As Michael Caine once said “Not a lot of people know this, but if you control your insulin, you control your weight…and I’m a nosey neighbour”. I’m pretty sure he said that anyway.
I realise now that so many people still don’t understand how the body works and therefore how their choice of ‘healthy’ foods affects their weight loss programs. Smart people are still of the understanding that if they cut back on their eating and eat less fatty foods then that will solve their problems. It’s a terrible idea and lets put a stop to it right now, train your body to run on fat rather than carbohydrates - do this by NOT eating and drinking grains and carbohydrates and DO eat healthy fats and vegetables instead. The body is designed to work at its best in a particular way but largely we don’t let it do that, instead we CONSTANTLY force our body to process foods that cause us short term and long term problems. Like you know that eating spicy food will make you sweat like a fury but your not quite sure what causes your bloating feeling after dinner, the headaches, the skin allergies, the asthma, the lack of energy or motivation, the mood swings, the sore feet, the achy joints, etc, etc, etc. These are side effects of unhealthy eating and the things that actually bring you down after a while. Even if you’ve learnt to live with them up till now, subconsciously its still eating away at you and influencing your behaviour – say when the kids are playing up and you react badly, or when you snap back at a work workmate. Its all tied together man and we have to dig deep and understand where these issues are coming from before we can make them right. When you eat carbs (glucose) your body creates insulin which allows the glucose to go where it can be used like muscles, brain but then puts the rest into storage as fat. EXPAND Looking good = feeling good. Control your insulin = control your weight AND minimises many other serious health issues. Eating heathy fat = satisfied eating AND weight loss AND helps your body function naturally. Eat and drink WAY less sugar and carbs = less inflammation within the body and less unexplained side effects. Michael Caine again “Now, Suzie from number 3 lost 12 pounds just by cutting out sugar and carbs from her diet, now she looks and feels amazing – I bet a lot of you didn’t know that either”. I’ve tried tying all this together with a flow diagram that you can visualise later when your driving or something…actually hopefully your walking instead because that’s another important point to make, we need to move around a lot more to help weight loss and also help calm the mind, also never drive and read flow diagrams. Feel down or depressed due to – feel fat, don’t look good, don’t feel well, lack of energy, have unexplained headaches, pain, rashes, swelling, etc. Change your diet – healthy fats, no processed sugar, no grains, minimal carbs for weight loss. Start doing exercise regularly – walking, routines (push-ups, planks, pullups, squats), playing (sprinting, play with kids, ride your bike, get off the net more often). Have a project on the go – not stressful but something you can think about and work slowly that your interested, no stress, no deadline, just enjoyable. Fasting – Intermittent, alternate day, longer fasts, eating less is a revelation to your mind and body. Learn new things – listen to audiobooks, read books, listen to podcasts, go to seminars, don’t sit around at night trawling through the net though. Get better sleep – learn about how to do it better, do those things. Blue light, temperature, wind down, meditate, same time every night, wake up without an alarm.
0 Comments
Choosing a Cancer treatment
Lisa fought her battle with Cancer using a Vegan type approach. I remember talking to her about some other techniques and tactics that I had researched…she was almost desperate in her answer… “Kane, there’s so many ways to do it, I have to just choose one way”. I totally respected that because I felt her confusion, anxiety and overwhelm when she said it. If your life is on the line and you must decide what the BEST course of action is and there are say 100 different ways to do it and you only get one shot at it and different experts are telling you to do it their way...how the hell do you decide? In the end Lisa went with what she believed was the best approach and she did it her way to the very end. That gives me some sense of relief that she felt like she left no stone unturned. At least this way you can go out feeling you did the right thing, and it reinforced with me that there’s only one person that’s right… and that’s you. Choose a Life Just like the many Cancers you can get and the many different treatments you can choose from your diet and lifestyle are no different. You have choices to make on how you will live your life but there are thousands of different ways to do it. Luckily your life’s not on the line though eh…or is it? What impacts are the foods your eating having? Processed foods with processed oils and preservatives are the normal foods available right now as fastfood or as packaged food. If you have a KFC meal for lunch you might feel a bit sick for an hour after, but it was real yum when you ate it so at least you felt good for a while. NO! Food isn’t supposed to make you feel like shit after you eat it. If it does then it’s your body telling you to stop and don’t eat it again. If your feeling sickly after one meal imagine what that impact will be like on your body a few years down the track – usually behind the scenes without you really knowing - while your living your blissful life of looking for your next temporary endorphin hit of sugary, processed food. Why should I care what you eat? I’m not talking about the occasional treat or occaisional Big Mac – it’s more about having these meals day in day out without knowing the impact it can have on your life. And why should I care? I guess I care because I don’t want anyone to go through what Lisa went through if it can be helped. Not that Lisa didn’t try because if anyone was going to beat her cancer it would have been her. She researched, took natural supplements, did the recommended chemo, etc as well as many alternative practices as she could find and ate extremely strict diets for three years after her diagnosis. Let’s also mention the organic, whole foods that were part of her life leading up to it. She couldn’t have done anymore if she tried…that is, as far as diet and nutrition went. What I do know about Cancer is that once it metastasises through your body there is very little chance of winning that battle, your body has taken over and it becomes a runaway train with you an unwilling passenger. I guess the trick is all in the prevention, easier said than done of course because we don’t know exactly how to cure people on a one on one basis, it’s a general sweep of Chemotherapy that will either kill or cure – and regardless of the stats I just don’t think it should be down to chance. Food has how much impact on health and disease? Well food is a major component – lifestyle and environment are the other factors but let’s review food for a sec. Mr Sceptical says: "If that was the case then how come many of us live and eat the way we do? You can’t tell me that most foods from the supermarket are bad for you – what about say, burger patties, some buns and tomato sauce – nothing too bad there". Mr Reasonable says: :Well if it’s packaged you probably can say it’s not healthy for you, over the long term anyway. Certainly not optimal but most likely doing some form of long-term damage. Most of the time it will be compounding the effects of previous years of suffering and frantic repair within your body, never allowing it to recover and allow natural repair mechanisms to take place". If I said nutrition affects your overall health, then most people would agree. But if I said that most foods available to us today are harmful and linked to most auto-immune diseases society is facing right now then I think you’d be sceptical if hearing it for the first time. There are some commonly agreed foods that the human being should be avoiding as much as possible to stay healthy – short of some sort of genetic issue or something like that – eating these foods too much and for too long will result in short- and long-term issues. Here’s the most important thing to remember…avoid processed grains, processed sugars, processed oils. Not a big list really, it’s just that most packaged foods today contain some or all these ingredients. I haven’t even mentioned food colourings, preservatives and all the other unnatural flavour enhancers which you would think would be high on the list as well. Don’t get me wrong, if you can really minimise these as well then you’ll be doing yourself a huge favour, but the three big ones are grains, processed sugars and processed oils. I won’t be going into detail about why, but I will give a heads up on the basics…let’s call it ‘avoiding sickness 101’. Excessive and long-term inflammation in the body seems to be the major cause of most diseases and illnesses of the modern age. The big three ingredients (grains, processed sugars and processed oils) enrage inflammation in the body which kicks off a tirade of internal chemical and hormonal warfare to try and fix the problem. So, grains are becoming more and more associated with causing poor gut health, like leaky gut syndrome where toxins enter your blood stream from the gut…makes you sick. They are also called ‘anti-nutrients’ because of the way it can rob some other nutrients from your system. Processed grains as opposed to whole grains are even more harmful to your hormone response, weight gain and eventual hunger, in fact, the more processed the worse these effects become. Gut health is strongly linked to Brain health too so up to you if you want a healthy brain or not. Processed sugars are everywhere, from burger patties to burger buns to burger tomato sauce. Because of the absolute volume you will consume every day through ‘normal’ foods (read packaged foods) you will get a raised hormone level of insulin which stores sugars as fat and stops your body using up body fat for energy. This is a major cause of obesity which is tightly linked (for various reasons) to all the bad boy medical conditions of today (Diabetes, Heart attacks, Alzheimer’s, Cancers, etc). Eating Processed oils have been described as having the same metabolic effect as eating radioactive waste! The body can’t tell the difference between good naturally fatty foods like avocados, animal fats, olives, etc and bad unnatural oils like vegetable oil, canola oil, soybean oil, etc. Some form of processing is required to extract oil from unnaturally oily things, this screws up the structure of the oil which consequently screws up your body at a cellular level if you eat it. Your body tries to use it for the usual repair jobs, energy production, etc but it just ends up damaging cells then floating off to screw up anything else it touches. Not cool. Again, processed oils are in just about every bought or packaged foods and most likely used in every restaurant or cafe (so don't trust any food unless you've made it yourself). Issues develop over time, if you put the wrong stuff in your body it will fight it then get back to normal duties. If you put the wrong stuff in at a rate that the body can’t handle then over time your body will start to malfunction – think auto-immune problems like skin issues, being overweight, feeling tired, feeling sick or getting sick often and more serious ones like diabetes, heart disease, brain disease and cancers. It’s hard to imagine that companies, governments and other experts around us would allow this to happen by placing most of the food we eat onto supermarket shelves. We are a modern, space age civilisation that has come a long way since the wild west days so why would we be purposefully putting ourselves at harm when we know so much? Well truth is that when it comes to the human body and how it ticks we only know that we don’t know enough, and more than ever. Some smart people, some scientists and doctors, some engineers are analysing thousands of scientific dietary studies to find common causes of disease and this new information is becoming available to us – just type in Cholesterol into google and you’ll be astounded at the different takes on if it’s good or bad for you or where the acceptable limits might be. Unfortunately, this makes research very confusing for the average person trying to filter through the bullshit and the accurate info. It’s often easier to tell ourselves that nobody really knows so just carry on as though none of it matters. Problem is that if we do know that processed grains, processed sugars and processed oils are actually bad for you and that most packaged foods contain these three things then ‘carrying on as though none of it matters’ will definitely lead us to a future of short term and long term sickness. This will make us more and more reliant on doctors, independent food companies, pharmaceuticals and the government to look after us…the very people that are providing the food and lifestyle infrastructure that is causing sickness in the first place! (Just so you know, this is the minimum you need to know on how to avoid sickness – I haven’t talked about other important factors like how much sugar it takes to upset your metabolism (and by that I’m talking about carbohydrates from table sugar to a slice of bread to a banana) or how many calories it takes or what eating fat and sugar together does or…a whole lot really. Hey knowledge is everything and once you start paying attention it becomes quite obvious what you should be doing and avoiding for health) Lifestyle So if Lisa’s diet and nutrition was pretty much on point (by avoiding processed grains, sugars and oils) why did she get Cancer? Lisa wasn’t perfect, none of us are, she had her hang-ups and her worries that she couldn’t shake - so could it have been a lifestyle that was too stressful over the long term that contributed to her Cancer? Look I don't know, she lived a happy life as far as I could tell - maybe it was genetics, maybe it’s bad luck. However, Lifestyle is something that we can work on as individuals and is another major component that covers quite a large range of topics. Let’s list some:
It’s pretty much just other ways that overly stress and inflame the body. So, there’s a ton of ways to bring on Cancer, disease or illness of some form or another. But really if we simplify the things that WE CAN CONTROL there’s only 2 areas to work on – Food and Lifestyle. Yes, they can be a big topic on their own but there’s definite guidelines that you can follow to create your own health template and maximise your chances of taking control of your health and life. Enjoy your life in whatever way that means to you - Lisa’s memory reminds me to do this every day. See my '40PlusFootballer' ebook for full explanations of whats mentioned in this blog aswell as pathways you can follow to design your own Food and Lifestyle choices. |
AuthorA few years of listening to experts in all fields of Food and Lifestyle can really help a guy out. Now I'm trying to help others. Archives
|