Two out of three Americans are either obese or overweight. More than 100,000 people die each year due to obesity related diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Obesity induced conditions cost the U.S. some $150 billion in health care expenses annually and these costs are bound to increase. An obese adult represents $1,400 more in annual additional health care expenses compared with healthier peers.

It’s not just adults who are suffering. Alarmingly, one-third of all American children between the ages of two and 19 are now either obese or overweight. This puts them at a higher risk of serious diseases that can impair their way of life or worse, cut their lives short.

Dr. Joseph Mercola believes that the very future of the developing world is at stake as a result of the exploding problem of obesity. He’s so concerned about this development that he co-wrote a book with Dr. Ben Lerner called Generation XL: Raising Healthy, Intelligent Kids in a High-Tech, Junk-Food World.

If the obesity epidemic is not reversed, we may see children living shorter lives than their parents, Dr. Mercola warns. He is determined to help turn this deadly trend around and shares seven steps you can take to help your child beat obesity:

1. Drink pure water instead of sugary juices and soft drinks.
   Kids can easily reduce the amount of sugar they consume if you don’t give them soda and juice due to the high amount of high fructose corn syrup in these drinks.. This step alone can have a dramatic effect on your child’s health and weight, since each can or bottle of soda or sugar-sweetened beverage consumed increases  obesity risk by 60 percent.
2. Learn your child’s Nutritional Type to plan meals accordingly.
   Encourage children to eat healthy, nutritious foods. Focus on fresh whole foods, preferably organic whenever possible, and avoid processed foods.
   Any meal or snack high in carbohydrates or sugars results in a rapid spike in your child’s blood glucose level. To compensate for this spike, the pancreas secretes insulin into their bloodstream, which lowers your child’s sugar level.
   Insulin is responsible for an overweight child’s bulging tummy and fat rolls. High insulin levels also suppress glucagons and growth hormones, which burn fat and sugar and promote muscle development.
3. Limit or eliminate TV time.
   A surprising 90 percent of American children under age 2 and almost 40 percent of babies under 3 months old watch TV regularly. This is because more than half of children have a television in their bedroom. Each week, a typical child watches about 38 hours of commercial media.
   Too much TV not only encourages inactivity, it also exposes children to commercials promoting junk food and fast food. A study published in the The Journal of Law and Economics suggests that banning fast food advertisements in the U.S. could reduce the number of overweight children. Eliminating the tax deductibility of TV advertising would also reduce the incidence of childhood obesity.
4. Lead by example.
   Seek to maintain a healthy body weight for yourself and your spouse. Avoid eating fast food. Cook healthy meals and set regular family mealtimes. Your efforts to keep your child away from fast food and junk food advertisements will amount to nothing if you don’t prepare healthy meals for the family.
   Studies show that families who eat together have better overall nutrition. Ask your children to help in meal preparation. Doing so will increase the likelihood for them   to eat the healthy foods you’re serving.
5. Increase exercise time.
   Exercise is extremely important for all children, Dr. Mercola stresses. An obese or overweight child needs at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. Major studies suggest that it is best for kids to get an hour of exercise daily.
   Start exercising as a family. Take daily walks, gradually increasing the intensity to include jogging. You can also implement a rule that allows your child one minute of video (TV or game) time for every minute of exercise.
6. Address emotional eating.
   Emotions play a huge part in childhood obesity. Emotional eating often thwarts weight loss efforts. If your child has a hard time giving up junk food, this is where Meridian Tapping Technique/Emotional Freedom Technique (MTT/EFT) can help. MTT/EFT can be very useful in addressing not only food cravings, but also the underlying emotional challenges – such as low self-esteem – that can lead your child to eat unhealthy foods or overeat.
7. Make sure your child is getting enough sleep.
   A recent study revealed that the risk of obesity increases when one sleeps less than six-and-a-half hours a night. So be sure your child is going to bed in plenty of time to get enough rest.

Numerous studies suggest that marriage and health often go hand-in-hand. In the first place, healthy people are more likely to get married. Historically, married people tend to be in better health than singles.

According to a major international study which spanned 15 countries and involved 34,493 people, marriage is beneficial for the mental health of both men and women and results in a lower risk of mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.

On the other hand, a divorce, separation, or becoming widowed is linked to a substantial increase of mental health disorders in both genders, which usually manifests as depression in men and substance abuse in women.

Moreover, studies show that married people are less likely to:

• Experience back pain and headaches
• Smoke
• Get pneumonia
• Need surgery
• Develop certain forms of cancer
• Suffer heart attacks
• Suffer from dementia
• Have a violent death

But in terms of weight management, married men are more likely to be obese or overweight. Men and women who have never married tend to be slimmer.

All married couples – happy or unhappy – are bound to experience some form of marital stress. A Swedish study of 300 women previously hospitalized for severe chest pains or heart attack revealed that those who deal with the highest levels of marital stress were nearly three times more likely to suffer another heart attack or require a bypass or other procedure.

Another study found that wives who were unhappy with their husbands and experienced high stress within their marriage increased their risk of heart disease due to “wear and tear” on their bodies. And yet another study showed that domineering men and hostile women increased their risk of cardiovascular blockages.

Whether you’re married or not, happier people tend to be healthier, as stress is a key factor in any illness, Dr. Mercola points out. It’s virtually impossible have a stress-free marriage, much more a stress-free life. But it’s not the fighting or stress itself that is unhealthy. Your emotions, positive and negative, play a major role in your physical well being.

Dr. Mercola recommends the Meridian Tapping Technique (MTT)/Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to help you release bottled up emotions safely and effectively. Conventional stress management tools like meditation and relaxation exercises help you cope with stress, but don’t address the cause. MTT targets your disrupted energy meridian system, which causes your heightened stress levels. MTT’s a simple, do-it-yourself acupressure technique that balances out your energy to eliminate your body and mind’s damaging stress response, which is the root of so many illnesses.

1. Blood Pressure
   Your ideal blood pressure should be about 120/80 without taking any medication. Elevated insulin is a major contributors to elevated blood pressure but anxiety, stress and tension may also contribute to this problem. If you’re suffering from hypertension, drugs should not be your first option. Seek out a health care professional who practices stress-relief methods, such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), which is Dr. Mercola’s personal favorite.
2. Cholesterol
   Checking your cholesterol levels can be a confusing thing. One of the reasons is the big emphasis on the importance of the total cholesterol, when the more important predictor of cardiovascular risk is actually the ratio of good cholesterol (HDL) to total cholesterol.
   Dr. Mercola uses the percentage of HDL and obtain this number by simply dividing the HDL by the total cholesterol (HDL/Total Cholesterol). This number ideally should be above 24 percent. Levels below 10 percent are very dangerous and usually indicate an imminent cardiovascular problem. Some clinicians obtain this ratio by dividing the total cholesterol by the HDL (Total Cholesterol/HDL), and in this case, the numbers should be lower. A poor ratio would be any number greater than 4, with greater than 10 having serious problems.
3. Insulin
   You have about one gallon of blood in your body and there’s only one teaspoon of sugar in that gallon, Dr. Mercola explains. If your blood sugar level were increased to one tablespoon, you would go into a hyperglycemic coma and die. It’s insulin’s job to keep your blood sugar at the appropriate level. Eating grain and sugar-rich foods, however, will force your body to make more insulin. You then develop insulin resistance and eventually become a diabetic.
   You need the hormone insulin to survive but many people have far too much of it floating around, leaving them prone to chronic degenerative illness and hastening the aging process. Ask your doctor to do a fasting blood insulin test to determine your insulin levels. If you get a level above 5, it means you have to significantly reduce your consumption of grains and sugars until you lower your level.
4. Weight
   Two out of three Americans are overweight and one out of three is obese. A simple way to find out if you have a weight problem is by measuring the distance around the smallest area below the rib cage and above the umbilicus (belly button) using a tape measure. Waist circumference is the best and simplest anthropometric measure of total body fat and is better than body mass index (BMI). It is also the best indicator of intra-abdominal fat mass. Men would be classified as obese if their waist size is above 40 inches and 37 is the obesity indicator for women.
   BMI, on the other hand, is useful in determining your ideal weight. The National Institutes of Health has a simple online BMI calculator that can help you painlessly calculate your ideal weight.

Before you can truly and fully take control of your health, listen to your body; you can trust it to provide you with the clues as to what is good for you. Consult your physician for more guidance.

Dr. Joseph Mercola believes that love and intimacy – not just the physical form with a significant other but also the emotional form occurring between families, friends and even strangers – can protect and heal us from disease. Studies show that when people express love and feel loved they tend to:

• live longer
• feel happier
• have better cardiovascular health
• be more productive
• be less anxious and depressed
• become less likely to drink alcohol or do drugs

Love is a wonderful thing but it can also be agonizing and destructive. Many health experts, including Dr. Mercola, now regard lovesickness as a serious health concern. Lovesickness can cause people to feel weak and destabilized, and in extreme cases, put them in an extreme sense of despair, depression, hopelessness and physical exhaustion.

Studies show that relationship problems can have a negative effect on mental and physical health, and can be particularly hard on women. Women experiencing severe stress from marriage difficulties were times more prone to heart attack than peers without such stresses.

Heartache is very real. Stress stemming from emotional events may even be worse for your body than the stress from non-emotional events, even though both evoke the same types of responses, Mercola explains.

So how do you deal with heartache and the stress that accompanies it?

Stress is a main contributing factor in any illness and it’s impossible to completely eliminate it from your life. Since stress will always be there, what you can do is to look for ways to adjust your body’s ability to tolerate it. Dr. Mercola recommends energy psychology tools like the Emotional Freedom Technique to deal with depression and stress.

Knowing how to give and receive love will lead to a happier and healthier life so take care of your heart.

Americans tend to eat under a state of stress and anxiety, says Marc David, director of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. When you are eating under the physiological stress response, you could be eating the healthiest food but you won’t necessarily be digesting, assimilating and burning the calories from that food.

When under the physiological stress response, your heart rate goes up and your blood pressure rises. Blood is shunted away from your midsection and goes to your arms, legs, and head. Your digestion also completely shuts down.

In relation to digestion, stress causes:

• cortisol and insulin levels to rise
• as much as four times less blood flow to your digestive system, leading to decreased metabolism
• decreased flow of oxygen and decreased enzyme production (up to 20,000-fold) to your gut
• decreased nutrient absorption
• water soluble vitamins, macrominerals, microminerals and calcium to be excreted and wasted
• a spike in your cholesterol and triglyceride levels
• an increased risk of food sensitivity or heartburn
• decreased gut flora population

Corisol and insulin are two hormones that tend to track each other. When your cortisol levels consistently rise under a chronic low-level stress response, you’ll likely have problems losing weight and building muscle.

The worse part is, with rising cortisol, you’ll tend to gain weight around your midsection. Body fat, particlularly visceral fat (fat around your midsection that gathers around your internal organs), increases your risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Eating under stress puts your body in the opposite state of where it needs to be so it can digest food, assimilate nutrients and burn calories. In short, eating under stress is a recipe for weight gain!

So what can you do to avoid eating under stress?

Stress management is an important part of optimizing your overall health. Though it is not possible to completely eliminate stress, there are several ways that will help you minimize the stressors that seriously disrupt your digestion and other important bodily functions.

Here are some stress-busting strategies:

• Use the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). Meridian tapping helps restore your mind and body’s balance by clearing emotional blockages from your system.
• Exercise is another effective and natural way of providing your body with relief from stress. Endorphins, your body’s “feel good” chemicals are released into your brain during exercise.
• Get proper sleep.
• Meditate.