LOSING WEIGHT with LIFE AHEAD
How can Life Ahead Contribute? First from simple entries of foods eaten in a day or a week Life Ahead will develop instantly the calories from the total of foods entered. You do not have to add up calories of everything eaten or do any calculations. The program using the power of the computer also will optionally 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 amounts of 5 key vitamins, 6 key minerals, folic acid, omega-3 fatty acids, and lycopene And each of these 10 values will be compared with desirable targets for health. Further, these health targets are not those general values advised for everyone. Your targets all will be more meaningful ones that are adjusted for sex and body weight.
Once your diet is partly entered Life Ahead will show 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. 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 is no longer accurate) and to compute calorie objectives for diet, etc. Life Ahead does all this for you with the weight loss indicator.
Life Ahead also can display the health value of any diet in terms of the Well-Days of life it will produce on average if eaten in all future years. A display can then reveal the specific deficiencies or any of 20 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.
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 needed nutrients for best health. And essentially every proposed diet from diet books tried has these deficiencies. Most diets are aimed at monitoring one thing, as carbo, protein, fat, etc. Life Ahead always keeps track of the need of adequate amounts of up to 20 nutrients. It is near impossible to do this without a computer program.
Those recipes in the diet books may help for a while, but you will not use them for the rest of your life. You will not know without a computer program how many calories you actually eat. And four of five people that diet regain the weight they lose. Thus a best approach may be to start with the foods you now eat regularly. Check out what the program tells about this diet. Then try modifying it 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 some wine at various times every day. Another learned that he was getting 400 more 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 provides a new opportunity for Diet Book writers. They can devise daily and weekly diets and recipes that are both tasty and produce a maximum of future Well-Days of life. This can provide a fascinating challenge. The result will be diets more healthful than those in any present diet book. This author would be pleased to help on any such project.
Diets can be Daily or Weekly, and can be Added Up: You can enter diets by day, or enter a diet for a full week. Entering a daily diet usually involves only 15-18 entries, and after some experience using the program food library 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 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 any 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 a previous day. If you eat the same breakfast 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.
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. See the accompanying article “More Healthful Diets from Life Ahead.”
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 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 should automatically 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 n the final display of the exercise entries.
Further, if you do the at least the moderately intensive kind of exercise that produces Cardiofitness, 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: 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. Most diet programs use the data base of the Dept of Agriculture. This massive library includes thousand of foods and is near impossible to use practically. A dozen or more examples of each food are given, each with differing nutrients. Or results of dozens of food manufacturers' products of a given type are given that still omit the one wanted. Yet even this library does not include the recipes that are prepared in homes or are eaten in restaurants. Entering a diet from this enormous data base can be a major investment in time that few people will accept.
The present Life Ahead Food Library includes only about 200 foods. This inevitably will miss foods that people will wish to enter. But in most cases an alternate food can be used to approximate the missing item. Most meats have similar nutrients, so if one is missing, use another. Select a substitute fruit or vegetable on the list for one that is missing. If a recipe as chili con carnie is wanted, build up the total using its ingredients. Build a peanut butter sandwich from the bread and peanut and from butter and jam if any. Add salad dressing if needed, etc.
The ADD FOOD to LIBRARY option is intended to provide for entry of foods missing in the library that are regularly eaten. This entry provides for entering the nutrients from the package label, or from a food nutrient book or computer database. Some package labels show only "% of requirement". If so, enter this value in this named column. But preferably enter the actual amount of nutrient if this is given. A good free Internet source for diet nutrients are www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/SR12/sr12.html. Copy and paste this in your favorites directory.
Use the add food entry for those foods of real importance to you, not for just one single entry. If your food does not include all nutrient values included in Life Ahead, the computations for the food will not include effects of missing items. A project for someone wishing to contribute to the Life Ahead project will be the development of say a supplementary data base of say perhaps a few hundred more foods that that includes the Life Ahead needed values. This data base downloaded to user's computers could help them add those foods of most interest that now are missing from the Life Ahead library.
A problem with food nutrients is that different sources of nearly every food can show differing values. A rough average value of those listed in various sources was selected for each food nutrient included in the Life Ahead library. To view values used in the library, select the food, and access the 'Show Food Value' option. The values included will display. Life Ahead also provides for revising your library values if the food you eat has much different nutrient values than those in the library. During the display of food values simply enter the revised nutrient values wanted, and click the Save Food Values option. The revised values will be saved and used henceforth. Keep in mind that if a food nutrient value is changed, all Life Ahead Well-Days and other results using this food also will change somewhat. Results may not be exactly comparable with those obtained earlier.
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 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.
Diet books and programs usually overstate 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.