If most of us thought about the conditions in which chickens used for meat and eggs are raised and slaughtered, we’d become vegetarian on the spot. Egg-laying chickens can be raised in cages with 6 chickens to a cage, each chicken getting only 67 square inches of space for its lifetime.

Unless they’re certified and labeled as being free-range or organic or natural, they might have been fed growth hormones to get them to slaughter faster, and antibiotics to combat the diseases which come from being raised in cramped and less-than-clean conditions.

And consider what the recommendations are for cleaning up after touching poultry? It’s recommended to clean surfaces with bleach to remove bacteria, and to wash your hands thoroughly after touching a chicken.

Do you really want to put something into your body that requires bleach to clean up after? Something that needs to be cooked to specific temperatures to be sure you’ve destroyed any bacteria that could make you sick?

Chickens and turkeys have become so mass-produced and injected with antibiotics and hormones that there’s no taste to it anymore, so why bother? Even the most humanely treated chicken has either been stunned in a salt-water brine before being beheaded. In John Robbins excellent book and video, Diet for a Small Planet, he shows us pictures of chickens being grabbed in groups by the neck and thrown into cages. Can you really consider eating a chicken with that vision in your head?

Any means of mass-producing animals for human consumption is by its very nature unhealthy and cruel for the animals, and unhealthy for humans as well. Even if you’re of the opinion that man is a natural hunter, how natural is it to eat an animal that’s been raised in captivity and fed a diet of hormones and antibiotics?

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Moderation is one thing that you should be looking for when you are considering which healthy eating plans are the best. To put it another way, if the plan has extreme restrictions or makes wild claims, then the chances are good that it’s unhealthy. The best diets will focus on moderation in the types of food you eat, as well as the portions it recommends.

If you have been considering various plans, then you have probably seen those that make claims that can tip you off to why they may not be so good. A common example is a diet that says you can eat as much of one food as you want, but then severely limits how much you can eat of other foods. Low carb diets may be the most popular example. They let you eat all the protein and fat that you want, but try to get you to cut out as many carbohydrates as you can.

While these so-called “healthy eating plans” say you can eat all the meat, fish and eggs you want and lose weight, you need to realize there are also risks. First, people are designed to eat a whole range of foods. Yes, you may be able to lose weight on a low-carb diet, but it could have negative impact on your health if all you’re eating is meat and eggs. Second, the idea of eating all the bacon (for example) you want sounds very appealing at first, but the craving for carbohydrates is more than most people can handle, and they end up binging on carbs…and weighing more than when they started.

Any type of diet that makes similar claims should be looked at with suspicion. A diet that tells you that you can eat all of the fat you like is just as bad as any diet that tells you to eat as much sugar as you want. It just doesn’t make sense. To be fair there are also diets that tell you to cut out all fat. Surely these must be healthy eating plans, right? Not really. Again, they are too restrictive for certain foods, and that’s your clue that they may not be good for you. The truth is that there are healthy fats. Again, the key here is moderation.

Of course the appeal for all of these types of diets is the same. What happens is that a person may try a reasonable diet, but then they find they crave certain foods. Say the diet says you shouldn’t eat cheeseburgers. There’s nothing wrong with that, but then you start wishing you could eat a big, juicy cheeseburger and go off the diet. Then later on you decide you’d like to lose weight again. But here’s the catch: you look for a diet that allows you to eat the cheeseburgers you missed on the last diet. You start off doing great, but even though you can eat your burgers, the new diet doesn’t let you eat pasta. So, you go off this diet and look for one that lets you eat pasta…and you keep repeating this cycle over and over again.

But real healthy eating plans let you eat just about anything you want, but only in moderation. In other words, they make allowances for the occasional treat, but they offset it in some way; they balance it out. Such a plan is much easier to stick to and will give you long term results.

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There are a lot of diets that have come and gone over the year, but there are always a few that work well enough to stick around for a while. One such diet is the South Beach Diet. This is an eating plan that is broken down into various stages. This type of plan works well for a lot of people for various reasons. Perhaps you are wondering about the South Beach Diet Phase 1. The general idea of the diet is to start out with some basic foods, and then add more and more foods in each successive phase.

This strategy works very well for a good number of people. They are not only able to lose weight early on, but they are able to keep it off. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of the South Beach Diet, with a focus on the first phase.

Phase 1 of the South Beach Diet has a lot of benefits. One of the best things about it is that it retrains how your body handles food. It works by fooling you into craving healthy foods, while losing your cravings for less healthy foods. Phase 1 does a very good job at not only changing what you eat, but how you think of food. There must surely be a catch, right? Yes, but only that you have to follow the diet for it to work. But that can be said of just about any diet.

Another benefit of Phase 1 is that it is relatively easy for most people to transition into it from their current diet. The main reason for this is that the South Beach Diet Phase 1 contains a lot of foods that a lot of people like to eat. This way they don’t feel deprived as they are starting a new diet. And if you can start on a positive note, there is a much better chance that you will be able to stick with the diet for the long term.

So what kind of foods can you eat? Well, how about cheese, vegetables, chicken, nuts, beef, turkey, fish and eggs for starters? Another aspect of the diet is to eat garden salads using nothing but olive oil for the dressing. It is also recommended that you have three meals per day. Generally speaking, most sweets are eliminated, but not completely. Just follow what the diet says and you will do fine.

What really counts, though, is that you will be retraining your body to stop craving unhealthy foods. This is a big difference when compared to other diets that only make you feel deprived by cutting out your favorite foods. But what if you stopped having those cravings and would start craving (yes, craving) foods that are better for you nutritionally and help you to lose weight? That would be awesome! That’s one of the biggest benefits of the South Beach Diet Phase 1…and that is only the beginning!

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Induction Diet – The Top Priority For The Atkins Weight Loss Plan

If you have ever heard of the induction diet and wondered what it was, then you’re in luck. The answer is simply that it’s the beginning of the Atkins Weight Loss Plan. This diet plan is famous for eliminating or reducing the intake of carbohydrates; at least that’s the popular myth. The Atkins Diet actually permits carbs, but they are kept to their absolute lowest during the induction phase. This is so the ketosis process can begin.

In fact, the induction diet can be thought of as the most vital phase of the program. If you want to try the Atkins Weight Loss Plan, then don’t skip this part as the rest of the diet hinges on this all-important phase.

The general theory of the Atkins Diet is that you can burn fat instead of muscle by replacing carbohydrates with protein. However, you should be warned that it’s a very strict regimen, and you need to follow it closely. This is even more true when going through the induction diet phase.

Most people find the induction process to be the most difficult aspect of the Atkins Weight Loss Plan. This is likely due to two reasons. One, you will have strong cravings for foods that are rich in carbohydrates, and the cravings will be at their strongest when you first start the plan. Two, you are limited to 12 grams of carbohydrates per day. That means the variety of foods you can eat is minimal. Even something like nuts–which most people think of as being high in fat and protein–are prohibited during this early stage of the diet.

Sure, there may be some foods that you can’t eat, and you may be craving carbs, but there is also some good news: you won’t be going hungry. That’s because you can eat as much of the allowed foods as you want. For example, eggs, shellfish, meat, poultry and fish are acceptable. And those can augmented with a small amount of vegetables, as long as you don’t exceed the 12 gram limit on carbohydrates. (That’s why it’s a good idea to have a form of reference that lists the carb content of any foods you want to eat.)

Avoiding pre-packaged foods will help you to keep your carb count under control. But you still need to double check before eating anything. Planning your meals carefully will also help give you more variety within the induction diet phase when doing Atkins. Yes, you may be looking forward to eating all of the bacon you want, but it can get boring after a few days, which will only increase the temptation to cheat.

Speaking of cheating on the induction diet (or any phase of the Atkins Weight Loss Plan): this is not the kind of diet you can cheat on and then resume it the next day. Atkins relies on changing the way your body works, and cheating will undo everything you’ve done so far.

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