A New Way to End Your Diet War

OK..... I know what you are thinking"'another diet book" but stop! It's not just another diet book. This book is about transformation..... about making a shift that can change your life in many areas. How do I know? Because this book has been instrumental in helping me overcome my lifelong war with my body and food. Discovering this book was a huge turning point for me on my journey to health and vitality. My weight loss to date is 50 pounds and counting. I have a ways to go but it has never been easier and this book is been a huge help to me. I read from it almost every day just to remind myself of where I am.

According to Martha Beck, life coach and monthly columnist for O, The Oprah Magazine there are "science-based thought and behavior strategies that will enable you to stay on a healthy eating program forever."

In her book The Four Day Win: End Your Diet War and Achieve Thinner Peace she says, "Everyone knows how to lose weight; eat less, move more. But though they know what to do millions of dieters don't do what they know. Why not? Because they don't understand the brain-body dynamics of weight loss. Now, cutting edge research has revealed that millions of overweight dieters are programming themselves to get fatter. These unlucky individuals are following typical weight-loss programs and are being trained to become thinner versions of themselves, like caterpillars becoming thinner caterpillars. In The Four-Day Win, Harvard-trained Martha Beck, PhD, reverses this trend and teaches dieters to get lean from the brain outward. Instead of becoming thinner caterpillars, those who follow "The Four-Day" Win will metamorphose into butterflies, with entirely new bodies.... for good."

Other books by Martha Beck:

Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

Steering by Starlight: The Science and Magic of Finding Your Destiny 

Fitness for Older Adults

As baby boomers are reaching retirement, more and more, they are looking for ways to get fit. Older adults across the country are increasing their physical activity in new ways. According to Physical Activity and Health, A Report of the Surgeon General, "Older adults can obtain significant health benefits with a moderate amount of physical activity." Benefits include reducing risk of heart disease, improving stamina and muscle strength, and a lowering the chance of falling and fracturing bones. Additionally, physical activity can result in improvements in mood and a sense of well-being. Senior living communities are leading the way, offering an array of exercise and health programs that encourage residents to enhance their physical fitness.

One group of luxury retirement communities across the country offers fitness programs for all levels. From aquacise classes to tai chi, residents of Classic Residence by Hyatt communities are encouraged to engage in physical activity.

With the influx of new exercise and diet recommendations, older adults are taking advantage of new services and educational opportunities. Many residents have shown great interest in tai chi, a martial arts form that enhances balance and body awareness through slow and precise body movements. Tai chi significantly reduces the risk of falls among older adults by nearly 50 percent, according to a study reported in the Journal of American Medical Association by the National Institute on Aging.

"Members of the group have noted several health benefits: increased muscular strength, improved balance, better memory, more manageable hypertension control, and a general feeling of well-being," said resident Beatrice Rose, M.D., M.P.H.

A personalized, three-day-a-week resistance training program helped resident Fred Donnelly to lower his body fat composition from 21 to 10 percent in one year. "The fitness program has enabled me to maintain my weight and my good health," Donnelly noted.

Diet is another essential aspect of overall health. For many older adults, food just isn't as enjoyable as it once was. The usual methods of enhancing flavors, such as adding salt and butter, are off limits for those on restricted diets.

To offer residents great-tasting and healthy food, the luxury retirement company has partnered with Dr. Susan Schiffman from the Taste and Smell Lab at Duke University to develop a natural way to enhance the flavor of food. The result is a breakthrough in cooking technique, Classically Pleasing Cuisine®, which uses all-natural ingredients to enhance food's aroma, flavor and tenderness with no added salt.

With a combination of good exercise, healthy eating habits and routine health screenings, older adults are minimizing their risk for illness and improving their overall health. This new generation of aging baby boomers wants the better quality of life that fitness brings.

"As a culture, we have confused velocity with accomplishment". We "run" ourselves ragged. Convinced that if we just do more and go faster we will succeed, we often lose the pulse of our own lives. We can find it again by slowing down and walking."

-- Julia Cameron from "The Vein of Gold"


Time pressure starts to subside when we shift to the heart to find quality of mood and ease. It's our unmanaged emotions that turn time into an opponent and make life a rat race. Managing time with the heart is the ultimate time management tool.
-- Doc Childre ~ HeartMath

The Intelligent Heart

This is an amazing book..... life changing
According to the authors of "The Intelligent Heart", David & Bruce McArthur

"The laws of love increase happiness, heal sorrow and regret, and bond people in healthy, life-enhancing relationships. Friends, lovers, parents, children, co-workers, and strangers will all be affected by your use of these simple yet powerful laws of love.

A simple five-step process is all it takes to change your heart. Scientific evidence from the HeartMath Institutes electrophysiology lab reveals that your EKG (heart rhythm) physically changes as you apply these simple laws. Happiness and health are within your reach each day, in any situation.

Free yourself of those heart-matters that age you. Whether a parent, spouse, or friend, you can be young-at-heart and happy in life."


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The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast

December 15, 2010, 12:01 am
Phys Ed: The Benefits of Exercising Before Breakfast
By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

The holiday season brings many joys and, unfortunately, many countervailing dietary pitfalls. Even the fittest and most disciplined of us can succumb, indulging in more fat and calories than at any other time of the year. The health consequences, if the behavior is unchecked, can be swift and worrying. A recent study by scientists in Australia found that after only three days, an extremely high-fat, high-calorie diet can lead to increased blood sugar and insulin resistance, potentially increasing the risk for Type 2 diabetes. Waistlines also can expand at this time of year, prompting self-recrimination and unrealistic New Year’s resolutions.

But a new study published in The Journal of Physiology suggests a more reliable and far simpler response. Run or bicycle before breakfast. Exercising in the morning, before eating, the study results show, seems to significantly lessen the ill effects of holiday Bacchanalias.

For the study, researchers in Belgium recruited 28 healthy, active young men and began stuffing them with a truly lousy diet, composed of 50 percent fat and 30 percent more calories, overall, than the men had been consuming. Some of the men agreed not to exercise during the experiment. The rest were assigned to one of two exercise groups. The groups’ regimens were identical and exhausting. The men worked out four times a week in the mornings, running and cycling at a strenuous intensity. Two of the sessions lasted 90 minutes, the others, an hour. All of the workouts were supervised, so the energy expenditure of the two groups was identical.

Their early-morning routines, however, were not. One of the groups ate a hefty, carbohydrate-rich breakfast before exercising and continued to ingest carbohydrates, in the form of something like a sports drink, throughout their workouts. The second group worked out without eating first and drank only water during the training. They made up for their abstinence with breakfast later that morning, comparable in calories to the other group’s trencherman portions.

The experiment lasted for six weeks. At the end, the nonexercising group was, to no one’s surprise, super-sized, having packed on an average of more than six pounds. They had also developed insulin resistance — their muscles were no longer responding well to insulin and weren’t pulling sugar (or, more technically, glucose) out of the bloodstream efficiently — and they had begun storing extra fat within and between their muscle cells. Both insulin resistance and fat-marbled muscles are metabolically unhealthy conditions that can be precursors of diabetes.

The men who ate breakfast before exercising gained weight, too, although only about half as much as the control group. Like those sedentary big eaters, however, they had become more insulin-resistant and were storing a greater amount of fat in their muscles.

Only the group that exercised before breakfast gained almost no weight and showed no signs of insulin resistance. They also burned the fat they were taking in more efficiently. “Our current data,” the study’s authors wrote, “indicate that exercise training in the fasted state is more effective than exercise in the carbohydrate-fed state to stimulate glucose tolerance despite a hypercaloric high-fat diet.”

Just how exercising before breakfast blunts the deleterious effects of overindulging is not completely understood, although this study points toward several intriguing explanations. For one, as has been known for some time, exercising in a fasted state (usually possible only before breakfast), coaxes the body to burn a greater percentage of fat for fuel during vigorous exercise, instead of relying primarily on carbohydrates. When you burn fat, you obviously don’t store it in your muscles. In “our study, only the fasted group demonstrated beneficial metabolic adaptations, which eventually may enhance oxidative fatty acid turnover,” said Peter Hespel, Ph.D., a professor in the Research Center for Exercise and Health at Catholic University Leuven in Belgium and senior author of the study.

At the same time, the fasting group showed increased levels of a muscle protein that “is responsible for insulin-stimulated glucose transport in muscle and thus plays a pivotal role in regulation of insulin sensitivity,” Dr Hespel said.

In other words, working out before breakfast directly combated the two most detrimental effects of eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet. It also helped the men avoid gaining weight.

There are caveats, of course. Exercising on an empty stomach is unlikely to improve your performance during that workout. Carbohydrates are easier for working muscles to access and burn for energy than fat, which is why athletes typically eat a high-carbohydrate diet. The researchers also don’t know whether the same benefits will accrue if you exercise at a more leisurely pace and for less time than in this study, although, according to Leonie Heilbronn, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has extensively studied the effects of high-fat diets and wrote a commentary about the Belgian study, “I would predict low intensity is better than nothing.”

So, unpleasant as the prospect may be, set your alarm after the next Christmas party to wake you early enough that you can run before sitting down to breakfast. “I would recommend this,” Dr. Heilbronn concluded, “as a way of combating Christmas” and those insidiously delectable cookies.

Food Journals Double Weight Loss

It's All About Accountability and Awareness
Miranda HittiWebMD Health News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD

July 8, 2008 -- Keeping a food diary may be a key to losing extra weight, a new study shows.
The study, published in the August edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, included 1,685 overweight or obese U.S. adults aged 25 and older.

For six months, they kept food diaries and were encouraged to eat a healthy diet and be physically active. They also met weekly in groups to share their food diaries and brush up on skills like how to judge portion size.

After six months, participants had shed almost 13 pounds, on average. The most powerful predictor of their weight loss was how many days per week they kept their food diary, says Victor Stevens, PhD, senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore.

Those who kept food records six days a week -- jotting down everything they ate and drank on those days -- lost about twice as much weight as those who kept food records one day a week or less, Stevens tells WebMD.

Why Food Diaries Work

"I think the most powerful part is accountability and the next most powerful part is increasing awareness of where those extra calories are coming from," says Stevens.

Showing your food diary to someone else is even better, in terms of accountability; that's what participants in Stevens' study did. "You're accountable to yourself when you're writing it down and you're accountable to other people who are looking at your food record," says Stevens.

Food diaries can also help target areas for improvement. For instance, Stevens says a food diary might make someone realize that he or she is eating 1,000 calories at lunch and set a goal to trim lunches.

5 Tips for Keeping a Food Diary

Stevens offers this advice for keeping a food diary:

Write as you go. Don't wait until the end of the day to record what you ate and drank. "We recommend they write it down as soon as they can after they eat," says Stevens.

Focus on portion size. Practice at home with measuring cups, measuring spoons, or food scales. And be aware that people tend to underestimate how much food they're served.

Use whatever type of food diary works for you. It doesn't matter whether you use scrap paper, a personal digital assistant (PDA), or a notebook. What matters is that you use it, says Stevens.

Don't skip your indulgent days. "We encourage people to keep records especially on days when they're tempted to eat," says Stevens. "What gets measured tends to get changed."

Cook at home. You'll have more control over what you consume, and you know what that food contains, and how much of it you're eating. That makes for a more detailed entry in your food diary.

Also, remember that even modest weight loss -- even if it doesn't bring you down to your ideal weight -- may have health benefits, says Stevens.

Slow and Steady

Here is something to think about........
According to Garbrielle Reece, who writes for Yahoo Health, you don't have to make the change all at once.

Gabrielle says, "I love it when people wake up one day and say, "That's it. No sugar, pasta, bread, alcohol. I'm going to work out 18 hours a week, and no more fun."

I wonder if it occurs to them that this approach may be one of the reasons they don't make it to the second week. Granted, for a small percentage of individuals out there, this works. However, for the rest of us flesh and blood humans, change is difficult.How about we approach the change with a slow and steady strategy?

1. Write down what changes you want to make in your day-to-day lifestyle.

2. Make a list of foods that you can't live without and foods that you are willing to give up.

3. Figure out what forms of exercise are attractive to you, that you relate to, and that you can see yourself participating in on a regular basis.

4. Create some goals.

• lose weight
• have more energy
• exercise 3-4 times a week
• go out and do something fun, just for you, once a week
• read more
• laugh with your family
• be more spontaneous
• take that risk you have been contemplating

OK, you get my point. These are just ideas, but make it your own list.

After you've written all of this information down, start to create your strategy. If you can't live without pasta, then start slow. Don't go cold turkey but try to eat it less often. If you eat it three times a week, then make a vow to only eat it once. You could even begin by "substituting" healthier alternatives (e.g., rice pasta). If you can't live without five diet sodas a day, switch to an unsweetened tea and only have one soda a day.

Are you sedentary right now? Well don't start hitting the gym 5 days a week and kill yourself. Begin with walking and doing little things at home with light weights, and then start heading to the gym. Start by taking a few classes and lifting 2 times a week. You don't need to begin by going 2 hours a day -- start with 30 minutes.

How does that sound? I know you can make the changes. Just have a real plan to support you while going through the process. I like the idea of keeping a journal and writing it all down.

If you are up for it, you could even create a calendar to keep track of all of the changes -- what activities you're doing, what foods you are or aren't eating. This way, the change will not only become obvious in you, but you'll be able to track how far you've come.

Hummmmmmmm........... this is definitely something to consider.