Author Archives: Lily Kiswani

About Lily Kiswani

I am an Integrative medicine practitioner. I transitioned into Integrative medicine after three decades of Gynecology practice and Endoscopic surgery. I was the first female Laparoscopic surgeon in India. I have co-authored a textbook, Endoscopic Gynecologic Surgery, available on Amazon. Now, after all these years, with the realisation that I can help people regain their lost health, I find myself inordinately excited and blessed to have this opportunity.

Identify ‘hunger type’ to eat healthy and stay healthy

Leave a reply

Marna Thall

Here are the three different hungers –
1. There’s mouth hunger
2. There’s stomach hunger
3. There’s head hunger?


Once we understand the difference, we can regulate when, how, what and why we eat, and we can achieve ideal weight as well ideal health.

Hunger Type #1: Mouth Hunger
Mouth hunger is actually thirst but can seem like hunger, so you have to watch this one. Your mouth signals you to have liquids by getting dry and needing something in your mouth; water being the best and healthiest bet.

Hunger Type #2: Stomach Hunger
Stomach hunger is the feeling you want to make friends with and listen for in order to know which meal to eat next. It’s your energy obtaining, food needing feeling AND it’s the feeling that 98% of the naturally thin feel that signals them to eat. It’s physical in nature and it’s what you should be aiming for as the only reason to put food into your body.


Hunger Type #3: Head Hunger 

Finally you have head hunger. Head Hunger is when you eat because you ‘think’ it’s time to eat or you ‘think’ some food sounds good. This little bugger is the hunger that creates the most havoc in our lives because it has nothing to do with the true nature of hunger and it attaches itself to all sorts of emotions. We’re hungry for a hug, and head hunger thinks “let’s eat to make us feel better”. We feel bored, and head hunger says “no problem” and we head to the fridge to fill up that time.

The naturally thin eat for head hunger but very very seldom; only around 2% of the time, which isn’t much at all.

What is the solution for head hunger you might ask? Feel your feelings is the answer. If you’re sad – cry. If you’re bored feel boredom and find an activity that you can do that’s healthy.

Practice FEELING into your feelings and let me know how it’s going for you. The saying really does apply to emotional eating – in order to heal your emotional eating, you’ve got to feel your feelings!


Clients who begin feeling instead of eating say that at first it’s pretty uncomfortable, but as times goes on it gets easier and easier until turning to food happens only on occasion.

Have fun feeling ! :)




 

An easy home made nutritional supplement with 5 seeds

Leave a reply

5-Seed Blend

This nutritional powerhouse sits on my counter, ready to dress my morning oatmeal or my rice at night.

It’s simply a jar of chia seeds, flaxseeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and sesame seeds.

Hello, magnesium, calcium, protein, omega-3 fats, and antioxidants all in one.

images

Here’s the recipe:
  • 2 cups ground flaxseeds. If you don’t have the time or inclination to grind them yourself, you can buy them already ground.
  • 1/3 cup – ground sesame seeds
  • 1/3-cup ground sunflower seeds
  • 1/3 cup ground pumpkin seeds
  • 1/3 cup chia seeds.

Use within a week.

Image Courtesy Google.

Is fresh fruit juice really a good choice?

Leave a reply

Fruit juice gained popularity as a “healthy” alternative to flavored drinks such as soda due to its reputation for containing a high concentration of vitamins and antioxidants. However, after taking a closer look at the way fruit is metabolized in the body and in the digestive system, fruit juices could be doing more harm than good to our health. Here’s why:

1. We process fruit differently than animals do.

Animals designed to eat high-fruit diets, such as birds and orangutans, have specialized digestive systems that allow the slow digestion of fruits. 

In contrast, our digestive system has a relatively shorter colon. This means that our gut bacteria aren’t evolved for the slower digestive processes required for a diet high in fruit. When we eat fruit, our digestive system sweeps the simple sugars into our blood stream.

2. Juicing strips the sugars from fruit out of their natural casing.

In nature, sugar is locked up tight by the structure and biology of the plant world. Simple carbohydrates are encased by complex carbohydrate cellulose walls. When we flood our system with simple sugars, it causes an imbalance in our gut bacteria to favor faster metabolizing microbes.This is known to be related to digestive conditions like irritable bowel disease and intestinal permeability, which is now being linked to immune system dysfunction.

3. Juicing delivers a tsunami of sugar with only some of the benefits.

Sugar’s solubility in liquid means that in a simple 12-ounce serving of orange juice, you’ll be delivering up to 7 to 8 teaspoons of sugar. As you can imagine, it’s far easier to gulp down a glass of orange juice than munch on 7 teaspoons of table sugar.

While juice might deliver a dose of water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C, the amount of sugar in it means that you’re better off getting the vitamin C from a vegetable with much less sugar!

4. Sugar in fruit juice can cause the same health problems as drinking too much soda.

It’s a common misconception that fruit sugar is “healthy sugar.” While the body is designed to metabolize glucose, many fruit juices will contain a high level of fructose, which can be metabolized only in the liver. As a result, an overload of fructose can result in fatty liver disorder.

This high concentration of sugar might also result in the same conditions that we relate to consumption of other sugary drinks, such as tooth decay, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cognitive decline.

5. Skip the juice and go for whole fruit instead.

Unlike our orangutan friends, humans should enjoy fruit in moderation (one to two servings per day). As an alternative, you should drink water, milk, or tea.

And Stay Healthy.

from Dr. Steven Lin

Safety – or otherwise – of Statins

Leave a reply
What Will Big Pharma Try to Sell Us Next—the Brooklyn Bridge?

  ON

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved a new class of cholesterol-lowering drugs that will cost more than $14,000 a year.

Why did a new class of super-expensive statins need to be developed? Partly because the older statins are coming off patent and cannot be sold at high prices anymore. Also because of the wide range of dangerous side effects associated with “regular” statins, of course!

Statins aren’t just incredibly dangerous—they’re ineffective. That is quite a combination! Dr. David Brownstein recently pointed out there is little evidence that statins work. They do not, in fact, reduce the incidence of mortality of strokes and heart attacks.

Why aren’t these facts better known? Part of the answer lies in the $29 billion of statin sales each year. One in four Americans over the age of 45 takes statins.

We also pointed out in our earlier coverage that cholesterol is not the problem and is in fact vital to human health. A real danger as we age is that our cholesterol levels can get too low—which is only exacerbated by taking statins!

There are safe and simple ways to stay healthy. Pharmaceutical drugs should be the last resort, not the first.

Stay Healthy.

Are Supplements safe to use?

Leave a reply
supplements in spoon
  ON

HHS Says Supplements Send 23,000 People to the Hospital ER! Each Year! Balderdash. The agency’s own CDC data shows that supplements are overwhelmingly safe.

The mainstream media is using a new study funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), released last week, to renew the false charges that supplements are unregulated, unsafe, and require more federal oversight.

Even a cursory examination of the data provided in the study, however, demonstrates once again that the alarmist headlines and the calls for tighter regulations are completely unsupported by the evidence.

First, over 20% of the cases analyzed were the result of unsupervised children swallowing pills. 40% of cases among those 65 and older were caused by choking. Many other cases were heart palpitations from ingesting too many diet pills, sexual enhancement pills, and energy drinks. Undoubtedly some percentage of these so-called dietary supplements were simply illegal substances, but we aren’t told what the percentage is.

One of HHS’s agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reports that there were actually only 3,249 supplement-related adverse event reports submitted, either from doctors or hospitals, to the FDA in 2012—a far cry from the 23,000 being claimed in the study.

Part of the gross discrepancy in the numbers is likely due to the fact that eye drops, ear drops, and other over-the-counter products that are not dietary supplements were apparently included by the researchers. Why they chose to do this, they will have to explain.

The study also omits important details on the adverse events counted. For instance, it does not report which products caused the adverse events. This is important because many adverse reactions could be the result of a handful of “adulterated” (illegal) products. The FDA already has the authority to remove adulterated products from the market. Supplements are further regulated by the FTC and must also follow stringent good manufacturing practices to ensure that products are safe.

In fact, the study actually demonstrates something we have been saying for a long time: supplements have an exemplary track record of safety. Considering that about half of all Americans—about 150 million people—use dietary supplements, even the inflated 23,000 number represents only about 0.015% of dietary supplement users.

Pharmaceutical drugs, on the other hand, even when properly prescribed, cause an estimated 1.9 million hospitalizations and 128,000 hospital deaths each year. Deaths outside of hospitals would add considerably to this total if recorded. If public health were truly HHS’s concern, shouldn’t they be focusing on prescription drugs?

What explains the misleading focus on supplements? Not surprisingly, some of the authors of the study are FDA officials. For years the agency has been trying to increase its authority over supplements, attempting to institute a drug-like approval system for them. Because Big Pharma pays the FDA’s bills and provides cushy post-government jobs, we suspect that a lot of this is attempting to curry favor with drug companies.

A drug approval system for supplements, remember, would lead to the destruction of the industry. Unable to pay the exorbitant cost of the FDA approval process (because they sell unpatentable natural substances and could never charge enough to recoup their investment for even one of their products, never mind their entire product line), supplement producers would have to shutter their doors, eliminating thousands of products from the market. This removes competition for Big Pharma and allows them either to monopolize the supplement market or more often try to turn supplements into hugely expensive prescription drugs.

Don’t be fooled by the headlines. The overall strategy at play here has little to do with consumer safety and much, much more to do with bolstering the bottom line of the world’s major pharmaceutical companies.

Staying Healthy is simple.