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Archive for the ‘ENGLISH POSTS’ Category
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Tuesday, July 12th, 2011Olive oil!
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011Only one wrinkle
Jeanne Calment lived to be 122. When she was 120, Jeanne said to a reporter, ‘I have only one wrinkle… and I’m sitting on it.’
She was there when they built the Eiffel tower and she met Vincent van Gogh when she was fourteen.
She had no signs of dementia, and rode a bike past the age of hundred. When researchers looked into what she might have been doing or eating that made her live so long, they found something unusual: olive oil. Jeanne said she used to spread it all over all her food all the time. She even used it to keep her skin healthy.
Anti-aging ingredient
As it turns out, there’s a reason olive oil worked so well for Jeanne Calment. Olive oil has a powerhouse anti-aging ingredient called tyrosol, which is one of the strongest antioxidants we have. It can get rid of free radicals ten times better than green tea, and twice as well as CoQ10 (1)
Free radicals
Tyrosol can also shut down aging in your cells. Tyrosol turns on a group of longevity genes called ‘forkhead box’ genes, or FOXO’s.
Scientists have known for a long time that cells which multiply rapidly – like white blood cells – protect themselves from free-radical attacks by using antioxidants. But there are a lot of other cells in your body that don’t multiply very fast, and don’t have antioxidant protection. So how were they surviving free-radical attacks? What they discovered was that FOXO genes were doing the work. FOXO’s were shutting down the aging of these cells when under attack, and directly increasing amounts of the body’s ‘master antioxidant’ Superoxide dismutase (SOD) (2)
FOXO genes were extending life in those cells an tyrosol turns on FOXO genes.
Tyrosol has also been found to protect cells of the central nervous system from dying after exposure to toxins like glutamate (MSG and artificial sweeteners). Because it’s neuroprotective, tyrosol is being studied as a beneficial treatment for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other diseases. (3, 4, 5)
White wine
By the way: tyrosol is also found in white wine. The Heart Foundation and Research Center in New Jersey tested white wines for their antioxidant power. They found white wine drinkers had the amount of harmful free radicals reduced by 34%. Only when you drink moderately though.
BUT!
Wikipedia learned me that Jeanne Calment also ate a kilo of chocolate per week, that’s she drank port, smoked, and lived a very comfortable life without having to work one day.
Olive oil (extra virgin!) is extremely healthy but of course there are other factors that play key roles in whether you age healthily or not…
Nevertheless 
You want to use the best and greatest tasting extra virgin olive oil from the east of Crete and you live in Holland?
Click here!
(Source: newsletter Al Sears, MD)
1 “List of Antioxidants.” Antioxidant Chart; www.antioxidantchart.com
2 Kops, G.J., Dansen, T.B., Polderman, P.E., et al, ‘Forkhead’ transcription factor FOXO3a protects quiescent cells from oxidative stress,” Nature Sept. 19, 2002;419(6904):316-21
3 Application for US Patent “Natural Products and Derivatives Thereof for Protection Against Neurodegenerative Diseases Through Use of Novel Phenolic Compounds.” Application Number 20030236202
4 Miró-Casas, E., Covas, M.I., Fitó, M., et al, ‘Tyrosol and hydroxytyrosol are absorbed from moderate and sustained doses of virgin olive oil in humans’, European Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2003;57:186–190
5 Visiolia, Francesco, Gallia, Claudio, Bornetb, Francis, et al, ‘Olive oil phenolics are dose-dependently absorbed in humans’, FEBS Letters February 2000;468(2-3):159-160
5 Steps to Stop Emotional Eating
Monday, March 7th, 2011Do you ever find yourself eating even though you know that you’re not physically hungry? In nearly all of us, hunger is not only a physical thing but an emotional one as well. We don’t just eat to feed our body, but to comfort ourselves when we’re feeling stressed out, sad, angry, or bored. The following five steps could be of help to overcome emotional eating:
Step #1 – Avoid Comfort Food
We all have a weakness for certain kinds of food. These are the foods that give us the most comfort. Each person has his or her own comfort foods but some of the more common ones include mass-market chocolate, ice-cream, pizza, and sugar or salt rich items (junk foods).
To make it easier for yourself to avoid these foods, you need to go through your kitchen and get rid of these foods. Just throw them out. Once these foods are not in your home, you will have to work harder to get them.
A little here and there is fine, but emotional eaters tend to use these foods as their main ‘crutches’. There has to be some self-control in order to shift where you get your calories from. You want high quality, nutrient-dense calories first. Then you can think about eating some of the ‘bad’ foods you enjoy on a limited basis.
Step #2 – Cook at Home
The best thing you can do to reduce temptation and overeating when you’re out of your home is to carry food that you’ve prepared in advance with you. It’s a bit more work but it will not only save you a whole lot of calories, but some money as well. Cooking at home is much cheaper than eating out every day. And in most cases, it’s healthier.
Step #3 – Reduce Stress In Your Life
The biggest cause of emotional eating is stress. We are surrounded by it at our job, at home, when driving. It’s the hectic modern lifestyle, but you’ve got to find a way to alleviate some of this stress.
A few tips:
• Try some breathing exercises each morning and night.
• Practice basic yoga and/or meditation.
• Take some time for yourself each evening and watch a sitcom. Laughter reduces stress very quickly.
• Avoid people who add stress to your life or learn to deal with them better.
• Exercise daily, even if you only have 10 or 15 minutes on any given day.
• Try trading massages with your significant other; or go pay for one.
Step #4 – Eat from Smaller Dishes
Have you ever found yourself eating food right out of the bag or box and then finding out that you’ve eaten nearly all of it without even noticing it?
The best way to stop this kind of mindless overeating is to place all your food on a small plate or in a small bowl. Our mind immediately judges the amount of food we have by how it fills our dishes. If the dish appears full, we tend to think of the portion as sufficient.
This is an easy and effective way to eat less, regardless of your mood. And the more you do this, the more natural it becomes.
Step #5 – Practice Mindful Eating
The final step you need to take to overcome emotional eating is to turn eating to something more mindful. Most people eat out of reflex. They don’t put any thought into it. This is how you overeat because most people eat until they are ‘over-full’ in order to feel satisfied.
Before you eat your next meal or snack, stop for a second and ask yourself: ‘am I really hungry?’ If the answer is ‘Yes’, go ahead and eat. If it’s ‘No’, then this was an emotional hunger and just by putting a little thought into it, you’ve managed to avoid falling for it.
Use these 5 steps and it will become easier for you to stop emotional eating, eat healthier, and lose body fat.
(Source: newsletter Joey Atlas)
Fatburning
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011Your body is made to store energy in your muscles, ready to use throughout the day to survive. When you do eat a little more than your body needs, it just stores it as fat.
If you work out in the ‘fat melting zone’ you’re using that stored fat for energy. But that only teaches your body to store more fat so you have it available for energy during your workout.
How to work out differently:
• do sets of exercises that are progressively intense.
• rest in-between each set.
• Exert yourself for no more than 12-15 minutes.
Why
For the first 2-3 minutes of a workout you burn ATP, or adenosine triphosphate. This molecule is the basic unit of cellular energy. It is stored in the muscle cells and is available at any time. It is also your high-octane fuel for intense effort.
There is only enough ATP for a few minutes of exercise. When your ATP stores are depleted, your body switches to glycogen, a carbohydrate stored in muscle tissue. Your glycogen stores will take you through about 15 minutes of exercise.
After both your ATP and glycogen stores have become depleted – about 20 minutes – you switch to fat. But if you stop before your body starts to use fat for energy, your body learns to store energy in your muscles, NOT store it as fat for later use.
Afterburn
It does this through the adaptive changes your body makes to prepare for the next time you ask it to perform that same activity. It’s called ‘afterburn’.
After intense exercise, you burn extra calories as your body repairs muscles and stores energy in them, and returns to its normal state. Since this can take from several hours to a full day, you will keep on burning calories long after the workout is over.
Research
A Colorado State University study measured the changes induced by exercising this way. People exercised for 20 minutes in sets of two-minute intervals, followed by one minute of rest. The researchers found that they were still melting fat at an increased rate sixteen hours after the exercise session. At rest, their fat oxidation was up by 62 percent (1).
In another study, researchers at Laval University in Quebec divided participants into two groups. One group cycled for 45 minutes without interruption. Another group cycled in numerous short bursts of 15 to 90 seconds, while resting in between (2).
The long duration group burned twice as many calories. So you might assume that they would melt more fat. However, when the researchers recorded their body composition measurements, it was the short-term interval group that showed the most fat loss.
In fact, the interval group lost nine times more fat than the endurance group for every calorie burned!
Body fat
This is why many endurance athletes have body fat percentages ranging from 10-20 percent, while athletes like sprinters and basketball players – who run in short bursts with progressive intensity – have a well-muscled physique and usually carry only 4-8 percent body fat.
In other words
You don’t have to do endless treadmill workouts and painful weightlifting sessions to lose weight. Instead, you can exert yourself for just a few minutes at a time, and challenge your body in a progressive way without depleting yourself.
(Source: newsletter Al Sears, MD)
1 Osterberg KL and Melby CL. “Effect of acute resistance exercise on postexercise oxygen consumption …” International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, 2000 Mar; 10(1):71-81.
2 Tremblay A, Simoneau JA, Bouchard C. Impact of exercise intensity on body fatness and skeletal muscle metabolism. Metabolism. 1994;43(7): 814-818.
3 weight loss myths explained
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011Myth #1: cutting calories will make you drop weight
In the long run cutting calories doesn’t work because your body has a built-in intelligence. For example, if you drop your calories too low and grow hungry, your body reacts as if it’s starving and does everything it can to preserve fat. And whether you eat 500 calories or 5,000 calories a day, you’ll gain weight if you don’t eat the right kinds of calories.
For example, a starchy carb calorie is not the same as a protein calorie or a fat calorie. Your body ‘counts’ them in different ways. Take a French fry, for example. That’s almost the same as eating table sugar. And the excess sugar of starches and carbs is what spikes your blood sugar and eventually gets stored as fat.
A burger, on the other hand, is filled with protein – an essential form of fuel. So when you eat protein your body uses this energy source to function at its best – and actually melt fat. That’s why it’s not about eating fewer calories, it’s about eating the right stuff.
Example: two patients of dr. Al Sears tried to lose weight. One ate from 4,500-5,000 calories a day of mainly high-protein foods. He dropped six pounds. Another cut more than 600 calories a day from her diet, exercised five days a week, and still ended up gaining four pounds.
Myth #2: cutting back on fat will make you drop weight
Eating fat doesn’t make you fat. But eating the wrong kinds of fat will. Our bodies need fat to absorb vitamins. In fact, vitamins A, D, E, K and CoQ10 can’t even be absorbed without fat. And when you deprive yourself of fat, you eat more carbs. And that’s what really makes you fat.
One study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people who ate low-fat diets showed no improvement in body composition, blood sugar, insulin levels, or blood pressure (1)
The key to fat loss is NOT to deprive yourself of the fatty foods you were born to eat. You just need to make sure you eat the right kinds of fats in the right ratios.
Myth #3: long cardio workouts lead to fat loss
The exercise industry tells you that spending long hours pounding away at the treadmill at the gym is what you need to do to melt fat. Unfortunately, melting fat while you exercise tells your body to make more fat to melt the next time you exercise. After a while, your body gets very good at doing just that. Before you know it, you’ve hit a plateau. No matter how many hours you spend at the gym or how grueling your workouts are, you still might not be able to drop a pound. Smart exercising (like moderate power training and to fit in your day to day life lots of moments that you move around) is the key, not heavy exercising.
(Source: newsletter Al Sears, MD)
1 Knopp, R. H., et al, “Long Term Cholesterol Lowering Effects of 4 fat-restricted diets in hypercholesteroemic and combined hyperlipidemic men,” The Diet Alternatives Study, Journal of the American Medical Association. Nov. 12, 1997; 278(18): 1509-1515
Four tricks to eat less
Sunday, January 9th, 2011Source: ‘59 Seconds’ by Richard Wiseman.
Trick #1
Several studies prove that the size of the bowl, plate, or spoon that you use can directly influence how much food and calories you consume.
Richard Wiseman, in the book 59 Seconds, talks about one study conducted where party guests were randomly given either 17 or 34-ounce bowls and 2 or 3 ounce spoons, and allowed to help themselves to ice cream. It was found that the party guests given the large spoons and large bowls had eaten 14% and 31% more ice cream respectively, than the people using the smaller spoons or smaller bowls.
Another study conducted at the University of Pennsylvania used a bowl of M&Ms that were left in the hallway of an apartment building. A sign next to the bowl told people to help themselves to the M&Ms. Some days a tablespoon sized scoop was used in the M&Ms and on other days, a larger scoop was used in the bowl. The researchers found that the larger scoop caused people to take twice the amount of M&Ms on average compared to the people that had used the smaller scoop.
Trick #2
You’ve probably heard before that eating slower can help you to eat less because it gives time for the fullness signal to reach your brain and thereby shut off your appetite before you’ve eaten too much. However, the study below found a twist on this.
According to Mr. Wiseman in the book 59 Seconds, a study at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center had overweight participants eat a meal at 3 different speeds:
a) their normal rate
b) half their normal rate
c) their normal rate at first, followed by half their normal rate (normal-slow combo)
The results were interesting: eating at the slower rate caused the men to eat less, but not the women (that’s weird…). However, the 3rd group that combined the normal pace at first with the slower rate after that caused both the men and women to have a large reduction in their appetite and eat less. The normal-slow combo was found to be more effective than just the slow-only group. Mr. Wiseman stated that the lesson here to eat less is ‘to start at your normal speed but then savor each and every mouthful’.
Trick # 3
According to the book 59 Seconds, a series of experiments conducted in offices compared putting chocolates right on people’s desks vs placing the chocolates six feet away. In another experiment, the chocolates were put inside either transparent or opaque jars. When the chocolates were placed on the person’s desk instead of 6 feet away, people ate on average 6 more chocolates per day per person. Also, the chocolates in the transparent jars were eaten 46% more quickly than the opaque jars. This shows: out of sight, out of mind.
Trick #4
Studies have found that people eat significantly more when they are distracted by the tv, movies, games, or other distractions. In one experiment mentioned in the book 59 Seconds, people who were more absorbed by a movie ate significantly larger amounts of popcorn compared to those that were paying less attention to the movie.
In another experiment, people who actively listened to a detective story during lunch (being distracted by the story), ate 15% more food than those who sat in silence during their lunch.
So, ditch the tv and other distractions and focus on your food. Enjoy every bite of your food and you will naturally consume less calories while enjoying your food more
Your liver
Tuesday, January 4th, 2011The liver plays a vital role in your body’s metabolic processes – particularly detoxification. The liver is often the most overlooked and ignored organ in the human body, as though it has a lot of very important functions.
Your liver:
• Detoxifies all the harmful substances it encounters, converting fat-soluble toxins into water-soluble substances you can get rid of. The waste may also be converted into bile, which is useful in digestion.
• Detoxifies environmental pollutants. If your liver didn’t continually remove metabolic waste and toxins from your bloodstream, you’d be dead in a matter of hours.
• Filters harmful toxins and substances out of your blood every day and allows nutrients to reach your cells.
• Produces more than thousands of crucial chemicals and hormones including cholesterol, testosterone and estrogen. It also manages more than 50.000 enzymes to maintain a healthy body.
• Regulates blood-sugar levels and prevents dangerous spikes and lows.
• Stores essential vitamins and minerals – including vitamins A, D, K and B12 – that help keep your bones strong.
Fat
When you’re overloaded with toxins such as alcohol, prescription drugs, household chemicals, processed foods and more, your liver finds another way to get rid of waste. It creates balls of fat that collect in the liver itself. Those fats also spill into your bloodstream in the form of triglycerides, which can increase your risk of heart disease.
Symptoms
Your liver also moves those toxins to other areas of your body, including your skin. In fact, skin conditions like dandruff and psoriasis are tell-tale signs that your liver isn’t functioning like it should.
Chronic fatigue, high blood pressure and auto-immune disorders often stem from a liver that doesn’t function as it should.
Good news
The good news is that there are practical steps you can take to maintain a healthy liver.
• Eat foods in their natural forms. Fried, spicy and starchy foods contain too many toxins and harmful chemicals in the form of color and flavoring agents, chemicals and preservatives.
• Drink plenty of water. This helps your liver flush out toxins because water acts as a lubricating agent.
• Exercise. All you need is 10 minutes of variable intensity exercise each day. Even if you don’t drop weight, clinical studies show you’ll still improve your liver enzymes.
Detoxify
Another thing you could do is give your liver some help and detoxify it once in a while. Ask a medical trained person (doctor in natural healing, homeopathic doctor, etc.) for help.
(Source: newsletter Al Sears, MD)
Weight-bearing vs weight-lifting
Thursday, December 16th, 2010‘Weight bearing’ refers to what your bones must be exposed to – in order to build bone density and bone strength. In other words: your bones have to be subjected to forces of compression, torsion or shearing in order for them to become more rigid and dense. These forces do not have to be applied by the use of weights as in weight lifting.
These types of forces can simply be a result of various muscle contractions to move your joints and limbs through certain ranges of motion to perform certain actions. Bodyweight exercises are perfect for this. The main reason being, all bodyweight exercises take advantage of the resistance created by gravity pulling on your body.
Since a creative and simple bodyweight exercise program (such as pilates) uses various angles and body positions for the desired effect, your bones are subjected to the necessary forces of compression, torsion and shearing which cause your bones to become more dense and much stronger – thereby reducing your risk of osteoporosis and even reversing it if you currently
have it.
(Source: newsletter Joey Atlas)
Breathing
Thursday, December 16th, 2010Your body has a thousand different autonomic functions going on all the time that you’re mostly unaware of. Your nervous system is a balance of those autonomic functions – the ‘fight-or-flight’ sympathetic system, and the relaxing para-sympathetic system. The two autonomic functions you probably know best are your heartbeat and your breathing. Normally you breathe without thinking, and you have a balance of the sympathetic and para-sympathetic.
Sympathetic – para-sympathetic
When you breathe in, it’s sympathetic – fight or flight. One example would be gasping in shock. When you breathe out, that’s para-sympathetic – relaxing. Again, it’s in our language. For example, ‘breathe a sigh of relief’ or ‘waiting to exhale.’
Focus
In today’s world you can be under a lot of stress, and your body can respond by staying in a sympathetic state. You can change this. It’s as simple as focusing your attention on your breath. This is what makes breathing so effective at resetting the balance in your autonomic nervous system that you have conscious control over.
You can, if you want to, focus your conscious intent on your breathing, and control it voluntarily. And as you do that, you bring your conscious mind into contact with that autonomic function.
Cadence breathing
One of the most effective ways to touch your autonomic system in order to restore your balance and relax is cadence breathing. What you do is breathe in to a count of four, hold your breath to a count of seven, and exhale to a count of eight. This was developed through trial and error over millennia, but it makes you exhale for twice as long as you inhale, and that’s the key.
Four steps
1. Clear your mind. The goal is to get rid of all the excitatory energy that your environment is pummeling you with all the time.
2. Focus your conscious attention on your breathing. Think about the cadence of your breath, and exclude other thoughts. Constantly re-focus your attention on the breath.
This is the way you train your mind – by constantly clearing your thoughts and re-focusing on your breath. Distractions are going to happen. But you don’t waste any energy over them. You don’t form an opinion on whether it’s good, bad or indifferent. Each time it happens, you gently redirect your focus back to your breath. And each time that happens, you can take a little credit, because you’re gaining more and more control over the process.
3. Observe your breathing. Observe how long it takes you to inhale and exhale. You’re not trying to influence it yet; you’re just trying to observe the cadence. Where does inhaling stop? Where does exhaling begin? Focus on the change and how it feels to go from inhaling to exhaling.
4. Elongate the exhalation. This is where you start to exert control over this autonomic function, and influence the para-sympathetic system to help you relax. Make sure you’ve inhaled fully, using your abdomen and lungs. Then, push out all of your breath slowly and fully.
Habit
The more you do this, the more proper breathing will become habit. This will help your body recover from the stress of the modern world and get back the balance nature intended for your autonomic system.
(Source: newsletter Al Sears, MD)
Butt exercise
Friday, December 3rd, 2010Joey Atlas, fitness trainer
The picture shows the top position of the ‘Butt Exercise’.
How to do it
Lying down, face up.
One leg flat on the floor.
The other leg is bent with the heel on the ground, toes pointing up.
Push that heel into the floor, raising the hips and straight leg off the ground at the same time.
Then, lower the hips, butt and leg back down.
Move slowly!
Keep your navel a bit tucked in (so your belly muscles are in action too) and keep your shoulders relaxed.
Try doing about 15 – 20 on each side (again: move slowly)
If you can only do 5 or 6 – that’s OK
If it was easy, do 10 or 15 more on each side.
Do this every other day for 2 weeks.
If it gets easy, add another set of 15 or 20.