Category Archives: Healthy Eating

Why your workout is not working

Leave a reply

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.

Intermittent Fasting FAQ

Leave a reply

Adapted from Kris Gunnars

Intermittent fasting (IF) is currently one of the world’s most popular health and fitness trends. People are using it to lose weight, improve health and simplify their healthy lifestyle.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is a term for an eating pattern that cycles between periods of fasting and eating.

It does not say anything about which foods you should eat, but rather when you should eat them. In this respect, it is not a “diet” in the conventional sense. It is more accurately described as an “eating pattern.”

Common IF methods involve daily 16 hour fasts, or fasting for 24 hours, twice per week.

Humans have actually been fasting throughout evolution. Sometimes it was done because food was not available, and it has also been a part of major religions, including Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. When you think about it, our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t have supermarkets, refrigerators or food available year-round. Sometimes we couldn’t find anything to eat, and our bodies evolved to be able to function without food for extended periods of time.

If anything, fasting from time to time is more “natural” than constantly eating 3-4 (or more) meals per day.

These are the most popular methods:

  • The 16/8 Method: Also called the Leangains protocol, it involves skipping breakfast and restricting your daily eating period to 8 hours, for example from 1 pm to 9 pm. Then you “fast” for 16 hours in between.
  • Eat-Stop-Eat: This involves fasting for 24 hours, once or twice a week, for example by not eating from dinner one day until dinner the next day.
  • The 5:2 Diet: On two non-consecutive days of the week, only eat 500-600 calories. Eat normally the other 5 days.

By making you eat fewer calories, all of these methods should make you lose weight as long as you don’t compensate by eating much more during the eating periods.

I’ve personally found the 16/8 method to be the simplest, most sustainable and easiest to stick to. It is also the most popular.

How Intermittent Fasting Affects Your Cells and Hormones

Orange ClockWhen you fast, your body changes hormone levels to make stored body fat more accessible. Your cells also initiate important repair processes, and change the expression of genes.

Here are some changes that occur in your body when you fast:

  • Human Growth Hormone (HGH): The levels of growth hormone skyrocket, increasing as much as 5-fold. This has benefits for fat loss and muscle gain, to name a few .
  • Insulin: Insulin sensitivity improves and levels of insulin drop dramatically. Lower insulin levels make stored body fat more accessible.
  • Cellular repair: When fasted, your cells initiate cellular repair processes. This includes autophagy, where cells digest and remove old and dysfunctional proteins that build up inside cells.
  • Gene expression: There are changes in the function of genes related to longevity and protection against disease.
  • By making you eat fewer meals, intermittent fasting can lead to an automatic reduction in calorie intake. In addition to lower insulin and increased growth hormone levels, it increases release of the fat burning hormone norepinephrine (noradrenaline). Because of these changes in hormones, short-term fasting may  increase your metabolic rate. By helping you eat less (fewer calories in) and helping you burn more (more calories out), intermittent fasting causes weight loss by changing both sides of the calorie equation.

Studies show that intermittent fasting can be a very powerful weight loss tool. In a review study from 2014, it was shown to cause weight loss of 3-8% over periods of 3-24 weeks.

That is actually a very large amount compared to most weight loss studies.

According to this study, people also lost 4-7% of their waist circumference. This indicates that they lost significant amounts of the harmful belly fat that builds up around the organs and causes disease. This is an extremely important reason to adopt this practice.

There is also one study showing that intermittent fasting causes less muscle loss than the more standard method of continuous calorie restriction.

Health Benefits of Intermittent Fasting
  • Weight Loss: As mentioned above, intermittent fasting can help you lose weight and belly fat, without having to consciously restrict calories.
  • Insulin resistance: Intermittent fasting can reduce insulin resistance, lowering blood sugar by 3-6% and fasting insulin levels by 20-31%. This should protect against type 2 diabetes.
  • Inflammation: Some studies show reductions in markers of inflammation, a key driver of many chronic diseases.
  • Heart Health: Intermittent fasting may reduce LDL cholesterol, blood triglycerides, inflammatory markers, blood sugar and insulin resistance. These are all risk factors for heart disease.
  • Cancer: Animal studies suggest that intermittent fasting may help prevent cancer.
  • Brain Health: Intermittent fasting increases a brain hormone called BDNF, and may aid the growth of new nerve cells. It may also protect against Alzheimer’s disease.
  • Anti-aging: Intermittent fasting can extend lifespan in rats. Studies showed that fasted rats live as much as 36-83% longer.
Intermittent Fasting Makes Your Healthy Lifestyle Simpler

Fish Meal on a PlateEating healthy is simple, but it can be incredibly hard to stick to. One of the main obstacles is all the work required to plan for and cook healthy meals.

If you do intermittent fasting, this gets easier because you don’t need to plan, cook or clean up after as many meals as before.

Now, when I am out and don’t want to eat an unhealthy meal, I simply skip it and wait to reach home.

Intermittent fasting is actually very popular among the “life hacking” crowd because it improves your health while simplifying your life at the same time!

Safety and Side Effects

Hunger is the main side effect of intermittent fasting. You may also feel week and that your brain isn’t performing as well as you’re used to. This may only be temporary, as it can take some time for your body to adapt to the new meal schedule. Also we are used to eating frequently and weakness may be a psychological effect. It certainly was for me. I felt I couldn’t go a few hours without eating, I would develop hypoglycemic headaches. But now that I understand how IF works, I am able to go 24 hours without eating, without any side effects!

If you have a medical condition, then you should consult with your (Integrative Medicine) doctor before trying intermittent fasting.

This is particularly important if you:

  • Have diabetes.
  • Have problems with blood sugar regulation.
  • Have low blood pressure.
  • Take medications.
  • Are underweight.
  • Have a history of eating disorders.
  • Are a female who is trying to conceive.
  • Are a female with a history of amenorrhea.
  • Are pregnant or breastfeeding.

All that being said, intermittent fasting does have an outstanding safety profile. There is nothing “dangerous” about not eating for a while if you are healthy and well nourished overall.

Frequently Asked Questions About Intermittent Fasting

Here are answers to the most common questions about intermittent fasting.

1. Can I drink liquids during the fast?

Yes. Water, coffee, tea and other non-caloric beverages are fine and can be particularly beneficial during a fast, because they can blunt hunger. Do not add sugar, though.

2. Isn’t it unhealthy to skip breakfast?

No. It is a myth that we can’t do without breakfast.

3. Can I take supplements while fasting?

Yes. However, keep in mind that some supplements (like fat-soluble vitamins) may work better when taken with meals.

4. Can I work out while fasting?

Yes, fasted workouts are fine.

5. Will fasting cause muscle loss?

All weight loss methods can cause muscle loss, that is why it is important to lift weights and keep protein intake high. One study shows that intermittent fasting causes less muscle loss than regular calorie restriction.

6. Will fasting slow down my metabolism?

No. Studies show that short-term fasts actually boost metabolism.

7. Should kids fast?

Sure they can, for short periods.

How to Start

Chances are that you’ve already done many “intermittent fasts” in your life.

If you’ve ever eaten dinner, then slept late and not eaten until lunch the next day, then you’ve probably already done a 16+ hour fast. Many people actually instinctively eat this way. They simply don’t feel hungry in the morning.

I personally find that the 16/8 method is the simplest and most sustainable way to do intermittent fasting. Another approach is to simply fast whenever it is convenient. As in, skip meals from time to time when you’re not hungry or don’t have time to cook.

Type 2 diabetes has become an absolute epidemic in all age groups. It seems pretty obvious that this is a balance problem. If you feast, you must fast. If you keep all the feasting and lose all the fasting, you get fat. That’s really not so hard to understand, is it?

But what happens when you lose all the feasting? Well, then life becomes a little less special. If you are the guy at the wedding who won’t drink, who won’t eat the cake, who won’t eat the full meal, who won’t eat the appetizers  – there’s a name for that – the party pooper.

Maybe you can keep it up for 6 months, or 12 months. But forever? Heck, not even the most extreme religions did that. That’s pretty hard to do. Life is full of ups and downs. Celebrate the ups because the downs are right around the corner. But you must balance the periods of eating a lot with periods of eating very little. It’s all a matter of balance.
If you feel good when fasting and find it to be a sustainable way of eating, then it can be a very powerful tool to lose weight and improve health.

Be Healthy.

3 Pillars for Beating Cancer

Leave a reply

 Prof. Keith Scott-Mumby MD, MB ChB, PhD

 I call my three pillars to beat cancer the “survival triangle.”  They are simple, proven fighters that will make you a winner against this devastating disease. Taking a single one and making it part of your life will make a huge difference in your overall health.

If you utilize all three, it will change your life.

Now, before anything, let me say that traditional cancer treatment (surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation) does its part to help patients survive cancer.

Unfortunately, they don’t address the root cause of cancer. They treat the tumors that result. They kill the cancer cells and a lot of healthy cells along the way. Conventional cancer modalities treat the disease…not the patient.

Even oncologists who understand that toxins and inflammation are the underlying cause of millions of deaths globally from cancer every year aren’t addressing prevention techniques that will keep these patients from coming back with another cancer in a year or five years.

Even if you fully expect traditional treatment to “cure you,” alternative methods can help you with the side effects you’re going to experience, keep your body stronger, and guard you against another episode of cancer in your future.

Alternative choices can improve your quality of life and help you endure treatments such as radiation that leave the body (and immune system) ravaged and weak. The “war” against cancer leaves as much destruction as a real war.

Pillar #1 – DIET

Cancer represents the biggest fight of your entire life.  You need to be as fit and healthy as you can be to meet the challenge. In order to handle the demands of exercise, to terminate infection and bacteria, to fight the effects of age, your body is going to need the right fuel.

That is why diet is the first pillar of beating the root causes of cancer.

Anyone (medical professional or otherwise) who tells you that diet does not affect your health or ability to fight disease is a liar. Period.

Diet is everything. Even the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around 40% of cancers are caused by diet (I think the numbers are actually much higher). What you choose to put in your mouth may mean the difference between life and death.

That isn’t dramatic, that is fact.

Eating a diet filled with junk food, dyes, preservatives, excess sugar, caffeine, or other “empty” calories cannot and will not feed your body. If your body doesn’t get the right vitamins and minerals – it stops running. Just like a car without gas.

Dietary requirements must be assessed based on each individual’s specific needs. Remove any foods (no matter how much you love them) that cause stress to your immune system.

My personal suggestion is to fill your diet with fresh, organic foods (where possible), salads, smoothies, and brightly colored produce. Remember that dairy, soy, grains, and even certain produce can be unknown stressors. Avoid white sugar, white flour, white rice, processed foods, dairy, and soy.

Pillar #2 – Emotional Cleansing

Negative emotion as a root cause of cancer is reality. There is far too much science to back this stance up, so keep an open mind.

Stanford psychiatrist, Dr. David Spiegel, was a skeptic when he began his study on the influence of negativity on breast cancer patients. He was shocked to discover that at the ten-year survival checkup, those women who included therapy in their lives survived twice as long as those who did not.

You read that right…there was a 50% better survival rate by purging negative emotion.

Another Yale research study found that cancer spread faster in women who had “repressed personalities.” They defined the word “repressed” as having intense feelings of hopelessness and not having the ability to express anger, fear, or other negative emotions.

In other words, they bottled it all up inside and it made them sicker, faster.

Stress is known in the traditional and alternative communities as a major cause of inflammation. It is one thing everyone agrees on (though traditional medicine’s answer is another prescription). Inflammation has been discovered at the base of all known diseases.

In other words, stress will kill you through cancer or heart attack or autoimmune disease…if you allow it to control your life. Balanced emotions equal a balanced physiological system.

Pillar #3 – DETOXIFICATION

There are countless stressors in our modern world and many of them are foods, people or situations, and products we allow into our lives. We’ve talked about the first two. Let’s discuss the contamination most people never consider.

Personal pollution is as dire as environmental pollution and we are surrounded by both at every turn. Pollutants are in our soil, water, and air and that means they are in our food supply. Those are harder to control (even organic foods are grown on the same planet we’ve corrupted with countless toxins).

You can control what you put on your body, what you put in your body, and how you maintain the environments you live in most (your home and work space).

If you haven’t heard about the chemical soup found in cosmetics, household goods, and everyday cleansers, I urge you to do some research on it right now. From heavy metals and arsenic to formaldehyde and parabens…products you buy every day at your local market are filled with endocrine disruptors, estrogen mimics, and outright poison to the cells in your body.

Big Business (food manufacturers, chemical producers, and even personal care manufacturers), and Big Pharma (drugs, drugs, drugs) don’t care about your health. They don’t care about “curing” anything at all because then…how would they make money?

Every time you use cosmetics, shampoos, conditioners, antiperspirants, paints, household cleaning agents, laundry detergent, or any host of other products…you are playing Russian Roulette with your health.

These deadly toxins don’t just pass through your system. No, that would be bad but your (healthy) immune system would be able to control most of the fallout. What makes many of these chemicals so dangerous is that they accumulate in your body, gradually building up (bit by bit) to levels that are toxic according to any agency.

The True Causes of Cancer

There are many things stressing your body each and every day. Junk nutrition, high levels of stress, and chemical contamination push these stressors past the brink of what your body can handle.

Eliminate them from your life.

Live Healthy to Stay Healthy.

Intermittent Fasting

2 Replies

Intermittent fasting is an eating pattern where you cycle between periods of eating and fasting.

Numerous studies show that it can have powerful benefits for your body and brain.

Here are 10 evidence-based health benefits of intermittent fasting.

1. Intermittent Fasting Changes The Function of Cells, Genes and Hormones

Here are some of the changes that occur in your body during fasting:

  • Insulin levels: Blood levels of insulin drop significantly, which facilitates fat burning.
  • Human growth hormone: The blood levels of growth hormone may increase as much as 5-fold. Higher levels of this hormone facilitate fat burning and muscle gain, and have numerous other benefits.
  • Cellular repair: The body induces important cellular repair processes, such as removing waste material from cells.
  • Gene expression: There are beneficial changes in several genes and molecules related to longevity and protection against disease.
2. Intermittent Fasting Can Help You Lose Weight and Belly Fat

Many of those who try intermittent fasting are doing it in order to lose weight.

Generally speaking, intermittent fasting will make you eat fewer meals.

Unless you compensate by eating much more during the other meals, you will end up taking in fewer calories.

Additionally, intermittent fasting enhances hormone function to facilitate weight loss.

Intermittent fasting works on both sides of the calorie equation. It boosts your metabolic rate (increases calories out) and reduces the amount of food you eat (reduces calories in).

According to a 2014 review of the scientific literature, intermittent fasting can cause weight loss of 3-8% over 3-24 weeks. This is a huge amount.

The people also lost 4-7% of their waist circumference, which indicates that they lost lots of belly fat, the harmful fat in the abdominal cavity that causes disease.

One review study also showed that intermittent fasting caused less muscle loss than continuous calorie restriction.

All things considered, intermittent fasting can be an incredibly powerful weight loss tool.

3. Intermittent Fasting Can Reduce Insulin Resistance, Lowering Your Risk of Type 2 Diabetes

Anything that reduces insulin resistance should help lower blood sugar levels and protect against type 2 diabetes.

Interestingly, intermittent fasting has been shown to have major benefits for insulin resistance and fasting blood sugar has been reduced by 3-6%, while fasting insulin has been reduced by 20-31%.

What this implies, is that intermittent fasting may be highly protective for people who are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

4. Intermittent Fasting Can Reduce Oxidative Stress and Inflammation in The Body

Oxidative stress is one of the steps towards aging and many chronic diseases.

It involves unstable molecules called free radicals, which react with other important molecules (like protein and DNA) and damage them).

Several studies show that intermittent fasting may enhance the body’s resistance to oxidative stress.

Additionally, studies show that intermittent fasting can help fight inflammation, another key driver of all sorts of common diseases.

5. Intermittent Fasting May be Beneficial For Heart Health

Heart disease is currently the world’s biggest killer.

Intermittent fasting has been shown to improve numerous different risk factors, including blood pressure, total and LDL cholesterol, blood triglycerides, inflammatory markers and blood sugar levels.

6. Intermittent Fasting Induces Various Cellular Repair Processes

When we fast, the cells in the body initiate a cellular “waste removal” process – triggers a metabolic pathway – which may provide protection against several diseases, including cancer and Alzheimer’s disease .

7. Intermittent Fasting May Help Prevent Cancer

Fasting has been shown to have several beneficial effects on metabolism that may lead to reduced risk of cancer.

There is also some evidence on human cancer patients, showing that fasting reduced various side effects of chemotherapy .

8. Intermittent Fasting is Good For Your Brain

What is good for the body is often good for the brain as well.

Intermittent fasting improves various metabolic features known to be important for brain health.

This includes reduced oxidative stress, reduced inflammation and a reduction in blood sugar levels and insulin resistance. It also increases levels of a brain hormone called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a deficiency of which has been implicated in depression and various other brain problems.

Animal studies have also shown that intermittent fasting protects against brain damage due to strokes.

9. Intermittent Fasting May Help Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease is the world’s most common neurodegenerative disease.

There is no cure available for Alzheimer’s, so preventing it from showing up in the first place is critical.

In a series of case reports, a lifestyle intervention that included daily short-term fasts was able to significantly improve Alzheimer’s symptoms in 9 out of 10 patients.

Animal studies also suggest that fasting may protect against other neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease.

10. Intermittent Fasting May Extend Your Lifespan, Helping You Live Longer

One of the most exciting applications of intermittent fasting may be its ability to extend lifespan.

Studies in rats have shown that intermittent fasting extends lifespan in a similar way as continuous calorie restriction. In some of these studies, the effects were quite dramatic. In one of them, rats that fasted every other day lived 83% longer than rats who weren’t fasted.

Although this is far from being proven in humans, intermittent fasting has become very popular among the anti-aging crowd. Given the known benefits for metabolism and all sorts of health markers, it makes sense that intermittent fasting could help you live a longer and healthier life.

Personal Experience

I tried Intermittent fasting, with a lot of trepidation, since earlier delayed meals would end up with ‘hypoglycemic headaches’. Once I understood the science that the body maintains the blood sugar level, does not allow it to drop, I was okay. (Which implies that the headaches were due to the psychological impact?) Now both my husband and I are able to go 16 to 20 hours without eating. And no, we don’t gorge after. No headaches either.

We’re happy to report a 14/ 7 kg weight loss respectively, and 7″ decrease in waist circumference!! Yay! We’re able to get into clothes we couldn’t earlier. Motivation enough.

Next we’re planning a 3 day fast, with only tea and water. Plus supplemental vitamins.

Stay tuned for updates!

Update on 27/10/15 : We have lost 20/11 kg respectively. About the 3 day fast: Husband managed 3 days (yay!!) but I chickened out after day 1. Its a mental, emotional fear which I need to overcome. However, any little bit is good!

Simple steps to Stay Healthy.

Adapted from Kris Gunnars

Which vitamins should be taken together, and which not

Leave a reply

Patients often ask which types of vitamins should not be taken together and which should be taken together for maximum effect.

Answer:
How you take a supplement can be just as important as which product you take — both may impact how much of a nutrient your body actually gets.

A few rules of thumb:

    • If you take a large dose of a mineral, it will compete with other minerals to reduce their absorption. The mineral most often taken in large amounts is calcium. So if you take a calcium supplement, take it at a different time of day than other mineral supplements or a multivitamin/multimineral supplement. Doses of magnesium can also be relatively large and should, ideally, be taken apart from other minerals. If you take high doses of zinc long-term, be aware that it can cause copper deficiency, so you may need to supplement with copper as well.

 

    • Some vitamins can actually enhance the absorption of other nutrients. Vitamin C, for example, can enhance iron absorption from supplements and plant foods.

 

    • The fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) are likely to be better absorbed if taken with a meal that contains fats. In fact, one study found that taking vitamin D with dinner rather than breakfast increased blood levels of vitamin D by about 50%.  Taking vitamins D, E, or K several hours before or after other fat-soluble vitamins would seem to maximize their absorption.

 

    • Taking certain supplements with food can reduce gastrointestinal side-effects. For example, taking magnesium with food can reduce the occurrence of diarrhea, and taking iron with food can reduce the chance of stomach upset.

 

  • Be aware that vitamins and minerals can also affect the absorption and effectiveness of medications.

Stay Healthy.