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MINDFULNESS: THE THREE ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS OF MINDFULNESS

admin — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:59:26 +0000

Mindfulness is a way to listen more closely to your mind and body to increase your understanding of your inner self. It gives you more personal power over your cravings and emotions. It provides a way to observe your mind, to watch your thoughts and feelings without being caught up in them.

Mindfulness is simply a different way of looking at things, a way that will enlighten, strengthen, and empower you. I see it happen to people every day.

The three characteristics of a mindful approach to your eating are:

1. Paying Attention

You must begin to focus your attention on the thoughts, feelings, and circumstances that trigger your desire to eat and make it difficult for you to stop eating. This means paying attention. Paying attention means not allowing yourself to be distracted.

2. Increasing Awareness

Once you begin to pay attention to your eating, you must begin to develop a sense of focused concentration on all aspects of your relationship with food. You must become aware of the details of how, what, where, and why you eat.

3. Focusing on the Present Moment

Mindfulness involves focusing on a particular moment in time. When you eat, you must begin to concentrate exclusively on eating. During a meal, I don’t want you to be thinking about what happened earlier in the day or what is going to be happening tomorrow. Neither do I want you to be on automatic pilot, only half aware of what you are doing. This will be a new experience since we live most of our lives in the past and future in a semiconscious state of going through the paces of day-to-day living.

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IMMUNE POWER DIET: AMINO ACIDS

admin — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 10:46:55 +0000

“Amino acids” are a buzz-word today. We buy amino acid shampoos and hair conditioners, amino acid skin lotions, even amino acid cosmetics. Unfortunately, most of this is pure sales hype; few people really understand how these amino acids affect our health and weight.

In the first place, they aren’t even what you think of as acids. They don’t sting or eat into your skin, and they’re not corrosive. You can swallow them without burning your throat. Their name comes from the fact that they belong to the chemical family of acids.

Amino acids are the building blocks of your body. You get them from the protein you eat, which is made up of combinations of different amino acids. Your body breaks protein down into its amino acid building blocks, then uses those blocks in various combinations to make your hair, fingernails, muscles, cells, tissues, and chemicals. In all, there are twenty-two different amino acids your body needs.

When I was explaining this to one of my patients, a sculptor and artist, her face lit up. “I get it, it’s simple. They’re just like the color chips of a mosaic. Each color is different, with its own identity and characteristics, but they all fit together to make the whole thing work!” I had to admit, after years of reading learned papers on the subject, that’s still the best explanation I’ve ever heard.

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THE RISKS OF UNTREATED HYPERTENSION

admin — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:40:10 +0000

Here’s study all the warnings about detecting hypertension and treating it are justified. Left untreated, hypertension can:

Damage arteries and lead to a heart attack. The chances of dying from a heart attack or heart failure are 50 per cent higher in a person whose hypertension is untreated than in someone whose blood pressure is under control.

There are two ways in which high blood pressure is thought to wreak its damage on the heart. One is through its effects on the arteries, the thick-walled vessels that carry blood from the heart to the body’s tissues. Even healthy arteries, which are usually elastic and resilient, are under continual and considerable stress: if the pressure within the system rises, these blood vessels lose their spring and become narrow due to degeneration of their walls. As a result, they are severely strained by the pressure of the blood pounding through them with an abnormally excessive force now.

At the same time, the heart itself has to work harder to pump blood through these narrowed, hardened blood vessels. In attempting to keep up with its extra workload, the heart gets bigger and tires out… setting the stage for heart failure. This strain and damage pave the way for atherosclerosis or plaque formation, in which small, waxy deposits called plaque build up in the blood vessels, eventually choking off blood flow and setting the stage for a heart attack.

Raise your risk for stroke. Atherosclerosis affects not only the blood vessels that supply the heart, but every blood vessel in the body. Among those especially vulnerable are the blood vessels of the brain. A blockage caused by plaque deposits in any of the cerebral arteries can bring on a stroke – in which a section of the brain suddenly stops working. Among the effects of a stroke are: weakness or paralysis down one side of the body, loss of speech, disruption in the higher brain functions.

Compromise mental functioning. This is especially so in hypertension of long duration and it’s an effect that fewer people know about. A study reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that, among a group of participants in the well-known Framingham Heart Study, those with elevated blood pressure scored lower, particularly on tests of memory and attention. The declines were modest, but nevertheless suggest that uncontrolled high blood pressure may have long-term negative effects on the brain.

Another study on Hawaiian men found that those who had untreated hypertension in their 50s had poorer mental funtioning — memory, attention, judgement — in their 70s, compared to those men whose b.p. was under control in midlife who scored higher mental scores at an advanced age.

Put you at risk for kidney failure. The kidneys are the body’s filtering plants, purifying the blood by straining it of toxins and waste materials. But with the hypertensive heart working overtime, the load on the kidneys also increased As the extra strain takes its toll, the kidneys fall down on the job (a condition known as renal failure), causing toxins and waste to accumulate in the blood. This is a life-threatening condition that calls for emergency treatment.

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FAT LOSS: SURGICAL TREATMENTS

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:30:16 +0000

1. Partitioning procedures or gastroplasties

These produce a small stomach pouch of 15-30cc connected to the lower pan of the stomach by a narrow opening or ‘stoma’. The effect of these procedures is to limit the patient to a very small meal which empties only slowly through the narrow stoma producing a feeling of satiety lasting 3-4 hours. Total daily food intake is, therefore, vastly reduced.

In order to achieve a good weight reduction with these procedures, patients must be prepared to make sacrifices and to be disciplined in the way in which they eat. This is not an easy way out and the patient must be strongly motivated to lose weight otherwise they may not feel that the sacrifices are worth while. They must:

• Adhere to a diet of easily masticated foodstuffs such as cereals, vegetables and white meats. Red meat is difficult to eat and the diet can seem boring.

• Measure food volumes and eat no more than 5 dessertspoons of food per meal. To eat more may cause vomiting and may stretch the pouch.

• Chew each small mouthful of food to a pulp before swallowing otherwise the food pieces may block the stoma causing vomiting and pain.

• Avoid high calorie semi-liquid foods such as chocolate and ice cream as these liquefy and pass rapidly through the stoma, causing weight regain or preventing weight loss.

• Avoid solids when rushed or upset as vorniting is more likely in this situation.

• Take daily multivitamins and occasionally take iron if required.

With discipline, excellent weight reduction can be achieved with the average loss being 35kg and some patients losing much more. Two common methods used are ‘stapling’ and ‘banding’.

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