One Thing

Do you remember in the movie, City Slickers where Billy Crystal’s character asks his guide and mentor, Curley what is the secret to life?  On his last dying breath the wise cowboy holds up his right index finger and reveals to Billy that the secret is just “One thing.”  While this response was perplexing to Mr. Crystal, I have found it to be sound advice on a journey to better health and wellness.  In some of my wellness presentations, I teach that we often overcomplicate healthy living.  To get healthier, all you need to do is take a piece of paper and write down one thing you believe you could do to improve your health and then go do that thing. The problem is that we all know a multitude of things that we could or should do, and we get paralyzed by the complexity of the decision and then do nothing.  The key is to do just “One thing.”

It really doesn’t matter what your initial “One thing” needs to be.  Perhaps you need to eliminate that sugary or fatty snack food from your diet.  Or maybe you need to commit to adding a fruit or vegetable to every meal.  What about devoting time for just 20-30 minutes of any kind of exercise per day.  Some of you may need to address the cause of a lingering pain by visiting a chiropractor, massage or physical therapist.  I find many people just need to give themselves an extra hour or half-hour of sleep or perhaps they need to practice some form of stress relieving activity such as meditation so that they can get sound and regular sleep.  I’ve seen many times that when you choose to drink the recommended 6-8 glasses of water per day, you will automatically drink less sugary and caffeinated beverages that dehydrate you and add unnecessary calories.

In the end, health is about habits.  All our bad habits took time and due diligence to develop.  Fortunately, most of us have time to change.  Keep it simple.  Choose your one thing you need to do and take the next month or two to work on making that change.  Once you’ve mastered that, take a look at your healthy to-do list and choose a new one thing to work on. 

Tapped or Bottled?

Drinking water is an essential of health.  Our bodies are made of about 70% water and nearly every one of the millions of chemical reactions that occur in the body happens in a water medium.  The fact is, we need water, but there is a great deal of controversy over the right source.  Ideally, we should be getting much of our water from food in the form of raw fruits and vegetables.  Since most don’t do this routinely, we need a regular source of healthy water.  As a result, the world consumes about 26 billion units of bottled water every year.  This is a healthy thing, right?

There are several things we need to know about bottled water.  First, is that much of the bottled stuff is actually tap water that has never seen a mountain stream.  This may not be a bad thing because the EPA requires municipal water sources to be tested for contaminants several times per day whereas the FDA requires bottlers to test as little as once per week or even every four years.  Just realize that what you’re paying for may not be any different than what you can drink for free.  The biggest concern I have regarding bottled water comes from the bottles themselves.  The grade of plastic used can leach chemicals into the water that resemble a digestible protein that the body will absorb.  This problem is accelerated when the bottle has been exposed to high heat or sunlight (on a truck or loading dock, or in your car).  These chemicals can cause hyperactivity, obesity, hormone and prostate problems and have been directly linked to breast and other cancers.  Lastly, the plastic itself is an environmental disaster.  The U.S. uses 1.5 billion gallons of oil every year to produce the bottles that are thrown away at a rate of 1500 units every second.  These discarded bottles are filling our landfills and polluting our oceans and rivers.  What’s the solution?

I recommend getting a filter for your tap water at home – reverse osmosis is best, but a simple carbon filter will suffice.  When you’re on the go, think ahead and fill up reusable stainless steel or glass bottles.  If you’re filling plastic bottles, check the bottom of the bottle and try to use plastic that has a recycle number of ‘5’ or greater.  These don’t break down as easily.  I don’t want this bad news to discourage you from drinking water!  Just plan ahead and you’ll be making a healthy choice for you and your family.

Belly Fat

O.K.  I don’t believe there’s anyone out there that is particularly fond of belly fat or as it is often referred to -- the “muffin top.”  In the past, I’ve discussed that the excess around the girth starts producing its own hormones including estrogen.  In that article, I shared how this abdominal fat is a primary predictor of not only cardiovascular disease, but also of diabetes and cancer.  These are 3 of the 4 top killers in our society.  So obviously eliminating the belly fat is a big deal, but for anyone who has tried, it can be a challenge.  One of the reasons losing belly fat is so difficult is that it’s not there only as a result of poor diet and lack of exercise.  Chronic stress will also contribute to the spare tire.

When you have any perceived stress, your body releases certain "fight-flight" hormones including cortisol, norepinephrine and epinephrine.  This is a normal healthy response to any threat or perceived stress. Typically, these hormones will go up and down throughout the day with stress. The problem is that when you are chronically stressed your cortisol levels go up and stay up. These elevated cortisol levels cause the body to resist weight loss because your body thinks times are hard and you might starve.  So it hoards the fat you eat and takes fat from healthier areas and moves it to your abdomen causing increased inflammation and insulin resistance in the body. This belly fat then leads to more cortisol because it has higher concentrations of an enzyme that converts inactive cortisone to active cortisol.  This increased cortisol retains more abdominal fat and the cycle continues.

So what can be done?  To lose the weight in this area you must reverse the cortisol and fight-flight reaction.  Fortunately, as long as you can find a form of exercise that you don’t resent and get more stressed over; all exercises will at least temporarily inhibit the stress and cortisol response.  Secondly, stress is most often a perception – we are not truly in a life-threatening situation.  Thus, you need to practice shifting your mind and your thoughts from what is wrong in life (stress) to what is right (gratitude).  Meditation to quiet your mind is also critical.  This change in the brain will change the hormones released.  Finally, your fuel sources need to be appropriate.  Caffeine, nicotine, sugar, flour and processed grains all act as stimulants that stimulate stress.  Lean protein, healthy fats (omega 3’s) and the minerals found in raw fruits and vegetables help to shut off the stress response.  In essence, if you eat, think, and exercise appropriately, you can reverse this deadly epidemic to our health and society.

Remaining Afloat

I want to put a name to a concept that I’ve reported on multiple times in the past.  In 1993 a term was coined to explain the wear and tear on the body and what happens when our levels of physical, chemical, and emotional stress become greater than our ability to adapt.  The term is allostatic load and it explains the physiological consequences to the nervous system, endocrine system, and immune system as they become compromised as a result of chronic stress.

When the body is in a state of balance and responding appropriately to life’s stresses and everything is working as you were designed, you are said to be in a state of allostasis.  The stresses that accumulate over time and have been proven to accelerate the aging process and the likelihood of disease are known to increase our allostatic load.  An easier way to think about this is as if you were floating in a raft in a pool on a calm, warm day.  This would be a state of allostasis.  However, if your kids started cannonballing into the water, making waves and began to place rocks in your raft, this would be equivalent to increasing your allostatic load.  As more rocks are placed in the raft, you begin to sink deeper and you would likely begin to kick and paddle to stay afloat.  However, you can only maintain this struggle for a limited time.  Eventually, because you begin to fatigue or more rocks are placed than what you can fight against, you will inevitably sink.  Staying afloat in this analogy is equivalent to maintaining health and a normal physiology.  The rocks are analogous to our physical chemical and emotional stresses whether they are traumas, poor posture, sedentary lifestyle, sugars and other inflammatory foods, toxins, emotional stressors like worry, anger and guilt and even lack of proper sleep. 

In the body, as these stresses increase and allostatic load increases, different hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol increase to cause problems in the gastrointestinal tract and circulation, along with increased nervous system activity, higher blood pressure and cholesterol and a weakened immune response.  Fortunately, you can work to remove the rocks out of your raft and decrease your allostatic load.  By removing interference to the nervous system from misaligned vertebrae, this is what chiropractic care does.  Likewise by increasing circulation, relaxing muscles, and decreasing stress, this is what massage and acupuncture do.  Meditation, exercise, proper diet and sleep all function to decrease your allostatic load.  The point of this discussion is that stress is real and it can sink you, but with some discipline and a little work you have numerous methods to decrease your load and remain afloat for a long and healthy life.

Diet Disaster

Consumption of diet drinks declined by about seven percent in 2013, dropping them to the lowest point since 1995.  Despite being promoted for weight loss, you may be surprised that beverages with artificial sweeteners have never been proven to actually promote weight loss.  I’ve reported several times of the hazards of diet drinks and artificial sweeteners.  However, just in case you haven’t gotten this message clearly, you may be interested in the most recent study where researchers determined a link between the low-calorie sodas and heart-related disease and even death.

In the past, I’ve reported on the connection between artificial sweeteners and an increased risk of multiple sclerosis, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and leukemia.  In this most recent 10-year study of 60,000 women, they found that those who consumed just two or more diet drinks a day were 30% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke and were 50% more likely to die from heart related disease!  Even when they adjusted out other factors such as BMI, smoking and other lifestyle factors, the stats didn’t change compared to the women who didn’t consume the drinks.  This study is a much larger version of similar smaller studies of the past.  In fact one animal study from Purdue University showed that artificial sweeteners caused the animals to develop a disrupted response to real sugar and to become hyperglycemic in the same way as diabetics.  This same study showed that the damaging cardiovascular effect is a result of a decrease of a heart-protective protein from the diet drinks. 

I see this as another case of what is common practice and common belief is not common reality.  Even though we’ve been trained that diet drinks are lower in calories and should decrease obesity, when was the last time you’ve known someone to lose weight and get in shape from drinking diet drinks?  The fact is, many studies show that artificial sweeteners actually promote weight gain!  In the late 80’s, the journal Physiology and Behavior found that low-calorie sweeteners produce an increase in appetite.  The belief on this is that the sweeteners trigger dopamine in the reward center of your brain.  This activates your brain’s hunger center, but the brain is never satisfied because the calories never come.  This leaves our hunger centers activated and we tend to overeat or eat high calorie snacks that undermine our efforts.

With the exception of Stevia, all of these artificial sweeteners should be thought of as toxins that create stress on the body.  My best advice is to avoid them at all cost.  Even this strategy is becoming more difficult as the manufactures, in order to prevent people avoiding their products, are renaming the sweeteners to things such as Sucralose and something called “Amino-sweet.”  If it’s considered diet or reduced calorie and you’re uncertain the ingredients, just stay away from the product.