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Calories control weight, but nutrition controls
hunger, and hunger controls how much you eat.
In this section, we show you the problems dieters
face with handling the vitamins and minerals -- and
what to do about them.
There are thirteen known vitamins and fifteen known
minerals that are required in human nutrition.
Like other necessary nutrients, these substances
must come from what you eat, because they cannot be
made by your body -- and they are vital to life and
health.
If you don't get enough of even one of the vitamins
or minerals, your body will be "stressed" by
trying to cope with the shortage. It's reaction to this
stress will almost always include triggering some
combination of hunger, cravings, aches, pains, low
energy, or other unpleasant symptoms whose purpose is
to force you to eat to get your body whatever
vitamin or mineral it needs more of to keep you
healthy.
As dieters, we don't want to suffer this hunger
because it makes dieting nearly impossible to do for
long enough to lose much weight.
Main Discussion:
"Vitamins" can make diets very easy -- or
very difficult.
Vitamins and minerals probably cause more "diet
failures" than any other single factor. But this
is only because people "take them for
granted".
Most people don't know how many vitamins or minerals
there are, much less how these substances will affect a
weight-loss diet. Although there is nothing surprising
about this ignorance, it's "a set-up for
failure".
In modern societies, most of the vitamins and
minerals really are "ultra-easy" to handle,
if you know how. Several, however, are not so easy and
they are the ones that cause 99% of the problems.
The lack of any vitamin or mineral will destroy a
diet because this lack will trigger hunger (or some
other "food-seeking" behavior), and you can't
stay on a diet very long when you are constantly hungry
or thinking about food.
So the general approach to vitamins and minerals is
to make sure you get enough of each of them. But
on a diet, this won't just happen by itself. (It often
doesn't happen by itself even in "ordinary
life".) Instead, you must do specific
things to make sure it happens.
Officially, there are 13 vitamins and 15 minerals
(28 total). But for dieters, the "vitamin vs.
mineral" distinction is not very important.
What is important -- and it is very
important -- is the "macromineral" vs.
"vitamin/trace element" distinction.
Of the 28 known vitamins and minerals, 21 are
vitamins and "trace elements". These are
substances your body needs in very small
quantities. "Small", in this case, means less
than one milligram per day. This means you can take a
single multivitamin/mineral supplement tablet and get
your full daily requirement of each of these 21 with no
further fuss or bother.
The remaining 7 of the 28 are
"macrominerals" -- and they are different.
Your body needs them in large quantities -- 1000
or more milligrams per day (magnesium excepted). You
cannot take these amounts together in a single tablet
because the pill would probably be too big to swallow
(and there could be other problems as well.)
Because the macrominerals are needed in such large
quantities, you often won't get enough of them
just from food, because on a diet you aren't eating
much food and only a very few foods have them in high
enough concentrations to make up for these small
quantities.
Therefore you need an eating technique that makes
sure you get enough.
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