Feeding

Posted on February 11, 2016 by dcarmack

Stove, oven, microwave, restaurant–the product is food, the difference is time. Modern man in the US is eating fast. Science and industry have provided us a way to eat without thinking at all. The tradeoff is that now we are further removed from our food than ever in history–we don’t know where it comes from, we don’t know what is in it–and now finally we are having to think about what our food is doing to us.

It would be wrong to say that what we are eating is killing us, we are all going to die some day anyway, but it would not be wrong to say that what we are eating is making us miserable.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Acid Reflux, anxiety, depression, heck maybe soon even Alzheimer’s, high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, joint pain–every one of these maladies is undoubtedly related to the kind of foods we eat, to the chemicals in the foods, to the lack of care and attention we pay to preparing it.

For a look at how the food industry and the food marketing industry has changed our lives by saving us time and simultaneously reducing our quality of life there is a new four part documentary about to be released on Netflix, “Cooked”–

Alex Gibney, documentary film maker known for the Scientology piece entitled “Going Clear”, has teamed up with one of my favorite food and food science authors Michael Pollan to explore what we are losing by forgetting how to cook.

There is something reverential about taking the living creatures and plants that are giving us life by giving their own and honoring that sacrifice by careful preparation and thoughtful eating. I am as lazy and thoughtless as the next man, but I do try to do my very best work when I am preparing meats for the family and friends to eat. When I hear grace being said at a meal I very usually think of the death that had to occur that I might live. I actually do try to honor the donor of my food.

The act of cooking, for me, is an act of love. I love the things that I am working with and I love the people that I am feeding. Cooking can be a duty, and it can be a meditation. Sometimes I feel like a symphony director, sometimes I feel like a juggler, but I always feel gratitude.

When I let a corporation cook for me I lose all of that. It would be impossible to feel gratitude for the plants and animals if all I ever did was move it from the freezer to the microwave to my mouth. Not only do I have no idea what is in it, it is just too separate from me and my life to pause and reflect on what I am actually doing. If your eating consists of this kind of food, frozen or instant “just add water and heat” kinds of cooking then you perhaps don’t know what you are missing out on. You will remember cooking though. Search your memory for the time that you helped your grandma or grandpa, mom or dad, to make something out of raw parts. Those are very special memories, and they are the soil on which you can begin to build your own relationship with food.

Watch the documentary, wish your life was like that, then make it so, America. Your stress levels will drop. Your health will improve. Eat real food, eat food you made yourself and feel pride of craftsmanship. Do it once and make some memories for your own kids.

Posted in Health | Leave a comment

Mortality

Posted on February 4, 2016 by dcarmack

What does it mean to be alive, I wonder. One thing it means is that for a short time, in relative terms, we get to enjoy this wide world. Enjoyment means different things to different people, but these days, around here, enjoyment means being entertained. We pay attention to things, and our attention is the highest and most precious thing that we can give. A huge percentage of our daily attention is spent on entertainment.

I happen to find food entertaining. I spend a great deal of my attention thinking about things that are truly good to eat, and now to make those good things better. I entertain myself by educating myself on the state of the art in food science, the physiology of food, and why some foods are better than others for your biological processes. Its one thing I like paying attention to.

From what I have seen the last couple of years, most people pay no attention at all to food. Everywhere you look people are mindlessly selecting and then eating food while giving the very minimum required thought to the process. If you eat while you are driving only one of those activities is getting your attention, and if you live through the trip it is proof that you are not thinking about what you are eating. Selecting from the drive thru menu is another exercise in paying no attention to your meal–“I will have number 2” is probably what you always say, having thought about it once, years ago. If I am describing you, then you are not enjoying your food–you are not in the habit of being entertained by the feeding process.

I know people that are entertained by stress. They pay attention to every contentious issue in their daily life and weigh in. They argue about things and care about things over which they have no control, things that nobody but the other people against whom they are arguing care about. In their minds it doesn’t matter that it is pointless. The body reacts anyway to the stress of the situation. When a man’s face gets red setting at his keyboard in his underwear, it doesn’t matter at all that the fists are only virtually flying. Whereas, in days gone by it would be a difficult thing to stay stressed out every waking hour, these days it is quite simple. My inbox is full of breathless missives from the Democratic party. Today they are wanting me to get all upset at the possibility of a Cruz Administration. Last week it was something equally horrifying. Perhaps in your house it is your favorite Fox News show, maybe you have Alex Jones on your radio, maybe it’s Cramer on the financial channel or Glen Beck that gets you all worked up. While all of this is entertaining to some, the constant stress that this engenders is actually quite harmful. In the real world red faced stress is hard to find. In the virtual world it is hard to avoid.

There are foods that we are all eating that only adds to the pile of stress-inducers.

There are boatloads of evidence that humans are more stressed today than we were thirty years ago. These stresses occur at home, in the workplace, and at school; in other words, all people all the time. Stress (e.g., job stress), depression, and excess cortisol are all linked to metabolic syndrome. For instance, psychosocial stresses correlate with risk of myocardial infarction (heart attacks) in adults. One of the hallmarks of metabolic syndrome is excessive cortisol due to adrenal gland overactivation. These examples all suggest that cortisol is a primary player in the development of metabolic syndrome (see chapter 9).

Lustig, Robert H. (2012-12-27). Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease (pp. 70-71). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Cortisol is a hormone, like adrenaline. It is naturally occurring and in quieter, saner times, it is a hormone that nobody would really care about. Occasional, maybe even once a day shots of cortisol are not ever going to harm anyone.

These three brain pathways (hunger, reward, stress) drive hyperinsulinemia (excess insulin levels), resulting in obesity and metabolic syndrome (see chapter 9). We call this model the “limbic triangle”— similar to the Bermuda Triangle: once you get in, you can’t get out. 13 Chronic insulin action at the VMH inhibits leptin signaling, which is interpreted as starvation. This decreases SNS activity (sloth) and increases vagal activity (hunger). In the VTA, chronic insulin deregulates hedonic reward pathways by inhibiting leptin signaling (reward). You want to eat more, especially high-fat and high-sugar treats, which results in excessive energy intake. Chronic activation of the amygdala increases levels of cortisol (stress). By itself, this promotes excess food intake and insulin resistance, ratcheting up insulin levels and accelerating weight gain.

Lustig, Robert H. (2012-12-27). Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease (p. 72). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Oh boy, another thing to worry about. I am trying to gain your attention. Eating that number 2 without thinking is causing you physical problems. Living in constant stress is causing you physical problems. The old saying “you are going to give yourself a stroke” is literally a descent prediction these days.

When cortisol releases from the adrenal glands, it enters the circulatory system immediately. The endothelial and smooth muscle cells that line your arteries are sensitive to glucocorticoids. In addition to this, there is evidence suggesting that high circulating amounts of cortisol makes arteries more responsive to norepinephrine and vascular resistance. When vascular tone is high, the space that blood can move through is reduced. As a result, the heart must pump harder to deliver blood to organs around the body. In turn, your heart continues to respond to other hormonal mechanisms at the kidneys which also increase blood pressure. For example, when the kidneys detect low blood volume or low sodium, they will initiate the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone cascade. All of this means that a constant state of hypertension can result. For the average person suffering from high cortisol levels, this means you increase your risk of other cardiovascular diseases. This includes coronary artery disease and heart attacks.—http://cortisol.com/the-connection-between-your-cortisol-levels-and-vascular-tone/#.VrNyzcdtG7k

Even if you don’t set in front of your TV throwing nerf balls at the idiots every day, even if you aren’t always fearful of melting glaciers, or the deluge of processed foods that are killing us, all you have to do to raise your cortisol levels constantly is eat. If you eat fruit, yogurt, even eight out of ten processed foods, you are raising your cortisol levels…

Fructose is a cortisol booster.

Adding to your stress-level hormone is making you more reactive to your world. All of the sugar you are eating in your processed meals from restaurants and from boxes and bags is slowly causing lasting damage. Not only are you getting fat, you are getting sick. Don’t get all worked up about it though. Just quit eating processed foods. If you want to enjoy your remaining years, stroke free, with normal blood pressure, normal body weight, normal emotional reactions to your world and the men and women around you, quit eating processed foods.

maxresdefault.jpg

Posted in Health, Living | Tagged | Leave a comment

It’s So Hard To Lose

Posted on January 25, 2016 by dcarmack

Weight. Today I was reading an article by a 74 year old woman that has been heavy, overweight, her entire life. She is fat, but she is still alive. She has finally quit worrying about it and has decided to just accept that she is fatter than average and enjoy the time she has left. Twenty percent of overweight people are like her, they are heavy but they are healthy. She is 74 and she is one of the people that were heavy even before food makers started putting sugar in eight out of ten processed foods. She was heavy before low-fat food was ever invented. There have always been fat people and there always will be, and there is nothing wrong with being above average weight for your height.

If there were a way that I could guarantee to you that you could get to the normal weight for person your height and build, if that way worked on every single person that did it, of course you would do it, you would get to normal weight, you would be happy and healthy. That way does not exist. The way that I espouse here works for people that are overweight because they do not tolerate all of the excess added sugars in processed foods. For most people added sugars create a cascade of health issues, and over a lifetime the issues become quite dire. If they all were to quit eating all carbs tomorrow, if they ate real, single ingredient foods from now on, they would gradually return to their ideal weight. It would work for everyone that has a problem with added sugars.

Everyone is not overweight because of added sugars. Some people are overweight because they do not eat enough insoluble fiber. Some people needed to eat the natural fibers in fruits, vegetables and greens in order to keep the bacteria in their large intestine and colon healthy. They did not, that colony of beneficial bacteria are gone. For them eating natural foods right now will not hurt them, but it will not bring them to their optimal weight range, either. For them, if I attempt to convince them that “my way” works for everyone, then when it does not work for them they will be discouraged, disgruntled, and they will be examples that I, like everyone else who has tried to help them, am wrong. Alternatively, they will blame themselves, like they are used to, for not doing it right. Lots of heavy people go around loathing themselves for being weak, lacking willpower, for somehow not being good enough to be thin. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is this: Every body is different. One size diet does not fit all dieters. Not eating processed foods is very difficult to do in the US. Not eating natural foods that contain fiber is really easy to do in the US. We are surrounded by food experts, none of which is qualified to deliver a customized picture of what your ideal diet should consist of. It’s tragic, but true, that when you are in need of weight loss and try to follow a one-size prescription and fail to keep it off, you are going to assume it’s you.

Look at any diet book title. Here are a few…an Amazon.com search for diet books yields a search result of 20,089 results. I am sure that the number of weight loss books is actually bigger than that, but Amazon carries 20,089 different ways to lose weight, as documented by legions of dedicated doctors, nurses, dietitians, celebrities…the Gravy Train is long.

The Negative Calorie Diet: Lose Up to 10 Pounds in 10 Days with 10 All You Can Eat Foods

How To Lose 10 Pounds In A Week – The Ultimate 7 Day Weight Loss Kick Start

The Fast Metabolism Diet: Eat More Food and Lose More Weight

Bone Broth: Bone Broth Diet -Lose Up to 18 Pounds, Improve Your Health–and Your Wrinkles!–in Just 21 Days (Bone Broth Diet, Lose weight, fight aging, Beauty remedy, anti aging, health diet)

Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

I could go on and on, indefinitely, because by the time I got to the 20,089th title, there would be one hundred new ones issued to put on the list. Apparently the American appetite for sugar is only exceeded by it’s appetite for advice on how to lose weight.

Every single one of these diet books has one thing in common. They do not work for everyone. Some of them hardly work for anyone, long term. Any diet that wants you to count calories is a lock to fail you, long term. You might lose it in ten days, but go back to eating to satisfy your constant hunger and regain and add to your weight. That is how the body works. Losing weight is a not a physics experiment, you are not a simple machine. You are a complex system of interlocking systems. When this one goes down, this one goes down, that one goes up, the rest of them react to those changes. Cause and effect for weight gain are horribly complex, almost more complicated that the weather.

Nobody is helped by lying scientists in the pay of the food industry, nobody is helped by diet books that spread the “wisdom” contained in books based on this faulty, wishful science. Nobody is helped by well-meaning friends and doctors that claim to know that “this way works for everyone”. That is just not true. It is true to say that you will quit gaining weight when you die. That is verifiably true. It is demonstrably true, as well, that no diet plan works for every body. From the link at the top:

My mother, however, did not consider plumpness pleasant. This was the 1950s when her generation of Jews was desperately trying to fit into the American ideal of slimness. I’d inherited the short, big-hipped and thunder-thighed Eastern European body that she despised. Since she spent her life on diets, she assumed I should do the same. Dinners at home were strictly supervised by Mom, controlled for carb content. I could see her add the calories up in her head as I served myself. Meat and veggies were OK, but second helpings of potatoes were not allowed. Dessert was not on the menu. I longed for street pretzels and ice cream cones like the other kids got, but Mom nixed anything but low-calorie treats. French fries were off-limits. And despite all these restrictions, I shopped in the “chubby” department at the store. My childhood taught me that my body was the enemy, an enemy to be subdued at all costs. I went on diet after diet, but they all led to an equal but opposite binge. At 16 I got really skinny with the help of amphetamines, but luckily I hated the way they made me feel so I didn’t get addicted.

Heavy before everyone was heavy, counted calories for scores of years. Nothing worked. Heavy but healthy. For some people it is like this, it is complicated. I will not say YOU can lose weight by eating real food. I can say that you will stay healthy if you do so. Why you are heavier than me is not as easy as “you eat too much,” or even “you eat the wrong things”. I don’t know why my way does not work for you. Try this, it works for some, try that, it works for others. Don’t quit trying, but 2 out of 10 fat people are perfectly healthy being above the ‘normal’ weight. If you are having health problems because of it, your joints hurt, you are diabetic, you have NASH then you need to do something, you aren’t healthy. Giving up will lead you to a declining quality of life. You are not the woman above. If you are the person who just never could get a handle on weight, you still should quit eating processed foods. You should still quit drinking soda pop, that wont hurt you, even if it does not help you.

Posted in Health | Leave a comment

I get Busy

Posted on January 21, 2016 by dcarmack

Thats my excuse. I don’t write daily because I get busy. I am not that busy, though, really. Truth be told I feel like anything I write these days will be watery versions of things that I have already written. But today…

Now though, I have learned a new thing. While I still hold that all processed foods are unhealthy, despite the label claims, I have discovered that all carbs are not unhealthy. There is one in the bunch that is almost always bad for you, but the rest are neutral.

If you eat any food in it’s own skin it will not be harmful. Eat all the grapes you want, when grapes are ripe on the vine, and you will put on pounds in the autumn, right before you lose all the weight you gained because food is so hard to come by. That is nature’s plan for you. The fruit is on the vine right before the pickings get slim. You and your tribe may have to migrate south to find survival sustenance. Even if you get fat on the fruit of the vine you will not stay that way through the winter.

Modern man has a different problem…the fruit is always on the vine. The only saving grace to eating fruit for twelve months out of the year…if you eat the whole fruit then you will be eating the skin. Fruit skin contains fiber, and it contains two kinds of fiber. One kind is water-soluble. The other kind does not dissolve in water. If you eat whole foods you will get both kinds of fiber. If you take the fruit and run it through a juicer or smooth it out in a Vitamix then you are only really getting the soluble fiber–you have decimated the insoluble. The value of insoluble fiber to you is that once in your intestine it coats the walls, and acts like a strainer, this strainer catches the soluble fiber as though it were a hair net, which becomes a gelatinous barrier to the starches and sugars in your food. They must penetrate this layer in order to get out of your intestine. It increases the amount of time that the sugars and starches are in your intestine, where some of them will be consumed by your germs living in your gut. The fibers themselves are being slowly consumed, too. The net effect is that you do not get a rush of glucose and fructose arriving in your liver at the same time. The rate that they arrive is called the ‘flux’. A low flux of sugars arriving can be properly metabolized by your liver. A high flux will overload it, and then your body must release insulin, cortisol, and other enzymes to keep your blood sugars in the safe zone. This acts to shunt a great deal of the energy you eat as carbs to triglycerides and then to fat storage. If you eat whole foods, if you break them up with your teeth instead of a machine, then instead you feed your microbes, your liver can handle the stress and you stay thinner and healthier.

Anything that keeps down the rate of flux of sugars into your system is of benefit to you. If you eat bread, crackers, pasta, then there is nothing that can help. This starch is the solid form of glucose. It will immediately penetrate your intestine and go into your system. Glucose can be utilized by the muscles and organs directly, though. The liver gets its share, but it doesn’t cause the liver to overload like glucose’s evil twin, fructose. Fructose is half of table sugar and if a food tastes sweet, it contains fructose. Fructose cannot be used by any organ or muscle, it must be dealt with by the liver. The difference between eating a cracker and eating a cookie is the fructose. The cookie is doubly fattening because not only does fructose require being turned into fatty acids, it also acts to suppress the satiety signal and causes you to feel hunger very quickly. We all know this to be true without the benefit of science. The science helps, though. The science says that we should not be eating fructose at every meal, it is added to just about all processed foods currently.

Now I must repeat myself. Your best, quickest route to eating healthy is to stop eating processed foods. Quit drinking processed drinks, including fruit juices. Start eating singe ingredient foods, any one of them, including any real fruit, is better than the very healthiest processed foods that exist.

Posted in Health, Living | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Travel Day

Posted on January 7, 2016 by dcarmack

Instead of blogging, today I am traveling. See you tomorrow, dear readers.

Posted in Health | 1 Comment

It Doesn’t Mean What You Think

Posted on January 6, 2016 by dcarmack

The following quote does not mean what you will at first think that it means.

My first professional research position was in a basic science laboratory conducting experiments with mice. Soon after starting this work, I became amazed by the beauty and complexity of the systems that control body weight. If we fasted a mouse for a few days, it would, of course, lose weight. Then, when given free access to food, the animal ate voraciously until it had regained all of the lost weight— no more, no less. The opposite was also true. Force-feeding could temporarily make a mouse fat, but afterward it would avoid food until its weight dropped back to normal. Based on these and other experiments, it seemed as if an animal’s body knew precisely what weight it wanted to be, automatically altering food intake and metabolism to reach a sort of internal set point, like a thermostat that keeps a room at just the right temperature.

Ludwig, David (2016-01-05). Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently (p. 4). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

If you are over your desired weight you may read the passage above and think that I, and the author, are saying that you may as well get used to being fat, that there is nothing you can do about it. In fact, if you have ever tried to lose weight by changing your diet and exercise habits you may have already began to suspect that you cannot change your weight this way. All of your life you have heard that if you reduce the number of calories you consume, or if you increase the number of calories you burn, that by simple physics you will lose weight. This has never been true.

Within a week, I felt an astonishing improvement in energy and vitality, and a robust sense of well-being that lasted throughout the day— as if some previously unknown but important metabolic switch had finally been flipped on. Four months later, I had lost 20 pounds and needed a new wardrobe two pants sizes smaller. Most remarkably, all this had occurred with no hunger and no carbohydrate cravings. Previously, I would be famished by late afternoon, and usually staved off hunger in the lab with a four p.m. break for a carb-laden vanilla scone from the local bakery. But with my new diet, I felt full for hours after eating. For the first time in my life, I completely lost interest in bread, which used to accompany my every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And when it was time for a meal, I’d experience a pleasant, stimulating interest in food, entirely different from feeling starved and in desperate need of calories.

Ludwig, David (2016-01-05). Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently (p. 7). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Re-read that last passage…if this sounds like the experience that you get when you are trying to get control of your expanding waistline, then you are already doing it right. Share with us in the comments section below how you are doing it. However, if you are like 100% of the people that are on traditional ‘starvation’ diets, then you need to read on. If you are denying yourself any nutrient, if you are counting calories, if you are working an extra 30 minutes on the treadmill per day for the purpose of losing body fat then you are using outdated instructions on how to operate the human body.

Too Many Calories in the Body, But Too Few in the Right Place

This situation is similar to edema, a condition in which fluid leaks out of the blood vessels and accumulates elsewhere in the body (for example, in the legs), causing swelling. Despite having too much water in the body, people with edema may experience unquenchable thirst, because there’s not enough water in the blood, where it’s needed. Telling people with edema to drink less is no more effective than food restriction for weight loss, because it ignores the underlying cause. Insulin (and other influences, as we’ll discuss later) has programmed fat cells into calorie-storage overdrive. People chronically overeat because they’re trying to keep enough calories in the blood to feed the brain, compensating for those being siphoned off by overstimulated fat cells. But until the underlying problem is addressed, it’s a never-ending battle, and those extra calories cause even more weight gain. The fundamental problem is one of distribution: not too many calories, but too few in the right place. Though we think of obesity as a condition of excess, it’s actually a matter of starvation to the body!

Ludwig, David (2016-01-05). Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently (p. 44). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

It is possible to be obese, packing around more than enough stored energy to last for many months yet to feel famished after missing a small percentage of the normal daily calorie intake. There is a lot to take in to be able to understand why this is so, but it basically comes down to knowing what causes hunger. The same thing that stores fat causes you to feel hungry, insulin. The key to understanding why you can’t lose weight long term is to understand how to control insulin production in your body.

Basically, insulin is released into the blood by the pancreas if the glucose in the blood rises above the safe zone set point. Too much glucose in the blood is deadly, too little glucose in the blood can be deadly. Eating highly processed foods and sugars leads to an immediate spike in glucose, thus a corresponding spike in glucose-lowering insulin. An hour after eating a highly processed, carbohydrate rich meal the blood glucose level, AND the blood lipid (fatty acids–another potential source of energy for all body functions) will have fallen dangerously low. In some cases, if the body does not get more food at this time then there is a true metabolic crisis, sweating, shakes, as the brain releases cortisol and adrenaline to free liver fats for immediate brain energy needs. This happens despite a person being hundreds of pounds over weight, and it happens because the insulin levels went too high in response to a blood glucose spike.

The trick to getting control of metabolism is to get control of insulin production. How? Read more tomorrow….

 

Posted in Health, Living | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Detox in Style!

Posted on January 5, 2016 by kscarmack

 

Are you like the people that want to jump on the band wagon and detox their bodies in the new year? Detox from what, though:sugar, processed foods, or maybe everything you ate in 2015?

Here is my question to you. Is your internal body clear enough to take on this massive and aggressive detox you may be getting ready to take on?

Do you know what could happen to you? I will tell you what you are risking, but you can avoid the risk and combine a different diet with any or all of these three physical activities to ensure success.

Yoga + Detox Cleanse = Positive Outcome

Massage + Detox Cleanse = Positive Outcome

Energy healing session + Detox Cleanse = Positive Outcome

 

Understand HERXHEIMER- MENTALLY, PHYSICALLY, EMOTIONALLY

 

DETOXING ALONE WITHOUT SUPPORT can be a recipe for trouble. On occasion when detoxing, particularly during your first few detoxes, you may experience some symptoms, often referred to as a healing crisis (Herxheimer reaction). It is characterized by a temporary increase in symptoms during the cleansing or detoxification process. Reactions, when they occur, are almost always mild, but on rare occasions can be severe.

Read this before you start and come see me or any other Yoga teacher/ Massage Therapist or Energy Practitioner that are available at The Wellness Wheel.

There are three primary triggers for a detox reaction.

  1. Any large-scale die-off of bacteria can release a significant amount of toxins present within the actual bacteria. The stronger those toxins are and the more bacteria present to release them, the stronger the cleansing reaction. Colon cleansing, the use of probiotics, digestive enzymes, immune enhancers, and pathogen destroyers can all trigger bacterial die-off.
  2. Any detox that causes the organs of the body (particularly the liver, which is a storehouse of drug and poison residues) to purge their stored poisons and toxins, can trigger a cleansing reaction, as can the use of an herbal blood cleanser.
  3. Any program, such as fasting or the use of weight-loss herbs, that causes a rapid breakdown of fat cells (which are a storehouse for toxins) can be accompanied by a detox reaction.Any program, such as fasting or the use of weight-loss herbs, that causes a rapid breakdown of fat cells (which are a storehouse for toxins) can be accompanied by a detox reaction

The bottom line is that the body must go through an elimination process to achieve good health. There will be ups and downs. Symptoms, if they appear, are usually mild, but in some cases can be severe. Understand, the symptoms you experience are indicative of the cleansing, purifying process that is underway. Go as slowly as your body needs to so that your elimination is gradual and comfortable. Also, keep in mind that this is not an endurance contest. If symptoms become too severe, stop the detox and regroup. You can always restart the detox again at a later date.

ANY YOGA PRACTICE CAN BE HELPFUL TO THE BODY BEFORE YOU START A DETOX PROGRAM

Detoxing The Body’s Modes of Elimination

Our bodies are innately equipped with an ingenious and highly interactive system of organs and processes through which it has been naturally designed to mobilize and purge toxic materials from itself on an ongoing basis.

These are the body’s primary organs and pathways of elimination:
Colon
Liver
Kidneys
Lymphatics
Lungs
Skin
Blood

Each of these pathways is synergistically interconnected with and interdependent upon the others, and if they’re all functioning properly chances are we’ll enjoy good health.

However, if one or more of these pathways becomes sluggish, congested, overwhelmed, or is otherwise functioning less than optimally, this puts an unnatural burden on the others, which often results in unpleasant symptoms. For instance, if our liver is congested, especially during a cleanse, we may notice some skin eruptions like a rash or adult acne. Or if we’re experiencing constipation while doing a detox protocol, we may develop flu symptoms like swollen lymph glands, a sore throat, or perhaps a cough or lung congestion.

Massage Tension & Stress Reduction

Deep Tissue Massage can also reduce tension and stress, leading to lower blood pressure. According to a study conducted by the University of Maryland Medical Center, guests may experience a drop in blood pressure of up to 5.3 mm Hg following a deep massage session. LEARN MORE about Improving Blood Circulation

The pressure associated with deep massage improves lymphatic circulation and encourages drainage, which leads to an improved range of motion and more flexibility. Due to these benefits, this type of massage is often recommended for people who have recently undergone surgery. Consult your doctor before receiving massage therapy; there may be a period of healing that is necessary before receiving a massage is safe or appropriate. LEARN MORE about why it is important to Lower Your Heart Rate and Improved Flexibility

Energy- Emotional “Our emotions and thoughts are always accompanied by biochemical reactions in our bodies. Energy fields interact within an individual person, interact between one person and another, and between one person and the world in general. When we begin to appreciate ourselves as fields of energy with the ability to affect the quality of our own experience, we will be getting in touch with our innate ability to heal ourselves and create health every day of our lives.”

– Christiane Northrup, M.D.

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Health

What it is

Energy therapy is the gentle art of clearing cellular memory through the human energy field promoting health, balance and relaxation. Energy therapy is based on the concept of connection between the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realms of our lives found in many holistic healing methods. It uses focused healing energy to clear blocks that accumulate in the body hindering the natural flow of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. This healing focus promotes personal empowerment, self-healing and spiritual growth.

Why it Works

For many people, feelings of being overwhelmed, anxious, and tired become a way of life. Living this way can lead to health problems such as headache, digestive disorders, back and neck pain tension, and sleeplessness, among others. Additionally, situations such as conflict in relationships, both personal and professional, being unproductive and unhappy at work, can easily and consistently develop. These types of issues, which originate from physical, emotional, and mental stress often involve an unhealthy complex relationship between mind and body, are ideally suited for treatment with energy based bodywork and therapy.

Energy therapy acknowledges that negative life experiences create emotions such as anger, fear, stress, resentment, guilt and sadness and that these emotions become trapped in specific areas of the physical body. Trapped emotions, often called energy blocks, create physical, emotional and mental disharmony.

How it Works

During an energy session, suppressed emotions are released without the client having to remember the actual stressful event that caused the energy block. It is a safe, gentle, supportive method that can be used to release negative patterns of the past and help to empower and bring balance to your life. It is an extremely effective healing modality that releases stress, feelings of being overwhelmed, and negative emotions.

The Results

As a result, energy therapy…

  • Releases tension and everyday stress that makes you feel tired, burned out, and overwhelmed.
  • Creates a renewed sense of vitality.
  • Supports healing on all levels—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
  • Brings balance to your life, allowing you to enjoy a clear sense of purpose and direction.
  • Leaves you with a deeply relaxed and calm state of being.

Lighten up… Automatically

Learn to Lighten Up…automatically…with the Four A’s of Ease:

    1      Awareness: Starts with YOUR-SELF—your observation of your own emotion (energy-in-motion).

    2      Absorption: Invite neutral curiosity to the observation. Learning in the experience of your own emotions is about enhancing your personal understanding and loving compassion as you honor your experience and the outcomes of your journey.

    3      Acceptance: Embrace that feeling with compassionate understanding and you will automatically start to learn from it and integrate. Practice staying in “neutral.” It happens most easily by using or embracing the idea of no judgment.

    4      Appreciation: Life is the result of your appreciation of your process and journey. It is about gratitude as part of the love vibration; an attitude of gratitude for the perfection that actually exists in each moment.

Face it, embrace it, automatically will replace it with a higher vibration or an easier situation occurring because the energy has been transformed and enlightened to a higher understanding…this is our creational potential and process.

http://www.lightnessofbeing.com/energy-therapy.htm.

Posted in Health, Living | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Stupid Girls: The Kardashian Phenomenon & How It’s Ruining Modern Women

Posted on January 4, 2016 by dcarmack

Totally off topic. Totally a hoot. I agree completely. Reposted with permission.

Posted in Health | Leave a comment

Exercise and Weight Loss

Posted on January 4, 2016 by dcarmack

Today we are leading off with a film. This film concerns the way that the body functions, it explains that your body is not just a simple machine, where all of the fuel you are putting into it is either burned or stored. Increasing the work output of this machine does not automatically increase the need for fuel of the machine.

As a complex machine your body can actually lower the rate at which some of your systems consume stored energy. It actually raises and lowers your metabolism based on the needs of the rest of the system. When you work hard you don’t automatically need energy stores (fats), your metabolism slows down in other areas (digestion, sex organs, lymphatic) so that the overall body requirements do no spike and trough throughout the day.

Your feeling of being energetic is controlled by this system. It is known that if you are overweight, or that for some reason your body is shunting large amounts of the energy you eat to stored fats, you will be lethargic. Your lethargy is a symptom of your body thinking that you should be storing energy instead of expending it. Lethargy is a symptom not a cause of weight gain.

Posted in Health, Living | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Lost Forever…

Posted on January 2, 2016 by dcarmack

Make 2016 the year that you lost all that weight and never found it again.

It is possible, quite likely in fact, that the most never-achieved New Year’s Resolution you have repeatedly made is that you will lose weight and not regain it for the year. The reason that the diet never worked, you have always considered was because of your own personal failing. In your opinion if you had been more religious in your calorie cutting, if you had been more consistent in your trips to the gym, if you had only stuck with it all a little longer, you would have been able to get it off and keep it off from then until now. Yet, here you are, making this resolution again.

Albert Einstein is widely credited with saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results”.  It really doesn’t matter that there’s absolutely no evidence that Einstein actually made this statement; it’s still a great quote!  Likewise, it really doesn’t matter that whoever did coin this insightful genius didn’t derive their inspiration from a description of Pharma Marketing strategy and tactics; but they certainly could have done!  – By Calum Graham

See more at: http://ideapharma.com/announcements/the-definition-of-insanity-is-doing-the-same-thing-over-and-over-again-but-expecting-different-resul#sthash.79R6qPMZ.dpuf

It’s not crazy to try the same thing over and over again. You can’t look thirty seconds in the diet book section (it’s the biggest section) at Barnes and Noble’s Booksellers to find this advice. It’s packaged one thousand different ways, each emphasizing a different part of the same three part strategy. 1. Eat Less. 2. Exercise more. 3. Cut out fats.

Now that you have found this blog though, you are about to take a different approach. I am not going to tell you any of those three things, not one of them. None of those things are what you are doing wrong that makes your weight loss plans crash and burn every year.

Here is a diet that actually works.

If you hate clicking links I will tell you what it says. Quit eating carbs.

You have never gained weight because you ate fats of any kind. Fats do not make you fat, the biochemistry is all wrong for that to be true.

You never gained weight because you didn’t work enough or sat around too much. You’re not a simple machine, a set of scales that has food on one arm and work on the other, where any time one side exceeds the other the scales move. Eating less makes you hungry, working more makes you hungry. That makes trying to lose weight this way absolute torture. You fight your natural instincts every moment that you do not eat to satisfy your hunger. Hunger is the enemy. Eating carbs makes you hungry. Just try to eat a bowl of pasta or a bowl of rice and set a stop watch. Stop it when you feel the first hunger pang. It will have not passed an hour, no matter if you ate an entire pound of pasta. This diet, starvation, is torture for every hour you are on it. It doesn’t work because your body works against it.

If you quit eating processed foods you will virtually cut out every bad thing you are eating, that is contributing to your insane weight gain-loss yo-yo. You will instantly stop eating breads, crackers, cookies, cakes, pastas, soda, juice, syrup, pancakes, waffles, cereal, oatmeal, yogurt, cooking oil (yes this is a highly processed food), margarine, candy, any other labeled food. It doesn’t matter if the label claims heart health, gluten freeness, low calorie, low fat, vitamin filled–if it has a label it is off the diet.

Unknown-1.jpeg

If you quit eating processed foods you will stop eating every preservative that is know to cause digestive problems. It may make your irritable bowel syndrome take the year off. It may make your MS go into remission, it may make your joint pain go away. Which food additive causes all of these horrible things? Nobody knows, and nobody is looking. Want to do a test on yourself for yourself? Quit eating processed foods, come back here in three months and share in the comments that what I have said is totally true. Some food additive is causing your great medical headaches, you don’t know which one, but by cutting them all out of your life you proved that it is true for you. What will it hurt to try?

Robert Lustig is a pediatrician. He has written a book documenting the known science behind why our children are fatter and sicker than ever before. Here is the book,

Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease

If you aren’t a reader let me tell you what it says. Kids don’t pick their own foods, they eat what their parents and schools provide for them eat. They are getting way fatter and sicker than at any time in history. Science knows why that is true, they eat too much processed food. Giving a kid processed fruit juice is not healthier than giving them a Coke with breakfast. There are equal amounts of sugars in both. Give them oranges instead and suddenly their health and weight improve. Read his book and find out that there is such a thing as a good carbohydrate, it is packed just as nature intended, in it’s own skin. Eat it that way and you will not gain weight.

Quit eating processed foods and instead eat real meats, real fats (butter, lard, tallow from beef). The fats you eat are good for you, if they are produced by nature in the years that it takes to make healthful fats. I take the organ fat from a slaughtered pig, slowly heat it in the crock put, and ladle off several quarts of the prettiest, whitest lard you have ever seen. It smells like nothing, tastes like nothing, but adds so much to any dish that you cook it in or with. It never goes bad, doesn’t need refrigeration, and can be reused if strained with a small enough screen (I use a reusable coffee filter). I deep fry in tallow that I make from beef fat in the same way. It can get all the way over 375 to deep fry foods and is not chemically changed into something dangerous (trans fats) in the process. It can be reused over and over–just like the fast foods used to do back when the fries were amazing. Shortening is a processed food. Vegetable oil is a processed food. Margarine is a processed food. Use what you have on hand and never buy it again. Thank me later.

Here is Lustig again in an interview on NPR about our food delivery system and the craziness of trying to lose the way we currently do.

 

Posted in Health | 1 Comment