Your Health is the Result of How You Live!

Healing happens we address our lives and make changes that our good for health. Often these improvements in our own health also benefit the lives of our family, friends and employers.  The Healthy and Active Metabolism Program has an unofficial motto which, is "How we feel and look is a result of our diet and lifestyle.”

A Healing Crisis Is An Opportunity For Change

This means that if we find ourselves in a healing crisis and we want to look and feel better then something needs to change.   Changing our lifestyle habits and diet and also lowering our caloric intake is the simplest, quickest and most straightforward route back to health unless your condition has become very acute.

An explanation of holism.

Unfortunately, Western medicine often leads patients and doctors to believe that ill health can be managed and that there is not need to get to the underlying root cause of our symptoms.  This results on living on medications and when that happens, we become reactive individuals who are at the mercy of chemicals and dependencies, rather than proactive ones that know how to take charge of oourslves.

We can only cure ourselves by making big lifestyle changes. These changes typically have to do with what we choose to eat, how we think, what we choose to be stressed out about, our quality of sleep, how often we exercise and move our body, and our attitudes toward our self and our life.

Change Happens When You Accept The Necessity For It

Change will not happen unless you embrace the idea. We are only complete when our body, mind, and heart are healed, conscious, connected, and whole again.

Making healthy changes is not necessarily just about you.  Being aware of holism is also about the awarenes that everything that you do, especially the positive things that you do benefits yourself and the community at large.

Being healthy is not just a personal necessity, it is also an ethical and moral responsibility. What you do with your health impacts others.  Taking care of your health is one of the most socially responsible things you can doin this day and age.

First of all there are 48 million people in the United States Census Bureau without health insurance [1] despite the introduction of Obama Care in that country. Here in Canada, there are many naturopathic services, blood tests and special medications, treatments and procedures that are not covered by provincial health plans such as OHIP. [2]

Self-Care is a Gift to Society

It is responsible to treat the fundamental causes of why we get sick and treat the whole body by addressing the lifestyle factors that cause these chronic diseases.  These approaches are both medically effective and cost effective, thereby improving your life quality while at the same reducing the burden of health care costs on society in general.

Heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer, and obesity account for 75 percent of health care costs today, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible through the changes in diet and lifestyle addressed in this book.

How effective are lifestyle changes when it comes to your health?  The medical journal The Lancet published a study led by Dr. Dean Ornish that followed 30,000 men and women in six continents and found that simple dietary lifestyle changes could prevent over 90 percent of cases heart disease.[3] Thus, the disease that accounts for more premature deaths and is more expensive than any other affliction is almost completely preventable, just by making changes to diet and lfiestyle.

Also notable is that the very same lifestyle changes that can prevent or even reverse heart disease can also help prevent or even reverse many other chronic diseases as well.

The key is food.  You are what you put in your mouth and you are only as good as what you eat. 

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.

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[1] United States Census Bureau, 2012.

[2] Health Canada, Canada Health Act Frequently Asked Questions, Ottawa, Canada: Canada Health Act Division, August 19, 2011. Retrieved electronically February 14^th 2014.

[3] Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease? Ornish, D. et al.

The Lancet , Volume 336 , Issue 8708 , 129 - 133

Your Diet and Your Eye Health

Many people who embark on the Healthy & Active Plan find their eyesight improves once they improve their lifestyle and diet. Like all other parts of the human body the eyes, the proverbial windows of the soul, need to be nourished and cared for. Eye health is about making sure that they are not subjected to inadequate light, too much ultraviolet light or strain.  Otherwise you could experience eyes that are tired, bloodshot, infected, irritated, itchy, ulcerated, dry, sensitive to light or watery.

You could also suffer from compromised vision in any of its forms including the need for reading glasses, bifocals or trifocals and  the type of macular degeneration that eventually leads to blindness.

Dietary Recommendations For Beautiful Eyes

To keep your eyes healthy you are well advised to include vegan sources of A, C, E and all of the B vitamins such as broccoli, raw cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, green vegetables, squash, sunflower seeds and watercress.

Eliminating sugar and white flour from diet can also help keep your eyes healthy and prevent kidney and liver dysfunction that in turn can lead to problems with vision. For instance, an overloading of sugar leads to diabetes and then eventually blindness.

Lifestyle Habits That Lead to Great Vision

If you were glasses or sunglasses  wear clear lenses that have been treated to help prevent damage from ultraviolet rays.  By the very best lenses that you can afford so that your vision is always crystal clear. Nikon makes lightweight lenses of high quality that are sold by most prescription eyewear outlets.

Never use hair dyes on eyelashes or eyebrows as that can cause blindness and be sure to remove all eye make up at night to reduce the risk of eye infection and eye strain due to minute mascara particles falling in your eyes.

Be aware also that there are many types of drugs that can cause damage to the yes. These include cortisone drugs, aspirins, anticoagulants such as warfarin and heparin, diuretics,sulfa drugs and tetracycline. Studies have shown that taking Valium, Haldol and antidepressants can also damage the eyes.

Smoking marijuana or cigarettes can also cause macular degeneration. If you want healthy eyes, quit smoking

To prevent bloodshot eyes, avoid situations that cause eyestrain or fatigue such as driivng for too many hours at night, sitting in front of a computer for too many hours in a row or enduring wood smoke or cigarette smoke for a great length of time.

Taking good care of your eyes can help prevent such conditions as eyestrain, floaters, dry eyes, loss of vision, macular degeneration, blindness, eye infections or bags under the eyes.

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.

Resist All Sugar and Be Well

If you want a fast, proven short-cut towards optimizing your health and if you want to make your body much more alkaline immediately then it is highly advisable to stop eating sugar immediately.

Sugar is not in and of itself a bad thing. Basically, sugar is the body's primary source of fuel. In the proper amounts and from a natural, unrefined source, glucose is beneficial and necessary for health, and even life.

here are a number of terms that refer to health problems that are sugar-based. Insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, type2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome: all are conditions that are telling us that the body's basic energy processing systems are in danger of breaking down.

Some people who are addicted to sugar feel physically unwell most of the time. They may not even realize that they feel bad until they kick sugar and suddenly feel well.

How Much Sugar is Safe?

Most people on the Healthy and Active Program discover through the blood profiling and also through their change in diet that eliminating all sugar possible from their diet is the way to health.

White Sugar Crystals

The World Health Organization released dietary guidelines in 2003 that stated that not more than ten percent of your total overall diet should come from sugar. The average energy requirement is two thousand calories per day, so that means that no more than two hundred calories, or about 50 grams of sugar should be in your daily diet.  This is the most that you should be consuming at any time but preferably you should consume much, much less if you can. This recommendation is an older one and it has not been revised. The bottom line is that sugar is a simple carbohydrate that is converted very quickly into glucose which is a challenge for your body to store as glycogen. It ends up in your blood stream and stored as fat.

Tracking Sugar Intake Can Be Confusing

Many people think they are cutting sugar and then are aghast to find out that they still have high blood sugar, high glycerides in their blood or diabetes problems. That is because there are so many hidden sources of sugar in our diet.

Here is an example of how confusing tracking your use of sugar can get. The typical serving of seemingly healthy low-fat yogurt contains about 32 grams of sugar, which is the equivalent of eight teaspoons. That means that in one fairly small portion of a "healthy" food you've consumed about 64 percent of the total daily-recommended sugar intake. You can see how easy it is to go beyond that when you consume cola drinks, cookies, sauces, syrups and other sweet foods.

Sources of Hidden Sugar

It’s not easy to quit sugar. Though it's not considered a drug like nicotine or opium, it can be very addictive and sabotage all weight loss efforts.

It is best to avoid -

• Soda
• Sports Drinks
• Vitamin Water (Made by Coca-Cola containing as much as 40 grams of sugar)
• Store-bought cookies, cakes, or pastries
• Fruit juice (even though juice sounds natural, it contains high concentrations of naturally occurring sugar, and should be generally avoided)
• Candy
• Condiments that contain sugar or high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)
• Chinese food
• Breaded foods (even something like a Japanese Tempura can be loaded with sugar
• High-glycemic fruits, such as watermelon, mango, or pineapple (
• Maple syrup, honey, sugar, chemical sugar substitutes (such as Splenda, Equal, Sweet'n Low)
• Ice cream or frozen yogurt
• Muffins
• Gourmet Coffees
• Gourmet Tea Blends (an example is Oprah Chai tea that is packed with sugar)

Another hidden source of sugar is cigarettes.  A sugar is comprised of approximately twenty percent sugar that the tobacco has been sprayed with to improve it's taste!

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.