Embracing Health Radio Show #63 – Evaluating the Modern-Day Workplace; Cell Phones and Cancer; Exercise Eases Anxiety Disorders; How Food Companies Trick You Part I

Top of the morning to everyone!  Happy Monday and hope everyone enjoyed the weekend as this was the last weekend before the official start of  summer, and it’s been toasty already here in north Georgia.

A couple of things here for this week’s radio show — I talk about our modern day workplace and how researchers are looking into part of the equation to weight maintenance from the energy expenditure  side of things, also known more commonly as calorie burn.  Most of us think immediately to exercise, but this recent research report looked at forms of activity that have nothing to do with formal exercise.  Not to long ago, we had to move alot more as part of our daily lives — whether we farmed or worked in industrial settings or other forms of manual labor.  Now, most people work at desks like myself, and we have to rethink the modern day workplace to make up for this lack of  activity.   You may not think it adds to much, but  the body to expend many more calories that over months can add up to quite a bit, about 120 to 140 calories per day over weeks and months is alot.  The foods that we eat can then be more used for energy rather than stored.  I present this to simply add to your understanding of the whole issue that presents itself to us today regarding body composition.  It’s important to know the metabolic/hormonal complications as well as the lifestyle/calorie imbalances that have occurred too.

Next, some discussion on resistance training and how it helps generalized anxiety disorders, much more than aerobic exercise.  There’s something about stressing your body appropriately and how that affects your whole outlook and mood.  The take away is to include short bouts of some form of intense exercise into your fitness program.

Then we get into a recent World Health Organization warning about cell phones and their potential risk in cancer.  They have put cell phone radiation in the same category as dry cleaning chemicals and pesticides.  That’s something you need to know and consider for your overall health.

A recent poultry drug was pulled from the market – Roxarsone – because of its arsenic content.  From this point, I talk about chemicals in our food and our environment and give you some perspectives on minimizing risk factors for disease by chemical accumulation.

Finally, part I in a series of “How Food Companies Trick You Into Thinking that Junk Food is Healthy” —– you won’t want to miss this one from the desk of Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, MD – founder and medical director of the Bariatric Health Institute in Ottawa, Canada.

Enjoy, and have a great week!   

(click here =>) In the News: Less Active at Work, Americans Have Packed on More Pounds: What the Modern Day Workplace Should Look Like; Resistance Training Improves Generalized Anxiety Disorder; Cell Phone Radiation May Cause Cancer, Advisory Panel Says; Poultry Drug to Be Pulled From Market Due to Arsenic Concern; How Food Companies Trick You into Thinking Junk Food is Healthy

Thinking of Spring

The weather here in the North Georgia Mountain area is challenging this time of year isn’t it? It is officially spring time, trees and flowers are blooming and the allergies have kicked in, yet we still have to layer our clothes or just end up inappropriately dressed for the weather on any given day.

I speak of spring because traditionally this time of year is when we all tend to break out the short sleeved shirts, shorts, and yes……the dreaded bathing suits. It is my job to help others to not only get ready for this time of year, physically and mentally but to learn to look forward to spring rather than dread it’s impending arrival. No, we can’t hide under our layers all year, unless of course we move to Alaska.

Anyone in their 40’s and above can attest that it takes much more commitment and diligence than it used to in our 20’s and 30’s, to have what would be a pleasant experience when we shed our layers  of clothing. This process should not be a similar situation to cramming for a final exam. I find that so many of us wait until March to decide to develop a fitness and nutritional plan in order to shed some excess weight. Though, it’s better late than never, I believe that for the long term health of the body, we must be more proactive and learn to develop new and lasting lifestyle habits and have them remain year round.

Here are a few tips on shedding the fat for Spring 2011:

• Find a friend or group of like-minded individuals who are also looking to live healthier lifestyles.
• Take the time each week to plan out your meals; it helps cut grocery costs as well.
• Minimize your intake of process food and complex carbohydrates; eat more protein, vegetables and fruit.
• Start moving; find a group class, personal trainer or a buddy who will hold you accountable. Start with 30 minutes 3 x week minimum.

Join us here on April 7^th at The Spa on Green Street for our “Shed the Fat” Seminar at 6pm. We will discuss the details and starting points to helping you change the way your live and transform your body permanently!!! Sign up soon as space is very limited. Call us today 678.450.1570

Fitness meets Skin Care

Ricardo and I are so excited to hold our second Fitness in the Round meeting of the year this Tuesday night at 6:00pm at The Spa on Green Street. We are going to have an exciting evening centered on anti-aging skin care through nutrition and our top Spa line of skin care products, Anakiri. This will be an interactive event where one of our estheticians will take you through an anti-aging and skin care routine, utilizing Anakiri products as well as our new skin care tool, the renowned Clairsonic, a sonic facial cleansing device. Ricardo will finish the evening discussing the importance of nutrition in skin health and offer tips on nutrients to help fight the aging process.

Our goal this year is to continue to offer quality educational opportunities each month, giving our clients and community as many tools as possible to live long optimal lives. We will be holding fun, interactive events that will include massage, skin care, exercise and nutrition, in an effort to inspire and to promote new perspectives on wellness. We understand at The Body Sanctuary Inc. and The Spa on Green Street that as we age we have to often change our habits and how we care for our minds and bodies; this will often create a plateau as we look to find the right rhythms for each decade of our life. Take the time today to step back and look at your life and assess your needs, please feel free to bring your questions and concerns to us via our blog, our events or our individual services at The Spa on Green Street, where people are eager to find new paths to health.  Have a wonderful week and please give us a call if you would like to attend our Tuesday night event at 6pm, as space is  limited. 678.450.1570

Exercise and Nutrient Timing

One issue that always comes up with folks looking to advance their health and fitness is what and how to eat to best fuel their workouts.  This becomes more important the farther along you are with respect to your goals, and it can be the deciding factor whether or not you successfully move past a plateau.   For example, how to lose those last 10 pounds that seem to just not budge, or perhaps how to increase your cardio by 15 more minutes or maybe how to move a bit higher in your repetition range or weight selection in your lunges.  Proper nutrition and some healthy/safe effort in your exercise are the keys to successfully advancing in your fitness goals.  In this context, food serves to both fuel your activities and recover from your activities.  Recovery is based on the fact that a sufficient amount of time for rest is required to make the muscle stronger, coupled with the nutritional restoration of depleted energy stores.

As you know, exercise takes energy to perform, and we can measure the intensity of the exercise depending on the effort required to perform it.  A leisurely walk is of far less intensity than the same amount of time given to resistance exercise.  Overall effort exerted mainly defines exercise intensity.  If you are interested in receiving the benefits of having good, solid lean muscle mass – muscle tone, good body shape, stronger bones, greater strength, even greater self-confidence, then this is where some time needs to be dedicated to building up your body.  As little as 15-30 minutes, 2-3x per week can make all the difference in the world.   Now, I don’t mean to imply bodybuilding as it is known today, but developing a lifestyle of what used to be known in the 19^th century as physical culture (click), where health and strength training were seen as integral to developing a well-rounded individual.  This involved numerous platforms of physique enhancement, from sports, dancing and folk games all the way to gymnastics, calisthenics and other structured programs.  Yoga, pilates, resistance bands all fit in to this description. 

The building up of your body requires a greater level of intensity than what your body has currently grown accustomed to.  This is the supreme law of adaption where the body will constantly adapt to achieve balance and stability in response to a changing environment.  If your body senses it is having to do things it has never done before, it is forced to adapt.  Thinking about it this way further, the body’s perfect adaption to a sedentary lifestyle coupled with caloric excess is to become overweight and even obese.  If it was not for the body’s ability to create fat tissue, we would die rather quickly because all this extra fuel would choke our metabolic engines.  On the same token, beginning an exercise program is a change in your body’s environment right?  And your body will adapt to that level greater intensity by losing weight (if your diet stays the same) and/or gaining strength and maybe even putting on some muscle.  After the adaptation occurs, it levels out once again and then you are forced to change your diet and/or exercise to keep your body changing.

Many training programs entice you into thinking you have to ‘confuse’ your muscles every workout to resist this adaptation response.   While you could take this route, in my opinion this adds unnecessary stress to your program by having to learn and think about new movement patterns which you have not developed the skill to do properly and this can and does lead to greater injury.  For the average individual, there are far more simpler and effective ways to avoid adaptive plateaus, which brings me back to my first point –  increasing intensity.

At the Body Sanctuary(click), we focus more on gradually increasing intensity in people’s workouts while sticking to basic, fundamental movement patterns which then work to provide a functional carryover to people’s lives.  The advantage to this is that your brain, through constant repetition, learns and locks in proper movement patterns.   This allows you to do simple things in life, safely and  effectively, such as walking up stairs and inclines, bending down and picking up grocery bags from the ground, lifting bags overhead in the airplane compartments, etc……things most of us end up not being able to do as we age.  The intensity is increased in our exercise programs by doing more work in a given amount of time (more repetitions and/or less rest between sets) and/or greater resistance in the movement, and/or moving the body through a greater range of motion.  All this requires more effort, right?  More effort even equates to greater caloric burn for those of you interested in weight loss.

Now, back to the main topic -  how to eat to maximize the benefit of exercise!  Understand this:  the body’s preferred fuel source for low intensity activities is fat, and for higher intensity activities is glucose.  Simply put, it is best for your health to reduce the amount of starchy, glucose-rich carbohydrate in the diet if your lifestyle and exercise plan does not call for high effort activity.  Conversely, if your lifestyle and exercise program does call for greater effort, it is just fine to fuel your exercise sessions with some starchy carbohydrate both before and after your workout and then minimizing it during other times.  It does not have to be a large amount either, but your body can utilize this starch/glucose much better timing it around your workout.  More and more scientific evidence is pointing out the dangers of having too much carbohydrate in the diet as it can prolong elevated circulating blood sugars.  I use this approach in clinical practice when dealing with many a health disorder.

So, the specifics:

• For low intensity activities and beginner programs, reduce starchy carbohydrates (grains, pasta, potatoes, fruit, beans) and eat low starch carbohydrates (green leafy vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, summer squash, zucchini )—- as well as proteins (beef, chicken, fish, eggs, turkey, lamb) and healthy fats (avocadoes, olive oil, coconut oil, macadamia nuts, almonds).  Look at my easy time veggie recipe (click) for ideas on cooking tasty vegetables.
  • No need to eat right before these activities due to their low intensity (though it won’t hurt you either and it may help for fat loss)
• For higher intensity activities, you can add more of the above mentioned starchy carbohydrates.  Make sure though there is enough protein though, as you will need the protein to help repair muscular damage and promote muscle protein synthesis if you are looking to gain some lean muscle mass.
  • If you are eating whole food meals, eat no closer than 1 hour before your exercise, preferably 90 min. to 2 hours so that you do not become nauseous while you exercise with good effort
  • If you are rushed and are hitting the gym right after work and you have not eaten since lunch, then it is advisable to drink a quick digesting protein drink in water, with a quick digesting carbohydrate like a piece of fruit
  • Perform your exercise, then have a whole food meal shortly afterwards.  This is where you can splurge a bit if it fits your program, to have some more sweets and treats when the special occasion comes around.  As Teryl says, “you gotta pay the lady!” meaning exercise to merit the planned indulgence in these treats.

 These are some general starting points supported by the scientific literature, and we always suggest to work with your doctor and/or health practitioner to find the right program for you.

Behaviors, Actions and the Wisdom of Austin Powers

Oftentimes when it comes to achieving some desired outcome in our lives, we are forced to break up common routines that we have set up for ourselves in our daily living simply due to the fact that those routines are the things we do that lead to the person we are today.  If we want something different, if we want to be someone different, then we simply have to do things differently to obtain that desired goal.  Thus, the interplay between our actions and our behaviors becomes an extremely critical component in achieving success. 

In reading through an interesting book on psychology, Control Theory, by renowned psychiatrist Dr. William Glasser, I came across an interesting perspective on the matter of behavior.  He mentions that all behavior is made up of three components: what we do, what we think, and what we feel.  He goes on to say that these elements actually come from inside of us and are not, as most people believe, an automatic response to things and people around us.  Isn’t it true that we tend to justify our actions and behaviors based on what’s happening around us?  “Well, if it wasn’t for so and so, or if wasn’t because of this, I’d already be 10 pounds lighter!”  Not so says Dr. Glasser,  His perspective is more about how our thoughts, feelings and actions are a part of our internal programming, where brain chemistry and physiology meet our psychology.  A lot has been written in this field, and especially in the field of appetite, body weight regulation and food intake where neurochemistry plays a huge role.  Neurochemistry is the study of the complex array of chemical messengers  by which the brain communicates with the rest of the body.

Eating, feeling good, appetite and overeating behavior can all be traced to internal programming and neurochemistry.  It is hard to control our behavior if we are not consistently mindful of our choices and simply just let the old ‘lizard brain’ unconsciously dominate our actions, because it appears that we are almost hardwired to get fat and put on weight as recent scientific evidence supports this being part of a built in survival strategy to deal with times of scarcity.  This of course leads to the worst possible scenario for all of us – lack of control in a never ending calorie-rich environment!  

The lesson here is that your body (lizard brain) doesn’t always want what you (rational brain) — conscious, analytical, rational you — want to happen. If you want to make changes, you have to realize this and not only fight for physical changes, but work to change your mental frame of reference as well. Your psychology is part of your physiology.  (Thanks Matt!)

So, what to do? We have to apply something of a pattern interrupt.

For starters, it’s always helpful to have a bit of honest reflection.  If you get off track, do you think and feel that other people or other circumstances are causing you to veer off course, to cause you to behave in a way that isn’t in line with your goals?  That if it wasn’t for that person or that particular situation at work, you’d easily do the right thing, eat the right foods, do your workout?  Well if you’ve seen any of the Austin Power’s movies, think of him simply telling you, “Oh, behave!” 

Watch for those tendencies, because they will haunt you and allow you to rationalize your way out of taking responsibility for your actions.  Not good, as you’ll end up in a mental tail-spin where it becomes very hard to recover from that and get yourself back on track.  Days and weeks can be completely lost, and if you are in the midst of developing healthy habits, then you have lost momentum and greater effort will be required. 

One of the best methods to continue this pattern interrupt and to get our behaviors and actions to line up constructively is to undergo a simple process of goal setting.  I’d like to share with you a step by step plan that I have found to be helpful in this regard, and this will become more necessary if the end goal requires long-term consistency and effort, such as the noble aspirations of greater health, fitness and improved body composition.  Stay tuned for my next post as I will describe this plan in greater detail. 

Are there challenges you are going to face in achieving these goals?  You better believe it, so let’s see how best we can encourage positivity in what we think, feel and do.  I’d love to hear from you and learn what you have done to encourage positivity!