The amount of fat you carry around is not determined by your genes, but by what you do and what you eat. Recent scientific studies has shown that neither the number of fat cells nor their seize is genetically fixed, but body fat is dependent on lifestyle. Your body has no internal reference for a permanent level of fat, only for a habitual level. When you remain at a particular fat level for a year or more, your body develops all the adipore cells, capillaries, enzyme counts, peripheral nerves,hormone levels and connective tissues to support it. It becomes to recognize that level of fat as self and will defend it vigorously. That’s called your fat point.

You body constantly monitors its fat point with hormonal messages, such as glycerol, which warns the brain to take defensive action if even the smallest quantity of fat is suddenly used for fuel. That’s why usual forms of dieting can’t possibly work. By slowing metabolism, increasing fat storage and increasing appetite, your body’s fat point defenses will defeat you every time. Then how can you treat it? Easy! Reliable studies show that it takes years of overeating to grow fat. Body fat accumulate very slowly, an ounce or so per day, a pound every two or three weeks. In a year you are 20 lbs over. In 3 – 4 years you gain 60 lbs of flab. As your body shifts its habitual fat point up very slowly, you have to operate down the same way, very slowly. Otherwise your body will cannibalize your muscle, excite your fat storage enzyme and boost your appetite to ravenous. It’s important to reduce you total daily calories by no more than 20%. That’s 400 calories off a 2000 calorie diet. That’s 2800 calories or 0.8 lbs of fat per week. Because of increases in body efficiency, you will not lose 0.8 lbs of fat but only about half a pound. That’s the most you can lose without triggering body defences. Step 1.: Lose no more than half-a-pound of fat per week.

Get your body composition measured once a month, including fat weight, lean weight and body water. A newly available alternative to underwater weighing are the inexpensive skin-fold calipers for self-use at home. These calipers have a tension device on them to ensure you get the same pressure on the fat each time you measure, provided you take the measurements in exactly the same spot every time. Step 2.: Measure your body fat once a month.

The calories you cut from your diet have to be the right calories,importantly from all kinds of fat. Contrary to the calorie-counting strategies of much of the weight-loss industry,we know that fat calories are fatter. When excess carbohydrate or protein are eaten, the body makes complex metabolic adjustments to promote glycogen storage in muscle and increase the use of protein or sugar for fuel. It also has to use a lot of energy to convert these foods to body fat. Hence you have to eat a bigger excess of carbs and protein than you do of fat before they end up on your hips. But when excess fat is eaten, metabolism remains unchanged. Virtually all the excess is promptly layered onto all the wrong places.

Now you know why calorie counting doesn’t work. Numerous recent studies show that you put on much more body fat by eating fat than by eating the same number of calories from carbs or protein. Fat calories pack on more body fat than calories from any other food. Step 3.: Eat a low, low fat diet.

Look on the nutrition facts label when you buy food. Divide the total calories by the calories from fat. If the answer is less than 5, don’t buy the food. In a diet of 2000 calories, that’s a maximum of 400 fat calories. Step 4: Don’t eat foods that contains more than 20% fat calories.

Many dieters think that they are on healthy, low-fat nutrition, when in fact they are misleaded by false food labeling. Many apparently dry foods like cookies, baked goods, crackers & chips are higher in fat than ice-cream. Even low-fat milk is really high fat. How does low fat milk get away with its name? By jiggery-pokery lobbying power, the dairy industry got an exemption from the new labels. Nevertheless, an 8 oz glass of low-fat milk (2%) serves you a hefty one-third of its calories from fat.

Food industry lawyers have filed exemption claims for all kinds of foods. So if you want to avoid hidden fats, don’t trust anything on food labels except the Nutrition Facts panel. That has to be accurate if it’s legal. Especially beware of “reduced fat” products. Under the label law “reduced fat” means 25% less fat than the original product. So it goes with everything from reduced fat bologna, high can still be 60% fat, to “light” and “lite” variants of foods, that have to be one-third less fat than the original, but can still be 40 – 50% fat. Step 5 : Trust only the Nutrition Facts panel on food labels.

Before starting any exercise program it is necessary to get an approval from your doctor.Start easy,don’t take strenuous weight programs in health clubs,which takes time out of your working day. It takes too much of your time and becomes a burden.Exercise should be part of your daily routine to be successful. It is better to exercise in the morning for twenty minutes than three hours at a gym on the weekend. Use your own body weight and gravity,instead of machines, which provide ample resistance.

It’s best to progress gradual, there is no need to work to your limit. Don’t strain. Your body doesn’t need to be heated in order to improve. The rhythms of nature are your limits.

Your exercise program has three goals. First and most important: to maintain and increase your muscle mass. Secondly: To maintain your cardiovascular system. Thirdly: To maintain your flexibility.

The average person stiffens as he ages, increasing the risks of strains and tendon, ligament and skeletal disorders.

When you have your doctor’s approval, you can do a little aerobics to warm up the system and get your blood pumping. Twenty minutes at even mild intensity will have cardiovascular benefits. I recommends aerobics to begin with for everyone, before you pick up weights.

Then 5-10 minutes stretching after your muscles are warm is all you need to maintain flexibility lifelong.

Now you are prepared to exercise your muscles. Your program should include resistance exercise for shoulders, arms, chest, back, legs and abdominals. If you exercise three days per week, which is the starting level for consistent benefit, then do: Day 1 – Shoulders and arms Day 2 – Chest and back Day 3 – Legs and abdominals For 5 days per week, do one body part per day.

1) Never do more per exercise than one warm-up set of 12 – 15 easy repetitions, followed by one medium heavy set of 6 – 10 repetitions to exhaustion.

2) Work a body part only once per week. It takes about 48 hours for exercised muscles to breakdown worn cells, then 48 – 72 hours to build new, stronger replacements. The muscle remains at maximum strength for 5 – 8 days and then slowly declines. Exercising a muscle every 5 – 8 days is the optimum program for progress.

3) Don’t train with weights for more than one hour per workout. Your ability to gain lean mass,is limited by your hormone levels. After 45 minutes to one hour,hormone levels decline.You can force yourself to continue,but it doesn’t do your body any good.

4) Use a wide variety of exercises. Restricted resistance exercises, especially on machines, stress only certain fibers of a muscle in certain positions. You need to get all the fibers in all positions.

5) In one hour at two sets per exercise you can do 12 exercises easily. Don’t force yourself to do more. For weight exercises, see Bill Pearl’s book: The Encyclopedia on Weight Training.

6) Accentuate the return phase of the repetition, when the muscle in question is lengthening under load. In a barbell bicep curl for example, the eccentric contraction occurs when you are lowering the bar to the start position.

Restrain yourself all the way down, because it is the stress of lengthening under load that causes most of the strength and lean mass gains that you are seeking.

7)Take a protein drink daily within one hour after workout. Research shows that weight training puts subjects into protein deficit, despite the high protein level of the American diet.

8) Take daily antioxidant supplements. All exercise increases oxidation in the body.

9) Eat an alkaline diet. All exercise increases body acidity. See www.nutrobalance2.net/ the alkaline/acid food theory.

10) Sip a cold light carbohydrate drink (7-10%) throughout workouts. Drinks containing a little glucose, a little zylitol plus mostly glucose polymers are best. It will trickle carbohydrate continuously into your blood and spare your muscle glycogen, thereby maintaining your energy level.

It will also prevent dehydration. Even 3% dehydration can reduce strength by 10%. And it will help to keep your body temperature down, at the same time reducing the amount of blood diverted to the skin for cooling, thus leaving more to supply your muscles with oxygen and nutrients.

A final note about weight-bearing exercise: without the stimulus to your body to grow, nutritional supplements can’t work properly. Important new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows, that multi-vitamin and mineral supplementation had little effect in improving the health of old people, unless a resistance exercise was added, the health benefits were astonishing, ranging from over 100% improvement in strength and muscle size to big improvements in mobility and recreational activity.

It takes a bit of puff and stickability to grow a high-performance body. But once you’ve done it, a little bit of exercise necessary to maintain it is one of life’s greatest bargains. For more information about nutrition and weight management,visit: www.nutrobalance2.net

“Every chronic degenerative disease , like coronary artery disease, cancer, strokes, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s dementia and macular degeneration is the direct result of what we call the “dark site” of oxygen – oxidative stress, in fact, oxidative stress is the leading theory behind the aging process itself. This generation is under greater attack from the pollutants in our air, food and water than any other previous generation.

Our stress-filled lifestyle also takes its toll on our health. It is critical that we understand the best defense against developing any of these degenerative diseases and premature aging is the body’s natural defense system, not the drugs I can prescribe.” Dr. Ray Strand, M.D. When Dr. Strand’s wife, Liz, began to feel tired, it was easy enough to chalk it up to the demands of being a wife and a mother of three children under age four. By the couple’s tenth anniversary, however, Liz was experiencing constant total body pain, overwhelming fatigue, debilitating allergies and recurrent sinus and lung infections. Even with drugs to treat every symptom, Liz was unable to keep up with basic household chores or care for the horses she had once so enjoyed riding. When a friend told Liz and Ray about a course of nutritional supplements that had dramatically improve her husband’s health, a desperate Ray could only surrender: “Honey,you can try anything you want. We doctors certainly are not doing any good” Within months, the sparkle returned to Liz’s eyes.She was out riding horses again and seemed to have completely renewed strength and joy.

How just a few nutritional supplements could cause such a dramatic improvement was a mystery to DR. Strand. He had always dismissed vitamin supplementation as simple the ingredients for “expensive urine.” This experience with his wife proved to be the launching pad for a seven-year quest to research for himself the facts behind nutritional medicine. What Dr. Strand discovered made a revolutionary impact on his practice. And based on his extraordinary findings,whether your desire is to protect your good health or reclaim it, you can now learn what to do to improve your own health.

No other nation on the face of the earth has produced the abundance of food that America has over the past half century. But when you look at the quality of our food from a health perspective, there are definite concerns. The processes used to produce and preserve our foods today have had a serious effect on the quality of this enormous food supply. Rex Beach wrote in his report to the U.S. Senate: “Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies, which cannot be remedied until the depleted soils from which our food comes,are brought into proper mineral balance? The alarming fact is that foods- fruits, vegetables and grains- now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals, are starving us no matter how much we eat.”

Beach made this statement in 1936 and in the almost seventy years since Beach’s plea to the Senate, little has been done to improve the nation’s depleted soil;in fact,the situation today is much worse than ever before in history. It is a fact that our food is significantly deficient in vital nutrients, even at the time we purchase them; however, the way we prepare our foods is perhaps even more critical. Overcooking, delay in preparing fresh foods and freezing foods are some of the reasons our food lose nutritional value. We began with depleted nutrients in our soils, which NPK fertilizers made worse. Then came the hybrid grains that produced nutrient-depleted foods.

Modern processing and food storage caused further depletion of the quality of our foods. We then take these foods home and continue to create further depletion because of storage and preparation. These all make good solid arguments as to why we should be supplementing our diets with high quality nutritional supplements. However, RDA levels (recommended daily allowances) have absolutely nothing to do with chronic degenerative diseases. This one simple fact is the cause of more confusion about the health benefits of nutritional supplements than any other fact. As you search the medical literature about oxidative stress and the amount of nutrients needed to prevent it, the level of nutritional supplementation is significantly greater than RDA levels. However, you will not get the optimal results when you take low-quality supplements. It is critical that you purchase high-quality supplements that are complete and balanced. For more information about nutritional supplementation, visit: www.nutrobalance.com.

Ray D. Strand, M.D.,graduated from the university of Colorado Medical School and finished his post-graduate training at Mercy Hospital in San Diego, California. He has been involved in an active private family practice for the past thirty years. He has focused his practice on nutritional medicine over the past seven years, while lecturing internationally on the subject across the United States, Canada, Australia, England, the Netherlands and New Zealand.Dr. Strand lives on a horse ranch in South Dakota with his lovely wife, Elizabeth. They have three grown children.

Losing your mind is the most destructive disorder that a human being can encounter. Most people who become senile and develop Alzheimer’s or other unchangeable form of brain degeneration are aware of it. The worst of it is: we do most of the damage to ourselves.The amount of information processed by your ten billion brain cells each second makes our most advanced computers look like children’s toys.Your brain controls everything, from the smallest wiggle of your toes to the momently balance of hundreds of hormones and the microscopically regulated metabolism of all the thirty trillion cells that enables you to think, feel and behave like a human being.

When only a few thousand brain cells get damaged or die,it effects our whole body. Because of poor nutrition, pollution in our body, over-use of drugs and lack of exercise, progressive brain damage builds up. Our intelligence declines, memories fade, muscles astrophy, bones weaken, immunity is lost and we become aged and an easy prey for every disease.

Undoubtedly,the final solution to disease lies in the prevention of brain degeneration.The good news is that recent nutrition science have discovered ways to maintain and even improve brain function.

In the average person, the first brain function to go is memory, starting at age 30 and accelerating after the age of 40.As long as you can store new information in long-term memory and recall it, you can change your behavior, improve your skills and enhance your life.

If that capacity declines, you become an automate, not able to learn anything new, forever re-enacting the habits and memories of an increasingly distant past.

In order to prevent this decline, it is good to know something about the structure of the neurons, which are the nerves in our brain. Each neuron consists of a stringy filement called a dendrite, then a cell body, then another stringly filement called an axon.

The dendrite carries nerve impulses towards the cell body and the axon carries them away again. The nerve impulses carry information, much like the electrical impulses that carry your spoken information along a telephone line.

However, unlike phone lines, neurons are not connected to each other. The end of axon of each neuron stops near the ends of dendrites of other neurons. The gap between the axon and the dendrites is called a synapse. The transmission of nerve impulses across the synapse is accomplished chemically by the release of neurotransmitters, compounds that flow from the axon to the neighboring dendrites.

Two of these compounds known to be involved in memory are serotonin and acetylcholine. Both are formed from specific essential nutrients that your body can’t make. You must obtain them from your diet.

Learning is stored as memory mainly through modification of synapes. The particular pattern of synaptic discharges, called up by learning new information, sensitizes the neurons involved to trigger that pattern more easily on subsequent occasions. When the pattern recurs, memory of what was learned recurs also.

A new important discovery is that the amount of neurotransmitter present at the synapse, determines wether or not memory storage takes place. If the amount of neurotransmitter is reduced, memory storage is disrupted. We look at serotonin first.

The results of animal experiments at the Center for Neurobiology at the Columbia University show that memory storage can be increased by introducing additional serotonin into the neuron. The same is true for humans, additional serotonin improve memory storage.

You can improve your memory if you sleep immediately after studying. Sleeping cuts off all further input and thus prevents interfering material from blocking storage of the learning. Now we know that the neurotransmitters are more important. Serotonin is released in large quantities into the brain as you fall asleep. It is the additional serotonin that improves memory storage.

The drug zimelidine also increase brain serotonin and imroves memory. Serotonin is formed in brain neurons from the essential animo acid l-tryptophan. The rate of serotonin formation depends on the amount of l-tryptophan that is available to the brain from the blood.

To raise your blood tryptophan you can eat proteins that contain tryptophan or you can take a pure tryptophan supplement. People in European countries have free access to this essential amino acid.

Because of the blood/brain barrier however,only an l-tryptophan supplement will raise brain tryptophan without difficulty. Transport of amino acids accross the blood/brain barrier is limited. Trytophan is one of the class of large neutral amino acids (LNAAs), that rely on a specific transporter molecule.

If you eat protein food at the same time as l-tryptophan, the other LNAAs in the food, isoleucine,leucine, valine, tyrosine and phenylalanine all compete with tryptophan for transport, as a result, only a fraction get through.

You can solve this problem by “neutrolizing” the other LNAAs in the blood by eating high carbohydrate food with the protein, like whole-grain bread or rice cakes. Carbohydrates lowers blood levels of all the LNAAs, except tryptophan, thereby permitting it to enter the brain preferably and so raise serotonin levels.Your memory will undoubtedly benefit from it.

The production of brain acetylcholine reduces when we grow older. However, memory improvement is achieved with the drug arecholine, which stimulates acetylcholine function. Brain acetylcholide is made from choline and pantothenic acid in your diet.

Memory improvement by taking choline can only be achieved when taken with pantothenic acid as well. Especially older people are lacking the essential nutrients, like folic acid, vitamin B12 and thiamin in their diet. Any strategy to maintain or improve memory must be based on complete nutrition. It is useless to supply your brain with acetylchloline if the neurons, whose function it is supposed to improve, are already dead. People with early memory loss still retain functional neurons on which the choline can act. It is best to start early with choline supplements before degeneration starts.

Another factor to be taken into consideration is that when choline is taken it will only increase acetylcholine synthesis in the brain if the brain is stimulated, for example by studying. Also exercising the brain seems to be necessary to maintain your memory level.

Memory improvement doesn’t happen overnight.. In most cases any improvement can only be experienced after several months, as it requires new growth of dendrites and axons and even growth of whole new neurons.

Science today has shown that it is possible to grow new brain cells. Dr Fernando Nottebohm has made this remarkable discovery from animal studies, when after given brain stimulating drugs and intense mental stimulation, grow new brain cells and connections in adulthood. Nottebohm believes it is also true for humans.

This new evidence proves that anyone can improve their brain, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It can take up to ten months and six years for acetylcholine increasement.

In an attempt to increase brain acetylcholine with lecithin intake, you must take into account that lecithin bought in health food stores contains only small amounts of lecithin. Only phosphatidyl choline supplements of about 20 mg will work.

The latest discovery shows that acetyl-l-carnitine maintains brain function partly by antioxidant action.It improves memory, prevents brain cell loss, boosts intelligence and restores acetylcoline metabolism.

It is used in numerous doses of 1000-2000 mg per day throughout Europe for treatment of Alzheimer’s, depression and memory loss in the aged and for improvement by younger people.