Wellbeing Workshop » diet

A paleo breakfast!

admin — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:33:50 +0000

One of the many things that I recommend that people do is to change to a paleo diet to avoid any future development of symptoms of Chronic systemic inflammation.

One of the worst meals for the development of Chronic Systemic inflammation (CSI) is the current breakfast fad of having grain based confectionery for breakfast.

While I know that many people consider a cereal breakfast to be a great start to the day, unless you are eating something luike porridge they really are just a cereal confectionery.

To answer some of the questions that I get asked. Here are some breakfast ideas.

Pancakes

1 cup almond flour , 1/4 cup coconut milk, 1 egg, 1/2 a cup of blueberries or other berries (optional)

2 eggs, 1 onion cooked in olive oil , 1 orange

2 eggs, a 1/2 a cup of steamed spinach, 3-4 slices of pineapple or melon, handful walnuts

leftover meat or deli meat, and a piece of fruit

Vegetable scrambled eggs

Heated up some butter in a small frying pan
Tossed in half a bag of roughly chopped up Baby Leaf Spinach (60p) for a few seconds till it was covered by butter and wilted very slightly In another bowl mix up 2 organic free range eggs (33p) with some pepper, mixed herbs and thyme (I used all dried but you can use fresh if you prefer
Chuck in the egg mixture to the pan and stir it around on a medium heat.
When the eggs are set to your liking, remove and put in a nice bowl with some smoked salmon

In fact almost any vegetable omelette is a great start.

Mind you try not to go too crazy eating eggs.

Another one that I enjoy is is a piece of cold chicken breast from a roast chicken and a 1/4 of a rockmelon/cantaloupe. Or you can try a fruit slushie and a boiled egg. It is also nice to whack some fruit into a blender and to drink that while eating a cold cut.

I will date this one the 14th of June and keep adding as I run across new recipes

What is Healthy Water II?

admin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:33:44 +0000

Yesterday we started with the question, what is healthy water, and why is is healthy?

So today I am going to start with the great question about water, which is: How much water do I need to drink. We have all asked that question at one time or another "How much water do I need to drink."

Considering that after air, water is our second most important nutirent, this is a very important question.

Unfortunately tha question is much more complicated than it would first appear. There are a number of key factors involved in that. The key in this question is what is your caloric intake? You see the second largest factor in the amount of water is that your bodies uses water as a tool when digesting food and energy distribution.

The Primary use of water is for thermal management. So depending on the weather you may use or lose up to 3+ litres of water per day.

So a list of water usage in your body includes,

Food intake.
Climate.
Activity level.
Environmental toxic load.
Airconditioning (dries you out).
Length of day (believe it or not).
Lubrication.
Moisturising skin and lungs.
Shock absprbtion. (very active people use more for this)
Cleaning and toxin removal from cells.
Transport of energy, nutrients and toxins.
Etc etc....

But you start to get the idea.

This means that almost any advice that you get regarding amounts to drink is flawed advice as it takes none of the above into account.

In fact the original 8 glasses of water a day was an off the cuff comment by a doctor given in response to an interview question in north Eastern USA around 30 years ago. It has little relevance to most peoples water requirements. Especially if you are living in a temperate or tropical climate.

The simplest and best advice that you can be given regarding water, and this does not apply to people with kidney disease or other such issues, is:

Drink enough water to need to urinate every 2-3 hours during the day.

This will cover most situations. As your body flushes toxins it ramps up and down depending on load. Also this will bypass the amount of water that your body is using for cooling and keeping your lungs moist. If you continue to have enough foe your kidneys and liver to process toxins out of your system then the other issues are covered.

Symptoms and Self Deception.

admin — Sun, 31 May 2009 06:31:58 +0000

One of the most common questions I get asked is why I tell people to ignore medical issues. While this is not quite my message, it is certainly a good question.

As a Public Health Nutritionist my focus is on avoiding issues. One of the frustrating issues in my professional practice has been peoples fascination with the outcomes of low quality diets, activity, hydration or sleep.

These outcomes include, obesity, overweight, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, fatigue, depression, artheriosclerosis, stroke and cardiovascular disease.

Now, while I absolutely encourage people with any of these conditions to see a medical professional, and Australia has some of the best in the world. My contention is that all of these conditions are symptoms of an underlying cause. And it is the causal issue that we need to address.

So here is my rule of thumb. See a medical professional to deal with those symptoms but do not get fascinated by them.

Redesign your life, have fun and focus on what works.

Osteoporosis! Take it or leave it?

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:35:46 +0000

Ok. So, finally i am sick of the hype and advertising I see all the time and think it is about time that health professionals got together and started teaching people how to be healthy. Not to just avoid being sick or treating disease.

As a nutritionist in Australia I am often talking to people who wonder why they are ill all of the time and doctors do not seem to make a difference. This Blog is going to be about that and my first subject is Osteoporosis.

On the weekend I was talking to a lady who has osteoporosis and has been told by her doctor that it is incurable and that it will shorten her life? At least that is how she interpreted the advice. I do hope that the doctor did not actually say that. One of my first actions was to advise her that this is not true. In fact osteoporosis is not even a disease in the true sense odf the word, just a set of symptoms that we label osteoporosis.

If your doctor does even a mild amount of reading outside of the drug journals they would find that many people think that osteoporosis is, in most cases, treatable. And most of the time totally avoidable. Many times we are told that it has something to do with our lack of calcium or a vitamin intake. This can be often true, however this is only a small part of the story. The thing that we are usually not told is that Calcium loss is most often the culprit.

What is calcium lass. It is the movement of calcium in your body and it is most often caused by having an acidic system caused by high intakes of grain, sugars, dairy and fatty meats. There are people groups who have low intakes of calcium but have no osteoporosis. There diets are mainly made up of Green plants, vegetables and low fat meat. They also have sufficient intakes of magnesium and vitamin A, which they get from their diets and being out in the sunlight.

(In fact recent research in China looked at several hundred vegan budhist nuns whose diet include less than 400Mg of Calcium per day.)

(There was no cases of opteoporosis).

In fact many researchers would say that these big four and the replacement of the diet that our bodies evolved with are likely to be behind many of the symptom sets that we call disease and illness in the west. www.ThePaleoDiet.com is a good example of this research.

There are some simple rules for avoiding many of these issues. Some simple ones are;

eat mainly unrefined plant food.
minimise cereal and grain intake.
avoid or minimise dairy intake.
avoid all sweeteners, artificial or natural.
drink mainly water. Amount you need varies.
avoid grainfed or processed meats.
increase your magnesium intake.
eat a vegetable rainbow everyday.

and the last is probably not dietary advice at all really, see or talk to a nutritionist or dietitian if you are having health issues. Few medical professionals do much, if any, study of human nutrition or nutritional bio-chemistry. So, absolutely see a medical professional for the management of acute symptoms but also talk to a nutrition professional for chronic issues like arthritis, osteoporosis or heart disease. Sometimes, for many, most often, the issue is really a poor diet or lifestyle that can be changed.

Why Dieting does not work IV

admin — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:55:00 +0000

Manage your actions.

When I say manage your actions I mean the little things that give you access to your own power. Constantly look at you actions through the eyes of the person that you want to be. Which means do not try and fix yourself, there is nothing wrong with you, remember.

If you want to be 67KG, think of how 67KG man would act.

Do you dance down the stairs and run up them.
Do you walk easily from place to place?
Are you active and energetic?
Do you have the pastimes of a 67KG man?
Do you rock climb, play touch, run, and dance?

Or are you still acting as if you are overweight and wrong. Do you arrive home after work, tired and strung out after a hard days work and plop yourself in front of the telly. Sit there with a beer until it is time for dinner and then sit there after dinner until you fall asleep in the chair.

Are those the action of a fit and active man?
Are those your actions?
Do you sit around at lunch time and eat prepared food from the cafeteria?
Do you skip breakfast and swallow cups of strong coffee to get you going?
Do you have a sugar hit at morning tea?
Are these the actions of a fit and healthy person?
Are you just like me and 10 Million other people trying to survive the day?

Because this is how I was. This was me and because it was me, I also understand that it is you.

Do you feel bad because of it?
Do all the “Diet” and “exercise” ads on tellie make you feel guilty?

Well guess what? All of this depresses your immune system and your metabolism. Feeling guilty especially, works directly against everything that you want.

So the most important place to start is to stop feeling guilty!!

It achieves nothing in the long or short term, and only acts to suppress you ability to make any lasting and worthwhile changes to where you are now.

Again, and listen to me “This is the secret of why diets do not work!”

Your mind and your immune system, your mind and your endocrine system, your mind and your metabolism are all intricately and intimately connected. You can not judge yourself, you cannot be guilty, you cannot be wrong, you cannot be bad, you cannot be any of these things and be healthy. All of these things work to suppress and depress you.
But there is another way. It is as simple as it is positive. Simply stop making yourself wrong. Reinvent your lifestyle the way you would have it be and then act as if that is the truth.

If you want to be that person, change your mind and act as the person you want to be would act. Find something about which you feel passionate and go do it. If you love dancing, go and do that. If you want to play football, go and do that. If you want to volunteer at a local homeless shelter, go and do that. Go and identify the things about which you feel passion and go and do them.

Your actions will not only affect how you think about yourself but the actions themselves will bring about a rush of chemicals that make you feel better about yourself. You will feel more alive and you will feel as if you are doing something, which will make it easy to be more, do more and have more.

One of the strange things about our society has been the development of an idea that our state of mind depends on what we do and have, where the reality that scientists and spiritual people know is that it is our being that has us do and have things.

So your first step to being the person that you want to be, is to change your mind and be that person. To create, in your mind, a vision of that person and then think and act as that person would act.

In everyday life, this is often called an act of faith. All religions and mystics teach this, as a matter of course. Scientists are now finding that this is true too. As a matter of cause, we now know that, it is our mind, our thoughts, that create the reality in which we live.

If you believe that there is something wrong, you will act as if there is something wrong, and there will be something wrong.

To have a different life you will need to change your mind and then find the actions that are in alignment with that new thought.