Tag Archives: body fat

circuit-training

Activity: essential prevention against all diseases

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Activity is important to maintain a healthy body.
I refer to my article: “Benefits of Exercise”
When you are not sleeping your body was designed to be almost
continually active.
If you immobilize a limb for just three hours, it starts to degenerate.
That’s why even during sleep you automatically flex and stretch and
turn more than a hundred times in one night. Inactivity is deadly!

You can read this in a report by Dr. Walter Bortz in the Journal of
the American Medical Association in 1982.
He reviewed over a hundred studies showing that the sedentary lifestyle
developed in the last 50 years in America causes widespread bodily
damage. This damage occurs independently of other health risk factors,
like smoking, alcohol, fat, age and family history of disease.

Here follows some of his findings:
By itself, simple inactivity causes a chain reaction of cardiovascular
decay. First, it reduces vital capacity. That means, sitting like a slug
reduces your ability to take up and use oxygen.
As a result, muscles, organs, and brain become partially oxygen deprived.
In addition, inactivity reduces cardiac output, that is, the ability of your
heart to pump blood around the body.

So the tissues of couch potatoes become double deprived.
They get less oxygen and less blood and the essential nutrients the blood contains.
In an effort to make up these deficits, your body constricts arteries,
thereby raising blood pressure. This arterial constriction on top of
a weakened heart not only increases the risk of clots and stroke, but also
makes your cardiovascular system less able to respond to sudden movement
or changes of position.

Consequently, sedentary folk often suffer dizziness on standing, because
the impaired system cannot instantly increase blood flow to the brain.
With any sudden movements they are prone to falls and accidents,
because the restricted system of blood flow cannot respond efficiently.

One of the most interesting studies shows that more sedentary people
than active people are hit and killed in traffic accidents.
Because their weakened cardiovascular systems make them incapable of
performing the nimble moves required to avoid oncoming traffic, with out
becoming dizzy and staggering or falling in the process.

Inactivity also increase levels of cholesterol and triglycerides.
Triglycerides are the fats you store, and we know that inactivity makes you fat.
Inactive muscles shrink, compromising your ability to burn fat, to perform
even simple tasks, like running up stairs,and even to hold up your skeleton.

Bones also thin and weaken, because your skeleton requires continuous
resistance exercise in order to grow new bone matrix.
A combination of inactivity and poor bone nutrition is the major cause of
the epidemic of osteoporosis now burdening America – another man made
– entirely preventable disease.

Inactivity also disrupts bowel function and disorders glucose metabolism,
independently of whatever food you eat. The near epidemics of intestinal
disorders and adult-onset diabetes in America bear mute testimony to our
slug lifestyle.

Sex hormone levels also decline with inactivity, now linked to the huge
increase in impotence in America. The evidence is overwhelming that the
incidence of male impotence in America has doubled since the 1940’s.

Activity Can Save Your Life
One of the best studies was conducted by renowned exercise guru
Dr. Kenneth Cooper at his Aerobics Center in Dallas.
They followed 13,344 men and women for 15 years.
This meticulous research, controlled for all major interfering variables, like age,
family history, personal health history, smoking, blood pressure, cardiovascular
condition, and insulin metabolism.

At the fifteen-year follow-up, reduced risk of death was closely correlated
with physical fitness. This included death from cardiovascular diseases,
a variety of cancers, and even accidents.

There is no longer any doubt: exercise can save your life, while couch
potatoism creates an existence that is nasty, sick, and short.

For Science based Nutrition, Training & Health resources , visit: www.muscle-health-fitness.com 

Activity Strengthens Heart and Lungs

Numerous studies show that exercise protects your body by maintaining
vital capacity, and therefore maintaining adequate oxygenation of tissues.

The average sendentary American male aged 45 has lost half his ability
to take up and use oxygen. With one year of the right exercise he can
restore it to the level of a 25 year old.

Dr. Bortz rightly stated that the health benefits of restoring vital capacity
are superior to any drug or medical treatment in existence.

In contrast to the weak cardiac function of sedentary folk, the athlete’s
strong, slow pulse is telling evidence of a healthy heart.
Many have rates in the 40s, and the Colgan Institute one recorded champion
cyclist Howard Doerfling at an incredible 29 beats per minute.

Sedentary folk, however, are likely to show heart rates in the 80s or 90s.
When heart rate rises above 84, risk of coronary heart disease more than doubles.

Activity protects blood pressure
The majority of average people show blood pressure of 120/80, which is regard
as normal but this is not normal at all. We know know that these people are already
on their way to disease. Risk of cardiovascular disease starts to rise as systolic blood pressure goes above 103 mmHg.
By 120 mmHg, previously thought to be normal, risk has risen from 51 to 77 per
10.000 people. That is an increase of 50%.
By 135 mmHg, a level that many physicians still regard as marginal, but acceptable,
risk has doubled. Beyond 135 mmHg you are a walking time bomb.

The same applies to diastolic blood pressure. Usual levels found in average people
are 80-89 mmHg. Recent research shows that these figures indicate a pre-disease state. Diastolic pressures below 80 mmHg shows an incidence of new cardiovascular disease of 10 cases per 1000 people, but by 90-89 mmHg it shows an incidence of 40 cases per 1000 people, a risk increase of 300%.

Don’t fret. It’s easy to reduce blood pressure with the right exercise.
Many studies show that exercise works for older people as well, in whom you might think the damage to blood pressure is permanent.

In a typical study sedentary hypertension patients, aged 55 to 78 years were followed.
All had elevated blood pressure.
After participating in an exercise program, systolic blood pressure felt by a whopping
20 mmHg. Regular exercise will lower blood pressure in almost anyone.

Activity Lowers Cholesterol
Despite media bleatings, cholesterol is not the bad guy.
Cholesterol is essential to every function of your body.
It forms part of all your organs, including your heart and your brain.

Your body makes all your steroid hormones, including adrenalin, estrogen and testosterone from cholesterol. You cannot live without it.

Most of your cholesterol is not from food at all. It is manufactured in your body mainly
by the liver. When a healthy person eats high cholesterol foods, the liver immediately reduces its own cholesterol production to keep blood cholesterol low and healthy.

Disordered cholesterol metabolism is the cause that blood cholesterol rises to dangerous levels and is a man-made disease, caused mainly by our degraded nutrition and
sedentary lifestyle.

As you probably know, we have “good” high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and “bad” low-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Total cholesterol is mostly LDL and this is still one of the best predictors of cardiovascular disease.
You can measure this total cholesterol with a simple device at home,
it is called the “Accumeter”.

What is a healthy cholesterol level? You may ask.
The American Heart Association and other US health authorities made in mid 1980
below 200 mg/dl their official recommendation.

Today we know that this is too high.
In a comprehensive study by Dr. Jeremiah Stamler, he followed 356,000 men
in 28 US cities. Following his research, death rates from cardiovascular disease
starts to rise when cholesterol gets above 168 mg/dl.
Total cholesterol in sedentary American men and women rise over 200 mg/dl
in their 30s and reach about 220 mg/dl by age 45.

It’s clear that sitting like a slug expose oneself to disease.
Recent research shows that average cholesterol levels in runners and bodybuilders
ranged between 158 mg/dl and 183 mg/dl.
It proves that exercise makes the healthy difference.

Chardiovascular diseases are far out our biggest health problem.
It kills more than twice as many Americans as all cancers, nine times as many as
all other lung and liver diseases together, and 28 times more than all forms of diabetes.

There are good reasons to warn everybody starting an exercise program
to have a thorough medical and physician’s approval before they start.
Sudden exertion in sedentary people “raises their changes of a heart attack by….100 fold!
A health letter from the Mayo Clinic stated:
“Most people who have heart attacks during activity are sedentary or have underlying heart disease and overdo it.”

Activity Prevents Cancer
Most cancers are slow-growing diseases, eating silently away at your body for years
before they show up.
Despite the overblown claims of successful treatment by the National Cancer Institute,
once a cancer emerges, medicine is usually  powerless.

Remember the swift deaths of Michael Landon of pancreatic cancer and Jaqueline
Onassis of Lymphoma. If there was an effective treatment, don’t you think those
immensely rich people would have bought it?

So if a little of the right exercise can prevent cancer, it’s worth than all the gold in
Ford Knox. And above all, like the other best things in life, it’s free!

From a study by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, it showed that incidence of all forms of cancer
was closely correlated with lack of physical exercise. Unfit men and women where
300% more likely  to develop cancer.
But the best finding from this study is that you have to move only a smidgen  out of
couch potatoland to prevent cancer big time.

Activity Against All Diseases

The right exercise is a major strategy for preventing and  treating All diseases.
Physicians who do not incorporate exercise into their treatment protocols are
guilty of malpractice.

The right exercise maintains your heart, lungs, your muscles, your bones, a healthy
level of bodyfat, even your intestinal function.
But what about more  subtle functions, such as insulin, and your body’s handling
of sugar?

We know that couch potatoism leads to glucose intolerance.
However, research has shown not long ago that getting off the couch not only
maintains insulin function to deal with the sugar, but also can reverse decades
of damage. In healthy people the right exercise completely protects glucose tolerance against the degenerative changes in insulin metabolism that lead to adult-onset diabetes.

Research has revealed the major way  in which activity protects you against all diseases.

It started with evidence that exercise increases overall white blood cells.
Then came more precise findings that moderate exercise increases bodily production of
lymphocytes, interleukin 2, neutrophills, and other disease fighting  components
of the immune system. There is no longer doubt that the right exercise strengthen
your immunity.

Hence it strengthens your resistance against all sorts of damage, decay, bacteria, viruses,
toxins, even radiation. Remember the wise words of Louis Pasteur, the father of
modern medicine: “Host resistance is the key”.

2 Simple steps to REMOVE visceral belly fat (the DEADLIEST type)

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Excess Abdominal Fat looks Ugly, and is a very Serious Health Issue!

The difference between subcutaneous fat and the more deadly “visceral fat”… with easy steps to get rid of this excess abdominal fat FOR EVER!

big stomach, visceral fatThis article applies to two dangerous types of stomach fat for both men and women… and this talk also applies if you only have a small amount of excess abdominal fat.

Are you aware of the fact that most people to-day have excess abdominal fat?  It’s true –at least 70% of the population in some “westernized” countries such as the US and Australia are now regard as either overweight or obese.  Most people think that their excess abdominal fat is simply ugly.
They cover up their abs from being visible, and makes them self conscious about showing off their body.

However, most people don’t realize that excess abdominal fat in particular, is not only ugly, but is also a dangerous health risk factor. Scientific research has clearly proved that although it is generally unhealthy to have excess body fat throughout your body, it is also particularly dangerous to have excess abdominal fat.

There are two types of fat that you have in your abdominal area.
The first type that hides your abs from being visible is called subcutaneous fat.
It  lies directly beneath the skin and on top of the abdominal muscles.

The second type of fat that you have in your abdominal area is called visceral fat.
That lies deeper in the abdomen beneath your muscle and surrounding your organs. Visceral fat also gives certain men that “beer belly” appearance where their abdomen protrudes excessively. But at the same time, also feels sort of hard if you push on it.

Both subcutaneous fat and visceral fat in the abdominal area are serious health risk factors. But science has shown that having excessive visceral fat is even more dangerous than subcutaneous fat.  Both types of fat seriously increase your risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, sleep apnea, various forms of cancer, and other degenerative diseases.

Research has shown that visceral fat is particularly dangerous, because it releases more inflammatory molecules into your system on a consistent basis.

The most important reason that some people accumulate more visceral fat than others can be caused by a high carbohydrate diet that leads to insulin resistance over time (years of bombarding your system with too much sugars and starches for your pancreas to properly handle the constant excess blood sugar).  Studies show that high fructose intake especially from high-fructose corn syrup can be an important contributor to excess visceral fat.

So what gets rid of extra abdominal fat, including visceral fat?

Your nutrition and training program are important if you want to get this right.
The good news is that I’ve spent over a decade researching this topic, analyzing the science, and applying it “in the trenches” with myself as well as thousands of my clients from all over the world.  To see what works to really stimulate abdominal fat loss.

I know of one particular study that divided thousands of participants into two groups:
a diet only and an exercise & diet combined group. While both groups in this study made good progress, the diet-only group lost significantly LESS abdominal fat than the diet & exercise combined group.

From my research, two of the most important aspects to getting rid of visceral fat are:

1. Apply high intensity forms of exercise and full-body resistance training.  Low intensity cardio exercise has no effect for removing visceral fat in particular.  High intensity exercise such as interval training, sprints (bike sprints or running sprints), AND full-body weight training are very effective at helping to improve your body’s ability to manage glucose and increases insulin sensitivity.  A crucial step in removing visceral fat.

These types of high intensity exercise routines are also very effective at increasing your fat-burning hormones. Creating a hormonal environment conducive to burning off abdominal fat, including visceral fat.

2.  Also, it’s vitally important to get blood sugar under control to help restore insulin sensitivity through the right nutrition.  By means of strongly reducing sugars and refined starches in your diet (including fully eliminating any use of harmful high fructose corn syrup!).
Focus more of your diet on healthy fats (such as avocados, nuts, seeds, coconut fat, olive oil, grass-fed butter, free-range eggs, fatty fish and fish oils, etc), also increasing protein and fiber intake.  The standard diet recommended by the government, which contains an unnaturally high grain intake does NOT help to control blood sugar and reducing visceral fat!

Having less grain-based foods in your diet and getting more of your carbs from veggies and high fiber fruits such as berries can significantly help to solve your excess abdominal fat problem.

Find out more about how to lose body fat by clicking here!

Best Weight loss Program

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For a weight loss program to be able to claim to be the “Best Weight loss Program” on the market, we have to be able to guarantee that the different systems used in this “Best Weight loss Program” really delivers success and satisfies the demands of all different types of people.

It’s not complicated to become lean, if you know how your body works.
Body fat is dependent on life style.

There are three main keys to losing fat and gaining muscle, and you can’t
miss any of them.

1. The only way you can lose weight ever is to eat less calories than you burn off.
2. Do high repetition, wide-variety resistance exercises
3. Eat enough protein to maintain muscle mass.

First we have to distinguish the difference between male and female, which is explained in “The Venus Factor”. It is designed to increase female metabolism, based on the fact that everything to do with weight loss for both men and women, is controlled by the Leptin hormone.

Then we have to take into account, that there are three body types, based on a person’s metabolism.
We can distinguish the Endomorphs: they have a rather slow working metabolism.
Then there are the Mesomorphs, with a higher metabolism, and the third type are the Ectomorphs,with the highest metabolism. The last group could eat anything without gaining any weight.
They need more carbohydrates and less protein, but the same amount of fat.

According to a nutritionist, Charlie Remington, a lack of exercise was not America’s overweight problem, but rather three mistakes in people’s eating habits:
1. not portioning foods properly
2. eating poor quality foods
3. not eating frequently enough, preferable four to five times a day, small portions of food.

Another factor to be taken into account is the Glycemic Index (GI)
The GI is a classification of carbohydrates based on their potential for raising blood glucose levels. Those foods that result in a rapid rise in blood sugar and therefor in insulin, have a high Glycemic Index. Carbohydrates that are broken down slowly and consequently only cause moderate increase in blood sugar, have a low Glycemic Index.

The Glycemic Load (GL) is a more accurate way to assess the impact 0f carbohydrate consumption that takes the Glycemic Index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does Glycemic Index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar.
It doesn’t tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food.
You need to know both things to understand a food’s effect on blood sugar.

Short term fasting, a 24-hour fast, once or twice per week can be a great way to get you into total calorie deficit for the week. Eliminating two full days of eating help to consume fewer calories than we use, and that in turn can help us to reach our goal of weight loss.

In order to get the classification of “Best Weight loss Program”, we have to add some other systems to make up our total picture.

First we have a program called: “Old School, New Body”.
It claims that you should never workout more than 90 minutes per week.
Also “slow go” cardio is OLD news and extremely ineffective when compared to short-burst intense exercise, and there are three studies to support this.

1. A 30-minute circuit style resistance training session was put to test.
The result was a 38 hour increase in metabolism, thanks to massive AFTERBURN.

2. This study showed that those who added short burst intense exercise to a reduced calorie diet burned up to 44% more fat than those who dieted alone.

3. The last study compared slow-go aerobic exercise to short burst intense resistance training and found that the resistance group lost significantly more fat without losing ANY lean muscle, even at an extremely low calorie intake.

The 3 Week Diet
This product promises the fast results that most dieters want: 23 pounds in just 3 weeks!
It’s based on the fact that at certain times of the day, your metabolism is burning at it’s peak. And those are the times you should eat to burn fat.

The system is so accurate and efficient that some people are able to lose up to 1 pound a day! Combined with a few extra types of foods, this diet is FOOL PROOF!

The next system I like to introduce is called: “The E-Factor Diet”.
It’s based on the fact that some foods you can eat in the morning, that are guaranteed to turn your fat burning switch to ON as soon as you wake up.

Then there is a special diet for men. Men want to fight aging, have better romantic lives and more energy. The key to much of this is: increasing their testosterone levels.
Not as a “body builder”type of way, but just a return to normal levels experienced in younger years, but with simple changes to men’s diet, that will naturally increase testosterone levels.
Testosterone is an important factor when it comes to burning fat and building muscle.

The “Fat Loss Factor” promote eating natural food. There is the #1 food ingredient that secretly makes us fat. It’s High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), which is a man-made sweetener, cheaper than sugar.
It travels straight to the liver, which turns this sugarly liquid into FAT.
It doesn’t cause the pancreas to produce insulin. As a result, our bodies are “tricked” into a vicious circle, eating food that gets immediately stored as fat and never feeling full.

This fact is associated with blood sugar problems. ADD/ADHD depression, fatigue, B vitamin deficiency, indigestion, tooth decay, and most importantly: WEIGHT GAIN!
The “Fat loss Factor” tells you how to avoid this problem.

Finally, there is another “quick solution” for fat loss. It’s the “14 Days Rapid Fat Loss Program”.
This plan encourage people to eat carbohydrates and makes them to work by using Macro Patterning. It shows you how to eat carbohydrates which never get stored as fat.

This conclude the “Best Weight loss Program”. I have included the most important factors associated with weight loss. I’m open for any comments regarding this “Best Weight loss Program” or anything I may have forgotten to include in this program.

Revving Your Lean Machine: The Truth about Soreness

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When you first started working out, you probably hated it. Soreness hurts! But as you progressed, you no doubt embraced it—most of us consider it a signal that we’ve done our diligence and stimulated plenty of muscle growth. But is that true?

The fact is, there are no studies connecting muscle soreness to hypertrophy. Okay, don’t stop reading yet; you will get some good stuff from being a bit sore–and you’ll probably even want to strive for it. But first you need to know what causes muscle soreness.

It’s believed that the pain is caused by microtrauma in muscle fibers—and it’s primarily triggered by the negative, or eccentric, stroke of an exercise—like when you lower a bench press, squat or curl rep.

Once your body repairs those microtears, it follows that the muscle should grow larger; however, that trauma is in the myofibrils, the force-generating actin and myosin strands in the fiber. Those strands grab onto and pull across one another to cause muscular contraction. When you control the negative stroke of a rep, there is friction as those strands drag across each other in an attempt to slow movement speed to prevent injury—and that dragging, it’s believed, is what inflicts the microtrauma.

That’s a simplification, but you get the idea. So it appears that some growth can occur after muscle soreness is repaired, but it’s in the myofibrils. More and more research is beginning to show that those force-generating strands do not contribute the majority of muscle size; serious mass comes via sarcoplasmic expansion. That’s the “energy fluid” in the fibers that’s filled with glycogen (from carbs), ATP, calcium, noncontractile proteins, etc.

So if soreness is an indication of only small amounts of muscle growth, why strive for it? Well, even small amounts of growth contribute to overall mass. Most of us want every fraction we can scrape up. But the real reason to seek some soreness is to burn more fat.

When the myofibrils are damaged by emphasizing the eccentric, the body attempts to repair them as quickly as possible. That repair process takes energy, a lot of which comes from body fat. The process usually takes many days, so your metabolism is stoked to a higher level for 48 hours or more, helping you get leaner faster. (Note: High-intensity interval training, like sprints alternated with slow jogs, damages muscle fibers during the intense intervals, the sprints, which is why HIIT burns more fat in the long run than steady-state cardio where no muscle damage occurs.)

Do you need heavy negative-only sets to get that extra bit of size and metabolic momentum? That’s one way, but negative-accentuated, or X-centric, sets may be a better, safer way.

For an X-centric set you take a somewhat lighter poundage than your 10RM and raise the weight in one second and lower it in six. That one-second-positive/six-second-negative cadence does some great things, starting with myofibrillar trauma for some soreness. While you’re coping with that extra post workout muscle pain, remember that it can build the myofibrils and that it’s stoking your metabolism during the repair process for more fat burning.

The second BIG advantage is sarcoplasmic expansion. At seven seconds per rep and eight reps per set, you get almost an entire minute of tension time (seven times eight is 56 seconds). A TUT of 50 to 60 seconds is something most bodybuilders never get—which is a shame because that’s optimal stress for an anabolic cascade and this is the perfect way to train as you age. I call it Old School New Body!

You can do an X-centric set after your heavy pyramid—if you’re into heavy training. In other words, use it as a backoff set.

If you’re more into moderate-poundage, high-fatigue mass building, as I am with the F4X method featured in the Old School New Body method, you can use X-centric as the last set of the sequence. Reduce the weight and do a one-up-six-down cadence. You’ll get sore, build some extra size and—bonus—burn for fat. How great is that?

Till next time, stay tuned, train smart and be Built for Life.

Steve Holman

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Lean for Life

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It might be true that running burns more calories than walking and cross-country skiing
burns most calories of all, but fat loss has little to do with calories used during an
exercise session.
Many recent studies show that the right exercise raises your metabolic rate for up to
18 hours afterwards.

However, if you exercise in the evening and then go to bed, you lose most of the
fat loss effect, because sleep causes your metabolism rate to drop rapidly.
The best time to exercise is in the mornings, the earlier the better.

Exercise five mornings weekly for a minimum of 30 minutes
Dr. Leonard Epstein analysed all the published studies on exercise and fat loss
and showed that people who exercise five times per week lose three times as much
fat as those who exercise only twice or three times per week, even if they exercise for
a longer period.Those who exercise only once per week lost no fat at all.

For  fat loss, five days weekly exercise of 30 minutes is much superior to three days
weekly of 70 minutes, even though the total weekly exercise time of the three day
people is an hour longer.
In order to keep that metabolic rate churning, frequent exercise is the key.

Take a multiple anti-oxidant every day.
As you can read in my article about exercise, oxidation is the primary cause
of human degeneration.
Because exercise uses 12 – 20 times more oxygen than sitting in a chair, it also creates
masses of free radicals that causes a lot of oxidation damage.

Without additional anti-oxidants you are slowly killing yourself.
You can prevent exercise oxidation  damage by taking antioxidant supplements.

The first strategy in your fight against body fat is to reduce your appetite.
Phenylpropanolamine helps a little. Better is ephedrine hydrochloride and its original
source: Ma huang or Ephedra sinica.

But you should be very sensible in the use of these compounds.
Don’t use more than 25 – 50 mg per day, otherwise it lose it’s effect  and can cause
many side-effects, including raised blood pressure, anxiety and insomnia.

The second strategy is to reduce the taste of food, especially sweet tastes.
The herb Gymnema silvestre has been used for this purpose for thousands
of years in Ayurvedic medicine. It works a bit.

The third strategy is to reduce your body’s tendency  to store fat.
The herb Garcinia cambogia, a specific variant of the English brindleberry
is used in Ayurvedic medicine for this purpose.
The active ingredient is hydroxy citrate.

Ongoing studies by DR. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona indicate
that 500 mg of garcinia may reduce fat storage from a high-fat meal by up to 30%.
As a bonus, it may also reduce appetite.

The final strategy is to raise metabolic rate so that your body burns more calories
during the day. It’s called thermogenesis, which means: it raises body temperature.
To maintain the increased temperature, the body has to burn more calories to make
the heat – lots of calories. And because it is low level activation, the calories burned
come mainly from fat.

There are a lot of drugs that does the job, but all of them causes side effects.
It doesn’t make sense to make yourself unhealthy while trying to lose fat.

Least damaging are the beta-adrenergic agonists and most harmless of these
is ephedrine or its herbal source: Ma huang. These compounds work by inceasing
bodely output of noradrenalin, one of our “fight-or-flight” hormones.
That warns you right away not to use too much,(25-50 mg per day max.) or you
run into severe anxiety, irritability, headache and insomnia.

The FDA are against ephedrine, because folk have used larger doses and
caused real damage to the thyroid gland and other organs.

However, ephedrine on its own is not effective, because your body quickly
defends itself with multiple mechanisms that turn off the extra noradrenalin.
The three main defences your body uses against a sensible ephedrine
regimen (25–50 mg/day) are: increasing output of phosphodiesterase enzymes,
and increasing prostaglandin production.

These defenses can be overcome respectively by using caffeine, theophylline
(from tea) and acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin).
Herbal sources can also supply the caffeine, theophyline and aspirin.
Standardized extracts of kola nut, guarana, black tea and white willow are good
sources. And you can prolong the effect of caffeine, which is mildly thermogenic
by itself, by using naringenin, a compound found in grapefruit.

.Another effective chemical to use in conjunction with beta-receptor agonists
is yohimbine, a compound from the bark of the yohimbe tree.
Yohimbe is one of the class of compounds called selective antagonists
of alpha-2 receptors. This action of yohimbine has shown to cause long- term
thermogenesis and fat loss in animals.

Use the right herbal fat loss supplement every day
Controlling excess body water is the last thing you can do to lose body fat.
Especially for women, who have this problem. Bloating and edema prevent
your Lean For Life program, because they make you feel blah and make you
to sit like a slug and avoid exercise.

Diuretic drugs are not the solution, but mildly diuretic foods like melons,
cucumber, grapes, apples, parsley, pineapple and cooked asparagus
all help to shed excess water.
Mil diuretic herbs, like Uva ursi and Sarsaparilla also have a use in this
phase of fat loss.

Form specific, measurable, public, rewarded fat loss goals.
Success is always achieved by setting goals. To improve your performance,
you should set  specific goals and sub-goals and write them down and post
them on the fridge, for example, so that everybody can see them.

Goals have to be specific, measurable and time limited.
“To lose weight” is to vague. Instead for example: to lose 10 lbs of fat by
my next birthday is a good goal.
Lean for Life is a very long-term goal, so you have to use sub-goals to be able
to check your progress.

Finally, you have to make your goals public, so that your  family and friends
can blame you for failure, but praise & reward you for success.

Facts about Fat Storage

Health & Nutrition, ,

The industry around weight loss is well aware of the fact that low-calorie diets cause fast loss of muscle and fat. For this reason, the market is saturated with fiber bars, liquid meals and light weight cereals.

We live in a society of instant coffee,….. while-you-wait, etc.
Fast results are essential for continuous sales results.
The average consumer is not aware of the fact, that when they are losing fat, they lose muscle also.

Nutrition scientists have known for many years that reducing calories to 800 – 1200 per day, which is below the essential energy requirement of the body to maintain vital functions, causes you to cannibalize your own muscles for fuel.
On these diets, muscle provides up to 45% of the energy deficit. If the deficit in essential energy requirement is 500 calories per day, then up to 225 calories will come from muscle breakdown. n only four weeks on such a diet, you can lose 1.5 kg of vital muscle. In your muscles is all your energy created by burning of fats, carbohydrates and proteins in the mitochondria of each and every cell.

Even an ounce of muscle lost, lowers basic metabolic rate of fuel consumption and reduces your ability to burn body fat. So all diets that are below the essential energy requirement of your body are a guaranteed recipe for failure.

Besides the fact of losing muscle,which is your body’s engine, the weight loss ndustry
also know that fast fat loss guaranties regain of fat. The physiology behind it has been known for decades.

Fast fat loss alerts the potent defenses of the body of its energy reserve.
The quantity and activity of the lipoprotein lipase enzyme increases immediately, which is the body’s main mechanism that collect digested fat from the bloodstream and stuff it into fat cells.
Lipoprotein lipase get hold of every fat molecule and even disable your body to use it for energy.In order to make up the deficit, you have to burn more muscle.

However, as muscle is your basic structure, it is harder for your body to burn it than fat.
As a result, your metabolism slows down, which reduces your ability to burn fat.
Toxic wastes build-up as a result of burning proteins. This can make you sick and cranky.

This activity does not help you to control your appetite, which becomes more ravenous.
It gets even worse. If you can’t resist the inconvenience any longer and succumb to
real food, the lipoprotein lipase has become so efficient, that you regain seven weeks painful fat loss in almost seven days.

But the biggest problem is that you don’t get any of the lost muscle back.
So the final result of the diet is that there is no change in body fat but a big loss in muscle.
This loss of part of your engine causes further fat gain as it reduces your ability to burn
the fat you have.

Overweight people using low-calorie diets lose so much muscle that they set their bodies up for permanent obesity, when they use them repeatedly.

Facts about Fats

Health & Nutrition, , , , , , , , ,

Since March 1990 the US health authorities suggested that all Americans over the age of two should reduce their daily intake of saturated fats below the 10% of total calories and their total intake of fat below 30% of daily calories. These suggestions were first introduced in the 1960’s and were at that time a fair representation of the evidence that saturated fats and excessive total fats in the diet can be the cause of cardiovascular disease and certain cancers.

Nutrition science made mighty advances since the recommendations made their laborious way through the heavy committies of the US health authorities. The advice of the 1960’s is now obsolete.
We know now that if you follow current government advice on fat intake you are most likely going to DAMAGE YOUR BODY BEYOND REPAIR. That’s putting it heavy, but as you will see, the new evidence is without dispute.

Fat is your body’s major fuel and some people still think that you have to eat much of it in order to keep your energy level high. They got it wrong. A slim man of 85 kg who has only 10% body fat carries 7% of that fat as a fuel store. This fat store weight 5500 grams and holds 49,500 calories,at 9 calories per  gram, which is enough to run for a hundred miles.

In contrast to his fat store, his other major source of fuel,his 450 grams of glycogen, holds only 1800 calories, at 4 calories per gram. The limit on energy is always glycogen, because your muscles cannot function properly without a minimum level of glycogen.

So even a very slim person never runs out of fat. You need to eat very little in order to maintain a sufficient fat store. This means between 10% and 15% of daily calories should be sufficient.
If your body should ever need any extra, it can easily convert proteins and carbohydrates into fat.

Body fat is put on much easier by eating fat than by eating other food. The current government advice that it’s ok to eat 30% of daily calories in fat encourage you to eat a lot of it. The result is waddling before us. Four in every ten American adults are overweight and it’s getting worse every decade.

Overwhelming evidence shows that even moderate overweight is a direct cause of many diseases and the risk of disability and death is on the increase in almost all diseases.
It’s obvious that our health authorities with their current advice on fat intake are making you sick.

All fats are made of fatty acids, consisting of a fat part and an acid part. Their chemical make-up consists of a carbon chain made of carbon and hydrogen atoms.
The length of the carbon chain depends on the type of fat. Short-chain fats such as
butyric acid in butter have four carbons. Fish oils and the long-chain fats that comprise most of our brain, have 20 to 24 carbons.

Besides  the fat our body use for fuel, it requires many special fats. They function as part
of the cell membranes around every cell and as parts of your brain, inner ear, eyes, adrenal glands and sex organs.

Our body can make these special fats only if it gets the right raw materials from our diet, which are two essential fats our body can’t make: linoleic acid and alpha-linolic acid.
Both of which are long chain (18 carbons). For optimum health, these two fats have to be provided by our diet. The body can transform them in any other kind of fat it needs.

Unfortunately, essential fats are scarce in the average diet. The best source of linoleic and alpha-linolenic acids is flax or linseed oil. Other sources are: pumpkin seeds, walnuts, soybeans and canola oil. Dark green leaves  of leaf vegetables also contain small amounts.
Good but expensive oil sources used in supplements are blackcurrant seed oil, borage oil,evening primrose oil and fish oils.

The fat content of common seed oils is shown in the table. This table applies only to cold-pressed,unprocessed oils that have not been hydrogenated. As you will see, when even the best oils are processed into margarine and cooking oils,they lose their healthful attributes.

The percentage of fats in vegetable oils. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Polyunsaturated Fats           Mono-         Saturated
Linoleic   alpha-linolenic  Unsaturated        Fats
Acid          Acid             Fats
______________________________________________________________________________________

The Good Oils
——————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Flaxseed         15         54        22      9
Pumpkin seed     45         15        32      8
Soybean  42         11        32     15
Walnut  50          5        29     16
Canola  26          8        57      9
——————————————————————————————————————————————————-
Second Best
——————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Almond  17          –       68     15
Virgin Olive 12          –       72     16
Safflower  70          –        1     12
Sunflower  66          –       22     12
Corn  59                 25     16
Sesame  45          –       45     13
Rice Bran  35          –       45     17
——————————————————————————————————————————————————–
The Bad Oils
——————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Peanut  29         –        56     15
Cottonseed 48         –        28     24
(May contain toxins)
———————————————————————————————————————————————————
The Ugly Oils
———————————————————————————————————————————————————
Palm    9          –        44     48
Palm kernel    2          –        18     80
Coconut    4          –         8     88
These percentages  hold only for fresh unprocessed, cold-pressed oils that have not been hydragenated.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————-                     Saturated and Unsaturated Fats.

Saturated fats have all their carbon atoms ’saturated’ with hydrogen atoms. They have no empty hydrogen spaces to link up with the hydrogen of other molecules in your body.
As a result, they can only be used by your body for energy. Unsaturated fats have empty spaces where hydrogen atoms are missing. These spaces form special keys that can fit the locks of other molecules in your flesh.

Health authorities would have you believe that saturated fats come mainly from meats
and raise cholesterol levels and vegetable oils are unsaturated and keep  cholesterol down. They are wrong!

It’s true that meats, cheese, eggs and milk are high in saturated fats, but so are palm oil, palm kernel oil and especially coconut oil. Many foods are loaded with  saturated fats. They raise cholesterol and low density lipoproteins (LDLs) and damage your health
just as much as the greasiest fatback bacon.

Also contrary to government health recommendations, recent evidence shows that not all saturated fats are bad. Carefully controlled studies now indicate that medium chain triglycerides (MCT’s) which are saturated fats extracted from coconut oil, don’t raise cholesterol. Neither does the saturated fat stearic acid.

To make things worse, we know now that many of the so-called polyunsaturated fats approved by our health authorities, raise cholesterol over the moon because of what food processing has done to them. Remember, the good oils in the preceding table remain healthy  only if they are unprocessed. Have a look at what’s happening to them on the way from the field to your table.

Cis Versus Trans Fats.
Almost all natural fats exists in so called a cis configuration. That means the hydrogen atoms on the carbons are all on the same side of the molecule. Because of their light electrical charge, the hydrogen atoms repel each other and put bends in the carbon chain, like a series of overlapping horseshoes. These bends are the essential shape of the molecule, the key which fits the precise locks in your body that enable the special biological functions in your body to take place.

This essential cis configuration is destroyed by modern processing methods, like heating,hydrogenation, bleaching and deodorizing. These procedures are applied to almost all mass-produced fats and oils. They change the healthy cis configuration into an unhealthy trans configuration. Chemically, the hydrogen atoms become rotated so that they lie on opposite sides of the fat molecule. The molecule then straightens out and loses its key shape that links with your cells in order to perform the biological functions of fats.

Your body is very adaptable. Although the trans fats no longer fit its locks, it still has to try and use them for the essential functions of fats. In cell membranes for example, trans fats cause the membranes to leak, thereby disrupting cellular metabolism and permitting toxic substances to enter the cell. We know now that trans fats incorporated into cells membranes cause abnormal cell functions that is implicated in both cardiovascular diseases and cancers.

Recent studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine also show direct disease
effects. Young, healthy males show elevated cholesterol levels and elevated low density
lipoproteins (LDLs) , if placed on a high trans fat diet for only three weeks.
These elevations in cholesterol and LDLs are as high as those reached by feeding subjects
a diet high in saturated fats from palm and palm kernel oils.

Identifying Trans Fats
All process oils contain trans fats. The more solid the oil, the higher the trans fat level.
Liquid vegetable oils contain up to 6% trans fats and margarine and shortening
up to 58%.
You can identify trans fats in other foods by looking for the words “hydrogenated” or partially hydrogenated in the ingredients list. You will find these words on the labels of many breads, candies,baked goods, chocolate, frozen dinners and processed meat products. If you want the best of health, don’t eat them.

The whole of Europe has had mandates against trans fats for some years.
Many  European foods now state specifically on the labels that they are made with cis fats, the healthy kind, even margarine. Buy and use only the good oils. Especially buy and use organic flax oil, it will go a long way to protect your health.

Smart Fats.
There are other important health reasons for using organic flax oil as a regular part of your nutrition. To understand them you have to know a little about what your body does with the two essential fats: linoleic acid and alpha-linolenic acid. Along the way I will show you why the two fish oils, eicosapentanic acid (EPA) and docosahexanoic (DHA) are such powerful protection against disease. It is vital to know about these essential fats if you want to protect your health.

The next figure shows the sequence of special fats that your body makes from dietary essential fats. As you can see, lnoleic acid from your diet is the start of the omega-6 sequence of fats.
Like all fats in biochemistry, it has a descriptive number, cis 18:2 omega-6.
Sounds complicated but it’s really quite simple. The number merely describes a series of bumps and hollows just like those on your car key.

Note first that the fats are in cis form. Biochemists know that only the cis form works in the human body. The first figure, in this case 18, represent the number of carbons that make up the length of the chain. The second figure, in this case 2, represent the number of hollows in the chain,that is, empty spaces for hydrogen atoms. These spaces create part of the key that fits the locks for specialized functions of fats in your body. The third figure, in this case 6,  refers to the number of carbons along the chain where the first empty space occurs. This position creates  the rest of the key.

Alpha-linolenic acid from your diet is 18:3 omega-3, the start of the omega-3 sequence of fats. Alpha-linolenic acid is converted by your body first into EPA, then into DHA. DHA is vital to health because most of your brain is made of it. A shortage of DHA  causes inevitable brain degeneration and is now believed by researchers to be one factor in America’s  current epidemic of Alzheimer disease.

EPA and DHA  are also the two omega-3 fats found in fish, especially oily fish like salmon,mackerel and sardines. If you eat these fish then you get your DHA preformed, saving your body a lot of work in making it. Now you know there’s some truth to the notion that fish is brain food.

OMEGA-3s FIGHT CANCER.
Omega-3 fatty acids produce vital chemical messengers in your body, called prostaglandins.
Studies have shown that some of these prostaglandins can kill breast, lung and prostate cancer cells stone dead. From this evidence, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute declared that omega-3 fats have “potential clinical usefulness” in cancer treatment.

This evidence is vital to your health because studies show that omega-6 fats, although they are essential for some functions, also produce inflammatory prostaglandins that promote cancer growth. Omega-3 fats keep this cancer effect of omega-6 fats under control.
For optimal resistance to cancer, you have to keep your intake of omega-3 fats dominant over omega-6.

Unfortunately, the American diet is very low in alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3), but high in linoleic acid (omega-6). Most vegetable oils have little or no omega-3 fats and a lot of omega-6 fats. The only common oil that contains a healthy balance is organic flaxseed.
That’s why it’s so important for good health.

The benefits of omega-3 fats don’t stop with cancer. The evidence is impressive that a high intake of omega-3 fats (about a tablespoon of organic flaxseed oil per day) goes a long way to inhibit cardiovascular disease, adult-onset diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
Include omega-3 in your nutrition every day!

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