Healthy Living

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Sat 3 May 2008

Sleep Away Your Excess Weight

Posted by Deb under Healthy Living
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Sleep away your excess weight:  sounds like a “dream” cure for weightloss, doesn’t it?  Don’t we all wish it were that simple?  It’s not, actually; there are several important things we must do to lose weight, including eating fewer calories, eating nutrient rich foods instead of empty calories, excercising more, and strength training.  But as it turns out, lack of sleep may indeed be an influential factor in weight gain and in sabotaging our weight loss.  Therefore, getting adequate sleep could really help our weight loss.

The reason for this appears to be linked to our hormone levels, which can become disrupted from their natural balance when we don’t get enough sleep.  I first heard about this when Dr. Oz mentioned it on the Oprah show several months ago.  Then, my husband gave me Dr. Oz’s book You on a Diet for Valentine’s Day, and I was able to get more detailed information on this phenomenon there.  Since then, I’ve read numerous similar accounts in books, magazines, and on Web sites.

Here is what appears to happen.  When we get enough sleep, our bodies produce adequate amounts of a hormone called cortisol, which controls appetite, allowing our bodies to naturally recognize when we’re hungry and when we’re full.  When we don’t get sufficient sleep, our bodies do not produce enough cortisol to effectively control our waking appetites.  Also associated with sleep are the two hormones ghrelin and leptin.   Ghrelin, which is produced in the gastrointestinal tract, stimulates appetite, while leptin, produced in fat cells, sends a signal to the brain when we are full.  When we don’t get enough sleep, it drives leptin levels down, which means we don’t feel as satisfied after we eat.  Lack of sleep also causes ghrelin levels to rise, which means our appetite is stimulated, so we want more food.  Even after consuming adequate amounts of food, we still feel hungry if there is too much ghrelin being produced in our bodies.  So, it is easy to see that if the we have too much ghrelin and too little leptin, the stage can be set for overeating, which can lead to weight gain.  Another thing about too much ghrelin is that it gives us a desire for high carbohydrate, sugary, calorie-dense foods, which are the best sources of the empty calories I mentioned earlier, and eating too much of that kind of food leaves our bodies “starving” for nutrients, which makes us even hungrier.  So, it seems that inadequate sleep can set us up for a hormonal train wreck leading to tireder, fatter bodies for all of us.

That leads us to two questions:  1) How much sleep do we need to have normal hormone levels reached? and 2) How do we manage to get that amount of sleep? First of all, I read somewhere that each of us individually needs different amounts of sleep.  Sleep experts say we need anywhere from 7-9 hours of sleep a night, and sleep researchers studying the sleep/weight loss connection say that there is typically only a fifteen minute difference in amounts of sleep gotten by normal weight people and overweight people.  So, it seems that increasing our sleep to optimum levels might not be as big of a challenge as we might fear.  That is, it’s not that big of a challenge if we’re within 15-30 minutes of our ideal sleep levels to begin with.  So, we have to figure out how much sleep we really need and compare that to how much sleep we actually get.  Sleep experts show that few of us actually get the minimum of seven hours, but to see how much is natural for us individually, we should find out in the following way:  Sleep as long as we want for several days (best done on vacation). Then, our sleep should stabilize, and we’ll find ourselves waking up after the same number of hours daily, within 15 minutes or so. That is our optimum level that we really need.  I don’t know what we do to tell how much we need if we have severe sleep problems and can’t sleep as much as we need whether on vacation or not.

I qualify as a sleep expert when it comes to knowing why certain of us don’t sleep well since I have had a history of not sleeping well and have undergone two separate sleep studies more than 10 years apart to see why.  Here are some reasons we don’t sleep enough:

  • Stress or anxiety
  • Illness
  • Noise
  • Light
  • An over-committed schedule
  • Caffeine
  • Alcohol
  • Stimulant medications (such as diet pills, cold and allergy remedies, asthma medications)
  • Depression or anger
  • Fear

There are remedies for all of the above, and if we’re not getting enough sleep, we owe it to ourselves to try to solve these problems.  I usually sleep quite well myself if I take certain precautions (see my article entitled “I Just Wanna Sleep!” in the Helpful Remedies Category) to make sure I do.  But my most recent biggest obstacle to getting a good night’s sleep is voluntarily staying up too late.  I naturally feel very sleepy between 10 and 10:30 every night, but if I don’t go to bed then and push past that natural sleep cue, I get a second wind and can stay up for hours past that before I get tired again.  I still must wake up at the same time, though, so this causes me to have a sleep deficit.  The only answer to my problem is to just stop doing it!

It’s very clear from my own experience and from a lot of things I’ve read and viewed that inadequate sleep can really sabotage a weight loss regimen, and even if we’re not on a weight loss regimen, lack of sleep can cause problems maintaining weight loss or can actually make us gain weight.  It may not be as simple as just sleeping away our excess weight, but it’s all too obvious that we all need to make getting adequate sleep a part of our healthy living style.   When our bodies are not hungry for sleep, maybe we won’t be so hungry for excess food either.

 

Wed 30 Apr 2008

TV Dinners

Posted by Catherine under Healthy Living
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How many times have you caught yourself sitting in front on the television with a bag of empty chips. The aftermath of mindless eating fills you with guilt. Before you know it, you’ve grabbed a bowl of ice cream and said to heck with healthy eating!

Before you allow yourself to be tossed off the track, give some thought to keeping yourself safe from such misadventures. A bit of forethought and planning might save you from the guilt monster and those extra pounds on your hips.

In our hurried lives it’s easy to plop down in front of the television with a tv tray and have dinner. Eating in front of the computer screen is not too uncommon, either. We are a society of multitaskers. We are a society of tired, overweight multitaskers. It’s easy to slip into mindless eating when we aren’t paying attention to what is going into our mouths.

Make eating an occasion to stop and smell the grilled chicken… so to speak. Clean off that kitchen table and use the thing for something besides storing your mail and unwanted catalogs. Take in the site and smell of what you are eating. Appreciate the time to slow down. If you make the tv and computer off limits for eating, you’ll begin to notice a difference in how much it takes before you feel satisfied.

Oh, I hear you whining. We all like a snack when we are deep into some horror film. Plan ahead. That’s right. Instead of getting into the opening credits and running to the kitchen to grab anything in sight, plan your snack ahead of time. Choose some carrot sticks if you feel the need to crunch. Some fruit slices are great if you feel you need something sweet. Prefer salty? How about some popcorn with just a touch of salt? The key here is planning a healthy snack to enjoy with your film.

Taking the time to pay attention to our food at one time and our favorite television show at another time can save us from adding on extra weight that we would rather not.

 

Sat 26 Apr 2008

Healing Hands

Posted by Deb under Healthy Living, Helpful Remedies, Inspired Living
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I have always felt the healing power in human hands, especially of those who love me. There is something indescribable about my husband’s touch on my arm or shoulder or my back or when he takes my hand in his. I feel immediate peace, comfort, reassurance, bliss. His hands are always very warm, and I know every time he touches me, I am healed in some way.

While visiting with our writer’s group last night, he was told that he probably had a very high ability to heal with his hands and probably always had. And I got to experience this healing hand technique from a Reiki (pronounced Ray-Key) massage practitioner. She is a friend and colleague of mine who is also a member of the writer’s group, and she has a multitude of healing gifts, including being a yoga master. She’s encouraged me to take one of her yoga classes at the college where we teach, but I’ve always shied away from that because I perceive my body as too injured to take yoga, which is probably the biggest reason I should take the classes! I did not know that she was a Reiki practitioner; in fact, I had never heard of Reiki massage until the subject came up last night.

My neck is a mess and has been for years now. I have had one surgery to repair a herniated disc and fuse the vertebra with a piece of my hip bone. I am afraid I need another surgery because I’m having the same pain as preceeded the first surgery, but I really would prefer not to have that done again. If there was another way to heal my neck, which sounds like a car tire crunching over gravel every time I move it, I would rather take that course. So, as we sat in a circle, sharing our writing last night, my neck began to bother me quite a bit. I don’t really complain about it, but I do stretch it and massage it and try to relieve the nerve pressure when it’s particularly bad. My friend asked me about it several times, and every time, I assured the group I was okay, just a little uncomfortable. Finally, she asked me if I would like some Reiki? Of course, I had to ask what it was before I consented. Here is how she explained it to me. There is healing energy in the Universe, which I already believe. Practioners who have been attuned to this healing energy can draw the energy through the top of their heads and have it come out of their hands and feet, directing it to any particular place they choose. This directed healing energy can relax and soothe the parts of the body being touched, thus causing a healing. I don’t think her intention was to permanently heal my neck, but I believe that if repeated enough, that might happen.

After I consented to the Reiki massage, she excused herself for a minute and went into another room. I am not sure what she did to prepare herself or attune herself, but I think it was some kind of quick meditation and perhaps a prayer of some kind. When she came back, she asked me exactly what my pain felt like and where it originated and where it radiated to. I explained, and she stood behind me and laid her hand on the origin of the pain. That was it. It’s called massage, but she didn’t actually manipulate my muscles, she just rested her hand on the pain source. She continued to participate in the normal conversation in the group as did I. Her touch felt extremely warm, and very soon, I began to feel a slight vibration in my neck. It felt just barely tingly as if the energy were humming inside my neck. After a moment or two, she moved her hand down further on my neck in just the location that my pain usually radiates. I felt the same warm vibration there and I began to feel complete relaxation in my neck. Finally she moved her hand down to the top of the back of my shoulder, again, exactly where the pain normally radiates. By the time she removed her hand from me, the whole process taking no more than five minutes, I felt no pain and a general wellness throughout my entire body and mind. I felt happy, for a lack of a better description. A few minutes later, I began to be aware of tension in the other side of my neck, which had probably been there all the while, but because of the pain on the other side, I hadn’t noticed it. So, she came back and placed her hand momentarily on that side, and the tension disappeared. My neck felt better than it had in weeks, and last night, I slept better than I have in a very long time. Even when I woke up this morning, I noticed how good my neck still felt. As I sit here typing now, I can feel some of the tension moving back into my neck, so I’m pretty sure my posture is aggravating the condition. I guess I need to work on that. Maybe the yoga would help with that!

After my Reiki massage last night, another member of the group asked her if she had accomplished what she intended to do with my neck, and she replied with a huge smile, “Oh, yes!” As I understand it, the healing energy that she directs from the Universe through me, does not leave her feeling depleted at all, but rather has the opposite effect of rejuvenating her, too. That’s how she knows that the healing has been effective.

I remember a scene from the movie “The Karate Kid,” in which Mr. Miyagi rubs his hands together and places them on Daniel to heal his karate injury. I believe this must be the same procedure I had done last night. My mind has been racing with this idea of healing since last night. So, this morning, I spent a few minutes Googling Reiki massage to find out more about it, and apparently there is no religious attachment to the method, although I imagine that the Christian concept of laying on of hands for healing comes from this same source. Reiki is older than Christianity, apparently originating in Tibet over 2500 years ago. The word Reiki is Japanese, and the “ki” part is the Japanese form of the Chinese word “chi,” which means Universal Life Force Energy. Reiki is one of the best known ways of directly applying this energy for healing purposes. The difference in Reiki massage and the other forms of this particular type of healing is, in Reiki, the practitioners can direct the energy into their own bodies for healing as well as into the bodies of others for personal healing.

I have been interested in alternative healing methods for a long time. I have considered taking some very expensive courses to get my certification in natural healing. But becoming a Reiki practitioner is available to anyone who becomes attuned through a ceremony with a Reiki master. One does not have to be particularly intelligent or subscribe to any particular religious or philosophical view; this seems to be one of those gifts that is available to all of us. And from a little further investigation, the training and attunement ceremony that follows the training is not very expensive either. And the thing that most intrigues me about this is that during my investigation of the technique, I saw pictures of Reiki practitioners using it on animals. There was one very sweet picture of a pet owner placing her hands on her dog to ease his pain. That picture and my own experience last night was what convinced me that this is something I need to be a part of.

 

Thu 24 Apr 2008

Healing with Hypnosis

Posted by Deb under Healthy Living, Life Management, Numinous Moments
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Have you tried everything you know to stop smoking and haven’t been able to quit? Have you been on every diet plan you’ve ever heard of and still can’t quit overeating? Do you get anxious in certain situations such as test-taking or riding an elevator, and you can’t seem to overcome your fear? Do you just have an inexplicable negative outlook on life, but want to change your mindset to positive? All of these situations and many more can be solved with hypnosis. Hypnosis is a trance state characterized by extreme suggestibility, relaxation, and heightened imagination. To be hypnotized, you have to enter an almost dreamlike state. You’re not actually asleep, but your brain waves are functioning as if you almost are asleep. That’s where the word “hypnosis” comes from, the Greek god of sleep, Hypnos. If you’ve ever been driving somewhere, and all of a sudden you’re there, and you don’t really remember how you got there, you’ve been in a state of mind similar to the one you will need to be in to undergo hypnosis. When you were driving in this state, your mind shut out most of the stimuli around you except for the most important subject at hand, your actual driving. So, you got where you were going safely, but you didn’t remember too much about anything else along the way. That’s exactly what it feels like to be hypnotized. To get into this state of suggestibility, you have to be totally relaxed. Every hypnosis session begins with relaxation methods of some type before the suggestions are offered to you. You can either have someone perform hypnosis on you, or you can hypnotize yourself. It just takes some practice.

You may have heard that some people can not be hypnotized. While it is true that some people have a higher inclination to being hypnotized than others, all people can be hypnotized. The really difficult ones just have to rely on a professional and be ready and willing to undergo hypnosis. If you don’t really want to do this, just like anything else, you won’t be able to. But if you’d like to try hypnosis to help with a problem that you really want to change, it will work wonders for you. Many people claim that nothing worked to help them stop smoking before they tried hypnosis. I know that hypnosis helped me lose 60 pounds with ease. Both Athena and I took a course in hypnosis, and we both learned to right hypnosis scripts and to perform hypnosis on others and on ourselves. We’ve both had good success with making changes in our lives by listening to tapes we’ve recorded that put us into a hypnotic state where our suggestions to ourselves were easily accepted by our minds. Once the mind accepts something as true, it helps control the body to act in the same way.

Here’s how it works: When you are sufficiently relaxed, you are in a state of suggestibility. That means that anything the hypnotist tells you will be accepted by your mind completely. That is what makes hypnosis done for entertainment so much fun to watch. Even a very shy person, under hypnosis, will sing and act crazy with enthusiasm. But while the person will do things that he or she might not otherwise do in front of an audience, the person will still retain his or her sense of safety and morality. Hypnosis can’t change that, and a hypnotist can’t make you do anything you truly do not want to do. Thus, if you don’t really want to modify your eating habits or exercise more to lose weight, then you won’t benefit from the hypnotism. Or if you don’t want to quit smoking, even after hypnosis, you won’t be able to. That’s why I said you have to really want to do this to make it work.

The suggestions a hypnotist gives your subconscious mind will be believed by the subconscious mind, and your subconscious is what makes it easy to make changes in your life. You could come out of hypnosis believing that you love fresh vegetables and prefer them to candy, cake, and cookies. Thus, if you really believe that, you will buy those things at the grocery store and eat them for meals and snacks instead of buying and eating the sugary things that offer you no real nutrition, but make you fat and lethargic. So, your hypnotism has been successful. Likewise, if your subconscious, after hypnosis, believes that cigarettes make you feel bad, and you don’t like the taste of the smoke in your mouth. Instead, you enjoy fresh, clean air, and after meals, you want to take a walk and breathe in that fresh, clean air. So, instead of lighting up a cigarette after mealtime, you will find yourself craving a walk and breathing in clean, fresh air after dinner. Again, your hypnotism has been successful.

With hypnotism, it’s best to work on one change at a time. Let your subconscious mind focus on exercising more. When you’ve mastered that concept, then you could work on changing your eating habits. After that, maybe you’d like to focus on quitting smoking. Or maybe you’re ready to conquer your fear of taking tests. It’s up to you. Your subconscious mind holds many beliefs that influence everything you do in your life. And your subconscious mind can change to new beliefs. Once your subconscious mind has a new belief, you behave in a new way. And, voila! You’re a new person!

 

Sun 13 Apr 2008

Exercising to Lose Body Fat

Posted by Deb under Healthy Living
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I am currently very close to a couch potato.  I was an exerciser a year ago, and I felt good, and I wanted to keep doing it.  I got a real buzz from it.  But I quit, and now I’m finding it hard to get going again.  I was doing aerobic exercise, which literally means exercising in oxygen.  Aerobic exercises can be performed continuously for a long duration, usually at moderate intensity.  Aerobic exercise builds endurance and is said to be helpful for strengthening the heart. This is the kind of exercise that my doctor wants me to have.  In aerobic exercise, you should calculate what your maximum heart rate should be and keep your heart rate at that level for the duration of your exercise time, first warming up to that rate, and afterward, cooling down to that rate.  The general rule for aerobic exercise is that you should be able to still carry on a conversation with someone while you’re doing it.  In other words, you should keep in an oxygenated state.  Aerobic exercises are what most of the exercise videos are about.  You can walk, spin, row, climb stairs, dance, or anything similar to that.  Doing it to music helps me to stick with it, making me able to do it for a half hour or even an hour with no problem.  I sort of get into my rhythm and just lose myself in the music.  This kind of exercise does burn calories and thus makes you lose weight.  It also revs up the metabolism while you’re doing it, but really doesn’t keep the metabolism up much beyond that.  And the moment you quit doing it, you quit burning the extra calories.  Over time, you strengthen your heart, and you build up endurance so you can do it longer and longer.  It’s excellent for limbering up the body and for helping with the pain of arthritis in stiff joints.  That’s the main reason I wanted to do it.  I also wanted to do it because my resting heart rate was too high.  I was able to lower that considerably by doing aerobic exercise.

Recently, I’ve become interested in anaerobic exercise, which means exercising without oxygen.  Anaerobic exercise is a higher intensity workout intended to be done for short periods of time, not more than a few minutes of each activity.  After doing this kind of high intensity workout, you will need to rest between activities to recover a little so you can go on to another burst of activity.  There are important reasons to do this kind of exercise, but mostly I am interested in it because it yields fast results.

Here are some reasons anaerobic exercise works better for losing body fat than aerobic exercise:

*After 30 minutes of anaerobic exercise, you can continue burning extra calories for hours afterwards because your metabolism continues to work at higher levels for that extra time after the workout.

*If you do enough sets of anaerobic exercises, your body will start to heat up, releasing lactic acid and rendering you completely breathless.  This is necessary to  promote the natural release by your body of Human Growth Hormone.  Human Growth Hormone causes free fatty acids to be released in your blood stream for burning and has often been referred to as the natural fountain of youth. I recently read that most models and some actresses take HGH to keep themselves lean with muscle definition.  But if you just do anaerobic exercise, you creat this substance naturally in your body.

*Anaerobic exercise builds more fast twitch muscle fibers.  Fast twitch muscle fibers are denser than slow twitch muscle fibers, and the more fast twitch fibers you have, the higher your natural metabolism will be allowing you to burn a far higher level of calories even when you’re doing nothing, such as being a couch potato.

*With anaerobic exercise, you will improve your max VO 2 (the highest amount of oxygen one can consume during exercise) and thus will improve your cardio-respiratory system.

*Anaerobic exercise creates a greater capacity to withstand the buildup of waste substances such as lactic acid and increases your ability to remove them from the body. This means your endurance and ability to fight fatigue will improve.

Weight training is an anaerobic exercise.  So is doing sprints (running, biking, swimming), jumping rope, hill climbing, intervals, isometrics (in which one part of the body is used to resist the movement of another part) or any rapid burst of hard exercise. But some of these  exercises are hard on the joints, so be careful.

Interval training is a great anaerobic exercise.  It can be done with many types of exercise (for example, running, biking, or swimming).  An interval is done by increasing your pace for a short period of time (for example, between 10 to 60 seconds) then having a slow recovery period that is at least 3 times as long as the interval. To interval train, you simply repeat these bursts of exercise during the course of your workout. For example, you can jog or powerwalk for 30 seconds, then walk for 2 minutes, jog or powerwalk for 30 seconds, walk for 2 minutes and so on for as long as you plan to exercise.

Because the muscles will build up a lot of lactic acid, making your muscles too tired to work long at that fast, intense pace, when beginning, don’t expect to workout for long periods of time.  But over time, the muscles will become more tolerant of the lactic acid, allowing you keep at the workout for a longer period of time.  You can also build up your intensity over time.  But always be sure to stretch and warm up before you begin interval training.  And be sure to properly cool down and stretch the muscles again afterward.

Building muscle will make you look leaner faster as you tone your muscles, and it will decrease body fat faster because muscle tissue requires more energy to sustain than fat does.  So, this is a good addition to your aerobic workout.  Just start slowly and don’t overdo it.

Of course, any kind of movement whether aerobic or anaerobic is good for you and better than not moving at all.  Just do what you can.  Don’t heed that old saying about “no pain, no gain.”  If it hurts, stop!  Our bodies know what they can do and what they aren’t ready for yet.  Still, it is true that if you don’t push yourself a little, you’ll never make progress.  So, start somewhere and increase a little at a time.  If you start just walking to your mailbox and back, the next day go to your mailbox and a couple of yards past it.  I heard Paul McKenna say on his TV show “I Can Make You Thin” that the average thin person walks about 6,000 steps a day.  And the average overweight person only walks about 4,000 steps a day.  So, as I can testify, the average overweight person conserves energy.  So, just start out trying to get your 6,000 steps in.  Park a little farther than you normally would.  Take a couple of short walks at work in addition to what you would normally do.  Walk out to that mailbox instead of driving by it as I do and getting your mail from the car window on my way into the drive.  Get a pedometer and clip it to your waistband or belt and actually see how many steps you’re taking.  Learn to walk like a thin person.  Then after you’ve managed to get your 6,000 steps in, up it a little bit every day until you’re walking 10,000 steps a day.  After you’re doing that, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt to just start that powerwalking for 30 seconds (you will cover more steps!) and then returning to your regular pace for 2 minutes.  You’re getting in your aerobic and your anaerobic workout then.  And you’re doing just about everything you can to lose that body fat.

 

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