How to beat asthma

Asthma partially obstructs the bronchial tubes, making breathing difficult. The cause of asthma is still not known. But if you are an asthma sufferer, you can, through natural means, considerably reduce the number of asthma attacks you get.
A placebo study has shown that asthmatics who consume 1 gram of vitamin C per day had 4 times fewer attacks. When they stopped taking vitamin C, the attacks resumed with the same frequency as before (Trop. and Geog. Med., Vol. 32, Mo. 2, 1980). As for magnesium, it also works wonders!
Dr. Zack H. Haddad of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southern California conducted a study on thirty children suffering from asthma associated
with allergies.
Twenty of them drank a daily amount of mineral water rich in magnesium, while the others received no magnesium supplement. After three months, the first group had a higher level of magnesium in their blood, and they were able to breathe more easily.
So taking vitamin C and magnesium is an excellent way to prevent asthma attacks. But what can you do to breathe more easily during an attack? Simply drink 2 or 3 cups of strong coffee. By activating blood circulation, it eases respiratory blockage.

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Why a high fat diet is no good

Even though there are major differences in the various types of fats, you should almost always keep your overall fat intake relatively low (30% or less, preferably closer to 20%). There are eight primary reasons why:

1. Fat is more calorie dense than any other source of calories.
After reading chapter six on calories, you now understand that to lose body fat you have to eat fewer calories than you burn each day. One problem with fats is they are more calorie dense than any other food. Each gram of fat contains 9 calories, while each gram of carbohydrate or protein contains only 4 calories. Since each gram of fat contains more than twice the calories, this means eating fat makes it more likely that you’ll eat too many calories. Quite simply, a high fat diet is a high calorie diet, and a high calorie diet is a fat storing diet. There are differences between the various types of fats, but ALL fats contain 9 calories per gram. So if you want to lose body fat, you’ll need to reduce your total fats in general in order to keep your calories down.

2. Fats have the lowest thermic effect of all foods
Fats are stored more easily as body fat than protein or carbohydrate because they have the lowest thermic effect of any food. Recall that the thermic effect refers to the amount of energy required to digest and utilize each food. Protein has the highest thermic effect – nearly 30%. Fats have the lowest thermic effect – only 3%. When you eat lean protein foods, 30% of the calories are burned off just to digest and absorb them. When you eat fatty foods, only 3% of the calories are burned off during digestion and absorption.

3. Saturated and processed fats (trans-fatty acids) cause serious health problems.
Certain types of fats, especially the saturated fats and trans fats, are bad for your
health. According to Dr. Erasmus, "Degenerative diseases that involve fats prematurely
kill over two-thirds of the people living in affluent, industrialized nations." Saturated fats have been linked to heart disease, cancer, diabetes and too many other problems to list.

4. A high fat diet doesn’t leave room for enough protein or carbohydrates
High fat diets are often promoted as effective ways of increasing anabolic hormones and controlling fat storing hormones, resulting in increased muscle mass and decreased body fat. The problem with this approach is that eating large quantities of fat doesn’t allow enough room within your daily calorie allotment for a sufficient quantity of protein or carbohydrate. Any diet that leans excessively towards one macronutrient is not a balanced diet and will never produce optimal results.

5. Saturated fats reduce insulin sensitivity
Insulin sensitivity refers to the responsiveness of your muscles to insulin. Insulin
carries the sugar into the muscles for energy and glycogen storage. It also carries the
amino acids into the muscles for growth and repair. When you have poor insulin sensitivity, it’s like insulin is standing outside with protein and carbs, knocking on the muscle cell’s door, but the muscle cell won’t let the insulin bring the carbs or protein (aminos) inside. So blood sugar continues to build up, and you release even more insulin to try to get the nutrients into the cells. Not only are the high insulin levels disastrous to your fat loss efforts, severe insulin sensitivity is essentially an early stage of diabetes.

6. Dietary fat gets stored more easily as fat than any other nutrient
Dietary fats DO get stored as body fat more readily than other types of macronutrients. This isn’t just due to the high calories, it’s because the process of converting dietary fat into body fat is chemically very easy. Body fat is made of glycerol and fatty acids. Dietary fat is made of glycerol and fatty acids. There’s no costly energy conversion that has to take place. This makes dietary fat very easy to store. Too much of anything gets stored as fat, but foods such as lean proteins and complex carbohydrates must go thorough a metabolically costly process to be converted into body fat.

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Why Eating Less Doesn’t Always Work

If you eat more calories than you burn, you will store the excess as body fat. If you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose fat. Simple mathematics, right? Well, not exactly. If fat loss were as black and white as calories in vs calories out, then how do you explain why some overweight people eat less than lean people, yet they still can’t lose an ounce? And how is it possible for someone with a 2200-calorie maintenance level to eat only 800 to 1000 calories a day without losing any weight? Using the strictly mathematical model, if you cut out 1000 calories per day from your maintenance level, that will add up to a 7000-calorie deficit in one week.
There are 3500 calories in a pound of stored body fat, so cutting out 1000 calories a day should – in theory – produce a weight loss of two pounds per week. Actual real world fat loss rarely works out with such mathematical precision.
Rob Faigin, writing in the book “Natural Hormonal Enhancement,” makes ahumorous, but true observation about calorie balance and weight loss. Faigin says, “If there existed an airtight mathematical relationship between caloric intake and weight loss, cutting caloric intake from 3000 to 1000 would result in a 60,000 calorie per year deficit and would result in a 200 pound weight loss after a year. What if the person began the diet weighing 200 pounds, would he disappear?”

When a calorie deficit is first introduced, weight loss generally occurs rapidly, just as the numbers would dictate, but it never takes long before weight loss slows, and then eventually stops completely. Why does this happen? Why is it that you don’t lose 50 pounds in 25 weeks or 100 pounds in 50 weeks with a 1000-calorie deficit?
The explanation is quite simple: Over thousands of years, humans have developed a weight-regulating mechanism that recognizes when there’s a food shortage and decreases energy expenditure to “protect you.” This survival mechanism is known as the “starvation response.”

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The top twelve best foods you should eat regularly

OK, now that you know what you shouldn’t eat, let’s talk about what you should eat. This recommended food list, called “the terrific twelve,” might be the most valuable resource in this entire program.
Although the possible variety in your food choices is nearly infinite, these are the staple foods that will make up the foundation of your program. Variety is important, butthese are the foods you can’t go wrong with and the ones you’ll keep coming back to time after time.

The 12 best foods you should eat all the time
-Oatmeal (or other whole grain cooked cereals such as barley, wheat, rye, etc)
-Yams (or sweet potatoes)
-Potatoes (white or red)
-Brown Rice
-Whole wheat bread and 100% whole grain products
-Vegetables
-Fresh Fruit
-Low fat & non fat dairy products (yogurt, cheese, milk, etc)
-Chicken or turkey breast
-Egg whites (or “egg beaters”)
-Lean red meat (top round, extra lean sirloin)
-Fish and shellfish

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The Power of Walking

walking at a brisk pace so that you are working your cardiovascular system. It’s great for beginners because everyone knows how to walk, although there are a few simple techniques you may need to learn. Walking is beneficial for practically everyone at every age and stage in life. It is not as rough on your joints as jogging or running, yet it offers the same cardiovascular benefits. It is suitable for most people with the exception of those with severe knee, hip, or back problems.If you walk outdoors, you can vary your route so you see different scenery every day or so. It’s portable. You can do it virtually anywhere. Best of all, it doesn’t require a lot of expensive equipment.
All you need is a good pair of walking or cross-training shoes. If you prefer to work out indoors, or in the event of inclement weather, you can do your power walking program on an exercise treadmill. If given a choice, I always opt to do my cardio outdoors where I can enjoy fresh air and sunshine, and connect with nature.

I write this posting based a book from Derek Nobel and Carol Colman. Try to take a power walk three to four times a week. Around 10 minutes into your power walk, be sure to check whether you have reached your target heart rate. Wearing a heart rate monitor is the easiest and most practical way to keep track of whether you are working hard enough. In my experience, most people don’t push themselves enough, and never reach their correct training zone. If you find that you have not yet reached your target heart rate, work harder. If you have exceeded it, lighten up.

Don’t forget to do your stretches, or your muscles can get tight and sore. Stretch out your hamstrings, quadriceps, calves, and glutes. When you’re done stretching, have a light post-workout snack. And don’t forget to keep drinking water during your walk and throughout the day.

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What foods contain trans fatty acids?

Diet Article- Hydrogenated oils and trans fatty acids are primarily found in margarines and spreads, baked goods and fried foods. Food manufacturers get real sneaky when it comes to trans fats, because they aren’t required to list them on their labels. They can say things like “no cholesterol,” or “low saturated fat” yet their product is loaded with harmful trans fats. Many people switched from butter to margarine thinking they were doing good by avoiding the saturated fat in the butter. What they missed was that the margarine was full of the “phantom” trans fats! Here is a partial list of foods to watch out for:
1. Fried foods (Fried chicken, French fries, fried onion rings, tater tots, etc)
2. Cookies
3. Crackers
4. Biscuits
5. Frostings
6. Pies
7. Pastries
8. Frostings
9. Doughnuts
10. Corn chips
11. Taco shells
12. Shortening
13. Partially hydrogenated vegetable oils
14. Refined vegetable oils
15. Baked goods (Croutons, crackers, cookies, cakes, breads)
16. Margarine

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The Carbohydrate tapering technique for maximum fat los

Although you’ll be eating a meal approximately every three hours, not all these meals have to be the same size. If you want to get leaner quickly, a simple way to accelerate fat loss is to reduce the size of your late day meals. This technique is known as “calorie tapering” or “carbohydrate tapering.”
Simply cut out the starches in your evening and late afternoon meals, leaving the green fibrous carbohydrates, lean proteins and essential fats. Examples of late day fibrous carbohydrate and lean protein meals include;
(1) broccoli and chicken breast with a 1/2 tbsp of flaxseed oil,
(2) tuna fish in a green salad with olive oil & vinegar dressing,
(3) Asparagus and salmon. When you drop the starchy carbohydrates from your last two meals, your ratios will automatically shift towards less carbohydrates and higher protein. It’s an incredibly simple and easy technique to use, yet it can cause massive increases in your results.

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