance stage carbohydrates are gradually added to the diet usually in the form of fruits and low-carbohydrate products.

Now this is my take on my new found information concerning the Atkins Diet:

I could eat a high amount of protein, a high amount of fat, but my carbohydrates would have to be significantly decreased from what I was use to consuming. This was not at all comforting to me due to the massive amounts of carbohydrates that were apart of my diet, but again I was desperate.  The thought that I could eat sausages, eggs, and cheese in the mornings seemed very appealing so I felt I should at least give it a try.

Grocery Shopping

I stocked up on cheese, eggs, cream, butter and oil, all no-no’s on most diet plans.  Now I was in this world of counting carbohydrates and quite frankly couldn’t recall if I had even been familiar with that term before now.

Being eight months pregnant and looking at thin beautiful models in Elle magazine is no time to hatch an idea about losing weight.  But that’s what happened to me.  I have been large all my life.  My thought was; if I could lose the weight this time, and get down to my dream size of 10, I would feel complete, accomplished and achieved a dream that had eluded me all my life.  Just to look anything like those models might help me attain more, be better, prettier and happier.  Statistics continue to show good-looking people get more, go further in life.  Womeninquire.com states, “good looking people are typically judged to be more talented, kind, honest and intelligent than their less attractive counterparts.”  So why not me?  I know this sounds far fetched, but these are exactly the thoughts that crossed my mind and started my yearlong odyssey with weight loss.

Nothing was easy about this and I did it completely on my own. The real reason I started this journey by myself is because deep down I knew if I didn’t take complete control I would never take it seriously.  It would be too easy to blame others for losing only a couple pounds.  If it were up to me alone, I would have to except complete failure or complete success for my actions. Charles Stuart Platkin, Ph.D., M.P.H at www.active.com says, “Create a responsible attitude right now; recognize that you are the only one who can make something happen in your life.”  There’s something else about me you should know, I don’t like to fail.

If you had told my journey would include:  depression, success, exhilaration, disgust, quitting and restarting I probably wouldn’t have even started.  Even at diet-blog.com they estimates the number of diets which fail is typically given as about 95%.”   But back then I thought, “if I can push a baby out I could certainly lose weight, couldn’t I?”   What better time to start than when I had to shed my post- pregnancy-baby-fat?

Before I shrunk myself to a size 10, I was a size 16.  All my life I have been big, I blamed it on big bones, getting my fathers massive rib cage and mothers pouch belly.  But the truth is I love food and couldn’t say no. My husband loves food too.  Together we ate ourselves silly. I really can’t blame him either, as before I even meet him, I would eat as if it was the last bowl of ice cream I would ever have.  As if I couldn’t just go to the grocery store and buy it when I wanted it.