A Few Tips to Break Bad Habits

Sure, breaking bad habits is easier said than done. But here are a few tips to help you get rid of those daily digressions which are no longer serving you.

First, it’s good to focus on the positive. Write down every single good habit you partake in. Eat an apple every day? Floss most days? Drink plenty of water? Walk to the mailbox instead of drive? Wash your hands frequently?

Writing all of your good habits down will change your perspective. No longer will the crutches and obstacles impeding your health and happiness seem as burdensome.

Hopefully, you’ll come up with a laundry list of good habits, which will prove you’re not as unhealthy as you think you might be.

Visualize how your bad habits physically affect you.

Now, to confront the demons: It’s critical to be aware of what your bad habits are and the full extent to which it is causing disharmony in your life.

For example, if you smoke a pack of cigarettes every day, you’re probably aware that smoking is bad for you, but chances are, for every “cancer stick” you shorten your life with, you’re not thinking about the exact physiology that occurs with every cigarette consumed.

If you know this vice is detrimental to your health, mentally picture yourself with one of the many deadly conditions and diseases that smoking causes and how it would affect you and your family and friends.

Perhaps if you focused on how you’d look with a tracheotomy tube or having to talk with a voicebox (satirized and made popular by the South Park supporting character Ned) each time you smoked a cigarette, it would perhaps help you cut down and eventually quit.

This bit of advice might sound like tough love, but tobacco addiction is a life and death matter and a bad habit you’ll be glad to break.

Recite an affirmation each time you’re about to partake in your bad habit.

Continuing with the smoking cigarettes example, each time before you light up, try to say out loud, or even in your head, an affirmation—even if you don’t believe it. Try this one: “I enjoy a superior state of well-being and health. I have the choice to continue to be healthy from this moment forward.”

Combining visualization of what your bad habit can physically—and psychologically— manifest if you continue indulging in it, along with saying positive daily affirmations can help you eventually break your bad habit.

It’s especially important to state the affirmation every time before you’re about to indulge. Make it as automatic as reaching for that cigarette or extra bonbon. 

Speaking of candy, I don’t smoke, but I do eat lots of sugar.

What about less egregious bad habits than smoking cigarettes? Maybe you’re not one of the approximately 35 percent of American adults who are overweight but you do over do it with junk food.

Many people struggle with overindulging in simple carbohydrates that convert easily into sugar, or just plain sugary treats that cause a rush of energy and then eventually a sugar crash.

What kind of energy do you want to have?

It’s important to visualize how you want to feel during the day. If you genuinely enjoy the rush you feel from drinking 3 cups of coffee in the morning, while skipping breakfast and then ultimately hitting the proverbial brick wall at 2 p.m., you probably won’t break the bad habit of drinking too much caffeine, which can wreak havoc on your adrenal glands.

But if you do prefer to have steady energy throughout the day without crashing in the afternoon, you’ll stand a good chance of kicking your sugar addiction.

Eating more often and making sure that you consume some protein and a little natural fat with every meal will help keep your blood sugar levels steady and you’ll feel satisfied for longer. Instead of feasting on candy bars and countless other junk snacks, you’ll find that you only need a tiny portion of a sweet, preferably a healthier one like a piece of fruit or a tiny wedge of dark chocolate to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Shortly after you start the good habit of eating more frequent smaller well-balanced meals, you’ll be able to conquer your sugar habit.

Get the “dope” rush. Also try other needles.

Overeating, drug addiction and other bad habits can cause a surge and then an eventual long-term suppressed levels of the pleasure chemical in our brain, dopamine.

Exercising can bring about the “natural” high feeling, which will hopefully replace the false pleasures our bad habits trick us with.

Exercise, visualization and positive affirmations all can help in trying to break bad habits. It won’t be easy but at least you’ll have a few tools to start with. Also consider acupuncture and hypnotherapy. Acupuncture points can help mitigate withdrawal symptoms. 

Are Fasting and Cleanses Necessary?

I'm sure you've heard of someone who's done the Master Cleanse diet, where you consume nothing but a concoction of water with lemons, maple syrup and cayenne pepper for 7-14 days. 


Sound like fun? 


I've known a few people who have actually done the Master Cleanse. The first few days, they are miserable. If they can make it past day 5, then they begin to adjust. Those that complete the 10 or 14 day cleanse report more energy and a flatter stomach. 


But what happens when they stop the Master Cleanse and eventually go back to what they've been eating and other bad habits? The weight comes right back on.


And it's not the weight that's a problem in the first place. It's the body-fat percentage. You will lose weight on any calorie restricted diet. If you had nothing but 3 Snickers bars a day, you'd probably lose weight. 


Most people need to add muscle mass and melt away body fat. Going on a calorie-restricted diet will waste away your muscle tissue and probably won't burn any fat. 


Every religion has a fasting holiday. This is an exception to the rule. It's probably a good idea to fast once or twice a year for a 24-hour period, if for nothing more than a spiritual appreciation of the energy that foods provides for us. It's also nice to experience once in a blue moon what more than half of the world's population experiences on a daily basis: hunger.


But at no other time, in my opinion, are fasting and cleanses necessary, unless directed by a medical professional. 


Your liver is a very resilient organ. You actually cleanse every day. Your liver does it for you. 


The best way to cleanse is to just start eating healthy from this point forward. Eat healthy 90% of the time. That means figuring out what ratio of macronutrients (carbs, fats, proteins) best supplies you with rock-steady energy throughout the day (health coaches like myself will help you figure this out). 


This also means eating foods that don't spike your blood sugar. 


Allow yourself to fall off the bandwagon about 10% of the time, which means that if you're eating 21 meals per week (breakfast, lunch and dinner), then 2 of your meals can be a "cheat" meal like pizza or a burger. 


Most people actually don't eat often enough to speed up their metabolism. Anybody who skips breakfast is literally telling their brain to go into starvation mode and slow down metabolism. Fasting is not wise, even "healthy" juice fasting. 


We should be eating foods that encourage muscle building. Juice fasting, unless, again, you're ill and can only consume juices or it's been recommended by a dietitian, will not encourage fat burning and lean muscle tissue growth. 


So don't be like a trendy celebrity and go on a cleanse or fast. You'll only be hurting yourself. Exercise so that your lymphatic system helps flush out metabolic waste byproduct (helps get the gunk out). Do this and eat cleanly 18 or 19 meals out of your approximately 21 meals a week and you'll be functioning at optimum speed--no cleansing or fasting necessary.

Healthy Snacks

Don’t reach for that donut just yet. Here are some guidelines for choosing healthy snacks….

When snacking, it’s a good idea to think about blood sugar levels. If you consume a sugary snack, chances are your blood sugar levels will spike. Although you might feel a temporary rush of energy and possibly an elevated mood, you’ll most likely feel like you’ve hit a brick wall and experience a crash shortly after snacking on high-glycemic index foods.

After crashing, you’ll feel hungry again and repeat the vicious cycle.

In order to stabilize your blood sugar levels, when snacking, apply the same fundamental rule to that of each of your regular meals. (Hopefully, you’re eating breakfast, lunch and dinner daily, to maintain steady blood sugar and help burn fat.)

Always combine the following three macronutrients when eating:

• protein 
• carbohydrates
• natural fat

Combining macronutrients ensures that you’ll feel full for longer and won’t need to binge on sweets. In fact, if your regular meals have a good ratio of the three macronutrients, you might find you may not have to snack at all.

Start paying attention to how you feel after eating a meal. If you feel full for three to four hours after eating and don’t have bloating or a drop in energy, then whatever you just ate is the right macronutrient proportion for you.

For example, a breakfast of two eggs, one piece of sprouted whole grain bread with a little dab of butter and two small slices of all-natural bacon may satisfy you for several hours.

To keep your blood sugar levels steady, it’s a good idea not to go more than four hours during the day without eating. So taking the breakfast example above, say, eaten at 8 a.m., you’ll want to eat lunch at about noon.

Maybe you don’t get home till 6 p.m. If you wait till then to eat dinner, you’ll likely be tired and cranky, so it’s a good idea to have a late afternoon snack.

Here are some examples of healthy snacks that combine all 3 macronutrients:

• Celery and raw almond butter: celery is a carbohydrate; almond butter is both protein and natural fat.
• Cheese and crackers: opt for grass-fed cheese for higher essential Omega 3 fatty acid content if possible and gluten-free rice crackers for less intestinal bloating.
• Hummus and carrot sticks: hummus contains both a little protein and natural fat.
• Nitrate and nitrite-free jerky: contains protein and natural fat; you don’t always have to include a carbohydrate if you can digest meat efficiently.
• Edamame sprinkled with sea salt: edamame is the whole soybean and it contains both protein and essential trace minerals if sprinkled with sea salt.
• Greek Yogurt: unless you’re on a restricted diet, go for the full-fat variety, which will keep you full for longer and includes all three macronutrients
• Apple slices with honey and olives: perfect for those who crave sweet and salty.
• Organic turkey breast slice with crackers: it’s very easy to bring a package of healthy deli slices with you to work, just make sure none of your co-workers steals it; turkey contains both protein and natural fat.

Even nutritionists, dieticians and health coaches fall off the wagon. If you do and reach for a donut, the best thing to do is to eat a little protein and natural fat (preferably before eating the donut) to stabilize your blood sugar levels.

But if you adopt these healthy snacking guidelines, hopefully, your cravings for sugary junk food will subside.

Why Low-Fat Diets Don't Work

The reason low-fat diets are so ineffective is related to our blood sugar levels. A low-fat diet will usually mean that we end up eating more carbohydrate. This carbohydrate is converted into glucose (sugar) in the bloodstream. There is a large variation between different people, but in general, the more carbohydrate we eat, the higher our blood glucose levels get.

Glucose in the bloodstream triggers the release of the hormone insulin. So, high levels of blood glucose result in high levels of insulin. The problem is that insulin actually blocks the ability to burn body fat and it is the hormone that is responsible for depositing fat into our tissues.

The excess glucose in our bloodstream (created by excess carbohydrate in our diet) is directly converted into stored body fat The situation gets much worse as time goes by since high levels of blood glucose lead to

type II diabetes. Studies have also repeatedly demonstrated that excess glucose damages the arteries and causes heart disease.

A study published in the health journal Lancet in 2006 collated data on blood glucose and cardiovascular
disease from 52 countries. It was found that more than 3 million deaths were attributable to high blood glucose levels. The total number of deaths related to higher than optimum blood glucose was comparable to the number of deaths from smoking.

So next time somebody tells you they are on a low-fat diet, offer them a cigarette to go along with their super-high carb diet--it'll be just as healthy for them.

P.S. If you really want to understand causes of heart disease, read a brilliant book (available online) a Metabolic Typing colleague of mine Justin Smith wrote. Available at http://www.29billion.com/

Reversing the Diabetes Trend

In October 2010, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) projected that by the year 2050, as many as one-third of all adults in the U.S. could have diabetes. Despite the dire prediction, it’s quite possible to prevent, manage or even reverse diabetes.

According to one diabetes-prevention website, almost 60 million Americans are on the verge of becoming diabetic, while over 20 million already—about 8 percent of the U.S. population—have type 2 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes accounts for approximately 90 percent of all diabetes diagnoses. Commonly referred to as a “lifestyle disease”, diabetes currently costs the global economy almost $400 billion per year.

That number is expected to jump to almost $500 billion in 20 years.

Diabetes, though, can usually be prevented, controlled, or possibly even reversed by:

• Managing blood sugar levels
• Losing weight
• Exercising
• Making dietary changes

In order to stem the tide of the diabetes epidemic, Al Pirnia, president of a diabetes-prevention company called Transformations, says that education and communication is crucial to managing and preventing diabetes.

“Every diabetes educator will encourage those with diabetes to lose weight and eat fewer carbohydrates, but what few people are saying is that you don’t need to have a huge belly in order to become pre-diabetic or diabetic,” says Pirnia.

Although it’s estimated that 80 percent of people with type 2 diabetes are obese, Pirnia says just a little extra abdominal fat can lead to a pre-diabetic condition.

“Just 10 pounds of extra abdominal fat,” he says, along with a stressful lifestyle that makes no time for exercise, “can get you over the top and make you become a diabetic,” cautions Pirnia.

More important than weight loss, says Pirnia, is educating people how to be in total control of their blood sugar.

“Diabetes is easy to correct at the early stage with simple food habit changes. Unfortunately, the [healthcare] system usually waits until it’s a disease condition before any action is taken,” Pirnia says.

Rather than educating the populace on how to regulate blood sugar levels, Pirnia claims that often times, a person’s blood sugar fasting levels are at 100 or even 110 before any comment is made by a healthcare professional.

Pirnia encourages those with pre-diabetic and diabetic conditions to frequently monitor blood sugar levels by using a self-administered glucometer.

Fasting blood sugar levels, says Pirnia, should not exceed 90.

Rather than simply telling someone with diabetes to modify their diet, Pirnia suggests educating those with diabetes on how to:

• Eat protein at every meal, including snacks
• Take a healthy snack between meals
• Never eat large meals full of starchy foods
• Learning, through use of the glucometer, which foods spike up blood sugar
• Eliminating or minimizing those foods which spike blood sugar
• Biochemically boosting the body’s fat burning process by adjusting carbohydrate to protein ratios
• Encourage hydrochloric acid (HCL) supplementation to support digestion and nutrient absorption
• Support healthy pancreatic function, especially those who have been on medication
• Educate pre-diabetics on the consequences of not changing their lifestyle

“It’s meaningless to tell someone, ‘lose weight’ if they are not going to learn how to burn abdominal fat,” says Pirnia.

“If people lose muscle mass when they lose weight, they are doing more harm than good. Furthermore, if those with diabetes or at risk of getting diabetes aren’t properly educated, they will just end up on medication and ultimately, their pancreas will be undermined or completely destroyed,” adds Pirnia, referring to the organ that secretes insulin to regulate blood sugar.

Failure to reverse diabetes could also lead to developing Alzheimer’s disease, certain cancers and heart disease, according to several contemporary studies.

The Gycemic Index scale, a measure of how quickly and for how long carbohydrates in a given food raises blood sugar levels, is one tool that nutritionists and dieticians frequently use to educate their clients.

But Thomas Wolever, Ph.D., a professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto cautions that people often think that the GI tells you what your individual glycemic response will be all the time for a specific food.

“It doesn’t,” he says, in HealthCommunities.com’s Diabetes Focus.

“The GI of any food is consistent from day to day…what changes is a person’s response.”

For example, white bread has the same GI regardless. But if someone eats bread three days in a row, Wolever claims the GI response could vary by as much as three fold because of activity, stress levels, sleep quality, and what other foods have been eaten at other times of the day and at the same time as the bread.

The aforementioned Pirnia would no doubt educate those interested in managing their diabetes to avoid white bread at all costs.

“The bottom line,” says Pirnia, “is to empower people to learn how to manage and be in control of their blood sugar so they can impact their need for medication if they are already a diabetic, and for those who are pre-diabetic to never become a diabetic.”

Judd Handler is an Encinitas, CA-based health reporter and wellness consultant.

The Only Time You Should Eat Sugar (and not Fat)

Sugar is evil. It'll make you fat. You'll get diabetes.....you've heard it all before. 

As well as it should. Without going off on a tangent, part of the reason the U.S. economy won't rebound anytime soon, is the spiraling, out of control cost of health care. Millions of people are eating way too much junk food loaded with high fructose corn syrup. They get sick, have to go to the doctor, swallow a lifetime supply of medication and drive up health insurance premiums for everybody.

While this might be a simplistic view, partially blaming obesity for our sluggish economy, illness prevention is simple: eat real food, exercise at least a little bit several times a week and avoid sugar. 

For those of us who are on the wellness path, there is one time you should gulp down sugar and that's after a high-intensity workout.

Immediately after a hard core workout, your body's glycogen (blood sugar) levels are low. It's at this time you have a window of opportunity of around one hour when calories will be used up to 400% more efficiently than at any other time. 

Physiologically, it's as if you can eat almost anything you want. Think of this time as free calories. 

But don't go reaching for the Twinkies yet, if you've just completed a 5-mile run and did 200 pushups. 

In the past, sugary sports drinks were the staple of athletes. But in the last five to ten years, studies have shown that the best recovery drink or food has both simple carbs and protein, in a ratio of 4 parts carbs to 1 part protein. 

Unless you are lactose intolerant, one of the best foods to consume after a brutal workout is chocolate milk. 

Who would have thunk it? But chocolate milk has about 28 grams of sugar to 7 grams protein, a perfect 4:1 ratio.  

Including some protein aids the recovery process. After all, when you're strength training, what you're really doing is creating micro tears in the muscle fibers. Protein and plenty of rest rebuilds the muscle tissue.

So what about fat? Should that be consumed after a workout? Just like sugar, fat has a bad rap. I've always thought fat should really be called "lipids." Then, fat-phobic aerobic junkies and models wouldn't be afraid to eat a nutritious avocado for fear of being fat.

But the one and only time you should avoid eating fat is after a challenging workout as it theoretically interferes with the uptake of nutrients to the bloodstream, muscle tissue and organs. 

Under normal circumstances, natural dietary fat should be eaten at every meal to prevent blood sugar spikes--perhaps the number one reason people complain of being tired.

So reach for the sugar, only after a hard workout. Because if your blood is constantly full of sugar you will unknowingly create damage to the lining of your arteries and over time this will create inflammation.

If you're in need of a recommendation for good recovery formulas, email me at judd@fitnessandbodywork.com. 

To your health,

Judd

Food Allergies: Reasons, Symptoms and Cures

Are you one of the 12 million people in the U.S. with a food allergy? 

Only eight foods account for 90 percent of all food allergies. They are:

·         Corn

·         Soy

·         Wheat

·         Cow’s Milk

·         Eggs (from hens)

·         Peanuts

·         Tree Nuts

·         Seafood

Symptoms of food allergies can appear within as little as two minutes or up to two hours.

If you’re one out of the 25 adults—or one out of 17 kids age 3 and under—who suffer from food allergies, you’ll likely have at least one of the following symptoms:

·         rashes

·         hives

·         itching

·         swelling

·         wheezing and breathing difficulty

·         swollen lips or eyelids

Some people experience severe gastrointestinal symptoms from food allergies such as:

·         vomiting,

·         cramps

·         diarrhea

Food allergies, especially to peanuts and shellfish, can even, in extreme cases, lead to death from anaphylactic shock.

Causes of Food Allergies

Diligently, western society scrubs itself clean of all germs with heavily-marketed anti-bacterial soap. Is this obsessive cooties phobia cause for an increase in food allergies?

That’s one theory that’s been circulating among physicians, allergists and naturopaths and holistic healers for at least the past two decades.

Had no clue that anti-bacterial soap could actually weaken your immune system, causing it to attack a particular food substance, releasing histamines and other inflammatory chemicals in your system?

Have you succumbed to the hygiene propaganda?

If you have a toddler and keep your house spic and span, neutralizing all foreign microscopic invaders—both good and bad—your child may become more vulnerable to developing food allergies.

Other causes of food allergies

Processed foods, breast milk from mother to infant, and cross contamination from processors who produce many different food products in the same facility, are some of the other theories accounting for the increased incidence of food allergies.

In the case of peanuts, one theory exists that although Chinese cuisine contains lots of them, peanuts do not promote allergic reactions in most Chinese people because they boil their nuts—not roast them, as is commonly the case in western processed snacks and butters.

Whole-wheat-sandwich-eating Eskimos: More prone to food allergies?

Perhaps some sufferers of food allergies get dismayed because they think they are eating a food that is generally considered healthy.

“No fair, why is that I start wheezing after eating whole wheat bread—I thought it was much more nutritious than white bread,” pleads a despondent hypothetical food allergy sufferer.

It’s true of course that white bread lacks as many nutrients as whole wheat bread, but for some people, for reasons mentioned already, plus another important one— genetics—their DNA is not particularly well suited to digest, in this case, wheat.

If a traditional Nunavut igloo dweller living in far northern Canada abandoned that region’s traditional diet and subsisted instead on baloney sandwiches on whole wheat, there’s a chance this Nanuk of the North might develop a food allergy.

Dieticians, nutritionists and food coaches schooled in the concept of individualized nutrition and Metabolic Typing® understand that certain foods, especially in the case of wheat, corn, peanuts and soy, were introduced to humans, relatively, a short time ago.

Because many of us are ethnic mutts, it’s hard to know what traditional foods our ancestors ate.

Are you 100 percent Scottish-American? Then maybe your ancestors subsisted on seafood and unadulterated porridges. A pure-bred Scot from the Hebrides who now eats foods fortified with soy protein could develop an allergy to soy.

Eating bad foods kills enzymes, causes allergies

Over time, eating foods that trigger allergic reactions can render ineffective the digestive enzymes in your gut. Take cow’s milk for example. A common food allergen, it’s theorized by some progressive-thinking nutritionists that the pasteurization process in milk suppresses lactase, the enzyme needed to break down milk proteins.

Avoiding Food Allergies

It’s important to get in touch with your body and recognize any symptoms. Eliminating offending foods is the only tried and true way to avoid flare ups.

You can have your physician or allergist do a skin test for food allergies, but keep in mind that just because your skin shows sensitivity, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll experience allergic reactions, at least not severe ones.

Keeping a food journal is one of the best ways to learn how to eliminate foods that trigger reactions.