memory

Whitney Nicole lost 50+ pounds

October 15, 2022 by Ajima Jackson Leave a Comment

Transformation of the Day: Whitney Nicole lost 50+ pounds. She was motivated by her love for her family and the memory of her father, who passed at a young age due to cancer. By committing to a proven program and consistent workouts, she got results.

Whitney Nicole before and after weight loss

Social Media:
Instagram: @queen_njeri92

What was your motivation? What inspired you to keep going, even when you wanted to give up?
My motivation was my husband, kids, and that I lost my dad when he was 23 to cancer. I wanted to be healthy and make him proud too.

How did you change your eating habits?
I used Weight Watchers the whole time. I also focused on more protein and fewer sweets but still allowed myself to enjoy all food groups.

What is your workout routine?
I do everything! Workout classes, elliptical, running, etc.

How often did you work out?
I work out 3-4 times weekly, but I also get movement in daily.

What was your starting weight? What is your current weight?
My starting weight was 245+ pounds, and my current weight is 196.8 pounds.

What is your height?
I’m 5’1″.

When did you start your journey? How long did your transformation take?
I started in 2016. I’m still transforming after 3 C-sections and a rough 2nd delivery.

Is weight loss surgery part of your journey?
No.

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far?
This is not a race or competition. It’s a lifelong process, and it’s okay not to be perfect.

What advice do you have for women who want to lose weight?
Start by putting one foot in front of the other by making small changes. Know that it will take time. Also, the scale is just a number. So you have to look for other accomplishments too.

What Happens to Your Body When You Skip Meals?

September 17, 2015 by Ajima Jackson 1 Comment

affects of skipping meals It’s safe to say that you’ve probably skipped meals either accidentally or on purpose. You may believe that skipping calories will simply help your weight loss efforts. Unfortunately, skipping meals doesn’t just leave you hungry but could actually increase weight gain! Not only is weight gain the opposite of what you are trying to achieve, but there are other side effects of missing meals that you should know about. Here are 6 things that could happen to your body when you decide to skip a meal.

Your Blood Sugar Drops

Blood sugar levels aren’t just something diabetics have to worry about. When you skip a meal or two your blood sugar levels drop and your body reacts to the lack of food. Low blood sugar can lead to shakiness, strong cravings, dizziness and even fainting if you constantly skip meals consecutively. Eating every 3-4 hours will help you avoid low blood sugar. Some people feel that the body goes in to “starvation mode” but that’s not entirely true because the body will break down excess fat (which we want it to do) and muscle if there is a lack of food for days and days.

Giving into Cravings or Outright Binging Increases

So, your blood sugar is low from a skipped meal. No big deal- you just eat a large one to compensate, right? Wrong! Low blood sugar pretty much signals your brain to eat a lot once you do have a meal to compensate for the lack of food. Eating a lot of food suddenly and rapidly (even if it’s a healthy meal!) can in turn spike your blood sugar, even if you’ve had low blood sugar before the meal. It all depends on how much you eat, how insulin sensitive you are and whether you have existing issues with blood sugar, your liver and your pancreas.

When you skip meals, you are far more likely to end up giving into cravings. Even worse, you are more likely to completely binge, because along with the cravings you may feel that you have calories to spare since you skipped a meal. It is easy for starve-then-binge patterns to become a habit and many dieters struggle with this.

You Destroy Your Energy Levels and Inhibit Workout Results

Skipping meals also depletes your energy levels. You are going to feel tired, heavy and physically slow. You may inadvertently pick up bad sedentary lifestyle habits just because you feel so weak. Feeling so tired is obviously going to affect your workout. Not only will you just not feel like working out, but you open yourself to overexertion and increased chance of injury if you’re tired. Your muscles run on glucose from food, so keep that in mind.

Focus and Short-Term Memory is Negatively Impacted

Going without meals makes your body tired but also can really affect your mental energy. One of the first things that happens when you skip a meal is difficulty when focusing on tasks. Your mind may feel foggy and slow. Also, you may have trouble remembering things at work, school or around the house. After you eat, the high blood sugar spikes mentioned earlier can also make your mind feel so jittery that you can’t focus simply from over stimulation. Don’t put your body on a blood sugar roller coaster.

You Increase Your Body’s Belly Fat Storage

When you miss meals regularly, your body can go into a protective mode that causes your body to store more fat, especially around the stomach. Based on an Ohio State University study, researchers believe that humans who go into this mode followed by binging or “gorging” eating behaviors inadvertently teach their bodies to improve their fat storing capabilities.

You simply can’t tell your body that you are skipping meals to lose weight. It simply doesn’t work that way. The body is designed to protect us from starving and it doesn’t know that there is a grocery store down the street. It is trying to anticipate famine before it happens and conserve energy. Continuing to eat in an unhealthy way is likely to just make your weight loss goals more difficult to achieve. This is one of the reasons that eating small meals spread out over the course of a day and meal planning can be so effective.

You Could Become Deficient in Important Nutrients

Skipping a couple meals throughout the week doesn’t seem like a big deal in terms of nutrition, but it can lead to serious deficiencies. Humans need a varied diet of vegetables, fruits, meats (for some), fiber, vitamins and more to be healthy. The average person is already deficient in some vital vitamins and minerals because unhealthy eating habits are so rampant. By skipping meals, you further reduce your opportunities to eat a variety of nutritious food.

Another common behavior among meal skippers that leads to deficiencies is that when they do eat, they tend to eat the same staple meals all the time. Even if your staples are very healthy, it’s easy to create a deficit if you really haven’t planned out your meals to be inline with your nutrition needs. A multivitamin can help, but it won’t correct the problem completely.

It is important to eat regularly and throughout the day. Calorie-counting and logging your meals with a website or app is also very helpful for weight loss. It allows you to track how much you are eating, which can help you prevent having to skip dinner or snacks just to stay in your limit.

How Can Sugar Affect Your Brain?

July 17, 2015 by Ajima Jackson Leave a Comment

When it comes to addiction in the United States, one of the most common addictions may surprise you. It’s not alcohol or some illicit drug. In fact, it is something children and adults consume everyday: sugar. Yes, sugar can be biologically addictive, just like any other refined chemical drug.

A new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that, in fact, higher sugar, higher glycemic foods can be addictive. David Ludwig, author of Ending the Food Fight, and his colleagues at Harvard, in a very sophisticated study, showed that foods with more sugar, foods that raise blood sugar even more than table sugar such as white flour, white potatoes and refined starch have what is called a high glycemic index, trigger a special region in the brain called the nucleus accumbens that is known to be “ground zero” for conventional addiction, such as gambling or drug abuse. – Dr. Mark Hyman, Huffington Post

Sugar is found in majority of processed foods that make up a typical American diet, with the average person eating roughly 20 teaspoons per day according to the American Heart Association. To put that in perspective, 20 teaspoons is nearly half a cup. Half a cup of sugar can seem like an impossible amount to consume daily but unfortunately this isn’t the case.

Why is all of this important to consider? It is well known that excessive consumption of processed sugars can contribute to a myriad of health problems.

The Dangers of Sugar

Sugar has a negative impact on health and many of its side effects are common knowledge. Some examples of health problems that have been directly linked to excessive sugar include:

Tooth decay
Obesity
High blood sugar
Risk of heart disease
Risk of diabetes
Fatty liver disease
Increases risk of cancer
Contributes to high levels of bad cholesterol

Eating and drinking refined sugars can be a risk factor for so many problems and it offers no nutritional value. So, why do people continue to eat it? Despite understanding it’s bad, people continue to consume refined sugars in excessive amounts because of the way it affects their brains.

Sugar and Your Brain

It can be a bit shocking to know that a common ingredient in so many foods can have a strong impact on your brain. There are four ways refined sugars have an effect on your brain.

Addiction

As alluded to earlier, sugar is literally addicting. When sugar is consumed the brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is like a chemical reward for the brain and body. It can occur when people experience anything from gambling to sex or, in this case, indulging in a sugary cupcake. It may seem extreme to compare sugar to a drug but this study shows that the brain reacts very much the same way to sugar as it does to cocaine.

This dopamine release is pleasurable and naturally people want to feel good. Unfortunately, addiction can easily set in as the person makes it a habit to achieve this happy state.

Memory

According to a study done by the University of Southern California sugar impairs memory functions. The study was primarily aimed at children though it is generally agreed that the same effect occurs in adults. The hippocampus is the portion of the brain responsible for memory, as well as organization and general information, and is very sensitive to refined sugars.

Mental Health

There is a strong correlation between sugar and mental health, in this case being anxiety and depression. A study featured in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that participants whose diets consisted of processed foods (high in refined sugars) had the risk of depression increase by 58%.

Anxiety from eating sugar shouldn’t be a surprise. Many people turn to a candy bar or similar snack as an afternoon pick-me-up when they feel tired. Sugar gives some energy which is followed by a crash. Anxiety can occur after eating sugary and rather than waking you up it cause jitteriness, inability to concentrate and nervousness. People with no anxiety disorder can experience this. Those with previous anxiety can have their symptoms made much worse.

Hormones

The brain works to regulate hormones and sugar can wreak havoc on that balance via blood sugar spikes. Sugar affects estrogen and testosterone. When refined sugars are consumed it cause estrogen and testosterone to get bound up in the bloodstream, causing them to increase. Increased levels of hormones can be harmful and due to the connection with insulin raise blood sugar affects fat accumulation. These hormones could also negatively affect mood, cause insomnia, and can exacerbate existing hormones problems like hypothyroidism. (more info on sugar and hormone imbalance)

There are many reasons to avoid sugar. Unfortunately refined sugars are impossible to avoid in a typical American diet consisting of processed foods. For overall health, aim to eat a balanced diet full of whole foods. That means plenty of vegetables, fruits, beans, whole grains and lean meats. Fruit sugars are not dangerous to overall health like processed sugars (they are not usually eaten to excess) but they should be avoided or eaten in moderation if you have diabetes or other issues impacted by high blood sugar.

What should you do? Here is an overview of why sugar is addictive and what you can do to break the addiction from Dr. Mark Hyman for the Cleveland Clinic.