Ways to protect your health even while still fat....

Today's Post:  Tuesday, 10-22-2013

Some people are heavy and are too fat for many reasons.

BUT, research finds many of them who are still fat, have decent blood pressure, good blood sugar readings and heart health indicators that aren’t in the dreadful category.

Since being fat itself tends to cause these health conditions such as high blood pressure and most of the things that cause becoming fat cause these health problems, this group of healthy fat people have been studied.

They are much more fit and less sedentary than those with very bad readings.

Their measures of inflammation are far lower.

And, their low readings prove they eat and drink less of the fattening foods that also cause health harms.

How can you join the healthy group if you are a bit fatter than you should be or even more?

1.  EXERCISE !

Exercise is such a powerful health protector that fit, fat people are MUCH healthier than skinny sedentary people!! 

(Research recently found skinny sedentary people are often fat inside and horribly under-muscled.)

Do at least one or two strength training sessions a week. 

Even 15 minutes can help; and doing lighter weights at superslow speeds for one set each is incredibly effective. It’s safer with the lighter weights and the slow, controlled and never jerky motions.  EASY, however it is NOT.  The last one or two repetitions can be dramatically hard to do.  Yet it is exactly those that make you stronger so that’s a GOOD thing.  Just do a few more as soon as you can and then increase the weight slightly.

Do at least two or three high intensity cardio sessions each week. 

Those are safe too if you do these two things.:  Particularly at first, start a bit on the easy side and make progress slowly!  And, if you feel as if you are running up on exhaustion, IMMEDIATELY stop or slow down until you aren’t.  As you become more fit, you’ll gradually do more high intensity exercise before that happens and you can rest a shorter time between bursts of high intensity or slow down less or for shorter time periods.

Doing the bursts of high intensity with rests is called interval cardio.  But doing the bursts of high intensity with slower paced cardio which might be best called variable cardio works too.

(I do the interval cardio with rests jumping rope.  And, walking, running, and using a Nordic track work well with sections of slower but brisk efforts in between much faster ones.)

You can literally do one 20 minute strength training session and two 5 minute jump rope sessions a week and get surprisingly good results!

Virtually everyone can find that much time each week!

The third kind of exercise that helps is the easiest to do but the very hardest to do enough of.

It’s ideal if you can do half an hour a day most days of walking or gardening or yoga or tai chi besides the strength training and cardio.  BUT it’s desirable and NOT essential if you do the strength training and cardio – which ARE essential.

And most people now do NOT have that much time to devote to it.  (That will change when it becomes more doable to exercise at your desk however.)

2.  Stop ALL inflammatory foods, get more omega 3 oils and OK foods high in them, and eat and take foods and supplements that lower inflammation.

Many, many people do not yet know one of the 3 or 4 biggest health dangers is eating foods that cause high chronic inflammation.  The things that do are:

a)  Oils high in omega 6.   Until now the average person has been getting five to twenty TIMES too much of them in their food and at that level they are like taking pills to cause inflammation! Those oils are corn and soy and safflower and canola oils.

Use only extra virgin olive oil instead!  The research showing that extra virgin olive oil instead protects your health has become massive and covers many areas from preventing heart health problems and stroke to mental decline.

b) Animal fats from animals fed soy or corn and other grains.  Far more than saturated fat, these inflammatory oils and the pesticide and herbicides from the grain that are bioconcentrated in them cause disease.  Eat beans and lentils or wild caught fish or beef from cows that are 100 % grass fed only – or only eat the leanest most fat trimmed and removed meats from grain fed animals and do it MUCH less often.

c) The worst in this group are the hydrogenated oils made from oils high in omega 6 oils.  They cause inflammation a second way by directly causing damage your blood vessels and causing heart disease.  The first two things push things in that direction.  But hydrogenated oils cause it to happen directly and the resulting inflammation is from the damage. Hydrogenated oils are heart attack starter! Worse, there is NO safe amount and cutting back is not enough because your body can’t remove them well so ANY regular intake of hydrogenated oils builds up to damaging levels!!

(What about taking omega 3 oil supplements and eating wild caught fish to increase the omega 3 oils?

Yes!  Do it because it does lower inflammation and has other direct health benefits, particularly DHA.  But the point is to improve the omega 3 and omega 6 ratio to one to one.  If you fail to cut the excess sources of omega 6 from five to ten to fifteen times too much down to the desirable amount, it’s hard to add enough omega 3 to cut inflammation enough to be protective.)

(What about foods and supplements that cut inflammation? 

YES. There are some that work.  Turmeric and the curcumin that comes from it not only slash excess inflammation, they have at least a dozen other verified health benefits!  Its cousin ginger is almost as potent and a better heart protector plus it tends to prevent nausea for people who get motion sickness easily.

The herbal supplement Devil’s Claw also works.  And I saw a study today that found that the supplement resveratrol also cuts inflammation.)

(Two other ways to avoid inflammation are to avoid ALL tobacco smoke.

And learn and do the practices that protect your gums from disease.  Flossing and brushing right are NOT hard to do but the extremely inflammatory bacteria they protect you from are extremely harmful an cause high inflammation too!)

d) Bonus.  If you eliminate ALL omega 6 oils and hydrogenated oils, you have to eliminate all the foods they are in.  And that’s a very valuable thing to do!  Those foods very often have things like high fructose corn syrup and refined wheat grain and MSG that also harm your health and tend to fatten you besides!

3.  Stop all the foods and drinks that tend to or DO fatten you that are EVEN MORE harmful to your health!

Any high fructose corn syrup, too much refined grains and virtually any refined wheat grain products, and too much sugar, and most artificial sweetners all boost your triglyceride levels to high levels.  We now know that means they are heart attack starter just like hydrogenated oils!

(No exercise; consuming hydrogenated oils; and eating or drinking these things each boost your levels of the small particle LDL that directly causes heart disease.  The damage that causes to the surface of your blood vessels creates heart disease AND boosts the dickens out of your inflammation level.

Bonus.  Most people who do these 3 things:

Eating organic produce and other naturally fed or harvested foods with extra virgin olive oil: and never ingesting these bad ingredients:

AND exercising – will enable you to become less fat with no additional effort needed and zero added real hunger!

That’s in addition to the health benefits you get right away!

A recent study found that you do NOT need to make an effort to eat less to achieve this effect AND the fat you lose will stay off with no rebound by doing these things!

Best of all, the improvement in your health and health protection can be fast and dramatic – literally within few weeks!