Do You Burn Fat Or Sugar?
January 29, 2013
Do you know there are two different ways that your body creates energy throughout the day? One is an immediate energy system (from burning sugar) that provides short bursts of energy, while it increases your appetite, makes you crave harmful foods, causes your body to be weight-loss resistant, lowers your energy, fuels cancer, lowers your immunity, and increases your risk of many chronic diseases. The other system (that burns fat) is an energy storage system. When your body draws energy from this fat burning system, you will maintain consistent energy all day long, sleep better at night, crave healthy foods, increase your immunity, and prevent most diseases including cancer and heart disease.
The crazy thing is that YOU determine which one of these systems is operative in your body. You likely agree that the fat burning system is clearly the preferred way to get energy. Yet most Americans have programmed their bodies to seek and produce short-lasting energy from burning sugar.
According to Ron Rosedale, MD:
“Health and life span is determined by the proportion of fat versus sugar people burn throughout their lifetime. The more fat you burn as fuel, the healthier you will be. The more sugar you burn as fuel, the more disease ridden you will be, and the shorter your life will likely be.”
So how do you know if you are a sugar burner or fat burner?
- You are a sugar burner if you:
- wake up tired and find you need caffeine/sugar to keep you going throughout the day.
- crash at 3pm, and get a second wind at 10pm at night.
- take naps often and don’t wake up from them feeling rested.
- are a restless sleeper, waking up often (especially around 2am).
- crave sugar and carbohydrates.
- are hungry often, and can be ravenous if you go without food for long periods.
- can’t lose weight no matter what you do.
- notice that you are gaining weight with no explanation for it.
- experience mood swings, cloudy thinking, and/or brain fog.
- get colds often.
- take several medications (including high blood pressure & cholesterol).
- often have headaches.
- have chronic musculoskeletal pain.
- feel exhausted all the time.
You are a fat burner if you:
- can go several hours without food and don’t feel like you will pass out.
- have a moderate to low appetite.
- have a strong immune system.
- have consistent energy throughout the day and don’t crash at 3pm.
- don’t need caffeine to keep you going.
- go to sleep easily at night and rarely wake up.
- wake up energized and refreshed.
- find you lose weight easily.
- take little to no medications.
- rarely have musculoskeletal pain.
- have injuries and illnesses that heal quickly.
- have good mental clarity and often feel optimistic.
- can workout in a fasted state and don’t feel the need to carbo load before a workout.
- feel the healthiest you have been in a long time.
Regardless of where you are today, you can program your body to burn fat instead of sugar. It just takes the right combination of foods and the correct type of exercise. This is EXACTLY what you will learn at our Makeover on Saturday, February 2nd.
If you haven’t signed up yet for this life-changing event, do so now before we sell out (we are super close to being out of tickets). This will be the most important nutrition and fitness event that we teach all year!! Rearrange your schedule, get a sitter, cancel a prior engagement, and make a commitment to YOU!
Together we can make 2013 your BEST year yet!!
What Can I Do To Stop The Shootings?
December 19, 2012
Like it may have for many of you, the shootings last Friday ignited something inside of me that said, enough is enough. I have come to a place where I realize it’s not ok to just sit back and be thankful that my children were not the victims. The time has come for all of us to engage in the solution. But where to start? There are so many issues wrapped up in what allows a 20 year old to walk into an elementary school and single handedly change the destiny of over 25 families.
As I watched CNN on Friday, Sanja Gupta pointed out that most likely the killer had a neurochemical imbalance. Of course he did. As did the other crazy killers that have been linked to prior mass shootings. In fact, it is public knowledge that all of these shooters were either on or withdrawing from antidepressant or antipsychotic medications. Obviously giving chemicals to a neurochemically imbalanced child is not the answer.
Angels on the hill; a tribute to those lost.
Photo Credit: Donna Morrissey/American Red Cross
We need to be more proactive. We need to stop searching for a drug that will cure all our children’s problems. As parents we need to do more. Every parent should be asking themselves what can they do to raise neurochemically BALANCED children.
Although I am a parent, I am by no means a parenting expert. But as a family chiropractor, I do know a few things about nurturing healthy families. After 16 years of working with thousands of families, it is clear to me that we should all be implementing Five Key Essentials into our family’s lives to keep them physically & mentally healthy.
Five Essentials for Healthy Family Life:
1. Give your kids a purpose.
Teach your kids that the greatest joys in life come from within. Model for them that there is no deeper satisfaction in life than working hard, serving others, and dedicating oneself to something bigger. Teach them that compassion, love, and forgiveness are as important as getting straight A’s or winning a little league game. As the wise Dalai Lama once said:
“My hope and wish is that one day, formal education will pay attention to what I call education of the heart. Just as we take for granted the need to acquire proficiency in the basic academic subjects, I am hopeful that a time will come when we can take it for granted that children will learn, as part of the curriculum, the indispensability of inner values: love, compassion, justice, and forgiveness.”
2. Keep your kids nervous system functioning at 100%.
Our brain and nervous system releases thousands of chemicals every second into our body. These chemicals make us happy, sad, hungry, sleepy, and drive every human function. The only thing protecting this amazing system is your skull and spine. So why do many parents take better care of their kids teeth then their spine?
Keeping your spine healthy is the most important thing you can do to keep your brain and nervous system functioning at 100%. A recent study of over 2000 patients revealed that chiropractic care significantly improved their well being: including emotional well being, negative feelings toward self, depression, difficulty sleeping, and family relations.
3. Teach your kids the power of eating healthy foods.
Our food has a powerful effect on how we feel and function. Today, more man-made and unhealthy chemicals exist in our food than ever before. Chemicals used to preserve food such as monosodium glutamate, and others such as dyes, high fructose corn syrup, and nitrates are poisoning our children’s bodies and minds. Studies demonstrate that these Chemicals cause countless physical and mental health problems. If you’re not taking action to ensure that your family is eating fresh, non processed foods, you’re asking for health problems down the road.
4. Model for your kids that exercise is NOT optional; it’s one essential key to a happy life.
When did exercise become a choice? It is a necessary daily habit that can bring you joy, energy, health, and vitality better than any drug can. Yet, many Americans still don’t carve out time to engage in daily exercise. Researchers have shown that walking for 30 minutes each day quickly improves patient’s symptoms faster than antidepressant drugs do. It’s simple, it’s free, and there are no side effects.
5. Detoxify your household.
We live in a massively toxic world. In order to raise healthy children we have to begin to be aware of the toxins that are harming us both physically and mentally. Take small steps to detoxifying your world: buy organic, unplug the microwave, throw away your plastic containers, limit your prescription medications, buy paraben and SLS free hair & skin products, and stop allowing preservatives and dyes that are so prevalent in our foods today into your home. Begin to get educated on this topic. In 2013, we will be doing more workshops on toxin-free living in our office to get you up to speed.
I realize there are no easy answers to this complicated subject. I know that mental health experts debate treatment protocols all the time. The answer is NOT going to be found in a new medication. It’s going to be in getting people OFF of medications and getting back to health basics. It’s time to look at what causes a child to be neurochemically imbalanced, starting at the chemicals that we inject into a child on the day he is born.
Parents need to stop blindly allowing prescription drugs to be the answer for all their children’s health needs. We need a better health plan than that. The above 5 essentials is that plan. Please share this information with the families in your community. Mental health is no longer one family’s problem, it has now become ALL of our problems. Once we begin to take responsibility for our community’s health, and stop relying on medications, we can stop this madness.
Is Your Digestion Making You Sick?
May 25, 2012
Is Your Digestion Making You Sick?
Did you know that you have a second brain in your digestive system? Next to the nervous system the digestive system is the most important system in your body. Doctors are now linking poor health in the gut to chronic health problems such as weight gain, blood sugar imbalances, autoimmune problems, sluggish metabolisms, chronic pain and arthritis. With a highly processed diet combined with high stressed living our digestive tracts are quickly becoming the source of many health problems.
The following is what you need to know to keep your digestion on the right tract:
What destroys your digestive system?
A diet high in white sugar, white flours, white rice and low in fiber will greatly injure the gut leading to poor absorption of nutrients and chronic inflammation. These will destroy the good bacteria of your intestinal tract
The easiest way to destroy your gut is through eating foods packed with chemicals that extend their shelf life and are high in Omega 6 fatty acids.
According to Dr. Mark Hyman, MD in his book the “The Blood Sugar Solution” many modern inventions such as antibiotics, acid blockers, anti-inflammatory medication, aspirin, steroids, antibiotics in our food supply, chronic stress, and even cesarean section births also injure the gut, alter our good digestive flora, and lead to systemic inflammation.
How do I know if my digestive system is in trouble?
A malfunctioning digestive tract cannot always be detected until a significant amount of damage has already occurred. The most obvious symptoms are pain or bloating after eating, episodes of diarrhea or constipation, or burning pain in the stomach.
A whole new set of symptoms are now being linked to poor health in the gut such as aches and pains that won’t go away, inflammatory arthritic pain, unexplained weight gain, sugar cravings, hypoglycemia, insulin-resistance, chronic colds, low energy, depression, many autoimmune diseases, and obesity.
Your body needs the perfect balance of good and bad bacteria in the gut lining in order to function at an optimum level. Poor eating habits and stress set up the bad bacteria to out-number the good. This damages the gut lining creating a leaky gut syndrome. Just like a sprained ankle, when the brain senses injury to the body it initiates an inflammatory response. When inflammation hits the digestive tract it damages your metabolism, affects how your brain controls appetite, and creates an insulin resistance and weight gain. If that inflammation continues, it will start to affect your joints causing pain, stiffness, and fatigue.
What can I do to heal my digestion?
1. No Whites
The first and most important step to repairing your gut is to get off the foods that damage it. A no white diet is a great first step. This means no white flour, sugar, rice, or pasteurized diary.
2. Eat Fresh Raw Foods
Enzymes help us break our food down so that we can digest our foods better There are naturally occurring enzymes in fresh raw foods..When we cook food we destroy those enzymes. This places all the burden of digestion on the digestive tract. A key step to getting your gut healthy again is to increase the number of fresh raw foods in your diet. Ideally you want to be eating fresh fruit and vegetables at every meal. Green vegetables such as celery and lettuce are great additions to any meal and will help your body breakdown the foods you eat better.
3. No Bad Fats
Bad fats include canola oil, safflower oil, vegetable oil, partially hydrogenated oils, and peanut oil. When we eat these oils it initiates the inflammatory response in our bodies. This inflammation will destroy the lining of our stomach and intestines and ultimately block the absorption of nutrients that are necessary to keep our bodies functioning optimally. Bottom line is that bad fats destroy your health
4. Add good bacteria
I highly recommend taking a probiotic supplement before every meal. Most likely you can get a good probiotic supplement at your chiropractor’s office or at a natural health food store. Adding good bacteria into your gut will help destroy harmful bacteria that may be making you sick. It also will help you increase the absorption of nutrients, fight infections, reduce yeast, and normalize the ph of your gut. Many patients ask me if they can just eat yogurt to get probiotics in their diet. I encourage a more quality source without the diary.
5. Get adjusted
In my sixteen years in practice, I have noticed that around ninety percent of patients with chronic low back pain, also have digestive problems. Why is that? If you look at the nerves that exit the vertebra of the lumbar spine, they supply information from the brain to the lower half of the body. This includes the small and large intestines. When a nerve has pressure on it from a bone, it reduces the amount of information that it can send. When any cell, tissue, or organ is deprived information from the brain it stops functioning properly. What a chiropractic adjustment does is move that bone off the nerve and allow brain and organ to communicate better.
6. Investigate more
There is a whole new way that doctors can investigate what is going on inside our bodies. It’s called Functional Health Testing. What functional health tests do is evaluate areas of your body that might not yet be in disease, but are definitely not functioning optimally. In our office, we use an at home diagnostic test that evaluates the stool to determine if a patient has allergies to certain foods, parasites, yeast, too much bad bacteria, too little good bacteria, or an infection that might be causing a patient to be in poor health. Once we determine where exactly the imbalance is, we can treat it nutritionally to improve a patients health.
If you suspect that some of your health problems may be coming from your gut or you want an evaluation to determine if your digestion has reached an unhealthy point, set a special appointment time with Dr. Mindy.
