WEIGHT LOSS TIPS

Healthy Eating with the Food Mover

Greg Overholtzer made the decision to change his life and begin dieting and exercising about four years ago. At that time he weighed a dangerously obese 600 pounds. Today he is down to 242 pounds.

He started by working out to Richard Simmons tapes (which he had bought several years previously but which had been collecting dust up to then). He worked out in his bedroom consistently and though it exhausted him at first, he soon saw encouraging results. He then starting using the Richard Simmons Food Mover tool which is a program with windows that you shut after you've eaten a particular item for the day and when all the windows are shut you have to stop eating.

The main change he made to his diet was to drop all foods that contained sugar or wheat and to emphasize vegetables and proteins.

Today he has a new lease on life. See the full story in the Evening Sun.

Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Lost 30 Pounds?

In Touch Weekly has Oprah on their cover this week and the caption reads "WOW! Oprah lost 30 pounds!" In the meantime, Life & Style Weekly said last week that she's lost 15 pounds! So what is the truth here? At any rate Oprah does look slimmer these days. Though whether she's sticking to a sub 1,000 calorie diet and exercising daily are debatable. Here's what some people had to say about Oprah's weight loss at the Skinny Website;

Oprah goes up and down in her weight so often that you will never really know what it is that she is doing. Like the last time that she lost a ton of weight and it was this huge deal, and it was “for good”. I remember hearing on more than one occasion that she didn’t even have a piece of her own birthday cake at that huge 50th birthday pary that she threw for herself. What happened next? She went on vacation and ballooned again. I have a very hard time believing that even if she is eating that way, it will be for any lengthy period of time.

Her body looks very fit and glam, but her face is looking elder…Maybe becouse of the yo-yo dieting. I hope she’s not going too far! Skinny isn’t a synonyme for beautiful.

sadly, i am not convinced that this weightloss is going to last. with that diet, barely over 1000 calories, she’s setting herself up for an intense face-stuffing fest. i admire that she lost the weight, but there’s only so much time before your body cannot handle that sort of deprivation.

That can’t be heatlhy… I ate more than that even when I was severely anorexic. And def. not sustainable. I bet her body will force her back into over-eating to make up for starving herself.

she’s starving herself. a woman her size should not be eating less than 1400 cals a day. no way can she sustain it. f’cking up her metabolism even more than it already is from her past diet failures. i don’t understand why somebody with her kind of money doesnt have people cooking and weight training with her constantly. sheesh… if i could afford to have my meals prepared i’d be eating the finest seafood, fish and lean meats and i’d have a hot personal trainer working me out every day. poor Oprah. she must not have time to do anything but starve herself. her diet sounds nasty. i rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than the slop she’s eating. her face looks bad. SEND IN THE BOTOX!

See here for more on Oprah's weight loss experiments over the years.

Girdles and BodyShapers

Girdles are hot with Hollywood Celebrities

Is Nicole Kidman wearing a girdle beneath this beautiful dress? Or is it the all new 'bumbum'? It's very likely something. Most celebrities probably wear some kind of girdle or shapewear when on the red carpet.

Forbes magazine has a good article saying that the latest hot topic for bridesmaids chatter is a new type of girdle that firms up the butt, tucks in the tummy and doesn't have the unwanted side effect of creating "muffin top"; the inch (or more) of skin that pours over a tight waistband.

And they attribute all this talk to SPANX, a relatively new shapewear company. SPANX sells a lot shapewear but last year they created the high-waisted control-top girdle that goes right up to the bra line. It's their biggest seller, the Slim Cognito, (pic shown here) a seamless midthigh bodysuit. It appeals to both slim and overweight women.

Forbes also reveals that In Touch Weekly plans to feature SPANX as "Hollywood's Big Secret" in an upcoming issue and to highlight all the

celebrities (including Oprah, Jessica Alba and Beyonce Knowles pictured here) who are into wearing girdles. I'll link to this feature here when it comes out. (P.S. Thanks much for the tip, Roger.)

Weight loss is not a typical topic for Wired magazine, but this month they have a cover feature story on The Thin Pill.

The article is all about what's called the metabolic syndrome, "a condition that though only concretely defined five years ago, is now said to afflict as many as 75 million Americans – whether they know it or not. We sit, indeed, amid an epidemic of metabolic syndrome, a fact all the more remarkable because so few people are familiar with it. For this is no virus on the loose, no plague that has spread unchecked. Rather, metabolic syndrome is just a new way to think about a cluster of well-known and increasingly prevalent conditions. Metabolic syndrome is characterized by five risk factors: high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high triglycerides (fatty acids in the bloodstream), low HDL ("good") cholesterol, and obesity. Of the five, obesity – which is itself often referred to as an epidemic – is the most important, because the rise of the morbidly overweight is directly driving the rise in the syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is, in fact, almost indistinguishable from obesity – at least 85 percent of those who have the syndrome are obese or overweight."

The article debates whether 'metabolic syndrome' is a disease that was invented by the pharmaceutical industry in order to push diet pills at us in the guise of medical authority.

Star Jones

Update: Where is Star Jones Now?

Star Jones lost a lot of weight a couple of years ago (about 150 pounds) and has kept it off.

In June, she says she was kind of fired from The View, a very popular show she had been cohosting for nine years.

So the question is, what is Star Jones up to now?

She has not updated her website as to her current activities since July. In July she hosted a week of a program called "House Hunters in New York City". Here she helped New York house hunters find their dream home. This program got the highest ratings in HGTV's cable channel's history while she was hosting.

But since then there has been no update posted on her site. So it seems she is taking a well deserved break to relax and regroup from her nine years of TV.

Star Jones is hugely ambitious; she grew up with a single parent, in a housing project, became a lawyer and then became famous on TV. I have no doubt she will be in the public eye again sometime soon.

Update November 17th: Here's a very recent photo of Star Jones at the after party for Dancing with the Stars taken in November 2006.

From ET Online: "ET breaks the news that STAR JONES REYNOLDS will be executive producing and appearing on a new TV program. "We are executive producing the first year ender on Black America," Star told us Wednesday night in Los Angeles. "We are doing a full look at the issues, the people, the conversations that were held in Black America, something that... has been a project that I've always wanted to do." Star told us that her show will air on TV One, a cable/satellite network geared towards African American adults."