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B'SD 19 Tevet, 5776 I've been on the road this week, traveling to clients, friends and stores. I'm tired from the high-energy effort, so I made more soup, a comfort food full of excellent nutrition. Kitchen activities soothe me. It's been fun to receive compliments on the pumpkin-leek soup I prepared for friends, and to fill requests for more of it. Israel's blustery winter weather is a shock to our systems. Hot, good soup is a comfort. I ate some while checking the news. I came across an interesting medical news item. It caught my attention because I know several people with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and their children. If you or someone you know has rheumatoid arthritis (a very painful condition that limits movement), you and they need to know that...
B'SD 29 Iyar, 5775 The month of Iyar is ending, and with it the endearing message of "I am GOD your healer" (remember the April 20th/1 Iyar blogpost that clued you in to that?). To end off the month on an upbeat note, I want to share a fresh look at weight control and improved health with you. I believe it can help your mind, emotions and body to heal in user-friendly ways. A friend of mine prepared the good-sense content.
I sympathize with people who feel that they weigh too
much and have trouble controlling their weight. While such people are often viewed to
be lacking in will power, there is more to the problem than willpower. The main problem is often one of
ignorance about how the body works.
One Pound Per Year
Suppose a person gains, on the average, one pound too
many each year, between the ages of 10 and 30. It doesn't matter whether the
excess is accumulated gradually or in spurts; by the time the person reaches
30, they’re20 poundsoverweight. This is enough to
adversely affect their health, let alone their social lives in today's society,
especially if the person is single, more so a single woman.
How it Adds Up
Consider how such a weight gainer probably added an
average of one pound per year with today’s common eating patterns: They ate
roughly400 poundsof carbohydrates, protein and fat each
year, and stored only 1/4 of one percent of it. In fact, they stored an even
lower percentage of that because most of the weight in body fat is water. To
gain a pound of "body fat," you only have to store a small fraction
of a pound of actual fat. The scientifically minded skeptic who believes that
if s/he eats100 gramsof chocolate will result in a gain, at
most,100 gramsof body fat, is forgetting that s/he
will inevitably drink the water needed to complete the extra weight. A person who becomes30 poundsoverweight in 30 years has most likely
overeaten by a mere one part in 1000.
The other side of the coin is that if overweight people
ate even one percent less than they burned, they would eventually starve.
However, when they eat less they burn less. The body knows instinctively to be
frugal about burning energy when food is scarce, so it is often harder for
people to lose weight than to gain weight.
Hunger Chemistry
Hunger and satisfaction are determined by chemicals
(e.g., ghrelin and leptin) that many people never learn about. They react with
our brains, creating an internal "feedback" monitor that tells you
how much you need to eat. Without the feedback, people would never guess to
within an accuracy of less than one percent error exactly how much they needed
to eat. And, some people will burn off the excess weight automatically. This
ensures that they balance intake with expenditure. But this feedback is a
genetic roll of the dice, and it is tampered with by stress, boredom, and the
simple fact that our ideal weight is not the same as it was when food was
scarce, so our evolution did not prepare us ideally for our present situation.
Nothing in life is perfect, including this feedback loop.
Simple arithmetic shows that even a tiny mistuning of the
hunger feedback loop that enforces the balance between calorie consumption and
calorie expenditure has drastic consequences for the individual. Not even a
trained musician could easily detect a one part in a thousand mistuning of a
musical instrument. The most experienced auto mechanic could do nothing about a
car engine that was mistuned by one part in a thousand relative to its optimal
performance parameters. And yet a mistuning of an imponderably complex, subtle
hunger instinct can ruin an important aspect of a person's life by making them
overweight. It doesn't seem fair.
Want to read more about how to tame your time with food? Part 2 is coming soon. Learn how dining on the right food can help your body to heal. Buy the E-book or print edition of EMPOWER Yourself to Cope with a Medical Challenge.
Face Your Medical Problems with Dignity.
Face Your Future with Optimism.
Fill yourself with foods that support your inner and outer health.
B'SD 12-13 Adar, 5773 Sorry for the late-in-the-day post. Technical issues delayed progress a bit. Check out a guest blogger post at Sneak Peek into The Comfort Foods Cookbook, then let me know if you're ready to eat the treats in store for you! The publishing world is a bit like a beauty contest. Writers prepare book proposals designed to entice $ALE$ OPTION$ and hope for the best. It's a tedious, often counter-productive process and I want to bypass it as I achieve a different sort of publishing success. I'm praying to bypass the misery of the proposal process and to attract a publisher with his or her eyeballs and online attention span. Wish me success! Oh - you can catch a previous sneak peek at the book when you click on Good4U Comfort Foods. I'm preparing whole grain and other organic goodies for Purim fun on Sunday. Friends have requested my home made breads and soups. They tell me that they literally feel better after dining on my wholesome foods.
Want to cheer up someone sick in a hurry? Buy them E-book or print edition EMPOWER Yourself to Cope with a Medical Challenge. Face Your Medical Problems with Dignity.
Face Your Future with Optimism. Use humor as an ally. Happiness promotes healing!
