Archive for the ‘I Wanna Be Healthy’ category

A Cost Benefit Analysis of your Health & Physical Fitness

March 19th, 2010

This post is for all of those people who:

  1. Want to live a long life, and
  2. Want that long life to be full of health, vitality and general awesome-ness

Because seriously, who wants to live until 100 if you have to spend the final 20-30 years of your life hooked up to machines and/or driving around in one of those motorized scooters because of your poor lifestyle choices

Luckily for you, I am here to help.

The True Cost of Health & Fitness Spending

Sadly, in our modern world, the biggest threat to living a long, healthy, vital and generally awesome life is our lifestyle.

  • Too little physical activity
  • Too much sitting
  • Too much of the wrong foods
  • Too little of the right foods
  • Chronic low level stress

Not good.

But, maybe that’s just the way things have to be. Maybe it’s a yin-yang kind of thing.

For all of the benefits of our modern society, there have to be some drawbacks.

Maybe the cost of our technological evolution is a slow, physical de-evolution into WALL-E blobbiness.

Maybe, there is nothing we can we do about it?

personal trainer toronto

wrong.

personal trainer toronto

Here are your options for getting super-fit.

1.   Wait for a Technological Solution

Whether it’s a new drug or surgery or medical implant or obesity hygiene device, some people are going to sit and wait for someone else to save them from…themselves.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Benefits

  • No exercise
  • More free time to watch tv and play video games
  • Eat whatever you want, whenever you want it

Costs

  • You may die before a “cure” is found
  • And you may have to spend big bucks on a Comfort Wipe

Conclusion

For me, the costs outweigh the benefits.

I have to give this plan a thumbs down.

2.   Become a Caveman

Our caveman ancestors might not have had an iPad, but they certainly were leaner, stronger & fitter. And, if it wasn’t for their higher infant death rate and the general lack of emergency room doctors, our caveman ancestors would probably have retained a high level of physical fitness well into the senior years.

So, solution #2….

Walk away from all of your modern conveniences, leave your home, walk into the nearest forest and adopt the lifestyle that our paleolithic ancestors thrived upon.

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Benefits

  • Eating real food (wild game, fruit, berries, nuts, vegetables, roots, water… will make a huge difference on your overall health as well as help you drop a few lbs.
  • Increased physical activity will drastically improve your overall physical fitness
  • Less tv, less computer, less video games, less time in the car will improve posture, pain and portliness.
  • Low level stress will melt away as you ditch your daily commute, your boss, your suit & tie and your need to conform

Costs

  • No income
  • Property laws mean that you will likely be arrested for vagrancy or trespassing on private property
  • Herds of wild buffalo are pretty scarce nowadays, so you might have a problem finding enough food.
  • Replace low level chronic stress with higher level acute stress – starvation, arrests for vagrancy, etc…

Conclusion

The costs associated with returning to our ancient way of life far outweigh the benefits.

Ergo, another thumbs down.

3.   Become a Modern Caveman

A modern caveman continues to work at his/her job, live in his/her nice warm home but chooses to eliminate or at least minimize those aspects of modern life that are causing us so much trouble

  • too much screen time – tv, computer, iphone, etc…
  • too much sitting
  • not enough physical activity
  • too many calories
  • not enough nutrition

Cost/Benefit Analysis

Benefits

  • Eating real food (wild game, fruit, berries, nuts, vegetables, roots, water… will make a huge difference on your overall health as well as help you drop a few lbs.
  • Increased physical activity will drastically improve your overall physical fitness
  • Less tv, less computer, less video games, less time in the car will improve posture, pain and portliness.
  • Taking a proactive approach to stress reduction will help improve the quality & quantity of your life.

Costs

  • Individuality – If you like to blend in, being a modern caveman isn’t for you
  • Grocery Bills – Real food often costs more than the typical processed Standard American Diet. Or at least it requires more imagination and effort to keep costs down.
  • Cost of physical activity – whether it’s time or money or a combination of the two, exercise is going to hit you in the wallet. Because you aren’t spending your entire day being active, you’re going to need to “exercise”. Whether you choose to run on your own or hire an in-home personal trainer, there is going to a cost – time, money, combination.

Conclusion

Millions of fit, healthy & attractive people are implementing some version of this plan each & every day.

Next week, i will go into some of the options and break them down…benefits, costs, etc…

Stay tuned.

.

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HIIT Kicks Cardio’s Butt

March 16th, 2010

I like to visualize Ben Johnson crushing Carl Lewis when I do my HIIT sprints

So, there I was.

I had just finished a set of killer HIIT sprints….when the Lance Armstrong clone to my left asked me “what’s the deal with that workout”?

I think I croaked something about anaerobic this and EPOC that…and was about to hop off the bike when he said…

“that’s just a fad..like Atkins. If you want to get fit, you HAVE to do cardio”

Arrrgggghhhh!

Stifling my hulk-like rage, I asked…

“What do you mean I have to do cardio?”

From there, he proceeded to tell me why cardio rocks and why high intensity training (HIIT, HIRT, resistance training) sucks.

Double arggghhhhh!

Hulk (me) was getting mad.

But, instead of smashing, I flipped him one of my business cards (along with a certain finger) and suggested he read the following study which shows (once again) how HIIT kicks cardio butt

And here’s the study.

According to the researchers, high intensity interval training (HIIT) is better than traditional endurance training for improving:

  • Athletic performance
  • Metabolic performance
  • Molecular adaptation to exercise

According to researcher Martin Gibala…”doing as little as 10 one-minute sprints on a standard stationary bike with about one minute of rest in between, three times a week, works as well in improving muscle as many hours of conventional long-term biking less strenuously.”

We have known for years that repeated moderate long-term exercise tunes up fuel and oxygen delivery to muscles and aids the removal of waste products. Exercise also improves the way muscles use the oxygen to burn the fuel in mitochondria, the microscopic power station of cells.

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Running or cycling for hours a week widens the network of vessels supplying muscle cells and also boosts the numbers of mitochondria in them so that a person can carry out activities of daily living more effectively and without strain, and crucially with less risk of a heart attack, stroke or diabetes.

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But the traditional approach to exercise is time consuming. Martin Gibala and his team have shown that the same results can be obtained in far less time with brief spurts of higher-intensity exercise.

Take that Mr. Lance Armstrong clone.

But wait, it get’s better.

One of the main complaints about High Intensity Interval Training is that it’s…well, too intense.

Sure, it gives you a great workout, but it will probably give you a heart attack.

Not according to Dr. Gibala.

The main purpose of his study was to prove the performance, metabolic and molecular advantages of a more practical model of low-volume HIIT.

The new study used a standard stationary bicycle and a workload which was still above most people’s comfort zone (about 95% of maximal heart rate) but only about half of what can be achieved when people sprint at an all-out pace.

  • Seven men performed 6 HIIT training sessions over 2 weeks.
  • Each session consisted of 8-12 x 60 s intervals (at ≈100% of peak power) separated by 75 s of rest.
  • That’s a total of between 17 and 26 minutes per workout or 2 ½ hours over 2 weeks

So, how does this workout compare to traditional cardio?

According to the doc, to achieve the same performance, metabolic and molecular benefits with traditional endurance (cardio) training, you’d need to complete over 10 hours of continuous moderate bicycling exercise over a two-week period.

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Hmmmmm…let’s recap.

HIIT

  • 2 ½ hours per week

Cardio

  • 10 hours per week

And I won’t even mention the fact that HIIT workouts make you look like this:

while cardio workouts make you look like this…

your choice.

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Obesity Isn’t The Disease…It’s Only A Symptom

March 12th, 2010

I read an interesting study the other day.

In this study, the researchers argued that when it comes to Metabolic Syndrome (hypertension, dyslipidaemia, glucose intolerance, hyperinsulinemia, central adiposity {big belly}, high blood sugar) obesity may actually be a good thing.

Here’s why.

  • Metabolic Syndrome is a result of our Standard American Diet
  • The S.A.D. combination of too many calories and the over-consumption of sugar + fat-centric meals causes…
  • An increase in the secretion of insulin. When this happens on a regular basis, we end up with…
  • hyperinsulinemia, which…
  • Causes the expression of the lipogenic transcription factor SREBP-1c and its target enzymes and so on and so on and so on until we end up with Metabolic Syndrome and all of the wonderful ailments I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Sounds pretty grim, doesn’t it?

And the first thing that your doctor is going to tell you if she suspects you have Metabolic Syndrome is to lose weight.

As if obesity is the cause of Metabolic Syndrome.

But, it ain’t.

We know that our bodies respond to our Standard American Diet by increasing the amount of circulating insulin.

This leads to an increase in body-fat.

Common sense tells us that this is bad.

These researchers disagree.

They propose that this new body-fat delays, rather than causes, the metabolic syndrome induced by chronic caloric surplus.

They argue that subcutaneous fat in general exerts a positive effect on insulin sensitivity. Subcutaneous fat is the body-fat that exists between your muscles and your skin – we’re not talking that solid “beer belly” kind of fat.

This “healthy” type of adipose tissue is genetically determined and has a strong sexually dimorphic component as well. Females, at any given body mass index, are protected against insulin resistance more than males.

And if we prevent insulin resistance…we prevent Metabolic Syndrome.

To test this hypothesis further, the researchers bred obesity resistance mice with with db/db mice, which normally become obese and develop severe metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes (T2DM) by the age of 8–10 weeks.

Sucks to be a db/db mouse.

They ended up with some mice who stayed lean despite their voracious appetites.

Unfortunately, these mice developed Metabolic Syndrome in 4 weeks instead of the typical 8-10 weeks.

The researchers concluded that body-fat is a normal response designed to permit stockpiling of fuels while simultaneously protecting our lipid-intolerant organs.

Metabolic syndrome appears only after the storage capacity of the adipocyte compartment has reached a maximum, at which point a gradual accumulation of ectopic fatty acids begins.

Ectopic means “not where it’s supposed to be”. It accumulates in the abdominal region (beer belly), the liver, muscle tissue including the heart, the pancreas, and perhaps in lipid-rich deposits in the arteries.

Obesity should therefore not be regarded as a pathology or disease, but rather as the normal, physiologic response to sustained caloric surplus without which the advent of metabolic syndrome is accelerated.

Conclusions

  • Obesity isn’t a disease
  • It’s a symptom of another disease – Metabolic Syndrome
  • It’s better to have squishy, subcutaneous fat than the big, hard beer belly kind of fat

My Suggestion

Stop thinking of obesity as a health issue unto itself.

If obesity is a result of something else, you need to know what that cause is and then take action to reverse the problem.

You can start by dumping the Standard American Diet and replace it with something more Mediterranean or Asian or Paleo.

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Jeff Garlin – my footprint

March 10th, 2010

Jeff Garlin’s new book (my footprint) is the best & worst diet book I have ever read.

The worst because…. it’s not really a diet book.

There’s none of the eat this and don’t eat this that all diet books are supposed to have.

There are no promises of rapid and permanent weight loss.

There are no recipes.

The cover doesn’t feature an image of a person with taut muscles and a rippling six pack.

It features Jeff…and his still too big belly…walking on a treadmill….in the middle of a forest.

Not exactly the prototypical diet industry role model.

But that’s okay.

It’s okay because Jeff has written a book that should be read by:

  1. People who find themselves unable to stop themselves from eating
  2. People who identify themselves as food addicts
  3. People who have to eat when they feel angry, sad, anxious, happy, etc..
  4. People who eat when they are already full
  5. People who eat to the point of nausea
  6. People who eat past the point of nausea
  7. People who hide their eating habits from others
  8. People who are ashamed of how they eat
  9. People who love and care for people who eat like Jeff Garlin

Now onto the book…

Jeff Garlin provided the voice for the overweight spaceship captain in the movie WALL-E.

If you haven’t seen the movie, you really should. Even if you don’t like animation – but, I digress.

Back to the book.

After attending the closing night of WALL-E at a movie theater in Hollywood, Jeff realized (not for the first time), that for years, he has been telling himself that he’s going to finally lose the weight and get in shape. But he never does.

On that fateful night, after watching the captain experience his own epiphany, Jeff realizes that it’s finally time for him to stop talking about losing weight and to finally do something about it.

“If not now, then when”?

And as his lies in bed that night, Jeff is struck by an idea – he’ll write about his attempt to lose weight.

And just like his character in WALL-E, he decides to add an environmental transformation to his physical one.

Jeff has decided to lower his carbon footprint as he simultaneously lowers his personal footprint.

Jeff’s Weight Loss Journey

The first thing you’re going to notice about this book is that it reads like a series of diary entries. Chronologically we read about Jeff’s day to day struggles to overcome his food addiction and drop a ton of weight (while simultaneously lightening his environmental impact upon the earth).

The second thing that you’re going to notice is that Jeff is funny. Seriously funny. For those people who are already fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm, this will come as no surprise. But for those people who have never watched Curb, let’s just say that as I read this book (in public – coffee shop, chiropractor’s office) I couldn’t stop myself from laughing out loud.

Yes – I was that strange person laughing to himself in a room full of people.

What I Loved About Jeff’s Message

Jeff made two points that struck me as terribly important.

1.     He is a food addict.

This is a very controversial statement.

Most weight loss experts (and the general) population that weight loss is as simple as eating less & moving more.

They are wrong.

People like Jeff know that in addition to the chemistry and biology of human metabolism, many of us have to deal with powerful mental & emotional obstacles that drive us to eat and eat and eat.

Just like the alcoholic, compulsive gambler or drug addict, our thoughts and emotions can have a profound effect upon our hormones, brain chemistry and ultimately our actions.

Food addiction is real.

2.     Weight Loss is hard work.

Unlike other “food addicts” Jeff doesn’t take the position that his addiction makes it impossible to lose weight. He doesn’t assume the role of victim.

Jeff is eager to spread the message that:

  • Weight loss is possible
  • But it is going to be really hard

There are no magic solutions.

There are going to be good days and there are going to be bad days.

Weight loss is hard work.

End of story.

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Click here if you want to buy the book.

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Protected: Health Habits Workout -Week 10/Day 1

March 8th, 2010

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Essential Workout Gear: The Gymboss Interval Timer

March 5th, 2010

I love interval training.

Absolutely love it.

There is something magical about the HIIT, HIRT and Tabata workouts that I inflict upon my clients.

As the clock counts down, they move quicker, lift heavier and recover faster.

Whether it’s bike sprints…

or jumping lunges…

…interval training is a powerful tool for burning fat and getting really, really fit, really, really fast.

So, how do you get started with interval training?

Glad you asked.

Step One:  Buy an Interval Timer.

Seriously, you’ll thank me. No more watching the clock out of the corner of your eye or screaming at your workout buddy for not paying attention. Spend the 20 bucks. Buy a Gymboss interval timer. Clip it to your shorts. It will beep & vibrate to let you know when to start & stop.

Simple. Effective. Buy the damn timer.

Step Two: Select one of the many free HIIT/HIRT/Tabata workouts that I have posted here @ Health Habits

Step Three: Start sweating

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That’s it

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Protected: Health Habits Workout -Week 9/Day 3

March 5th, 2010

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Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

March 3rd, 2010

This is a joke….right?

A really, really, really bad joke….but still a joke.

How can a kid not know what a tomato looks like?

How can an “adult” think that pre-fab chicken is a healthy food choice?

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Get Fit – Save Money

March 2nd, 2010

While watching some of the healthcare debate stuff on the news, I started thinking about:

  1. How the U.S. could save healthcare dollars by spending more on disease prevention / health promotion
  2. How Canadians pay less for pharmaceuticals thanks to public health care

All this deep thinking happened while I was shopping for fish oils, etc at my favorite health food store.

It got me thinking, what if all of the customers in the store got together, pooled all of their purchases and asked for a volume discount?

What would happen?

As individuals, we don’t have the leverage needed to get better prices.

But, what if thousands of us joined together as a group (perhaps an online group) and demanded better prices for our:

  • Nutritional supplements – vitamins, etc…
  • Health club memberships
  • Workout equipment
  • Workout clothes
  • Personal training sessions

Would we get a better price?

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So, as a little experiment, I have set up a little beta test.

Using a facebook Group, I am asking all of my readers who live in the Greater Toronto Area to join the Health & Fitness Buying Group – Toronto

The more people the better. That way I can pressure retailers to offer bigger & better discounts.

(if this test works, I will expand the group / set up new groups to service other areas or possibley even just set up 1 big group)

.

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Protected: Health Habits Workout -Week 9/Day 1

March 1st, 2010

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