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Nothing ever comes easy. When it comes to weight, it takes years of neglect from eating an improper diet, lack of exercise and the development of bad habits that leads to an overweight condition It won't take mere days to lose it all.

Despite the advertising that losing weight can be easily achieved, many people continue to struggle to shed pounds without success. Weight loss in not just a matter of getting on the latest fad diet or eating less. It requires a complete change in lifestyle that many people simply don't have the determination to start or stick with until results begin to show.

To lose weight you need to address three issues: Chang the diet; Exercise; Cut out bad habits. Let's take a look at each one and how it can impact you for better health and longevity.

1) Diet: Today's diet is a diet of convenience. It consists of food high in carbohydrates and low nutrition. The food we typically eat comes packed with fat, sugar and various chemicals to preserve freshness and color. Unfortunately, this kind of diet is a recipe for disaster. With the lack of essential nutrients the body simply cannot function and becomes vulnerable to the many of today's modern diseases of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Easy digested and highly refined foods have replaced whole grain breads, and organic fruits and vegetables that our ancestors consumed to get through their day.

Take breakfast, one of the most important meals to start the day. For many it consists of sweetened fruit juice and sugary breakfast cereal. For some it means bacon and fried eggs with a slice of toast with sweetened jam and jelly while others prefer pancakes smothered in corn or maple syrup. Added to this comes the coffee sweetened with sugar and perhaps a donut. The average American starts the day on a sugar high. Oat bran, wheat bran and whole grain cereals make for a healthier breakfast. I f you desperately want sugar, stevia is a natural sweetener over table sugar.

Eating on the run is the norm for many people and naturally so is constipation, acid reflux and a multitude of other stomach ailments. We just don't chew food properly and when we do eat, we eat too much. The result is evident on the weight scales.

2) Exercise: From the time we get out of bed to the time we retire, we sit or lie down. That kind of sedentary lifestyle only means that the spare tire remains well past middle age until disease begins to take a toll on health. We are a nation of overweight and obese people. A great number

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