By Jennifer Gregory
Oftentimes couples gain weight together because of sharing unhealthy eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle. And many people find it challenging to lose weight when their other half continues to live the couch potato life.
The good news? Couples who diet together, benefit together. Here are some ways couples can start out and support each other on their mutual weight loss journeys.
By Jennifer Gregory
While dieting at any time requires planning and willpower, dating while on a diet can pose some extra challenges. Many dates revolve around dinner or drinks, and once you hit it off with someone it can be easy to spend time with your new partner instead of heading to the gym. If you aren’t careful, you can quickly gain back the five pounds you spent the last month working so hard to lose.
But don’t despair, it is very possible to both date and continue to lose weight by following a few simple tips:
Plan Active Dates
Instead of meeting for a meal, suggest a date where you both get moving. “Dieting is not all about food, it’s about being active, too,” said Kenzie Harrick, Certified Health Coach at KHolistic.com. Some ideas include a bike ride, kayaking, hiking, roller skating or even throwing football in the park together. “Active dates are a creative date idea, a way to exercise and a way to test your connection with more than dinner conversation,” said Harrick. During dates where you do eat out, suggest an after dinner walk to work off the calories and get some fresh air.
If a dieter decreases their calories, they also decrease their brain cells’ calories. This process has recently been researched and linked to the ultimate demise of most diets. As the hungry brain cells signal the body of that hunger, appetite increases, and metabolism slows. But what if the brain couldn’t send out those signals? That’s a whole new arena we’ve never been to before.
Recently, researchers have created mice whose brains can not send out hunger signals or appetite-increasing proteins. These mice were found to be leaner and ate less even after they were starved. It’s believed that these results would apply to humans since mice are often used as human biological models.
In the study the scientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York were able to isolate the appetite-sensing neurons in the mice. These neurons are the culprits for increasing autophagy, a process where cells break down their used parts. When the breakdown of cells is increased, appetite-inducing proteins are released. Ultimately, the brain is told it’s time to eat due to these proteins.
When the researchers turned this process in the mice, their appetite-inducing proteins stayed low and even in times of starvation, the hunger signals stopped. Compared to normal mice, the mutant mice were 10 percent leaner, capable of burning more energy, and were more active. One of the most revealing facts was that these mice still ate less even after food was withheld to the point of starvation.
Remember SnackWell’s snack cakes? Think back to the mid 90s and you might remember the distinct green packaging and popularity of their Devil’s Food Cookie Cakes. Nabisco SnackWell’s came along in 1992 and grew enormously popular as the go-to brand for low-fat snacks. Unfortunately, other brands caught on to the low calorie snack craze and forced SnackWell’s to stop advertising in 2005.
Now SnackWell’s is reintroducing the brand with several new snacks that are higher in calories than the popular 100 calorie portioned snacks that are widely available. The new offerings from SnackWell’s will have a very different packaging and will vary in calories but range from 130 to 150 calories per serving.
Although these snacks offer a low calorie count, all calories are not created equal. This product line is still very highly processed. The new products from SnackWell’s include Cinnamon Raisin Cereal Bars, Peanut Butter Cereal Bars, Chocolate Cereal Bars, White Fudge Drizzled Caramel Popcorn, Fudge Drizzled Caramel Popcorn, Vanilla Crème Brownie Bites, Fudge Crème Brownie Bites and Fudge Drizzled Double Chocolate Chip Cookies. A closer look at the ingredients on these new products reveals that most of them have brown sugar, sugar, maltitol syrup and corn syrup listed in the first five ingredients. They also include things like fructose, which is also a form of sugar, and partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil which is trans-fat. The products are still allowed to make the claim of being trans-fat free if they contain less than 0.5 grams per serving, which is the case with the SnackWell’s products. This new product line proves the importance of reading nutrition labels.
You have undoubtedly heard how important it is to maintain weight loss to avoid health problems. You’ve also heard that losing weight and gaining it back continually through fad diets or any other means just isn’t good for your health. Well now there is a study that shows that losing weight and gaining it back is better than not losing weight at all.
This study was done on mice, but it shows that yo-yo dieting isn’t as bad as it was once believed to be. There were three groups of mice in the study, placed into a low-fat, high-fat and yo-yo diet groups. The mice that were placed on the yo-yo diet alternated between a low-fat and high-fat diet.
The mice on the yo-yo diet were healthy when they followed a low-fat diet and had higher body fat, blood sugar and body weight when they were on their high-fat rotation. Another surprising detail of this study was that the yo-yo diet mice lived just as long as the mice that maintained a low-fat diet the entire time. This amounted to about six months longer than the mice that followed only a high-fat diet.
