Category Archives: Exercise

Why your workout is not working

You can’t out train a bad diet.

If you just “workout”, you could actually increase your cortisol, which will force your body to store more fat. You don’t want that.

You see it all the time. People work their butts off (figuratively that is, because at the end of the day their flabby butt is still there). They train and wonder ‘why am I not getting lean?’

Let me tell you why…three reasons:

#1 Backward Body Composition

We trade fat for muscle as we age. This tanks our metabolism because our muscle is metabolically active while fat is dead ugly weight.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to lose muscle than it is to lose fat. Our bodies PREFER to use lean muscle tissue for energy over our belly fat.

But with a strategic combination of high intensity interval training (HIIT), strength training and a nutrition plan that works synergistically with these workouts, you can actually force your body to harness belly fat as energy buy putting your metabolism into Afterburn.

#2 Hormone Havoc

Fat storing hormones like cortisol wreak havoc with belly fat and in today’s high stress world this hormone is at an all time high. Hormones that can promote fat burning like growth hormone and testosterone (women should have a healthy level of testosterone as well) decline with age but can be naturally boosted with the right kind of exercise. (This does NOT include things like running on the treadmill that actually increase fat storing hormones like cortisol.)

#3 Poor Eating

No matter what your exercise plan, if you’re not backing it up with solid nutritionally dense food, your plan will fail. And when it comes to eating, failing to plan is planning to fail, especially when your diet is too restrictive.

Adequate protein, nutritionally dense foods, weight training and HIIT together can get us the optimum health we so need.

Be Healthy and Stay Healthy.

Weight Loss – Four Simple Steps

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Go to the mall. See a movie. Look around next time you’re in an airport. What you’ll see is the confirmation of all the statistics that we’re hearing so much about these days related to the ever-increasing prevalence of obesity. It’s everywhere and it’s affecting most of us.

Books, online information, infomercials, daytime T.V., and even nightly news programs are constantly hammering us with the scary news that relates increasing abdominal girth to just about every bad medical condition you don’t want to get. At the same time, these same resources offer up some new trendy solution to the obesity epidemic daily, often in the form of some new and exotic dietary supplement.

Truth is, losing weight doesn’t happen when you give in and buy the latest pill. Weight loss happens when the body shifts from storing fat to burning fat. It is that simple, and far and away how we signal our metabolism to make this fundamental shift depends on what we choose to eat.

But it’s understanding how our food choices influence the ratio of fat storage to fat burning that will help give commitment to making the right dietary changes to trim down.

When we humans consume glucose or carbohydrate-rich foods that are then broken down into glucose, it stimulates the pancreas to secrete the hormone insulin. We all learned in high school biology that insulin works in the body by facilitating the reduction of blood sugar by driving it into cells. But while that is true, insulin performs two other functions in your body that you need to be aware of: it stimulates fat production and inhibits fat breakdown. This explains why sugars and carbs make people fat.

In our hunter-gatherer days, the ability of insulin to stimulate fat production might well have paved the way for our ability to survive. Long before wheat fields, apple orchards or convenience stores, late summer and early fall were pretty much the only times of the year when humans would stumble upon sugars, because that’s when fruit ripens. Eating these sugar-rich foods would stimulate insulin production, leading to fat storage that provided us a calorie buffer for the winter, when food was scarce. This is actually an incredible adaptive mechanism. Unfortunately, sugar-rich foods are no longer just something we have for a few weeks a year. Sugar and carbs are available in abundance 365 days a year, all the while telling us to store fat for the winter of food scarcity that never comes.

Dietary fat has pretty much the opposite effect in terms of insulin signaling. It actually sends signals to our physiology that food is abundant, shutting down the need to store fat for the future.

The other player influencing whether we are fat or lean is the microbiome, the collection of more than 100 trillion organisms living within our body. So influential are these organisms in terms of our metabolism that scientists now regard the 3-pound microbiome as actually representing an organ within the body like the liver or the heart. Specifically, the bacteria within the gut play a huge role in regulating how many calories we extract from a given meal, the level of our desire to eat, and even the production of the brain chemicals that influence our eating habits.

So here’s the skinny:

Eat a diet that’s really low in sugar and carbohydrates. I recommend a target of 60-80 grams/carbs/day. Opt for whole fruit, not fruit juice. Avoid dried fruit as it is highly sugar-concentrated.

Eat more fat. Welcome fat back to the table in the form of extra-virgin olive oil, coconut oil, nuts, seeds, free-range eggs, wild fish and grass-fed beef.

Add probiotic-rich fermented foods to your plate. Foods like fermented fish, kimchi, fermented vegetables, kombucha, and cultured yogurt are teeming with healthy probiotic bacteria that can help pave the way for weight loss.

Eat more fiber. Fiber rich foods increase the sense of fullness and that helps reduce overall food consumption. More importantly, foods containing a special type of fiber, prebiotic fiber, cater to the healthy gut bacteria, expanding their numbers and enhancing their positive influence on your health. These include choices like jicama, dandelion greens, Jerusalem artichoke, onion and garlic.

Be Healthy.

Waist circumference Better Than BMI In Determining Health Risk

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More research is beginning to show BMI isn’t as accurate at determining health as we once thought. String may work better.

For over a century, doctors have been improving on the body mass index (BMI), their go-to method for determining whether a person has an unhealthy amount of body fat. Now, scientists are beginning to realize body mass index may not be the best indicator of a person’s fat level or the best predictor of their risk for health problems like heart disease. Instead of using BMI, a group of researchers from the UK say string will do just fine.

In their new study, researchers from Oxford Brookes University suggested a new method that’s been gaining acceptance of late: waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). They found that measuring a person’s height with string, then folding the string in half and seeing if it’ll fit around a person’s waist comfortably could be a better indicator of whether a person is overweight. Having too much fat around the abdomen has been linked to heart disease, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders.

One study from 2013, for example, found that larger waistlines correlated with lower life expectancy. In the press release, the researchers said, “We would like to show that Waist circumference is not only superior to BMI in first stage screening for the health risks of obesity, but it is also more efficient in practice and can be done by personnel with minimal training and resources.”

Waist circumference greater than 31″ in women or 35″ in men is linked to Insulin Resistance, which can lead to Diabetes.

Stay Informed. Stay Healthy.

Top Six Myths About Osteoporosis

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Susan E. Brown, PhD.
Image result for images osteoporosis

Worried by what you hear about bone loss and osteoporosis? You don’t need to be; much of what we’re told about bone health is actually a myth. In reality, there’s a lot you can do at any point to build bone strength, prevent osteoporosis, and reduce fracture risk. Let’s set the record straight:

Myth 1: Lack of calcium causes osteoporosis.
Yes, calcium is important, but it’s a myth that simply taking a high amount of calcium will guarantee bone health. To protect your bones, you need enough of 19 additional essential bone nutrients, not just calcium. For example, without enough vitamin D, your body only absorbs about 10- 15% of the calcium from your diet, but when you take enough, the absorption rate jumps to 30-40%. Other critical nutrients for bone health are vitamin K, magnesium. manganese, zinc, copper, strontium, boron, vitamin C, vitamin B12, and folic acid.

Myth 2: Osteoporosis is normal; as your bones age they should get weak.
One of the most dangerous bone health myths is that osteoporosis is inevitable as we age. While there are some fixed risk factors — such as our age and gender — you can control most of the risk factors that lead to excessive bone loss, osteoporosis, and fracture. The truth is, you can maintain and rebuild strong bones at any age.

Myth 3: A diagnosis of osteoporosis means you’ll suffer a fracture.
Research shows that the vast majority of those who fracture do not have an “osteoporotic” bone density; they have either osteopenia or normal bone density. Real facture risk depends not on bone density, but on one’s “total load” of bone-weakening risk factors.

Myth 4: You don’t need to worry about osteoporosis until menopause.
Bone loss — even osteoporosis — can be secretly affecting you in your 20s, 30s, and 40s. We normally achieve peak bone mass in our 20s and then begin to lose it, some of us more quickly than others.

Myth 5: There’s nothing you can do once you have osteoporosis other than take a drug.
The U.S. Surgeon General recommends much more than drugs! The first steps are the natural approach to bone health combining nutrition, physical activity, and fall prevention. Next comes assessing and treating the underlying causes of compromised bone health. Finally, bone drugs are listed as a last recourse.

Myth 6: There aren’t any signs or symptoms of bone loss.
While many women don’t realize they have a bone issue until they fracture, there are early signs and symptoms of bone loss. These include receding gums; decreased grip strength; weak and brittle fingernails; cramps, muscle aches and bone pain; height loss and low overall fitness. Another good way to know if you are losing bone is to test your first morning urine pH level to see if your body is too acidic. Metabolic acidosis can deplete your bone mass systematically. Alkalizing through diet and supplements preserves bone.

Image result for images osteoporosis treatment

Why should you avoid osteoporosis drugs such as Alendronate and the like?
1 You’ll put your bones at long-term risk.
Bone drugs have troubling side effects that can significantly affect your bone health, especially when used over time. One troubling side effect is seen with bisphosphonate drugs. While they may halt bone breakdown in the short term, after about a year, these bone drugs also halt bone building — leading to brittle bones that may be more susceptible to fracture, not less. How’s that for irony?

2 There are risks to your whole body.
Serious consequences like stomach irritation, heightened risk of esophageal cancer, blood clots, leg cramps, vision changes, nausea, vomiting, or constipation. These side effects are critically important to consider, especially if you’re being asked by your doctor to take bone drugs for what may be normal bone loss or even as prevention.

3 Bone drugs produce few lasting results.
Popular bisphosphonate bone drugs “work” by temporarily creating bone mass from drug molecules, but they don’t offer lasting results. Based on my experience, I’ve learned that just because bones may look denser on a bone scan, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are measurably stronger. What’s more, the recommended limit for taking bone drugs safely is just five years, at which time any “benefits” of bisphosphonates disappear.