"Organic Living - Practical tips for starting and maintaining an organic and healthy lifestyle" by R. K. Mendis

NEW RELEASE

Organic Living - Practical tips
for starting and maintaining
an organic and healthy lifestyle

by R. K. Mendis

Description

Have you thought about living the organic lifestyle but aren't sure how to get started?

It's actually much easier than you may think. Organic Living gives you practical tips you can use to live a more organic lifestyle. It provides helpful insight on what makes something organic as well as tips on incorporating organic foods into your current lifestyle. While reading this book, you will discover:

• Why you should stop eating foods treated with chemicals and pesticides.
• What it means when something is labeled organic and when it's "made with organic ingredients".
• How to read food labels and what you should be looking for when you read them.
• Which foods to eat to help boost your energy, improve your health and improve your appearance.
• Recipes that will help you put the tips shared throughout the book into practice.

Excerpt

Chapter 1: Why Eat Organic?

 Eat organic or not to eat organic?

Is that the question?

I think that a better question would be, what is organic and how will I know when I see it?

Ok, that’s actually two questions but the point I’m making is that when it comes to eating organic or living an organic lifestyle, before we can determine whether we should eat organic we must first determine what makes something organic.

If you’ve gone to the grocery store to buy organic food, the first thing you probably noticed is that it’s often much more expensive than non-organic food.

Why is that, you may ask?

First let me dispel the notion that organic food costs more because it’s labeled organic. That’s not entirely true. The process it takes to call something organic is typically what makes it more expensive. But before I take you through that process, I want to first clarify what organic really means.

What is organic?

Essentially a food is considered organic when it’s produced through organic farming methods. Organic farming methods are ones that involve limited amounts of synthetic or chemical treatments such as pesticides and fertilizers.

Why does that matter?

Over the years, scientific research has found that some pesticides and fertilizers don’t have the most beneficial effects on people. In fact, some of them can be downright harmful. When a pesticide or fertilizer is deemed potentially harmful, it’s often banned or severely restricted. One such pesticide is called POPs pesticides. POPs means Persistent Organic Pollutants.

Over time it was discovered that these pesticides don’t break down very easily and can remain in the environment for long periods of time. Some of them have been shown to evaporate in hot climates, only to travel down to colder climates and accumulate there. They have also been shown not to be fat soluble, so they will build up in your body and cause issues over time. People who have consumed POPs have experienced issues like infertility, hormonal disruption and cancer.

One type of POP called dieldrin was used in Africa to eradicate locusts. Once it was discovered that dieldrin was harmful to the environment and the people living in it, it was banned, but because of its makeup, it tends to linger for a really long time. Even when it’s no longer being used, it’s still a hazard.

When you eat organic, you reduce your chances of consuming potentially dangerous pesticides or fertilizers. Unfortunately, pesticides and fertilizers aren’t always discovered to be harmful until after they have been used for an extended period of time.

If it’s safer why are organic foods so expensive?

When a farmer wants to sell organic foods, there’s a certification process that must be done. The USDA has instituted a National Organic Program, designed to ensure the integrity of foods being sold as organic in the United States. This program has established a set of guidelines that must be adhered to by any product being sold as organic.

It’s a fairly extensive list of USDA requirements, but here’s an overview as explained by the USDA:

Organic crops

The USDA organic seal verifies that irradiation, sewage sludge, synthetic fertilizers, prohibited pesticides and genetically modified organisms were not used.

Organic livestock

The USDA organic seal verifies that producers met animal health and welfare standards, did not use antibiotics or growth hormones, used 100% organic feed and provided animals with access to the outdoors.

Organic multi-ingredient foods

The USDA organic seal verifies that the product has 95% or more certified organic content. If the label claims that it was made with specified organic ingredients, you can be sure that those specific ingredients are certified organic.

As you can see, organic food can come in three forms: crops, livestock and multi-ingredient foods. All of these types of foods have a unique set of requirements that must be met before they can be sold as organic. While there are general food safety regulations that everyone must follow, the organic regulations are an added layer. This extra layer requires additional costs that the farmer must cover, which ultimately affects you as the consumer.

Figure 1-1 USDA Organic Seal

The image in Figure 1-1 is what you can look for when you want to eat organic. When you see this label it means that the food is 95% or more organic and has been certified based on USDA standards. If a food is between 94% and 70% organic, it will say “made with organic ingredients”. Those foods can’t use the seal or the organic label,  but they can include the word organic in their ingredient list. If the food is less than 70% organic, it may not be labeled as organic at all, but the ingredients that are organic may be listed as such on the food label.

So when a food is labeled organic you can rest assured that it has gone through a regulated process to ensure that it is indeed organic. This is why eating organic foods is ultimately better for you. Not only is the food grown with less chemicals, it’s a much more regulated process.

Review

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About the Author

R. K. Mendis was born in London, U.K., and specializes in writing books in the health niche. Some of the books include Health Benefits of Juicing, Health Benefits of Coconut Oil, and The Mediterranean Diet. He has recently published Organic Living, a new book on the organic healthy lifestyle.

Stay tuned for a lot more books on healthy living.

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The Diet Dropout's Guide to Natural Weight Loss: Find Your Easiest Path to Naturally Thin by Stan Spencer

NEW RELEASE and GIVEAWAY

The Diet Dropout's Guide to Natural Weight Loss: Find Your Easiest Path to Naturally Thin

by Stan Spencer, PhD

You're in for a treat. You have the chance of winning a paperback copy of this book. Enter the GIVEAWAY below for your chance to win. Thanks to Dr Stan Spencer for donating this awesome prize.


Description

This book isn't about the latest celebrity diet, wonder food, or miracle supplement. It's about creating a personalized weight loss plan - your own easiest path to naturally thin. While you can lose weight with almost any diet, keeping the weight off is much more difficult, requiring permanent changes in eating and exercise habits. This book provides a science-based approach for making those changes in a way that works best for you, without wasting time, money, or effort.

Dr. Spencer explains why we gain weight and why the fat lost by dieting almost always comes back. He then presents an array of practical weight loss tools for controlling emotional eating, calming cravings, boosting metabolism, and improving nutrition and exercise. In the final chapter he has you create a natural weight loss plan based on your unique set of needs, abilities, and preferences. Simple recipes are provided for weight loss foods that reduce cravings and prolong satisfaction.

What this book offers is a solid approach to weight loss - self-directed, gradual, and lasting - in contrast to the quick but fleeting weight loss offered by most one-size-fits-all diet plans.

Excerpt

If this were the early 1960s instead of the 2010s, you might not need a weight loss book. Most people were thin then.

Not now. Even with all the dieting we do, more than two thirds of US adults are now overweight, and the rate of obesity has almost tripled since 1960.

The extra weight isn’t natural, nor is it healthy. It not only affects our looks and physical abilities, it increases our risks of developing diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, gallbladder disease, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, high cholesterol, complications of pregnancy, menstrual irregularities, and cancers of the uterus, breast, colon, and kidney.

So what is behind this weight gain epidemic?

A Less-Active Lifestyle

Our bodies are designed for manual labor and long-distance walking. Many of us, however, enjoy door-to-door motorized transportation to and from a desk job followed by hours of television or other passive entertainment. Such a lifestyle not only burns few calories but can also encourage us to eat more than we would if we were busy with physical activities.

The Fattening Food Environment

Before processed foods became the norm, our ancestors filled their dinner plates with minimally processed vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Meats were unprocessed and lean. These natural foods, combined with an active lifestyle, promoted a slim, healthy body.

In contrast to the healthy foods enjoyed by our ancestors, the foods on our grocery store shelves today are often highly processed and have added fat and sugar. These processed foods are packed with calories and are so convenient and tempting that it’s easy to eat too much of them. As a result, the average adult today eats more calories than in past decades, with most of the extra calories coming from carbohydrate-rich foods such as sweets, soft drinks, potato products, pizza, bread, pasta, and white rice.

There are ten important aspects of our food environment that encourage us to eat too much.

Foods that Don’t Satisfy

Food processing produces calorie-heavy, low-nutrient, low-fiber foods that digest quickly. These foods leave us with loads of calories, soon-empty stomachs, and cravings for more.

Highly Palatable Foods

Highly palatable is a term used by scientists for foods that taste so good that we are tempted to eat them even when our stomachs are full. Most of these are processed foods high in fat, sugar, or refined flour. Such foods have become more abundant and affordable in recent decades, resulting in greater temptations to overeat. We often eat these foods for comfort or pleasure, not because we are hungry.

Highly palatable foods affect the parts of the brain that are responsible for drug addiction and cravings. The authors of a scientific study of the brain's response to highly palatable foods concluded that “overconsumption of palatable food triggers addiction-like responses in brain reward circuits and drives the development of compulsive eating.” In other words, junk food can be addictive.

Calorie-Heavy Foods

While the vegetables, fresh fruits, and whole grains our ancestors ate were high in nutrients and low in calories, the processed foods that fill our grocery store shelves are just the opposite — high in calories and low in nutrients. The result is that a typical meal of modern processed foods has more calories than we need and often too few nutrients. Calorie-heavy foods are believed to be a major factor in the weight gain epidemic.

Cheap, Convenient Food

There is inexpensive, ready-to-eat food almost everywhere we go. We have candy jars at work and cookie jars at home. We stock our refrigerators with soft drinks and our pantries with packaged snacks. Just seeing junk food can make us hungry, and food within easy reach is harder to resist than food that requires a little more effort to obtain. Eating too much has never been easier.

Large Portions

In the US, portion sizes of many foods have increased two- to five-fold since the 1970s.11 We tend to keep eating until the portion in front of us is gone, no matter what its size. Similarly, we tend to eat more when eating a snack food directly out of a large package (such as a bag of potato chips) than when served individual portions.

Passive Entertainment

Watching television or movies burns very few calories. It also encourages needless eating. If we eat during such entertainment, our distraction with the storyline can cause us to continue eating past the point at which we would normally be satisfied.

Convenient Substitutes for Water

Sports drinks, sugary soft drinks, fruit juices, and alcoholic drinks are readily available in our homes and elsewhere. These drinks quickly add calories without lasting satisfaction. Their consumption is believed to be a major factor in the weight gain epidemic.

Misleading Labels and Advertising

A picture of a slender athlete on a package of fresh fruit might make sense. The same picture on an “energy bar” consisting mostly of corn syrup and puffed rice does not. Advertisements often inaccurately depict the health benefits of the foods they are promoting.

Unhealthy Snack Foods

Common snack foods tend to be higher in calories and lower in nutrients than the kinds of foods usually eaten with meals. They are quick to add calories but slow to satisfy.

Restaurants

We eat out more now than in decades past. Restaurant food tends to be higher in calories and served in larger portions than food cooked at home. As a result, one restaurant meal might have enough calories for an entire day.

The Solution

Think of excess fat as a collection of bad habits. Lose the fat-promoting habits, and you will lose the excess fat. Each time you give up one of these bad habits (all other things being equal), you will lose fat until your body naturally settles at a lower weight. At that point you will need to give up another bad habit to lose more weight and keep it off.

Permanent weight loss requires permanent lifestyle changes. The information in this book will help you replace bad habits with good ones and make the lifestyle changes required for lasting weight loss. You will learn how small adjustments in your eating and exercise habits can result in a big difference in body fat over time, why many of the things you hear about gaining or losing weight are false, and why popular diets rarely produce permanent weight loss. You will also learn how to change your personal environment so it’s no longer fattening, boost your metabolism without drugs or supplements, give your body the exercise it needs without wasting time, eat fewer calories without counting them or going hungry, and beat temptation with the willpower you already have.

Often, the hardest part of forming new habits is just getting started. Watch for the QuickStart Tips as you read through the book. They will prompt you to pause and take solid steps down the path to your naturally thin potential.

Review

By BJVCampbell

Being married to an amateur health guru who writes her own health blog, I have read countless articles, books, magazines and watched innumerable documentaries on the topic of health. In that span of time, I have learned about diets (and why they don't work), sleep, exercise and their effects on overall health. But it was not until I read this book that I found so many high-level concepts reduced to a simple language with specific tactics that make taking up a healthy lifestyle so practical, without being gimmicky in the least.

The beauty of this piece is that it deals with weight from every angle - cognitive, emotional and physical. So many works on the market deal with just one at a time, but Dr. Spencer's work provides a blueprint with tactics to manage all three at once to make simple yet effective and lasting change in the reader's life. It also comes in a book that can be read in an afternoon and the reader can start down their new path today.

The concepts Spencer addresses in the book need not only apply to those looking to manage their weight - they provide a foundation for anyone wanting to live a healthy lifestyle. I would recommend this book to anyone who has ever tried a diet and not gotten the results they were looking for, as well as anyone who is serious about leading a healthy life.

About the Author

Stan Spencer, PhD, was born in Mexico and grew up in Utah, USA. He is a biological consultant and former research scientist. Stan has conducted laboratory studies in biochemistry at Brigham Young University, in botany and evolution at Claremont Graduate University, and in genetics at the Smithsonian Institution. Stan lives in southern California his wife, Amy, and a varying number of their seven children. He blogs on natural weight loss techniques at Fat Loss Science.

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