If you’ve been watching your weight for any period of time, chances are you have largely given up sugar and honey and maple syrup, except in those special desserts, in favor of artificial sweeteners. There’s the stuff in the pink packet, the blue packet, and the yellow packet. Concerns about whether or not they are safe have surfaced from time to time, but there are always those reassuring studies done by the manufacturer or some company they have hired that show they won’t kill you, at least not right away. And we do want to be thin, don’t we?

So far as I know, first there was saccharin, much sweeter than sugar, but with a slight bitter twang in the aftertaste. I grew up with it so I’m used to the taste. Anybody remember Fresca? In very large quantities it’s induces cancer in rats, but there has never been any evidence that it hurts people in normal amounts.

That was supplanted by cyclamates, which were in a pink packet. Although this one has been banned for causing bladder tumors in rats, then unbanned after further studies in rats and mice , and is now in FDA limbo. Could be a tumor promoter, i.e., it doesn’t cause tumors all by itself, but can help them develop in the presence of another carcinogen. So now the stuff in the pink packets is saccharin again.

Then there was aspartame, which the FDA does not cause brain damage, brain tumors, or endocrine disorders. Other scientists say it definitely has neurotoxic properties and it should be pulled from the market while more extensive studies are done by someone other than the manufacturer. It can break down into methanol and/or formaldehyde, which will definitely kill you, but you would have to drink a LOT of very old, badly stored soft drinks to get enough to do any harm. Still, consumer reports of symptoms like headaches or dizziness persist. The FDA says these are relatively mild and most people don’t seek medical attention and some people are just more sensitive to it. Of course it is very bad for people with phenylketonuria and is so labeled.  One big disadvantage for the blue packet is that it breaks down and loses its sweetens if it’s heated, like in cooking.

The newest kid on the block is the relatively expensive star in the yellow packet, Splenda. It stays sweet when you cook with it and since it is made from sugar, then it must be OK. Right? Well, there is a dedicated group of scientists who think otherwise. There is an interesting article about artificial sweeteners, especially Splenda, on the Epoch Times website: How Sweet It Isn’t

It quotes physician and biochemist James Bowen, M.D., whose 2005 article, “The Lethal Science of Splenda, a Poisonous Chlorocarbon,” says that sucralose has been found to shrink the thymus gland and cause liver inflammation in rats and mice. The thymus gland controls the differentiation of cells that play key roles in immune responses. So I don’t think I would give anything with Splenda in it to children. Anyway it’s something to keep in mind.

So what’s a body to do? I use stevia, which is incredibly sweet, occurs naturally in a plant called “sweet leaf” and has been used for at least 1,500 years by indigenous people of Paraguay and other South American countries. There are limited studies showing it may have anti-diabetic and blood pressure lowering qualities, as well as other beneficial effects. You can buy it at health food stores. If you buy highly purified extracts, it can have a bitter, licorice-like aftertaste so try several brands until you find one that tastes right. Alternatively, you can buy the less-processed brown or green powder and you shouldn’t have much trouble with bitterness.

The other solution is to wean ourselves away from our sweet tooth. Learn to like unsweetened tea and coffee don’t drink commercial soft drinks at all. There are a number of health reasons for avoiding those. Drink mineral water, flat or naturally sparkling, by itself or with a little citrus or other actual fruit juice in it. Then enjoy your OCCASIONAL treat with natural sugars without guilt. Nobody ever got fat from one bowl of real ice cream or one piece of pie or cake or whatever a week. Enjoy! –Di

technorati tags:weight, loss, artificial, sweeteners, Splenda, stevia, saccharin, cyclamate, aspartame

Well, this program is aptly named. It has an attention-grabbing website that purports to make the whole fat loss process idiot proof. They have (a) great copywriter(s) who offers dirt simple solutions to very complex topics. Just plop down your $39 and you get access to the handbook and the amazing diet generator software. No thinking required here, on the Idiot Proof Diet.

The “Handbook” is totally on screen. Nothing to download unless you want to print screen shots. You get descriptions of 10 basic rules, followed by another 35 or so pages of short essays on subjects like how much water to drink, is wheat bread or honey or maple syrup really better, the myth of salad, the importance of varying the types of food you eat, and so on. Altogether less than 50 short pages with big print, so you don’t get bogged down in reading.

The diet generator software quizzes you about some of your likes and dislikes, then spits out your diet for the next 11 days. You can print that out. This is not a calorie-limited diet. You can eat however much it takes you to feel satisfied, but not stuffed, of the item allowed for each meal. You eat 4 meals a day, at least 2 1/2 hours apart, except for day 6, which has three meals, all fruits and veggies. Most of the meals are “monomeals,” at which you only eat one thing. A lot of soy chicken in my case. On most days, one of the four meals has two things, like maybe yams and soy chicken. The proportions of protein to carbohydrates to fats changes from day to day and is apparently one of the driving forces of this diet.

I think this is not a plan that you can or should stay on for an extended period of time. The emphasis is on plain and there doesn’t seem to be enough variety allowed to give you all the nutrients you would need for your body or your psyche. At the very least, you’ll be needing good vitamin and mineral supplements, not to mention your omega three fat supplement. There really is no attempt to teach you how to design a really good diet for yourself and your family. You just eat what the software tells you for 11 days, then go back to whatever bad habits got you to the place where you needed to lose weight for 3 days, then ask the computer to give you a new diet for the next 11 days and so on forever.

The exercise component of this program is, ideally, two 30 minute walks a day or one 45 minute walk. As discussed elsewhere on this blog, walking is a great way to get started moving, but eventually your body will need some change if it is going to continue to burn fat.

Do you have questions about the program? Want to call or send an email to the author? Actually, I couldn’t find any way to do that. If it is not covered on the website, including the Frequently Asked Questions, then that’s just too bad. No contact info anywhere, except an address to which you could send snail mail, except there’s no name anywhere to address it to. No idea who is responsible for this.

Can you lose weight on this diet? Possibly. Your intrepid and endlessly curious experimenter and blogger will give it a try and update this blog with the results. The last time I tried it, I lost interest several days into it when faced with a can of cashews for dinner. In the meantime, if you’re dying to give it a try yourself, here’s the link: Fat Loss 4 Idiots

Be well!! –Di

Update after one complete round of this diet:  

After the 11 days of eating what the computer told me to, no more and no less, I had lost exactly five pounds and had neither lost nor gained in fat percentage. I did the recommended 2×35 minutes of walking (about 4.5 miles for me) every weekday and about 50 minutes on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

At that point, I was bored out of my mind with the very limited selections, got hungry between meals, and had that deep down “ghost hunger” that comes when you stay on a restrictive diet plan too many days in a row. I craved everything, even things I hadn’t even thought about for years. Perhaps I was missing some essential nutrient(s) or maybe my body was just trying to find that 5 pounds I had “lost.”

The second part of this diet is three days of “normal” eating after the 11-day computer-generated menu. During that period I made sure I didn’t binge on anything, although I did eat some low carb bread products and had a good-sized piece of cake with ice cream at a family birthday party.  Two of the five pounds reappeared, making my net loss for those two weeks three pounds. So this diet does sort of work, but others work as well, are less painful to go through, teach you how to make healthful and yummy menus, have built-in mechanisms for elevating the metabolismand give you a plan you can live with very well for the rest of your life .

Final score: two stars for ease of use and at least some effectiveness.

I do believe Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle is the most famous of all the downloadable diet books. This is the gold standard by which others are judged and rightfully so. I thought the title was great and certainly reflected what I would like to do with my body. So I paid for it and downloaded it and let it sit on my hard drive for a few months Didn’t do much good there.

Then I noticed that I had fewer and fewer clothes I could get into and that I looked pretty much stuffed into those few I could get into. So, I decided, back to The Diet.

Just as a bit of background. When I was in college I had a pretty long walk to class, rode my bicycle all over Boston, and played several sports. Also, dining hall food wasn’t that tempting and so I was fairly trim. I got married right after college and didn’t have a job right away so I stayed home and cooked for my wonderful, appreciative husband. I soon blossomed forth out of all my clothes and even after I started my new job, I continued to gain weight. I had worked up to a women’s size 22 dress when my mother-in-law, always helpful, handed me a diet book she said her sister swore by.

The book was called The Eating Man’s Diet, written by Ralph Sharkey, as I remember. It’s out of print but you can sometimes find it for sale from individuals. Without going into too much detail, what this book advocated was alternating days of very low calories intake, less than 1000 calories, with days of enough calories to maintain your ideal weight. What kind of calories wasn’t really an issue, although the author did stress that you should eat a balanced diet with lots of fruits and veggies and protein. He said the occasional day of fasting wouldn’t hurt. He also said that, while exercise was probably a good thing, it wasn’t at all necessary to lose weight on this diet and that he purposefully didn’t exercise when he was testing this diet to make sure that was true.

Well, I set out to follow that diet when I hadn’t been able to stay on other diets for long at all. I would be OK for a week or two but I would just get hungrier and hungrier and feeling more and more deprived until I was a psychological and physical wreck. Then I would go back to my old fattening ways. One really good thing about The Eating Man’s Diet is that the deprivation was only one day in a row. You can stand just about anything for one day. The next day, I could have whatever, as long as it fit into the allowed number of calories. I got to be very good at calorie tradeoffs and stayed on that diet until I lost 80 pounds, 12 in the first month. My husband and everybody I knew loved my new look and everybody accommodated themselves to my “diet day” and “eating day” schedule quite happily. I kept those pounds off for a decade plus by just going back to The Diet whenever I saw my weight creeping up past a certain ominous number. It worked for years but gradually I got busy sitting in front of the computer all day and half the night munching on almonds between my three square and didn’t watch my weight and… You probably know that story.

So, once again, I took myself in hand, and decided to go back to The Diet. I stayed under 800 calories on my “diet” days, which left me definitely hungry and feeling deprived, and never went above 2200 on my “eating” days. I lost 8 pounds in two months. Years of largely sedentary living had allowed my muscle to atrophy so my resting metabolism had gotten lower, making it harder to lose weight. In the meantime, I had bought one of those scales that also measures body fat and it said I was 35% fat (!!!) at the beginning of those two months and 38% (!!!!) fat at the end. So the pounds didn’t come off so easily and I sure wasn’t losing much fat. I thought there had to be a better way.

Open up Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle. This book is so compellingly written that I went right through the whole thing in two days. Started the program the next day. This one also uses a “zig zag” approach, with two to four “light” eating days interspersed with a “normal” one but what a difference! You eat five or six times a day, so even on the “light” days you never go below 1200 calories and you’re never hungry. No feeling deprived. No pain. Also, since you set the ratios of the types of nutrients to fit your body type on this program, you are always full of energy. Exercise is definitely part of this program, too, and Tom explains very clearly what kind, how much, and how often.

This is no “one plan fits all” approach. Tom tells you how to figure out what your body type is and so what would be a good starting ratio of good carbs, protein, and good fats for you to start with. Then he tells you what to watch for and how to modify your diet and exercise plans to get the best results for you. This is one of the very few books that deals with the dreaded weight plateau effct. He tells you exactly what to watch for and how to correct it.

The author is a body builder and so he knows all the secrets. You don’t have to want to look like him or the woman on his web page to use his secrets to your advantage. This book really is worthy of being called his life’s work. It is a complete approach to living the fit life that you can master regardless of where you’re starting from. If you really want to be mistress/master of your physique and are willing to learn how to do just that, you NEED Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle.

If there’s anything I would point out as a drawback to this book, it would be that perhaps it has too much information. It’s hard to digest it all in one reading. I got a pretty good idea from my first reading but got a lot more the second time through. Also, you shouod know that if you follow the plan he teaches completely, you will be doing lot of calculations of calories, calories from carbos, proteins, and fats and percentages. The calculations can be alittle daunting at first. Fortunately, he does describe how to do this in an approximate kind of way that works fine. So no need to do all those numbers if that’s not your cup of tea.
I’m not a body builder. I’m an old lady with a sedentary job who wants to look and feel like she’s twenty-two again. After twelve weeks of following Tom’s system, I am 18 pounds lighter and three dress sizes smaller. My merciless Tanita scale says I am still 25% fat but that’s a huge improvement. When I go out for a brisk walk with a few sprints thrown in, I feel like I’m floating because I have so much energy. I give Burm the Fat, Feed the Muscle a four and a half star rating out of five. Go get it here:

I used to think my body was some kind of machine. I thought that losing weight was a simple matter of cutting the intake and/or increasing the output and soon I would look like your average Hollywood starlet. If I wanted to lose a pound, all I had to do was eat 3500 calories less than my maintenance level of 2000 calories a day or walk 35 miles or some combination of those. If you were of the same opinion you have probably noticed, like me, that the reality isn’t quite so simple. In fact, the August/September issue of ACE (American Council on Exercise) Certified News has an article by Ralph LaForge various factors that interact to determine just how many calories you burn during a given period of exercise.

If you just starve yourself, you get unhealthy and the body gets to be very efficient at maintaining your weight on very reduced levels of calories. You are always hungry so you get crabby. What weight you did lose was muscle and water, with some fat, so when you relent, as you must if you have any survival instincts, you gain back all the pounds plus some extra ones and they are NOT attractive, firm muscular pounds.

So you have a look at the magazines at the grocery checkout or your local newspaper and they convince you that you need to get moving, you need some horizontal movement, to get started down the road to slim, along with reasonable amounts of vegetables, fruits, protein sources, and whole grains. The idea is to create a 500 calorie per day deficit and then you’ll lose a pound a week.

I ran out and bought a pedometer and vowed to let no day go by without at least 10,000 steps, which is around four miles for average walking strides, and cut out that 3:00 PM latte. That should be a 500 calorie a day deficit, I thought. A week later I stepped expectantly on the scales and perhaps saw a tiny bit of shift to the left. Oops, maybe I miscalculated. Have you tried this? Did it work for you?

Didn’t think so. Actually that idea doesn’t take into account the basal metabolism rate (BMR), which is the most important factor in determining our overall metabolic rates. The BMR determines the calories that you would be burning even if you were fast asleep, which need to be subtracted from your projected deficit total.

Our BMR is in turn affected by a number of factors, some of which are beyond our control. We can’t really do much about our genetics, your gender, your age, your internal body temperature, or how much thyroxin or adrenalin your body is releasing at the moment. But it also depends on how much you weigh, your body surface area, your lean body mass, whether you’re in starvation mode, and other things you can influence over time. Taken together the number of factors that can influence you BMR and their interactions make it hard to estimate accurately. But when it comes to determining how much effect it has on calorie burn during exercise, the other major component is how much energy you’re putting out during the exercise itself.

Your current weight affects how many calories you burn doing any given exercise, which makes perfectly good sense. The more mass you are moving, the more energy it takes to do it. But the point is to reduce that mass, right? Especially the fatty part of it.

The duration and intensity of the exercise is the major factor in determining its calorie and fat burning effects both during and after the exercise. For example, as Mr. La Forge points out, if a 154-pound person walks a mile at a rate of 3.5 miles per hour, she burns 54 calories. If she walks faster, say in the 3.5 to 5 m.p.h. range, it’s 97 calories, and 107 calories if she jogs it. So it’s not just the distance but how much effort you exert in covering that distance that counts. Using a treadmill reduces your effort and so also reduces your calorie burn. Exercise that doesn’t fight gravity, like swimming or cycling, use fewer calories to cover that distance, too.

So now we know it’s good to do 10,000 steps every day but it is better to slowly work up to doing them faster. The basic aerobic exercise formula says you should determine your maximum heart rate (220 minus your age in years) and strive to maintain a level of exertion that keeps your pulse at 70 to 85 percent of that for 30 to 60 minutes in a row for at least 5 days of the week. That would be a good thing.

Seems there’s an even better thing called interval training. That’s where you start slowly, say about 50 percent of your maximum heart rate for 5 minutes, then put on a burst to about 90 percent of max for 60 seconds, slow down again for 75 seconds, then another minute at close to full throttle, slow down for 75 seconds, and so on for four or so more rounds. Then take five minutes at 30 percent to cool down. That’s just one example of a schedule you could use.

So what do you accomplish with that? There was a study done at Laval University in Canada that compared results after standard aerobic conditioning (endurance) versus interval training. The standard aerobic group worked out longer, 45 minutes per session, 6 sessions per week for 20 weeks in a row (90 sessions), while the interval group did 30 minute sessions, 6 sessions per week for 15 weeks (60 sessions). The endurance group also burned twice as many calories during each session as the interval group. One would expect that the endurance group would have lost more fat, assuming similar diets for the two groups. But it turns out that the interval group reduced their body fat NINE times more than the endurance group. The reason is that the interval training boosts the resting metabolic rate so they burned more calories even when they weren’t exercising. Sound good?

Don’t just get up off the couch and start sprinting. You have to work up to this and check with your doctor. But, as part of an overall training program, along with weight (resistance) training and flexibility/balance training, interval training is a good way to get the fat to burn off. Sometimes being a little breathless isn’t a bad thing. –Di

We know that being overweight is not good for our health, but even worse than subcutaneous fat is the deep-seated visceral fat that encases our internal organs and sends out chemical messages that are not in our best interests. Although it is metabolically active, it still can be very stubborn about melting away, especially in women. Now there is word about a compound in seaweed that just might help with that.

Speaking at the 232nd national meeting of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Kazuo Miyashita from Hokkaido University in Japan described some of his experiments in mice and rats with a compound from a brown  kelp seaweed called Wakame. The compound is called fucoxanthin, which is structurally related to carotenoids. It has antioxidant properties and encourages the liver to produce an omega-3 fatty acid that is usually found in fatty fish. So far so good.

It also enhances the function of a protein, UCP1, which stimulates the utilization of internal fat for energy. It was found to reduce the fat tissue in rats and obese mice.

Don’t go rushing off to the nearest Japanese grocery store yet. First, there’s always the question: Will it have these same effects in humans? Second, Dr. Miyashita warns that you simply couldn’t eat enough of the seaweed to get enough fucoxanthin to have such effects on you. So we must wait until the compound can be isolated and concentrated and tested on humans and then, perhaps, the good researcher will license his work to a pharmaceutical house so it can manufacture and sell it to you .  This, he says will take three to five years or so.  –Di

technorati tags:weight, loss, obesity, visceral, fat, seaweed, wakame, fucoxanthin

First it was in the fast food industry. You couldn’t buy anything without your friendly server offering to get you a bigger version of it. The good thing was that you also had to pay more for it. Now it seems to be everywhere. Woe betide the eatery, plain or fancy, that hasn’t adjusted the amount of food they deliver as a “portion” upward.

Coming in the September issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, will be an article about a study from Rutgers that compares what 177 young adults perceived as normal portions of breakfast, lunch, and dinner items with what a similar group allotted for similar items 20 years ago. The young people were invited to have a free meal at which they were to choose typical portions of eight food and beverage items at breakfast or six items at lunch or dinner. It turned out that the perceptions of typical portion size were drastically increased for items that were served from and consumed from a cup or a bowl. As an example, study authors Jaime Schwartz, M.S., R.D. and Carol Byrd-Bredbenner, Ph.D., R.D., specifically mentioned that the subjects’ ideas of typical portions of orange juice were 40 plus percent larger than 20 years ago. They also mentioned that this amount of juice would provide 50 additional calories and, if one drank that amount every day, it would add up to enough calories to add on five pounds over the course of a year.  In all, more than half of the portions selected for breakfast were at least 25 percent higher than chosen by the young people of twenty years ago. For lunch and dinner items, about 70 percent of the portion sizes chosen by today’s young adults were at least 25 percent higher than those of twenty years ago.

The investigators also compared the portion sizes considered typical by their group of subjects with the serving size listed on Nutrition Facts panels for those foods and found those labels also were underestimates of what was actually considered a normal serving size by their subjects.  So there seems to be an agreement here, between increasing portion sizes and increasing girth for the population. The whole situation is undoubtedly more complicated than can be explained by this one factor, but it could well be a major contributor to the weight control difficulties of many people.

If there was any good news in this study, it was that the amount of salad dressing used by the young adults in the current study was actually less than from two decades ago. And, yes, they did eat salad. Perhaps the message from the dieticians that one should not ruin the positive nutritional effects of raw vegetables by coating them in oil and sugar is being heard. That opens up the possibility that further educational efforts might also be effective.

Given that many people, perhaps including people near and dear to us, or even our own selves, now think that what constitutes a normal portion is larger than it used to be, how can those of us who would like to control our weights of even lose weight, cope? Here are just a couple of ideas.

The first thing in weight control is to learn to sense our body’s signals when it is no longer hungry and respond to them immediately. That requires eating slowly, with full attention on the food at hand, so that you can give our body time to send us satiety signals and pay attention to the signals it is sending. If you really, really pay attention to what you are eating, you will really, really enjoy it more. You also learn what really tastes good to you and won’t want to waste calories or time or taste sensations on junk that just doesn’t measure up. This is also the best strategy for dinner parties or holiday feasts or any occasion where you’re eating food someone else has prepared and they might be insulted if you don’t seem to be eating with pleasure.

If you are preparing your own meals, then you can measure everything and put it onto smaller plates or into smaller bowls than usual so it fills the space. Full plate, full stomach, regardless of the size of the plate, right? It actually does help. Also, by measuring things, you get a good idea of what your appropriate serving size looks like so you can judge when you hit the buffet line. Be sure to use a small plate there.

Frequent small meals eliminate the psychological need to stoke up. If you have eaten only three hours ago and will eat again in three hours, then you only need true normal portions to keep hunger at bay. This pattern also keeps the metabolism up, making weight loss easier.

If you’re eating out, try ordering a full meal, then take half of it home for lunch the next day. The amounts they give you at restaurants these days are so huge, you can easily get two meals out of one and save some dollars, too.   –Di

Finally, we have a professional answer to the question of whether you can get rid of cellulite if you lose weight in the area where the cellulite has appeared. And, like all honest official answers, the response was “sometimes.”

If you’re part of the 15% of women who have no experience with cellulite, then you are indeed blessed. For many of us, especially the ones who are veterans of the weight wars, however, we know it intimately. If you look in the mirror at all, there’s no missing those fat deposits under the skin that make it look like orange peel, usually on our hips, buttocks, and thighs. It’s most common in those of us of the feminine persuasion. It comes about because there are strands of fiber-like collagen tissue that connect your skin with the underlying tissues and thus create compartments for our fat cells. When the fat cells get bigger, the compartments bulge out and produce the dimpling effect. The more fat in those fat cells, the more bulging and you can guess the rest.

But there also seems to be a genetic component that helps determine whether a person will display cellulite or not. Some thin women exhibit marked cellulite in certain areas and some women who are medically classified as “morbidly obese” don’t display any at all. People who have thicker skin seem to have less of it, too. In addition, hormonal and other changes that occur during pregnancy and aging can lead to weakening of the collagen fibers and the thinning of the skin, both of which can lead to more cellulite.

There is no well-defined adverse medical effect of cellulite, other than cosmetic, so The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) stated that “there is no medical condition known or described as cellulite in this country” almost 20 years ago. So there’s no “cure” for this unsightly phenomenon, but there certainly seem to be a lot of products and procedures on the market with the professed goal of combating it.

Notwithstanding all these considerations, the conventional wisdom is that weight gain is directly associated with the appearance of cellulite on our bodies. If that’s true, then losing weight should help get rid of it.

In the August 2006 edition of the journal of the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, Dr. Sam Speron, from Chicago, described a study on 29 women who were enrolled in medically supervised weight loss programs. The programs varied from low fat meals to liquid diets to prescription drugs to surgery. The average weight loss for these patients was 30.5 pounds, but ranged from 2.3 to 102 pounds.

At the end of the study, seventeen of these patients had an improved appearance in the cellulite-affected areas, but nine actually looked worse. The cellulite didn’t totally disappear in anybody. The dimples got shallower in the patients who looked better.

So what made the difference? According to Dr. Speron, the patients who lost larger amounts of weight, especially fat in the thigh area, had the greatest improvement in their cellulite. These were also the patients who had the highest starting body mass index (BMI; a measure of weight to height) and the worst cellulite to begin with. The ones whose cellulite got worse started at a lower BMI, lost less weight, and did not decrease their percentage of thigh fat. Another important factor related to appearance was skin elasticity. If the skin didn’t tighten up after the weight loss, the cellulite looked worse.

So what’s a body to do? Seems a major key here is to reduce the percentage of fat in the thighs or wherever the cellulite is appearing. Anybody got any good ideas on how to do that? Seems the experts all say there’s no way to get rid of subcutaneous fat in just one area. You can build the underlying muscles by doing exercises that emphasize using those muscles, but that doesn’t reduce the fat over them unless we lose fat all over. So it’s back to the sound diet and every day exercise routine. What price health and beauty? –Di

technorati tags:weight, loss, cellulite