Triumph Training

Ready or Not, Here I Come

andrewj — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:36:05 +0000

“Three things cannot long be hidden:
the sun,
the moon,
and the truth.”

–Confucius

Advice from my Mentor

andrewj — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 12:47:17 +0000

“Your body is your temple of worship. This is the only place God can truly reside! If there’s no God in your temple, you certainly won’t recognize God anywhere else! TODAY is a great day to stop judging and start LOVING yourself!”

–Paul Chek

The Eat to “Live” 6-Week Disaster

andrewj — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:38:46 +0000

From the book Eat to Live: The Revolutionary Formula for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss by Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

If you don’t have the book, save your money. If you do have the book, give it to someone you don’t like. Soon they’ll be so fat and unhealthy, you’ll take pity on them. Here are the guidelines with my responses in CAPS.

UNLIMITED (eat as much as you want):

all raw vegetables, including raw carrots (goal: 1 lb. daily)
I LIKE THE CARROT, BUT THE RAW VEGGIES HAVE A HOST OF ANTI NUTRIENTS, INCLUDING SOME WHICH ARE ANTI-THYROID AND, THUS, ARE CONSIDERED TO GOITROGENS.
cooked green vegetables (goal 1 lb. daily)
I‘D ONLY EAT SEASONAL DUE TO THE HIGHER CONTENT OF PUFA’S.
beans, legumes, bean sprouts, or *tofu (minimum 1 cup daily in total of these)
BEANS CONTAIN LIGNINS AND PHA (PHYTOHAEMAGGLUTININ), BOTH OF WHICH ARE NOT DIGESTIBLE = TOXIC TO THE SYSTEM. ADDITIONALLY, THEY CAUSE GI INFLAMMATION (NOT JUST GAS) AND HAVE HIGH ANTI-THYROID PROPERTIES. OH, YEAH, AND THEY HAVE BEEN SHOWN TO CAUSE HEPATIC NECROSIS! AND DON’T GET ME STARTED ON TOFU–GO READ MY ARTICLE, SAY IT ISN’T SOY.
fresh fruit (at least 4 daily).
WOW–HE GOT ONE RIGHT!
eggplant, mushrooms, peppers, onions, tomato and other non-starchy vegetables, cooked and raw (unlimited)
I CAN HANDLE THIS IF YOU DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM WITH NIGHTSHADES.

*Beans should be eaten daily; tofu should be eaten less frequently.

LIMITED (not more than one serving):

cooked starchy vegetables OR whole grains–Maximum 1 cup per day (butternut or acorn squash, corn, sweet potato, brown rice, cooked carrots, whole grain breads*, whole grain cereals*)
I LIKED THE BELOW GROUND VEGGIES, BUT THE GRAINS ARE A DIFFERENT STORY–WE’RE NOT MADE TO EAT THEM AND THE HIGH PHYTIC ACID CONTENT WILL INHIBIT THE ABSORPTION OF CALCIUM, MAGNESIUM, ZINC, IRON, AND COPPER. GRAINS IS HOW “FARMERS” MAKE THEIR LIVESTOCK FAT (AND UNHEALTHY).
raw nuts and seeds (1 oz. or 28.5 grams a day) or 2 ounces avocado
HIGH IN PUFA’S AND, IN THE CASE OF THE RAW NUTS, PHYTIC ACID AGAIN.
ground flaxseed
PUFA
soymilk, low-sugar preferred–Maximum 1 cup a day
REALLY, SOY AGAIN? IF IT DOESN’T HAVE NIPPLES, YOU SHOULDN’T MAKE MILK FROM IT.

*avoid breads and cereals as much as possible
HE’S GOT ANOTHER ONE RIGHT! MAYBE I’M BEING TOO HARD ON HIM…

OFF-LIMITS:

dairy products
animal products
between meal snacks
fruit juice, dried fruits
salt, sugar
THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT A PERSON SHOULD EAT!!! I’D MINIMIZE THE DRIED FRUIT AND FOCUS ON RIPE, ORGANIC PRODUCE, OF COURSE.

Dr. Joel Furhman’s Eat to Live/Eat for Health plan sounds like a sadly deficient diet with temporary “successes” attributable to a lack of calories. High nutrients good. Low calorie, low animal based nutrition bad– it’s a recipe for thyroid dysfunction along with all the related (and unrelated) diseases: Hypothyroidism can decrease HCl and other digestive juices, leading to malabsorption and resultant nutritional deficiencies. And the low calorie approach is going to do a number on your thyroid. This can cause such issues as atherosclerosis, hypo/hypertension, headaches, skin problems–this DIEt does it all!

What’s sad is he will sell lots of books and screw up lots of people. The ones who get do better following his plan (or the dozens of failed diets like it) will come from the Standard American Diet (SAD) and eat shit meat and processed crap. But avoidance of these foods coupled with an improvement in health is not a sign that this diet is effective at anything. Do it long enough, and I guarantee that person will suffer from some of the issues mentioned above along with many other problems. So his methodology is based on anecdotal evidence which confuses cause and association along with a liberal dose of pseudo “science” which only thinly veils a moral (and often economical) agenda.

True that!

andrewj — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:47:42 +0000

“Now that our public health establishment has eliminated smoking from public places, maybe they can find a way to reduce stress and disease by removing morons from positions of power.”

~Dr. Ray Peat (another one of my mentors)

You’re wearing your most dominant thought

andrewj — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:02:05 +0000

“Medicine in general does not change the nature of a person’s mindset; it only (chemically) manipulates one’s perception of the reality they continue to create.”

–Paul Chek (my mentor)

Fat and happy?

andrewj — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 15:46:45 +0000

95% of serotonin (the feel good hormone) is made in the gut–you might want to put down that gluten, that soy, that alcohol, those “medicinal” drugs, or anything which could be inflaming your gut wall…

Why low carb diets DON’T work for permanent weight loss

andrewj — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:31:07 +0000

Glycogen content of the liver affects the liver’s conversion of T4 to T3.

Your Office Chair is Killing You

andrewj — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:17:30 +0000

Your Office Chair Is Killing You
Meet public enemy No. 1 in today’s workplace

By Arianne Cohen

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_19/b4177071221162.htm

If you’re reading this article sitting down—the position we all hold more than any other, for an average of 8.9 hours a day—stop and take stock of how your body feels. Is there an ache in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they’re not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you’re doing—sitting. New research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn’t offset it. “People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising,” says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. “Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body.”

In a 2005 article in Science magazine, James A. Levine, an obesity specialist at the Mayo Clinic, pinpointed why, despite similar diets, some people are fat and others aren’t. “We found that people with obesity have a natural predisposition to be attracted to the chair, and that’s true even after obese people lose weight,” he says. “What fascinates me is that humans evolved over 1.5 million years entirely on the ability to walk and move. And literally 150 years ago, 90% of human endeavor was still agricultural. In a tiny speck of time we’ve become chair-sentenced,” Levine says.

Hamilton, like many sitting researchers, doesn’t own an office chair. “If you’re standing around and puttering, you recruit specialized muscles designed for postural support that never tire,” he says. “They’re unique in that the nervous system recruits them for low-intensity activity and they’re very rich in enzymes.” One enzyme, lipoprotein lipase, grabs fat and cholesterol from the blood, burning the fat into energy while shifting the cholesterol from LDL (the bad kind) to HDL (the healthy kind). When you sit, the muscles are relaxed, and enzyme activity drops by 90% to 95%, leaving fat to camp out in the bloodstream. Within a couple hours of sitting, healthy cholesterol plummets by 20%.

The data back him up. Older people who move around have half the mortality rate of their peers. Frequent TV and Web surfers (sitters) have higher rates of hypertension, obesity, high blood triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, and high blood sugar, regardless of weight. Lean people, on average, stand for two hours longer than their counterparts.

The chair you’re sitting in now is likely contributing to the problem. “Short of sitting on a spike, you can’t do much worse than a standard office chair,” says Galen Cranz, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. She explains that the spine wasn’t meant to stay for long periods in a seated position. Generally speaking, the slight S shape of the spine serves us well. “If you think about a heavy weight on a C or S, which is going to collapse more easily? The C,” she says. But when you sit, the lower lumbar curve collapses, turning the spine’s natural S-shape into a C, hampering the abdominal and back musculature that support the body. The body is left to slouch, and the lateral and oblique muscles grow weak and unable to support it.

This, in turn, causes problems with other parts of the body. “When you’re standing, you’re bearing weight through the hips, knees, and ankles,” says Dr. Andrew C, Hecht, co-chief of spinal surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. “When you’re sitting, you’re bearing all that weight through the pelvis and spine, and it puts the highest pressure on your back discs. Looking at MRIs, even sitting with perfect posture causes serious pressure on your back.”

Much of the perception about what makes for healthy and comfortable sitting has come from the chair industry, which in the 1960s and ’70s started to address widespread complaints of back pain from workers. A chief cause of the problem, companies publicized, was a lack of lumbar support. But lumbar support doesn’t actually help your spine. ”

You cannot design your way around this problem,” says Cranz. “But the idea of lumbar support has become so embedded in people’s conception of comfort, not their actual experience on chairs. We are, in a sense, locked into it.”

In the past three decades the U.S. swivel chair has tripled into a more than $3 billion market served by more than 100 companies. Unsurprisingly, America’s best-selling chair has made a fetish of lumbar support. The basic Aeron, by Herman Miller, costs around $700, and many office workers swear by them. There are also researchers who doubt them. “The Aeron is far too low,” says Dr. A.C. Mandal, a Danish doctor who was among the first to raise flags about sitting 50 years ago. “I visited Herman Miller a few years ago, and they did understand. It should have much more height adjustment, and you should be able to move more. But as long as they sell enormous numbers, they don’t want to change it.” Don Chadwick, the co-designer of the Aeron, says he wasn’t hired to design the ideal product for an eight-hour-workday; he was hired to update Herman Miller’s previous best-seller. “We were given a brief and basically told to design the next-generation office chair,” he says.

The best sitting alternative is perching—a half-standing position at barstool height that keeps weight on the legs and leaves the S-curve intact. Chair alternatives include the Swopper, a hybrid stool seat and the funky, high HAG Capisco chair. Standing desks and chaise longues are good options. Ball chairs, which bounce your spine into a C-shape, are not. The biggest obstacle to healthy sitting may be ourselves. Says Jackie Maze, the vice-president for marketing at Keilhauer: “Most customers still want chairs that look like chairs.”

Recently Levine talked to Best Buy (BBY), Wal-Mart (WMT), and Salo accounting about letting him design their offices and keep people walking and working as much as possible. Levine jerry-rigged an old 1- to 2-mph treadmill to stand under a desk and put a handful of them in conference rooms. Those who wanted could have walking desks in their offices, and he partnered with Steelcase to manufacture a $4,500 version of the machine. “Within two weeks, people basically get addicted to walking and working,” says Levine. “You just need to give them the chance.”

How to identify Genetically Modified produce

andrewj — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 01:46:06 +0000

Over 80% of processed food contains genetically modified (GM) ingredients. When you’re shopping for produce, here’s how to tell if your food has been tampered with by folks who can’t see the future due to focusing on their funds:

–GM produce has a 5 digit PLU code on the sticker which starts with the number 8.
–ORGANIC produce has a 5 digit PLU, too. But the first number will be a 9.

And for those who are more inclined to remember things when put in verse, try this:
Don’t put an 8 on your plate or you’ll hate your fate because of what you ate.

Question about Cholesterol with my response

andrewj — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:16:56 +0000

Bob and I have been taking capsules of apple-cider vinegar twice a day (4 today a day) for over six months at Kathryne’s suggestion. Yesterday I read in the paper that they are not good for you. This was not the result of a study, just the opinion of the doctor who gives advice in the AJC weekly. I can show you the article. What is your opinion of taking apple-cider vinegar capsules? Thank you, Mary.

My question to you would be why are you taking them?

Because Kathryne said they would lower cholesterol and mine was a little high at this recent annual exam. The doctor said everything was excellent except my cholesterol. So that’s why.

Longevity is predicated on higher cholesterol levels.
As people age, cholesterol levels should go up:

New Study Finds that Low Cholesterol in Elderly Doubles Risk of Early Death

Study finds that elderly with cholesterol less that 189 had a double risk of dying.

Physicians were informed to consider very low levels of cholesterol as potential warning signs of a serious disease or as signals of rapidly declining health.

The study included 4520 men and women between the ages of 65-84.

The study concluded that low total cholesterol was associated with a higher risk of death.

Low cholesterol level is a robust predictor of mortality in the nondemented elderly and may be a surrogate of frailty or subclinical disease according to the research team.

References:

Brescianini S, Maggi S, Farchi G, Mariotti S, Di Carlo A, Baldereschi M, Inzitari D; ILSA Group. Low total cholesterol and increased risk of dying: are low levels clinical warning signs in the elderly? Results from the Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2003 Jul;51(7):991-6.

Schupf N, Costa R, Luchsinger J, Tang MX, Lee JH, Mayeux R. Relationship between plasma lipids and all-cause mortality in nondemented elderly. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2005 Feb;53(2):219-26.