Thursday, December 15, 2011

Diets and Work-outs and Hormones, OH MY!

I've been riding the Dukan diet bandwagon lately and have been seeing pretty good results.  Currently in the "Attack Phase", 4.5 lbs have fallen off in less than a week.  Not to mention that I've been hitting the "30 Day Shred" and the treadmill at the Gym lately.  I plan on losing a good 10 lbs. by the time New Years rolls around and to be in pretty decent shape by Jan. 25th for a possible show.  THEN I want to be in top "bikini model" shape for this upcoming summer.  Once I've droppped the pounds of lovely female insulation, I plan on really toning up the bod before the Spring's end.

Unfortunately, I think the one factor that is working against me is my hormones.  I think I'm hitting PMS this week and I'm starting to lose focus.  Everything makes me angry, pissed off and sad this week.  I seem to hate everyone and cry at commercials on the telly...very possible this is all hormonally based, or I'm just a sad, angry person...I'm going with "sad, angry person"  lol!  But seriously, it's crazy how hormones can affect our logic, our reason, our desires and our willpower.  How many times have you been off "chemically" or "hormonally" and found yourself saying "Ah F#$K it! I'll eat what I want, forget my diet...I'm just too stressed...or tired...or ________ (insert excuse)"?  Yeah, that's life, and we have to deal.  SO, I'm trying to keep my cool, not lose my mind, deal with crap that the world throws at me and persevere through.

Today I have a gym date to do some guerilla cardio on the treadmill with my girl Kristina.  She's been a good gym buddy and has lost 40 lbs. in the past year with diet and exercise.  My girl Vicki has lost 28 lbs. so far in the last 2 months (thank you Dr. Dukan) and has about 30-40 more to go before her beach wedding this coming August.  I know she'll stick with it and look fantastic for her big day...we won't let her do otherwise ;)

All in all, life is good.  I'm seeing successes in my diet, my fitness, and my career...my love life on the other hand is a bit strained, which can really throw a wrench in anything you do.  Emotional distraction and distress cloud one's judgement and sucks the energy and will right out of you.  We just have to trust ourselves, know our strengths and really push forward no matter what...In fact, nothing makes you feel better than a good work-out.  Get your anxieties out in the gym, go for a run, pop in a killer work-out DVD or go for a long swim...trust me, you'll feel better afterwards and look great too!

Have a great day!
Bex

Monday, November 28, 2011

Recovery Week

The Grand Thanksgiving Feast is done, the leftovers consumed, the alcohol in dregs and the dent in the sofa is ever deeper.  Now it's time to turn from our glutenous and slothful ways, back to the healthy eating and the frequent visits to the gym...its time for Recovery Week!  If you've found yourself plumper than the turkey that was on your table this past Thursday, then it's time to take action.

My personal approach is to detox, eat lean, green and healthy, and to not forget those calorie shedding moments in the gym.  Today I started back with a mostly lean protein, green veggie diet with a morning fruit/green protein shake in the morning (also great for a pre-workout shake).

 Jackie Warner's Secret Shake:
I would blend the liquids, powders and protein first in the blender, adding a splash of water as needed.  Then add your cup of frozen spinach and blend until your shake is green and smooth, then finally adding in the frozen berries until fully blended.  Drink immediately.

This is such a great start to my day, and really gets my metabolism going.  I have my shake at 7am and I'm easily hungry again by 9am, so then onto egg whites or 0% Greek yogurt.

Here's a sample of my daily nutrition on this lean diet and the work-outs I get in:

  • 7am - the not so "Secret Shake"
  • 9am - 3 Egg whites (and a nice cup of hot green tea)
  • 11am - 0 % Greek Yogurt
  • 1pm - Chicken Breast and mixed veggies (mostly green and cauliflower)
  • 2pm (30 minute Guerrilla Cardio at the gym on the Treadmill)
  • 3pm - 10 to 15 raw almonds (maybe another cup of green tea)
  • 6pm - Portabella Mushroom "pizza" with lean ground beef bolognese and skim shredded mozzarella (I make my own bolognese because I can control what goes into the sauce, keep the sugar out, add the protein in and keep it low fat.)
  • 7pm (Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred DVD)

During this phase, I keep my dairy intake low (it contains lactose), drink tons of water (at least 64 oz), cut all sodas (diet, I never drink regular) out, drink 1-2 cups of green tea per day, and try to keep the rest of the day low in caffeine and sodium (too much caffeine induces the liver to produce excess insulin plus can increase cortisol, and sodium keeps us puffy).

I also like to track my food, water intake, weight and exercise at http://www.myfitnesspal.com/ ... I've found that if you log it, you're more likely to stick with it.

Ok, so now you have the tools to drop the Holiday poundage...go for it.  I have found that I average about .5 - 1 pound per day for the first two weeks.  It's a great way to shed unwanted bellyfat and bloat.  After the first two weeks, I add in more legumes like black beans and kidney beans to keep my energy up with the increase in exercise (the "secret shake" is great for energy as well plus muscle repair).

Feel free to hit me up with any questions or comments.

Have a great day,
-Bex

Thursday, November 10, 2011

I'm baaack

Well after a crazy summer of hitting Austria's many wonderful music and dance festivals, a successful launch to a new opera company, a tour with the National Lyric Opera's production of Tosca and an incredible evening of comic opera set in a speakeasy...I finally have one moment to breathe and blog.

Austria:  The summer was a whirlwind of events and travel for me.  I found myself involved with a great group of artists and Austrians, and thus ended up in Austria this summer for 2 weeks.  On my travels I visited Vienna, Graz, Salzburg and Carinthia.  What a lovely country with lovely people.  I can't wait to go back.  And the music was sublime.  The only downside is that the food is so delicious that I had to do some serious damage control once I got back to the States.


Opera Moderne:  My new opera company Opera Moderne launched on August 31st...and the New York Times gave us a very favorable review among a few other reviewers.  And just recently we performed the rarely done Wolf-Ferrari comic opera "Le Donne Curiose" to a completely packed house at The Players Club this past Friday.  It was a roaring success with everyone dressing in 1920s fashion and enjoying an evening of prohibition cocktails, great jazz & opera singing, and the wonderful Hot Box Girls who came in and entertained during the intermissions.  It was a night not to be missed!

Diet & Exercise:  After my ridiculous eating in Austria, I came back to NYC and found myself a bit chubbier than I like.  So my girls and I put ourselves on the Dukan diet.  Wow did this work!  I lost a good 13 lbs. in a month and was very pleased to take on some performing when it came to me on Oct. 20th (it was a new twist on Musetta, the clothing was minimal).  Now I've been slacking off a bit and need to get myself and my mindset back on track.  Not to mention, it's time to find myself regularly at the gym, especially with the changing weather coming in (no more beautiful, warm, outside work-outs).  I've got no excuse.  I've gotta bust my butt...if nothing else than to be in great shape in February for when I go back to Vienna to sing this same Musetta role.  I want to look like a freakin' bikini model if I can help it.  I guess it's Dr. Dukan and Jillian Michaels to the rescue.  One thing I have realized on the Dukan diet is that when you have Protein Veggie days, please make sure to get LOTS of green vegetables.  I suggest having a pure green juice if you can get it...those micronutrients are so important and your body needs it.  I'll stick to Dukan until my goal weight of 20 lbs. down from now, and then I'm switching over to slow carb, because I love me some legumes.  I know Paleo works, but I miss my dairy and legumes...so that is the choice I've made.

Simply Green Juice

- 1 cup of spinach
- 2 cups of kale
- 2 cups of parsley
- 1 cucumber
- 3 celery stalks
Add a little garlic and/or ginger if you like. Wash thoroughly and juice.

Well, I hope you are all healthy, happy and fulfilling your goals.  And if you have any questions on these latest adventures, please feel free to hit me up.

Have a great day!
-Bex


Tuesday, June 21, 2011

My Carb Addiction

Why is it so hard to kick the carb habit?  I'm all for moderation, but it's an everyday struggle for me.  Once I have those sugary goods, I can't help but want more, no matter how bad it makes me feel.  It's sick, really sick that I would want to eat something that makes me feel like crap moments later...why can't I help myself?

Perhaps the reason is, I'm an addict.  And the sooner I realize that and take control, the sooner I get of the stuff that can lead to a sad demise of obesity and diabetes (which happens to run rampant in my family.)

This article from Details Magazine gives you a pretty good understanding of refined carbs and their addictive properties:

ARE CARBS MORE ADDICTIVE THAN COCAINE?

YOUR BODY IS VIRTUALLY DEFENSELESS AGAINST A DEPENDENCY ON CARBOHYDRATES—THE SUBSTANCES THAT REALLY MAKE YOU FAT—AND IT'S TIME FOR AN INTERVENTION.

BY PAUL JOHN SCOTT,

MARCH 2011 ISSUE OF DETAILS MAGAZINE

Photographs by Zachary Zavislak

I'm sitting in a comfortable chair, in a tastefully lit, cheerfully decorated drug den, watching a steady line of people approach their dealer. After scoring, they shuffle off to their tables to quietly indulge in what for some could become (if it hasn't already) an addiction that screws up their lives. It's likely you have friends and family members who are suffering from this dependence—and you may be on the same path yourself. But this addiction is not usually apparent to the casual observer. It has no use for the drama and the carnage you associate with cocaine and alcohol. It's slower to show its hand, more socially acceptable—and way more insidious.

I'm in a Panera Bread outlet. The company is on Fortune's 2010 list of the 100 Fastest Growing Companies and earned more than $1.3 billion in 2009, mainly from selling flour and sugar by the railcar. Last year, Zagat named it the most popular large chain in the United States and ranked it second in the Healthy Options category. The company responded by touting its "wholesome" food. Sure, Panera sells a few salads. But why do the scones, pastries, baguettes, and bear claws get all the good lighting? Why are the grab-and-go packs of cookies and brownies next to the register? What need is fulfilled by serving soup bowls made of bread, with a mound of bread for dipping, and then offering more bread on the side? How come it's noon and the couple behind me are eating bagels while the guy to my right is sawing into a cinnamon roll with a fork and a knife like it's a steak?

The answer is that fast-burning carbohydrates—just like cocaine—give you a rush. As with blow, this rush can lead to cravings in your brain and intrusive thoughts when you go too long without a fix. But unlike cocaine, this stuff does more than rewire your neurological system. It will short-circuit your body. Your metabolism normally stockpiles energy so you can use it as fuel later. A diet flush with carbohydrates will reprogram your metabolism, locking your food away as unburnable fat. When you get hungry again you won't crave anything but more of the same food that started you down the path to dependency. Think of this stuff as more than a drug—it's like a metabolic parasite, taking over your body and feeding itself.

You aren't supposed to talk this way about carbohydrates. According to USDA dietary recommendations, they are not only healthy but are supposed to make up the majority of the food we eat—45 to 65 percent of all calories. Carbs, which are classified as starches and sugars, make up the essence of bread, cereal, corn, potatoes, cookies, pasta, fruit, juice, candy, beer, and sweetened drinks—basically anything that isn't protein or fat. Our government's recommendations were established in the 1970s and have since been accompanied by an explosion of obesity and diabetes. The advice came about as early nutrition scientists rallied around a misguided maxim that remains embedded in the fabric of our attitudes toward food to this day: Eating too much fat makes you fat. But science never bore out this pre-Galilean view of nutrition. What is now clear is this: At the center of the obesity universe lie carbohydrates, not fat.

"You could live your whole life and never eat a single carbohydrate—other than what you get from mother's milk and the tiny amount that comes naturally in meat—and probably be just fine," says Gary Taubes, the award-winning author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, which is helping to reshape the conversation about what makes the American diet so fattening.

If all you knew about food is what you read in the USDA guidelines, you'd think our bodies conveniently come into the world seeking the one nutrient that is cheap and amenable to commercial mass production: carbohydrates. "Sugars and starches provide energy to the body in the form of glucose, which is the only source of energy for red blood cells and is the preferred energy source for the brain," says the latest edition of the guidelines. Wrong, says Taubes, who just released Why We Get Fat, a layman's version of his influential scientific tome. In the absence of carbs, your body will burn fatty acids for energy. It's how you sleep through the night without eating for eight hours. "The brain does indeed need carbohydrates for fuel," Taubes says, "but the body is perfectly happy to make those out of protein, leafy green vegetables, and the animal fat you're burning." As a pair of Harvard doctors (one an endocrinologist and one an epidemiologist) wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association last summer, carbohydrates are "a nutrient for which humans have no absolute requirement."

•••

The Diets That Work

You wouldn't know it from reading the latest dietary headlines, but all of the popular diets—from Atkins to Dean Ornish (Bill Clinton's weight-loss plan) to the diet-of-the-moment, Paleo—are successful because the most important change they advise is the same: stop eating refined carbohydrates. This only reminds us of what had been the conventional wisdom in medicine for hundreds of years before the USDA stepped in: that sugar, flour, potatoes, and rice are what make a person fat, not meat and milk.

Forty years into the low-fat, high-carbohydrate way of eating—we can thank it for "diabesity," shorthand for the societal prevalence of type II diabetes paired with obesity—it seems clearer than ever that our problem lies not simply in carbohydrates, but in their fundamental addictiveness. They sidestep our defenses against overeating, activate brain pathways for pleasure, and make us simultaneously fat and malnourished. They keep us coming back for more, even as they induce physical decline and social rejection. They achieve this more effectively than the controlled substances that can get a guy thrown into jail. Maybe the question isn't whether carbohydrates are addictive, but whether they are the most addictive substance of all.

In 2007, researchers at the University of Bordeaux, France, reported that when rats were allowed to choose between a calorie-free sweetener and intravenous cocaine, 94 percent preferred the sugar substitute. The researchers concluded that "intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward. . . . The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus to lead to addiction." Nicole Avena, an expert in behavioral neuroscience at the University of Florida in Gainesville, has spent many hours analyzing the behavior of rats enticed into sucking up sugar. She says that feeding on sugar can, like snorting coke, lead to bingeing, withdrawal, and craving. It does this by lighting up the same circuitry within the brain triggered by cocaine and amphetamines, the dopamine center.

But a carbohydrate addiction is potentially more destructive than an 8-ball-a-day habit, because it hijacks your metabolism. If you eat a low-carb diet, you are able to remain satiated between meals, because the body will burn its fat stores. But eating carbs, especially refined varieties like sugar or flour, sweetened drinks, or starches, causes the body to release the hormone insulin. The body secretes insulin as a response to high blood sugar—a serious, even potentially lethal health risk over time. The hormone directs cells to extract sugar from the blood and store it as fat, and what's worse, in order to get sugar out of the blood as efficiently as possible, insulin makes it extremely difficult for the body to burn its fat stores. Over time, the presence of insulin in our carb-heavy diet causes diminishing returns. As our cells become resistant to the effects of insulin, our bodies frequently release even more of it to compensate. The result is a blood-sugar vacuum: The body craves more of what the hormone feeds on and triggers our hunger mechanism, which works subconsciously, to direct us toward the nutrient causing all the problems in the first place—carbohydrates. You get fatter and your body craves even more carbs in order to maintain your increasing weight. Drug cartels can only dream of a narcotic with an addiction cycle this powerful.

Once hooked, can you quit your carb addiction? It's not like there's a carb-cessation program at Promises, after all. Taubes says it won't be easy, but given the alternatives, you simply have to try. And cold turkey is as good a method as any. "Anecdotal evidence suggests that the craving for carbs will go away after a while," he says, "although whether a while is a few weeks or a few years is hard to say." And frighteningly like an addict in recovery, you're unlikely ever to be totally cured, and you'll always be tempted to relapse when the opportunity arises. Be warned: The number of Panera Bread outlets is 1,421 and counting.

•••

How You Get Hooked (Over Time)

1. When you take in carbs, like Gatorade or whole-wheat bread, you secrete the hormone insulin. Even thinking about carbs causes this to happen.

2. Refined carbs spike blood sugar, and this is a big problem. The first result is that your body immediately stops burning its existing fat stores.

3. Too much blood sugar is a dangerous situation, and in response, insulin, a hormone, rips it from your blood and tells the body to store the energy as fat (in men this first happens around the waist).

4. Normally your liver controls blood sugar, but because you eat so many carbs you have a constant supply of insulin circulating. This turns out to be bad—very bad. This causes you to become resistant to insulin.

5. Insulin resistance means your body pumps out more insulin to make up for the deficit. Now you're getting fat, but what's worse is that your body desires even more carbs as fodder for the excess insulin.

6. You get fatter and fatter and your body craves more carbs to feed your increasing girth. This destructive cycle is why Americans are so overweight (the process doesn't happen overnight).

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Toxic Sugar = Cancer?


I found this article in the NYTimes very interesting, and thought I should share...knowledge is power:

Is Sugar Toxic?


By GARY TAUBES

On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology.

Lustig is a specialist on pediatric hormone disorders and the leading expert in childhood obesity at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, which is one of the best medical schools in the country. He published his first paper on childhood obesity a dozen years ago, and he has been treating patients and doing research on the disorder ever since.

The viral success of his lecture, though, has little to do with Lustig’s impressive credentials and far more with the persuasive case he makes that sugar is a “toxin” or a “poison,” terms he uses together 13 times through the course of the lecture, in addition to the five references to sugar as merely “evil.” And by “sugar,” Lustig means not only the white granulated stuff that we put in coffee and sprinkle on cereal — technically known as sucrose — but also high-fructose corn syrup, which has already become without Lustig’s help what he calls “the most demonized additive known to man.”

It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.”

If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease, hypertension and many common cancers among them.

The number of viewers Lustig has attracted suggests that people are paying attention to his argument. When I set out to interview public health authorities and researchers for this article, they would often initiate the interview with some variation of the comment “surely you’ve spoken to Robert Lustig,” not because Lustig has done any of the key research on sugar himself, which he hasn’t, but because he’s willing to insist publicly and unambiguously, when most researchers are not, that sugar is a toxic substance that people abuse. In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us.

This brings us to the salient question: Can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says it is?

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. And I also have a disclaimer to acknowledge. I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.

The history of the debate over the health effects of sugar has gone on far longer than you might imagine. It is littered with erroneous statements and conclusions because even the supposed authorities had no true understanding of what they were talking about. They didn’t know, quite literally, what they meant by the word “sugar” and therefore what the implications were.

So let’s start by clarifying a few issues, beginning with Lustig’s use of the word “sugar” to mean both sucrose — beet and cane sugar, whether white or brown — and high-fructose corn syrup. This is a critical point, particularly because high-fructose corn syrup has indeed become “the flashpoint for everybody’s distrust of processed foods,” says Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist and the author of “Food Politics.”

This development is recent and borders on humorous. In the early 1980s, high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in sodas and other products in part because refined sugar then had the reputation as a generally noxious nutrient. (“Villain in Disguise?” asked a headline in this paper in 1977, before answering in the affirmative.) High-fructose corn syrup was portrayed by the food industry as a healthful alternative, and that’s how the public perceived it. It was also cheaper than sugar, which didn’t hurt its commercial prospects. Now the tide is rolling the other way, and refined sugar is making a commercial comeback as the supposedly healthful alternative to this noxious corn-syrup stuff. “Industry after industry is replacing their product with sucrose and advertising it as such — ‘No High-Fructose Corn Syrup,’ ” Nestle notes.

But marketing aside, the two sweeteners are effectively identical in their biological effects. “High-fructose corn syrup, sugar — no difference,” is how Lustig put it in a lecture that I attended in San Francisco last December. “The point is they’re each bad — equally bad, equally poisonous.”

Refined sugar (that is, sucrose) is made up of a molecule of the carbohydrate glucose, bonded to a molecule of the carbohydrate fructose — a 50-50 mixture of the two. The fructose, which is almost twice as sweet as glucose, is what distinguishes sugar from other carbohydrate-rich foods like bread or potatoes that break down upon digestion to glucose alone. The more fructose in a substance, the sweeter it will be. High-fructose corn syrup, as it is most commonly consumed, is 55 percent fructose, and the remaining 45 percent is nearly all glucose. It was first marketed in the late 1970s and was created to be indistinguishable from refined sugar when used in soft drinks. Because each of these sugars ends up as glucose and fructose in our guts, our bodies react the same way to both, and the physiological effects are identical. In a 2010 review of the relevant science, Luc Tappy, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who is considered by biochemists who study fructose to be the world’s foremost authority on the subject, said there was “not the single hint” that H.F.C.S. was more deleterious than other sources of sugar.

The question, then, isn’t whether high-fructose corn syrup is worse than sugar; it’s what do they do to us, and how do they do it? The conventional wisdom has long been that the worst that can be said about sugars of any kind is that they cause tooth decay and represent “empty calories” that we eat in excess because they taste so good.

By this logic, sugar-sweetened beverages (or H.F.C.S.-sweetened beverages, as the Sugar Association prefers they are called) are bad for us not because there’s anything particularly toxic about the sugar they contain but just because people consume too many of them.

Those organizations that now advise us to cut down on our sugar consumption — the Department of Agriculture, for instance, in its recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or the American Heart Association in guidelines released in September 2009 (of which Lustig was a co-author) — do so for this reason. Refined sugar and H.F.C.S. don’t come with any protein, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants or fiber, and so they either displace other more nutritious elements of our diet or are eaten over and above what we need to sustain our weight, and this is why we get fatter.

Whether the empty-calories argument is true, it’s certainly convenient. It allows everyone to assign blame for obesity and, by extension, diabetes — two conditions so intimately linked that some authorities have taken to calling them “diabesity” — to overeating of all foods, or underexercising, because a calorie is a calorie. “This isn’t about demonizing any industry,” as Michelle Obama said about her Let’s Move program to combat the epidemic of childhood obesity. Instead it’s about getting us — or our children — to move more and eat less, reduce our portion sizes, cut back on snacks.

Lustig’s argument, however, is not about the consumption of empty calories — and biochemists have made the same case previously, though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics, specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it, that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient quantities.

The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.” This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose (from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same, but the metabolic consequences are quite different.

The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form — soda or fruit juices — the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.

In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.

If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.

The last time an agency of the federal government looked into the question of sugar and health in any detail was in 2005, in a report by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academies. The authors of the report acknowledged that plenty of evidence suggested that sugar could increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes — even raising LDL cholesterol, known as the “bad cholesterol”—– but did not consider the research to be definitive. There was enough ambiguity, they concluded, that they couldn’t even set an upper limit on how much sugar constitutes too much. Referring back to the 2005 report, an Institute of Medicine report released last fall reiterated, “There is a lack of scientific agreement about the amount of sugars that can be consumed in a healthy diet.” This was the same conclusion that the Food and Drug Administration came to when it last assessed the sugar question, back in 1986. The F.D.A. report was perceived as an exoneration of sugar, and that perception influenced the treatment of sugar in the landmark reports on diet and health that came after.

The Sugar Association and the Corn Refiners Association have also portrayed the 1986 F.D.A. report as clearing sugar of nutritional crimes, but what it concluded was actually something else entirely. To be precise, the F.D.A. reviewers said that other than its contribution to calories, “no conclusive evidence on sugars demonstrates a hazard to the general public when sugars are consumed at the levels that are now current.” This is another way of saying that the evidence by no means refuted the kinds of claims that Lustig is making now and other researchers were making then, just that it wasn’t definitive or unambiguous.

What we have to keep in mind, says Walter Glinsmann, the F.D.A. administrator who was the primary author on the 1986 report and who now is an adviser to the Corn Refiners Association, is that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be toxic, as Lustig argues, but so might any substance if it’s consumed in ways or in quantities that are unnatural for humans. The question is always at what dose does a substance go from being harmless to harmful? How much do we have to consume before this happens?

When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of “added sugars” as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that’s indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig.

But 40 pounds per year happened to be 35 pounds less than what Department of Agriculture analysts said we were consuming at the time — 75 pounds per person per year — and the U.S.D.A. estimates are typically considered to be the most reliable. By the early 2000s, according to the U.S.D.A., we had increased our consumption to more than 90 pounds per person per year.

That this increase happened to coincide with the current epidemics of obesity and diabetes is one reason that it’s tempting to blame sugars — sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — for the problem. In 1980, roughly one in seven Americans was obese, and almost six million were diabetic, and the obesity rates, at least, hadn’t changed significantly in the 20 years previously. By the early 2000s, when sugar consumption peaked, one in every three Americans was obese, and 14 million were diabetic.

This correlation between sugar consumption and diabetes is what defense attorneys call circumstantial evidence. It’s more compelling than it otherwise might be, though, because the last time sugar consumption jumped markedly in this country, it was also associated with a diabetes epidemic.

In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.

Emerson’s argument was countered by Elliott Joslin, a leading authority on diabetes, and Joslin won out. But his argument was fundamentally flawed. Simply put, it went like this: The Japanese eat lots of rice, and Japanese diabetics are few and far between; rice is mostly carbohydrate, which suggests that sugar, also a carbohydrate, does not cause diabetes. But sugar and rice are not identical merely because they’re both carbohydrates. Joslin could not know at the time that the fructose content of sugar affects how we metabolize it.

Joslin was also unaware that the Japanese ate little sugar. In the early 1960s, the Japanese were eating as little sugar as Americans were a century earlier, maybe less, which means that the Japanese experience could have been used to support the idea that sugar causes diabetes. Still, with Joslin arguing in edition after edition of his seminal textbook that sugar played no role in diabetes, it eventually took on the aura of undisputed truth.

Until Lustig came along, the last time an academic forcefully put forward the sugar-as-toxin thesis was in the 1970s, when John Yudkin, a leading authority on nutrition in the United Kingdom, published a polemic on sugar called “Sweet and Dangerous.” Through the 1960s Yudkin did a series of experiments feeding sugar and starch to rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and college students. He found that the sugar invariably raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels in Yudkin’s experiments, which linked sugar directly to type 2 diabetes. Few in the medical community took Yudkin’s ideas seriously, largely because he was also arguing that dietary fat and saturated fat were harmless. This set Yudkin’s sugar hypothesis directly against the growing acceptance of the idea, prominent to this day, that dietary fat was the cause of heart disease, a notion championed by the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys.

A common assumption at the time was that if one hypothesis was right, then the other was most likely wrong. Either fat caused heart disease by raising cholesterol, or sugar did by raising triglycerides. “The theory that diets high in sugar are an important cause of atherosclerosis and heart disease does not have wide support among experts in the field, who say that fats and cholesterol are the more likely culprits,” as Jane E. Brody wrote in The Times in 1977.

At the time, many of the key observations cited to argue that dietary fat caused heart disease actually support the sugar theory as well. During the Korean War, pathologists doing autopsies on American soldiers killed in battle noticed that many had significant plaques in their arteries, even those who were still teenagers, while the Koreans killed in battle did not. The atherosclerotic plaques in the Americans were attributed to the fact that they ate high-fat diets and the Koreans ate low-fat. But the Americans were also eating high-sugar diets, while the Koreans, like the Japanese, were not.

In 1970, Keys published the results of a landmark study in nutrition known as the Seven Countries Study. Its results were perceived by the medical community and the wider public as compelling evidence that saturated-fat consumption is the best dietary predictor of heart disease. But sugar consumption in the seven countries studied was almost equally predictive. So it was possible that Yudkin was right, and Keys was wrong, or that they could both be right. The evidence has always been able to go either way.

European clinicians tended to side with Yudkin; Americans with Keys. The situation wasn’t helped, as one of Yudkin’s colleagues later told me, by the fact that “there was quite a bit of loathing” between the two nutritionists themselves. In 1971, Keys published an article attacking Yudkin and describing his evidence against sugar as “flimsy indeed.” He treated Yudkin as a figure of scorn, and Yudkin never managed to shake the portrayal.

By the end of the 1970s, any scientist who studied the potentially deleterious effects of sugar in the diet, according to Sheldon Reiser, who did just that at the U.S.D.A.’s Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory in Beltsville, Md., and talked about it publicly, was endangering his reputation. “Yudkin was so discredited,” Reiser said to me. “He was ridiculed in a way. And anybody else who said something bad about sucrose, they’d say, ‘He’s just like Yudkin.’ ”

What has changed since then, other than Americans getting fatter and more diabetic? It wasn’t so much that researchers learned anything particularly new about the effects of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup in the human body. Rather the context of the science changed: physicians and medical authorities came to accept the idea that a condition known as metabolic syndrome is a major, if not the major, risk factor for heart disease and diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimate that some 75 million Americans have metabolic syndrome. For those who have heart attacks, metabolic syndrome will very likely be the reason.

The first symptom doctors are told to look for in diagnosing metabolic syndrome is an expanding waistline. This means that if you’re overweight, there’s a good chance you have metabolic syndrome, and this is why you’re more likely to have a heart attack or become diabetic (or both) than someone who’s not. Although lean individuals, too, can have metabolic syndrome, and they are at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes than lean individuals without it.

Having metabolic syndrome is another way of saying that the cells in your body are actively ignoring the action of the hormone insulin — a condition known technically as being insulin-resistant. Because insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome still get remarkably little attention in the press (certainly compared with cholesterol), let me explain the basics.

You secrete insulin in response to the foods you eat — particularly the carbohydrates — to keep blood sugar in control after a meal. When your cells are resistant to insulin, your body (your pancreas, to be precise) responds to rising blood sugar by pumping out more and more insulin. Eventually the pancreas can no longer keep up with the demand or it gives in to what diabetologists call “pancreatic exhaustion.” Now your blood sugar will rise out of control, and you’ve got diabetes.

Not everyone with insulin resistance becomes diabetic; some continue to secrete enough insulin to overcome their cells’ resistance to the hormone. But having chronically elevated insulin levels has harmful effects of its own — heart disease, for one. A result is higher triglyceride levels and blood pressure, lower levels of HDL cholesterol (the “good cholesterol”), further worsening the insulin resistance — this is metabolic syndrome.

When physicians assess your risk of heart disease these days, they will take into consideration your LDL cholesterol (the bad kind), but also these symptoms of metabolic syndrome. The idea, according to Scott Grundy, a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center nutritionist and the chairman of the panel that produced the last edition of the National Cholesterol Education Program guidelines, is that heart attacks 50 years ago might have been caused by high cholesterol — particularly high LDL cholesterol — but since then we’ve all gotten fatter and more diabetic, and now it’s metabolic syndrome that’s the more conspicuous problem.

This raises two obvious questions. The first is what sets off metabolic syndrome to begin with, which is another way of asking, What causes the initial insulin resistance? There are several hypotheses, but researchers who study the mechanisms of insulin resistance now think that a likely cause is the accumulation of fat in the liver. When studies have been done trying to answer this question in humans, says Varman Samuel, who studies insulin resistance at Yale School of Medicine, the correlation between liver fat and insulin resistance in patients, lean or obese, is “remarkably strong.” What it looks like, Samuel says, is that “when you deposit fat in the liver, that’s when you become insulin-resistant.”

That raises the other obvious question: What causes the liver to accumulate fat in humans? A common assumption is that simply getting fatter leads to a fatty liver, but this does not explain fatty liver in lean people. Some of it could be attributed to genetic predisposition. But harking back to Lustig, there’s also the very real possibility that it is caused by sugar.

As it happens, metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance are the reasons that many of the researchers today studying fructose became interested in the subject to begin with. If you want to cause insulin resistance in laboratory rats, says Gerald Reaven, the Stanford University diabetologist who did much of the pioneering work on the subject, feeding them diets that are mostly fructose is an easy way to do it. It’s a “very obvious, very dramatic” effect, Reaven says.

By the early 2000s, researchers studying fructose metabolism had established certain findings unambiguously and had well-established biochemical explanations for what was happening. Feed animals enough pure fructose or enough sugar, and their livers convert the fructose into fat — the saturated fatty acid, palmitate, to be precise, that supposedly gives us heart disease when we eat it, by raising LDL cholesterol. The fat accumulates in the liver, and insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome follow.

Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance.

Similar effects can be shown in humans, although the researchers doing this work typically did the studies with only fructose — as Luc Tappy did in Switzerland or Peter Havel and Kimber Stanhope did at the University of California, Davis — and pure fructose is not the same thing as sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day — a “pretty high dose,” he says —– their livers would start to become insulin-resistant, and their triglycerides would go up in just a few days. With lower doses, Tappy says, just as in the animal research, the same effects would appear, but it would take longer, a month or more.

Despite the steady accumulation of research, the evidence can still be criticized as falling far short of conclusive. The studies in rodents aren’t necessarily applicable to humans. And the kinds of studies that Tappy, Havel and Stanhope did — having real people drink beverages sweetened with fructose and comparing the effect with what happens when the same people or others drink beverages sweetened with glucose — aren’t applicable to real human experience, because we never naturally consume pure fructose. We always take it with glucose, in the nearly 50-50 combinations of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. And then the amount of fructose or sucrose being fed in these studies, to the rodents or the human subjects, has typically been enormous.

This is why the research reviews on the subject invariably conclude that more research is necessary to establish at what dose sugar and high-fructose corn syrup start becoming what Lustig calls toxic. “There is clearly a need for intervention studies,” as Tappy recently phrased it in the technical jargon of the field, “in which the fructose intake of high-fructose consumers is reduced to better delineate the possible pathogenic role of fructose. At present, short-term-intervention studies, however, suggest that a high-fructose intake consisting of soft drinks, sweetened juices or bakery products can increase the risk of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases.”

In simpler language, how much of this stuff do we have to eat or drink, and for how long, before it does to us what it does to laboratory rats? And is that amount more than we’re already consuming?

Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to learn anything conclusive in the near future. As Lustig points out, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup are certainly not “acute toxins” of the kind the F.D.A. typically regulates and the effects of which can be studied over the course of days or months. The question is whether they’re “chronic toxins,” which means “not toxic after one meal, but after 1,000 meals.” This means that what Tappy calls “intervention studies” have to go on for significantly longer than 1,000 meals to be meaningful.

At the moment, the National Institutes of Health are supporting surprisingly few clinical trials related to sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in the U.S. All are small, and none will last more than a few months. Lustig and his colleagues at U.C.S.F. — including Jean-Marc Schwarz, whom Tappy describes as one of the three best fructose biochemists in the world — are doing one of these studies. It will look at what happens when obese teenagers consume no sugar other than what they might get in fruits and vegetables. Another study will do the same with pregnant women to see if their babies are born healthier and leaner.

Only one study in this country, by Havel and Stanhope at the University of California, Davis, is directly addressing the question of how much sugar is required to trigger the symptoms of insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. Havel and Stanhope are having healthy people drink three sugar- or H.F.C.S.-sweetened beverages a day and then seeing what happens. The catch is that their study subjects go through this three-beverage-a-day routine for only two weeks. That doesn’t seem like a very long time — only 42 meals, not 1,000 — but Havel and Stanhope have been studying fructose since the mid-1990s, and they seem confident that two weeks is sufficient to see if these sugars cause at least some of the symptoms of metabolic syndrome.

So the answer to the question of whether sugar is as bad as Lustig claims is that it certainly could be. It very well may be true that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup, because of the unique way in which we metabolize fructose and at the levels we now consume it, cause fat to accumulate in our livers followed by insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, and so trigger the process that leads to heart disease, diabetes and obesity. They could indeed be toxic, but they take years to do their damage. It doesn’t happen overnight. Until long-term studies are done, we won’t know for sure.

One more question still needs to be asked, and this is what my wife, who has had to live with my journalistic obsession on this subject, calls the Grinch-trying-to-steal-Christmas problem. What are the chances that sugar is actually worse than Lustig says it is?

One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.

This goes along with two other observations that have led to the well-accepted idea that some large percentage of cancers are caused by our Western diets and lifestyles. This means they could actually be prevented if we could pinpoint exactly what the problem is and prevent or avoid that.

One observation is that death rates from cancer, like those from diabetes, increased significantly in the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th. As with diabetes, this observation was accompanied by a vigorous debate about whether those increases could be explained solely by the aging of the population and the use of new diagnostic techniques or whether it was really the incidence of cancer itself that was increasing. “By the 1930s,” as a 1997 report by the World Cancer Research Fund International and the American Institute for Cancer Research explained, “it was apparent that age-adjusted death rates from cancer were rising in the U.S.A.,” which meant that the likelihood of any particular 60-year-old, for instance, dying from cancer was increasing, even if there were indeed more 60-years-olds with each passing year.

The second observation was that malignant cancer, like diabetes, was a relatively rare disease in populations that didn’t eat Western diets, and in some of these populations it appeared to be virtually nonexistent. In the 1950s, malignant cancer among the Inuit, for instance, was still deemed sufficiently rare that physicians working in northern Canada would publish case reports in medical journals when they did diagnose a case.

In 1984, Canadian physicians published an analysis of 30 years of cancer incidence among Inuit in the western and central Arctic. While there had been a “striking increase in the incidence of cancers of modern societies” including lung and cervical cancer, they reported, there were still “conspicuous deficits” in breast-cancer rates. They could not find a single case in an Inuit patient before 1966; they could find only two cases between 1967 and 1980. Since then, as their diet became more like ours, breast cancer incidence has steadily increased among the Inuit, although it’s still significantly lower than it is in other North American ethnic groups. Diabetes rates in the Inuit have also gone from vanishingly low in the mid-20th century to high today.

Now most researchers will agree that the link between Western diet or lifestyle and cancer manifests itself through this association with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome — i.e., insulin resistance. This was the conclusion, for instance, of a 2007 report published by the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — “Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer.”

So how does it work? Cancer researchers now consider that the problem with insulin resistance is that it leads us to secrete more insulin, and insulin (as well as a related hormone known as insulin-like growth factor) actually promotes tumor growth.

As it was explained to me by Craig Thompson, who has done much of this research and is now president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the cells of many human cancers come to depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor (and related growth factors) also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do. Some cancers develop mutations that serve the purpose of increasing the influence of insulin on the cell; others take advantage of the elevated insulin levels that are common to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type 2 diabetes. Some do both. Thompson believes that many pre-cancerous cells would never acquire the mutations that turn them into malignant tumors if they weren’t being driven by insulin to take up more and more blood sugar and metabolize it.

What these researchers call elevated insulin (or insulin-like growth factor) signaling appears to be a necessary step in many human cancers, particularly cancers like breast and colon cancer. Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 percent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that work to enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells. Cantley is now the leader of one of five scientific “dream teams,” financed by a national coalition called Stand Up to Cancer, to study, in the case of Cantley’s team, precisely this link between a specific insulin-signaling gene (known technically as PI3K) and tumor development in breast and other cancers common to women.

Most of the researchers studying this insulin/cancer link seem concerned primarily with finding a drug that might work to suppress insulin signaling in incipient cancer cells and so, they hope, inhibit or prevent their growth entirely. Many of the experts writing about the insulin/cancer link from a public health perspective — as in the 2007 report from the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research — work from the assumption that chronically elevated insulin levels and insulin resistance are both caused by being fat or by getting fatter. They recommend, as the 2007 report did, that we should all work to be lean and more physically active, and that in turn will help us prevent cancer.

But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that’s quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly. For just this reason, neither of these men will eat sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, if they can avoid it.

“I have eliminated refined sugar from my diet and eat as little as I possibly can,” Thompson told me, “because I believe ultimately it’s something I can do to decrease my risk of cancer.” Cantley put it this way: “Sugar scares me.”

Sugar scares me too, obviously. I’d like to eat it in moderation. I’d certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade. If sugar just makes us fatter, that’s one thing. We start gaining weight, we eat less of it. But we are also talking about things we can’t see — fatty liver, insulin resistance and all that follows. Officially I’m not supposed to worry because the evidence isn’t conclusive, but I do.

Gary Taubes (gataubes@gmail.com) is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation independent investigator in health policy and the author of “Why We Get Fat.” Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Walk the Walk

I was watching a health & fitness report on the news the other morning, and found myself rather annoyed at the "experts" giving advice.  The report was about an overweight young man who is pre-diabetic and wanting to get healthy, especially since his mother just past away from diabetes related complications. 

Now, I'm ALL for getting healthy...and I totally respect his desire and choice to do so.  However the folks that are giving him advice are the one's I'm concerned with.  You see, these are diet, exercise and nutrition "experts" that are guiding this young man through his journey...a very slow and long journey, according to his progress report.  Why so slow you ask?  It can be that he's not necessarily sticking with the plan 100%...but my guess is it has something to do with these so called experts.  These middle-aged women who look like the rest of the overweight, unhealthy Americans out there.  I'm sorry, but if I'm going to listen to you about a health and weight-loss program, you better be the model of health.  Now I know big people who are healthy and can kick butt in so many things.  But these ladies were not only overweight, their skin, hair and basic demeanor was unhealthy.  I just can't believe they really have the secret to a new and healthy lifestyle...and especially not the way to maintain said lifestyle.  I think this young gent would be better off if he went to a normal gym, picked up a well known success program / book or even talked ta a friend who has done the work...heck he may be further along in his goal than his current state.  And its SO discouraging when progress is slow, especially at the beginning.

So I say, look to Tim Ferris, Jillian Michael, or some health guru at your local gym who has done the work, shows and gets results, and really walks the walk.  I think your chances at success are better stacked in your favor.  Buyer beware.

Have a great day!
Bex

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Quick Tips for 4HB

Ok...so with The 4 Hour Body, you definitely see results and in reading the material (regarding the fat loss section), all of his methods are reasonable.  I've been on almost every diet and have experimented with what works and what doesn't.  He too seems to have lab ratted himself out for similar purposes.  So let's break it down and discuss what works and why:

Overview:  The Diet

No starches, flours, sugars, alcohol (except 2 glasses of dry red wine), dairy, fruit or basically any white carb (except cauliflower)

Eat lean proteins, good fats, veggies (preferably green) and BEANS (preferably black & lentils)

Keep your diet drink and artificial sugar consumption at a bare minimum...no more that 16 oz of diet soda, the chemicals mess with your digestive enzymes and slow weight loss.

As for the Red Wine, you can have it, but in my experience it slows the weight loss as well.

And I recommend drinking 100 oz of water to help the weight loss progression...it helped several of my friends get out of their weight plateau.

Ideally he wants you to have protein in every meal, and to make sure to eat within 30 minutes of waking up...and he's right...it gets the metabolism going.

He also recommends eating 4 times a day (a meal every 3-4 hours)...another great way to keep the metabolism going.

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY...you're only dieting 6 out of the 7 days in a week.  Ya get a cheat day (he recommends to really go hog wild)...not only do you get one...you should take one for many different reasons.
Reason # 1:  You're human and you need to allow yourself a day off and a day to eat whatever you like.
Reason #2:  If you have a craving or are tempted to cheat, you'll be able to remind yourself that you can have it on your cheat day.  OR if you have an event where you know you'll be eating and/or drinking unauthorized things, you can make that event day your cheat day and be good the other 6 surrounding it.
Reason #3:  You need the nutrients, sodium and fat that are found in a lot of the crap foods you'll be eating on your cheat day.  Moderation is a good thing, thus 1 day out of 6 of eating "bad" is a good thing.
Reason #4:  Once you eat all that crap, and feel a bit ill, it's a good reminder as to why eating healthy is the way to go and it helps you stick with it.  Plus you're a lot less likely to want the crap the other 6 days a week.

Well I hope this is helpful...if you have any adds, questions or comments, please do so.  So far I've lost 4 lbs. in a week and everyone keeps commenting that I look like I've lost weight...weird for that to be notice so soon.

Have a great day!
Bex

Monday, May 16, 2011

4HB

Ok...reading the latest in Diet/Excercise books...The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Workweek).  I will let you know what I think and what I discover as I experiment with this program.  Here goes nothing.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Water Logged

I'm trying to drink 100 oz. of water everyday, but it's not as easy as it sounds.  Why 100 oz.?  Well believe it or not, besides water being so good for you, it turns out that the more water you drink, the less you retain.  This is music to my ears, especially when you're trying to get rid of that pesky bloaty feeling...yick!  So here I am guzzling water like there's no tomorrow...going to the bathroom every 30 minutes (or so it seems).  But it's all good.

Currently I'm producing 3 major projects at one time and working on my own performing career included, and I'm starting to feel a little busy...lol.  Not to mention that I just finished doing hair, make-up and wardrobe at Dicapo Opera for their latest opera Gianni Schicchi.  However I have found that I'm sticking to the diet and exercise pretty well even though my schedule seems to be very busy.  What can I say...I do it to myself. 

Today, I'm going to do cardio sculpt with my girl Challis and I fear that it's going to kick my butt due to the fact that I haven't been taking class for a while.  My form of exercise over the past month has mainly been guerilla cardio, dance rehearsal, kettle bell swings, and lovely walks outside in the sunshine  :)  Soooo, yeah, I'm gonna be hurtin' tomorrow.

Well kids, back to the grind.  Hope you have a great day.
-Bex

Thursday, April 14, 2011

What to Expect

The 7 Day Peaking (Shedding the Water Weight) Diet is really a type of Detox Diet.  You can find similar plans in other books like South Beach (Phase 1) or the Paleo Diet...however this one is different because of the amounts of water you have to drink and the lack of sodium you can take in...plus very little fats except for what's found in nuts and avocado (no cooking with oils).  This is very much a limited diet, and should only be done as recommended.  Let me tell you what to expect on this plan.

  • You will feel lethargic, due to the lack of caffeine and sugars that you are no longer ingesting.  Don't worry, you will get over that feeling, but it takes time for your body to adapt.  You just have to be patient...I usually adapt after 2 weeks of lean eating with no carbs, caffeine or sugar.

  • You may feel achy both in the body and the head.  Again, don't worry...you're body is resetting itself to healthy levels and getting rid of the residual junk floating around in your system...thus the detox part.  It's not the most comfortable of things, but necessary to clean up your insides.  Drinking water to flush the system will help and so will sweating it out at the gym.

  • You may feel dizzy...that can be due to several factors:  a.) Need of hydration to help flush the toxins from the system, so definitely drink the 100 oz of water recommended.  b.) Your blood sugar is trying to balance out...give it time...again I know it usually takes my body about 2 weeks.  c.) Are you eating enough and often?  Try to stick to the recommended foods and certain amount of meals...I eat 4-5 snack/meals a day...sometime 6 based on how many hours I'm up and functioning...I sometimes work 18 hour days.  and/or d.) Sinus pressure in the head, related to the body's detox mode...again hydration will help with this.  I have also found that deep cleansing breaths help...the bod needs oxygen.

  • Cravings...yeah, you always want what you can't have.  It's a mind game...the long term rewards are sooo much better than the momentary lapse.  Just think of what you have and can attain by being diligent in your efforts.  And if you do slip up, get right back on, DO NOT make an entire binge day out of one little calorie.  You're body is going to want caffeine and sugar...it's addicted...but you're stronger and smarter than addiction...it really is mind over matter...so suck it up, and do it!
That's pretty much all I can think of at the moment...probably has something to do with the lack of sugar in my body...lol.

I do know and recognize that when I do eat clean and lean with no sugars or empty carbs in the bod, I function so much better.  My joints stop hurting, my clothes fit better, and I feel good all over (once I get past the initial phase.)

Feel free to hit me up with any questions you may have.

Good luck and have a great day,
Bex

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Water Shedding

4.5 lbs. down in two days!  Yep, we have water weight kids...and we're happily getting rid of that empty poundage.  Did you know that every 1 pound of weight you carry = 4 pounds of impact on your joints?  My plan is to lose as much water weight in 7 days as I can to saves my joints some serious issues.  10 lbs. of water weight gone = 40 lbs. of impact gone...so I can really hit my hardcore work-outs with a little more "ease"...at least joint-wise.

The "Making the Cut" plan is not for the faint of heart or fitness challenged.  You have to pass Jillian's fitness test in the book before you can even start the program.  I've had this book for over a year now, and have just now gotten to level of fitness where I believe I can do the whole 30 days.

I've tried so many different diet and exercise programs in my lifetime.  Read hundreds of books on the subject that I should receive an honorary doctorate from Fitness U.  And the one thing I've learned from all of it is this:  Clean healthy eating, some moderate treats, and constantly changing up your activities (shock the body) is the way to see continuous results.  However, your mental mindset is the number one key to unlocking it all.  Not only do you need to push through and persevere, but you also need to reaffirm your dedication to the project rather often.  For me, it takes a new book or fitness regiment to keep me going.  I need to read or re-read certain books to reset the brain and get me into the groove again.  This time it's Jillian's "Making the Cut"...a book that I'm finally ready for in my life.  I'm at the point where I have my last 20 lbs. to lose to reach my goal weight and I'm so excited that I can already see the victory.  I see myself in bikini, running on the beach, swimming in the waves, soaking in the sun (with serious sunblock of course).  I see myself taking a tropical vacation and happily showing off my new hot bod.  I see myself on stage in my gorgeous, barely there costumes strutting my stuff confidently.  I see the best me I can be...and I see the way to continuing that lean, healthy body for the rest of my life.  I know how to maintain...it's just the final goal that's always alluded me.  But no more, the time is at hand, and I will achieve my heart's desire to be fit and healthy!  It's been a long road, but I'm finally on the last leg of this goal's journey, with new goals to be set and achieved.  I can't wait to see what I can accomplish.  What new fitness levels and heights I can reach.  There's so much capability when it comes to the human body and I want to understand how far I can take it.  Can you tell I'm excited here people?

Alright, onward and upward.

Have a great and productive day.

Best,
Bex

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Water & Cutting

3 lbs. in one day???  Yep, thanks to that lovely thing known as water weight.  I'm currently on a regimen that helps rid the bod of excess water weight.  Why you ask?  Besides the obvious benefits of getting rid of excess bloat, I'm preparing for a serious fitness & nutrition plan.  This week is all about getting rid of my water weight so that when I get to my new hardcore fitness/nutrition plan, I can see the real results.

Water-Weight-Be-Gone Diet (7 days only):

Lean Green Steamed or Raw Veggies only
Lean Protein (Chicken or Turkey Breast)
Raw Nuts & Nut Butters (no sodium)
Low to NO Sodium (keep it under 500 mg a day)
Absolutely NO Table Salt
Egg Whites
Drink 100 oz of Water per day (distilled preferred)
Decaf Coffees & Teas (very little dairy allowed)
NO Sugar
No Flours
No Starches or Carbs
No Oils

Then once we've achieved our 7 day water/detox, it on to doing Jillian Michaels "Making the Cut".  I'm so excited, this is serious fitness for the serious person.  I plan on hitting it hard and reaping the rewards and results.  I'm on my way to the bikini bod that I want for the season...and not just beach season, but performance season!

Onward and upwards my friends.

Best,
Bex

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Detoxing Life

So as part of my regular detox, I've decided to detox my life as well...in other words, get rid of not only foreign, processed materials that may enter my body, but my brain, heart and soul as well. 

Just recently I decided after much strain and conflict, to resign from one of the major Projects I've been working on for years...that was a huge weight gone off of my shoulders immediately.  No need to stress over something you have no control of.  Just gracefully decide not to take anymore abuse and know when to walk...that's what I did.

I have other ventures that are going swimmingly both performance and producer-wise...and the aforementioned resignation has helped me balance my life a little more. 

The detox body-wise, is the attempt to clean my eating up a bit more.  I've cut the dairy and added lemon juice & hot water in the morning.  So far today I've had 1/2 of a grapefruit with the hot water & lemon and some dried mango with tea.  I've now got to figure out what's for lunch.

Work-outs include 20 minutes of Guerrilla Cardio, and the exciting addition of KettleBells into my regime...plus I'm taking a dance class once a week at night on top of my daily lunch work-outs. 

Something lovely about my lunch work-outs is the fact that I have had a gym buddy for the past 3 months.  She's a good friend and it's been like therapy to get together, burn calories and chat about your day to day...it's also been crucial when days are bad or frustrating to have someone to vent to.  Plus when you're hurting emotionally, the "pain" from the work-out cancels out everything else...it's scientifically proven that your brain can only recognize one form of pain in the body at a time, including mental versus physical.  So stressed, angry and/or hurting...go to the gym...it's the best way to fight off those frustrations.

AND there's just something about having a regularly scheduled gym buddy...it makes you go to the gym even when you don't feel like it...hello accountability. 

So you can see that my detox is well underway with everything from nutrition and fitness, to mental health for both mind and soul.

What's your therapy?

Have a great day,
Bex

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Day 2...again...

Work-out...check
Eat healthy/clean...check
Still on the path to wellness...check

Ok, so I'm at day two again, and it feels good.  There was a lot of conversation with myself to get myself to the gym...and guess what...I went...good conversation.  The eating has been good today so far, but now the tough part is getting through the evening without caving into temptations and emotional eating.  I'm pretty strong and plan on distracting myself with other projects, so I should be ok.

That's all to report today, I won't get into the drama of my world other than health and fitness today.  Let's just say, I'm dealing with a whole mountain of stress, but still I can deal...so no worries.  One day at a time.

Have a great day,
Bex

Monday, March 7, 2011

The Rant

Work-Out...check
Eat Clean...check
On Path to a healthy lifestyle...check
Stay on Path...GOD I hope so!!!

You'd think that the thought of performing practically half-naked infront of crowds & crowds of people would be motivation enough for anyone to get their butts to stay on a healthy regiment of diet and exercise. Right?  Hmmm...It currently doesn't seem to scare me half as much as it should...I just can't seem to stay motivated.  I find myself always neglecting my health when it gets really busy in my life.  For example...my projects picking up, more being added everyday, my mom in the hospital (poor mom has heart and diabetes problems), boy "issues", roommate "issues", money "issues"...boy that's alot of issues.  And unfortunately, these "issues" seem to affect my my mindset of staying healthy and determined to work-out.  I've got to get it together.  I know, breathe and take it on day at a time, but I tell ya, I've been pretty slothful lately and the scale, nor do pictures, lie.  Ok.  So, here I go again.  Back to re-re-committing myself to my healthy, clean, gluten-free eating and to getting myself moving (ie. getting my butt to the gym).  Time to take control...heck I control everything else in my life, you'd think I could manage something as simple as what I put in my mouth or if I walk myself over to the gym and climb onto the treadmill.  That sounds rather basic and doable... right? SO WHAT THE HECK'S MY PROBLEM!!! 

Now for some self love (not that kind...gutter people).

I will take care of myself, I will love myself, I will make sure to put good things into my body and keep the bad to the minimum.  Sounds like a plan! Now to stick with it.

Hope you're doing well on whatever endeavors you're on.

Have a great day,
Bex