Is This The Blueprint To Losing 68 Pounds? Woman claims these two things helped her go from 210 lbs. to 142 lbs. Will they work for you?

12 Apr

It might be because of what we see on television, the Internet, or magazines but it seems like almost everyone wants to lose weight. Some just want to drop a few unwanted pounds while others need to lose a whole heck of a lot more. For that reason, weight loss is estimated to be a $60 billion industry. When there is that much money involved, you know it will attract con artists and scammers who want to sell you the next magic pill, exotic diet, or whiz bang gadget that will make the pounds fall right off your body. Some of their approaches may work, but doesn’t it seem like within a couple years, the same people are pitching the next miracle doo-dad? What happened to the last one?

Believe it or not, there is a proven and effective way to lose all the weight your heart desires. It is 100% free, and this story tells it all.

It’s the story of a young woman named Dawn who is married to Steve, a soldier deployed in Afghanistan.

Dawn gained 55 pounds while pregnant with their first child, though she readily admits that she had started gaining weight long before that. She was still surprised when her doctor told her she weighed over 200 lbs.

Six weeks after their son was born, Dawn weighed 210 pounds. Then, Steve left for Afghanistan. On Facebook, Dawn wrote, “At the time, I still weighed 210 pounds. I grew to hate mirrors, and my attempts to squeeze myself into my old clothes left me feeling defeated. One day, not long after Steve had left, I decided I was done feeling bad about myself. I wanted a healthy body again, so I had to get to work.

“I started a strict exercise routine and committed to two daily workouts, including a bootcamp class and 45 minutes spent on the treadmill. I cut out fast food for 11 months without cheating and never skipped a workout. My husband was in awe of my commitment. While he’s deployed, we rely on Facebook to communicate, and I sent him updates from home, pictures of our son, and messages about my progress in the gym. I was getting stronger every day, and I loved that he got to cheer me on from overseas.”

When Steve came home just before their son’s first birthday, Dawn weighed 142 lbs. (less than she weighed when they first met)!

So, what is the “blueprint?” The blueprint is simple: Commitment and hard work. Dawn said, “It wasn’t easy. There is no magic pill for good health…”

Making that acknowledgment and accepting that statement as fact is the first step in losing any amount of weight you want and living a much healthier life.

Yes, losing weight is NOT complicated. In fact, it is quite simple, but simple doesn’t not mean “magic” or “overnight” or “no work” or “take this pill and wake up skinny while eating ice cream and sitting on the couch.”

All those statements are tactics used by marketers trying to get their share of the $60 billion weight loss industry. Listen to Dawn. Make the commitment, eat right, and do the work… for the rest of your life. Forget about those magical fat burners.

Are You Getting Enough Sleep? How Not Getting The Proper Amount of Sleep For YOU Can Cause Health and Relationship Problems, and More…

11 Apr

For many, there is no bigger pain in the entire world than the sound of their alarm clock rousing them from a beautiful, deep slumber.

Do you get up or hit the snooze button? Are you lazy if you slept eight hours and don’t get up? Well, perhaps not. New research shows that your desire for more sleep may not come from laziness at all. It may be genetic. More on that in a moment, but first, how much sleep do you really need?

The amount of sleep your body needs is the amount that results in you feeling fully rested and alert. According to a report by ABC News, if you find yourself sleeping in on weekends, then your body may be catching up on lost sleep time. On one hand, some researchers recommend trying to sleep more during the week to balance out your sleep schedule so you sleep the same number of hours on weekends. A short 25-minute nap in the afternoon can help make up for a sleep deficit during the week. On the other hand, Dr. W. Christopher Winter, medical director of the Martha Jefferson Hospital Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, thinks there’s no harm in sleeping in on Saturday and Sunday morning to make up lost time.

But, that may not be such a good idea for some people. We’ll cover that later too…

How Many Hours of Sleep Do You Need?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends adults sleep 7-9 hours per night, teenagers sleep 8.5-9.5 hours per night, and children (ages 5-10 years old) sleep 10-11 hours per night. A review of 16 long-term studies published in the journal Sleep found that both short sleepers (under 7 hours) and long sleepers (over 9 hours) lived shorter lives than those who slept 7-9 hours per night. This may be the basis for the CDC’s 7-9 hour recommendation.

Inadequate sleep can negatively affect your heart, lungs, kidneys, appetite, metabolism, immune system, reaction time, mood, and brain function. People who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes (and all the health problems associated with that disease) because inadequate sleep affects insulin sensitivity.

A study of 24,000 Japanese women found those who slept less than six hours a night were more likely to develop breast cancer while a study by Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland found men who slept less than six hours a night were at a higher risk for potentially cancerous colorectal polyps.

Another study found lack of sleep might cause relationship problems. This research from the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) found that couples fight more and are less healthy after a bad night’s sleep. “For the first time, to our knowledge, we can see the process of how the nature, degree, and resolution of conflict are negatively impacted by poor sleep,” said Dr. Serena Chen, a Professor of Psychology at UCB.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you sleep less than seven hours a night but you feel rested and alert when you wake up, that may be fine too. In fact, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco discovered individuals with a mutation to the DEC2 gene can function well on five or six hours a night, with no apparent adverse effects.

Oversleeping May Be Just As
Bad As Not Getting Enough Sleep! Interestingly enough, sleeping over nine hours a night

can lead to many of the same problems as sleeping too little. Long sleepers are at risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, back pain, depression, and heart disease. If you tend to wake up before your alarm clock and you feel rested, get up and start your day. Forcing yourself to sleep in may do you more harm than good.

If it’s true that some people may genetically need less sleep, then the opposite is likely true as well: some of us may be genetically predisposed to needing more sleep than the “average” person. So, if you need more than nine hours of sleep to feel rested and alert, that may be okay.

Irregular Sleep Patterns May Be A Problem Too!

People with irregular work schedules (that, in turn, lead to irregular sleep patterns) may also experience health problems. One study recently found that females working shift patterns are associated with an increase risk of menstrual disruption and subfertility. The study collected data on 119,345 women from 1969 – 2013 and found that those working shifts (alternating shifts, evenings and nights) had a 33% higher rate of menstrual disruption than those working regular hours, and an 80% increased rate of subfertility.

In a nutshell, you must get the proper amount of sleep to be healthy. One of the biggest things we can take from this study is that the proper amount of sleep is individual. It is not “8 hours.” We are all different, and you must figure out what the proper amount of sleep is for you.

We all know people who can sleep five hours and wake up with a full charge. Five hours might be optimal for them, and that is awesome. However, you might need eight, nine, or even more.

If you’re the type who has trouble getting restful sleep, here are some tips:

  • Regular exercise is often advised to improve sleep. Some experts recommend you try exercising earlier in the day, others think the evening before bed is a better idea. See what works best for you. Stress and anxiety can affect sleep and exercise has been shown to help relieve stress and anxiety, even if you don’t really want to work out.
  • Eating before bed may trigger acid reflux or an upset stomach that can hinder sleep. However, consuming a relaxing food or beverage (like a warm glass of milk) may help you fall asleep.
  • Avoid caffeine, alcohol, and smoking before bed as they can disrupt sleep patterns.
  • Take a hot bath, shower, or sauna before bed. This will raise your body temperature and cooling off facilitates sleep. The temperature drop from getting out of the bath signals to your body that “it’s time for bed.” On the same note, keep the room cool. Lower temperatures help with sleep.
  • Get out of bed. If you are having trouble falling asleep, get up and do something else. Don’t linger in bed and fret about not being able to fall asleep because it could develop into an even bigger sleeping problem.
  • Turn off the lights. Complete darkness (or as close to it as possible) is best. Even the tiniest bit of light in the room can disrupt your internal clock and your pineal gland’s production of melatonin and serotonin. Cover your windows with blackout shades or drapes.
  • Consider a “sound machine.” Listen to the sound of white noise or nature sounds, such as the ocean or forest, to drown out upsetting background noise and soothe you to sleep.
  • Try to sleep a consistent number of hours each night. While it may be okay to catch up on sleep during the weekends, if you can’t sleep Sunday night because you slept in on Sunday morning, that can be a problem.
  • Increase your melatonin. If you can’t increase levels naturally with exposure to bright sunlight in the daytime and absolute complete darkness at night, consider supplementation.

    Last but not least, health conditions like back pain or neck pain can interfere with a good night’s sleep so make sure to get adjusted regularly to help keep your body functioning optimally so you can sleep restfully.

World’s Fastest Man Reveals One Of Life’s BIGGEST Secrets.

10 Apr

Do you know who Usain Bolt is?

If you do not, he is a runner and the current World record holder in both the men’s 100m and 200m track events. Not only is he considered to be the fastest man alive, but he may be the fastest man EVER.

The fastest man EVER exemplifies one of the biggest secrets to living a happy and healthy life we have ever seen. It is a secret that is sadly overlooked by most people.

What is this “secret?”

First, you have to understand that Usain Bolt broke the World record for the 100 meter dash in 2008 with a time of 9.72 seconds. The previous world record was set less than one year before with a time of 9.74 seconds.

If you look at those times, the new World record is only .02 second better. That is about 1/50th of a second. According to scientists, 1/10th of a second is the approximate time it takes to blink an eye. 1/50th of a second is five times faster.

So, literally, a fraction of the time it takes to blink an eye is the difference between being a famous World record holder and no one knowing your name.

What does this have to do with you? Plenty, actually. Most things in life work the same way. Achieving happiness and good health are not BIG THINGS that happen all at once. They are an accumulation of small things done consistently over time.

Usain Bolt trained years and years and years to shave fractions of seconds off his personal best time, and all those small things he did eventually made him the fastest man EVER.

For example, eating some vegetables or fruit instead of a candy bar is a small thing. In the whole scheme of things, just one candy bar may not make a long term difference to your health or wellbeing. But, if you the right things every day, you’ll improve your personal best. You’ll have a victory. You’ll have better health.

The same goes for exercise. Every day you choose to go walking, or hit the gym, or whatever, over sitting on the couch and watching TV, it’s one more fraction of a second building up towards your victory of being in shape.

Make no mistake about it – tiny, seemingly inconsequential things add up over time and can make all the difference in the world.

What small thing can you do TODAY to start yourself on the path to being the happiest and healthiest person EVER?

Practice Learned Optimism.

9 Apr

Our basic premise is that your body is amazing. You get a do over. It doesn’t take that long, and it isn’t that hard if you know what to do. In these notes, we give you a short course in what to do so it becomes easy for you, and for you to teach others. We want you to know how much control you have over both the quality and length of your life.

This month, we want to talk about YOU and staying optimistic, or learning to be so. When you embrace a glass-is-at least half-full view of the world, and when you’re willing to acknowledge its challenges, you can increase your happiness quotient and get younger. Thankfully, you don’t have to recite wimpy affirmations like Saturday Night Live’s Stuart Smalley (who was good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, people liked him!) to get all the benefits that come from “learned optimism”. (Yes, you can learn to be optimistic.) By being optimistic, your body will have:

Arteries More Able to Give You the Energy to Live those Optimistic Dreams. Even if you’re at high risk for heart disease because of family history, have high lousy LDL cholesterol, or elevated blood pressure and blood sugar, living with a sense of hope reduces arterial disease (you know heart attacks, strokes, and most memory loss) by 30-50%. If you’ve already had a heart attack, optimism can help you stay on track with exercise and lower your odds for dying within five years after a cardiac event by a whopping 40%.

Makes the Fats in Your Blood Less Hazardous. Optimism nudges levels of healthy HDL cholesterol upward and pushes levels of heart-threatening triglycerides down.

Improved decision-making. Optimism enhances your ability to make good decisions, a skill that can help you say ‘no thanks’ to that third drink after a tough day of work, and “yes” to a walking meeting. That means you’ll be better at solving whatever challenges life throws your way.

Stronger immunity. Your positive outlook boosts your “cell-mediated immunity”. This helps you control your body’s ability to fight invading bacteria and/or a nasty virus and even helps battle some cancer cells.

So, if you’re ready to gain those benefits, here’s a way to help you learn “more” optimism:

Please turn over…

Think loving thoughts. A short “loving kindness” meditation (you focus on feelings of love and compassion for yourself and others) increases optimism.

Love Your Neighbor (spiritually, we’re talking here). Spending time with friends is another important mood-booster.

Feeling good? Go deeper. People who pay attention to and enhance into their positive emotions are more able to overcome tough times. So, turn up the volume on good feelings to build a reservoir. Notice when you feel playful, serene, or spiritually uplifted and then ask yourself how you can heighten that feeling. It’s fun!

Keep it real. Having unrealistically positive expectations or glossing over problems instead of solving them can backfire, triggering low moods.

See positive challenges instead of threats. Resilient people attack problems in everyday life like a plumber who knows she’s got a well-stocked toolbox and plenty of experience dealing with like problems. The leak may even be dirty, but she has the confidence to make things clean and dry.

Try to consciously make a positive mind shift. When you feel threatened or worried, just reminding yourself to think more positively is often all it takes. Whenever we You! docs feel negative, we just walk thru the ICU and think how lucky we are to be walking around in the first place.

That positivity will make you healthier, happier, and protect your heart, brain, lungs, kidneys, and that youthful glow on your skin! So, enjoy POSIVITY EVERY DAY!!

Thanks for reading. And feel free to send more questions–you can always send us questions at youdocs@gmail.com, and some of them we may know enough to answer (we’ll try to get answers for you if we do not know).

Young Dr Mike Roizen (aka, The Enforcer)

NOTE: You should NOT take this as medical advice.
This article is of the opinion of its author.
Before you do anything, please consult with your doctor.

You can follow Dr Roizen (and get updates on the latest and most important medical stories of the week) on twitter @YoungDrMike.

Feel free to continue to send questions to youdocs@gmail.com. You can follow Dr Roizen on twitter @YoungDrMike (and get updates on the latest and most important medical stories of the week). The YOU docs have a new web site: YOUBeauty.com and its companion BeautySage.com the only site we know of where you can find skin products proven to meet the claims (opened for business on June 1st, 2012), and a new book: YOU: The Owner’s Manual for Teens.

Michael F. Roizen, M.D., is chief wellness officer and chair of the Wellness Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. His radio show streams live on http://www.healthradio.net Saturdays from 5-7 p.m . E-mail him questions at YouDocs@gmail.com. He is the co-author of 4 #1 NY Times Best Sellers including : YOU Staying Young and YOU: The Owner’s Manual. He is Chief Medical Consultant to the two year running Emmy award winning Dr Oz show– The Dr Oz show is #2 nationally in daytime TV. See what all the fun is about, and what he, The Enforcer, is up to. Check local listings or log onto DoctorOz.com for channel and time. And for more health info, log onto youbeauty.com anytime.

10 Facts About Carrots.

9 Apr
  1. Carrots are 88% water.
  2. The carrot primarily gets its characteristic and bright orange color from beta-carotene.
  3. Carrots are rich in antioxidants and minerals.
  4. Carrot greens are edible as a leafy vegetable, but are only occasionally eaten by humans.
  5. Baby carrots are really just carrots that have been cut and peeled into uniform cylinders.
  6. Growing carrot plants with tomato plants increases tomato production.
  7. The carrot is one of the top-ten most economically important vegetables crops in the world.
  8. Carrots can be stored for several months in the refrigerator or over winter in a moist, cool place.
  9. Carrots are a member of the Umbelliferae family, which also includes celery, parsley, dill, cilantro, caraway, cumin, and the poisonous hemlock.
  10. Eating too many carrots can cause a person’s skin to turn yellowish orange, especially on the palms or soles of the feet. This is called carotenemia. It is completely reversible once the consumption of carrots is reduced.

Man Celebrates 65th Birthday By “Paying It Forward.”

8 Apr

If you have seen the movie Pay It Forward, you have an idea what we are talking about. If not, it doesn’t matter because the concept of “Paying it Forward” is much, much, much older than the movie that made it popular.

The concept can be dated back to 1841 when Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “In the order of nature, we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody.”

In 1916, Lily Hardy Hammond wrote, “You don’t pay love back; you pay it forward.”

In a nutshell, pay it forward is asking the beneficiary of a good deed to repay it to others instead of to the original benefactor. In other words, passing on the good to the rest of the world, especially those who may not be in a position to pay YOU back or give ANYTHING to you in return.

That’s exactly what Doug Eaton decided to do for his 65th birthday. As the story goes, he turned 65 on June 11, 2012. He was looking for something to do, so he asked his friends on Facebook what he should do. He got a whole bunch of suggestions. Some were good. Some were bad. Many were ridiculous. One was brilliant.

That suggestion was, “Why don’t you do 65 random acts of kindness?” Eaton immediately knew that was the winner.

According to Yahoo: [Eaton spent] 65 minutes standing on the corner of NW 39th Street and May Avenue in Oklahoma City, handing out $5 bills to people who passed by. He told his Facebook friends that he handed out more than $375, but the response – and the amount of good cheer he shared – was priceless. From a distance, Eaton looked a bit like any other panhandler holding a sign at a street corner, but instead of a plea for money, his sign read: “I have a home… and a car… and a job. Do you need a few bucks for some coffee?”

As you can imagine, people who drove by were shocked. Some just drove by shaking their heads. Others told him, “God bless you.” Many did not want to take his money.

Eaton posted on Facebook, “One obviously needy truck holding a family came around the second time after misunderstanding the first time to give ME $2 just to bless ME for what I was doing. I took their money AND gave them a $5. We kind of traded blessings.”

A lot of people told him to give theirs to someone else.

But, Eaton did not invent this birthday act of kindness idea. In 2010, Robyn Bomar turned 38 by doing 38 random acts of kindness. Bomar wrote on her blog, “I planned out 38 things ahead of time, just in case, but really was praying for opportunities to present themselves throughout the day. My husband, three daughters, and my husband’s parents joined me in the most favorite birthday of my life!”

That day changed Bomar’s life and she started a website with an online community of people who celebrate their birthdays by paying it forward. The website is http://www.thebdayproject.com. Now you know what to do for your next birthday!

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