An Apple A Day Helps You Lose Weight
Dietary fads come and go, but this may be an idea that could benefit not just your weight. Adding an apple a day, and making sure you have those menopausal hormones under control, could help you shed those extra pounds.
If you have tried most of the diets and found them lacking then a simple, old fashioned, remedy might just help.
According to the old wives tale ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ and they do have decided health benefits, including reducing inflammation in the body, but no one has linked them to weight loss before.
Why apples for weight loss?
Good digestion relies on a healthy gut and here apples do have a role to play. A study performed by Washington State University’s Department of Food Sciences and others are re-examining the health values of bioactive compounds in apples and now non-bioactive indigestible compounds are being discovered in the fruit to help balance bowel microbiota as prebiotics do.
All apples contain these indigestable compounds that pass through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract unchanged and are not metabolized by the body. This allows them to go into the bowels intact to finally become fermented and help create more probiotic bacteria in the colon and this leads to a healthy gut and could reduce obesity.
You would think all apples would be the same in terms of these indigestible compounds, but it seems some apples are greater than others. The varieties of apples researched were Braeburn, Fuji, Gala, Golden Delicious, McIntosh, Granny Smith and Red Delicious.
If Granny Smith apples are your favourite, then you are in luck because that variety came out on top, but all varieties have some amount of the indigestible compounds.
One key point though but they must be organic. Non-organic apples are among the most heavily sprayed fruit and in the USA they were in the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen of the most affected foods.
What else can help?
The problem with menopause is that the body starts putting weight on to give us back some of the oestrogen we have lost. Unfortunately it tends to do this on the stomach, abdomen and thighs which is just where we don’t want it.
The usual suspects all can make a real difference: a balanced healthy diet, plenty of enjoyable exercise and getting oestrogen dominance (excess oestrogen not balanced by progesterone) under control.
Because progesterone supports thyroid function, and also acts as a diuretic, it helps with excess fluid and bloating and encourages weight loss due to the excretion of excess fluid from the body.
In the USA Dr C W Randolf has written a whole book, (‘From Belly Fat to Belly Flat’), about the ways progesterone can contribute to weight loss.
