From Your Health Journal…..”Adam C. Powell did an excellent post with the Huffington Post this week which I wanted to share with you. As many of you know, I do love stories from the Huff Post. Dr. Powell wrote about how to keep your New Year’s resolutions to lose weight. Weight loss is the most common resolution on New Year’s, yet many people are unable to keep there promise to themselves to lose weight. Our collective failure to do that has made America the world’s fattest nation, and has added needlessly to our healthcare expenditures. Dr. Powell discusses how weight loss is not really hard, just exercise more, eat less. But, many Americans do make poor choices, and do not help themselves lead healthier lifestyles. The article concludes with Dr. Powell giving some great suggestions on how to keep your New Year’s resolution. Please visit the Huff Post web site (link provided below) to read the complete article, and many other interesting health articles.”

From the article…..

If you hope to lose weight in 2013, you are not alone. Polls have shown that weight loss is the most common New Year’s resolution. Yet few people actually succeed in meeting their weight loss goals. Our collective failure to do that has made America the world’s fattest nation, and has added needlessly to our healthcare expenditures.

In theory, losing weight isn’t hard. You simply eat less and exercise more. However, cultural, environmental, and social barriers lead people to make poor choices. Plus, many folks tend to underestimate the calories in their food and overestimate the benefit of exercise. While weight loss companies have existed for decades, the growing popularity of smartphones gives us innovative approaches that were not feasible during the era of boxed meals and public weigh-ins. Here’s how high-tech tools can hep you succeed with this year’s resolution.

1. Know how many calories you are really eating. A Starbucks coffee can range from being a healthful beverage containing only 5 calories to a dietary monstrosity of 700 calories. (Venti Iced Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha with whipped cream, anyone?) Likewise, while Subway sandwiches were the key salvation for company spokesman Jared Fogle, had he made the poor decision to regularly pick the Chicken & Bacon Ranch Melt, he might have ended up even fatter.

Now you can use apps to avoid such errors. Restaurant Nutrition provides nutritional information for meals at most chain restaurants. If you prefer to cook at home, MyFood offers nutritional insights about your groceries.

2. Don’t fool yourself into thinking ketchup is a vegetable. It’s a lot easier to reduce the number of calories going in than it is to increase the number going out. For example, you can slurp down a mocha in minutes, but would have to walk for over three hours to burn off the calories you just injested. To make matters worse, people systematically underestimate the calories they are consuming, particularly in the case of meals combining healthy and unhealthy items.

While precise measurement is admittedly not for everyone, sharing photos of meals with friends can provide a reality check. An app called The Eatery lets you photograph meals and have friends rate them as either “fit” or “fat.”

To read the full article…..Click here