First, I'm going to tell you what you should be doing. Then I'm going to tell you why you should be doing it. OK, here goes.

• Reduce your intake of dietary fat -- both saturated and unsaturated -- to a max level of 30 percent of total calories. You can accomplish this by limiting meats, trimming away its excess fat, avoiding fried foods, and cutting down on butter, creams, and salad dressings.
• Increase consumption of fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain cereals. This will automatically increase your intake of these five nutrients: beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E, selenium, and dietary fiber.
• Only moderately consume salt-cured and charcoal-broiled foods, or ditch altogether.
• Only moderately consume alcoholic beverages, or ditch altogether.
• Eliminate from your diet these items: All salt except for what's found in food itself, all stimulants like coffee and tea, all refined sugar and flour, hydrogenated fats, pepper and other hot spices, foods containing artificial additives or preservatives, and all cured meats such as hot dogs.
  
  

You know all of this already, don't you? In one way or another, and with a bit of tweaking here and there to meet the changing times (coffee, for example), we write about this stuff at That's Fit all the time. Here's why: This is precisely the type of diet eaten in countries where people regularly live to be 100 or older, says Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles and advocate for healthy living. And so I'm packaging this advice in one short post to remind you that if you want to prevent illness and disease and you want to live a good long time, this is what you should be doing.

Oh, there's one other thing you should be doing: Exercising. It does a body good.

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I am so tired of fad diets. Ever since my mom brought home a box of the ill-named AYDS candies in the early 80's I've always been suspicious of fad diets. They never seem to work. Ever. Or, if they do, it's for the short term only. So why do folks insist on taking up every new fad diet out there like it's the next best thing? Is there, in fact, a fad diet--any fad diet--that actually works?

Well, America, we may finally be on to something that works. It does not require eating hordes of a particular vegetable, say cabbage (a la the cabbage soup diet--remember that one?) or restricting certain food groups like the guilt-inducing no-carb high protein diets that chastise for even thinking about a dinner roll. It does not require the purchase of any pills or medications. The only thing that is required is that we find a way to cut 50 calories a meal from our diets.

The concept is a simple one, involving our old friend math. According to a recent article by Karen Collins, R. D. who writes for the American Institute for Cancer Research, if we cut just 50 calories from each meal we'd be cutting 150 calories a day. Considering a pound is 3500 calories, it would take just under 24 days to lost a pound (3500 / 150 calories a day = 23.33 days).

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