Two ways to power your fat loss....

Today's Post: Monday, 7-13-2009

It’s MUCH easier to eat MORE to cause fat loss than it is to eat less!

&

Eating less of the bad stuff is much easier if you know more completely why and how it’s so harmful to you.

Here are two articles on doing exactly that with my comments & ideas on how to use the information.

1. It’s MUCH easier to eat MORE to cause fat loss than it is to eat less!

Trying to lose fat by eating less of what you already eat can work if you don’t overdo it and it that’s only ONE of about 10 things you do. But if you overdo it to the place you get extremely hungry or trigger your body’s famine response, it causes fatloss failure.

Why not try something that decreases the calories you eat without making you less hungry and where you actually get to eat MORE food?

That method actually does exist and actually will improve & protect your health too!!

Here’s today’s article from Early to Rise that reminded me of it.:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com .”

ETR Monday, 7-13-2009

“The Best Diet for Weight Loss

By Craig Ballantyne

Most diet "plans" are really complicated... or downright confusing. But the truth is, eating for fat loss is simple. Just avoid junk food and eat more whole, natural foods.

If you need proof, take a look at this...

European researchers studied 89,431 men and women from five countries in Western Europe for 6.5 years. They found that the more fruits and vegetables someone ate, the greater their chances were of losing weight. It's as easy as that.

So if you want to lose fat, make sure you increase your intake of fruits and vegetables…..”

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Nonstarchy vegetables have such low calorie counts and such high fiber, they wind up providing ZERO effective calories.

They work about five times better than most whole fruit to create fat loss.

If you eat none now, try adding one serving a day at least 5 days a week for a week.

Then add another & repeat each week until you eat 4 or 5 servings each day.

It works. And, even better, a glass of vegetable juice a day has been proven to work as well for fat loss as a whole, raw vegetable serving. So, two servings of raw vegetables; two servings of cooked vegetables; & one glass of vegetable juice works well. Just add one each day a week at a time.

You DO wind up eating a bit less of the other foods you eat. BUT you need not make ANY extra effort to do this. You simply wind up too satisfied and full to need or want second helpings.

Fresh fruit like a whole apple that is very low glycemic works almost as well.

So do berries of all kinds. But many other fruits have enough fruit sugar per gram of fiber to make you better off eating one a day but not more. And fruit juice is better skipped or drink only one a day drunk after a food that’s high in health OK protein &/or fat &/or fiber.

The good news is that both these vegetables and whole pieces of fruit, particularly if they are organically grown, have incredibly health protective nutrients.

So by eating MORE of them, you not only get almost effortless fatloss without extra hunger, you get healthier in other ways too.

2. Eating less of the bad stuff is much easier if you know more completely why and how it’s so harmful to you.

Here’s last Saturday’s article from Early to Rise that reminded me of this.:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com .”


ETR Sat, 7-11-2009

“How to Monitor One of the Most Important Factors in Your Health

By Kelley Herring

Because blood sugar is one of the most important factors in your overall health, you might think getting tests is a good way to keep it in check. You’d be right on that count. But you might be surprised to know that the best test may not be one you’re familiar with.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from ETR readers about blood sugar. What most of them are concerned about is this: Which test is better - fasting blood sugar, oral glucose tolerance, or random blood sugar?

The answer is “none of the above.” It’s the glycated hemoglobin or A1C test.

The A1C is far superior to the other tests. Not only can it be used to diagnose diabetes, it also gauges how well a diabetic is managing his or her condition.

And that’s not all. The A1C tells you what percentage of your hemoglobin (a protein found in red blood cells) is sugar coated (glycated). And “sugar coated” is a really bad thing when it comes to your cells. In fact, these glycated compounds are associated with an increased risk for heart attack, stroke, Alzheimer’s, cataracts, and many other chronic ailments.

Ask your doctor for an A1C test. Ideally, you’ll want an A1C of less than 5 percent, which corresponds to an average glucose level of 90 mg/dL.

[Ed Note: If you steer clear of sugar, you're doing yourself a big favor. But if you've swapped the "white devil" for artificial sweeteners, there's something you should know. Studies show that people with diabetes who consume sucralose have significant increases in A1C…..]”

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Actually, HBA1C levels of 5.0 to 5.6 are excellent to good. 5.7 is on the low end of undesirable but a bit of a warning shot. 5.8 or 5.9 is a flashing yellow light and should be brought down ASAP. 6.0 to 6.3 is dangerous and some doctors will diagnose you as having type 2 diabetes. All of them will diagnose type 2 diabetes if you get from 6.4 to 6.9. And most will prescribe drugs at that range sometimes & always will if you get 7.0 or higher.

As bad as the drugs are except for low dose metformin, they are correct in doing so. HBA1C of much higher than 7.0 begins to harm your blood vessels and capillaries all over your body and begins to destroy you by doing so. Blindness, painful nerves or numbness, Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of senility, kidney failure, foot amputation, and heart attacks all get caused or triggered by such damage!

Glycation is also one of the two main causes of aging.

So, in addition to everything else it does to you, a high HBA1c reading means a high rate of aging!

So, now you know why NOT to let yourself in for high HBA1c readings, it’s worth noting that regular soft drinks, diet soft drinks, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and refined grains &/or foods made of them all tend to spike blood sugar and drinking and eating more than a very small amount each week tends to cause increases in your HBA1C readings.

So, if you drink soft drinks or at a lot of packaged snacks or white bread or commercially prepared baked goods, or eat most packaged cereals -- each week, let alone all of the above !!, you will not only be much fatter than you should be, you’ll be gradually killing yourself off too.

Worse, these foods either give you calories without turning down your hunger, or they make you hungrier for more sugar as artificial sweeteners such as sucralose and diet soft drinks do, they often make you a bit less hungry and then suddenly very hungry again when your blood sugar that was slammed up to high then goes down too low.

That means all these things make you fat by adding calories without making you less hungry or even making you MORE hungry. AND they harm your health if you ingest a lot by as about as much as smoking does!

In conclusion, if you eat a lot more vegetables and some more fresh fruit, it becomes much more doable to eat less of the bad stuff and you’ll gradually lose a lot of your excess fat.

Other tips for eating less of the bad stuff and getting away with it if you do include any at all is simply cutting the amount per week in half and then repeating the process a few times. I’ve found that one effective for the things on that list I personally like.

The other is to only let yourself have such things ONLY AFTER you’ve eaten some health OK protein or fat and some nonstarchy vegetables. Even combining the foods as in eating pecans and raisins works better than just eating the high glycemic food by itself.

The net effect on boosting your blood sugar goes way down if you do that.

And, no surprise, regular vigorous exercise tends to lower HBA1C. So, if you do that kind of exercise every week, you’ll be less fat and be more able to get away with some of the bad foods instead of none.

***

In summary, eating nonstarchy vegetables will make you less fat. And eating none or very little of the foods that spike your blood sugar not only will make you less fat, it will protect your health and reduce your rate of aging.

Why not do both?

How omega 6 oils and sugar make you sick....

Today's post: Friday, 2-6-2009

If you’ve read our posts for awhile now, you already know we recommend taking omega 3 oil supplements and eating wild caught fish not too high in mercury -- 2 or three times a week so you have an adequate omega 3 oil intake. Doing so has abundant health benefits from lowering your triglycerides to protect your heart to making you feel better and improving your personal relationships by helping prevent or turn off mild depression and excess irritability.

You’ve also read we suggest you NOT ingest oils high in omega 6 such as corn, soy, safflower, canola, etc. And, we also recommend NOT eating refined grains and minimizing whole grain foods in part to avoid their excessive omega 6 oils. We also recommend minimizing the animal fat you eat from animals fed grain instead of their natural foods in part because doing so avoids the high level of omega 6 oils in the meat of animals fed grains.

Lastly, we recommend when you want to use an oil, you use primarily extra virgin olive oil.

If do all three, you increase your omega 3 oils and lower your omega 6 oils. Doing these 3 things also has other health benefits. By moving your ratio of omega 3 oils from the far too little most people get and minimizing the excessive omega 6 oils most people get, the evidence shows you will have far better health.

Similarly, you’ve read that we recommend you ingest NO transfats including doing so by NEVER buying or ingesting anything with hydrogenated vegetable oils in it or on its label; ingest NO high fructose corn syrup; stop eating refined grains and things made from them; and being quite moderate in eating sugar or foods that contain it.

We still do! Please follow these recommendations. You’ll be far less fat; & the list of diseases and avoidable medical costs you’ll avoid is LONG.

But what if we and the other up to date health experts who have been saying similar things haven’t convinced you yet or you haven’t yet begun to follow these recommendations?

Please read this article from today’s TotalHealthBreakthroughs email. Dr Lundell does a superb job of explaining why to do so and how not doing so is so much more harmful to you than you might have imagined.

My title for the article is: HOW too much omega 6 & sugars cause disease.

Here’s the article.:

"This article appears courtesy of Early to Rise's Total Health Breakthroughs, offering alternative solutions for mind, body and soul. For a complimentary subscription,
visit http://www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com"

“Heart Surgeon Admits Huge Mistake!

By Dwight Lundell, MD

….

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. Let's say you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator -- inflammation in their arteries.

Let's get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6's are essential --they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell -- they must be in the correct balance with omega-3's.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today's mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That's a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today's food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer's disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation-causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them. One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labeled polyunsaturated. Forget the "science" that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

[Ed. Note: Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa, AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie…..]”

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A. His article is brilliant at how well it describes what eating refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, and too much sugar while eating too little fiber and health OK proteins and health OK oils does too you.

“Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.“

That means if you eat this stuff and particularly if you eat a lot of it every day, you’ll tend to get insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, very high blood sugar levels – AND you’ll get fat!

“If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today's mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from C. That's a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today's food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, Alzheimer's disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated. “

Dr Lundell also makes it crystal clear why to get plenty of omega 3 oils and minimize omega 6 oils.

B. But he didn’t add that we know that the food the people we are descended from ate a diet that was bout 1:1 or equal amounts of omega 3 and omega 6 oils and that went on for at least a million years and didn’t stop until about 10,000 years ago. He does point out that it’s only in the last 60 years that we’ve adopted eating patterns that produce “15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6.”

That mean our bodies aren’t designed to run on junk food. They won’t operate as well, stay running well, or last as long unless we eat the food our body was adapted and designed by over a million years of evolution to eat.

C. Not getting the exercise people got over 10,000 years ago is not quite as critical because the exercise demands varied. But not getting the exercise most people got until 60 years ago IS critical. Virtually no one got that less than that for the over a million years before that.

Current research backs this up. It turns out that regular exercise, particularly strength training and interval cardio tends to prevent or reverse the insulin resistance Dr Lundell describes. And, since such regular exercise also has been tested to lower the systemic inflammation he describes, NEVER getting regular exercise, makes everything he describes much worse.

So the way to good health or much better health is simple.:

Get abundant omega 3 oils every week; stop ingesting junk with excessive fast acting carbs and excessive omega 6 oils; and get regular exercise each week.

Soft drinks & Jam contain MERCURY ?!....

Today's post: Wednesday, 1-28-2009

As those of you know who have read this blog for awhile know, I currently very rarely post on Wednesdays.

But THIS is breaking news!

High Fructose Corn Syrup has been tested as containing MERCURY. Many people no longer eat swordfish because it contains so much mercury. And many people eat less tuna or eat it less often because it contains some mercury.

Mercury is a neurotoxin that reduces your IQ and can, if the concentration in your blood and brain gets too high, cause senility that’s hard to tell is NOT Alzheimer’s disease.

No one who knows this who is in their right mind would want to eat things often that contain mercury.

But the problem is you likely are now and already have been for years.

Most people today still drink regular soft drinks, mostly because it’s sold well and only recently have we found out it’s about as bad for you as smoking.

But, there’s more. High Fructose Corn Syrup, since it’s cheaper, sweeter, and easier to add to manufactured food and drinks, is still in as many as half the items in your local grocery store!

It’s in soft drinks, virtually all commercial baked goods and desserts, almost all jams, jellies, and syrups (except 100 % real maple syrup), and even things like ketchup, and even ice cream.

As you know, we have been recommending that you ingest no food or drink containing High Fructose Corn Syrup.

The evidence is mixed but the articles I’ve read suggest that it both makes sweet things more addictive since it is sweeter than sugar and causes extra metabolic problems that sugar does not.

But even more important, the stuff that contains High Fructose Corn Syrup is virtually all high glycemic foods or semifoods that you would be far healthier and less fat if you ate them rarely, once a week total at most, while the average American now gets several servings each and every day.

If you haven’t started reading labels yet to avoid foods that contain, High Fructose Corn Syrup; and no longer buy or ingest that stuff, check this out!

Every other serving on the average contains mercury!

This past Monday the online Health Day news ran this story:

“MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.


HFCS has replaced sugar as the sweetener in many beverages and foods such as breads, cereals, breakfast bars, lunch meats, yogurts, soups and condiments. On average, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS, but teens and other high consumers can take in 80 percent more HFCS than average.


"Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high-fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered. We are calling for immediate changes by industry and the [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] to help stop this avoidable mercury contamination of the food supply," the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy's Dr. David Wallinga, a co-author of both studies, said in a prepared statement.”
This study was “…. based on products "bought off the shelf in the autumn of 2008” “

Here’s why half of the High Fructose Corn Syrup contained mercury and half did not.:

“The use of mercury-contaminated caustic soda in the production of HFCS is common.”

It seems that the other half tested was made without this contaminant.

To be sure, at some point, rather than stop using High Fructose Corn Syrup and having the manufacturers stop making it, the industry will either voluntarily stop making the mercury contaminated kind of High Fructose Corn Syrup or the FDA will demand it.

But why trust those people?

The mercury free High Fructose Corn Syrup is almost as bad for your health. And, when you want to occasionally indulge in a sweet treat made with real sugar, you can add the sugar yourself or buy things that only use real sugar. I think they will start becoming more available at the store.

So do your health and waistline a favor and have fewer future medical bills and disabilities, simply stop buying or ingesting anything that contains High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Lose fat and think better too....

Today's post: Monday, 1-26-2009

In a recent article in the online Health Day news, they reported a study that found that people who had high blood sugar simply did NOT think as well as people with normal blood sugar levels. Their blood sugar was measured by their HBA1C tests, which tests their average blood sugar for the last 60 to 90 days by measuring sugar on their red blood cells that live that long.

They thought more slowly; didn’t remember as well; and were less able to multitask. Ouch !!

Besides that, the article noted that people with such higher blood sugar were 1.5 times as likely to develop some kind of senility. (We did some recent posts on that, why it’s so, & some of the recent research on it.)

But other than the drugs that lower high blood sugar, which are not very good so far with many undesirable side effects and expensive, other than lower dose Metformin in some people, how can you bring down your blood sugar if it’s high?

1. Start lowering it the minute it tests as high. (High enough to prompt action is a fasting blood sugar of 100 or more or an HBA1C reading of 5.9 or more, possibly even 5.8.) That’s because it takes very little more to begin to put you into type 2 diabetes and the related insulin resistance, which can be harder to reverse. But at lower levels of high blood sugar, it almost always is reversible.

2. Take as much action as you can to lower it and get your HBA1C retested after 3 or 4 months to see if it worked.

For best results, get an at home fasting blood sugar test device and supplies through your doctor or HMO. With that, you get instant feedback on what makes your blood sugar worse and what makes it better. Bread, soft drinks, and other high glycemic index foods plus NO exercise tend to make it worse while zero and low glycemic index foods and vigorous exercise from brisk walks to strength training to interval cardio make it better.

3. But the best news is that if you do the things that make your blood sugar go down to where it should be, you’ll also become less fat, healthier in several ways, & your sex life is likely to improve!

That’s because when your blood sugar is just right you tend to lose excess fat; & when your blood sugar is high, you definitely GAIN fat.

Since we just posted on just this set of things last Friday, to save you time if you didn’t see that post, here are some of the key things in it that can also help you lower your blood sugar if it’s high.: (I add some extra info after these 3 sections as well.)

2. One of the very best and most effective ways to lose fat, lose belly fat, and reduce all these risks is to do regular exercise that includes some progressive strength training and interval cardio every week.

Both the total amount of calories burned even in low key exercise and activities such walking and light housework and the amount of vigorous exercise you get that causes you to exert an extra effort or to stop afterwards to catch your breath make a difference. But if you can do the more vigorous exercises several times a week without overdoing it, you’ll burn the most calories and remove the most belly fat.

Both interval cardio and progressive strength training cause increased metabolism and calorie burning for up to SEVERAL HOURS after you stop doing them. Even better they tend to reverse insulin resistance and high blood sugar and prevent their return if you keep doing vigorous interval cardio and progressive strength training each week.

Even better, such exercises help to both relieve stress and to increase the amount of stress you can handle without feeling overstressed and in need of comfort food.

(These kinds of exercise done regularly every week do an extremely effective job in lowering high blood sugar and insulin resistance. Few drugs come close. One man with type 2 diabetes virtually wiped it out with just strength training alone. You may need more than that. But you WILL see positive results from this kind of regular exercise.)

3. To the extent you can manage it, eating or drinking zero or very low glycemic index foods and drinks over 95 % of the time while avoiding artificial sweeteners -- both will help you lose fat all over and will help you lose belly fat.

Health OK proteins and fats and oils essentially get a zero glycemic rating. (They work in enough other ways to remove belly fat and protect your health, we list them in our next way to lose belly fat by themselves. But they work and fit very well here also.) The more zero glycemic foods you eat, the lower your overall glycemic index of what you ingest will be.

The very low glycemic index foods include virtually all nonstarchy and/or green vegetables.

The very low glycemic index foods also include some fruit such as whole apples and cherries and blackberries. Most other whole fruit is relatively low in glycemic index; but enough higher to eat once or twice a day rather than more often.

The lowest glycemic index beans are lentils; but the other kinds of beans are low.

Barley is the only grain that has a truly low glycemic index. But eating only whole grain foods and about a third as many grain foods as most people do now or less -- & as whole grains only -- can also help.

The second way to eat a low glycemic diet is to stop eating or drinking virtually ALL high glycemic index foods. Or to eat them extremely rarely. Since the body acts as if you ate sugar if you eat things that are sweetened by non-nutritive sweeteners, they fit in this category also.

This means essentially NOT eating any refined grain foods whether it’s bread, cereal, baked goods, or snack foods. And it means virtually never drink any soft drinks. This means NOT eating or drinking anything sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and eating very few things sweetened by sugar.

(Since many people still have no clue how fattening and bad for your health these things are, that’s why we suggested taxing them in yesterday’s post.)

Bottom line, if you eat or drink them now, and stop doing it, it’s an excellent way to lose belly fat!

(Similarly, zero, low, and some moderately low glycemic foods tend to give you normal blood sugar levels while the high glycemic foods virtually always give you high blood sugar readings.)

4. Eat more health OK oils and protein foods and mostly stop eating bad ones.

a) Monosaturated oils tend to help you lose belly fat according to the Flat Belly Diet book, which is still relatively new. Monosaturated oils also increase your HDL or don’t lower it and they lower LDL. People who are working to lose weight or fat who have some of these monosaturated oils each day, oddly enough, lose more fat; and of even more importance, they are dramatically more likely to keep off the fat and weight they lose.

They are in extra virgin olive oil, avocados, and nuts. These foods are so nutritious and have so many other health benefits they’ve been called superfoods. Eat any of them you aren’t allergic to and you’ll have better health and less belly fat.

b) Omega 3 oils lower inflammation and triglycerides and help you think better, feel better, and handle stress without getting so angry or irritable you make your problems worse!

The safer and more effective omega 3 oils are in:
DHA from algae and well purified fish oils (both available as supplements);
wild caught fish, particularly salmon, mackerel (NOT king mackerel), and sardines;
walnuts;
and some green vegetables and greens, particularly one called purslane.

Conversely, AVOID getting as many omega 6 oils and saturated animal fats as you can.

c) Omega 6 oils come from grains and most oils other than olive oil. They tend to increase inflammation and may help cause cancer, particularly if heated. Unlike monosaturated oils and omega 3 oils, they do not help you lose belly fat or protect your health.

Eating some omega 6 oils is OK in whole grains. Omega 6 oils cause health problems, including obesity if you eat 20 times that much, as many people still do. Omega 6 oils are high in animals fed grains instead of their natural diets. This means most meat in stores is higher than it should be in omega 6 oils since the animals it’s from were fed almost only on grains.

So mostly avoid meat from grain fed animals; eat whole grains only moderately; eat no refined grain foods; and avoid soy, canola, safflower, and corn oils in your food.

(To recap, exercise and eat zero and low glycemic foods. You’ll be less fat; your blood sugar will be lower; & we now know, you’ll think better too!)

Why avoid more than 3 drinks...

Today's post: Thursday, 12-4-2008

As an English speaking country, the culture of the United States has been influenced by English culture. And, the culture of the United States has also been influenced by German culture because German immigrants arrived early enough in the history of the United States to influence its culture. This is also true for Irish culture.

English, German, and Irish cultures tend to be positive towards high intakes of alcohol, particularly by men who are socializing away from work or who are celebrating or who are under a lot of stress.

I grew up in this culture and found that in many cases drinking 3 or more drinks did sometimes seem to result in good times. And, I found that two or three drinks worked well as a stress reliever.

However, sometimes more than 3 drinks and quite often more than 5 drinks has unfortunate or even very tragic consequences. Deadly car accidents and unwanted and unplanned pregnancies can result & have from drinking that much in a few hours.

But the cultural message is that this is mostly OK.

I got a very large dose of this while I was growing up & have indulged more than I should have on many occasions.

By making an effort and by being unusually lucky I’ve avoided the very worst consequences of doing so.

However, new research, including some just publicized this week, suggests I may have done my health a good deal more harm than I’ve previously perceived by doing so.

One example is that binge drinking, 5 or more drinks in 2 hours or less by men, or 4 or more by women, increases the amount of plaque build up in the arteries by SEVEN times the normal amount.

Does this create an increased chance for having a stroke or a heart attack?

It likely does for heart attacks because the added plaque and some of its side effects, such as high blood pressure, tend to cause heart attacks; but I’ve not seen a study on it directly.

However, such drinking HAS been shown to cause sharp increases in blood pressure and the risk of strokes.

In addition to that, averaging more than 2 drinks a day each week for men or more than a drink a day for women tends to cause people to get fat. And the death rate for people who drink that much is considerably higher than people who drink less.

When I lost 30 pounds, one of the key strategies I used was to cut out drinking more than 2 drinks a day and to drink 12 or less per week.

I still do that. And to be sure I do so, I literally keep a daily log and total it each week.

I also usually drink a half a glass of wine instead of one or two more if I find I need more stress relief than I get from drinking just one.

And, I’ve also taken to brewing and drinking a cup of Hibiscus blend tea with some Chamomile as a substitute for a second or third glass of wine. It’s not that much of a stress reliever in and of itself. But the activity does give me a substitute activity; and there was research recently reported that drinking herbal tea that’s mostly hibiscus lowers systolic blood pressure. That study found a 10 point reduction! So drinking this tea helps compensate for the reverse effect from the wine. (Hibiscus Blend tea is sold by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, which is where I’ve bought the Hibiscus tea I drink.)

I still have 3 drinks or so on occasion. But I do it a LOT less often than I did. And, unlike before, I virtually never have 4 or more now.

I’d already put these things in place to help keep my blood pressure down to desirable levels and keep from gaining back the fat I lost.

But the recent news makes me quite glad I did. It seems I’ve also slashed my risk of having a disabling stroke and likely further reduced my risk of heart attack, heart failure, erectile dysfunction, peripheral artery disease in my legs, and angina. (Reducing artery plaque and avoiding excessively high blood pressure reduces the risks of getting these. And, avoiding drinking more than 3 drinks a day or 14 a week we now know reduces those.)

Enjoy a hearty breakfast....

Today's post: Friday, 11-21-2008

People who eat breakfast have better health than people who don’t. This effect is so strong that even people who eat less healthy foods at breakfast have better health than people who have no breakfast.

And, people who eat breakfast are much more likely to be trim or to keep off any fat they lose. This is even more true for women than for men. So women who want to be trim should virtually always eat breakfast.

That said, there are some foods that people eat for breakfast that are so bad for you, it makes good sense to not eat them or only eat healthier versions once a week or much less.

However, there are some really great tasting breakfast foods that are OK for most people a few times a week. And, there are some really super healthy breakfasts, some of which can be astonishingly quick to fix and eat.

All of this adds up to this conclusion.: If you eat a combination of really great tasting breakfast foods that are OK a few times a week and some really super healthy breakfasts you can be much healthier and less fat than people who do not do so.

I was reminded of this on Monday this week when I read that day’s health article in the Early to Rise email I get.

Here’s that article.:

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com .”

“Eating Breakfast Is Only Half the Story

By Jonny Bowden, PhD, CNS

For what seems like forever, nutritionists like me have been urging people not to skip breakfast - for a number of reasons. For one thing, studies have found that people who skip breakfast are far more likely to be overweight or obese than those who eat breakfast on a regular basis. Researchers have also found that there's a correlation between eating breakfast and better performance/concentration at school and work, more energy, and improved well-being.

But those of us who have been on the breakfast bandwagon seem to have left out one of the most important details: the breakfast menu. Because even if you eat breakfast, all bets are off if you choose the wrong foods.

In a new study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers confirmed that breakfast eaters, in general, eat fewer calories during the day. But the study also showed that people who eat a really high-calorie breakfast are more likely to eat more calories during the day. Plus, their average intake of important nutrients (like calcium) falls.

When you think about it, this makes sense. Breakfasts that are very high in calories are almost certain to include junk like pastries, donuts, and other "foods" that have nothing to do with reaping the benefits of a solid, high-protein, low-calorie breakfast that's been shown to moderate cravings. In fact, a high-calorie junk-food breakfast is far more likely to lead to overeating during the day - exactly the opposite of what you want.

So don't skip breakfast. But do skip the donuts.”

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1. Consider avoiding these:

Corn bread, biscuits, donuts, croissants, toast made with refined grain bread, jam or jelly, and bagels made with refined grain all have refined grain and tend to also contain salt or sugar usually in large doses. As commercially made and served in restaurants, they often can have transfats, though that is lessening some, and/or high fructose corn syrup.

Waffles and pancakes with syrup also have these problems. And many, if not most, commercial syrups served for them use only high fructose corn syrup.

They all are health damaging foods. They tend to spike your blood sugar, and as the ETR article suggests, they also tend to give you carbohydrate rebound hunger about mid-morning.

Just about the only breakfast cereals that are OK to eat are oatmeal (traditional, or “Old Fashioned” is much better for you than “instant.”) & hot, plain oat brain. Virtually all the others are made with refined grains and most have added sugar or worse. Plus traditional oatmeal and oat bran help lower LDL cholesterol; and people who eat them often have fewer heart attacks than other people do. And, oats are moderately high in plant protein.

Toasted wheat germ is a bit too high in carbohydrates but is high in fiber and quite high in protein and B vitamins. Notably, it’s higher in choline than many supplements. And getting enough choline helps keep your protective HDL levels high.

1. It’s desirable to have a high protein food in your breakfast most days.:

Eggs, particularly if they are from pasture fed chickens, shrimp, Canadian style bacon from cows fed only grass, plain yogurt – particularly 2% lowfat and nonfat, and nuts are all higher protein foods that can be in a high protein breakfast. Some nonfat or 1% lowfat milk can be OK though some carbohydrate sensitive people who are trying to lose fat or keep it off need to go easy on the quantity.

Once or twice a month a piece or two of uncured bacon or similar sausage is OK for many people. Similarly, cheese added to an omelet or parmesan cheese added to hot oatmeal can be good.

Crab and lobster are also good if a bit pricey. Wild caught salmon can be part of a good breakfast sometimes as well.

And, a blender drink using a protein powder from hemp, whey, or eggs can also give you a decent amount of protein. Whey and egg protein is particularly high quality and has virtually all the essential amino acids. (If as I do, you find stevia to taste like a cheap, badly made marshmallow flavoring, Jarrow makes a whey protein powder that is stevia-free.)

2. It can be a good idea to include some kind of vegetables also. Onions sautéed in extra virgin olive oil or added to an omelet or in a salsa you add to an omelet work well.

Alfalfa sprouts or broccoli sprouts plus shrimp with their tails removed go well with scrambled eggs or in an omelet.

It’s definitely an acquired taste. But the Korean fermented cabbage dish, Kimchi, is a traditional breakfast food there. Nutritionally, it’s a superfood.

Similarly, seaweed soup can work well for breakfast, particularly if you add some diced onion, or ginger, or fresh crushed garlic and some kind of protein such as shrimp.

Lastly, both Dr Al Sears and Dr Dharma Singh Khalsa sell a “green drink” that you can add to a breakfast, blender drink. These have high fiber, high nutrition, and abundant minerals in them.

3. Because your body digests carbohydrates best first thing in the morning at breakfast time, this is also an excellent time, particularly, if you have some protein or fish or nuts with it, to have a small amount of real fruit juice or a even a large serving of fresh whole fruit.

Blueberries; dark red, sour cherries; most other berries; cantaloupe; bananas; kiwi fruit, or dark purple grapes, and oranges all can be great foods for breakfast.

4. If you need a fast breakfast, you can experiment with combinations of blender drinks.

Vitamix blenders work quite well for this and come with their own recipe suggestions.

And you can put in a protein food or protein supplement powder, a green drink mix powder, and a kind of fresh fruit you like to make a fast to make and fast to eat breakfast. That will give you protein, vegetable, and fruit all in one.

Unsweetened whey powder plus yogurt plus green drink mix plus chilled blueberries or banana would work well for some morning for example. Just throw them in the blender. Blend them and drink the smoothie that results.

More on calorie restriction and other ways to live longer....

Today's post: Monday, 10-27-2008

Two news stories that appeared today in the online health news had some exciting findings on just this topic.

1. The one that was in several sources was about the effects of a purple tomato that researchers had bioengineered to have anthocyanins that provide the purple color in blackberries, blueberries, bilberries, and other kinds of fruit.

Those researchers tested it on mice bred to develop cancers. The mice who were fed this tomato lived so much longer it would be as if humans fed this kind of purple tomato lived an average of 20 years longer.

They also found that two measures of inflammation and LDL cholesterol were significantly lower in these mice. Those effects tend to prevent cancer and protect against heart and cardiovascular disease

Since in today’s world we encounter so many kinds of chemical pollution our bodies already contain so many we might just as well be genetically bred to develop cancers because of the cumulative possible effects of these chemicals. To me that suggests that getting an abundant supply of anthocyanins from fruit and supplements is quite likely to do as much for us. And there is beginning to be some research that suggests this is so. Eating blueberries has been shown to help prevent or even reverse age related mental decline for example. I personally take bilberry extract and grape seed extract and eat blueberries 3 times a week.

My Tuesday, 10-14-2008 post on 14 ways to live longer that included, “eat purple food” looks to be accurate and the method effective based on this new study.

2. The second story appeared in yesterdays, Sunday, 10-26-2008 HealthDay online news.

In this study, the researchers fed rats tart cherry powder and the results suggest that calorie restriction and the effects of the anthocyanins in tart or sour cherries may overlap the results of calorie restriction. In fact, the study suggests that eating tart or sour cherries (with no sugar added anyway) and/or taking tart cherry extracts such as the tart cherry powder the researchers used may be a significant help to people trying to lose fat and to lose it from their waist or belly or abdominal area.

The rats the researchers fed the tart cherry powder to lost 14 % of their bodyweight mostly by losing fat in their belly or abdominal areas.

Most of us have ancestors who successfully survived famines, many of them more than once. So these fat loss effects are likely much more than people would experience. The amount of tart cherry powder per pound of bodyweight may also have been higher in these rats than people would be likely to consume.

However, it still looks as if sour cherries and any kind of tart or sour cherry extract is likely to give you some of the effects of calorie restriction. And, if you are eating right to lose fat or are using calorie restriction, eating sour cherries &/or taking any kind of tart or sour cherry extract might well improve your results and help you lose fat from your belly or tummy region.

Given the negative effects of excess abdominal fat on your health and appearance, that’s very good news indeed.

New information on Fat Loss....

Today's post: Thursday, 9-25-2008

There are two parts to this post. The second part has the key to fat loss success.

1. Being fat not only makes you look less sexually appealing, it tends to turn off your sex drive.

2. A little known fact is one of the most important reasons people who try to lose fat weight fail to lose it all and keep it off. But there are three ways to overcome it. If you want to lose all the fat you should & would like to lose and keep it off, it’s definitely worth trying all three together.

1. Being fat not only makes you look less sexually appealing, it tends to turn off your sex drive.

Most people know being fat makes you look less sexually appealing. But few people know it also tends to turn off your sex drive.

Last Friday, 9-19, in the Yahoo News health section online, Reuters Health had a story titled,

"Obesity may diminish a man's fertility ."

They found married fat men tended to not have as many children as married men of normal weight. They found that measurable in differences in hormone levels in the fat men caused this effect.

The fat men had below normal testosterone levels. And, some of the fertility related hormones that were low in the fat men caused the researchers to believe that excess body fat likely also tended increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen in a man's blood. They measured higher estrogen levels in the fat men.

They also said that previous studies found that fat men had lower libido and increased risk of erectile dysfunction when compared with men who were not fat.

The good news is two fold.

One, if you are fat now, you can increase your testosterone level right away, even before you lose very much fat, AND increase your chances of losing the fat and have it stay off. Doing progressive strength training and/or interval cardio regularly -- releases testosterone.

Doing these two kinds of exercise also boosts your metabolism for hours after you exercise and increases your muscle mass. So since the increased muscle burns more calories than fat does, you burn more calories in two ways and tend to both lose fat and increase muscle. This helps ensure that not only do you lose only fat as you lose weight, you may well lose MORE pounds of fat than you lose pounds on the scale.

You can also have more testosterone by preventing some of it from being converted to estrogen. According to Dr Al Sears, taking the supplement DIM or eating lots of broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables that contain it or both does exactly that.

Now, here’s the really interesting part of this post.:

2. A little known fact is one of the most important reasons people who try to lose fat weight fail to lose it all and keep it off. But there are three ways to overcome it. If you want to lose all the fat you should & would like to lose and keep it off, it’s definitely worth trying all three together.

As often happens, I read some key information earlier today in the health article in today’s Early to Rise.

“This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, an e-zine dedicated to making money, improving your health and quality of life. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.”

“Don't Diet TOO Much

By Craig Ballantyne

Bodybuilders have long known that if you eat too little for too long, you can actually decrease your resting metabolic rate (the number of calories you burn at rest).

Now, scientists are catching up to our muscle-building friends. Researchers from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana studied long-term dieting in 48 normal-weight subjects.

For six months, one group of subjects reduced their calories by 25 percent. A second group reduced their calories by 12.5 percent and exercised to burn another 12.5 percent of their calorie intake each day. A third group consumed only 890 calories per day until they lost 15 percent of their body weight, and then went on a weight-maintenance diet.

The researchers found that resting metabolic rate decreased after only three months in the subjects who'd reduced their calories by 25 percent. The 890-calorie-per-day group and the diet + exercise group also had a decreased resting metabolic rate, but it took six months for them.

The conclusion: When you diet too hard and too long, your body starts to conserve energy by reducing your metabolism and by decreasing the number of calories burned in any exercise you do.

To keep your resting metabolism high, follow these three guidelines when trying to lose weight:

1. Don't cut your calories too much. A 10 percent reduction - combined with regular exercise - is plenty.

2. Permit yourself a "reward meal" once a week. Eat your favorite foods, but don't go over the number of calories you had been eating each day before you started the diet.

3. Every eight to 10 weeks, take a few days off of dieting, and go back to your pre-diet caloric intake.

[Ed. Note: Supplement Craig Ballantyne's diet rules with a fat-burning exercise routine. Learn how to build muscle and blast fat with his Turbulence Training program.

And for more advice on how to lose weight, eat right, and exercise better, sign up for ETR's free natural health e-letter.] “

(Their “natural health e-letter” comes out currently twice a week and you can sign up for it at:
www.totalhealthbreakthroughs.com .)

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Here are the 3 other ways to prevent this effect.:

1. A combination of: eating less or hardly any of the foods and drinks that tend to make you fat;
and eating more green and nonstarchy vegetables;
and a 10 percent reduction or even a bit less in your total calories while keeping a dairy before the reduction and every week after it.
-- Will remove fat from your body. And, doing it in ways that allow you to eat other foods you enjoy and only cutting back that much, will enable you to keep doing it.

(I only had to cut my beer and wine intake a bit and ate more vegetables and was already avoiding fattening foods and drinks and exercising each week. But I’ve been able to maintain my fat weight loss since that’s all I had to add & subtract. So I’ve just kept doing it.)

Cutting back more than that tends to lower your metabolism and tends to make you feel bad to the place you both stop losing fat and tend to give up. Why do that? Upgrade your diet to health supporting foods and drinks and cut back the calories just a little. That both prevents the decrease in metabolism and makes it doable to continue.

For me this is not theory. I set out to lose just 10 pounds. But since I was able to keep up the changes easily, I lost 30 pounds.

2. Doing progressive strength training and/or interval cardio regularly not only releases testosterone and improves the sex lives of BOTH men and women, doing these two kinds of exercise also boosts your metabolism for hours after you exercise and increases your muscle mass. So, since the increased muscle burns more calories than fat does, you burn more calories in two ways and tend to both lose fat and increase muscle.

This also tends to prevent this drop off of metabolism that can slow or prevent losing fat.

3. There may be a way to improve this protection against having your metabolism drop even more. It does nothing by itself to lose fat. So people who don’t eat a bit less calories and upgrade how health supporting their foods and drinks are AND do both progressive strength training and interval cardio can use it with little effect.

But the people who do the things that cause fat loss, apparently get quite an effect if they add this third method too. I just discovered it existed a few days ago. And today’s Early to Rise article explains why it can be such an asset in fat loss.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have something you could take that would both totally prevent this drop in your metabolism AND cause you to lose most or all of your excess abdominal fat?

What if it also was safe to take and produced no “speed” or over-stimulation effects as well?

It’s a bit on the pricey side. It costs $50 to $60 a month to take it. And, it’s likely useless if you don’t do the other things and keep doing them.

But if you have the money and are doing the other things, I think it looks worth doing.

An active ingredient in wakame seaweed and some other kinds of seaweed is called fucoxanthin.

Wikipedia has this.:

“Fucoxanthin reduces fat because of its increase in cell energy expenditure. This is important because fucoxanthin helps to increase your metabolic rate, which becomes progressively slower as you age, explaining why normal dieting doesn't always have the desired long-term results. There have been recent studies in both humans and animals that showed taking fucoxanthin supplements helps to reduce body weight as well as significant losses in visceral fat, decrease in liver and abdominal fat, and an increase in energy expenditure. Subjects taking the fucoxanthin supplements lost an average of 14 pounds, 11 pounds more than the placebo group.”

The supplement most readily available in health food stores is Garden of Life Fuco Thin.

(from http://palmbeachnutrition.com/Garden-of-Life/Fuco-Thin/tabid/229/Default.aspx ):

“Garden of Life Fuco Thin

Fuco Thin by Garden of Life is for anyone who is seeking to manage body fat and support a healthy metabolic rate while following a balanced diet and a regular exercise regimen.

All-natural concentrate with fucoxanthin levels 250-500 times higher than wild seaweed

Supports the metabolism or breakdown of fat in white adipose tissue, including belly fat

The first marine algae-derived ingredient with clinically proven thermogenic effect

Does not stimulate the central nervous system and will not cause jitters or lost sleep.”


The Garden of Life literature reports that many of the people who do the other things and also take Fuco Thin lose inches off their waist in addition to pounds on the scale.

I lost 30 pounds without taking it and only lost 2 inches from my waist. I’d love to find that taking this would trim off another 2 to 4 inches off my waist.

So I intend to try it myself soon.

If you try it and it works for you, please leave a comment here.

New information to Double the fat you lose....

Today's post: Thursday, 7-10-2008

We’ve already posted many of the keys to losing excess fat and keeping it off here.

We’ll do a quick summary of those & then add the news from this week on a new study that shows a way to double the fat you lose on top of all that.

Then we’ll comment on it.

A. Quick summary of ways to lose excess fat and keep it off that we’ve already posted about.

1. Never drink regular soft drinks.

For the same reason, read the labels on EVERY packaged food you consider buying & do not buy & do NOT eat any that have any high fructose corn syrup in them. If you haven’t yet done this, you may be astounded at how many foods now contain this junk.

And, the data show you should also never drink DIET soft drinks.

Regular soft drinks, high fructose corn syrup, & diet soft drinks either cause you take in calories but NOT feel less hungry or even worse feel MORE hungry.

So, they quite literally cause you to get fat if you eat or drink them & prevent you from losing fat even if you do many other things that would normally take off fat.

Not surprisingly they also tend to cause type II diabetes & heart disease.

2. Eat some nonstarchy vegetables at almost every lunch or dinner you eat. They have so few calories & so much fiber Weight Watchers rates them as having ZERO points.

Organic vegetables not only have less pesticides & herbicides, recent studies show they are also dramatically more nutritious.

And, if you eat raw cauliflower, raw broccoli florets, or other raw cruciferous vegetables every week, your risk of all cancers, particularly prostate, breast, & ovarian cancers drops like a stone.

Doing this makes you MUCH healthier, fills your tummy & turns down hunger with very little net calories.

It’s so effective that BY ITSELF it’s one of the secrets of successfully losing fat weight & keeping it off.

3. Do at least two sessions of progressive strength training each week with at least one day off in between.

Do at least three sessions of interval cardio each week that alternates moderate effort & very vigorous effort after you build up to it several times each session.

This has all kinds of extra health benefits --.including growing new brain cells and improving your sex life, which it does in BOTH men & women.

By doing this you lose fat in three ways: a) When you eat, you begin to feed the newly added muscle weight it develops & stop adding those calories to your fat stores. b) This kind of exercise boosts your metabolism for HOURS after you are done exercising; so for that time you burn a LOT of calories you otherwise would not. c) The weight you lose on the scale will all be fat; otherwise you tend to lose some muscle & less fat when you lose weight.

Each of these effects reduces the amount you have to cut back to lose fat & by continuing to exercise, it allows you to lose fat & keep it off without getting excessively hungry.

4. Eat health OK protein foods every day. This helps lose fat since eating protein turns off hunger better than eating fats & MUCH better than eating carbohydrates.

Stop eating refined virtually all carbohydrate foods; eat only moderate amounts of whole grain foods or less; & cut way back on table sugar and foods that contain it.

Carbohydrate foods, particularly those with no fiber, only turn off hunger for a short time and then they turn hunger back on.

These foods tend to cause type II diabetes & sabotage your fat loss efforts by making you hungry when you would not have been if you hadn’t eaten them.

5. Watch less TV. Try NEVER to eat while you watch it. And, never allow a TV into your bedroom.

The more hours people watch TV, the fatter they are according to the many studies done on it.

You burn less calories watching TV than you do sleeping,

There are a lot of adds on TV for soft drinks, diet soft drinks, and for snacks and dessert foods that are mostly refined grains, sugar, & high fructose corn syrup. And these foods often contain bad fats too.

And, the more TV you watch, the harder it is to fit the exercise you need into your week.

If you do a good job on these five things, you will lose a good deal of fat & keep it off. And, you will be a LOT healthier than you might otherwise have been.

B. The very good news is that you can at least double the fat loss you get by following this program by keeping a food diary of everything you eat.

Here’s the story that appeared just this week.:

“USA Today - Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Using food diaries doubles weight loss, study shows

By H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY

Dieters in the study were instructed to follow the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, which suggests consuming:

Nine to 12 servings of fruits and vegetables daily.

Two to three servings of low-fat dairy foods daily.

25% or less of total calories from fat.

A low-sodium diet, with 2,400 milligrams or less of sodium each day.

No more than one alcoholic beverage a day for women; no more than two drinks a day for men. One drink equals 12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine or half an ounce of 80-proof liquor.

Source: August's American Journal of Preventive Medicine

Dieters who write down everything they eat each day lose twice as much weight as those who don't, according to one of the largest weight-loss studies ever conducted.
This confirms the importance of keeping a food diary — advice that nutritionists and weight-loss programs have pushed for years.

Scientists at four clinical research centers recruited 1,685 overweight or obese adults who weighed an average 212 pounds. Forty-four percent were African Americans.

The participants were offered 20 weekly group sessions led by nutritionists and behavior counselors and encouraged to try to lose at least 9 pounds in six months. They were told to consume about 500 fewer calories a day, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, do about 180 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week, and keep daily food and exercise records. The findings reported in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine:

•Dieters who kept their food diary six or more days a week lost an average of about 18 pounds in six months, compared with about 9 pounds for those who didn't keep food diaries.

•The biggest losers also attended most of the group meetings and did more exercise. Some did 300 minutes or more of physical activity a week, but the average participant in the study did about 117 minutes a week.

•69% of the participants lost 9 pounds or more, which is enough to improve some health measures such as blood pressure, joint pain and pre-diabetes.

•69% of black men and 59% of black women lost at least 9 pounds.

"There is a misconception that nobody can lose weight, but in this study, two-thirds of them lost enough weight to make a difference to their health," says Victor Stevens, senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute sponsored the study.

These weight-loss techniques work well with everybody, including African Americans, who are often underrepresented in studies and yet suffer from a high rate of obesity and weight-related illnesses, he says.

Food diaries are a "powerful self-management technique. They help you figure out where the extra calories are coming from," he says. It works best if someone else looks over your food record. "When you put yourself in a position where you are accountable for your behavior, it changes behavior."

Many people are getting lots of extra calories by eating large portions at restaurants, Stevens says. He is currently working with a client who was consuming 1,500 calories of fast food at lunch. The dieter is now bringing a 500-calorie lunch to work, saving 1,000 calories a day.

Dawn Jackson Blatner, a registered dietitian in Chicago, tells people that a food diary "is the best way to monitor every crumb, morsel, nibble, sip, swallow and bite you take."


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Note that the people who lost the most weight also kept a log of all the exercise they did each week.

Note also that keeping a food log each week is one of the key reasons that people lose weight & fat when they attend Weight Watchers meetings. And, it’s one of the reasons studies show that the Weight Watchers meetings are one of the most successful programs for losing weight & excess fat.

Avoid simple carbohydrates to protect your heart....

Today's post: Thursday, 6-12-2008

It used to be that the recommendation to avoid heart disease was to eat a low fat diet that was very low in saturated fat.

As we posted on recently, some restriction on eating saturated fat from animals does protect your health.

But there are some new additions that make an enormous difference in how well that works to protect you.

The amount of the harmful LDL the saturated fat converts to in your body is controlled by how high your blood glucose is & whether or not you exercise regularly and do other things to increase your HDL levels.

(The tiny particle kind of LDL that goes into the molecular chinks in your blood vessel walls, particularly if it becomes oxidized, is the kind that we now know causes heart & cardiovascular disease.)

If you do enough regular exercise & eat health OK protein & fats and unstarchy vegetables for most of your food & carefully avoid most simple carbohydrates, your HDL will be high & your triglycerides & blood glucose readings will be desirably low.

This keeps your total LDL cholesterol readings down to some degree. But the really important thing is that it forces the bad kind of LDL to be very, very low.

This works even better if you get progressive strength training and interval cardio exercise each week & totally avoid the worst simple carbohydrates or high glycemic load foods.

Here’s a recent Early to Rise article on this. I’ll add my comments after it.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

“The Diet That Cardiologists Are Being Urged to Recommend

By James B. LaValle, RPh, MS, ND, CCN

What would you do if you were a researcher and you realized that a diet that had been accepted for years is all wrong? Would you write letters and more letters, urging your colleagues to be aware that research is showing the need for a change? That is exactly what some of the country's top researchers have been doing, including Dr. Walter Willett (who chairs Harvard's Department of Nutrition) and Dr. Frank B. Hu.

Research has clearly shown that the low-fat and low-cholesterol diet that many doctors have been recommending since the late 1980s has done almost nothing to prevent heart disease. Meanwhile, scientists have discovered that a diet with high levels of carbohydrates, specifically those with a high glycemic index and load, is hard on the heart.

Studies as far back as the 1940s show that low-carb diets are effective for fat loss. And epidemiological studies from the 1970s showed a correlation between high carbohydrate intake and the risk of coronary heart disease. But those results were ignored, because everyone thought fat was the lone culprit.

Low-carb diets have now been validated in study after study - not only for weight management, but to control insulin and glucose elevations. This means they are also very effective for controlling Type II diabetes and hypertension. And that is why researchers and some members of the medical community are urgently calling for a change. But will anyone hear them?

A diet that is higher in good fats (not harmful trans-fats) and protein but lower in high glycemic index and high glycemic load foods is the diet that is best for lowering what is now being called cardio-metabolic risk. This new term implies what I and other ETR experts have been teaching for years. The best way to control your weight and reduce your risk of diabetes and coronary disease is to control your glycemic response.

If you haven't yet gotten serious about a low-carb approach to health, it is time for a change.

[Ed. Note: By modifying your diet, medications, lifestyle, and exercise habits, and with nutritional supplementation, your health is largely in your control. James B. LaValle, RPh, ND, CCN - the founder of the LaValle Metabolic Institute and a nationally recognized expert on natural therapies - has come up with an approach to health that has worked for thousands of patients…..]”

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Foods that boost your blood sugar the worst, even more than sugar, include all refined grain foods, high fructose corn syrup, white rice, & white potatoes without the skin.

The glycemic load of your diet is found by multiplying the blood sugar boosting rate, or glycemic index, of the food by the amount of the food you actually eat.

And, the glycemic index of a food when you eat it is influenced by what you eat it with. If you eat it with healthy fats & proteins & fiber the effective glycemic index of the food is lowered & the blood sugar boost you get & its speed is lowered.

Interestingly, straight sugar is only moderately high in glycemic index. But if you eat a lot of it every day, its glycemic load in your diet will be high.

The good news is that you can eat a wide variety of good tasting foods that are low in glycemic load. And, if you only eat it a few times a month in small amounts AND exercise regularly, you can even get away with some real sugar.

The bad news is that at least half the foods that the average person in the United States eats now, have the ingredients in the list above that you are well advised to simply NEVER eat.

And, you have to not buy about that many of the food items in most grocery stores today to avoid those ingredients.

One secret is to buy organic nonstarchy vegetables, health OK fats like extra virgin olive oil, health OK protein foods like beef fed only grass or walnuts for most of your food.

Fresh fruit, real fruit juice with NO sugar or high fructose corn syrup added, nonfat & very low fat dairy all are OK but since their glycemic load is higher, you have to keep your intake down to moderate levels.

Low moderate intake of whole grain foods can be OK. But you have to be careful not to overdo the amount you eat of these foods as they have nearly the glycemic index of sugar.

And, if you have fat you need to lose, the low carb people are right, you need to eat even less.

Unfortunately, the list of packaged foods that have refined grains, high fructose corn syrup, or excessive sugar is astonishingly long.

If it comes in a package, to avoid this stuff, you absolutely must read the label.

It used to be that foods were sweetened with sugar. Some foods still are. But a majority of packaged foods in your local supermarket are sweetened now with high fructose corn syrup.

Jam, jelly, regular soft drinks, ice cream, ketchup, snack foods, breakfast cereals, even some peanut butter, are sweetened today with high fructose corn syrup.

Most breads, and virtually all snack foods, breakfast cereals, & commercial baked goods are made with refined grain.

Your health & your heart health will be MUCH better; & you will be a good bit less fat, if you totally stop buying and eating these foods.

The good news is that if enough people do this, our health & health insurance costs will be lowered by the cost of the illnesses people no longer get.

And, grocery stores & food companies will make more health OK choices available to us.

But if you do this, the health benefits & protection you get are virtually immediate.

To lose fat, upgrade your lifestyle....

Today's post: Monday, 2-25-2008

Most people in the United States are too fat.

(I do enough things in this post better than many people that I’m as much as 50 or 60 pounds lighter than I easily could be. But that includes me still. My weight is close to what it should be. But I still eat a bit too many grains; & get too little strength training and total exercise.)

And, as the sedentary lifestyle & United States style eating become more common, this is increasingly true of people in other countries as well. And, there are statistics now to prove it.

But, except for doing sedentary work, you can upgrade your lifestyle in ways that allow you to escape from this problem.

Here are five upgrades that will help most people lose a lot of fat.

None of them are actually too hard to do as none of them force you to go hungry AT ALL. And, if you need to do all five and make the upgrades, you’ll lose fat like it is being peeled off.

1. Soft drinks. The data is in. Drinking soft drinks makes you fat. Drinking diet soft drinks makes you fatter because it apparently acts as an appetite increaser.

So, if you drink soft drinks at all now, if you upgrade your life and stop doing it, you may well lose more than 10 % of your current body weight without any further effort. And, you will NOT feel hungrier than you do now. In fact, the evidence is you may feel LESS hunger given that you keep the other foods you eat about the same. Not bad !!

The upgrade is to switch to water, tea, green tea, or coffee if you drink it without added sugar & either black or with just a bit of milk or lowfat milk. Also, if you keep the total consumption down, wine, beer, & real fruit juice also work. (PS: If coffee is too strong and you dislike black tea, Earl Grey tea is different enough, you might like it better.)

2. Watching TV. The data is in, the more you watch, the fatter you are. You burn less calories watching TV than you do sleeping! And, many people eat the fattening snack foods or respond to ads for them that appear on TV.

So, be more selective & watch less TV but more focused on what you like best. Skip watching TV some nights or week-ends and go to the gym instead. Or, get an aerobic or cardio exerciser at home & watch while you exercise. If you have them, turn off TV some nights and spend time with your kids. (You can record any must see TV broadcast then to watch later.)

3. Eat no fast food or only eat the health OK stuff when it’s available. The data is in. The more often adults or kids eat at fast food places as most of them still are, the fatter they are.

The food fast food places have served has been very high in sugar, transfats, refined carbohydrates, & with little real food. They tend to serve grain fed meat & poultry. Even worse, they specialize in serving soft drinks.

The upgrade is to substitute food from home; eat in a more upscale restaurants, or only eat the health OK things or almost health OK things when you go into a fast food restaurant.

To be fair, MacDonald’s is beginning to make an effort to provide some health OK alternatives. I’ve found that the easiest ones to eat in a health OK way at are Subway Sandwiches & the Mexican chain, Uno Mas.

But it’s not easy if you still like the regular fare. You need to eat the sandwiches Atkins style with no bread -- only. Eat no French Fries or chips. Eat no desserts. And, substitute water, tea, coffee, or orange juice for soft drinks. It also helps to add extra onions & other veggies to the protein part of the sandwiches. If you can do that, you can still eat at fast food places. If not, you are best served by never, ever going into one.

4. Snacks at home.

If you eat commercial baked goods such as cookies, donuts, bagels, cakes; packaged crackers, chips, & other similar snacks several times a week or, worse, a day, the data is in. You will be fat.

One cure is to eat four meals a day always including breakfast, so you never have to go more than 4 hours without real food.

Another, is to realize that you get virtually no nutrition from such snacks; they are much more expensive per month than most people realize; & they tend to be made with refined grains, sugar, salt, trans fats, & very little else.

The upgrade if you need or want snacks is to eat real food that tastes good enough you actually like it & manage your meals enough you need fewer snacks.

Cherries & kiwifruit & strawberries are just three really good tasting superfoods you can snack on. Monosaturated fat-based snacks that actually work well in moderation are guacamole, avocado slices, stuffed olives, & nuts. Raw broccoli florets, cauliflower, carrot sticks, & celery with a tasty extra virgin olive oil based dip also work. Deviled eggs also work in moderation.

These foods provide fiber & real nutrition so they don’t tend to produce type II diabetes. And, they tend to make you less hungry unlike the bad snacks that surge your blood sugar & then produce rebound hunger.

So, you’ll be a LOT healthier & be less fat if you make these upgrades; & lose the junk food snacks entirely.

5. The other thing you can do is to add regular strength training and other exercise into your life each week.

If you make this upgrade, you get fabulous health benefits. Even better, even while you are still fat, you will be healthier than skinny people who don’t exercise.

You’ll gain muscle & lose fat even if the scales don’t show it at first. And, you’ll tend to keep off any fat you lose as long as you keep up your regular exercises.