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Dr Phil’s Weight Loss Challenge – Great Results

Spa Health — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:01:38 +0000

Spavelous is a proud sponsor of the Dr Phil Weight Loss Challenge

Dr. Phil unveiled his plan to help America lose weight. Using the 7 steps listed in his new book, The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom, Dr. Phil will guide 13 people through 10 months of weight loss. Dr. Phil bases his program on 7 keys that you must master to permanently lose weight: When you use Dr. Phil’s 7 keys, you begin to: rid yourself of wrong thinking, heal yourself of emotions standing in the way of a healthy relationship with food, create a no-fail environment, shape your eating behavior into what you need for lifetime weight control, get real about nutritional choices that worked to your detriment, change your priorities to include exercise, and plug into a circle of support for encouragement and accountability. In short, you are changing how you’re living.

Key #1: Right Thinking

Understanding what you really think about yourself and your weight, learning how to have positive thoughts

Do You Have Faulty Thinking?
Challenge Your Faulty Thinking
What’s Your Weight Locus of Control?
The Challengers’ Internal Dialogues
Keep an Online Diary

Key #2: Healing Feelings

Deal with emotional eating. The Challengers Work to Gain Emotional Control

Key #3: A No-Fail Environment

This involves removing temptations to eat and rearranging your schedule in order to avoid or minimize triggers to overeat. Change your environment to promote success. Take a Personal Environment Audit. The Challengers Unlock The Door to External Control.

Key #4: In charge of Food and Impulse Eating

This key helps you identify those payoffs, unplug from them, and replace bad habits with healthy behavior.

Key #5: High-Response Cost, High-Yield Nutrition

Choose the right stuff for your body. To lose weight, you must choose foods that support good behavioral control over your eating, that is, high-response cost, high-yield foods, organized into a moderate, balanced, calorie-controlled plan to ensure weight loss.

What Should You Be Eating?
A 7-Day Meal Plan
The Challengers Master Key #5

Key #6: Exercise Right

Prioritize regular exercise into your life most days of the week — walking, jogging, aerobic dance classes, yoga, playing a sport, or lifting weights.

More About Key #6
Robert Reames’ Training Tips
A Sample Exercise Program for Beginners
Take Dr. Phil’s Exercise Audit
The Challengers’ Fitness Competition

Key #7: Find Your Support

Surround yourself with supportive, like-minded people who want you to lose weight and succeed at your health and fitness efforts.

Dr. Phil’s Social Support Audit
Circle of Support Do’s and Dont’s
Find a Local Support Group
The Challengers Struggle to Find Support

Start changing your life today! Read The Ultimate Weight Solution: The 7 Keys to Weight Loss Freedom and
The Ultimate Weight Solution Food Guide and master the keys to weight loss success.

Purchase the Spa Gift Card offered on Dr. Phil show

Gene Therapy May Control Weight Loss

Spa Health — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 23:52:06 +0000

NZ scientist’s gene research could be the answer to the obesity epidemic

Both of these mice were obese, but the one on the right lost weight after being injected with genetic material.

A world-leading New Zealand researcher wants to start human trials of gene therapy to control obesity, after proving the technique in animal experiments.

Professor Matthew During, of Auckland University and Ohio State University in the United States, was the lead investigator of the ground-breaking animal trials. They are reported online today in one of the world’s top medical science journals, Nature Medicine.

Based on the success of the animal trials, Professor During, a neuroscientist, wants to start human clinical trials.

“We believe we could be in the clinic with this approach within 12 months treating morbid obesity.”

The treatment is similar to Professor During’s gene therapy to the brain for Parkinson’s disease, given under local anaesthetic, which is being used in phase 2 human clinical trials.

Obesity is a major problem throughout the West. In New Zealand, 26.5 per cent of adults are obese. The Ministry of Health is considering spending $16 million on obesity surgery for around 900 people each year who are extremely obese, because other treatments rarely work long-term in this group.

Obesity experiments by Professor During’s team involved injecting up to three kinds of genetic material into the brains of various kinds of mice and measuring the effects on their body-weight and markers of diabetes.

The genetic material is injected into the part of the brain called the hypothalamus, after boring two holes through the skull. It is carried in a harmless virus whose genetic material has been replaced by the therapy.

The main active component is part of the human gene that causes the production of a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). This is a protein involved in weight regulation. It is coupled with genetic material that triggers auto-regulation of the BDNF to control the weight loss once the process is well under way.

A third genetic component was developed for a subsequent neurosurgery injection, if needed, to knock out the introduced BDNF gene as a rescue device that halts the weight-loss process.

In one of the trials, the body weight of obese mice reduced by 20 per cent in three weeks and stabilised for the remainder of the 11-week experiment.

The researchers noted suppression of food intake and increased energy output contributed to weight loss in diabetic mice given the gene therapy, but energy output – both at rest and from spontaneous activity – was considered the more significant factor.

Professor During said many genes had been found to be involved in obesity, but little had been achieved in converting that knowledge into effective treatments – until now.

“The efficacy and the degree of weight loss is very dramatic. We haven’t seen that in any study previously … We have very high expectations that this would also work in humans.”

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