Successful New Year’s Resolutions and health resolutions....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-30-2011

To have a successful New Year’s resolution or health resolution, you have to make one.

Many people don’t bother to make any. Almost all of them fail. (Some of those who are taking action separately to make good things happen will succeed anyway.)

Many people think up a couple and stop there. Almost all of them fail.

A few people write down a resolution or two. Some of them succeed.

But why not join the group that succeeds or at least makes worthwhile progress on achieving their resolutions almost every time?

Make these several changes.

Write them all down. (This year, I found a place I can review them a few times each month.)

Write them down as goals to achieve in the coming year instead of as a resolution.

Have only one or two that are a real challenge to reach.

Include at least one or two related goals that you know you can get done. (That way, you can review each of them all throughout the year and see some progress at least on those goals.)

Then right away, write down a few things to do to work on getting them achieved. Begin doing those things in January.

This can be well worth doing!

John Carlton writes of doing three things, writing his goals for the year as of a year later and as if they were achieved. He had a potentially effective way to reach his goals. And the goals he set were quite modest.

( See http://www.john-carlton.com/ The Rest Of Your Freakin’ Life, Re-Redux Tuesday, 1:31pm Reno, NV )

It worked. And, repeating the process allowed him to succeed in reaching MUCH larger goals later.

Health writer Dr Al Sears in his email today endorses the idea of scheduling just one or two doable things to do in January to move him closer to reaching his goals.

He thinks he will even make progress with this method on a couple of goals he hasn’t been able to reach in prior years.

Write down your goals for the year. Write them down as if it’s next January and you are reporting you got them.

Have at least some of them clearly doable or very likely doable.

Pick one or two things you clearly can do to begin the process of reaching each one that you schedule to do in January.

I’ll use myself as an example.

Despite my healthy lifestyle and weight lost on the scale, my waist is still too fat and large. And my blood pressure, while not at the level drugs are needed to treat IS a bit too high for best health results.

For the fat loss goal, I’ve already begun making progress on building more muscle in my legs. And, later today I’ll buy a logbook to help me succeed in eating a bit more nonstarchy vegetables and less of other things for my after dinner snacks. And, I’ve listed about six more things to add after that.

Losing more belly fat will drop my blood pressure a few points too.

Earlier this week I bought my first video Tai Chi lessons and last night I began learning from them.

(Since doing Tai Chi calms you and your overactive response to stress – which I’ve had -- the research says I’ll drop my blood pressure by itself to where I’d like it to be. One research study found people who began doing Tai Chi regularly dropped 17 over 11 points from their high blood pressure.)

Second, there is a supplement that is taken from a mild herbal tea, Hibiscus, that tested as dropping high blood pressure about 13 over 8. (I tried the tea and simply didn’t care for it; but I can take the supplement to get the effect of regularly drinking a few cups each day of the tea.)

I ordered today that supplement today and will begin taking it when it arrives in two weeks at my local health food store.

My blood pressure when I’m relaxed is 135 over 80. But it can easily be 159 over 93 when I’m stressed. I want to look back next January when it measures 119 over 71 when I’m relaxed and 139 over 83 when I’m stressed! I also am working to have less stress in my life. But that’s not always within my control.

I’d planned to add some easy to do but profoundly effective health goals you might want to consider to this post but find I’m out of time.

So I may do that next week.

Have a happy and prosperous and healthy New Year!

And, stay safe on New Year’s Eve so you are around to enjoy it!

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 5....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-29-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part 1 on Tuesday, 12-20-2011, last week.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

Last Thursday’s post covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

Friday last week we covered 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

If your friends, family, and neighbors are fat, it can be much harder to lose fat yourself. But there are three ways to do it. And, of those there are many ways to keep enjoying your current friends while being more effective influencing them than the other way around. That post had those solutions.

And, on Tuesday this week, we posted on how to keep yourself on track. That about doubles your chance of success.

And, we posted on how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. That too will at least double your chances of success.

Doing both, if you do them well and you keep doing it, it will at least multiply your chances at success by over 4 times. For many people doing both will guarantee your success.

Today, we add a bonus post to this series. When I decided to do this series I wrote down 6 common fat loss problems to give solutions to.

The last post, how to ensure you keep going I put in as the 6th problem to solve because I lost my original list of 6. And, I found I could only remember 5.

I remembered the first 5; posted on those; did the last post about how to virtually ensure success by both managing it yourself and getting skilled and supportive outside help.

Today, I was doing an end of the year clean up at work and found the original 6th problem.

It was too much sitting!

Until a hundred years ago most people didn’t sit much and before 1,000 years ago very few people sat more than 4 or 5 hours a day. Modern man evolved something like 30,000 years ago; and our primate ancestors go back over a million years. Most of them sat very little each day!

Today, it has become common for people to sit for 9 to over 12 hours a day.

That’s a huge difference in activity level and average blood circulation during each day.

The calories burned difference and the less exercised muscles that has caused are two of the reasons far more people are fatter than they were on the average before a 100 years ago.

But that’s far from all.

First, if you sit much over 6 hours a day, your risk of virtually everything you’d like to avoid goes up.

This includes aging, heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, and sexual dysfunction. It also includes brain shrinkage, memory problems, and also is a contributing cause of Alzheimer’s disease.

Second, fatter people sit even more than normal weight people. One study found that obese, definitely fat, people sat an average of 9.5 hours a day while normal weight people sat an average of 7.0 hours a day.

That 2.5 hour a day difference is quite large. Even very light activity burns at least 100 calories an hour more than sitting. Over a week’s time, it adds up to 1750 calories a week. That’s about the calories in half a pound of body fat.

If two people eat the same number of calories for a year and the one who sat 7 hours a day was the same weight at the end of the year, the one who sat 9.5 hours would be 26 pounds fatter!

Mercifully the person sitting more usually tends to eat less, so it’s usually not that bad.

BUT, for one cause of sitting more, it is often worse!

And, the studies reflect that too. People who watch TV less than 14 hours a week are routinely far less fat on the average than people who watch TV over 28 hours a week.

Watching that 2 hours more of TV tends to build in more sitting time. But it’s even worse than that for three reasons.

You sit so quietly while watching TV, you burn less calories than while you are sleeping!

Second, the ads on commercial TV specialize in advertising the bad for you and fattening foods and drinks that you should virtually write off if you want hunger free fat loss.

Third, if you eat any kind of snack – even healthier ones, let alone fattening ones -- while you watch TV, you simply eat on automatic pilot. You also even keep eating when, had you been paying attention, you’d have noticed you were no longer hungry and were full!

Earlier in this series under how to find time to exercise, we posted on two ways to turn TV time into exercise time.

One way is to turn off the TV and do some kind of vigorous exercises such as strength training or interval cardio or moderate exercises like walking, swimming, or gardening for longer times.

The other way is to set up some kind of exerciser you can use while you watch TV.

There are two other solutions.

Program in regular breaks in your sitting so you don’t just stay totally still for more than an hour or two.

Getting up to get yourself coffee, tea, or water throughout the day keeps you hydrated and gets you up to do it. But it gets you up a second time to visit the bathroom too!

I also got the idea to do about 30 seconds of a moderate exercise a few times a day. Good idea; but a few weeks later, I realized I’d done it once on the day I thought of it and never did it again!

I’ve since put in a double reminder and do it 5 times virtually every weekday.

When I get up to get a cup of tea or green tea, right then or when I finish the cup, I do the short exercise session. AND, I make a mark in my special logbook for that day. That combination is very effective. And only on the very busiest days do I fail to do it all 5 times.

But there is more coming!

What if you could burn 50 to 100 calories for at least half of your sitting time too?!

An expensive set up where you can work on your computer and on your phone while walking, a “walking desk”, has been tried. It does work; but it’s expensive for the purpose and it can be tiring or can distract you from your work.

Eventually I personally plan to get a specialized minibike or other 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. Then they’d keep it off!

(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 UP to my goal weight! That’s because I’d be 10 to 20 pounds less fat. I’m only 5 pounds over my goal weight now; but my waist is still too fat!)

I’ve also had a new idea. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!

But until those become available for $69.38 at WalMart or $79.95 at Big 5 Sporting Goods, by all means do the other things in this post! They will help.

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 4....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-27-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

Last Thursday’s post covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

Friday last week we covered 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

If your friends, family, and neighbors are fat, it can be much harder to lose fat yourself. But there are three ways to do it. And, of those there are many ways to keep enjoying your current friends while being more effective influencing them than the other way around. That post had those solutions.

This time we’ll cover how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. It will at least double your chances of success. And, if it’s done well and you keep using it, it will virtually guarantee your success.

It’s a key part of

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

These basic three principles were in the first post in this series and all the others.

Plan to upgrade your lifestyle permanently to one that protects your health and supports your health without hunger. Instead of a temporary plan, a diet, that gets temporary results if any, focus on doing sustainable upgrades.

Do so in a way that does trim off some calories you were taking in and burns more while doing so in ways that avoid making you unusually hungry all the time.

Always aim to do these things in ways YOU find sustainable. (Not being too hungry all the time makes that much easier.)

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

The first part is the focus and controls you build into your life yourself.

The first way to do that and double your chances of success is to keep track regularly.

Exercise is a key part of staying healthy and losing fat without hunger. People who keep a logbook of their exercise they use at each session they do right then as they exercise each time, are more than twice as likely to keep exercising. I use a system that enables writing in mine to just a few seconds for each exercise.

Measuring your waist and hips and chest and your weight on the scale on the same day of the week or the same day of the week once a month and analyzing what went right or less than OK to cause that period’s results also can double your results. (My own monthly report was a post last week.)

If you eat a very varied diet, it can help to keep a similar log for what you eat.

But having planned variation for each breakfast and each weekday lunch and many weekday dinners where you eat what you planned and eating almost only the right kinds of food the rest the time is easier on you. You just have the meals you planned and by adding some variation but often eating the same foods for the same meals each weekday, you know what you ate without having to take the extra time to record it.

Having those planned meals also makes it much easier to shop for your food too.

You do keep control of what you eat that way; but save the time the more complex logs of eating would require.

Controlling your exercise, managing your food intake, and monitoring your progress taken together can ensure your long term success.

But if you aren’t used to doing that sort of thing or your motivation to stay on course is variable, it can more than triple your success chances to have regular support for your efforts.

Such support can help you do this kind of management. It can encourage you to continue. It can provide solutions to the problems that you need help with.

Jillian Michaels is not perfect. But she does have a decent online support system for a relatively modest fee. She does particularly well for women who find her and her successful students inspiring and who need specific exercises and eating plans to get them going.

Weight Watchers has both an online program and a weekly meeting you can attend in person. People who need to add calorie cut backs to exercise and eating foods that support your health can do well with Weight Watchers. And people who need in person support and more productive thinking styles can do well with their weekly meetings. The meeting leaders can give you the emotional boost and the positive way to think about problems and solutions you need.

Weight Watchers does have some problems but has improved in many of those areas. They recommend more of a calorie cut back than is wise for permanent fat loss to ensure people get fast enough results they don’t drop out. (I found that by adding more nonstarchy vegetables, a zero point food, and aiming for a smaller cut back, and continuing to exercise, I was able to lose more fat than the cut back looked likely to deliver.)

Though they have gotten more proactive at encouraging people to delete fattening foods and drinks than they were, they still don’t emphasize that enough nor cutting back on all grains. They also don’t emphasize exercise enough. And, for many kinds of fruit, it may have been a mistake to list them as zero point foods.

But if you join and use either Jillian Michael’s system or Weight Watchers, by adding our information to their system you can do well in improving your health, losing fat, and keeping it off.

We are working to design and make our own online support system available too.

To access that when it becomes available, just keep reading our posts and our fat loss posts in particular. We will announce it on our posts when it’s ready; and it will be available through its own link from our posts.

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-23-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

Last Thursday’s post began solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.

It covered 4. Stress triggered eating -- and solutions to keep it from sabotaging you.

This time we’ll cover 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

This one can be quite challenging for many reasons.

For family members who still think junky foods and drinks are normal and want to keep eating them or who would dislike have being fat uncomfortably brought to their attention who are now ignoring it and those who both fail to support you or make it harder for you for whatever reason, some of these solutions will help.

The good news is that in many families where the person who lost weight is clearly happier and continues to be nice to the other people in the family, the influence goes the other way! You can inspire them to lose fat too!

But for bad family situations you need the last solution we’ll cover next week which is ways to get outside support by people who want you to lose fat.

a) The first idea is to get a firm grip on the fact that if you learn how to keep yourself healthy and lose fat and keep it off AND do it and keep doing it, you join a new and elite group of people.

You’ll keep your family and many of your friends. But you will now belong to a new group of people who include championship athletes, doctors who help their patients prevent diseases, personal trainers, health writers, and health coaches.

You’ll also fit better with groups of people who do the best in life including college professors, successful entrepreneurs and sales people, CEO’s and other executives, other achievers, and other college educated people. That’s because each of these groups is more likely than average to be in the new group you are joining.

People enjoy being members of an elite. And this is an elite you can join by choosing to do so and doing the actions necessary.

b) Find ways to socialize with your friends and acquaintances that support them but do not support their bad eating habits or lack of exercise. And, begin to avoid some situations where they would want you to eat badly with them.

If they are active on Facebook, do some of your socializing there.

Invite them to go with you on short hikes in interesting or beautiful places. Then let them set the pace.

Instead of going to their home, when you can, meet them at a restaurant at which there are food choices that fit what you need as well as the standard fare.

Meet them at potluck events where you can bring health OK foods you can eat and pick out what foods you’ll eat.

If you go to their home to eat, be an unusually friendly and polite guest and make the conversation fun and interesting for them. But take small servings of foods you shouldn’t eat and say if they taste good; but leave some of the most fattening stuff.

But do NOT try to sell them there on why to eat the way you do. ONLY do that if once you do lose enough fat it’s noticeable and either they ask how you are doing it or they say yes when you ask if they would like to do as you have done.

Focus on the things about that friend that you like and make the meal a positive event and focus on the things you have in common.

You’ll keep the friendship and be MORE likely to be positive example to them!

So by socializing some by Facebook and email; eating with them at locations that easily allow them and you to eat the way you want; and making the good times you share more important than the food when you eat at their place, you can keep the friendship and NOT have your fat loss derailed or your health harmed.

c) If you need to and can do so, spend some time socializing with people like personal trainers or people who have been going the gym for years and look like it in addition to your fatter friends.

Read books about health and fat loss. Read this blog when the topic interests you.

That way part of your thinking, social input, and social modeling is on people who already are the way you are becoming yourself.

Next time we’ll cover how to set up a support system making regular use of such supportive people and information. It will at least double your chances of success. And, if it’s done well and you keep using it, it will virtually guarantee your success.

Solutions to common fat loss problems, part 2....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-22-2011

We posted on solutions to 3 of the most important problems in part one last Tuesday, 12-20-2011.

1. Effective fat loss plans that do not turn on your body’s famine response succeed and you can keep the fat off. Diet, temporary starvation routines always turn on the famine response and fail. That post has the solutions that make up an effective fat loss plan.

2. Foods and drinks most people now think of as normal that did not exist or didn’t exist at all in their current forms 100 years ago. But they are NOT normal. That post has a bit about how that happened and why virtually avoiding all these foods and drinks makes hunger free fat loss almost easy. People who have been consuming a lot of these can lose tens of pounds with almost no other changes.

3. A key strategy in a fat loss plan that does not turn on your body’s famine response is to exercise. But finding time to exercise can be quite challenging. The post last Tuesday had 3 proven ways to find the time to exercise.

This post begins solutions to 3 more common fat loss problems.

4. Stress triggered eating.

5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat.

6. How to persist, lose all your fat or close to it, and keep it off.


4. Stress triggered eating.

Some stress is so severe that the shock and adrenalin response completely turn off your appetite.

But most of the stress people have is chronic and mild to severe. The effect of this kind of stress is similar to the effects of the famine response.

People become more hungry for “comfort” foods that may be from the not really normal list and horribly fattening. It always tends to cause more appetite for sugary and fattier foods.

There are two ways to beat it.

Be less stressed. And, avoid this effect when you are stressed

Being less stressed IS possible. It’s not often easy. But there are ways you can have less stress. You can prevent some kinds of stress. You can escape or turn off some stressful problems, and you can turn off your body’s stress response.

The post we did: High leverage ways to live longer, part 2.... Thursday, 12-8-2011 covers these three methods in detail because people who do these 3 things age more slowly, have better health, and live longer.

Bonus for this post.: In that post we forgot three great ways to turn off your body’s stress response.

a) Believe it or not you can get quite substantial if brief stress relief AND wake up a bit too within a few seconds. You don’t even have to learn how because it was already wired in when you were born! Just take a few seconds and yawn and stretch on purpose.

(People you know you or who see you as similar to them in some way will tend to yawn too and get the same stress relief often without even realizing it.)

b) Another blogger reminded me that watching videos or old movies you think are funny and laugh at also can be superb stress relief.

c) Doing a fast set of a relatively vigorous exercise also gives you almost instant if brief stress relief.

Being stressed without giving in to fattening foods also works.

If you follow the methods that cause hunger free fat loss that does not trigger your body’s stress response, your real hunger will be low or reasonable.

Saying no to stress caused eating is dramatically easier when your real hunger is not also high! Women who always eat a filling and health OK breakfast can say no to very fattening treats found in some offices MUCH more easily than women who haven’t eaten since last night as one example.

If you’ve eaten food that turns down your hunger and fills your tummy with some fiber too and some food that you enjoy eating, if you do reach for comfort food, it’s dramatically easier to have just a bit instead of a lot more.

Another way is to know the health harms of the ingredients of some of the worst treat foods. You may be hungrier for them from stress. But focusing on what those ingredients will do to you can make it much, much easier to pass completely.

The last way I’ll list is to refuse to eat treat foods that you don’t really like that much normally. Only eat those you normally really like. And just eat some while remembering that you are aiming to average mostly healthy and nonfattening foods.

Next time we’ll cover 5. Friends and family and neighbors are fat --
and how to overcome the effects of that.

Solutions to common fat loss problems....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-20-2011

1. The fail safe famine response is the big one.

Fat loss eating plans with no net calorie reduction tend not to work. But 95% or more fat loss plans overdo calorie restriction enough that the bodies of the people using them, trigger this famine response.

It makes people get hungrier and for it to take more food to stop them feeling hungry. It slows fat loss. It lowers energy levels and metabolism so you feel less like exercising and burn less calories. And, it makes sugary and fatty foods taste better than they already do.

It’s like taking 3 effective drugs to fatten you up at the same time.

The 3 main solutions are to:

a) Eat only or almost only lower glycemic and nutritious foods that support your health. These foods have fewer calories or cause your blood sugar and insulin to spike very little or both. The health OK protein foods and the health OK fats and oils turn off hunger well and have no extra rebound hunger later. And, many of these foods are high enough in fiber that you have a full stomach when you eat them.

Eating enough of them to turn off your hunger will NOT trigger your famine response.

That’s particularly true for the protein foods and the foods higher in fiber. And adding some health OK fats and oils most days makes the famine response even less likely research finds.

(We post quite often on these foods and drinks that actually support your health without fattening you by the way. Virtually all of them also have multiple health benefits and protect you from many diseases.)

b) Do enough more exercise overall and enough strength training and interval cardio to use up more calories instead of eating less of them.

This doesn’t work by itself short of 8 to 10 hours a day of exercise. But even a few minutes almost every day of such exercise does burn enough more calories to cause more fat loss. It also helps ensure you lose fat instead of muscle.

The biggest two benefits though are that you get enormous health benefits even before you lose much fat. And, because you can lose fat with less food cut backs, you can lose fat without triggering the famine response.

c) The additional calorie cut backs need to happen in a pattern that does NOT trigger the famine response. We are descended from people who had a variable food supply. So some calorie cuts backs are OK. But meal after meal day after day calorie cut backs at every meal and every day, your body will read as a famine.

Strategies like only cutting calories extra every other day or only two days a week that have a day or two off between them or only one half day partial fast a week done every week, do net out fewer calories each week. But because they allow you to be normally fed most of the time -- tend not to trigger the famine response.

In summary, every day calorie cut backs in a temporary diet plan, produce temporary results and zero permanent results.

Since it is unpleasant to do and doesn’t work, it hasn’t worked for the people who try to lose fat that way.

People who try it feel as if they have failed at fat loss. They were fine and still are able to lose fat. They used a method that always fails. To lose fat they have to use the method that does work instead.

But people who do a thorough job permanently upgrading their lifestyle to these 3 methods lose fat they keep off.

It’s not easy for many people. But it is doable. And it gets easier once you get used to it and customize it to you.

2. The boiled frog problem.

It’s said that if you put a frog in a pot of water on the stove and increase the heat very gradually, the frog will cook without noticing the risk at all.

Most people today are far too fat because something very like that happened to all of us over the last 100 years.

People now see fattening foods and drinks as normal today. These foods and drinks often did not exist a 100 years ago. Or they were a few times a month treats eaten by people who burned thousands of calories a week walking and in other ways few people do now.

The change from then until now has been so gradual that few people realized it was happening.

Similarly, the companies that have been making money providing these foods and drinks, only gradually cut the quality and cost to make them and increased how addictive they were and gradually advertised them more. They now make a lot of money by harming masses of people and making them fat.

But they didn’t start out that way. They began making small amounts of treats that people only consumed small amounts of a few times a month. The people doing it got plenty of exercise and many of them needed MORE calories to be healthy instead of less. And, the companies used real foods just like the original home made recipes of the day.

Seeing these foods and drinks as normal and safe to eat and drink is easy to do and most people do it.

But every last one of them is unnatural and fattening and harmful in any but the tiniest amounts. They tend to be made out of refined grains, cheap vegetable oils high in omega 6, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, and artificially saturated vegetable oils. They also add chemicals and other additives to make the food more addictive.

People who succeed best in fat loss throw out these products, don’t buy any more or take them as gifts. And, they stop buying foods or drinks with these ingredients or ordering them in restaurants.

It’s truly an unfortunate situation. And it can be challenging to do when the people around you don’t know any of this or how harmful to health these ingredients are.

But now you do. You can stop being a slowly cooking fat frog and switch permanently to being less fat.

But once you know and get used to not having these things, strangely it can be relatively easy to lose tens of pounds of fat.

These foods tend to not turn off your hunger very well and they all tend to turn it back on again from the blood sugar and insulin surges they cause. That means you actually may be LESS hungry while losing tens of pounds of fat.

This is even true for diet soft drinks research has repeatedly found. Despite having no calories diet soft drinks or foods with artificial sweeteners act as a potent appetite increasing drug. Worse, they increase your appetite for sugary foods!

Fat loss is far easier for people who don’t take this kind of appetite increasing drug!

3. Lack of time to exercise is another real problem.

Two solutions that work are these.

a) Do strength training an interval cardio you can do at home in 15 to 30 minute sessions. And do one session first thing in the morning most days.

You get a lot of results for short periods of time this way. And by doing it before the demands of your day start up, it’s dramatically more reliable and doable to fit it in.

b) Trade TV watching time for time exercising or exercise as you watch TV.

Both of these are well worth trying.

You burn fewer calories watching TV than you do sleeping so doing less while doing things like going to the gym or taking a Tai Chi class an evening or two a week instead of watching TV can really help!

Watching less TV also cuts your exposure to ads for the foods and drinks you should completely avoid.

So exercising instead of watching TV is a triple win for your fat loss and keeping it off.

You can also get some kind of easy cardio you can do while watching the TV you really want to watch. In fact many gyms have cardio equipment rooms with TVs to make this easier for people.

If you burn only 50 to 100 calories an hour but you do it 5 to 15 hours a week it can really add up!

There are many other problems people have with fat loss. But here are solutions for three of the most important to solve problems.

My monthly fatloss progress report....

Today's Post: Monday, 12-19-2011

Since last month, I lost another pound.

That’s the good news. And, there are three reasons for it.

First, except for the Thursday that was Thanksgiving, I did my partial fast at lunch the other Thursdays. Second, I was able to skip drinking an extra day and averaged my new and lower number of alcoholic drinks each week, 8.5, despite drinking a bit extra on Thanksgiving. Third, one of the people who usually brings a food to Thanksgiving that I eat a bit extra was unable to make it. And other things happened too such as less appetite due to my cold, so I ate less at Thanksgiving than I have in the past.

I’m pleased the partial fast at lunch method is still working and that I was able to avoid drinking extra for the month. Clearly I’d have weighed more and gotten even fatter had I not done them.

But the bad news is that on both of the two measures of my waist I take -- a bit tight AND a bit relaxed, I gained about three quarters of an inch.

That means I lost lean weight and got fatter! Oops!

To do that I clearly lost muscle. On a guess, I gained a couple pounds of fat and lost three pounds of muscle.

What happened on the gaining muscle side that caused me to lose it instead?

Simple. In between 11-19 & 12-17, the Saturdays I took my monthly measurements, on 11-22 I came down with a really bad cold.

Much to my shock, with all the things I do that make colds half as bad and only half as long, THIS cold was triple strength! The bad part of the cold lasted a week. The almost as bad part lasted a second week. And, it took another two weeks to recover my strength and cough up all the gunk in my chest in addition.

Colds are worse in the late afternoon and early evening. And my Monday and Weds evening jump rope sessions need extra energy and deep breathing. So I had to skip those sessions. I suspect I lost muscle from my legs and butt by doing so.

In addition, I kept up my morning exercise sessions. But to avoid making my cold worse, I used lighter weight and less repetitions. So, here again I suspect I lost some muscle.

The far better news is that the recent several morning sessions are back to normal and I’ll be able to get back to my jump rope sessions tonight.

My hope is that I gain the muscle back by next month, that I lose another pound, AND lose back the 3/4 inch from my waist or even lose an inch.

(My main goal now that I’m close to my goal weight is to lose inches off my waist by adding muscle on my larger muscles like my chest and butt and legs and keep those two measures the same or increase them.

Clearly I went backwards on this one last month. Although I may not make progress on more, over the next month I should be able to regain the muscle I had.)

Also, I had a plan to get a log book pad of paper to keep track of the broccoli I ate each evening. But I was too tired in the evenings from the cold to make the extra effort at all to unthaw the frozen broccoli florets and eat some. And, I was too short on time and energy to buy the kind of log book pad of paper I plan to use.

I will have some extra shopping time the Monday after Christmas to buy the log book pad of paper. And, I’ve had excellent results following through on things I once use a log book system to track.

So, between adding back the muscle and the one day a week partial fast at lunch and that evening effort, I believe I’ll again lose a pound on the scale by next month.

The combination of adding muscle and losing weight should cut back on my waist measurements. Next month, the weight loss should be fat loss and my fat loss should be greater than the weight loss!

Let’s hope so!

I now need to lose 4 pounds total to return to my goal weight. And, I still need to lose at least four 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 18 to 24 pounds of fat while gaining 14 to 20 pounds of muscle.

My strength training has gone decently lately – once I finally got over my cold; but I need to add some heavier dumbbells now and eventually will need to go to 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 or more challenging exercises for them.

THAT I’ve begun doing something about.

Not long ago I began doing a set of squats with one leg at a time, one for each leg, two times a week. I’m only at 11 repetitions once for each leg. But I can clearly keep adding one each time for quite awhile. In fact, it has gotten enough easier, I’ll be at 14 reps soon. Once I do that, I’ll add holding the 25 pound dumbbell as I do them. That will be as if I added 50 pounds to doing two legged squats. (Then once I get some heavier dumbbells, I can add more weight.)

Eventually that will add some thigh and butt muscle and increase my pounds of muscle. In fact, I may be able to get a more solid balancing post and add a dumbbell of enough weight to make this more likely.

So far, that plan is working but is still at too early a stage to expect much on the scale or tape measure.

(Eventually I’ll also need to get a specialized minibike or other seated leg 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 or other seated exerciser for your legs 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 or other seated 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.)

I’ve also had an idea for awhile. Before sewing machines had electric power, they had an under the work area treadle that was designed to be effective but avoid distracting the person sewing from doing their sewing.

It may be possible to find an antique sewing machine and find a manufacturer to make a design of that treadle mechanism that would do the same for people working at a desk.

It’s proven to do the job needed in actual use!

The best 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 11 pounds lighter than I was when I started.

I’ll certainly keep doing those things!

I’ll let you know how my additional planned changes and efforts work next month!

People doing 2 day a week low carb lost MORE weight....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-13-2011

There are many ways to lose fat and its weight but some give you a larger return than others.

The ideal way would help you lose more and be easy enough to do that you can easily sustain it.

That way you would get enough results to give you an incentive to continue. And, you’d find it doable for you to do so. That way you’d lose more weight AND keep it off.

One way to do just that was recently tested to work!

It’s known by many that a low carb diet or even a very low carb diet is effective at fat loss. And, it’s known by some that being extra strict every other day can help you lose fat without triggering your famine response.

It’s also known that people who succeed in losing fat with a 7 day a week low carb diet often drop out because it prevents eating ANY of so many kinds of foods.

And, one French doctor who helps people use low carb fat loss methods teaches his clients to only eat protein foods and nonstarchy vegetables ONE day each week to maintain their fat loss. He found it to be effective.

So, some researchers decided to test if having people who were eating a Mediterranean diet that was mildly restrictive on calories might lose more fat if, on two days a week, Monday and Weds or Tuesday and Thursday for example, they ate a very low carb version of it.

They also decided to see the results if on those two low carb days, calories were cut back extra for one group and there were no restrictions on how much food people ate in a second group.

The test was done on women at above average risks of breast cancer since it’s known that obesity adds to the risks of breast cancer.

But my strong belief is that the results would also be the same for other women and for men who were making an effort to lose fat.

All the women were eating a Mediterranean diet. But one group just did that 7 days a week.

One group on two days a week could have all the lean meat, olives, and nuts they wanted.

And, a third group ate those foods but less than half as many calories worth as they ate on the other 5 days.

Both those last two groups eliminated bread and pasta on those two days. (Potatoes and rice are NOT part of the Mediterranean diet. But to be sure, they were asked NOT to eat any on those 2 days.)

(Note that soft drinks, packaged snacks, home made desserts, packaged desserts, and baked goods and pastries are NOT part of the Mediterranean diet either!)

The women in both the no restriction and the reduced calorie low carb 2 days a week groups lost 9 pounds in 4 months. And the women who ate the Mediterranean diet 7 days a week lost 5 pounds in 4 months.

The women in both of the two low carb day a week groups also showed greater improvements on insulin and leptin and insulin resistance.

That’s part of the reason they lost more fat. But it also means they were more successful in avoiding or partially reversing type 2 diabetes and the slightly too high blood sugar that often leads to it. So, that means they got more heart protection too!

The women tested also must have been relatively health oriented before the test period. Had they done this test on women who, before the test period, were fatter due to consuming a lot of drinks, packaged snacks, home made desserts, packaged desserts, and baked goods and pastries, the results would have been better. The weight loss would have been a lot more in all 3 groups.

Also, the results would have been better for all 3 groups if the program had also had a good exercise program and emphasized increasing nonstarchy vegetables all 7 days a week for all 3 groups. Emphasizing beans and lentils and all the days except the low carb days would also have gotten better results. (Eating some beans and lentils on the low carb days also might have made the program easier to maintain long term for some people according to the results of one fat loss expert.)

But, this report has convinced me to take 2 of my weekday every other day strict days each week and make them even more low carb than they were.

Note that the emphasis in the South Beach Diet and the more recent Atkins diet plans on health OK proteins and oils for health reasons has been shown to be important and health protective.

Small amounts of sour cream, butter, and fatty meats WILL work in a low carb fat loss diet. So will processed meats such as bacon, sausage, ham, pepperoni, and salami.

But the preservatives in processed meats and the omega 6 oils in those foods if they are from animals fed grain are now well known to be harmful to your health and to help cause heart disease.

So very eating lean meat, wild caught fish, nuts, and some eggs are better choices for protein. And, olives, nuts, avocados, and extra virgin olive oil are dramatically better choices for fats and oils for protecting your health.

High leverage ways to live longer, part 4....

Today's Post: Monday, 12-12-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

Tuesday, 12-6-2011 we posted the first 8 strategies.

Thursday, 12-8-2011 we posted 3 strategies.

Those were 9, 10, & 11 which have to do with stress. (Those were effective ways to avoid stress, effective ways to escape or lessen stress, and how to keep the stress left over from harming you.)

The one in today’s post, #12, is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.

(We posted the first part of #12 last Friday, 12-9-2011.)

Doing the first 11 is dramatically effective. Just by doing those you can slow aging, live longer, and have many more healthy years.

One man who did them all lived to be 96 and was in good health until about the last month or so of his life. His healthy years were over about 30 years more than was average for men born the year he was.

So, he lived as an adult in good health almost TWICE as many years as the average man. And he did live double the number of healthy years of the men who messed up on just a few of the more important of these strategies.

So if you do all of these, the postive effect on your life can be huge.

At this writing though, there is one MORE way to live longer and have more years of healthy life in addition to the first 11.

12. There are 3 categories.

a) For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

b) There are also some supplements that help you maintain youthful abilities even though you have aged.

(Of the first 8 ways, regular exercise, well done has exactly this effect. In fact, exercised muscles almost don’t age at all on the cellular level research found.)

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)


a) Here’s more on the first one:

For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

Last time we posted on 3 supplements that have large and multiple benefits in preventing disease.

Here are some of the other supplements helpful for preventing particular diseases.

(Last time we covered supplements that help prevent heart disease, supplements that help prevent cancer, & supplements that help prevent Alzheimer’s and mental decline.

We’ll cover supplements to help prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes and to prevent osteoporosis.

For preventing type 2 diabetes, the two biggest levers are to eat right and get regular, vigorous exercise. NOT eating or drinking the foods and drinks that spike blood sugar is the most important factor. And, regular, vigorous exercise is also essential. Once you do those, adding 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid or 100 mg of r-lipoic acid each day can help. So can taking 200 iu a day of chromium polynicotinate. (Solgar makes that supplement.)

(I already did regular, vigorous exercise when I was tested to have a fasting blood sugar of 115. My doctor told me how dangerous that was, particularly if it got worse. I cut out half my sugar intake, switched to no sugar added apple sauce and began taking 200 mg of alpha lipoic acid and 200 iu a day of chromium polynicotinate. My fasting blood sugar dropped to 87 and has remained 96 or less ever since.)

Supplements and actions to prevent osteoporosis and hip fractures is a subject with new information just in the last few years. The three most important steps are NOT supplements.

The first one is to do weight bearing exercise and strength training several times each week. Those cause your body to make your bones heavier and stronger. NOT doing that causes your body to gradually make your bones lighter and weaker. So, it may be THE most important thing to do.

The second one is to virtually never drink soft drinks and to drink cola drinks even less. They contain phosphoric acid that leaches the calcium out of your bones and weakens them. (Taking antacid or proton pump inhibitor drugs daily prevents your body from absorbing some of the key nutrients and makes taking compensatory supplements virtually mandatory to prevent bone weakness and fractures.)

The third one is to eat foods high in calcium and magnesium almost every day to several times each day. Low fat dairy foods and canned salmon including the bones are quite high in calcium. And nuts and greens and beans and lentils are high in magnesium and have some calcium.

It used to be thought that taking calcium as a supplement was a good idea to help prevent osteoporosis. Many doctors still recommend this. But there are two problems with that. The resulting surge of calcium tends to stick onto any plaque in your blood vessels and worsen high blood pressure and increase your risk of heart attack somewhat new studies found. The second problem with taking calcium supplements is that it’s ineffective without other nutrients that ARE effective without that much extra calcium from more than food sources.

So what supplements do help prevent osteoporosis and bone fractures?

Taking 400 to 800 mg a day of magnesium along with 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 IS effective. And, when combined with strength training and weight bearing exercise and eating FOODS with calcium, it can even protect you from taking antacid or proton pump inhibitor drugs daily.

Lastly, if you do not eat dairy food and you think or your doctor thinks you should take calcium supplements, there are some safer ways to do it. Do NOT take calcium supplements on an empty stomach. Only take them at the end of a meal that has some fiber to slow down the rate that they go into your blood stream. It also makes sense to take only 250 mg per meal. And, if you can, take calcium from one of the supplements that get it from seaweed because it is in a form your body absorb better and more slowly because it is a concentrated food source of calcium. Lastly, taking the calcium will be ineffective unless you also take magnesium and vitamin D3 and do weight bearing exercise and strength training and avoid soft drinks! The vitamin D3, taking the magnesium, and the exercise are all essential. And NOT drinking soft drinks is almost as important.

b) Supplements that can reverse some the effects of aging.

The most important supplement in this category is a natural substance in your boy that young people have enough of and older people almost always do not. Worse, the people who take statin drugs cause dangerously low levels of it by doing so.

It’s a substance called ubiquinol that your body makes from the CoQ10 in many protein foods. Ubiquinol is to the power source of each of your cells what gasoline is to an engine that uses it for fuel. Ubiquinol keeps the mitochondria, the power source inside each of your cells, healthy and operating at full strength.

You have less energy and each of your cells operates poorly if your mitochondria aren’t working well. They don’t if your ubiquinol levels fall from aging or from statin intake.

Initially, researchers and doctors tried CoQ10 supplements. Often they were ineffective. Then when they used 200 to 300 mg a dose with some kind of oil or fat and had people take that three or four times a day, they got good results. People had more energy, their hearts beat more strongly, and their cells worked better.

That was a bit expensive though. THEN it was discovered that having people take the ubiquinol as a supplement that your body turns CoQ10 into and actually uses, made dramatic improvements. You only needed to take a fourth as much and it lasted twice as long in your blood stream. So instead of taking 200 to 400 mg a day of CoQ10 three or four times a day, you could, and at this writing still can, take 50 to 100 mg of ubiquinol once or twice a day.

This makes statin drugs dramatically safer to take and reduces the feeling of energy depletion many experience due ubiquinol depletion from taking statins.

For people who protect their hearts in other effective ways, taking 50 to 100 mg of ubiquinol once or twice a day does more. Their energy levels and the way their body operates both far closer to what they were when the people were younger.

So taking ubiquinol essentially prevents aging from slowing you down as much as you otherwise would experience.

Supplements thought to directly slow or reverse aging is the next subject.

Experiments on mice found that giving them ubiquinol supplements dramatically slowed aging. As far as I know, that’s not yet been duplicated in a study of people. But since it does help me function at a more youthful level and this experiment found those results, I take 100 mg of ubiquinol at breakfast and 50 mg at lunch each day.

DHEA and resveratrol were both thought to slow aging or extend life.

Moderate amounts, such as taking 25 mg a day to 100 mg a day of DHEA depending on how old you are, does seem to help keep your testosterone and growth hormones closer to youthful levels. I’ve not yet seen evidence that taking DHEA slows aging or extends life as regular exercise does however. It might though. So I’m glad I take it.

Resveratrol, a nutrient in red wine and some other foods, was though to duplicate the cellular effect of mild but chronic calorie shortage in slowing aging.

The promise was that you could eat more normally and still age more slowly and extend your life by taking resveratrol for that reason.

So, far taking resveratrol seems to have failed the tests indicating it actually does this.

BUT, resveratrol does have moderately strong heart protective effects. And, it may work better with cofactors found in red wine to protect your heart. So taking 100 mg a day of trans resveratrol and moderate drinking of red wine, may not slow aging. But it will improve your heart protection and help you prevent having your life your energy levels cut by heart problems.

So taking ubiquinol and DHEA and resveratrol can help you function as if you are younger and may also slow aging somewhat. The proven benefits make them worth taking. And if they help you slow aging too, that’s a bonus.

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)

There are several components of aging. But having your telomeres gradually get too short does look like the basic cause.

It’s actually simple in concept. If your cells make perfect copies as they tended to when you were 16 to 24 years old you’d stay that physical age.

But at the end of each strand of the DNA you need the perfect copies made from is a shoelace cap like structure called a telomere. If they are still there and long enough, your DNA copies stay perfect. You tend to stay well and have no aging.

But the telomeres gradually wear down or shorten faster due to illness or stress. When that begins to cause imperfect copies due to short or missing telomeres, you become prone to diseases and your body ages as it begins to have defective cells.

This is what makes the 3 ways to reduce stress so important. Particularly if you do Tai Chi or other comparably effective stress relievers, it makes your telomeres stay considerably longer.

(Avoiding tobacco smoke and getting regular exercise also likely have this effect too. That’s because tobacco smoke clearly speeds aging and regular exercise is proven to slow aging in several ways.)

But your body make a compound called telomerase that either makes your telomeres longer or keeps them from getting shorter or both.

And, there is a special extract of the herbal supplement astragalus that causes your body to release more telomerase.

Dr Al Sears has tried using this supplement on himself and his patients. The results on the effectiveness of their immune systems and ability to exercise and recover from doing so, suggest taking it not only slows aging but may partially reverse it.

At this writing, Dr Sears sells that supplement. But it costs over $300 a month. So, you have to have more money than most people to try it.

See www.alsearsmd.com .

So far I can’t afford to try that one, so I’m learning Tai Chi instead. But if the price goes down, it remains available, and I begin to make enough money, I may get some pretests and try it for several months and see if the post tests show the predicted effects.

High leverage ways to live longer, part 3....

Today's Post: Friday, 12-9-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

On Tuesday, 12-6-2011, we posted 8 of these strategies.

Yesterday, Thursday, 12-8-2011 we posted 3 strategies.

Those were 9, 10, & 11 which have to do with stress. (Those were effective ways to avoid stress, effective ways to escape or lessen stress, and how to keep the stress left over from harming you.)

The one in today’s post, #12, is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.

Doing the first 11 is dramatically effective. Just by doing those you can slow aging, live longer, and have many more health years.

One man who did them all lived to be 96 and was in good health until about the last month or so of his life. His healthy years were over about 30 years more than was average for men born the year he was.

So, he lived as an adult in good health almost TWICE as many years as the average man. And he did live double the number of healthy years of the men who messed up on just a few of the more important of these strategies.

So if you do all of these, the postive effect on your life can be huge.

At this writing though, there is one MORE way to live longer and have more years of healthy life in addition to the first 11.

There are 3 categories.

a) For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

b) There are also some supplements that help you maintain youthful abilities even though you have aged.

(Of the first 8 ways, regular exercise, well done has exactly this effect. In fact, exercised muscles almost don’t age at all on the cellular level research found.)

c) There is one supplement that actually can partially halt or reverse aging -- and has even been tested to partially reverse aging -- by making your telomeres longer.

(Since it IS expensive, that’s why it’s nice you can achieve much of the same effect in slowing aging by using the stress protective methods we covered yesterday.)


a) Here’s more on the first one:

For almost every kind of chronic disease, there are additional supplements you can take that make that disease less likely for you. Some of these can even help reverse these diseases in their early stages. Even better, many supplements have multiple health benefits.

Many of our posts on preventing specific diseases include the supplements that help prevent that disease.

Taking many of these supplements can prevent you from dying or becoming disabled by preventing these diseases. That both helps you live longer and have more healthy years of life too.

Three supplements are like the superfoods of supplements.

(And, it also helps that there are superfoods that contain them. Getting them in supplement form helps ensure that you have them every day and get enough of them to protect you. They can also be more convenient as supplements and make room for even more kinds of super foods in what you eat because they are more concentrated.)

1. Taking somewhere between about 4,000 & 10,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 helps prevent Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases. (Taking 2,000 to 4,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is the lowest amount likely to have this effect.) It also dramatically increases your immune system’s ability to kill off viruses and harmful bacteria. This effect in turn helps your body to remove cells on their way to becoming cancers and helps prevent many kinds of cancer.

2. Taking omega 3 oils from algae or purified fish oil lowers chronic inflammation which strongly helps prevent heart disease and helps prevent cancers. It also helps lower triglycerides and any excessive tendencies for your blood to clot too easily. So taking them is strongly protective and will help you avoid heart disease and heart attacks.

(All these effects are much greater if you also & at the same time avoid eating any high omega 6 oils such as corn and soy oil and minimize eating fats from animals fed grain since grains are high in omega 6 oils.)

Taking omega 3 oils is also strongly protective of your brain and your mental abilities. This is particularly true for the omega 3 oil DHA.

If you have high blood pressure taking omega 3 oils may lower it somewhat.

And, you tend to not get depressed and are considerably less irritable if you take omega 3 oils.

(An unusually high intake of omega 3 or taking them with a blood thinning drug can overdo their blood thinning effect. So don’t take six capsules a day instead of one or two. And NEVER take a blood thinning drug without talking to your doctor first if you take omega 3!)

3. The combination of the supplement curcumin and black pepper or the spice turmeric (from which curcumin is derived) and black pepper is strongly protective against Alzheimer’s disease. The new research show it both prevents the causes of the disease and tends to remove them even after there is some damage.

But there’s more! Taking curcumin or eating the curried foods spice with turmeric also is strongly preventive against heart disease and many cancers!

It is one of the safe and natural ways to lower LDL cholesterol AND it lowers inflammation. So doing this is also strongly heart protective and will help you prevent cancers.

Here are some of the other supplements helpful for preventing particular diseases.

For heart disease, niacin and inositol hexaniacinate is far more heart attack preventive for most people than taking statin drugs. (The best cardiologists give patients a $150 genetic test to see if they are in the minority that statins actually help and then still only use statins for people with serious problems too acute to wait for other methods to work.) It not only lowers LDL cholesterol. In addition to niacin and turmeric, taking or eating ginger and taking sterol supplements lowers LDL. (Avoiding refined grains, soft drinks, and more than occasional real sugar also lower triglycerides besides taking omega 3. And drinking moderate amounts of red wine and regular vigorous exercise increase your protective HDL.) Taking 1,000 to 2,000 mg a day of vitamin C and one a day of deodorized garlic one study found to reduce plaque in your blood vessels. So that supplement combination is also protective. Note that like omega 3 oils garlic and garlic supplements have a blood thinning effect.

These supplements and actions are so effective that even many people for whom statins would be protective can avoid the risk of their side effects if they do these other things soon enough.

For cancers there is some evidence that 200 iu real, natural vitamin E, particularly the gamma tocopherol form and 200 mcg a day of the mineral selenium but NOT more selenium than that can help prevent cancers. (Do NOT however take the cheap man made inaccurate copy of vitamin E. It was recently found to increase prostate cancer. And, the carotene lycopene which is best gotten in tomato based past sauce with extra virgin olive oil is thought to prevent prostate cancer. And you can also take lycopene supplements. One researcher found 30 mg a day to be effective for prostate cancer. And it made the cover of TIME magazine when the news broke.

For preventing Alzheimer’s and mental decline the top 3: vitamin D3, omega 3 oils, and curcumin/turmeric plus black pepper are protective. (Regular exercise and each and every effective way to prevent heart disease also help. Using only extra virgin olive oil also helps. Not only does this help the omega 3 to omega 6 ratio and lower inflammation but there is a phyto nutrient in extra virgin olive oil that is directly preventive. Avoiding all tobacco smoke, using the well organized life style we posted on yesterday, socializing well and often, and continuously learning new things also help.)

Once again we are out of time. So the other parts of this #12 method on supplements will be next week in the fourth part of this series.

We’ll cover supplements to help prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes and to prevent osteoporosis.

Then we’ll cover the supplements that can reverse some the effects of aging and those thought to directly slow or reverse aging.

High leverage ways to live longer, part 2....

Today's Post: Thursday, 12-8-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

On Tuesday, 12-6-2011, we posted 8 of these strategies.

This part 2 post has 3 more. (In the set of 12, they are 9, 10, & 11.) 12 will be tomorrow.

9, 10, & 11 have to do with stress.

(#12 is different but can be very health protective as well. And one kind of it has been tested to somewhat reverse aging.)

Everyone is stressed by something.

Even people who are doing well have some stress. In fact, people who do worthwhile things or achieve personal goals often do things that add some stress.

Then too, many people are hammered by sudden and harsh stresses on occasion. Earthquakes, fires, floods, tornados, car accidents, and the like don’t always happen to other people.

Yet some people are less harmed by all this. They keep their health better and age more slowly. They recover from things others don’t. And they bounce back faster.

This is a very challenging area. So much so, that it is one that can take a lot of work to improve.

But if you know the key strategies and learn to use them well, you can live longer, have better health, age more slowly, and become much more stress resilient.

9. The first one is a set of related habits or skills that directly reduce the stress in your life. It seems simple. If fewer bad and stressful things happen to you, you are less stressed and you live longer, age more slowly, and stay healthier.

It’s proven to increase longevity too. It is more than just plausible from reasoning. In fact, it was found in one study to even help prevent Alzheimer’s disease.

There are several factors in this one area.

Be prudent, purposeful, and systematic about what you do and how you manage your life. Be analytical, accurate, and very careful in thinking about bad things that happen.

Be prudent:

Avoid unnecessary risks. Take reasonable precautions. Use safeguards. Learn to manage the risks in an area by preparing ahead of time to master the necessary skills. Check out warnings if you can or simply believe them. People who ignore some warnings often die rather suddenly afterwards. But even the more slow acting dangers can cause you damage and stress if you ignore warnings about them and those warnings are accurate. Test things in safe and revealing ways BEFORE taking risky actions.

This one already appeared last time in several specific areas.

Totally avoid tobacco smoke and products. Avoid the major car accident causes and always wear your seatbelt. Always brush and floss your teeth the way that protects your gums and do it every day.

Doing all these 3 directly reduces the stresses you will be under your whole life. But it also begins to give you this skill that you can apply in other areas too.

The Boy Scout motto Be Prepared fits here.

One of my professors put it this way. If you want to dive into water you can’t see into, never do so directly. People who do that often break their necks or their heads. Jump in feet first and explore around a bit BEFORE you dive in!

Businesses that ask the kinds of people who might buy what they have thought up to sell to find out what they might buy and what the for sure won’t buy, sometimes succeed. The businesses who do that and then do a very small and cheap test or several to see if those kind of people actually will buy, often get NO as an answer. They then don’t ruin careers or lose their own or investors money. So they have less stress.

But if someone tests many such things and finds one they CAN sell, they can make enough money to help pay to avoid risks in many ways.

The key that works in all areas not just starting businesses is the practice of doing well thought out and relatively safe tests and explorations BEFORE assuming a risky action is safe.

Another real world example is the explorer Roald Amundsen who was the first man to lead a successful expedition to the South Pole. He studied what the Eskimos did that actually worked in practice to survive in arctic cold. He gathered those materials and he and his men learned to use them. He carefully analyzed what key supplies it would be a disaster to be without suddenly and brought spares along! Despite real discomforts and hardships he and his men reached the South Pole and survived to return.

The competing explorer, Robert Scott, just set out with what he thought might work and without spares for critical supplies. He didn’t quite get to the South Pole and he and his men all died.

In every area of your life where there is enough risk to harm you if things go wrong, do your very best to emulate Roald Amundsen. He was systematic and thorough in his study of how to overcome the known risks and his preparation.

You’ll live longer and escape a lot of stress and harms others will not by using these skills.

Be systematic and well organized. Develop use and improve systems and procedures for important things you do often. Use outlines and to do lists. Set worthwhile but reachable short term goals you work regularly to achieve.

A study of people who did this and were prudent too found that they had so much less stress in their lives that they aged more slowly, lived longer, and were less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease.

Important point. Are people who do these things boring and inflexible?

Surprisingly they are actually more likely to do dynamic things and are MORE flexible than those who do not. The study I just noted found that the people in it who had these skills had just as many creative and interesting experiences as the people who were low or more. They just had easier to take and less stressful lives.

Another study of the jet aces from the Korean war found they were better organized and careful than non-aces. But they were also MORE flexible and able to improve.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot!

Martin Seligman in his study of resilient and optimistic people found they were analytical and precise and almost scientific in how they explained bad events to themselves.

Most bad things have specific and temporary causes that come from outside your control.

The causes of bad events often do not keep happening. For many bad things, if you can find the cause you can often avoid it next time. Even those that damage you leave some good things intact. In even very damaging events, there are ways to recover. In some cases, you can recover to better a place than where you were to begin with. Even if you made a mistake to help produce the bad result, chances are it had other causes. And both your part in it and those other caused can often be avoided next time.

People without this skill tend to assume the opposite. They think that the part they played in it can never be fixed and that they are stuck with not being able to do it differently. They label themselves as stupid or incompetent or not being good at whatever skill would have helped. The horrible thing is that they then will make similar mistakes because this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They won’t bother to upgrade their skills or get expert help because they assume permanent defeat ahead of time. Seligman calls this learned helplessness. But it comes from an unrealistically pessimistic and inaccurate thinking style.

Always find what things caused a bad situation that were outside your control. Always find what causes were temporary or can be avoided next time. Always assume you can learn skills or find ways to get expert help in similar situations next time. These are actually more accurate than the pessimistic view. And they enable you to be dramatically more resilient and less stressed when things go wrong.

This skill is incredibly important in dealing with other people and sustaining positive relationships as well.

People with this skill think of people as grouchy today rather than as nasty people. They remember the good things or friendly things they did and do even when they are acting nasty.

Here again this saves them from shooting themselves in the foot. This enables them to be dramatically easier to live with and tends to avoid permanently antagonizing the people in their lives. It often saves them from avoidable and unnecessary divorces as just one example. And, divorces are so stressful that even people in legitimately bad marriages are less stressed than people who get divorced.

And, this skill tends to make marriages enough better to not get to the really bad marriage category in the first place.

10. The related skill is to tend to believe that you can take actions to prevent bad situations and that you will be successful in your efforts.

Strangely, Seligman found that despite being MORE realistic and accurate in assessing bad things, optimistic people tend to believe they can be effective more than the objective facts suggest is possible. They can strike pessimists as being unrealistic and even dense.

The great news is that as long as you are prudent in how you avoid risks, this is a very powerful asset!

The reason for that is the effect it has on what you do.

People who have hope and this kind of optimism, look energetically for things that might solve the problem and try some, see the results, and then do more of what worked or try something else if they got bad results.

People who are more conventionally realistic and lack this skill assume failure in advance and do nothing.

The result is that people with this skill are proactive and work to improve things.

And, they often get good results when it looked initially as if good results were impossible.

People with this skill avoid or escape stress and are dramatically more resilient when stressed or even harmed.

One set of researchers even found they looked at potentially stressful problems as challenges they will overcome.

Just thinking that enables you to be less physically stressed even before you succeed at solving the problem in fact.

11. Whether you have chronic stress or right now have acute and severe stress or you tried to do too much and it’s caught up with you, even people with all these skills will have enough stress to damage them and speed aging some weeks. It can even be every week!

Your body tends to get stuck in flight or fight syndrome and drain your reserves until they are gone and the stress damages you.

But there are several practices that act almost as an off switch to turn off this over-reaction in your body. Using them enables you to stop the damage and physical stress.

People who use the more effective practices regularly do this so well, they simply are far less damaged by stress. They think better, they stay in better health, and they age more slowly.

In fact one researcher found that doing one of these practices both helps prevent all kinds of mental decline and Alzheimer’s disease. He even found that it can help reverse many cases of mental decline.

In particular the more effective of these practices can turn off high blood pressure. They even have turned off high blood pressure that the drugs could not in some people.

The 3 kinds that have been effective for people are meditation, yoga, and tai chi.

For most people meditation is the weakest of these practices. The people for whom it works tend to have a near religious belief in it and have the time for half an hour to an hour a day to do it. (People who do less meditation than that still get some lowering of high blood pressure but not very much. ) So unless you are really into it and have the time or happen upon a dynamic teacher, meditation may be a poor choice for you.

Yoga can work for some people. You do get some exercise from it and tend to become more flexible. Dr Dean Ornish has found a form of yoga that has given his patients great results for example. So, it can be a good choice.

But some forms of yoga are much less effective at reducing stress. And people have been injured enough to lose time from work by overdoing yoga stretches.

If you happen on a good teacher and like it, yoga can be a good choice. But for a universal recommendation I find yoga, like meditation, a bit on the too variable in results side.

My recommendation and the one I’ve begun to learn myself is Tai Chi. If you learn it and practice it for even 10 minutes a day on most days, you get superb and reliable stress relief.

Tai chi is enough of an exercise that you burn as many calories an hour doing it as you would if you went on a walk that many minutes.

(Meditators by contrast burn as many calories while meditating as sleepers or TV watchers!)

Tai Chi is also a slow and controlled, defensive martial art. So you also gain some self defense skill by learning it and practicing it every week.

One woman found it enhanced her ability to play the sport she did for recreation for example when part of this self defense skill enabled her to move more effectively in competition.

But the strongest recommendation of all is that the studies done on Tai Chi find it delivers the best stress relief by far.

People who have high blood pressure who learn and begin to practice Tai Chi were tested and lowered their blood pressure by 17 over 11. Only the strongest drugs to lower high blood pressure lower it that much.

Another study found that doing Tai Chi caused your telomeres to stay 43% longer.

As you may know, that much effect on your telomeres sharply slows aging and helps prevent virtually every disease.

(Telomeres are the protective caps on the end of your DNA. When they stay long, your cells make perfect copies. When they become too short, your cells make defective copies of your DNA which is the underlying cause of aging. Studies show people with short telomeres are much more likely to get heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and infectious diseases!)

That makes doing Tai Chi an incredible asset.

That’s why despite my very tight schedule I’m beginning to learn it myself.

I’m out of time again today, so factor 12 will be in tomorrow’s post, part 3 in this series.

High leverage ways to live longer....

Today's Post: Tuesday, 12-6-2011

There are many ways to live longer but some give you a larger return than others.

I thought an interesting post would be to list the ones that give you the most leverage.

Some are easy, some are easy for some people but hard for others, and some take a lot of work for anyone who does them.

The overall strategy is to watch for these strategies and begin to use them yourself when you find them.

Or, if it’s something you used to do, when you see it again, resume doing it!

1. The easiest action to do to live longer now, taking vitamin D3, may be taken off the market by the FDA, but let’s hope it is not. (Since there is no justification whatever for their proposed plan to eliminate all supplements, this IS being vigorously opposed.)

It’s new information. A few years ago, vitamin D was thought of as the minor vitamin in multivitamins that prevented rickets. And, it was believed that the form of vitamin D in the cheaper supplements, vitamin D2, was almost as effective as the vitamin D3 your body makes when you get sunlight on your skin. The amount most daily multi vitamins had was 400 iu.

Since then research has found that taking an optimum amount of vitamin D3 cuts your risk of death from all causes by 6%.

(Vitamin D2 which would remain if the FDA pulls vitamin D3 has some value. Taking it cuts your risk of death from all causes by 2%. That’s a third as effective. And, since you’d have to get a prescription and pay drug prices at the pharmacy for it, it would cost more than vitamin D3 supplements now available that do three times as much for you!)

Specifically, you are then less likely to get many cancers, heart attacks and other heart diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, and autoimmune diseases.

Avoiding these expensive to treat and very nasty diseases is worth doing for its own sake! In fact, if you do so by taking vitamin D3, in your case, you may live 20 years longer and live 15 or 20 more HEALTHY years. So your longevity and worthwhile life may well go up far more than 6%.

It’s also been found that the optimum dose per day of vitamin D3 is at least 2,000 to 4,000 iu a day. And many researchers doing vitamin D research now take 4,000 to 10,000 iu a day. One researcher stated that the most effective dose to prevent cancers and autoimmune diseases is 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3.

(Your body uses at least 3,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 if it’s available. And, the amount your body makes on a summer day when you are outside in the sun can easily top 20,000 iu a day. So despite the large sounding numbers, taking 4,000 to 8,000 iu a day of vitamin D3 is well within the range your body deals with easily.)

2. Avoid all tobacco products and tobacco smoke to the very best of your ability.

Tobacco products and tobacco smoke cause at least 30% of ALL cancers and a full 25% of heavy smokers get lung cancer. Tobacco today is radioactive. It has enough radioactivity from the fertilizer used on tobacco that if you get it or its smoke in your blood stream, you are at greater risk for all cancers. In addition, most smokers use lighters today to light cigars, pipes, and cigarettes. The hot flame in lighters produces several short lived but very dangerous carcinogens. One researcher found that the plot of the curve for the increased incidence of lung cancer was almost identical to the curve for the increased use of cigarette lighters.

And, that’s far from all. As horrible as it can be cancer is the LITTLE problem with tobacco smoke! Some smokers either don’t get it or die before they do. So most of them think they will be one of the lucky ones who don’t get cancer and keep smoking.

Smoking also speeds aging up. This happens to all smokers and people exposed to second hand smoke. That can cut your life by many years by itself.

But the BIG problem with smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke is that EVERY exposure begins to cause heart disease and other diseases of circulation. And, it begins to impair your ability to breathe. The plaque that tobacco smoke builds up in your blood vessels also gradually causes high blood pressure. And, the drugs for high blood pressure often harm your quality of life. Very, very few smokers know all this.

It means that absolutely no smokers and no people exposed to much second hand smoke escape harm! The smokers who continue to smoke thinking they may escape cancer may be right about that. But unfortunately for them NONE of those smokers escapes harm

This includes brand new teen aged smokers. And, it includes people who think they are safe because they smoke so few cigarettes each day. (One study of teen smokers found they had the breathing capacity of middle aged people from lung damage caused by smoking for example.)

And once again, that’s not all! We now know that in addition to causing the underlying heart disease and plaque build up in your blood vessels, tobacco smoke triggers heart attacks in people who would have escaped them otherwise! (Communities that banned smoking in most of their community found the rate of heart attacks and admissions to their Emergency Rooms with heart problems dropped dramatically as soon as the bans went into effect!)

It’s completely proved. If you avoid tobacco products and tobacco smoke, you will suffer less, have much lower health care costs, live more healthy years, and live more years.

Using this strategy is a very high leverage way to live longer and live more healthy years.

Being a nonsmoker who avoids second hand smoke and other tobacco products is one of the highest leverage things you can do to live longer.

3. The third way to live longer and have more healthy years IS harder to do and can be risky if done badly or in dangerous places.

But it can be done safely and in safe places.

And, once you establish the regular habit, it simply becomes a normal part of your life.

It dramatically slows aging and even grows new brain cells. It prevents heart disease and does so more each year you do it and the better you get at doing it. It also tends to prevent or reverse type 2 diabetes.

It also makes it easier to lose fat if you gain too much and dramatically easier to keep that fat off.

People who do it tend to live 10 to more than 20 years than people who do none of it at all. They also tend to gain that many healthy years.

This is doing a few sessions of vigorous exercise every week. Some people do an hour three days a week. Some people do as I do and do a few minutes to half an hour most days a week. But the key is that some of the exercises be quite vigorous but not done for too long at that intensity and to do it EVERY week you can and keep doing it.

People who get this kind of exercise keep their ability to do things far more and far longer than people who don’t. Their useable and enjoyable years of life go up dramatically. They are far less likely to get any kind of mental decline and their brains stay full sized while sedentary people have shrinking brains instead.

College professors tend to live longer lives. But in a study at Stanford with people otherwise matched, the sedentary ones died ten or more years sooner and had more heart disease and other health problems before they died than the those who kept getting some kind of vigorous exercise each week.

And, there’s more! If you set out to be less fat, it may take a while to do. But researchers found and keep finding that fit fat people are MUCH healthier than skinny sedentary ones. So, you can very quickly be much healthier if you begin to do vigorous regular exercise even if you still have fat to lose.

There’s also an extra bonus. In both men and women, if you have a sex life at all, it will be much better if you are an exerciser!

4. Always wear your seat belt. Make a very strong effort to avoid driving drunk. And, NEVER text while driving or your car is in motion or has its brakes off.

People do things like drive to the store and for errands and to and from work every day. If you do these things and never do the reverse, if there is an emergency, you are three times less likely to die or be hurt. If you are hurt it will only be a third as bad. And most of the time, you will avoid the accident completely or walk away from it with only the car damaged.

Do the reverse and you can lose 40 years of healthy life in some cases. You can wind up in jail a long time for manslaughter from negligence or driving under the influence.

This is a under-rated way to live longer and stay in good health. But doing it works. It’s not horribly hard. And the problems it prevents can be horrific. The reason it’s so high leverage is the incredible multiplier factor of having it operate day after day every day for every year you life.

Be sure to use this one!

5. Learn to brush your teeth in a way that brushes your gumline and gums. Learn to floss well. Do each one every day at least once. And see your dentist for cleaning and a check up every 6 months if you can. You’ll keep your teeth. You’ll look and smell better. And you dramatically cut your risk of heart disease and cut your risk of cancer a bit!

This one is completely under-rated. And that doing it prevents heart disease is a new discovery.

But if you do it, your health will be better, you’ll live longer, and you’ll look younger.

6. Avoid harmful foods and drinks as close to completely as you can. And, focus on eating foods and drinking drinks that benefit your health.

This one is complex to learn and for many people will mean no longer having things they have liked or having them dramatically less often.

But doing it well helps prevent heart disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and all kinds of mental decline including Alzheimer’s disease.

And, once you learn it and get used to doing it, you CAN keep doing it and many of the foods you eat will be dishes you enjoy eating.

Many of our posts since I began writing them over 5 years ago have been on this subject.

To save time this list will leave out the reasons why but just will list things to delete, avoid, or have very rarely. And we’ll list foods that benefit your health to eat most of the time each week.

a) Virtually eliminate drinking all soft drinks very definitely including diet soft drinks.

Drink water, water with just carbonation, tea, green tea, and coffee instead. Drink some real juices but with no sweetening added and stick to just one a day.

b) Eat no foods and drink no drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup or artificial sweeteners. (Eat some treats with real sugar, honey, or molasses but not very often. Definitely avoid eating them more than a few times a week!)

Completely eliminate shortening that isn’t lard, margarine, and ANY food that contains trans fats or any hydrogenated oil! (By itself, that eliminates many foods with refined grains and most packaged desserts, packaged snacks, and commercial baked goods.)

c) Get rid of virtually all breads and other foods made with refined grains. Completely drop packaged desserts and snacks and commercial baked goods or cut eating them to a few times a YEAR! Avoid eating any white rice and only eat brown rice in small servings on occasion instead of every day.

Eat beans and lentils and nonstarchy vegetables and some 100 % whole grain foods instead.

d) Stop using any soy or corn or safflower oil or buying foods that contain them. Minimize eating or using canola oil.

Instead use extra virgin olive oil almost exclusively. (Some extra virgin olive oil is mild to almost unflavored. Some extra virgin olive oil has flavors you may like in salads or on occasion but for most uses the mild to unflavored is more adaptable.

Use some real butter occasionally, ideally from cows fed only grass and coconut oil but not often and avoid high heat when you use them.

Eat raw nuts and avocados if you aren’t allergic to them

e) Eat wild caught fish, seafood from sustainable and unpolluted sources, meat from animals fed only grass, if you can get it -- eat poultry raised on pasture foods from lands that aren’t polluted, and raw, unsalted nuts if you aren’t allergic to them. Eat some whole eggs and lowfat dairy foods.

If you eat grain fed meat and poultry do it far less often and eat the trimmest most fat removed versions and dishes only. Add back a mild extra virgin olive oil if you need more fat in a dish you have made with super lean double fat trimmed meat.

7. Eat a lot of kinds and amounts of nonstarchy vegetables each week -- particularly the cruciferous vegetables and be sure to eat some of those raw.

This is so good for your health and longevity and avoiding gaining excess fat, it deserves a separate listing.

There are many healthful cuisines that test as being protective from the Mediterranean diet to the DASH II diet and all the health supporting ethnic cuisines. ALL of them have this one factor in common.

8. If you aren’t allergic to them, eat raw nuts almost every day.

Most people wouldn’t dream this is so. But one study found that for those who aren’t allergic to them, eating nuts in this way added to their health and longevity as much as smoking reduces it.

That’s a HUGE effect and not well known.

The five reasons seem to be that people who eat nuts have their protective HDL go up and their harmful LDL go down AND they tend to eat less fatty, grain fed meat. So their heart disease is dramatically less.

They also get many key minerals needed for good health that even people who take supplements often don’t get enough of.

They also eat nuts as a snack instead of the junky treats that cause disease -- most of the time.

(The hidden benefit of eating nuts is that they are so filling that people who eat them eat less of other things and despite nuts having fat, the people who eat nuts do NOT gain weight!)

There are some more powerful ways to live longer that will be in part II next time.