If you are short on time but committed to getting lean and fit, here’s the quick-start plan for kitchen clean-up.  Grab your trash can, open the refrigerator door and dump these three items to decrease your calorie intake and lose weight faster.

3 Food Items to Dump if You’re on a Diet

1. Salad Dressing.  Salad sounds like the perfect diet food. Fill your lunch plate full of healthy veggies and you’ll lose weight, right? Wrong!  In many cases, your salad is a diet disaster. And many times, the salad dressing is what adds the most fat and calories.  In small amounts, salad dressing isn’t too bad.  But when is the last time you measured the amount that you poured on your salad?  The calories in salad dressing can ruin your energy balance for the day.  Even fat-free dressings have a downside.  Often, these products are full of sugar and still very high in calories. A better option is to add spicy, flavorful ingredients like peppers or radishes to your greens and go dressing-free.  Or dress your salad with lemon.
2. Flavored Coffee Creamer. If you can’t live without the sweet, milky taste of flavored creamer in your morning coffee, I feel your pain. I used to be addicted to hazelnut creamer.  But I got over it when I realized the health impact it had on my diet.  If you read the nutrition facts label, the calorie and fat content of flavored creamer doesn’t look too bad. But when you read between the lines, the story isn’t so pretty.  Flavored creamers are one of the most common foods we overeat. If you multiply your actual portion size times the calorie count per serving, you might be surprised. Think the fat-free creamers are better?  Nope. Non-dairy fat free creamers are one of the most common sources of hidden fat.  A better option is to learn to make healthier flavored coffee drinks at home.
3. Juice.  Again, juice sounds like it should be part of a healthy diet-friendly breakfast. In fact, some dieters make juice the entire meal.  But the bottom line is that when you drink fruit juice you are drinking a glass full of sugar. Fresh juice does contain vitamins that are good for you, but why not just eat a whole piece of fruit?  You might be surprised to find that when you compare the calories in an orange to the calories in a glass of orange juice the fruit fares better. And whole food is more satisfying than sipping your calories through a straw.

The one thing that these foods have in common is that many dieters believe they are healthy because they contain a healthy ingredient or because they have a healthy looking label.  We often overeat foods that carry that “health halo” and we end up consuming excess fat, calories and ingredients that aren’t good for us  Of course, dumping these foods is just the beginning of a full kitchen clean-up, but if you can trash these three things, you’ll be on your way to a healthier diet and a slimmer physique.

Now, however, I’m recommending L-carnitine to more and more of my patients because recent studies show that when older people take this safe, inexpensive nutritional supplement, it boosts physical and mental energy and endurance, reduces fatigue and muscle loss, and enhances cognitive function.

Two Key Benefits of L-Carnitine: Energy and Healthy Aging

Carnitine is an amino acid that is synthesized in the liver and kidneys—and concentrated in the body’s most metabolically active organs: the brain, heart, and muscles. Its primary job is to transport fatty acids into themitochondria, where they’re burned for energy.

Young, healthy people produce all the carnitine they need. However, levels may be depleted by kidney and liver disease, genetic defects, valproic acid (an epilepsy drug), cancer—and advancing age. Declines in mitochondrial function are a significant underlying cause of the energy drain associated with aging, and carnitine plays an essential role in increasing energy production. Therefore, it’s not surprising that deficiencies in this amino acid are associated with fatigue, loss of muscle mass and increase in body fat, mental and physical slowdown, and frailty.

This leads to an obvious question. Could replenishing carnitine stores with nutritional supplements delay or reverse some of the adverse effects of aging?

L-Carnitine Puts Pep in Your Step

Clinical trials of supplemental L-carnitine have yielded consistently positive results in terms of self-reported physical and mental fatigue, ability to exercise, and improvements in body composition—particularly when the study subjects are older and/or have documented carnitine deficiencies. Here’s an example.

Italian researchers enrolled centenarians, who fatigued easily and had impaired strength and mobility, and gave them either 2 g of L-carnitine or placebo capsules daily. After six months, no significant changes were noted in the placebo group. Those who took L-carnitine, however, gained an average of 8.4 pounds of muscle mass and lost four pounds of fat. Mental and physical endurance improved, and they gained an average of four points on the 0–30 scale of the Mini-Mental State Examination, a common test of memory function.

Now you can see why I’m so enthusiastic about the health benefits of L-carnitine. If 100-year-olds can have such remarkable turnarounds, just imagine what it could do if you started taking L-carnitine in your 60s or 70s, when carnitine concentrations begin to plummet?

L-Carnitine Offers Extraordinary Cardiovascular Support

At Whitaker Wellness, we put all our patients with cardiovascular disease on L-carnitine. Its efficacy was confirmed by a meta-analysis published recently in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings. Researchers analyzed 13 placebo-controlled studies involving 3,629 patients with a history of heart attack. Compared with placebo, L-carnitine reduced angina by 40 percent, dangerous ventricular arrhythmias by 65 percent, and death by 27 percent.

Before we go on, I want to address a safety issue in regard to heart disease. A few days before this meta-analysis was released, the media had a feeding frenzy over a small, insignificant study that suggested dietary carnitine and L-carnitine supplements promote cardiovascular disease. The stupidity of this nonsensical conclusion is evident to anyone who bothers to check the science. But most media outlets do little more than regurgitate press releases or march lockstep with the likes of the New York Times, which did a real hatchet job, and the sound bite about “the dangers of carnitine” went viral. (For more information, refer to this blog post.)

Meanwhile, the stunning, absolutely newsworthy Mayo Clinic Proceedings meta-analysis was all but ignored. Nobody retracted the warning against L-carnitine—you’ll still find it on the Internet from what I used to think of as reputable sources such as Dr. Oz. Do not believe it. The science indisputably proves that L-carnitine is exceptionally safe and does not cause heart disease. On the contrary, it’s one of the best supplements for treating cardiovascular conditions.

Even More Health Benefits of L-Carnitine

L-carnitine is often positioned as a weight loss aid. Although it definitely improves body composition in older people, many of the studies in younger people aren’t so positive, probably because they already have optimal carnitine stores. It can, however, enhance exercise endurance and capacity in all age groups by increasing muscle carnitine levels and improving energy metabolism. L-carnitine is by no means a magic bullet, but if you’re willing to exercise regularly—especially if you follow the mini-fast with exercise protocol—it may help.

Other health benefits of L-carnitine, especially acetyl-L-carnitine, include improved memory in older people and slowing of Alzheimer’s progression. The acetyl group in this type of L-carnitine can be used to form acetylcholine, an important neurotransmitter that markedly declines as dementia advances. Both forms, however, increase mitochondrial energy production and power up energy-starved brain cells.

Patients with cancer will likely benefit from L-carnitine as well. Most people who undergo chemotherapy and/or radiation report significant fatigue. In addition, advanced disease is associated with cachexia, or muscle wasting and weight loss, and low carnitine levels may well contribute to this. L-carnitine is not a cancer therapy, but it has been reported to improve fatigue and quality of life—and that’s reason enough to use it.

More benefits of L-carnitine include relief from chronic fatigue syndrome, diabetic neuropathy, peripheral vascular disease and intermittent claudication, insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, kidney disease and dialysis, and male infertility and erectile dysfunction.

For all these reasons and more, I’ve added L-carnitine to my daily supplement regimen and suggest you consider doing the same.

Start Reaping the Benefits of L-Carnitine

You can get carnitine from dietary sources including poultry, fish, dairy, and red meat, but for therapeutic purposes I recommend supplements. If memory is your main concern, you may want to go with acetyl-L-carnitine; otherwise, I’d stick with less expensive L-carnitine. The suggested dose is 2–4 g per day, taken in divided doses (1–2 g twice a day) between meals.