Your life is yours alone, Rise up and live it! ~Terry Goodkind

(this is an excerpt of a section in the Abs Diet book, by David Zinczenko)

Calcium: The future of fat fighting

You’ve seen more than enough milk moustaches to know that calcium strengthens your bones, but did you also know that calcium can also flatten your belly? Researchers at Harvard Medical School showed that those who ate three servings of dairy a day—which in conjunction with other foods provides about 1,200 milligrams of calcium (about the daily recommendation)—were 60 percent less likely to be overweight. In studies at the University of Tennessee, researchers put women on diets that were 500 calories a day less than what they were used to eating. Yup, the women lost weight-about 1 pound of fat a week. But when researchers put another set of people on the same diet but added dairy to their meals, their fat loss doubled, to 2 pounds a week. Same calorie intake, double the fat loss.

Calcium seems to limit the amount of new fat your body can make, according to the University of Tennessee research team. In another study conducted at the same lab, people who added three servings of yogurt a day to their diets lost 61 percent more body fat and 81 percent more stomach fat over 12 weeks than those who didn’t eat yogurt. A study in Hawaii found that teens with the highest calcium intakes were thinner and leaner than those getting less calcium.

Some researchers speculate that dairy calcium helps fight fat because it increases the thermic effect of eating—in other words, you burn more calories digesting calcium-rich foods than you would if you ate something with equal calories but no calcium. That’s one reason why calcium supplements, though good for bone-building and other bodily functions, don’t have the same effect as dairy—fewer calories to digest, so fewer calories to burn.

And calcium has its benefits beyond stronger bones and leaner bodies. After analyzing data from 47,000 men involved in the Health Professional’s Follow-Up study, Harvard researchers found that men whose diets included 700-800 milligrams of the mineral a day were up to 50 percent less likely to develop some forms of colon cancer than men whose diets contained less than 500 milligrams. For best effect, shoot for about 1,200 milligrams (mg) of calcium per day.

Related Articles:

http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/nutrition_articles.asp?id=464

http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/nutrition_articles.asp?id=1061

http://www.webmd.com/diet/features/milk-for-your-bones

Goals:

Eat 3 servings of dairy per day, including milk in cereal, yogurt as snacks, milk before bed, ect.