Do we really do this? If we do, them we need to change our way that we think about eating.

Eat More to Lose Weight? The 3-meal-a-day secret to shedding pounds. by DOREEN VIRTUE Published: April 14, 2010 Why yo-yo-dieting doesn’t work. IT’S IMPORTANT TO EAT THREE times a day, although I understand that this concept makes some people anxious. “But I’ll gain weight if I do that!” you may be saying right now. I used to believe that if I ate breakfast, I’d gain weight—never realizing that skipping breakfast was keeping me 10 to 55 pounds heavier than I wanted to be. Many of my clients listened to my advice about yo-yo dieting under protest, insisting, “It will make me fat to eat three times a day!” But, they tried it because others had lost weight at my clinics. These clients were astonished to watch their weight drop without starving themselves, taking diet pills, or buying special foods—just as I was when I first discovered this “secret.” If you skip breakfast, you’ve probably noticed that you don’t get hungry in the early afternoon. Many people conclude that eating breakfast makes them hungrier and therefore makes them eat more food. However, the reason you feel hungry a couple of hours after breakfast is that your metabolism—the process that makes you burn calories—has sped up. If you skip this meal, your metabolism slows down and therefore you’ll have great difficulty losing weight permanently. Breakfast is also important because without it your blood-sugar level drops, leading to low energy levels and depression. These feelings of fatigue can bring on food binges later in the day as you try to “medicate” the sleepy feelings with food. Skipping meals doesn’t erase calories from previous binges. The only thing it does is slow down your metabolism so calories take longer to burn. A sluggish metabolism doesn’t “undo” the chocolate cake eaten the day before. Skipping a meal also sets you up to overeat at your next one. If you forgo breakfast, lunch, or dinner, your blood-sugar level will drop, and you’ll probably feel light-headed, irritable, and weak. Under these conditions, you’ll be less likely to have the presence of mind to avoid your binge foods at the next meal. When you don’t feel well, you’re also less likely to care whether you lose weight or not. Make sure you always eat three meals per day, and never skip one! Some people approach eating in a way I call “creative dieting.” Through this process, a person uses various rationales for skipping meals, such as: “I ate that big dinner and fattening dessert last night, so I’ll skip breakfast this morning.” Creative dieters approach eating much like the person who juggles money and floats checks to avoid bouncing payments. The juggling system doesn’t work very well with either eating or money because it usually ends up collapsing on itself. If you’re a creative dieter, consider this thought for a moment: If you knew you had to eat three meals a day, would you be as likely to eat a huge dinner or dessert? Or does your creative approach to dieting give you implied “permission” to binge on fattening foods? If it does, then you’ve fallen into a common but erroneous approach to weight loss. One final question that creative dieters might ask themselves is: “If my creative dieting system worked, would I need to lose weight today?” Doreen Virtue is a spiritual doctor of psychology and a fourth-generation metaphysician who works with the angelic, elemental, and ascended-master realms in her writings and workshops. Visit: www.AngelTherapy.com.

Ginger is an herb -so why don't we know more about it?

ntegrative Medicine: Ginger

Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden
The Sacramento Bee, Calif.

07-08-11

Ginger is an herb with a complex chemical structure and proven efficacy in treating certain medical conditions. So why don't we know more about it and use it more often?

Actually, many parts of the world have been using this herb for more than 2,000 years - it is a common additive and medicinal herb in Chinese and Indian cultures.

Over the last 20 years, numerous studies have shown the efficacy of ginger in treating various conditions. In vitro studies suggest that ginger has antiemetic, anti-inflammatory, and hypoglycemic effects and may additionally protect against Alzheimer's disease and cancer.

The best studied effect of ginger is its gastrointestinal properties. Ginger is commonly used to treat various types of "stomach problems," including motion sickness, morning sickness, colic, upset stomach, gas, diarrhea, nausea caused by cancer treatment, nausea and vomiting after surgery, as well as loss of appetite.

How does it work on the GI tract?

The chemicals shogoal and gingerol found in the ginger rhizome are believed to stimulate the flow of saliva, bile, and gastric secretions. Ginger also has been found to suppress gastric contractions and improve intestinal muscle tone and peristalsis. Constituents in ginger are thought to interact with 5HT-3 receptors and may be partially responsible for the antiemetic (antinausea) benefits.

How well does Ginger work on various conditions?

Studies have shown that ginger is possibly effective for:

-Nausea and vomiting following surgery. Most clinical research shows that taking 1 gram of ginger one hour before surgery seems to reduce nausea and vomiting during the first 24 hours after surgery. One study found ginger reduced nausea and vomiting by 38 percent. However, ginger might not reduce nausea and vomiting in the period three to six hours after surgery. There is no conclusive evidence, however, about the effectiveness of ginger for nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy for cancer.

-Dizziness. Taking ginger appears to reduce the symptoms of dizziness and nausea.

-Preventing morning sickness (discuss the possible risks with your healthcare provider)

-Arthritis. There is some preliminary evidence that ginger might be helpful for decreasing musculoskeletal pain in Rheumatoid arthritis and Osteoarthritis. But studies have shown varying degrees of benefit, possibly because ginger seems to take many months to start working.

-Alzheimer's and cancer: Furthermore, an in vitro study shows early evidence that that ginger may have therapeutic effects against Alzheimer's disease by protecting neuronal cells from beta-amyloid insult. And finally, in vitro studies and some in vivo studies in mice show that ginger may be effective in preventing the growth of cancer cells, including lung and ovarian cancers.

How do you take ginger?

Ginger products are made from fresh or dried ginger root, or from steam distillation of the oil in the root. The herb is available in extracts, tinctures, capsules, and oils. Fresh ginger root can be prepared as a steeped tea. Ginger also is a common cooking spice and can be found in a variety of foods and drinks, including ginger bread, ginger snaps, ginger sticks, and ginger ale. Usually, however, food sources flavored with ginger contain less than 1 percent ginger.

The therapeutic dose of ginger, generally, should not exceed 4 grams daily, with the standardized dose being 75 - 2,000 mg in divided doses with food.

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(Drs. Kay Judge and Maxine Barish-Wreden are medical directors of Sutter Downtown Integrative Medicine program in Sacramento, Calif. Have a question related to alternative medicine? E-mail adrenaline@sacbee.com.)

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(c) 2011, The Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, Calif.). Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.

Eat More, Weigh Less | HealthyWomen

Eat More, Weigh Less | HealthyWomen
Eat More to Lose Weight?The 3-meal-a-day secret to shedding pounds.by DOREEN VIRTUEPublished: April 14, 2010Why yo-yo-dieting doesn’t work.IT’S IMPORTANT TO EAT THREE times a day, although I understand that this concept makes some people anxious. “But I’ll gain weight if I do that!” you may be saying right now. I used to believe that if I ate breakfast, I’d gain weight—never realizing that skipping breakfast was keeping me 10 to 55 pounds heavier than I wanted to be. Many of my clients listened to my advice about yo-yo dieting under protest, insisting, “It will make me fat to eat three times a day!” But, they tried it because others had lost weight at my clinics.These clients were astonished to watch their weight drop without starving themselves, taking diet pills, or buying special foods—just as I was when I first discovered this “secret.” If you skip breakfast, you’ve probably noticed that you don’t get hungry in the early afternoon. Many people conclude that eating breakfast makes them hungrier and therefore makes them eat more food. However, the reason you feel hungry a couple of hours after breakfast is that your metabolism—the process that makes you burn calories—has sped up. If you skip this meal, your metabolism slows down and therefore you’ll have great difficulty losing weight permanently.Breakfast is also important because without it your blood-sugar level drops, leading to low energy levels and depression. These feelings of fatigue can bring on food binges later in the day as you try to “medicate” the sleepy feelings with food.Skipping meals doesn’t erase calories from previous binges. The only thing it does is slow down your metabolism so calories take longer to burn. A sluggish metabolism doesn’t “undo” the chocolate cake eaten the day before. Skipping a meal also sets you up to overeat at your next one. If you forgo breakfast, lunch, or dinner, your blood-sugar level will drop, and you’ll probably feel light-headed, irritable, and weak. Under these conditions, you’ll be less likely to have the presence of mind to avoid your binge foods at the next meal. When you don’t feel well, you’re also less likely to care whether you lose weight or not.Make sure you always eat three meals per day, and never skip one! Some people approach eating in a way I call “creative dieting.” Through this process, a person uses various rationales for skipping meals, such as: “I ate that big dinner and fattening dessert last night, so I’ll skip breakfast this morning.” Creative dieters approach eating much like the person who juggles money and floats checks to avoid bouncing payments. The juggling system doesn’t work very well with either eating or money because it usually ends up collapsing on itself.If you’re a creative dieter, consider this thought for a moment: If you knew you had to eat three meals a day, would you be as likely to eat a huge dinner or dessert? Or does your creative approach to dieting give you implied “permission” to binge on fattening foods? If it does, then you’ve fallen into a common but erroneous approach to weight loss. One final question that creative dieters might ask themselves is: “If my creative dieting system worked, would I need to lose weight today?”Doreen Virtue is a spiritual doctor of psychology and a fourth-generation metaphysician who works with the angelic, elemental, and ascended-master realms in her writings and workshops. Visit: www.AngelTherapy.com.

Benefit of mammograms even greater than was thought

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The longest-running breast cancer screening study ever conducted has shown that regular mammograms prevent deaths from breast cancer, and the number of lives saved increases over time, an international research team said on Tuesday.

The study of 130,000 women in two communities in Sweden showed 30 percent fewer women in the screening group died of breast cancer and that this effect persisted year after year.

Now, 29 years after the study began, the researchers found that the number of women saved from breast cancer goes up with each year of screening.

"We've found that the longer we look, the more lives are saved," Professor Stephen Duffy of Queen Mary, University of London, whose study is to appear in the journal Radiology, said in a statement.

Dr. Stamatia Destounis, a radiologist at Elizabeth Wende Breast Care in Rochester, New York, who was not involved in the study, said radiologists have been quoting results of the Swedish study for years and the new findings show breast cancer screening is "even more of a benefit than we understood."

She said sweeping changes in the U.S. screening guidelines two years ago that scaled back recommendations on breast cancer screening caused a lot of confusion among doctors and patients about the benefits of mammograms.

"We've had to do a lot of education of the patients and their doctors. This will help for that," Destounis said.

In the study, women were divided into two groups, one that received an invitation to have breast cancer screening and another that received usual care.

The screening phase of the trial lasted about seven years. Women between 40 and 49 were screened every two years, and women 50 to 74 were screened roughly every three years.

"Our results indicate that in 1,000 women screened for 10 years, three breast cancer deaths would be prevented," Duffy said, adding that most of the deaths prevented would have occurred more than a decade after the screening had started.

"This indicates that the long-term benefits of screening in terms of deaths prevented are more than double those often quoted for short-term follow-up."

The new data adds to evidence on the long-term benefits of regular mammography screening.

SCREENING CONTROVERSY

New breast screening recommendations issued in 2009 by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an influential advisory group, recommended against routine mammograms for women in their 40s and said women in their 50s should get mammograms every other year instead of every year.

The guidelines contradicted years of messages about the need for routine breast cancer screening starting at age 40, eliciting protests from breast cancer experts and advocacy groups who argued the recommendation for fewer screenings would confuse women and result in more deaths from breast cancer.

The changes were meant to spare women some of the worry and expense of extra tests needed to distinguish between cancer and harmless lumps. But the latest results from the Swedish study show the rate of false positive results was low.

"We saw the actual number of overdiagnosed cases was really very small - less than 5 percent of the total," Robert Smith, director of cancer screening at the American Cancer Society and one of the study's authors, said in a telephone interview.

Many groups, including the American Cancer Society, have stuck by their long-standing recommendations of a yearly breast exam for women starting at age 40, stressing that the breast X-rays have been proven to save lives by spotting tumors early, when they are most easily treated.

"I think for anybody who was beginning to have their faith shaken in the value of mammography, these data show mammography is quite valuable as a public health approach to reducing deaths from breast cancer," Smith said.

Duffy said he thinks screening women 40 to 54 every 18 months and screening women 55 and older every two years would be a reasonable schedule.

He said the new findings do not speak to the frequency of screening issue, but they do make clear that screening works.

"Everyone must make up their own mind, but certainly from combined results from all the screening trials, mammography in women aged 40-49 does reduce deaths from breast cancer," he said.

Breast cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death among U.S. women, after lung cancer. It kills 500,000 people globally every year and is diagnosed in close to 1.3 million people around the world.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/jzsOmR Radiology, online June 28, June 2011.

Seven Tips to Get Yourself Moving...

ife's 

GET HEALTHY

Are You a Reluctant Exerciser?

7 Tips to get you moving!

Published: July 3, 2011

by CHRISTIANE NORTHRUP, M.D.

What does it mean to be fit?

I GREW UP IN a very fitness-oriented family. It’s simply part of who we are. My mom, Edna Northrup, always incorporated exercise into her daily life. She loved to walk and climb, and because we lived where there were hills, she did it routinely, at least three times a week. In the spring of 2010, my mom spent weeks in Colorado training for a trek to Mt. Everest base camp, which is 17,000 feet above sea level. Edna completed that trek at age 84, along with my sister Penny and her husband Phil Kirk (in May 2010).

My mom set the stage for lifelong health because of her love of an active life. When I was growing up, my sister, Penny, was a competitive skier with the U.S. Ski Team on the World Cup Circuit. My brother John also skied competitively. As kids we started hiking in elementary school, and often hiked and skied as a family. Although I was a bookworm and sometimes resented being forced to climb and ski and keep up with my siblings, it’s a legacy that I’m genuinely thrilled about now.

Move to Be Fit

What does it mean to be fit? A few years ago, I spoke with Debbie Rosas about the importance of exercise. Debbie is the cofounder of Neuromuscular Integrative Action (NIA), an exercise that combines martial arts, tai chi, yoga, dance, and breathing. Before founding NIA, Debbie had been an aerobics instructor who decided to take up martial arts. When she first met her teacher, he asked her to move for him. All she could do was jumping jacks. She realized that being fit meant was more than the ability to “feel the burn.” It was about moving her body in a natural, pleasurable way.

Debbie says one measure of fitness is the ability to get down on the floor and get back up a few times. Another definition of fitness I like is the ability to meet the demands of your daily life plus one emergency. Given what your life is like, are you fit enough to accomplish the necessary tasks? Could you run up or down the stairs if there were a fire or other emergency? Run in the street after a child? I’ve noticed an increasing number of people who can’t perform simple moves like getting up from a seat and walking off an airplane.

It’s Never Too Late

You can’t maintain mobility and good health unless you’ve integrated a movement practice of some kind into your life. You notice this particularly at midlife. If you’re reading this and you aren’t active regularly, know that any time you start you’re going to build fitness. And once you have, it’s much easier to keep it going. In fact, Dr. William Evans did fascinating studies on people in nursing homes who were 90 and older. He taught them weight training and found within a very short period of time that those who had been unable to make it to the bathroom or mount stairs on their own were able to do so. They also developed strength and increased muscle mass in their quadriceps

Tips for Lifelong Fitness

To help encourage a life of fitness, I’ve put together a few suggestions. As a reluctant exerciser in my early years, these tips have stood me in good stead. They’ll do the same for you.

Tip 1. Do what you love. My mom and her friend Anne (now 87) consider it fun to climb unmarked peaks where you have to clear the trail and put your food up in trees so that the bears don’t get at it! I prefer Argentine Tango, Pilates, belly dancing, walking outdoors, or working out on the elliptical trainer. There’s something for everyone.

Tip 2. Don’t overdo. When you’re working out, make sure that you’re working within your target heart rate or that you can easily breathe in and out through your nose. Your target heart rate is determined by a formula: 180 minus your age is the upper limit; 170 minus your age is the lower. A 50-year-old woman’s target heart rate is 120–130 beats per minute. If you are just starting out, are overweight, or are sick, you adjust these numbers down by 10 to 20 points each.

Tip 3. Tone your muscles. To help build bone mass, do a little weight training. Light weights with multiple reps are best. Or try something like yoga or Pilates, which tones your muscles while keeping the spine aligned.

Tip 4. Listen to your body. As with other aspects of your health, your body will let you know what’s right—and what’s wrong. Follow your body’s intuition. Never put up with an exercise program that includes injuries or undue stress, even if it’s suggested by a qualified trainer.

Tip 5. Take thousands of steps, three times per week. Walking two to five times a week for a total of 10,000 steps each time will build stamina and endurance fairly quickly. Does this sound like a lot? Clip on a pedometer. You’ll be amazed at how many steps you take in a day. Ten thousand steps is equivalent to about four miles. If some of your terrain is hilly, 5,000 steps may be enough. If you’re just starting out, 2,500 steps is plenty.

Tip 6. Walk upright. It’s important to walk and keep yourself upright, with your shoulder blades down and your heart open. If you see my mom walking toward you from a distance, you’d have no way of knowing her age, because she doesn’t have a geriatric gait. She strolls along with a bounce in her step and plenty of swing time.

Note: Ski walking poles are excellent for keeping your upper body upright. Data shows that ski walking burns 40 percent more calories than walking without poles. Plus you work your upper body at the same time.

Tip 7. Use your imagination. There’s no such thing as a static state of health. You’re constantly replacing your body parts with new cells. So if you’d like stronger legs, begin to visualize stronger legs right now. You can create them in six short months.

You can have vibrant health in your 90’s. It starts with doing something enjoyable every day. Start now! Breathe in deeply through your nose. Pull your shoulder blades down and open your heart. Now, step into your future!

Christiane Northrup, M.D., a board-certified ob/gyn, is a visionary pioneer; beloved authority in women’s health and wellness. Dr. Northrup now devotes her time to helping women truly flourish on all levels through tapping into their inner wisdom. Website: www.DrNorthrup.com

FILED UNDER:CHRISTIANE NORTHRUP | FITNESS | EXERCISE | FLOURISHING | EDNA NORTHRUP | MOUNT EVEREST | US SKI TEAM | HIKING | DEBBIE ROSAS