Dammit – Why is This so Hard..?

Why do people struggle to stick to their Health and Wellbeing goals?

One major reason is most of what we do each day is the result of ritualistic habit.

From the way we brush our teeth, to which shoe we put on first in the morning, is something we barely think about. It’s deeply ingrained and minimal effort is required to get the job done.

Our eating and exercise habits work the same way. The way we eat, why we eat, where we eat – our food choices are all habits that have been formed over years.  You may have got used to the flavour of highly-sweetened foods that lead to cravings, and now expect that flavour whenever you’re hungry. Others have avoided vegetables for so long, the flavours taste quite foreign.  Still others are working on the same basic training programme they started on in the gym 20 years ago!

While these habits lead to poor results, weight gain, low energy, poor health or simply frustration, we stay hooked because they’re so familiar – hence periodic inspiration drops away and the old behaviour continues. Behavioural science tells us that as humans the fear of losing or giving up something is always stronger than the anticipated reward of attaining another.

What to do?

You must develop critical self-awareness. Take an honest look at your destructive eating patterns. Do you eat mindlessly? Do you play self-sabotaging mind games? Is there a lack of preplanning or having healthy foods available to you?  Do you have a dedicated time and place for exercise? Do you fool yourself that watching football on the TV somehow makes you “sporty”?

The more you understand why you do what you do, the better you can change what doesn’t work, and shift your health trajectory to a more successful position..!

A Good Feeling in Your Gut…

Ever since probiotics became popular, the market has been FLOODED with products that are weak, under-spec’d and often barely effective.

We subscribe to Consumer Labs, an independent testing laboratory, which recently ran a test on 43 different probiotic brands. And of the 43 probiotics they tested, many of them contained only HALF of the amount of live bacteria that the label claimed. So you might be paying $40 for a probiotic, but only getting half the value you thought!

Maybe it would be better to source natural, full-strength probiotics by regularly eating fermented foods…?

Here’s a list of the 10 healthiest fermented foods and vegetables that will get your gut biome really working well (in no particular order – they’re all good!):

1.  Kefir. Kefir is a fermented milk product (cow, goat or sheep milk) that tastes like a drinkable yogurt
2.  Kombucha
3.  Sauerkraut
4.  Pickles
5.  Miso
6.  Tempeh
7.  Natto
8.  Kimchi
9.  Raw cheese, made with goats milk, or un-pasteurised sheeps milk
10.  Bio-live unsweetened yogurt

There’s more information, discussion and strategic action points for optimising your gut health in our latest book“The Wealthy Body in Business” out now. Order your copy HERE

It Ain’t So Hard…

By Anne Laing –

Common Myths #42: “It’s so hard to change eating habits back after the Christmas period”.

The Facts: Yes, it may feel hard getting back to normal healthy eating again, because festive food and drink is often very addictive.

But you are more than the sum total of just your eating habits.

You can change your behaviours and your choices anytime that cause your physique to be out of shape.

We have up to 100 trillion cells in our bodies, each demanding a constant supply of daily nutrients to function properly. What you eat affects all these cells and their operating ability and therefore every aspect of our being from mood, energy levels, and food cravings, to thinking capacity, sleeping habits, immunity and general health.

You are totally made up by what you eat and drink, how you exercise, how you sleep, and the status of your internal medical biomarkers.

Our body requires essential nutrients to survive and if we keep eating food that is lacking in nutrients our cellular stocks of these become depleted so we slowly start to malfunction. It will become increasingly harder to concentrate and process information as this continues. There is also less energy and it is more difficult for the body to metabolise food and burn fat.

This is why processed, packaged and sweet foods are called anti-nutrients. They are addictive; they literally attack your stores of nutrients and change health for the worse.

Take time to think before you eat, forget the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods… think what food the body needs to operate optimally.

Practising this technique will help you naturally make healthy choices based on your bodies needs and once you have got the hang of it you will never have to bother with diets.

Get this right and you’ll have more energy for exercise, sleep better and your internal health will improve.

You see, you can change your choices. Over the last few weeks you’ve learned to behave in a particular way, but you can also unlearn it because persistence, desire and education will always win out over an out-of-shape physique and ill-health.

“Be careful the environment you choose, for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose, for you will become like them.” – W. Clement Stone, 1902-2002, Author and Businessman

5-Day Conference? I Think I Need a Drink…

So it’s 42 degrees Centigrade in the shade, and it’s the end of a loooong day in the middle of a corporate event. Whether you’ve just delivered a presentation, finished sittting through one, or been manning the stand on the trade show floor – what you do next could mean you either ‘nail it’ or ‘fail it’ the next day….

Dude, you’re doing that wrong …

By Anne Laing –

When travelling abroad we still see business people at the hotel breakfast buffet loading up with their morning fruit juice, in the mistaken belief they’re making a healthy choice. For sure it’s healthier than a soda, but not by much…

For a day of high productivity, performance and concentration most juices are no help to your brain health. Commercial juices contain a large amount of refined carbohydrates guaranteed to give you a concentration slump. Each 12-ounce glass of juice has about the same amount of sugar (8 teaspoons) as a 12-ounce glass of soda, even if no sugar is added.

According to Dr Mercola, international health expert, these juices may also be contaminated with mould and should best be avoided.

Sports drinks, such as Gatorade, should also be left well alone, as one of their main ingredients is high-fructose corn syrup, and others may contain large amounts of caffeine per serving.

To fire up your neurons eat a piece of whole fruit or half a cup of dark berries, which appear in their own natural, high-fibre package. Alternatively go for green or purple fresh-made smoothies, tomato juice, fresh-squeezed lemon juice with sparkling water, coconut water, mineral water, or herbal teas…!

Planning ahead, you can also grab an apple or banana from the buffet to slip in your briefcase as emergency rations for later in the day!

Where Have All The Oranges Gone…?

Orange segments are a healthy and easy-to-eat snack for children during rugby half time break (or any sport for that matter).  Oranges are loaded with vitamin C, which helps counter the effects of oxidation and stress. This marvellous fruit has fibre and carbohydrates in the right mix, and provides children with fuel and stamina.

Eating orange halves at half time will also help keep your child hydrated, as oranges have high water content – unlike lollies.

Sadly we now see coaches of junior sports teams handing out sweets and candy bars like confetti.  Concentrated sugar in the body, such as in sweets, always come with adverse biological reactions in a child’s body, whether it is obvious or not.  Visible reactions can go from a hyper-active sugar “high” – through to irrational and violent behaviour, often ending in extreme lethargy and fatigue.  Not what a coach wants to see in his or her team!

Chemical ingredients in sweets and sweet drinks (as many so-called ‘sports’ drinks are) will also cause certain children to have adverse and uncharacteristic reactions to the preservatives, colourings, flavourings and stabilisers they are laced with.

If a child’s overall diet is well balanced, there should be no adverse dental issues with eating oranges at half time – which seems to be the main argument for this shameful change.  This is one area where dentists seem united, indicating that children are far better off eating oranges or other healthy snacks rather than sweets, soft drinks, sports drinks, etc, during and after the game.

Prof. Grant Schofield explains, “I’d say most professional sports teams are now at least [consuming] low sugar or low carb. That’s not always high fat, but it’s healthy fats. Nutrition for sport is really changing fast.”

If the All Blacks have shunted sugar aside, deleting it from their training foods, why can’t this filter down to our children, the most damaged by these pseudo-foods..?

Alternative Snack Ideas for the Sportsground…

Ryvita & Peanut Butter

Almonds, Walnuts, Brazils – or trail mix (careful of children with nut allergies).

Fig Bars

Oatmeal biscuits

Organic Yogurt and berries

Bananas

Orange slices

Clementines/Mandarins

Melon skewers and slices (watermelon, cantaloupe, etc)

Apple slices

Strawberries

Apricots

Peaches

Kiwi fruit

Carrot sticks

– even Hard Boiled Eggs..!

Racing Through History…!

Evolutionists estimate we’ve been on this planet nearly 2.5 million years. We have been healing ourselves and living on a ‘hunter-gatherer’ seasonal diet of ‘primal’ foods, such as meat, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, since the dawn of our species.

Only relatively recently – about 10,000 years ago – did we start to settle in communities to grow crops of grains such as wheat and corn.  Now if you condense the whole of human evolution into just one year, it turns out we started eating grains only about a day and a half ago. The pharmaceutical and drug industry started from its roots in botanicals (yes, really) in the mid-1800’s, then left this behind for the more lucrative synthetic compounding in the early 1900’s.

These are just a blink of an eye in our history, yet now we’re taught to scorn the old, natural, bio-identical methods of keeping the body healthy, which has sustained us over these millions of years.  Genetically we are virtually identical to our ancestors and are best adapted to these primal foods. Unfortunately, much of what passes for ‘food’ that we now end up ingesting (courtesy of the agri-chemical, pharmaceutical and factory-food industries) is largely unrecognised by our ancient, but highly efficient, biological systems – or our genes.

It is ironic that our bodies are surviving longer now through a combination of better hygiene, advanced trauma treatments and a notable absence of sabre-toothed tigers, yet here we are getting older, slower, sicker, fatter and weaker as we age than ever before in our long history.

So let’s go back and nourish ourselves on whole, unprocessed foods, free of chemicals, additives and mankind’s meddling. Let’s go back to growing and buying food that looks like it’s supposed to, and support ethical and sustainable farming. And let’s go back to eating food that’s made in a kitchen, rather than in a lab.

It’s NOT the Coffee or Tea…!

Would it surprise you to know that one of the greatest risk factors from drinking coffee, tea – or even hot chocolate – doesn’t come from the TYPE of drink you’re having at all, as I explain in the following short clip:

The Facts Behind the Fuss:

According to a study published in the British Medical Journal, drinking very hot beverages increases your risk of oesophageal cancer by up to 8 times..! Researchers at the University of Tehran, Iran, studied over 300 people in Northern Iran who had the disease and compared lifestyle factors against 500 people from the same region who did not. The region does not have high rates of alcohol consumption or smoking – the two most common risk factors for oesophageal cancers – but the inhabitants are prolific tea drinkers, often downing over a litre of black tea per day!

Researchers concluded, however, that it was not the tea, per se, that caused the problems, but that fact that the tea was HOT.

According to Dr Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society “The problem is not the tea, but the chronic inflammation that results from drinking it hot.”

So how hot is too hot?

Drinking a very hot drink at 70 degrees Celcius (158 degrees F) or above raises your risk by 800%. Tea drunk slightly lower than that only doubles your risk, and hot drinks less than 65 degrees C (149 F) poses little or no risk at all.

Bear in mind that a cup of coffee at 65 degrees is still pretty hot, so don’t think you’re missing out on a heart-warming winter experience by taking the temperature of your drink down just a little bit…

Careful you don’t gulp your hot drink either…. Finishing a cup of tea in less than 2 minutes could increase your risk of oesophageal cancer by up to five times, whereas adopting a more leisurely (and some would say “polite”) pace of four to five minutes, poses little risk of damage – and possibly offending your fellow tea-drinking companions!

Something to Chew On…

I became aware, quite recently, that life has taken on a much faster pace than ever before.

It seems there is more and more to be achieved in less and less time. Faster cars, faster internet, faster travel. We have less time to spend with family, less time to sleep and even less time to eat. We multi-task around our meal times, and our food is bought pre-prepared, heated in an instant, and quickly devoured.

Bite-swallow, bite-swallow, bite-swallow.

Have you ever noticed; we never take the time to CHEW anymore..?

It may seem boring, but it’s true – chewing (mastication) is the mechanism installed by nature to break food down in our mouths from large chunks into a more easily-digested paste.

This makes it easier for your intestines to absorb nutrients from the food particles as they pass through, and therefore offer better supply and support to all your bodies operational systems.

In addition, when you chew your food thoroughly, your mouth releases a chemical called Hypothiocyanate [OSCN]−, a natural – and powerful – antibiotic, helping protect you from uploading various bugs and germs that may have attached themselves to your food.

There are other obvious advantages to chewing your food more thoroughly – The longer you chew, the more time it will take you to finish a meal, and eating slowly may help you to eat less, thus avoiding the chances of weight gain.

Of course it’s best to eat in a relaxed, non-distracted environment; eating on the run or while you’re working – or watching TV – is not conducive to proper break-down, digestion or absorption of your food.

Try these simple suggestions:

• Always eat at the dinner table where you’re sitting upright, ‘disconnected’ from the noise around you, and are mindful of what is on your plate.
• Take smaller bites of food to begin with (it’s easier to chew smaller morsels).
• Chew slowly and steadily, some suggest chewing each mouthful up to 32 times – once for each tooth in your head..!
• Chew until your mouthful of food is liquefied or has lost all of its texture.
• If your food liquefies in your mouth instantly, or you’re able to swallow it in less than 5 chews, it’s either over-processed or over-cooked and probably not the wisest choice of nourishment. (Obviously this wouldn’t apply to a green smoothie or bowl of fresh wholesome soup…).
• Finish chewing each mouthful and swallow completely before taking another bite of food.

Aside from the potential health benefits, chewing your food rigorously and thoroughly forces you to slow down, savour each morsel, and could also be regarded as a CBO™ (Calorie-Burning Opportunity)

There you go – “Face Fitness from Your Food.”  I feel a new Weight-loss Video coming on….

(Photo by Mark Taylor/Rex Features)

Oh No – Not Red Meat Again..!

“Sheep get bowel cancer too – and how much red meat do sheep eat?” A quote by Frank Frizelle – a Professor of Colorectal Surgery and Editor in Chief of the New Zealand Medical Journal.

Well, here we go again. Each year, like clockwork, the conventional medical establishment mounts an attack against red meat.

For decades, we were told not to eat it because of the cholesterol and saturated fat it contains.  It will surely give us heart disease.

When that argument lost validity http://chriskresser.com/the-diet-heart-myth-cholesterol-and-saturated-fat-are-not-the-enemy/ a new one came out; farming animals for meat causes too many greenhouse gases.  Yet the man-made disaster that is the illegal burning of plantations and rain forests in Indonesia for the unhealthy palm oil industry are currently producing more carbon dioxide than the entire US economy. And in three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.  This alone overshadows any level of animal wind, gas or farts.

Now we’re being told not to eat red meat because it will give us cancer!

If this was true, it makes us wonder how our meat eating ancestors ever managed to survive long enough to populate this planet – all too successfully, I might add…

The arguments do not differentiate between those who only eat free range, pasture-fed organic meat, (nose to tail), low in chemicals and a diet high in vegetables, against those who have a high intake of processed meats (high in chemicals, refined sugars, stabilisers, preservatives, flavourings, flour and other fillers) and a low intake of vegetables and fibre.  This is a sure recipe for cancer!  Of course smoking, alcohol consumption, bodyfat levels, size of meals and exercise also must come into the equation.

Yet these two groups of people are always lumped together as “meat eaters” in the studies and media reports.

In order to accurately say a healthy meat eater is more prone to cancer, there has to be double blind studies. Two matching groups of people isolated in a lab with strictly controlled diets, exercise, and lifestyle factors. Researchers would also have to ensure they had identical metabolic factors, blood and hormone profiles, lean mass, body composition, exposure to environmental toxins, stress levels, and so on.

One group given controlled intakes of healthy red meat, and the other group not, for 20 years or more, with otherwise identical diets. Why 20 years? Because cancer takes years to develop! You can see it’s virtually impossible to conduct any meaningful study on this, therefore we must approach such broad announcements with caution.

In the meantime, enjoy your healthily and sustainably-reared red meat as your ancestors did thousands of years ago…