Contents

1.     HRH Program News

2.     Ask Craig Anything: Is there a simple blood test for insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome?

3.    All Year's Resolution 2: Transmit Only Good.

Your HRH Program E-book and Bonuses

If you haven’t yet purchased the HRH Program e-book, there’s no time like the present! Go to www.heartratehealth.com to get a copy, plus nearly $100 in bonus material.  And remember, if it doesn’t work for you for any reason, you have a full year to return it for a full refund.

HRH Program News

I’m sorry for the irregularity of the newsletter to start off the year.  You’ve heard about burning the candle at both ends, right? Well, I feel as if I just went ahead and threw the candle in the fireplace.  Yes, it’s been a busy and stressful new year, and I’m afraid it will get worse instead of better in the short-term.  I’m glad I’m on the HRH Program, because I’d be a wreck otherwise.

Hey, Heartmath was on the Today Show not too long ago.  You should check it out, and then go to HeartMath to learn more. 

I’ll do my best to get the next newsletter out sooner next time, but I can’t make any promises.  If you have any questions in the meantime, please write to me at ask-craig@heartratehealth.com.

Ask Craig Anything

Is there a blood test I can take to see if I have Insulin Resistance or Metabolic Syndrome? 

The simple answer is “yes” for insulin resistance, and “not really” for metabolic syndrome.  But you may know by now that I prefer to expand all simple answers into full-blown articles, so read on. 

There is a simple blood test to see if you have insulin resistance, or “impaired glucose tolerance” in medical circles.  It’s a little more complicated for metabolic syndrome, as insulin resistance is just one of the factors.  Let me explain, and you can also go to www.heartratehealth.com/diabetes/ to learn more. 

Insulin resistance is a disease where your cells are unable to uptake glucose (blood sugar).  Insulin is a hormone that acts as the key to open up your cells to the blood sugar, essentially telling them, “Hey, there’s food to be had if you just open your mouth!” Normally, cells just say thank you very much and eat up the excess glucose floating around in the blood.  All is well when this happens.

Unfortunately, through a number of causes, the cells become less responsive to insulin and cannot uptake the sugar.  This is “insulin resistance”, and it’s extremely dangerous! First, your cells aren’t getting the energy they need, perhaps causing you to lose energy.  Second, high blood sugar is dangerous to the cells themselves.  Bathing the bodies’ cells in extra sugar, overall, causes them to age about twice as fast as normal and eventually causes full-blown Type II Diabetes, which will become the most prevalent disease of the 21^st century within 10 years. 

Fortunately, insulin resistance is easy to detect through a simple blood test.  For the blood test, the doctor will ask you to eat and drink nothing before the test, so you’ll want to do it in the morning.  When you eat, your blood sugar goes up naturally, and it’s difficult to tell what’s happening at the base level. 

After the test, make sure to tell your doctor you want to make sure to get your exact blood glucose level.  Often, the labs will call you back and say “everything’s normal”, without elaborating.  Don’t be afraid to say, “I need the exact blood glucose level you measured.”  Then, go to the link I mentioned above to see where you fit in.  (There are a couple of ways those are reported.  It will either be between 5-10 or about 90-130.)

 Metabolic Syndrome is actually a collection of symptoms, of which insulin resistance is probably the most important.  Others include abdominal fat, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, and low “good” cholesterol.  Metabolic syndrome occurs when you have three of the five symptoms just listed.  While the blood test detects triglycerides (high fats in the blood), low good cholesterol, and insulin resistance, it’s pretty clear that belly fat and high blood pressure are not measured by blood tests. 

Metabolic Syndrome is one of those ill-defined diseases, where doctors and researchers disagree on what’s really important.  But any of the symptoms are important to pay attention to.  For more on whether metabolic syndrome, click on Does Metabolic Syndrome Even Exist?

Book Review: Eating, Drinking, Overthinking

All Year’s Resolution #2: What Are You Transmitting? 

At times, I go through stages where some very unusual “coincidences” take place—the kind that really don’t seem coincidental at all.  The past few weeks have been one of those times.  Let me tell you about a couple of them, and hopefully we’ll draw some sort of lesson out of the muck of synchronistic happenings. 

The first one is less of a one time experience and more of an ongoing one.  It happens with my three year old daughter, Rachael.  .  (Let me first brag that someone recently said she has the kindest face of anyone she had ever seen.)  Just the other day, as I was getting out of my car, I couldn’t remember if I had turned off the lights.  I started having visions of the battery running down.  Then I thought that I really have no idea how a battery keeps its charge in the first place.  Just stream of consciousness thinking.   

At the dinner table that night, Rachael asked, right out of the blue, “What’s in a battery?”  Now, let me ask, what business does a three-year-old have asking that type of question!? I figured I either communicated something to her about it, or maybe the opposite.  We have those experiences all the time. 

The second one was so strange that I had to call my dad about it.  I was at our local chess club recently, just walking around watching some games in between selling some extra books I had.  A master player I know suddenly looks up at me and says, “You look like a guy from Kansas!” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “I don’t know, you just seem like you could have walked off the farm and became a city boy.” Alright, I thought, Brian says some unusual things, but I didn’t put too much stock in it.  

Then, he said, “Looks like a guy from Tribune, Kansas.”  I almost fell out of my socks.  My dad is originally from Tribune, Kansas, and a good deal of my remaining family on his side is from Tribune, a town of 835 people, according to the latest census.  (I haven’t been there in 20 years, though, so I hardly just walked off the farm.)

It turns out that he had worked there as a teenager for a summer.  He had a random thought about Tribune earlier that day, and it apparently struck him as something to reminisce about.  Then, he “randomly” blurts this out to me, after I hadn’t seem him in about five years.  I’m not statistician, but I would imagine there are some low odds to that sequence of events. 

I’ve always been interested in occurrences such as this, but since I’ve never had a controlled experience with it—being able to transmit information on purpose—I largely just let it happen and pass. 

But then I thought about Rachael again.  It started me thinking.  What, exactly, am I transmitting? And what effect is it having on her? Kids are great at picking up signals.  They’re naturals at it, I think, because they don’t “think things through” the way we do.  They feel, and they respond to those feelings.  I want to make sure that she’s only picking up the best from me at all times. 

I firmly believe that we’re all connected and that we’re all receiving a lot more from “others” than we know.  Let me change that.  I know this is true.  How? Well, mostly because I’m pretty nerdy and like to read book on quantum physics.  But deep down, it feels as though it has to be true, and I’m willing to try to live as if it was.  

With that in mind, given that we probably can’t control exactly what people are going to pick up (like the geo-location of your family tree), we might as well focus on the things we can control, like how we feel and think about others.  What do you want to transmit to others?

For me, I only want to transmit Good: love, understanding, kindness—all that mushy stuff! I’ve been focusing on that since about the beginning of the year.  Let me tell you, this hasn’t been the easiest start to a year I’ve experienced.  In fact, it’s likely been the hardest.  But things are just rolling off me now.  If’I feel wronged, I just let it go and try to think good thoughts and feel positive emotions about the person who did it.  It’s working a lot better for me than doing the opposite.   

Now, please understand, this is a process, and I’m not saying that I do it any way close to perfectly.  But it seems to have a good effect on me, on others around me, and on my daughters.  And that’s reason enough to keep on trying.   

So, finally, here’s the All Year Resolution: Transmit only Good.