Total Wellbeing Blog

Vitamin B12 - Can It Really Help Weight Loss?

There are claims that Vitamin B12 can produce significant weight loss.  Many doctors also claim that there is no proof that B12 can help lose weight - although apparently it has been proven that it can help people stop gaining weight!  With so many conflicting stories in the media, it is difficult to know what to believe when it comes to finding something to help with your weight loss efforts.

As a starting point you need to understand that B12 is vital for our bodies to function normally and a deficiency of B12 can have a serious effect on your body.  Leaving out such an important vitamin is like leaving a key ingredient out of a recipe - it just doesn't work right.  Vitamin B12 along with other important nutrients helps your body to operate more efficiently and this in itself means that your overall health will improve and good health is an essential foundation for effective weight loss.

B12 can also give you a great energy boost and whilst this alone is not responsible for shedding the pounds, it can have an impact on your motivation to move more and exercise more regularly.  In addition, B12 boosts your metabolism.  This means that you digest your food faster and burn more calories just by sitting there.  And the more calories you burn, the fewer calories you store as fat.  Plus, if you increase your exercise level, you’ll boost your metabolism even more!

A great way to get more B12 is to increase the amount of foods containing this great vitamin in your diet.  Some foods high in B12 include: clams, liver, trout, and salmon.  Many foods such as breakfast cereal have been fortified with B12 and other vitamins and minerals so these can also help.

So what is our verdict?  Whatever the arguments for and against B12 for weight loss, it is an essential nutrient that can give our bodies a great boost and not getting enough can be detrimental to our health.  Taking B12 is not a magic formula for losing weight but as with anything else, if it makes you feel better and more energetic you are more likely to have the motivation to eat healthily and exercise more.

Losing Weight Without Dieting - Introducing The Food Philosophy Vital!

As a student of the original Food Philosophy Course, I was really pleased to hear that a new version of the course 'The Food Philosophy Vital' is now being offered to help people break free from dieting once and for all.

This version of the course is more affordable as it is a non-coaching version of the six-week online weight-loss course for just £30. Not everyone can afford the original course and it is important that as many of you are reached as possible and given the tools to get yourselves out of the overeating trap, lose weight, increase confidence and raise your self esteem.

For £30, you get all of the online course material, regular articles and advice, as well as membership to The Food Philosophy forum where you can chat to other people who are doing the course, support each other, go through the steps and exercises together and also talk to those who have already been through the course and who are already out of the overeating trap.

Sue Thomason, The Food Philosophy Coach explains more...

Over the last two and a half years since FP started, the response from course members has been amazing. The Food Philosophy has been called ‘life changing’ so often that I’ve come to take it for granted that it will change the life of everyone who embarks on the journey out of the depressing and stressful trap that overeating is.

Most course members come directly from a lifetime of yo-yo dieting and the relief they feel when they realise that there is an end to the suffering is enormous. Just imagine a life without overeating! This is so alien a thought that it might even seem scary to you. What will you find to think about, to worry about, to fill the gap when you don’t have to worry about food or your weight any more? But there’s nothing to be afraid of. With FP, the gap is filled with the creation of your ‘self’ – something that has been given a back stage position while obsession about weight and eating has been in the spotlight. You fill the gap with your full and colourful life. The life that you really deserve.

Someone recently asked me if FP involves IE (intuitive eating) and I said, yes, it does. But when you read FP, you realise that intuitive eating is actually ‘normal’ eating. All non-overeaters eat intuitively and it’s not a new skill that you need to learn, but an old one that you have lost because you have become so out of touch with your own needs and wants and desires. It’s a natural part of you that you need to remember or re-learn.

Intuitive eating is a very good way to live if you’re a compulsive overeater because it puts you back in the driving seat where food is concerned. The hard thing is actually getting into the driving seat – for many years you’ve been looking outside yourself and asking if you are ‘allowed’ to eat this or that and looking to others and asking whether you’re acceptable and if not, what size would you have to be to become acceptable.

This is entirely natural for a long-term yo-yo dieter because the kind of diet thinking you’ve been brainwashed into over the years deliberately removes all self responsibility where food is concerned and you have effectively become an automaton, in passive receive mode, unable to eat anything or think about your own body without externally referencing it all to check that it is ‘allowable’ or ‘correct’.

You’re not alone, though. Every single overeater in the world looks outside themselves for instructions when it comes to food and weight (and sometimes other parts of their lives too - sometimes, but not always, they do this with EVERY area). Even overeaters who are great successes in other areas of their lives and who wouldn't dream of looking to others for instructions about what they should think do it in the area of food and weight. They don't even realise they're doing it. Not one compulsive overeater and chronic dieter knows their own mind in this respect - every overeater is in passive receive mode.

This is something that really does have to be turned around if you want to get out of the overeating trap. Intuitive eating can never be truly intuitive unless all of your decisions are made internally and based on your own wants and needs. The Food Philosophy will help you to achieve independent thinking that supports your real goals for health, weight loss and much more. When I ask course members how The Food Philosophy affected their lives one of the most usual answers is: “It gives me a life to have an affect on!”

For more information e-mail Sue at sue@foodphilosophy.co.uk

Sleep and Weight Loss

Have you been struggling to lose weight?  Have you tried diet, exercise, and even weight loss pills, but nothing seems to be doing the trick?  The trouble may not be with the things you’re doing while you’re awake, but rather the simple fact that you are awake.  Studies have shown that getting more sleep and better quality sleep can help you shed pounds without expensive fad diets.  So if you really want to get rid of those excess pounds once and for all, why not spend less time counting calories and more time in bed?

Getting a good night’s rest makes you feel energized and awake the next day.  If you sleep well the night before, you’re more likely to be able to exercise the next day.  Sufficient sleep can give you the energy to work out harder and for longer periods of time, further fueling your weight loss efforts.

We used to believe that you were hungry when your stomach was empty and full when your stomach had no room left, but we know better than that now.  We now know more about hormones and other chemicals in the body and how they affect hunger.  One of these chemicals is cortisol.  Excess cortisol not only causes us to feel hungry when we’ve had enough to eat; it can also affect the amount of fat we store.  On top of this, cortisol decreases memory retention along with other stress inducing side effects.  Getting sufficient sleep helps return the cortisol balance to normal. 

Two other chemicals that have recently been shown to be affected by the amount of sleep your get are the hormones leptin, which makes you feel hungry, and ghrelin, which makes you feel full.  Reduced amounts of sleep can reduce ghrelin levels and increase leptin levels, causing you to feel you need to eat more when you’ve actually had enough.

Another side effect of sleep deprivation is a change in the way the body metabolizes carbohydrates.  Most individuals have problems fully digesting carbs without sufficient sleep. This means that instead of being burned for energy; these calories are being stored as fat.  Plus, excess carbs in your system can cause a rise in blood sugar levels, along with insulin resistance; these are both symptoms of type II diabetes. 

And if all these reasons aren’t good enough for you, lack of sleep also drops the level of human growth hormone in your system.  While HGH helps children grow bigger, it affects the percentage of fat in proportion to muscle in adults.  Decreased levels of this hormone send even more of the food you eat to be stored as fat reserves, further hindering your weight loss.

So if you’re really serious about losing weight and improving your health, make it a goal to get a full night’s sleep every night.