By James Fedich, D.C.

Today, more than ever, diet fads are becoming a part of everyone’s life. Diets are based on everything from a person's blood type; skin color, eye color, and some are based on nothing at all. Many of these diets are about deprivation. The basic idea behind many of these diets is depriving your body of something that it wants and craves. While I don’t believe that you should eat everything that you can get a hold of, your body craves things for a reason.

Often times women crave chocolate at certain times of the month, that is due to the high concentration of magnesium in chocolate, a nutrient which becomes depleted. While there may be better ways to get magnesium, your body is very intelligent and knows what it needs to survive. Why would you not want to listen to your own internal regulation system?

Losing weight has and always will be about eating less and exercising more. However, depravity is not part of that equation necessarily. Your body burns approximately 1200 calories per day while lying in bed. If you work during the day, you can burn nearly 2000 calories a day not doing anything for exercise. So, how many calories are you eating a day, 3000, 4000. The key to losing weight and maintaining that loss is to equal that balance and then to exceed the calorie intake by 500 per day. A bottle of soda has about 250 calories in it. Therefore, if you drank two bottles of soda a day, switch to water, and you would essentially lose a pound per week if all other intakes were even.

Small changes can make a big difference, take the longer walk to work, park your car across the parking lot, take the dog for a walk, cut out soda, little things like this can make a large impact. Simply working out for twenty minutes a day, three to five times a week, and cutting 500 calories out of your diet every day, and you will lose one to two pounds per week, healthily, happily, and without depriving your body.

It is the little things that matter most in this world and the same applies to becoming healthy, little changes everyday, add up to big changes in the end.

“Every day that you aren’t getting stronger and better, you’re getting weaker and worse.” –D.A. Benton.