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.

Dialing It In: Nutrition and Exercise for Weight Loss

In the last seminar I gave a few weeks back, Secrets to Fat Loss, I mentioned an important concept that I feel merits a bit more discussion in our efforts to lose weight.  I think we all can agree that the simpler the program, without sacrificing practical effectiveness, is the way to go.  So what if there are complicated methods that can allow you to burn 4-5 pounds of fat per week – they are out there and I may talk about them in future posts, but you have to configure your diet and your exercise just so that for most people, the complexity of the program makes it unsustainable for the long term.  It requires a level of obsessive discipline for them to work, and there is a tendency for people to develop a condition called ‘orthorexia nervosa’, a type of eating disorder coined by Dr. Steven Bratman, which is characterized as an unhealthy preoccupation with eating healthy food and avoiding anything artificial or ‘toxic’.  You don’t want to go there; it is a slippery slope and I counsel everyone to keep their diet and fitness in perspective.  Many a top athlete have suffered serious drawbacks as a result of placing these unreasonable demands upon their bodies.

Fat loss should be looked at in much more sensible ways.  Just as it takes time for a significant amount of fat to develop in your body — it doesn’t happen overnight or even just in a few short weeks — it takes times to get it off.  For women ½ lb. to 1 lb. of fat loss per week is normal, or even every 2 weeks given our schedules, holidays, travel, etc.  Men can reasonably expect slightly quicker results, roughly double that amount, if things are working right.

One of the guiding principles of weight loss is in the regulation of your food intake relative to the energy your body expends.  It gets much more involved than that when you factor in metabolic imbalances and diseases of metabolism like diabetes, which is a growing concern for the world today and especially right here in our country, but as an entry-level starting point, you should look at the interrelationship between the amount of energy you take in as food, and the amount of energy you expend through your metabolism plus the exercise you do.  Think of a bank account – you put more money in the bank than you take out, then your account has more money, i.e., you gain weight.  You withdraw more than you have, then you are in a deficit — you lose weight in this scenario.  Now I know this borders on the simplistic as many of you have heard me say that there is much much more to consider, but bear with me for just a bit.

When you are seeking to lose weight, you need to create this energy imbalance where your body makes up for the extra energy needed to fuel both your metabolism and exercise by drawing from its fat stores.  And you create this energy imbalance only if you are eating less food than what your metabolism and exercise require, plain and simple.  The main thing to focus on here is how to create the deficit.  Many choose to create the deficit by exercising even more and eating a bit less.  Sounds simple enough right?  In fact the newly released 2010 Dietary Guidelines for America state this simple fact.  However, I’ve seen many problems related to this and perhaps the largest issue I have is in the overestimation of how many ‘calories’ people burn during exercise.

If you have ever looked at a treadmill or any exercise device that measures how many calories you burn, you can come away with the impression that “wow, I can eat an extra 150 calories and still stay in a deficit!”  Calorie burn and energy expenditure is grossly overestimated in these machines, and the tendency is to have the idea that you can reward yourself with ‘x’ amount of food because you burned a certain amount.  This puts you on a slippery slope of cutting deals with yourself, where you rationalize yourself off of your nutrition plan for example, by planning to take an extra 30 minutes to walk or treadmill your way out of indulging in ‘more food’.  Good intentions, but then your plan falls apart because something changes in your schedule or some other thing comes in you didn’t quite expect.  Don’t let your mind go there, it’s got plenty of tricks and sneak attacks up its sleeves that can get you off course real quick.

Teryl and I both feel we should instead focus our efforts in exercise to:

• Build shape and lean muscle mass
• Strengthen our bones
• Improve our cardiovascular health
• Improve blood sugar balance
• Gain flexibility and mobility
• Move and have fun

Exercise will surely enough burn some calories, but you really shouldn’t count on it for weight loss because of the aforementioned problems.  Instead, think about your exercise as icing on the cake, an added bonus on top of what you can achieve with your diet.  This will help you stay on track by keeping your mind focused on the food side of the equation when it comes to weight loss.  If you are not losing weight, don’t look to work out harder or longer if that is not what you like to do or can reasonably and consistently do – rather, focus on your nutrition.  Trying to juggle too many variables can create confusion which can lead to frustration and lack of results.  You are already working hard at this, and so the best advice comes to all of us in the form of simplicity -  K.I.S.S. — Keep It Simple Silly! to laser your mind always towards nutrition when you want to lose weight.

Fitness in the Round Success !!

Last night we had our first “Fitness in the Round Meeting” of 2011 here at The Spa on Green Street, it was a great success. Everyone arrived enthusiastic, excited and full of appreciation for the opportunity to gain education and connect with others who have chosen to take on the daunting task of making “permanent lifestyle changes”.   We discovered over the course of our very short time together, that each one of us has many things to learn and that we each have the ability to make a difference to others.  The sun had set on a great day and signaled a new start for all of us, a new mindset is emerging.

Our country is currently in the middle of a massive health crisis, mostly due to “lifestyle” related diseases, preventable diseases. The only way we can make a difference on a larger scale is to create connections and communities where health and wellness are priorities, and exercise is not considered an option. Exercise can look different for each of us, depending on our goals, physical abilities and our interests. It does not have to look like spending every Wednesday in the gym or slinging around heavy weights to a video in your living room.  Exercise is not about getting in a workout on Wednesday, it is about adding 20 years to your life! If we can look at getting active as a way of extending our lives with quality living, maybe we can find the motivation and inspiration to do so.

A great man passed away recently who lived this motto to the very end, Jack Lalane. He was a heavy child who fell in love with physical fitness in his teens and lived every day as an example to others, an inspiration! He set out to do things that nobody had done relative to group exercise and fitness instruction. He leaves behind an amazing legacy, he revolutionized the world of fitness and created many of the fitness tools we all use today. The last few years of his life were lived vibrantly, not in a nursing home carting around oxygen tanks and various other external containers. Isn’t that how we all want to live our lives?  What we choose to do each day will be the example we set for our children and grandchildren. If we can change the course of OUR future relative to OUR  health we can lift a  great financial and physical burden off of our loved ones, and hopefully break the cycle of disease and create  a legacy of health for our descendants.

 The following are a few questions we left with our group to ponder over the next few weeks . Please take the time to answer these questions and feel free to make any comments or ask any further questions. We will be providing solutions along the way to help with the challenges we face when we are making long lasting lifestyle changes. Hope to see you on February 22,2011 at 6pm for another great Fitness in the Round meeting!

• What have been the biggest obstacles to achieving your fitness goals?
• What is your biggest concern relative to exercise: time, energy, money, motivation?
• What is your biggest challenge when it comes to eating healthy?
• What percentage of ingredients do you understand when you read food labels?
• Do you pay attention to how you feel after you eat? Are you aware of how certain food affect your body?
• Do you know which foods are good to eat and which ones you should be avoiding? Ie: healthy fats, sweeteners, salt, natural foods, soy, etc….

The Big 3

Continuing along with the theme of ‘effective simplicity’, I’d like to dive in some more with you on the 3 main areas to focus on regarding your health that you will derive the greatest benefit  and get the biggest bang for your buck from, if you simply apply these consistently.  This is what I call ‘The Big 3’ – nutrition, exercise, and sleep.  This is to help you sort through all the competing influences of health information that you read  and see in the magazines, newspaper articles and television shows, which if you are like most people, end up leaving you more confused and not sure what to do to improve your health. 

It goes something like this —- Should I use the microwave?  I heard it’s bad for you.  Oh yes, gotta throw out the plastic – bad for you too.  Drink goji juice.  Don’t eat starch and meat at the same time.  Never eat fruit with other foods.  Umm, let’s see, also have to eat oats to lower my cholesterol right?  Oh yeah, gotta stay away from egg yolks, because that will give me a heart attack.  And don’t put anything in aluminum foil – it will give me Alzheimer’s.   I have to get my heart rate in the ‘fat-burning zone’ to burn fat because other exercises will boost my cortisol too much and cause me to gain belly fat – can’t do that.  What’s that special pill my friend was telling me about?  She heard from someone somewhere that it cured their diabetes — gotta remember to ask her………you get the picture, on and on, ad nauseum.   While some of this may be true, where is the leverage?  What are the things that are going to make the most difference?  Enter ‘The Big 3′.

 ‘Big 1’: Nutrition

Perhaps the single most important factor in your nutrition is a diet that works for you to keep your blood sugar stable.  I have spoken extensively about the role of proper blood sugar management here and here.  Keeping your blood sugar stable will greatly contribute to greater energy levels which don’t rise and fall as the tides do, but stay steady and calm providing you with a sense of well-being including better mood and emotional balance.  Good blood sugar control is paramount to healthy aging; in fact, the aging process – how rapidly you age – is determined by the damage that high blood sugar exerts on your tissues over time.  Serious stuff here.

Appetite is directly tied into blood sugar levels, so when there is balance here, your appetite is normalized and you won’t constantly crave processed foods – the sweets and treats and refined baked goods that oftentimes for many of us are hard to resist.  Multiple studies have shown that processed, refined carbohydrates are the key players in the onset of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and many forms of cancer; we know this well by now, but we need to get to a point where we don’t crave them because willpower will only get us so far in helping us avoid eating these ‘foods’.  Our bodies have to come to a point where there are no strong desires for them, and this is done simply through a process of regulating your blood sugar. 

So how do you know if your blood sugar is stable or not?  Please go back to my radio show posts I mentioned above, take a listen to them, and find out.  You’ll know by some reference ranges in your bloodwork such as fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C, as well just seeing how you feel after eating meals.  For instance, if you find yourself tired or grumpy after eating, that particular combination of foods is probably not helpful to you.

So the question is, what to do about it.  Drawing from my own personal experience, my professional clinical experience in working with hundreds of people, and what the overwhelming majority of research studies done in this field has to say, a diet that is low in these highly refined carbohydrates is a starting point for everyone.  These are the ‘foods’ that cause massive disturbance in blood sugar levels, so of course you would want to avoid them.  What about whole grains?  For many of you, these can be worked in your diet just fine, but keep an eye out for the above symptoms, for these also can generate high blood sugar levels.  Note that some of you will simply not do well with whole grains – you could be genetically predisposed to blood sugar problems and thus it is not surprising that you don’t do well with them.  You may experience bloating or have the same energy crashes I mentioned above as with the simple, refined carbohydrates.  Furthermore, many of you are sensitive to gluten, a substance found in most grains, and that just adds to the problem, insult to injury.  If you are pre-diabetic or diabetic (type II), I would suggest to work with your doctor or healthcare provider to gain control over this, because with proper care and attention, your body may be able to recover, heal and return to good health.  Diet is key, no question about it, and as Hippocrates indeed stated so long ago, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food.” 

What to eat?  Well, let’s take a good look around us, and in particular, around the grocery store, along the perimeter.  What’s there?  Fresh foods – fruits and vegetables, meat, chicken, seafood, eggs, dairy and cheese (if you are not intolerant).  I gave a whole 2 hour seminar recently where I spoke of the necessity of having the bulk of our diet come from these foods, in an effort to stabilize blood sugar levels, stabilize the important hormone insulin, and therefore vastly improve our health.  Ditch the soda, fruit juice and sports drink and develop the fresh taste of pure water.  No need to count calories on this type of approach, for your appetite normalizes, you feel fuller longer, and your energy levels consistently improve while your body composition and weight balance out.  Other benefits soon follow – lower blood sugar levels, improved cholesterol profiles, better blood pressure control, lowered inflammation – all major risk factors for chronic illness tend to improve.  I will write much more in this topic in future posts to do this piece justice.

 ‘Big 2’: Exercise

One quick, casual glance at the human body and you can immediately see that it was designed for movement.   The vast network of structural, functional muscles as they attach to the various bones in our body which act as levers for muscle to attach to, allow for swift and efficient movement, movement that has to occur regularly if there is going to be any use for our muscles and bones.  The fact of the matter is, that our muscles are very metabolically active tissue, meaning that they require lots of energy from food if they are used properly and they contribute a very very large portion to our overall health.  When used, energy requirements go up and lucky for us, we get to eat more.  The key here is, of course, used properly.  If we don’t use them, then we must lose them. 

In a time where we had to physically work for our food, our muscles were constantly being called into action and we did not have to think about exercise for it was a natural part of daily living and our survival depended on it.  With the advent of agriculture and the commodities of modern living, our physical exertions became less and less, and as a result we have become more sedentary.  The consequences of this have come at a high cost, because first and foremost, the more sedentary we are, the more our caloric needs go down – yet we leave in a time of abundance, with all types of artificial foods around us which trick our natural appetite and hunger mechanisms to the point where we cannot intuitively rely on them.  We then have to consciously curb portions, and one question to always ask here is – “how’s that working for you?”   Remember that willpower alone will only get you so far if you are constantly feeling hungry.   You gotta work the balance, and this balance relies on blood sugar.

Well guess what?  Exercise is well known to enhance insulin sensitivity, which helps maintain stable blood sugar levels.  That’s right, exercise is good medicine.  It effectively allows you to eat more carbohydrates than if you did not exercise, and that is most helpful in the sea of carbohydrate abundance we live in today.  Most people when they crave food, they crave chips, breads, pasta, cereal, cookies, crackers —- refined carbohydrates; they don’t crave meat, eggs, vegetables and fruits necessarily, do they? (Unless they’re pregnant of course, then all generalities go out the window!)  Well, part of this is because these carbohydrates cause a quick increase in serotonin in the brain, and that is a feel-good neurotransmitter – you are immediately rewarded with stress reduction when you eat these foods; however, the price you ultimately pay for that down the road is far greater.  Spiraling out of control glucose levels and associated inflammatory damage is occurring when this gets out of hand, and statistics do show that 50% of adult Americans will be either full blown diabetic or at the least pre-diabetic by 2020 if this continues.  Regular exercise and physical fitness allows us to get away with more carbohydrate in the diet, plain and simple, because the blood sugar is burned off for energy, not left floating around in the bloodstream causing harm.

So, exercise for good health and well-being.  Find something fun and stick to it consistently.  Explore what may be a new type of fun for you – try some yoga, pilates, strength training, swimming, biking, tennis, etc.  What is fun you will most likely continue with.  Find a friend to make this fun for you if you are the more social type and need motivation.  But by all means, as Nike is famous for saying, “Just Do It.”  Many more posts to come on this topic too.

 ‘Big 3’: Sleep

Ok, now right after reading this, turn out the lights and go to sleep.  Seriously?  Seriously folks.  What’s the average amount of sleep you get per night?  If you are like most people, then roughly about 6 to 6.5 hours per night.  That’s not going to cut it for optimal health and well-being.  It has been shown that the body will sleep about an average of 8.5 hours if left uninterrupted, and this is to facilitate the regeneration and repair of all tissues and organs in your body.  Your body grows most at night while asleep, if you are looking to put on muscle.  Your body works more diligently to combat infection while asleep, which is why oftentimes fevers are more pronounced at night.  Your conscious, active part of the nervous system takes a back seat to rest and lets other parts of the brain become more dominant so that it can wake up in the morning and do it all over again.  Once again, with the advent of modern living and technology, we have sacrificed sleep requirements for getting more things done.

You owe it to yourself to rearrange your priorities and responsibilities to slowly but surely allow for more sleep.  Many of you are wakeful at night and/or have difficulty falling asleep.  If it’s a chronic problem, seek attention and please view my previous posts on the importance of sleep and what you can do about it.  It’s that critical, because so many things in your health hang on this one very critical facet of life.  Case in point: a study was performed on two groups of Olympic athletes – people who were very fit and ate a healthy diet.  One group was the control group, where everything was the same, and the only difference  in the test group was that they were instructed to restrict their sleep to just under 6 hours.  Within 3 days, this control group developed blood sugar levels in the range of pre-diabetes!

Your quality of sleep is an effective barometer of how your body is dealing with stress.  Typically good sleep equates with good stress control.  You can probably see how poor stress control also dovetails into less healthy food choices and lack of motivation for physical activity.  Better sleep, better stress control, more motivation to live a healthier lifestyle.

The Road Ahead

How can you have more energy and experience a greater sense of well-being?  How can you most simply and effectively improve your health condition?  Acknowledge the  ‘Big 3’ and start letting the big changes into your life that are surely to follow.  No matter what your limitations may be, there is always something you can do to help yourself here, and if you need further help, please ask us.  This is who we are, and this is what we do.

I trust that this helps you as you read and hear about the next dietary or fitness trend that is due to hit the bookshelves, magazine stands and airwaves – ask yourself, how does it square up to the ‘Big 3’?  My hope is that this simplifies your understanding of what it takes to be healthy and feel well, for these 3 areas will always be the foundation of health.

A prosperous 2011 New Years to you and yours, and feel free to let me know what your thoughts are on the topic.  We always love to hear from you!

Ricardo Boye