Category: Motivational

They win in the end. If they can’t kick your a$$ like this, they’ll eventually ravage your arteries!

If you wonder if research supports the abolition of OILS in our diet, just watch this video directly on YouTube & click on all the links in the description box below the video:

Thank you “Mic the Vegan”. You make a great case for us to cut WAAAAYYY back on processed fats!

TIME / TOPIC
3:28 / Food addictions
6:23 / Dealing with plateaus?
10:45 / Eating, but not feeling full?
13:39 / Types of food to eat?
15:30 / Yo-yo diet damage?
18:44 / Starch daily check sheet?
(starch, starch, starch, fruit, salad, exercise)
22:04 / Starch targets VS scale?
26:25 / Some gain faster than others?
28:26 / Nuts, dried fruit, avocado?
33:29 / Emotional eating?
42:03 / Bulimia damage?
45:30 / All-u-can-eat calorie dilute diet?
49:15 / Eat salad 1st, veg 2nd, starch 3rd
51:07 / Environment factor?

https://youtu.be/YtJq_otrvtY

Love this concept. It’s a new definition of holistic body building for *longterm* results. Notice waistline in video, that’s amazing for this 44 year old!

“Wide waist syndrome” (I just made that up) is commonly accepted as part of the aging process. Not true! Not necessary! Definitely not ideal! 

OLDER exercise addicts I see at the gym in the big boys’ room (for whom I have the *greatest* respect) often have widening waistlines accompanying big upper body muscle. 

What’s the point? When waistline is narrower it defines the entire appearance… if appearance is the goal, which is ludicrous. Strength without wellness is a contradiction.

But it’s not just the men! Older female gym rats make another mistake: either they too live with an ever expanding waistline, trying to puff up adjacent muscle to camouflage the appearance… or they starve themselves to lose that “spare tire” around their waist, and in the process lose muscle & curves! Both approaches are less than optimal. I’ve got to remember this!

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I have a new definition for beauty… it’s outer AND inner strength… it’s *firm* flexibility… *ageless* agility… defined waistline. It’s a challenge to attain, but the guy in the video knows the way to eat himself happy to that goal. 

If you think the meals on his youtube channel look gross, why do you suppose he gets so excited about eating them? They’re so simple & unembellished, why would anyone be happy eating them? I tell you the truth, although I’m not as clean as he is, this manner of fueling your workout grows on you. It’s addictive, and it does make you happy in real-time, in the NOW as well as the later… extremely happy!!!

This morning I was checking out Amazon reader reviews of Dr. Mark Hyman’s book: EAT FAT, GET THIN… (boy, don’t we all wish that were true! 🙂 )

I was pleasantly surprised to come across a recent (one star out of five) review submitted by Dr. T. Colin Campbell, Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, the author of The China Study & consultant to the PlantPure Nation Jumpstart program, which I am starting soon.

Take a look…

A Seriously Misguided Path To Health
By T. Colin Campbell on March 23, 2016

This book is a major but not surprising disappointment. It is yet another book in a series of books that relies on a blatantly false assertion, namely, that fat is good, not bad.

Dr. Hyman claims that he is attempting to break the so-called myth told during recent decades that fat is bad. To support the nobility of his efforts, he quotes John Kennedy’s wise words “for the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears.”

Myth-buster Hyman’s claim that fat is good, not bad, is the principal basis for this entire book. This same theme has been used many times in other so-called low-carb books, mostly starting with Dr. Atkins first book published in 1973. Hyman’s bold assertion is so important that, if wrong, the book’s main message—and that of similar books—falls apart. His first chapter is titled “How did we get into this big fat mess?” then continues his second chapter titled “Separating fat from fiction”.

Hyman claims that since 1970, government authorities and their industry comrades have repeatedly told us to decrease fat consumption because it is bad. We listened, so he says, and we tried that experiment, only to learn, sadly, that it doesn’t work. We got fatter and fatter, sicker and sicker with this low fat diet. Instead, we increased consumption of sugar and other refined ‘carbs’ and it is this gluttonous consumption of carbs that has caused our health problems, thus giving rise to the advice to use low carb diets.

Hyman says in the book’s second page that we “reduced fat in our diet from 43 percent to 33 percent of calories and cut back even more on saturated fat.” Notably, he gives no reference for this claim. Accordingly, we got “sicker than ever, with the percentage of people getting heart disease increasing” while “type 2 diabetes and obesity rates around the globe skyrocketed.”

Although it is true that type 2 diabetes and obesity have increased in recent decades and although it is true that too many misguided agencies and other parties have waved the low fat flag much too vigorously, I know of no reliable evidence that dietary fat decreased from 43% to 33% of total diet calories, from 1970 onwards, as Hyman and his colleagues are claiming. We NEVER experimented with low fat diets. According to the U.S database on food consumption trends from 1970 to 2000 <[...]>, “total caloric sweeteners” increased by 23%. But “added fats/oils” increased even more, by 39%, exactly opposite Hyman’s claim. It’s true that this modest increase in consumption of caloric sweeteners shifted to corn-based sweeteners, but it is debatable how much specific effect on diabetes and obesity occurred, compared with other sweeteners. But please keep in mind this: we DID NOT EXPERIMENT WITH LOW FAT DIETS. Our diets have been consistently high in fat for the past 50-100 years, especially becoming worse during the past 50 years.

Sticking with his stubborn but FALSE CLAIM about our so-called experiment with low fat diets, Dr. Hyman then searches for evidence to support this claim. Based on my experiences as an experimental researcher for most of my 60-year career (professional reviewer of research grant funding applications of fellow researchers and writing and reviewing research manuscripts for publication), Hyman’s attempt to support his discussion with lots of references does not meet the test of professionalism. He has had no experience with experimental research and no research publications—his is obvious. His attempt to include references, at best, is cosmetic. I decided to check out some of his references—he invited the reader to do so—and, among his first ten very assertive statements on the health value of fat that he highlights, most of his citations are either too narrow in scope for his grand statements and/or they are unrelated to his claim.

Virtually everyone in science accepts the evidence showing that refined carbohydrates—especially simple sugars—are unhealthy. But to claim that increased rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease among others from 1970 to 2000 is due to an increasing consumption of ‘carbs’ and not to an even greater increased consumption of added fats and oils, is wrong, disingenuous and harmful to our society. At a minimum, it is a gross misrepresentation, being more suitable for a case of malpractice, were there such a mechanism for establishing such an allegation.

Adding further insult to injury is Dr. Hyman’s recommendation to consume 4-6 ounces of protein for each meal, thus yielding 12-18 ounces of protein per 3-meal day (i.e., 336-504 g protein/day). I understand that he probably is assuming protein to be the same as meat (like many other people), but this is a very superficial comment rarely, if ever, spoken by experienced scientists. This is clearly incorrect, for it would mean 1344-2016 calories provided by protein.

It should also be noted that virtually all commentary by low carb enthusiasts like Hyman refers to a so-called low fat diet as being about 25-30% fat. This is not the level of fat in diets of whole plant based foods (10-15% fat) that reverses (i.e., cures) serious diseases like heart disease and diabetes rather quickly for nearly everyone. Unfortunately, except for a couple of notable studies of Drs. Esselstyn and Ornish, none of the thousands of human studies of the last half century have included subjects using this diet. Thus, Hyman’s reference to so-called low fat diets in the scientific literature is false.

Mark, you are committing several serious offenses when referring to the scientific literature. You are wrong about claiming that we experienced a low fat experiment in the recent 3-4 decades—we did not. You are wrong that our higher rates of disease in recent decades are solely attributed to our increased consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates that somehow also support recommendations against the consumption of whole grains. You are wrong about recommending such a high intake of protein—you ignore the ability of animal-based protein to increase serum cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, to enhance experimental cancer development, to associate with major cancers in human population studies, and to increase risk for osteoporosis, among other ailments. All of these effects, some direct, some indirect, are buttressed by a symphony of biologically plausible mechanisms.

You say that you get some impressive results with your patients but I suggest that, at best, this is only short term results. If you examine lifetime experiences with diet and various chronic diseases, we see really impressive positive associations of animal based foods and disease risk and there is no way to ever see the opposite, i.e., high animal-based protein and low disease risk.

These several claims of yours are grievously false. They further confuse the public and do an enormous disservice to the future of medical practice, the cost of health care and the health of our planet. What is your motivation for advancing such nonsense?

I think you know why I call you by your first name; some have told me that you have referred to yourself as a student of mine. You were a student, about 30-plus years ago, as an undergraduate in my upper class course in nutritional biochemistry at Cornell although I did not personally know you in that large class of about 175 students. It is disingenuous to refer to yourself as my student—that kind of reference refers to graduate students who spend several years working in the laboratory of their mentors. I am disappointed that you did not take away something of value (although this was before my research group had fully made the connection between plant based diets and disease) because I would have hoped that you would have had at least a semblance of basic nutrition to help build your career in medicine. I regret that you could not have been my graduate student, eventually to recognize the reasons why science does not support either the use of nutrition supplements or the concept of functional medicine, which I consider to be only a platform to further that awful concept called polypharmacy..

I must be candid and rate your book as a failure and I do not want this to infer a personal failure. More importantly, it is a failure for our fellow citizens and I do hope that you might do some more study and inform yourself what the idea of reliable science really means. You are an engaging personality and you could have much to offer. The world needs a nutrition-oriented solution to its health care problems.

Hi guys! Honestly, I’m too busy at work to notice if anyone is listening out in blogger-land, but I’ll just keep yappin’ away!

😉

Very hectic time of the year for me. I’ve decided to postpone celebrating my first year on Project Waistline until after things calm down, early this summer. I’m going to have some medical tests done in order to compare the before & after numbers (LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, etc.)

With all this rush-rush scuttling about I often grab something quick to eat after work. It’s always healthier & less costly if I cook, but not much time for that right now!

El Pollo Loco is my favorite fast food option. I order two customized BRC (beans, rice, cheese) burritos, requesting:

* no tortilla (serve it in a bowl)

* black beans (pintos have added fat)

* replace cheese with raw cabbage

* at salsa bar I add onions, cilantro, red & green salsa

Unfortunately the rice is processed white, and the food is a bit salty. This costs about $4. (I don’t know where else you can get take-out lunch for under $5 these days.) It’s a lot of hassle for the staff to do it “my way”, so I like to ring their gratitude bell on my way out the door:

Other times I bring home Mongolian bbq restaurant food, loaded with great veggies, served with (white) rice instead of noodles because their noodles are made with eggs. I have to say “cook with NO OIL, plez… and package rice on the side”.

Cost is about $9. I usually save side of rice for later, and serve veggies over my own egg-free high fiber wheat noodles at home:

Trader Joe’s has a delicious vegan eggplant wrap. It comes with a fatty oil-based dip which I try to avoid (often unsuccessfully). It’s served in a low fat wheat wrap. (During the week I avoid processed carbs like bread, so that’s a drawback.) It costs $4.++ because I usually buy extra sides (chopped raw veggies, edamame, etc) & stuff them inside:

The local Japanese restaurant makes me a delicious vegan sushi roll sometimes. It has (white) rice, cucumber, celery, carrots, high fat avocado, wrapped in Nori seaweed. This costs somewhere between $8.-$10.

I enjoy Chipotle’s veggie bowl. I never add their processed vegan “meat”, too fatty. But I usually indulge in their lovely high fat avocado. This is pricey at about $9. if I add avocado… but hey, the rice is brown! 🙂

Okay, so those are my reasonably healthy “uh-oh, I’m starving & have no time to cook!” options.

For a change I’ve decided to try some frozen entrées from PlantPure Nation. (Note: They are now only available as shelf-stable meal starters.) I just ordered the 20 meal pack @ $6.89 each:

Here’s a description.

CLICK HERE

Here’s where to order:

CLICK HERE

Scroll down the page, read the details, watch the brief videos. This is a program designed by a team of lifestyle professionals, including T. Colin Campbell, the author of The China Study – a twenty year collaborative research partnership including Cornell, Oxford & the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine. There’s nothing “crack pot” about it. This is the decades long culmination of hard science, not the soft & fuzzy kind. 🙂

If you order the JumpStart package you get the same 20 meals + an electric warming tray for frozen meals, & lots of literature (books, cookbooks, videos, online communication). I just went with the food.

They’re pretty hefty, so here’s my plan:

* Oatmeal & fruit w/ Martian milk (that’s almond milk blended with green leafy veggies) for breakfast
* PlantPure frozen entrée w/ side salad/veggies for lunch
* Snack of fruit/veggies
* Repeat entrée & salad/veggies for supper

On heavy workout days I’ll probably increase portions. Kickboxing can really rev-up the old appetite. Try it & see! 🙂

Hasta luego, baby…

Okay, so I went a little too hard the other day and injured my foot during a kickbox routine. Didn’t really hurt at first, but in the middle of the night I had a stabbing pain which caused me to jump out of bed and do the crazy dance in the dark! The next day it was fat. The next day it was even fatter. And by the end of that day it was fat AND black & blue!

Nooooooo! This can’t be happening now, not NOW when I’m in the big finale, the final stretch, the three-month push to my first Project Waistline anniversary weigh-in event! I have been XL-partying a bit too much the last week or two, what with the holidays. I was going to use my foot (and the *rest* of my body, for that matter) to work off some of those extra calories I had been indulging in. Now I’m sidelined for a spell. I’m going to have to use my wits to stay on pace.

Hmmm… this may just be the best thing that could have ever happened to me. Now I get to dive into this program (and see what could be the most dynamic results) by adjusting my eating habits alone. I just hope my foot recovers soon. I’m like a little kid…I LOVE my exercise. Sitting still is like containment in a medieval torture chamber for me!

Searching YouTube for encouragement I stumbled upon two excellent ideas. The first is a short presentation about caloric concentration. Remember, we should always be gravitating to the low calorie concentrated foods, and shying away from the high calorie concentrated foods. Here is a quick, concise, visual explanation of this concept from the Small Step Advocate, Nutritionist Sid Garza-Hillman:

CLICK HERE

For a deeper understanding of the “why” I found this humorous talk by one of the authors of The Pleasure Trap, Behavioral Psychologist Doug Lisle:

Have you taken notice how restaurants play into our weakness – the human pleasure trap? They serve us tiny anemic house salads with gobs of high fat dressings, then a gigantic plate with limp over-cooked veggies on the side like an afterthought, punctuating the mountain of higher calorie dense food (usually meat & taters). The quantity of raw salad & cooked veggies are insignificant enough that they leave plenty of space for those high density main courses… quite the opposite of where we want to be.

The video links above emphasize a few simple & effective power strategies that we can incorporate into our lives, particularly if we have limited mobility at this time:

* Stop focusing on weightloss (okay, okay, okay… I’m listening!)
* Focus on healthy lifestyle… strength, endurance, flex-mobility, disease/pain free living
* Make morning oatmeal a HABIT !!!
* Eat your main meal in this order, in descending-sized servings:

– HUGE SIZED: raw salad
– MEDIUM SERVING: cooked veggies
– ALL U CAN EAT (w/out exploding): starchy main course (beans, potatoes, pasta, etc)

Don’t you just love this concept? It makes the high starchy main course act like your dessert. You fill most of your belly with the nutritionally dense raw salad and lightly steamed veggies, then you get to reward yourself with the higher calorie starchy foods (which I, for one, crave more than I do a sweet dessert!) It’s as though I can tell myself, “YES, you may have that pasta, you may have that slice of avocado toast… just be sure to eat it when your tummy is nearly full 🙂

Okay, so I’m going to incorporate these ideas into my eating routine until I’m back on my feet again, kickboxing away the calories. Even if I do not separate my food and eat it in this order, I will combine it in proportions in line with the concept.

Hasta la vista baby!

Hello all!

Things have been hectic on the job lately, but I’m very excited about a special countdown anniversary thing starting today. I am exactly 100 days away from my one year Project Waistline anniversary! I have not touched animal products & significantly reduced salt, oil, sugar for 265 consecutive days. I have also exercised consistently (modifying somewhat during my busy work schedule), and in 100 more days I will finally reach the one-year milestone.

My plan is to do a simple, lighthearted, before & after photo thing on my anniversary in March…. and do a long awaited statisticaI update (waist-to-hip ratio, weight). Recall that I stopped tracking these statistics five months ago. The results will be a big surprise to me, if no one else!

At the one year mark I will also conclude my daily diary posts of food/exercise, and devote more time to analyzing and adjusting the program, as needed.

It certainly doesn’t mean I’ll stop eating and exercising this way, it just means I’ll be able to take the time to create some other types of content for my blog and YouTube channel.

I have been somewhat distracted during the last several months, what with the demands at work. However, I do have a holiday coming up in a few weeks at which time I will be able to devote more of my attention to the project.

If you look over my daily menu you’ll see I’ve had lots of XL items of late, probably more than I should have. This may have slowed down my progress, so I am making the decision here & now to eat even *cleaner* than ever over these last 100 days! You will see fewer XL items on my daily menu, and I will try to limit most of these extravagant items to one or two days per week. It’s just my attempt to get “splurging” back under control.

Fact is I probably haven’t lost as much fat as I had hoped to. Yet I have often had this fantasy, “What will I do if I start losing too much weight?” It seems silly because nine months ago I began at a hefty 170 pounds! I’ve eaten plenty, never went to bed hungry. It just seems silly that I would ever be in a situation where I would lose *too* much weight. I have carried excess weight as far back as I can remember in my adult life… at least ever since I started having babies.

Seems like the way to slow weightloss would be to continue the liberal pattern I have developed these most recent months… be more liberal with the XL items that are relatively healthy, the plant-based XL items like avocados, dates, a few more nuts & seeds, more coconut, whole grain bread, etc. I mean, I *know* these things are not the best choices, but I consider them acceptable on rare ocassions. I’ve just had too many “rare ocassions” in my life lately 🙂

Knowing how to slow down the weightloss can be helpful in knowing how to kick it up a notch. That’s what I’m going to be majoring on for the next 100 days…fewer avocados, dates, nuts, seeds, coconut, bread… and for certain fewer sugary beverages.

Okay, sleepytime. Party-on…

Here’s some great motivation for my “rock bottom” workout today… an article from the NY Times:

BRAWN AND BRAINS

by Gretchen Reynolds
November 18, 2015

Sturdy legs could mean healthy brains, according to a new study of British twins.

As I frequently have written in this column, exercise may cause robust improvements in brain health and slow age-related declines in memory and thinking. Study after study has shown correlations between physical activity, muscular health and mental acuity, even among people who are quite old.

But these studies have limitations and one of them is that some people may be luckier than others. They may have been born to have a more robust brain than someone else. Their genes and early home environment might have influenced their brain health as much as or more than their exercise habits. Their genes and early home environment also might have influenced those exercise habits, as well as how their bodies and brains responded to exercise.

In other words, genes and environment can seriously confound experimental results.

That problem makes twins so valuable for scientific purposes. (Full disclosure, I am a twin, although not an identical one.) Twins typically share the same early home environment and many of the same genes, and if they are identical, all their genes are the same.

So if one twin’s body, brain and thinking abilities begin to differ substantially over the years from their twin’s, the cause is less likely to be solely genetic or the early environment, and more likely to be attributable to lifestyle, including exercise habits.
It was that possibility that recently prompted Claire Steves, a senior lecturer in twin research at King’s College London, to consider twins and their thighs.

Muscular power, especially in the legs — which are the largest muscles in the body — is widely accepted as a marker of healthy aging. Older people with relatively powerful leg muscles get around better than those with weak legs. They also tend to have sharper minds, studies show.

But whether people’s lifestyles, and in particular their exercise habits, had provided them with good legs and minds, or whether they had won the genetic lottery, remained unclear.

So for the new study, which was published this month in Gerontology, Dr. Steves and her colleagues turned to the TwinUK registry, which includes health and fitness data for thousands of British twins.

The scientists pulled records for 162 healthy, middle-aged, female twin pairs, some of whom were identical and some not.

The scientists looked for twins who, 10 years previously, had completed extensive computerized examinations of their memory and thinking abilities, as well as assessments of their metabolic health and leg-muscle power, which measure muscles’ force and speed.

The scientists focused on the twins’ muscles rather than their exercise habits largely because the power measures were objective, unlike people’s notoriously unreliable recollections of how much they have worked out. (There was a correlation, though, between more self-reported exercise and sturdier legs.)

The scientists then asked the twins to visit a laboratory and repeat the cognitive tests.

Twenty of the identical twin pairs also completed brain-imaging scans.

Then the researchers compared leg power 10 years earlier with changes in brain function over the same time period.

They found that of the 324 twins, those who had had the sturdiest legs a decade ago showed the least fall-off in thinking skills, even when the scientists controlled for such factors as fatty diets, high blood pressure and shaky blood-sugar control.

The differences in thinking skills were particularly striking within twin pairs. If one twin had been more powerful than the other 10 years before, she tended to be a much better thinker now.

In fact, on average, a muscularly powerful twin now performed about 18 percent better on memory and other cognitive tests than her weaker sister.

Similarly, in the brain imaging of the identical twins, if one genetically identical twin had had sturdier legs than the other at the start of the study, she now displayed significantly more brain volume and fewer “empty spaces in the brain” than her weaker sister, Dr. Steves said.

Over all, among both the identical and fraternal twins, fitter legs were strongly linked, 10 years later, to fitter brains.

Of course, this study involved only a single snapshot of the brain health of middle-aged female twins. The scientists did not directly study the effects of exercise on the women’s brains, or look at changes in muscular health over the 10 years and whether that affected how well the twins could think.

The study also was not designed to uncover how muscle power builds brainpower, Dr. Steves pointed out, although she said she suspects that working muscles release biochemicals that travel to the brain and affect cellular health there. And the sturdier the muscles, the more of these chemicals they create.

More experiments obviously are needed, however, to understand these mechanisms.

For now, she said, the results imply that whatever your genetic make-up, building muscles can strengthen your mind, and should your legs currently be spindly, you might want to consider walking, running, standing or dancing more often.

“I was quite surprised by the strength of the findings,” Dr. Steves said, “because to be honest, I am someone who has always in the past prioritized work of the mind over work of the body. This study brings home to me that the brain needs exercise to keep fit.”

mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2015/11/18/brawn-and-brains/