Losing Weight and Feeling Great

Archive for March, 2008

I’ve been thinking about vitamin and mineral deficiencies lately, and how dieting and aging effect them.  Why should we be at a special risk — women over 40 who are losing weight?

Dieting and Balance

Losing weight by dieting opens up a can of worms, so to speak.  You’re taking in less food, and presumably less nutrients, although hopefully better as far as overall nutrition.  But are you getting enough of the vitamins you need to stay healthy, even with an improved diet?

Or…are you one who just looks at cutting calories, and not balancing the calories you do take in.  Sorry, taking in 1,200 calories worth of Ben and Jerry’s and popping a multi-vitamin pill isn’t the same as eating a varied diet of fruits, veggies, proteins and fats for that 1,200 calories.

Either way, you could be setting yourself up for a vitamin / mineral deficiency.  And the older you get, the more important to pay attention to what you do eat.  You might have been OK with rice cakes and tuna in college, but that doesn’t cut it now.

Getting Older (That Aging Thing)

Ladies, we all know about osteoporosis and how it can effect us.  We know we have to take in more calcium or at least calcium supplements as we get older.  Broken bones are no fun in the best of circumstances, and can be life-threatening as we age.

But did you know that you could be setting yourself up for a B12 deficiency, just by getting older?  Sad, but true.  Vitamin B12 starts its path into your body by being broken up in your stomach with the enzyme pepsin.  As we get older, our bodies produce less and so we can’t break down all the B12 we take in.

The list of symptoms of a vitamin B12 deficiency are frightening; yet also very familiar.  They should be, because they sound exactly like the "normal" aging process, yet aren’t!  It makes you wonder exactly how many people in nursing homes don’t really need to be there.

It makes you wonder if that forgetfulness you’ve had lately is the result of a B12 deficiency or something more insidious.

Aging and Diet

The older we get, the more important it is to take care of our bodies.  Face it — they don’t bounce back as fast anymore.  Our reflexes aren’t as fast, and we may have a few more "foggy" days as far as our minds go.  It happens, but we don’t have to let ourselves degenerate faster than we normally would.

We don’t have to be relegated to a nursing home in our 70′s or 80′s.  We can take back our lives and health — some people a little, some people a lot.  But we need to finally start taking care of ourselves, right here and now.

We can’t change the past.  We can change the future.  And we can start today by discovering what our bodies need more of as we age, the signs of deficiencies and how to combat them.

Start out with the list of B vitamins, and I’ll be researching other vitamins and minerals that are vital to our bodies.

Losing weight — it’s hard enough without the specter of bad breath.  Why do we get that awful smell, and is there anything we can really do about it (aside from gargle every five minutes)?

Losing Weight and Bad Breath — Why?

First is the "why" — why when we go on a diet we start being odoriferous?  There are a couple of reasons.

1. Our diet detoxes us. Now I’m talking a sensible weight loss plan here — not a total fad like eating nothing but hot dogs or peanut butter.  When we start eating properly, and start to lose weight, the toxins stored in our body start releasing.  Some toxins may give us additional sweating, others strange body odors and some…bad breath.  The good part is that as you detox more and more, the odor gets less and less.
2. Some diets are more prone to bad breath.  A high-fat, high protein, low carb diet (example:  Atkins) will naturally give you additional interesting scents.  Part of it may be that some of the natural breath cleansers (many fruits and veggies) are pretty much absent.  Also, the release of ketones in your body can produce bad breath all by itself.  Check out WebMd for more information on low-carb diets and bad breath.

How Sweet it Is

Now even if losing weight and bad breath goes hand-in-hand, it is not a reason to quit dieting — face it, extra weight is worse for your health than bad breath!  But there are some things you can do to start smelling sweeter again.

The first is, naturally, brushing regularly.  Why?  One is to remove food particles that can cause odors.  The other is to keep your teeth and gums in good shape — you don’t need a tooth or gum infection to smell even stronger!

You can also pop sugarless mints occasionally.  While this has merits, especially for a quick fix, you don’t need all those extra chemicals in your diet (more to detox).  So keep your mints around for emergency fixes, but don’t totally rely on them.

Drink more water, less coffee.  Coffee adds to the smell, while water washes it away.  You can also use green tea, which is light and sweet in smell and guess what — it’s good for your teeth!

The standard remedy of chewing herbs can also help.  Just about everyone knows about parsley, but have you also considered any of the mint family — mint, peppermint, spearmint and even chocolate mint (although that’s one you’ll have to grow yourself)?

Consider a colon cleanse to hasten a detox.  There are gentle ones that work over the course of a month.  There are also, ahem, explosive ones that work very quickly.  (They aren’t really explosive, although it may seem that at first.)

Well, see you later — I’m off to brush my teeth and drink some water!