Before the advent of modern society and mass agriculture, people had to struggle to get enough fuel in their bodies to survive. Sources of food were sometimes sparse and unpredictable. Cavemen and their contemporaries would sometimes have to travel vast distances and face fearsome predators in order to get enough nutrients to keep them and their families/tribes alive. The thought of a pre-historic human counting calories or weighing out just the right amount of bison meat is quite absurd. When food is scarce, you eat as much as you can when the food is available.

Unfortunately, we’ve kept this instinct to over eat into a period of history where food is abundant throughout the modern world. When we mix this abundance with an instinct to eat beyond our immediate needs, a recipe for obesity develops. Many of us can no longer depend on our own body mechanisms to keep a healthy weight. People who find themselves in this situation need a plan of action in order to overcome their evolutionary desires to over consume. Some can do this by pure will alone, but being unable to do so is not necessarily a sign of weakness.

Losing weight in these situations requires a weight loss plan that creates eating habits based on science, not instinct. This requires strict control and the willingness to listen to what the body needs, not necessarily what the body wants. The way that scientists have been able to make this distinction is through the field of study known as nutrigenomics. This field of science is applied to the public through DNA diets, controlling the nutrients we eat which interact with our genes.

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Imagine waking up one morning and making the goal to become the President of the United States. If you paid attention to politics or history you would know that you would have to accomplish a lot before this could realistically happen. You’d have to develop positive ties to the community, get elected to local positions, refine your public image, get elected to higher level offices and then eventually get elected as something like a governor or senator, all while establishing a vast network of connections and raising lots of money for campaigns.  Only then would you have a realistic chance of being elected president. It’s all about making small victories to form a path to a larger one. It works the same way for losing weight.

Creating smaller goals leads to lots of smaller victories. Let’s say you have a goal of losing 50 pounds on a diet. If that is your only goal, than you will have not accomplished anything until you have lost all 50 pounds. If you, however, create a series of smaller goals to lose 5 pounds, you can accomplish the same end result in the end all the while achieving a bunch of smaller victories. These small victories will provide a tremendous amount of confidence that can snowball into ever greater success.

These small victories are also much more manageable psychologically. The goal of losing 50 or 100 pounds may sound daunting, and that’s because it can be. Losing that amount of weight can take as long as a year or more. Maintaining that kind of motivation over such a long period of time without any goals successfully completed can be draining or depressing. Staying motivated over such a long period of time requires positive thinking and the belief that you can accomplish what you put your mind to on a DNA diet. Achieving a lot of smaller victories is a powerful way to maintain this mentality.

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It’s Friday night. And for some people, that means going out with friends for drinks and food at a bar or restaurant. A steady stream of frothing overflowing beer mugs, delectable plumb vodka soaked olives and sweet citrus mixed tequila drinks beckon, but so does the diet plan. “How can I go out and still have a good time without drinking?” we all ask. How many beers fit within my calorie limit for the day, how many margaritas? And it’s not only the drinks we worry about, but the “oh so delicious” greasy bar food: the cheesy potato skins, jalapeno poppers, deep fried artichoke and melted cheese carbohydrate overloads.

Completely abandoning a social life out at bars and restaurants is a significant sacrifice for some, but there are many people that choose to go that route. There are tons of opportunities to socialize and have a great time outside the bar scene. The key to this is finding a social atmosphere that doesn’t revolve around the consumption of alcohol and fatty foods. One of my favorite activities, and one that is becoming increasingly popular for younger people, is movie at home night. This is as simple as it sounds. You get a bunch of friends together at home and watch a movie on the big screen. This allows your friends to drink and eat whatever they want, and for you to enjoy access to your own healthy all-natural foods from your DNA diet.

If you’re serious about weight loss, then you know that you may have to sacrifice certain foods you love in order to reach your weight loss goal.  But drinks that contain alcohol are also high in calories and carbohydrates, which may upset the carefully calculated balance of carbohydrates in your meal program.   So be sure to let your friends know that you’ve made an important choice to get healthier by losing weight but that you still want to enjoy their company when you go out.

If you’re dedicated to the bar scene and going out, there is still hope. Many establishments nowadays are very conscious of the healthy eater. Some of them go out of their way to offer salads and other light dishes on the menu, so you can enjoy the company of your friends without sacrificing your path to weight loss. On your GenoVive customized meal program, you can have an alcoholic beverage on your “free day”.  If you do choose to have alcohol, limit your servings and make the smart choices. If you’re going to have a cocktail, make sure to request diet soda or low sugar juices. Stick to one or two drinks at most. Alcohol not only has calories, but can reduce your inhibition and cause you not to care about breaking the rules of your diet. With good company and sensible snack choices, one drink can be more than enough to enjoy a night out with friends.

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Starting a new diet, exercise plan or home delivered meal program can be a huge lifestyle change. It’s not that unusual for some people to feel a wide variety of unpleasant symptoms like hunger or fatigue as their new healthy lifestyle starts to take shape. For some reason, many of our bodies and minds are very resistant to change. You may be one of these people, or you are close to someone who is. One of the fundamental issues with dieting is being able to adapt to new healthy eating habits and make them feel like normal ones. This is easy for some of us, but very challenging for others.

There are a lot of areas of life that offer very important lessons in the area of breaking from old habits. Smokers know all too well the difficulties of quitting an addiction, and let’s face it, some of us really do feel addicted to over eating. Quitting cold turkey is one of the more popular ways for smokers to quit, but quitting eating altogether is obviously not a viable option when it comes to dieting. We can quit eating certain foods cold turkey, especially foods that we know for a fact are very unhealthy: fast food burgers, deep fried starches, foods loaded with fat and sugar. When starting a new weight loss program like a DNA diet, quitting these high calorie unhealthy foods cold turkey is a great way to get used to new eating habits as quickly as possible.  Many people make the mistake of trying extremely low calorie diets without the proper nutrients and enough calories to fuel their metabolism, which can lead to feelings of hunger and fatigue.  On the GenoVive DNA customized diet, you’ll be eating plenty of real all-natural foods each day at the right calorie level for you.

Another lesson we can learn from people breaking off other addictive habits is that motivation is an extremely important component of success. Smokers find motivation from the knowledge that smoking causes numerous health problems, or that smoking causes stained teeth or a foul odor.  Dieters can use the numerous health problems that arise from obesity as motivation to break their bad habits. Many of us respond to positive motivation much better than negative, however, so focusing on future good healthy, feeling thinner, fitter and more attractive are all more powerful than responding to the threat of future illness.  Either way, we can incorporate the lessons learned from all different types of addictions to help us succeed in weight loss, ultimately leading us to a far happier and healthier life.

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You’re probably familiar with all of the popular excuses used by people to quit their diet and exercise plans; maybe because you have used them yourself at one time. I’m too tired. It’s too hard to stick with. The food doesn’t taste good. I’m too busy. We use these excuses because our resistance to change is more powerful than our will to succeed. There is very little truth in them. They are simply rationalizations for our failure of will, something we tell ourselves to alleviate the guilt we feel when we don’t succeed. We can only overcome this problem when we realize that rationalizing against better health is our worst enemy when it comes to losing weight.

A great way to overcome the cycle of excuses is to attack the reasoning behind them head on. The most often used excuse is the claim of being too busy to diet properly. For some reason there is a pervasive myth that it is harder to eat healthy on a busy schedule, or that eating healthy requires an inordinate amount of time. The truth is that eating healthy requires very little time, especially if you are on a home delivered meal program like the one offered through Genovive’s DNA diet. Even after you are done with the full program, cooking healthy meals can take as little as 10 minutes.

The busy excuse is also used to skirt exercise routines. There may be some people trying to lose weight that may not have any time for anything other eating, sleeping, working and taking care of our families. The rest of us, however, spend a lot of time doing things like browsing the Internet, watching TV, drinking coffee, gossiping with friends and other leisure activities that could easily be substituted out for a custom exercise routine. Effective exercise for weight loss can take as little as 30 minutes three times per week, and your custom exercise program will have you doing the routine that is best for your type of body.

Take a few minutes and think about how you are really spending your time each day.  You may find more “non-productive” time than you think you have to spend exercising and establishing a routine for better long-term wellness.

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Communication is the cornerstone of all human culture. Social interaction amongst individuals and between groups has been proven to not only increase mental health, but general well-being as well. This same phenomenon translates over to weight loss. People who have the goal to lose weight and communicate with others who are trying to do the same will end up being far more successful in the long run. This is because communicating with others while dieting is a powerful motivator and a great source of information.

This is why GenoVive created the Gen-V community, an online diet forum where people on our DNA diet can come together and discuss their successes, failures and aspirations. It’s a great place for people to share ideas about staying motivated, what works and what doesn’t work, and how to get through the inevitable difficulties that come about on any diet. It’s also a great place for people to come and hold each other accountable. After all, accountability is one of the most important factors for staying successful on any type of program.

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Dieting is one of those things for people that can be a lifelong problem. This is because eating is an everyday part of life, and thus requires an everyday solution. It is not a problem that can just be ignored most of the time, and only to be caught up with at a later date. Changing eating habits and getting into an exercise routine requires dedication and enough motivation to want to succeed. Without those things, losing weight becomes exponentially more difficult.

Part of the problem for many people is that they simply don’t know what direction to go in. The amount of weight loss foods in grocery stores these days is staggering. They all make fantastic claims like “all natural, zero fat and low carb,” but without context, none of these things mean anything. It’s possible for someone to eat nothing but low fat products in the store and gain weight because of the excess sugar. Losing weight requires more planning than just shopping for products making certain claims.

DNA diets like the one offered by GenoVive try to solve this issue by providing a comprehensive diet plan that includes home delivered meals and a custom exercise program that works with your level of fitness. This plan will provide the focus on a diet that a person needs so that they can focus on staying motivated rather than trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work. This plan will not only work to lose weight, but can be used as a tool far into the future for maintaining a healthy weight and positive eating habits.

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The human body is probably the most complex machine on the planet earth, and like any other machine, it requires energy. But unlike mechanical machines, humans are capable of consuming far more energy than what they actually need. The way the body stores this excess energy is through fat deposits for later use. This was a very useful feature before food was abundant, but now that our food supply is secure in the western world, these fat deposits never go away and just build over time.

Our DNA helps determine how the nutrients we eat turn into energy in our bodies. Each individual can have different challenges in their metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. You probably recognize this in people who can eat pretty much whatever they want but never gain any weight. Other people seem to have the opposite problem, where seemingly every calorie they eat turns into fat cells on their thighs and stomach.

DNA diets work because they account for these variances in our metabolism. This happens when you first join GenoVive and your DNA is analyzed by our lab. GenoVive puts together your gender, age, height and weight plus your individual genetic profile to determine what is going to work best for you on a diet. You’ll quickly find that your diet is quite different than whatever one size fits all programs you’ve seen before. That’s because the diet has been customized just for you.  You’ll see and feel the difference with GenoVive.

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For many people on a diet, the goal of losing weight is not just about reaching a certain number, but reaching that number by a certain time. Whether it’s for a school reunion, the beach days of summer, or for a wedding day, many of us use a big event in our lives as a powerful motivator for sticking to a diet. It’s important to realize, however, how realistic our date oriented goals are. This is not to discourage someone from attempting to get healthier by a certain date, but to keep them from being disappointed if they don’t reach a nearly physically impossible goal.

Realistic estimations of how much people can lose during a certain amount of time fluctuate from person to person and on diet to diet. People can lose anywhere from 4 pounds to half a pound in any given week, depending on how much someone needs to lose and how intensely they are dieting. While everyone wants to lose as much as possible and in the shortest amount of time, losing weight too quickly can be unhealthy. A managed diet program like our DNA diet can help you lose weight at a healthy rate that will help you reach your timed goal with far more effectiveness.

A DNA diet is able to do this because the home delivered meal program you get is based on your unique genetic code. Your DNA plays an important role in your metabolism. GenoVive knows just the right amount of calories you need and the correct macronutrient balance for you to effectively lose weight using all-natural foods. They also create a customized exercise program for you that will help you lose weight even faster. People who go on diets on their own often don’t know exactly what will help them lose weight, but with GenoVive, a scientific approach is used to maximize weight loss so that you look great by the day of your big event.

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Going out to eat at fine restaurants or even neighborhood diners can be a fantastic experience, but it can also be a nightmare for dieters.  Eating out allows people to experience the joy of freshly prepared food without having to go through the hassle of prep work, cooking and cleaning at home. It also allows people to enjoy each others company in a friendly and comfortable setting. Unfortunately, restaurant food often has huge portions and is very high in calories due to the types of ingredients often used. Most restaurants, however, offer healthy alternatives that can be just as delicious as their high calorie counterparts.

When you are on a DNA diet like the one from GenoVive, it’s a good idea to be able to pick out foods at restaurants that fit within your macronutrient balance.  Because a DNA diet is unique to each individual, this will mean different things for different people. For some people a skinless chicken breast with roasted vegetables will be the best option. For others, maybe a salad with oil and vinegar dressing. When ordering, don’t be afraid to ask any information you might need or want to know about your meal option. In most major chain restaurants they will have ingredients and calories listed for each item. For smaller local places, they may not know the exact calories, but they will probably be willing to tell you what is in each item. The more information you have about the food you are eating at a restaurant, the better your ability will be to pick an item that stays within the guidelines of your DNA diet and keep you on track to losing more weight.

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