You Can't Buy A Healthy Weight, You Have to Own It!

It is time to accept the idea that losing weight is not something that can be bought or sold. It is not a commodity.

The key is to adjust your lifestyle. It means eating a largely plant-based diet based on whole foods coupled with  daily exercises. There is no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to obesity.  Once you are diagnosed with it chronic disease it can set in to stay despite pharmacology, meditation or other attempts to cure yourself.  No amount of positive thinking can alkalinize acidic tissues. You need to change your diet!

Sickness, Obesity and The North American Lifestyle

Think of the people that you know who are fat. Do you know someone who eats fried meats, junk foods and things like French fries and candy bars? Are they sick all of the time?  What is his or her weight like?

Now think of people that you know who maintain a healthy weight.  Do they eat a lot of refined food, meat and sugar?  You have probably noticed that they are mostly abstainers from these toxic foods.

Now turn your attention to traditional cultures from around the globe.  Think of the traditional Asian body and recall how svelte of an archetype it is.  In China Japan and India people have been eating a mostly plant based diet for thousands of years.  It is only recently that these race types have been less than slender thanks to the invasion of our toxic products into their culture.

After you are done picturing the body shape of the average Asian then picture what your average American looks like.  Then picture him eating snacks at a baseball game. The beer full of calories and the hotdog full of fat and nitrates stuffed inside a white fluffy high carb bun is what immediately comes to mind. Hardly health food.

Sadly the overweight American has become the stereotype of North America.  Even if the American happens to be Latino, Asian or from some other descent they tend to be bloated with the toxins and calories that are in our addictive junk foods and meat products once they locate onto our Western soils.

Vegans Tend to Be the Healthiest Humans

So just what are the statistics hewn it comes to vegans? How much healthier are they than us?  Research studies show that vegetarians and vegans are anywhere from five to thirty pounds skinnier than their fellow citizens. 

You don’t have to trust the research. You can trust your own eyes. In fact, ask yourself – when was the last time you saw a really fat vegan?

So just how much weight can you immediately lose if you become a vega?.  During a sturdy at the Pritikin center, 4,500 patients who went through a program of eating as much as they wanted of low fat, plant based whole food lost 5.5% of their body weight.  They also lost an average of seventeen pounds!

Other intervention studies on vegetarian diets have show similar results including two to five pounds lost after twelve days, sixteen pounds lost over twelve weeks and twenty-four pounds lost after one year.

Consuming a low whole foods plant based diet will help you to lose weight and the best news is that the more you weight the quicker you will lose it once you switch to a vegan based diet.  People were able to keep the weight off over the long term better as well, which of course also improved their overall health.

Of course, do not become vegan if this is not part of your Healthy & Active plan, but for most individual eating more in the Paleo style with less startches and no junk food, sugar and fat keeps them at their optimum fitness level.

For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41) 440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Michael Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.

Rev Your Metabolism Through Belly Breathing

Your breath contains oxygen and that in turn is what feeds every single cell in your body.  If you want to improve your metabolism, then make an effort to do some quality breathing.  This is an inhalation that begins in the belly as opposed to your chest. Before you know it, you will be running up that hill and never be gasping and bending over because your body has run out breath again!

Train Your Breath To Be More Efficient

To train your breath so that your body makes more efficient use of oxygen as a tool you need to give the muscles that you use for breathing a bit of a work out. In fact, you should work out these muscles every single time you take a breath to train yourself to breathe from deep below the diaphragm.

The muscles that you must train are the diaphragms which are the big curved muscle that separates the chest from the abdominal wall and the muscles sandwiched between your ribs called the intercostal muscles.  It is these two sets of muscles that allow you to expand your muscles as much as possible when you inhale and thereby also increase your oxygen.

Be a Belly Breather

Most people have believed since childhood that breathing is a function of the chest and that if your chest is not moving up and down then you are not breathing correctly.  This what causes shallow breathing, gasping and oxygen deprivation while you are working out.  It also expends energy in the upper carriage and shoulders that could be used elsewhere, causing you tire out sooner than you like.

To tell whether or not you are committing the sin of belly breathing run hard and fast until you are a bit out of breath.  Stop and place your hand on your chest? Is it heaving? Then you are not breathing from the belly.

The way to start breathing from your belly is to start thinking of it like a balloon that you are blowing up with your breath. Place your hand on your stomach and practice taking breaths that move your stomach, as opposed to your chest, up and down. Breathe from your belly every day to build up the strength of the muscles in your diaphragm in general so you have more of a capacity to take a deep breath.

Three Ways to Improve Your Breath

There are a three main ways to improve your breathing during exercise. 

Breathe through your mouth. First of all, if you are jogging then try breathing through your open mouth. Your mouth is bigger than your nasal passages and you will be able to take in more oxygen so you can nourish your tissues.

Breathe in rhythm with your footfalls. Each time you take a step with one foot breath in and then, as your other foot hits the ground breath out.  This works especially well with runners and joggers.

Do a chest extending exercise.  Before you work out expand your chest capacity by standing with your feet apart at the same width of your shoulders. Relax your shoulders and bend slightly at the knees. Inhale deeply from the belly and sweep your arms up in the air until your biceps are parallel with your ears. As you exhale, lower your arms slowly to your sides. Do this five times while focusing on taking in as much oxygen as your belly will hold.

Repeating these three chest-opening and diaphragm opening exercises every day can really help you expand lung capacity and breathe properly.

For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41) 440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Michael Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.

Take Control of Your Life By Eating Alkaline Food

You have probably heard the saying that if you don’t have your health, then you don’t have anything in life.  Embarking on a Health & Active program is all about regaining your health in total so that you are back in the “driver seat” when it comes to how well you feel on a daily basis.   

How well we feel on a daily basis depends on what kind of fuel we put in our body.  In many ways, we become what we eat.

Another metaphor that applies here is exercise.  Running your body without exercise is like running a car without a tune-up. Sooner or later your health just breaks down.

Feeling Unwell is a Call to “Go Alkaline”

Whenever your body sends you a symptom, such as weight gain, fatigue and high blood pressure, it is a sign that all is not well and that is time to make some lifestyle changes. It is a biochemical “flag” that is waving wildly to warn you that it is time to change your diet and eat alkaline to prevent your body’s pH from becoming so acidic that your cells begin to suffer from free radical damage. 

An acidic blood pH level causes most disease. This is corrected by eating foods that are considered to be alkaline.  Do not take this idea literally. Just because something is sour, does not mean it is acidic.  This way of looking at food is about biochemistry.  Some foods are simply more alkaline than others and when you embark on a Healthy & Active Program you will begin to learn which foods are acidic and which are alkaline.

For instance, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and colas, and eating refined sugars and starches and lots of fatty red meat creates an acidic amino acid profile in your blood. Eating raw, vegan and fresh as much as is possible for you helps to create an alkaline condition in your body that is repellent to free radical damage to your cells. Disease cannot find a foothold in a body that is mostly alkaline.

Healthy & Active Living Prevents Acidosis

Healthy and active living means getting enough exercise and eating alkaline foods so that you can prevent your body from going into a state of acidosis.  Once the body enters acidosis, you begin to experience issues such as phlegm, inflammation, lowered immunity and joint pain. If a state of acidosis is left to fester than you are at risk of cellular degeneration, premature aging and disease.

Acidosis is a problem that is easily solved because preventing it is all about diligence and making the right choices when it comes to your diet. Many people experience relief from symptoms almost immediately when they switch their diet to alkaline foods. Some people go through what is called a “healing crisis” caused by the body throwing off the poisons and toxins it was storing in the liver, blood and the fat as the result of being in a state of acidosis.

For many individuals all that this entails is cutting sugar, junk food and refined foods and trading them in for fresh raw foods, juices, smoothies, salads and homemade meals.

The good news is that you do not have to embark on this type of program without guidance.  For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41) 440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Michael Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.

Understanding The Role of Basal Metabolism in a Healthy and Active Lifestyle

In general, the metabolism can be understood as being the rate at which your body burns calories just to keep itself alive.  You need calories to keep your heart beating and the blood pumping through your arteries. It is a fallacy to think you are not burning calories when you are at rest.

Your body is burning calories all of the time, even when you sitting as still as possible or asleep. In fact, you body burns a certain amount of calories per pound just to maintain body weight every day. The average woman burns about 10 calories per pound every day and the average man, about 11 calories per pound.

You Burn Calories When You Eat

Not many people realize this but you actually burn calories when you eat. About 30% of the calories that you burn each day are actually burned by the act of digestion. However, your body uses far more calories to digest a protein then it does a carbohydrate. You burn about 25 calories for every 100 calories of protein consumed and only about ten for every fat and carbohydrate you burn. This is why it is recommended that you eat lean healthy proteins to lose weight.

You Burn Calories Through Exercise

Every day you burn ten to fifteen percent of your calories as the result of moving your muscles. It does not matter what activity you do, you are burning carbohydrates every time you run, walk, lean over, flip a page in a book or press a key on the remote.  It is not really possible to burn more calories than fifteen percent a day, which is why it is important to lead a happy and healthy lifestyle and exercise as much as possible on a regular basis.

The Importance of Basal Metabolism

When fitness experts talk about the basal metabolism, they are referring to the calories that you burn per day when you are doing nothing at all.  Sleeping, watching television and sitting at you desk burn up between sixty and eighty percent of your available calories. That is because your body is at work all of the time, dividing cells, engaging in cell respiration and disposing of toxins.

The basal metabolism rate refers to the calorie burn that comes from the physiological functions that we don’t even think about or are not aware of it. That is why it is so important to eat foods and adopt a lifestyle that raises the basal rate of your metabolism so that all of your downtime is actually fat-burning time.  This is also why restricting calories works better than trying work off calories through constant exercise. Constant exercise works in shedding off the pounds to some extent but if you really want to lose weight it comes down to consuming less calories.

For more information about the Healthy & Active Program please visit our website at www.healthy-active.com. You may also call us in Toronto at (41)440-2217 and ask for Adrienne Wright Bulow or Dr. Micheal Rahman or email us at adrienne@healthy-active.com.