Seriously, I’ve been trying to eat and live healthier and one of the results to this goal is that I’ve begun to start taking vitamins regularly. At first I was just taking vitamin A and vitamin E daily. Now I’ve added two new vitamins to the regimen.

Cranberry, this one is to promote healthy urinary tract functioning. One of the many bad habits I’ve picked up since attending college is not going to the restroom regularly. I don’t really like using public restrooms and sadly a lot of the ones on campus are particularly nasty. Add to that all of the STAPH outbreaks and what not on campus and I am positively paranoid about going into any restroom other than certain ones that I know are cleaned regularly. And since those ones happen to be nowhere near me, typically I’ll just wait until I get home. I also hate using the restrooms at work because, ugh I swear the football team has no sense of cleanliness. Combine this with my heavy caffeine intake and you know there is a disaster waiting to happen. So in order to try and “undo” the damage I’ve added these vitamins to the mix.

The down side to these suckers is that the recommendation is to take 2-4 capsules three times a day with water at mealtimes. I can also prepare them as a tea, but I think not! So yes, trying to remember to choke down 2 of these suckers three times a day with water and at mealtime is a chore for me since I don’t always have water on hand (Gatorade if I’m at work and soda or tea on campus) and since I’m used to swallowing pills without drinking anything I really have to remind myself to drink water. Then there is the fact that I don’t always get three meals a day. Ah, the college student’s life. Got to love it.

The second vitamin I’ve begun taking is more of a vanity addition. Studies have shown that Conjugated Linoleic Acid (CLA) can actually help to speed weight loss and build muscle. What, is Joana buying into the weight loss gimmicks now too? No not really. It’s a known fact that dieting does not necessarily help you to lose weight, rather you have to make smart and healthy habits and keep them. Dieting recklessly may result in you shedding the pounds like like Pamela Anderson shed clothes in front of a camera, but the moment you stop the “diet” you’ll gain it all back and then some. It’s important to have a proper balance in our diet but most “wonder diets” cut out the necessary fats that we do need, and this is where CLA comes into play:

Some scientists believe that in our quest to lose weight, we are not eating enough fat, or at least not the right kind of fat. The fat that is missing from our diet is conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which is found in red meat, lamb, and dairy products. Although these foods contain some of this good fat, they do not get a clean bill of health, since they are very high in calories and are also packed with saturated fat, which can promote cancer and heart disease. In other words, people who are struggling with obesity have to add more CLA to their diets, otherwise they will be, in Dr. Howenstine’s words, “trapped with an inability to lose weight despite their best intentions to diet.”

In addition to America’s preoccupation with dieting, our abundance of processed foods also leads to our nationwide lack of CLA. The processing techniques manufacturers use strip the CLA right out of the foods we eat. Without CLA, many aspects of our metabolism fail to operate efficiently, as Mark Stengler explains in Natural Physician’s Healing Therapies. “It (CLA) helps glucose get into muscle cells more effectively, thus preventing glucose from being converted into fat. It also helps fats enter the cell membranes of muscle and connective tissue, where the fat is burned for fuel.”

Why do we need CLA so badly? According to Dr. Howenstine, human beings are not able to convert enough linoleic acid into conjugated linoleic acid. If we do not have enough CLA in our bodies, all our dietary fat will be stored as the physical fat that you see on your problem areas, rather than converted into muscle.

I really recommend that anyone thinking of dieting or adding CLA to their diet read the article in its entirety as it is very informative and something I think everyone, whether they’re trying to lose weight or not, should read.

Those are the vitamins that I am taking daily, in theory. Do you take vitamins regularly, if so which ones and why?

Here’s to living healthier.

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