It's hard to stick to a low-calorie diet day after day to lose weight, but new research shows you don't have to, says Dr. Susie Rockway, a veteran nutritional and biochemical expert in the U.S. health industry.

"Recent studies show you can lose 10 to 30 pounds in eight weeks through alternate-day fasting," she says. "Every other day, dieters in the study ate only lunch - no breakfast or dinner - between noon and 2 p.m. The following day, they could eat whatever they wanted. Not only did they not 'gorge' as expected on the feed days, most had an easier time sticking with it."

Dieting is as much about the mind as it is about the body, and most people have a difficult time staying with any sort of very strict regimen, says Sebastien Hebbelinck, a 20-year-plus veteran of the nutraceutical industry.

In the alternate day fast studies conducted by Dr. Krista Varady of the University of Illinois at Chicago, participants on average consumed only 110 percent of their energy needs on feed days, Rockway says. Lunch on fast days was 400 to 500 calories for women and 500 to 600 calories for men.

Hebbelinck, the CEO of Apax Business Development, which produces the water-soluble fat-binding supplement Lineatabs, www.lineatabs.com, offers these other suggestions for indulging your taste buds while losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight.

• Eat your bigger meals earlier in the day. Avoiding large meals at dinnertime is effective in helping to lose weight, particularly abdominal fat. In fact, another fasting study -- presented at this year's American Diabetes Association conference - showed that dieters who ate big meals at breakfast and lunch and skipped dinner lost more weight than participants who ate six small meals a day.

• Don't belly up to the buffet bar. Whether it's a cheat meal or a cheat day, throw all those studies out the window if you gorge on huge quantities of food. Eat controlled portions of healthy, nutritious foods. You can enjoy a nice lunch with a glass of wine and even a dessert, but don't go back for seconds and don't order the Decadent Chocolate-for-Four if you have no plans to share!

Rockway adds the following tips based on her nutritional and biochemical expertise.

• Include plenty of fiber and water (stay hydrated!). Unlike most nutrients in foods, we don't absorb fiber. It passes through our digestive tract, and if it's soluble fiber, it can help us feel full since it forms viscous gels. High-fiber foods include legumes, beans, avocados, nuts, whole fruits (versus juice), and whole-grain foods such as whole wheat spaghetti. On a cheat day, you may splurge on    a higher fat hamburger or fries, which case this is the perfect time to take a fiber-rich fat-binding supplement such as Lineatabs before the meal to help prevent some of the excess fats from being absorbed. Rockway likes Lineatabs because, unlike other fat-binding supplements, it dissolves in water and is consumed as a beverage, making the fiber soluble in the stomach and immediately available to bind to fats. It then forms a viscous fiber in the small intestines to form a barrier to reduce absorption. AND you get the fluid your body needs!!

• Healthy eating: Plan meals that are higher in lean protein and lower in simple carbohydrates. This will help you avoid a sugar spike that will leave you feeling hungry soon afterward. It also stabilizes your insulin levels, and protein foods are the most satiating.  If you are satisfied after you eat, you will be less likely to snack later. Some great high-protein choices include turkey or chicken  breast, pork loin chop, tuna and salmon and whey protein shakes. Avoid foods high in simple carbs, such as syrups, soft drinks and jams.

About Dr. Susie Rockway, Ph.D., C.N.S.

Dr. Susie Rockway, Ph.D., C.N.S., is a veteran nutritional and biochemical expert and decades-long health industry expert. Rockway has worked for multiple companies in executive capacities, including as an executive director of product development, a director of research, and a manager for science developing health and wellness products, where she communicated nutrition and new science updates to consumers. She has also designed testing strategies for clinical efficacy studies.

About Sebastien Hebbelinck

Sebastien Hebbelinck is an internationally recognized business entrepreneur who has been active in the nutraceutical industry for more than two decades. He is the founder and CEO of Apax Business Development, a 21-year-old company that has experienced major success in Europe with the dietary supplement Lineatabs, www.lineatabs.com. The product contains Solusitan, an all-natural fat-binding complex contained in an innovative delivery system that dissolves in water, making it immediately available in the stomach to bind with fat molecules in food.

We're not No. 1 anymore. Mexico, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, has surpassed the United States as the fattest nation in the world.

An estimated 70 percent of the population is overweight, and about one-third of Mexicans are obese. Just one fat-related disease, diabetes, accounts for nearly 70,000 Mexican deaths per year.

"But this doesn't mean our health to the north has gotten better - it just means others have gotten worse, and the dubious distinction of who is the world's most obese nation is debatable," says Dr. James L. Hardeman, who has seen firsthand the consequences of unhealthy habits during his 30 years as a practicing physician.

"For one, we've been fatter longer than Mexico has and yet we still haven't sufficiently dealt with our national epidemic of fat-based disease. Our overweight and obese percentages are neck and neck with Mexico's, and some of this is due to misinformation."

Dr. Hardeman, author of "Appears Younger than Stated Age," (www.jameslhardeman.com), a pragmatic guide to looking younger, debunks some of the myths that aren't helping dieters:

• Myth: Thirty minutes of exercise three times a week is sufficient. Moderate exercise may work for the 25-year-old with a reasonably healthy diet. When we are young, our basal metabolic rate (BMR) rages like a furnace. Unfortunately, our BMR decreases 2 to 3 percent each decade after age 25. That means we have to make up for that decrease with either better eating habits, more exercise, or both - if we want to maintain a healthy weight. For those who are older, overweight or obese, a stronger commitment is necessary, including an hour's worth of exercise at least five times a week.

• Myth: Gaining weight with age is healthy because it's natural. Metabolism slows with age, causing many to put on the pounds. However, maintaining your Ideal Body Weight (IBW), which factors in height, gender and frame size, will keep you feeling and looking younger if you do not slowly gain weight over time. Also, casually accepting some weight gain over time can lead to massive weight gain considering our largely sedentary lifestyles and easy availability of quick, fatty meals.

• Myth: You should drink at least eight glasses of water per day. Humans posses a sensitive thirst center in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, which responds to dehydration and tells us to drink water. The amount of water needed for each person varies; so we don't need to target a set amount because our thirst will tell us. However, drinking plenty of water may decrease appetite, and water should always be chosen over sugary beverages for satiating thirst.

• Myth: Diet books keep you slim. "Going on a diet" is one of America's favorite pastimes. Diets typically entail temporarily altering eating patterns, losing a bit of weight, and then going back to old habits. This has created an entire genre of literature, as well as videos, gear and meal plans that have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Really, it all boils down to the I&O (Intake and Output) principle. People who stick to Atkins, South Beach and the Sugar Busters diets lose weight because they limit the intake of calories.

• Myth: Taking vitamin supplements every day makes you healthy. Dietary supplement sales represent a $20 billion a year business, yet the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act allows for significantly more lenient rules for supplements than medications from pharmaceutical companies, which are carefully scrutinized by the FDA. Manufacturers are not required to substantiate the supposed benefits of their products. A balanced diet generally provides all required vitamins and minerals needed, with the possible exceptions vitamin B12 for those who eat no animal products, folic acid for women of childbearing age, and, if blood tests indicate deficiency, vitamin B12 and vitamin D in the elderly.

About Dr. James L. Hardeman

Dr. James L. Hardeman has been a practicing physician for 30 years. Triple board certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Diseases, and Critical Care Medicine, Dr. Hardeman has maintained the demanding schedule of both hospital-based medicine and a busy office practice. After graduating Summa Cum Laude from University of California at Irvine he attended Baylor College of Medicine where he graduated with honors. Postgraduate training in Internal Medicine and Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine took place at USC and UCI.

Emotional. Sensual. Intuitive.

Society tends to treat these "feminine" qualities as liabilities; traits that should be suppressed and discouraged because they make us appear "weak."

"Those characteristics are in fact the foundations of our feminine power," says Leela Francis, author of "Woman's Way Home," (www.VividlyWoman.com), which includes techniques and tools from her Vividly Woman Embodied Leader Tools and Training.

By resourcing the power within one's own body, Francis teaches, "a woman can have the life of her dreams."

One of the ways to do that is to master the world of your emotions.

"Emotional power is the freedom to feel the truth of your feelings and the ability to harness them so you're the master of them," Francis says. "When you can do that, your emotions will expand you rather than consume you."

Denying, suppressing or expressing emotion to manipulate others all stifle this wellspring of potential for depth and intimacy, which is a source of mental, physical and spiritual joy, Francis says.

What can you do to begin reclaiming your own emotional power? Francis offers these suggestions.

• Indulge your emotions without dumping them on others. When you digest food, your body absorbs the nutritious elements and expels the potentially toxic wastes. Emotions must be digested the same way. It's important to express your feelings in responsible ways so that you don't build up emotional toxins and pollutants in your body. This may be why anxiety, depression and panic attacks have become so prevalent in our culture, Francis says. Some healthy, responsible ways to express emotion include creative endeavors, such as the visual arts - painting, drawing, sculpting; expressive arts such as singing and dancing; and healing arts such as massage.

• Don't demand others witness your emotional expression; and don't allow others to demand you witness theirs. Using emotional expression to evoke responses from others is manipulative and does not allow you to experience the truth of your feelings. Crying, yelling, even pretending to be happy when you're not in order to influence someone else's behavior are abuses of emotional expression. Not only are we denied the benefits of expression, we have to live with our own lack of integrity for using them irresponsibly.

• Make the time to engage in intimate, authentic verbal sharing. The honest, spoken expression of our true feelings allows us to tap the deep emotions that facilitate our tender connections to others. These connections trigger a physiological reaction that creates our own, natural brain elixir. When women engage in intimate conversation, it encourages the production of the hormone oxytocin, which creates feelings of euporia. (It's the same hormone secreted after childbirth to help our minds and bodies quickly recover from the pain of labor.) It also encourages production of the hormone serotonin, which gives us a feeling of well-being.

• Don't impose your emotional process on others. We sometimes seek to avoid the discomfort of painful emotions by expressing them outwardly to others, for instance, angrily blaming someone else for our discomfort. Yelling at others because of the emotion we're feeling only indicates that we have an inner turmoil, and an inner turmoil can only be resolved self to self. In addition, blaming someone else - or yourself! - for painful emotions causes us to become a victim, which creates suffering.

"These steps will help you begin to master your emotions, and once you do, you will find they will make you richer and more vibrant," Francis says.

"Our emotions don't make us weak; they give us the empathy and love that make us care for and nurture our loved ones. That's pretty powerful."

About Leela Francis

Leela is the founder and director of Vividly Woman Embodied Leader Tools and Training. A facilitator of groups and individuals for over 20 years, she's an expert in the field of body consciousness and soulful personal expansion.  Along with her trained staff and apprentices, Leela facilitates Vividly Woman workshops and retreats at beautiful nature resorts all over the continent and appears regularly as a speaker and contributing facilitator at other live & virtual events. Leela divides her time between Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, and the rest of North America.

Before Karen Kataline knew what a calorie was, she was restricted to 500 of them a day. At dinner, she was not served the same foods as her parents and brother. She remembers being hungry all the time.

Kataline was a toddler beauty queen and performer.

"I'd started performing in dances and beauty pageants at the age of 3 in the 1960s," says the author of a new, award-winning memoir, "Fatlash: Food Police & the Fear of Thin," (www.KarenKataline.com). "My mother wanted me to be a star, and she was obsessed with my weight and appearance. She wanted me to be thin.''

Years of being forcibly held to a restrictive diet had a profound effect. As a child Kataline learned that she could "win" by eating as much food as she could sneak without getting caught. She especially sought the foods that were denied her, from gravy to chocolate bars.

"When parents - or some government agency or official - make food choices for individuals, it sets people up to develop eating disorders," says Kataline, an experienced mental health therapist with a master's degree in social work from Columbia University. "Many times, a child wouldn't have a weight problem at all if his or her parent weren't superimposing their own fear and anxiety about it onto the child."

Likewise, Kataline is troubled by increasing efforts to legislate food choices for adults, from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's attempt to ban super-sized sugary drinks to Los Angeles City Council's prohibition against fast-food restaurants in certain minority neighborhoods,

"The attempt to control a choice as personal and critical to our survival as what we put in our mouths creates serious consequences - whether the control is imposed by an overzealous parent or an army of food police," she says. "Government attempts to force people to eat in a particular way will have the backlash of actually making people fatter."

Kataline offers these suggestions for families who want their children to have a healthy relationship with food - and with themselves.

• Teach children "body integrity" - that they have autonomy over their own body. Ultimately, each of us is responsible for the choices we make, and that includes the choices involving our bodies, Kataline says. Teach children to recognize the differences between healthy and unhealthy choices, and encourage healthy choices by emphasizing its their body and they must both expect and accept the consequences - good and bad - for the choices they make. "Children will learn to moderate their eating habits when they are in touch with their own hunger signals," she says. "When someone else takes responsibility for that, they lose touch with it."

• Set boundaries and respect them. It's normal for parents to revel in their child's accomplishments. But there's a problem when they desperately need  their child to look a certain way, or excel in a particular area, Kataline says. They are imposing their own issues and arrested development on their child -- she calls it "Princess by Proxy." Living through their child and having their child's appearance and accomplishments feed their own need for attention and recognition, or their own political agenda, makes the child a proxy for the adult's agenda and can result in mental and emotional damage to the child. "Parents need to work out these issues for themselves, or with the help of a therapist, and establish boundaries that respect the child's autonomy," Kataline says. "By the same token, we as citizens need to set similar boundaries for our politicians and take responsibility for our own choices."

• If your child is making a lot of unhealthy food choices, encourage her to "check in with herself" to identify the cause. "Sometimes the body says what the mouth cannot," Kataline says. Significant weight gain can be a child's body armor, protecting her from something that feels painful but she's unable to articulate. As a young performer and pageant star, Kataline says she was sexualized at a very early age - given a sexual persona through hair styles, makeup, costumes and even dance moves. Adults' response made her feel vulnerable. The overeating that began as a way to beat her mother's strict dietary rules eventually became a way to protect herself from the looks that made her uncomfortable.

About Karen Kataline, MSW

Karen Kataline is a social worker, public speaker and performer whose professional and personal perspective on the effects of beauty pageants on young children has won the 2013 Sponsor's Choice Award for the National Indie Excellence Awards; the 2013 NIEA Award Winner for Women's Issues and Addiction & Recovery; 1st place Evvy Award, Colorado Independent Publishers Association; and was a finalist in Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Awards. Kataline received her master's degree in Social Work from Columbia University and has worked with teenagers, the elderly and the profoundly traumatized. She taught communications at the New School for Social Research, Parsons School of Design in New York, New Jersey's Montclair State College and Fairleigh Dickenson University, among others. She also continues to perform as a talk radio host, broadcaster and voice-over artist, in musical comedies, and in television and film.