Spiritual/Emotional

Aug

Would you like Lipitor with your burger?

Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Spiritual/Emotional, Sports, Supplements, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment

Giant Burger...

Here is a crazy concept… hand out free anti-cholesterol statin drugs with high fat fast foods. I guess the idea is that since you won’t get people to quit eating unhealthy food, you might as well give them the magic pill to partially counteract the effects. At that point, why don’t they just mix it into the hamburgers. The idea of encouraging people to eat unhealthy foods by lowering the risk with drugs just seems crazy to me. If you have to take a drug to keep something you eat from killing you, it seems like common sense would tell you not to eat it. But as the saying goes- “common sense is not all that common”. From MSNBC-

…

Fast food outlets should hand out free cholesterol-lowering statin drugs to their customers to “neutralize” the heart risks of eating fatty foods like burgers and fries, British scientists suggested on Thursday.

But a few experts say you might want to ask your server to hold the statin at this point.

In a study published in the American Journal of Cardiology, scientists from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London calculated that the reduction in heart disease risk offered by a statin could offset the increase in risk from eating a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

“Statins don’t cut out all of the unhealthy effects of a burger and fries. It’s better to avoid fatty food altogether. But we’ve worked out that in terms of your likelihood of having a heart attack, taking a statin can reduce your risk to more or less the same degree as a fast food meal increases it,” said Dr. Darrel Francis, who led the research team.

…”Although no substitute for systematic lifestyle improvements, including healthy diet, regular exercise, weight loss, and smoking cessation, complimentary statin packets would add, at little cost, one positive choice to a panoply of negative ones,” the scientists write in their paper.

Jul

Natural Cures for Depression, Insomnia and others

It is well know that many of our modern ailments are self-inflicted and caused by the high stress culture we live in. Add in poor diet and lack of exercise and you have the perfect storm. But many of those symptoms can be alleviated with natural remedies.

Take for instance depression. New studies show that massage therapy is equally effective as anti-depressants at relieving symptoms. There is little doubt that acupuncture is a very effective way to treat certain types of chronic pain without taking drugs. Green tea and cocoa are both excellent helping with arthritis and hypertension.

You can read the whole article over at MSNBC-

Apr

Training With the Stars- Apolo Ohno

Great video showing a typical training day for Apolo Ohno as he was preparing for the Olympics. I live his attitude- “No regrets, no regrets”. The 45 minute session on the stairs is sick… Remember, stairs are a great way to exercise no matter where you are. If you’re traveling, you can hit the stairs in the hotel and get a great leg/cardio workout in 30 minutes.

Feb

Quit Sodas and Lose Weight

Coke

Most people have no idea how many calories they eat and drink every day. They just eat an drink whatever they want with no concept of what is healthy and normal. Soda, sweet tea, and specialty coffee drinks from Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts can easily add over 1000 calories per day to your diet. That is huge since most people only need 2000-2500 calories/day to maintain a healthy weight. Unfortunately, the excerpt below describes a pretty typical American lifestyle… one that will kill you. I suspect that this lady was also at very high risk for diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. From MSNBC-

…

The newest member of the Joy Fit Club, who once weighed 308 pounds, recalls being heavy all her life. Although she considered herself happy and successful, with a loving family and an engaging career, she knew she needed a healthier lifestyle. Her daily intake, primarily fast food, hovered around 5,000 empty calories a day. “I just ate with no rhyme or reason … all day, every day, nonstop.” Billie’s biggest vice was soda; she would drink six 20-oz. bottles of regular Coca-Cola.
More important, Billie realized the impact she was having on her kids. Not only did she set a poor example; she also often felt she couldn’t fully participate in their lives: She couldn’t run, play or do anything but sit with them.

…

My advice to all of my friends and family is to wean yourself off of any kind of sugary drinks. There is no nutritional value in these types of drinks and huge risks for most people. Water is the best thing to drink but coffee, tea and other kinds of unsweetened drinks are fine if you like them. It’s OK to put a teaspoon of sugar in your coffee if you need to, but if you need to make it super sweet just to drink it, you should probably find something you like better. Cutting you sugar intake will have a huge beneficial effect on your weight and how you feel. So just do it! Get someone at home or work to take the challenge with you and hold each other accountable. It is a lot easier to make these kinds of changes if you have a partner. Oh and keep your kids from getting addicted to high sugar drinks by not keeping them in the house. Simple and effective.

Jan

Weight Lifting Makes You Smarter- Really

Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Spiritual/Emotional, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment

Hack Squats

There is an old stereotype out there of the dumb weightlifter who really can’t do anything else very well. I think that stereotype really came from people who just don’t want to workout. Actually, the reverse is true… people who lift weights become measurably smarter. Really. I’ve met many very brilliant people in the gym and they weren’t just treadmill rats, they were hard core weightlifters. In one gym I worked out in, the evening crowd included a bunch of high powered personalities. One guy was an eye surgeon, another was a lawyer, another a CPA, etc. Of course there were stupid people in the gym as well. But there are stupid people everywhere. Yet, the perception persists and I really don’t know why- maybe the high school jocks vs. geeks thing. But the fact is that even at the most basic level, people who exercise are smarter simply because they realize that exercise is important for good health.

But, that’s not even the point of the article I’m referring to. Andrew over at MPF linked an article which suggests that weightlifting actually increases your cognitive abilities.

…Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises.

A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration — 0.5 percent. The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.

…

I’ve been lifting weights ever since college and I don’t think most people consider me all that smart. It’s scary to think what I would be like if I didn’t lift weights every day! Anyways, good article. Check it out.

Jan

Correlation between depression and junk food found

Skip this for better health!

Whenever you start looking for cause/effect relationships, you invariably run the risk of getting it wrong and possibly backwards. But in this study there is a pretty good case to be made for eliminating as much junk food from your diet as possible since the correlation is so strong. It is possible that depressed people just eat more junk food. But with what we know about how diet affects every area of our lives, it is very likely that whole, natural, healthy foods benefit our brain function. So with that in mind, check out this article over at MSNBC Health and pass it along to your friends and family who might be struggling with depression. My experience is that changing your diet and adding exercise to your daily regimen has a powerful effect on mood as well as physical well-being. For a good 6 meal per day diet, check out this page…

…

British and French epidemiologists analyzed food and mood data from 3,486 men and women (average age 55) in the Whitehall II study on London-based office staff. Each participant answered a food frequency questionnaire in which they were asked how often they had eaten a designated portion size of a food during the previous year (set responses ranged from “never” to “six or more times per day”).

That data was then converted to a daily intake and two dietary patterns were identified: the “whole food pattern” (defined by a high daily intake of vegetables, fruits, and fish) and the “processed food pattern” (characterized by high consumption of sweetened desserts, chocolates, fried food, processed meat, pies, refined grains, high-fat dairy products, and condiments). Five years later, all the participants answered a short questionnaire designed to measure symptoms of depression in the general population.

Dec

The Benefits of Exercise for the Mind and Spirit

walking in the woods

We often think that when it comes to diet, exercise and health that the latest is the greatest. We also tend to think that no one before us could possibly have the insight and clarity that our current generation has. But that is of course a fallacy and falls under the category of “chronological snobbery” as CS Lewis calls it. So here is a quote from the famous 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon-

He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood-pigeons in the forest, the song of birds in the woods, the rippling of rills among the rushes, and the sighing of the wind among the pines, needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing and his soul grows heavy. A day’s breathing of fresh air upon the hills, or a few hours, ramble in the beech woods’ umbrageous calm, would sweep the cobwebs out of the brain of scores of our toiling ministers who are now but half alive. A mouthful of sea air, or a stiff walk in the wind’s face, would not give grace to the soul, but it would yield oxygen to the body, which is next best.

So head out and get oxygen! It will be good for you body, mind and spirit.

Nov

A Guide for Healthy Food and Eating

Grilled Fish

WebMD has an article about an address Michael Pollan gave to a gathering of scientists and doctors at the CDC back in March. In the talk he gives 7 words and 7 rules for food and eating. He also notes that there are some ironies about American eating habits that we should pay attention to. Although he makes little mention of the importance of exercise, I feel the need to remind you that exercise has huge benefits that diet alone cannot make up for. But, all in all, he has some really good advice. When guys in the gym asks me about supplements and protein powder, I always tell them to simply save their money and buy good real food.

…

As part of an effort to bring new ideas to the national debate on food issues, the CDC invited Pollan — a harsh critic of U.S. food policies — to address CDC researchers and to meet with leaders of the federal agency.

“The French paradox is that they have better heart health than we do despite being a cheese-eating, wine-swilling, fois-gras-gobbling people,” Pollan said. “The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world.”

In various parts of the world, Pollan noted, necessity has forced human beings to adapt to all kinds of diets.

“The Masai subsist on cattle blood and meat and milk and little else. Native Americans subsist on beans and maize. And the Inuit in Greenland subsist on whale blubber and a little bit of lichen,” he said. “The irony is, the one diet we have invented for ourselves — the Western diet — is the one that makes us sick.”

Snowballing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S. can be traced to our unhealthy diet. So how do we change? Read on here!

Oct

Keeping Your Mind Sharp as You Age

Take a Bike Ride!

If you want the magic formula for staying sharp mentally as you age, here it is- EXERCISE. Well, what did you think I was going to say, “watch more TV”? There are tons of studies that show huge benefits for our brains as well as the rest of our bodies from daily exercise. This article from Prevention lists a week long (7 day) program for staying young and feeling better. It works for kids and it works for senior adults, although the results for seniors is nothing short of amazing. Take the time to read through it and write down a daily schedule to follow. None of the suggestions are overly time consuming and most can be done at home. Just DO IT! From MSNBC-

To create the ultimate brainpower workout, we developed this 7-day plan based on cutting-edge research that will wake you up above the neck while still delivering the calorie-torching, body-toning benefits of ordinary workouts. The twist: Simple tweaks such as choosing scenic walking routes, closing your eyes while strength-training, and even playing catch activate areas of your brain that regular exercise doesn’t challenge. Follow along for a week’s worth of workouts, then continue to use the strategies below as often as possible, whether you repeat the 7-day plan or incorporate the techniques into your own routine.

Aug

Scientists Working on Anti-Fat Pill

Bike Ride

I’m not sure how good an idea this is… giving people the option to simply take a pill instead of controlling their diet and exercising will surely have unintended consequences. At any rate, if they can’t get a drug company to help develop it, I’m sure the fast food industry will be glad to step in and help! Seriously, the problem with a “pill” solution is that while it may help with weight loss, it does nothing for the other huge problem- lack of exercise. Exercise is the magic pill that everyone is looking for- and it has many benefits beyond weight loss. Exercise has been shown to change your body’s chemistry and hormones in a positive way. While there are still questions about how far reaching the benefits of exercise are, I suspect there are things that we will still be learning 20 years from now. So, the magic pill is already here- get out and exercise. Work in your yard or go to the park. Head to the gym. Ride your bike. Sit down and think of ways to add just 30 minutes of exercise to each day and you will look and feel better almost immediately.

…

WASHINGTON – Researchers searching for a cure for obesity said on Thursday they have developed a drug that not only makes mice lose weight, but reverses diabetes and lowers their cholesterol, too.

The drug, which they have dubbed fatostatin, stops the body from making fat, instead releasing the energy from food. They hope it may lead to a pill that would fight obesity, diabetes and cholesterol, all at once.

Writing in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Salih Wakil of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, Motonari Uesugi of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues said the drug interferes with a suite of genes turned on by overeating.

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