1. You need to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day they said.

- Not such a good advice as far as nutrition is concerned. If you live in a very hot climate you have to make sure you are getting enough water to compensate for what you lost through perspiration. But in normal circumstances – drink when you feel thirsty.

- Any kind of liquid is good to keep the water levels in your body in check. What so much water does is dilutes your electrolytes and makes you feel full. You are advised to drink that amount if you want to lose weight.

2. Do not eat after 7 PM

– The French laugh at it and for a good reason. People live different lives on different schedules. Some work at night. There is no formula that fits all. It’s really about what you eat not when you eat it.

3. Eat as much chocolates as you want, it’s good for you.

- Wrong. The bitter chocolate that contains at least 70% of cocoa has health benefits. The regular milk or filled chocolate is good for your sweet tooth only. It has no health benefits.

4. Another idea that has been popular is that carbohydrates are bad for you and will make you fat.

- That is an idea that gathered speed in the 70′s when Dr. Atkins came out with his revolutionary low carbs diet by avoiding carbohydrates all together.

- Some carbs (as they are called) are indeed bad for you. Sugars, white rice, white flower, pasta are all heavy with simple carbs that get turned to sugar very quickly.

- When there’s excess, this carbs turned sugar will be stored as fat, probably around your middle section.

- There are a lot of healthy complex carbs you should eat and not avoid. Your body needs it. Eat beans, vegetables, fruit, brown rice and whole grain flower and it will take the body a lot of effort (calories) to break it down and won’t raise your insulin levels.

5. Another myth is that you don’t need dairy products after you’ve grown up.

- Look at the calves, they say. When they grow up they stop drinking milk and eat hey instead. Well, we are not cows and our stomachs and bodies work differently.

- We need the calcium that dairy products are full with, and we need the vitamin D they are enriched with to help the calcium be absorbed. Stay away from dairy products that are full of saturated fats (whole milk, sour cream, whipping cream etc.) and keep the ones that are low fat or fat free.

- Recent research showed that Americans, especially children, have very low levels of vitamin D probably because of sun blocks or because they hardly play outdoors. Doctors believe high levels of vitamin D help combat different kinds of cancers. So do make sure you are getting enough calcium to avoid osteoporosis.

6. Don’t eat more than one or two eggs a week is another idea that is rebutted.

- Yes, eggs have cholesterol but they also have a lot of proteins that keep you satisfied and not hungry for a long time. They have B vitamins, iron and minerals that our body needs. There is no risk in eating one egg a day, every day, if you are healthy.

The culprits, he uncovered, are the carbohydrates. Those building blocks turn into glucose and if we do not use all of that energy on physical activity, it turns into fat and accumulates in our bodies.

Therefore his diet is based on a few or no carbohydrates at all. You can eat as much proteins (meat and animal products) as you like and you can eat as much fat as you like, as long as you avoid carbohydrates you will lose weight.

The diet was based on proteins; bacon is OK, huge steaks are OK, creams, cheeses are OK and you can eat as much of it as you want. Eliminate the flower, rice, sugars and other carbohydrates from your food and you will lose weight.

Low and behold it worked! People were losing weight in huge amounts while gorging on their favorite foods and Dr. Atkins became the talk of the town.

The diet calls for a ridiculously small amount of carbohydrate for the first two weeks, about 20 grams a day (one slice of bread has about 18gr.) and no fruit at all because they are high in carbohydrates and sugars.

After the initial two weeks and after you have lost 4-8 pounds a week, you can slowly and carefully increase the amount of carbohydrates until you stop losing weight. That is your plateau, your base line and now you know what your limit is and reduce the intake in order to lose weight. You can also check the amount of ketosis in your urine which is an indication that your body is burning the fat it has been storing.

The problem with this diet is two pronged ; you deny yourself some foods and you start craving them after a while. There’s a risk you will go off the diet and start eating carbohydrates. Together with the fat you’ve been eating it is a recipe for an immediate weigh gain.
The more serious problem is the cholesterol which you have been consuming in big quantities.

It has been known for years that cholesterol is a major factor in heart attacks and cardiovascular system problems and is altogether dangerous to your health. Indeed when Dr. Atkins stepped out of his office in New York, in April 2003, slipped on the ice and fell; he died 9 days later at the age of 72. His cause of death was characterized as “blunt impact injury of the head” but subsequent reports show he had congestive heart failure and his weight at the time of death would have made him obese.

Since his death, although his wife tried to continue with his institute and diet empire, the popularity of this diet has declines dramatically, and it is the least recommended diet by doctors and health professionals.

The idea behind this diet is the glycemic cycle happening in our bodies when we eat. When we consume sugars and carbohydrates, the body produces insulin to break the sugars down. The more sugars we eat, the more insulin is produced.

The doctor theorized that this causes a cycle; we eat sugars, insulin breaks it down and when there is no more sugar to break down, we feel hungry and eat again. If we prevent the spike in insulin production we will avoid the hunger feeling that causes us to eat more of that same food.

People have been confusing this diet with a low-carbohydrate diet such as Dr. Atkins, but it is not the same. You are not ask to forgo carbohydrates all together, rather choose complex carbs, such as beans, vegetables and whole grain rice and flower, which makes the body work longer and harder to break down. Same thing happens with regard to fat.

Do not avoid fat all together, like many popular, health oriented diets (such as the Pritikin diet) have advocated, rather choose the Good Fat – unsaturated fat and foods rich in omega 3 oil (fish). His diet was a new way of healthy living rather than a diet you do only to lose weight.

The plan calls for three phases; the first phase takes two weeks. No sugars, no processed carbohydrates, no fruit and no vegetables high in sugars (such as beets and carrots) are allowed. No alcohol of any kind either. The purpose of this phase is to re-train the body to produce less and less insulin and get you off the craving for carbohydrates. What you are losing in this first phase is mainly water, so you have to be careful not to get your electrolytes out of balance.

Phase two continues as long as you want to lose weight. It reintroduces fruit, vegetables and some complex carbohydrates, such whole grains but still avoids sugar.

Phase three of this diet is the one you will stay on for the rest of your life. There is no list of allowed or not allowed foods. You are expected to understand and feel in your body what causes your insulin to spike and avoid those foods.

In 2004, Kraft Food Company came out with a line of prepackaged food along the guidelines of the South Beach Diet, and called it South Beach Living. It includes whole grain, whole rice foods with complex carbohydrates and complex sugars and meant to help you stay healthy and lean for many years to come.

With so many diets on the market and gyms in every corner, the question that keeps coming up is, why? Why is this generation so overweight when we have all those new exercise techniques and sport research to maximize the exercise effectiveness?
The simple answer is nutrition. People just do not know how to eat right.

Eating right doesn’t mean skipping meals. It does not mean avoiding certain foods all together. A Balanced nutrition means you should have a little of every food group; proteins, carbohydrates and fat. Balanced nutrition has to include all three, plenty of water, and vitamins and minerals. But on that a bit later.

The objective of a correct nutrition is to supply and maintain the body with the elements it needs for healthy normal function. Thus, if you avoid completely one of those ingredients you are not getting the nutrition you need.

Many articles have been written about the Atkins diet for example. Dr. Atkins believed that the fat content in our food is not the reason why we are overweight. In his opinion the culprit is the carbohydrates. Under his guidelines you could eat all the fat and proteins you like, but eliminate the carbs almost completely.

People did lose weight on his diet, but did they become healthier? No, they became slimmer and sicker. The huge amounts of animal protein they were consuming contributed to a dangerous rise in cholesterol levels, which is an unwanted outcome.

Nutrition is not about weight but about health. A balance diet has to include a lot of vegetables and fruit, which do contain carbs. A balanced nutrition has to supplement all the body systems and keep them in optimal working order.

Since most vegetables and fruit in our modern, hurried world are not grown organically or without pesticides, herbicides or hormones, fruit and vegetables do not contain the amount of vitamins they used to. Our society lives on processed foods that are easy to eat, and fast to digest but they do not supply the body with the vitamins it needs.

Recent research in the United States showed that most people, especially children, have a deficiency in Vitamin D. It might be caused by an unbalanced nutrition or it might be caused by not enough time in the sun. Now that we have discovered how harmful the sun is to our skin, we cover ourselves with clothes and sun blocks. We stay indoors during daylight hours in offices and closed spaces where the air is forced in by machines but the sun doesn’t shine. Now the doctors recommend loading ourselves with huge amounts of Vitamin D to make up for the loss.

This would have been avoided had we kept a balanced nutrition that includes fresh produce, meat, fish, grains and some outdoor activity. Good nutrition is the most important element to a healthy, happy and active life.