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How to manage Bland Diet

What is a bland diet? It is a diet specially set to treat certain gastrointestinal or stomach problems such as heartburns, ulcers and gas.

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An answer to a question, what is a bland diet, is that it is a simple treatment for people suffering from any one or more gastrointestinal disorders such as chronic gastritis, ulcer, esophagitis and dyspepsia.

Bland diet is a dietary regimen for people suffering from stomach disorders. Hence, it is quite understood that ingredients of a bland diet are soft food items, which are easy to digest with a capacity to keep the acidity to low levels. Questions about diet may be asked to your physicians and he/she can suggest the diet or recommend a dietician to do it.

Diet medical questions may include the queries about the food stuffs to eat and food stuffs to avoid during the time while a person experien ces any gastrointestinal disorders. However, before a dietician could decide the bland diet for a person, he/she needs to seek answers to several medical questions related to the person such as any food allergies or irritations associated with any food items and emotions medical questions of people.

Bland Diet:

The diet prescribed as a bland diet will include food items that are easy to digest and low in fiber and acid contents. Even giving up alcohol and smoking is advised while patient is on bland diet. Also a patient is advised to have 4 to 6 light meals after regular interval to avoid heavy and large meals.

Chewing food properly and eating slowly helps in the digestion of the food. Adequate sleep, avoiding smoking and controlling anxiety are supportive treatments for the standard treatment of the problem.

Allowed Food Items:

• Dairy Products
Milk, cheese, yogurt with low-fats and other dairy products are easily digested and hence, can be included as a part of bland diet. However, there is no restriction on ice-creams and one may consume even ice creams during bland diet, but it should not have any product such as nuts that are not allowed in bland diet.

• Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
Fresh vegetables and fruits are allowed to a bland dieter. However, while carrot, squash, green peas are good to eat in a bland diet, broccoli, onions and green peeper should be avoided as it forms gas. In fruits, oranges, grapefruits, and bananas are allowed.

• Proteins
Protein requirement of the body, while on a bland diet should be met with soy products and meat. Fried chicken and greasy hamburgers are not allowed to be consumed, while grilled and baked chicken is allowed.
Low-fat peanut butter and eggs are also efficient to meet the body’s protein requirement in a bland diet.

• Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates are contained in whole grain breads, pasta, oatmeal, corn flakes, white rice and sweet potatoes. All these food items are allowed.

Bland diet is designed for treating certain medical circumstances such as gastrointestinal problems. Hence, to answer what is a bland diet, we can say that this is a diet that aims at improving the digestion with the help of a timed-routine diet and soft to digest food items. Once the problem is controlled patients can return to their normal diet.

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Apply the Lessons Learned from Those Who Have Failed

A common theme found in successful goal achievement manuals, e-courses, videos, etc. is to seek and find a mentor who has successfully achieved the results that you are seeking. In the realm of fat loss, it is no different. Many articles have been written about those who have achieved weight loss success, and one should take advantage of the great information they contain.

Well, a coin always has two sides. Now, it is time to look at the other side…and it isn’t very pleasant or shiny!

Sometimes, it is valuable and important to learn from failure. Failure shows us what NOT to do. Failure shows us what doesn’t work. Specific to weight loss, what if we could learn from others that failed to lose body fat? Thankfully, the National Weight Control Registry’s (NWCR), located at www.NWCR.ws, has more than just solutions to weight loss. Interestingly (and quite intelligently), they also make it a point to find out exactly what caused individuals to fail. Think about how valuable it will be, and how much time you will save, if you take the time and energy to avoid the things that have proven to lead not to success…but to failure.

1) If the point hasn’t been drive home enough, already, the NWCR also found a common characteristic of those people that FAILED to maintain their weight loss. What was it? Simply stated: the people that failed to maintain weight loss failed to continue their behavioral changes that brought them success in the first place. In other words, they stopped eating right and exercising.

2) Here is even more startling motivation for keeping the weight off permanently. The likelihood that people will regain weight consistently drops as time passes. So, the longer you practice the habits of eating intelligently and exercising properly, the more you reduce the chance that you will ever gain the weight back. This explains why fad diets don’t work! The change must become permanent, and “quick” fixes just don’t do the trick. Failure tip: it is important to continually developed and nurture your motivation for a lifetime, so that old, unhealthy, fat-producing habits do not eventually destroy you.

3) Sadly, life-endangering medical issues seem to be the best motivator and predictor of successful weight loss. The study clearly showed that people lost weight faster and kept it off for much longer immediately after a major medical scare. Do yourself a favor and think ahead…before your doctor asks you to sit down, so that she can explain that your excess fat is literally killing you.

4) Do you need more motivation to keep the weight off? At the National Weight Control Registry, they also found this disturbing statistic: for those people who had regained some of their lost weight, only 11% returned to their previous lowest weight point in the following year. Let us give you an example. Let’s say that a person has successfully gone from 200 pounds down to 150 pounds. However, the person backslides and gains back 30 pounds. Experience shows that only 11 out of 100 people will be able to drop the weight back down to 150 pounds over the next year. Keep in mind that these are people that had already successfully lost weight and knew exactly what to do to lose the weight they had re-gained. Don’t you agree that more than 11% should have been more than able to return to their previous baseline weight. They had the knowledge. They had the experience. They knew what worked for their body. Sadly, though, logic does not always lead to success.

We can summarize all of these “failure points” pretty easily, can’t we? In essence, people failed because they failed to continue with the habits that created the initial success.

Perhaps, though, you haven’t yet experienced successful weight loss. Don’t let that be an obstacle for you. Use this article to motivate you to make a serious commitment…a lifelong one…so that you develop a true change in your lifestyle. You learned in our last article that there are thousands of people who have proven that long-term lifestyle changes create true fat loss success. You learned this week that working on fat loss with a short-term view in mind is not nearly as successful, and instead, often leads directly to failure. So, decide now to develop the habits that are necessary to transform your body into one that you are proud of.

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A Quick Look at Some of Today’s Most Effective Diets

The idiot-proof diet is all about calorie shifting. That is, in this diet, you shift your food intake throughout the day instead of eating just 3 meals a day. The diet is popular because it’s actually very easy to follow and there are hardly any restrictions when it comes to the types of food you can eat.

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The Idiot-Proof Diet

The idiot-proof diet is all about calorie shifting. That is, in this diet, you shift your food intake throughout the day instead of eating just 3 meals a day. The diet is popular because it’s actually very easy to follow and there are hardly any restrictions when it comes to the types of food you can eat.

The ‘calorie shifting’ model takes place because you eat every two and half hours. The theory is that because your body is consuming calories (energy) constantly throughout the day, it’s always in ‘burning calories’ mode instead of the ‘saving calories’ mode.

When you sign up for the diet, you get access to a diet handbook, an 11-day diet-plan and a diet calculator. You get to pick what foods you like to eat so don’t think that you’ll be tarving in this diet!

NutriSystem

The NutriSystem way of dieting is all about proper meal planning. People love this diet because it takes away the burden of trying to figure out what to eat during their dieting phase. You see, a lot of people actually get confused as to what they can eat when they want to lose weight. That’s not really surprising because there’s so much information out there and for every yay sayer, there is a nay sayer so it’s really tough to know what to eat.

However, with NurtiSystem, they do all the meal planning and portion controlling for you. You just need to sign up to any of their diet programs (e.g., Women’s Program, Men’s Program, Vegetarian Program, etc.) and order a multi-day (usually for 28 days) diet program.

After you choose your diet program, a menu is presented to you and you simply choose what you want to eat. The meals are then delivered to your doorstep at various intervals during your diet program.

The South Beach Diet

The South Beach Diet is popular because the name alone conjures bikini-clad bodies! Add to that the fact that it was founded by a cardiologist, Dr. Arthur Agatston, then you have a sort of ‘doctor recommended, doctor approved’ seal on the diet as well.

At first glance, the South Beach Diet looks a lot like the Atkins Diet in the sense that it restricts carbohydrates during the initial phase of the program (there are 3 phases). The first phase (14 days) encourages ‘normal eating’ in the sense that you can pretty much eat whatever you want but you must NOT eat bread, rice, potatoes, pasta, or baked goods. Fruit is also not allowed. No sugar. No alcohol.

The second phase allows you to SLOWLY introduce these items back into your diet but at lesser levels that you consumed them before of course. The third phase is more about general maintenance.

Weight Watchers

Probably one of the longest running diet programs out there is Weight Watchers. It believes in the overall approach where food, exercise, behavior and support are addressed.

Weight Watchers is known for advocating a point system for foods. Using this system, one calculates the calorie intake of the foods he or she eats. The number of points you can have in a day varies depending on your weight. The beauty of the program is that there are no gut-wrenching food restrictions so you never feel deprived of anything. However, the point system teaches you how to balance your meals so that even if you indulge on one food item, you don’t go overboard and consume too much in a day.

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