Chia's Tip of the Day
Want a simple but effective exercise you can do anywhere with no equipment?
I call it "air jump rope," and you simply go through the motions of jumping rope - but without a jump rope. Seriously: I use it in hotel rooms when traveling to work up a mild sweat and get some simple exercise with no equipment and no trip to the gym.
Health Tip of the Week: the calcium myth.....go easy on that protein
(excerpted from Robert O. Young The PH Miracle)
Robert O. Young in his The pH Miracle book. Here is his answer. What about Calcium?
(In response to cutting out dairy products & calcium supplementation.)
We get asked this question a lot. It is true that calcium is vital for many functions in the body, but the current rage for getting huge doses of the mineral through large quantities of dairy products daily as well as supplements is based in faulty understandings of how the body uses it. Many people worry totally unnecessarily that if milk products are eliminated, their diet will leave them deficient in calcium.
The fact is that all leafy, green vegetables and grasses are inherently high in calcium (as well as iron, magnesium, vitamin C, and many of the B vitamins, but thats another story), as are celery, cauliflower, okra, onions, green beans, avocado, black beans, garbanzo beans (chickpeas), tofu, almonds, hazelnuts, and sesame seeds.
In short, you get plenty of calcium with a diet that looks like the one described in this book. When were asked about where we get our calcium, we often answer with a question of our own: Where does a cow get hers?
It is also important to evaluate how much calcium you really need to keep your bones and body healthy. To do so, you must understand that one of the things calcium does in the body is neutralize the acid created by eating animal protein.
When you eat these acidic foods, the body tries to return to its alkaline state the only way it can by withdrawing calcium from your bones if there isnt enough on hand in the food it self to do the job. Your kidneys also rob your bones in order to eliminate the excess nitrogen found in animal protein.
The current recommendation for 1,000 mg. a day of calcium and more assume an average American diet which consists of 1.5 to 4 times as much protein as necessary, creating an unnatural demand for calcium. Many experts blame the seeming epidemic of the bone-weakening disease osteoporosis on this protein overdose. It isnt really a lack of calcium at all!
Or rather, it is a calcium-robbing problem, not a calcium-deficiency problem. We need to stop worrying about not getting enough calcium and pay attention instead to not getting too much protein. In the meantime, were living the irony that getting plenty of calcium-rich dairy products can actually leave us with a negative calcium balance by the time all that protein is buffered.
Source: The pH Miracle, Robert O. Young, Warner Books, 2002.
Regards in health & fitness,
Chia
Fitness and Lifestyle Coach/A.C.E. Certified Personal Trainer
Tip of the Week: Fitness Tip
Steady state cardiovascular exercise actually teaches your body to STORE fat, for the next time you do that same walk or bike ride again. To not have this occur, and you have a good base of fitness, do intervals of undulating intensity. Sort of like youre walking up and down hills. For one minute your heart rate may go higher, then the next minute you recover at an easy pace. Consult your Doctor before exercising if you haven't done so.
Those who dont make time for exercise will surely have to make time for their Doctors! Just move!
Health Tip of the Week: Regarding Nutrition
Eat food, mostly plants...not too much....also, try to consume at least 80 % of your food raw to retain the raw, living enzymes.
Chia's Tip of the day
If you're using olive oil for pan-frying foods, remember this: In Mediterranean cooking, they add the olive oil after the cooking, not before! This avoids exposing the olive oil to high temperatures which denatures the oils and creates health-harming chemical compounds. (Any oil that's cooked at high temperatures becomes less healthy.).... except coconut oil.
The Amazing Benefits of Coconut Oil:
I want to briefly discuss the amazing health benefits of coconut oil.
Coconut oil is rich in lauric acid, which converts in your body to monolaurin. Monolaurin is the actual
compound found in breast milk that strengthens a babys immunity. Lauric acid present in coconut oil
protects against AIDS, flu and various allergies. Interestingly, the only other source of lauric acid in
the entire world is mothers milk.
The popular misconception about coconut oil is that it contains saturated fats that lead to obesity and
heart problems. However, coconut oil contains medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) or triglycerides that
are instantly absorbed by our body and turned into energy. These fats are burned easily as the body i
mmediately converts them into fuel. Over 50% of Americans are overweight. One of the paramount
benefits of coconut oil lies in its ability to stimulate your metabolism.
Back in the 1930s, Dr. Weston Price (a dentist) traveled throughout the South Pacific, examining
traditional diets and their effect on dental and overall health. He found that those eating diets high
in coconut products were healthy and trim, despite the high fat concentration in their diet.
Then in the 1940s, farmers found out (by accident) that when they tried using inexpensive coconut oil to
fatten their livestock, it didnt work! Instead, coconut oil made the animals lean! Since then, many animal
and human research studies have demonstrated that replacing long chain fatty acids (LCFAs) with MCFAs results in both decreased body weight and reduced body fat percentage. So, by changing the fats in your diet from the unsaturated LCFAs found in vegetable or seed oils to the MCFAs in coconut oil, you will lose weight! Yes, you heard me right! Eating coconut oil will help you lose weight!
My wife, Charlene, makes FANTASTIC and HEALTHY french fries with coconut oil. She also makes some mean fried green tomatoes. Since coconut oil doesn't change chemically when heated, it's actually healthy to fry foods in this amazing oil.
Did you know that the music you listen to affects your physiology?
Angry heavy metal music causes a neurological imbalance and can actually make you more stressful and angry. Ambient music or classical baroque musical scores can actually lower your stress and improve your body's healing response.
Music has well established psychological effects on moods and emotions. Think about that.
We already know this if even subconsciously. If music did not have a physiological effect on our body and mind, marches would be played at bedtime and not at the half-time of football games. Lullabies would be heard at parades and Gregorian chant would bombard our ears at the grocery store.
Want to know more? Here is the scientific answer to how music affects our physiology and our psychology.
When our level of consciousness changes from waking to sleeping, the electrical activity of our brains changes as well. If one induces a sleeping pattern in the brain by drugs or other means, the behavior goes along. Music can have an influence in the same way.
To begin to understand the power of music on our bodies and brains, we need to consider some physiology.
The brain sends and receives messages from the rest of the body every minute, second and fraction of a second. As for the receiving side of things, the brain gets information from our senses -- vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, etc. But there is another major source of input to our brainsour bodily hormones. These are secreted by our endocrine system and include hormones, like testosterone and estrogen, and a group called "stress" hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol.
There are several studies that have addressed the issue of whether music itself actually changes the amount of release of our stress hormones. Most of these have concentrated on measuring levels of cortisol before and after various exposures to music.
The studies start with attempts to reduce cortisol levels, or more specifically to prevent increased release of this stress hormone, in conjunction with a traumatic experience. Without going into the entire scientific research, the answer was YES. Music can greatly reduced the duration of the cortisol response to stress. What does this mean? It means that listening to the right kind of music can prevent you from getting stressed or anxious by lowering the bodys response to stress hormones.
We already self-select music but often without an understanding of how or why certain music affects them in a particular way. If a selection of music produces certain signs of stimulation of the autonomic nervous system, like increased respiration and heart rate, the we could be "self-dosing" with increased levels of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones. For example, runners will choose a song with an upbeat tempo that innately helps them keep their pace while exercising. Exercising to music can increase the level of endurance by up to 30%!
Ask yourself, if music has all this affect on your own body and brain, and you are transmitting this to your horse, how important is choosing the right music for you and your horse to ride to?
