Dear Readers,
I hope your holidays were as joyous as mine. I wish you an abundant and healthy New Year.
Update on my latest book:
My new book is now available online!
The Secret of Health: Breast Wisdom, which I wrote with Dr. Ben Johnson (Morgan James 2008). It’ll be available in bookstores and elsewhere in a couple of months.
Look for another new book soon. I’ll give you the details in the next issue.
Fit and Fat?
It’s almost 2008. Are you beating yourself up about the excesses of the holiday season and vowing that you will lose weight this time?
We all know that the vast majority of New Year’s resolutions go the way of Christmas fruitcake by February.
I’ve got a different take on this annual guilt fest: Don’t do it.
You can see my photo on the website and you’ll see that I’m really far from a size 2. OK. I’m pretty far from a size 12, too.
I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it: There is an obesity epidemic in America.
We know that the government has declared war on fat. We also know that two-thirds of Americans are now overweight.
My doctor has lectured me on the need to lose weight, even as he discreetly attempts to adjust his white coat to cover his paunch.
It’s a problem, I agree, but I’m not here to lecture you or beat myself up. I’m here to offer you a different way of looking at health.
You can be fit and fat. And it’s a far sight better than being thin and a couch potato.
If you’re a Dancing with the Stars aficionado as I am, you’ll remember that the first celebrity to bite the dust in the 2007 season was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who probably weighs 92 pounds soaking wet. She never worked out, had no muscle tone and no stamina. The night she was eliminated was a sweet moment for some of us rounder types.
While there are loads of studies that show the health dangers—and the costs—of being overweight, compelling new research suggests it’s physical fitness, regardless of weight, that protects us against heart disease.
If you are exercising and strong, half the battle is won, regardless of what your scale says.
And of course, if you’re fit and exercising to build strong bones and lean muscle tissue, eventually metabolism will kick in, believe it or not, and you’ll start to lose weight.
Here are some other indicators of your overall health that may be better indicators of your risk for serious health problems than the number of pounds that register on your bathroom scale:
Cholesterol ratio: By now you’re probably well aware that the American Heart Association, your doctor, your local dog catcher and the makers of Lipitor think your total cholesterol should be below 200 and your HDL (or “good”) cholesterol should be above 40.
For people with heart disease or diabetes, these target numbers are significantly lower.
Actually, there is no independent research that links high cholesterol to heart attacks, only drug company research that suggests people who take their drugs have fewer heart attacks. It’s a fine line, but an important one.
What we do know, however, is that the ratio of HDL to total cholesterol is important in preventing heart attacks and strokes. You can figure your ratio by dividing your total cholesterol by your HDL cholesterol. The optimal ratio should be 3.5 to 1. At the very least, your cholesterol ratio should
be 5:1. Anything higher suggests you are at high risk for heart disease.
For example, if your HDL cholesterol is 37 and your total cholesterol is 200, considered by most doctors to be the upper limit for “normal” cholesterol, and your cholesterol ratio is 5.4:1.
Translation: This isn’t good.
However, if your HDL is 60 and your total cholesterol is 215 (considered over the mark by most docs), your ratio is 3.5:1 and that’s optimal for the prevention of heart disease. Therefore, it’s important to look more closely at your ratio and less at the individual or total numbers, regardless of your weight.
You can learn your numbers and figure your ratio by having a simple blood test at your doctor’s office. Local health fairs also administer cholesterol tests and mail your results.
If you’re not within the ratio you’d like to be, regardless of your weight, more exercise is probably the best way to improve your numbers.
Blood pressure: You’ve probably heard this one before: Aim for blood pressure of 120/80. Most experts agree that there is very little wiggle room on this one. Study after study shows the risk for heart attacks increases substantially if the upper number or systolic blood pressure climbs above 130 mm/Hg. According to the National Institutes of Health, the risk of heart attack and stroke doubles if your blood pressure climbs just a little to 135/85. Drug treatment
is recommended if blood pressure climbs to 140/90.
Of course, you want to get an accurate blood pressure reading. First, be sure you have been sitting and at rest for at least five minutes before you take a reading. If you have a cold or flu or other illness, your blood pressure is likely to be temporarily elevated. And many people have
what is commonly known as “white coat hypertension.” This means your blood pressure rises when you’re in the doctor’s office, but not at other times.
If this is your problem, buy a blood pressure monitor (you can get a good one for under $50) and keep track of your readings during peaceful moments at home. Intense exercise can also raise your blood pressure by 10 points or more for an hour or so after your workout ends.
Finally, here’s a blood pressure issue of which most of us (doctors included) are unaware: Low blood pressure. Low blood pressure (under 112/75) is not something to congratulate yourself about. It’s a sign of adrenal exhaustion or low thyroid. It can actually be a cause of low metabolic rates and overweight.
If your blood pressure is in this range or below, you’ll need to pursue the matter diligently.
Fasting blood sugar: Type 2 diabetes is also epidemic among a younger and younger population in the United States. This is largely due to our collective weight gain. There are several tests that measure your blood sugar and help your doctor diagnose diabetes.
Diabetes puts you at extreme risk for a host of unpleasant side effects, including heart disease, kidney disease, retinopathy (eventually leading to blindness), peripheral neuropathy (often leading to amputations) and more. It is a disease you want to avoid at all risks.
That said, many of you may have been told you have impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) or a “little bit of sugar.” IGT is also sometimes called pre-diabetes and it means your ability to process the sugars you eat is impaired, but you may not yet have full-blown diabetes.
The simplest way to discover your fasting blood sugar is to have a simple finger stick test done first thing in the morning. You may have a friend who has a monitor. You can have your doctor do it or you can have it done at a local health fair.
There is also little wiggle room on these results. Normal readings are between 70 and 100 mg/dL. If your fasting blood sugar is between 101 and 125 mg/dL, you have impaired glucose tolerance. Above 126, and you have diabetes.
Of course, you should not self-diagnose this condition and most likely it will take more than one reading above 126 to confirm the diagnosis. If you are in the range tipping you toward diabetes, your doctor will probably order a glucose tolerance test, a blood test in which your ability to metabolize large amounts of sugar over a specific period of time will be measured.
If you’re in the “impaired” range, you can stop yourself from tipping over into full-blown diabetes by improving your diet and exercise regimens.
There’s another side to the diabetes coin: low blood sugar or hypoglycemia.
Many people wake up with a blood sugar reading of 65, 60 or even lower. Generally they have difficulty awakening, they are woozy, irritable, dizzy or ravenously hungry. Low blood sugar is temporarily corrected by eating almost immediately upon rising, but it is a warning sign. People with hypoglycemia are at high risk for developing diabetes. That early morning low is a sign
that your blood sugar metabolism is impaired.
So what does this all mean?
In my opinion, if your numbers are in the ranges where they should be, your risks from being overweight are greatly reduced.
As serious as heart disease and diabetes can be, reducing your risks by having your numbers where they should be doesn’t address other health problems related to obesity, including arthritis and certain types of cancer.
I think one of the worst side effects of being overweight is the stress it can cause in your life. Most of us have seen the obnoxious television commercial for a product purporting to reverse the stress hormone cycle that contributes to overweight. There is truth to it.
The stress hormone cortisol has been linked to building of the most dangerous kind of fat: abdominal or belly fat, which has been shown to increase risk factors for heart disease and diabetes.
Stressing yourself about your weight will only worsen your problem. Eat sensibly and choose wholesome, healthy foods. Get your exercise and leave the worry to those Sports Illustrated swimsuit models.
Eight Ways to Green your Winter
from Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple ustainability by Greg Horn (Freedom Press, 2006))
It’s not too late to start now!
Here are the eight simplest ways to cut the energy consumption in your home:
1. Seal up the cracks: Closing small cracks around windows, doors and electrical outlets with a $10 can of foam sealant will go a very long way toward tightening up your house and preventing heat or air conditioning from escaping through those cracks. Green architect Bob Swain estimates that if you added up all those cracks, you would find that you had a two-foot square hole in your house. Imagine how much can escape through a hole that size! Swain estimates you’ll save as much as 20% of your heating and cooling bill.
2. Turn down the thermostat: Add an extra sweater in the winter and an extra blanket on your bed. In summer, open windows in the evening to let in cool air and close windows on the sunny side of the house in the daytime to help keep the house cooler. When it’s possible, use fans, which cost much less to run than air conditioning. Ceiling fans will circulate cool air in the summer and keep warm air closer to the floor in winter, making your heating and cooling systems more efficient.
3. Replace your light bulbs: Compact fluorescent light bulbs are four times more efficient than stand incandescent bulbs and they last much longer. Standard bulbs use 95% of the energy they consume to heat the bulb. A 27-watt compact fluorescent gives off the same light as a standard 100-watt bulb – yet it burns 10,000 hours longer. Compact fluorescents cost anywhere
form $2 to $3 apiece, about four times as much as standard light bulbs, but the amount of energy they save over their long life will more than make up for the difference. Replace your five most-used bulbs and save $60 a year in energy costs. Replace standard light bulbs with full spectrum compact fluorescents and save energy while keeping your brain chemistry balanced. They’re more expensive – about $14 apiece if you buy four or more, but they can save you crushing depression some people experience in the winter months, sometimes called Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Experts say if every American household replaced three standard light bulbs with compact fluorescents, the energy savings would be the equivalent of taking 3 million cars off the road.
4. Turn off the lights. It goes without saying that you should turn off all lights and computers, even peripherals like cell phone chargers when you’re not using them to save even more.
5. Conserve water: The average American has used 100 gallons of water before leaving the house in the morning doing things like flushing toilets and leaving water running while brushing teeth. Take a five-minute shower instead of a bath and save 10 gallons of water or more. Install a low water consumption toilet and save at least two gallons per flush. Only do full loads of laundry and, this one is a surprise, use your dishwasher instead of hand washing dishes. A fully loaded dishwasher cuts the water usage by half, more than enough to offset the electricity use. For gardens and lawns, use soaker hoses rather than traditional sprinklers with a high evaporation rate.
6. Lose the plastic: No, I don’t mean that you should throw out all the plastic things in your house. That would just clog up the landfills before it’s necessary. Use your plastic mop buckets and picnic supplies and outdoor chairs, but when it’s time to replace anything plastic in your home, consider alternatives: metal buckets, paper plates for picnics and sustainably harvested wooden outdoor furniture. There are a couple of places I would recommend getting rid of harmful plastics now: in drinking cups for both children and adults, children’s toys, especially where children might chew on them and vinyl shower curtains. All of these are sources of dangerous chemicals called phthalates. Instead, use ceramic cups for hot liquids, toys made out wood and other traditional materials and shower curtains made of tightly woven cotton, organic if possible, to prevent outgassing of even more chemicals when they are exposed to hot water.
7. Buy recyled paper: If every household in the United States replaced just one box of facial tissue with 100% recycled ones, we could save 163,000 trees over the coming years. If every household in the United States just replaced one roll of toilet paper with 100% recycled toilet paper, we could save 423,900 trees. If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll
of paper towels with 100% recycled ones, we could save 544,000 trees. And if every household in the U.S replaced just one package of paper napkins with 100% recycled ones, we could save 1 million trees. Add them all up, and in the coming few years, we could save more than 2 million trees in the coming years with simple changes. These numbers are staggering and have a powerful protective effect on our planetary ecosystem. Think carefully when you buy disposable paper goods. The Natural Resources Defense Council has a comprehensive listing of specific products and their recycled or post-consumer content.
8. Look for the Energy Star™ label: Whenever you’re replacing appliances of any type, look for The Energy Star certification that these products are as energy efficient as today’s technology allows. Energy Star certification applies to virtually very type of appliance ranging from washers, dryers and refrigerators to telephones, computers and televisions.
Contents of this page are copyrighted, and may be used freely, if unedited and with attribution as follows:
Source: Kathleen Barnes, www.kathleenbarnes.com
The content provided by this site is for informational purposes only and has not been approved by the U.S. FDA. This site is not intended to provide personal medical advice, which should be obtained from a medical professional.
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