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How to manage Bland Diet

What is a bland diet? It is a diet specially set to treat certain gastrointestinal or stomach problems such as heartburns, ulcers and gas.

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An answer to a question, what is a bland diet, is that it is a simple treatment for people suffering from any one or more gastrointestinal disorders such as chronic gastritis, ulcer, esophagitis and dyspepsia.

Bland diet is a dietary regimen for people suffering from stomach disorders. Hence, it is quite understood that ingredients of a bland diet are soft food items, which are easy to digest with a capacity to keep the acidity to low levels. Questions about diet may be asked to your physicians and he/she can suggest the diet or recommend a dietician to do it.

Diet medical questions may include the queries about the food stuffs to eat and food stuffs to avoid during the time while a person experien ces any gastrointestinal disorders. However, before a dietician could decide the bland diet for a person, he/she needs to seek answers to several medical questions related to the person such as any food allergies or irritations associated with any food items and emotions medical questions of people.

Bland Diet:

The diet prescribed as a bland diet will include food items that are easy to digest and low in fiber and acid contents. Even giving up alcohol and smoking is advised while patient is on bland diet. Also a patient is advised to have 4 to 6 light meals after regular interval to avoid heavy and large meals.

Chewing food properly and eating slowly helps in the digestion of the food. Adequate sleep, avoiding smoking and controlling anxiety are supportive treatments for the standard treatment of the problem.

Allowed Food Items:

• Dairy Products
Milk, cheese, yogurt with low-fats and other dairy products are easily digested and hence, can be included as a part of bland diet. However, there is no restriction on ice-creams and one may consume even ice creams during bland diet, but it should not have any product such as nuts that are not allowed in bland diet.

• Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
Fresh vegetables and fruits are allowed to a bland dieter. However, while carrot, squash, green peas are good to eat in a bland diet, broccoli, onions and green peeper should be avoided as it forms gas. In fruits, oranges, grapefruits, and bananas are allowed.

• Proteins
Protein requirement of the body, while on a bland diet should be met with soy products and meat. Fried chicken and greasy hamburgers are not allowed to be consumed, while grilled and baked chicken is allowed.
Low-fat peanut butter and eggs are also efficient to meet the body’s protein requirement in a bland diet.

• Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates are contained in whole grain breads, pasta, oatmeal, corn flakes, white rice and sweet potatoes. All these food items are allowed.

Bland diet is designed for treating certain medical circumstances such as gastrointestinal problems. Hence, to answer what is a bland diet, we can say that this is a diet that aims at improving the digestion with the help of a timed-routine diet and soft to digest food items. Once the problem is controlled patients can return to their normal diet.

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The Tummy Tuck: Everything You Need to Know

The tummy tuck, or abdominoplasty, is quickly becoming one of the most popular forms of cosmetic surgery. The reasons are easy to discern. Following weight loss or pregnancy, many people find themselves in an undesirable physical state. This state includes having a great deal of loose skin around the abdominal region. This doesn’t look good in a bathing suit, to say the least. This can be disheartening to people who have worked hard on their diet and exercise to lose weight, only to be ashamed of the body they are left with. There are no magic pills to snap loose skin back into place. For many people, a tummy tuck is the only answer.

As stated, the best candidates for a tummy tuck are those individuals who have loose skin following weight loss or pregnancy. There is no diet or exercise program in existence that will do anything about this loose skin. For some people, the skin will bounce back in time, but only if you are young and were not particularly obese to begin with. For most others, it becomes a decision between simply living with it or having the abdominoplasty done.

Poor candidates for the procedure include those people who plan to get pregnant again, those who still have quite a bit of weight to lose, and those who don’t feel confident that they won’t put the weight back on. A tummy tuck should be a final period at the end of a woman’s pregnancies or a person’s struggle with their weight. It is a rather invasive and extensive surgery which requires quite a bit of downtime and recovery, not to mention a moderate amount of risk. It simply doesn’t make sense to have such a procedure done if the effects will be undone in the near future.

If you want to go ahead and get the procedure, you should make sure and find a highly qualified surgeon. Any physician is licensed to perform plastic surgery operations, but that doesn’t mean you should just go to any old physician to have it done. It’s important to find one who is specialized in the field of body contouring. With their experience, they will be able to recommend the right procedure and minimize downtime, scarring, and other unpleasant side effects of the tummy tuck. You may wish to make sure your surgeon is certified through the Board of Plastic Surgery, which indicates a high level of dedication to his craft, not to mention a higher level of skill and experience.

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Diets – the ‘too-strict’ diet

One of the most frequent complaints that dieters give for not being able to complete a diet is that they just couldn’t stick to it. OK, so you’ve heard this before but listen carefully to them for the reason they often give is that it was too strict. Well, a diet has to be strict to let you lose weight so what are we to do?

Humans are designed to eat a wide range of food and, in fact, we need that range of food to gather all the building blocks required for a healthy body. If you restrict that range then your body will do it’s best to make you eat the food that you are missing – in order to make up the shortfall.

Looked at another way, your body is used to eating a certain variety of different foods which constitutes the way that you normally eat and will try its best to ensure that you go on eating it whatever happens.

This is one reason why diets are so hard to keep to since they usually insist that there are certain food that you can no longer eat, even though your body can see them all around you and knows that it wants them.

You can now begin to see the problem that you have when you try to remove a food or, worse, a food group from your diet – your eyes see the food and your body tells you that you need it but the diet says you can’t have it. So who wins?

OK, you’re right! Your drive to eat that food will become overpowering until you eventually give in. Many dieters already know this to their cost!

But this is not all, for most diets also restrict the amount that you eat as well as the type of food and the result of this is that you become hungry. Now hunger is a much more powerful drive than many people imagine and most people in the Western World (at least in modern times) have, thankfully, never experienced it before.

Believe me, hunger will make you eat no matter how good your intentions or no matter how strong your reserve, you just will not be able to resist it.

It follows, therefore, that any diet which takes out whole food groups or which severely restricts the number of calories that you can eat is doomed to failure in the long term.

You also know that a diet like this is not worth following for the short term since the weight loss will be pursued, once you quit the diet, by a weight gain that sometimes takes you over your starting weight!

I’m afraid this is dismal reading, but the question remains – just how do you diet then? The answer is in choosing the right diet, that is, one that restricts you but does not restrict you too much.

Firstly, it must not curtail the variety of food that you eat, allowing you to eat from all the food groups if possible.

Secondly, it should not restrict too much the number of calories that you eat. Ideally, it should be just less than the amount that you need.

This is the way that many calorie controlled diets work. These let you eat most any food you want but, by using a rationing system of points or similar, they keep your calorie intake to just below the amount that you require but not so far below that you get ravenously hungry.

Because of this, it is possible to follow these diets for a long time and they still remain both healthy and capable of letting you lose the pounds one or two at a week. At the end of the day that is still good weight loss and it is also the sort of weight loss that is sustainable.

The other advantage with these diets is that they help you to change your lifestyle for one that is healthier and more in keeping with modern thinking.

So, before you embark on that diet, review the way it works and see that it meets the criteria above. Then, and I believe this is most important, try it for a fortnight and see how you get on. Only choose it if you are sure that you can get on with it and stay with it over the long term.

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