Lack of sleep = weight gain?

According to researchers at the Sleep Disorders Center at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital in Virginia, that lack of sleep can affect levels of the appetite-regulating hormones leptin and ghrelin and thereby weight. These researchers conducted two studies, each included 1,000 men and women, and they found that those who reported sleeping less tended to weigh more. Certainly, being overweight may make people more likely to have sleep disturbances which may undermine quality sleep. But in another recent study which included 12 healthy men in their 20s, who slept only four hours for two nights, the study found that levels of leptin, a hormone that tells the brain it’s time to stop eating because the stomach is full, decreased by 18 percent during the two-day study period. Levels of another hormone, ghrelin, that turns the hunger mechanism on, increased by 28 percent.

“Hormones change with sleep loss and deprivation,” said Dr. Patrick Strollo. “Sleep deprivation can affect appetite and also the type of food that one desires. When you’re sleep-deprived, you generally don’t crave carrot sticks.” Does anyone?

Source: Starved for Sleep? Watch Your Waistline (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_62257.html)
 

Does Dieting Work?

Do you feel that weight loss has always been an issue? Do you feel you have tried ever weight loss diet with little to no results? Did you know that dieting starves the body of necessary food and nutrients. According to Dr. Larson in Depression Free Naturally, he states through research that dieting creates long term weight gain, as well as many other mental/emotional dysfunction such as stress, anxiety and depression.

In this newsletter, I am going to provide you with my thoughts and theories of why dieting does not work and what to do instead of starving your body!

Dieting: Does is really work?

1. When you diet, you end up burning muscle for fuel because you are taking in very little. Muscle is there to keep the metabolism going and burn calories. This muscle loss slows down your system and causes the calories you eat to turn into fat rather than be burned off for energy.

2. When you diet, this is a HUGE stress to the body. It considers dieting a famine state of being and a red alarm goes off. It does this by lowering the flame of metabolism: levels of T3 (hormone that raises metabolism). This will continue to lower and lower, slowing your metabolism until the correct amount of more calories come in. This is why most women gain weight after dieting. When they start eating again, the body will hold onto anything it can for fuel (storing fat, glucose, etc) because of “its” fear of dieting or famine again. This is the greatest damage and takes time for your body to feel safe again.

3. When yo-yoing on a diet, you start to create more lipogenic enzymes, which are the fat storing enzymes in your body. The more diets you try, the more of these enzymes you create. Thus with each new diet you try, the harder it is to loose weight! At the same time, you decrease the number of lipolytic enzymes, which are your fat burning enzymes.

4. Dieting causes an increase in cortisol and insulin, which are fat storing hormones.

5. Dieting puts up prison bars around you telling you everything that you cannot eat. It does not teach you how to live nutritionally after you have dieted.

6. You must get healthy to loose weight, not loose weight to get healthy!

What to do:

1. Eat right: eat organic, eat for your metabolic type (refer to The Metabolic Typing Diet by Bill Wollcott or call us here to get tested), add good quality fats to your diet and think energy in = energy out! It takes life to give life!

Food elimination: gluten, sugar, NaCl, pasteurized milk and soy. Most of these products cause stress to the body and create dysfunction, adding to weight gain.

2. Sleep right: Get to bed by 10pm and get up no earlier than 6am. Your body repairs physically and psychologically at night. This is a time for you body to balance hormones, repair tissues and regenerate.

3. Drink right: The only thing your body was designed to drink is water. Your body is 85% water and physiologically it requires water as a catalyst to most functions within your body.

4. Move right: The right type of exercise and the right amount of exercise is important. Less is more!

5. Think right: Everything you do in life begins with a thought. If you think it, you will manifest it!

For more in depth information, please refer to Paul Chek’s book How to Eat, Move and Be Healthy. As well, feel free to call us for a free consultation.

Hope you have enjoyed and learned from this newsletter. Feel free to forward it by clicking on the link below to anyone you feel that would benefit. As well, don’t forget to check out our new blog at the link below.

With love and qi,

Joshua Rubin
EastWest Healing and Performance
“Helping people to help themselves!”
www.eastwesthealing.com
760-277-0337

Chris Jordan’s Art of Our Trash

Running the Numbers An American Self-PortraitThis series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007 http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php

Oprah and “Attitude” Stumble Upon Video

Check out this professor that was on Oprah. Talk about appreciating life and realizing time is some that we create, that life is not to be taken for granted, that life is all about lessons and that each individual purpose here is to not only find self, but to allow others to see self within you.

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=ithct48cqw

AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water

AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water

By JEFF DONN, MARTHA MENDOZA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press Writers

Monday, March 10, 2008

(03-10) 06:17 PDT , (AP) –

A vast array of pharmaceuticals – including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones – have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs – and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen – in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas – from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

Water providers rarely disclose results of pharmaceutical screenings, unless pressed, the AP found. For example, the head of a group representing major California suppliers said the public ‘doesn’t know how to interpret the information’ and might be unduly alarmed.

How do the drugs get into the water?

People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The wastewater is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

And while researchers do not yet understand the exact risks from decades of persistent exposure to random combinations of low levels of pharmaceuticals, recent studies – which have gone virtually unnoticed by the general public – have found alarming effects on human cells and wildlife.

‘We recognize it is a growing concern and we’re taking it very seriously,’ said Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Members of the AP National Investigative Team reviewed hundreds of scientific reports, analyzed federal drinking water databases, visited environmental study sites and treatment plants and interviewed more than 230 officials, academics and scientists. They also surveyed the nation’s 50 largest cities and a dozen other major water providers, as well as smaller community water providers in all 50 states.

Here are some of the key test results obtained by the AP:

_Officials in Philadelphia said testing there discovered 56 pharmaceuticals or byproducts in treated drinking water, including medicines for pain, infection, high cholesterol, asthma, epilepsy, mental illness and heart problems. Sixty-three pharmaceuticals or byproducts were found in the city’s watersheds.

_Anti-epileptic and anti-anxiety medications were detected in a portion of the treated drinking water for 18.5 million people in Southern California.

_Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey analyzed a Passaic Valley Water Commission drinking water treatment plant, which serves 850,000 people in Northern New Jersey, and found a metabolized angina medicine and the mood-stabilizing carbamazepine in drinking water.

_A sex hormone was detected in San Francisco’s drinking water.

_The drinking water for Washington, D.C., and surrounding areas tested positive for six pharmaceuticals.

_Three medications, including an antibiotic, were found in drinking water supplied to Tucson, Ariz.

The situation is undoubtedly worse than suggested by the positive test results in the major population centers documented by the AP.

For the whole article go to : http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/03/09/national/a091634D19.DTL