In the first act of Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote, "Your face, my thane, is as a book where men may read strange matters."
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Your face shows how you lead your life. In other words, "Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician." How can you improve your face?
Healthy exercise and hard work doing good deeds, benefits your face more than the same time and money spent on artificial makeup.
Stop eating sugar and processed flour. Your skin will improve. Stop fried food and soda. Simple healthy nutrition improves your face and skin more than all the money spent on fast food, expensive "health food," engineered supplements, and skin drugs.
The woman hoeing a field in India doesn't use indulgent face peels. Her dignity and honest work polish her face. Genuine laughter does more than corny face exercises and laugh yoga. The life you live of integrity, thinking of others, and lack of self-absorption, shows more on your face than all the facial exercise gizmos and programs.
Actress Lauren Bacall said, "I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that." Instead of spending on externals, save the money or give it to the poor. Decide how you want your life to look, then go make a face.
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Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and The Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. For personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class spaces for personal feedback. Top students may apply for certification throughDrBookspan.com/Academy. Learn more in Dr. Bookspan's Books.
Here is Friday Fast Fitness - custom portable fitness tea, quick and inexpensive, no need for hot water:
Put clean (or filtered) water in your own healthy bottle.
Poke a teabag in the bottle. The tea will brew on its own in a short time, no need for hot water.
Choose your favorite tea or experiment to find your favorite. Mix several together to make your custom brew - for example mint and lemon (all non-caffeine), or ginger plus green (half and half), or green and black tea together (extra interest). Or a whole bunch of flavors.
This makes a fresh drink, no preservatives or coloring, no hype or purchased throw-away bottles. It easily transports with you to work, school, gym, exercise, and biking.
Add water to make more throughout the day. At the end of your day, remove the bags and wash the bottle for another custom tea tomorrow.
Future posts will cover making your own teabags from loose tea and preparing herbal teas from flowers.
--- I make posts from fun mail and success stories. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
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Image by Akibubblet via Flickr. No derivative works.
Fast Fitness - Better Than Ice Cream, Quick Homemade Healthy Treat
Friday, August 28, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - one of my own favorites - good for a pre-game meal, exercise recovery food, desert, and quick snack. It tastes like chocolate ice cream, sweet and creamy, but made of healthy food, no sugar or dairy, good amounts of vitamins, minerals, fiber, anti-oxidants, and the health benefits of cocoa without the chemicals and sugar of commercial chocolate, quick, inexpensive, and easy to prepare:
Peel and freeze bananas.
In a food processor or bowl, mix plain unsweetened, undutched cocoa with enough water to make a smooth paste. (Boxes of Hershey's powdered cocoa is available in most supermarkets.)
Beat in one frozen banana until creamy smooth (or two bananas and more cocoa).
Don't use unfrozen or partially frozen bananas or it won't be sweet and creamy. Crush in walnuts or pecans for crunchy nut taste. If you can't eat tree nuts, try flax seeds. For extra taste, crush in a slice of fresh ginger root.
If you don't like chocolate, leave out the cocoa. It will still taste like ice cream. Experiment with healthy additions of mint, ginger, real vanilla bean, and spices.
--- I make posts from fun mail and success stories. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
Reposting - Physician Told Her Give Up, Fitness Fixer Made Her Able
Monday, August 24, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Last week, several Fitness Fixer posts did not become viewable after writing and posting them. One reappears here (hopefully) with the rest to follow this week. Photos will not load at all, so I have included links to view them at another page. May all life's troubles continue to be this small :-) enjoy the posts:
Another reader named Lisa wrote in with a success story. This Lisa had not been active for many years. Her doctor had told her the way to stop injuries from running was to give up running. She is now successfully doing marathons, changing to healthy movement, and working as a professional photographer.
Lisa P writes:
"I had done some running in college and wound up with a stress fracture on the ball of one of my feet. I remember the doctor telling me to stay away from running in the future.
"I have enjoyed visiting your site for many months (more than a year for sure) and find your practical, everyday life approaches to body movement and exercise right on. The idea of walking a marathon was a "no-brainer" once I found out that walking was allowed.
"As someone who grew up in a home where shoes were always worn, I never got the chance to let my feet walk around barefoot for any extended periods (or distances). My feet couldn't handle "feeling" everything as they had been encased for so long in any number of supportive shoes.
"I remember reading a post of yours about hiking in flip flops and tried to imagine myself doing anything in flip flops or another simple shoe without a lot of cushy padding and support in "all the correct places." I am using my muscles to adjust to uneven surfaces while walking barefoot or with minimal padding between my feet and the ground. I think this has improved my body mechanics. Doing it myself helps in a way that wearing special shoes to do it for me does not. Time will tell of course.
Walking may take more time than running, but I've become a faster walker with training and will surely realize my goal of completing a marathon in under 6 hours this fall.
"I've made an effort to reduce and or eliminate certain things from my diet such as refined sugars, hydrogenated oils, and processed foods. This most certainly has contributed to the results I get in training. As I near the actual marathon, I will be walking upwards of 30 miles a week. It is amazing how my stamina improves as the miles add up.
"Attached is a photo of me at mile 25 of The Nike Women's Marathon, the first marathon I completed.
"Oh, one other thing that I have you to thank for is my regular routine of push ups. After every training walk, I do push ups and am currently doing 36. Won't be long before I get to 40!
Going barefoot by itself, or wearing special shoes will not automatically put your foot in healthy position or increase balance skills. You can walk in healthy or unhealthy ways when barefoot, and in healthy or unhealthy ways even in an expensive corrective shoe. You can easily change how you move to healthy ways without needing devices, and save time and money. You can change to healthier eating and reduce a grocery bill greatly, by no longer buying unhealthful food. Click the labels under this post for all Fitness Fixer articles with ideas on each topic.
--- I make posts from fun mail and success stories. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
Physician Told Her Give Up, Fitness Fixer Made Her Able
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Another reader named Lisa wrote in with a success story. This Lisa had not been active for many years. Her doctor had told her the way to stop injuries from running was to give up running. She is now successfully doing marathons, changing to healthy movement, and working as a professional photographer. Lisa P writes:
"I had done some running in college and wound up with a stress fracture on the ball of one of my feet. I remember the doctor telling me to stay away from running in the future.
"I have enjoyed visiting your site for many months (more than a year for sure) and find your practical, everyday life approaches to body movement and exercise right on. The idea of walking a marathon was a "no-brainer" once I found out that walking was allowed.
"As someone who grew up in a home where shoes were always worn, I never got the chance to let my feet walk around barefoot for any extended periods (or distances). My feet couldn't handle "feeling" everything as they had been encased for so long in any number of supportive shoes.
"I remember reading a post of yours about hiking in flip flops and tried to imagine myself doing anything in flip flops or another simple shoe without a lot of cushy padding and support in "all the correct places." I am using my muscles to adjust to uneven surfaces while walking barefoot or with minimal padding between my feet and the ground. I think this has improved my body mechanics. Doing it myself helps in a way that wearing special shoes to do it for me does not. Time will tell of course.
Walking may take more time than running, but I've become a faster walker with training and will surely realize my goal of completing a marathon in under 6 hours this fall.
"I've made an effort to reduce and or eliminate certain things from my diet such as refined sugars, hydrogenated oils, and processed foods. This most certainly has contributed to the results I get in training. As I near the actual marathon, I will be walking upwards of 30 miles a week. It is amazing how my stamina improves as the miles add up.
"Attached is a photo of me at mile 25 of The Nike Women's Marathon, the first marathon I completed.
"Oh, one other thing that I have you to thank for is my regular routine of push ups. After every training walk, I do push ups and am currently doing 36. Won't be long before I get to 40!
Going barefoot by itself, or wearing special shoes will not automatically put your foot in healthy position or increase balance skills. You can walk in healthy or unhealthy ways when barefoot, and in healthy or unhealthy ways even in an expensive corrective shoe. You can easily change how you move to healthy ways without needing devices, and save time and money. You can change to healthier eating and reduce a grocery bill greatly, by no longer buying unhealthful food. Click the labels under this post for all Fitness Fixer articles with ideas on each topic.
I make posts from fun mail and success stories. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books. Limited Class spaces for personal evaluation. Top students may apply to certify throughDrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
For weightlifters who enjoy Olympic lifts, rows, cable cross-overs, curls, and all the other good stuff with endless heavy weight, you may like growing vegetables.
We have been tilling a vegetable garden from a rocky field at my Mom's. Seems her home was built on landfill. We had to sledge-hammer and pry concrete slabs - prodigious squatting, levering, clean-and-jerking, and hundred pound medicine ball throws over the just-built garden fence into a pile. Then lifting and hauling away the pile.
Carrying sand, earth, rocks, weed bales, tree branches as heavy as you can lift, over uneven rocky hilly earth back and forth from the truck, the field, and the new compost pile a hundred feet away for hours is functional weightlifting. Hours of repetition-maximum (RM) hoeing gives a harder abdominal, arm, and gluteal workout than it looks.
Healthline software still isn't uploading my own photos. At left above, a photo of a statue with too much lumbar curve/hyperlordosis to be healthy, but in general doing functional weightlifting. Use your muscles to prevent overarching like this when you swing a sledge, a kettlebell, or other weight. For Fitness Fixer posts on neutral spine and hyperlordosis, click the photo or here.
Over the winter while visiting home in Asia, my husband Paul and I went to a workman's shop. The store-keeps remembered us and smiled. The first time we went there years ago, they were so sure we were lost tourists, they took our shoulder and gestured at a restaurant. In the best Thai I could manage, I explained that Paul is a carpenter, has done forge metal work, and loves old-world tools, strong bamboo handles, and hand-hammered metal. They smile each year we return. In the US, we live in a crowded urban area with minimal bricked exterior in deep shade from surrounding buildings. Vegetable gardens don't grow. Paul wanted to plant my Mother's field - a brambled overgrown area.
In the Thai tool store, I explained with the words I knew that Paul was looking for a specific Thai tool, shaped like a backward shovel, that you use in overhead action, like a mattock (flat bladed pick).
Quickly, excitedly, word went from the store-keep, to her friend in the next shop, to the next, and next:
"Man who good to Mother of wife!"
The coconut telegraph was happy. We bought two heavy tools, called "job" in Thai. Both had thick lovely bamboo handles. One was giant sized for Paul, the other for me. Fun getting them through flights and US customs.
Mom had asked a local man what it would take to clear her field, and he told her a blowtorch, a machine plow, three men, and a week. Paul and I cleared it in one day in early April with a digging stick and the Thai hoe-shovels. The ground was half frozen. Six, or so hours massive exertion - first clearing brush and tall grasses, then hours of half-squats to seize handfuls of stalks, standing back up to pull them with grip strength. Then excavating slabs of concrete and discarded materials with a pry bar, the Thai digging tools, and bare armed weight lifting.
The packs of seeds we had scattered in assorted flowerpots, pans, shoeboxes, and containers sprouted over just a week into tiny plants - broccoli, cabbage, pea, hot and sweet peppers, strawberries, eggplants, and assorted spices. We have been learning about complementary planting - plants, just like people, who are better and healthier with specific other kinds of plants so that chemical fertilizer isn't needed. We are learning about plants that repel pests, instead of using insecticides.
We got a rain barrel to reduce water bills. We attached an old broken hose. The holes made it a natural soaker hose. We poked more holes and arranged it around the garden for drip irrigation. We don't know the water quality of either the rain or from the tap. We will send six dollars and a soil sample to an agricultural university for testing. Maybe other toxic things are in that landfill that we don't want the vegetables absorbing. Maybe commercial food factories have the same problem. Many things to learn.
Weeks pass squatting and sitting well to plant seedlings, still hitting buried rubble. More lifting and hauling. Each night we are too tired to worry or think anything bad. We are barely were able to lift hands and feet. I consider what people for thousands of years have been doing just for subsistence farming, day after day, year after year. I thought of Fitness Fixer success story Ivy and her story - Farm Work, Lifestyle Exercise, and Preventing Overuse Pain.
We thought we planted everything, then found a half pack of pea seeds left. Paul mentioned we didn't have one more container for them. I laughed, "we didn't have a pot to pea in."
Ideas:
If you're a tough vital strong person, or want to be, dig a garden.
If you don't have anywhere to dig one, hook up with some nice elder who wants one, a community group, Habitat for Humanity, or someone who doesn't want to exercise like this but still wants a garden.
Contact your community to see about organizing parents and children out in sunshine for functional exercise doing good for all.
If you only want one hour a day of hard total body fat burning muscle building exercise, only plant a small vegetable garden.
No need to buy fancy tools, use what's handy.
If you don't want to exercise so hard, try a single pack of seeds in some potting soil in almost any container on a sunny windowsill. A chance to get the vegetables you like.
Fancy individual peat pots and seed starters aren't essential; a simple pack of seeds can get you a pan full of fragrant oregano, said to be very healthful. It gives a gasp of wonder (to me) when seedlings actually sprout.
Before the 2008 election, a video appeared by Roger Doiron (I don't know him, just liked the video). He asked the next President to grow a garden. It did come true. Here is his viewpoint of getting your own garden started, showing various bending, occasionally good:
Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. Before asking more, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, or in the Fitness Fixer Index.
Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books. Get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - Bend right and pull one of the highest nutrition garden items, free, even if you have not planted a garden:
Find dandelions. You can tell them by their jagged leaves. The leaves gave them their name, from the French for 'dents de lion' (tooth of the lion).
Use good bending, with squat or lunge, to pull free nutritious food. Many people will let you have theirs free.
You can eat the green, the flowers, even the roots. USDA Bulletin #8, "Composition of Foods" (Haytowitz & Matthews 1984) ranks dandelions in the top 4 green vegetables in overall nutritional value.
Dandelion has long been known as a top nutritional food and even medicine. The official name, Taraxacum officinal, comes from the Greek, 'taraxos' meaning 'disorder' and 'akos' meaning 'remedy.'
Eat the greens as salad, sautéed like other green vegetables, or make juice. Greens are best fresh and young, just before the plant flowers. Greens have bitter taste (like coffee and beer) that is said to aid digestion. People who are accustomed to junk sweets may not like them at first, then they taste better over time, and mixed with nuts, spices, and vinegar.
Dandelion flowers are pretty in salads and on vegetables, or use them to make wine (to be covered in posts to come). Dandelion root contains inulin, a soluble fiber which does not raise blood sugar or triglycerides, making it helpful to people with diabetes. Dig roots in early spring or fall. You can eat them as is, or soak them in a jar of brandy or vodka for four weeks (or more) to make a tincture.
Now you can stop using poisonous and expensive chemicals on your lawn too. Better not to add these substances to the water system, or to yours.
The good news? Even when you pull them to eat, they come back to make more free nutritious garden without work.
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Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from fun ones. Before asking more, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, or in the Fitness Fixer Index.
Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books. Get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.
Here is the latest fun update from Robert Davis on losing fat and increasing strength and flexibility. He has been sending success after success using Fitness Fixer techniques:
"I have noticed a big improvement since I started in my flexibility. I noticed this the other day when I realized just how much farther I can stretch now. I could not lower completely into a sitting squat without tipping before. Now I can and it sure as heck makes working in really low areas for a longer time very easy without resorting to bending (bad weighted flexed) which I refuse to do at all now.
"I have seen increases in all areas of stretching. I see that it just takes time and consistency.
"Since I am a musician, I carry a guitar bag everywhere. I decided to make a "portable" gym. Got a pull-up bar that goes in doors (removes and mounts quickly) and my guitar bag. That is all I need. I fill the bag with random objects to add weight and strap it on (like a backpack) and do everything from the books with increased weight and also pull-ups of all kinds of grips/variations for more challenge. You mentioned the wall handstand pushups and this reminded me of that. I strap my weighted bag to my back and do those now too. No need to go to the gym =P
"PS my friends think the wall stand pushups are "nuts" and can barely hold themselves up in position when they try. Who needs the military press? I actually found this to be much harder because of all the stabilization. Unlike a machine or barbell, it feels like a lot more muscles are coming into play a bit more when doing them like that. Seems so with almost all the body weight exercises. No wonder aside from cosmetics, weight training has no functional use outside of the gym. Takes a bonehead like me to realize this!
"Oddly, since I had changed my diet from meats and animal to Vegan (inspired by the body builders you have shown on the Fitness fixer) I have had people comment that I seem to be getting bigger! This is kinda funny because I actually lost some mass and it is mostly body fat from the weightlifting diet (now changed to vegan) and doing these exercises in place of weight training. They often do not believe me when I say I have not touched the bench in 3 months or so now. =0"
Watch for Fast Fitness this Friday to see what Robert Davis will show you next.
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Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from cool ones. Before asking, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, and archives at right.
Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. Become certified through the Academy - Dr.Bookspan.com/Academy BrowseDr. Jolie Bookspan's books on her website.
Healthful Real Food Tastes Good - No Commercial Health Food Needed
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Ivy of New Zealand sends me frequent updates of her continuing improvements. She is a great-grandmother and still getting stronger, healthier, more mobile, and having more fun while she does all this. Ivy writes,
"Around 7.30 yesterday morning, my daughter's partner arrived - he was in the area so thought he would surprise me with a visit. I was about to make breakfast. He laughed and asked if I was about to cook some steak.
"I dished up buck wheat, molasses (he commented that it was horse food) banana, feijoas followed by ground flaxseed, sunflower and sesame seeds. I ground the seeds so he would not comment that I was feeding him bird seed. Smile, smile.
"Surprise, surprise, he could not get over as to how delicious it was. I pointed out that it was "whole food" and it would stick to his ribs, therefore no junk food required mid morning."
Hugs Ivy
Many Fitness Fixer readers send inspiring stories. Some continue to send updates, with improved fun, strength, mobility, and good thinking each time. Ivy's Successes have inspired many readers, all ages and abilities. Here are some of Ivy's gems:
Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from selected ones. Before asking, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, and archives at right.
Health Homework Becomes AntiObesity Chronic Disease Reality Check
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Jeff & Sabrina sent me an e-mail that their 7th grade son was given a school assignment about the "proper amount of calories to have a normal weight" but with junk foods listed in the menus.
They made a video of the events, explaining,
"Could it be that our schools are actually Suspect Number One in fostering obesity and chronic illness?"
This is not a surprise. I have taught at medical schools and attended medical conferences that serve unhealthy foods. I was on a national committee to determine nutrition consensus statements where the box lunches served had cookies, sodas, processed bread, cured meat and cheese sandwiches, "sports bars" which are candy in an expensive wrapper, and gloppy fatty dressing. I have received many letters from doctors and fitness instructors that they can't be expected to eat right, or even exercise enough given their busy schedules. This is not fitness. Fitness is not appearances, or being unhealthy while giving medical advice to others, or taking stimulant drugs to stay awake to work extra jobs to support a spending habit, or doing repetitions of artificial exercises 10 times, then returning to slouching and bad bending to pick up your gym bag. Fitness is how you think, move, act, and help the world be better.
We need some role models. Click the arrow to watch the video.
If the video does not appear on your screen, click their link
Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from selected ones. Before asking, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, and archives at right.
Fixed Injuries, Got Strong, With Functional Exercise - Real Life
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
This fun note and great story came in from Robert Davis:
" I have tried to find a way to contact you for a while now!
"I have a story I thought I would share and I am so glad I had found your books and website.
" I had injured myself via weight lifting in late October. I had felt the warning signs before this, however I ignored them and continued to train full out. The result was I had hurt my lower back very badly. The pain was unbearable.
" Sitting hurt. Getting up and walking hurt. To top all this off, I was so adamant that one's "back" health is determined by how well you can stretch forward bending! So this became a discouraging struggle as the more I tested that, the worse I hurt! I had many bad habits besides that and will go into that in a moment.
" I kept training "thru" the pain and bad movement thru to about November 24th. I kept aggravating the area thru bad habits (while doing these exercises. Arched back, rounding etc). I finally went to the doctor and he just made me do some simple movements and the typical straight leg lift. He had decided for now that it was not something all that bad and said that we would do a MRI (or was it CAT scan?) if it did not get better.
I struggled for the next few weeks as I was told to simply rest. I realize the fallacy in this because "just taking it easy" had lead to muscle weakness. It was now a double edged sword by Christmas. I hurt in my back, but when I tried to exercise it it was so weak it hurt more.
I finally ran across your website just after Christmas and before the new year. I started to play around with the ideas at first. I was still stuck though on "better" meant no more pain bending forward. So for a week or two more I played back and forth with these ideas.
" Finally around the 15th or so after the new year I decided "what the heck" I will order some of your books. They seemed more promising then anything I had looked at and I realized in an "aha" moment that it was a form of exercise, which I so very much craved at the time as I simply love to exercise. This "resting" was driving me nuts..
I was watching a show on TV one night on beaches and shell collecting of all things and the biggest "aha" came to me in the form of a little girl. I watched adults picking things up and they bend right over without thought. This went on for a while. Then I saw a child pick up shells. She squatted every time! I said to myself "jeez these books are absolutely right, I am basing everything on bad habits!"..
" I immediately started becoming aware of everything I did during and after exercise. I took your book "fix your own pain" and have almost memorized every chapter and decided if I am going to do this I am going to balance my whole body.
" So after weeks of this (trial and error). I slowly got better. Things I learned along the way are this.. Bending over to pick stuff up is not healthy nor is it natural (that child in the show!).. I learned even after doing weight training for 2 years that my legs were still not as strong as I thought. I learned I had developed bad leg positions from unhealthy squatting (on the knee joints instead of behind). I had further learned that I was holding my feet outward and I think this had come from doing leg pressed with feet slightly out to try to target certain areas.
" I learned to strengthen my core much more effectively and better thru the ab revolution and fix your own pain. I was a 500 crunch type person. I am no longer doing sit ups crunches or whatnot. The stuff in your ab revolution is much more difficult to do and healthier.
I learned to strengthen my body thru its own weight, destroying the myth that you need "weights" for gains as I found these exercises to be just as challenging, if not more in some cases because of the added balance and flexibility required.
" I am now sitting here writing this and I tell you that compared to the initial injury and repeated re-injury (doing the same exercises with bad habits) to now, I am close to 100 percent.
" The funny thing is, I no longer have the desire to go back to weight training, which is odd because that was my life! I have discovered a whole new world of fitness with body weight alone. I am trying more challenging things by the day and I have realized that this is actually more fun the weight training for health and I am getting the same, and often better results (since I am not a body builder, just love exercise and looking fit). I had gone and bought a few things like pull up bars and planche devices and am currently working on mastering some very difficult moves that require body strength alone, but at the same time a mindful awareness of how I am doing it by using your techniques (keeping the back straight with slight tilt etc, no arching).
" It is fun working up to one arm pull-ups in good form. Jeez, to think you could bench press close to 300 a few months ago but doing a few of these exercises in your book were hard! I was surprised I could not do very many pull ups or hold these planks and whatnot.. I am set on a new adventure and I love it because it feels so "free" and balancing. I don't have to spend a huge fee to go to the gym. My gym is my body and functional movement.
" Thank you for your knowledge. Having my back back (sorry for that funny saying!) is great. I intend to keep it healthy now and have begun the correction process of all my body, all the way to my feet!
" I don't look at my injury as a mistake anymore. I look at it as a life changing experience and a chance to explore more functional and fun ways of living. I have passed this site and your books on (not my personal copies!) to a lot of friends into fitness. Some are already reporting healing knees and what not and even re-considering how they live and workout!
" PS I have also changed to a Vegan diet just to see what happens. I was very intrigued by the 72 year old body builder who is vegan.
"You are a godsend. Robert Davis"
Great work Mr. Davis! Robert has been sending me many insightful updates with photos, to be posted with his ongoing success stories. His next story starts here: Cardiovascular Cleanup.
Junk food can be vegan and vegetarian with unhealthful additives, dyes, refined processed sugar and flour. Click the label "Nutrition" under this post for all posts on how to get healthy fun sports food and Healthier Fitness by clicking the label "Green Fitness."
Weightlifting and Weightbearing With Lower Spine Overarching (Sticking out too much in back) Compresses Vertebral Facet Joints:
Read success stories of these methods and send in your own. Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from selected ones. Before asking, see if your answers are already here by clicking labels under posts, links in posts, and archives at right.
Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right.
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - practice patience and peel pomegranates for hand dexterity, and the antioxidants and fiber you can't get from juice.
It's pomegranate season. For the next few months, look for red, round fruit with edible seeds, called arils, prized for health benefits:
Cut each end off thinly, enough to reach white pulp without cutting into the arils
Score the peel into quarter cuts with a knife, enough to reach white pulp without cutting into the arils. The idea is to make it easy to break open into four quarters.
Finger the arils from the cut sections into a bowl. Discard the whitish sectional pulp into a bowl or compost heap.
Photos still not loading. Please use imagination exercise.
It may take as much as 5 minutes to patiently tease out the arils. Good for practicing breathing, and good posture while standing over a counter.
Eat the sweet, slightly tart arils with a spoon. They are crunchy and juicy.
Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from selected ones. See if your answers are already here by clicking links and archives. Read success stories of these methods and send your own.
Have The Fitness Fixer e-mailed to you, free. Click "updates via e-mail" - Health Expert Updates (trumpet icon) upper right column.
Do you have to spend money to be healthy? A look around typical food market carts shows much spent on unhealthy food and products (photo, right). This post is the start of a new Fitness Fixer feature of Fast Finance Fixes - saving money while being healthier. We need a good brand name so send in your votes. Until then, we'll call it Fiscal Fitness.
Reader Ivy writes:
"How often does one hear that eating healthy is too expensive? Yesterday on my return from shopping at my favourite shop, a friend asked me as to what I had bought. I showed her the organic brazil nuts, sunflower and sesame seeds as well as the green, red and brown lentils. She remarked that organic products are far too expensive. Later in the day, I decided to phone two friends who are in a similar age group, live alone and are also on a low income. We discussed living costs so with their permission, I did a little exercise.
"I choose to be a vegetarian, my friends are not - I do not eat dairy, cakes, cookies or junk food of any kind, plus I do not drink coffee or alcohol. My friends both eat out on a regular basis, I choose not to. I do not buy cleaning products, instead, I use baking soda and white vinegar. I also use a phosphate free laundry liquid which I buy in a 5 litre container through a friend who kindly gives me a 20% discount. I do not have a mobile phone I also turn off my hot water during the day - this can save me about $10 a month in electricity charges.
"I was the only one of us three who exercised on a regular basis. I found it interesting that I was the only one who seldom visited a doctor, also, unlike the others, I did not get a cold or 'flu this past winter.
"The result of this exercise being that our costs were approximately the same within a few dollars. We three respect each others difference - each of us making personal choices. Afterall, isn't that what life is all about.
"You, my dear Dr Jolie, have been a huge influence on my life in more ways than you realise - again I thank you. Your lovely little reminders re life are also an inspiration. Thank you for your support." Ivy
Ivy first found The Fitness Fixer a few years ago when looking for information to fix severe sciatica and drop foot. Click Inspirational Ivy to see how she quickly stopped sciatica, got rid of her cane, and how her neighbor took the photos for the post. Each post links to updates Ivy has been sending since then. Reader Sylvia has since been fixing her own drop foot with Ivy's help in post comments. Sylvia's success story is on the way.
Save plenty - don't buy things that are not healthy anyway. You don't need to be vegetarian or give up coffee and alcohol. With all the money you don't spend on junk food, commercial sports food and drink, and unnecessary fitness fad products, you can give to the poor and still have enough for good food and a vacation.
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Questions come in by the hundreds. I make posts from selected ones. See if your answers are already here by clicking links and archives. Read success stories of these methods and send your own.
Have The Fitness Fixer e-mailed to you, free. Click Health Expert Updates (trumpet icon) "updates via e-mail" - upper right column.
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - learn a long-known, little talked-about world crisis encompassing health, politics, economics, pollution, and human rights. See the movie Flow to quickly learn several global practices that improve your health to know:
Water is the third largest global corporate-profit industry after electricity and oil, leaving surprising pollution, disease, graft, and social destabilization in its wake. Corporations seize local waters for resale, leaving the world's poorest without access to unpolluted water to drink and bathe, and frequently without any water at all. Over 1 billion people do not have safe drinking water, resulting in millions of sicknesses and deaths per year, including several millions of children and infants. Even Westerners are affected. Possibly 116,000 human-made chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and hormones are already identified in public water supply, consumed in the West through drinking and through the skin in washing. Known health effects range from stomach illnesses frequently mistaken for "flu," food-poisoning, or bowel problems, and breathing difficulties.
Be aware that you can turn on a tap and get water. An average American uses 150 gallons of water per day. Billions in developing countries walk miles and still cannot get more than five gallons. Staggering numbers of people around the world have total income averaging $2 (two American dollars) a day, and are being charged to travel distances and lift and carry water that was once available to them without charge.
When you buy expensive bottled water know that it is frequently ordinary tap water resold in deception, various pretentious "fitness waters" are not as healthful as eating ordinary fruit, and the bottling results in avoidable large scale pollution.
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - quick vitamin and fiber-rich sweet drink helpful before and after exercise:
Put fresh watermelon slices in a blender, seeds and all.
Blend to a sweet smooth drink.
Depending on your blender, you may need to push the slices down to the blades with a wooden spoon. If you don't have a blender, get arm exercise mashing the slices to sweet juice in a bowl.
The seeds provide good nutrients. Watermelon has high levels of several vitamins including lycopene. Replaces muscle glycogen, blood electrolytes, and other helpful nutrients. No chemicals or refined sweeteners.
Healthline has requested that we don't add labels to the posts, for now. To see easy sources of good tasting healthy recipies and sports food, see my books page, www.DrBookspan.com/books.
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
Olympic Calories for Michael Phelps and Everyone Else
Monday, August 25, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
I didn't intend to cover this topic until several reporters deluged me in one week. They said I must answer immediately because they had deadlines, gave specifics I must answer so they can be paid for their article (while I supply everything with no remuneration), hours I must contact them at my expense, perhaps without them knowing my time zone placing it in the middle of the night, and so on.
Two reporters seemed to want the usual myths, not corrections or understanding. In numerous interviews, I earnestly debunked urban legends and explained facts, then found their article quoting my name wasn't anything I said. With apologies to readers waiting patiently for earlier topics, here are some of the questions:
The reporters wanted a comment that it was uncommon or abnormal that Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps eats up to 10,000 calories a day when training. It is not a mystery. If athletes train hard over many miles, they need more calories.
It is not unusual to eat large quantities of food and calories, athlete or not. Eating a great deal is nearly customary in the West, certainly in the US. Many people eat many thousands of calories a day more than they burn, and so, gain weight. The only trick seems to be to get people to stop eating that much.
The reporters asked what special techniques are needed to get that many calories. None. Look around restaurants and grocery lines. A typical fast food entrée, with French fries and milkshake can total 5000 calories in only one meal. A "salad-bar" with dressings, sauces, and usual Western choices can start at 1000-2000 calories a plate full and go upward from there. A bag of crisps, chips, or nuts can total 1000 calories in one snack. Exercisers and dieters lulled by slick advertising add hundreds of calories with sports shakes and bars. Ordinary people can eat thousands of calories per meal that they really don't know about, plus snacks. It is not a math mystery that they eat thousands of calories per day, and have extra body weight, regardless of other personal factors.
Another question was what made Phelps burn such an unusual number. It is not unusual for a swimmer or other endurance athlete to burn thousands of calories. When I trained swimming for various competitions I ate between eight and ten thousand calories a day myself, swimming five to seven miles a day. I posted about the mileage in Last October in Fast Fitness - Healthier Sports Shake.
Two reporters asked me to confirm an item from a National Public Radio interview, that once Phelps (or anyone) stops exercise, the body stops feeling hungry, therefore, someone not exercising will eat less. Clearly, this isn't so. People can eat too much regardless of exercise. You are not a cause-and-effect automaton. Food choices and overeating habits can occur separately from exercise habits. Days I didn't swim twice a day, miles at a time, I had to remind myself not to eat the same as when training. Now that I don't train like that, I can't eat like that. It is not increased age but that I do less. No mystery.
No it is not hard for most Westerners to eat - they just buy the food. No special eating techniques are needed. Overeating and eating when not hungry are common. One cup of nuts is about 800 calories. I can stuff about half a cup in a brimming handful. My husband Paul, a hard working carpenter who is taller and more muscular than Phelps, but about as lanky, fits almost a cup in his giant hand. We may scoop a handful while commuting on bike to work. Other people may eat handful after handful while watching television, totaling many thousands of extra calories a week.
It is not true that Phelps is "pure muscle" and no one is. Hopefully they have bones, and brains, and lungs, and some skin and so on.
It is not true that only muscle burns calories, or gender is the deciding factor. All your cells that are alive need to breathe and eat in various amounts, male or female. That is why a fat person, male or female, uses more calories everyday to feed all the extra. A fatter person may need more calories to stay at that higher weight than a smaller muscular person, male or female. Weight loss occurs when they do not eat enough to feed it all. Add a small amount of exercise over the day to do functional daily movement. See the lifestyle links at the end for more.
Resting metabolic rate is not mysterious, or fixed by gender or age. A car in idle uses gas, and people also burn calories even at rest with no exercise. Just like different size cars get different mileage, so do we. Adding suitcases in a car trunk needs more gas to tote them around, even though suitcases are not motive parts. A small to average adult may burn about 75 calories an hour, depending on size, to fuel all the cells to stay alive. Over 24 hours that is about 1800 calories a day. A smaller person may need less. A larger person may need 100 an hour or 2400 a day. When you exercise you use more.
There were more questions, taking me days to write. Until then, click these:
Reader Steve writes me funny updates. Steve fixed his back pain that surgeons said was hopeless, using my methods. Then his knees, arches, neck, and various dings and injuries he gets during his active life as an adventurer and professional photographer.
Now he is losing weight in healthful ways. Usually reader inspiring stories start at the beginning. Here is Steve's latest update, sent from Japan. Future posts will work backward, through Steve's upbeat updates. Steve writes:
"I have reduced my waistline by four inches so far. It's a wonderful feeling cutting the excess from my web belts! I've changed my diet to a more healthy one, eating lots of fruits and veggetables, cut out almost all fried foods and processed stuff. I've been exercising. No health club stuff, just ordinary PT. Push-ups, arm circles with weight (20lb potato sacks... Some day I might even put some potatoes inside...) hanging knee lifts, pull ups, etc, and my favorite, the hamster wheel thingie... the little tryk wheel with the handle going through it. About 15-20 minutes of actual work, roughly every other day. I can see my abs again. Hell, I can see my toes again! …I can fit into pants I haven't been able to wear in 8-10 years. Of course, right now I would love to order a nice big pizza, but I'll just have to wait for dinner.... My mid-afternoon snacks are now fruit or nuts. I do treat myself to a square of 80% chocolate after dinner. And of course, a bowl of popcorn later on in the evening. But I'm popping it myself using just a spoonful of olive oil. No more microwave popcorn. And the fat is dripping off me like melted butter. I like that!"
Click labels for more on each topic. The "nutrition" label, for example, gives all articles on healthy cooking and food choices for fitness. The label "readers inspiring story" gives all articles so far of readers who fixed their injuries and pain. These are not testimonials, but tutorials so you can learn what they did, why, and how. Read, have fun learning, then send in your own.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
The post Junk Food Through Your Skin? about making your own healthier skin and hair care products brought in many notes from readers asking for more.
Fitness is not just in a gym. Health comes from all your actions. Commercial cleaners may have toxic fumes or compounds you absorb through your skin. They may be mass-produced in ways that pollute water sources, degrade air quality, generate industrial litter, and destroy resources faster than can be replaced. Healthier ways are simple and usually cheaper. Here are a few cleaners to try making on your own. Children who are able, can have fun helping you measure, mix, and get good physical and mental exercise from making things clean and healthy:
Rust Remover - Sprinkle salt over the rust. Squeeze a lime over the salt until soaked and leave for a few hours. Use the lime rind to scrub off the rust. When sanding, vinegar helps see the metal to determine how much rust still remains.
Furniture Polish - Squeeze the juice from a lemon. Good hand exercise. Mix in a teaspoon (5 ml) of olive or other oil. Apply thinly to the wood and use a soft cloth to make it shine. Experiment with how much oil you like compared to lemon. A thin rubbing of plain coconut oil makes great wood polish as well as nice skin cream and hair shiner.
Counters and Surfaces - mix a quarter cup of baking soda (about 60ml) and quarter cup of vinegar in a quart (liter) of water. For stains, sprinkle baking soda over the surface, wet with water, and allow to sit until you feel like wiping it off with a sponge or lemon rind. Plain white vinegar makes a nice disinfecting cleaner by itself.
Glass Cleaner - Add 1/4 cup white vinegar to a quart warm water. Add a tablespoon of cornstarch. Apply any way you prefer from a sponge, spray bottle, or crumpled newspaper.
More Fitness Fixer to make your cleaning into healthy exercise:
Mr. Jim Morris is the 1973 AAU Mr. America and 1996 Mr. Olympia Masters Over 60. He is now 72. Mr. Morris is a vegan bodybuilder who reminds people that body building involves selflessly looking outward to do good, rather than focusing only on appearance and commercialism. He urges real nutrition through healthy food, rather than artificial chemically produced supplements, and healthy movement rather than harming yourself to gain physical looks or heavier lifts.
Mr. Morris looked over my Ab Revolution book, and wrote to me that he wanted to order several copies for his clients. He wrote, "You are the first person I know of to finally get it right."
Later, after reading Health and Fitness in Plain English Third edition, he wrote, "I have a copy of "Health and Fitness in Plain English" I just received and every page I open to, I say, 'I wish I said that,' and then add, 'I have been saying it for years.' Glad someone finally put it all into print and in one volume. Thanks, Jim Morris."
Here is Fast Friday Fitness - easy, good tasting, healthful food you can grow yourself in your kitchen. Sprouting seeds can be fun to do with children to teach them many things about food, responsibility, biology, and more. Mung beans are a good easy bean to start with:
Spread a bunch of dry beans on a plate. Add enough water to wet the beans. Leave out on a sunny counter.
Rinse beans and plate daily, and return beans to the plate with fresh water.
Within a week, you will have fresh sprouts.
Above photo is a plate of mung beans a few days after sprouting
Sauté lightly in a pan with balsamic vinegar, a slight amount of olive or grapeseed oil, and season with any variety of healthful spices that you like - curry, pepper, fresh lemon, etc. Scramble the sprouts into whatever vegetables or other good food you are cooking.
If you eat the sprouts when they are barely sprouted, it will taste nuttier. If you wait until the sprouts have grown long, they will taste more like greens.
Sprouted sunflower, clover, broccoli, radish, lentil, mung bean, and pea sprouts taste good and have many vitamins and disease-fighting phytochemicals. Sprouting seeds and grains reduces the amounts of phytates in the food, which in turn, increases absorption of minerals like calcium.
The post Junk Food Through Your Skin? told how sprouts contain sulphoraphane, which activates cancer-fighting enzymes in your own cells throughout your body, making sprouts healthy not only when eaten, but when used as part of homemade sunscreens.
The post How Strong Is Your Arm? - Readers Find Out tells how true fitness does not mean doing a bunch of exercises, then returning to slouching, criticizing, smoking, harming others, and putting damaging things in your body. Fitness is making the many aspects of your life clean and healthy. A reader (who I know to be a good person) wrote:
"Something that I find helpful for people around me and for myself, is to start with setting a milder goal. Like promising yourself you'll only eat sweets during weekends. Many who plan to stop cold turkey can't live up to that and end up feeling bad about themselves all of the time. That's not healthy either. ;-)"
I would not say the same about heroin or binge drinking or hurting the weak. I would not teach a child that it is ok to have unsafe sex or drive drunk, as long as it is "only a little" or only on weekends. Doing something you know is damaging or wrong (not just eating some sweet fruit or small amounts of jaggery, or honey if you are not vegetarian, but junk food that is damaging to body and environment) is not solved by limiting it to weekends.
"Feeling bad 'all the time'" because of it is also not a healthful strategy. Knowing something is not right is useful to change your behavior. If you feel bad and do not change your behavior what are you accomplishing? Don't use it as an excuse to continue unhealthful things just so you don't feel badly.
A useful plan is to think. We teach children not to drink automobile coolant, no matter how sweet it tastes. Pools of coolant on the ground have poisoned many animals who come to drink the sweet stuff. It is sweet as a sugary drink, but damaging to put in your body.
Posts on how to strengthen your health as daily mindset:
Readers have been writing in since the post How Strong Is Your Arm? They wanted me to know that they first thought they were strong because they lifted weights or went to exercise class, then realized for the first time that they thought they can't improve what they say, do, think, or eat, and were not strong as a human being.
Reader Dean e-mailed that he had previously thought that stress made him eat, and that it was "just natural." Then he realized that he was eating on purpose because he was angry, and thought it was his only way of showing he could do anything he wanted. Then he realized that doing that wasn't strength and control, but lack of it.
"Once again, I am back at the farm house/animal sitting for a few days. Little did I know that my "strong arm" was going to be put to the test. Last night while preparing my evening meal, I opened the pantry door and what do I see but a chocolate/rocky road cake covered in M & M's. I quickly shut the door then, after a few minutes, temptation took over. I decided that maybe I could have just a little wee bit, knowing full well that one piece would not suffice, I would want more - once a chocoholic, always a chocoholic. Who should come into my mind but you Dr Jolie and your post "How Strong is Your Arm" plus the fact that I had (replied to that post with a comment) telling the world that my arm is strong. Needless to say, the cake stayed where it was. On reflection, I still cannot believe that, after all this time, I would even consider eating such food. I would like to assure you and your readers, that should I have given in to temptation, I would be standing up and saying that my arm is not as strong as I thought."
Ivy had also written me in the past asking what to do when people insist that you should eat their unhealthful cooking at get togethers or give her gifts of unhealthy junk food. When Ivy politely refused bad food and explained she wanted to be healthy, the people were not understanding or enlightened, but disrespectful and insistent. I e-mailed Ivy that she could try accepting the bad food with a smile and a sincere thanks for caring to give a gift, and give it away to someone who wanted it. Ivy sent this update:
April 4 "I thought this little story might interest you. It is amazing how ones life can change.
"Marrianne, a friend of mine has just phoned to tell me that she has become a vegetarian. She is a little younger than me (note - Ivy is 71) and has not long returned from a trip to Nepal. She told me that while there she ate with the people and you would be aware that these people are vegetarian. Since returning to New Zealand she made the decision to change her way of life. She now appreciates the difficulties I have come up against these past two and half years, by that I mean re well meaning friends who make negative comments etc. I gave her the piece of advice that you gave me re being given food that you don't want to eat - accept it gracefully and give it to someone in need.
"I was also able to pass on advice re foods she needs to eat to keep healthy which pleased her. As I mentioned to you a week or so ago, healthy food has become my passion.
"Tomorrow we are having a get together here in the village. It is to be held out doors so hopefully, the weather will be kind. No doubt there will be lots of cakes, muffins and scones to eat plus wine to drink. I am going to make up some snacks of walnuts, raisins and blueberries. As I said to Marrianne, one has to harden up when people make rude comments re what one eats. I, personally, make no remarks re what others eat, I would like to think that others give me the same respect.
"Finally, over the past few weeks, on two separate occasions, women who I have not seen in over a year, have made remarks just how well I look. One of them said and I quote "Ivy, you exude health." This, of course, pleases me."
This e-mail arrived after the get-together:
April 5 "There were 27 residents at the get together and not one of them tried my walnuts and blueberries. Instead, they ate the pastries, cakes, pavlovas, desserts etc.. In saying that, I will say this "no wonder we have such a high obesity problem in this country." "Hugs Ivy"
Then this:
April 9 "I truly believe that I have beaten my addiction to chocolate. This morning I am feeling a little distressed re the news that my dear friend Joan who will be 87 in a couple of months time, had a fall. She will be fine, her only injuries being bruises plus a grazed elbow. One of my neighbours called by to give me a couple of chocolate cookies her words being, "You will be feeling upset about Joan and I know how much you love chocolate." I took your advice and thanked her then, (did not eat them).
"In the past, those cookies would have gone straight in my mouth. Even though I was tempted to eat chocolate cake a couple of weeks ago, I truly believe that I have the addiction under control, in fact, I am patting myself on the back. Just had to share my little story."
Fitness does not mean going to a gym, then going out slouching, smoking, to eat unhealthful food, and thinking unkind things about other people. Fitness means making the many aspects of your person clean and healthy. Don't harm yourself with bad thoughts, deeds, actions, and taking in unhealthy things in your body.
If you want self control, exercise it to become strong.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
We live part of each year in Asia. For a few months, I was posting articles for you from various villages. The town shower of one is pictured at right - not the hut, the outdoor green post with hose. Imagine what the Internet café was like.
On the flights over, our only bag was lost. US transportation security required us to check our sole knapsack, since it had a small gift for friends containing liquid. It never reappeared. We don't need "things" and it was just as easy to make our own soap, comb, and toothbrushes as carry them.
In Western stores, I am astonished by the number of "personal care items." Not just shelves full, but aisles. Each promising better hair, skin, nails, and other parts, but with ingredients that are not healthy for your body, produced in ways that pollute the world, and packaged in plastics that are unhealthy to produce, pollute when discarded, and which apparently leak chemicals into the product that can be absorbed through your skin - see Green Water. A study commissioned by the Organic Consumers Association found that even shampoos, body washes, and lotions labeled "natural" and "organic" can contain unhealthful, even carcinogenic compounds.
I feel high maintenance just carrying a toothbrush. Then we arrived without even that. What freedom.
We made simple hand sanitizer from coarse salt, rubbed between the palms.
For body, face, and hair, we picked aloe leaves, squeezed out the gel inside, and rubbed directly on - see Fast Fitness - Aloe Inside and Out. It dries non-sticky, and makes your hair shiny, clean, and healthy. We used the rest of the gel in food and drink for healthy digestion.
Bamboo is easily made into cooking pots (photo above left). We also visit our favorite bean sprout PadThai restaurant - an outdoor wok on wheels run by a friend. Paul is always popular when we travel (photo at right). The others are not sitting; Paul is really that tall, and has to duck those umbrellas, doorways, and ceilings.
Baking soda and salt makes clean toothpaste. Even without them, a short branch called a neem stick with one end mashed until fibrous, makes a soft, effective bristled toothbrush. Neem extract is said to be a good antiseptic, and effective against various health ills and germs.
After a long day at work and after hard training, instead of hand lotion, you can rub sesame or other light healthy cooking oil onto your hands and feet. You can scent it with mint leaves, citrus peels, spices, and flowers. More ideas in Healthy Mother's Day.
I don't use sunblock, even in the tropics. I do use something to stop some of the unwanted effects of too much sun, but I do not want to block the Vitamin D and other helpful effects of sunlight. Vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis (thin, brittle bones) and osteomalacia (rubbery, demineralized bones). Vitamin D deficiency is associated with increased risk of a few types of cancer, including lung cancer. Studies find that people with low blood levels of vitamin D were more likely to have high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, cystic ovary, and type 2 diabetes. Another study found that a number of patients with aches and weakness were vitamin D deficient and concluded, "A lot of 'fibromyalgia' may be D deficiency."
Instead of blocking or deflecting UV rays using chemical sunblocks that may contain chemicals that I am not sure are healthy, I mix my own, that I hope stops the oxidizing effects and makes my own body better able to stop skin cancer mechanisms. I mash together fresh coconut pulp, green tea, vegetable sprouts, mashed turmeric root, and aloe gel.
A study by Johns Hopkins researchers, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (October 30, 2007, vol. 104, no. 44, 17500-17505) found that rubbing an extract made from broccoli sprouts on your skin may help prevent skin cancer from high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Broccoli, and the sprouts in particular, contain a chemical called sulphoraphane, which is found to activate cancer-fighting enzymes in your own cells throughout your body, not only skin cells.
Instead of chemical anti-mosquito products, we try various things. Marigold flowers rubbed on the skin seem to work for us. I don't seem to be "sweet," and mosquitoes often ignore me while going after Paul. We have heard various theories from locals. One is that he eats sweet rice while I eat more garlic. Various grasses rubbed on the skin also work well for us. There are vines growing in Thailand with beautiful purple flowers. When you rub them on wet hair, it leaves your hair soft and shiny and sweet smelling, but the bugs do not like it. There are other vines that, when mashed with water made effective gentle soap and mosquito control combined.
In Asia, martial arts training is often more rigorous and disciplined than is common in the states. After hard evenings of training, I would sit by a candle made from oil and tightly wrapped bamboo leaves, and rub salt and oil into my, and Paul's, tired feet. Bliss.
Non-Plastic Non-Aluminum Sports and Fitness Food Carriers
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Readers were excited by the post Green Water which tells some of why the fitness craze of bottled water isn't healthy or necessary. You don't need that much water, and the containers are unhealthy in themselves in many ways. My student Lily found a site for us - KleanKanteen.com with stainless steel containers. This is an alternative to aluminum containers.
See what you can do to reduce litter and unhealthful packaging. It's cleaner for your spirit and the world. For travel, lunch, healthy things to eat after work and exercise, I pack everyone food wrapped in grape and banana leaves, and make edible little transportation boxes easily out of large leafy greens, sealed with a toothpick or just folded.
See Lily demonstrate healthier hip positioning for lunges and anterior hip stretch in the post Lunges and Beans, and see her quick healthy good tasting recipe for beans.
Several readers asked what else they can do for painful head and sinus congestion, because after two+ weeks of medicines and doctor visits, they were no better, or were worse. Common treatments do not work as claimed, including decongestants and sprays, and can cause sinus pain to continue and recur.
What Are Sinuses? The sinuses in your head are eight spaces in your skull behind your eyes and nose. They produce mucus, and that is good. Mucus produces antiseptics, and traps and filters germs and particles that you don't want to pass into your respiratory system and the rest of your body. Sinusitis occurs when one or more of your sinus cavities become inflamed.
Inflamed by Inhaling Things Sinuses can become inflamed without any germs causing it, for example from inhaling particles, allergens, or liquids up the nose. If you have ever "gotten water up your nose" in a pool, you have felt the results. The practice of irrigating the nose and sinuses with salt-water sprays is often prescribed for sinus congestion, and even for preventive "maintenance," but it removes important protective mucus layers and natural disease-fighting compounds, and is irritating in itself. Some people regularly spray the sinuses using a variety of squeeze bottles, or a device called a neti pot. It is an unnecessary practice, and does not prevent the underlying cause of sinus pain. It sets up an addictive cycle of rebound congestion and irritation, and increased risk of infections and discomfort to follow.
Another contributor to rebound congestion is regular use of camphor inhalers. Sniffing camphor is a widespread practice throughout Asia, where decorative camphor containers shaped to fit the nose are sold in most grocery, pharmacy, and convenience stores. Camphor irritates mucus membranes causing a cycle of irritation, more camphor inhalation, and more congestion. Some people develop a habit of inhaling camphor, thinking it is for their congestion, not realizing they have a substance inhalation addiction called "huffing."
Decongestants Decongestants are a big money item in drug store sales. They are not the best treatment for sinus pain and congestion. You are already too clogged up. You do not want more "drying out." The clogged areas would do better becoming more dilute by drinking hot liquids, not by becoming more gummy and concentrated with the "drying out" of a decongestant. After the decongestant wears off, a rebound can occur of more congestion. Taking more decongestant perpetuates a negative cycle, and can raise blood pressure. Cough syrups and pills that contain dexomethorphan (DXM) to block coughing are not as effective for coughs as hoped, but are popularly abused by kids looking for a cheap, easily available "high" ("rhobotripping") with unhealthy physical and psychoactive effects. Infections and Antibiotics Sometimes sinuses fill with bacterial or viral fluid. Antibiotic do not help against sinusitis, even the kinds colonized by bacteria. Antibiotics can kill your body's good "bugs" or weaken them, leaving you susceptible to stronger bad bugs, who learn how to live and multiply in your body. Antibiotics taken orally reduce the needed numbers of beneficial flora that normally live in your GI tract. The nutritional and immunogenic products that they normally make in your body are not made, and the organisms responsible for several illnesses can rapidly reproduce and get out of control. An example is antibiotic-associated Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) colitis, an infection of the colon that occurs primarily among patients exposed to antibiotics. More than three million C. difficile infections occur in hospitals in the U.S. each year. He number is growing. An estimated 20,000 C. difficile infections occur each year in the U.S. outside the hospital - directly caused by taking antibiotics.
Healthier Ways to Decongest and Sooth:
Hot steamy showers and baths.
Hot facial compresses.
No need for fancy vaporizers with chemicals (more camphor or other irritants to inhale). Put on a kettle or any pot of water and heat until steaming. Stand at a distance where you feel the warm steam, without standing close enough for any chance of burns. No need to bend over as in the photo at right. Stand in healthy comfortable position for your back and neck.
Eat spicy foods that you like, such as wasabi or chili peppers.
Drink hot peppermint tea, or other warm, aromatic teas with lemon.
A walk outdoors in fresh air and sunshine helps clear breathing and pain.
Do any fun exercise to heat your body. Increasing body temperature loosens clogging secretions and generates heat shock proteins that have been found to be pretty good for you. The post Exercise and Cancer touches on the basics of heat shock proteins.
More information on preventing and resolving sinus problems, things to know about antibiotic use, and other infectious topics are in the book Healthy Martial Arts.
Is your arm strong enough to put down the junk food, soda, ice cream, French fries, fast food, cookie, processed sugar products masquerading as sports food, lunch meats, Danish, donut, cigarette, chips, pretzels, recreational drugs.
They are not healthy. They are not necessary. They are a bad habit. They work against you. They reduce your fitness. They create dependence. their production creates extra litter and pollution. It is money that is not necessary to spend that you could put toward healthful good food, or helping the poor.
How strong are you really? Is your arm strong enough to put them back down, away from your mouth?
Healthy Youth Parties - Fun Exercise, No Junk Food
Monday, February 25, 2008
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Mike is a Fitness Fixer reader who fixed many injuries - impinged shoulder, hip pain, radiating pain down the leg, and bad nutrition from sports food that is really junk food in a sporty label. In December, he sent us his reader success story that I posted in A Whole Big Fix. In the comments of a follow-up post on the December 28 2007 Fast Fitness - Dynamic Partner Balance Challenge, Mike wrote,
"I'm going to use some of your partner exercises as breaks for my students. They will get blood moving, muscles exercising and coordinating, and they will probably giggle. These will be a nice break from sitting so long. Mike."
Mike kept his promise and sent this update:
"This whole year we have not had food at our class parties, with no complaints from students. We just play games involving social interaction. I have tried to have "healthy food parties." In the past, parents send boxes of food-like substances that say, "whole grains" on the sides but still are very processed, loaded with sugar, and have a lot of the nutrition processed out (like granola bars, sports drinks, and "fruit" roll-ups). So, it's easier just to not allow any food.
"The kids still have a blast instead of just sitting and stuffing their faces with cupcakes and cookies (I have 3 ten-year-olds who weigh over 135 lbs). We are taking exercise breaks. Mike"
Mike couldn't send photos of actual kids because of privacy and other issues, so I asked Mike if he would share some of the fun activities they do. He wrote:
"We just had our Valentine's Day party with cut up fruit. They were only allowed to put candy in the individual cards if they chose to, so we didn't have mounds of cup cakes and cookies. We had pineapple, apples, kiwi, two kinds of grapes, and oranges. No one complained. The kids played board games only, no electronic solitary games. They played games like Cranium, Jenga, Life, and Yahtzee, which encourage lots of dialog.
The same day we did an analysis of "Vitamin Water," which shows 13 g of sugar on the label. The whole bottle has 6.5 teaspoons of sugar in it, so I spooned 6.5 tsp. of sugar into a similar sized glass of water and dropped a multi-vitamin in it to show what they are paying for."
Readers, have fun getting ideas throughout the Fitness Fixer column, and send in your stories, and photos where appropriate.
--- I make posts from fun mail and success stories. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Read success stories of these methods and send your own.For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
We have been traveling for the past 2 months in Asia and are on the way to the chilly Smokey Mountains of Tennessee USA to teach medical students for a week during their rotation elective in Wilderness Medicine. This is the third year I will teach there.
I will teach the entire curriculum of diving medicine and physiology, plus a workshop on why commonly prescribed stretches are not healthful, and what to do instead. Several members of the Knox County Sheriff's Office from Knoxville TN have requested to attend my lectures, and several readers made the effort to find the class information on my web site and make arrangements to travel to the camp to attend.
As a physiologist, I design the techniques that physicians use. I spent many years as a military and university researcher in environmental physiology, which is how the body functions in the heat and cold, at altitude and underwater, breathing different mixtures of gases, doing different forms and intensities of exercise. It's important to understand why things work. If you don't understand, then you can't think for yourself, and all you can do is repeat the mistakes of the generation before you, who also were just repeating what they learned in a book from teachers who just were repeating what they had heard.
This problem occurs with some of the exercises and stretches given as physical therapy. An introduction to the problem is in the post What Does Stretching Do? In the past two years teaching at the camp, we encountered young students who were not interested to change bad stretches, and made a point of showing me after my lectures that they will keep doing their rounded bent forward toe touches, since "everyone knows" that is how it is done. However, Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch.
The problem can occur with medical treatments that are in the books, even though wrong. In my diving physiology lectures, I try to show that if you understand the physiology, you will know why certain treatments do not work or are not needed. Immersion in water, for example, creates many interesting effects such as distributing blood volume more out of the limbs to the body. This is similar to the effect that occurs in space, described in Collapsing Astronaut Gives Healthy Reminder. Recently, during our travels, Paul wound up in the hospital with a swollen leg. The doctor who was Chief of Medicine of the hospital, announced that the treatment was bed rest. Paul was told he must lie flat in bed for at least three to fours days with the leg elevated to drain the fluid. We understand that bed rest is often listed in books as a treatment for this, but it is wrong. I asked the doctor if going in the water could help. The doctor said that standing in the water meant the leg would be "hanging down" and the leg needed to be elevated to drain. If you understand immersion, then you know why immersion can more effectively treat limb edema and water retention than medicines and lying in bed. Extended bed rest is unhealthy, and reduces muscle and bone health so much that it is used to study the damage to the body from floating around during space travel. We escaped the medical care and went into the water. I will post more on immersion, edema, and health soon.
I will not have Internet access for the next week to read or reply to comments. Enjoy the posts. Start taking and sending in fun photos of your successes using all the fun techniques.
Here is Friday Fast Fitness - aloe vera fresher and cheaper, and probably more effective than bottled, to help cell repair.
Cut a one or two inch chunk from a whole aloe leaf. Ethnic markets may be more likely to have some.
Remove the side spines
Peel the skin and scoop the cool gel. Be careful cutting the slippery insides.
Add a chunk when making fitness water and sports shakes, and rub the inside of the peel on your face and hands, or apply to cuts and small wounds. Dries without stickiness.
Aloe is promoted as aiding cell growth and repair, as an anti-inflammatory, and helps move slow digestion on through. Promotes fitness inside and out.
Rich Tarpinian, IT systems engineer, musician, hockey coach, and vegan, fixed grinding neck pain, back spasms, disc pain, and tension-type headaches. He had not been comfortable sleeping in any position. Rich said the neck grinding and discomfort, "felt like it was never going to go away."
Rich writes:
"Thanks again for your help! Here's my update. I stopped cranking my neck around and the grinding stopped within the 2 weeks or so that you had indicated.
"I am controlling my body positioning, more aware, and have eliminated lots of neck tension even though I work at a computer all day. The anxiety I was having about disc problems, etc., has mostly been replaced with good knowledge, a feeling of control, and an ability to heal.
"Every morning (instead of sitting on the bed) I get out of bed the way you have recommended - why? because it makes sense. I don't sit on the bed and then try to straighten my body as I start to walk. I get up from the face down position in the already standing position.
"I've always had an interest in the mechanical aspect of how the body moves and what the sources of problems can be which is why, when I was pouring over information on the internet, your information regarding cause/effect relationships instantly caught and held my attention.
"I eat a pretty good diet - vegan with a good amount of raw foods, but had not paid much attention to posture and movement. I will now.
"As a side note, I coached hockey for about 8 years and played up until about 4 years ago. I had an opportunity to get back into some coaching recently but was really worried about the neck issues that I had been having for weeks. I also used to get a lot of back spasms when I played/coached. After experiencing the progress from your recommendations, which came just in time, I stepped confidently back on the ice a couple of weeks ago and have felt good given some expected muscle soreness that is now gone. The hardest thing was lacing up the skates but, once I was on the ice, I felt great.
"What you have done effectively is to empower people with the knowledge of how to find and return to the correct answers in order to maintain their own bodies. You've done that by providing reasons where needed, presenting conflicting information to show contrast, and using repetition to help solidify the important concepts."
"The key is that I now understand the causes of the problem and can, for the most part, manage the process when things start going wrong. As I cruised the internet looking at information, my anxiety meter kept rising - until I found your article on fixing the neck grinding problem which prompted me to read your other articles on sitting, lifting, etc. The article was immediately positive with a no strings attached approach to fixing and preventing the problem. My overcoming the neck issues is directly attributable to you."
Rich first fixed his pain using my web site summary sheets. These Fitness Fixer posts also describe techniques used:
Two important stretches to do first thing in the morning and throughout the day to restore ability to sit, move, and stand without unhealthful neck position - Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain and Nice Neck Stretch
Having muscles soreness is not bad, it means you're out having fun. Make sure there is no pain or soreness in the joint. That is the difference. See Teen Dies After Using Muscle Soreness Rub
I wrote Rich to congratulate him on his initiative and great work, and thank him for his story. He replied:
"Just when I've corrected the forward head problem, I'm going to need those neck exercises to treat "swelled head syndrome."
Smile and laugh. It's healthy too.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
November 1 is World Vegan Day, and all of November is celebrated as Vegan month.
Vegans are vegetarians who don't eat, and often don't wear, any products from animals. The idea is no more unusual than not wanting to hurt, wear, or eat your pets. Vegan living can be healthier, and vegan diet can fuel both endurance and strength athletes.
Vegans and vegetarians have been found to have lower body fat on average than non-vegetarians, and lower risk of diabetes. A new study by The World Cancer Research Fund making big news as "a landmark study" found that keeping slim is one of the best ways of preventing cancer, and that evidence is stronger than previously realized that eating meat, and processed meats such as ham and bacon, increase risk of colorectal cancer. The report makes 10 recommendations including getting exercise every day, drinking water rather than sugary drinks, and eating fruit, vegetables, and fiber. There is no fiber in meat, dairy, or eggs. Vegan meals can provide enough calcium to prevent osteoporosis. See Exercise is More Important Than Calcium Supplements for Bones and Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures.
Vegans may promote farm sanctuaries and work for better ways than vivisection (hurtful testing on animals). The argument is not if you would rather that a child not get needed medicine rather than test on an animal, the quest is for neither to suffer, and find smarter, healthier ways for all. Significant examples exist of tests based on animal physiology that were ineffective or injurious when applied to humans in need.
Vegan bodybuilder Kenneth G. Williams is pictured above and at right. His web site is www.VeganMusclePower.org.
In the tradition of fighting monks, Chris Price is a vegan Muay Thai and mixed martial arts fighter. His web site is http://www.veganfighter.com/
Helpful Book: Healthy Martial Arts - Healthier training for all sports, featuring vegetarian and vegan athletes. Chapters on strength, endurance, speed, balance, nutrition, performance enhancement, injuries, building the spirit and the mind.
Happy Birthday to readers who celebrate their birthday today, October 31. Also those with birthdays yesterday and tomorrow. Everyday too.
One reader with a special birthday today is Ivy who turns 71 - Inspiring Ivy. Ivy has been generously sending in stories for all to benefit, giving ideas for healthy exercise as part of normal daily life.
"I hope I can look as great as Pearl does when I reach 97, she is amazing. You will smile when I tell you that I did this fun test on the internet whereby you have to answer 34 questions re your health, what you eat, if you take medication etc. etc. The answer came back that I really was 45.5 years of age and I was going to live until I was 106.5 years of age.
"I had already told my kids that I am going to live until I am 96 and that it would be pay back time. I have now changed it to 106.5 years of age - my very words being "May God help you." Of course they laughed - I reminded them of the old saying 'Words said in Jest.'"
Happy Birthday! We made everyone delicious Internet birthday party and Halloween party food. Everyone come celebrate.
Happy Halloween and everyday. "Boo unto others" with good happy food, activity, and spirit. Celebrate everyday, by eating, moving, and living with fun, happy, intelligent, good spirit. Here is a Halloween poem to laugh:
Don't yell at us Don't scream and shout 'Cause when we're scared Our eyes fall out!
The third harvest is here in the Northern Hemisphere. The Hunter's Moon is bright in the sky.
The last harvest of fall is a time of endings and beginnings. More than a commercial holiday of destruction and gruesome death, the approaching winter was historically a time to reverently mark departure of the living and life-giving fields, and be thankful for the harvests they gave. Revering of elders was observed in analogy.
The first and most important precept of thousands of years of yoga and martial arts is ahimsa. Ahimsa means non-violence, non-harm, non-destruction. Ahimsa was reaffirmed in recent times by the Mahatma Gandhi, and in the West by Martin Luther King, Jr. In all the classes I teach, I remind the students that ahimsa is something you incorporate in all your actions. Don't harm yourself by sitting in injury-producing bad slouching. Don't harm yourself with bad exercise. Don't harm yourself by destructive thoughts and actions. Don't harm yourself with unhealthful food and drink. Don't harm yourself by hunching your shoulders to stress through preparing meals, when you can relax your shoulders, straighten your back, breathe, and use each stoke of washing, cutting, and preparing food as beautiful meditation in the same amount of time. Don't harm others with spiteful words, deeds, and thoughts. Don't cause others fear or pain. Don't cause yourself fear and pain.
In many of the countries where we have traveled and lived, lovely short public service announcements occur daily with kind messages of doing good. Television and radio commercials are paid for with no other purpose than to give specific positive examples of helping each other for a better world. Where we have lived in the US, continuous messages of spiteful and worse behavior are common as entertainment.
Several centers in your brain process self-control. They need exercise like anything else. Studies of imaging these brain centers in people who overeat, showed that with retraining, the centers changed in level of activity when pictures of food were viewed. "Exercising self-control" is more than an expression.
Children, and even adults, need consistent positive examples. It is good and crucial exercise. It is easy to destroy, and takes (but also gives) energy to be good. Instead of "Mischief Night" tonight, do good. Instead of spending money on destroying property with thrown eggs and toilet paper, have fun learning a healthful recipe that you can enjoy for years to come. Learn to stand on your hands safely. Paint or draw a picture of a good wish. Talk about how it can come true. Design and construct inspired homemade costumes. Help the community. Volunteer at a shelter. Exercise your spirit. Develop a fun, beautiful positive public service announcement for your home, or a commercial project, that reminds to uplift spirit and behavior. Teach a child something. Don't wait until they are already doing bad. Teach them consistently, before they know to do either, so that they will more often know to choose good and why.
The average American spends nearly $15 on Halloween candy - more than $1 billion total on unhealthful refined sugar and hydrogenated fat candy - just for Halloween. This is not parental love. It is the same as giving them cigarettes or addictive drugs. Change that. Parental love is giving them beautifully functioning self-control brain centers. Halloween story and ideas in Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food.
Positive behavior is too important to leave up to only the schools, the entertainment industry, the government, the Internet, the home. We all add ahimsa.
Many chapters of ideas for happy bountiful living are in the book Healthy Martial Arts.
Photos of Paul Creating Good on Halloween. Can you find Jolie in the photos?
Diabetes causes such serious health problems that the risk of death is twice as high for someone with diabetes compared to someone of similar age without. More than 20 million people in the US have diabetes (colloquially called "the sugar" disease) with 2 million a year more cases diagnosed every year. Exercise has been found to be a top factor to prevent and treat diabetes.
Three main types of diabetes are type 1, type 2, and gestational.
Type 1 diabetes, where the body does not make enough insulin (in the body organ called the pancreas), is treated with injected or inhaled insulin, although nutrition and exercise changes are a fundamental part of management.
An estimated 90–95% of cases of diabetes in North American are type 2. Type 2 diabetes is also called non insulin-dependent diabetes and obesity-related diabetes. Type 2 was rare until modern sedentary habits combined with mass sales of unhealthful food.
Gestational diabetes is generally a form of type 2 during pregnancy.
In the recent past, type 2 diabetes developed only in adults as they gained weight, reduced activity, and increased packaged, commercial, unhealthful foods. An escalating phenomenon of type 2 diabetes in children is now occurring.
Approximately 85% percent of adults and children diagnosed with type 2 are overweight and less active than they could be. Type 2 is increasingly being found to be best treated with more fun movement and less bad food, a win-win situation.
Several studies have found that exercise and healthier diet are more effective than medicine for people with type 2 diabetes. A recent randomized controlled Canadian study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that people with type 2 diabetes who began exercising developed better blood sugar control, both from aerobic exercise and resistance training. Not exercising yielded no improvements in sugar control. People who combined aerobic exercise and also lifted weights had the biggest improvement. It is not known in this study if results occurred because of the type of exercise mattered, or because the duration of exercise was greater in the combined exercise training group. According to an editorial co-published with the study, "Doctors should prescribe exercise to all type 2 diabetes patients who are healthy enough to work out."
In the past people with diabetes and diabetes-related complications were discouraged from exercise. However, exercise has been known in the past, with recent substantiating studies, to be the top factor to prevent and reverse diabetic problems. According to William Kraus, MD, of Duke University Medical Center, "Failing to prescribe exercise to patients with diabetes is simply unacceptable practice."
Things To Help
You do not need a gym or special clothes or equipment to get aerobic or weight lifting exercise.
Go outdoors for a break every day that you can, for fresh air, sunshine, and fun movement.
For both active and resistance exercise indoors and out, remember that daily healthful movement easily accumulates from your healthy bending, balancing while dressing, taking the stairs, and other daily real life movement.
Have fun - skate, bowl, cycle, walk, go dancing, gardening, shoot hoops, take food to shut-ins and get them moving too, with improvised exercise of moving arms and legs, clapping, singing, and having fun.
For fun exercise-as-lifestyle ideas, check through lists of Fitness Fixer posts, linked at the right of each article.
My post Hyperbarics for Diabetic Foot Injury gives more information on preventing amputations from diabetic wounds, and lists some of the ways that exercise reverses the contributors and complications of diabetes.
There is great hope. Have fun making a new healthier life.
Trendy vitamin water for exercise is big business, adding cost, litter, and sometimes dyes, synthetic isolated vitamins, and questionable sweeteners. Instead, easily make your own sweet, whole-food vitamin water for pennies:
Put clean water in a blender
Add a few grapes with the skin and seeds and blend well.
Carry it with you in healthful containers - described in Green Water
Grape skins and seeds have been found to contain cancer-fighting and other disease-fighting compounds. Think of the money you just saved on expensive grape seed oil products.
For a different light flavor, squeeze in some fresh lemon. Helps keep the container cleaner, too. If you like tea, put a tea bag in the container. No need for hot water. Try a few strawberries with the green tops, watermelon with the seeds, or some raw sweet red pepper to make a variety of light, vitamin water drinks.
Commercially bottled water may not be a healthy fitness drink, from the container it comes in to the water inside.
The water may be no healthier than tap water, the plastic containers may leach chemicals into the water they hold, and the bottling, transport, and disposal all seriously weaken environmental fitness, and ultimately your own.
The Cornell Daily Sun made a nice summary of the information:
CNN news reports that Aquafina and Dasani are no different than tap water
Plastic water bottle manufacturing process, requires 1.5 million barrels of crude oil a year
13,700 18-wheelers are used per week to transport one billion bottles of water across the world.
Bottled water undergoes eight tests under Environmental Protection Agency requirements. Tap water must undergo 22 different tests (tests in countries like Great Britain and Canada are more stringent).
One kilogram of plastic bottles requires 17.5 kilograms of water to be used in the production process. You're putting more water into it than you're getting out.
Bottling and shipping water produced more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2006.
Tap water is a safe and economical alternative to plastic bottles.
Both articles, plus others, advocate avoiding commercially bottled water and re-filling your own plastic or Nalgene bottles with simple tap water. I add two things:
Use non-plastic bottles. Small glass bottles have been working for me and my students. For more safety, wrap them in protective neoprene sleeves, available easily in many places, including "dollar" stores. Some students have come in with stainless steel bottles from old army supply. We discourage aluminum bottles until we know if there is possibility of the aluminum leaching into the water and if that may affect health.
Get a water filter for your tap water. There is work showing the water supply increasingly contains medical drugs excreted by the users and other chemicals that constitute a "body burden" of compounds with potential health effects. Future posts will explain those topics.
One of my students, Lily, who brings me a wonderful quick-bean recipe in thoughtful glass jars, adds this site for more eco-health through Deforesting Your Mailbox of catalogs.
Click this Friday Fast Fitness for recipes for Healthier Fitness Water. Readers, send your ideas for healthy, convenient water and photos of your inventive, fun containers.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class spaces for personal evaluation. Top students may apply to certify throughDrBookspan.com/Academy.See Dr. Bookspan's Books. ---
Photo 1 by blmurch. Photo of trashed posture and water bottles by justin.
A New Zealand swimmer asked for more sports nutrition. Here is Friday Fast Fitness - quick, good tasting sports shakes - cheaper and healthier than store-bought.
My father and grandfather, (and great-grandfather+) were Ice Swimmers. We all swam all year in open water including several over 20 miles (32km). My grandfather's sure-power recipe was an oily mixture (for future posts). When I raced competitively, I swam 5-7 miles a day, 35-40 miles a week (up to 64km/week). The coach pushed the common fad of eating Jello powder. As a vegetarian I skipped it, and watched other vogue sports food assumptions come and go. Best is real food.
Throw in a blender or other mixer:
Clean water
Peeled banana
Peeled orange with the seeds
Some of the well-washed orange peel
Raw walnuts or other favorite
Some cooked brown rice left from a meal
Sweeten with raisins or a prune softened in clean water. Molasses optional. Adds many minerals.
Cinnamon powder to level blood sugar
Tips:
For the day of the event, you can substitute tea for the water.
Experiment with amounts to get preferred consistency
If you want a chocolate shake, add a scoop of unsweetened cocoa powder (unsweetened non-dutched baking cocoa). People with migraine can leave out the cocoa.
Don't junk it up with milk, sugar, artificial sweeteners, commercial sports powders.
If you use a juicer, put the solids and pulp back in, or you will be drinking sugar water and throwing away the point and the nutrition.
Try different fruit - Persimmons, mangosteen, pineapple, melon, berries, your favorite. Raw red beets are an overlooked sweet fitness food good in shakes.
For flavors, add a small slice of unpeeled ginger root, washed mint leaves.
"The water temp now (has risen to) 14 degrees Celsius (57F) and I had a robust swim this afternoon in Wellington Harbour (photo below right). Interestingly enough there was virtually no shivering. I'd swum for about an hour and a half in the pool earlier today.
"I was struck by the difference between pool and ocean swimming... technically I've improved tremendously in the pool over the past few weeks and my times have improved greatly. In the ocean it's much harder -- but I felt faster nonetheless.
"I am not a fast swimmer -- in fact, at this point I am still too slow to pass Phil's test -- but I can feel I'm making progress. I've been able to hold a pace of 2.5 km/hour for a few hours, and this has been an improvement from a measly 2 km/hour not very long ago. And I'll be up to 25 km/week by the end of this month (about 15.5 miles a week - longer and generally more work swimming than running).
"My plan is to increase weekly mileage to 40 km (approx 25 miles) per week by the end of November and then to make a push through to 50 km/week (about 31 miles) by the end of December -- the 'crunch' month. I'll attempt to renter the open waters by mid-November and begin reacclimatization to the cold. With luck and persistence, I'll be granted the privilege of attempting the Cook Strait swim.
"I met with Phil Rush -- the man who has crossed the Strait seven times (including a double-crossing) and who holds the world's record for a triple crossing of the English Channel. He will be piloting the support boat for my attempt, which will hopefully be in February 2008. His advice: swim, swim, swim… then be ready to take a 6-hour test in early January. In the test I will have to demonstrate that I can sustain at least a 3 km/hour pace for the 6 hours. He told me I'd have to figure out the kind of sustenance I'd need on my own, and he recommended that I not try to gain too much weight -- though he cautioned not to lose any from this point on. He also suggested that I procure the skills of a swim coach to refine technique (Fitness Fixer posts in progress on faster healthier stroke mechanics for swimming).
"Any advice on nutrition or cross-training would be appreciated. Because I also have a full-time job, time is tight and hours in the water are limited. I've experimented with a commercial product (name deleted) for multi-hour endurance activities that's easy on the stomach."
I am not a nutrient biochemistry or epidemiology researcher, so I can only report what I have read from others, which can inadvertently repeat and perpetuate wrong information incestuously (we all say so, it must be true). Following is a summary of what I believe and have seen from working with my patients and athletes:
In general, good nutrition all year will give more benefit than eating special foods for an event, race, or hike.
Processed packaged sports supplement foods cost far more than the ingredients, and you can get healthier ingredients, cheaper, and just as easily without commercial sports powders, bars, drinks, and other preparations.
Many nutrients need to work in the original food containing other components that make each part work better. Some do not work, or have even been found to increase health risks when concentrated in vitamin and mineral supplements.
In general, no commercial processed "sports food," no matter how engineered or marketed as effective for training, will give you the health of healthful real food. Whole foods, for example, a simple apple with the skin, contain combinations of nutritional and disease fighting chemicals that are not available in supplements.
"Energy food" technically means it has calories. Extra calories alone will not enable you to build muscle or win a race.
Increasingly, some "energy food" and drinks contain stimulant compounds. This practice is a foolhardy one to become accustomed to, building cycles of inability to focus, exercise, or feel well without them, and varying degrees of agitation with them, sleep difficulties, and various cardiovascular risks.
Products with soy are usually unfermented soy. Unfermented soy contains enzyme inhibitors which block digestion, goitrogens which inhibit thyroid function, phytic acid, which blocks minerals like zinc and calcium, and estrogen-promoting compounds. Anyone with tendency to estrogen-dependent tumors or cancer, fibroids, cystic ovary and breast, or endometriosis will be better to avoid unfermented soy.
Even if sugar water will extend endurance, it is still junk food, not healthy for the long term. Science Daily reports "Sports drinks face junk food label"
Protein and carbohydrate together work better for training than sugar alone, however commercial processed powdered mixtures are still not the healthy choice over the long term.
This is all good news. You can eat good tasting food, that is quick to make, and cheaper and better for you than expensive commercial "sports food."
Don't worry that you have to eat engineered products to be able to win. You will win better in the long run without them.
Here is Friday Fast Fitness - for clean, healthy, fresh energy food for hiking, exercise, and sports, and October Vegetarian Month - Easy peanut butter in your own kitchen:
Put fresh, raw peanuts, or other favorite like walnuts, in a bowl and crush them for arm exercise with any kitchen pounding tool. Or use a chopper, grinder, blender, coffee grinder, or other processor.
Crush to powder, depending how chunky you want it.
Mash in apple cubes to make moist, creamy sweet peanut butter. Spice with cinnamon if you want.
Spread on apple, carrot, and other fruit and vegetable slices. Make it portable by stuffing inside raw sweet green and red peppers, in sandwich and wraps (non-grain eaters can make tasty wraps from leafy greens). Use for toppings.
Vary the combination - try almonds mashed with pears. Sunflower seeds or walnut and banana. Sesame seeds and figs. Make with a friend for healthy social fun. Exercise your imagination for healthy sports food.
"Vegetarians have the best diet. They have the lowest rates of coronary disease of any group in the country. [T]hey have a fraction of our heart attack rate and they have only 40 percent of our cancer rate." —William Castelli, M.D., Director, Framingham Heart Study, the longest-running epidemiological study in medical history
From my work in sports medicine, I will add to Dr. Castelli's work that I see fairly consistent reduction in joint pain and other pain syndromes when patients stop known "inflammatory foods" including meat and dairy.
October 1 is World Vegetarian Day (www.WorldVegetarianDay.org). The month of October is Vegetarian Awareness Month. The purpose is for a happier, more aware and respectful, and healthier society.
Hurting animals is unhealthy for all involved. In the spirit of healthy body and mind, this post gives four ideas:
Build your own health and benefit your exercise: food and recipes for better exercise training (regardless of your sport), and preventing disease and pain syndromes. Get the book Healthy Martial Arts
Free vegetarian starter kit, free newsletter, with materials in Spanish, to avoid cruelty to yourself, animals, and the Earth, one meal at a time - TryVeg.com
Reduce global warming: GoVeg.org reports on work published in NewScientist.com - It's Better to Green Your Diet Than Your Car (17 Dec. 2005). "You could exchange your "regular" car for a hybrid Toyota Prius and, by doing so, prevent about 1 ton of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year, but according to the University of Chicago, being vegan is more effective in the fight against global warming; a vegan prevents approximately 1.5 fewer tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere each year than a meat-eater does. The math is simple: You could spend more than $20,000 on a Prius and still emit 50 percent more carbon dioxide than you would if you just gave up eating meat and other animal products."
Feel encouraged. Being vegetarian or making occasional vegetarian meals does not have to involve any strange or expensive foods from specialty stores. You do not need any special pots or food processing equipment. It is a myth that vitamin supplements are necessary. Grocery bills can also be also far less expensive when you don't purchase meat (and don't substitute other expensive food that you do not need).
More Good Stuff:
I will post easy-to-make healthful (real) food for athletes and exercisers, during October vegetarian month, and for Vegan month in November.
Click the label "nutrition" under this article for all Fitness Fixer on healthy smart nutrition, and other labels for all posts on each topic. NonVegetarians are welcome.
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
Inspirational Ivy II - Beating Foot Drop and Sciatica, and Getting Healthier
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Jolie Bookspan, M.Ed, PhD, FAWM
Ivy had serious sciatica with foot drop. She had knee and other injuries. She was in awful pain. In this kind of foot drop, the nerve cannot serve the muscles enough to lift the foot to walk normally. The toes drag. The foot hangs limply and slaps the ground with each step.
Commonly, someone with foot drop is put in a leg brace for life. One surgery done for foot-drop fuses the ankle so the foot is rigid and doesn't hang. Other problems come over years from changes in walking mechanics. For the terrible pain, patients are often directed to drugs and surgery. These are not healthy.
We changed that:
Monday's post Inspirational Ivy told the essentials of stopping the cause of the sciatic pain and nerve impingement, rather than treat the results with unhealthy means. Links to specific methods are there.
Sciatica, disc damage, facet pain, and impingement are results, not the cause of pain. They are not a diagnosis. When you have them, find what is causing them. Then you can reverse the cause: The Cause of Disc and Back Pain
Ivy followed my directions exactly and used her brain to understand how to get the intended results, not just "do a bunch of exercises." When she first began, she wrote,
"Over the past few days, I have been very conscious of my movements and, hey presto, I have not experienced any tingling or pain. I have to take total responsibility for every movement I make. I am constantly telling myself 'Think before you go to the fridge or need to pick up something off the floor - think lunges.'"
I gave her simple gait retraining. Ivy quickly discarded the cane she had used for nearly 7 months.
Ivy went on to teach several neighbors in her community how to fix their own pain. One story is posted in Each One Teach One.
In April 2006, Ivy wrote,
"It is nearly 5 months since I started your wonderful programme so I thought it was time that I gave you an update. I am fit and well, the sciatica has disappeared, if I get a little niggle in that area, I ask myself as to what have I done wrong, my left knee (IT Band) is no longer a problem, my balance has improved immensely and the "dropped" foot is great, in fact, when I go for my daily walk, I no longer hear the plop, plop of which I hated. I can also now wear "normal" shoes.
"Without your help and support and putting me on the right road so to speak, I would still be in constant pain plus making the chiropractor richer. Please note, I no longer go to him for treatment - I DON'T NEED HIM."
At age 70, Ivy is steadily improving strength and range of motion using healthy movement for daily life. She is eating healthful vegetarian food. January 2007 brought this note:
"The reason for this e-mail being that I feel somewhat excited re a remark made by the son of one of my fellow villagers. His very words being, "How did you become the woman that you are now. I have watched you over the past couple of years - when I first met you, you were obviously in a lot of pain, what is your secret?"
"I also sent the photos to my son and daughter-in-law who live in the US, they too, could see the improvement - they thought I looked great. Mind you, over that 2 year period, I gradually lost 20 lbs."
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Limited Class spaces for personal evaluation. Top students may apply to certify throughDrBookspan.com/Academy.See Dr. Bookspan's Books. ---
Last October, Ivy from New Zealand left a comment on Fitness Fixer how she first found me while looking for relief from severe sciatica with foot drop. For 11 months, she had tried treatment and an exercise regimen from a chiropractor. Last week, she e-mailed me a funny update of improving mobility and health from a new stretch. I started writing this post just to tell of Ivy's stretch and how readers can have the same success.
I looked over my file of Ivy's comments on Fitness Fixer and her e-mails to me over the last two years - each story weaving to the next - of improving health, mobility, and joy of life for herself and people in her community. Reading them again was like sitting by a stream that sparkled over rocks on its way by, inspiring and lovely. Some are private, some I have her permission to tell.
Last October, Ivy wrote:
Ivy wrote, "I knew I should be feeling better than I was. During those months I was continually surfing the net looking for answers, then in November 2005, I discovered Dr Jolie Bookspan's "How to fix your own pain without drugs or surgery." Everything she described was ME, 69 years of bad habits had finally caught up with me.
"So began my journey to good health and freedom from pain. I began with the pec stretch, trapezius stretch, wall stand, sitting correctly at the computer without sticking out my chin, hamstring stretch, isometric abs (no more crunches), squats and lunges instead of bad bending.
You can imagine my joy when after 2 days I was free of pain. I was so excited that I contacted Dr Jolie, who in turn, took time out from her busy schedule to e-mail me giving me further advice and exercises which I might add, I follow religiously along with a daily 30 minute walk (weather permitting).
"Some months ago, I decided to follow a vegetarian diet. I feel so well and happy, in fact, I have loads of energy. I turn 70 at the end of this month (Oct 2006) and am looking forward to the next stage of my life feeling healthy and free of pain."
This year Ivy followed up when we were corresponding on making sure of healthy nutrition:
"This is the second winter that I have not had either a cold or 'flu. For someone who was always getting the 'flu, that is really something. I put it down to my healthy vegetarian diet."
Ivy used my free web site summary sheets on fixing pain, my books, and Fitness Fixer posts. Here are links to posts Ivy used:
Wall stand - this is a quick check of functional muscle tightness to see if you can use healthful positioning for normal activity. It is described in the first paragraph of the post Fixing Upper Back and Neck Pain, above.
Isometric abs (no more crunches) - this one isn't up on Fitness Fixer yet. It is in my book The Ab Revolution and Fix Your Own Pain, and on my web site summary on functional use of abs to stop overarching the lower spine. Ivy sent a photo of doing this exercise. I will post it when I post about this fun, different, functional abdominal exercise.
The posts on lunges, Doorway Hamstring Stretch, and Functional Achilles Stretch, feature photos that Ivy sent me. I had written Ivy earlier this year asking if she could send me photos demonstrating what she is doing. She invited a neighbor to visit and take the photos, had them developed, then mailed a pack of them to me from New Zealand. Ivy writes:
"My dear 86 year old friend took them and we certainly had a lot of fun doing what I will call a "photo shoot." Bear in mind her age when I tell you that while I was trying to hold the pose, she would press the incorrect button and would have to start all over again. I would lose what I would call the correct form and so it would go on... I can now sympathize with models who have to hold poses for what seems an eternity."
In February 2007 Ivy sent an update, signing it:
"I shudder to think where I would be if I had not found your web site over 15 months ago. I mean it when I say "Thank you for helping me get my life back." I am fit, I am healthy, what more can one want in this life. I have passion about what I do something that I haven't had in a very long time."
To get a better lunge stretch and stop pressure on the medial knee (the side facing the other leg), don't turn your back leg outward (left photo). Turn your back foot parallel, and face forward (right photo)
The previous post Hip Stretch While You Strengthen Legs shows a key move to position the hip to get a great stretch on the front of the hip and feel a better strengthener for the legs as you lower and rise in standing lunges.
One of my students, Lily, demonstrates good hip and leg position for the lunge (second photo at right). Instead of tilting the hip forward in front and out in back, you tuck the bottom of the hip to maintain it vertical from the top of the leg (hip joint) to the middle of the waist. Note the stripe of the side of the pants compared to the vertical line in the wall behind her. On occasion, Lily makes me a wonderful bean dish and brings it to class in a glass container. The glass is a thoughtful healthy touch to avoid whatever may leach out of plastics into food. My students and I try to do this with food and drinks carried to work and class. Here is her recipe. Just throw it all in a bowl:
Lily's Wonderful Beans
Cup or two of cooked black beans Cup or two of corn 1 jalapeño pepper, diced 1 red onion, chopped 1 red pepper, chopped 2 tablespoons cumin powder 1 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped salt and pepper to taste sprinkle of olive oil, just enough to blend ingredients squeeze 1 fresh lime over the top
Some people with celiac omit the corn. Celiac causes various discomforts after eating wheat and related products.
Good bending gives free exercise and stops a major cause of several chronic pain syndromes (muscle strain, disc degeneration, disc herniation, and sciatica) at the same time. Click the labels under this post for related posts. If you use the lunge and squat around the house for all the things you need to bend for instead of bad bending, you will stop a major source of back pain back, and get hundreds of free leg exercises a day. Enjoy healthy eating and healthy lunging.
For the next two weeks, I'll have uncertain access to Internet, mail, or messages, to read or answer comments. I stored some fun posts for you. New Healthline staffer Leigh is scheduled to put them online while we make our way 'out West' during the week before the meeting. Thank you Leigh.
With each trip out to this part of the US, we work to document and preserve various martial arts systems of Native American Indians, as much as they want us to have. Will also make our way through the Rocky Mountains.
For going off-trail, we don't carry a tent or sleeping bag, let alone a computer. Simpler. There are still things to carry. The post Healthier Backpack Carrying to Get Better Exercise and Stop Back Pain explained the role of using abdominal muscles to prevent one kind of back pain from carrying backpacks. It is not by tightening the ab muscles, but using them to position the lower spine forward enough to reduce an overly large lower back arch, and stand with neutral spine. Strengthening exercises, whether for abdominal or back muscles do not make the spine attain neutral position in place of overarching. That is why strengthening core muscles does not stop this kind of pain. You get better and more functional core exercise by preventing overarching when carrying loads than by doing crunches or exercises for any specific back muscles. When you hold neutral spine, a small inward curve remains, just not the large one with the "backside-stuck-out-in-back" tilt that damages the lower back.
The post Throw a Stronger Punch (or Push a Car or Stroller) Using This Back Pain Reduction Technique gives a quick effective way to feel how to move your hip and lower spine using your abs away from arching to neutral. This Friday's post should cover preventing upper back and neck pain when carrying backpacks. In pretty much any terrain, we don't wear hiking boots or fancy cross-training shoes. I wear roomy, cheap (ten or fifteen dollar range), discount store sneakers (usually in tatters). A shoe should not be what holds your foot in position - it is better when your own ankle, leg, and foot muscles do that. For me, shoes are more to avoid hookworm, other parasites, tetanus, and bites. The posts Arch Support Is Not From Shoes and Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles? show how to hold healthy foot and arch position, and give ideas for better gait and balance. In technical climbs, tight shoes are often worn. I'm not much of a climber, but decline tight climbing shoes for bare feet, and enjoy feeling the rocks. For daily wear, tight shoes are not healthful: See, Are Your Shoes Too Tight? My near-seven-foot-tall husband Paul does the same, in his size 17 sneakers or flip-flops (approx size 52+ European).
We don't bring "sports food," commercial hydration drinks, or energy bars and drinks. Refined sugar is not health food. Unfermented soy in many of these products is increasingly documented to promote unhealthy over-estrogenic effects for both men and women. The post Is Your Health Food Unhealthful tells hidden dangers to avoid. The posts Healthy Mother's Day and Independence Day for Fitness give a few quick, good-tasting, healthy foods and drinks to try instead. If you don't have a blender, mash ingredients by hand for arm exercise. Dehydration is important to prevent, and can be done with healthy food and drink.
We hope to arrive in Snowmass by Saturday for the toxicology symposium before the meeting. Then interesting lectures, my two workshops (come take them) and other workshops. The WMS will present the first Fellows of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine. I have been advanced to Fellow, along with Wilderness expert and Medicine for the Outdoors blogger Paul Auerbach, and others in the field. Dr. Auerbach could have easily been "grandfathered" to Fellow status for his stack of achievements, but he went through the exacting point system along with the rest of us. You set the bar high Boss, wow, thank you.
I will try to get to the conference Internet café during the meeting. For the week after, will again be outback without access. If you comment or e-mail, I may not have access to reply. Check existing replies to posts for answers already there. Look for fun posts until then. Hope to see you at the meeting.
"Utility is when you have one telephone; luxury is when you have two, and paradise is when you have none."
I am still getting caught up with work from the sports medicine meeting I attended in late May.
An interesting study was presented at the pulmonary and respiratory physiology session - "Effects of a High-Fat Meal on Pulmonary Function in Healthy Subjects." It is known that high fat meals negatively affect people with asthma and other pulmonary problems. It is also known that a high-fat diet increases internal inflammation, which is associated with higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis (possibly other forms of arthritis such as osteoarthritis), and several other chronic illnesses. What about effects on your lungs and breathing?
The study looked at the effect of a high-fat meal on airway inflammation and pulmonary function. The researchers tested subjects for total cholesterol and triglycerides, then fed them a high fat meal. Subjects were tested after the meal for cholesterol and triglycerides, various pulmonary functions, markers of airway inflammation (exhaled nitric oxide), and C-reactive protein, which is a marker of systemic inflammation. The researchers found that the high fat meal increased total cholesterol, triglycerides, and exhaled nitric oxide. They concluded that the results suggest that high-fat meals may contribute to inflammatory diseases of the airway and lung (in addition to other health consequences).
Just as smoking or taking amphetamines are not healthy, but help weight loss, popular weight loss diets "work" but have health drawbacks. Check your meals to see if you eat high fat, whether for a diet, or just from unhealthful eating habits.
A diet may help weight loss, but be unhealthy. An exercise may work a muscle but be bad for your joints. A medicine may fix a disease but harm the patient. You don't have to choose. Many fun healthy ways to exercise and control weight that don't harm the body are given throughout this Fitness Fixer blog.
Click the labels under this post for related posts that give information about breathing exercises and healthier nutrition.
--- I make posts from fun mail and success stories. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
Today is Independence Day in the United States. The Declaration of Independence was drafted in June of 1776. Signing began by July. The paper itself didn't grant independence - work continued until independence came a few years later. After getting the idea to do something, the next thing is to take action. Here are ideas for a life free from things that are unhealthy - pain, unhealthful food, and exercises that reinforce bad habits:
Freedom from junk food:
Instead of soda, put a red sweet pepper in a food grinder. Cut about an inch of fresh ginger root and add through the grinder. In about 30 seconds preparation time you will have a sweet, cool, red, slushy drink with an exotic tang of ginger. Healthy and good tasting.
Instead of refined sugar sports drinks, put a peeled whole cucumber into the food grinder or low speed blender with a whole kiwi fruit. It will make a sweet, cool, slushy, green drink.
Instead of processed peanut butter and refined sugar jelly, put fresh raw nuts and apple slices into a grinder, mill, or chopper. In less than a minute of preparation time, you have a sweet nut butter that you can spread on fruit slices, carrots, and other good foods. Try walnuts, almonds, other fresh raw nuts, and experiment with different fruit combination to make different sweet creamy fresh nut butters.
Masses of products crowding store shelves claim to fix this and cure that. Millions of dollars are spent. The products seem dazzling, but much is hype and many produce unhealthy effects. Then more dollars are spent on more pills and products for the new problems caused by the medicines. Many prescribed medicines cause new problems that can be avoided. Stop the cycle and save yourself time, money, and unhappiness. If it is not healthy, it is not health care: Teen Dies After Using Muscle Soreness Rub Human Growth Hormone Is Your Health Food Unhealthful? Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures
Freedom from physical pain and injuries:
At the Special Operations Medical Association conference two years ago, it was released that 62% of our American injuries in Iraq are "Disease Non-Battle Injuries"(DNBI) - not from combat or supporting operations, but occurring in the gym. At the ACSM conference last month, a research study reported that their American military units had 17% DNBI injuries. I asked them how they kept their numbers so low. They replied that the number was for evacuations - injuries so serious they required removal from the base. Some of the most common exercise and stretching practices are not healthy. It is not that they are not good for some people or that they are overuse or done "wrong" - they are inherently bad movements. The same high injury rate is happening to fitness and yoga and Pilates instructors and students. I wrote about this in Welcome to the Fitness Fixer. Here are some specifics on why and what to do instead: Why So Many Aerobics Injuries? The Stretch You Need The Least Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch Safer Overhead Military Press Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
Abdominal crunches are a popular exercise, but they are not healthy. This is new and different information, I know. Crunches "work" your abdominal muscles, but not in a healthful or beneficial way, whether done sitting or standing or using a machine. Crunches also train rounded bad posture that you know is unneeded and unhealthy when sitting or standing that way in real life.
The idea that strengthening the abdominal muscles stops back pain is a myth. Many muscular people have pain. They do their crunches, then stand and move in the overly-arched spinal posture that is the hallmark sign that the abs are not even being used, and which creates one major kind of chronic pain: Fixing the Commonest Source of Mystery Lower Back Pain
The simple act of standing and doing all your activities and exercise without letting your lower spine overly arch, and instead keeping neutral spine, uses more abdominal muscle involvement than doing crunches:Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine.
The book No More Crunches No More Back Pain The Ab Revolution explains a healthier better way to use and exercise your abs (114 illustrations 124 pages). I have a number of copies of the new 3rd edition expanded to give to military personnel as gifts. Contact me to send one (free) to someone you know, to keep our guys healthy.
Independence is Healthy: This post included links to a few past posts about being free of unhealthy things. Click the labels below each post for more related posts. Keep the things you do, eat, and think healthy. If a medicine is not healthy, it is not health care. If an exercise trains injurious body mechanics, use the time for healthier exercises that are more fun. There are better, healthier ways. Be free.
I am attending the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). There are many hundreds of studies, seminars, clinics, workshops, lectures of all sorts, running concurrently. It is like drinking candy from a fire hose.
Dashing from one lecture to another in the enormous conference center trying to learn as much as possible from simultaneous sessions is exercise in itself.
Some of the "studies" predictably show glowing results. Studies funded or conducted by candy bar manufacturers show athletic gains from eating their candy bar. A study funded by the US Poultry Association concluded that dietary cholesterol may have a modest role in muscle mass and strength increases (and an "uncertain role on cardiovascular risk factors.") Studies from sugar water manufacturers, who are also major sponsors of this sports medicine conference, show high results in athletic events drinking their product. There is no doubt that hydration and blood sugar are enhanced from refined sugar products to complete athletic events with good results. Commenting professionally, I am not sold on these products for long-term health. Moreover, you can get the same results in most cases with healthier food. The post Is Your Health Food Unhealthful? gives some healthy food choice ideas. Click the label "nutrition" accompanying that post for all Fitness Fixer posts that give ideas for healthier sports nutrition.
One nice little study from University of Pittsburgh researchers showed that overweight adults who achieved higher levels of physical activity during a weight loss program also reported "adoption of eating behaviors recommended to improve weight loss." They also found that, "Failure to sustain physical activity reflects the failure to sustain recommended eating behaviors." The bottom line is still, "Stay active and eat right."
Another nice study from the Nutritional Interventions sessions found that, "Individuals at risk for developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) can reduce risk factors through diet and exercise before resorting to drug treatment," that, 'Ingesting vegetable versus animal protein has also been shown to have beneficial effects on various risk factors" and that "Participation in a 12 week resistance exercise training program significantly increased strength and decreased CVD risk factors in overweight, hypercholesterolemic men with no added benefit of protein supplementation." The bottom line is still, "Stay active and eat right."
The previous post mentioned I am writing from the meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). Yesterday the ACSM ran a blood drive at the conference center. At a blood drive, volunteers donate a small amount of (their own) blood; only a pint. Giving blood is a helpful simple thing to do. Your body will quickly make more and replace the small amount you give.
You can give as often as every two months. Seventy-nine-year-old Lillian Bloodworth from Florida has given 160 times, spread over 40 years. Just giving one time in your life still makes you a hero. The single pint you give can be used to save several sick, even dying, people of any age.
Before donating, donors are screened through questions to make sure they have not engaged in practices that make them more likely to have diseases spread through blood. These practices can be sexual, injecting drugs for recreation or bodybuilding, even receiving tattoos or piercings. A small blood screening is done to assure that you have enough blood iron to make donation safe for you. Then you lie down comfortably while they take the blood from a vein in the inside of your elbow. A good phlebotomist (venipuncturist, blood donation taker) makes the process painless. A common topic in sports medicine is low iron. Medical texts devote much attention to populations with lowered iron levels, considering it a bad thing. Just as important to consider is high blood iron level, which is one intriguing risk factor for cardiovascular disease. High iron levels have also been associated with unusual fatigue, and perhaps cancer. One, of many, reasons to cut back (or eliminate) red meat is high iron content. Conversely, premenopausal women who lose small monthly amounts of iron, and vegetarians and athletes have lower incidence of heart disease than the rest of the population. One of the factors is that these populations often maintain lower iron levels.
High iron is not only an issue with extreme levels, or a genetic disorder of iron metabolism, such as hemachromatosis. Raised iron level from dietary sources may raise cardiac risk, particularly in men who don't have the benefit of monthly blood loss. Understandably, people with iron levels that are too low are turned away from blood donation. Other people donate to benefit their own health by lowering blood iron.
Either way, it can be healthy and kind to donate blood.
Neolithic groups (stone age) worshiped the mother. Ancient Germans worshipped the virgin Hertha holding her child. Scandinavians worshipped virgin Disa holding her child. In ancient Egypt it was Isis with infant Osiris. In India, Devaki had Krishna (also by virgin birth). In Asia, Cybele and Deoius. Chinese holy mother Shing Moo held her child in arms. Christian missionaries to Tibet, China, and Japan found that holy mothers depicted with splendid light around their head and holding a divine child had been worshiped long before they got there.
In Rome, the goddess was Demeter, meaning Earth Mother, wearing wreathes of braided corn in her hair. In ancient Greece, Demeter was called Ceres, the great mother with baby at breast. From her name "Ceres," we get the word "cereal" (grains), "which made man different from wild animals."
In the spring in ancient Greece, celebrations were held in honor of Rhea, the Mother of the Gods. Christian Europe celebrated the spring festival of "Mother Church" who (they believed) would protect them from harm. During the 1600's, England celebrated "Mothering Sunday" on the 4th Sunday of Lent, honoring the mothers of England. All cultures worshiped the divine, the Mother, who gives life and food, compassion and love.
So. How to celebrate this Sunday on Mother's Day? I'm in favor of some goddess worship, probably involving some rocks and food and chocolates and compassion and love. Not so original, but time tested and universal:
Visit Mom (or a Mom) and give her a massage (if she wants one). Neck, hands, feet, back. Good for circulation for giver and receiver. Touch can be healthy. Ask her stories.
Make her (and you) something healthy to eat. For light teas, try cinnamon, cloves, grated orange peel, or ginger in hot water.
For a cold treat without unhealthy junk food, mash a frozen banana with crushed raw walnuts or flax seeds. Use a food grinder or get free exercise by mashing them yourself in a bowl. It will taste like creamy ice cream. Flax seeds and walnuts have been found to be effective to help bone health as vegetarian sources of omega-3 (n-3) fatty acids. Raw walnuts (as part of a general low fat and cholesterol diet) have also been found to have a beneficial effect to decrease cardiovascular disease risk, among other benefits. This treat has fiber and is non dairy, both associated with lower breast cancer risk.
Goddess worship often is helped with chocolate. The primary chemical in chocolate is theobromine. "Theo-" means God and "broma" comes from a word meaning food. The theobromine in chocolate was named for "food of the gods." Theobromine is an antioxidant, weak diuretic, stimulant, and mood booster, opens breathing airways, and relieves coughing. Dark chocolate has more theobromine than lighter chocolate, with flavonoids and phenolics, plant substances that are good for the heart. People who get a kind of vascular headache called migraine do better not to eat chocolate. For others, get plain cocoa, unsweetened, not junked up with sugar. Add the unsweetened cocoa to the frozen mashed banana and walnuts for a healthy sweet wonderful treat that tastes better than you would expect. For exotic flavor and more health benefit, add fresh grated ginger root.
Sit outside in the air and sun to have your tea and frozen banana. Warnings on the dangers of overtanning are important for preventing skin cancer for people who work outdoors, who over-tan for cosmetic purposes, and a few other populations. Another group to consider is those spending too little time outdoors. Sunlight exposure and the Vitamin D it makes your skin produce, is increasingly documented as crucial to bone density, healthy immune function, positive mood, sound sleep at night, relief of symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, MS, Parkinsons, polycystic ovary, diabetes, and other health issues. A nice massage and tea and chocolate outside in the sunlight could be made into a wonderful Mother's Day. Nice excuse to buy a hat.
Make Mom (or a Mom) some homemade healthy skin lotion. Commercial products have preservatives, dyes, and chemicals. Try combinations of grape seed oil, tea tree oil (very small amount), vitamins C and E, ginger, honey, tea, fresh aloe, and fragrances from oils, fruit, flowers like lavender, or leaves like mint. (Don't wear citrus oils like lime out in the sun.)
Help out at a woman and child shelter. Or help at a men's shelter to help the guys get back on their feet to help their own families.
Celebrate Mother Earth - go out and pick up litter. It's good exercise. Bend right.
Make a trip to look around a home improvement center to see about some do it yourself solar projects, even if only to replace a few lights.
On April 1st, I covered some fun fitness myths and how to change myth into healthier exercise. Today continues with more fun ways to get more exercise and reduce injury at the same time:
Heart Health
Myth - Anger has no health effects. Instead, turn contempt and anger for others to healthy dialog with: Healthier Heart.
Understanding How "Sticking Out in Back" Isn't Neutral Spine:
Then try Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine to visualize how you simply tuck enough to make the belt line level when standing, not tilted. A small inward curve in the lower back remains when you shift to neutral spine, but not large enough to cause degenerative pinching on the facet joints, the joints of the lower spine.
Myth - Pressing navel inwards to tighten abs is the way to strengthen your abs or fix your posture. Fact - tightening will not move your spine out of unhealthy position and it impedes normal fluid motion: Using Abdominal Muscles is Not Tightening or Pressing Navel to Spine.
Exercise Injuries
Myth - Exercise injuries are usually overuse and aging. Fact - Simple misuse is easily fixed: Why So Many Aerobics Injuries? and What is "Fitness as a Lifestyle?" A recent injury survey by US military revealed that 62% of American injuries in Iraq are occurring in the gym. Welcome to the Fitness Fixer tells more. Some top docs say the military press should be avoided. I think it is a functional exercise and can be done in ways without upper body injury: Safer Overhead Military Press.
Myth - surgery is necessary to avoid later problems. Fact - Studies have now found that is it not true that you necessarily risk future consequences if you do not have surgery. Surgery itself can be a source of later trouble: Fix Disc Pain Without Surgery and Studies Say Back Surgery Not Needed.
Myth - Vertebral discs just go bad without warning, from small provocations like a sneeze or reaching or from aging, so it doesn't matter what you do. The good news is that discs are not soft "jelly donuts" as often described. They are tough like truck tires. It takes years of the same, specific, problem to break them down and move them out of place. See the mechanism: Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix
Myth - knocks to the head are funny and harmless. In reality, long-term damage may be common and serious. This has far reaching implication for law enforcement, domestic violence, full contact sports, and extreme entertainment: Rocky IV and Head Injury.
Sitting and Back Pain:
It made headlines when researchers seemed to say that sitting up straight was wrong. Here is what they really meant: Don't Fall for "Don't Sit Up Straight."
"The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except which is worth knowing." - Oscar Wild
April 1 seems to be a day to notice, more than usual, if things in the news are not facts but April Fool. On other days, urban legends and other stories are still popular, sometimes more popular than what is really going on.
The observation that the Earth is flat seemed obviously true at one time until we had more information. It used to be a taught as a medical fact that the cause of epilepsy was masturbation. When I was in school, one of my medical books stated that you don't need to eat calcium since you can "get all you need from your bones." It is true that you pull calcium from your bones when you don't eat enough, although with unhealthy results.
The post Forensic Science told of two crime-science myths, often still taught in forensic books and popularized in television shows, which were never true. Following are more posts hoping to replace myth with information, so that you can get stronger and do more, without the injuries or restrictions in activity that are part of many fitness or injury rehab practices.
Actor Sylvester Stallone made news this week for being found with the drug Jintropin. Jintropin is a brand name for the drug growth hormone (GH).
Growth hormone is naturally made in the pituitary gland of your brain. It does several things, including stimulating protein to make muscle. Various bodybuilders and athletes get injections of synthetic growth hormone hoping to get bigger. Actors and models use growth hormone injections to look more muscular and lean, and some cosmetic procedure doctors promote it as a drug against various signs of aging. Growth hormone use is not yet detectable by drug testing.
In children, one function of growth hormone is to stimulate bone lengthening. When the pituitary doesn't produce enough, children don't grow enough, causing one form of dwarfism. Occasionally, with too much, a child can grow to a giant. An adult taking growth hormone will not increase long bone length, so cannot get taller. Instead the forehead, hands, feet, and jaw may elongate.
Growth hormone "doping" is expensive, and must be done for a long time before results occur. For bigger results, some bodybuilders and athletes combine, or "stack," growth hormones with anabolic steroids (body building hormones). Some users add the dangerous practice of injecting insulin in combination with growth hormone (and/or steroids) for bigger muscles, more veins showing, and the appearance of exceptionally thin skin, looking as if shrink-wrapped over the muscle (believed a desirable look by some). Insulin doping can cause serious, long-term illnesses.
Growth hormone use does not seem to cause the serious health problems produced by steroids (as far as known). Problems from GH can include joint pain, wrist pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, joint swelling, facial swelling, facial elongation, and increased blood pressure. Using large doses can decrease thyroid function and increase risk of diabetes. Sadly, users may think these are signs of aging, so they take more growth hormone believing it will stop this "aging." If the user already has cancer, it can increase growth of the tumor. Growth is what this hormone does. There is no need for too much of it.
Growth hormone is naturally produced in your body all your life. Older people produce less growth hormone, but they still produce it. Some advertising for GH tries to persuade that older people are somehow at a disadvantage without a lot. Remember that older people (above the age range of puberty) need less because they are not growing, although they still need enough for strength and tissue repair.
Aging alone is not what makes you not have enough growth hormone. Four main practices reduce your body's levels:
Lack of exercise. That makes sense, because without exercise your muscles, bones, and other tissues have no reason to rebuild; you aren't using them, after all.
High blood sugar from dietary sources - such as eating too much and eating junk food.
Already high levels. Your body reduces its growth hormone levels if it already has too much. Growth hormone stimulates your liver and other tissues to secrete "insulin-like growth factor-I" (IGF-I), which is the real factor behind most of the effects of growth hormone. Having high blood levels of IGF-I decreases secretion of growth hormone as a normal regulatory function.
Anti-inflammatory and immune-suppressive medicines called glucocorticoids (such as prednisone, dexamethasone, and hydrocortisone). Ongoing dosage with these can lead to osteoporosis, muscle weakness, delayed wound healing, and increased infection risk. This should be kept in mind by people taking them for injuries and pain.
How do you get more natural growth hormone in healthy amounts without side effects? Three main agents stimulate GH secretion:
Exercise. Getting exercise in healthful ways, described throughout Fitness Fixer blog posts, boosts GH at all ages.
Deep sleep. With good exercise, you will sleep well at night too.
Low levels of sugar in your blood. It is shown that both high fat and high refined-sugar diets increase blood sugar. It is not rocket science to eat less junk and more fruit and vegetables to be healthier and to lower high blood sugar.
Related Fitness Fixer: There is more to growth, metabolizing fat, or building muscle than taking hormones. Click these posts on safe "natural" training for a healthy muscular body:
My book Healthy Martial Arts has a chapter on performance enhancing foods and substances, good and bad, and chapters on effective fun exercise, stretch, and improvement for body and mind. Not just for martial artists, it is for everyone who wants to move in healthier ways.
We're just back from teaching the medical school elective in wilderness medicine. Each year I teach there, working over my birthday. Same food as last year. But the creek was thinly iced - good for ice swimming.
Before lecturing, I worried that my information on health - stand up straight, eat right, exercise, "and all that," would be so known and obvious to the bright young medical students that it would bore them. Instead, it was called, "Out of the box." When did health become out of the box?
I spent years of my career in a lab as a serious, intensely number-checking research scientist. I worked to ensure that we knew what truly worked, and what was hype, unrelated, or just wrong. I made certain that what I discovered and developed for patients was squarely right, practical, and in the best interest of the patient (and fun too, which is health). All I pursued was The Truth. Matt Cartmill once said, "As a youth I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life. So I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet women."
Why is bypass surgery, angioplasty, stents, obesity, diabetes, and medications with uncomfortable, unhealthful side effects considered normal, while eating a vegetarian diet is labeled wacky and extreme when it is medically documented to stop and prevent heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other prevalent conditions that rob people of joy in life?
In my diving medicine lectures, I wanted students to see how the information worked and how it relates to many things in and out of diving, not just dictate lists of conditions to memorize. I showed slides, asking them to identify why an accident would happen on the way down versus up and why. I told them that if they understood, they would not have to memorize. I just wanted them to think. As my father once enlightened me, "Jolie, you're asking a lot!"
In the orthopedic lectures, I taught the same principles I tell in this Fitness Fixer blog of gaining great physical improvements without making pain and injury in the first place. After one of my lectures, students scattered for personal time, while a few stayed in the lecture hall, bent over laptops. They sat hunched, rubbing sore shoulders. Eventually one nudged the other, "Get the doc, she's right here." After some indecision, one student asked me to give him stretches to fix the pain of working at the computer. I told him you can sit and work without getting pain in the first place, and why didn't I show him that, instead of a stretch as an "antidote." He protested that the computer made his neck hurt. I agreed that the way he was sitting would do that, and repeated that you can easily sit and work in a way that doesn't cause the pain in the first place. More protests came, that as students they had to work on the computer long hours.
Medicine is not supposed to consist of allowing bad things to happen so that you can do a cool procedure to try to reverse it. Readers, do you want to try what I showed him and get a free house-call right now?
I moved his chair in close to the table where he was working. Move yours in close now.
Standing behind him with my hands on his shoulders, I gently pulled his upper body up and back to rest against the chair back. At home you can feel me guide your shoulders and upper body back.
Next, keep the chin gently in, not jutting forward.
We moved his computer back from the front edge of the table to make room to rest his forearms while using the keyboard. If you use a "below-desk" keyboard tray, it is often better to move the keyboard back to the desk. Don't crane your wrists, making a new problem. Relax and breathe.
I told them that at my own desks, I raise computer on a shelf, block, or book about 10 inches higher than desk level, and use a cheap external keyboard. Even without these helpful changes, you don't have to round forward over a laptop.
The seat back of the lecture chairs were concave - shaped to curve like the letter "C" so that you sat rounded forward. This is a common problem in many chairs, even some called ergonomic chairs. Another of the students mentioned he had a commercial lumbar roll at home. It was expensive and he didn't use it much because it was uncomfortable. I showed them how to use a small soft roll, which can be your gloves or light sweater, nothing fancy or expensive. Nestle it in the small inward curve of the lower back, then press your upper back, not lower back, against the chair back so that you can sit straight and lean back, instead of rounding forward. Pressing the lower back against the lumbar roll is a common way to make it useless and uncomfortable.
It turned out that most of the young, active, outdoorsy, academically talented medical students had muscle and joint pain. So did many of the top ranked physician faculty. Several told me they thought their pain was normal from their activities, from studying, their fallen arches, or body structure. They regularly took anti-inflammatory medicines and thought they needed special shoes.
You probably heard not to slouch since you were a child. That easy medicine hasn't changed. You heard to eat vegetables for health and an apple a day to keep the doctor away. I think only a few of the medical students I was teaching caught on, and will help others with what they learned. It can be so easy. As for the rest? Who is the one who is out of the box?
Are you doing unhealthy sitting without realizing it, during work, play, and exercise?:
All-in-one resources for healthier pain free life:
Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery. Chapters on fixing each kind of pain plus patient stories in every chapter tell how things work, why, and why not.
Health & Fitness THIRD ed - How to Be Healthy Happy and Fit For The Rest of Your Life. Exercise, food, health, fixing pain, functional built-in healthy life, family, mental, it's all here.
Healthy Martial Arts. Top level book for any athlete or those who would like to be.
--- Questions come in by hundreds. I make posts from fun mail. Before asking more, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy. ---
Early tomorrow we're traveling to the Great Smokey Mountains of Tennessee to teach for a week at the Wilderness Medical Society medicine elective. I posted about the elective in December.
Last year we brought flashlights but no phone, as no cell signal got through there. Before arriving last year, I asked the medical director if we should pack in food. He said, "Not at all, the camp has its own chef." He told us there was plentiful vegetarian food. When we arrived, the breakfasts were sugared, packaged cereal, or sugared processed oatmeal packages, lunchmeats with greasy gloppy potato salad and fruit salad for lunch, meat loaf or other meat for dinner with small sides of vegetables soaked in fat. This is more than innutritious, it is harmful to health. There were many unfermented soy loafs and products. Unfermented soy, popular in protein powders, drinks, bars, and meat substitutes, is not turning out to be healthy as previously thought, and does not have the benefits of fermented soy products. Two previous posts, Is Your Health Food Unhealthy and Exercise is More Important Than Calcium Supplements for Bones explained that unfermented soy is known to slow the thyroid and has estrogen-promoting qualities - increasingly documented to contribute to estrogen-dependent tumors like fibroids, cystic ovary, breast cysts, and endometriosis. Hundreds of thousands of women annually have needless, serious, and painful surgery for conditions they might alleviate by avoiding estrogenic foods and the numerous "women's" supplements sold in "health" food stores. There were plenty of cookies, cakes, and muffins, coffee, and, in fairness, a bowl of fruit.
We were surprised that a medical education program would serve unwholesome food. Should we have been surprised? At the several medical conferences I attend every year, the breakfasts and meals at functions and meetings are bacon or sausage (these are not helpful protein sources; they do more damage than good), cheese Danish, and other junk food. The fruit is served covered with sugar and cream or as a small side. The only vegetables are the decorations. "Break-out" snacks are confections, candy bars, and ice cream. I was once on a committee that decided and promoted national health policy. The box lunches were ham, cheese, and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread (or processed flour wraps) with a wisp of something green sticking to it, a bag of potato chips, a package of cookies, and a can of soda. I inquired one time about it and was told by the people in charge that it was "perfectly healthy and contained greens." At another conference, I was told they once tried to have healthful food, but were threatened by their physician members with reduced enrollments if they did. These are the physicians and health providers you go to, to safeguard your health. But, they are of the old generation and times have changed, haven't they?
At the Wilderness elective last year, I went believing that the young, "hip," privileged medical students had grown up with all the right information. I queried one student there about the food, and he replied without hesitation that it was no different from what he ate at home because healthy eating, "was too expensive and too time consuming and you need too many special pots and pans to cook that weird healthy stuff." I was taken aback by his misinformation. Several medical students agreed that they couldn't be expected to eat right with their difficult schedules, and that healthful food tastes terrible. Most had candy bars and bags of chips in their packs, or fancy "energy bars," which truthfully, are little more than candy (with unfermented soy and some synthetic vitamins) not the health products that advertising wants us to believe. I always thought that people know what is bad and would be embarrassed if anyone knew they did bad things. But the students didn't know it was unhealthy and flaunted their bad habit. These are the next generation of doctors who will make decisions about your health? Or prescribe drugs and surgery for things they don't know are from bad eating habits?
Our job there as their teachers is to give them information and open doors of insight. But their mind was set, and they did not want to hear how to have easy, inexpensive, and good-tasting healthful food (without needing special pots and pans).
I went to the director, a friend and sensible man, with the great idea to teach a healthful eating course at the next elective. He told me the students wouldn't be interested. I offered the idea to just change the menus to beneficial food at each meal, to live what they learn. The director smiled and told me they had a hard enough time getting enrollments and didn't want anything to decrease numbers. I said, "Don't tell them it's healthy food ahead of time." He winked, "Word would get out!"
I will let you know what happens this year with the students. We're bringing vegetables, fruit, onions, and spices for ourselves. If you're interested in how to make easy, inexpensive, fast, and good-tasting food, see the book Healthy Martial Arts. The interesting information I will be lecturing about this week on diving physiology and hyperbarics, is also on web site books page.
Stomach Acid Drugs Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Healthline
A study from the University of Pennsylvania reported in the BBC News found that taking a class of drugs that reduce stomach acid, called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs), for at least a year increased risk of hip fracture by 44%. Taking the drugs for longer periods further increased risk. Proton pump inhibitors include Nexium, Prilosec, Prevacid, Zoton, Inhibitol, and others.
The study needs more work and questions remain, but this is not a surprising finding. The common practice of using proton pump inhibitors, as well as ordinary antacids, has long been identified in accepted studies to reduce calcium absorption.
Taking acid-reducing medicines contributes to other problems as well. You need stomach acid for health. Stomach acid is necessary to kill unhealthy germs and food-borne infection. Low stomach acid allows infectious organisms to grow in your system. Acid suppression is a known risk factor for traveler's diarrhea and other gastrointestinal illnesses. Although acid suppression is commonly used to treat ulcers, the resulting lack of stomach acid encourages overcolonization of the bacteria Helicobacter pylori that is associated with ulcers. H. pylori is not all bad, and has important functions in your system. But using acid suppression with H. pylori colonization present seems to be linked with an increase in the progression to gastric cancer.
What can you use for your stomach instead of acid-reducing medicines?
Pain, reflux, and constant burping are often a sign of low acid, not high acid. Drink a little apple cider vinegar in water and sprinkle balsamic vinegar, wine vinegar, or other vinegar that you prefer in your food.
Clinical trials indicate that the "good" yeasts and bacteria called probiotics in fermented food like sauerkraut and kimchi help control several diseases, such as reflux, ulcerative colitis, and irritable bowel.
Cabbage has been found in studies to be an effective antibacterial for stomach ulcers associated with Helicobacter pylori.
Broccoli sprouts have been found to specifically control H. pylori.
It is established in scientific studies in standard Western medicine that several spices have bacteria-inhibiting properties. Seasoning food with raw crushed garlic, onions, and fresh ginger root may inhibit strains of Helicobacter, E. coli, Staphylococcus, and Streptococcus, without harming beneficial digestive bacteria.
Garlic, allspice, and oregano have been found to have action against "bad" bacteria, followed by thyme, cinnamon, tarragon, and cumin.
Capsicum, such as chilies and other hot peppers, have moderate antimicrobial action. White and black pepper, ginger, anise seed, celery seed, and lemon and lime juice follow.
Researchers at the University of Kansas found garlic, cloves, cinnamon, oregano, and sage kill E. coli.
Use ginger root to sooth stomach pain, rather than medicines.
To reduce risk of osteoporosis:
Stop smoking.
Avoid drinking large amounts of alcohol.
Stop drinking colas. The high phosphorus content in both regular and diet colas are not good for your bones.
Avoid agents that reduce calcium absorption, such as antacids, and eating animal protein
Don't crash diet. Rapid weight loss is shown to lower hip bone density.
Check for wheat intolerance. People with Celiac, which is an autoimmune reaction to the protein in wheat, have higher rates of osteoporosis.
To build bone, stay active. Sedentary people lose bone even if they supplement with calcium. Exercise is the stimulus for bones to use the calcium. Get outside in the sunlight (sanely) for the several benefits of sublight not available in pills and supplements. Get fun movement and exercise outside, at least a little every day.
To build bone in your upper back and wrist (two of the three principal sites of osteoporosis):
People with muscle and joint pain are frequently put on over-the-counter or prescription anti-inflammatory medicines. Several of these hurt the stomach lining. Acid-reducing medicines are often added to try to counter this problem. Along with the problems that acid suppression medicines can produce, a common, under-recognized side effect of acid suppression medicines is achy muscles and joints.
If stopping pain and helping your bones are New Year's Resolutions, reduce or stop the need for taking anti-inflammatories for joint pain by learning the healthy joint mechanics given throughout this blog. Often when people stop taking both their anti-inflammatories and stomach acid medicine, they feel better than when they were taking both together. You can stop your pain without medicine, then stop the need for the medicines so that your stomach, and your joints, can heal.
Related:
Nutrition for stomach, bones, and health for everyone, in the book Healthy Martial Arts.
Click labels under this post for more on each topic.
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. Why not try fun stuff, then contribute! Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certified - DrBookspan.com/Academy.
Readers have been e-mailing me to ask what supplements to buy for holiday presents to get muscular and slim. This post will cover a bit about protein supplements for exercising.
Advertising for protein supplement products wants you to believe that eating more protein builds muscle and causes you to lose more fat. Neither is true. When you exercise more, you use a small amount more protein than when you are not exercising. It takes very little protein to build more muscle. Most of the rest of muscle weight is water. Drinking extra water also will not build more muscle. All you need to do is healthy exercise. On an average Western diet, you do not use all the protein you eat, even when exercising hard and lifting weights. You break down unused protein, excrete the byproducts, and store the extra calories eaten as fat.
Protein supplements made with whey, dairy, and unfermented soy are a major cause of a bloated uncomfortable gastrointestinal tract. (Unfermented soy also is also increasingly being found unhealthy, and recommended to be limited.) Many protein supplements have sweeteners like sorbital and corn syrup, which produce more painful gas. More serious, high protein diets contribute to several major health problems. Eating high protein is long known to be a contributing factor in reduced bone density and osteoporosis. Animal protein, including the animal protein in dairy, increases urinary calcium loss. New studies are showing that high protein diets may increase risk of cancer and shorten life span.
Good quality protein is available without meat, dairy, or supplement powders. Try oats, brown rice, beans, lentils, sesame seeds, nuts, chickpeas, muesli, peas, seaweed, kelp, brewers yeast, hummus, tahini, and spirulina. These have protein, antioxidants, many nutrients, and fiber. It is not true that you need to carefully mix specific foods in each meal to get complete proteins from vegetables, grains, and legumes. Proteins combine on their own in the body over the day of eating a variety. It is another food myth that you must avoid eating protein with starch (carbohydrate), or not eat one food group in combination with others. Nutrients usually work better together.
You can build much strength and muscle without eating any supplements or high protein diets. I will post more about "fitness" supplements. In short, save your money. Just do honest exercise in healthy ways. You will be healthier and wiser and look great. Take the money you save and make a real gift of the season by donating to impoverished areas or going to a shut-in neighbor and doing their vacuuming. That is the spirit of the season and fitness as a lifestyle together.
Photo model - Paul Plevakas, vegetarian athlete, who uses the natural exercise in my books and on this blog. This copyright photo is on the cover of the book Healthy Martial Arts.
Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Healthline
Martial arts class fell on Halloween night this year. Would students pay lip service to health and discipline in class then go out eating unhealthy junk?
The festival of Halloween, Samhain (pronounced "saow-in") or Summer's end, Hallotide, Saint's day eve (All Hallows Eve), Day of the Dead, and a month earlier as Babye Leto in chilly Russia, is supposed to remember and revere (or at least appease) the ancestors and Saints. The idea wasn't to glorify gore or sickness (or merchandising), but think of those who are gone, just as the life of summer is gone, and thank the last harvests before the coming Winter. Gifts of food, lights, and effigies of those passed on decorate houses and streets.
My students have been learning that self-discipline is a voluntary exercise. To have inner peace, you just stop tensing your body and saying rude things. To stop slouching, you just use your own muscles to move your spine to healthy position. There is no special exercise to strengthen you to do it; you use your muscles to sit and stand straight and that gives you the exercise. There is no special exercise to be able to do the vigorous moves we do in class. You just keep moving and trying, without stopping and without complaining, and that gives you the strength. This week when I came in to teach, students were sitting quietly and comfortably straight. Their equipment was ready and neat. Since class began in September, several quit smoking, at least the day before and of class, to be able to get through class. Two students told me they had stopped binge-and-purge eating because they could not do class as well when they did, even though they had always done it for exercise classes before. They realized a better body and spirit came more from all we do in class than from an eating disorder. Others stopped eating junk because they want to be healthier, and to practice having control instead of acting on every impulse.
Sometimes, people think that training in martial arts means whoever can beat up others the most, or be the most destructive, is the best. The kneeling Zen story before class last night was the story of who is the true master:
Two wizards met on the mountaintop to see who was the greater. The first one shouted, "I control the sun. At the wave of my hand, it burns away all I see. I control the seas. I control the rivers. At my bidding, waves drown villages and destroy crops. I control the beasts of all the worlds to tear apart any who annoy me." He looked at the other wizard and said, "So, what do you do?" The second wizard said, "I eat only when I am hungry. I drink only when I am thirsty. I don't take in anything harmful."
It was clear that the second wizard was the true master - the master of himself. In class, students stayed disciplined to learn rapid hand strikes and jumping kicks. After class I had bags for them of oranges and apples, notepads to write thoughts, sprouted mung beans to mix in snacks, some walnuts to crack for hand strength. When they walked outside in the dark and cold, they seemed to glow like harvest candles, standing straight with warmth and cheer from their hard work.
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Most people know junk food when they see it at Halloween, coming next week. Would you recognize it in disguise now? In gyms and fitness centers, I see people buying expensive exercise foods and drinks advertised for "health" and "energy" that are not healthful. Here are four things to check, with more in coming posts:
Many "energy" and workout foods are high calorie. The sport science definition of calories is energy. That does not mean calories make you energetic. If you are calorie deficient you will feel weaker. More calories than you need will not make you stronger or able to exercise more. A 400 calorie workout then eating a 200 calorie sports bar and a 200 calorie energy drink plus regular meals will result in weight gain not loss.
Next, many bars and drinks are little more than unhealthful candy - refined sugar, fillers, dyes, hydrolyzed proteins, unhealthy fats, and some synthetic vitamins. Eating them does not make you healthy just because they have the words "natural," "healthy," "vitamins," or "exercise" on the label. You would get more vitamins and health from eating a pear and some walnuts. Some that are labelled "low-carb" are high in unhealthy transfat and hydrogenated fat. Many products labelled "low-fat" or "no-fat" have much junk refined sugar. Junk fats and sugars damage your health over the long term. There is nothing you need to eat that has high fructose corn syrup. Both junk food and "health food" low carbohydrate products can have sugar substitutes like sorbital that can make you bloated and gassy.
Third, many powders, drinks, and bars have unfermented soy, which does not have the benefits of fermented soy, and in large amounts can slow the thyroid and may have estrogen-promoting qualities. People with tendency to estrogen-dependent tumors like fibroids, cystic ovary, and endometriosis probably want to avoid these products.
Fourth, watch for stimulants in exercise foods, often caffeine, guarana, ephedra, ginseng, ma huang and others. You don't need them to exercise or lose weight. Many exercisers take them, plus energy pills, diet pills, and their usual coffee and espresso. A cycle starts of needing them to avoid feeling weary and headachy. Nervousness, anxiety, inability to concentrate by day and sleep at night, and irregular heart beats can occur. Then over-the-counter or prescription medicines to try to stop those effects? That's not health.
Make healthier, less expensive sports drinks by putting an apple, banana, grapes, or other fruit, with nuts, a green pepper, and clean water in a blender, grinder, food processor, mixer, or just mash them in a bowl. Add any combination of unsweetened cocoa powder, cinnamon, cloves, ginger root, sesame seeds, and healthy items for flavor. When baking Halloween treats, there is no need to add any sugar. Use mashed fruit. Instead of shortening, use a cooked sweet potato and ground flax seeds or walnuts. Instead of icing, mash apples (no cooking needed) for a topping as sweet as any sugar or syrup, and a better habit for the long run. Get more ideas on our food blogger's Candy Free Halloween Treats (and Tricks) and on The NYTimes opinion page today for commentary on making the change to healthier food thinking.
Exercise your brain and be able to spot foods marketed for health and exercise that are unhealthy foods in disguise.
See an entire chapter on making good tasting, easy health food for exercise and a chapter on performance enhancing supplements, drugs, and food in the book Healthy Martial Arts.
A Little Good Exercise, a Lot of Bad Food - Overweight Still No Mystery
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Healthline
A recent study in Great Britain found that exercise alone won't prevent childhood obesity. They concluded that changing unhealthy eating is needed too. The study has an important message, and, as one of my patients who works an engineer building spacecraft engines would say, "This isn't rocket science."
The children in the exercise group in the study didn't get as much exercise as recommended. They still received several health benefits of exercise plus important motor skills. They didn't lose weight because they were eating more calories than they burned.
More calories makes more weight. An easy way to improve weight and health at the same time is to stop eating junk. It is called junk for a reason. Don't give children soda or diet soda any more than you would give them cigarettes. People say, "You have to let them have a little fun," or, "If I don't let them have a little, they will want it more." Would you say the same about heroin? Antifreeze tastes sweet too but we teach children not to drink it because it is harmful. Talk to them. Teach them there is a better way. Set an example of exercising strength by putting away the cookies and shakes. Don't eat the 1000-calorie bag of chips. Do fun exercise with them like catch, skip rope, tumbling, and fun games you make yourself.
Remember that children can't wait to run away from the table to play, but are made to have the bad habit of sitting still and eating everything on their plate. Don't make them hold still when they can run. These common practices teach them to be sedentary overeaters who have too much pent up energy to concentrate in school or sleep at night. Let them jump and play after dinner instead of sitting in front of a television. Tell them how happy you are to be together. Sing and smile together while they help you around the house. That is fitness and health as a lifestyle.
Many people say they don't have money to eat healthful food, then spend the same money and more on junk food, supplements, "calming" drugs, and "energy" drinks. Put the money in a jar and exercise instead, and you can lose weight and feel calm plus feed the poor. Sports drinks with refined sugar and stimulant compounds are not healthy for everyday life or for exercise. Eat a banana instead. It is not more time consuming or difficult to steam or sauté in balsamic vinegar and spices instead of fry. You don't need to buy a steamer; use any pot. You can throw vegetables in the pot in the same time it takes you to heat a can of processed soup with too much salt, fillers, unhealthy fats, sweeteners, and little fibre or vitamins left after processing. Future posts will show how to make your own exercise drinks and bars, and how to have healthy exercise with kids (and elder parents). Fitness as a lifestyle means exercising your brain and sensibilities to live and move in happy, simple, uplifting ways for real health.
--- Read success stories of these methods and send your own. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
Metabolism as you get older is not the culprit with much weight gain. Think of all the people who are eating more than in past years, exercising less, doing less, sitting around more, and eating junk food and soda. They gain weight and say the reason is that their metabolism slowed because they got older.
That fact that you burn fewer calories when you decrease activity can be twisted by clever product advertising as "slower metabolism." Don't fall for it. Find fun, healthy things you like to do and start them again to get the increase in metabolic calorie burning that comes with activity.
Don't fall for pills and supplements advertised to increase metabolism and therefore promote weight loss. Some contain stimulating compounds that increase heart rate or other functions. That is not helpful or healthy for your body. Many people feel stimulated and happy on these products, and don't notice the nervousness, anxiety, inability to focus, moodiness, difficulty falling asleep at night, and depression that also often occurs. A more serious cycle starts when people take other drugs to try to stop these symptoms. Then more drugs when the first drugs upset their stomach. Exercise will improve mood and increase your metabolism for weight loss more safely without the negative effects of stimulants and medicines.
Several devices, pills, and patches claim to burn calories or fat while you sleep or watch television. They can claim that because you always burn calories and fat when you sleep or watch television. That is how you stay alive. It is not because of the pill or the machine.
Eating food raises metabolism. The increase comes because your body has to do something extra – digestion. You still gain calories from the food and can gain weight if you eat more calories than you burn. Watch out for advertising that exploits the fact of the "thermogenic" (heat producing or calorie burning) effect of food. The effect is small compared to the calories you have eaten.
Some devices and pills claim to increase metabolism even after exercise ends. They can claim that because all exercise does that - with or without the device or pill. Exercise raises metabolic levels. It takes time after stopping exercise to return to resting level.
Live a healthy active life. Get outside and play. Move, bend properly (Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix), and stretch as part of your everyday life (What is "Fitness as a Lifestyle?"). Get up now and walk away from the computer to take a break, breathe, stretch arms overhead, move, look up at the sky, and smile. The average amount of money spent on diet products that don't work is saddening. Every time you want to spend on them, put the money in a jar and go do something active instead, even if it is just dusting or gardening. Lift weights, including your own body, to regain the muscle you need for metabolic rate (How Good Would You Look From 400 Squats a Day - Just Stop Unhealthy Bending). Muscle loss from sitting around is often confused with aging. You will burn some calories, keep your joints moving, feel better, and save enough to give to the poor with enough left for a vacation.
--- Read and contribute your own success stories of these methods. Before asking questions, see if your answers are already here - click labels under posts, links in posts, archives at right, and the Fitness Fixer Index. For answers to personal medical questions - Replies to Medical Questions. Subscribe to The Fitness Fixer, free. Click "updates via e-mail"(under trumpet) upper right. See Dr. Bookspan's Books, take a Class, get certifiedDrBookspan.com/Academy.
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Thank you to Paul & Aline for this photo from Creative Commons
Exercise is More Important Than Calcium Supplements for Bones
Monday, September 18, 2006
Healthline
A study making recent news concluded that taking calcium supplements does not do much to reduce bone fractures in childhood or later life. The study did not cover all reasons, but it does not stand alone. Studies over many years show that bone density depends on more than eating calcium. Calcium loss occurs through smoking, drinking too much alcohol and soda, lack of exercise, and eating animal protein. A young person can thin their bones through bad habits to the equivalent of an elderly person.
Bone density when you are older depends on what you are doing now. Sedentary lifestyle is a major risk for osteoporosis and fractures. Exercise thickens bones from the muscles pulling on them. Without exercise, you can lose bone density no matter how much calcium you eat. Without exercise, you "pee" the calcium you eat back out. You need to give calcium a reason to stick on your bones.
Even if you are a young man you need to build bone now. Osteoporotic hip and spine fractures are a major cause of illness and death for both women and men. One in eight men over age 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture, greater than his risk of prostate cancer. The death rate in the year following a hip fracture is nearly twice as high for men as for women.
Research in elder populations shows ability to increase bone density with exercise. Weightlifting is often mentioned as needed. People think they need to go to a gym or buy hand weights for home use. Weightlifting includes lifting groceries, children, and packages around the house. Weight-resisting activity includes moving, pulling, and lifting your own body weight. You can load your upper leg at the hip, a major site of osteoporosis, by bending right using your legs for all the many times you need to bend every day. Go to Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix for tips. Future posts will show more bone building exercise from daily activities.
Several vitamins and minerals in fruit and vegetables help bone density. Calcium also needs vitamin D to work. Sunlight is an often forgotten source. Sunlight is necessary for your immune system, bones, mood, and overall health. There are some who say there is no safe sun exposure. Balance your time of exposure to reduce risk of cataracts and skin cancer. Get out of your chair and get outside in the sunshine for exercise every day.
To many people, fitness means stopping your "real life," changing clothes, driving somewhere else, and doing uncomfortable things without similarity to movement in daily life. Then they go back to "real life" - slouching, bending wrong, walking heavily, sitting rounded, leaning back to carry packages, taking elevators, and avoiding movement.
At the gym, people do squats with a trainer, paying to learn proper form and upright back, then bend over wrong to put the weight down when they’re finished. They do proper lunges for their legs in exercise class, then bend over wrong without using their legs to pick up their things when they leave. They work with weights to isolate arms but never learn how their entire body stabilizes a weight, then hurt their back opening a window at home. They work on a treadmill or elliptical trainer but sprain their ankle when out walking because they haven't trained balance and stabilization. They sit hunched in bad posture waiting for exercise class to start. In modern life, exercise is something you go and specially "do," then destroy and ignore your health the other 23 hours a day. Fitness has become “fast food” – stripped of value, sweetened up, and mass produced, even when unhealthy.
Changing your real life into healthy movement is a big and inspiring area of rethinking and retraining. Instead of sitting slouched then stopping to stretch because your back hurts, sit and stand well so that you do not get stiff and sore in the first place. Instead of lifting packages, babies, groceries, laundry, and everything else wrong all day, then stopping to do back exercises because your back hurts, lift properly. I will show you exactly how in posts to come. You will get built-in exercise, strengthen your knees, and save your back. You don’t need to go to a gym; move, balance, and reach in healthy ways in order to do your real life. Instead of thinking you must stop your life to get health and exercise, fill your life with built-in healthy movement.
Photo: National Cancer Institute, Linda Bartlett (photographer)
A recent injury survey by US military revealed that 62% of American injuries in Iraq are occurring in the gym. The same is happening at home. How can this be? Several things are happening. Just as not every medicine is healthy, not all exercises and stretches are healthy.
Just as smoking "works" for weight loss, but is not a smart or healthy way to do it, many exercises "work" for cosmetic results, but result in long-term injury, and promote bad movement habits. Other common exercises don't work your body the way you need to move in real life, resulting in strains and injuries when going about daily activities.
This Fitness Fixer blog will show you hundreds of simple ways to change your exercises, stretches, and daily movement, to make them fun, healthy, and the way you really need to move for healthier daily life. In my laboratory research in human physiology, and my sports medicine clinical practice, I see patients every day who are hurting and unhappy, despite all the exercise and fitness they do. Many of my patients are yoga teachers and Pilates teachers with back pain, hip pain, and neck pain. I see personal trainers with herniated discs and knee pain. I see body builders with back pain, despite all the abdominal exercises they do. I see patients, including fitness instructors, who aren't getting more flexible no matter how much stretching they do. I see people who are stressed, tired, achy, and not in shape, even though they spend hundreds of dollars a month on supplements and pills, gizmos, equipment, trainers, and classes. The answers are simple, and this regular column will cover many easy changes you can make so that your fitness becomes not only more effective, but fun and healthy.
Photo by Jolieof Paul who does real life not gym exercise
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