Ever hear of Oprah's Book Club?

Thought working through a book with a group may be fun - more interesting?

This is something new I thought I would try:

Using the book titled "The Vice Busting Diet" that claims it has a 12 week plan to break your worst food habits and change your life forever - I thought we would as a group go through the challenges it offers.

The holiday season is quickly approaching and what a better time to try a 12 week challenge. Up for it?

Each day a new challenge will be presented - once the challenge is complete, place the comment in the days box (this helps in the accountabilty).

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.

A 12 Week Plan...........

All challenges and words will be shared from The Vice Busting Diet written by Julia Havey.

"Too much food had caused too much me!"

Everyone has a diet vice.

A diet vice? Any habitual action that is keeping you from reaching and maintaining a healthy weight.

For example, if you eat a dozen chocolate chip cookies every day at noon, you can rest assured that cookies are your diet vice. If you drink a gallon of regular soda every day, this is definitely your diet vice. If you sit on the couch and are glued to the television for four hours a day, that is your diet vice. If you eat Big Macs every day, that is your diet vice. If your portion sizes are too large, that could also be considered a diet vice.

Can you identify your diet vice?

TOP THREE DIET VICES

Soft Drinks

Soft drinks and beverages that are not "diet" are by far one of the single most important items making a major contribution to the obesity epidemic.

During the 1950's the typical soft-drink order at a fast food restaurant contained 8 ounces of soda. Now a large soda at McDonald's is 32 ounces. 32 ounces is exactly 4 times a 8 ounce soda. That large soda contains a whopping 310 calories. We are getting too many calories from soft drinks at fast food restaurants and home. The majority of those calories come from refined sugars.

Fast Food

Fast food and soft drinks go hand in hand and they are the one-two punch that is keeping many of us from our healty weight goals.

The most common item available at a fast-food restaurant is beef, and our consumption of beef has steadily increased over the last 50 years.

In 1950, we consumed an annual average of 53 pounds of beef per person; now the annual average is 65 pounds a person. What goes great with hamburg? Right - cheese! Our cheese consumption has skyrocketed in this same time period. Our annual cheese consumption has increased 287 percent! It was 7.7 pounds per person and now an average of 29.8 pounds a person a year!

Along with the advent of fast-food restaurants we have changed other eating habits.

The consumption of milk and eggs is considerably down since the 1950's.

What used to be 37 gallons of milk per person in the 1950's is now 23 gallons per year (including lower fat amd whole milk). In the 1950's, the annual consumption of eggs was 374 per person per year - now it has dropped to approximately 250 per person. So we consume a third less eggs than we did 50 years ago.

We consume more bad stuff because we now have light beer, low fat crackers, low-carb cookies, and lean meats, which seems to give us permission to eat more.

In the 1950's total added fats and oils were about 45 pounds a person per year - that number is now 75 pounds per person.

The popular fast food sandwich has 560 calories and 30 grams of fat, and the crispy chicken salad with a Caesar salad dressing packs 550 calories and 36 grams of fat. It's clear that "healthy" fast food isn't much better than the regular variety.

Television

Did you know the average person watches more than 4 hours of tv a day? What could most of us do with 4 hours a day in just one year?

Think of time- 365 days x 4 hours = 1,460 hours!

Television has its place, but not taking up 25% of your waking hours.

Ironically, television is the source of many advertisements for weight loss programs, diet pills, and so on. Would we need them if we simply turned off the tv, put down the snack, and used the time differently?

If we are sitting and essentially doing nothing, we're not burning calories. On top of that, if we're snacking, we are adding calories to our current weight. In simple terms, we are gaining weight every day that we sit in front of the tv (or computer) and more weight if we're snacking while watching.

If you gained 1 pound for every 40 hours of television, that's a pound every 10 days - then after a year you would gain 36 pounds (an average of 3 pounds a month)

Obesity is gaining on, and ready to overtake, smoking as the leading cause of preventable death. That means we can prevent it through the choices we make. With the average household having more televisions than bathrooms, it's no wonder that we have our priorities i the wrong place. How we choose to spend our time is just as important to our health and our weight as what we choose to drink and eat.

The most common answer to the question:

"How many diet plans or products have you tried?"

is TOO MANY TO COUNT (or something very similar)

Apparently, we are willing to try just about anything, and we aren't going to stop making attempts to lose weight.

The first reason that past weight loss attempts may not have worked is that you may have done too much too fast.

If you think that it's necessary to make every diet change in the first day, think again. There is no really good reason I can think of, or that I've read about, for changing your diet overnight. Your body needs time to adjust - so does your mind!

Ready to take the 12 week challenge?