Have you ever been in a conversation with someone and, while continuing to nod and say ‘uh-huh’, they begin to fiddle with their iPhone, reading a text that just chimed in? You know that they are not ignoring you completely, and it is usually only a moment that they are distracted, but still, it is attention divided.

What if that someone divided their attention in this way every time you spoke to them? Well, it wouldn’t take long for you to realize that you and your conversational contributions were of little importance to them. Soon, I would think you wouldn’t want to talk to them at all. What if you and this person were colleagues at work or a married couple? This would not be a very functional relationship.

If you can identify with this scenario or have endured situations like these, then you understand: it is frustrating. It’s even worse if you are somehow tied to this person and are unable to find a fully engaged conversation. Well, chances are you are doing this every second of every day; hurting someone very close to you. That someone is you.

Your chattering, multi-tasking mind treats your animal body in this way. Your body becomes the jilted lover in the mind/body relationship and, because it is not being heard, sits blithely on the couch seeking love in a pint of ice cream, or another glass of wine. This is not some crafty metaphor; this is what is happening. Our bodies are secondary to the glory of the over stimulated mind. We can’t blame the mind, it is doing its job. This is how the mind grows and precisely why we are atom wielding space travelers, philosophers and artists. But it left something behind

For thousands of years we lived in an environment that took all of our faculties to survive. We had to listen, smell, react, respond, leap and bound and be fully aware of where we were. We gathered food on the look out for dangerous animals and preyed upon those that would sustain us. For thousands of years we behaved in this manner. Our genetic pre-dispositions and collective unconsciousness allowed for complete environmental immersion. This connectedness meant survival.

Try and think: when was the last time you went through a traffic light and wondered, “was that light green?” We are too much in our heads and our bodies are dying.

When you try and exercise in a crowded gym or home in front of a screen you are not in your environment, you are in your head. Your chattering mind that is busy multi-tasking is being further stimulated as it responds by grasping at comprehending where you are.

Yaboga asks three things of you as a whole being: Still the Mind, Move the Body, Eat Real Food. We accomplish these by instituting The New Ritual of The Hunt.

The Hunt for You is a 5 part process that lasts about a half hour. The most important aspect of this is to still the mind. Without reigning in the mind the body will never fully respond. Sure, you can work out and do all manner of movements but without joining the mind and body you are only fooling yourself and you know it. This is why workout routines are hard to maintain. Your mind is already dangerously over loaded. Stress kills. So pushing it even harder to take in, comprehend and maintain an exercise routine is even more work.

Learn how to survive.Try Yaboga today.

I have talked about balance on this blog before, but I think it merits more time. Balance is a Universal! In all things, balance is necessary. Without it one aspect of a group or set would go unchecked and overtake its counterpart.

It is no grand observation that we do less with our bodies and more with our minds in this modern existence of ours. But to what end? Is a lack of balance in this regard bad for us, or is it evolution as usual?

For thousands of years our minds and bodies worked in harmony, focused and engaged in the actions and motions of surviving. This balance kept all of the system (mental and physical) working in harmony; both systems fully engaged, in tandem. Today’s world represents a disharmony with that balance. We do FAR more with our minds and FAR less with our bodies. To simply leave the cubical and hit the gym isn’t enough. Your body isn’t fooled.

To the majority the current method of fitness is relegated to a few hours in a gym. We trudge through a mentally exhausting day at a work/social climate and then abscond to another work/social climate at the neighborhood gym. The average gym environment consists of people milling all around, the overhead sound system tuned to a commercial radio station (usually the one the gym advertises on) and external device and application hoops for your body to jump through.

The average gym is not to dissimilar to the average work environment. Your brain is still doing what it had been doing all day: spinning and chattering. The body is only tangentially engaged as your mind thinks about the busy day you had, the busy day tomorrow and the time wasted waiting on the person that is currently on the machine you need.

The average gym does not promote body/mind balance. You continue to suffer disharmony which affects the whole of you: glucose response, sleep cycles, depression, memory, abdominal obesity, anxiety, learning, blood pressure just to name a few.

The body is not an object that the mind strives to control. The mind and body are one. Unless you take the time to learn how to connect them again you are not living fully.

Yaboga can help. We start in the mind, allow for the re-connection, and move the body with mindful purpose and in movements that it remembers from eons of behavior.

Yaboga.com

I don’t “count calories” in the deprivation-diet sense of the phrase, but I like knowing my caloric intake. I, unlike a lot of people, am a utilitarian eater. I like foods of all kinds and appreciate that which is well prepared and tasty, but you don’t have to pry me away from the refrigerator, is all I’m saying.

This was not always the case, until I figured out the vicious insulin spike phenomenon. Once I started controlling intake of grains and sugars, and, thus, the up’s and down’s of sugar highs, I noticed a sea-change of difference. I started eating more slowly (which you should endeavor to always do) and in smaller portions. By offering myself preponderance fat instead of a preponderance of sugars and starches, the cravings abated.

Nonetheless, this app is really cool. I am going to try it out for a while and see if it is all that. Stay tuned.

What we do often, we make easy. That is the plan anyway. Our bodies are always looking for the easiest route; call it a system conservation oversight, or, better yet, survival.

In essence, our bodies are looking to do more with less. So, that elliptical routine is less effective tomorrow because your body is ready for it: mentally, chemically, physiologically. Heck, you may even begin to carbo-load the night before in anticipation for a great work-out.

There is the first symptom: planning and consistency. Regular schedules allow our bodies the foresight of regimentation. Your body hopes for that consistency, so it can allocate systems accordingly, so it can effectively do more with less. Survival mode. But look around, we are creatures that have lost survival mode attitudes and instincts. And, by the way, adding length to routines or increased weight or sets is actually counter-productive. This adds stress to the body which adds to the equation stress hormones and injury. You see you only need to increase weight and reps if the body is prepared for the attack. If the body is unprepared, work-outs are shorter and more intense.

For those that train regularly, work-outs can sometimes become these behemoths of effort that await you on work-out days. What is ironic is that they only get longer because so much is an anticipated step of this “process” towards an ideal self that may not even be right for you and your over-worked body.

Variety of movement and short, burst routines -anytime and anywhere. Add to that a diet low in processed foods and you’ll be keeping your body on its toes by not allowing a pattern to emerge. Because as soon as your body sees a pattern, it starts trying to save on its systems, trying to do less in order to survive.

Don’t survive..LIVE!

Yaboga uses music as its inspiration. Centeredness as its goal. Chaos as its core.

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Surprise! Less is truly more.

by: Tracy E. Thomas

The body is a collection of systems. Systems like neural, cardiovascular, autonomic, immune and metabolic; they all work in concert together for sustained health and, you guessed it, happiness.

Conventional wisdom has always held that stress kills. We all know (and feel) what stress is, right? But other than that ‘stressed out’ feeling, what else is going on, especially with these aforementioned systems?

Allostasis literally means “achieving stability through change”. When our bodies become stressed, system harmony is affected. This is called allostatic load.

A recent study from The Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology, The Rockefeller University, NY, NY finds indicators that show that under stress, our brains change their ‘geography’, they shrink, if you will. That’s right, the brain, the very plastic organ that houses all of these systems, morphs under the load of our daily grind just like our backs, knees and feet.

I don’t know about you, but a sore back or feet are one thing, a brain, quite another.

The brain sees stress as a threat. So, that being said, the brain sees no difference between a bear charging toward your campsite or a bear-market charging at your 401K. The brain triggers the same set of chemicals to try and re-acquire allostasis. One chemical is a hormone called catecholamine. Catecholamines increase heart rate and blood pressure to aid the body in its fight (or flight). Looking back at the bear analogy, a charging bear may happen once and is over in moments. A bear-market may last for months. Whichever your predicament, catecholamines are going to do their thing. Chronically increased blood pressure and heart rate wear at cardiovascular system, taking it out of balance, or, increasing the allostatic load.

One system out of whack causes other systems to drift out of balance as well. This is because the body releases more chemicals to stabilize the ones that are over stimulated. This adds to more stress and increased allostatic load.

You see where this is going? No wonder the brain changes. It is trying to survive. To survive, it must adapt or evolve. This happens in animals as well. Environmental disruptions can affect mating and hibernation cycles due to elevated cortisol levels in ‘stressed’ animals. Cortisol is usually referred to as the “stress hormone” as it is involved in response to stress and anxiety. It increases blood pressure and blood sugar, and reduces immune responses. Freak, springtime snowstorms or being held captive at a zoo are stressors that can interrupt mating and hibernation cycles in animals; what if they added hyper connectivity, smoking, taxes, work place pitfalls and war? Well, humans adapt, right? Yes we do. Our brains change under undue loads of stress spewing out reactionary chemicals that shorten our lives in both quality and quantity. YUCK!

Our stress, or allostatic load, isn’t just a sensation we endure and lament to friends over coffee. It is an all-systems-go fight to reestablish balance. The victims of this fight are glucose response, sleep cycles, depression, memory, abdominal obesity, anxiety, learning, blood pressure and, oh yeah, a shrinking brain.

By Tracy E. Thomas

It stands to reason that ‘healthy is as healthy does’, but as we all know: sometimes the doing is the hardest part.

Look at the lucrative industry of fitness that abounds, all backed by good intentions and guilt motivated impulse buying. How many of you have equipment in your home taking up valuable square footage, or gym memberships that somehow end up unused after 2-3 months? Yeah, that’s right; I am talking about burn-out.

What if told you that you could workout a fraction of the time you do now, but to an improved physiological (and psychological) response? Would you read on?

Well, it seems that re-thinking the fitness grind paradigm now has evidence backing it up.

A group of scientists published in January 2009 Bio Med Central; BMC Endocrine Disorders found that short, High-intensity Interval Training [HIT] showed significant improvements in glycemic control in its test subjects. HIT can also be used as a training strategy to reduce metabolic risk factors in young and middle aged populations who, like in the opening paragraph, have a hard time finding the time staying consistent with exercise regimes.

Let’s look more closely at the physiological benefits first. What exactly is glycemic response and why is it important?

The glycemic index, GI is a measure of the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels. Carbohydrates that break down quickly during digestion, releasing glucose rapidly into the bloodstream, have a high GI; carbohydrates that break down more slowly, releasing glucose more gradually into the bloodstream, have a low GI. For most people, foods with a low GI have significant health benefits. The concept was developed to find out which foods were best for people with diabetes.

Several lines of recent scientific evidence have shown that individuals who followed a low GI diet over many years were at a significantly lower risk for developing both type 2 diabetes and coronary heart disease than others. High blood glucose levels or repeated glycemic “spikes” following a meal may promote these diseases by increasing oxidative stress to the vasculature and also by the direct increase in insulin levels. In the past, post –meal glycemic spikes has been considered a risk factor associated mainly with diabetes. However, more recent evidence shows that it also presents an increased risk for atherosclerosis in the non-diabetic population. So all those potatoes and bread you had for lunch place you firmly within the realm of glycemic spike. That sounds like a description that fits 90% of lunchtime America.

Currently it is thought that in order to improve glycemic response involves moderate to vigorous intensity aerobic and resistance exercise for several hours per week.

Sound familiar?

Worse than that, hours spent working out is hard to maintain in the real world of work, family and catching the latest episode of TrueBlood. I make this last point only because ‘down time’ is also needed for a balanced approached to overall health.

If you are stressing over the unused Super Glide 9000 that is now where you hang the dry cleaning, or the bank draft the gym pulls out of your account every month, you may want to consider re-thinking your approach to fitness. Because stressing over not exercising AND stressing over not using the things that are supposed to aid in that attempt is insult to injury.

Yaboga is an approach to health that considers the balance we all need.

Rather selling you on this idea that a piece of equipment or a gym membership is the only way to put in all the hard work required to get ideal looking body, Yaboga looks at what is needed to achieve improved health, not improved fitness industry sales.

You get healthy and your body will look great, guaranteed.

As parents, we need to seriously look at aspartame on the developing mind. Remember, at one point in history conventional wisdom would bleed people out to rid the body of damaging ‘humors’ in the blood. We may be a little smarter, but we are still looking far a way around doing the right thing.

Conclusion
It was seen that aspartame disturbs amino acid metabolism, protein structure and metabolism, integrity of nucleic acids, neuronal function, endocrine balances and changes in the brain concentrations of catecholamines. It was also reported that aspartame and its breakdown products cause nerves to fire excessively, which indirectly causes a very high rate of neuron depolarization. The energy systems for certain required enzyme reactions become compromised, thus indirectly leading to the inability of enzymes to function optimally. The ATP stores in the cells are depleted, indicating that low concentrations of glucose are present in the cells, and this in turn will indirectly decrease the synthesis of acetylcholine, glutamate and GABA.

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if you are interested in forging a new body by eating like a caveman and getting your groove on to your favorite playlists.