BHB Bashing Bootcamp

 Data suggests that the conditioning of our cartilage prevents our joints from damage. If the damage acquired from exercise is greater than the body's ability to repair it, the joints start a degenerative pattern. So if you are just starting to exercise, start gently, and work your way up to the ninja style kicking boards and jumping from extreme heights. Give your cartilage time to get buff too!

 This data also indicates starting to go through all ranges of motions at a joint and working up to loading all planes of joint motion. Injury occurs in our joints by loading too much force in positions we rarely go through. So starting to increase the tensile strength of our joints may prevent these occurrences and even prevent osteoarthritis in those joints.

Everything that Goes UP

We all know that everything that goes up must come down. But how do things go up and how can we apply this to our bodies?

Whenever you do a bicep curl or put those plates up in the cupboard or crawl under your bed for that bag, the forces to get you to do that action come from whatever base you have established. A force goes through the entire body when we do anything with our upper body.

Therefore, everything that goes up must have support down. Make sure that your legs and hips are balanced before you train your upper body. Your stance will also increase the effectiveness of upper body training. 

For example, if you have lordosis in your back when you lift an item, the forces for you to lift will come from your lower back. However, if your hips and back are in alignment the force will come from your abdominals and your thighs.

Lordosis---(an extra large curve of your lower back) 

 The good news is that if you are able to align yourself, every movement you do above your waist will benefit your entire body and make you stronger. So take the first step and identify how your body sits on your legs. 

If you are unable to do this and you still want to train your upper body, sit in a chair and make sure that you can feel your abdominals contract in every movement. Remember to work on your lower body until you can do work standing.

Hate Exercise???

Do you hate exercise or just feel like you don't have enough time for a consistent exercise schedule? Make it more about fun than about work: chase the dog around the yard, dance in your living room to your favorite music, jump on a trampoline, take the groceries in with your hands above your heart (cactus pose), see how fast you can rake the leaves. It's time to Play!

Blood Clots, Part I

I recently did some research for a friend about blood clots. One of her friends had a very large clot in their leg and was on several medications but had been given no instructions about diet and exercise to aid in their healing other than to not eat things that contained Vitamin K.  They were not doing well and wanted to have more tools to help him feel better.


The information I gave her was multipart so I plan to break them up into sections.

   Part I--- Nutrition and Exercise for those with Blood Clots
   Part II-- Nutrition, Exercise, and Meditation for Blood Pressure
   Part III- Arterial Health and Maintenance


PART I- Nutrition and Exercise for those with Blood Clots
Be Advised, I am not a doctor nor a clinical nutritionist. I am a  Chek Nutrition and Lifestyle Coach that has an avid interest in Nutrition, Physiology, Anatomy, and Exercise. Please talk to your doctor before changing your diet and exercise regime.


Avoid Foods that have high Vitamin K content:  Vitamin K is a vitamin that is necessary in the body for proper blood coagulation.  This means Vitamin K helps clot formation to prevent excess bleeding, like when you cut your finger. This is a good thing in a healthy body, to prevent major blood loss when injury occurs. If you are told to stay away from Vitamin K it is not because it directly interacts with the medicines you are taking to prevent blood clots, it just makes them less effective as the medicines are regulating factors that decrease the bodies ability to form blood clots and prevent the existing clot to become worse.

So here are my suggestions about diet and Vitamin K:
 Eliminating Vitamin K altogether would be very difficult. It is in almost all the food you eat, especially in dark greens like Kale and Collard Greens. It is also produced in the colon, by the good kinds of flora. However you can modify your diet so that you are eating more foods that are low in Vitamin K:
 
I did find a very helpful chart that shows different foods and there relative amounts of Vitamin K. If you have a clot you should stick with the very low and low categories.

You should not cut out vegetables and fruits altogether. You will notice that there are fruits and vegetables that have low Vitamin K content. Eating these fruits and vegetables is important because they contain antioxidants that help break apart clots gently. 


The best fruits and vegetables with high antioxidants off that chart in the low and very low sections are:
raspberries, blackberries, grapes, artichokes, red cabbage, and red bell peppers


Also, beware of vegetable cocktails and restaurant food. These contain lots of salt which may elevate your blood pressure and increase your chances of the clot breaking off and causing a stroke.


A necessary supplement if you are not allergic to fish is KRILL OIL or a high potency FISH OIL. If you are a vegetarian, try FLAX OIL. These contain Omega 3s which help your body make anti-inflammatory mediators to reduce factors like clots and arterial plaques in general. Krill oil has been shown to be the best of these supplements because it is shelf stable and has added benefits.

I would also recommend that eating  limited amounts of sugar. Sugar is not good for you anyway. However, blood sugar spikes can negatively impact blood pressure.
 
Another important factor is fiber. It sounds unrelated, but the better your bowels move out toxic components, the less your body has to fight inflammation in your colon and is more able to work on those arteries. These are in vegetables and fruits especially when eaten raw, but since you want to not overload your Vitamin K content you could get a psyllium fiber supplement. As well eating some prunes helps you stay regular. If you hate prunes, like I do, then get the juice and its more tolerable especially after heating it slightly in a pot.


Exercise:Okay so exercising is difficult when you get this far into arterial problems. This is what I recommend: When you move large muscles (fast twitch fibers) you initate a pressor response, which means it raises the blood pressure and heart rate. Something that should be minimized in this case. However there are many stabilizer muscles that you can work out that should have a minimal pressor response and can generate a benefit to your condition:

Shoulder Circles:  I use a purple weightless ball from target against the wall with a flat palm and a straight arm rising from his side. make little slow circles. twenty to thirty and make sure you don't hold your breath. If you can do it twice on both sides that is good. However, start out with whatever is tolerable and work up from there.

Ankle circles: sit in a chair to where your feet are dangling (phone books help this happen) make concerted circles one ankle at a time trying to maximize the range.

Tummy tucks. Pull your in your belly button for three seconds and release. Make sure again that you don't hold your breath. do this many times throughout the day. Try twenty before every meal or something that makes it easy to remember. You can do this sitting, standing, or reclining, just see what's best for you.

Stability ball. Sit up straight on a stability ball with your feet flat on the floor. Someone may need to the person balance or make it so the person is holding onto something until they get the hang of it. Start by sitting up straight with the belly button in and breathe normally. Start with a time that is tolerable. If you back starts to hurt the exercise is over. (If the back should act up tuck the pelvis under the next time you try it until you feel the front of your abdomen start to work. Stretch your back by lying on your back and pull your legs into you. IF that is impossible for your condition, use a heating pad on your back, then after 15 stand against the wall and make your lower back touch the wall). Work up to 15 minutes, twice a day, then thirty minutes twice a day, until you get to an hour twice a day.

Make sure that a heart rate monitor is worn during these activities. A doctor should be able to tell you what Heat Rate to stay under.

Cold Mornings

The cold mornings are starting. Add some cinammon to your tea/coffee/oatmeal. It will help warm you up and it is also great for stabilizing your blood sugar.

General Vitamin Information

    When we were children, vitamin supplementation came in the form of chewable Flintstones characters. They were delicious and we took one every day by the recommendation of our caring parents. Now we are adults. We have different issues.  There are many choices, and there are many articles suggesting we take this and that. It gets very confusing. So here is all my 'general' information for you.

    If you are perfectly healthy, you still need to supplement your diet. Why, you ask? Our food used to have all the nutrients we needed from the soil. But today, the soil is nutrient depleted, so even though you may be buying organic food (WAY BETTER FOR YOU) you still will not eat enough of the good stuff to have everything you need in your diet. Generally, you can find this in a multi-vitamin formula. Of course, there are good ones, bad ones, ugly ones, and not-much-in-em ones. To understand which are good and bad would take a lot of research and time. So my advice to you is to find a raw foods supplement. They exist in powders like the ingredients found in AMAZING GRASS and other green drink powders. They have raw foods that you could never find in your grocery store or possibly have time to incorporate into your everyday diet. The drawback is that they can get kind of pricey. So look for vitamin capsules that are made in the same fashion, from raw materials as opposed to manufactured synthetically in a lab. For a majority of vitamins, we still do not know how they are absorbed in the intestinal tract. By taking a raw supplement, you are increasing your chances of absorption because they are packaged with enzymes and other nutrients that will not be incorporated into a synthetic formulation. But, even with all that said, something is better than nothing. If you have a bottle of ONE-A-DAY, taking that every day is better than not supplementing at all.

    Everyone should take an Omega 3 supplement. It's incredibly good for the body as an anti-inflammatory. There are claims that every disease in the body is caused by some form of inflammation. These are best to take right before bed, as the body produces fatty acids during your sleep cycle. The absolute best supplement of this sort is KRILL OIL. It has a less fishy taste and offers extra benefits in addition to the Omega 3 content. If you are a vegetarian to the core, flax oil is a good replacement, but there have been articles stating that it is not as beneficial as fish oil (I have not researched the validity of this statement).

    Antioxidant formulas are big on the market now.  You should pack in as many antioxidants as you possibly can into your diet. This is by way of vegetables and fruits, some teas and coffees. However, research on oral antioxidant supplements has not always been positive. One study, SELECT, gave high doses of Vitamin E and C  to men with prostate cancer. The study had to be discontinued because the cancer was progressing faster in  many of the patients taking the supplements.It is suspected that at some dosage the antioxidants turn into free radicals, exacerbating the original problem. Please note that this study was shown to be flawed in many ways, so we can not take this information as an absolute truth. They used synthetic sources of Vitamin C and E. For instance, in the Vitamin E supplement, there was only one of the four tocopherols in the formula. While there is not a great deal of black and white evidence from the study, what we can take from it is this: unless you have a nature-derived supplement the maximum dosage you should take is 500mg. Keep in mind that caffeine that will be in your coffee and tea inhibits vitamin absorption so if you have to have your cup of joe, do it hours after you eat and take your vitamins.

    Now where this changes is in the cases of deficiency. If you have a vitamin deficiency, taking more than 500mg might be necessary for you to reinstate your health. For instance, I take a high dose of Folate and the rest of the B-complex vitamins every day for my brain function and stress levels as my intestines are not absorbing the B-Vitamins adequately from food (because I'm gluten intolerant). The amount I'm taking is way past the suggested daily intake. Yet, this works for me. Again, if you are trying to take an extra dose of something, see what compounds it is found hanging out with in our natural vegetation and find the most well-rounded formula. See if you can spread the dosage throughout the day, especially if they are water-absorbant vitmains. That way the body can deal with excess intake more easily. Sometimes we have to go with trial and error. If a dosage really works for you, do it. You're the only one who can take charge of your health.

    Calcium, Magnesium, and Vitamin D should be taken together. It is best to take calcium after you have eaten and with a glass of water. In a supplement workshop I attended, the teacher suggested that if taking both a multivitamin and a calcium supplement, you should take them at different times. So, to take them correctly, try taking the multivitamin with your meal at the beginning and the calcium supplement after you are finished eating. Vitamin D has been shown to be extremely beneficial to preventing disease. However, you can over do it with Vitamin D, so it's best to follow dosing instructions.

    Brazil nuts have a high dose of selenium, which is anti-carcinogenic. It is recommended that every adult eat 2 Brazil Nuts a day. However, there are two schools of thoughts on this:
1) 2 Brazil Nuts a day is perfect
2) Brazil nuts have so much selenium in them, it is better to spread them out (taking one a day or every other day) to avoid the negative effects of selenium overdose.

    Nonetheless, if you do decide to take them, do so before you go to sleep. The fat and protein in the nut, discourage the body from glycemic fits in the night for a full sleep. 

    Turmeric is another anti-carcinogenic compound. While, I've tried these in capsule formulations, I prefer to skip the gelatin capsule and just sprinkle it on every food I consume.

    Perhaps you are all the more confused about the adult version of Flinstones for our health. I hope that this article simply makes you look at your supplements with a little more skepticism and knowledge. If it has boggled your noggin', just remember this: Something is better than nothing.

Calcium from Greens

You absorb 60% of the calcium in calcium rich vegetables compared to the 30% you can absorb from a pill. Try kale and red peppers, a much tastier way to get calcium.