ITG Diet Blog

Summer is finally here! With the beautiful weather comes lots of great summer parties, cookouts and barbecues, and even birthdays and graduations. And of course, they all revolve around eating, drinking and socializing. Many people enjoy an opportunity to make that great new recipe they found and use these parties as an excuse to try them out. When you show up at a party for 20 people, there is usually enough food to feed an army.

You're faced with all these delicious dishes that you never get to eat, because you are on a diet. What will you do? ITG is here to give you some tips that will help you stick to your diet and survive those summer parties!

We eat when we're happy. We eat when we're stressed, sad, bored, or lonely, We often eat more than our body actually needs.

In the past few decades, our food tastes and habits have been changing. We used to eat due to hunger and for our energy needs. These days, we eat for pleasurable experiences, and those foods are densely packed with sugar, salt, and fat. Plus, everything is readily available any time of day or night at stores and drive-thrus.

If you're working on reaching your goal weight quickly and efficiently using the ITG Diet Plan, you may have been learning the importance of understanding nutrition labels and how to decipher them. Over the years I've spent coaching the program, I certainly have learned a lot about labels myself. Remember, years ago, we were taught how bad fat was for us? "Fat will make you fat!" Starting in the 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s, "reduced fat" and fat-free foods gained their foothold in our lives. The low-fat diet was born. However, looking back now we can start to see that fat isn't quite as bad for us compared to what was being pumping into these foods to add flavor without that fat: sugar and salt.

Over the years and from an early age, we've all been taught how bad it is to eat fat. From low fat foods, to reduced fat foods, to low fat lifestyles, avoiding fat has been engrained in our thinking: that eating fat will cause us to gain fat. While too much of any nutrient can very easily be converted and stored as fat in the body, fat is still an essential part of our diet. What types of fat are healthy, which should we eat in moderation, and what types should we avoid? 

Selenium is a trace mineral that is found in small amounts in nuts, meats, and some vegetables. Trace minerals such as selenium are needed for many of the body's processes, including proper muscle development, cell maintenance, immune system responses, and thyroid hormone metabolism.