LOSING WEIGHT with LIFE AHEAD
How can Life Ahead Contribute? First from simple entries of the actual foods eaten in a day or a week the diet module will develop the calories from the total of foods entered. You do not have to add up calories or do any calculations. The computer also can display percentages and grams of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. If desired, you can view amounts of saturated, unsaturated, polyunsaturated and trans fats. It will show free cholesterol and fiber. It can show values for the new Antioxidant Index and amounts of 5 key vitamins, 6 key minerals, folic acid, omega-3 fatty acids, lycopene and glycemic load. And each of these values will be compared with desirable targets for health. Further, your targets all will be more meaningful ones that are adjusted for sex and body weight. An option that appears on the screen following diet entry 'View Nutrients by Meal' will display some diet factor values by meal, and compare vitamins and minerals with target values.
Once your diet is partly entered Life Ahead will show at lower-middle the likely pounds per week that the diet entered will subtract or add to the weight of an average person of your age, weight, sex, and doing your amount and kind of exercise. This pounds per week indicator will re-compute a new value after each food is entered or deleted from the diet. Thus you can design your program at food entry to accomplish a likely weight change target. A unique feature of the program is that it acknowledges the recent research that now does show that calories of carbohydrates (carbo) are significantly more important in increasing or decreasing body weight than are calories of fats and proteins. The long argued dogma that all calories contribute equally to weight gain simply is not true. Thus you can learn how addition or subtraction of any food or combination of foods - carbo or other - will contribute to changing your probable weight in pounds per week based on actual research. You do not have to go through those calculations of how many daily calories you need using 3500 calories per pound (which no longer is accurate) and to compute calorie objectives for diet, etc. You do not have to work with or think about "Carbo grams." Life Ahead does this for you with the weight loss indicator and the more accurate glycemic load value.
Life Ahead also can display the health value of any diet in terms of the average Well-Days of life it will produce if eaten in all future years. A display can then reveal the specific deficiencies or any of 23 different nutrients in this diet that may need correction for better long range health. And it shows how correction of each of these deficiencies will improve Well-Days of health. It is practically impossible to do this without a computer program. Today, Life Ahead is the only available computer program that can accomplish this.
Life Ahead Can Help with any Diet: You can use Life Ahead together with any other diet or diet book - Weight Watchers, Pritikin, Atkins, Scarsdale, Protein Power, or what have you. These all can be useful in suggesting starting food programs and useful recipes. But Life Ahead will reveal relentlessly the deficiencies of any of these diets if they fail to include the nutrients needed for best health. And essentially every proposed diet from diet books tried has these deficiencies. Life Ahead Model #3 includes the new Global Scientific Nutrition that can measure the health value of any diet, can compare health of different diets, and even value the effect of addition any food or combination of foods to a diet.
Diets usually fail because they do not teach users what they need to do to MAINTAIN weight after some is lost. Those recipes in the diet books may help you lose weight for a while, but you will not use them for the rest of your life. Without a computer program you will have no good way for knowing how many calories and other key nutrients you actually eat. Thus at least four of five people that diet regain the weight they lose. Successful dieting requires that you must LEARN how to eat in a way that will maintain your desired weight. Life Ahead provides a unique advantage: It can help you design a diet that can both improve diet health and reduce weight. And you can monitor you diet any time you wish.
A best approach can be to start with the foods you now eat regularly and prefer. Check out from one or two simple daily diet entries what the program tells about these diets both for weight and for health. A probable weight change per week will appear directly on the diet entry screen. Then try modifying the diet stepwise to correct the deficiencies by subtracting foods that will cause least deprivation, and including other foods that are most acceptable. As example, if your diet calories are too high (and most people today eat too much) just sort your diet on calories in the Sort Display. This will show immediately where most of your calories are coming from. One user was shocked to learn that she was getting 500 more calories per day from drinking wine at various times every day. Another learned that he was getting 400 more daily calories from eating quite a few peanuts each evening during "Happy hour." Finding things like this out can make a needed correction obvious. Life Ahead makes finding these problems easy. Another Life Ahead alternate is to sort your foods by 'Weight Change'. This will replace diet calories with a modified calories that recognize the differing effects of carbohydrate and fiber on actual weight change.
The Life Ahead 'Summary of Diet Actions' that appears on the 'Diet Analysis' option takes you through the steps needed to correct a starting diet to a diet that is very healthful. You can use this same approach to also develop a diet that also should reduce weight. This 'Summary' shows you which foods in your diet may be causing the health problems. As you return to the diet entry screen to experimentally change foods in your diet you will see the weight indicator result. If this shows too high a weight gain, click 'See the Food Library' and select 'Your Diet' to view in order the foods in your diet that are producing the most calories or weight gain. Try one or two food deletions here to bring the weight change indicator to a desired change per week.
Diets can be Daily or Weekly, and can be Added Up: Entering a daily diet usually involves only 15-18 entries, and after some experience using the program food library and its convenient search option this can be done in a few minutes. But it can be difficult to design daily diets that do not have some problems of nutrient deficiency. Thus a key need is to develop a series of diets as those for a full week that do meet overall nutrient needs. Thus Life Ahead provides for the valuation not only of each individual diet saved but of sequential series of daily or weekly diets. You can enter daily diets say for a week, and then obtain a health and nutrient valuation of the seven days of daily foods eaten. Recalling what has been eaten for a full week may be difficult. It can be best to note down after each meal in a diary what was eaten that day. Entering a weekly diet from the diary will be much easier than trying to recall each food eaten. If you enter a weekly diet it is necessary to enter how many days each food was eaten.
Life Ahead can start with a previous day's entry as a default. Thus you just need to change the foods eaten differently than on a previous day. If you eat the same breakfast and/or lunch each day this can make a next days entry very simple. One approach is to enter a diet for today or a previous day when you call up your E-Mail. A good practice is to write down in a notebook immediately after each meal the foods eaten. From this you can enter either your daily or weekly diet into the computer at any time. If you keep your computer on all day, load Life Ahead with meal entry active, and minimize it. Then after each meal bring the program up and enter the foods for that meal. But you cannot save the daily meal until the end of the day and all foods for that day have been entered. Once saved, a diet cannot be changed.
You can save a starting diet that has been modified as above as a new diet number. You also can print out any diet that has been entered or saved. This can give you a printed guide about a diet you develop. If you have saved say 7 daily diets, you can start a diet analysis using the results of all seven. Or alternately you can enter a full week's diet. Modifying such a larger diet basis can give you more options as for example adding fish just twice during a week. You also can do this effectively with a daily diet by adding the fish as a 2/7ths portion size. Life Ahead converts all diets to effective average daily diets for purpose of analysis.
The Life Ahead recipe option will permit entry of all nutrients from a serving of this recipe from use of a single named and saved "Add Food" library item. Or it can combine all nutrients in a usual meal as breakfast or lunch into a single 'Add Food' entry. See more on this in 'How to Use Life Ahead'
Life Ahead will check how your diet produces objectives, and you will be teaching yourself continually what you need to do to both keep weight down and keep the diet healthy. As you work your daily food calories down to achieve your weight loss objective keep in mind the general dietary advice of “Eat several portions of fruits and vegetables each day, and ” Replace some meat portions with chicken”, and consider replacing some of either with broiled fish. You must be sure to eat sufficient tomato to reach the lycopene goal. And enough omega-3 fats to reach this important goal. See much more on this in the accompanying article “More Healthful Diets from Life Ahead.”
You will not have to use Life Ahead diet every day or every week. A first use of the program on your usual diet often will be be incredibly informative and surprising. You may be amazed to see how deficient your previously thought 'very healthful' diet can be in important nutrients. This will give you the guides to make some important changes. After making changes you may have to try the new diet only occasionally. But it will be well to recheck your diet at least every few months with new Life Ahead diet entries.
About Exercise: Proper exercise should be a part of any program to reduce or maintain weight. But your exercise should not be designed to just produce more exercise calories. Rather, it is far more important for both your weight and your health to design exercise to obtain Cardiofitness. If you do this you probably also will obtain a maximum reward in weight reducing calories per hour of time spent exercising. You must enter any and all of your exercise and physical activity into the Exercise and Fitness displays of Life Ahead during your initial entries into the program. Once this is done the program will automatically compute your exercise calories, and these will be recognized in the weight loss/gain indicator that appears in your diet entry display. Thus you do not need to do any further calculations or estimates of exercise calories. The estimated numbers of these daily exercise calories will be displayed by type and kind of exercise in the final display of the exercise entries.
Further, if you do the moderately intensive kind of exercise that produces Cardio fitness, your rate of metabolism will be increased, and this increase will continue for up to several hours after your exercise is stopped. You can verify this by carefully measuring your heart rate after your exercise each half hour or so, and comparing this heart rate with your heart rate during a similar day when you do not exercise. This elevation in metabolism due to fitness generating exercise will continue to burn off calories for up to 3-4 hours after exercise is stopped.
The Life Ahead Weight Calorie Record: Life Ahead provides a display for monitoring weight change if needed. This option together with an entry for setting a weight-diet calorie objective appears at end of the diet analysis display. As shown in the demo, this provides for entering a body weight and a brief note about recent habits or problems. The program will recall the recent diet calories and date and print an entry. This can provide users a monitor of a weight loss program.
The Life Ahead Food Library and Diet Entry Program: A problem in the design of Life Ahead Diet was optimizing a food library that would be practically easy to use, and still include examples of most foods US people eat. No other suitable diet program was found. More about the Life Ahead food library and the diet program is discussed in More about Life Ahead Diet.
Some Possible Problems: All values computed in Life Ahead are long range values for average US adults. Your metabolism may differ from average. You may require more or fewer calories than average to lose or gain a pound of weight. This will mean that the Life Ahead weight change indicator will not be accurate for you. But the indicator still should be able to help. If you do not lose weight despite the program indicator showing that you should lose, and you are confident that you have been dieting in accord with the program and entering carefully the size and number of portions you eat, you must try for a still lower calorie objective value. You many need to modify the weight indicator target value by say 0.3 or 0.5 pound per week. All food calorie and nutrient values depend on portion size eaten, these amounts not only can be approximate, but may be much smaller than the amounts most people eat today.
Diet books and programs usually overstate - often vastly - the weight loss potential from their programs. Many diets, and especially low carbohydrate diets produce body water loss during a first week or two that produce far larger weight losses than are potential over the longer term. These are the weight losses usually advertised. Much research on diet programs shows that weight loss from dieting usually is limited to about one pound per week over 13 or more weeks. A maximum usual continuing rate of loss on a very low carbo diet might be 2 pounds per week for those obese. Be realistic about weight loss. A diet more than 500 calories per day less than that comfortably eaten rarely will be maintained.
