Get Moving!

I find it interesting that so many of my clients, friends and family end up having this conversation with me. Sometimes it comes up directly as is often the case with my clients. Other times, it's this circumspect navigation around to the topic. What it comes down to is that in this American culture of "busyness" we have conveniently convinced ourselves that there just isn't enough time to get any exercise in the day. We have to pick up and drop off kids, we have to commute to work and back, we have to do the laundry, we have to do the taxes, you name it, there's a reason. The reasons all sound like good ones. They are all things that need doing in this adult world, and not all of them fun either. Still, I challenge everyone on this point.

I think part of the issue is that we have also been convinced by marketers, researchers and magazine articles that "exercise" is something separate from your life. Something you have to take time out to do. Something that requires a whole separate wardrobe or gear or machines or memberships. What we forget is that we have these bodies 24/7 until we're 6 feet under. They move us through space, hold us upright in line at the bank, carry that laundry to the machines in the garage, and swing our children or grandchildren up for a piggy back ride. These bodies are designed to move and bend and lift and walk. Most importantly, walk. It's one of the few things that makes us special as a species, and yet as a culture we are doing our level best to avoid it at all costs. We have invented all sorts of ways to avoid walking: elevators, escalators, cars, moving sidewalks and golf carts to name a few.

Here is my challenge to you: from the standpoint of moving, act as if you live in 1810 rather than 2010 as often as you can. See where you can opt to take the stairs or leave the car at home and walk. If you must drive, see if you can park once and walk to all your errands with the car in a central location, or at least park the car as far as possible from the front door of the business you're visiting.

For the techies out there like me, invest in a pedometer and track your progress. Spend the first week just logging what you normally do. Then challenge yourself to add 100 steps each day until you get up to at least a mile. You'll be surprised at how quickly it actually happens! Most people start out thinking they'll never be able to and end up walking 5 miles or more a day just by increasing the steps they take in living life.

It doesn't take purchasing a gym membership, $100 shoes, or a $1000 bicycle. It also doesn't take blocking out 2 hours each day to get to the gym, change, get all sweaty in an hour-long workout, shower, and get back to your life. Of course those planned workouts will accelerate the process of getting and staying healthy, but THE most important thing is just to move. Move more. Eat less. Get REAL.

Medicinal Effects of Foods - Part 4

OK - here goes: SWEETENERS

I have to take a deeeeeep breath here because this is a huge topic of interest and concern for my clients. This is one of those places where politics, money, marketing, health, science, habits, and the force of denial come crashing into each other. In my experience, artificial sweeteners are in the top 3 of the most controversial and heatedly debated food topics today, the other two being dairy and soy (followed closely by GMOs and pesticides).

For starters, people don't want to believe that food is political. We KNOW this on one level, but we don't want to know it at another. If you've worked with me for even a short amount of time you've likely heard me say that denial is a force stronger than gravity. Our denial is like burying our heads in the sand or refusing to see what is actually right in front of us. Denial allows marketing agents to play on our fears and our habits that keep us from making changes that will cost their clients money. Denial allows back room dealings between politicians and the industrial food industry to remain relatively hush hush because we really don't want to know that Donald Rumsfeld was instrumental in getting the drug aspartame pushed into our food supply; or that huge industry efforts were made to silence scientist Dr Mary Enig when she started to speak out about the health dangers of trans-fats; or that the beef industry waged a terrifyingly large law suit against Oprah for saying she wouldn't eat conventional beef on national TV. Denial allows us to walk into our average grocery store and assume that whatever is being sold on the shelves must be safe to consume. So first off I'm going to ask my readers to put denial aside for a few minutes and read on.

Here in the industrialized world we have been operating for decades on the belief that we can have better lives through scientific manipulation of our environment, our foods, our cleaning products, our water... actually nearly everything. At the sustenance level, we have gotten it into our heads that we are smarter than Mother Nature and we can create better foods than the ones our bodies developed utilizing over eons. With an exceptionally limited understanding of how the human body and all of it's systems work, we think we can create substances that will provide our bodies with exactly what they need as well as feed the habits of desire without consequences. So, we end up with things like "no calorie sweeteners" in the form of aspartame or sucralose, and "fat substitutes" like olestra. The trouble begins when you start looking a bit more closely at how the body utilizes these "Frankenfoods". For this post, I'm going to limit this glimpse to artificial sweeteners. Here are just a few simple verifiable facts:

Fact: Aspartame (aka NutraSweet, Equal, AminoSweet, and Candarel) breaks down in the human body into 2 amino acids, and methanol. Methanol, also known as "wood alcohol", is broken down in the body to formaldehyde. Yup, you read that right. Formaldehyde, the same stuff that those frogs were floating in before you dissected them in high school biology class.

Fact: Formaldehyde is a carcinogen and neurotoxin. There is no safe level of human exposure to formaldehyde (which is why those frogs are no longer preserved in it for biology classes).

Fact: Donald Rumsfeld was CEO of Searle Laboratories before taking office in the Reagan administration. After his appointment, he vowed to get aspartame approved for use in the American food supply. It had been denied for the previous 16 years due to significant health concerns.

Fact: Sucralose is a laboratory-made chlorinated hydrocarbon with the same base as DDT made by using phosgene which is a neurotoxin used in World War I as a choking gas. Phosgene is also used to make plastics and pesticides.

Fact: Chlorine is a highly reactive substance in the body and one of the most active pro-oxidants in the human system. Chlorine gas was used against troops extensively in World War II.

Fact: The company that makes sucralose (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) is in the midst of a lawsuit for false advertising and misleading the public into believing it's actually just sugar that has had its calories magically removed.

Fact: The long term use of no-calorie artificial sweeteners will actually cause weight gain and worsen diabetes.

Fact: Sucralose can cause shrinkage of the thymus gland, enlargement of the liver and kidneys, decreased red blood cell count, blood sugar disregulation, reduced fetal and placental weights, and miscarriage.

Fact: There are over 92 significant side effects of aspartame ingestion including: migraine, seizures, blindness, tinnitus, dizziness, confusion, severe depression, anxiety, aggression, heart palpitations, increased blood pressure, bloody diarrhea, birth defects and brain damage.

Heard enough yet? I could go on and on, but it gets me really riled up so I'm stopping here. Your body knows what to do with sugar. It's 10 calories per teaspoon.

Get smart. Get healthy. Get REAL.