Lentil Soup Never Looked So Good

Here's the beautiful Nigella Bites showing us how she makes lentil soup.

The Cave Woman Diet

Coty Fowler lost 20 pounds in six weeks and reached her ideal weight by adhering to what she calls "The Cave Woman Diet". The diet is based on eating meat, fruits, nuts and vegetables.

She says she began "by purging the kitchen of every slide of bread, every cracker, every package of pasta, and every cream-filled pastry."

She goes on to describe what her daily meals were like and then she says; "At the end of five days, I had lost three pounds and my chronic indigestion. Goodbye Tums! And I was never hungry since I ate all the time. Previous dietary study indicated that to change our metabolism it is necessary to eat often. This reprograms the body to stop storing fat.

The second week I dropped four pounds and my energy level skyrocketed. I was not just cleaning house, I was cleaning closets and kitchen cabinets and organizing items for a yard sale. Interestingly, I had no more sinus headaches or joint pain and had eliminated the use of over the counter decongestants and arthritis pain relievers.

At the end of six weeks, I had lost twenty pounds, my clothes no longer fit and I had energy to spare. I was sleeping soundly and my anxiety level was greatly reduced. I felt better than I had in years."

Check out The Cave Woman Diet story here.

Weight Loss Stories at Good Housekeeping

Good Housekeeping Magazine has some nice weight loss success stories they've recently posted to their online site. Here is one of their success profiles; Robyn Spieler. She lost 70 pounds in less than a year.

She did this by cutting out the carbs and by going to the gym four days a week. See more about her story and other stories at Good Housekeeping here.

Looking Ten Pounds Slimmer on Camera

Can a camera make you look ten pounds slimmer? The HP Photosmart camera has a 'slimming feature'. And it really does work. Here's a photo of Libby before and after using the slimming feature on her camera. See more details about how this deceiving magic works at a blog by Regina Lewis.

A Doctor Loses 270 Pounds

Dr. Nick Yphantides weighed 470 pounds at one point. He then decided to change his life. He took a sabbatical for one year to focus on what he enjoys most (baseball) and to lose weight in the process. He went on a medically supervised liquid protein diet (soybean based) for several weeks. Just over a year later he had lost an amazing 270 pounds.

He's been quoted as saying "Food was never meant to be your friend, Valium on a plate, where you turn for comfort, an alternative to boredom. Food is for nutrition. I eat for very different reasons than I did in the past. How I eat and why I eat is more important than what I eat."

There is an inspiring 7 minute video about his weight loss story here. It shows him at his heaviest weight and his current weight. At one point, after he had lost 103 pounds, he says he was very discouraged because he didn't feel much different. But then he went on a fishing trip with his brother in Alaska and happened to catch a 100 pound fish (as shown in the video). That experience got him completely motivated again and he was able to persevere until his goal was reached.

Raw Foods to Sing About

Angela Stokes lost 160 pounds by switching to a raw foods diet. Here's another of her videos. Here she reminds us to try eating more raw foods each day. She shows us some of her favorite raw foods.

Drinking Tap Water for Weight Loss

Drinking lots of water is one of the easiest ways to lose some weight quickly, especially for many people who are chronically dehydrated.

But tap water is usually a better alternative to bottled water. Bottled water companies are not regulated for safety or purity. And the environmental waste resulting from the bottled water craze is horrific. Here's an eye-opening passage from the Food & Water Watch:

Bottled water wastes fossil fuels and water in production and transport, and when the water is drunk the bottles become a major source of waste. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Each one of those bottles required nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide, and benzene. Then, rather than being recycled, 86 percent of them are thrown away. Breaking down these plastics can take thousands of years, while their components seep into our water supplies.

Confronting Morbid Obesity

Here's an artist who is morbidly obese and has created this very touching video about his weight loss issues. His name is James Barany.

Janet Jackson Gains Weight

The Skinny Website has just posted these new photos of Janet Jackson. After losing over 60 pounds and keeping the weight off for more than a year, it looks like she has gained more than a few pounds since her cover photo on US Magazine (just seven weeks ago) where they celebrated her one year weight loss anniversary.

Competitive Eating

Joey Chestnut is a competitive eater from San Jose, California. On July 4th he won the 92nd Annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, beating six-time defending champion Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi by consuming 66 hot dogs and buns in twelve minutes.

Jocelyn Noveck writes;

Watching these "gustatory gladiators," as the show calls them, brings a few basic questions to mind. Why do people subject themselves to this torture? More importantly, how do they do it (when most of us would get sick after, oh, four hot dogs or six waffles or a dozen ribs)? And is there any long-term harm?

The first question is pretty simple. Why do people do it? As with many things, the desire for fame and money. Prize money at some events can be $30,000 for the top player, and the Nathan's contest, for example, gets an hour of Big Event coverage on ESPN.

Still, there must be something deeper — the fiercest of competitive instincts — motivating Sonya Thomas, the most unlikely speed-eating champ you'll ever see. The woman they call the "Black Widow" weighs 105 pounds. Yet, she can consume one-sixth of her body weight — routinely defeating guys three times her size.

Some of these men are so big, "it looks like they have their own ecosystem," says the witty George Shea, who with brother Richard runs the International Federation of Competitive Eating. Thomas, in comparison, "looks like she couldn't finish a tin of cottage cheese." (Spoken like a man who probably never eats cottage cheese ... since when does it come in a tin?)

Thomas is an assistant manager at Burger King, which in terms of speed-eating training seems as good as it can get — kind of like Andre Agassi growing up on a tennis court.

See the rest of the article here.

Walking the Weight Off

Mr. Fat Guy set out to lose 100 pounds. He is six feet tall and weighed 303 at Christmas. That's when he started walking off the weight. By March he had lost 28 pounds.

But then he fell off the wagon. In June he started in earnest again. He now weighs 281 pounds and has recently made an extreme goal of walking two hours per day. When he keeps to his regular walks the weight falls off quickly. See his progress at No More Mr. Fat Guy.

The beautiful photo above is by chaosinjune.