Grains? Who Needs Em!

I've got some pretty amazing results by omiting grains from my diet.  Many people think I'm going to keel over dead though.  They incist that grains are a vital part of your nutitional intake.  I beg to differ, they provide no nutrient which cannot be found elsewhere and even in better quality.  Grains are completely unnecessary.

 

I was excited to see another excellent article by Mark's Daily Apple entitled, Why Grains Are Unhealthy speaking to exactly this.  He talks about many of the misconceptions surrounding grains and our nutritional requirements.  If you are a nasayer and feel animately that grains are required in your daily diet take a look at his article.

 

Apart from maintaining social conventions in certain situations and obtaining cheap sugar calories, there is absolutely no reason to eat grains. Believe me – I’ve searched far and wide and asked everyone I can for just one good reason to eat cereal grains, but no one can do it. They may have answers, but they just aren’t good enough...

 

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Feel the Burn Baby Burn...

Turns out Latic Acid is not quite what you think it is.  Latic Acid is actually a fuel source. It steps in to take over when there's no more oxygen to burn glucose.  Many many years ago Otto Meyerhof performed a study and actually pointed to Lactic Acid as a villain.  As a result popular belief is bad things occur as a result of lactic acid buildup.  This phobia has led to many restrictions on training, etc.

An interesting study by Dr. Brooks found otherwise.  In a recent New Your Times, article they speak to the true function of Lactic Acid, you can check it out here, Lactic Acid Is Not Muscles' Foe, It's Fuel

Coaches and personal trainers tell athletes and exercisers that they have to learn to work out at just below their "lactic threshold," that point of diminishing returns when lactic acid starts to accumulate. Some athletes even have blood tests to find their personal lactic thresholds.  But that, it turns out, is all wrong.

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Avoid the Poison Cocktail!

I find this hilariously comical yet disturbingly scarey.  As a college student I always wasn't the safest, best nourished, student.  Many times bars would offer drink specials.  Most every time the special was some concoction of an energy drink (Monster, Red Bull, etc.) combined with hard alcohol.

Most every time I got sick as a dog after drinking these things.  My body never knew if it wanted to bounce off the walls, go into a perpetual sleep mode, or just simply seize to function all toegether.  The next day I would always have the worst hangover of my life.  Furthermore I heard rumors of people having heart attacks, falling into comas, you know all the common college urban legends that float around.

Apparently there was some merit to the urban legends!  After my college years these drinks gained some traction and alcohol distributors started bundling them and selling them as alcoholic energy drinks (Sparks, Four Loco, etc.).  The FDA is now recalling all these energy drinks!

Here's an excerpt from the CNN article, FDA Calls 7 Caffeine-Alcohol Drinks Unsafe

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration told the manufacturers of seven caffeinated alcoholic beverages Wednesday that their drinks are a "public health concern" and can't stay on the market in their current form.

Personally, I'd recommend staying away from these poison cocktails all together.  I'd actually recommend staying away from drinks which combine refined sugars and caffeine all together.  Let alone alcoholic drinks with these two!  Caffeine only serves to amplify the negative effects of the underlying ingredients as it increases your circulation delivering the nutrients to more nooks and crannies in your body.

But hey it's your body and your health.  So enjoy!

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Brocolli Will Rock You Joints Off! Or not...

I recently learned that Dr. Weil lives in Tucson and also heard he teaches at the University of Arizona now.  That being true I'd love to take one of his classes.  He's an expert in health and nutrition and has written many books about more proactive medicine via healthy nutrition.  Very interesting guy.

 

I stumbled onto an interesting post on his blog.  It was about Broccoli that little green vegtable most of us didn't like as kids.  Although I did, so does that make me weird???  Anyways, as a body builder I ate TONS of Broccoli so I was excited to learn a little bit more out about it.

 

Apparently it's also good for building healthy joints!!!  Dr. Weil writes about it in his post, Broccoli for Healthy Joints

 

...a compound in broccoli, helps deter the arthritic process and provides long-term benefits for joint health.

 

Enjoy!

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Happy Cows Make Happy Healthy Butter!!!

I thought this article was interesting.  I've been hearing a lot of good things about butter recently.  However, proteins contained in dairy products (casein and other protease inhibitors) have a tendency counteract / block digestive enzymes in our digestive tract.  FYI... This is a bad thing.

Butter actually has some exceptionally healthy fat and antioxidant properties not to mention it tastes damn good.  Through a simple process called clarification (http://allrecipes.com//HowTo/clarifying-butter/Detail.aspx) you can easily keep all the flavor & healthy nutrients, while stripping the butter of the protease inhibitors.  This is the process of butter clarification which you can read about here,

Just make sure to purchase good quality butter from healthy happy dairy cows because you are what you eat!  I recommend reading this article so you know how to shop for butter http://whole9life.com/2010/11/butter/

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Yet Another Reason to Avoid Fast Food...

Diet Blog brings up a good point.  The people who serve your food are actually encouraged to work sick!  They have absolutely no incentive to stay home when they feel ill.  For the most part they don't even get health insurance let alone sick days!  Plus I hate to imagine their levels of health if they are eating their own products!  Could you live on a big mac and fries as your staple diet?

According to Diet Blog post, People Who Handle Your Food Work Sick and a recent Survey of workers,

In the report, a lady working in the food service for 30 years talks about being really sick one day. She had a bad cold with all the trimmings: runny nose, sneezing, cough, and a fever. But she couldn't call out, she needed the money.

 
This just reafirms a conversation I recently had with a buddy of mine.  He worked through college in the restaurant business.  He told me the movie Waiting a comedy staring Ryan Rynalds about waiters in a local restaurant, isn't a far cry from the truth.  He said just about everything he saw in the movie he saw at one point working in the restaurant business!  Scarey thought!  But funny movie :)

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Dumbfounded by the Twinkie Diet?

I recently stumbled across the Twinkie diet.  If you haven't read up on it you can do so here, Twinkie Diet Helps Nutrition Processor Loose 27 pounds.  This is a diet where a nutritional professor lost 27 lbs in two months eating junk food, primarily consisting of the little unsavory snack called Twinkies.  He wanted to prove a point that you can loose weight primarily by caloric deficit.  However, I would never advise such an approach and I feel this study is dangerously misleading.  Here's why:

According to Whole Health Source article to follow up on The Twinkie Diet for Fat Loss

There are many studies in which rodents are made obese using industrial high-fat diets made from refined ingredients [Matt:  Twinkies ring a bell here??]. The rats eat more calories (at least in the beginning), and gain fat rapidly. No big surprise there. But what may come as a surprise to the calorie counters is that rodents on these diets gain body fat even if their calorie intake is matched precisely to lean rodents eating a whole food diet. In fact, they sometimes gain almost as much fat as rodents who are allowed to eat all the industrial food they want. This has been demonstrated repeatedly.

The clear distinction to see here, and what most people do not realize is that, caloric counting does not take into account absorption and conversion of foods into energy!  The benchmark Calories in your food are measured against is the amount of energy required to heat water!  Water is a far cry from how much energy food supplies to your body and in turn how much excess energy is stored as fat or left unprocessed poised for exit from the body.

Eating primarily junk food leads to many health implications.  Despite the professor lost 27 pounds (by default makes you feel good) he still provided very little or suboptimal nutritional value in his diet.  In the long run this deficit of nutritional value will add up while low quality junk food ingredients accumulate in his body.  This leads to complex health related issues that we don't even want to explore.  So I ask why would you deprive your body of what it needs most to eat junk.  This doesn't sound like a solid approach to becoming healthier and loosing weight...

After all you are what you eat and do you want to be a cream puffed process Twinkie??

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How to Grow Taller, Sleep Deeper, and Feel Better!

Interesting article discussing necessity of proper posture in bed!  I'm surely going to give this one a shot first chance I get (tonight!).

Whether you’re in bed, on a cot, or on the floor, the key is to lengthen your spine. You touch ground with your sacrum, lay your palms on the ground, and slowly lower yourself back, taking care to actively lengthen your spine – vertebrae by vertebrae – by pushing through your hands. The result is an oddly awkward feeling; you really do feel longer than normal. It takes a few minutes to get used to it, but it’s an incredibly comfortable way to lie down. The first time I tried it, I fell asleep (inadvertently) in ten minutes. In fact, her method of “long lying” was my biggest takeaway from the book, simply because I wasn’t expecting to learn how to lie down. Posture? Yeah, I see how modern posture is dysfunctional, but I figured lying down was pretty basic stuff that no one could mess up. My sleep is better than ever since adopting her method of lying down. I no longer have to find the sweet spot to get my joints aligned and my spine supported. I am the sweet spot.

I believe what he's eluding to is to not curl up like a ball in bed but rather to stretch / elongate your body as much as possible.  You can read more on it here: 

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/sleep-posture/

He also wrote another article on various sleeping position options.  They all seemed rather uncomfortable but if you're so inclined feel free to check that article out too.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/improve-sleep-posture/

At any rate I had a few simple sleeping tips on my site as well.  These are immediate and guaranteed to give your sleep a boost! 

http://www.fitlish.com/overcominginsomnia

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Paying with Cash Means Less Junk food!

Interesting article on how you better watch your money when you pay with cash!  Give it a look...  Paying With Cash

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Eggs... Are you getting what you think?

Chickens are raised in some of the most in humane manners.  This leads to unhealthy eggs and as you know you are what you eat!  Most all corporations whom raise and distribute eggs would have you believe otherwise by their fancy pants egg cartons.  Don't be fooled.  Educate yourself on what these labels truly mean.  After all it's your health!

Here's an excellent article on Whole nine blog going into detail of the various egg carton labels and how you should interpret them:
Whole 9 Life Egg - Carton Labels

[...] happy, healthy chickens = a healthier egg, which leads to a healthier YOU!  Don’t let the confusing factory farming system trick you into supporting something you’re not in favor of.  Vote with your dollar, and support those egg producers who truly care about the environment, animal welfare and your health.

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Hey checkout my trip photos

Hey Everybody:

Sorry in advance for the rather impersonal mass email.  Drop me a line after you get this, I'd love to catch up!

Recently things have been exceedingly stressful.  Despite working around the clock it's everything just to stay a head of my Mortgage.  Just last week I said the heck with all these worries.  Despite it wasn't the best time (suppose it never is), I dropped everything and traveled off into the expanse with a couple close friends. 

Together we visited four destinations Zion, Arches, Grand Canyon, and Sedona.  Between Andy and I we took nearly 1000 photos, hiked across some of the most treacherous trails in the US (some I had to sit out lol), and all round had a great time.  It was an awe inspiring trip that showed me all the hard work I've been putting in is well worth it.

Attached are my 6 favorite photo's out of the original 555 photos I took.  I hope you enjoy them!

Matt

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Supporting Entrepreneurs!

Thanks everybody!!!

I made a little dough from your purchases through Fitlish.com a couple months back.  It's been really slow and very hard starting out but I figure what goes around comes around.  I took everything from the affiliate and supplement sales and poured it into a zero interest loan for Juanito Cabangon a farmer in the Philipeans.  He's trying to support his family by expanding his rice crop.  So I loaned him the money for free!

He paid us back so I've now moved onto helping a farmer in Ecuador.  She's a young lady aspiring to own her own home someday!  I can relate to that!  I'm actually struggling with my own home right now so I want to do what I can to help her out!  You can check out her profile here, Lida Johanna

Thanks again for supporting our cause.  Help us spread the word one healthy habit at a time!

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