Focus on Your health

2012-02-09T13:48:00.000-08:00

Jawbone fitness tracker may be very helpful....

Today's Post: Thursday, 2-9-2012

I heard it existed last Saturday in a talk by the doctor who founded the Stanford Center for Disease Prevention, Dr John Farquhar.

See http://jawbone.com/up/product .

1. Keeps track of your activity all day long from walking to your car to go to work to jumping rope fast. 2. It can be set to prompt you to stand up if you have been sitting too long!

The bad news first.

Currently it is only for people who have an iPhone and are tech savvy and into social media.

If you lack any part of that, you can’t yet use this product. BOO! That means I can’t use it.

The measurement device and programming could easily be put into a product the rest of us could use that would need no mobile device. I saw no listing of plans to do so however.

Hopefully they will realize they are leaving more than half their potential income on the table and change that. But I saw no sign that they intend to do this so far.

The three things it has to recommend it most are that:

1. You can get a real picture of how much effect you are producing from your exercise program and how active you are the rest of the time.

Most people who exercise keep track in a log; but some people don’t and almost no one keeps track of their other activity. This device can give you extra data to put into your exercise log. But most importantly, it can help you keep track of how much you move the rest of the time and help you improve it.

This is like being able to see out when you drive on the freeway. If you can’t, you have no data to use to stay in control. With exercise logs and some knowledge of calories burned by different exercises you can get more than half way to the data you need for exercise. But for your other activities, this device can give you a 100 % picture instead of hardly any idea. That’s a huge positive improvement.

2. I read that sitting too long was a bad idea and tried an idea to get me up more often. I forgot to do it. Then I developed a couple of sets of easy but vigorous standing exercise and a log to help me ensure I remember to stand up an extra time and do these five times every weekday. In 5 more months, I’ll have used this for 24 months. It’s worked out well. (I already got up 5 times a day to go make tea and at least that often to visit the bathroom from the extra water.)

But sitting long is so bad for you that just standing up and sitting down about 10 times a day besides that would help. Now, I’m simply to busy to mess with it.

If you have their device, you can set it to buzz you every 15 minutes to remind you to stand up briefly. As busy as I am I don’t have the mental bandwidth to remember to do that and do my work too. But I just stood up and sat down and timed it. It took two seconds! THAT I would have time for. The reminder function this device has for that is worth the whole price of the device and its “App” software based on the research I’ve read on the health harm of sitting too long.

Also, if you take really long air flights, this function could save your life. Sitting for over 5 hours without getting up more than once or twice can cause life threatening blood clots. But if you get up every 15 minutes extra, you may never get these clots.

3. The device also can track how well you sleep. Do you sleep well now?

If not, you might benefit a lot from getting into exercise every day if you don’t already to that. You might sleep better if you took a tiny dose of melatonin at bedtime. You might sleep better in a darker room. You likely would sleep better if you usually drink more than two drinks a day and might if you cut your average to closer to one a day.

You can try these positive changes one at a time and see exactly how much each one helps.

You might even find you have sleep apnea in time to fix it before its effects kill you.

This again is worth the whole price.

The added feature that it can get you up at a time you aren’t in the deepest sleep might appeal to some people.

That one I’d have to try. But I doubt I’d use it.

Yes if you get up at the exact same time each day and sleep closer to 6 hours a day than 7 or 8, you do wake up some mornings feeling as if you need someone with a crane to get you up and a bit groggy at first or have the alarm slam a dream you like to a full stop.

But when you need all the sleep you can get and find this alarm gets you up 7 to 10 minutes before your alarm setting when you need that sleep, that is something I find horribly obnoxious when it happens to me by itself now! I’d have to try it. But I doubt I’d use it.

A device to shape your sleep sections to optimize getting up would be nice so you’d get up right on time but from a light sleep. But I suspect this device isn’t quite up to that. Using it for a month might have that effect though with a gradual training effect. But again, I'd have to try it to see.

2012-02-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

Soft drinks are as bad as smoking and diet soft drinks are worse....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 2-7-2012

Most people know that smoking is harmful to your health.

(Although few yet know how certain the harm is or that tobacco causing 30% of all cancers is its LITTLE problem. The BIG problem with smoking is the certain increase in heart disease and cut backs in your blood circulation from tobacco smoke exposure.)

But how many people know that drinking soft drinks is very close to that harmful?

It should be close to 100 %. Needless to say it’s dramatically less than that.

Then too, millions of people drink diet soft drinks in hopes of getting less fat than if they drank regular soft drinks. Oops!!

How many of THOSE people know diet soft drinks fatten MORE than regular and are also that harmful?

Both the sweeteners and many of the other ingredients in soft drinks are harmful.

Here’s the summary in three parts.

Ingesting excess sugar, once thought to be relatively harmless even by doctors, turns out to lower HDL and increase triglycerides. But, thanks to research done at Harvard, we now know that means that ingesting things that do that increase the amount of small particle LDL which is a direct cause of heart disease.

The main single source of excess sugar today is from people drinking regular soft drinks. And the high fructose corn syrup in them is a form of sugar that is even more fattening than regular sugar. A recent study found that excess calories even from healthy foods can make you fat. BUT, a study found that high fructose corn syrup is a bad exception -- with the same number of calories you will get a LOT fatter from high fructose corn syrup calories!

What about diet soft drinks? People who drink them don’t know they act as triple strength drugs to massively boost their appetite for real sugar. Based on the research results, they then find a way to eat even more sugary calories than they would have from drinking regular soft drinks. And, so far, the health impact is as bad or worse. Research has documented diet soft drinkers get fatter and grow the fat in their waist area even more than people who drink regular soft drinks.

In addition to these drinks most people think are normal and harmless being a direct cause of getting fat and causing heart disease, these same metabolic effects help cause type 2 diabetes.

Two other key points.

1. Like tobacco and its smoke, drinking soft drinks helps cause many other health problems.

But two are worth special mention because they are unusually nasty to the people who get them. (The others aren’t far behind.)

a) Imagine being unable to move because your leg bones are broken and can’t support your weight. Also imagine having pains all over your body from small breaks in your other bones. It’s called osteoporosis and the drugs for it have dreadful side effects and do little to fix it.

If you eat enough foods with calcium and magnesium and get enough walking and other exercise and take or get enough sunlight to wind up with 3,000 or more iu of vitamin D3 a day, normally you’d not get osteoporosis.

(Drug hormone replacement for women at menopause was thought to help prevent it but was proven to be harmful for other reasons. Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy is thought by many to be as effective in preventing osteoporosis and to not have those side effects.)

But today in BOTH men and women many people already have some or a lot of osteoporosis. Most of them have no clue they do either. Why?

Every day they drink soft drinks that taste a bit spicier and refreshing because they contain phosphoric acid. Oops! Phosphoric acid leaches both calcium and phosphorous from bones. It’s like taking a daily drug that causes your bones to weaken structurally and doing it every day of every week for years. (Both regular and diet soft drinks contain phosphoric acid.)

b) Imagine getting someone to get thousands of tiny stainless steel needles and somehow firing them into many of the smaller joints in your hands and feet. Sounds like something out of a horror movie. It’s called gout. And the needles in your joints are actually crystals of uric acid.

Something that horrible would be worth missing wouldn’t you say?

Men who ingested the most fructose, more than doubled their chances of getting gout researchers in two separate locations found.

Who ingests the most fructose today?

People who drink regular soft drinks more than 7 times a week and people who drink diet soft drinks that often and then eat foods sweetened with high fructose corn syrup because of how much their craving for sugar went up.

2. The MUCH better news.

If you have been drinking soft drinks for years because you thought like most people still do that they are normal and harmless, you have a way to lose a good bit of fat without getting hungrier at all!

Ten to fifty pounds or more of fat now on your body is there from drinking soft drinks. But if you switch to water, soda water only, tea, or coffee without sugar or excess cream, you’ll cut off all that calorie intake. But not only will you not be hungrier, you’ll actually be somewhat less hungry and with fewer sugar cravings. That’s true if you have been drinking regular soft drinks. But the huge drop in sugar cravings you’ll get from stopping diet soft drinks is even more.

Hunger free fat loss is the main key to losing fat and never having it return – permanent fat loss.

Simply not drinking any soft drinks any more for people who drink them now is just about the most effective and hunger free way to do just that.

As extra benefits, your heart health protection will go up and your chances of getting type 2 diabetes and several other diseases will go down.

2012-02-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

Why tax fattening food and drink components....

Today's Post: Monday, 2-6-2012

UCSF is the University of California medical school campus in San Francisco.

It is at the state of the art in many areas of medicine and preventive medicine. And, since I live in the area it’s local to me. So I see information often about their research.

Dr Robert Lustig, a doctor specializing in obesity studies, and health policy researchers Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis authored an article in the journal Nature that appeared last Thursday, February 1, 2012.

It was covered in the online health news that day and the following Friday.

Their article highlights the cost of treating obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancers caused by excess sugar intake.

They explain that taxing sugars would reduce the amount of such diseases that recent increases in sugar intake have caused to go up. And, they point out that the money raised can also help pay for the costs of treating these diseases.

We’ve posted on this before. A study was done that found that making healthy foods less expensive caused people uneducated on this issue to buy more sugary treats with the money saved!

In contrast, increasing the cost of the sugary treats caused people to buy less of them and buy more health supporting foods. And, no time consuming and inefficient educational efforts were needed. So the effect was virtually instant.

That study supports their position!

I’ve also posted that today most governments are short on revenue and that virtually all other taxes slow the economy and cost jobs.

In contrast to that, taxing harmful food ingredients saves so much in the medical costs avoided that:

TAXING HARMFUL FOOD INGREDIENTS RAISES MONEY FOR GOVERNMENTS BUT DOES NOT SLOW THE OVERALL ECONOMY. (This is also true for taxing tobacco products of all kinds.)

That was their point in their article.

The United States federal government is apparently considering a soda tax that would raise the price of a can of soft drink by around 10-12 US cents, bringing in about 14 billion dollars a year.

The authors say that the statistical analysis they used suggests that the price would have to double to significantly reduce soft drink consumption – “so a one-dollar can of soft drink now should cost two dollars.”

No, having a tax of 10 cents an ounce for both regular and diet soft drinks, wouldn’t raise ten to 12 times as much because people would buy and drink less.

But the cost of the treating the diseases now produced, currently about $165 billion a year would also drop that much.

So instead of $165 billion a year in health care costs and no tax, we might have something like $70 billion a year in yearly tax income and have the health care costs drop to $82.5 billion a year.

It’s important that the tax per ounce on soft drinks include diet soft drinks since despite their zero calorie content they act as a strong drug boosting sugar cravings reliably increasing sugar intake as much or more than the regular soft drinks multiple studies have found! (Literally tens of millions of people who do not yet know this now drink diet soft drinks!)

Comparable taxes on sugar and other sweeteners by themselves and as ingredients in other foods make sense as well.

The comments in the news coverage focused on soft drinks; but their underlying focus was on the health harm from fructose which is in both regular sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

They did not cover the comparable health harm from eating refined grains. But the glycemic effect of refined grains is actually higher than sugar delivers!

So comparable taxes on refined grain foods also make sense.

Imagine if both all states and the federal government imposed taxes on all soft drinks, all sugars, and all refined grain foods and those drinks and foods all cost four times as much.

The governments would rake in some serious money. And, the amount of these things people would buy and ingest and be harmed by would drop like a stone.

These foods and drinks would still be available. But they would be the occasional treat people have a few times a month or a year instead of the two or three times a day intake some people now have.

The coverage of the article didn’t cover the specifics of why sugary foods and refined grains in excess cause disease.

But the research shows these effects, though little known by most people, are quite real.

Eating lots of sugary foods and refined grains in massively excess quantities reliably cause dramatic increases in triglyceride levels and substantial decreases in the beneficial HDL cholesterol.

But that effect, researchers at Harvard found, means that the small particle LDL that causes heart disease goes up that much too. So eating lots of sugary foods and refined grains in massively excess quantities is heart attack starter just like eating trans fats and hydrogenated oils is.

Secondly, research has found that the high triglyceride levels and roller coaster blood sugar levels eating lots of sugary foods and refined grains in massively excess quantities causes insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

So, these three authors are quite right.

Cutting back on how much of this stuff people ingest by taxing it enough would dramatically cut the amount of people with heart disease and type 2 diabetes and the medical costs we now are paying to treat them.

By the way, I personally love sugar and the treats it’s in. But after learning this information I’ve cut back by over 8 to one in how often I allow myself to eat it. And, I drink no soft drinks as a firm policy.

These taxes are for the people who don’t know this information or refuse to believe it or can’t get themselves to cut back even after they find out.

And these taxes are for the cash strapped governments that now are paying for some of these avoidable health care costs!

The evidence shows they are badly needed; long overdue; and should be enacted immediately!

2012-02-03T13:58:00.000-08:00

Health OK Super Bowl snacks, 2012....

Today's Post: Friday, 2-3-2012

This is an updated edition of our post from this time last year, 20011 & going back to 2008.

Health OK Snacks for Super Bowl parties...

Why are health OK snacks so important?

It's not just at the time the Super Bowl happens each year about now that people eat snacks. Many people make snacks as much as a quarter or a fifth of all their weekly food. Some go to a full third of the calories they eat.

The other factor is that the health damaging snack foods are some of the very worst foods people eat while the health OK snack foods are actually good for you or at least not that bad.

That means that hosting or taking snacks pot luck style to a Super Bowl party is a chance to try
out health OK snacks yourself & introduce them to your friends & family.

Dips:

First, let's literally dispose of one category of what NOT to use. One year, my wife & I were taking snacks to my parent's house. I knew that two things to use to dip snacks into that are actually good for you & taste great are guacamole & hummus. But my wife wanted to bring some traditional dips as well. I went to an upscale grocery store in our area & went to that section. Ouch !!

Even there, there were no health OK choices at all. Every one of the commercially made up dips (except the guacamole) they stocked had partially hydrogenated oils (which contain transfats) or high fructose corn syrup with some having both.

(In case you don't yet know, partially hydrogenated oils-- which contain transfats -- & high fructose corn syrup are avoidable health poisons that are not yet completely outlawed & out of our foods.

Transfats are literally cardiovascular disease & heart attack starters. They have the same kind of effect as using lighter fluid to start up charcoal for a BBQ. The safe amount of those to eat is zero, absolutely none. (Trans fat causes your LDL to become the tiny particles that go into the cracks in your artery walls, build up, and then restrict or block blood flow!)

High fructose corn syrup is not quite that bad. It only tends to make you fat & trigger type 2 diabetes. (People who eat real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup may get a bit fatter; but eating the same calories of high fructose corn syrup they get even fatter!) It may be safe to eat on occasion. But eating it in the quantities people do who don't know to avoid it -- is NOT safe.
(And there’s more, about 30% of the high fructose corn syrup contains mercury, a nerve toxin that can cause Alzheimer’s like symptoms!)

So, to be sure my wife & I don't eat high fructose corn syrup in quantity or eat any that contains mercury, we do not eat it all. We also are doing our part to boycott an unsafe food additive by doing that.

(As of 2008, between 30 % and 55% of the products, including name brands, that contain high fructose corn syrup also contain mercury because a mercury compound is use to make the high fructose corn syrup used in those products. Also note, if high fructose corn syrup is listed first or second on the ingredients list, it’s more likely the product contains mercury.

2012 update: Since it has NOT been in the news that this has been fixed, I seriously doubt that it has been fixed.

So we currently recommend you completely avoid buying or ingesting high fructose corn syrup.)

So, for dips at this writing, you have three health OK choices: buy guacamole; buy hummus: or make your own dips.

Health OK components to consider running through a blender or adding to after you run the blender to make health OK dips are salsa, vegetarian beans, cooked black-eyed peas, regular baked beans, hummus, nonfat yogurt, frozen chopped spinach, chopped onion, extra virgin olive oil, chili powder, & chopped cilantro.

You can also make a somewhat healthier dip by substituting one of these for part of the sour cream in sour cream based dip recipes. A half hummus, half sour cream recipe would have half the saturated fat of a full sour cream recipe. But it would taste richer than a hummus only version.

2008 addition: Real sour cream is not exactly a health food due to its high saturated fat content. But compared with dips with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil it almost IS a health food by comparison. As an occasional dip treat, we found that real sour cream with a good bit of a good quality, multiple ingredient, curry powder makes a great dip.

We’ve taken to bringing 3 dips when asked to provide them: Hummus, guacamole, and this curried real sour cream. I particularly like having about 2 or 3 fresh veggies with each of the three dips. That way, I get a lot of the fresh veggies and two thirds of the dips are actually good for me to eat.

Crunchy foods:

People often use crackers for crunchy snack foods. This is an extremely bad idea. Commercial crackers today still tend to use partially hydrogenated oils (which contain transfats). Almost as bad, they usually are badly over-salted and are made only or mostly from refined grains. About the only food component they contain is calories. So eating them tends to make you fat.

If for variety or for guests who would feel deprived, you would like to serve some crackers, there are two kinds that are almost OK.

Crostini makes an absolutely delicious cracker that is not too salty & uses olive oil instead of transfats. They sell those at Whole Foods Market stores. They do use refined grains. But they taste good & avoid the other health damaging components.

Safeway & other major grocery chains carry RyKrisp or Rye Krisp crackers. At least one of their versions has no fat at all. These are almost a little too crunchy for my taste. But that's because they have whole grains, which are better for you. But be careful as one or more of the available versions have partially hydrogenated oils (which contain transfats). Just check the label to see which kind is OK & skip the other versions. The version that has NO fat at all is the health OK one.

Chips: Most potato chips and related snacks are messy to clean up after. People tend to massively overeat them. And, this is true to such an extent that they wind up being as fattening as soft drinks in the people who eat them every week -- which is pretty bad!

They also are heavily over-salted. The real fans of one or the other of the teams will likely ramp up their blood pressure pulling for their team. They could do without super salty chips adding to the effect! So, the advice from here is to leave chips out totally.

Nuts:

Because some people are quite gravely & severely allergic to these, they are likely NOT a good idea for larger groups of people you don't know well. This kind of allergy to peanuts is so wide-spread now, we suggest you never serve peanuts or mixes containing them to people you don't know.

Only serve nuts to family or friends you know can eat nuts OK.

However, for people who can eat nuts safely, raw walnuts, raw pecans, & dry roasted almonds are delightfully good crunchy snack foods. Even better, they have so many health benefits, that people who eat nuts regularly live several years longer than people who don't.

(I've found the best store for these to be Whole Foods Market stores. They carry these kinds of nuts in bulk & in packages -- both at reasonable prices.)

(Unfortunately, commercial nut mixes often do everything wrong.

We do NOT recommend those !!

They often include peanuts because they are cheaper. They increase the shelf life by roasting them in partially hydrogenated oils (which contain transfats) or in polyunsaturated oils like corn or soy oil that tend to break down at that temperature & contain excessive omega 6 oils. Then they usually make them even less health OK by over-salting them. Yikes!)

Crunchy vegetables:

Broccoli Florets; Cauliflower Florets, Celery sticks, & Carrot sticks work really well with dips.

Radishes are also a nice change of pace. They are too small to dip well. But they are both crunchy & spicy.

Protein foods:

B & M Baked Beans are decent simply heated up & served. If you want totally vegetarian, Bushes makes a decent, pre-cooked Vegetarian baked beans. Both come canned at major grocery stores.

If you can afford them, real crab meat, lobster meat, & shrimp with the tails removed are all health OK choices.

(Just don't mix these into dips as some people are allergic to them. Served alone though, people can see what they are & avoid them if they are allergic.)

Cheeses are less health OK because of their sky high amounts of saturated fat – and if from grain fed cows, they are also too high in omega 6 oils. But for special occasions only, they have no other health problems; they are easy to set out in bite sized pieces; they are available almost everywhere; & they come in many varieties with abundant flavor.

Other foods:

Another snack food that works really well is stuffed olives. They are a little too salty to eat at all often. But they are health OK otherwise. And many of the versions taste great. Pitted olives come with (or you can make them up to contain) sun dried tomato, blue cheese, feta cheese, garlic, blanched almonds, etc.)

Fresh strawberries that have been washed & green leaves & stems removed are an absolutely wonderful snack that is also really good for you to eat.

Drinks:

For non alcoholic drinks, Martinelli’s carbonated apple juice & carbonated apple cranberry juice are decent choices for special occasions. And, some people like, grape juice, orange juice, tomato juice, &/or V8 juice. You can also try 100 % cranberry juice mixed half and half with Martinelli’s or club soda for a lower glycemic and tarter but still festive drink.

(Drinking all kinds of sodas & soft drinks is so harmful to the health of so many people, I personally feel that they should never be bought or consumed even on special occasions.

If you feel differently though, drink as little of them as you can stand.

Here's why:

1. They usually contain high fructose corn syrup*, sugar, or artificial sweeteners, a preservative that has been implicated as causing cancer and thyroid disease, artificial flavors, water & nothing else besides the carbonation. Only the water is good for you. Sugar is OK only in strict moderation. And the other junk tends to reliably make people fat & cause health problems.

(See the previous comments about high fructose corn syrup and the mercury in it.)

2. Diet soft drinks believe it or not are even more fattening and harmful to your health direct research has found.

That sounds impossible doesn’t it?

In addition to possible harm from the artificial sweeteners for some people, it seems that ingesting something that tastes really sweet with no sugar in it causes your body to lower your blood sugar when it started out not high. You then have low blood sugar and begin to strongly crave real sugar and the foods it’s in.

This means that in practice drinking diet soft drinks acts as a powerful drug to make you eat even more sugar than you would have had you drunk a regular soft drink. And, you’ll eat a LOT more than if you drank water or tea or coffee.

Would you take a drug that was an appetite booster for sugar and sugary foods so strong it was virtually irresistible?

NO. You likely would not if you didn’t want to get fatter and more likely to get type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

If those are things you too would like to avoid, do NOT drink diet soft drinks!

Of the alcoholic beverages, red wine & dark beer actually have extra health benefits! And, beer is a traditional drink for watching football. Even better, there are a huge number of really good dark beers now available.

New this year: I just found out that beers like Michelob Ultra and Molson Ultra taste as good as regular beer but with far lower sugar and carbohydrate content. So if you want a beer that’s OK if you are trying to lose fat even at a party, those can be good choices.

Most alcoholic beverages, in fact, tend to boost HDL cholesterol.

But make sure to make the quantities small to moderate. Not only can people who drink too much cause problems at your party or get into an avoidable car accidents driving home, if they get into an accident where there is injury or significant property damage, as the host who served them too much alcohol, you can be sued in court.

For your own drinking, drink one or two early in the party and if you drink another have it be early in the second half. The longer the time between when you drink and when you drive, the safer you are.

If you will drink or do wind up drinking more than that, take a cab or have someone drive you home

(I’ve found that two pints of beer early and then hot chocolates after that keeps me feeling festive but hangover free the next day.)

I hope this post gives you some ideas as to what snacks to avoid year round & some that are either almost OK or are actually good for you to use instead.

2010 addition:

Some people serve chili at Super Bowl parties. Here are three alternatives.:

1. If you use exclusively beef from animals fed only grass, any good chili recipe you find or like is good at least on special occasions. (Grain fed beef has excessive fat, saturated fat, omega 6 oils and tends to have pesticides and herbicides bioconcentrated in its fat. Beef from cattle fed only grass is a bit more intense in flavor and avoids these problems.)

And, you can make up your own recipes. It’s not at all hard. Make one and taste it on Saturday; and if you like it or find it decent, save some to reheat and have during the Super Bowl.

2. Use any kind of cooked beef you like that comes from cattle fed only grass. Use hamburger, shredded cooked beef or chop cooked beef into quarter inch or a touch bigger cubes.

Use any good tomato sauce or pasta sauce with no oil added plus the amount and kind of mild extra virgin olive oil you like. (Or you can buy Muir Glenn pasta sauce at Whole Foods which, in its Four Cheese, Italian Herb, & Roasted Garlic & some other varieties has some olive oil; & it comes in glass bottles -- not canned where you have to worry about BPA.) I use Muir Glenn and then add some extra, extra virgin olive oil for a richer taste. (Avoid any kinds, if you can, that use soy or canola oil. Those have too much omega 6 oils.)

Then add a good chili powder. Spice Islands and many other companies make these. Add a bit and taste. Then consider your likely guests in deciding how much to add or whether to add a bit of red pepper also. The ideal is to make it spicy but not so harsh or hot that some people won’t like it.

(You can add, mild cooked green chilies, chopped onions sautéed in olive oil, mushrooms, etc.

And, you can set out several kinds of add-ons, diced sharp cheddar cheese, diced raw onions, mushrooms if you don’t include them in the chili, or diced, fresh, organic tomatoes.)

Simply stir the ingredients together over low to moderate heat until heated through and your chili is done. (This presumes you cooked the meat first. Or, you can put everything into a crock pot and run it on low for several hours which both cooks the meat without overheating it and melds the flavors together.)

Unless you have guests coming you know hate garlic, it also adds a lot of taste and health benefits to add it. Use two or three or four cloves, depending how much chili you’re making,. Then peel, dice, and crush them and stir them in after the chili is cooked and just before it’s served.

3. You can also make 100% vegetarian chili. You can substitute whole, cooked beans or blenderized, cooked beans or canned black eyed peas or canned cooked lentils for the grass fed beef. You can even make it with hummus. If you add enough good tomato or pasta sauce, chili powder, extra virgin olive oil, and other spices the flavor is just as good as the grass fed beef version. (I like the versions with the blenderized cooked beans as it’s smoother and easier to eat than the whole cooked, bean versions.)

From 2011:

We do NOT recommend sandwiches on refined grain bread or chicken wings fried with a breaded and spicy sauce. (Refined grain breads both fatten you and tend to harm your health. They are nice for a kind of edible holder or temporary plate. Use paper napkin or fork or a real plate instead!)

But skinless chicken thighs with or without the bone or the smaller part of chicken wing in the bone with the wing part removed before cooking where they are slow cooked with a spicy sauce or marinade can be served with paper napkins or forks if boneless and plates or small paper plates can work. Cooking them overnight in a crock pot works and blends in the flavor too. Olive oil with garlic powder and red pepper to taste can work. Coconut milk with diced garlic and diced, peeled ginger also works well.

You can also use boneless, skinless chicken breasts and cut them after they are cooked into bite sized pieces and serve on plates with a small fork.

Our you can cook hamburger patties using grass fed beef and serve them Atkins style on plates with a fork.

Using garlic powder and a pinch of salt and adding a bit of olive oil to compensate for the grass fed beef being lean and add some dried sour cherries and diced onion before the patties are cooked and then cook them over moderate heat in a cast iron frying pan.

Annie’s natural foods makes a yellow mustard with no MSG and a ketchup with no high fructose corn syrup. Both are also made with organic ingredients.

Last point.:

Super Bowl parties are a special event. So, people will be watching the game. Plus, this is one of the few times a year they watch the commercials. So, it is understandable that they will eat while watching. Our recommendation is to not worry about this for the Super Bowl game. If the snacks are health OK, stop there and let people enjoy the event.

But, one of the surest ways to get fat the rest of the year is to eat while watching TV.

Watching TV is fattening by itself, particularly if you watch over 15 hours a week.

And, snacking even on health OK snacks tends to cause people to concentrate on the TV and just keep eating even though they are no longer hungry. People who do both AND drink soft drinks and eat fattening snacks are virtually all obese (very fat!)

So, THAT we do suggest avoiding!

New this year:

I read a good idea. Set up the table where food is served in a different room than the TV. That way people get a bit of a break from sitting to get food and they’ll eat a bit less.

A related non-food idea was if you have two TV’s and enough room, have a TV in one room for the serious fans and a second one in a room where people are there mostly to socialize.

Whether you bring things to a party or host one, I hope you enjoy the game!

2012-02-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

Exercise helps prevent cancer & helps people recover from cancer treatment....

Today's Post: Thursday, 2-2-2012

Research on those two subjects came out this week.

1. The one on preventing prostate cancer with exercise was good to know since in my family there is a family history of it.

I found it very nice to know that the exercise I’ve already been getting has given me the extra benefit of adding to the many things I’m doing to prevent cancer, prostate cancer, and aggressive prostate cancer.

But the information on HOW they discovered it works means that exercise also likely helps prevent ALL cancers! That’s huge. It’s front page news important!

2. People who get chemo or radiation treatment for cancer quite often feel impaired, less mentally sharp, and have a reduced quality of life. (That’s in addition to the stress of worrying about the cancer!)

The second study found that exercise can and did reverse a good bit of all that!

That too is huge. It’s front page news important!

1. The first study was in this story: “Science Shows How Exercise Might Help in Prostate Cancer By Steven Reinberg TUESDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News)

Apparently the research was done by a team led by June Chan, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, and urology at the University of California, San Francisco.

They found that vigorous exercise caused changes to the expression of 180 genes.

(In case you haven’t yet heard, it seems we don’t inherit genes that have only one setting. We mostly inherit genes that either have several settings or can be switched on or off, “expressed” or not “expressed.”)

Apparently the exercisers switched ON genes known to suppress tumor growth. And they switched ON genes that repair DNA.

The researchers were careful and said exercise could help prevent or delay progression of the disease.

Clearly exercise did cause the desirable things to happen! In a given person that might or might not be enough just like putting water on a fire.

The men who got the good effects did a total of at least three hours a week of exercise or activity than is or often is vigorous. The men in the study did running, swimming, and played tennis but that much vigorous exercise every week was the key.

The researchers found direct evidence that exercise likely also helps prevent breast cancer in women.

That’s because two of the genes more expressed in the men who exercised are two of the best known to suppress breast cancer, BRCA1 & BRCA2.

The men who exercised had increased expression of genes involved in DNA repair. That means that small cancers might get fixed before they get larger.

And they also expressed genes that tended to turn off or stop or slow the growth of cancers.

To me that means that if you want to not get cancer or have it be slow growing enough you have a shot at surviving it, exercise averaging about half an hour a day can be a huge help.

Note that if you don’t now exercise, the sooner you begin and the sooner you build up to the 3 hours a week – as long as you don’t rush it and overdo – the sooner you begin, the sooner you get this protection!

2. What if you get cancer and then get it treated with chemo or radiation?

Wouldn’t it be nice if your recovery and quality of life and mental ability went well or at least better than it now often does?

Apparently doing both cardio and strength training each week even if you just begin exercising after the treatment does exactly that!

The second study was in this story: “WEDNESDAY, Feb. 1 (HealthDay News) -- Exercise can improve the health, energy and well-being of cancer patients after they've completed their main cancer treatment, a new review finds.”

Women just treated for breast cancer who then went on an exercise program -- "....showed improvements in” things that exercise normally does such as better blood sugar control & getting less fat & their legs got stronger

But the front page news is that they also got better in vitally important ways to recover from the treatment. They had less fatigue and depression, and their quality of life improved.

Patients with other types of cancer who exercised got similar improvements. They got stronger as measured by hand-grip strength, and they became more fit.

But the key thing is that they too improved with less depression and better quality of life.

Also breast cancer patients found that aerobic exercise AND doing some kind of strength training was much more effective.

Breast cancer patients who did both got better results “on physical fitness, emotional fitness, overall well-being and fears about breast cancer….” They got better results than the women who did only cardio.

(Doing some strength training too was a huge help in other words.)

Other research on exercise and its benefits also show that doing some cardio AND some strength training each week provides better results than just doing cardio. So that part might have been expected. The results were the same.

There was some variation in the results. Younger people tended to do better for example. The researchers speculated that might have been because the younger patients were able to do more exercise.

Similarly, I suspect that people who were doing such exercise before their treatment and resumed after the treatment or began doing closer to their prior routine would also do better. (They too would be able to do more exercise after the treatments.)

The bottom line is that that doing regular and vigorous exercise doing both cardio and strength training each week gives you two huge benefits.

It makes getting cancer or bad cancer less likely AND it can help your recovery go MUCH better if you do wind up getting chemo or radiation treatment for cancer.

2012-01-31T14:23:00.000-08:00

The truth about cholesterol....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 1-31-2012

One simple way to put it is this.

You can lower your total cholesterol and your LDL cholesterol and not get much heart protection.

But it’s also quite true that if you do the things that do protect your heart, your total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol will tend to go down.

That may seem to not quite make sense. But it is quite true.

Here’s why.

a) Total cholesterol contains protective HDL AND potentially harmful LDL.

So, if you lower your total cholesterol by lowering your HDL, your total cholesterol goes down but so does your heart protection!

Large particle LDL that’s not oxidized or loaded with excess sugar is thought to be quite harmless. Small particle LDL tends to cause heart disease. So, if you lower large particle LDL without lowering the small particle LDL, your total cholesterol and LDL go down. But you get little if any added heart protection.

That means that there are two ways to lower your total cholesterol that worsen your heart protection or leave your heart protection the same.

But if you do the heart protective things that increase HDL and lower small particle LDL your total cholesterol will go down somewhat and your LDL will down more.

The four things that do that best by themselves are:

1. Completely stop eating hydrogenated oils. Because they lower HDL and increase small particle LDL, hydrogenated oils are basically heart attack starter. Earlier this month, Friday, 1-20-2012, we did a post on this and how to avoid eating this stuff since it’s still in so many foods!

2. Build up to it safely and a bit slowly to be sure. Take short breaks when you need to while exercising. But get into and continue doing vigorous exercise most days of every week. This directly increases your HDL and lowers your small particle LDL. Recent research even found that every year you keep exercising this way, your protection and this effect keeps getting better!

3. Completely avoid tobacco smoke. It both boosts your blood pressure immediately and causes heart disease directly and the plaque in your blood vessels tends to cause high blood pressure over time AND heart disease.

Tobacco smoke, lowers HDL and oxidizes your LDL and harms and inflames your blood vessel walls causing any small particle LDL you have to cause even more heart disease. Every puff or exposure does this damage. Worse, tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks too!

We did a post on this and on new ways to quit last week on Thursday, 1-26-2012.

4. Take niacin. Even 300 mg after a large meal once or twice a day can help, particularly if you do many other heart protective things as well.

(Some people with liver damage should not take it. And taking more than 1,000 mg a day can cause liver damage in some people. So it’s safest to have your doctor check your liver function if you take niacin.)

But we now know that if your HDL goes up and your triglycerides go down, that means your small particle LDL went down too! When you take niacin, that’s exactly the effect you see! Your HDL goes up; your triglycerides go down. And the drop in LDL you also get tends to be the small particle kind that causes heart disease.

Best of all, research found that people who take niacin tend to have a lower mortality rate. In plain language, you not only will be less likely to have a heart attack or an obstructive, ischemic, stroke, you’ll be less likely to die from one.

b) Taking statin drugs can lower your LDL and total cholesterol. But only some people get much heart protection.

Most people have a genetic type such that 100 people have to take a statin for years to prevent one heart attack.

There are also some people who have a genetic type where 41 times as many people get heart protection.

Cardiologist, Arthur Agatson, wrote an article in which he said the test to tell which category you are in was only $150.

If you are in the larger group, you will be more likely to get side effects than heart protection from statin drugs. And some of the side effects are obnoxious such as cataracts and a feeling of low energy and some serious such as fatal muscle breakdown.

In that category, your LDL goes down but you get very little heart protection for the cost and risks.

c) Eating many things like whole fresh fruit and raw and cooked vegetables and cooked beans and lentils and NOT eating high fructose corn syrup, much sugar, or foods made of refined grains and NOT drinking soft drinks tends to lower your risk of heart disease in many ways. Eating raw nuts if you aren’t allergic to them also helps.

You’ll be less fat.

You will be less likely to have high blood sugar or type 2 diabetes, very high blood sugar.

Your blood pressure will be lower.

Your triglycerides will be far lower. And, your HDL will be higher. That means your LDL will be lower and much of that drop will be the harmful small particle kind.

In fact, because the oils high in omega 6 and hydrogenated oils are in many foods made with refined grains you will stop eating, your drop in LDL from doing this will be unusually heart protective!

This tends to create excellent heart protection. Yes your LDL will go down.

But using this method to create that LDL drop gives you heart and health protection that drugs cannot begin to match.

d) Eating this way and getting the regular, vigorous exercise also make your LDL you still have far less harmful for another reason

Eating this way AND exercise tend to prevent high blood sugar. That’s huge because high blood sugar makes your LDL far more harmful.

Excess sugar tends to stick onto LDL and make it like traveling sand paper in your blood stream. In previous times there was a weapon on a chain that was a ball of iron with spikes sticking out of it. Really high blood sugar makes your LDL about that hard on your blood vessels. The plaque that builds up on the damage on your larger blood vessels helps cause heart disease and this sugared LDL begins to simply destroy your capillaries.

This may even mean that the larger fluffier kind of LDL that’s normally harmless can begin to harm you too.

The bottom line is that doing these several things that ARE protective will lower your LDL and total cholesterol.

But, for most people getting lower total cholesterol and LDL by taking statins is not that protective.

Worse, if people who do all these things wrong take statins, the risks and costs of statins or totally wasted.

Doing these things wrong will overwhelm any good the statins might have done.

I read there has been a recent debate on whether or not doctors should put people on statin drugs to lower their total cholesterol or LDL if they are just a bit high. This has become quite common and even the norm for some doctors.

This information shows that this is NOT a good idea and that it is bad medical advice.

Doctors should know to be prescribing these lifestyle upgrades instead and doing so.

If they aren’t good at teaching or persuading people to use these upgrades, they need to prescribe seeing someone who is to these patients.

For their patients who are unable or unwilling to take that advice, the next step is not prescribing statins. The same is true if their total cholesterol or LDL is quite high. (High triglycerides or low HDL also would add urgency since that means high levels of small particle LDL.)

The next step is to have them take the genetic test to see if they are in the minority who actually get worthwhile protections from statins.

If not, the more common result, the Berkeley Heart lab found that taking niacin is far more protective.

Only if they do test in the group that statins help and have quite high scores or have already had a heart attack do statins make sense.

And, for the most at risk patients, prescribing the lifestyle upgrades becomes more critical. That’s particularly true for the younger, seemingly healthy people who have dreadfully bad risk factors.

2012-01-30T14:37:00.000-08:00

How & why to exercise as you sit....

Today's Post: Monday, 1-30-2012

Yesterday, Parade Sunday Magazine had an article on exercisers you can use while sitting.

Catherine Price who wrote it lists 4 different exercisers you can use while sitting.

(I’ll come back to those later in this post.)

Too much sitting makes you fatter and increases your risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and mental decline. This is a LARGE effect! Unless you sit less or exercise while sitting it’s a more forceful effect than taking drugs for those things.

Between sedentary transport to work instead of walking, jobs mostly sitting at a computer, and TV or reading or video games evenings and weekends, most people today spend about two or three times too much time sitting for good health!

Watching 14 hours or less a week of TV instead of 28 or more helps. (You burn less calories sleeping than watching TV! And the fattening things you’d be better off not eating or drinking have lots of ads on TV too.)

Exercising during the evening when other people are watching TV or when you used to do so can help.

For some people, using an elliptical trainer or treadmill while watching TV can help. (Many gyms are set up for it.)

Getting regular exercise during the time you aren’t sitting can help. Walking and strength training for your legs are ideal. Even spending time doing housework or gardening while you are standing up can help.

But if you sit an hour a day during your commute, 8 hours a day at work, and watch TV for 3 hours, that’s 12 hours a day of sitting.

The Parade article and something I’ve been adding to my own fat loss progress report recently are a badly needed and I think doable solution to this.

If you only exercise while sitting half the hours at work and half the hours you sit at home, that’s 42 hours a week! Even if you only exercised hard enough to burn 50 calories an hour, that’s 2100 calories a week.

Both for keeping good health and for avoiding getting fat or getting rid of it, the data is in that 2100 calories or more of exercise a week begins to be at the ideal range. And, that’s time you actually have available now if you can exercise as you sit.

So, far, the state of the art is not very good.

The exerciser needs to be smooth enough in operation and just easy enough to do that between those two, you can do the exercise on it while you sit without taking your attention away from you are doing otherwise.

Since that’s most important at work and most people sit the most at work, that makes this extremely important.

None of the four exercisers in the Parade article will do the job for most people at their work as far as I know. Though one might.

The one that slides around is too distracting, doesn’t give you much exercise, and could cause you to fall and either be hurt or mess up work you’ve spent hours on doing when you put out your hand to stop your fall.

The foot exerciser is too much work to do by the hour though it would go underneath most desks.

The bicycle motion one with just a stand, something that turns, and pedals might work but won’t fit under most desks. The article said it was available for $150 at magnetrainer.com . (Note that URL has only one T.) If its size matches you and it operates smoothly enough, you might be able to use that one a home while reading or watching TV.

The similar exerciser that bills itself as an elliptical trainer is also available for $150 at staminaproducts.com . The author says it might work at some desks in a recumbent bicycle style.

That might be true if the foot strokes to operate it can be short enough strokes.

Those two very well might work at home if they are smooth enough in operation.

But for either at home or at work use, you’d want to have a very low hassle money back guarantee to buy online Or it would make sense to have them in a chain sporting goods store, such as Big 5, where you could try out a demo model and check out the clearances and sizes and smoothness of operation.

One or both of those might work at home. They would cost way less than a full scale elliptical trainer or treadmill. The key would be some way to test how smooth they run for you without buying first.

The second one might work for people at their work. But potential buyers would also need to be able to try it at work to be sure -- or want it for home use if it didn’t work at their job.

This is an area I’ve been thinking about for several months.

During that time, I’ve been ending my monthly, personal, fat loss progress report with this:

“Eventually I’ll also need to get a specialized minibike or other seated leg exerciser I can use while seated at my desk and another I can use while reading at home or at my home computer.

They don’t yet make those that I know of but most people today need them. Given the health harm of sitting too much and how many people do that, these minibikes or other seated exerciser for your legs and chairs that match them well are coming soon I think.

Walking burns about 300 calories an hour. (200 if you are skinny and walk slowly to over 500 if you walk really fast or walk somewhat fast but are much heavier.)

Using a seated minibike or other seated exerciser that you use much less effort on but keep moving slowly most of the time you sit can easily burn 50 calories an hour.

Then, if like many people today you sit for 6 hours a day, you could easily add an extra 2100 calories a week by using a seated minibike exerciser most of the time you sit at home or at work. That would help people lose about 2 and a half pounds a month for a few months once they got into the habit of always using one.

If I’d used one of the seated minibikes since I began my current fatloss plan, I’d still need to add the extra muscle to be at my goal weight. But I’d be trying to add muscle weight to get back to my goal weight! That’s because I’d be 10 to 15 pounds less fat.)

I’ve also had an idea for awhile. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from doing their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!)”

** If you’ve used either the MagneTrainer Mini-exercise bike or Stamina’s E1000 Elliptical Trainer OR you’ve found something else in that price range that you have used and would like to do so, please comment here!

2012-01-27T15:13:00.000-08:00

Ways to live long and in good health....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-27-2012

Recently there was an article on ways to live to be 100. I messed up & didn’t save where I saw it. (It made some good points, so I wish I had and could refer you to it directly.)

But I’ve used it as a starting point rather than just listing the ideas in it.

1. It’s helpful if your parents and grandparents lived long lives. Part of living long does look to be inherited.

But the genes for long life are complex and there are many. Not just one or two.

And, some of the apparent heredity is from doing as you saw your long lived relatives do or they taught you to do and what you saw them not doing!

The best news though, is that we now know that these genes are NOT rigid designs. Instead they are available built-in capacities. AND both the helpful ones and the harmful ones can be turned on and off, “expressed” or not depending on what YOU do.

The kinds of exercise to do and foods to eat and foods and drinks to NOT eat we often post about quite often are your control levers to turn your longevity genes on and not off!

Doing the reverse – eating and drinking junk, not exercising, and smoking or getting a lot of exposure to tobacco smoke tend to turn them off!

So, to maximize your genes for long life, read our posts and similar information:

Find ways to customize to you the health supporting lifestyle we write about and that work for you.

Do the best you can. The people who do tend to live into their 90’s and stay healthy almost all of their lives.

2. The article I saw said, “Don’t retire.”

That’s one way to do it. For people who make a contribution at their work and still can do so, who are good at their work, and who like it, that works.

Similarly, some people do well with partial retirement. Some cut back to part time. Some become consultants in their area of expertise.

The real message, though, is stay engaged and active in your life.

For many people not fully retiring from work does the job well.

But other ways work for some people.

Some people who can afford to retire from work and already spend time with their extended families or their church or nonprofit work or even their hobbies.
If these people then do these full time or close to it and almost as energetically and as solidly engaged as they did when they were working, that also does the job.

It’s the active engagement with live, staying active, and staying connected to other people that does the job.

I’m likely to keep working myself. But both my parents retired and used the second method.

They both work. Use one of them or both of them. But stay engaged and active.

This both improves your health and makes it worth continuing to live.

3. Use healthy life management strategies.

a) Be prudent. Avoid harm when you can. Always wear your seat belt. Be “proactively paranoid” as business author, Jim Collins recently put it. Find out about risks and how to avoid them and do it.

b) Be purposeful and well organized.

Develop systems and even day to do routines that you almost always use. Take actions you know work to achieve your goals. Find out things that might work and check for the facts and try them.

Have goals and purposes that are important to you. People who have a main personal mission or life work live longer than people who don’t. (This relates to the stay active strategy.) But it doesn’t have to be that grand. Having several things you want to do take action to do also works.

c) Be scientific, careful, and analytical when things go wrong. Things that go wrong do so for specific reasons and can be better if more useful causes are put into place. That’s the truth. People who assume they will stay bad are simply less accurate and less careful thinkers. Worse, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and excuse to do nothing to improve things. Learn NOT to shoot yourself in the foot that way!

But in working on goals or when things go well notice the good things and how they help you and how they keep appearing. Have hope and be optimistic. Remember things you got done and assume you can make these goals happen or you’ll find a way. Then take action.

Martin Seligman, PhD studied these two factors. People who are high in both have better lives in every way. They have better health and live longer. They usually make and have more money. They have more friends. They often succeed in achieving their goals big and small.

d) Be conscientious. Be kind. Be dependable.

You’ll feel better about yourself.

But even more important, you’ll stay connected to people and they will treat you better.

Both benefits help you live longer and enjoy it more.

e) Whether you or not take supplements too, be sure to know which foods have multiple health benefits and eat many of them every week.

Foods have the vitamins and minerals you can get in supplements. But they often do far more.

For mixed carotenes and calcium getting them in food is more effective and safer than taking them as supplements.

Many nutrients have health benefits in their natural form that are NOT in the synthetic partial copies in some supplements.

But the really important 3 reasons for eating lots of these superfoods are these:

Many nutrients such as vitamin E in foods, are complexes or families of related nutrients. The common supplement for vitamin E, alpha tocopherol in its natural form, does have benefits. But gamma tocopherol gives far more protection from prostate cancer. Walnuts have both kinds. Extra virgin olive oil has more kinds than just alpha tocopherol.

In some cases the supplement has a valuable ingredient even by itself. But the foods that ingredient is in also have co-factors that can multiply that value as much as 20 times.

Third, we don’t know all the values of all the nutrients in foods. But scientists are already discovering there are dozens in almost every kind of natural food.

Many of the supplements ARE valuable by themselves or add the value of eating those nutrients in foods. But the best health always comes to people who eat the most nutritious foods.

Blueberries and other berries. Raw nuts walnuts and others for people who aren’t allergic. Extra virgin olive oil. Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables. Broccoli and other dark green, yellow, or orange vegetables high in carotenes. And, avocados -- are all super foods.

People who eat abundantly from these foods have dramatically better health and live longer than people who don’t.

For example, broccoli and other dark green, yellow, or orange vegetables high in carotenes contain alpha carotenes. People who eat them look healthier because they get a warmer skin color. But a high blood level of alpha carotene also goes with good health and living a long life recent studies found.

f) Get at least 6 hours a day of sleep. If you also exercise and sleep that core 6 hours at the same time each day or very close to it doing this works even better. Avoid sleeping more than 8 and a half or 9 hours most days.

g) Do vigorous and moderate exercise most days of every week.

It keeps your brain working and dramatically slows aging.

h) Learn to brush and floss right and do so every day. (The focus on that is stimulating your gums and cleaning your gumline thoroughly.) Get your teeth cleaned and checked every 6 months. This prevents gum diease which causes health harm in your whole body. It allows you to keep your teeth which helps you look and feel younger.

i) Stay connected with people and socialize with them regularly. Learn to do it well and find and stay connected with people you like and enjoy.

Be SURE to include many people younger than yourself and keep meeting new ones! That way if you outlive many of your friends from your earlier life you still are connected.

This does 3 things each of which helps you live longer.

You enjoy life more and find it worth staying alive.

You gain a support network than can give you essential help at times.

And, you get brain exercise from socializing that is hard to believe brain scans found. Just because you are skilled and have done it all your life, it feels easy. But the scans show it requires and activates enormous resources in your brain.

That means that socializing, just like physical exercise,keeps your brain working well as you get older.

2012-01-26T14:40:00.000-08:00

New breakthroughs in quitting smoking....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-26-2012

1. The good news is that it’s now known that EVERY exposure to tobacco or its smoke is harmful. This is known in some detail too.

This means that second hand smoke is almost as bad as smoking yourself.

And, it hacks away the most common rationalization most smokers now use like Alexander’s sword cutting apart the Gordian knot.

That goes like this: “Some smokers don’t get cancer. So I have a shot at continuing to smoke and not get cancer. I’ll just presume I’ll be one of the lucky ones who don’t and keep smoking.”

We now know the reality is far different.

All tobacco smoke exposure EVERY time with no exceptions -- begins to add a brick to the wall of creating disease in your blood vessels that will cause heart attacks, strokes, ED (impotence), PAD or peripheral artery disease, and does the same to your lungs aging them very rapidly and impairing your breathing. It also gradually causes high blood pressure. And tobacco smoke exposure also causes blood pressure to rise within a few seconds and stays high for some time after the exposure stops.

The build up in plaque in the arteries to your brain from smoking can cause mental decline and does. And the medical procedure to remove it has a death rate. Again, this effect is sure and happens to ALL smokers.

Smoking not only causes all these disease effects, it speeds up aging too!

We also know that all tobacco smoke exposure triggers heart attacks in people who would otherwise have escaped them for years or who never would have gotten them. (That immediate rise in blood pressure is one likely reason.)

This is true of brand new teen smokers, babies in smoking homes, and smokers who only have 5 cigarettes a day.

In fact, they showed teen smokers that tests of their breathing ability were similar to what much older and even older middle aged people usually had.

Twice as many of the teens were able to quit smoking. That is very important to know!

Each of these effects is certain and happens every time!

No smoker or person exposed to second hand smoke escapes them!

Being lucky doesn’t prevent them. EVERY smoker is harmed and none escape.
The only effective escape is avoiding tobacco and its smoke.

Worse, the cancer risk from tobacco is MUCH worse than we once knew.
Tobacco and tobacco smoke causes 30 % or more of all cancers! It doesn’t just cause lung cancer.

And, we now know why. All commercially grown tobacco is fertilized with a fertilizer that contains small amounts of the radioactive element polonium. If this element gets into your blood stream, it tends to cause cancer everywhere your blood goes. So breathing tobacco smoke or putting tobacco in your nose or mouth puts radioactity into your blood.

That means that it can cause any cancer in the body -- from brain and colon cancer to breast and prostate cancer!

And the statistics show it does. This is NOT guesswork.

So, if smokers who might quit or succeed in doing so, knew all this information, the quit rate would be higher than it is now!

Just part of this information doubled the quit rate for teens for example.

Meanwhile most smokers have never heard of this other information. Most still believe that because not all smokers get cancer, they can escape harm even if they keep smoking.

So the first breakthrough that can at least double the quit rate and double the success rate of people working to quit is to make sure all smokers find out!

That goes double for people trying to quit.

2. Smoking actually does things for the people who smoke. Yet few programs to help people quit provide much to get ALL these benefits to smokers in other ways.

The other major breakthrough is that this is fixable. Some of those fixes are reasonably effective now. Better, each of those fixes is improving.

a) Smoking is a well anchored, conditioned stress reliever.

People who take long and slow drags when they are full right after dinner or enjoying the company of people they like have low stress. Then if they get over-stressed, they can connect to that unstressed feeling by smoking the same way.

And they do just that!

I once ran a stop smoking group for a company that thought people could just smoke a bit less each week starting with giving up the cigarettes people didn’t want that much any way and going from there.

It was strikingly ineffective, unfortunately.

With only the exception of an unusually determined man and a woman who had to quit to get married to a man in a religion that didn’t allow smoking, this problem de-railed ALL the other 50 or 60 people in my classes.

The majority of them were able to get to the point where only the cigarettes that connected relaxation to smoking such as right after dinner and the cigarettes they smoked when most stressed were left.

Did they give up those two kinds of smoking? Nope. When it came time to do so, they almost all dropped out and continued to be smokers.

But we now know a couple of effective and extremely fast stress relievers that have not yet been taught to smokers trying to quit.

Yawning and brief but vigorous exercise.

A few deep breaths is suggested now but doesn’t do much. Yawning with a related stretch of your arms and shoulders however is surprisingly effective. It’s even a bit faster and can be done immediately when you first realize you are stressed.

For people who know such exercises and can do them safely, doing a few seconds of an exercise vigorous enough to command their full attention and cause fast breathing – and then the recovery from it is close to as effective.

And, there are several ways to teach people how to get long term stress relief.

The best is to help people learn to take actions that prevent, escape, or turn off the stress.

That can’t always be done nor can these skills be instantly taught. But most smokers can quickly improve their skills in doing this.

Any regular exercise tends to increase the capacity of the person who does it to overcome stress without physical effects from the stress.

I read a study that found twice as many smokers trying to quit who also began exercising quit successfully than the smokers who didn’t add the exercise.

(That’s from other causes too. Smokers who quit also need relief from depression and a way to avoid gaining fat once they quit. Exercise helps do all three, stress relief, depression prevention or improvement, and helping avoid or remove excess fat.)

The other stress protectors are doing exercises that in themselves are relaxing.

Tai Chi is the best. People who practice it almost every day get very good stress relief. In people with high blood pressure, people who learned to do Tai Chi and who then practiced it almost every day, dropped their high blood pressure by 17 over
11. (It also burns about as many calories as walking during that time and is effective even in 10 minute sessions.)

This means that Tai Chi gives better stress relief in far less time each day than the other alternatives.

A recent study found that sessions of 30 to 45 minutes of swimming worked. (People with high blood pressure who took up swimming dropped their blood pressure by 9 points a recent study found.)

Some people who do yoga get this effect. But that varies a good bit.

Meditation works for some people but takes the most time to do. Not everyone can learn to do it or has the patience to do it. Few people have the time needed. And the average person gets the least stress relief and the least lowering of high blood pressure from meditation according to the studies I saw.

b) Depression cure or relief.

Nicotine acts as a kind of antidepressant though it does this more for some smokers than others.

The safer drug to help people quit is the antidepressant Wellbutrin, also known as Zyban for helping smokers quit. It’s the same kind of antidepressant as nicotine. So it does work to help some people quit.

The problem is that this drug has a very high rate of side effects which I once did not know. And, like nicotine, it works better for some smokers than others.

Nicotine replacements like patches and inhalers and “gum” have helped many smokers quit. But it too is not effective for everyone. And some people who do stop smoking stay addicted to the nicotine replacements.

Wouldn’t a more far more effective way to reduce depression without drugs be better?

How about one with other benefits instead of side effects and with a 75% or better proven success rate?

Few know it yet, but there is one:

The program creator has a book on it. And exercise is one of these 6 methods. People who do all 6 of his steps to the best of their ability do stop being depressed unless they have brain damage.

His book is available on Amazon in paperback. The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs by Stephen S. Ilardi .

c) Fat gain prevention or permanent fat loss.

Smokers who quit often wind up getting fatter.

My next door neighbor quit and then went back to smoking when he saw that he got more of a pot belly.

So know how to prevent that and doing it before or as you quit can really help!

When people quit their food tastes better. And some quitting smokers turn to comfort food to replace smoking as a stress reliever.

So another way to relieve stress and eating only nonfattening foods are both keys to avoiding this problem.

Our posts here often cover what to eat MORE of AND far less of to avoid this and that exercise helps a lot and which kinds of exercises people have time for that works best.

Also, Weight Watchers works for some people.

The basics are to stop drinking soft drinks. (Both regular AND diet make you fat.)

Stop eating foods that contain refined grains or harmful ingredients like hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup.

Eat a DASH diet or a Mediterranean diet or a combination emphasizing eating lots of nonstarchy vegetables and less refined grains.

Cut your intake of sugar or sweet foods at least in half. Cutting it in half a second or third time is even better.

Build up to it gradually from what you can easily do at first. But do strength training and interval cardio or other vigorous exercise for a few minutes to half an hour almost every day. Do a good bit of extra walking too if you can fit in the time for it. Keep brief log every time you exercise. Try to do most of it first thing in the morning at home. People who do are more likely to be able to keep doing it.

Cut back a bit extra on calories only some days of the week. And only eat right all 7 days of the week with only a few exceptions each year. Do NOT overdo cutting back eating less too much or too often. If you do your body’s failsafe famine response will make you get fat again. If you find you have more than a bit extra hunger, eat more protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables. And cut back your overall calories a bit less.

Weigh and measure yourself a least each month on the same day and time each time. Take action if you gain to stop it. Keep doing what is working for you.

Fat gain prevention or permanent fat loss is doable. But it requires permanent lifestyle upgrades. Temporary starvation always fails and is not good for you either.

5) Health protection and damage recovery.

People who value their health who want to keep it or have it be better AND who take action to do so find it FAR easier to quit smoking.

Second, people who have been smoking have harmed their health and are more likely than most people to get the resulting diseases.

Mercifully, just quitting and staying away from second hand smoke turns down those effects. And that begins almost immediately. Much of the damage is reversed in two months and much of the remaining damage is reversed in a year or so.

But if you want to stay healthy, taking action to speed that up and to prevent heart disease and cancers is definitely a good idea!

But doing this, learning how, and doing it consistently also multiplies your chances at quitting smoking permanently!

If you spend several hours cleaning and polishing something, you might be upset with someone who messed that up soon afterwards.

Similarly, if you are working to protect your health every day and turn off the damage from smoking faster, what happens if someone offers you “just one cigarette?”

Before, you might have messed up before and just restarted smoking. Once you’ve invested your own effort in protecting your health and reversing the damage and begun to think of yourself as someone who takes action to protect your health, part of your reaction will be, “If I do that, it will mess up all my hard work!” And, “I used to not know any better. I’m not like that any more.”

So a major way to quit smoking successfully is to begin to take action to protect your heart health and to prevent getting cancers.

Our posts regularly cover ways to do each of these.

For example, one of the ways that smoking causes heart disease so effectively and every time you are exposed is that it causes your protective HDL to go down and even make what’s left ineffective at protecting you.

So begin to do things that boost your HDL. Use extra virgin olive oil instead of margarine or butter or cheap oils high in omega 6 like corn and soy oil. If you can drink safely, drink a glass of red wine with dinner most days. Try taking 300 mg of niacin after your largest meal each day. Be SURE to get regular vigorous exercise. Eat some egg yolks or wheat germ or take a choline supplement or all 3. Eat berries most days or several days a week. Eat raw unsalted raw nuts most days if you aren’t allergic. Stop eating anything with trans fats or hydrogenated oils in it. (See our post last Friday, 1-20-2012.)

Begin to do things that lower your LDL. Doing so with foods you do eat and stop eating is effective as statin drugs. It gives you more heart protection. And it’s dramatically safer. Last, you get other health benefits. Eat beans and lentils and lots of nonstarchy vegetables. For a grain food, eat oatmeal that is NOT the quick kind such as rolled or steel cut oats. Eat organic apples or applesauce with no sugar added. (Most of those foods also help keep off excess fat or help remove it.) Stop eating anything with trans fats or hydrogenated oils in it. (See our post last Friday, 1-20-2012. This not only lowers LDL, it stops adding the kind that causes heart disease into your blood.

Use ginger and curries with turmeric in your food on several days each week.
Both lower LDL and curries with turmeric eaten with black pepper also help prevent Alzheimer’s disease and cancer!

Stop drinking soft drinks. (Both regular AND diet make you fat.)

Stop eating foods that contain refined grains or harmful ingredients like hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup.

Eat a DASH diet or a Mediterranean diet or a combination emphasizing eating lots of nonstarchy vegetables and less refined grains.

The foods and drinks in this list to stop ingesting, tend to increase LDL and lower HDL – the reverse of what protects your heart. And they increase heart harmful triglycerides. Add in that they make you fat by adding calories that make you hungrier and avoiding them begins to make a lot of sense!

So, if you know how dreadfully harmful tobacco and its smoke really are,

Have ways to turn down stress that work without smoking;

Have ways to make you not or less depressed that work without smoking;

Have ways to keep from getting fatter when you quit;

And, you begin to reverse the damage by doing things that reverse the damage from smoking,

It becomes dramatically easier to quit!

2012-01-23T13:26:00.000-08:00

My monthly fatloss progress report....

Today's Post: Monday, 1-23-2012

Since last month, I lost a half inch or so off my waist. My chest and hips dropped about an eighth of an inch too.

That’s the good news.

I gained 2 & a half pounds on the scale. That’s the bad news.

The summary is that to lose size and inches while gaining on the scale means that all or most of the weight gain on the scale was muscle.

But to not lose on the scale or to gain that much, I likely had no fat loss.

So last month was a mixed review.

I seem to have gained muscle without any fat loss. Since I did more exercise, I ate a bit more than I should have to lose fat at the same time.

Once again, there are three reasons for it.

First, I got more exercise and more exercise likely to build muscle.

I was able to keep up my one legged squats with a dumbbell and do more repetitions each time. I have completely managed to restore my whole jump rope sessions and kettlebell exercises twice each week completely since building back from the very bad cold I had in late November.

And, we had to walk quite a bit to take transit during the almost two weeks our car was in the shop because they were too busy to get to it right away. Quite brisk 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 minute walks several times each week is a proven way to lose extra fat. Even if you have been doing leg exercises, it hits your legs from many extra angles. So if you haven’t been in practice doing it, you do build new muscle in your legs and butt.

Second, although I did my partial fast at lunch each Thursday, I did slip a bit on my alcoholic drinks. They increased from 8.5 a week to 9.5 or 10. I plan to get that back to 8.5 a week this next month.

Third, even though I did keep a log of my after dinner snacks each evening – my new strategy I just began – and I did eat a serving of broccoli most evenings, and I wasn’t excessive in eating almond butter, I apparently now need to eat it a bit less by eating it with dinner OR as an after dinner snack but not both. Or I need to eat some nonfat cottage cheese and more broccoli instead of having any almond butter as a snack on my stricter days. I’ll try both this next month to see if that helps.

(I now need to lose 6 and a half pounds total to return to my goal weight. And, I still need to lose at least four to 6 inches off my waist.

According to pictures I’ve seen, I’m now at about 22 % bodyfat or a bit more, perhaps 25%. To remove my abdominal fat, according to those same pictures, I also need to add enough muscle to stay at or just slightly below my goal weight AND lose about 12% to 15% of my current bodyweight as fat.

This translates into losing 18 to 24 pounds of fat while gaining 14 to 20 pounds of muscle.)

My strength training has gone decently lately.

But I need to add some heavier dumbbells now to add more muscle. My largest one now is 25 pounds. So I plan to buy a 30 pound one and may get a 35 pound one too this upcoming weekend.

They will come in handy on my new program, doing a set of squats with one leg at a time, one for each leg, three times a week. I’m at 11 repetitions once for each leg while holding a 25 pound dumbbell. (Last month I was doing 11 with not dumbbell at all. Doing them while holding the 25 pound dumbbell, I’ll be at 14 reps soon. Once I do that, I’ll add holding the 30 pound dumbbell as I do them. That will be as if I added 60 pounds to doing two legged squats. (Then I’ll build up to using holding the 35 pound one and then to holding a dumbbell in each hand. I can do that even before I get another even heavier dumbbell.)

Eventually that will add some thigh and butt muscle and increase my pounds of muscle. In fact, I have already been able to do them without holding a support post for balance now as I hold the 25 pound dumbbell. (Last month I was using no weight and holding on to a balance post.)

So far, that plan is working and it likely helped my improvement on the tape measure.

So by continuing to do and make progress on my strength training, I plan to keep adding muscle.

Next month I’ll focus on continuing to make progress on my strength training and on eating more fiber and nonfat protein and less almond butter.

And I’ll keep doing my other exercises and every other day stricter eating plan and the few daily calorie cut backs I added.

Ideally, I’d like to gain another pound of muscle and lose 5 pounds of fat by next month. That would show as a 4 pound weight loss on the scale. And, it would cut my waist another half inch or more.

* X * X *X *

(Future improvements still planned:

Eventually I’ll also need to get a specialized minibike or other seated leg exerciser I can use while seated at my desk and another I can use while reading at home or at my home computer.

They don’t yet make those that I know of but most people today need them. Given the health harm of sitting too much and how many people do that, these minibikes or other seated exerciser for your legs and chairs that match them well are coming soon I think.

Walking burns about 300 calories an hour. (200 if you are skinny and walk slowly to over 500 if you walk really fast or walk somewhat fast but are much heavier.)

Using a seated minibike or other seated exerciser that you use much less effort on but keep moving slowly most of the time you sit can easily burn 50 calories an hour.

Then if like many people today you sit for 6 hours a day, you could easily add an extra 2100 calories a week by using a seated minibike exerciser most of the time you sit at home or at work. That would help people lose about 2 and a half pounds a month for a few months once they got into the habit of always using one.

If I’d used one of the seated minibikes since I began my current fatloss plan, I’d still need to add the extra muscle to be at my goal weight. But I’d be trying to add muscle weight to get back to my goal weight! That’s because I’d be 10 to 15 pounds less fat.)

I’ve also had an idea for awhile. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from doing their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!)

The best good news is that most of what I did to lose the 15 pounds I wanted and 3 pounds extra I lost temporarily is still in place. I’m still doing those things too. And, I am still about 10 pounds lighter than I was when I started.

I’ll certainly keep doing those things!

I’ll let you know how my additional planned changes and efforts work next month.

2012-01-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Hydrogenated oils & how to avoid this heart attack starter....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-20-2012

Research was done that found conclusively that ingesting artificial trans fats from hydrogenated oils caused the bodies of the people eating it to increase the amount of small particle LDL in their blood.

Oops! Small particle LDL is one of the direct causes of heart disease!

These particles are both glue-like and tiny enough to fit into the molecular chinks in your artery walls.

So they are something like pouring sand into an engine that’s small enough it get through the screens due to its small size.

But there’s more. They are sticky and tend to stay in your artery walls once there.

Worse, they either cause high inflammation by doing this or the omega 6 oils they are made out of do this or both.

Guess what your body’s defense is to harms and small tears in the inner surfaces of your blood vessels (the endothelium)?

It sends in and adds on glue like patches!

In small amounts this is healthy because it keeps your blood from leaking out of small tears.

But the small particle LDL and inflammation combined lay an extra foundation for this stuff to add to and ensure your body does extra. That begins to stiffen and close up your blood vessels. Then if you have a big piece of fat or some of this plaque break off and stick into the now very narrow passage, you get an obstructive stroke or a heart attack.

So hydrogenated oils cause a process that directly causes heart disease and the risk of strokes and heart attacks. It also causes ED and PAD, peripheral artery disease, and angina.

If you’d like to avoid having this process go on, how much of this stuff should you eat?

About the amount of arsenic, another slow poison, as close to zero as possible!

So, if you see something that suggests you limit your intake of this stuff to less than most people now eat, is that good?

Eating less is certainly better than eating more. But it’s not great advice either.

It’s about like having a big pile of dried leaves and shredded paper recycling you want not to burn. Yes, tossing three lit matches on it is safer than tossing 10 of them. But the safe number is zero!

Since it does add to shelf life, replaces more expensive fats and oils, and doesn’t cost much, hydrogenated oils are still in a lot of food left over from the days people didn’t know how harmful it is and was.

So if it’s actually still hard to avoid eating it in very many of today’s foods, how can you avoid it?

There are three ways.

1. If a food has a label, you can look up to see if it has any trans fats other than zero listed. If it has a number of grams of trans fats, take a pass. Don’t buy it or eat it or do so again if you have been before!

2. But you have to take a second step to avoid trans fats by using the label. The people who wanted to keep using hydrogenated oils got a ruling that allows them to hide small to medium amounts and still claim zero trans fats per serving!

If what they say is a serving has less than half a gram of trans fats, they are allowed to put zero on the label.

But often the average amount people eat of these tiny “servings” is often actually from 5 to 10 of them. That means that a product with a fair amount of trans fats, .48 grams per serving which qualifies for zero on the label, will cause you to eat 2.4 to 4.8 grams of trans fats. Yikes!

They are required to list the ingredients.

So check out the list and if ANY hydrogenated oils or partially hydrogenated oils are listed, the food has trans fats. Don’t buy it or eat it or do so again if you have been before!

This can be a bit obnoxious at times. I used to really like a meaty canned chili but was shocked to find it had several grams of trans fats. I put the can back on the shelf and contacted the company saying I can’t eat the chili and couldn’t they please find a way to make it without that problem. They responded by mailing me coupons for free cans of their chili.

Oh well.

Similarly, unlike some people, I never really liked Oreo cookies, so not doing so at all any more was no hassle. But some store bought cookies, with chocolate chips or nuts and oatmeal cookies and some others, I’d like to allow myself and eat some every other month or so. But unless such cookies are home-made they are too harmful to eat that often. Almost all commercially baked cookies have partially hydrogenated oil in their list of ingredients.

The third way to avoid trans fats and hydrogenated oils is to know what foods are made out of them or now have them as an added ingredient

With some foods this happens often enough it’s worth usually to almost always avoid them when you go out to eat AND always reading the labels if you buy them at the store.

3. Know the list of foods that are made out of hydrogenated oils or almost always contain them and almost always take a pass on eating any.

I was fortunate enough to learn about reading label and discovered many of these foods that way.

But there was an excellent article from Health.com dated 12-20-2011 that was featured on Yahoo that listed 22 of these foods!

It had the foods I knew about and several more!

So here is the combined list with my comments.:

1. French fries in fast food places and similar foods such as potato cakes tend to be fried in hydrogenated oils. Since they are high glycemic and fattening too, eat no more of the ever -- or eat half as much of them 10 times less often when you go out. Or make them at home -- which means you can use extra virgin olive oil and you’ll also have them far less often.

2. Pie crusts.

This one breaks my heart since I used to love ordering pie as a stand alone treat or dessert when we went out to eat.

But commercial pie crusts are virtually all made with hydrogenated oils.

(Now I order pie far less and just eat the filing on my piece.)

If you make pie at home, you can use nut meal or flour or 100 % whole grain or 100 % gluten free buckwheat for the crust and use butter, ideally from cattle fed only grass or coconut oil.

3. Margarine is made out of hydrogenated oils.

You can get “margarine’s” that are horrible tasting substitutes and one that’s mostly corn oil with less hydrogenated oils. It tastes OK but the high omega 6 corn oil also helps cause heart disease from the high inflammation it helps cause. So take a complete pass on buying or eating margarine.

Get butter instead. Don’t eat it often or use very much. Heat it as gently or as little as possible. And do your best to find butter that comes from cattle fed only grass. (One German company exports one now.)

4. Shortening is made out of hydrogenated oils.

It once was made out of lard from animal fat. Today with lard coming from grain fed cows lard is little better.

Take a pass. A BIG one.

5. 6. 7. & 8. all follow from this problem with shortening.

5. Most cake mixes;
6. Most frosting mixes or commercial frosting in containers;
7. Most pancake and waffle mix;
8. and, virtually all biscuits and biscuit mixes contain hydrogenated oils.

9. & 10. Fried chicken and fried fish often to always in some places contain hydrogenated oils. No wonder people who eat them often, common in the South in the United States, tend to have bad health.

11. Always read the label on ice creams. A surprising percentage still use and contain hydrogenated oils. This one I found by reading the labels!

12. Non Dairy creamer is almost universally made out of hydrogenated oils! Yikes! Way too many people who drink coffee now poison themselves several times a day with this stuff. Ouch!

Use small amounts of light cream (sold as half and half though it has no milk in it) or use small amounts of 2% lowfat milk or almond milk instead. Or drink your coffee black using a bit of ice water to cool it instead of a creamer.

13. Microwave popcorn is usually very dreadful stuff!

The kinds with any kind of “butter” or oil are all far more than 50% hydrogenated oils.

The high glycemic popped corn is not much better for you with no oil.

Eat as little as you can stand of any popcorn. Hardly ever use microwave popcorn and only do that AFTER you read the label. And never get any with extra “butter” added unless you, yourself add real butter to it.

14. Besides biscuits and pie crusts almost all commercial baked goods from cookies to cakes to breads to pastries to rolls use hydrogenated oils.

The refined grains they are almost all made out of are fattening besides. Eat as little as you can stand and never more than a few times a year.

Good tasting but horribly bad for you and fattening stuff unfortunately!

15. Biscuit based breakfasts have the same problem and contain hydrogenated oils. This has become a very common fast food offering lately.

16. Hamburgers, hot dogs, and sausage, and as I found out, canned chili, usually contain trans fats and hydrogenated oils.

(The hot dogs and sausage also contain preservatives recently found to be almost as heart harmful as hydrogenated oils.)

This is unfortunate since some better quality hot dogs and most sausage is quite tasty.

The good news is that it may be possible to make them without hydrogenated oils or trans fats and minimize the preservatives somehow.

But until that’s done, you are better off not eating these foods.

The Health.com article said that some canned turkey chili was free of hydrogenated oils. And, you can get canned vegetarian chili free of hydrogenated oils. These use beans only. Whole foods carries them.

(If you get beef from cattle fed 100 % on grass and an at home meat grinder, it is possible to make hamburgers that aren’t this harmful. But eating hamburgers in most restaurants and fast food places is likely a very bad idea for your heart health.)

17. Most frozen dinners contain hydrogenated oils.

Since they make them taste good and microwaving them makes them fast for lunch or dinner, this is unfortunate.

But the upside is that foods you prepare at home, in batches on the weekend if needed, will often cost far less.

18. Packaged creamy puddings often contain hydrogenated oils.

19. Most packaged beef jerky and meat sticks contain hydrogenated oils.

20. Crunchy noodles both packaged in the store and in restaurant foods contain hydrogenated oils.

21. Most commercial crackers , just like the cookies, contain hydrogenated oils.

22. Much to my great surprise, many regular breads contain hydrogenated oils.
This can even be true for 100 % whole grain breads. So do as I did to find this out and always read the labels.

23. Candy bars often contain hydrogenated oils.

I had several favorites from one company. Then I happened to read the labels. Oh my. The all had hydrogenated oils. Too bad. I no longer buy or eat those.

So, if you get candy bars, always read the label.

24. Peanut butter. Just like candy bars, you have to read the label.

I have to admit, after reading the label on one popular peanut butter and finding both added sugar and hydrogenated oils, I was appalled to see it advertised on TV as being great for Moms to buy for their kids!

The FDA never called them on it either! If they did, it was never publicized. And that peanut butter is still on store shelves.

***
If you are wondering what you CAN eat after this list, look up the foods in the DASH and Mediterranean diets.

Eating far more nonstarchy vegetables and eating whole fresh fruit helps in both.

Wild caught fish, meat from 100% grass fed animals, and safely harvested seafood OR very low fat and fat trimmed grain-fed meat or chicken in small servings on occasion and nonfat or low fat dairy work.

Nuts, and beans and lentils work.

Extra virgin olive oil works well.

And some whole grain foods may not be bad if you aren’t fat or trying to lose it.

After seeing this list, the wonder is not that half of the people die of heart disease, it seems the wonder is that the percentage is that low!

2012-01-19T14:10:00.000-08:00

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 7....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-19-2012

(Last Thursday’s post on how to eat out at restaurants and fast food places & still lose fat was part 6.)

This one could also be titled,

“What to do if your fat loss and weight loss stops or you even gain some.”

Last week Yahoo featured health writer and weight loss expert Denise Austin.

Mercifully, there are a LOT of things you can do besides what was in her article which we will include later. But because she has experience helping people lose weight, I decided to start with her 3 strategies.

(Here’s the direct reference for her article and how to find out more of her information: Denise Austin
http://www.deniseaustin.com/newsletters/push-past-your-weight-loss-plateau.aspx?xid=nl_EverydayHealthManagingDiabetes_20120111 & http://www.deniseaustin.com .)

1. Her first strategy is to be sure to check your portion sizes. If you are eating larger portions of any higher glycemic or higher calorie foods you could stop your fat loss. Conversely, if you are eating smaller portions of nonstarchy vegetables on skipping them when you didn’t before that WILL slow or stop your fat loss.

Both things happened to me. I was using a larger spoon to eat almond butter (and also eating more than one serving.) I noticed this and used one of her next steps to stop eating more than one serving & began using a smaller spoon.

Similarly, I’d been eating a serving of thawed frozen broccoli florets and dropped my portion to zero by forgetting to eat them!

I reversed this and began always having that serving of these nonstarchy vegetables. I dropped my effective portion size of the high calorie though health OK almond butter. And, I added something I’ll describe below. Instead of gaining a pound or two over a month as I had been doing, I lost a pound. And then lost another the next month.

2. Her second strategy is to keep a detailed food log for at least a week with the same purpose as the portion size check. If you are actually eating worse for fat loss and simply are unaware of it and exactly how you are doing it, you can’t fix it.

In my case, I eat the same breakfasts every day seven days a week --- though different each day with exactly the same portion sizes. And, I do the same with lunch 6 days most weeks and 5 to 7 times a week with my dinner when I come home. The variable for me was my after dinner snack. I knew the problem before I kept a log. But I started one I enter into each evening to help me be SURE to only eat one spoonful of almond butter—not more. And to be SURE I remember to have my serving of broccoli florets.

It’s working! Now, instead of messing up almost every night, I do what I want to do and need to do to keep my fat loss on track almost every night. That’s a BIG difference!

3. She also suggests increasing your exercise routine. She made a point of considering adding strength training or doing a bit more.

That’s an excellent suggestion! Not only will the added calories burned help, the added muscle will burn more calories even when you are resting. You’ll tend to lose more visible fat and inches off your measurements. And you’ll help ensure the weight you lose is all fat!

That, in fact, was my motivation for adding more strength training. I’d lost all the pounds I wanted to lose. But I’d also wanted to lose inches on my waist and only lost a fifth of what I wanted to lose!

Adding more muscle to feed without eating more will clearly cause the fat on my belly to shrink.

So, I’ve added a kettlebell session two evenings a week to my morning strength training which I’ve kept doing. And, I decided to find a safe way to squat with weight on my 3 morning leg exercise sessions I do at home.

I’ve not seen the results yet because I think I’m not yet built up to using enough weight.

But I’ve become more consistent in doing the kettlebell exercise sessions. And I can feel they are really exercising my whole upper body when I’m done plus I do get some leg exercise from using the kettlebells. When I improve a bit more, I plan to get a heavier kettlebell.

You can safely squat at home with weight if you are careful and do it correctly.

I found that you can do a partial lunge forward with one leg but slowly until the knee of your other leg just touches and then come back up while being careful to stay balanced.

I worked up to doing that 14 times with each leg.

Then I began holding my 25 pound dumbbell on the side I’m squatting with. I’m up to 10 times each leg. In a few days, I’ll be up to 14 and will buy a couple of heavier dumbbells.

These two added steps will add muscle and help ensure I lose no muscle while I lose on the scale. But my hope is that it will begin to change the way I look and shrink my waist too!

The other strategies to use follow the same design. Make more of a consistent effort to do things right each week. Correct course if you find you have slipped. And add more effort and a few or several new ways to lose fat to what you are already doing.

4. If you still have treats with sugar, keep doing it if you like. But cut how much you eat each month or week in half. This can make a BIG difference. How? I love sugar and once ate a good bit every single day. I’ve cut back that amount four times! That means I only eat about a sixteenth as much sugar as I once did.

5. Do you still eat or drink the stuff that makes you hungrier or adds calories without your body registering them and getting less hungry?

If so, make similar cut backs or decide to eliminate them totally or almost totally.

These include both regular and diet soft drinks. It includes all packaged snacks, all packaged desserts, and virtually all pastries and commercial baked goods. It includes all bread and rolls made with refined grains.

If you eat very little and only with other ingredients that support your health and eat right otherwise and exercise regularly, you can get a way with some treats that have sugar.

But this list of the foods and drinks are made out of high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6.

Worse even than that, it’s common they are made out of cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6 that have been hydrogenated. Research shows conclusively that stuff is heart attack starter.

These foods are almost invariably made out of 100 % refined grains. There is some evidence that people evolved not to eat ANY grains not even whole grains. And this shows up most in people who eat a lot of grains and get fat from doing so.

But with refined grains, it’s simply no contest. They crash your blood sugar up. Then your body increases insulin to get that back to normal. But high levels of insulin cause your body to store fat and prevent your body from removing any!

But it gets even worse! Then your blood sugar goes too low. You feel bad. And you begin to crave sugary foods to get your blood sugar back up. The problem is that the calories you take in then were not really needed to keep you going and healthy. And all this extra hunger causes you to take in calories that you wear as excess fat.

Then these foods have chemicals like MSG and related glutamates and others added by the company that makes them to make them taste better and be more addictive!

In short, to lose fat permanently, you want to do it without extra hunger

These foods and drinks and the STUFF they are made out of add calories without lowering your hunger or worse make you quite hungry for calories your body doesn’t need.

They are the exact opposite of the foods that help you lose fat without hunger.

Cutting them back to zero or virtually zero is one of the secrets of hunger free fat loss.

As a side benefit, it protects your heart and the rest of your health far better than taking drugs after you are already damaged!

6. Be extra strict but only every other day or even two days a week.

This has been shown to get better results than doing it every day! The reason is that you do eat fewer calories each week. But your body does NOT read this as you being in a famine. So it does not drop the anchor and stop your fat loss or reverse it.

And, getting plenty of protein every day also helps to prevent your body going into famine protection mode.

7. Try a partial fast for part of just one day a week.

Doing this for one weekday lunch each week where I only eat nonstarchy vegetables is the main way I recently resumed my fat loss.

As long as you still have less restrictive days each week and get plenty of protein all week, this too can lose fat and calories over a week without triggering your body into famine control mode.

2012-01-17T14:20:00.000-08:00

Why strength training prevents mental decline....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 1-17-2012

Last Sunday in the Parade section in their StayHealthy feature they had an interview with Dr Gary Small who is the author of “The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program.”

They asked him what exercise had to do with memory. He first noted that the improved circulation benefits your brain. He noted that exercise helps prevent type 2 diabetes which is a direct cause of mental decline and may be of Alzheimer’s disease as well.

Then he said, “And we’ve found that lifting weights can improve cognitive health too, perhaps due to the brainpower spent on maintaining proper form.”

That’s true from what I’ve read. But there are several other reasons. Then too there are other ways to get that effect. And, there are other kinds of exercises that give you similar effects.

That’s what this post is about. And, there are supplements that add to one of these likely effects.

To do strength training well, you do have to maintain proper form at least to some degree or you’ll injure yourself.

Some styles or patterns to doing strength training give you better results. It takes mental effort and focus to do those patterns. You count the number of repetitions. You monitor your level of effort. You focus and increase your effort at certain key times. You manage and sequence the exercises and sets.

If you are experienced and want to keep exercising you often write down what you did in a log in abbreviated form. You then compare what you did with what you wanted to do and what you did before.

Each of those are executive functions that you also use to remember and recall things. With memory, you note things you want to remember later. You organize the like things you want to remember and how they relate to each other.

And, when you want to recall things, you think of all the things that are associated with them as an aid to the recall. These range from remembering where you learned that thing to what letter the word started with to why you thought it important at the time and more.

When you use the executive skills doing strength training, you not only develop skill, your brain grows new brain cells and connections that support the executive function.

And the more of those you have, the more you can lose without the overall system not working.

But strength training also makes losing brain cells less likely!

(Surprisingly, regular conversation and social contact has similar effects on your executive skills and the nerves it grows and uses.)

You do get the better circulation from strength training too. You get stress relief. And such exercise produces several chemical messengers that help your body control blood sugar and avoid getting too fat or help losing fat.

But the huge benefit of well done strength training is that it causes growth hormone release! One of those hormones, BDNF, grows new nerves and brain cells! This may happen to build up the nerves in your brain and muscles to support the kind of exercise you are doing. Some of those new brain cells are in the same executive skills areas that you use in memory skills. And, all the rest of your brain gets the benefit too.

Also, exercises such as strength training, interval cardio, doing a martial art, dancing – particularly at a fast or brisk pace, aerobic dancing, or doing a competitive sport -- all have these similar effects too!

I just read an online story today from Scientific American noting that one cause of mental decline from aging is that as the cells in your body age, they stop producing as much of something called, “Lon Protease.”

(I strongly suspect the growth hormone release from such exercises slows this drop off effect also.)

That compound helps your cells to avoid damage from oxidation. In particular, it helps to avoid damage to the mitochondria in your cells. The mitochondria are the energy and power centers of each of your cells. You feel you have less energy because you do have less if your mitochondria are damaged. But worse than that, your cells can die if they get too much of this kind of damage.

But the kind of exercise that increases circulation and boosts your growth hormones dramatically slows aging. It prevents the messages in your nerves from slowing down. And it may even preserve the ability of your body to repair things with its own stem cells.

Also you can also prevent this damage and even reverse it to some degree with some foods and supplements.

And, there is a supplement that directly protects and increases the health of your mitochondria.

Oranges, berries, many other kinds of fruit, and most raw vegetables are high in vitamin C. Eating those foods and taking 500 mg or more a day of vitamin C does the double.: The vitamin C is an antioxidant and directly protective. And, some studies have found that getting enough vitamin C keeps your telomeres from getting shorter which directly slows aging.

Taking the natural form of vitamin E, not the inferior synthetic one, and eating health OK oils in foods gives you the whole complex of highly antioxidant E vitamins, tocopherols and tocotrienols, is a powerful way to boost these antioxidants in your body. Nuts, avocados, and extra virgin olive oil are great sources to use.

The supplement alpha lipoic acid helps your body get more antioxidant effects from both water soluble antioxidants like vitamin C and fat soluble ones like vitamin E.

The most effective version of the supplement that directly protects and increases the health of your mitochondria is called ubiquinol.

(CoQ10 is processed by your body into ubiquinol. And the form your body uses is ubiquinol. You can take CoQ10; but your body may be inefficient in converting it into ubiquinol. And your blood stream has far less to use than it does if you take ubiquinol directly studies found.

Or to put it the other way around, you might need to take 400 mg of CoQ10 3 times a day to get the same effect as talking 100 mg of ubiquinol two times a day.)

Like many other key compounds, your body makes ubiquinol or CoQ10 when you are younger.

But to have that same energy and heart and brain health when you are old enough that no longer happens much, it helps a good deal to take ubiquinol.

Now this new information shows taking ubiquinol may also prevent your brain cells from dying too!

All this shows that you CAN protect your brain from mental decline by doing vigorous exercise every week that commands your executive attention from dance aerobics to strength training.

You can enhance and extend that effect by eating organic foods high in antioxidants and taking good quality antioxidant supplements.

And, you can enhance and extend those effects by also taking the supplement ubiquinol.

Even better, each of those steps improves your heart health and overall health too!

2012-01-16T14:17:00.000-08:00

Focusing on fast benefits of exercise helps people start & keep doing it....

Today's Post: Monday, 1-16-2012

Last Friday, HealthDay News had this story: “Need to Exercise More? Think How It Will Help You Now” By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter.

The story was about a University of Michigan study which found that women who exercised based on short term positive quality of life effects worked out 15 percent to 34 percent more often than women who did not.

Long term goals such as slowing aging or losing fat and keeping it off or gradually getting more and more protection for your heart may motivate many to start exercising. These goals may help keep you exercising too.

And, eventually you can see the results for many of these long term goals. The fat and pounds you lost don’t all come back as they did when you lost them without doing exercise. Your HDL cholesterol goes up more each time and your LDL and triglycerides go down. Your blood sugar readings are better. Your blood pressure reading may go down if it was high before.

BUT, to get those results you have to start exercising. You have to do enough exercise and do it enough days each week to be effective. And you have to keep doing it every week!

What this study shows is that the many benefits you notice right away are much more important in helping you do those things than we may have known before.

The good news is exercise DOES give you these immediate benefits!

1. We just posted that even short sessions of vigorous exercise give you almost immediate stress relief.

Regular exercise also increases your ability to withstand stress more and longer before it makes you feel stressed. And you can function better when you are stressed.

Many exercisers notice this even in the first few weeks after they first start exercising.

2. The article said that women in the study found this effect enabled them to be more laid back and in a better mood with their children. Having a better mood and being less irritable also gets better results and gives them a second benefit because their families are then in a better mood too!

3. Almost all people, and especially women, get a strong boost to their self esteem even in the first week or two after they begin exercising.

4. The much better circulation and increased neurotransmitters from vigorous exercise also give you a feeling of mental clarity and effortless energy.

That is very rewarding and can happen the same day you do that kind of exercise even on the first day!

5. For men and for everyone wanting to lose fat or get stronger, it can be quite rewarding to see and feel that your exercise is doing the job!

a) This works great for people new to exercise. You can do a given effort more times or you can use more weight or do the exercise faster almost every week after you start exercising and for several weeks more. (After that, you do have to work a bit more to improve or work at the same level for a bit.)

That’s really fun and enormously motivating! (You do have to start slow and increase slowly enough to avoid injury or burn out to do this. But it is doable.)

b) And, when you do strength training that is working to build you up or do vigorous enough interval cardio, when you are done, you can literally feel the extra blood in the muscles you just exercised. You can often feel the extra circulation when you do either very vigorously just after you finish the exercise.

You can see it too as your whole body will turn pinker from the extra circulation.

6. While it may take a couple of years to lose a lot of fat or make incredible improvements in your heart health blood tests, 80% of the health improvements happen in the first 3 to 6 months! They begin to happen the first week! And you do NOT have to lose more than a bit of your fat or get more than a bit stronger either.

For health, regular exercise gets fast results even on the long term goals!

I once posted that one of the reasons for anyone losing fat to immediately start exercising is that exercise begins to deliver the results people are losing that fat to achieve! They feel better; their self esteem is better; they look happier; and their health improves. And this all happens even well before all the fat they will lose comes off!

In short, when you exercise, you feel better and are easier to be around and become healthier and begin to feel the results right away.

Once you notice these results and see they stop if you skip a few exercise sessions, it also becomes much easier to keep exercising!

2012-01-13T14:36:00.000-08:00

How to get fast stress relief....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-13-2012

There are three ways to get fast stress relief.

1. Escape soon.

2. Get Powerful help right away.

3. Use the quick ways to lower your body’s stress relief.

You tend to be stressed by events that threaten to harm you and that you haven’t enough resources to turn off.

1. The first method can work. In some situations, you can get out of the situation where you are threatened. When you turn off the threat by getting away from the situation where it exists, you can lower your stress level.

Here’s a common example. Successfully landing a job with nicer and saner or less stressed people and a stronger company for which you can do more can be a great way to escape a job with mean, incompetent, or abusive bosses or coworkers. They may still be just as hard to take. But once you are no longer there, your stress stops!

2. Get powerful help right away.

Often stress is caused by a problem money or expertise or knowledge will solve.

If you have a problem that costs more money to fix than you have, you may have a friend or relative who can give that to you or even lend it to you in a way that you’ll be able to pay back. This can be an enormous relief.

Or if you can get some money from a relative as a gift, get a loan from a friend, and pay for some of it with your credit card, that can also solve your problem and cut your stress too.

Sometimes you may be totally unable to solve a problem or escape a threat because you lack the knowledge or expertise to do so. If you can afford help and get a referral to someone who has what you lack, that also works!

This even works for countries! When the United States entered World War II, Winston Churchill put his feeling of stress relief very well. “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”

Both of these two methods work best the sooner you can use them because you are under stress for a shorter time and less likely to be harmed by the threat.

One study of people who lived unusually long lives found that, more than shorter lived people, those who lived long tended to have used one of these methods to escape or overcome a very large source of stress at least once.

3. Fast physical stress relief when needed:

But what about being under stress suddenly when something happens that is out of your control to prevent?

What happens when you have too many small stresses gang up on you all at once or for too long?

Often your body goes into flight or fight syndrome too much or stays in it too long and totally wears you out.

Then that makes the original problem worse and can make you sick or speed up your aging process.

Learning and doing Tai Chi or some forms of Yoga or meditation ahead of time and doing it every week can make this less likely.

So can doing regular exercise.

These things increase your ability to tolerate stress or prevent your body from over-reacting.

But, if you have too much of this stress reaction or can’t turn it off when you need to, what can you do to give yourself a stress break that works FAST?

a) How about one you already know how to do that takes -- and works -- in about 30 seconds?

Believe it or not, yawning and stretching while you do also drops your physical stress significantly.

It feels strange at first to do this on purpose instead of automatically when you need more oxygen or to wake up more when needed. But it’s easy enough to do, you don’t need a lot of practice.

What you do need to practice is noticing when you are a bit too stressed and getting in the habit of always using it when that happens.

b) Another method that’s almost as good and one that helps stop you from mentally obsessing about something that’s stressing you is to stop and do a set of a very vigorous exercise. Do 20 fast pushups or squats or jumping jacks. Run fast in place for 30 seconds. It works. And it works right away too.

It works for two reasons. You have to focus hard enough on doing it, you stop obsessing because you have to concentrate on your exercise to do it that vigorously. But you also get the extra oxygen and blood circulation from doing the exercise and when your body goes into recovery mode from the exercise slowing your heart rate and breathing, your body turns your physical stress response down too.

c) For those who aren’t in a situation where slowed reactions would be dangerous or where they can’t drink due to addiction problems, drinking one or possibly two alcoholic drinks right away can do this too. This works quickly and within a few minutes.

It works surprisingly well for temporary stress relief. That’s one reason for the popularity of drinking. And it’s one of the several reasons that moderate drinkers have better health than people who don’t drink.

But drinking more is unwise. It adds very little more stress relief, costs you more money, and makes dangerous and added problems more likely. Worse, you then wake up with a hangover and still have the original problem too!

d) Find a way to laugh. Truly, a merry heart is one of the world’s best medicines!

Like yawning or vigorous exercise, laughing is hard wired to turn down your physical stress. And it’s VERY effective.

You can laugh at how ridiculous your efforts to solve the problem have been.

You can laugh at how crazy our world is.

You can go hang out with friends who laugh and make you laugh.

Or you can watch a movie or a video or a TV show that makes you laugh.

Of these, hanging out with friends who laugh or watching comedy that makes you laugh tend to work best.

In a recent email, health writer Frank Mangano added these ideas:

e) Go outside. Sunshine even through dark overcast boosts your vitamin D levels and positive brain chemicals enough to brighten your mood. Recently they found out that compound you smell or breathe in from trees boosts your mood.

Weather can be intense enough to relieve stress like vigorous exercise since it commands your attention.’

And sometimes being outside shows you scenes of enough beauty to engage your emotions in a positive way. This too commands your attention long enough to turn down stress.

If the outside air is clean, taking deep breaths of it can enhance the effect.

Or if you walk briskly that lowers your stress from the exercise and from being outside too.

f) Have a Hobby and spend some time doing it.

You control doing it. You can be creative doing it and engage your ability to solve other problems. You enjoy doing it and are usually good at it.

Each of these things and feelings turn down your stress response.

g) Talk to someone

This can be someone who can help you with the problem. This can be someone who shows they care and support you when you talk about your problem. Or it can be someone interesting or fun to talk that simply distracts you from what’s stressing you. (It’s one of the reasons Facebook has become so popular.)

h) Take time to breathe deeply for a few minutes.

Like yawning this boosts your oxygen in your system. It takes your mind off what’s stressing you as you do it and boosts your circulation and lowers your stress as your body recovers from it just like vigorous exercise does.

i) Get a pet

If you are in a living situation where you can and you can support one and aren’t allergic, getting a pet you are good to can help lower stress enormously.

Being nice to your pet and having them respond can make you feel empowered even if you have felt powerless by what’s stressing you.

A pet can be glad to see you when no one else is. And a pet can show concern when they sense you are upset.

Simply put, pets are proven stress relievers.

2012-01-12T14:51:00.000-08:00

How to eat in restaurants and still lose fat....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-12-2012

(This is also “Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 6”; but I wanted to make it easy for people with the problem to find it!)

People eat out and at restaurants for far more of their food than they once did.

So if they do it wrong, it can make it impossible to lose fat and its weight. It can even cause fat and weight gain!

Worse, restaurants and fast food places make it quite easy to eat too much and of the worst foods and drinks. And, they can at times make it hard to eat well.

So between the importance and the difficulty of this problem it’s important to know how to solve it.

The good news is that solving this problem is quite doable.

One group that learned one set of strategies to use in restaurants, wound up using them at home too and lost weight both eating out AND at home.

That set of strategies we’ll cover last.

1. First, many people eat breakfast and lunch at restaurants. And due to the time pressures and the large number of fast food places, people often eat at fast food places for these meals.

There are four ways to solve this problem.

a) You can often find a way to eat at your desk or in your company break room and bring your breakfast and lunch most days. You control that far more. And the things that will harm your health and make you fat can be left off your menu totally.

Similarly, you can eat a fast but healthy breakfast at home that’s faster to eat than the time needed to go to a fast food place.

I do both. I prep both my breakfasts and part of my bag lunches the night before. Each of them takes less than 10 minutes to eat.

b) You can edit what you order and which parts of it you eat even if you go to a fast food place. For this you have to really know to avoid the things that harm you and make you fat. And you have to do it when you are hungry.

It IS doable if you focus on why NOT to eat the bad stuff and order and eat enough of the good or at least better stuff to turn off your hunger.

Drink water or coffee or tea and never get soft drinks! Both regular AND diet are proven to make you fat and aren’t that great for your health either.

This is close to half the battle in terms of fat loss because all soft drinks are so fattening!

Leave out all or almost all of the refined grain foods.

Ask for your sandwiches “Atkins style” on a plate with no bread. Or remove the bread you are served and toss it in with the other trash before you go. You will need to get a fork or use your fingers in the worst case. But most places do have plastic spoons and forks at least.

Ask they not serve extra bread or a package of chips. If they do serve it, leave it or toss it out. These both surge your blood sugar and add extra calories and give you no real nutrition. The chips are proven fatteners and the bread is little better.

Virtually NEVER order or eat croissants or dessert foods at a fast food place.

Once you remove the refined grains, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and bad oils or worse, hydrogenated oils, from these things you have nothing left! And every single one of those ingredients is both fattening and harmful to you!

(Bring a bit of raw nuts or a dark chololate bar to eat before you go in or after for dessert if you really want one.)

Skip or toss out the fries. If you are very hungry and love them, get the smallest package and eat less than half of them. (They surge your blood sugar as much as bread and more than sugar! And the oils they are cooked in aren’t that great for you, all are high in omega 6 oils; and fries add extra calories and no nutrition. Plus most people eat enough salt without adding the salt in fries.)

If you get a hamburger or two, ask for extra onion and be sure to get and eat the lettuce and tomato. The onion and lettuce and tomato help fill you up. And the onion is a partial antidote to the fats in the hamburger.

If they offer it, it can also be worth getting grilled chicken or ham or sliced turkey or avocado instead of hamburger.

(Don’t eat fish in fast food places. Except for the halibut at Fish and Chips places, the other fish is farmed fish which are incredibly high in pollutants.)

If one meat serving and the vegetables will leave you too hungry without the chips, fries, and bread, order two.

Some fast food places now will give you a decent salad with no dressing or dressing on the side. Even if you only eat part a salad they are made up out of lettuce and tomatoes and onions, each of which is a nonstarchy vegetable that will help fill you up.

c) Go to Subway! If you can avoid the bread and get your sandwich Atkins style and NOT get desserts or soft drinks, Subway is a great resource!

There are Subway locations almost everywhere. And they DO have choices like grilled chicken, ham, sliced turkey, and avocado for their sandwich fillings.

Best of all, they allow you to add all the diced onion, tomato, and other veggies you want at no extra charge. They also have a great tasting diced up mild pepper you can get. If you get a vegetarian or avocado sandwich and a turkey sandwich both Atkins style and add these veggies to your taste, you can eat quite well at a Subway for lunch and not eat or drink fattening stuff!

d) Eat at home or work most days. But when you do eat out go to a better class of restaurant. Good restaurants will be more comfortable with special requests and have better food choices on the menu. This strategy costs about the same as fast food every day. But it is often much better for you and less fattening.

2. What were the strategies used by the people in the article I read that lost weight after learning them even while they ate at restaurants a lot?

They learned which foods to order on the menus of the restaurants they went to. If they had been eating fattening foods before, they tried the more healthful and less fattening choices.

a) If they had been eating the appetizers and desserts and second or third glasses of wine suggested by the wait staff, they usually to always said no instead of always saying yes!

b) They were also taught a strategy I’m personally fond of.

“Make each calorie count.” They were taught to occasionally eat treat foods but only their most favorite ones. If it was an OK but not great treat food always pass! Why waste your extra calories on stuff you don’t like that much anyway?!

c) They were also trained to always order many of the more fattening ingredients on the side. This is most important for salad dressing. But if they would otherwise overdo it, it can help to do this for gravy and butter too.

d) They also taught “mindful” eating. One strategy was to rate how hungry you are before eating from 1 to 10. That helps to avoid eating 10 units of food when you would have been full at 5 to 7!

e) If you find you have food on your plate when you are no longer hungry, just leave it or ask for a take out container for it.

f) “Pay attention.’:

If you notice the smell and taste and texture of the food as you eat it, it fills you up faster.

Half way through, rate how hungry you are then. That avoids eating extra on autopilot while you are thinking about something else.

If you have time, slow down and talk to your companions or look about you at the décor or the scene outside. That both increases your enjoyment and stress relief and allows your stomach to register the food you just gave it. That means you’ll eat less and digest what you do eat better.

These 3 are the steps for mindful eating. They do help if you get used to always doing them. And, if you practice at home too, it becomes more likely you’ll use these steps when you eat out. Plus you may find as these people did that you lose more fat at home too.

3. Large portions are a common problem in restaurants.

You can leave out the stuff they would have served that’s fattening such as the bread, French fries, or potatoes or white rice. Ask them not to serve you any!

You can order extra vegetable sides instead. Larger amounts of those help you lose fat!

You can split a meal between yourself and another person. For couples going to places with large portions or who are conserving money, this can work quite well.

You can ask for the take out container at the start of the meal and put the half you really don’t need now into it before you start eating.

Or you can eat what you are actually hungry for and get a take out container then.

4. You can find and go to restaurants and fast food places that make this style of eating easier. (Subway qualifies if you know how to eat there and do NOT eat or drink the other stuff.) But this often works best at good restaurants in upscale neighborhoods.

The other way to do it is to go to a restaurant regularly and be nice to the wait staff and learn their names if you can.

They will then get to know you and what you want. They may even do things for you they normally don’t do for their less regular customers. Tipping decently helps too!

I like eating out. If you do also, these are strategies you can use to avoid it being fattening or stopping you from losing fat!

2012-01-09T14:44:00.000-08:00

The many ways a coach or support site can help you reach your health goals....

Today's Post: Monday, 1-9-2012

To reach a health goal takes many steps and many kinds of steps.

A good coach or support site for the health goal you choose can help you with each of these steps.

Here are some of them.

1. You have to know what to do. You have to know what not to do or to stop doing.

It can be very helpful in empowering you to learn and keep doing these steps on your own if you also find out why to do these things.

2. In many cases you have to learn HOW to take the steps necessary. And, it helps a lot to have help learning how.

It can be very helpful to have a coach or support site explain how to make each of these actions easy to learn or easier. It can be very helpful to know common mistakes beginners make and how to avoid them or what to do to overcome them if you make them.

3. But the two most important ways a good coach or support site can help are two related steps.

For most health goals, you need consistent action to get to and keep your health goal. You have to make your actions effective. And, you have to keep doing them to reach your goal or keep it.

So helping you keep going and keep going even when you mess up or feel like quitting is critical.

It’s profoundly important in fact.

In every kind of achievement the people who succeed make a strong focused effort on the most important things when it counts most. AND they do this extra when they mess up or feel like quitting.

It’s even why whole societies do well or not.

David McClelland at Harvard found 3 key variables that explained which societies and economies did well or not.

One he called “hard work.” The actual data show that this was completely inaccurate. People can work hard and long hours and fail. Though doing so can be helpful sometimes.

So what was this mislabeled third factor?

He used themes in children’s stories that predicted effects when they grew up.
And this third factor every time was that the characters in the story or historical real people made a strong focused effort on the most important things when it counted most. AND they did this extra when they messed up or felt like quitting.

That’s focused extra effort when it counts most -- NOT just hard work in general.

But with challenging goals and for people who haven’t yet learned this skill, you can get de-railed or prevented from doing this.

In a newspaper article in the Magazine section of yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, the staff writer had a great way of putting this.

A coach who knows what’s possible for you better than you do will insist you make the extra effort and cheer for you when you succeed despite your initial doubts.

“Agony turns to euphoria when it turns out the coach was right.”

And,

“When we fall, it’s the coach who picks us up, let’s us wallow for a minute, then gives us the perspective and encouragement to try again.”

That way you get both parts. You make an extra effort and succeed. And if you don’t quite get there, your coach helps you make an extra effort to continue even when you feel like quitting AND gives you hope you will yet succeed and strategies to make it more likely.

One book points out that many people who succeeded in reaching their goals, did this exact thing. They made a strong effort that failed. But they tried again also with a strong focused effort and their real success began when that second effort worked.

(Of course, another writer calls the successful style experimental persistence. They keep their goal and persist in trying to reach it. But they will stop using methods that don’t work and test others that might.)

A good coach or support site for the health goal you choose can help you with each of these steps.

That’s why if you can get a mentor or coach or personal trainer or support site that is skilled and works well with you, it can dramatically increase your chances of success!

If you already are doing somewhat well on your own, they can double your chances of success. And if you know less and are just beginning, they can multiply your chances of success by twenty or more!

2012-01-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

How exercise slows aging....

Today's Post: Friday, 1-6-2012

It does so in several ways in fact.

But the newest information is exciting since it suggests beginning to exercise and continuing may partially reverse aging in people who were not exercising before.

Let’s start there. New research found that as you age your body begins to stop making new stem cells. So damage to different parts of your body begins to build up and get worse because your body can no longer replace damaged cells as well as you’d need to get better. It no longer has the stem cells needed.

Then they tried injecting healthy muscle stem cells into older animals. Much of their age related disability reversed and the animals began to seem and act younger.

But here’s the key fact. Separate research found that exercised muscles even in older people tended to stay as youthful and strong and quick moving as the muscles of much younger people. How did that happen? When you exercise a muscle hard enough through strength training, interval cardio, other vigorous exercise, or hard physical work it triggers a rebuilding process. How does your body do that? It releases extra growth hormones including one called BDNF that grows new nerves and brain cells. But the research shows this rebuilding in older people even into their eighties and nineties and older continues to work well.

I don’t know that this has been tested. But this suggests strongly to me that it also creates and uses new muscle stem cells.

Meanwhile this does not happen in people who don’t get such exercise every week.

Their brains shrink. Their mobility decreases. And, their immune systems become impaired.

So they think less well and remember less well. Their lives become limited and their ability to be self reliant or helpful to the people around them becomes less. They are more likely to get and die of bacterial or viral diseases. AND, their immune systems stop being as able to kill off cancer cells.

Note that it is possible to overdo exercise at any age enough that it lowers your immune system instead of boosting it.

But to do that takes a LOT of effort. And in people who eat enough protein and eat foods that contain antioxidants and take antioxidant supplements, it takes far more exercise to do this.

In addition vigorous exercise of this kind boosts your blood circulation all over your body. And each part of you works better with adequate blood flow.

Bottom line is that such regular and vigorous exercise that we already knew helps prevent heart disease and brain shrinkage and keep your muscles strong enough to keep you mobile does quite a few other things too!

It helps your body prevent bacterial and viral diseases AND most cancers. And it helps your body’s immune system to turn off these diseases if you once get them!

Does that mean people who want to avoid cancer as they get older should do this kind of exercise? It certainly looks that way.

Does that mean people who got cancer as they got older should do this kind of exercise to help reverse it and prevent it from coming back? It certainly looks that way.

Such exercise is also a good physical stress reliever due to the extra relaxation and better sleep that follow the exercise as your body does this recovery process.

But that, hold the presses, DIRECTLY reverses aging!

Effective physical stress relief both lengthens your telomeres to some degree and prevents them from getting shorter.

Telomeres are the shoe lace cap like ends on your strands of DNA. When they stay long your cells make perfect copies of your DNA. But when your telomeres get too short, your body makes inaccurate copies or none at all.

There are other basic causes of aging and damage to your body. But this process is the aging process itself.

So, you might well ask, if this is so effective haven’t any direct tests found this result?

Yes! In fact, when they looked for it, it was easy to find!

At Stanford University back nearly 50 years ago in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s when the stress relieving and life enhancing effects of running were publicized a group of Stanford people who were a bit older began to run regularly for exercise. Some of this group were medical people and some of them were interested in disease prevention. They began to notice they were getting fewer diseases of aging and living longer than the people at Stanford who were not getting that kind of regular exercise.

So later on, some of them carefully gathered the data for a study. Running in older people tends to produce too many overuse injuries to continue. So their group of exercisers contained people who were still running and people who were still getting that much regular exercise in other ways.

The results were spectacular. The exercisers lived from 10 to over 25 years longer than the sedentary people. They got fewer things like heart disease and strokes and cancers. And if they got those things, they got them at older ages.

But that may UNDERstate this effect! The people who weren’t exercising were also from the Stanford community. They had stable and decently paying jobs that tended to be safe to do and access to decent medical care.

Are you doing regular and vigorous exercise now if only in short sessions?

If not, here are some questions to consider.

Do you want to age more slowly? Do you want to get fewer things like heart disease and cancers? Do you want to survive and recover if you get heart disease or some kind of cancer?

If yes, consider starting some regular exercise this week and keep doing it and improving it.

In the third part of our post, Solutions to common fat loss problems, just a few weeks ago on Tuesday, 12-20-2011 we included some ideas on how to find time to exercise.

Things like dumbbells and jump ropes can help.

But note that many of these exercises require no equipment at all beyond a rug or yoga mat or towel to do the exercises that you do on the floor.

You can do push ups. You can do pushups from the knees which require less initial strength. You can march in place lifting your knees a bit extra on each step. You can do abdominal crunches. You can do “lunges” where you step out with one foot far enough to have your front knee wind up at a right angle and step back and do it on the other side. You can do half squats or full squats. And there are literally hundreds more that you can learn from a Jazzercise or aerobics class or instructor.

The 6 keys to success are,

Schedule a definite time at several times each week to do these exercises even if it’s only a 3 to 6 minute session some days. Morning sessions first thing in the morning tend to be best and most reliable.

Start with fewer repetitions or times you repeat the movement for each excise than you can do. You can literally start with doing one or two or three repetitions the first time and succeed! You want it to feel easy and doable and refreshing NOT hard and overwhelming!

Rest briefly if you get too tired or out of breath AND do it soon after you notice it. You can build up to more later. But it’s both safer AND more effective to exercise vigorously and stop to rest than just continuing when you get tired. You just do it again when you recover.

Keep doing a bit more repetitions or do them a bit faster. Consider adding other exercises or trying them once you establish the habit of exercising. Making it progressive in this way allows you to end up highly capable even if you start at a very low level.

But be very careful to only do a bit more each week. If you add too much you can burn out or injure yourself. But if you add just a bit each week by just continuing to exercise each week you can make huge progress. For example, if you do marching in place and start with just doing it two steps worth, if you add just 2 steps a week in a year you will likely do 100.

Once you establish this think of yourself as an exerciser and a member of the health elite and remember the benefits! It’s a good feeling!

2012-01-05T14:19:00.000-08:00

Avoid or improve osteoarthritis & new discovery....

Today's Post: Thursday, 1-5-2012

Osteoarthritis is obnoxious and painful and can be limiting -- and expensive to fix in the case of hip replacement.

But new discoveries have found that if you start early enough in life, you may be able to avoid it or mostly avoid it.

And, if you already have it, you can stop it from getting worse, make it less painful and limiting, and may even be able to partially reverse it!

1. The really big new discovery is that while it’s been traditional to think that arthritis causes inflammation that’s the less important thing to know. It does.

BUT the new discovery is that inflammation CAUSES osteoarthritis!

The new research found that high chronic inflammation even more than overuse triggers the damage that gradually removes the natural cushion and smoothness of your joints.

So, if you turn off high chronic inflammation, you turn off the major cause of osteoarthritis!

So if you start or succeed in turning off high chronic inflammation before you get osteoarthritis, you won’t get it or will get very little.

If you already have osteoarthritis and work at and succeed in turning off high chronic inflammation, it will mostly stop getting worse, it will stop hurting you as much, and it may even get better!

(Note: If you have and turn off succeed in turning off high chronic inflammation, you also tend to avoid heart disease, mental decline, & some cancers! You will age more slowly or be less harmed by the aging process also.

For example, a high reading on the HSCRP test of C Reactive Protein, an indicator of high inflammation, is a significant risk factor for future heart attacks and other heart disease.)

2. We now know how to turn off or avoid high chronic inflammation without using drugs or risking their side effects!

Aspirin cuts inflammation. But it can overdo blood thinning and cause stomach bleeding.

NSAIDs such as Advil and Motrin etc lower inflammation but new research suggests they prevent blood thinning when it’s needed and may increase the risk of heart disease.

Statin drugs ability to lower inflammation may be more important in preventing heart disease than their ability to lower LDL cholesterol.

But only some people with a certain heredity and with dangerously advanced heart disease or extremely high risk factors should be on them.

(We’ve posted on that before. So we won’t go over it here. The good news is that for lowering chronic inflammation and a high HSCRP level the new information in this post can do the job. And, it also has many other health benefits instead of side effects.)

So what new information is there on lowering chronic inflammation or avoiding it in the first place?

a) People who don’t know how to avoid it today get 16 to 20 times too much omega 6 oils and close to no omega 3 oils.

But more than a small amount of omega 6 oils triggers high chronic inflammation. Meanwhile the omega 3 oils most people aren’t yet getting lower inflammation.

We explain how to change that below. Each part of that set of actions has other health benefits too!

b) Gum disease is almost totally preventable mostly by brushing and flossing right. But most people who don’t do both well get gum disease.

Oops! The bacteria that go with gum disease boost the heck out of your level of chronic inflammation. And this goes on until the gum disease is all gone.

But you don’t have to go there or stay there!

We covered a bit of that in our last post and will cover more below.

Fixing both these causes of high chronic inflammation is quite doable.

But what if you already have osteoarthritis or your efforts to turn off inflammation are good but not great?

Wouldn’t it be useful if there were other ways to turn off or turn down high chronic inflammation too?

c) There are two spices, both currently available as supplements that do just that.

In addition they provide some of the most important health benefits known in many other areas and have very few side effects.

There are also several spices and an herbal supplement that have a component in them that also lowers inflammation. It may also help repair joint damage.

And it is a safe and natural anabolic that helps your growth hormones prevent damage and heals damage and keeps your muscles strong -- although adding strength training enhances these effects.

We cover these last in this post.

a) People who don’t know how to avoid it today get 16 to 20 times too much omega 6 oils and close to no omega 3 oils.

How do you reverse that or avoid going there?

Simply put, eat right and take omega 3 supplements.

But our understanding of how to eat right to do this is new.

Most people know that eating right means eating more real food and no longer eating junk and semifoods.

But precisely how is this done to lower your omega 6 intake and increase your omega 3 intake. Why are those steps important and effective?

Most foods today, unfortunately, are or are made out of cheap oils – all high in omega 6. Many of those oils are also hydrogenated which makes them even more pro inflammatory and causes other health problems.

Or they are made out of refined grains which are high in omega 6.

Or they are protein foods but from animals purposely overfed grain instead of allowed to eat their natural diets.

That makes the fat and oils in them unnaturally and dramatically high in omega 6 by close to 20 to one too much! And it close to eliminates the omega 3 oils that would otherwise be in those foods. This is particularly true of cattle raised in factory farms and in farmed fish.

The set of things to do to avoid this have many other health benefits from preventing heart disease, preventing mental decline, preventing or improving high blood pressure, and helping to avoid excess body fat or get rid of it!

In our last post on Tuesday, 1-3-2011 we covered how to almost completely avoid trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils. Use that information since those are unusually harmful to your health AND all made with the cheapest possible high omega 6 oils!

If you use oil to the extent you can, only use real extra virgin olive oil. The much cheaper soy, corn, safflower, and canola oils are all high in omega 6. They all are grown on factory farms and in the United States most are also genetically modified but not so identified on their labels. Don’t buy them at all and minimize or eliminate foods that contain them.

(Canola oil is only high in omega 6 instead of very high and does have the plant based omega 3 oil. But if you are able to do so, eating raw walnuts for that plant based omega 3 oil, getting omega 3 oils from animal sources, and using extra virgin olive oil instead are each much better for you.)

(Real mayonnaise is no longer sold in any of the stores I’ve shopped at. If you want the real thing that contains only olive oil, currently you have to make it yourself. The others all contain these cheap oils instead. Some premade salad dressings only have olive oil. But most use soy oil today. Eat as little of these as you can manage! Use extra virgin olive oil instead whenever you can.)

What about the high omega 6 content in meats and other protein foods that are fed grain instead of their natural diets?

That too is a huge problem for most people.

But there are 3 solutions:

Get protein from animals fed their natural diets. Wild caught fish and meat from 100 % grass fed animals instead of grain fed animals and farmed fish are example. It costs more so you have to eat a bit less. But it saves your health and future medical bills!

Get safer oils from nuts and avocados and extra virgin olive oils and protein from nuts and beans and lentils.

Get a bit of protein from less refined oatmeal and some 100 % whole grain foods but not too much.

Eat such whole grains, beans and lentils, and nonstarchy vegetables instead of refined grain foods.

If you do eat foods from animals fed grain, minimize the amount and make it all as fat reduced and lean as you can.

Yes the fats and oils from grain fed animals are high in saturated fat – much more than from naturally fed animals. But minimizing that fat is much more important for your health because of the reduction in omega 6 oils!

Eat chicken, usually, remove the skin before cooking, and drain it after cooking to remove even more oils.

Only buy the leanest cuts of meat, trim any visible fat, use a mechanical tenderizer such as the one from Butchers Kitchen, and add back some extra virgin olive oil in recipes that would suffer from too little oil.

Mostly avoid processed meats. They tend to be the fattier cuts and use harmful to you preservatives we just found out.

Mostly use 2% lowfat dairy products. The regular has twice the fat. And the nonfat and 1% tend to use dried milk which boosts inflammation.

Kerry Gold Irish cheese is from grass fed cows. And, there is a German butter from grass fed cows. Use those when you can get them instead of from grain fed sources.

Eat eggs from the most naturally raised chickens you can. Their ratio of quality protein to bad fats is actually favorable even if from grain fed because egg protein is so complete and the yolks don’t have that much fat.

If you can get eggs from pasture fed chickens fed in unpolluted locations do so. But that’s still rare unless you live near such a farm.

If you do the best you can at each of these things, you can still eat plenty of protein and good tasting food and slash your intake of omega 6 oils.

Second, ensure that you get daily and weekly infusions of omega 3 oils.

In my view the best source of the plant version of omega 3 is walnuts.

Unless you are allergic and cannot eat them, they have that omega 3. They have some monosaturated oils too. Walnuts have been tested to have heart health benefits from their minerals and other phytonutrients.

They do have some omega 6 oils. But because they also have fiber and protein and these other oils, if they are one of your few sources of omega 6 your intake will be small enough to not be a problem. (Also, you do need some omega 6 oils. So if you virtually eliminate all your other sources, you can get you minimum intake needed for good health from walnuts.

People who eat raw walnuts, or almonds, or pecans eat a high fat food. But they rarely gain weight – virtually never if they only eat an ounce or two a day.

How can that be?

The reason is that nuts contain each of the six things that turn off appetite. They have fats and oils. They have fiber. They have protein. They taste good. And, they are crunchy enough you can tell you’ve eaten. And it takes a few minutes to eat them. So people who eat nuts lower their appetite enough, they eat that many calories less of other foods.

Small wild caught fish from unpolluted waters may be the best source of omega 3 oils from food. They contain less pollution than larger fish that eat lots of fish their size. And, many of them such as sardines are high in DHA which is unusually brain protective and enhancing. Some people are allergic to canned fish. And some canned fish can be a bit too smelly. Though I have heard that soaking them for a half an hour in milk before eating or heating up can cut that way down.

Wild caught salmon are also a good source of omega 3 oils. Fewer people are allergic to them. And even canned salmon tends to not be too smelly to eat immediately. Alaskan canned salmon is all wild caught and relatively inexpensive. (Caution, if salmon in a store or a restaurant is not labeled as wild caught it is virtually certain to be farmed salmon. Farmed fish is often fed grain and has less omega 3 oils. Worse, it is very high in pollutants. Avoid it totally or only it once a year or less.)

What if you don’t want to eat fish or you only eat fish or seafood with omega 3 oils once or twice or three times a week? What do you do instead or every day to ensure you have omega 3 oils each day?

Purified fish oil supplements from Nordic Naturals provide exactly that. They start with small wild caught fish low in pollutants and then purify that oil. I take two a day of their omega 3 supplement. I also take a separate DHA supplement daily as it is the most brain protective one.

Omega 3 oils help protect you in other ways besides lowering inflammation too. They lower your triglycerides. They slightly lower your bloods tendency to clot. And for some people they help lower high blood pressure a bit. Each of those effects is heart protective. And the reduce inflammation is heart protective too.

And, there’s more. Omega three oils in general and DHA in particular not only help your brain work better and improve your mood and make you less irritable and protect you from depression, a recent study found they help you prevent your brain from shrinking as you get older. Until that study came out, we thought that only regular exercise did that.

So eat a DASH diet with extra vegetables and some garlic and some extra virgin olive oil and eat fish or take omega 3 supplements. Consider adding some red wine in moderation.

Or eat a Mediterranean diet with a bit less pasta and more vegetables and eat fish or take omega 3 supplements.

These two diets with these additions overlap a bit. And they are low in omega 6 oils.

And, since they are decent on protein and high in nonstarchy vegetables and have very few fattening foods, many people who eat them experience almost effortless fat loss. It’s common for people who begin eating the DASH diet to lose 20 or 25 pounds if they have been eating more fattening foods and drinking regular or diet soft drinks before.

b) Gum disease is almost totally preventable mostly by brushing and flossing right. But most people who don’t do both well get gum disease.

Oops! The bacteria that go with gum disease boost the heck out of your level of chronic inflammation. And this goes on until the gum disease is all gone.

But you don’t have to go there or stay there!

People who, at least once a day every day -- floss their teeth and then brush them with special techniques and attention to brushing their gums with a soft bristled brush, get dozens of health benefits.

They get the obvious ones. They are less likely to have really bad breath. They are far less likely to get gum disease. And they are far more likely to keep their teeth. Plus they don’t have to pay for expensive gum disease treatments or pulling loose teeth or false teeth. And, their future appearance and breath will be far better. They’ll look younger and less poor than they otherwise would.

But they also get several massive health benefits besides those! Because of the damage from the bacteria in gum disease and the chronic inflammation in your system all the time, gum disease makes death, heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s disease all more likely. In addition, that inflammation also may help cause cancers and DOES help cause osteoarthritis. Really! Ouch!

There’s a special technique to flossing and brushing your teeth that makes it most effective.

You can schedule a teeth cleaning or check up at your Dentist’s office and ask for a lesson or two on how to brush and floss your teeth while you are there. (That’s how I learned to do both correctly. I got lucky and they volunteered to teach me.)

Here’s my short version.

They found that flossing first and then brushing was most effective.

When you floss don’t just get the floss between your teeth and remove it. After you have it between your teeth make a kind of x motion to clean down both side and into your gumline just a bit.

It only takes about one minute to do this.

(The main idea of both flossing and brushing correctly is to clean out the tiny food particles that otherwise get trapped just underneath your gumline. That’s what the bacteria get into to cause all the problems. So cleaning it out with flossing and brushing each day is the best defense.)

Then after you put a bit of toothpaste on your brush, brush the flat part of your back teeth on each side and top and bottom. That helps prevent cavities there particularly if you use a fluoride toothpaste.

All the rest of the brushing is for your gums although your teeth get brushed in the process. Brush the gumline inside and out on both top and bottom. AND, angle your brush at a 45 degree angle so it digs into your gumline just a bit. That’s why to use a soft tooth brush and be a bit gentle in your brushing. Then brushy your gumline inside and out and top and bottom a second time. Then on the third pass, brush your gums directly just above the gumline also inside and out and top and bottom.

If you do each of these three steps in 20 or 30 seconds, all your brushing takes less than two minutes.

So both flossing and brushing together takes about 3 minutes or just a bit more.

If you don’t have a soft toothbrush or a new soft one, buy a soft bristled toothbrush sometime this week. (Brushing your teeth at the gumline and brushing your gums directly is critically important to do. But medium and hard bristled tooth brushes damage your gums if you brush this way.)

If you don’t have floss, buy two containers of floss sometime this week. (That way when you run out of the first one, you begin using the second one which you then replace the next time you go to the store.)

Then make a very strong special effort to floss and then brush once every day. First thing after breakfast tends to work best. And do that for 3 weeks. After that, you are in the habit of doing it. Just resume if you notice you begin skipping. Pick a start date soon and begin then!

(What if you get super rushed some mornings? Even if you are so rushed you skip breakfast or a shower, always do at least a fast brushing. Then floss later that day after dinner. That way even when being that rushed, you both brush and floss once that day. Then always do both right after breakfast on the days you aren’t so rushed.

As a last resort, up to once a week, skip flossing. But make a strong effort to never skip two days in a row. If you do, it puts you at risk and you can tell the difference when you restart.)

Brushing and flossing this way every day is critical to your health. Virtually everyone can afford it.

And, even the best dentists can’t make up for all the damage if you don’t do it.

Not many people, even some dentists, don’t yet know that flossing and brushing can help prevent or improve osteoarthritis too.

But you are now one of them!

It also helps to get a teeth cleaning every 6 months at the dentist to remove the little bit of plaque your brushing and flossing miss.

That’s very important because this little bit of plaque hardens and acts like sandpaper to your gums. That also increases inflammation and can cause gum disease.

So if you have dental insurance or can afford to do this twice a year, it’s well worth it.

But what if you already have osteoarthritis or your efforts to turn off inflammation are good but not great?

Wouldn’t it be useful if there were other ways to turn off or turn down high chronic inflammation too?

c) There are two spices, both currently available as supplements that do just that.

In addition they provide some of the most important health benefits known in many other areas and have very few side effects.

There are also several spices and an herbal supplement that have a component in them that also lowers inflammation. It may also help repair joint damage.

And it is a safe and natural anabolic that helps your growth hormones prevent damage and heals damage and keeps your muscles strong -- although adding strength training enhances these effects.

The first two spices are turmeric and ginger. They are biologically related and have some overlapping effects.

Turmeric or the curcumin in it has an intense yellow color and a slightly harsh taste. Almost all curries have it as a key ingredient.

If you eat turmeric as a spice or eat curried food that contains it or take curcumin or turmeric supplements AND eat some black pepper at the same time and do this from several times a day to once a day you get some incredibly powerful health benefits!

You get enough inflammation reduction to turn down arthritis pain about as well as aspirin or NSAIDs but with other health benefits instead of side effects.

This daily inflammation reduction also helps prevent osteoarthritis. And, it helps prevent heart disease and many cancers.

But it’s first found health benefit is that it prevents and may even help reverse early cases of Alzheimer’s disease. It turns down tau protein which is now thought to create the initial damage. It lowers beta amyloid that tends to build up and worsen the damage. It even helps remove some beta amyloid over time.

But why the black pepper at the same time? Here are two reasons. One researcher found that turmeric was 200 times more absorbed and used when taken with black pepper! That’s a huge difference. The other was that in the research that found turmeric lowered tau protein now thought to be the initial trigger for Alzheimer’s disease, it did so when given with black pepper!

Turmeric and curcumin also help lower LDL cholesterol by up to 20 points when you get them that regularly.

Between all their effects they are also one of the best ways to prevent heart disease.

Ginger works better as a spice in different foods including sweet foods. It’s a bit hotter but far less harsh in its taste than turmeric.

Ginger also does a good job lowering inflammation. And well used as a spice it can really help foods taste good.

Ginger too lowers inflammation and LDL cholesterol and has other heart protective effects. One of those, it’s blood thinning effect, can be problematic in people taking blood thinning drugs however.

Lastly, ginger increases your resistance to nausea and air and sea sickness enough to be quite valuable for that use.

There are also several spices and an herbal supplement that have a component in them that also lowers inflammation. It may also help repair joint damage.

And it is a safe and natural anabolic that helps your growth hormones prevent damage and heals damage and keeps your muscles strong -- although adding strength training enhances these effects.

The ingredient is ursolic acid. It’s in many kinds of greens and the spices based on them. In addition to lowering inflammation once researcher found it acts as a safe and natural anabolic helping to preserve muscle and other lean body weight as people get older. It also may make your immune system enough more effective to speed your recovery from colds and the flu. That effect is substantial enough that as a drug, ursolic acid has anticancer effects.

So what’s it in?

It’s in most of the plant based savory spices, Oregano, Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, and Basil. And a kind of basil called Holy Basil has enough you can get holy basil as a supplement. Oddly, it’s also high in apple peel. So another way to get it is to eat organic, unwaxed whole apples.

Currently you can also get ursolic acid as a supplement directly. But we know that getting ursolic acid as a spice or food is effective. It likely works as a direct supplement too. But these spices may well have complementary phytonutrients that make it work better.

Of course if you get osteoarthritis, there are also supplements such as glucosamine and chondroitin and hyaluronic acid and shea oil that each may help.

But eating right in this way; preventing gum disease; and taking these directly antiinflammatory supplements and spices are the 3 best ways to prevent and improve osteoarthritis.

2012-01-03T13:54:00.000-08:00

Successful New Year's resolutions & health resolution ideas....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 1-3-2012

To have a successful New Year’s resolution or health resolution, you have to make one.

(Our last post on Friday, 12-30-2011 had several key ideas to make resolutions you actually achieve.)

That post included this idea:

“Health writer Dr Al Sears in his email today (Fri, 12-30-2011) endorses the idea of scheduling just one or two doable things to do in January to move him closer to reaching his goals.

He thinks he will even make progress with this method on a couple of goals he hasn’t been able to reach in prior years.”

Today, I’ll list two health related resolutions and such easy ways to make a real start on achieving them.

The resolutions are each well worth doing. But even if you already do them or prefer not to work on them right now more than you already are, they are examples of how to pick health resolutions and do doable steps or actions to do them or get started.

1. Here’s one that’s close to free. It’s easy to do once you learn how and get used to doing it. And, it has massive health benefits!

People who, at least once a day every day -- floss their teeth and then brush them with special techniques and attention to brushing their gums with a soft bristled brush, get dozens of health benefits.

They get the obvious ones. They are less likely to have really bad breath. They are far less likely to get gum disease. And they are far more likely to keep their teeth. Plus they don’t have to pay for expensive gum disease treatments or pulling loose teeth or false teeth. And, their future appearance and breath will be far better. They’ll look younger and less poor than they otherwise would.

But they also get several massive health benefits besides those! Because of the damage from the bacteria in gum disease and the chronic inflammation in your system all the time, gum disease makes death, heart attacks, strokes, and Alzheimer’s disease all more likely. In addition, that inflammation also may help cause cancers and DOES help cause osteoarthritis. Really! Ouch!

How to start doing this and preventing all these bad diseases?

Read our upcoming post now planned for Thursday this week on how chronic inflammation is a direct cause of osteoarthritis and how to brush and floss your teeth to save your gums and do it time efficiently. That’s one of the best ways to prevent osteoarthritis and keep it from getting worse.

Or, schedule a teeth cleaning or check up at your Dentist’s office and ask for a lesson on how to brush and floss your teeth while you are there. (That’s how I learned to do both correctly. I got lucky and they volunteered to teach me.)

If you don’t have a soft toothbrush or a new one, buy a soft bristled toothbrush sometime this week. (Brushing your teeth at the gumline and brushing your gums directly is critically important to do. But medium and hard bristled tooth brushes damage your gums if you brush that way.)

If you don’t have floss, buy two containers of floss sometime this week. (That way when you run out of the first one, you begin using the second one which you then replace the next time you go to the store.)

Then make a very strong special effort to floss and then brush once every day. First thing after breakfast tends to work best. And do that for 3 weeks. After that, you are in the habit of doing it. Just resume if you notice you begin skipping. Pick a start date soon and begin then!

(What if you get super rushed some mornings? Even if you are so rushed you skip breakfast or a shower, always do at least a fast brushing. Then floss later that day after dinner. That way even when being that rushed, you both brush and floss once that day. Then always do both right after breakfast on the days you aren’t so rushed.

As a last resort, up to once a week, skip flossing. But make a strong effort to never skip two days in a row. If you do, it puts you at risk and you can tell the difference when you restart.)

2. Here’s a health resolution that makes permanent fat loss easier and that has as many or even more health benefits.

Find out how and cut your intake of trans fats and related hydrogenated oils to zero! Then start doing it.

Eating them is like eating heart attack starter! They cause your bad, small particle, LDL to go up and begin causing plaque deposits in your blood vessels.

But that reduces your blood circulation and increases inflammation too. So it also causes high blood pressure from hardening and narrowing of your blood vessels and helps cause strokes and Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia too!

Eating a moderate amount of health OK fats and oils in such things as extra virgin olive oil, nuts, avocados, wild caught fish, omega 3 oil supplements, and some lowfat dairy and meat from 100 % grass fed animals is actually good for you. And, it actually IMPROVES fat loss over eating a very lowfat diet.

But eating trans fats too, adds extra calories you tend to wear as fat. So if you cut that back to zero, you will weigh less from doing so.

But it’s even more effective than that to eliminate trans fats and hydrogenated oils as a help to fat loss. Why?

Because most trans fats and hydrogenated oils are in packaged desserts and snacks and most commercial baked goods and in many fast foods.

And, those also often have such fattening ingredients as high fructose corn syrup, refined grains, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and excess salt.

Lastly, these foods tend to be eaten along with drinking a regular or diet soft drink—or more than one. Those drinks act as the perfect fatteners. They have no protein, health OK fats, fiber, or nutrients. And they both act as very strong appetite boosters. Worse they boost your appetite for sugary foods!

The less of these things you eat and drink, the less fat you’ll be. And you may even be LESS hungry!

How to avoid trans fats and hydrogenated oils?

Stop eating margarine, shortening that isn’t lard, nondairy coffee creamer, and microwave popcorn that contains any kind of oil. (Add butter later if you want. But the oils used in the other kind of microwave popcorn are virtually all trans fats and hydrogenated oils.)

Eat far less packaged desserts and snacks and most commercial baked goods and fast foods. (Begin always reading the labels first. If the label has any trans fat reading at all except 0.0 OR it lists ANY hydrogenated oil as an ingredient, take a pass. And, if it has no label, take a pass almost every time.)

And what are some ideas to get started doing it?

Begin reading the labels on all the food you buy or eat that has labels. Trans fats and hydrogenated oils are also still in many candy bars, ice creams, peanut butters, and breads!

Then leave them on the shelf if they have any of this stuff. Buy another kind of food or a better brand that has none of this stuff.

Simply read the labels the next several times you go to the grocery store.

2011-12-30T12:48:00.000-08:00

Successful New Year’s Resolutions and health resolutions....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-30-2011

To have a successful New Year’s resolution or health resolution, you have to make one.

Many people don’t bother to make any. Almost all of them fail. (Some of those who are taking action separately to make good things happen will succeed anyway.)

Many people think up a couple and stop there. Almost all of them fail.

A few people write down a resolution or two. Some of them succeed.

But why not join the group that succeeds or at least makes worthwhile progress on achieving their resolutions almost every time?

Make these several changes.

Write them all down. (This year, I found a place I can review them a few times each month.)

Write them down as goals to achieve in the coming year instead of as a resolution.

Have only one or two that are a real challenge to reach.

Include at least one or two related goals that you know you can get done. (That way, you can review each of them all throughout the year and see some progress at least on those goals.)

Then right away, write down a few things to do to work on getting them achieved. Begin doing those things in January.

This can be well worth doing!

John Carlton writes of doing three things, writing his goals for the year as of a year later and as if they were achieved. He had a potentially effective way to reach his goals. And the goals he set were quite modest.

( See http://www.john-carlton.com/ The Rest Of Your Freakin’ Life, Re-Redux Tuesday, 1:31pm Reno, NV )

It worked. And, repeating the process allowed him to succeed in reaching MUCH larger goals later.

Health writer Dr Al Sears in his email today endorses the idea of scheduling just one or two doable things to do in January to move him closer to reaching his goals.

He thinks he will even make progress with this method on a couple of goals he hasn’t been able to reach in prior years.

Write down your goals for the year. Write them down as if it’s next January and you are reporting you got them.

Have at least some of them clearly doable or very likely doable.

Pick one or two things you clearly can do to begin the process of reaching each one that you schedule to do in January.

I’ll use myself as an example.

Despite my healthy lifestyle and weight lost on the scale, my waist is still too fat and large. And my blood pressure, while not at the level drugs are needed to treat IS a bit too high for best health results.

For the fat loss goal, I’ve already begun making progress on building more muscle in my legs. And, later today I’ll buy a logbook to help me succeed in eating a bit more nonstarchy vegetables and less of other things for my after dinner snacks. And, I’ve listed about six more things to add after that.

Losing more belly fat will drop my blood pressure a few points too.

Earlier this week I bought my first video Tai Chi lessons and last night I began learning from them.

(Since doing Tai Chi calms you and your overactive response to stress – which I’ve had -- the research says I’ll drop my blood pressure by itself to where I’d like it to be. One research study found people who began doing Tai Chi regularly dropped 17 over 11 points from their high blood pressure.)

Second, there is a supplement that is taken from a mild herbal tea, Hibiscus, that tested as dropping high blood pressure about 13 over 8. (I tried the tea and simply didn’t care for it; but I can take the supplement to get the effect of regularly drinking a few cups each day of the tea.)

I ordered today that supplement today and will begin taking it when it arrives in two weeks at my local health food store.

My blood pressure when I’m relaxed is 135 over 80. But it can easily be 159 over 93 when I’m stressed. I want to look back next January when it measures 119 over 71 when I’m relaxed and 139 over 83 when I’m stressed! I also am working to have less stress in my life. But that’s not always within my control.

I’d planned to add some easy to do but profoundly effective health goals you might want to consider to this post but find I’m out of time.

So I may do that next week.

Have a happy and prosperous and healthy New Year!

And, stay safe on New Year’s Eve so you are around to enjoy it!

2011-12-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 5....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-29-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part 1 on Tuesday, 12-20-2011, last week.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

Last Thursday’s post covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

Friday last week we covered 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

If your friends, family, and neighbors are fat, it can be much harder to lose fat yourself. But there are three ways to do it. And, of those there are many ways to keep enjoying your current friends while being more effective influencing them than the other way around. That post had those solutions.

And, on Tuesday this week, we posted on how to keep yourself on track. That about doubles your chance of success.

And, we posted on how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. That too will at least double your chances of success.

Doing both, if you do them well and you keep doing it, it will at least multiply your chances at success by over 4 times. For many people doing both will guarantee your success.

Today, we add a bonus post to this series. When I decided to do this series I wrote down 6 common fat loss problems to give solutions to.

The last post, how to ensure you keep going I put in as the 6th problem to solve because I lost my original list of 6. And, I found I could only remember 5.

I remembered the first 5; posted on those; did the last post about how to virtually ensure success by both managing it yourself and getting skilled and supportive outside help.

Today, I was doing an end of the year clean up at work and found the original 6th problem.

It was too much sitting!

Until a hundred years ago most people didn’t sit much and before 1,000 years ago very few people sat more than 4 or 5 hours a day. Modern man evolved something like 30,000 years ago; and our primate ancestors go back over a million years. Most of them sat very little each day!

Today, it has become common for people to sit for 9 to over 12 hours a day.

That’s a huge difference in activity level and average blood circulation during each day.

The calories burned difference and the less exercised muscles that has caused are two of the reasons far more people are fatter than they were on the average before a 100 years ago.

But that’s far from all.

First, if you sit much over 6 hours a day, your risk of virtually everything you’d like to avoid goes up.

This includes aging, heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, and sexual dysfunction. It also includes brain shrinkage, memory problems, and also is a contributing cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

Second, fatter people sit even more than normal weight people. One study found that obese, definitely fat, people sat an average of 9.5 hours a day while normal weight people sat an average of 7.0 hours a day.

That 2.5 hour a day difference is quite large. Even very light activity burns at least 100 calories an hour more than sitting. Over a week’s time, it adds up to 1750 calories a week. That’s about the calories in half a pound of body fat.

If two people eat the same number of calories for a year and the one who sat 7 hours a day was the same weight at the end of the year, the one who sat 9.5 hours would be 26 pounds fatter!

Mercifully the person sitting more usually tends to eat less, so it’s usually not that bad.

BUT, for one cause of sitting more, it is often worse!

And, the studies reflect that too. People who watch TV less than 14 hours a week are routinely far less fat on the average than people who watch TV over 28 hours a week.

Watching that 2 hours more of TV tends to build in more sitting time. But it’s even worse than that for three reasons.

You sit so quietly while watching TV, you burn less calories than while you are sleeping!

Second, the ads on commercial TV specialize in advertising the bad for you and fattening foods and drinks that you should virtually write off if you want hunger free fat loss.

Third, if you eat any kind of snack – even healthier ones, let alone fattening ones -- while you watch TV, you simply eat on automatic pilot. You also even keep eating when, had you been paying attention, you’d have noticed you were no longer hungry and were full!

Earlier in this series under how to find time to exercise, we posted on two ways to turn TV time into exercise time.

One way is to turn off the TV and do some kind of vigorous exercises such as strength training or interval cardio or moderate exercises like walking, swimming, or gardening for longer times.

The other way is to set up some kind of exerciser you can use while you watch TV.

There are two other solutions.

Program in regular breaks in your sitting so you don’t just stay totally still for more than an hour or two.

Getting up to get yourself coffee, tea, or water throughout the day keeps you hydrated and gets you up to do it. But it gets you up a second time to visit the bathroom too!

I also got the idea to do about 30 seconds of a moderate exercise a few times a day. Good idea; but a few weeks later, I realized I’d done it once on the day I thought of it and never did it again!

I’ve since put in a double reminder and do it 5 times virtually every weekday.

When I get up to get a cup of tea or green tea, right then or when I finish the cup, I do the short exercise session. AND, I make a mark in my special logbook for that day. That combination is very effective. And only on the very busiest days do I fail to do it all 5 times.

But there is more coming!

What if you could burn 50 to 100 calories for at least half of your sitting time too?!

An expensive set up where you can work on your computer and on your phone while walking, a “walking desk”, has been tried. It does work; but it’s expensive for the purpose and it can be tiring or can distract you from your work.

Eventually I personally plan to get a specialized minibike or other exerciser I can use while seated at my desk and another I can use while reading at home.

They don’t yet make those that I know of but most people today need them.

Given the health harm of sitting too much and how many people do that, these minibikes and chairs that match them well are coming soon I think.

Walking burns about 300 calories an hour. (200 if you are skinny and walk slowly to over 500 if you walk really fast or walk somewhat fast but are much heavier.)

Using a seated minibike exerciser that you use much less effort on but keep moving slowly most of the time you sit can easily burn 50 calories an hour.

Then if like many people today you sit for 6 hours a day, you could easily add an extra 2100 calories a week by using a seated minibike exerciser most of the time you sit at home or at work. That would help people lose about 2 and a half pounds a month for a few months once they got into the habit of always using one. Then they’d keep it off!

(If I’d used one of the seated minibikes since I began my current fatloss plan, I’d still need to add the extra muscle to be at my goal weight. But I’d be trying to add muscle weight to get back UP to my goal weight! That’s because I’d be 10 to 20 pounds less fat. I’m only 5 pounds over my goal weight now; but my waist is still too fat!)

I’ve also had a new idea. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!

But until those become available for $69.38 at WalMart or $79.95 at Big 5 Sporting Goods, by all means do the other things in this post! They will help.

2011-12-27T13:18:00.000-08:00

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 4....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-27-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

Last Thursday’s post covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

Friday last week we covered 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

If your friends, family, and neighbors are fat, it can be much harder to lose fat yourself. But there are three ways to do it. And, of those there are many ways to keep enjoying your current friends while being more effective influencing them than the other way around. That post had those solutions.

This time we’ll cover how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. It will at least double your chances of success. And, if it’s done well and you keep using it, it will virtually guarantee your success.

It’s a key part of

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

These basic three principles were in the first post in this series and all the others.

Plan to upgrade your lifestyle permanently to one that protects your health and supports your health without hunger. Instead of a temporary plan, a diet, that gets temporary results if any, focus on doing sustainable upgrades.

Do so in a way that does trim off some calories you were taking in and burns more while doing so in ways that avoid making you unusually hungry all the time.

Always aim to do these things in ways YOU find sustainable. (Not being too hungry all the time makes that much easier.)

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

The first part is the focus and controls you build into your life yourself.

The first way to do that and double your chances of success is to keep track regularly.

Exercise is a key part of staying healthy and losing fat without hunger. People who keep a logbook of their exercise they use at each session they do right then as they exercise each time, are more than twice as likely to keep exercising. I use a system that enables writing in mine to just a few seconds for each exercise.

Measuring your waist and hips and chest and your weight on the scale on the same day of the week or the same day of the week once a month and analyzing what went right or less than OK to cause that period’s results also can double your results. (My own monthly report was a post last week.)

If you eat a very varied diet, it can help to keep a similar log for what you eat.

But having planned variation for each breakfast and each weekday lunch and many weekday dinners where you eat what you planned and eating almost only the right kinds of food the rest the time is easier on you. You just have the meals you planned and by adding some variation but often eating the same foods for the same meals each weekday, you know what you ate without having to take the extra time to record it.

Having those planned meals also makes it much easier to shop for your food too.

You do keep control of what you eat that way; but save the time the more complex logs of eating would require.

Controlling your exercise, managing your food intake, and monitoring your progress taken together can ensure your long term success.

But if you aren’t used to doing that sort of thing or your motivation to stay on course is variable, it can more than triple your success chances to have regular support for your efforts.

Such support can help you do this kind of management. It can encourage you to continue. It can provide solutions to the problems that you need help with.

Jillian Michaels is not perfect. But she does have a decent online support system for a relatively modest fee. She does particularly well for women who find her and her successful students inspiring and who need specific exercises and eating plans to get them going.

Weight Watchers has both an online program and a weekly meeting you can attend in person. People who need to add calorie cut backs to exercise and eating foods that support your health can do well with Weight Watchers. And people who need in person support and more productive thinking styles can do well with their weekly meetings. The meeting leaders can give you the emotional boost and the positive way to think about problems and solutions you need.

Weight Watchers does have some problems but has improved in many of those areas. They recommend more of a calorie cut back than is wise for permanent fat loss to ensure people get fast enough results they don’t drop out. (I found that by adding more nonstarchy vegetables, a zero point food, and aiming for a smaller cut back, and continuing to exercise, I was able to lose more fat than the cut back looked likely to deliver.)

Though they have gotten more proactive at encouraging people to delete fattening foods and drinks than they were, they still don’t emphasize that enough nor cutting back on all grains. They also don’t emphasize exercise enough. And, for many kinds of fruit, it may have been a mistake to list them as zero point foods.

But if you join and use either Jillian Michael’s system or Weight Watchers, by adding our information to their system you can do well in improving your health, losing fat, and keeping it off.

We are working to design and make our own online support system available too.

To access that when it becomes available, just keep reading our posts and our fat loss posts in particular. We will announce it on our posts when it’s ready; and it will be available through its own link from our posts.

2011-12-23T12:46:00.000-08:00

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-23-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

It covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

This time we’ll cover 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

This one can be quite challenging for many reasons.

For family members who still think junky foods and drinks are normal and want to keep eating them or who would dislike have being fat uncomfortably brought to their attention who are now ignoring it and those who both fail to support you or make it harder for you for whatever reason, some of these solutions will help.

The good news is that in many families where the person who lost weight is clearly happier and continues to be nice to the other people in the family, the influence goes the other way! You can inspire them to lose fat too!

But for bad family situations you need the last solution we’ll cover next week which is ways to get outside support by people who want you to lose fat.

a) The first idea is to get a firm grip on the fact that if you learn how to keep yourself healthy and lose fat and keep it off AND do it and keep doing it, you join a new and elite group of people.

You’ll keep your family and many of your friends. But you will now belong to a new group of people who include championship athletes, doctors who help their patients prevent diseases, personal trainers, health writers, and health coaches.

You’ll also fit better with groups of people who do the best in life including college professors, successful entrepreneurs and sales people, CEO’s and other executives, other achievers, and other college educated people. That’s because each of these groups is more likely than average to be in the new group you are joining.

People enjoy being members of an elite. And this is an elite you can join by choosing to do so and doing the actions necessary.

b) Find ways to socialize with your friends and acquaintances that support them but do not support their bad eating habits or lack of exercise. And, begin to avoid some situations where they would want you to eat badly with them.

If they are active on Facebook, do some of your socializing there.

Invite them to go with you on short hikes in interesting or beautiful places. Then let them set the pace.

Instead of going to their home, when you can, meet them at a restaurant at which there are food choices that fit what you need as well as the standard fare.

Meet them at potluck events where you can bring health OK foods you can eat and pick out what foods you’ll eat.

If you go to their home to eat, be an unusually friendly and polite guest and make the conversation fun and interesting for them. But take small servings of foods you shouldn’t eat and say if they taste good; but leave some of the most fattening stuff.

But do NOT try to sell them there on why to eat the way you do. ONLY do that if once you do lose enough fat it’s noticeable and either they ask how you are doing it or they say yes when you ask if they would like to do as you have done.

Focus on the things about that friend that you like and make the meal a positive event and focus on the things you have in common.

You’ll keep the friendship and be MORE likely to be positive example to them!

So by socializing some by Facebook and email; eating with them at locations that easily allow them and you to eat the way you want; and making the good times you share more important than the food when you eat at their place, you can keep the friendship and NOT have your fat loss derailed or your health harmed.

c) If you need to and can do so, spend some time socializing with people like personal trainers or people who have been going the gym for years and look like it in addition to your fatter friends.

Read books about health and fat loss. Read this blog when the topic interests you.

That way part of your thinking, social input, and social modeling is on people who already are the way you are becoming yourself.

Next time we’ll cover how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. It will at least double your chances of success. And, if it’s done well and you keep using it, it will virtually guarantee your success.

2011-12-22T14:27:00.000-08:00

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 2....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-22-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

This post begins solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

4. Stress triggered eating.

Some stress is so severe that the shock and adrenalin response completely turn off your appetite.

But most of the stress people have is chronic and mild to severe. The effect of this kind of stress is similar to the effects of the famine response.

People become more hungry for “comfort” foods that may be from the not really normal list and horribly fattening. It always tends to cause more appetite for sugary and fattier foods.

There are two ways to beat it.

Be less stressed. And, avoid this effect when you are stressed

Being less stressed IS possible. It’s not often easy. But there are ways you can have less stress. You can prevent some kinds of stress. You can escape or turn off some stressful problems, and you can turn off your body’s stress response.

The post we did: High leverage ways to live longer, part 2.... Thursday, 12-8-2011 covers these three methods in detail because people who do these 3 things age more slowly, have better health, and live longer.

Bonus for this post.: In that post we forgot three great ways to turn off your body’s stress response.

a) Believe it or not you can get quite substantial if brief stress relief AND wake up a bit too within a few seconds. You don’t even have to learn how because it was already wired in when you were born! Just take a few seconds and yawn and stretch on purpose.

(People you know you or who see you as similar to them in some way will tend to yawn too and get the same stress relief often without even realizing it.)

b) Another blogger reminded me that watching videos or old movies you think are funny and laugh at also can be superb stress relief.

c) Doing a fast set of a relatively vigorous exercise also gives you almost instant if brief stress relief.

Being stressed without giving in to fattening foods also works.

If you follow the methods that cause hunger free fat loss that does not trigger your body’s stress response, your real hunger will be low or reasonable.

Saying no to stress caused eating is dramatically easier when your real hunger is not also high! Women who always eat a filling and health OK breakfast can say no to very fattening treats found in some offices MUCH more easily than women who haven’t eaten since last night as one example.

If you’ve eaten food that turns down your hunger and fills your tummy with some fiber too and some food that you enjoy eating, if you do reach for comfort food, it’s dramatically easier to have just a bit instead of a lot more.

Another way is to know the health harms of the ingredients of some of the worst treat foods. You may be hungrier for them from stress. But focusing on what those ingredients will do to you can make it much, much easier to pass completely.

The last way I’ll list is to refuse to eat treat foods that you don’t really like that much normally. Only eat those you normally really like. And just eat some while remembering that you are aiming to average mostly healthy and nonfattening foods.

Next time we’ll cover 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

2011-12-20T14:15:00.000-08:00

Solutions to common fat loss problems....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-20-2011

1. The fail safe famine response is the big one.

Fat loss eating plans with no net calorie reduction tend not to work. But 95% or more fat loss plans overdo calorie restriction enough that the bodies of the people using them, trigger this famine response.

It makes people get hungrier and for it to take more food to stop them feeling hungry. It slows fat loss. It lowers energy levels and metabolism so you feel less like exercising and burn less calories. And, it makes sugary and fatty foods taste better than they already do.

It’s like taking 3 effective drugs to fatten you up at the same time.

The 3 main solutions are to:

a) Eat only or almost only lower glycemic and nutritious foods that support your health. These foods have fewer calories or cause your blood sugar and insulin to spike very little or both. The health OK protein foods and the health OK fats and oils turn off hunger well and have no extra rebound hunger later. And, many of these foods are high enough in fiber that you have a full stomach when you eat them.

Eating enough of them to turn off your hunger will NOT trigger your famine response.

That’s particularly true for the protein foods and the foods higher in fiber. And adding some health OK fats and oils most days makes the famine response even less likely research finds.

(We post quite often on these foods and drinks that actually support your health without fattening you by the way. Virtually all of them also have multiple health benefits and protect you from many diseases.)

b) Do enough more exercise overall and enough strength training and interval cardio to use up more calories instead of eating less of them.

This doesn’t work by itself short of 8 to 10 hours a day of exercise. But even a few minutes almost every day of such exercise does burn enough more calories to cause more fat loss. It also helps ensure you lose fat instead of muscle.

The biggest two benefits though are that you get enormous health benefits even before you lose much fat. And, because you can lose fat with less food cut backs, you can lose fat without triggering the famine response.

c) The additional calorie cut backs need to happen in a pattern that does NOT trigger the famine response. We are descended from people who had a variable food supply. So some calorie cuts backs are OK. But meal after meal day after day calorie cut backs at every meal and every day, your body will read as a famine.

Strategies like only cutting calories extra every other day or only two days a week that have a day or two off between them or only one half day partial fast a week done every week, do net out fewer calories each week. But because they allow you to be normally fed most of the time -- tend not to trigger the famine response.

In summary, every day calorie cut backs in a temporary diet plan, produce temporary results and zero permanent results.

Since it is unpleasant to do and doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for the people who try to lose fat that way.

People who try it feel as if they have failed at fat loss. They were fine and still are able to lose fat. They used a method that always fails. To lose fat they have to use the method that does work instead.

But people who do a thorough job permanently upgrading their lifestyle to these 3 methods lose fat they keep off.

It’s not easy for many people. But it is doable. And it gets easier once you get used to it and customize it to you.

2. The boiled frog problem.

It’s said that if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and increase the heat very gradually, the frog will cook without noticing the risk at all.

Most people today are far too fat because something very like that happened to all of us over the last 100 years.

People now see fattening foods and drinks as normal today. These foods and drinks often did not exist a 100 years ago. Or they were a few times a month treats eaten by people who burned thousands of calories a week walking and in other ways few people do now.

The change from then until now has been so gradual that few people realized it was happening.

Similarly, the companies that have been making money providing these foods and drinks, only gradually cut the quality and cost to make them and increased how addictive they were and gradually advertised them more. They now make a lot of money by harming masses of people and making them fat.

But they didn’t start out that way. They began making small amounts of treats that people only consumed small amounts of a few times a month. The people doing it got plenty of exercise and many of them needed MORE calories to be healthy instead of less. And, the companies used real foods just like the original home made recipes of the day.

Seeing these foods and drinks as normal and safe to eat and drink is easy to do and most people do it.

But every last one of them is unnatural and fattening and harmful in any but the tiniest amounts. They tend to be made out of refined grains, cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and artificially saturated vegetable oils. They also add chemicals and other additives to make the food more addictive.

People who succeed best in fat loss throw out these products, don’t buy any more or take them as gifts. And, they stop buying foods or drinks with these ingredients or ordering them in restaurants.

It’s truly an unfortunate situation. And it can be challenging to do when the people around you don’t know any of this or how harmful to health these ingredients are.

But now you do. You can stop being a slowly cooking fat frog and switch permanently to being less fat.

But once you know and get used to not having these things, strangely it can be relatively easy to lose tens of pounds of fat.

These foods tend to not turn off your hunger very well and they all tend to turn it back on again from the blood sugar and insulin surges they cause. That means you actually may be LESS hungry while losing tens of pounds of fat.

This is even true for diet soft drinks research has repeatedly found. Despite having no calories diet soft drinks or foods with artificial sweeteners act as a potent appetite increasing drug. Worse, they increase your appetite for sugary foods!

Fat loss is far easier for people who don’t take this kind of appetite increasing drug!

3. Lack of time to exercise is another real problem.

Two solutions that work are these.

a) Do strength training an interval cardio you can do at home in 15 to 30 minute sessions. And do one session first thing in the morning most days.

You get a lot of results for short periods of time this way. And by doing it before the demands of your day start up, it’s dramatically more reliable and doable to fit it in.

b) Trade TV watching time for time exercising or exercise as you watch TV.

Both of these are well worth trying.

You burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping so doing less while doing things like going to the gym or taking a Tai Chi class an evening or two a week instead of watching TV can really help!

Watching less TV also cuts your exposure to ads for the foods and drinks you should completely avoid.

So exercising instead of watching TV is a triple win for your fat loss and keeping it off.

You can also get some kind of easy cardio you can do while watching the TV you really want to watch. In fact many gyms have cardio equipment rooms with TVs to make this easier for people.

If you burn only 50 to 100 calories an hour but you do it 5 to 15 hours a week it can really add up!

There are many other problems people have with fat loss. But here are solutions for three of the most important to solve problems.

2011-12-19T13:50:00.000-08:00

My monthly fatloss progress report....

Today's Post: Monday, 12-19-2011

Since last month, I lost another pound.

That’s the good news. And, there are three reasons for it.

First, except for the Thursday that was Thanksgiving, I did my partial fast at lunch the other Thursdays. Second, I was able to skip drinking an extra day and averaged my new and lower number of alcoholic drinks each week, 8.5, despite drinking a bit extra on Thanksgiving. Third, one of the people who usually brings a food to Thanksgiving that I eat a bit extra was unable to make it. And other things happened too such as less appetite due to my cold, so I ate less at Thanksgiving than I have in the past.

I’m pleased the partial fast at lunch method is still working and that I was able to avoid drinking extra for the month. Clearly I’d have weighed more and gotten even fatter had I not done them.

But the bad news is that on both of the two measures of my waist I take -- a bit tight AND a bit relaxed, I gained about three quarters of an inch.

That means I lost lean weight and got fatter! Oops!

To do that I clearly lost muscle. On a guess, I gained a couple pounds of fat and lost three pounds of muscle.

What happened on the gaining muscle side that caused me to lose it instead?

Simple. In between 11-19 & 12-17, the Saturdays I took my monthly measurements, on 11-22 I came down with a really bad cold.

Much to my shock, with all the things I do that make colds half as bad and only half as long, THIS cold was triple strength! The bad part of the cold lasted a week. The almost as bad part lasted a second week. And, it took another two weeks to recover my strength and cough up all the gunk in my chest in addition.

Colds are worse in the late afternoon and early evening. And my Monday and Weds evening jump rope sessions need extra energy and deep breathing. So I had to skip those sessions. I suspect I lost muscle from my legs and butt by doing so.

In addition, I kept up my morning exercise sessions. But to avoid making my cold worse, I used lighter weight and less repetitions. So, here again I suspect I lost some muscle.

The far better news is that the recent several morning sessions are back to normal and I’ll be able to get back to my jump rope sessions tonight.

My hope is that I gain the muscle back by next month, that I lose another pound, AND lose back the 3/4 inch from my waist or even lose an inch.

(My main goal now that I’m close to my goal weight is to lose inches off my waist by adding muscle on my larger muscles like my chest and butt and legs and keep those two measures the same or increase them.

Clearly I went backwards on this one last month. Although I may not make progress on more, over the next month I should be able to regain the muscle I had.)

Also, I had a plan to get a log book pad of paper to keep track of the broccoli I ate each evening. But I was too tired in the evenings from the cold to make the extra effort at all to unthaw the frozen broccoli florets and eat some. And, I was too short on time and energy to buy the kind of log book pad of paper I plan to use.

I will have some extra shopping time the Monday after Christmas to buy the log book pad of paper. And, I’ve had excellent results following through on things I once use a log book system to track.

So, between adding back the muscle and the one day a week partial fast at lunch and that evening effort, I believe I’ll again lose a pound on the scale by next month.

The combination of adding muscle and losing weight should cut back on my waist measurements. Next month, the weight loss should be fat loss and my fat loss should be greater than the weight loss!

Let’s hope so!

I now need to lose 4 pounds total to return to my goal weight. And, I still need to lose at least four to 6 inches off my waist.

According to pictures I’ve seen, I’m now at about 22 % bodyfat or a bit more, perhaps 25%. To remove my abdominal fat, according to those same pictures, I also need to add enough muscle to stay at or just slightly below my goal weight AND lose about 12% to 15% of my current bodyweight as fat.

This translates into losing 18 to 24 pounds of fat while gaining 14 to 20 pounds of muscle.

My strength training has gone decently lately – once I finally got over my cold; but I need to add some heavier dumbbells now and eventually will need to go to the gym to use heavier weights as well to do that.

That’s mostly true for leg exercises since I’ve not done enough heavier or more challenging exercises for them.

THAT I’ve begun doing something about.

Not long ago I began doing a set of squats with one leg at a time, one for each leg, two times a week. I’m only at 11 repetitions once for each leg. But I can clearly keep adding one each time for quite awhile. In fact, it has gotten enough easier, I’ll be at 14 reps soon. Once I do that, I’ll add holding the 25 pound dumbbell as I do them. That will be as if I added 50 pounds to doing two legged squats. (Then once I get some heavier dumbbells, I can add more weight.)

Eventually that will add some thigh and butt muscle and increase my pounds of muscle. In fact, I may be able to get a more solid balancing post and add a dumbbell of enough weight to make this more likely.

So far, that plan is working but is still at too early a stage to expect much on the scale or tape measure.

(Eventually I’ll also need to get a specialized minibike or other seated leg exerciser I can use while seated at my desk and another I can use while reading at home.

They don’t yet make those that I know of but most people today need them. Given the health harm of sitting too much and how many people do that, these minibikes or other seated exerciser for your legs and chairs that match them well are coming soon I think.

Walking burns about 300 calories an hour. (200 if you are skinny and walk slowly to over 500 if you walk really fast or walk somewhat fast but are much heavier.)

Using a seated minibike or other seated exerciser that you use much less effort on but keep moving slowly most of the time you sit can easily burn 50 calories an hour.

Then if like many people today you sit for 6 hours a day, you could easily add an extra 2100 calories a week by using a seated minibike exerciser most of the time you sit at home or at work. That would help people lose about 2 and a half pounds a month for a few months once they got into the habit of always using one.

If I’d used one of the seated minibikes since I began my current fatloss plan, I’d still need to add the extra muscle to be at my goal weight. But I’d be trying to add muscle weight to get back to my goal weight! That’s because I’d be 10 to 15 pounds less fat.)

I’ve also had an idea for awhile. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from doing their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!

The best good news is that most of what I did to lose the 15 pounds I wanted and 3 pounds extra I lost temporarily is still in place. I’m still doing those things. And, I am still 11 pounds lighter than I was when I started.

I’ll certainly keep doing those things!

I’ll let you know how my additional planned changes and efforts work next month!

2011-12-13T14:07:00.000-08:00

People doing 2 day a week low carb lost MORE weight....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-13-2011

There are many ways to lose fat and its weight but some give you a larger return than others.

The ideal way would help you lose more and be easy enough to do that you can easily sustain it.

That way you would get enough results to give you an incentive to continue. And, you’d find it doable for you to do so. That way you’d lose more weight AND keep it off.

One way to do just that was recently tested to work!

It’s known by many that a low carb diet or even a very low carb diet is effective at fat loss. And, it’s known by some that being extra strict every other day can help you lose fat without triggering your famine response.

It’s also known that people who succeed in losing fat with a 7 day a week low carb diet often drop out because it prevents eating ANY of so many kinds of foods.

And, one French doctor who helps people use low carb fat loss methods teaches his clients to only eat protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables ONE day each week to maintain their fat loss. He found it to be effective.

So, some researchers decided to test if having people who were eating a Mediterranean diet that was mildly restrictive on calories might lose more fat if, on two days a week, Monday and Weds or Tuesday and Thursday for example, they ate a very low carb version of it.

They also decided to see the results if on those two low carb days, calories were cut back extra for one group and there were no restrictions on how much food people ate in a second group.

The test was done on women at above average risks of breast cancer since it’s known that obesity adds to the risks of breast cancer.

But my strong belief is that the results would also be the same for other women and for men who were making an effort to lose fat.

All the women were eating a Mediterranean diet. But one group just did that 7 days a week.

One group on two days a week could have all the lean meat, olives, and nuts they wanted.

And, a third group ate those foods but less than half as many calories worth as they ate on the other 5 days.

Both those last two groups eliminated bread and pasta on those two days. (Potatoes and rice are NOT part of the Mediterranean diet. But to be sure, they were asked NOT to eat any on those 2 days.)

(Note that soft drinks, packaged snacks, home made desserts, packaged desserts, and baked goods and pastries are NOT part of the Mediterranean diet either!)

The women in both the no restriction and the reduced calorie low carb 2 days a week groups lost 9 pounds in 4 months. And the women who ate the Mediterranean diet 7 days a week lost 5 pounds in 4 months.

The women in both of the two low carb day a week groups also showed greater improvements on insulin and leptin and insulin resistance.

That’s part of the reason they lost more fat. But it also means they were more successful in avoiding or partially reversing type 2 diabetes and the slightly too high blood sugar that often leads to it. So, that means they got more heart protection too!

The women tested also must have been relatively health oriented before the test period. Had they done this test on women who, before the test period, were fatter due to consuming a lot of drinks, packaged snacks, home made desserts, packaged desserts, and baked goods and pastries, the results would have been better. The weight loss would have been a lot more in all 3 groups.

Also, the results would have been better for all 3 groups if the program had also had a good exercise program and emphasized increasing nonstarchy vegetables all 7 days a week for all 3 groups. Emphasizing beans and lentils and all the days except the low carb days would also have gotten better results. (Eating some beans and lentils on the low carb days also might have made the program easier to maintain long term for some people according to the results of one fat loss expert.)

But, this report has convinced me to take 2 of my weekday every other day strict days each week and make them even more low carb than they were.

Note that the emphasis in the South Beach Diet and the more recent Atkins diet plans on health OK proteins and oils for health reasons has been shown to be important and health protective.

Small amounts of sour cream, butter, and fatty meats WILL work in a low carb fat loss diet. So will processed meats such as bacon, sausage, ham, pepperoni, and salami.

But the preservatives in processed meats and the omega 6 oils in those foods if they are from animals fed grain are now well known to be harmful to your health and to help cause heart disease.

So very eating lean meat, wild caught fish, nuts, and some eggs are better choices for protein. And, olives, nuts, avocados, and extra virgin olive oil are dramatically better choices for fats and oils for protecting your health.

2011-12-12T14:56:00.000-08:00

High leverage ways to live longer, part 4....

Today's Post: Monday, 12-12-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

Tuesday, 12-6-2011 we posted the first 8 strategies.

Thursday, 12-8-2011 we posted 3 strategies.

Those were 9, 10, & 11 which have to do with stress. (Those were effective ways to avoid stress, effective ways to escape or lessen stress, and how to keep the stress left over from harming you.)

The one in today’s post, #12, is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.

(We posted the first part of #12 last Friday, 12-9-2011.)

Doing the first 11 is dramatically effective. Just by doing those you can slow aging, live longer, and have many more healthy years.

One man who did them all lived to be 96 and was in good health until about the last month or so of his life. His healthy years were over about 30 years more than was average for men born the year he was.

So, he lived as an adult in good health almost TWICE as many years as the average man. And he did live double the number of healthy years of the men who messed up on just a few of the more important of these strategies.

So if you do all of these, the postive effect on your life can be huge.

At this writing though, there is one MORE way to live longer and have more years of healthy life in addition to the first 11.

12. There are 3 categories.

a) For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

b) There are also some supplements that help you maintain youthful abilities even though you have aged.

(Of the first 8 ways, regular exercise, well done has exactly this effect. In fact, exercised muscles almost don’t age at all on the cellular level research found.)

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)

a) Here’s more on the first one:

For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

Last time we posted on 3 supplements that have large and multiple benefits in preventing disease.

Here are some of the other supplements helpful for preventing particular diseases.

(Last time we covered supplements that help prevent heart disease, supplements that help prevent cancer, & supplements that help prevent Alzheimer’s and mental decline.

We’ll cover supplements to help prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes and to prevent osteoporosis.

For preventing type 2 diabetes, the two biggest levers are to eat right and get regular, vigorous exercise. NOT eating or drinking the foods and drinks that spike blood sugar is the most important factor. And, regular, vigorous exercise is also essential. Once you do those, adding 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid or 100 mg of r-lipoic acid each day can help. So can taking 200 iu a day of chromium polynicotinate. (Solgar makes that supplement.)

(I already did regular, vigorous exercise when I was tested to have a fasting blood sugar of 115. My doctor told me how dangerous that was, particularly if it got worse. I cut out half my sugar intake, switched to no sugar added apple sauce and began taking 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid and 200 iu a day of chromium polynicotinate. My fasting blood sugar dropped to 87 and has remained 96 or less ever since.)

Supplements and actions to prevent osteoporosis and hip fractures is a subject with new information just in the last few years. The three most important steps are NOT supplements.

The first one is to do weight bearing exercise and strength training several times each week. Those cause your body to make your bones heavier and stronger. NOT doing that causes your body to gradually make your bones lighter and weaker. So, it may be THE most important thing to do.

The second one is to virtually never drink soft drinks and to drink cola drinks even less. They contain phosphoric acid that leaches the calcium out of your bones and weakens them. (Taking antacid or proton pump inhibitor drugs daily prevents your body from absorbing some of the key nutrients and makes taking compensatory supplements virtually mandatory to prevent bone weakness and fractures.)

The third one is to eat foods high in calcium and magnesium almost every day to several times each day. Low fat dairy foods and canned salmon including the bones are quite high in calcium. And nuts and greens and beans and lentils are high in magnesium and have some calcium.

It used to be thought that taking calcium as a supplement was a good idea to help prevent osteoporosis. Many doctors still recommend this. But there are two problems with that. The resulting surge of calcium tends to stick onto any plaque in your blood vessels and worsen high blood pressure and increase your risk of heart attack somewhat new studies found. The second problem with taking calcium supplements is that it’s ineffective without other nutrients that ARE effective without that much extra calcium from more than food sources.

So what supplements do help prevent osteoporosis and bone fractures?

Taking 400 to 800 mg a day of magnesium along with 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 IS effective. And, when combined with strength training and weight bearing exercise and eating FOODS with calcium, it can even protect you from taking antacid or proton pump inhibitor drugs daily.

Lastly, if you do not eat dairy food and you think or your doctor thinks you should take calcium supplements, there are some safer ways to do it. Do NOT take calcium supplements on an empty stomach. Only take them at the end of a meal that has some fiber to slow down the rate that they go into your blood stream. It also makes sense to take only 250 mg per meal. And, if you can, take calcium from one of the supplements that get it from seaweed because it is in a form your body absorb better and more slowly because it is a concentrated food source of calcium. Lastly, taking the calcium will be ineffective unless you also take magnesium and vitamin D3 and do weight bearing exercise and strength training and avoid soft drinks! The vitamin D3, taking the magnesium, and the exercise are all essential. And NOT drinking soft drinks is almost as important.

b) Supplements that can reverse some the effects of aging.

The most important supplement in this category is a natural substance in your boy that young people have enough of and older people almost always do not. Worse, the people who take statin drugs cause dangerously low levels of it by doing so.

It’s a substance called ubiquinol that your body makes from the CoQ10 in many protein foods. Ubiquinol is to the power source of each of your cells what gasoline is to an engine that uses it for fuel. Ubiquinol keeps the mitochondria, the power source inside each of your cells, healthy and operating at full strength.

You have less energy and each of your cells operates poorly if your mitochondria aren’t working well. They don’t if your ubiquinol levels fall from aging or from statin intake.

Initially, researchers and doctors tried CoQ10 supplements. Often they were ineffective. Then when they used 200 to 300 mg a dose with some kind of oil or fat and had people take that three or four times a day, they got good results. People had more energy, their hearts beat more strongly, and their cells worked better.

That was a bit expensive though. THEN it was discovered that having people take the ubiquinol as a supplement that your body turns CoQ10 into and actually uses, made dramatic improvements. You only needed to take a fourth as much and it lasted twice as long in your blood stream. So instead of taking 200 to 400 mg a day of CoQ10 three or four times a day, you could, and at this writing still can, take 50 to 100 mg of ubiquinol once or twice a day.

This makes statin drugs dramatically safer to take and reduces the feeling of energy depletion many experience due ubiquinol depletion from taking statins.

For people who protect their hearts in other effective ways, taking 50 to 100 mg of ubiquinol once or twice a day does more. Their energy levels and the way their body operates both far closer to what they were when the people were younger.

So taking ubiquinol essentially prevents aging from slowing you down as much as you otherwise would experience.

Supplements thought to directly slow or reverse aging is the next subject.

Experiments on mice found that giving them ubiquinol supplements dramatically slowed aging. As far as I know, that’s not yet been duplicated in a study of people. But since it does help me function at a more youthful level and this experiment found those results, I take 100 mg of ubiquinol at breakfast and 50 mg at lunch each day.

DHEA and resveratrol were both thought to slow aging or extend life.

Moderate amounts, such as taking 25 mg a day to 100 mg a day of DHEA depending on how old you are, does seem to help keep your testosterone and growth hormones closer to youthful levels. I’ve not yet seen evidence that taking DHEA slows aging or extends life as regular exercise does however. It might though. So I’m glad I take it.

Resveratrol, a nutrient in red wine and some other foods, was though to duplicate the cellular effect of mild but chronic calorie shortage in slowing aging.

The promise was that you could eat more normally and still age more slowly and extend your life by taking resveratrol for that reason.

So, far taking resveratrol seems to have failed the tests indicating it actually does this.

BUT, resveratrol does have moderately strong heart protective effects. And, it may work better with cofactors found in red wine to protect your heart. So taking 100 mg a day of trans resveratrol and moderate drinking of red wine, may not slow aging. But it will improve your heart protection and help you prevent having your life your energy levels cut by heart problems.

So taking ubiquinol and DHEA and resveratrol can help you function as if you are younger and may also slow aging somewhat. The proven benefits make them worth taking. And if they help you slow aging too, that’s a bonus.

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)

There are several components of aging. But having your telomeres gradually get too short does look like the basic cause.

It’s actually simple in concept. If your cells make perfect copies as they tended to when you were 16 to 24 years old you’d stay that physical age.

But at the end of each strand of the DNA you need the perfect copies made from is a shoelace cap like structure called a telomere. If they are still there and long enough, your DNA copies stay perfect. You tend to stay well and have no aging.

But the telomeres gradually wear down or shorten faster due to illness or stress. When that begins to cause imperfect copies due to short or missing telomeres, you become prone to diseases and your body ages as it begins to have defective cells.

This is what makes the 3 ways to reduce stress so important. Particularly if you do Tai Chi or other comparably effective stress relievers, it makes your telomeres stay considerably longer.

(Avoiding tobacco smoke and getting regular exercise also likely have this effect too. That’s because tobacco smoke clearly speeds aging and regular exercise is proven to slow aging in several ways.)

But your body make a compound called telomerase that either makes your telomeres longer or keeps them from getting shorter or both.

And, there is a special extract of the herbal supplement astragalus that causes your body to release more telomerase.

Dr Al Sears has tried using this supplement on himself and his patients. The results on the effectiveness of their immune systems and ability to exercise and recover from doing so, suggest taking it not only slows aging but may partially reverse it.

At this writing, Dr Sears sells that supplement. But it costs over $300 a month. So, you have to have more money than most people to try it.

See www.alsearsmd.com .

So far I can’t afford to try that one, so I’m learning Tai Chi instead. But if the price goes down, it remains available, and I begin to make enough money, I may get some pretests and try it for several months and see if the post tests show the predicted effects.

2011-12-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

High leverage ways to live longer, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-9-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

On Tuesday, 12-6-2011, we posted 8 of these strategies.

Yesterday, Thursday, 12-8-2011 we posted 3 strategies.

Those were 9, 10, & 11 which have to do with stress. (Those were effective ways to avoid stress, effective ways to escape or lessen stress, and how to keep the stress left over from harming you.)

The one in today’s post, #12, is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.

Doing the first 11 is dramatically effective. Just by doing those you can slow aging, live longer, and have many more health years.

One man who did them all lived to be 96 and was in good health until about the last month or so of his life. His healthy years were over about 30 years more than was average for men born the year he was.

So, he lived as an adult in good health almost TWICE as many years as the average man. And he did live double the number of healthy years of the men who messed up on just a few of the more important of these strategies.

So if you do all of these, the postive effect on your life can be huge.

At this writing though, there is one MORE way to live longer and have more years of healthy life in addition to the first 11.

There are 3 categories.

a) For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

b) There are also some supplements that help you maintain youthful abilities even though you have aged.

(Of the first 8 ways, regular exercise, well done has exactly this effect. In fact, exercised muscles almost don’t age at all on the cellular level research found.)

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)

a) Here’s more on the first one:

For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

Three supplements are like the superfoods of supplements.

(And, it also helps that there are superfoods that contain them. Getting them in supplement form helps ensure that you have them every day and get enough of them to protect you. They can also be more convenient as supplements and make room for even more kinds of super foods in what you eat because they are more concentrated.)

1. Taking somewhere between about 4,000 & 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. (Taking 2,000 to 4,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is the lowest amount likely to have this effect.) It also dramatically increases your immune system’s ability to kill off viruses and harmful bacteria. This effect in turn helps your body to remove cells on their way to becoming cancers and helps prevent many kinds of cancer.

2. Taking omega 3 oils from algae or purified fish oil lowers chronic inflammation which strongly helps prevent heart disease and helps prevent cancers. It also helps lower triglycerides and any excessive tendencies for your blood to clot too easily. So taking them is strongly protective and will help you avoid heart disease and heart attacks.

(All these effects are much greater if you also & at the same time avoid eating any high omega 6 oils such as corn and soy oil and minimize eating fats from animals fed grain since grains are high in omega 6 oils.)

Taking omega 3 oils is also strongly protective of your brain and your mental abilities. This is particularly true for the omega 3 oil DHA.

If you have high blood pressure taking omega 3 oils may lower it somewhat.

And, you tend to not get depressed and are considerably less irritable if you take omega 3 oils.

(An unusually high intake of omega 3 or taking them with a blood thinning drug can overdo their blood thinning effect. So don’t take six capsules a day instead of one or two. And NEVER take a blood thinning drug without talking to your doctor first if you take omega 3!)

3. The combination of the supplement curcumin and black pepper or the spice turmeric (from which curcumin is derived) and black pepper is strongly protective against Alzheimer’s disease. The new research show it both prevents the causes of the disease and tends to remove them even after there is some damage.

But there’s more! Taking curcumin or eating the curried foods spice with turmeric also is strongly preventive against heart disease and many cancers!

It is one of the safe and natural ways to lower LDL cholesterol AND it lowers inflammation. So doing this is also strongly heart protective and will help you prevent cancers.

Here are some of the other supplements helpful for preventing particular diseases.

For heart disease, niacin and inositol hexaniacinate is far more heart attack preventive for most people than taking statin drugs. (The best cardiologists give patients a $150 genetic test to see if they are in the minority that statins actually help and then still only use statins for people with serious problems too acute to wait for other methods to work.) It not only lowers LDL cholesterol. In addition to niacin and turmeric, taking or eating ginger and taking sterol supplements lowers LDL. (Avoiding refined grains, soft drinks, and more than occasional real sugar also lower triglycerides besides taking omega 3. And drinking moderate amounts of red wine and regular vigorous exercise increase your protective HDL.) Taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C and one a day of deodorized garlic one study found to reduce plaque in your blood vessels. So that supplement combination is also protective. Note that like omega 3 oils garlic and garlic supplements have a blood thinning effect.

These supplements and actions are so effective that even many people for whom statins would be protective can avoid the risk of their side effects if they do these other things soon enough.

For cancers there is some evidence that 200 iu real, natural vitamin E, particularly the gamma tocopherol form and 200 mcg a day of the mineral selenium but NOT more selenium than that can help prevent cancers. (Do NOT however take the cheap man made inaccurate copy of vitamin E. It was recently found to increase prostate cancer. And, the carotene lycopene which is best gotten in tomato based past sauce with extra virgin olive oil is thought to prevent prostate cancer. And you can also take lycopene supplements. One researcher found 30 mg a day to be effective for prostate cancer. And it made the cover of TIME magazine when the news broke.

For preventing Alzheimer’s and mental decline the top 3: vitamin D3, omega 3 oils, and curcumin/turmeric plus black pepper are protective. (Regular exercise and each and every effective way to prevent heart disease also help. Using only extra virgin olive oil also helps. Not only does this help the omega 3 to omega 6 ratio and lower inflammation but there is a phyto nutrient in extra virgin olive oil that is directly preventive. Avoiding all tobacco smoke, using the well organized life style we posted on yesterday, socializing well and often, and continuously learning new things also help.)

Once again we are out of time. So the other parts of this #12 method on supplements will be next week in the fourth part of this series.

We’ll cover supplements to help prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes and to prevent osteoporosis.

Then we’ll cover the supplements that can reverse some the effects of aging and those thought to directly slow or reverse aging.

2011-12-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

High leverage ways to live longer, part 2....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-8-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

On Tuesday, 12-6-2011, we posted 8 of these strategies.

This part 2 post has 3 more. (In the set of 12, they are 9, 10, & 11.) 12 will be tomorrow.

9, 10, & 11 have to do with stress.

(#12 is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.)

Everyone is stressed by something.

Even people who are doing well have some stress. In fact, people who do worthwhile things or achieve personal goals often do things that add some stress.

Then too, many people are hammered by sudden and harsh stresses on occasion. Earthquakes, fires, floods, tornados, car accidents, and the like don’t always happen to other people.

Yet some people are less harmed by all this. They keep their health better and age more slowly. They recover from things others don’t. And they bounce back faster.

This is a very challenging area. So much so, that it is one that can take a lot of work to improve.

But if you know the key strategies and learn to use them well, you can live longer, have better health, age more slowly, and become much more stress resilient.

9. The first one is a set of related habits or skills that directly reduce the stress in your life. It seems simple. If fewer bad and stressful things happen to you, you are less stressed and you live longer, age more slowly, and stay healthier.

It’s proven to increase longevity too. It is more than just plausible from reasoning. In fact, it was found in one study to even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

There are several factors in this one area.

Be prudent, purposeful, and systematic about what you do and how you manage your life. Be analytical, accurate, and very careful in thinking about bad things that happen.

Be prudent:

Avoid unnecessary risks. Take reasonable precautions. Use safeguards. Learn to manage the risks in an area by preparing ahead of time to master the necessary skills. Check out warnings if you can or simply believe them. People who ignore some warnings often die rather suddenly afterwards. But even the more slow acting dangers can cause you damage and stress if you ignore warnings about them and those warnings are accurate. Test things in safe and revealing ways BEFORE taking risky actions.

This one already appeared last time in several specific areas.

Totally avoid tobacco smoke and products. Avoid the major car accident causes and always wear your seatbelt. Always brush and floss your teeth the way that protects your gums and do it every day.

Doing all these 3 directly reduces the stresses you will be under your whole life. But it also begins to give you this skill that you can apply in other areas too.

The Boy Scout motto Be Prepared fits here.

One of my professors put it this way. If you want to dive into water you can’t see into, never do so directly. People who do that often break their necks or their heads. Jump in feet first and explore around a bit BEFORE you dive in!

Businesses that ask the kinds of people who might buy what they have thought up to sell to find out what they might buy and what the for sure won’t buy, sometimes succeed. The businesses who do that and then do a very small and cheap test or several to see if those kind of people actually will buy, often get NO as an answer. They then don’t ruin careers or lose their own or investors money. So they have less stress.

But if someone tests many such things and finds one they CAN sell, they can make enough money to help pay to avoid risks in many ways.

The key that works in all areas not just starting businesses is the practice of doing well thought out and relatively safe tests and explorations BEFORE assuming a risky action is safe.

Another real world example is the explorer Roald Amundsen who was the first man to lead a successful expedition to the South Pole. He studied what the Eskimos did that actually worked in practice to survive in arctic cold. He gathered those materials and he and his men learned to use them. He carefully analyzed what key supplies it would be a disaster to be without suddenly and brought spares along! Despite real discomforts and hardships he and his men reached the South Pole and survived to return.

The competing explorer, Robert Scott, just set out with what he thought might work and without spares for critical supplies. He didn’t quite get to the South Pole and he and his men all died.

In every area of your life where there is enough risk to harm you if things go wrong, do your very best to emulate Roald Amundsen. He was systematic and thorough in his study of how to overcome the known risks and his preparation.

You’ll live longer and escape a lot of stress and harms others will not by using these skills.

Be systematic and well organized. Develop use and improve systems and procedures for important things you do often. Use outlines and to do lists. Set worthwhile but reachable short term goals you work regularly to achieve.

A study of people who did this and were prudent too found that they had so much less stress in their lives that they aged more slowly, lived longer, and were less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.

Important point. Are people who do these things boring and inflexible?

Surprisingly they are actually more likely to do dynamic things and are MORE flexible than those who do not. The study I just noted found that the people in it who had these skills had just as many creative and interesting experiences as the people who were low or more. They just had easier to take and less stressful lives.

Another study of the jet aces from the Korean war found they were better organized and careful than non-aces. But they were also MORE flexible and able to improve.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

Martin Seligman in his study of resilient and optimistic people found they were analytical and precise and almost scientific in how they explained bad events to themselves.

Most bad things have specific and temporary causes that come from outside your control.

The causes of bad events often do not keep happening. For many bad things, if you can find the cause you can often avoid it next time. Even those that damage you leave some good things intact. In even very damaging events, there are ways to recover. In some cases, you can recover to better a place than where you were to begin with. Even if you made a mistake to help produce the bad result, chances are it had other causes. And both your part in it and those other caused can often be avoided next time.

People without this skill tend to assume the opposite. They think that the part they played in it can never be fixed and that they are stuck with not being able to do it differently. They label themselves as stupid or incompetent or not being good at whatever skill would have helped. The horrible thing is that they then will make similar mistakes because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They won’t bother to upgrade their skills or get expert help because they assume permanent defeat ahead of time. Seligman calls this learned helplessness. But it comes from an unrealistically pessimistic and inaccurate thinking style.

Always find what things caused a bad situation that were outside your control. Always find what causes were temporary or can be avoided next time. Always assume you can learn skills or find ways to get expert help in similar situations next time. These are actually more accurate than the pessimistic view. And they enable you to be dramatically more resilient and less stressed when things go wrong.

This skill is incredibly important in dealing with other people and sustaining positive relationships as well.

People with this skill think of people as grouchy today rather than as nasty people. They remember the good things or friendly things they did and do even when they are acting nasty.

Here again this saves them from shooting themselves in the foot. This enables them to be dramatically easier to live with and tends to avoid permanently antagonizing the people in their lives. It often saves them from avoidable and unnecessary divorces as just one example. And, divorces are so stressful that even people in legitimately bad marriages are less stressed than people who get divorced.

And, this skill tends to make marriages enough better to not get to the really bad marriage category in the first place.

10. The related skill is to tend to believe that you can take actions to prevent bad situations and that you will be successful in your efforts.

Strangely, Seligman found that despite being MORE realistic and accurate in assessing bad things, optimistic people tend to believe they can be effective more than the objective facts suggest is possible. They can strike pessimists as being unrealistic and even dense.

The great news is that as long as you are prudent in how you avoid risks, this is a very powerful asset!

The reason for that is the effect it has on what you do.

People who have hope and this kind of optimism, look energetically for things that might solve the problem and try some, see the results, and then do more of what worked or try something else if they got bad results.

People who are more conventionally realistic and lack this skill assume failure in advance and do nothing.

The result is that people with this skill are proactive and work to improve things.

And, they often get good results when it looked initially as if good results were impossible.

People with this skill avoid or escape stress and are dramatically more resilient when stressed or even harmed.

One set of researchers even found they looked at potentially stressful problems as challenges they will overcome.

Just thinking that enables you to be less physically stressed even before you succeed at solving the problem in fact.

11. Whether you have chronic stress or right now have acute and severe stress or you tried to do too much and it’s caught up with you, even people with all these skills will have enough stress to damage them and speed aging some weeks. It can even be every week!

Your body tends to get stuck in flight or fight syndrome and drain your reserves until they are gone and the stress damages you.

But there are several practices that act almost as an off switch to turn off this over-reaction in your body. Using them enables you to stop the damage and physical stress.

People who use the more effective practices regularly do this so well, they simply are far less damaged by stress. They think better, they stay in better health, and they age more slowly.

In fact one researcher found that doing one of these practices both helps prevent all kinds of mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease. He even found that it can help reverse many cases of mental decline.

In particular the more effective of these practices can turn off high blood pressure. They even have turned off high blood pressure that the drugs could not in some people.

The 3 kinds that have been effective for people are meditation, yoga, and tai chi.

For most people meditation is the weakest of these practices. The people for whom it works tend to have a near religious belief in it and have the time for half an hour to an hour a day to do it. (People who do less meditation than that still get some lowering of high blood pressure but not very much. ) So unless you are really into it and have the time or happen upon a dynamic teacher, meditation may be a poor choice for you.

Yoga can work for some people. You do get some exercise from it and tend to become more flexible. Dr Dean Ornish has found a form of yoga that has given his patients great results for example. So, it can be a good choice.

But some forms of yoga are much less effective at reducing stress. And people have been injured enough to lose time from work by overdoing yoga stretches.

If you happen on a good teacher and like it, yoga can be a good choice. But for a universal recommendation I find yoga, like meditation, a bit on the too variable in results side.

My recommendation and the one I’ve begun to learn myself is Tai Chi. If you learn it and practice it for even 10 minutes a day on most days, you get superb and reliable stress relief.

Tai chi is enough of an exercise that you burn as many calories an hour doing it as you would if you went on a walk that many minutes.

(Meditators by contrast burn as many calories while meditating as sleepers or TV watchers!)

Tai Chi is also a slow and controlled, defensive martial art. So you also gain some self defense skill by learning it and practicing it every week.

One woman found it enhanced her ability to play the sport she did for recreation for example when part of this self defense skill enabled her to move more effectively in competition.

But the strongest recommendation of all is that the studies done on Tai Chi find it delivers the best stress relief by far.

People who have high blood pressure who learn and begin to practice Tai Chi were tested and lowered their blood pressure by 17 over 11. Only the strongest drugs to lower high blood pressure lower it that much.

Another study found that doing Tai Chi caused your telomeres to stay 43% longer.

As you may know, that much effect on your telomeres sharply slows aging and helps prevent virtually every disease.

(Telomeres are the protective caps on the end of your DNA. When they stay long, your cells make perfect copies. When they become too short, your cells make defective copies of your DNA which is the underlying cause of aging. Studies show people with short telomeres are much more likely to get heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and infectious diseases!)

That makes doing Tai Chi an incredible asset.

That’s why despite my very tight schedule I’m beginning to learn it myself.

I’m out of time again today, so factor 12 will be in tomorrow’s post, part 3 in this series.

2011-12-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

High leverage ways to live longer....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-6-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

1. The easiest action to do to live longer now, taking vitamin D3, may be taken off the market by the FDA, but let’s hope it is not. (Since there is no justification whatever for their proposed plan to eliminate all supplements, this IS being vigorously opposed.)

It’s new information. A few years ago, vitamin D was thought of as the minor vitamin in multivitamins that prevented rickets. And, it was believed that the form of vitamin D in the cheaper supplements, vitamin D2, was almost as effective as the vitamin D3 your body makes when you get sunlight on your skin. The amount most daily multi vitamins had was 400 iu.

Since then research has found that taking an optimum amount of vitamin D3 cuts your risk of death from all causes by 6%.

(Vitamin D2 which would remain if the FDA pulls vitamin D3 has some value. Taking it cuts your risk of death from all causes by 2%. That’s a third as effective. And, since you’d have to get a prescription and pay drug prices at the pharmacy for it, it would cost more than vitamin D3 supplements now available that do three times as much for you!)

Specifically, you are then less likely to get many cancers, heart attacks and other heart diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune diseases.

Avoiding these expensive to treat and very nasty diseases is worth doing for its own sake! In fact, if you do so by taking vitamin D3, in your case, you may live 20 years longer and live 15 or 20 more HEALTHY years. So your longevity and worthwhile life may well go up far more than 6%.

It’s also been found that the optimum dose per day of vitamin D3 is at least 2,000 to 4,000 iu a day. And many researchers doing vitamin D research now take 4,000 to 10,000 iu a day. One researcher stated that the most effective dose to prevent cancers and autoimmune diseases is 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3.

(Your body uses at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if it’s available. And, the amount your body makes on a summer day when you are outside in the sun can easily top 20,000 iu a day. So despite the large sounding numbers, taking 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is well within the range your body deals with easily.)

2. Avoid all tobacco products and tobacco smoke to the very best of your ability.

Tobacco products and tobacco smoke cause at least 30% of ALL cancers and a full 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancer. Tobacco today is radioactive. It has enough radioactivity from the fertilizer used on tobacco that if you get it or its smoke in your blood stream, you are at greater risk for all cancers. In addition, most smokers use lighters today to light cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. The hot flame in lighters produces several short lived but very dangerous carcinogens. One researcher found that the plot of the curve for the increased incidence of lung cancer was almost identical to the curve for the increased use of cigarette lighters.

And, that’s far from all. As horrible as it can be cancer is the LITTLE problem with tobacco smoke! Some smokers either don’t get it or die before they do. So most of them think they will be one of the lucky ones who don’t get cancer and keep smoking.

Smoking also speeds aging up. This happens to all smokers and people exposed to second hand smoke. That can cut your life by many years by itself.

But the BIG problem with smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke is that EVERY exposure begins to cause heart disease and other diseases of circulation. And, it begins to impair your ability to breathe. The plaque that tobacco smoke builds up in your blood vessels also gradually causes high blood pressure. And, the drugs for high blood pressure often harm your quality of life. Very, very few smokers know all this.

It means that absolutely no smokers and no people exposed to much second hand smoke escape harm! The smokers who continue to smoke thinking they may escape cancer may be right about that. But unfortunately for them NONE of those smokers escapes harm

This includes brand new teen aged smokers. And, it includes people who think they are safe because they smoke so few cigarettes each day. (One study of teen smokers found they had the breathing capacity of middle aged people from lung damage caused by smoking for example.)

And once again, that’s not all! We now know that in addition to causing the underlying heart disease and plaque build up in your blood vessels, tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have escaped them otherwise! (Communities that banned smoking in most of their community found the rate of heart attacks and admissions to their Emergency Rooms with heart problems dropped dramatically as soon as the bans went into effect!)

It’s completely proved. If you avoid tobacco products and tobacco smoke, you will suffer less, have much lower health care costs, live more healthy years, and live more years.

Using this strategy is a very high leverage way to live longer and live more healthy years.

Being a nonsmoker who avoids second hand smoke and other tobacco products is one of the highest leverage things you can do to live longer.

3. The third way to live longer and have more healthy years IS harder to do and can be risky if done badly or in dangerous places.

But it can be done safely and in safe places.

And, once you establish the regular habit, it simply becomes a normal part of your life.

It dramatically slows aging and even grows new brain cells. It prevents heart disease and does so more each year you do it and the better you get at doing it. It also tends to prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes.

It also makes it easier to lose fat if you gain too much and dramatically easier to keep that fat off.

People who do it tend to live 10 to more than 20 years than people who do none of it at all. They also tend to gain that many healthy years.

This is doing a few sessions of vigorous exercise every week. Some people do an hour three days a week. Some people do as I do and do a few minutes to half an hour most days a week. But the key is that some of the exercises be quite vigorous but not done for too long at that intensity and to do it EVERY week you can and keep doing it.

People who get this kind of exercise keep their ability to do things far more and far longer than people who don’t. Their useable and enjoyable years of life go up dramatically. They are far less likely to get any kind of mental decline and their brains stay full sized while sedentary people have shrinking brains instead.

College professors tend to live longer lives. But in a study at Stanford with people otherwise matched, the sedentary ones died ten or more years sooner and had more heart disease and other health problems before they died than the those who kept getting some kind of vigorous exercise each week.

And, there’s more! If you set out to be less fat, it may take a while to do. But researchers found and keep finding that fit fat people are MUCH healthier than skinny sedentary ones. So, you can very quickly be much healthier if you begin to do vigorous regular exercise even if you still have fat to lose.

There’s also an extra bonus. In both men and women, if you have a sex life at all, it will be much better if you are an exerciser!

4. Always wear your seat belt. Make a very strong effort to avoid driving drunk. And, NEVER text while driving or your car is in motion or has its brakes off.

People do things like drive to the store and for errands and to and from work every day. If you do these things and never do the reverse, if there is an emergency, you are three times less likely to die or be hurt. If you are hurt it will only be a third as bad. And most of the time, you will avoid the accident completely or walk away from it with only the car damaged.

Do the reverse and you can lose 40 years of healthy life in some cases. You can wind up in jail a long time for manslaughter from negligence or driving under the influence.

This is a under-rated way to live longer and stay in good health. But doing it works. It’s not horribly hard. And the problems it prevents can be horrific. The reason it’s so high leverage is the incredible multiplier factor of having it operate day after day every day for every year you life.

Be sure to use this one!

5. Learn to brush your teeth in a way that brushes your gumline and gums. Learn to floss well. Do each one every day at least once. And see your dentist for cleaning and a check up every 6 months if you can. You’ll keep your teeth. You’ll look and smell better. And you dramatically cut your risk of heart disease and cut your risk of cancer a bit!

This one is completely under-rated. And that doing it prevents heart disease is a new discovery.

But if you do it, your health will be better, you’ll live longer, and you’ll look younger.

6. Avoid harmful foods and drinks as close to completely as you can. And, focus on eating foods and drinking drinks that benefit your health.

This one is complex to learn and for many people will mean no longer having things they have liked or having them dramatically less often.

But doing it well helps prevent heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and all kinds of mental decline including Alzheimer’s disease.

And, once you learn it and get used to doing it, you CAN keep doing it and many of the foods you eat will be dishes you enjoy eating.

Many of our posts since I began writing them over 5 years ago have been on this subject.

To save time this list will leave out the reasons why but just will list things to delete, avoid, or have very rarely. And we’ll list foods that benefit your health to eat most of the time each week.

a) Virtually eliminate drinking all soft drinks very definitely including diet soft drinks.

Drink water, water with just carbonation, tea, green tea, and coffee instead. Drink some real juices but with no sweetening added and stick to just one a day.

b) Eat no foods and drink no drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. (Eat some treats with real sugar, honey, or molasses but not very often. Definitely avoid eating them more than a few times a week!)

Completely eliminate shortening that isn’t lard, margarine, and ANY food that contains trans fats or any hydrogenated oil! (By itself, that eliminates many foods with refined grains and most packaged desserts, packaged snacks, and commercial baked goods.)

c) Get rid of virtually all breads and other foods made with refined grains. Completely drop packaged desserts and snacks and commercial baked goods or cut eating them to a few times a YEAR! Avoid eating any white rice and only eat brown rice in small servings on occasion instead of every day.

Eat beans and lentils and nonstarchy vegetables and some 100 % whole grain foods instead.

d) Stop using any soy or corn or safflower oil or buying foods that contain them. Minimize eating or using canola oil.

Instead use extra virgin olive oil almost exclusively. (Some extra virgin olive oil is mild to almost unflavored. Some extra virgin olive oil has flavors you may like in salads or on occasion but for most uses the mild to unflavored is more adaptable.

Use some real butter occasionally, ideally from cows fed only grass and coconut oil but not often and avoid high heat when you use them.

Eat raw nuts and avocados if you aren’t allergic to them

e) Eat wild caught fish, seafood from sustainable and unpolluted sources, meat from animals fed only grass, if you can get it -- eat poultry raised on pasture foods from lands that aren’t polluted, and raw, unsalted nuts if you aren’t allergic to them. Eat some whole eggs and lowfat dairy foods.

If you eat grain fed meat and poultry do it far less often and eat the trimmest most fat removed versions and dishes only. Add back a mild extra virgin olive oil if you need more fat in a dish you have made with super lean double fat trimmed meat.

7. Eat a lot of kinds and amounts of nonstarchy vegetables each week -- particularly the cruciferous vegetables and be sure to eat some of those raw.

This is so good for your health and longevity and avoiding gaining excess fat, it deserves a separate listing.

There are many healthful cuisines that test as being protective from the Mediterranean diet to the DASH II diet and all the health supporting ethnic cuisines. ALL of them have this one factor in common.

8. If you aren’t allergic to them, eat raw nuts almost every day.

Most people wouldn’t dream this is so. But one study found that for those who aren’t allergic to them, eating nuts in this way added to their health and longevity as much as smoking reduces it.

That’s a HUGE effect and not well known.

The five reasons seem to be that people who eat nuts have their protective HDL go up and their harmful LDL go down AND they tend to eat less fatty, grain fed meat. So their heart disease is dramatically less.

They also get many key minerals needed for good health that even people who take supplements often don’t get enough of.

They also eat nuts as a snack instead of the junky treats that cause disease -- most of the time.

(The hidden benefit of eating nuts is that they are so filling that people who eat them eat less of other things and despite nuts having fat, the people who eat nuts do NOT gain weight!)

There are some more powerful ways to live longer that will be in part II next time.

2011-12-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

Why get flu & pneumonia vaccines....

Today's Post: Monday, 12-5-2011

One of the health information emails I get had a question from another reader.

It seems that his employer asked that all employees get the flu shot. He asked if the doctor who writes that newsletter recommended he do so.

That doctor said no he did not.

1. He said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims for deaths from getting the flu each year were about ten to one or more overstated.

Based on what he said, it may be that for people who have no chronic health conditions and don’t get something else when they are sick with the flu, he may be correct.

I thought that was a very weak reason indeed. Even he acknowledged that having the flu does have a death rate although a small one. I prefer to avoid such things when I can!

You may have type 2 diabetes and not know it yet or you might come down with the flu and a bad cold or pneumonia at the same time. If so, your risk would be a lot higher if you got the flu.

He also apparently is OK with people getting horribly sick, feeling horrible, and maybe missing work for several days to a week or more. I prefer to avoid such things when I can!

So his first reason I thought was far too weak to back his recommendation. In fact, this part of his answer to me SUPPORTS getting the flu shot!

2. He said that some flu vaccines have mercury in them. That reason has more merit.

However, apparently the amount of mercury in one flu shot is quite small and once a year is a very small multiplier.

The amount of mercury some people get from ingesting high fructose corn syrup over 20 times every week or get from eating too much tuna per month that is high in mercury IS dangerous.

Except for people with the gene to not get rid of mercury, however, it may well not be a problem to get this exposure once a year from your flu shot.

But there is better news. You can get the flu shot at many locations. And, at some of them, the vaccine comes in a single use container. Our HMO had those this year. And, there is no mercury I found out in the single use container.

3. But his strongest argument was that he stated that “flu vaccine is not very effective.”
That would be a problem if it was true.

However, this one is not quite accurate which considerably weakens his case against getting a flu shot.

The average person getting one flu shot for the first time I read recently will escape 57% of the risk of getting the flu.

Given how horrible the flu is to have, escaping over half the risk sounds great to me!

But, besides that, there are two ways to make the flu shot more effective.

He suggests getting an optimum amount of vitamin D3 to make getting the flu less likely without the shot. That much D3 we now know does make your immune system much more effective. So he is correct that by itself taking enough D3 will help prevent the flu.

But getting enough D3 makes the vaccine more effective too!

If two or three weeks or more before you get your flu shot, you begin taking that much D3, the flu shot will give you closer to 60 to 95% protection!

To do this you need to take at least 2,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 and 4,000 to 8,000 iu is better some research suggests, for you in many ways and likely more effective.

Secondly, flu vaccine immunity does drop off somewhat unless it’s renewed. But if you are exposed to a strain not in this year’s shot but which WAS in the flu shot last year or the year before AND you get the flu shot every year, you have a shot at escaping that flu even if it wasn’t in this year’s shot. Or you may get a mild case instead of a bad case of that flu.

To me, this set of things completely destroys his best argument to pass on getting the flu shot.

Take vitamin D3 each day and get the flu shot each year and you WILL escape cases of the flu you otherwise would not. I think that’s effective enough to be worth doing.

5. Then there is the reason his employer wants people to get the flu shot. This doctor said nothing about that.

Sure, it benefits the employer if their employees are sick or absent less time from getting the flu.

But that’s not all.

If you get the flu shot and take vitamin D3, you not only will avoid the flu; but some of your coworkers who would have caught it from you will avoid it too.

And, the reverse is true. If your co-workers get the flu shot and escape it, they may very well avoid giving it to you!

6. One of the ways the flu can kill you is if you get pneumonia when the flu has weakened your immune system. And, regardless of how you get it, pneumonia has a higher death rate than the flu.

But there’s excellent news. You can get the pneumonia vaccine too.

Research found that for people who get enough vitamin D3 the pneumonia vaccine is effective. Better yet, you only need to get it about once each ten years.

To me that’s a lot of protection for not very much effort.

So, I completely disagree with this doctor about flu vaccines although I like some of his other work.

For the reasons I’ve described here, I believe in getting the flu shot each year as early in the season as I can. I take 8200 iu a day now of vitamin D3. And, I’ve had my pneumonia vaccine and will renew it once it has been 7 or 8 years.

If you hate having your life threatened and being sick as much as I do, consider doing the same!

2011-12-01T12:51:00.000-08:00

Eating fish found to prevent mental decline AND brain shrinkage....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-1-2011

We’ve already posted on exercise having a similar effect. Studies found that people who walk 6 miles a week or get comparable exercise or more each week avoid the brain shrinkage completely sedentary people get.

There are two reasons for this. Exercise literally causes your body to release BDNF, a growth messenger that causes you to grow new brain cells. And, exercise slows aging too.

The new research on eating broiled or baked fish is as strong or stronger.

People who ate fish cooked in a way other than frying one or more times a week not only were scanned and measured to keep their grey matter when non fish eaters did not. They kept their working and short term memories in a way non fish eaters did not.

Those are the memory functions that are critical to keep to avoid mental decline and Alzheimer’s like effects.

The research was done at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The researchers also controlled for age, physical activity, and other factors. They didn’t in other words think they found this effect because fish eaters exercised more. Apparently even sedentary fish eaters showed this effect.

The NewsMax story on this also said that studies found that omega 3 oils from fish also slow the aging process and enable your brain to work faster.

And they noted a Dutch study found the older people with the highest blood levels of omega-3 oil measured much higher in cognitive tests.

We also have research already that one of the omega 3 oils in fish, DHA, is unusually beneficial and protective to your brain. That research separately found that people with high intakes of DHA tend to have better cognitive function and less mental decline. (The other omega 3 oil from fish, EPA, also strongly reduces high levels of inflammation which is also protective.)

The fish that have high levels of omega 3 and are so far mostly OK for your health to eat include wild caught fish that live in colder waters.

Wild caught salmon works. So too do the smaller fish that are now wild caught since it’s too difficult to farm them such as sardines, herring, and small mackerels.

Farmed fish are unusually high in pollutants to the point they are not safe to eat in my view – including farmed salmon. (And, in a restaurant, if they have salmon on the menu instead of wild caught salmon, it’s almost certainly farmed salmon.)

So far, you can also take purified fish oil omega 3 supplements. Nordic Naturals is a company that now provides these that is unusually well thought of. Some experts think Carlson’s is as good. I get and take the omega 3 supplements from Nordic Naturals now.

I also eat wild caught Alaskan salmon three times a week.

Like regular exercise, in addition to being protective for your brain, eating wild caught fish and taking omega 3 supplements is also protective for your heart. Doing so lowers high triglycerides and high inflammation which lowers your risk of heart disease.

So there were already good reasons to exercise regularly, eat wild caught fish high in omega 3 oils, and take purified fish oil or algae based omega 3 oil supplements.

Now, along with eating or taking turmeric (or the curcumin in it), taking vitamin D3, avoiding tobacco smoke, and using extra virgin olive oil, we now know eating fish and exercise also keep you mentally sharp and competent.

And, both regular exercise and eating fish once or more each week each literally keep your brain full sized!

2011-11-29T13:27:00.000-08:00

Some people are unaware they are fat but may have health risks from it....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 11-29-2011

Some people are unaware they are fat but may have health risks from it.

1. Yesterday I saw an online health article about the more common way this happens.

It was a poll that found that just since 1990, the average American adult is about 20 pounds heavier.

This was true for both men and women. Both men and women said an ideal weight for them was about 10 pounds heavier than they said in 1990.

But this was the most important statistic: “just 39 percent of Americans classified themselves as overweight, with 56 percent reporting their weight was "about right."

Dr. Earl S. Ford and his colleagues from the CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion looked at data on nearly 23,000 people aged 20 and older as of 2008.

In 2008 he found that 44 percent of men had waists large enough, 40 inches or more, to have abdominal obesity. In 2008 62 percent of women had waists large enough, 35 inches or more, to have abdominal obesity.

That means as a group half of all Americans in 2008 were too fat. And, of those people two thirds of that group had weights on the scale that registered in the 30.0 or higher range for BMI.

Healthwise the indicator that relates to health risk is the waist measurement. That means that some of the 56% who thought their weight was about right were actually fat enough to be at a health risk because they had too much fat on their stomachs.

Enough people have begun to follow the lifestyle of several packaged desserts, pastries, and salty snacks each day that being pretty fat makes you look like many of the people around you.

But following that lifestyle and keeping it up once you get that much abdominal fat is a surprisingly high health risk for heart disease, cancers, and type 2 diabetes.

2. There are also people with high health risk from excess abdominal fat who eat less and weigh in the desirable range with BMIs under 25.0 and who have waists less than the cut off point for being visibly fat.

How did this happen to them?

They get no exercise at all – ever. They have so much lighter bones and such lighter more flabby muscles, that they have room for a large amount of internal fat. Scans of their insides revealed this to researchers.

And, of course many of them have the same junky foods each day, they just eat less of them.

Conversely, people who are fat but who exercise almost every day tend to stay in good health.

(And the research on this second group shows that people who are fat but who exercise almost every day ARE less fat inside than the people who weigh and measure the same but who never exercise.)

So, if you are in either group, to stay healthy, it is important for you to exercise on most days every week.

You can begin with very short walks and strength training with light dumbbells that just begin to be slightly challenging after lifting them over 12 times.

Second, soft drinks both regular and diet, and packaged desserts, pastries, and salty snacks all add this kind of dangerous fat to you each time you consume them.

Stopping them all totally works and is best for most people.

But if you have several you really like and are unwilling to do that, begin systematically to cut how much of them you have each week in half. Then do it again once you are used to having less. Drop any that aren’t your special favorites. Then only have these things every other day or every other day on weekdays.

And, only use this strategy if you also have begun regular exercise too.