The Mediterranean diet is also called the Cretan diet and is one of the best diets that people can follow for leading a healthy and long life.

You will learn why the Cretan diet can prolong life, increase quality of life and diminish chances of cancer and heart disease.

First of all there is a difference between the term Mediterranean diet and Cretan diet. A Mediterranean diet can be from the South and Southeast of Europe (Spain, France, Italy, Corsica, Croatia , Montenegro, Albania, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus) and the North of Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria).

The Mediterranean diet is loosely defined as the diet of the people in the Mediterranean countries where they cultivated olive oil a few hundred years ago.

The term Mediterranean diet has become generalized and this has lead to the creation of many different versions of the diet to suit our modern lifestyle and the availability of many processed foods. In this article I will talk about the real Mediterranean and Cretan diet. The Cretan diet is the one that makes people live much longer without disease… let’s discover why!

The Cretan and Mediterranean diets have become known worldwide because a study showed that people on this diet outlived all other groups from all over the world. It was surprising that the people of Crete had the lowest incidence of cancer and heart disease and that the island was linked to good health and longevity. This test took more than 30 years when all the test subjects from all over the world were dead, 50% of the subjects from Crete were still alive! Crazy isn’t it?

The Cretan diet consists of foods that are produced in the island of Crete. When this research was done all the agriculture in Crete was organic and so were the foods. Food processing was kept to a minimum and there were no unhealthy processed foods with a refined sugar or fats. This paragraph sums it all up. The Cretan diet is based on natural and organic foods, encourages minimal food processing, no junk food, no refined grains or sugars.

If you apply these principles to any diet, you will become healthier and live longer. These factors are the foundation to living disease free and with the best health possible. So lets talk more about the principles of the Mediterranean diet and why it is healthy for most people.

Organic Food

When you eat fresh and organic food you will not be putting the toxins from pesticides and preservatives in your body. Eating the food of the season that is locally grown and avoiding processed foods will make you eat healthier than 95% of the population.

Your immune system will be stronger and you will feel more energetic and in a better mood.

Normal Portions

Eat healthy and organic food and you will be satisfied with less food. One of the reasons that people eat so much is because they eat foods full of sugar, fat, emptycarbs and salt. When you ingest these foods they fill you up but an hour later you are hungry for more. Why? Because your body did not get the nutrients that it was expecting.

Nowadays there are many foods that are so processed that people are malnourished even after eating big servings. The body needs real food with real micro nutrients, minerals and trace minerals. With empty foods you can’t stay healthy!

Healthy Fats

The Mediterranean diet doesn’t make you quit using fats. Fats are essential for good healthy because they help you metabolize nutrients that are essential for your body. There is a lot of fatty food available nowadays… but you need to be eating the right types of fats.

Mono-saturated and poly-saturated Omega 3 fats are essential for a healthy diet. The fats you should avoid are trans fats and other hydrogenated fats. These increase the risk of cancer and heart disease.

Olive Oil

The trademark of the Mediterranean diet is olive oil. It is used on almost everything and its the main fat in this diet. If you replace all butter, margarine and other fats with olive oil, you will feel much better.

Olive oil is a healthy fat and will give you some benefits. By replacing other bad fats with olive oil you will ingest less unhealthy fats.

Omega 3 Fats

When you eat a lot of fatty fish like sardines, salmon, trout and tuna and get fat from plant sources you ingest natural omega 3 fatty acids.

These nutrients have many positive effects on your body and they also improve your concentration and mental well being.

Whole Grains

Eating whole foods is always healthier than refined flours. Many nutrients are in the grains peel and all this is taken away in the refined flours. Nowadays the grains are refined to such a small powder that absorption of the nutrients is different causing constipation and other bowel problems.

Refined grains are stripped of nutrients and transformed into empty calories that make you gain fat. Remember that each time you eat pizza, bread and pasta you are eating refined grains.

Red Wine

The Mediterranean diet recommends you drink a glass or two of red wine a day. Note that this is red wine and not white wine. Red wine has some anti oxidants that help against heart disease.

Anti oxidants like transresveratrol and oligomeric proanthocyanidin help dilute the blood and aid blood circulation. This prevents the formation of blood clots and subsequent strokes.

White wine doesn’t have these positive effects and is to be avoided. I don’t endorse alcohol consumption and think it is bad for the body. Drinking some red wine will do you more good than harm especially if you are following the whole Mediterranean diet.

Mediterranean Diet Tips

• Olive oil is the main fat and you should replace all other fats, oils, butter and margarine with it.
• Eat vegetables, grains, nuts, beans and seeds.
• Eat fresh organic fruit as a desert. Don’t eat processed foods because they contain a lot of sugar and saturated fat.
• Eat minimally processed food and don’t overcook your food. Cooking food can destroy its nutrients so don’t overcook until the meat is charred “to kill the germs”. No need for that. The more processed the food is the more sugar, saturated fat, salt, preservatives, color and flavor agents it contains. When eating organic food you don’t have to worry about this.
• Eat moderate amounts of organic cheese and organic yogurt. You can learn how to make yogurt easily if you want to!
• Drink water. Don’t drink sodas, sugared juices or energy drinks. Drink water. Check out he article on Are you Dehydrated to know how much water you should drink.
• Drink a glass or two of red wine per day with meals. This is optional and not mandatory.
• Eat fish 3 times a week, poultry 2 times a week and red meat 2 times a month. You can eat up to 7 eggs a week. Remember that everything should be organic and serving sizes vary on muscular development and gender. Men eat more than women.
• Eat organic food. Most specialists seem to forget that the people on the Mediterranean diet have a disease free live because they don’t eat processed food. When you eat industrialized food grown with pesticides, herbicides, anabolic steroids and antibiotics and stored in plastic or cans with preservatives, color agents, synthetic aromas and flavor agents… You think that junk gets into you after you eat the animal or the vegetable? Well… maybe (that’s me being sarcastic). Of course those toxins get into your body.
• Physical activity. Walk, go run or work in your garden.

The people that followed the Mediterranean diet lived so long because they were eating healthy and most of them had enough exercise by walking and working in their vegetable gardens.

Living a stress free life, eating organic food while exercising moderately are the 3 components for a healthy life. To know more about a healthy diet and exercise you can read the articles on how to get a six pack, how to lose belly fat and how to lose weight!

The cabbage soup diet is one of the most well know fad diets… some people even say that it’s not a fad diet because its been around for so long. So lets examine the cabbage soup diet and figure out its pros and cons and possible side effects.

It is said that you can lose up 10 pounds in 1 week with this low calorie diet… First of all lets hype things down a little bit. It is physically impossible to lose 10 lbs of fat in 2 weeks, and in one week its even more ridiculous. The only way you will lose that much weight is with an abdominoplasty or a heavy big liposuction. The human body can burn up to 2 pounds of fat per week if everything from diet to exercise is done in the right way.

It is however possible to lose weight in other ways. When you start such low calorie diets you body will enter in a catabolic state, this means that you are burning up more calories than you are ingesting and your body needs to go into its reserves. The human body can extract energy from food, muscles and fat deposits.

Lose 10 pounds in 7 days?

I think that 10 pounds in 7 days is possible and I will describe that “best case” scenario now.

Imagine Jane, she is 32 years old, 5’5, and she weight in at 170 pounds. In her opinion Jane eats a relatively healthy diet, she doesn’t eat a lot of fast food, eats some vegetables, drinks soda and juice here and there, eats pasta and pizza a few times a week and she goes to the toilet about 3 to 4 times a week.

Se wants to know how to lose weight and finds the cabbage soup diet on the internet and gives it a try. What she doesn’t know is that she his constipated and has a bowel inflammation like manny of the people. Sometimes she feels a little bit bloated and constipated. This is very normal for people that have an average American diet, especially in women because they have much more sensitive digestive systems. The diet she described doesn’t seem so bad for American standards but it’s a clinical fact that those factors put together lead to constipation and an inflamed bowel because of all the excess sugar and refined flours she consumes. This is made worse because she drinks soda and sugared drinks instead of flat water. If she drank alcohol it would be even worse.

So when she gets on the cabbage soup diet (which many dietitians and doctors say is a suicide mission) she is actually eating something that her bowels find easier to digest than the normal crap she eats, although it is very low calories and nutrient deficient.

The cabbage soup diet says she can eat as much fruits and vegetables as she wants, so she is hungry every day and stuffs that soup in until she is totally full. The cabbage soup diet also says that it is imperative to drink a lot of water and hydrate because it will help to flush out toxins.

Until now everything is going great because she is eating less calories, she is drinking more water and staying hydrated, she is eating vegetables instead of the usual junk food or refined flour foods she normally consumes every day. This is giving her digestive system a chance to play catch up and clean the bowels. She then goes to the toilet every day and has normal bowel movements everyday. Because her bowels are cleaned up the bowel inflammation is diminishing. Do you see where the weight loss is coming from?

Because she poops everyday like a healthy person should she is “dumping” off some serious weight. Because her digestion was normalized the bowel is not inflamed anymore and the water and liquid retention of the inflammation also goes away… that is some more pounds right there. Normal bowel movements and no bowel inflammation make her lose a lot of weight and make her feel better.

She is so pumped up because she is doing the diet and goes walking 15 to 30 minutes a day, which helps her to lose some fat also.

If you put these factors together it may be possible to lose 10 pounds in 7 days… but you need a seriously inflamed bowel for that. Losing 5 or 6 pounds with this diet is very doable, depending on your current diet.

Cabbage Soup Diet vs. American Diet

The weight loss results of the cabbage soup diet are inversely proportional to the quality of your day to day diet. If you know you have an unhealthy diet then the cabbage soup diet won’t do you much harm because it is a week long detox and colon cleanse diet. The cabbage soup diet instructs you to drink a lot of water and avoid sodas and refined carbs it will actually do you some good because you won’t be ingesting your usual poisons.

The cabbage soup diet will help you clean your bowels out and detox your body and if you think you need it… then your usual diet is not good and you should think about adapting your lifestyle to be healthier.

If you are already pretty healthy and just want to lose a few pounds the cabbage soup diet is not a good choice. When on such low calorie diets with deficient nutrition it is not a good idea to do moderate or heavy exercise because you will be going in a catabolic state and you body will literally feed on its own muscle. More than feeding on its own muscle you might be deficient in some minerals and vitamins and that is not good for your health.

A colon cleanse or a detox diet are still recommended but I would never recommend you the cabbage soup diet. To know a little more about this you can read the articles on the detox diet and on a healthy diet.

Nowadays detoxifying your body is more important than ever! We eat a high quantity of processed foods with sugar and hydrogenated fats… and most of the food is grown with pesticides, herbicides, hormones and antibiotics and when it is processed its filled with color agents and preservatives to lengthen the shelf life.

When we eat these foods all these toxins end up in our body. So what detox diet should we follow?

In the long term these toxins are what cause our immune system to weaken and collapse to diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. More common symptoms are feeling bloated, tired, constipation, frequent colds, sore throat, etc.

90% of all diseases start in the gut.

Knowing how to detox your body naturally will help clean out all these waste materials that you ingested and boost your immune system by cleaning your gut and other organs of their toxin overload.

Even when we do an effort to eat healthy food it can be hard to find if you have a busy lifestyle or travel. It certainly costs more to eat healthy than to go toMacDonalds.

To detox you have to avoid eating junk food and sugared or caffeinated drinks.

Drinking Water to Detox

The most important thing to detox your body is drinking enough water. As I already mentioned in the article on dehydration, water is important for your well being and health. Drinking clean water detoxifies your body like nothing else. It is so beneficial because you are replacing your soda and coffee with water. Removing a big source of toxins like sugared drinks, coffee, tea, alcoholic beverages will greatly increase your health and vitality.

Caffeinated and sugared drinks like soda and juices are non-foods. Non-foods require more nutrients than they contain, so that your body can process them… They steal the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that your body can use for other things like keeping your immune system strong and fight diseases.

Medical tests have shown that when people drink less water their addictions are augmented (addictions of sugar, fats, alcohol, tobacco, medication and recreational drugs). So if you drink enough water you will do yourself a favor, because it will make you healthier and it will make it easier to change your diet and lifestyle for six pack abs.

If I had to give you one piece of advice to feel better, lose weight, lose belly fat, feel more energetic, detox, solve digestive problems, get more mental clarity and concentration it would be to drink enough water.

Detox Diet and Six Pack Abs

A detox diet can accelerate your journey to getting a good looking six pack. Most people walk around with inflamed guts or constipation… or both. The obvious side effect is that your belly looks bigger because it is inflamed and because you have a bunch of undigested food lodged in your intestines.

From the moment that you stop taxing your digestive system with toxins, your body starts using its resources to continue detoxing your body and cleaning the whole mess up. This leads to less undigested food in your digestive system and it doesn’t get inflamed. This also leads to a healthy digestive system without constipation.

In reality you body doesn’t start detoxing. Your body is always detoxing to its maximum potential. The problem is that it can’t keep up with all the sugar, hydrogenated fats, preservatives, antibiotics, steroids and other trash that is in the industrialized food that you eat.

How to Lose 10 Pounds in 2 Weeks

I have seen women loosing 10 pounds in 2 weeks because they started eating right. This looks like its an ad for a weight loss product… how is this possible? First of all they don’t really lose weight, they are lose water weight.

Second… most women are constipated. When you start eating right and actually start going to the toilet regularly… those things add up to some weight. When they start evacuating their bowel the capillary beds start tightening up and the gut is less and less inflamed. When the bowel inflammation goes away the water retention in the intestine tissues has disappeared and that is a few extra pounds that are lost.

All this weight loss is due to defecation and water retention that goes away because the body starts functioning like its supposed to!

This happens mostly with women, because women are much more sensitive to constipation and bowel inflammation.

Healthy Diet and Exercise Response

If you don’t feel good and have digestive or health problems you should not start to do heavy exercise. Manny people go to the gym to get fit and spend an hour on the treadmill or stepping machine.

Cardiovascular exercise puts an enormous strain on your body and if you have digestive problems and are not eating healthy you are doing more damage than good.

Detox Diet or Untoxic Lifestyle?

Doing a special detox diet now and then is a good thing and it is a great start for a healthier life. Doing these exceptional efforts once in a while is not going to give you the quality of life and well being that you are looking for. If you want to live disease free, look better, age gracefully and save on doctor visits you need to start adapting your lifestyle.

So to sum up, these are the things you should do to detoxify and keep the toxin intake to a minimum:

• Drink a lot of water. The skin is the largest organ of excretion of the body. If the liver and kidneys can’t handle the toxic load your skin will show you. Zits come from the inside and they are nothing but toxins that couldn’t leave the body through the kidneys and urine or through the bowels and fecal material. If you look at the people that are putting these expensive acne treatments on their face you will see that almost every one of them is constipated and has a poor diet. If you start eating right and clear up your food allergies your skin can clear up like its magic. The problem is coming from the inside, not the outside.
• Don’t drink sodas and other artificial drinks, this includes sugar “juices”. They overload you bodies pathways of detoxification, dehydrate you and clog your body up. Caffeine is a dehydrating substance, when you drink a lot of sugar your body has to suck the water out of your digestive system and muscles to be able to break it down. The combination of sugar and caffeinated drinks is highly addictive so if you drop those you get a double whammy of good results!
• Get your digestive system working properly. Getting your digestion working normally is essential to keeping the body clean and healthy. If you have digestive problems your liver will be overloaded and you will not be able to detox at a normal rate.
• Know your food intolerances. You need to go to access what kind of food intolerances you have because they inflame your bowels and don’t allow your digestive system to work properly.
• Stay away form deep fried foods. Most of these fats and oils are bad for you.
• Prescription drugs are a major cause of toxification. When you apply all the principles for a healthier life you will start seeing results and can start using less prescription drugs.

Once you are over the sugar and caffeine cravings it will all be very easy. You will feel better, your body will work like its supposed to and you will wonder why you didn’t do it before. To know more on how to get a six pack and how to lose belly fat check out the other articles on that! I hope you enjoyed this articles and if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

There are tens of thousands of books on healthy diets and weight loss diets and every year there are more books coming out. What does this mean? Well it means that there is a lot of misinformation about the subject and most people don’t know what the hell they are talking about!

At any given moment there are always men and women on some diet… now ask yourself this question: did that person get results? Of 10 people you know that went on a diet, how many lost weight and kept it off? One in ten? Maybe even less! If you are wondering what is right in the world of dieting and are jumping from one diet to the other with no results and no quality of life then it is time to get this handled.

There are many popular diets… Atkins diet, zone diet, south beach diet, macrobiotic diet, Pritkin diet, vegetarian diet, raw food diet, Mediterranean diet, blood type diet… and the king of them all: the low fat and high carbs diet.

With so many literature on the subject and such poor results world wide… are these authors all stupid? Does nothing work? Do they all work?

The answer to that is simple: All the diets work… but you have to chose the right one.

Do you think an Irishman, a Mexican, a Spaniard, a Moroccan, a Chinese, an Eskimo, an African and an Indian all have the same nutritional requirements? Do they all have the same metabolism? No they don’t. Over hundreds of thousands of years people have evolved in order to adapt to their environment and that has changed their nutritional requirements. This is called biochemical individuality.

There is no healthy diet that fits everyone. The nutrition requirements that you need to feel your best and have a disease free life are as individual as your personality!

Metabolic Typing Diet

This is called metabolic typing and it was researched by a man called Dr. Weston A. Price. For more than a decade he travelled through the whole world looking for the healthiest people and indigenous societies and he then compared the effects of the modern white man’s diet to their traditional diets.

He looked for siblings and in some cases twins, where one of them had a traditional diet and another one a modern diet. This research showed the changes that can occur in one generation of an unhealthy diet.

These are some of the mysteries that can be solved by having the right diet for each person:

• Have you ever wondered why a friend of yours tried a new diet and had great results. He or she lost weight and had energy and vitality… but when you tried the diet you felt like crap and you were even gaining weight?
• Why do some people always feel tired and have a lack of energy when they are eating healthy and sleeping enough?
• Why can’t some people control cholesterol levels with a low fat diet? Instead of lowering their cholesterol it goes up? Why?
• Some people eat the most high quality organic foods that money can buy, take the most expensive supplements, sleep enough and do exercise but don’t see any results?
• Why do some people never get colds, sore throats, the flu or other diseases and why do others have such a weak immune system?

Different people react to diets differently because everyone needs to eat food that matches their own genetic requirements to achieve optimal health. Optimal health means being disease free, not being overweight and feeling and looking great.

There are many factors that dictate each person’s dietary requirements and the most important is your ancestral heritage. Different peoples have developed different adaptation systems according to their habitats and type of lifestyle. This was dictated by the available foods, climate and geography.

For example: people that live close to the equator have a diet with more vegetables and less proteins and fats because they have fruits and vegetable foods available all year round and they don’t have big game to hunt.

On the other hand, when you got cold regions people have relied more on animal protein and fat. This is because that was the main food source available when everything is full of snow.

Being Healthy, Loosing Weight Getting a Six Pack

Different people have different nutritional requirements and when you find your own diet you will feel better, have more energy and be sick less. People have different metabolism types and they react in different ways to the same foods. That is what biochemical individuality is all about.

When you find your balance you will find it much easier to lose weight and get a six pack. I hope you enjoyed this article and that you made some sense of why there are so many contradictory theories in the diet and weight loss world. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

Dehydration is one of the most underestimated problems of today. There are many things that cause dehydration and not drinking enough water is the obvious reason… But why?

People drink a lot of coffee, coke, juices and other liquids… There is water in that right? Yes, there is water in those drinks… and toxins… and sugar… and caffeine.

We also eat a lot of processed foods that are full of chemicals, toxins and low nutritional value. Do you think that carbonated,caffeinated and sugared drinks have no toxins and waste? Do you think that these factors interact with our body functions? Yes they do.

When your body gives you the signal of being thirsty you are already dehydrated. You need to hydrate with clean water… and not with coke (sugar, carbon dioxide, preservatives, etc) coffee, or some packaged juice. The body needs water to cleanse itself from toxins and other waste. If you add more toxins to the mix you are defeating the purpose of hydration.

We need to drink water to cleanse the toxins that we have in our body.

Water and it is vital to our body functions because:

• Regulates body temperature
• Affects how nutrients and oxygen is transported
• Removes waste and toxins

How much water should I drink?

Most people don’t drink enough water… so how much should you drink? It is said that you need to drink about 8 glasses of water a day, but that is not very accurate. How big are the glasses, how hot is it where you live, how active are you and how heavy are you?

If you are in a warm climate, are very active, exercise hard or go to the sauna you need to drink more.

To calculate how much water you have to drink divide your weight by 2, that number in ounces is what you need to drink daily.

So if you weigh 140 pounds you need to drink 70 ounces of water a day. The rule of 8 glasses a day would get you up to 64 ounces of water…

Some people may be drinking enough water but they are not spreading it out enough. If you drink some water every hour then you are spreading it out better. You can do this by having a bottle of water at work, in the living room and taking water with you when you drive around.

Water Drinking Tips

• Drink through the day. When you feel thirsty you are already dehydrated. So don’t let it get that far!
• Don’t drink when you eat. This dilutes the digestive process and will make it harder for your digestive system. You won’t be thirsty during your meals if you hydrate properly.
• Drink water. Not tea, not coffee, not sodas. No sugar or salt in it and no carbonated water either.
• Learn more about water. You need to drink good water, not everything that comes out of the tap. Water that has chlorine or other chemicals that are bad for your health are not good!

Dehydration Symptoms

The most common symptoms of dehydration are dark yellow urine and feeling thirsty often. When you are thirsty your body is already dehydrated so you should replenish yourself with water and drink consistently so that you don’t feel thirsty.

To avoid feeling thirsty and dehydrating create a habit of drinking water throughout the day.

Drink Water! Not Sugar, Caffeine or Salt…

Manny people drink fluids with sugar (coke, fruit juices and other sodas), coffee or other drinks with salt (isotonic drinks for the gym). These drinks won’t help you get hydrated and replenished. When you are thirsty always drink water… not tea, not coffee, not soda, not carbonated water… just water. Water also regulates your appetite, when you drink these other fluids with sugar and sodium you will feel more hungry and you won’t hydrate yourself with them.

If you drink soda or coffee you are being counter productive because you are pouring more toxins into your body… instead of cleansing your body with clean water.

When you are well hydrated you will feel more energetic and more relaxed. It will be easier to handle stress and disease because your body functions are more efficient and over time your hormonal levels will be at their optimal level because you are dumping out more toxins (because you are drinking properly) and ingesting less toxins (because you are avoiding sodas and other sugar drinks).

Chronic Dehydration Symptoms

Chronic dehydration causes headaches, lack of energy, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, low blood pressure and dry mouth and eyes. This cripples your body’s immune system and makes you vulnerable to many other health problems to come.

If your urine is dark yellow then you should definitely drink more water… that is the most accurate indicator. Your urine should be from a light yellow and almost colorless.

Drink more water and you will feel better, have more energy and be stronger against disease and health problems.

In my opinion dehydration is one of the most underestimated problems in this age. Drinking beverages full of calories, sugars and toxins that you don’t need is a bigger problem than you might think. Over the years this adds up, and make no mistake: this will make you ill. It may take 30 years or it may take 15 years.

I also think this is easy and simple for any person to correct. Drinking water and letting go of sodas and coffee will give you benefits in health, weight loss, muscle gain, stress resistance and it will improve your overall quality of life!

Being well hydrated is also the beginning of detoxifying your body, which is an essential step for your well being, health and athletic performance.

Drinking enough water is the first step to be healthy and achieve your fitness goals. If you want to lose weight, gain muscle or detox you need to get this part of your diet in order… don’t read this lightly or overlook this issue. Drinking junk liquids and not enough water will sabotage your efforts to lose weight, gain definition, build muscle and will stress you out! To stay hydrated you just need to develop the habit of drinking water regularly and throughout the day… everyday! Its not as hard as you think and you will get used to it after a few days.