The Importance of Shape

By David Heber, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.P., F.A.C.N.
Chairman of the Herbalife Nutrition and Scientific Advisory Boards

What is your shape?

You may think you know when you look in the mirror, or you may be too busy trying to cover up unshapely areas to really see yourself as you are. Do you know how much fat you’re carrying, compared to how much muscle? Do you know where you tend to gain weight–upper body, lower body or around the middle? Until you know the answers to these questions, you are not ready to make your personal plan for losing weight and keeping it off. Understanding your body is the first step to reaching your best personal shape. As someone who teaches both doctors and the public about obesity, I believe weight loss has been overemphasized and body shape underemphasized. You have probably read about the Body-Mass Index (BMI), which is a weight-to-height ratio. If your BMI is greater than 25, you are considered overweight in the U.S., and if it is greater than 30 you are obese. This ratio has been a powerful way for scientists to document the obesity epidemic in this country and its effects on health and disease. However, when it comes to you as an individual, it can be misleading. A football player can be considered overweight on the BMI scale, but if the extra weight being carried is muscle, he is not really fat. A thin woman can have a normal BMI, yet still be over-fat. So shape counts.

Shapes are personal and go beyond the usual apple and pear. Women can have three typical body shapes–upper body fat, lower body fat and both upper and lower body fat. Men usually only get upper body fat. The upper body stores fat in times of stress and some people can lose and gain weight rapidly in the upper body. The lower body fat in women responds to female hormones such as estrogen and progesterone and stores fat for breastfeeding a newborn baby. Women who have both upper and lower body fat will lose their upper body fat first. Women with more upper body fat tend to have more muscle than women with lower body fat and will need more protein in their diet to help control their hunger. Losing weight is harder if you have lower body fat rather than upper body fat, but the medical benefits of losing your upper body fat are greater. Losing weight around your neck, face, chest and waist usually goes along with losing fat on the inside as well. So as you look better, you are also improving your health tremendously.

Finally, there are two more body shapes to consider: The shape you can change and the shape you can’t change. It is important to know the difference and work on the shape you can change, while adjusting your wardrobe and attitudes to the shape you cannot change. Due to low metabolism, many women with lower body fat can’t lose weight just by cutting calories. These lower body-fat cells are resistant to both exercise and diet. Only a personalized program can help make sure you get enough protein to control cravings and build or maintain lean muscle.

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Escape the Fat-Free Diet Trap

By Staff Writer

Since the "fat-free craze" began, statistics show we have grown fatter and fatter.
Just because a food is fat-free doesn’t mean it’s calorie-free. Get up to speed on “good fats” and lose the fat from your body, not your diet.

Today, supermarket shelves are packed with foods that call to dieters with the words “FAT-FREE.” But as conscientious weight watchers load up their shopping carts with fat-free foods week after week, many discover this alarming fact: their weight is going up!

Getting fat on fat-free
Since the beginning of the “fat-free craze,” statistics show Americans have grown fatter and fatter. Although we’ve been taught to think of fat as the culprit in the weight-loss battle, clearly this is only part of the whole diet picture. Just because a food is fat-free doesn’t mean it’s calorie-free. Many fat-free foods are actually very high in sugar and carbohydrate calories. And these calories, when eaten in excess, become converted into the one thing we’ve been taught to avoid–fat!
Lose the fat from your body, not your diet
Ironically, in order to burn fat and lose weight you need a certain amount of good quality fat. That’s why the ShapeWorks® Weight-Management Program stresses the importance of a well-balanced diet that includes enough “good fats,” such as those found in fish and olive oil, together with Herbalife’s highly nutritious meal replacement shakes and snacks.

By avoiding the fat-free craze and giving your body the complete nourishment it needs with Herbalife’s Cellular Nutrition supplements and weight-management products, you’ll lose weight steadily and feel healthier along the way.

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Eating Right at Night

Eating Right at Night

By Luigi Gratton, M.D., M.P.H.

For many, when the sun goes down, so does their willpower. They maintain their sensible eating habits during the day, only to eat junk food like pizza and ice cream at night. There is, however, a simple solution. You can control your appetite after dark by eating a healthy and nutritious snack.

Putting the Myth to Rest
You’ve probably been told at some point that eating late at night is detrimental. However, there is no conclusive scientific evidence proving that calories ingested at night are metabolized differently than other times. Therefore, it is not the time of day that leads to weight gain, but rather the total daily caloric intake as a whole. Whether you're eating in the morning or at midnight, your body turns any extra calories into fat.

Feeding Frenzy Metabolically speaking, our bodies have the lowest need for calories at night. Yet in America, we eat more during dinner than any other meal. One study showed that participants consumed 42% of their daily calories from dinnertime on. But there are reasons these unhealthy patterns are so commonplace. Some people don’t eat enough during the day, causing a drop in blood sugar levels, which can lead to over consumption at night. Others are simply overindulging as an emotional escape from stress or to beat boredom. We tend to mindlessly reach for junk food during sedentary activities such as watching television or using the computer. These foods contain large amounts of sugar and saturated fat which can lead to weight gain, insomnia, indigestion or even more serious health problems.

Suitable Snacks
The good news is that there are appropriate alternatives. You can effectively curb your hunger with a high protein, low calorie snack. An Herbalife Protein Bar is a great guilt-free snack, containing 12g of protein, healthy fiber, as well as 23 vitamins and minerals to help manage your weight. Roasted Soy Nuts with Cardia®^† Salt is another healthy snack that is high in nutritional value. Both are packed with protein and flavor to keep you satisfied, and also rich in nutrients and fiber.

So the next time you feel like “midnight munching”, think about the benefits of a healthy, protein-powered snack. The nutritional difference will be like night and day.

Protein Snacks

It is well established that the typical person eating a western type diet consumes more daily calories than he needs. High-calorie snacks filled with fats and sugars contribute to these extra calories. Protein packed bars, drinks, soups, and nuts are far superior to other snacks because of the inherent differences between protein and sugars and fats.

First off, protein is more satisfying than the other two macronutrients because of specific signals it sends to the brain. When we snack on protein instead of sugars and fats, the body feels more full which helps people control their appetite between meals, thus cutting calories and controlling their weight. Recent clinical research has supported this physiologic phenomenon.

A second reason for choosing protein as a snack is its thermogenic effect. This refers to the metabolic tax a food puts on the body after we eat it. This metabolic tax for protein is much higher than sugar or fat because the body uses more energy to digest it. This means that when you choose protein over the other two, you are burning more calories during the process of digestion. Having this higher tax rate is good because protein tends to be low in caloric content, so the body is working harder on fewer calories.

A third reason to choose protein snacks over sugars and fats is the body's need to replenish the building blocks of muscle tissue. Muscle is important for our daily activities and it determines our metabolism. So the more we maintain our healthy lean muscle mass, the higher we maintain metabolism.

So the next time you reach for a snack, choose a protein-rich bar, drink, or soup. Avoid high-calorie chips, cookies, candies and sweets. They are generally much higher in calories, and they offer little nutritional value to the body.

Nutrition

Nutrition

Nutrition is the science that studies how what people eat affects their health and performance, such as foods or food components that cause diseases or deteriorate health (such as eating too many calories, which is a major contributing factor to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease). The field of nutrition also studies foods and dietary supplements that improve performance, promote health, and cure or prevent disease, such as eating fibrous foods to reduce the risk of colon cancer, or supplementing with vitamin C to strengthen teeth and gums and to improve the immune system.

Between extremes of optimal health and death from starvation or malnutrition, there is an array of disease states that can be caused or alleviated by changes in diet. Deficiencies, excesses and imbalances in diet can produce negative impacts on health, which may lead to diseases such as scurvy, obesity or osteoporosis, as well as psychological and behavioral problems. Moreover, excessive ingestion of elements that have no apparent role in health, (e.g. lead, mercury, PCBs, dioxins), may incur toxic and potentially lethal effects, depending on the dose. The science of nutrition attempts to understand how and why specific dietary aspects influence health.

Sports nutrition

Sports nutrition focuses on how food and dietary supplements affect athletic performance (during events), improvement (from training), and recovery (after events and training). One goal of sports nutrition is to maintain glycogen levels and prevent glycogen depletion. Another is to optimize energy levels and muscle tone. An athlete's strategy for winning an event may include a schedule for the entire season of what to eat, when to eat it, and in what precise quantities (before, during, after, and between workouts and events). Participants in endurance sports such as the full-distance triathlon actually eat during their races. Sports nutrition works hand-in-hand with sports medicine.