Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 4....

Today's Post: Monday, 10-31-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

(We posted 5 of them in Monday’s post. These are mostly what you should do to upgrade to a nonfattening lifestyle.

Tuesday’s post, part 2, covered what NOT to eat since many of those things make you hungrier AND fatter at the same time! It also helps to stop eating or drinking things that harm you. Even better, the fattening foods and the bad for you foods are often the same or are in the same stuff!)

Last time we covered these two things.:

7. Why it’s so critical to focus most on the things to do and eat and drink and what not to.

8. Why it’s critical to underuse cutting calories.

(Exercise helps do this by doing part of the job so you don’t need as much calorie cut back. As long as you don’t overdo eating MORE or at bad things exercise allows you to cut back less and still lose fat!)

Today we cover: 9. The solutions to the remaining kinds of hunger.

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This time, we’ll cover solutions to other kinds of hunger and ways to sneak in SOME extra calorie reduction.

Last time we covered how drinking soft drinks INCLUDING diet soft drinks and eating refined grains and packaged snacks and desserts made from them cause rebound or post sugar surge hunger.

The solution is easier for some than others.

But it is simple and it prevents that kind of rebound hunger. Do NOT any longer eat or drink that stuff. Or cut it back to once to three times a month! (Once to three times a day is what makes and keeps many people fat!)

Last time we also covered the new study that found how overdoing calorie cut back both increases your hunger and then makes you eat longer before you stop being hungry! (That’s why you can make a massive effort everywhere else; but keep your extra calorie cut backs very small if you want to have permanent fat loss without getting too hungry to continue!)

Here are today’s topics:

Addictive eating and stress driven eating feel like real hunger but are not. There are proven ways to turn them off.

And, once you do the basics, there are ways to do some extra calorie reduction that tend NOT to trigger your body’s famine response.

Addictive eating is when you are so used to eating or drinking things that create extra hunger and rebound hunger, that you are addicted to doing it.

There are three solutions.

a) The best one is to really understand and know that these things cause dreadful harm to you if you eat or drink them.

Any that you have in the house pour out or toss in the trash. If you hate wasting things and are tempted to give them away, remember how the people getting them will be harmed.

b) If you are tempted later to buy or order them at a restaurant, you’ll stay addicted if you thing of how you once liked them.

But even if that’s there, if you focus on the ingredients and how they harm your health or how they’ve made and kept you fat, it can be dramatically easy to take pass.


c) If you still want treat food, follow these guidelines.:

> Dramatically drop the frequency. Once or twice a month will keep you fat far less than two or three times a day.

The author of the book, Why French Women don’t get fat, found that this was one of the key reasons!

Cut the days a week in half that you have that kind of treat. Then cut the number of times a day or the amount in half. Then cut the days in a month you have that treat in half again. (I went from over three tablespoons of sugar every day to two tablespoons 7 times a month. I still eat sugar. But I went from 105 tablespoons a month to 7

>> Only eat real food sweetened with real sugar when you have treats.

Remember why omega 6 oils and fully and partially hydrogenated oils and refined grains and high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners make you fat and help cause type 2 diabetes and heart disease. If check the label on a treat or know it came from a place that uses that stuff. Take time to remember it and avoid those foods and drinks.

>>> Eat treats that contain health OK oils or almost OK oils instead of those that contain refined grains only. Candy bars with real sugar and real butter or ice cream with real sugar and real cream only not only are far less harmful than other kinds, the butter and cream cut back the blood sugar surge from the treat.

That makes them less fattening, less harmful, and less addictive. Just remember to not eat them too often or too much at a time.

(Or have a smaller treat with some real food with health OK oils. Some raw walnut halves with a small piece of dark chocolate can be quite nice. It’s more filling and will boost your blood sugar less than no walnuts and three times as much dark chololate.)

Also see the emotional eating and stress eating below. You can reward yourself and manage stress and get relief from stress without eating food treats too.

Stress driven or emotion driven eating is when you use food – often high in sugar or fat to reward or comfort yourself.

Here again there are multiple solutions.

The guidelines above for addictive eating and treats work better than eating lots of really fattening and bad for you foods – or drinking them.

But there are some more strategies.

There are long term strategies to be under less stress.

a) Learn to work well with people. They will cause you less stress and their support or actual help on occasion will slash your stress levels!

Know and like people for their strengths. Know and remember reasons you like particular people.

Make an effort to know what they want and are trying to do and find opportunies to encourage them or even help them get it.

For most people, if they do bad things it’s because they are temporarily in a bind or in bad mood. People who know this and think of people as crabby or having a bad day instead of hateful, have dramatically less stress.

And, if you need them to stop doing something that annoys or harms you. Ask them to stop. Sometimes it helps to say how that action makes YOU feel. (But always avoid saying something that suggests they ALWAYS do this or are a bad person or calling them a name. Don’t think it to begin with. But even if you think it might be so, NEVER say it!

The effect is always like pouring gasoline on a fire. They may do something really hateful to you. Or, perhaps they may decide they really are that way. Oops! That can be even worse, because they might do MORE of that thing instead of less in the future!

If you really feel or think you MUST have them stop, give them a consequence you will do if they persist. But try asking nicely FIRST for them to stop.

b) Be prudent, well organized, and work hard when it counts.

People who do this live longer, have better health, and experience dramatically less stress.

Never text while driving. Never drive when really drunk and rarely drive when you’ve had more than a drink or two. Always wear your seat belt. Avoid following other cars so closely you haven’t time to stop or drive around them if it suddenly is important for you to do that.

The stress that these simple steps can save you is so huge it’s hard to measure. You’ll be less than half as likely to be in an accident. You’ll be way less than half as likely to be in accident that was legally your fault. And, if you ARE in an accident you are at least 3 times as likely to escape disability, death, and injury.

Always brushing and flossing your teeth at least once each day slashes your stress in your life from bad breath, toothaches, paying for false teeth and huge dental bills. It even may cut your chances of heart attack and stroke by as much as two to one!

These little seeming practices done right virtually every single time, slash some serious kinds of stress out of your life.

Then you won’t have stress eating from the stress you didn’t have to begin with!

And, you can apply the same skills of acting consistently to avoid bad consequences to your fat loss skill!

c) For some kinds of horrible stress, the best solution is to ESCAPE.

A job where it’s so stressful, you’re almost sick from the stress after you are there each day may be worth asking to be transferred to a different location or department. Or it may require spending 10 hours a week finding a better job before you quit. Some jobs, even unemployment in this economy is a better choice. But that has its own stresses, so use that one only after trying every other way to escape the problem.

A relationship where the other person is beating you up is another run for the exits situation.

Surprisingly, many people who lived to be 100 years old told of using this method at least once in their lives and credited it as a reason for their long life.

d) Almost everyone has more stress than they’d like. And there are things like earthquakes and tornados and the like that can cause very significant stress to anybody exposed to them.

If real disaster strikes, be glad it wasn’t worse; and think through what you can still do to make things better. Then systematically rise to the challenge of doing those things. Start right away and keep going. They call it resilience. But that’s what does it for you.

The other mercifully more common thing is to have ordinary stresses but have trouble turning off the fight or flight emotional response when you aren’t actually being stressed right then.

That one tends do cause emotional or stress driven eating. The best solution is to have a practice -- or several of them! – that allows you to turn off the fight or flight physical response that you do when this happens or do every day no matter what.

The information I’ve read suggests that regular practice of Tai Chi is the best way to do this. It was tested best for lowering high blood pressure. It has been found to have multiple other health benefits from stronger bones and better balance and more. And, best of all for people working to take fat off and keep it off, every minute you do Tai Chi burns as many calories as walking!

That said, some people have gotten similar results from yoga. And for people who have the time for it and get good at it spending more time each day than needed for yoga or Tai Chi meditating can help.

Much shorter meditations do less; but some people might find them enough to prevent stress driven eating.

Similarly many kinds of stress relief are enjoyable recreations. Take a hot bath. Read a favorite book for half an hour. Go shopping or window shopping if you like it and have the time.

Have ONE alcoholic drink when you get home from work on some days. (Alcoholic drinks have calories and drinking too much can cause things that INCREASE stress. But one drink can be far better than pigging out on 3 servings of a treat food. It’s less calories and it actually lowers stress faster, more reliably, and lowers stress more!

In addition, red wine has other health benefits. This is one reason why the Mediterranean diet has the health benefits that it does.

Reward or celebratory eating is another kind that many men find can be a problem.

Ideas to use.

Do it but make up for it 100 % later by covering ALL the extra calories with temporary eating less or extra exercise or both. Or simply go back to more disciplined eating but make sure to do it for at least a week with no other exceptions.

Better is to do half of what you feel like with food or drink and do something else to celebrate. Buy something. Treat a friend to something. Get some extra sleep or do one less chore this one time.

Best is to have same treat or drink that you would have normally had that day; but share it with someone you like or who will be pleased for you for what you are celebrating.

Some of these solutions are easy enough you can do them this week with no problem. Others like learning Tai Chi or getting a less stressful but decent job may take longer.

But the more of them you do, the less stress related eating you’ll do – or need to do.

Next time we’ll cover ways to do some extra calorie cutting but which do NOT cause your body to jump into famine response mode.

Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 10-28-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

(We posted 5 of them in Monday’s post. These are mostly what you should do to upgrade to a nonfattening lifestyle.

Tuesday’s post, part 2, covered what NOT to eat since many of those things make you hungrier AND fatter at the same time! It also helps to stop eating or drinking things that harm you. Even better, the fattening foods and the bad for you foods are often the same or are in the same stuff!)

Today we cover three things.

7. Why it’s so critical to focus most on the things to do and eat and drink and what not to.

8. Why it’s critical to underuse cutting calories.

9. The solutions to the remaining kinds of hunger.

No surprise. They are related.

7. Why it’s so critical to focus most on the things to do and eat and drink and what not to.

People who eat real food and that only become less hungry on fewer calories. People who eat and drink a lot of fattening junk are actually MORE hungry on MORE calories.

So upgrading completely from junk to real food is a critical way to lose fat. You take in less calories AND are less hungry.

One version that works and has health benefits is the DASH II diet with extra nonstarchy vegetables and some added extra virgin olive oil and less grains.

The Mediterranean diet with extra nonstarchy vegetables and some added extra virgin olive oil and less grains is very similar except it tends to use more red wine and garlic and cooked tomatoes and spices. And, it is less focused on reducing salt than the DASH II diet. This diet too works and has health benefits. Just be moderate with your use of red wine and extra virgin olive oil instead of using them heavily.

Creative use of these diets includes many foods that you’ll find taste good. People all over the world have eaten them successfully

That means that this switch and upgrade to a better lifestyle for food and drink is sustainable. Making it permanent is doable!

Best of all the faster you upgrade completely and more strict you are in following it, the faster you lose fat. But you tend NOT to get hungrier. You get enough calories your body tends not to decide you are in a famine. The fact that you get enough protein and key oils and eat enough to fill your stomach makes that even easier.

Similarly, using the 3 kinds of exercise helps you burn more fat without cutting down on your food intake. That’s huge! You lose fat a bit faster and do NOT need to cut calories as much.

In fact, you can actually eat more! The trick is to exercise enough to boost your calories more than you add.

People who do enough exercise to burn 200 calories in a session who eat something fattening with 500 calories not only make no progress, they can go backwards! But if you add 100 calories more of healthy foods, you are about as much less hungry but keep losing fat.

Milder exercise that you fit into your life as you find you can such as tai chi, walking, gardening and similar things for a total of an hour or two a week burns 300 to 600 calories a week. And, it tends not to make you much hungrier.

Progressive strength training and interval cardio do some even better things.

They add muscle which enables you to burn more calories even when you are resting. This also helps the pounds you lose be fat only!
And even in brief sessions, once you build up slowly and safely to very vigorous workouts, they have two incredible benefits.

You burn more calories for up to several hours after your session—NOT just the calories you burned while exercising.

Best of all, when you do eat beans or whole grains or sweeter fruit or an occasional treat with real food ingredients, when you exercise vigorously and use your muscles intensely, your body is able to release less insulin for a shorter period of time. That means your body deposits less fat and allows you to use your fat for energy more easily. And, it means the added hunger you get is low enough you can eat more but still be under the calories you burned!

8. Why it’s critical to underuse cutting calories. (Make progress as fast as you can on the things to do and not do. But be sparing about cutting calories. You must cut calories in ways that do NOT trigger your body’s famine response.)

We covered that initially; but new research has just endorsed it big time.

If you cut back to a third or a fifth of the calories you were eating, you will lose weight at first. But since you often cut protein when you do that, some of the weight will be bone and muscle, NOT fat. And as bad as that is! -- something MUCH worse happens!

Your body decides you have been in a famine! The recent Australian research just reported this week found that your body then sharply increases your food cravings for up to 12 months!

Oops!

They found that ghrelin, which makes you hungrier, increased after weight loss created by this very low calorie diet.

AND, leptin, which tells you you’ve had enough food it’s OK to stop eating now went DOWN.

That means that after such low calorie weight loss people began eating sooner and stopped later. Bingo! There bodies basically caused them to eat more.

Why are the eating right and the exercise so critical?

Because the solution to this kind of hunger is to NOT do the things that produce it.

Eating right and exercise give you a lower net calorie effect but do NOT cause your body to think you have been in a famine.

Next time, we’ll cover solutions to other kinds of hunger and ways to sneak in SOME extra calorie reduction.

Addictive eating and stress driven eating feel like real hunger but are not. There are proven ways to turn them off.

And, once you do the basics, there are ways to do some extra calorie reduction that tend NOT to trigger your body’s famine response.

Hunger free weight loss solutions, part 2....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 10-25-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

(We posted 5 of them in yesterday’s post. Today’s post, part 2, has more!

So far, we’ve covered what to keep eating or even eat more of.

6. What do you eat less of then?

Simple. Stop ingesting the foods and drinks that harm your health or make you hungry instead of less hungry!

(Some of those foods are double fattening too! They cause your body to produce more insulin which causes your body to store extra fat and use less of it for energy.)

We cover that today.

a) Cut calories but not eating or drinking foods or drinks that harm your health!

One of the best reasons to lose fat is to protect your health. So, every single food or drink you may have ingested that harms your health, STOP doing it!

By doing that you win twice! You no longer take in those calories which helps you lose fat. And, you just may live 15 healthy years more when you do!

And, the fat loss can be HUGE. Most Americans today get something like 25 to 40 % of the calories they take in from these two kinds of foods and drinks!

That means if you are 40 or 80 or more pounds too fat, just doing these two things may remove most of them!

(Yesterday we covered what to mostly keep eating or even eat more of!)

b) The second part which very often overlaps the first is that high glycemic carbs and artificial sweeteners create a delayed INCREASE in hunger.

This stuff is the perfect storm. You want to lose fat but get sidetracked by getting too hungry.

This is the biggest solution. Stop eating and drinking the foods and drinks that add calories or cause you to add fat AND make you hungrier too!

You will actually wind up LESS hungry AND you’ll take in fewer calories too!

a) Here are two kinds of harmful and high calorie foods to never or close to never eat again:

Hydrogenated vegetable oils are heart attack starter.

Not all fats and oils are bad for you. But they are high in calories.

Hydrogenated vegetable oils ARE horribly bad for you. So, STOP eating those calories!

Hydrogenated vegetable oils are still in a remarkable number of products from candy bars to ice cream to cookies to donuts to bread to even peanut butter. And, that’s what shortening and margarine are made out of!

Hydrogenated vegetable oils lower your good cholesterol, HDL. They increase your LDL and triglycerides. And, we now know that anything that lowers HDL and boosts triglycerides makes your LDL divide up into small particles that literally go into your artery walls and cause heart disease. In fact, it was when hydrogenated vegetable oils were directly tested to increase the number of small particle LDL particles that this stuff began to be outlawed.

Worse, hydrogenated oils are often found with other fattening foods such as refined grains, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

So, if you can read a label on a commercially baked treat and see ANY partially hydrogenated oils don’t buy it or eat it. (Fully hydrogenated or interesterified oils are even worse.)

(Similarly, if it has ANY trans fats listed at all, somehow it has hydrogenated oils even if they were not listed. So, pass on any food that has any!)

What if it lists zero trans fats but also says it contains some hydrogenated oil?

Take a pass! It does contain trans fat! The truth is that so far it’s legal to list a product with 0.49 grams of trans fat per serving AS zero. But if most people eat three to five such “servings” at a time, they really are getting 1.47 to 2.45 grams of trans fats each time!

In addition, these vegetable oils are cheap to buy. That’s one reason that until the science catches up with the market, they are still so much used.

But these oils, corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed are also harmful even without being hydrogenated. They are high to extremely in omega 6 oils. Those omega 6 oils tend to cause heart disease and help cause some cancers according to the information in the Anti Cancer book.

This effect may be made worse and other harms to your health may be in them as well because at this writing in the United States, most of these oils are made from genetically modified plants.

(These health harms from these oils are why to use extra virgin olive oil or eat or take omega 3 oils instead.)

So, even if the oil is not hydrogenated, take a pass on buying or eating these oils high in omega 6 too.

(Canola oil is not quite as bad for you and it has some plant based omega 3. So it is somewhat less harmful. Just try to minimize how much of it you eat. Also, as far as I know it isn’t currently hydrogenated.)

b) The second part which very often overlaps the first is that high glycemic carbs and artificial sweeteners create a delayed INCREASE in hunger.

This stuff is the perfect storm. You want to lose fat but get sidetracked by getting too hungry.

This is the biggest solution. Stop eating and drinking the foods and drinks that add calories or cause you to add fat AND make you hungrier too!

You will actually wind up LESS hungry AND you’ll take in fewer calories too!

Refined grains, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup and even white potatoes and to some degree whole grains have this effect.

To lose fat without hunger, STOP eating or drinking refined grains, sugar, and high fructose corn syrup.

That specifically means to virtually never drink either regular or diet soft drinks.

The regular ones add calories without making you less hungry at first. THEN the sugar surge & insulin surge that follows causes your body to store extra fat and make you HUNGRIER later. Yikes!

The diet ones have no calories but your body tastes the sugar and your insulin surges making you much hungrier and hungry for sweets even faster.

When you are trying to lose fat without hunger, do you WANT to drink something fattening that also has a strong or extremely strong appetite booster in it?!

If not, do NOT drink soft drinks!!

As far as I know, carbonated water or club soda has none of these effects. So if it’s the bubbly thirst quencher you crave, drink that or drink it over ice.

If it’s the caffeine you were getting in colas you really needed, coffee or coffee with 2% lowfat milk, or green tea or black tea or unsweetened cocoa without milk actually have health BENEFITS and will do the job.

And, plain water or water and a whole piece of fruit will quench your thirst.

High fructose corn syrup (which may soon be labeled as corn sugar) is cheap but tends to have this effect whether it’s in soft drinks or food.

Plus about 30% of it was tested to contain mercury. Plus if you eat too much of it you do get too much fructose which is worse for your health and more fattening than regular sugar.

Even worse, it tends to go with refined grains and hydrogenated oils in the foods that contain it.

Always read labels and never buy or eat high fructose corn syrup.

Lastly, real sugar does taste good. But it tends to fatten too. It makes you hungry after you eat it also.

The double solution is to find many savory and unsweetened foods that have no sugar that you actually and enjoy eating AND only eat sugar or foods containing it rarely instead of several times a day.

The average American was found recently to ingest 22 teaspoons a day of some kind of sugar. That’s a bit over SEVEN TABLESPOONS full!

So, to lose fat without excess hunger, cut back to eating that much a MONTH or less instead.

You can go directly there. Or you can do as I did and keep cutting it in half.

Once I cut back on how much I ate each time, I cut back more than double how many times a week I at sugar.

I still enjoy some sugar; but I enjoy my food on the other days too when I have none!

I’m no longer addicted to sugar. I’m less fat. And, my blood sugar readings are better – in the desirable range instead of a bit too high.

The last category of food that is fattening due to triggering a blood sugar and then an insulin surge is refined grains.

Bread has been a traditional food. But our bodies evolved to eat other foods for hundreds of thousands of years before humans had any grains at all starting about 10,000 years ago.

Many people who eat in health supporting ways otherwise and who exercise regularly and who eat it with other foods can be healthy and even not fat while eating SOME 100 % whole grain foods. But the ones who eat whole grains least tend to be the least fat.

But for refined grains that it is far from true. Refined grains began to become what the average person thinks of as normal food about 150 years ago.

But grains spike your blood sugar about 50 % MORE than sugar or high fructose corn syrup. The whole grains when eaten in moderation make up for that with some nutrients and with the fiber they contain to some degree.

Refined grains are NOT normal or good for you AT ALL.

Yet because refined grains have become so cheap to produce and breads made from them make useful, edible wrappers for other foods, refined grain breads, snacks, and desserts are in every store and almost every restaurant in the country.

But they are as fattening as soft drinks.

Every time you can find an opportunity to NOT eat a refined grain food or bread or snack or dessert will help you to lose fat without hunger.

Does that mean to do things like eat the topping on a pizza and leave the crust or get a plate and eat the filling of a sandwich or hamburger but not the bread or bun?

That’s exactly what it means in practice now! That’s because this information is too new to have changed these foods yet.

The good news is that NOT eating refined grains was one of the things Dr Atkins got right as a way to be healthier and less fat.

As a result, people in many restaurants have had his followers come in before.

So, simply asking for your sandwich “Atkins style” sometimes will save the restaurant the bread or bun and just get you the real food part of the sandwich on a plate.

Since I’m out of time again today, I’ll do part 3 next time.

Hunger free weight loss solutions....

Today's Post: Monday, 10-24-2011

It may seem impossible since most people have to cut the amount of calories they eat to lose fat.

And, most people who eat less get hungrier.

The good news is that there are several basic strategies that work.

The even better news is that learning to do them and doing enough of them consistently works!

You do lose fat. You don’t get that much hungrier than you did before. And, since everything you do is sustainable, once you do them by habit and make them a part of your upgraded lifestyle, the best news is that your fat loss will be permanent.

The most powerful strategies are these:

1. Slow and steady wins the race! Why?

Most of us are descended from people who survived not one but multiple famines. So, if we cut back too much or too fast, our body’s failsafe famine response gets triggered.

We get too hungry to ignore. We get hungriest for sugary and fatty foods. We burn fewer calories and have less energy and our metabolism. Usually all the fat you lost comes back faster than you lost it!

So, the core principle of permanent and effective fat loss, is to cut net calories in ways that do NOT trigger this destructive response.

So it’s been found that it works far better to use lifestyle upgrades to lose your fat over several months to a couple of years depending on how much you have to lose.

It’s silly for most people to try to lose the same amount of fat in a few weeks instead. Unfortunately, over 99 % of the time that fat comes right back just a short period of time after the famine response kicks in which it almost always does.

2. Your body is far more likely to trigger your famine response if you cut protein too much than just cutting calories.

(For your health, we now know it’s important to focus on health OK protein foods such as beans and lentils; nuts if you aren’t allergic; wild caught fish;
100 % grass fed beef, and some superlean and fat trimmed skinless poultry or meat from grain fed animals but not too much.) (Never eat farmed fish or meat processed with nitrites if you can possibly help it. Eat very little fat from animals fed grain.)

You do not have to stuff on protein. But eat the same or slightly more. If you want to achieve permanent fat loss, do NOT cut back on protein.

Protein foods turn off hunger best and longest. So that helps too!

By eating enough protein, you’ll be less hungry and your body will forgive you cutting calories in OTHER areas and won’t be so quick to hit the panic button and trigger your famine response.

3. Cutting back too much on even health OK fats and oils harms your health and makes you hungry and tired of not having any!

Fat does help satisfy hunger. In addition, health OK oils keep you healthy in several ways.

People who lose fat permanently all keep eating some of these healthy oils. By actual test, they succeed far more than people who cut ALL fat.

Fats taste good; they carry flavors; and they buffer harsher spices enough you can enjoy eating those spices when you can’t with no oil at all.

So, no fat diets tend to fail and cause hunger. Eating LOTS of fat does gain fat too. The secret is to eat some every day but in controlled amounts.

(Extra virgin olive oil, raw nuts and avocados if you aren’t allergic, and oils from fish high in omega 3 oils are the health OK oils. Small amounts of dairy fat from animals 100 % grass fed are OK. Some nonfat and lowfat dairy from animals fed grain is OK but in moderation only.)

4. For most people, exercise alone won’t produce fat loss. But you likely won’t get permanent fat loss or the health benefits you could have had if you leave it out.

It’s simple really. If you want to cut a certain amount of net calories each week, if you do enough exercise to do half the job, you only need to cut the calories you eat by half as much!

And, that more than triples your ability to achieve mostly hunger free fat loss that is permanent.

But there’s more. Exercise can directly give you some of the benefits you lose fat to achieve. Better health; more energy; more self esteem; often a better sex life; and better appearance all get better with exercise. That happens even before all your fat comes off! It makes the combination of your upgraded lifestyle MUCH easier to sustain.

And, here again, it makes your body far less likely to trigger your famine response.

5. To some extent, did you know there is an appetite suppressant that works effortlessly and automatically, has close to zero calories, makes you healthier, and has few side effects?

Yes indeed there is. And, within reasonable limits, the more you eat, the easier hunger free fat loss gets.

Raw and lightly cooked nonstarchy vegetables on their own or eaten with other foods do exactly that.

Dr Dean Ornish even featured them in a book, “Eat more; weigh less!”

Recently I posted that I calculated I’d lose a small amount of weight by adding a couple of nonstarchy vegetables each day. I did. But because of this exact effect, I found I’d lost three times as much weight!

The only two caveats are to add vegetables gradually.

Add just one or two at first. If you add 5 servings from none, your body will freak out. And, the experience is no fun. But adding one a week or every other week until your body gets used to 5 slowly can work just fine.

Focus on vegetables that you feel good about eating because of their health benefits or you like their taste or crunch when you eat them. Or eat them with spices you really like. The idea is to find vegetables that you will be OK eating enough you will keep doing it! When you also enjoy most of them, or KNOW your health is better protected, it’s a LOT easier to keep doing it!

So far, we’ve covered what to keep eating or even eat more of.

6. What do you eat less of then?

Simple. Stop ingesting the ones that harm your health or make you hungry instead of less hungry!

We’ll cover that tomorrow.

Turmeric plus pepper may strongly prevent Alzheimer’s disease....

Today's Post: Friday, 10-21-2011

Alzheimer’s disease may be a particular kind of brain nerve destruction that tends to feed on itself and get worse once a certain threshold is reached.

Enough restriction of blood flow the brain or damage to the blood vessels and capillaries in your brain causes nerve destruction. Then, nerves destroyed in this way may begin the process of Alzheimer’s disease. And, even before that, this often produces vascular dementia.

And, the net damage to your ability to think and remember also depends on how robust the size of your brain is to begin with and the number and complexity of the interconnections.

It’s like the internet in that way. In a set of 100,000 servers, if 15,000 go down, the network may still function. But if a set of servers is 15,500 and loses 15,000 and many of the remaining 500 aren’t directly connected, the network may be toast!

It may also make a difference if brain cells and interconnecting nerves die off but more nerves and interconnections are added each week than die off.

Simply put, that means if you can stop the process of Alzheimer’s disease in some direct way and act in these other areas as well, you have a real shot at preventing both Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of mental decline.

The news is that we may already know how to do just that.

I found out last week that eating or taking turmeric and black pepper together may do this last preventive action.

In an email on Tuesday this week, Dr Al Sears lists a study on mice fed turmeric and black pepper that found an 80% drop in the tau protein that is thought to be a direct cause of Alzheimer’s disease. And, it found a 40% drop in the amyloid plaques that either help cause the disease process continue or keep the nerves near them from working.

Other spices may work as well or better than black pepper to make this desired effect of turmeric or the curcumin in it in having this effect. So, it’s no surprise that people who eat curried food often each week have been found to have very low risk to no risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease. Most curries have a combination of turmeric with one or more “hot” spices—pepper, red pepper, and others.

So, true, people aren’t mice. But we found the effect in people first! So, it looks quite likely turmeric plus black pepper does in fact directly help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

There is separate research that the optimum intake of vitamin D3 has a comparable effect. We now know that a daily intake from supplements, foods, or sunshine of 4,000 to 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 boosts the effectiveness of your immune system so much that this may work because your immune system is then able to clean up the damage faster than it is created.

The combination of addressing these other factors and the turmeric plus back pepper may prevent the process while the vitamin D3 acts like a janitor that cleans up what still gets through.

Going back to the original list, everything you do to support your body in giving all parts of you good blood flow and preventing damage to your capillaries and blood vessels is extremely valuable.

All of you including your brain, your heart, your legs, and your sexual parts stays healthy when you do that.

So, get regular exercise including interval cardio and a milder exercise such as tai chi or walking each week.

Totally avoid tobacco smoke.

Eat only real sugar and not a lot nor every day.

Use extra virgin olive oil almost exclusively while almost never using soy, corn, or canola oil; take omega 3 supplements; eat wild caught fish high in omega 3 and low in mercury; eat meat from only 100 % naturally fed animals or eat the leanest most fat trimmed meat from grain fed animals and not often; use lowfat dairy products if the cows were grain fed; eat beans and lentils; and use garlic, onions, ginger, turmeric, and curries to spice your food; eat nuts and avocados if you aren’t allergic to them. And, brush and floss your teeth well every day!

These actions each help to lower inflammation, keep your blood vessels health and free of plaque. They also help keep your blood sugar from getting so high the sugars on your LDL cholesterol destroy the surface of your blood vessels and capillaries.

All of you, including your brain, your heart, your legs, and your sexual parts, stays healthy when you do that.

And, in your brain, that both prevents mental decline from other causes and removes several of the triggers for Alzheimer’s disease.

Better yet, the exercise, including any strength training you also do, grows new brain cells. Separate research shows that the brains of people who do no exercise shrink while those of exercisers tend to stay the same. So this effect is significant!

People who actively use their brains and learn new things every day or who learn new skills get double protection.

Their more robust and interconnect brains can sustain more damage without impairing their ability to think and remember. AND, they grow new brain cells and interconnections to replace those that are damaged.

(Work done at the University of California at Berkeley found that this process goes on still in people who are over 80 years old!)

That’s in addition to building up a robust network that can sustain a lot of damage and still work well!

So, it’s no surprise to learn that people who socialize often have fewer signs of Alzheimer’s and any kind of mental decline.

(We now know socializing uses so many brain cells images of your brain activity show most of it is lit up when you speak and listen to conversation. It feels easy because you grew up doing it; but it’s as challenging brainwise as competing in an athletic event!)

Similarly, educated people get less Alzheimer’s disease, get it in later in life if they do, and progress more slowly than people who aren’t.

And, people who speak more than one language are known too for being very resistant to Alzheimer’s and mental decline.

Doing all these things may be a lot of work, particularly at first for those you haven’t yet been doing them.

But it looks increasingly as if we can prevent well over 95% of Alzheimer’s disease and all other kinds of mental decline with these methods!

For yourself, why not aim for 100%?

Easy way to start fat loss that TRIPLES your chance of success....

Today's Post: Thursday, 10-20-2011

Earlier today I found that Yahoo under Health in its feature section had The Doctor Oz Prescription by Dr. Mehmet Oz.

And his article today was titled, "The ONE small secret to weight loss."

Its theme was: "What Does it Take? Actually, nothing more than a small gesture."

He said he found research showing that for those people who wanted to begin fat loss, the ones who simply make a tiny beginning on something likely to work were THREE times more likely to succeed!

His two examples:

One was to save a recipe that would taste good but help you lose fat. He suggested ripping it out of a cookbook. (Since you might want to use the recipe or the book again, circling it in the book, putting in a book mark or writing the page on the cover might make more sense!)

His other example was to set your running or exercise walking shoes by the door earlier in the day when you plan to begin doing an exercise walk that day after work or before bedtime for the next morning before work.

He also refers indirectly to research that shows conclusively that taking such a small step dramatically increases your motivation to keep going!

You do the little thing because you do want the result. But then you have to explain to yourself why you did it! And, your mind apparently tends to say, since I did that, it shows that I really do want this result a lot.

The wonderful thing is that this then empowers you to do far more than you would have done otherwise! That’s why this technique is so powerful.

And it's ten times easier to get started that way!

Here are two examples of similar research.

In one, they were collecting small funds for a local charity back before much of the current inflation.

They did it one of two ways.

First, they explained how the charity benefitted people and worked well. Then they asked for a donation. A few people gave them money. Maybe one out of ten or twenty people gave something.

Second, they did exactly the same thing. BUT, instead of asking “Will you please make a donation?”

They asked “Will you please make a donation? Even a penny would help!”

“Even a penny would help!” Right! As if that would work!

WOW !! was too mild to describe the results! It was as if they had Thor throwing lightning bolts!

More than half the people asked gave something! To be sure many of them did give a penny only. And many more gave little more than that.

BUT more than half the people gave something! And the total they collected for the charity DOUBLED!

The other experiment was as spectacular. They went out asking if people would put up a large yard sign several feet long for a local candidate for office.

The candidate did have local support. But only something like one person in a hundred said yes.

Then they tried a two step procedure.

The first time they asked if people would put a small sticker on their front door supporting the candidate.

Most of the candidate’s supporters said yes.

Then a week later, they asked those people if they would put up a large yard sign several feet long for that local candidate. As I remember it, something like 25% of those people said yes.

So Dr Oz is correct. He may well understate the case in fact.

Making a small gesture towards beginning a fat loss action can make a truly huge contribution to your success.

And, it may well multiply your chances of success more than TEN times!

You can use it to begin losing fat at all. And, once you’ve begun, you can use it to add new actions that increase your leverage and boost your chances even more.

Here are some ideas:

You can try Dr Oz’s suggestion.

Suppose that several days after work you have been going to a fast food place and adding French fries and a soft drink to your hamburger as part of your dinner.

Look up a meat loaf recipe that would be easy to fix online or in a cookbook you already have to fix next weekend and eat after work next week instead.

Bingo! Really, it’s that powerful.

Doing just that one thing may start you on the road to losing all the fat you want to lose!

(My style is to modify the recipe to be healthier and taste better to me. My wife likes to make the recipe exactly as written. But either way, homemade meatloaf is better for you and less fattening than French fries and a soft drink and a hamburger on refined grain bread!)

(For meatloaf, I’d use ground 100% grass fed beef from Whole Foods and add some extra virgin olive oil since that’s leaner than the grain fed ground beef at most supermarkets. I’d use rolled or steel cut oats instead of breadcrumbs from refined grain bread. And, I’d add extra diced onions for more flavor and their health benefits. And, I try using a good quality tomato based pasta sauce with garlic and oregano instead of catsup. And, I might even try some extra oregano or some red pepper or curry powder for the second try at the recipe to spice it up. My belief is the better your good for you food tastes to you, the easier it is to keep eating it!)

Here’s another suggestion. Suppose that you have been buying 6 packs of soft drinks and putting them in your refrigerator to drink on evenings and weekends. And, suppose you like to drink the bubbly soft drinks over ice for the refreshing mouthfeel.

But that habit will guarantee you will have easily lost but just as real dozens of pounds of excess fat.

So, next time you write your grocery shopping list, put bottled water that has only carbonation or club soda on the list instead of the 6 packs of soft drinks.

Bingo! Just putting it on your list is exactly the kind of gesture Dr Oz is talking about.

Then buy the carbonated water & don’t resume the soft drinks!

(Since both regular and diet soft drinks tend to make you extra hungry and fatten you, deleting them is a key to hunger free and permanent fat loss. So that one thing may easily lose you twenty or thirty pounds of fat over then next several months with a slight DROP in how hungry you normally feel!)

Similarly, although you do need to eat less fattening foods in a way that cuts the calories you take in to lose fat, once you do so, you can take a huge step forward by adding exercise too.

Once you’ve done regular exercise for a few weeks, you will be less fat and be firmer even when you don’t show extra pounds leaving yet.

And, particularly for strength training, you may begin to feel better and more in control even during the very first week.

If you set out your running shoes for an exercise walk as Dr Oz suggests, that works. Bingo! You’ve made your small gesture.

But, what if when the time for the exercise walk comes, you find you need for the session that day to be for less than five minutes? Or what if you find your motivation is really low for a challenging walk?

Since BEGINNING is the payoff goal -- NOT the direct results of that day’s walk, that’s an easy one. Look at your watch and walk away from your house for one or two minutes and then walk back! Don’t even walk fast unless you feel like it after you begin walking.

Next time, you can hit the door a bit earlier or schedule your activity that follows your walk a bit later.

After you’ve been doing it a few days, you can try short bursts of really fast walking. But, at first, slow down on those a bit BEFORE you get too tired. Dr Al Sears calls this kind of interval cardio his PACE program. By just doing a tiny bit more each week while keeping up your control to avoid overdoing it each time, in a year you will have fitness you may have trouble believing now.

He had one woman do that who lost 45 pounds by adding that kind of exercise to her healthy eating program.

And, her first walk? It lasted 45 seconds!

Folks, you do NOT have to start out as fit as superman!

And you do NOT need to race to get there either. In fact, making slow progress helps prevent injuries which enables you to keep going!

Just start at all and make easy but systematic progress.

I’ve lost fat weight successfully twice. I lost 30 pounds initially. More recently I’ve lost 10 of the 15 pounds I gained back. So my sustained fat loss is currently 25 pounds.

But I used this technique both times now that I think of it.

The first time, I got the booklet from my Dad who went to Weight Watchers and studied their points system.

My idea was to see “What can I learn from this I could actually do?”

Sitting down with that book while looking for answers to that question was my small gesture.

(That’s the best way to approach reading any accurate information on fat loss by the way!)

The first conclusion was, since vegetables fill you up for virtually zero calories and I didn’t eat many at all, I thought, “How can I add some to my workday lunches and eat some for dinner?”

I found ways to do both.

The second conclusion was that I could cut back about 20% on my alcoholic drinks per week.

So I stopped drinking about that much. I cut out a beer on Saturdays and a couple of days I’d been drinking two glasses of wine, I drank one or one and half instead.

And, I kept up the exercise I was already doing.

Since I made sure NOT to cut back enough I’d get hungry, I didn’t feel like I’d done that much. But note that I simply looked at what I could do and was OK doing. Then I began doing it. I calculated I’d lose 10 pounds but it would be gradual and take a few weeks.

It did. After a few weeks I was 10 pounds lighter. And since it was doable and I had no interest in getting the 10 pounds back, I just kept doing it.

But I got a very nice surprise at that point! After a few more weeks a second 10 pounds left. Then after a few more weeks a THIRD ten pounds disappeared too!

(It seems that eating nonstarchy vegetables acts as an effortless appetite suppressant that has health benefits instead of side effects. Had I not tried them and kept eating them, I would have never known that!)

The second time was a bit different. I decided to make a list of small tweaks that I could do that would each help me lose a pound or two on average. I came up with 12 doable things to make sure I would lose 15 pounds in 12 months.

For the health benefits I wanted to keep drinking a glass of real fruit juice each day. But drinking a glass of real cranberry juice instead of grape juice saved me a 100 calories each time I did it. And, my dinners every other time with one tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil instead of two tasted as good and were as filling. But I saved about 125 calories each time I did it. And, instead of drinking almost two glasses of 2% milk with dinner each night, I cut back to just one exactly.

Every one of these things was simple. They were easy to do. And, there will twelve of them. Some did more heavy lifting than others. But the combination was effective.

Making that list was my small gesture.

And, since I’d chosen every single one of those things from a list of things I could easily do without excess hunger, they were doable when I tried them.

And, I lost the 15 pounds in 6 months instead of 12 months!

I wish you similar success.

The tiny starts WILL work for you! Pick a couple and try them!

Recent Headline about vitamin E is NOT accurate....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 10-18-2011

Most health oriented men want very much to avoid prostate cancer. And, they are right to want to avoid it!

So just a headline saying something like,
“Men taking vitamin E more likely to get prostate cancer” can cause some men never to take vitamin E again even if they didn’t read the article!

But if you read the study this headline was based on, you’d be in for a shock.

This research did NOT test vitamin E!

In fact, it tested a different substance that has tested as somewhat harmful in other studies. Yep. That’s really what they did!

For some supplements, the man made version is the same as the natural one. Magnesium citrate is an example.

But with vitamin E, that is simply NOT the case. The real vitamin E is alpha tocopherol from natural sources. The manmade version is NOT the same substance. But of course it is far cheaper. This study tested that, the manmade version of vitamin E. It did NOT test vitamin E!

(The cheaper and man made versions of many vitamins can be enough to prevent deficiency. But for the best benefits you need the natural versions from food or from supplements ONLY containing the natural versions.

This is critical for analyzing results for vitamin C and E for example. Just like an accurate but backwards key won’t turn locks the right version will turn, the mirror image molecule of natural vitamin C or E or a 50-50 mix cannot be expected to get the results of only the natural kind.)

To be fair, the news coverage – INSIDE in the actual article – did note that a different test of vitamin E (which likely actually tested natural vitamin E) found that prostate cancer went DOWN in the group that tested it.

But the case that this was not about testing supplements at all is made further by the fact that in doses of half as much as in this study, real vitamin E taken WITH adequate vitamin C provides some heart attack protection.

That’s how vitamin E is actually used normally. Did they test people taking that combination to see if their risk of cancer or prostate cancer went up and using the normal 200 iu amount of real vitamin E?

No. It wasn’t even close. They did NOT do that.

But it gets worse! Alpha tocopherol is only the best known of the tocopherols.

There is evidence that GAMMA tocopherol DOES lower the risk of prostate cancer.

Neither the researchers or seeming experts quoted as commenting on this bogus study said anything at all about that!

This suggests strongly that these researchers and seeming experts were more interested in creating the belief that supplements are harmful and must be tested before we can take them.

They show no real interest in helping men prevent prostate cancer at all!

“People tend to think of vitamins as innocuous substances, almost like chicken soup — take a little and it can't hurt," said lead author Dr. Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic. The study shows that is not true.”

Since they didn’t actually test vitamin E but an inferior substitute and tested it in ways people don’t actually take the real vitamin E --

HIS study shows nothing of the kind!

It’s as if someone wanted that statement to be believed.

Unfortunately, that may well be the case.

Publicizing that statement to people and to doctors who are unaware it’s based on false evidence & doing so in news sources all over the country may have been the real agenda here.

But why?

The problem is that for many disease and conditions, supplements exist that can prevent them or help them get better that DO work and have few if any side effects.

Drugs to do these things cost more and often are less effective or come with obnoxious or even harmful side effects.

People who take supplements in these ways as I do, tend to stay well and avoid taking drugs unless they get sick and actually need the drugs.

But if everyone did that, the drug companies would lose tens of billions of dollars a year in sales they have now. And if more people ate better and exercised and didn’t smoke AND knew to take these supplements too, the losses to the drug companies could easily quadruple!

So, they are systematically doing their best to use these big lie techniques to persuade politicians, doctors, and regulators to eliminate the access of people to these supplements.

If they succeed, more people will get sick and our health care costs will go up even more – and most of these added costs will go into their pockets.

Are there ethical drug companies? Are there people in drug companies who care about making people well and only earning money from doing so? Are there drugs that actually do help people get well?

Of course there are. And, I do NOT advocate harming these legitimate parts of the industry.

But many of the big companies, it seems, want the monopoly power to exclude competition that does help people stay well and does so better and at a lower price.

If the current FDA NDI guidance goes into effect, the unethical part of the drug industry will have won.

These supplements will no longer be available anywhere to anyone.

But virtually everyone else will lose. And, they will lose BIG.

A family often now buys less things of value and saves less and has less discretionary income to buy nice extras because they pay 12 to 15% of their real income on medical care. (It used to be a lot less.)

Because of the Baby Boom generation turning 65 and the huge amount of younger people who will get sick due to eating junk food and the like, the percentage is already going to go to the 15 to 19 range soon.

If the protective supplements become unavailable as the unethical people in the drug industry have been working to make happen, that percentage may go to the 18 to 25% range instead.

Say hello to the permanent recession if that happens!

That’s why headlines and coverage of such misleading and badly done research as this bogus vitamin E study are so horrible.

They could easily help that to occur.

My monthly fatloss progress report....

Today's Post: Monday, 10-17-2011

Since last month, I gained a half pound. Since a month ago I’d lost a half a pound, I now weigh about what I did two months ago – that’s better than a net gain. But it’s not the progress I want either!

Of the two measures of my waist I take to try to make them more comparable, the conservative, relaxed one was less and the more normal and slightly tense one was about that much more. Oh well! Again, that’s not bad news; but it’s not the good news I want either

The normally but not excessively relaxed waist measure, the conservative one, was 39 & 1/4 inches -- a bit less than that same measure was last month. The normally but not excessively tense measure was about 38 & 3/4 inches -- a bit more.

I now need to lose 6 pounds total to return to my goal weight. And, I still need to lose at least three 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 20 to 25 pounds of fat while gaining 14 to 20 pounds of muscle.

My strength training has gone decently lately; but I’ll eventually need to add some heavier dumbbells and go 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 exercises for them.

(Eventually I’ll also need to get a specialized minibike 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.

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.)

A. Last month, my two part plan to eat differently was a bit better.

1. My plan to eat less almond butter was a bit better.

I was unable to cut back to one serving a week. But I did about the same number of servings but used a smaller spoon and a bit smaller serving.

2. I had also planned to eat a few thawed frozen, organic, broccoli sprouts in place of the almond butter. (I had found before that adding nonstarchy vegetables is effective.)

I DID still manage to eat a good bit more thawed frozen, organic, broccoli sprouts last month. I put the frozen chunks in their container much more consistently and ate some of the thawed florets most evenings compared to three months ago.

B. I still had the significant worry most of last month. But I have taken action to try to resolve it. And, I have worked on building a just in case strategy too since last month.

I’ll still worry for quite a while since it will take months to know if my efforts helped, but I’m somewhat calmer emotionally. That will help me avoid gaining fat from eating too many comfort foods.

C. Because before this month, I got a minor injury doing my jump rope in part because I skipped doing it a bit too often, I did not skip my jump rope sessions at all this past month. Now that I’ve done that and the cooler weather is arriving, I’ll begin to build that back. Then I’ll try to make some progress!

Similarly, I was doing my short kettlebell routine just after my jump rope, but I skipped it to help me be sure to do the jump rope one day a week and the other day when I was doing it more often, I also skipped for the same reason and because it was too hot. Now the cooler weather is arriving, I’ll begin do my short kettlebell routine again and to build that back and eventually return to making progress in it.

D. I haven’t the time on Thursday nights to go to the gym for heavier leg exercise. But I will begin to experiment with doing one leg at a time half squats and begin to work to do full squats holding my kettlebell. That will almost be as much work as squatting with 225 pounds with two legs. That’s still not much weight; but it’s a good bit more than I have been using!

If that works and adds some muscle to my legs and butt, my waist should go down and the scale may go down also.

E. The 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 9 pounds lighter than I was when I started.

I’ll certainly keep doing those things!

F. But the real news is that I will try a new way to cut calories next month.

I read two separate reports on this. One said that fasting one day a week tended to cut pounds of fat without triggering the famine response and even had health benefits. The other said that eating your normal breakfast and then just that one day, skipping your lunch and dinner had the same effect.

I’m not convinced that’s really a benefit to your health when you already don’t pig out on tons of calories of harmful foods. Nor do I think I’m likely to be able to do it or keep doing it.

BUT, I’ve decided to try something along those lines next month.

For lunch on Thursdays, I’ve been eating walnuts, pecans, a half sandwich on whole grain bread, a serving of raw broccoli and baby food winter squash. And, I’ve been eating cooked pinto beans, parmesan cheese, extra virgin olive oil, spices, and nonfat cottage cheese plus pasta sauce for dinner.

This month, on Thursdays only, I’ll only eat the serving of raw broccoli for lunch.

And, I’ll delete the pinto beans and the nonfat cottage cheese and the parmesan cheese and half the extra virgin olive oil and pasta sauce and put the remaining past sauce and extra virgin olive oil the baby food winter squash only that I have been eating for lunch.

The calories not in those two meals are close to enough 825 calories to cause a one pound fat loss by next month. That, of course, is only if I can do it without adding a large snack or eating extra the following day – AND if I can do it on a permanent basis!

The better news is that if it almost works and is almost doable, I may be able to make it work by adding some non-caloric fiber so my tummy doesn’t get quite so empty.

(PGX from the kanjac root does work for some people for this purpose and to slow blood sugar rise for people who need that. But I’d prefer to do without the added expense; it may tend to plug me up too much; and it soaks up water enough it may tend to prevent uptake of water soluble vitamins.)

So, I’ll try doing without it first. Then I’ll try half the suggested amount of the PGX just at dinner. If I can do this strategy either of those two ways, this one strategy added to what I’m already doing will cause me to lose about 14 pounds of fat over a year or so.

At worst, I’ll lose back the 6 pounds of fat I’m now carrying above my goal weight and get me back down to my goal weight.

At best, I’ll lose the 14 pounds of fat or more and add 8 pounds or more of muscle from my other work and my waist will finally get noticeably smaller and still have me at my goal weight.

I’ll let you know how that works next month!

How to start exercising for fat loss....

Today's Post: Friday, 10-14-2011

First, a quick reminder on why it’s critical to include exercise in losing fat.

(The second part is ideas on how to start and keep going with exercise.)

Back on August 2, 20011, I wrote that both eating right are needed for successful fat loss. And, I included this:

“People who only use food and drink changes to lose fat usually find that they lose muscle and other lean body mass in the weight they lose.

Even worse, they are prone to overdoing the food restriction which triggers their bodies' famine responses or they think of these changes as temporary until the fat is lost.

Then they not only gain the weight back but may gain back even more fat!

What about the reasons why they are trying to lose the fat?

Do they look better?

Do they feel better?

Do they have better self-esteem?

Is their health better?

Too often they don't achieve these things with just eating better.

2. So the people who believe or say that: "Exercise is critical for successful fat loss." are also quite correct.

There are several reasons this is true.

a) Starting with the last points first, these are important to know.

Consistent research shows that fat people who exercise are healthier than those who don't. They even test as healthier in many ways than normal weight people who do no exercise at all! Best of all, that starts happening within a week or two - well before they lose that much fat.

As they keep exercising, they begin to have better and better protection from heart disease, type 2 diabetes (see our last post), some cancers, and both Alzheimer's disease and other kinds of mental decline. Their rate of aging slows down too!

Once people begin to improve how much exercise they do and how well they do it, they immediately have better self esteem. And, in addition to that, as they develop better circulation and neurotransmitters, they begin to feel better physically too.

And, they look better. They are more alert and move better even before all the inches of fat come off. Then too as they continue to exercise and they age more slowly, they begin to look better and younger than the people who don't exercise.

b) Because exercise builds muscle and bone, strength training and interval cardio and moderate exercise done standing up like walking or tai chi mean that all or most of the weight you lose will be fat only!

c) Because such exercise reduces insulin resistance, leptin resistance, and elevated insulin levels, you will gain better appetite control and your body will store less fat.

d) The vigorous exercises and those that add some muscle mass cause you to burn more calories even when you are not exercising. They also burn a lot of calories directly even in short sessions which makes fitting in the exercise more doable. (See our last post for ideas on getting into exercise.)

e) Although exercise does not burn enough calories to allow you to pig out or eat the wrong things much more often, exercising most days every week DOES allow you to eat more and still lose fat.

That is a HUGE advantage in permanent fat loss.

It makes it far more doable for you to keep eating right when you aren't too hungry all the time.

And, of even more importance, eating that much more because more exercise allows it -- tends to eliminate having your famine response get triggered.

Why is that important?

The number one cause of failure at fat loss is too much excess hunger. And, if that hunger is driven by your famine response, keeping off the fat can be like trying to hold back a building that is falling on you.

Why go there?

If you eat enough of the things that make you healthy AND exercise AND keep your calorie restriction relatively low, you can avoid excess hunger and the famine response. That makes your upgraded lifestyle sustainable and doable.

Then the fat you lose stays off!”

How to start and keep going with exercise:

The basic strategy is simple.

Find things you can already do and begin doing them at an easy level.

Then gradually do more and add more ways to exercise.

And, find ways to keep exercising each week.

There are two basic routes for success, do morning exercise most mornings a week at home.

And, if you need to can afford it get a personal trainer or a coach or join a gym where they will get you started exercising by showing you how to set up a workout and do the exercises.

People who exercise in the morning are at least twice as likely to become regular exercisers. It’s simple. You do the exercise first or only after you get up and get started on your day. You hardly ever have a competing demand that keeps you from exercising if you do that. But later in the day, competing demands come up. And, when you come home you can be tired and hungry. So, if a needed errand gets you home late on both the evenings you planned to exercise you can miss exercising the whole week.

That’s happened to me. I’ve had weeks where I exercise as planned every one of the seven days in the morning and would up doing only one or none of my evening sessions due to this. (The solution I’ve found is to make more of an effort on such days but to only do the more important half of my routine.) But it’s easy to see how a new exerciser might never get going with evening sessions.

And, those who do so at home are twice as likely to do so because they only have the exercise time and don’t have to add travel time to a separate location.

It’s simple. You only need the time at home for a short session or the most important half of it, to get in that exercise. In my case that’s 15 minutes or half an hour. But add half an hour round trip to that each time and it would be 45 minutes or an hour.

Having a personal trainer come to your home works too. But you have to have money for it and find a trainer you work well with.

If you have a good bit of weight to lose, the bad news is that you may not be able to do much at first. And, at first you have to be a bit more careful not to overdo it.

But there are two pieces of good news too. Because you are heavy, you have already developed extra strength without realizing it. And, moving yourself may burn three times the calories that same thing will add later when the weight is gone.

That often means you can start out stronger and do more with lifting weights than you otherwise would. And, it also means that at first the not very much exercise you CAN do, is two or three times as much work and benefit as it would be for a lighter person.

The other good news is that you can begin at the most incredibly low levels and succeed!

You literally can begin with two 30 second walks with a few minutes rest in between each day at home and add one more each week until after 4 weeks you do six.

Then do three 60 second walks and add one each week the week after that.

By the end of two years you may well be able to get to walking 2 miles each day and race walking every other block.

Just do it every day you can each week. And, do just a doable bit more each week.

Dr Al Sears had one woman patient who did almost exactly that. She could only walk for 45 seconds before she had to stop at first. But she just did a bit more each week. And, after a few months, she lost over 40 pounds and had worked up to walking several sessions at a much faster pace each time.

Another way to succeed is to join a gym and get into a class or group that exercises together and get to know some of the regular members.

That worked for me once. I was weight training but not making progress and I’d work hard for a while and then after a few weeks, I’d get frustrated and stop going.

Then a friend invited me to his workout group. THAT worked. Even if I felt I was making horrible progress, I could cheer one of them on. And, even if I didn’t feel like going or exercising that day, I went anyway because I liked to see those guys.

Guess what? After a year or so of this, I had gone consistently often enough I got stronger and began to make progress!

If you exercise in the evening, here are three ways to use the time you watch TV now to find time to exercise.

Go to the gym two evenings a week instead.

Watch half as much each evening and exercise the other half of the evening.

Or, at home or at the gym, do cardio on a machine while you watch TV. Most gyms are set up for that. But if you get an exercise bike or treadmill at home, you can pick what you watch and hear it better.

This set of strategies is very valuable.

You burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping. By exercising in that time instead you burn a LOT more calories.

Most commercial TV has ads for the foods and drinks that fatten you. So the less of it you watch the easier your fat loss and avoiding that stuff becomes.

Even better you can lose fat and get healthier during your favorite shows that you still watch!

An article a few days ago had several ideas to make exercising easier.

One was that if you have a family that always interrupts your favorite TV show, if you can go to the gym and workout on a cardio machine to watch it, you will actually get to see all your show too!

Another was if you go to the gym to find one first that you find you like to go to because it’s a good fit for you and the people are nice.

Another was to have a picture of someone in worse shape than you that you want to avoid being or looking like while another was to list your reasons to lose the fat. Both suggested looking at these often or when you need extra motivation to exercise.

Another said to treat your exercise sessions like a doctor’s appointment or going to work. Plan definitely to do it. And do it unless something that important comes up. If you wouldn’t cancel going to work for it, consider doing at least half of your session or doing it with lower weights if you are unusually tired or do it for a bit shorter time or distance.

That’s one reason I like my few minute first thing in the morning routine. At about the same time each morning I do the exercises I do every week on that day. When that time comes, I go into my room and do the exercises.

Negative news on supplements may NOT be real...

Today's Post: Thursday, 10-13-2011

Two news items this week sounded like taking supplements was a bad idea.

And they were mostly presented as if the news source wanted to be sure to leave that impression.

In my opinion, they found the equivalent of overeating apples can cause a stomach ache and then said not to eat oranges.

Why would this happen? It looks to me as if it might be systematic influence by money from drug company executives trying to do a character assassination on their competition.

If they get people to believe supplements are not needed and harmful, in those cases where there are supplements that do a better, cheaper, and much safer job, they might get away with selling them inferior solutions. This would make them a lot more money. But the public health, the cost of health care, and individual health and pocket books would all suffer.

Drug companies provide a real service. They do make drugs that can help people get well or reverse disease faster than other methods. I support them in that and making money from doing so.

But undermining the competition when it’s mostly about making more money by establishing a monopoly while harming everyone else is simply unethical.

To me these studies and the publicity for them and the added but mostly untrue editorial comments in each article strongly suggest their influence behind the scenes.

The first study to appear was titled: “Vitamins Don't Boost Longevity Tuesday.”

It led with this: “Women taking multivitamins don't live longer than those who get their nutrients from food alone, a new U.S. study shows. In fact, they appear to have slightly higher death rates, researchers found.”

And, early in the article, this editorial comment was included:

"There is very little evidence showing that common dietary supplements would be beneficial in prevention of major chronic diseases," said Dr. Jaakko Mursu of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who worked on the new study.

"Unless you are deficient, there is hardly any reason to take them,"

They do not actually report many details of the study in the article released to the public.

But the statement ” There is very little evidence showing that common dietary supplements would be beneficial in prevention of major chronic diseases” is totally false.

We’ve posted dozens of articles with many kinds of supplements that have been found effective in preventing several major chronic diseases.

These have often been due to studies finding those supplements effective.

In my own case, I’ve lowered my undesirable LDL cholesterol from 130 to 73 with supplements. And I have the blood test records to prove it.

The doctor is either deliberately lying or horribly underinformed. Either way he is completely wrong and doing harm to the public with this comment.

The article also had this: “…research suggests that some of the largely unregulated substances — such as vitamins A and E — could be harmful in high doses, according to an editorial published along with the new findings in the Archives of Internal Medicine.”

Supplements are NOT unregulated. They are subject to many regulations including some that are quite reasonable and some that are not.

To be fair, it has been found that very large amounts of the animal sourced vitamin A, retinol, massive doses of vitamin E, high doses of vitamin B6, and excessive doses of selenium can be harmful.

But instead of informing people about this, the thrust of this comment is to try to prevent access instead of giving people the actual facts and letting them decide.

Worse, in vitamin C and vitamin D3, and some others, the most health benefits are found in much higher doses than the amount needed to prevent very severe deficiencies.

The study itself found that women who take calcium lived longer and taking iron sometimes was unwise.

The calcium finding reveals the basic flaw of this study.

New information finds that women taking calcium supplements increase their chances of high blood pressure and heart attacks by taking calcium as a supplements.

Bingo! Taking calcium as a supplement likely shortens life. Yet this study found the opposite.

How could that be?

Simple, with the exception of the iron finding, this shows that who the people were who were studied had more influence on the results than the actual effects from the supplements.

That means the conclusions being taken from it are likely completely unsupported. More careful studies that pay attention to who the people are and how exactly they take supplements simply are unlikely to get the same result.

Most women who took calcium supplements in the time period of this study were advised to do so by their doctors.

We now know that taking calcium supplements does more harm than good and that weight bearing exercise, eating foods with calcium and taking supplements of vitamin D3 and magnesium and drinking NO soft drinks in combination are what is needed to prevent osteoporosis safely.

But women educated well enough and affluent enough to see doctors live longer than those who don’t. So, despite the risks of heart disease at older ages from taking calcium supplements the women who did lived longer. But since that particular supplement reduces lifespan, the finding of this study found that women educated well enough and affluent enough to see doctors live longer than those who don’t.

The calcium supplements almost certainly can take no credit for them living longer.

What about the more general finding that women who took supplements lived slightly fewer years?

There are three reasons in my view, NONE of which shows the supplements had anything to do with the results.

People who smoke or are fat or who do no exercise live fewer years than people who do the opposite. And, in the case of smokers, the effects are very great.

There are people who take a simple multivitamin and who smoke or are fat or who do no exercise who hope that their inaction on these more serious problems will go away from taking a simple multivitamin.

They will live fewer years as a simple multivitamin has too little effect to compensate for their inaction.

Did this study carefully exclude such people so it actually looked at people that a simple multivitamin might have benefitted instead.

Nope!

Second, a simple multivitamin for many vitamins and minerals is ONLY useful to help contribute to the higher amounts that are actually needed to have good health effects.

They do have enough iodine to do the job for most people. And for some people they can have enough vitamin B2 to be helpful. But since they have below the optimal amounts of vitamin C and far less for vitamin D3 and niacin and lack certain key B vitamins, only those people who add those things really get the full effects on benefitting their health.

Did this study look at THOSE people? Nope!

Third, this study was of inexpensive multi vitamins. The cheaper and man made versions of many vitamins in them can be enough to prevent deficiency. But for the best benefits you need the natural versions from food or from supplements ONLY containing the natural versions.

This is critical for analyzing results for vitamin C and E for example. Just like an accurate but backwards key won’t turn locks the right version will do, the mirror image molecule of natural vitamin C or E or a 50-50 mix cannot be expected to get the results of only the natural kind.

There is even some evidence that larger doses of vitamin E using the man made version can be harmful. Because it’s cheaper many studies have used the man made version instead of the man made one.

Next week we will do a post on the vitamin E study because that was one of the likely reasons for the negative finding that study had.

What to do about slightly high blood pressure....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 10-11-2011

It used to be that a blood pressure reading of 120 over 80 was considered normal.

Now it’s becoming more widespread to say that blood pressure of 119 over 79 or a bit less is desirable.

And, to be fair, that’s true as long as your blood pressure isn’t too much lower. A blood pressure of something like 112 over 70 is close to ideal though below that it becomes less so.

Also, recently a study was in the news showing that even for slightly elevated blood pressures such as 135 over 80 or thereabouts tended to be associated with a significantly higher chance of having a stroke. This risk was even higher for blood pressures in the range of 140 over 85 to 150 over 95.

This research or its publicity may have been sponsored by the drug companies.

Why?

Why indeed because these results may be perfectly accurate?

Because it’s easy to make the assumption that lowering blood pressures in this range with drugs will solve the problem and is a good idea.

Both lay people and doctors could easily draw that conclusion from these results.

There are indeed several things that people with these slightly to definitely raised blood pressures should do.

But for several reasons, taking drugs to do so may be best avoided.

A large study was done that compared death rates of people from high blood pressure. For people with readings of over 160 over 100 or well over that, taking drugs lowered the death rates. For blood pressures in the 135 over 80 to 150 over 85 range that was NOT true. Apparently the harmful side effects of the drugs and their negative impact on the quality of life for the people taking them was as much or more than the health benefits of taking the drugs at these lower blood pressures.

But if drugs don’t help that much and are obnoxious to take to boot, what should be done for people at increased risk from these less elevated blood pressures that are less than 160 over 100?

There are three things to do. They should also be done IN ADDITION to taking drugs for people with blood pressure readings of over 160 over 100.

1. Remove any causes of the high blood pressure that are still happening!

2. Do things that directly prevent the bad effects of elevated blood pressure.

High blood pressure helps cause strokes, heart attacks, and mental decline. So, it makes superb sense if you have any kind of elevated blood pressure to stop doing other things that cause those problems and do protective things instead.

3. Do things other than drugs that lower high blood pressure.

(This category and the first two often overlap. So many key actions do more than just lower your blood pressure.)

Here are some examples.

a) If you are in a very stressful situation, you may be able to escape it.

If you do that, your blood pressure may go down. If you are good at what you do in a strong market for that talent but your boss is consistently harsh and mean, not just trying to get better results, find a better job! If you can afford to move to slightly smaller house or apartment and where you are has become dangerous since you moved there, move to a smaller place in a better neighborhood. The same thing applies if your commute is so long that you have no time for exercise or your family or enough sleep because of it.

This one is effective. One study of people who lived to be 100 years old found they had often done this sort of thing and much more often than people had who were NOT so long lived.

b) You may smoke or work in a place where you are exposed to a lot of second hand smoke.

This situation CAUSES high blood pressure from increasing the thickness and stiffness of the plaque on your artery walls over time AND keeping your blood pressure a few points higher as you are exposed to it each time you are.

Tobacco smoke also causes heart disease AND triggers heart attacks that people would have avoided without that exposure. And, these same factors make strokes more likely too!

If this applies to you and your blood pressure elevation is low, the priority for you is NOT to take blood pressure drugs. The priority is to escape the tobacco smoke ASAP!

c) Drinking soft drinks daily and also eating refined grain foods and grain fed meats and packaged snacks and desserts helps cause high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease and strokes. So does the high salt intake this way of eating causes. The cured meats you can avoid eating often also recently have been found to tend to cause heart disease and strokes.

If you stop that completely and eat foods and drink drinks that are NOT like that and include lots of nonstarchy vegetables in what you eat, do you know what happens?

Your blood pressure will go down in some cases as much as if you took two drugs that work well. And with no further effort you will be much less fat!

There are abundant studies to prove this. They even have a name for what to eat and drink instead. It’s called the DASH II diet. Whether your elevated blood pressure is 135 over 80 or 180 over 123, other than adding some spices you like, a very few treats, extra virgin olive oil, and perhaps moderate drinking to that, you should be on a DASH II diet that is customized to you!

The drugs are often obnoxious to be on. And, even if your blood pressure is quite high they are only moderately protective of the things you want to avoid.

The DASH II diet with these modifications is MUCH more protective. People who eat that way have LESS diabetes, obesity, and heart disease and strokes. And, that’s true even if they only get down to a moderately elevated blood pressure.

d) Regular exercise is also critical. People who do it have lower blood pressure and less diabetes, obesity, and heart disease and strokes.

In fact, if you exercise four or five days a week, your blood pressure will be lower on the days you exercise than on the other days.

So the cure is to exercise at least some 6 or 7 days a week even if on some days it’s just for a few minutes.

e) Stress is such an effective driver and cause of high blood pressure, relieving it well has as much blood pressure lowering effect as taking two of the more effective blood pressure drugs. In fact, it can lower your blood pressure when the drugs aren’t even working for you.

Escaping really bad stressful situations when you can safely do so does help.

But there are so many kinds of stress you can’t escape, if you have elevated blood pressure, a stress reliever that works is far more important to you than taking blood pressure drugs unless your blood pressure is over 160 over 100.

And, you would be very well advised to use one if your blood pressure is that high!

For some people mediation works well. For others yoga works well.

But the most reliable and time efficient stress reliever is Tai Chi. You do have to learn it, but one study found people who do Tai Chi most days of the week for just 10 or 20 minutes lowered their high blood pressure by 17 over 11!

And, Tai Chi can be done virtually anywhere. It’s free to do. And once you learn, it’s like learning to swim or ride a bicycle, you can do it whenever you want.

But perhaps best of all, you burn about as many calories in the time you do Tai Chi as you would while walking.

So, if it’s too hot, too wet, too cold, or too dangerous to walk outside, you can still get in that much exercise by just doing Tai Chi inside.


f) There are also some foods and drinks that LOWER your stroke risk.

Eating organic blueberries or dark chocolate, and drinking tea, green tea, or unsweetened cocoa without milk each tends to increase blood flow and reduce your risk of stroke.

Dark chocolate does this much better than milk chocolate. But a recent study even found that people who ate milk chololate often had significantly fewer strokes than people who ate hardly any.

If you have elevated blood pressure either just a bit or quite high, do the best you can to do each of these things!

And, if your blood pressure elevation is low or moderate, do them all ASAP. And do them BEFORE considering taking drugs unless your blood pressure is over 160 over
100.

Doing them is MORE protective than the drugs and these steps have other health benefits instead of obnoxious side effects!