This Article originally appeared on Health.com – and to insure they get credit, I have lopped off the end of it!  So go there to check it out, I however saw it on CNN.com – http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/health/why-new-diets-fail/index.html?hpt=he_c2

My dislike for the article is tempered with like.  Which points do I dislike – well, I believe that there surely is a one size fits all diet from the standpoint of rules.  I then think you use the understanding of those rules to manufacture your own personal direction.  But the approach to diet stats with an understanding of what creates weight loss.

That said, anyone can lose weight if they are 40# over weight, by simply eating less, and working out more.  Reduce certain foods, and you will see results.  Even those of you who would say, “I have tried everything, and nothing works”… you too could do it pretty easily with a few of the correct modifications.  However, you will run into a plateau.  You will find that somewhere, you get stuck, and your goal is still beyond your reach.

Others will fall into the category that the author describes, where you will decide that you “just don’t work that way”.  Which is a cop out.  You have addictions, and at some point in pursuit of health, you will have to confront those addictions, or once again, be stuck without the ability to reach your goals.  Ask anyone who has completely changed their appearance, and they will tell you it was a hard fight.  Never easy.  PERIOD.  So the ultimate reality is this:

Reaching your goals requires both

1. Knowledge of how diets work.
2. The mental training to stay committed.

I think it is mostly mental.  SO take that into this article, and see what you think.  I would appreciate your comments! See mine in Italics throughout, Be well and Be blessed! – Dr. E

(Health.com) — The start of the new year is the ultimate opportunity to undo the holiday damage, make a fresh start and resolve to avoid the indulgences that have left you feeling less-than-confident about your body.

To get results that won’t fizzle out before February, check out my previous post “5 questions to ask before trying any diet” on Health.com, as well as the tips below for coping with the challenges that often go along with a new quest to shed pounds.

Confusion over which approach is best

The top question I’m asked these days is, “What should I do?!” Nearly everyone I talk to feels overwhelmed about the myriad of popular approaches others swear by, many of which are drastically different from each other, including detoxes and cleanses, ditching carbs and eating like a caveman, going gluten free, and becoming vegan.

I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all, but in my 15+ years counseling clients, I do know this: if a particular approach doesn’t feel right for you, it will surely backfire.

For example, I recently had a client who, before working with me, had cut out all carbs, including whole grains, fruit, and most veggies. Despite struggling with fatigue, headaches, mood swings, intense cravings, and trouble concentrating at work, she tried to stick with it, because an ultra low-carb diet seemed to be the trendy way to lose weight. After breaking down and bingeing on bread, then sweets, and realizing that her body and brain “just didn’t work right” without any carbs, she was ready for a different approach.

Before you begin your chosen weight loss tactic, do a gut check to be sure it feels sane and sustainable. And if a structured plan isn’t right for you, focus on committing to a few changes you know you can stick with, like trading fast food for quick homemade meals, ditching diet products, or consistently making simple swaps, like eating spaghetti squash instead of spaghetti.

Health.com: 16 ways to lose weight fast

Not losing weight fast enough

I know that seeing quick results is key for staying motivated, and feeling confident and inspired to stay on track, but it’s important to put numbers in perspective.

If you don’t hit a double digit loss within a week, don’t assume that your approach isn’t working. Shedding just a single pound of body fat is like melting 16 ounces of shortening (one of those short, round tubs) off of your frame, which can make a huge difference in how you feel and how your clothes fit. On the flip side, losing water weight, which is far easier and faster, does nothing to change your body composition, and you can regain it all within a matter of hours.

So rather than getting hung up on numbers, focus on how you feel, whether your jeans fit looser, and how your body is changing, like clearer skin, less facial puffiness, etc.

And if you really aren’t seeing results, it may be time to get honest about your habits — check out my previous post “5 little white lies you tell yourself that derail weight loss” on Health.com.

(Definitely true – but your diet better have “staying power” which to means, an approach that can scientifically be explained, so that you can understand why it would work)

Bloating

One of the side effects of adopting a cleaner, healthier eating plan you may not expect is an increase in bloating. Upping your intake of fruits, veggies, whole grains, beans, lentils, and nuts, can mean a considerable increase in your daily fiber intake.

Because fiber doesn’t get broken down and absorbed from your GI tract into your blood stream, it has to work its way through your system, which can take a few days. Eating fiber is also kind of like strength training to your digestive tract, because your GI muscles have to contract to push the fiber through, to be eliminated. Continuing to eat this way consistently, and drinking plenty of water, helps to lessen the effects, but your belly may balk initially.

(The author kind of misses the mark here.  Bloating from an intestinal side due to gaseous development, is going to cause a mild increase in abdominal distention, whereas true bloating from inflammation, molecules that cause a systemic inflammatory response, will cause major bloating everywhere.  Funny, the one molecule that really does this well in her list, would come from grain.  Gluten.)

Health.com: Best superfoods for weight loss

Just remember that bloating has nothing to do with your weight or body composition. In other words, trading a muffin or scone for oatmeal topped with fresh fruit and nuts may make your belly a bit rounder after breakfast, but if you’re losing body fat and upgrading your nutrition game, it’s worth a little temporary expansion – and in time, your body will adjust.

Lack of support

This is probably the top barrier my clients face when trying to stick with a new lifestyle approach.

Often significant others, friends, family members, and coworkers sanction skipping the gym, offer tempting treats, or suggest social activities that revolve around unhealthy patterns, like pizza and Redbox, or going out to dinner.

“I feel like everyone is out to sabotage me!” is a phrase I hear a lot. If you find yourself in the same boat, seek out support where you can.

Recruit another health conscious coworker to eat lunch with, connect with like-minded friends via email, text, or online, and celebrate your own successes by giving yourself regular pats on the back or healthy rewards for getting through challenging situations. Even something small, like a song download, new app, a 10-minute chair massage, or a single fresh flower for your desk can help you stay in an empowered frame of mind that makes it easier to cope when you lack support from others.

And if you need to have a heart-to-heart with the people closest to you (to ask for help, or at the very least to not be hindered), check out my previous post “DOs and DON’Ts for dealing with food pushers” on Health.com.

(Good ideas here – just be aware that life change requires support.  I hate the idea of a diet, but adopting it into your lifestyle is key.  People become barriers.  My mother has been with us for a week now, and she is hard core 60 Day Turnaround Diet… she hasn’t failed, because even though we are not on the diet, everything about our home: pantry, refrigerator, mentality… supports the hard core version.)

Slipping up on difficult days

Regardless of how great you feel after revamping your eating habits and regularly hitting the gym, there are going to be days when you’ll want to give up.

The truth is it does take more time, energy, and awareness to live healthfully. So after a stressful day, when you’re already tired and you still have to cook dinner, you may feel like throwing in the towel. Plus, we’re practically programmed from birth to turn to food as a way to soothe, escape, reward, and comfort ourselves – so when you’re mad at your boss or boyfriend, foregoing a healthy home-cooked meal and ordering a pizza instead kind of go hand in hand.

(We call this living intentionally.  Decisions are decisions, not random acts.  You were made to live this way, and you can!)

Health.com: 10 ways your personality affects your weight

… read the rest at : http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/health/why-new-diets-fail/index.html?hpt=he_c2

OR –

This article originally appeared on Health.com

Written by Dr. Michael Moss

Great news! I will be hosting my first community health talk at Breadbecker’s on March 6th! Sue Becker is one of the health leaders in Woodstock and we are very excited to team up with her as we reach out to the community and teach what we know to be health transforming information.   When I first heard this information 5 years ago, I could barely contain myself. I started to think of all the people in my life, all the friends and family members that could benefit from hearing the real, true answer to their health woes.  I still haven’t shut up about it.  It’s that important to me that everyone I know has access to the same information that I know. All of you should be thinking of someone right now that is in need of hearing this information. Get them to this talk… if you have to pick them up and carry them in… it is crucial that they get this chance to get and stay well.  It may be the only time in their life they ever get to hear it!

That being said, I want to give you some insight into what we will be covering that night…

There are brilliant explorers and scientists throughout history that have made important discoveries that have completely changed our perspective on how we, as humans, view the world.  The world was once thought to be flat. Magellan proved this to be wrong in one voyage out to sea.  Galileo proved with the telescope that we do not live in an Earth-centered solar system, but rather that the Earth revolves around the Sun.  Without Einstein, we wouldn’t have GPS, computers, remote controls, CD players, cell phones, or anything that requires a laser.  Newton, Aristotle, Mendel… The list goes on and on, and each has re-shaped our paradigm.  Today, a cell biologist named Bruce Lipton has changed our paradigm once again. You can think of him like an Albert Einstein of today. After spending 35+ years looking into a microscope, he discovered that genes do not control our health!  After years of science blaming our health on our genes, we are no longer victimized by our specific genome.  We control our genes!  With the exception of a handful of genetic diseases (only about 2.5% of all diseases known to man… having an extra chromosome, missing one, genetic mutations… these are examples of true genetic defects resulting in disease), we have the power to live a long and healthy life!

“A gene can DO nothing by itself. It can only be expressed or unexpressed. We control what genes are expressed”

A gene is nothing but a blueprint.  And, just like a blueprint… it can do nothing by itself unless acted on by an outside force.  In other words, it is up to the architect to read and interpret the information on the blueprint.  Think of two houses with the exact same blueprint.  It is up the architect to decide whether or not to use good and long lasting materials like brick and mortar.. or to use sticks and model glue.  One house will last for what will seem like an eternity, while the other may cave in the during the first rain. Our genes contain the information for health and vitality, but if we bring faulty raw materials to build our body with… our bodies will not be able to weather even the smallest storm.

Bruce Lipton proved this in a simple and highly reproducible experiment with stem cells.  Stem cells taken from an organism contain the exact same genetic code as the next stem cell taken from the same organism.  They are absolute carbon copies of each other. Keeping that in mind… if you put one cell in a petri dish (glass dish used to culture cells) with an environment that has proper nutrition to create a bone cell… that stem cell will grow into a bone cell.  Now, if you take another stem cell with the exact same genetic code and put it into another petri dish with an environment conducive to  creating a liver cell… that stem cell will grow into a healthy liver cell.  Ask yourself, “how closely does a liver cell resemble a heart in physicality and function?”  Not at all!  They are nothing alike! They come from the same genes… yet the only thing that we’ve changed in this experiment is… wait for it…. wait for it…. still waiting….

THE ENVIRONMENT!!

Environmental signals control our genes, by turning them “on” or “off”… leaving them “expressed” or “unexpressed”.  So, it was the environmental signals that turned the stem cell liver gene on in one dish, and the bone cell gene on in the other.  So how do we control our genes? By changing our environment.  Interestingly, if you put toxins in the petri dish, the cell becomes weak, dysfunctional, and diseased.  And, miraculously, if you take the toxins back out of the petri dish and the environment of the cell, the cell begins to express healthy function once again!  Here’s the kicker.  We are all skin covered petri dishes.  Our specific cell and organ function is directly correlated to the environment that we provide our cells and genes with.  So, what materials are you building your body with? What toxins are the cells in your petri dish being exposed to?  Today we have to work harder at protecting our health than at any previous time in history.  Our bodies and our cells are being continuously bombarded with toxins and less than ideal raw materials on a daily basis.  But, this is our reality.  We are responsible for protecting our greatest asset, our health.

So, what did Bruce Lipton (the Albert Einstein of today) prove with one simple experiment? That 98% of every disease known to man is not only preventable, but our incredible bodies are also capable of reversing and healing them through lifestyle changes.

I occasionally write about the way to shop for chicken and eggs, sometimes we get deep and look at the Cornucopia Institute and their ratings.  But this current article from Mercola is a must read for anyone who eats chicken… ever!

Here it is in partial – you can read it all at the link!

Organic, Cage-Free, Free-Range or Pastured… Sorting Through the Confusion on Egg Labels

By Dr. Mercola

Proteins are nutrients that are essential to the building, maintenance and repair of your body tissues such as your skin, internal organs and muscles. They are also the major components of your immune system and hormones.

Proteins are found in all types of food, but only foods from animal sources, such as meat and eggs contain complete proteins, meaning they provide the eight essential amino acids.

Eggs, as well as the chickens they come from, are both healthful sources of protein but ONLY if raised the way nature intended… Unfortunately, as illustrated in the video above, today’s agricultural model of factory farming has complicated what used to be a simple affair.

Organic, Cage-Free, Free-Range, or Pasture-Raised?

Health conscious consumers know to look for designations like “organic,” “free-range,”  “pastured” and “cage-free,” but while you may think these are interchangeable, they’re actually not. In many ways these labels are little more than creative advertising.

The definitions of “free-range” are such that the commercial egg industry can run industrial farm egg laying facilities and still call them “free-range” eggs, despite the fact that the birds’ foraging conditions are far from what you’d call natural.

For example, regulations on the use of the term “free-range” do not specify the amount of time the hens must spend outdoors or the amount of outdoor space each hen must have access to. Nor do they indicate that the hen must have access to a pasture diet.

True free-range eggs, now increasingly referred to as “pasture-raised,” are from hens that roam freely outdoors on a pasture where they can forage for their natural diet, which includes seeds, green plants, insects, and worms.

Large commercial egg facilities typically house tens of thousands of hens and can even go up to hundreds of thousands of hens. Obviously they cannot allow all of them to forage freely. They can still be called “cage-free” or “free-range” though, if they’re not confined to an individual cage. But these labels say nothing about the conditions they ARE raised in, which are still deplorable.

So, while flimsy definitions of “free range” and “cage-free” allow such facilities to sell their products as free range, please beware that a hen that is let outside into a barren lot for mere minutes a day, and is fed a diet of corn, soy, cottonseed meals and synthetic additives is NOT a free-range hen, and simply will not produce the same quality eggs as its foraging counterpart.  There’s also the issue of veterinary drug contamination. As reported in the featured article1:

“Formally certified organic accreditation – which is a membership-based process and comes with it a logo on packaging – signifies whether the chicken is free from unnatural additives or processes. Most brands don’t actually hold this accreditation.

 [C]ertified organic poultry is the only poultry product that is 100 per cent guaranteed to be antibiotic-free. “Antibiotics can be fed to conventional chickens to accelerate weight gain and treat or prevent disease. “Free-ranging chickens can be treated with therapeutic antibiotics under veterinary direction and sold with the use of coccidiostats [a chemical agent added to animal feed]”, says Sally, author of Eat Yourself Healthy in 28 Days…”

So to summarize, what you’re really looking for is chicken and eggs that are both certified organic and true pasture-raised. Barring organic certification, which is cost-prohibitive for many small farmers, you could just make sure the farmer raises his chickens according to organic, free-range standards, allowing his flock to forage freely for their natural diet, and aren’t fed antibiotics, corn and soy.

Organic Pastured Eggs Contain Superior Nutrients

Testing2 has confirmed that true free-range eggs are far more nutritious than commercially raised eggs. The dramatically superior nutrient levels are most likely the result of the differences in diet between free ranging, pastured hens and commercially farmed hens. In a 2007 egg-testing project, Mother Earth News compared the official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient data for commercial eggs with eggs from hens raised on pasture and found that the latter typically contains the following:

2/3 more vitamin A	3 times more vitamin E
2 times more omega-3 fatty acids	7 times more beta carotene

 

READ THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE

This device is solidly the most cool tech gadget that I have heard of.  I just got a new iPad mini for Christmas, I already have an iPad, but as many of you know, I am connected.  I am an administrator of over 30 facebook pages from World Wide WOD, to The Garage, to CrossFit Bridgemill, to the 60 Day Turnaround, to the Firebreather Challenge Destiny Run.  The list goes on and on (of course add HealthSprout to this list with two pages, the HealthSprout Chiro friend page and the HealthSprout Special Events page).  My point, I need to be able to connect, and write and publish easily, so tech is cool for me.

However, I think I would trade my tech in, to get my hands on this new product.  Though it won’t help me stay connected, and it won’t help me publish, it will still help me reach my mission by improving my ability to educate.  This gadget, the Tell Spec will tell you the “specs” on any foods you lay out in front of yourself! Seriously, this is as Star Trek as I have seen for a food based gadget.  The Mashable Article showed this photo of a device “hovering” over a plate of food, while it scans the food, and “beams” the readout to your connected smart device.

The info that is sent to your smart phone, tablet, etc, contains details on the content of the food in question.  Gluten, dioxins, soy, lactose, aspartame… I don’t know all the details yet, but I wonder if we could find the total carbohydrate content, or perhaps break down carbs to fructose vs sucrose… this info is really relevant to what I teach right now, but if YOU actually had the device, then I could make all of this really relevant to all of you, quickly.

But, according to the article, we might be seeing price tags around $400-500 at first, which makes me think most of you won’t see the value in it… yet.  But once that price comes down over a number of years, I would hope to see the purchases sky rocket.  I guess it is yet to be seen how effective this device truly is.

“Our core IP is really the technology, the process. And this is the difference,” says Hoffmann. TellSpec beams a low-powered laser at the food in question, and low-energy photons are then emitted back to the TellSpec’s spectrometer, which sorts the photons by wavelength and determines what chemical compounds are within. The device is expected to hit the market in August 2014 at an initial price of $350-$400, and Hoffmann hopes demand will drive the price down to $50 in a few years.

This suggests to me that the product isn’t at a 90% accuracy as of yet (they are describing the difference in their product from others in the paragraph above), this because the low energy photons that are received back, could represent many different compounds.  Thus there might be a really hard time differentiating many of them,  as many chemical compounds will look and act very similar.  But move a bond in a different place, and the compound acts completely different in the body, take tans fat and compare it to typical omega-6 vegetable oils, and you will see minimal differences, until it hits the body and starts destroying your tissues.

I ate at Waffle House today.  Yep!  My once a year excursion to the house.  I do this every year for my daughters birthday, as she wants to go hang out where her papa hangs out.  I had some of their trans fat rich butter today as well (not butter, just awful stuff).  It wasn’t much, just a small little blip of it, but I was interested in inspecting taste.  It occurred to me, that the taste of what I eat on a regular basis, is so much richer and more satisfying, than any taste that came from this restaurant.  Which then suggested to me, that everyone could enjoy the life that I lead, at least from a food taste perspective, but they don’t because they don’t know the difference.

Once a year… and I saw two people I know, a member of CrossFit Bridgemill, and a graduate from our Total Food Makeover.  I just had to smile and say hello, and just chuckle it off.  Oh well, I have said it before and will say it again…. 80/20 is my rule.  And I recommend you get there too.  If you want to go 100/0, then be sure you don’t offend people too often.  God cares more about you loving people, than eating right.  I have colleagues and counterparts who sometimes fail to see that, and yep… sometimes I miss it too.

So keep your eye out for a Tell Spec in the office…. as soon as my tech budget goes up, I am grabbing one!

Be well and be blessed!  – Dr. E