No-Diet Tip 2: Six Steps to Success

On your lifetime no-diet plan you follow a nutritionally wise eating plan to enable yourself to progressively lose weight until you level off at your desired weight. You won't have to change your diet at that point because you will have already changed and stabilized it.

The following are common but tested techniques that you can work into your no-diet plan to support a lifestyle change in your eating habits:

1. Get rid of fattening foods such as cakes, cookies, potato chips, and other non-essential snack or dessert items, and then don't restock them.

2. Drop one fattening component from your diet each month. Pick the most fattening first (ice cream or cake, for example).

No-Diet Tip for Enlightened Eating

Eat healthy foods and eat more. These are the foods that deliver important nutrients to support all your body functions and that help keep your weight healthy and level.

That's right, you can eat more! Eat more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and you will be able to eat much more and feel satisfied by doing so. Let's look at one way to make enlightened eating choices.

Compare a cup of pinto beans to a five-ounce steak. The cup gives you 265 calories. The steak is 300 calories. That is a 35 calorie difference. That's a small caloric difference. The beans give 15 grams of protein to the steak's 44. "Oh," you say, "let's go with the steak." Before you rush to your local butcher for that filet, let's zoom in on this issue.

Excited Over Pope’s Condom Comments? Hold the Applause

As Spiderman was once so sagely advised, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I venture out on a limb to suggest that the Pope may have missed this memo, at least when it comes to protecting the reproductive health of his one billion or so followers.

The Catholic Church’s staunch view against the use of birth control was cemented in a 1968 pronouncement and hasn’t budged since. After four decades and the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, condoms got a big old “talk to the hand” again last year during the Pope’s trip to Africa, where he said the contraceptive “aggravates the problems” despite the HIV infection of more than 20 million on the continent.

Pope Clarifies: Condoms a “Lesser Evil”

After a few days of speculation, and perhaps putting some words in the Pope’s mouth, the Vatican’s spokesman has come forward to clarify the Pope’s recent comments on condom use.

The Pope is not condoning homosexual relations, prostitution or condom use just for males. Three out of three of those things are still very, very wrong. The Vatican maintains its castigating eye, but clarifies that when faced with the decision whether to use condoms or transmit/contract HIV, condom use is officially the lesser of those two evils. And this goes equally for men, women, and “transsexuals.” Relieved, aren’t you?

U.S. Flunks Women’s Health

Kids might dread that report card that comes every winter, but a nationwide report card on women’s health doesn’t make officials nearly as anxious as it should.

According to the National Women’s Law Center’s latest report card on state and national health policy, no state got a “satisfactory” (S) grade on the group’s selected health measures, and only Vermont and Massachussetts scored an S-minus. The many “F” states were concentrated in the Southeast, such as Mississippi. The nation as a whole got a big “U” (unsatisfactory), with passing marks in only three key areas:

the percentage of women age 40 and older across the country getting mammograms regularly, the percentage of women visiting the dentist annually and the percentage of women age 50 and older who receive screenings for colorectal cancer.

Women’s Health Care Ignored From the Waist Down

When it comes to health care, who would deny that prevention is preferable to treatment? I’m right there when public health recommendations include tobacco-free living, a reduction in alcohol and drug abuse and healthy eating. So I’m behind the president’s National Prevention, Health Promotion and Public Health Council, which he established in June. The council developed a national prevention, health promotion and public health strategy, complete with recommendations [PDF] that “provides an unprecedented opportunity to shift the nation from a focus on sickness and disease to one based on wellness and prevention.”

Why Have Abortion Rates Stopped Dropping?

Abortion rates have generally fallen since the 1980s for a variety of reasons including greater access to contraception and the availability of over-the-counter emergency contraception. But in recent years, according to a new study by the Guttmacher Institute, abortion rates have stalled, raising questions about whether pregnant women have access to a full range of reproductive options and choice.

The study reports:

Nationwide, the number of abortions peaked in 1990, at 1.61 million, and dropped 25 percent, to 1.21 million, by 2005. Similarly, the abortion rate declined 29 percent over the same period, from 27.4 per 1,000 women aged 15-44 to 19.4 per 1,000.

Obesity and Morbid Obesity - A World Wide Problem

During the past 20 years or so a new life threatening disease has crept upon mankind. It's a disease of affluence that's affected wealthy countries in the past but is now being seen throughout the world. The disease is obesity, a condition caused by people being grossly overweight.

Obesity and especially morbid obesity, are regarded by the health profession throughout the world as being a killer disease.

It can be said that obesity affects those people who fail to look after their general health. As such it's a disease that's totally avoidable - with care and diligence the worst aspects of the condition can be prevented.

Warning: You Could be Pre-Pregnant

What ethical complications arise when physicians imagine all women of reproductive age to be potential moms, whether or not these women ever want or plan to become pregnant?

That’s what worries University of South Florida philosophy and internal medicine professor Rebecca Kukla. She says that the “preconception care movement”–the recent push by organizations such as the March of Dimes, the Office of Minority Health and the American Pregnancy Association, along with health initiatives like Every Woman California, to offer prenatal care to all women has troubling implications, particularly for the low-income, minority women who are the movement’s target.

Five Tips to Stay Energized During Winter

Cold weather and dark skies can make just about everyone feel lethargic at times. The feelings known as “winter blues,” are more than just your imagination. It’s a real condition called “Seasonal Defective Disorder,” or SAD, and you may feel depressed, without energy, or simply not yourself. Fight off the winter blues with these tips and keep yourself going strong, all winter long.

Stay Hydrated. You may not feel as thirsty as you do in the summer, but you need to remember to stay hydrated. Drink plenty of water, of course, but if you need to warm up and want something tasty, consider a cup or two of hot green tea. Green tea is rich in anti-oxidants, which gets your blood moving and improves your energy level.

No Surprise: Abortion Does NOT Cause Mental-Health Problems

A list of good things that come from Denmark: Vikings, butter cookies and Legos. As of today, add one more thing: a study that says that abortion definitively does not lead to mental-health problems.

As reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, Danish scientists studied 365,550 teenagers and women in the country who had an abortion or first-time delivery between 1995 and 2007. By tracking their mental-health counseling both before and after abortion or delivery, researchers were able to assess the psychological impact of each choice. They found that only about 15 per 1,000 women needed psychiatric counseling within a year after an abortion–similar to the rate seeking help nine months before having an abortion.

Midwives Fight for The Right to Deliver

As if politicians weren’t busy enough attacking abortion rights and access to contraception, there’s another reproductive choice that’s under threat from conservative lawmakers: the right to choose where your baby is born and with whose help.

Though it may sometimes be eclipsed by the public fixation on the abortion debate, a movement to improve women’s access to midwife and home birth services has been steadily gaining ground in recent years.

Having long championed home and out-of-hospital birth as a less stressful, potentially healthier birthing method, midwives have weighed in on the healthcare reform debate by advocating for a more holistic system of maternity care based on personal “hands-on” help throughout pregnancy and after delivery. The Big Push for Midwives campaign has also advocated for state legislation that enables birth under the care of licensed Certified Professional Midwives, which is currently unavailable in 23 states as of August 2010.

Where Mammograms Fail

At the recent TEDwomen conference in Washington D.C., one of the presenters was Dr. Deborah Rhodes, an internist who has become a leader in assessing breast cancer risk. Rhodes became immersed in the challenge of how to effectively detect breast tumors in women with dense breast tissue when one of her pregnant patients, in her 40s and with a family history of breast cancer, asked her for an honest appraisal of the odds of finding a tumor in its early stages.

Rhodes understood that for women with dense breast tissue, “the mammogram doesn’t work well at all.” In fact, as she wrote to me via e-mail,

What Abusers and “Pro-Family” Conservatives Have in Common

Birth control sabotage has been revealed to be a common form of partner abuse. In a report released earlier this week by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, 25 percent of women callers to the hot line, who voluntarily answered questions about birth control and pressure to get pregnant in their relationships, reported some form of reproductive coercion.

The callers said their partners hid birth control pills or flushed them down the toilet. Some refused to wear condoms or poked holes in them. One woman’s partner became furious when she recently got her period.

The study’s authors state firmly that reproductive coercion is a form of abuse. Family Violence Prevention Fund president Esta Soler says, “While there is a cultural assumption that some women use pregnancy as a way to trap their partner in a relationship, this survey shows that men who are abusive will sabotage their partner’s birth control and pressure them to become pregnant as a way to trap or control their partner.”

Women CAN Handle the Truth–About Cancer OR Alzheimer’s

The BRCA genes were discovered in 1994 and 1995, but when you visited your doctor anytime from 1995 through the early 2000s, chances are that she or he did not recommend that you test for a mutation on the genes that would indicate an increased chance of developing ovarian or breast cancers. Why not? Because the paternalistic feeling of much of the medical community was that women who might be carriers of mutations couldn’t handle knowing their risk.

In fact, in 1998, an esteemed panel of experts convened a conference at Stanford University to decide what to do with the newfound ability to test for these genes. Their conclusion? Genetic testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2: