The Heart Rate Health Program

Lunch Box Lead Tests Raise Concerns – washingtonpost.com

I’m not sure how much influence lunch box makers have over policy at the FDA, but this story makes me think we have the wrong people doing the deciding.

Here’s a quote from Julie Vallese, a Consumer Products Safety Commission officer:

“Children would have to rub their lunch box and then lick their hands more than 600 times every day, for about 15-30 days, in order for the lunch box to present a health hazard.”

That doesn’t sound like something a parent of a young child would say. Imagine your child anxiously awaiting lunch, fidgeting by scratching his lunch box on his little desktop. Doesn’t some lead come off in a case like that?

Why is ANY lead allowed in children’s lunch boxes?

Note to Women Only: Don’t let your spouse read this article.

Note to Men Only: Don’t let your spouse read this article.

My wife puts a priority on having the kitchen clean in the morning. It’s her fresh palette for mixing and mashing a new masterwork by dinnertime.

Unfortunately, her kitchen maid, her husband, doesn’t share the urgency, and instead thinks of the time after dinner until waking as the time to honor his wife’s creations with still and quiet gestation – with just a dash of primetime television after the kids retire.

The conundrum: my wife rightly wants her creative workspace clear of clutter, and I want to…well, I really just don’t want to do the dishes until right before dinner the next night (at the earliest).

Last night, and many nights prior, however, I found myself compelled the put away all leftovers and clear away the counters before leaving the kitchen. Why? Some sort of reasonable compromise, perhaps? Uh, no. Promises of even more outstanding culinary masterpieces? Ok, now you’re giving me too much credit. I like a good meal like the next guy, but my appreciative capabilities top out well before five-star dining.

No, this was psychological pressure. While reason couldn’t convert me, it turns out that a small family of mice easily defeated my will to sit and do nothing.

To a mouse, our house looks just like cheese. They are instantly attracted. Once in and
established, the mice cleverly climb up through the stove, onto the counter, and find every last crumb of leftover delights.

I’m not easily dissuaded from eating things. If it drops on the floor, I have a very generous 10-second rule: if I can pick it up within 10 seconds of first seeing it, it’s edible, regardless of whether it’s been there for a week and I haven’t seen it yet. If food in the fridge smells OK when I have a cold, it will be fine. My kids call me their garbage disposal and are well aware that any uneaten dinner will disappear forever.

But sharing my foods with rodents is not OK. Don’t they carry the plaque? Or maybe it’s something worse?

So, if I’m not 100% convinced my traps have eliminated every last one (sorry PETA), I’m cleaning the kitchen right away.

These mice are real, but I started to think they wouldn’t have to be for me succumb to the same pressure. If my wife suddenly screamed in the kitchen while making dinner, jumped onto the couch, and told me she saw a mouse on the counter, I’d be on watch from that moment on.

If the mice didn’t appear in the traps, all the better for her, I suppose. The odd success of the Predator movies is probably based on the fact that, to a man, the most dangerous enemy is the one you can’t see. Then, vigilance must be at its highest, and you may need Schwarzenegger.

So, if you want your husband to clean the kitchen right away, “see” a mouse. And guys, if your wife “sees” a mouse, double check that it wasn’t in her imagination. We’ve got our own standards to uphold!

Scientists have made an important advance in understanding who is more at risk for Type II Diabetes by mapping the genome for the disease. I’m a big supporter of gaining every bit of information about diseases like Diabetes, but I’m never sure exactly how information like this will influence behaviors.

Will some people think, “Wow, my mom and dad died from Type II Diabetes, but by the time I’ll suffer from it, there will be a cure, so I shouldn’t worry too much,” and then proceed to act as if they’re not at risk? Unfortunately, I think the answer is “yes”.

The article cites 170 million people on earth are suffering from Type II Diabetes. That will likely double within a decade or two. Maybe drug makers will be able to give you medicine for it based upon your genes, and that will be good. However, since the progression from insulin resistance to pre-diabetes to full Type II Diabetes is almost 100% reversible, it’s still best for us to focus intensely on preventing it than treating it once it’s contracted.

When I see articles like this, I just hate that they don’t really mention that even people with a genetic predisposition can and should do everything possible to start exercising and eat better.

FDA Approves Non-Prescription Diet Pill – washingtonpost.com

This can’t be good. It says in the article that the weight loss pill “alli” will not work if a person does not exercise and restrict calories. When someone is doing the appropriate exercise, they will lose a couple extra pounds for every 5 pounds lost naturally.

First of all, if you can lose weight with a diet and exercise program, why not just do it a little longer without the diet pill?

It simply must be dangerous to stop digesting fats and having them pass right through you. If the colon isn’t used to pushing that through, it makes sense that it will be negatively affected, and I suppose the research pointing toward pre-cancerous tumors bears that out precisely.

But the real problem isn’t for people who are exercising and eating more healthily. The biggest problem is for those who take it and don’t modify their lifestyle!

If a person has to convince a doctor that they are exercising and eating well in order to get the pill, then that’s helping build a foundation for future success without the pill–you know, if they don’t die of colon cancer first.

But what about the person who maintains a sedentary lifestyle and doesn’t modify their diet? Will they use it just so they can eat a little more? Will they use it before they eat hugely fatty meals?

Like I said, that can’t be good for anyone…except GlaxoSmithKline.

Lifestyle Changes Cut Diabetes Risk in Half

At the link above, there is an interesting discussion on the latest research confirming, once again, that “lifestyle interventions seem to be at least as effective as drug treatment” in preventing the progression from pre-diabetes to Type II Diabetes. In other words, as we talk about so often here, lifestyle choices can reverse insulin resistance.

I love to read Dr. Mercola’s work in general, but I think the advice he gives is too extreme for most people. His advice to eliminate all grains and sugars just isn’t a realistic option for most people. Not that it wouldn’t help insulin resistance, but just that it’s way too hard for a “normal person” to simply stop eating grains and sugar. Stress, something most children and adults are experiencing in heavy doses, creates a direct craving for sugary treats. Trying to fight against that with will power isn’t going to get the job done for most people.

The HRH Program is designed to have the same effect on pre-diabetic insulin resistance over a longer time frame. If you exercise using the heart rate zones in the HRH Program, your stress levels diminish, your body utilizes insulin better, and you stop having the cravings for sugars that you’re used to.

Most people find it’s a lot more pleasurable to reduce their insulin resistance this way than just to try to stop cold turkey. Of course, Dr. Mercola as recommends exercise–and a good form of it, at that. I’ve just found that trying to do it all at once creates a lot more failure than success. On the other hand, letting your body adjust gradually seems to create a lot of success in losing weight and reversing pre-diabetes.

You might have heard something about the unusual snowstorms in Colorado over the past three weeks. Something like four feet of snow since before Christmas, and the snow has been on the ground ever since it started. As I was out shoveling snow yet again tonight, the results of numerous studies showing that Minnesota was the “healthiest state” finally made sense to me.

Before, I just ignored the results, thinking there’s no way Minnesota can be healthier than Colorado. As Minnesotans have told me, their weather features four distinct seasons of winter. Unless everyone snowshoes in sub-zero weather, they just couldn’t be more active and fit than Coloradans.

Now I know. It’s the shoveling! As fellow Colorado digger Brad Feld pointed out this morning, every cubic foot of packed snow weighs about 30 pounds. He had to get rid of about 4000 cubic feet with two friends this morning, which equates to lifting about 40,000 pounds of snow in 90 minutes. Whew!

I did far less than that, and I thought my abdominal muscles might explode. To say it’s a good aerobic workout is the ultimate understatement. In Denver, where a good half of our population lives, we get surprisingly little snow (or moisture in general). When it does snow, the odds are good that it will melt that very same day.

That has clearly made us weak!

So, I give up. Minnesota, you’ve earned your right to be #1. And, please know, I’m in no hurry to beat you out in this category.

Happy New Year from Craig at the HRH Program!

Most people have a problem with undertraining, as in not working out enough. However, when we inevitably decide we have to turn our lives around, we want to be thin and healthy as soon as possible–and this can lead to dangerous overtraining.

This article covers the topic a little, but I think it misses the most important point: your body’s needs are determined by its current state. What I mean by this is that couch potatoes should not try to become marathon runners within a few weeks. Their body’s just aren’t ready for it, and pushing too hard will likely cause a lot of damage.

Overtraining has an ill effect on the heart and the autonomic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system–the one that keeps stress from overwhelming us–acts like it’s punch drunk during bouts of overtraining. It just can’t keep up, and every little bit more pushes it toward giving out completely. If this should happen, it may be necessary to quit all physical activity for up to a month.

So, give your body what it needs now, which is to start exercising at its current capacity. Build up slowly and surely. You’ll feel better quickly, and you’ll be surprised at how fast you gain momentum and power toward your goals.

Nightline ran a story on calorie restriction this week, and I thought I should make a comment as to how this relates to preventing insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome. As noted in the program, calorie restriction is more about living longer than about losing weight. Of course, consuming very few calories per day will certainly lead you to lose weight.

I don’t recommend calorie restriction as the best way to overcome insulin resistance…at least not until everything else is in order.

First of all, we don’t know if calorie restriction will work as well in humans as it does on laboratory mice and monkeys. Though we’re also mammals, we don’t live in a lab, which means we have to deal with a lot more stress, some “cognition” problems in understanding we’re hungry, and environmental hazards like pollution that are also a factor in how long we live. So, we shouldn’t expect calorie restriction to extend our life by 20-30 years, unless we want to move into a cage. A couple of years is possible, yes, maybe 5-10, but we’re counting on a lot of other things to go right during that time, like not getting hit by a car, for instance.

Second, if we start eating a lot less, our body starts to slow down its metabolism. It thinks a long winter with little food is on the horizon, so burning fewer and fewer calories is called for in order to survive. To boost your metabolism, and to get it into a fat-burning mode, you actually usually need to eat more food and exercise to burn it off.

When starting the HRH Program, I recommend you eat certain foods, but I don’t think you should limit yourself until the symptoms of insulin resistance go away, which leads us to the third point: calorie restriction is not easy.

Hey, if we could have cut our food intake by one-third, wouldn’t we have done so already? Isn’t that why we have insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome problems in the first place? Very few people have the will power to discipline their food intake so much. If you haven’t had that sort of will power in the past, don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll suddenly have it now.

With pre-diabetes and diabetes, you need to get your body chemistry back in order before you can even consider going on a calorie restriction regimen. Because you’re almost sure to fail if you don’t.

Fortunately, by doing fat-burning exercises like I recommend in the HRH Program, you speed your metabolism, get your blood sugar back in line, lose fat, and feel better. Once you’re to that point, which takes quite a while, you can reassess your priorities and determine whether you want to try a life extension program like calorie restriction.

Exercising moderately for 45 minutes, five days per week can help you avoid the common cold this winter, according to research discussed in this Yahoo News story. The key to preventing the colds was the consistency of the exercise over time. Those who did it over a year (the length of the study) significantly reduced the number of colds they experienced against the control group.

The article doesn’t speculate as to why this was the case. But we can take a few educated guesses. First, when you’re exercising moderately, your immune system gets a boost. You’re also helping your body process waste in the system by getting the blood and lymph moving.

According to many doctors, naturopaths and authors, viruses just don’t have the chance to take hold in a healthy body, because the body is quick to destroy them. In a compromised body, however, the viruses can easily lodge themselves in, as the body is so busy taking care of detoxification measures that it doesn’t have the resources to fight the virus. (They believe this not just for colds, but for all viruses. Some include AIDS in that category, but I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to test that theory!)

One thing the article might have mentioned, though, is that the benefits of exercise decline if one goes too far past a moderate rate of exertion. When the body is constantly overtraining, the immune system weakens and health declines.