Exercise - Your Second Month Running

You’ve completed your first month running, now onto your second month.

You read the other posts on how to get motivated, how to start running and your first month. If you haven’t you really need to read those first.

So, you’ve been running for a month. You’ve followed the schedule for the first 4 weeks, you’re still motivated and you’re beginning to feel the benefits of feeling fitter. Well wait to you get to the end of this month, as hopefully you will manage one run of 30 minutes without stopping, but really don’t worry if you don’t.

As we said in a previous article, depending on your age and fitness level, we all progress at different rates, so don’t increase the rate of training if you don’t feel comfortable to do so. Just repeat the same week over again, and the distance only when you are ready.

But please, if you have still not yet checked with your Doctor or Physician, please do so first before running.

Running is both about getting fit and can also be about losing weight and burning fat if that’s your goal. You will burn more fat than swimming or cycling, 100 calories per mile, roughly, and it’s doesn’t take that long. Lowering cholesterol and your blood pressure as well.

Remember to try to keep your route on reasonably flat ground. One steep hill at this stage, will be too difficult. Stick to the pavement or sidewalk if you can. Even running on grass can sap the energy from your legs.

OK, we’re ready to progress to week 5. You’re going to be out of the front door a little longer than last month, only about 10 minutes or so, but it will be worth the effort. Previously you were doing sessions about 3 times a week. You now need to step this up to 4 times a week.

OK so week 5. Walk for the first couple of minutes as before to warm up. On week 4 you were running for 7 minutes, so this week you’ll run for 8 minutes. Then repeat 3 further times, ie. Walk for 2 minutes then jog for 8 minutes.

For week 6, you’ll again walk for two minutes and then jog for 9 minutes, repeating three times. At week 7, move up to 11 minutes.

Now on to week 8. If you managed to follow the schedule so far great, your target for this week is a 30 minute run at the end of the week. If you haven’t kept up, do not feel bad or demotivated. Just progress at your pace, and believe me you will get there. So walk for about 5 minutes, and then jog for about 20 minutes with another short walk and a further jog, the second jog does not have to be 20 minutes again if that’s too much. The goal here is to jog for 20 minutes without stopping. In the next session, move onto 25 minutes then when you can do your first 30 minute run without stopping. After a 30 minute run, that’s enough! No need to repeat. Just walk home to cool down.

So well done. Follow the cooling down exercises from our earlier article and get ready for Month 3

Lana Soko is passionate about health and writes for http://www.lose-weight-with-us.com

Are Cookbook Authors Immune to Heart Disease?

Not that I have attempted any formal tabulation or statistical analysis, but it would appear that almost a majority of recipes in a majority of cooking magazines, TV show internet sites and mainstream cookbooks require a copious quantity of some form of cream or butter. Whenever a dish leads my eye to the ingredients, I inevitably find that one of them is cream, double cream, triple cream, quadruple cream, sour cream, fresh cream, crème fresh, crème stale as well as butter or some other variant of milk fat and lots of it.

 

This supports my perception that most recipes are written only to be looked at but never actually prepared, or written on the assumption that readers cook baked beans on toast six nights a week and only pull out the cookbook for one weekend meal with friends, so if that meal includes an indulgence in cream and lots of it, what, one might presume, is the issue? I addressed the issue of recipes being written to accompany photos of food or filmshoots of its preparation but not to be prepared in Why do Recipes Invariable Serve Four? but perhaps there are other reasons.

 

Published and television-presented recipes can generally be divided into two categories: indulgence and austerity. A good many of the chefs presenting them, too young to concern themselves with such trivial issues as heart disease, are very comfortable with the “feel-good” image associated with indulgence cooking. Recipes to balance the diet are clearly the responsibility of “somebody else”.

 

But could it be that television shows and especially cooking magazines are susceptible to the invisible hand of the advertiser’s cheque book? The dairy industry’s promotional budget could very well be at work here, after all, every source of advertising revenue is revenue. But could those magazines and television programs be missing out on another source? Given their zeal for promoting high-fat recipes, they ought to be able to generate some sponsorship from cardiologists and manufacturers of coronary stents as well.

Cholesterol and Inflammation by Dr. Jaromir Bertlik: Part 2

What does all this have to do with inflammation?

Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range.  Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel walls.  This is what I refer to as repeated injury to the blood vessel wall and this is what leads to inflammation.  When you “spike” your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper and sanding down the walls of your delicate blood vessels.

But for now, let’s go back to the sweet roll: That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is also baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean.
Chips and fries are also soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6s are essential to the human body as they are part of every cell membrane, controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be present in direct correlation and balance to the omega-3s.

If this balance shifts due to excess consumption of omega-6s, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation. Today’s mainstream western diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats.  The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of the omega-6s.  That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation.  In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you acquire from eating these foods creates an overload of fat cells that in turn produce large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals adding to the injury which your body is already enduring.  The process that began with what seemed as an innocent sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle which over time creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and finally, as the inflammatory process continues unabated – Alzheimer disease.

Who would willfully expose him/herself repeatedly to harmful foods and other substances that are known to cause injury to our bodies?   Only smokers perhaps, but they made their choice willfully.  The rest of us are simply following the mainstream dietary recommendations and consuming foods that are low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, completely oblivious to the fact that we are indeed causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. 

It is this repeated injury that creates the chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity. 

Let me repeat that: the injury, and subsequently, the inflammation in our blood vessels are caused by the low fat diet that has been recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

My recommendations:

• Choose complex carbohydrates such as colorful fruits and vegetables.
• Eliminate or at least cut down on the inflammation-causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them. Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6s and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly “healthy polyunsaturated oils”.  The belief that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is just that: a belief and not a fact.  Actually the belief that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol at all is fairly weak itself.  Today, we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, and therefore any concern about saturated fats simply sounds absurd.  As absurd as the fact that the whole cholesterol theory led to the no-fat/low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods which are currently causing the epidemic of inflammation.  We are now facing an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.
• Choose the wholesome foods your grandmother served and not those of your mother which came from grocery shelves filled with manufactured and processed foods.  By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food to your diet, you can reverse the damage caused to your arteries and your body.
• Choose AKUNA products to help eliminate and prevent inflammation and future disease and use them daily.  The ingredients in all Akuna products are natural; this means that our bodies can digest them in the correct physiological forms and many of the ingredients are also well known for their ability to eliminate toxins from the body.  In my naturopathic practice I have had unparalleled results with the Akuna products therefore I recommend regular use of Alveo and Take Plaster at the least.  However, if you have access to other Akuna products such as Onyx Plus, MasterVit, Pinky or Cleanse Plus, I also recommend the regular use of those.
• Improve the quality of life for your children as well by improving their diets.

There is no escaping the fact that as we continue consuming prepared and processed foods, the more we expose ourselves to the risk and dangers of inflammation.  The human body cannot process, nor was it ever designed to process foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.  There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is to return to consuming food close to its natural state.

With great health – Dr. Jaromir Bertlik

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Cholesterol and Inflammation by Dr. Jaromir Bertlik, Part 1

We see it in scientific literature, we are continually bombarded with it at educational medical seminars, and allopathic medical doctors, as opinion setters, have for as long as I can remember insisted that heart disease is the direct result of elevated blood cholesterol.  For years, the only accepted method of therapy for heart disease has been prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricts fat intake (also intended to lower cholesterol).

 It’s Not True!

It is now becoming evident that these recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible.  The turning point was the discovery made a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is in fact the real cause of heart disease.  This discovery is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be regarded and treated.

 

What is inflammation?

Inflammation is quite simply our bodies’ natural defense to foreign invaders such as a bacteria, toxins and viruses.  If we chronically expose our bodies to injury by toxins or foods which the human body was never designed to process, chronic inflammation occurs.  In short, chronic inflammation can be very harmful.

What role does inflammation play?

Simply stated, without the presence of inflammation in the body, cholesterol has no reason to accumulate in the wall of the blood vessels.  It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.  Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended.

Which are the 2 biggest causes of chronic inflammation?

•  An overload of simple and highly processed carbohydrates such as white sugar and flour
•  And the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils such as soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods

Foods, loaded with refined sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life, have been the mainstay of our diets for six decades.  These foods are slowly poisoning everyone.

What happens to our bodies?

While we savour the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader has declared war on our immune system.  So how does eating a little sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you ill?  Basically, when we consume simple carbohydrates such as refined sugar, our pancreas, in response, releases insulin whose primary purpose is to drive the sugar into our cells to be stored for energy.  As our cells become filled with sugar (glucose), any extra sugar is turned away.  Blood sugar continues to rise producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

 

To be continued…

 

Until next time…stay healthy

Katarzyna

Sheri's Rants # 26: Diet Head in Debt

When planning purchases, especially major ones, life is much easier if you’ve saved up for them, isn’t it?  If you haven’t, then you end up in debt – and once you’re in debt you’re accruing interest rates, and now you owe even MORE money, right?  And the pain of payment is stretched out over time; in other words what was a simple transaction becomes much longer, expensive and more involved.  We are all familiar with this simple math.

So many of us are so used to the above math – that simple transactions become more complicated and expensive over time – that we apply it to our physical process of health.  How?  Like this:

“I can’t exercise like this the rest of my life.  It’s boring.  Why do this now when I know I can’t keep it up?”

“It’s ridiculous to think I can spend the rest of my life not eating bread.  This is way too rigid for me.  I can’t do it.”

“There is no way I am going to journal my food forever.  So why get good at it now?”

On and on; ad nauseum.  You get me, here, I know you do.

Here’s the Diet Head in this transaction:  you’re assuming that because you’re working hard today to get to where you want to be, that maintaining and taking care of your body in the future is always going to be ‘this hard’, so why even put all your effort into it now, because DUH – you’re not going to keep up this pace.  Who in their right mind would?

Here’s the sanity piece: In REALITY – you’re dealing with a body that you have not taken care of or have simply trashed over the years through dieting and starving and fasting and cleansing and over or under exercising and perhaps you’ve even began accruing the natural results of self abuse which include the diseases we see as a result of stuffing our pieholes with crap and expecting our engines to run, anyway, and usually at breakneck speeds and fueled by sugar and caffeine:  high blood pressure, high cholesterol, thyroid issues (yes, I’m saying it – it’s your FOOD not your DNA), blood sugar disturbances, on and on.  So that’s where you are.

Now, when you have a broke down vehicle, and your mechanic keeps it in the shop for 3 weeks and does a major engine overhaul and then hands it back to you all running sweetly and freshly washed & waxed, do you expect to keep that vehicle in the shop with all that work going on all the time?  (If so, I’ve got the number of a mechanic for you…)  You don’t, do you?  No.  You expect to be able to get back to your regular maintenance schedule (here’s a thought – with a good maintenance schedule would your vehicle have broken down?  Probably not.),  add good fuel and go.  Right?

YOUR BODY WORKS THE SAME WAY.  This Transformation work is the BEGINNING.  You are repairing, restoring, fueling and healing your body so that you can get it back to where it was SUPPOSED to be to begin with, before you started trying to drive long distances with water in your gas tank.  Before you started dumping crap into your pie hole.  Before you decided that a donut cured stress.  Before your alcohol consumption made your liver throw up it’s little hands and start relying on fat storage because it can’t process all the crap you’re handing it.  Before your body started burning muscle tissue for fuel and jacking your cholesterol around.  Before your blood sugar rides ruled your moods and relationships.  Before your entire system began relying on burning carbohydrates to try to function.  Before the diets, fasts, cleanses, starving, and disease.  You with me?

Get it in your head.  The initial Transformation takes work because you are doing WORK on your body – you are restoring it.  Once that is done, the ride gets MUCH easier.  So easy, in fact, that you can back down on exercise and have a bit more freedom in your eating.  But you have to get all that inflammation off your body, you have to get your body to TRUST you, you have to turn off that famine response solidly, and more importantly you have to develop a strong level of SELF RESPECT.  You have to treat yourself nice, forever.  That doesn’t mean tons of cardio and living on chicken breast and lettuce, friends.  It means when your vehicle is repaired you only have to learn how to maintain it with regular care.  Now if you want to add some extras – some symmetry to your muscles, some increased endurance and strength – I mean, you can do ANYTHING from that healed state.  New chrome pipes, paint job, shiny rims, whatever.  Your fitness level (because now you’ll have one) can continually improve – and there’s all sorts of new things you can do that you may or may not consider ‘hard’.   But those are options.

Okay.  So I recently posted a youtube video on epigenetics that clearly states that our current understanding of biology is that we are not, in fact, machines – but energy.  I buy into this, due to what I have seen with humans and the miracles I’ve seen humans do with their bodies.  Energy.  If I come at this from that standpoint, I’d say the same thing:  You have to put more attention into your self care NOW because of all the neglect you need to catch up on.  Once you’re ‘there’ – it requires less attention to keep your body functioning highly.   The truth is that in Diet Head you are having VERY high expectations of how fast your body should change given the small amount of time you’ve spent giving it attention.  I mean, please.  Be realistic.  How long did you keep your body in the negative for?  Do THAT math.

YOU WILL YOUTH.  You can literally turn it ALL around.  Think about your body as a vehicle if that makes sense to you, or think about it in terms of energy – either way, understand that the repair work has to be done at a higher level of attention for a while.  Then it gets easier.  You’ll have more self respect and won’t look at simple self maintenance as a pain in the ass.