Lessons At The Hospital

Unfortunately I have spent more time than I would like visiting family in hospital over the last 2 years, and this has taught me 3 important lessons.

1. Hospitals are definitely the experts when it comes to hi-tech medicine.

Hospitals have the monopoly on all the “machines that go ping”. Over the last two years I have been amazed at how many tubes they can stick into a person to help keep them alive. They have machines that monitor your blood pressure, heart and breathe rate, temperature, the amount of oxygen, nutrients and waste in your blood, how coordinated your heart beats are and many more. (Hmm, sounds like something your brain can do perfectly everyday!) They also have all the machines that can take over if you break down, they can feed you, breathe for you, filter your blood, and feed you painkillers when you need them.

2. If I don’t do the simple things like eat well, exercise, get enough rest, get my spine checked then there is a good chance I will end up with some of those tubes stuck in me at some time.

Looking at the vast majority of people in the hospitals many could have stayed out of they followed these simple guidelines throughout their life. Fortunately, if you’re not in hospital yet, it’s not too late to start looking after yourself.

3. Don’t expect hospitals to teach me how to look after myself.

While hospitals have all the wonderful doctors, nurses and machines that can stop you from dying (at least for a while) they aren’t equipped to keep you out of hospital. I am still dumbstruck that you can buy coca cola in a hospital! I couldn’t find any wholegrain breads. It’s worse if your a patient though. Patients in a paediatric respiratory ward were offered Milo, juice, white toast with jam and rice bubbles with milk. I know they were trying though, the milk was low fat. Unfortunately, because of it’s higher sugar content, low fat milk is worse for kids than full cream milk.

In A Nutshell:

Hospitals are great at keeping you alive when you are really sick but not very good at keeping you healthy. That’s up to you.

Cheating and Bliss Foods

Australian researchers had some great news for us chocolate lovers this week.  Eating high fat and high sugar foods alters our brain chemistry and makes us feel good!

Since reading her book Changing Habits Changing Lives I have followed Cindy O’Meara’s advice on eating bliss foods. (To be truthful the chapter on cheating was easily my favourite in the book.)

You see us homo sapiens don’t have such a good sense of smell. We do have an excellent sense of taste though. When food was scarce we survived by eating the foods with the highest energy and nutrition available.  Between fat, carbohydrates and protein, fat provides the most energy. And fruits and vegetables are also most nutritious is when sugar level are at their highest. Think about what an under-ripe grape tastes like, how about an over-ripe apple.

So we are hard wired to want to eat fatty and sugary food. I’m pretty sure if it was celery that we all had those huge cravings for McDonalds and Hungry Jacks would be selling it by the truck load. Imagine that “The Celery’s Better at Hungry Jacks”

The approach I take with junk food is pretty simple. I give myself three meals a week where I can have absolutely anything I want. I can have those three meals all on the one day or spread out through the week.

I have found this approach has some side-effects though. Since I get three cheat meals a week, I make sure they are good ones. No more Snickers bars, I go straight to the top self, which for me is Green & Blacks chocolate, where a small amount really satisfies me. And when I sit down to that large margarita pizza I make sure I get it from the best pizza place in town, somewhere they use real ingredients in the tomato sauce, the best cheese and add fresh basil on top, cooked in a wood oven. I’m not going to waste my cheat meal on a $5 pizza.

The other benefit is that after gorging myself on my cheat meal I really don’t what too much for the next few meals. What I usually want after that pizza is a fresh raw salad.

Now I really what that pizza!

How do people who don’t get regular adjustments get by?

A client at Parade Chiropractic asked me an interesting question this week.

“How do people who don’t get regular adjustments, get by?”

And the answer is really quite simple. Our bodies have an amazing ability to adapt. When one part of our body isn’t working 100% other parts will compensate by working harder. For example in a vertebral subluxation we have a joint which isn’t moving properly irritating the nerves around it. It might not be able to turn properly or be stiffer than it should be. Fortunately the joints around the subluxated joint can compensate by moving more and we don’t notice any symptoms.

But here’s the problem – How long do you think you can go compensating like that? Well it’s different for everyone and every injury. It might be a couple of minutes or a few decades. I often see patients who’ve never had any back pain in their life come in with debilitating back pain well after their 50th birthday. When we take x-rays, we see advanced spinal degeneration. They have been compensating for a very long time.

I explained it to a mechanic like this one day.

Imagine your 6 cylinder car with 2 damaged cylinders. The remaining 4 will have to work harder to keep you car running and they are going to wear our quicker. (To my relief the mechanic said this is exactly what can happen…phew)

Developing this analogy further (I’m sure I’ll find out during the week if this is true or not), imagine driving this car around town, you may not notice the poor performance from the car since you are only asking it to perform at a fraction of it’s potential. But hook the caravan up and hit the road for your winter retreat and you’ll notice it.

This is why elite sportspeople have their chiropractor check them very regularly. Dr Jeff Spencer checked Lance Armstrong twice a day. 

So i guess the next question is – where do you want to fit on this line?

 

It’s how hard you go, not how long you last that matters!

Researchers from the University of Kuopio wanted to investigate how much lifestyle factors affected men’s risk of dying from cancer.

They followed 2268 men for over 16 years and questioned them on their leisure activities and tracked all the cancers and the men who died from cancer in the group.

They then scored the leisure activities by how hard the men had to work in METs, or Metabolic Equivalent of Task. 1 MET is the equivalent of sitting in a chair at rest. Walking or working in the shed is 2 METs. Swimming and cycling are over 5 METS. Ball games are over 6 METS while running is around 8-10 METS.

The researchers found that 30 minutes of moderate exercise, that is exercise of over 4 METs, reduced the men's risk of dying from cancer by a whopping 49%.

So if you’re prone to laziness like me, here’s the good news. You don’t need to go for that 2 hour walk everyday. Just up the tempo and get it done in half an hour, giving you an extra one and a half hours per day to read a book on the couch!

And women aren’t going to get off so easily either. While this study focussed on men, one of the authors, Dr Kurl, Medical Director of The Institute of Public Health at the University of Kuopio, said that he can’t see why they wouldn’t see the same results in women.

For those just starting out, or getting back into exercise after a long break, I recommend you see to health practitioner first, start slowing and closely monitor heart rate so you know exactly how hard you are working.

Diabetes Less Likely with Better Lifestyle Choices. Who Would Have Thought?

Ten years ago the Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group compared intensive lifestyle changes to drug therapy and the placebo effect. No surprises, the intensive lifestyle group did much better than the drug and placebo group.

Last week the  Lancet published a paper on it’s website a follow up to that study called “10-year follow-up of diabetes incidence and weight loss in the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study” where they found that the lifestyle group were still way out in front.

Should we be surprised? I don’t think so. One of the important features of the lifestyle group was the “intensive training in diet, physical activity, and behaviour modification. By eating less fat and fewer calories and exercising for a total of 150 minutes a week, they aimed to lose 7 percent of their body weight and maintain that loss.”

This program reminded me of the Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days documentary where as the title suggests they go way beyond preventing diabetes but actually reverse it using a raw, organic, vegan diet.

Now if you’re like I was a few years ago your probably saying “Raw? Vegan? Organic? … there’s no way I could do that. I just couldn’t give up all the good stuff.

Once you watch the documentary you realise that you don’t have to give up wonderful tasting food at all. (I especially like the bit about chocolate!) Hands up who’s had a green smoothie. One of the rules is it has to taste good.

For those of you who work or play in the city I absolutely recommend Bliss Organic Cafe just off Gouger Street for awesome vegan organic food.

Eat Your Greens!!

def. Greens (noun) “the flat leaves of a plant,

attached to the stem, that can be wrapped around a finger”. 

Victoria Boutenko.

From childhood on, we are told to eat our greens.  It is fairly widely recognised that they are a very important (some even say the most important) food group.  But how many of us actually have a decent serve of greens each day?

Greens have an image problem.  Sure they might be good for you, but do they taste any good?  Do they fill you up?  Will your friends and family support you or call you ‘Rabbit’ for ordering a salad?

If you choose to eat meat, there are many varieties available and hundreds of different ways to prepare it.  Decent greens are hard to come by.  Most restaurants have a wide selection of meat dishes on the menu, but greens?  Most places there is only a dodgy day-old salad! 

So, a couple of good home-made salads and some cooked spinach now and then, that’ll be good enough, right?  And a piece of lettuce in a sandwich?

WRONG!  Well, OK, you’re off to a flying start, but to get the most out of your greens you need to consider three factors: 

1. your greens should be raw, and as fresh as possible, in order to preserve the vital nutrients they contain; 
2. you need to consider possible food interactions that may minimise the benefits of your greens to your body; and
3. they need to be very thoroughly ‘chewed’, to a creamy consistency, to ensure that you are actually breaking down the tough cellular structure of the greens in order for your body to access the goodness within.

Stressed?  Don’t be… there’s a simple solution!  Get yourself a good blender and have a Green Smoothie.

A what?  A GREEN SMOOTHIE??

OK, now you think I’m crazy.  But it wasn’t my idea! 

Take your chosen green leaf variety, stick three chunky handfuls into a blender and add your favourite fruits and / or berries.  Add some water and blend!!  Drink slowly, ensuring a good mixture of saliva into each mouthful.  Start with a couple of times a week, increase gradually to daily and even twice daily if you get hooked!

WHY???  Hopefully you will experience higher energy levels, improved mood, fewer cravings for unhealthy foods, some healthy weight loss and stabilisation of blood sugar levels, and improved immunity!  Sound good??

Pointers:

• keep it simple, one type of greens with a basic combination of fruits and water;
• MAKE SURE YOU GET IT TASTING GOOD!  Believe me it can, and if you don’t enjoy drinking it then you won’t stick at it;
• have your smoothie on its own, with a 40 minute buffer between it and other foods;
• rotate the type of greens that you use to avoid alkaloid toxicity;
• go organic!!

Much of this information comes from the work of Victoria Boutenko, “Green For Life” and “Green Smoothie Revolution”.

 

Good Luck!

Clodia Porteous

Driving The Porcelain Bus

• Vomit
• Chuck
• Technicolour yawn
• Acid flavoured stew
• Puke
• Chunder
• Spew
• Hurl
• Barf
• Throw up
• Repeat
• Burp for the hearing impaired

Now I’ve got your attention I’ll save you from the pictures. We often think of symptoms as bad. But what are symptoms really? Apart from a radical weight loss solution (definitely not recommended) why have these symptoms.

In the case of vomiting, obviously it is to get something out of your stomach that shouldn’t be there, the fast way! Too much alcohol, dodgy take-away, or that cheese from the back of the fridge (Is it ok? Should be. I’ll just cut the green bit off).

Unfortunately we often treat the symptoms as the problem instead of recognising it as the solution.

Consider the fever and muscles aches of flu. Easily treated with paracetamol, but is this what you really need?

When we become infected with a virus,  antigens or toxins from the pathogen and chemicals produced by our white blood cells stimulate the hypothalamus in our brain to set the body's temperature higher. So we shiver until we get to the new temperature. Some pathogens don't work well at higher temperatures while our white blood cells do, effective giving our body an advantage in fighting the infection. Pretty clever hey?

Our immune cells also produce more free radicals as ammunition to kill the infected cells or bacteria. Unfortunately this war between our immune system and the invading virus or bacteria leaves the battleground (our body) ravaged (painful).

The aches and pains we get in this type of infection has another useful side effect. They force us to rest allowing more energy to be spent on recovering from the illness rather making that deadline at work.

As usual my advice is:

• feed yourself healthy food/exercise/thoughts/mental stimulation,
• get enough rest,
• make sure your brain can communicate effectively with the rest of the body and vice-versa (hopefully you know that I mean – “get your spine checked by your chiropractor regularly”),
• and when your body is showing symptoms understand what those symptoms really are. Is your body taking control of the situation? If so, give yourself a pat on the back for being so clever.
• if you do get sick find out what can you do to help yourself get over the problem (maybe even assist the symptoms)

Symptoms are often a sign of being healthy.

This small list is all the synonyms for vomit I could think of. The less mature among us (yes I know that includes me) might enjoy this page.