Want to lose weight but tired of weight loss gimmicks? Follow this sensible advice.
1. Eat only real food: how much of what you eat comes from a box? If it’s processed, it’s probably no good for you. Real foods are the foods that you find in the fruit and vegetable aisle of your grocery store. Come in a box? Read the ingredients. If there are too many, or the names of the ingredients are unpronounceable, then don’t buy it. In doubt? Leave it. Fruits, vegetables, complex carbohydrates and lean proteins should be your diet. Don’t waste your money on processed foods that will only bog you down.
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If you understand the chemical effects of exercise and competition on your body then you should also be able understand why the antioxidants and neurotransmitters available from organic cocoa can help to improve your athletic performance and reduce your recovery time. In order to attain the benefits that cocoa has to offer, however, it should be taken in as raw a state as possible, and cocoa processed into a hot drink or into chocolate is not as powerful as the natural bean.
During exercise your metabolism generates not only energy from glucose with the mitochondria of your muscle cells, but also a by-product known as free radicals. These are small oxygenated molecules that have only one purpose in their short life: to grab electrons from their nearest neighbor and in so doing, destroy them. Hence, muscle cells are destroyed and have to be replaced.
In addition to free radical oxidative damage, tissues such as your joints, tendons and ligaments can become damaged during hard exercise and competitive performance. This initiates the inflammatory response of the immune system leading to swelling, inflammation and pain. A certain amount of inflammation occurs with most exercise, although it is not always noticeable.
The first benefit of organic cocoa is its high antioxidant content(1). It contains more flavanoids than highly antioxidant foods such as blueberries and tea(2), and can be used by more than just athletes seeking to reduce the oxidative stress initiate by training and competition. Antioxidants destroy free radicals on sight – in fact as soon as they are formed. Not only do they prevent the oxidative stress of exercise, but they also prevent atherosclerosis, where free radicals render low density lipoproteins water-insoluble so that they precipitate from the blood and form cholesterol plaques on arterial walls.
With regard to exercise and recovery, however, the antioxidants in organic cocoa prevent damage to muscle cells and the proteins that form muscle tissue. The same phytochemicals also possess anti-inflammatory properties, and so help to reduce the effects of inflammation. It is ironic that the inflammatory response of your immune system is intended to protect your body tissues from damage, but doesn’t know when to stop and ends up causing swelling and pain. Anti-inflammatories are used to alleviate the effects of inflammation that can retard recovery after exercise. Experimental evidence indicates that organic cocoa contains powerful anti-inflammatory effects(3).
Another benefit of organic cocoa is that it can promote cardiovascular health. By dilating your arteries and other blood vessels it can improve blood flow, and hence help to maintain muscle oxygenation during exercise. This in turn not only permits longer and more effective athletic performance, but also helps to convert exercise into more powerful muscle density. It regulates your hear rate and lowers your blood pressure, and generally promotes athletic prowess and effective exercise.
Another benefit that is not truly appreciated is offered by the neurotransmitter content of cocoa. Remember that great feeling you get after jogging a few miles? Referred to as ‘jogger’s high’ it can be provided by the endorphin content of organic cocoa. Endorphins are ‘feel-good’ neurotransmitters and cocoa, in providing that plus others such as serotonin promote a positive outlook and a general feeling of well being.
These attitudes are important to athletes, and another that cocoa offers is anandamine, a chemical released by the brain that promotes relaxation and enables you to relax easier after extreme exercise, thus promoting more rapid recovery. Finally, phenylethylamine helps you to focus on the objective in hand, and together with the other neurotransmitters that cocoa either contains or promotes in the brain, can put you in the right mood for hard work and athletic achievement and improve the symptoms of fatigue, particularly of chronic fatigue(4).
1. British Journal of Nutrition (2009), 101, 931-940
2. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Dec 3, 2003.
3. J Cardiovasc Pharmacol. 2006;47 Suppl 2:S163-71; discussion S172-6.
4. Endocrine Abstracts (2006) 12 P68
Copyright 2010 LifeHealthSecrets
Your immune system is your body’s way of protecting itself from disease and invasion by pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, yeasts and fungi. If you are not sure what it protects you from, consider what happens when you die and your immune system shuts down. Your body is rapidly invaded by bacteria and parasites and rapidly degrades. It is only your immune system that prevents this from happening when you are alive.
What’s next? You could say. Whoever heard of such a thing? No doubt it’ll be called “The Love Diet”. Some will immediately wonder just what would be on the menu. Interesting and inspiring as that …
As we get older, our bodies get stiffer, and we gradually lose the natural flexibility we once possessed as children. Why does this happen? Flexibility comes not just from stretching, but from possessing adequate current flow in your body.
While babies are born very flexible, if you were to feed a child a diet of free-radical inducing foods – such as fried foods – that child would lose flexibility very quickly. This is because free radicals rob electrons from the body, which then leads to abnormal tissue oxidation. This in turn causes the collagenous and elastic connective tissues located around your muscles to ‘stick’ to each other (called cross-linking), which is a leading cause of stiffness.
In the emergency medical profession, doctors work according to an order of operations. The first priority is to stabilize the patient’s condition, and only then do they undertake more elaborate measures, operating if necessary. This is because without a stable base, without addressing issues like stopping hemorrhaging or providing oxygen or blood transfusions, the operation is more likely to fail. By creating a solid foundation, doctors increase their chances of success and saving lives.
In today’s fast-paced world, everyone is exposed to stress on a daily basis. Whether it’s in the form of our morning commute, pressures at work, the demands of raising a family, sleep deprivation, or even just the overwhelming number of messages and choices that bombard us, stress is here to stay. Unfortunately, we weren’t built to respond to chronic stress.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of ads online for weight loss supplements that all make essentially the same claim – the diet industry sets its customers up for failure on purpose. While this is an ironic statement coming from companies hawking their own miracle diet solutions, I’ve been wondering if there’s any truth to it.
How can you expect to lose weight if you don’t know exactly how you gained those pounds? Dieting, like quitting smoking, is about a lot more than just eliminating certain foods or cutting back. For true success, you have to know your weaknesses and understand their underlying causes. So many diets are destined to fail because people don’t restructure their lives to support their changed eating habits. Without addressing underlying causes and habits, no diet is sustainable.
Want to lose weight but tired of weight loss gimmicks? Follow this sensible advice.
1. Eat only real food: how much of what you eat comes from a box? If it’s processed, it’s probably no good for you. Real foods are the foods that you find in the fruit and vegetable aisle of your grocery store. Come in a box? Read the ingredients. If there are too many, or the names of the ingredients are unpronounceable, then don’t buy it. In doubt? Leave it. Fruits, vegetables, complex carbohydrates and lean proteins should be your diet. Don’t waste your money on processed foods that will only bog you down.
When people say they want to lose weight, they’re usually talking about losing excess fat.
If you want to lose fat, then it’s important to know under what conditions fat cells multiply, grow ‘fatter’ or shrink. Yes, fat cells can get fatter also. They are the cells responsible for storing the unused calories you consume, so the more calories and less exercise, the larger they will get. What’s more, when a fat cell grows fat enough (3 to 6 times its original size), it multiplies. These new cells, in turn, can get fatter.
5 years ago, I was under a lot of stress and I was constantly coughing and had problems breathing. I thought I had a cold or some virus. Went I went to the hospital, they took an X ray and found that my heart was so enlarged it was almost the size of one of my lungs. My stress hormones were also elevated – they found high levels of cortisol in my blood. I discovered that I was born with cardiomyopathy (a disease that involves the weakening and inflammation of the heart). The doctors installed a defibrillator, as a protection in case my heart stops beating, to shock it back to life.
