Category Archives: Health

Mar22

Hello?? Anyone out there?

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Well, we’re in the thick of it and what a better time to start writing again! COVID-19 is taking over the world and I have been reading and reading and READING all the comments and thoughts about it. So much so that I had to delete my Facebook app from my phone for about 3 days until I realized I needed it to keep connected to another writing group.

Everyone’s thoughts from social distancing and home schooling to playing outside in public and still running to the grocery store. Some people don’t want you to step foot outside your house and some can’t be contained one minute longer. I get it. I see it from both ends. We want to be safe, but we want to be outside, too.

So, I am technically on day 5 working from home and keeping my little at home, too. The hubs gets to keep going outside to dig in caves since he’s isolated to working with only 1 or 2 other people. We’re keeping busy with dance parties, work out sessions, puzzles, and LOTS of movies. We’re not going to stress over school work, but we’re going to keep an interest in learning by watching intellectual shows or listening to a book on Alexa.

We’re counting down the days since there is no end in sight. Personally, I think we’ll be better for it. Hug your people, take a break in any way you can, and be nice to one another.  We’re going to make it.

Sep14

My 5-day Juice Cleanse

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If you’ve never done a juice cleanse and want to know what to expect, read this. I prepaid for my juices and had to pick up my 6 daily juices every morning. This was my first time to do a cleanse and my thoughts are below.

Day 1: I could do this for 20 days!
The day was easy. I enjoyed all of the juices and was just mildly hungry by the end of the day. But, when you’re at the beginning of a cleanse or a diet, you tend to start planning your first meal like it’s your last. Also, food commercials on TV are super annoying. I want pizza!!

Day 2: Why don’t they have a ranch dressing cleanse?
Juices are okay today but I’m really craving ranch dressing. My coworker tried to find a ranch dressing cleanse with no success. We did decide that if we blended spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, and a tablespoon of dry ranch dressing mix that technically we would make a salad. As the day goes on, I start to notice that I have to go to the bathroom more often, for more than one reason if you know what I mean. The best part of the day was fitting into my size 6 pencil skirt and tucking in my blouse. The worst part of this day is that no one really explained how your body does the cleansing and everyone should be aware about possible anal leakage because I had an accident on the way home…in my pencil skirt.

Day 3: Ginger is the ROOT of all evil!
Today is the worse day. I hate it so much I feel like throwing my juices back and asking for a margarita instead. (Which makes me think they should make a margarita juice cleanse, too.) Every day someone new is making the juices and today 2 of them had way too much ginger. It was so overpowering that I couldn’t hold anything down. Luckily, we have a small store in our office so I could buy a banana. I also ate an avocado that evening but only drank 2.5 juices of the 6 for the day. At this point I wonder if the person who created this awful idea of juicing did it for punishment purposes of killing yourself slowly from the inside out.

Day 4: All I want is chicken
I’ve been a pescatarian for about 2 months and today I want meat…particularly chicken. I want it fried, baked, and dipped in ranch (go figure). The juices are okay but the ones with ginger are still disgusting. I’m really not sure if I can ever eat ginger again. I had some carrots during lunch and half of a white peach during dinner. I’m so thankful that I’m feeling better, there’s only one more day left, and my rear is starting to feel better. I go to bed dreaming of Chick-fil-a’s chicken salad sandwich and fries…dipped in ranch.

Day 5: A new reason to be thankful for Friday
Finally, it’s the last day and I’m feeling more like myself. I keep thinking all day that I want to eat a salad tonight. I had an apple during the day and only drank three of the juices. I had a small salad with no dressing during dinner and so glad this dang experience is nearly over. Oh, and the juicer I ordered from Groupon before starting this cleanse finally arrived. I don’t even open the box and even consider returning it.

Day 6: I’ve reached the promise land
I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EAT!! I’m so excited it’s like Christmas Day!! I made coffee first. Later I shared a plate of eggs, red potatoes, and refried black beans with my husband for breakfast. By lunch I had a black bean patty and some edamame. We went to a birthday party and there was both ranch and onion dips! I tried to control myself because I knew we were going to sushi. Sushi was soo good. Sake was soo good. I’m happy and never want to do a 5-day juice cleanse again.

Day 7: I Love Food
I had no extra weight gain from my food binge the day before. Yippee! Overall I lost 5 pounds and I’ll take that in a week any time. Now all I have to do is keep it up and keep the weight off!

Jul3

Fitness coffee

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I found a new coffee at my grocery store called Fitness Coffee and since I’m working out and trying to be more fit, I decided to try it. The package read that it has “3.5 times the antioxidants that green tea has and significantly more than red wine.” The price was about $1 more than my normal coffee, so what the heck?

Fitness Coffee

Fitness coffee does not taste like other coffee!! With all the extra herbs and supplements added, it tastes like my dieter’s tea, which is a diuretic. So, naturally, I was afraid when I drank it right before work one Tuesday morning. Luckily, there have not been any crazy side effects or sudden urges to run to the bathroom.

The website claims that it’s patented formula “could enhance your workout, speed up your metabolism, help you lose unwanted pounds, and speed up muscle recovery.” There are all sorts of ingredients including liquorice, mints, cinnamon, cancer fighting, and tumeric. I’ve been drinking it for a week, although not every day, and I do feel I have lost some water weight with it and maybe my metabolism has sped up a bit. After a few days I decided to only use 2 scoops (instead of 3) and add a scoop of my usual, decaf coffee to help with the bitter taste.

You can read more about it here. The company also makes a Fitness Barley, Fitness Orzo, Fitness Tea, Fitness Caffe Healthy Espresso pods, AND Sensual Coffee. (Don’t worry honey, I will only bother you for 3-5 hours.) You can read more about their other products here.

May1

Alcohol and Fat Metabolism

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Four weeks ago I started in a new diet program at work.  Diet is emphasized here because it’s not really a diet program so much as it’s a new way of living life.  The program is called Nuvita and allows you to track your exercise and calories burned through a watch and band you wear while working out.  You also track your daily food intake and mobility (stretching).  The program seems to be successful and we have a coach that meets with us every Monday to review the program and go over lessons.

Last week, our coach reviewed alcohol and what the intake can do to your body and metabolism.  I, personally, know that alcohol is a huge factor in my weight gain.  I’m pretty sure that if I stop drinking and limit it to only special occasions I will probably see a good drop in my weight.

I wanted to share the document she sent to all of us that discusses alcohol and weight gain.  I’m not a doctor but, it makes sense.  And, it’s interesting to see how long your body haults your metabolism when drinking.

I have written about the effects of alcohol on fat metabolism before.  During my recent interaction with employees, I was asked about this subject.  I was presented with several statements similar to the following, “I eat really healthy, but…… I like to have a few beers. Is that why I can’t lose weight?”  The article below should answer that question.

The main problem with alcohol aside from the number of empty calories it contains is  the effect is has on fat metabolism. A recent study, for example, has shown that even small amounts of alcohol have a large impact on fat metabolism. In this study, eight men were given two drinks of vodka and lemonade separated by 30 minutes. Each drink contained just less than 90 calories. Fat metabolism was measured before and after consumption of the drink. For several hours after drinking the vodka, whole body lipid oxidation (a measure of how much fat your body is burning) dropped by 73%.

The reason why alcohol has this dramatic effect on fat metabolism has to do with the way alcohol is handled in the body. When alcohol is consumed, it readily passes from the stomach and intestines into the blood and goes to the liver. In the liver, an enzyme mediates the conversion of alcohol to acetaldehyde followed by a rapid conversion to acetate by other enzymes. So rather than getting stored as fat, the main fate of alcohol is conversion into acetate, the amount of acetate formed is dose dependent on the amount of alcohol consumed.  The more you drink the more acetate formed. For example, blood levels of acetate after drinking the vodka were 2.5 times higher than normal. And it appears this sharp rise in acetate puts the brakes on fat loss.

Also alcohol, because it can be considered part way between carbs and fats, has more calories than carbs. That’s why even the low carb beers contain less than 100 calories even though they only have about 2.5 grams of carbs and .5 grams of protein. While the carbs and protein only make up 12 calories, the 12 grams of alcohol make up the remaining 80 or so calories.

• 9 calories per gram of FAT

• 4 calories per gram of PROTEIN

• 4 calories per gram of CARBOHYDRATE

• 7 calories per gram of ALCOHOL

Daily alcohol consumption will slow or stop your results. The drawbacks are probably going to far outweigh any health benefits. Your liver can’t metabolize alcohol and fat at the same time. It will always get rid of the acetate converted from the alcohol first. That means that as long as there’s alcohol in your system you won’t be burning any body fat. If you have one or two drinks, you might stall your fat loss for a few hours. If you have quite a few drinks, it might be as long as four days before you’re metabolizing fat again.

If wine with dinner is part of your lifestyle, and you’re not in any particular hurry to have abs like a cheese grater, you might experiment a little. See if you can have a glass of wine a few times a week and still be making progress. If it’s really slow going, keep cutting back the number of drinks until you’re satisfied with the level of your results.

Jan26

D3 vitamins

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Last summer a coworker of mine told me that she may have found a vitamin to help with her mild rosacea.  She said it was D3 and she buys the liquid form and put drops under her tongue.  The maximum daily amount shown on most pill bottles is 4000 IUs, which is four drops for her.  She really noticed a difference in her skin and the redness and breakouts were not as bad as before.

I went to Walmart and bought my own D3 but I got it in the pill format.  I decided to only take 2000 IUs each day and see how that worked.  It took some time but at about four weeks of using it I realized I had not had any deep, bruising pimples I used to get.  And, any tiny blemish I did get was gone within 24 hours.  I continued to use the pills every day and never had an outbreak.  About 10 days ago I ran out of the vitamins and just held off on buying more until I went to the store over the weekend.  Five days passed and I got a breakout.  The deep, bruising pimples were back.  When I got home with the pills I immediately took 4000 IUs (4 pills) and then kept up with my daily 2000 IUs.  My skin is better again but it was amazing that just only 5 days of not taking the pills I broke out.

I’m not a medical doctor or involed in selling pharmaceuticals.  I’m just noting my own personal experience with these vitamins.  You can research vitamin D and see that it has a major play in skin and diseases that affect your skin, like psoriasis.  Besides helping the skin, vitamin D can help with rheumatoid arthrits, blood pressure, and PMS.  I also just read an article that researchers are in an early discovery to see how vitamin D can help out with Lupus and you can read it here.

If you want to try vitamin D3, be sure to follow the instructions on the bottle and if you have any questions, contact your doctor.