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Q. I often get headaches when I eat only 1000
calories a day. What should I do?
A. Your headaches may be caused by going longer
than three hours between meals or snacks. Try
spacing your meals and snacks where there are
fewer hours between them.
Some people who are used to drinking regular
coffee with caffeine notice headaches when they
stop consuming coffee for several days. If this is
the case with you, you might want to ease off the
coffee more gradually.
Q. I don’t like red meat. I notice that the Lean
Cuisine
®
Lasagna with Meat Sauce contains
beef. What can I substitute for it?
A. Lean Cuisine
®
has many other frozen dinners
that you may substitute for Lasagna with Meat
Sauce. Try to find one that contains the same
calories, with approximately 15 to 20 percent of
the calories coming from fat. Some of the Lean
Cuisine
®
dinners actually have too little fat for
my nutritional requirements.
Q. May I have dinner for lunch and lunch
for dinner?
A. Yes.
Q. I tend to get a headache when I drink
cold water. Can I drink water without it
being chilled?
A. Yes, but you won’t get the 123 calories or more
thermogenic effect from warming the cold water
to core body temperature. Try a more gradual
drinking of the cold water. You may have been
consuming it too quickly.
Q. Is it possible to drink too much water?
A. Certainly. To do so, however, you’d probably
have to drink four or five times as much per day
as I’m recommending. There are a few ailments
that can be negatively affected by large amounts
of fluid. If you feel you have a problem, check
with your doctor before starting the program.
Q. Is bottled water better than tap water?
A. Research shows that bottled water is not always
higher quality water than tap water. The
decision to drink bottled water or not is usually
one of taste. If you dislike the taste of your tap
water, then drink your favorite bottled water.
But first you might want to try a twist of lemon
or lime added to the water from your tap. Some
people say it makes a significant difference in
the taste.
Q. I’m a middle-aged woman who gets black and
blue marks on my legs when I diet. Am I doing
anything wrong?
A. I doubt you are doing anything wrong. Such
black and blue marks are usually the result of an
increased level of estrogen circulating in your
body, which weakens the walls of the capillaries
and causes them to break under the slightest
pressure. When this happens, blood escapes and
a bruise occurs. Estrogen is broken down in the
liver, and so is fat. When you are dieting, your
liver breaks down the fat, leaving a lot more
estrogen in the bloodstream.
It may be helpful to supplement your diet with a
little extra vitamin C each day to help toughen
the walls of the capillaries.
Q. I’m a 40-year-old woman with a teenage son
and daughter. My husband and I both want to
lose 10 pounds (4.5 kg) and the children would
also like to lose some weight. Can I put the
whole family on the program?
A. It would be great if you could, but you cannot.
The number of calories per day is the problem.
Teenagers require significantly more calories
each day than 1500, which is the highest level.
Check with a registered dietician (RD) for
appropriate recommendations.
Your teenage son and daughter, however, could
follow the Bowflex
®
exercise routines.
Q. I’m afraid that I might get large, unfeminine
muscles from some of the Bowflex
®
exercises
you recommend in this course. What can I do
to prevent this from happening?
A. You are worrying about large muscles
unnecessarily. Building large muscles requires
two conditions. First, the individual must have
long muscles and short tendons. Second, an
abundance of testosterone must be present in
the blood stream. Women almost never have
either of these conditions.
Under no circumstances could 99.99 percent
of American women develop excessively large
muscles. Progressive resistance exercise such
as with the Bowflex
®
machine will make your
muscles larger—but not excessively large—and
larger muscles will make your body firmer and
more shapely.
Q & A