Diabetes – The Holidays 4

“Everyone Knows Someone Who Needs This Information!” (TM)

Not wanting to be the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, it is still necessary to discuss a few important relevant topics for diabetics as you go through a round of parties and holiday eating, especially if you want to be reasonably healthy at the end of this Season! How do you do it?

___   Be open to a wake-up call!

Example 1:  What do I mean by that? Well, for example, I just gave my sister, who had spent the summer and fall successfully losing weight by increasing exercise (swimming) and cutting back on food quantity and making smarter food choices, a copy of Dr. Rosedale’s landmark book about diet biochemistry. Bad choice. She wouldn’t read it.

I backed off as she’d been self-motivated and was being successful. She’d just asked for and received a pair of top-notch running shoes and was prepared to start her running regimen in winter. But, the information I was trying to share with her would have made it all “easier”, as she would have been learning how to work WITH her body, instead of trying to bash-it-into-compliance.

She’s off to California. The book is here. I’m sad. I wish her well, and I know I was helping. She doesn’t know what she missed. I think she will succeed, but it will be harder than it needed to be.

Example 2: You all know that I try to respond to the good and the bad on the TV program “The Biggest Loser”. Next week will be this season’s finale, and America is voting for the last of the three contestants who will make it to the finale. I am voting for Ada, as she has had the bigger obstacles in her life, least support from family and shown herself to be a person of great determination and fortitude which I want to reward. She just made a new record when winning the Biggest Loser Marathon! Brava! You can vote, too, here Biggest Loser Vote.

Surprisingly, I am proud of Americans. They are starting to get the wake-up call and starting to see that, especially in tough economic times, their Health is even more precious and in need of protection by their own Good Choices! If we lose our health insurance (which I did for the second time, several years ago and still have none), all you have is Knowledge and good judgment to protect you! Many more people are in that boat now.

Being practical — going in to try to apply for a job looking overweight and unfit is not going to “cut it” when employers are concerned about health costs and there are 5 times more applicants for every job, than usual. Time for you to start to re-invent yourself, with your doctor’s permission and guidance.

If you have no physician, then my suggestion is to just walk for at least an hour, everyday, at conversation pace (not being breathless, but being able to constantly talk to a companion, comfortably, if you wanted to for the whole time). You need to try to carve out the whole hour, as biochemical steps “kick-in”. But, if you can’t do the whole hour at once, then next-best choice is to cut it into either 40 minutes at lunchtime, 20 minutes in the morning or evening OR 20 minute chunks: morning, lunchtime and evening. Do this everyday. Walking isn’t strenuous enough to say “one day off, one day on ” or using “cross-training” rules, as we were meant to walk everyday.

___   Learn all you can about your body, food and exercise!

You’re here, so I am patting you on the back! Stay away from the American Diabetes Association food pyramid like the plague. Remove most grains from your diet (even if whole-grain). Get celiac, non-gluten recipes and start to try them. Use quinoa and wild rice (this is not a grain) as your main “grain” substitutes; both are very good for diabetes.

Use no artificial sweeteners. Use low glycemic stevia and agave nectar for natural sweetness and maple sugar, prudently. All these are good for diabetics. Eat way more than the 5 a day vegetables and fruits recommended by the US Government health bureaus. Eat less fruit, more vegetables. Include Vitamin C veggies and fruits everyday – kiwi is a good choice as it has Omega-3s, too.

Learn how to make your body pH alkaline everyday. I’ve written about this many times and have given you charts of pH alkaline foods. Look in the Titles Archive on the navigation bar above.

When you go to holiday parties, eat ahead at home, first. Then, at the party, with the roster of good pH alkaline foods remembered, indulge moderately. Also, calculate the empty calories of alcoholic drinks, the seriously acidic pH of any soda pop. Consider club soda with a twist and a shot of lemon or lime juice and 2 T of a little sweeter juice like pomegranate — with beneficial ellagic acids. It looks festive and has beneficial aspects to it. Do NOT use Seltzer Water. On the Club Soda label, look for either sodium bicarbonate or potassium bicarbonate, only.

If it’s a sit-down dinner, enjoy the healthiest parts of it.

There is time for celebration on the Middle Path. But, it’s important to know just when and how much is the time to choose. Not every office and collegial friend’s party is an “excuse”, but maybe you just really enjoy the time you spend on your main meal with family.  Choose a time to truly celebrate, in a moderate way.

___   Become a role-model for others!

The severely overweight, morbidly obese contestants who succeed on The Biggest Loser are very aware about Pay It Forward actions. You can too. Here are some amazing numbers about global obesity. These statistics come for  the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), but they are not perfectly meshed (as the country details are sometimes from different years and vary in sample size). But this is the best snapshot we have, so far, for the Globesity Epidemic.

The “healthiest” countries, which have at least 70% of their population still at “normal” body-mass index are, in order (best first): Laos and Ghana

The next tier has 60% – 70% of their populations at normal weight, in order (best first):  Madagascar, Japan (mostly because of Okinawa), Viet Nam, Mongolia, Philippines, South Korea, India, Kyrgyzstan and  Estonia

This third tier has 50% – 60% healthy weight, in order (best first): Morocco, Switzerland, China, Singapore, Thailand, Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, Romania, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, France, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Cuba, Iran, Latvia, Norway, Colombia, Bulgaria

The fourth tier has only 40% – 50% of the population at normal body mass index, in order (best first): Cyprus, Iceland, Malaysia, Vanuatu, Slovakia, Lithuania, Canada, South Africa,  Czech Republic, Poland, Spain, Hungary, Portugal, Jordan, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Turkey

This next group is in serious trouble, with only 30% – 40% of their populations at normal weight, in order (best first): Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, United States of America, Croatia, Malta, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Panama

And, the worst country in the world, for obesity, where only 18% of the people are at normal weight, is Kiribati.

Next week, I’m going to give my thoughts as to why these numbers and what more can be done, but find your country of residence; find your ethnic heritage and start thinking about where you get your food behaviors from and exercise outlooks from. Then, you’ll be ready to take part in next week’s important conversation.

Meanwhile, prepare for your holiday season carefully and thoughtfully.

I sincerely wish all of you a Happy, Peaceful, Secure Holiday Season and I fervently hope all will be much better when I write, again, this time next year.

Best to all — Em

REFERENCE:
W.H.O. stats Global Obesity
21 Fattest Countries with great photos!

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Diabetics – Body Information Markers Help 2

“Everyone Knows Someone Who Needs This Information!” (TM)

In last week’s article I introduced the idea of B.I.M. (Body Information Markers) which you can use to help you assess your own Health or that of your children. As a diabetic, you are used to self-measurement, but these are new tools, and they work for everyone!

So, here are some new B.I.M.s and the link to last week’s article is below.

___ Neck circumference has been explored in studies as a B.I.M. for potential obesity and heart problems in adults and the information below also applies to children.

One of Body Mass Index’s (the usual method) shortcomings is that it “does not accurately define central body fatness,” said Dr. Nafiu (an assistant professor of pediatric anesthesia at the University of Michigan School of Medicine Health, Ann Arbor).

Neck circumference could give better clues to actual body fat composition.

Additionally, Dr. Olubukola Nafiu and his colleagues examined 1,102 children and recorded their heights, weights and neck circumferences to determine whether this measurement could be another way to assess obesity in children. It can.

At the link below, you can get relevant charts for neck circumference guidelines. Help you and your child by referring to them often.

The doctors measured necks using a flexible tape at the most prominent part of the neck for young children. For older males, that area was around the Adam’s apple level (larynx bump, in the front of the neck).

But common sense also indicates the connection between a large, fatty neck circumference and ill health.

It was particularly poignant to see this research as in a recent week’s “Losing It With Jillian”,  trainer Jillian Michael’s intervened to save the health of a Miami 9 year old, who was already pre-diabetic and almost at full-blown Type 2 diabetes, which is at epidemic levels among juveniles.

___   David Alvarez, Jr. was a miniature, thick-necked version of his severely overweight father and somewhat overweight Mom. He was already having to monitor blood sugar, and the terrible thing about juveniles who are getting Type 2 diabetes is that food can either create or obliterate the condition!

If a family will choose healthy foods and use it and exercise to get the weight off, then you are on your way back to Health. But, children are at the mercy of their parent’s ignorance or lack of concern or both.

Children don’t buy or prepare the food they eat; adults do that, and it is up to the adults to validate and encourage healthy exercise and other healthy habits.

Jillian courageously told the Alvarez family that they were causing their son’s ill health.

So, Jillian showed them how to eat better and exercise properly and efficiently and choose time to have fun together. By the time 6 weeks had gone by, little David had lost 25 pounds and he was most of the way to becoming a normal-sized kid again.

He was no longer being taunted; he had a new lease on life, as he wanted to make sure his new friends stayed healthy or the ones who needed help learned what he had. Talk about paying it forward!

Jillian supported little David’s after school program so he could continue to help the other kids learn how to live a healthy life. Brava! and Bravo!

___ And, you need a test like the neck  B.I.M.  above to help gauge your children’s weight well being, as the usual growth charts (which are based on BMI) may not tell the whole story, yet another article suggests. However, the medical profession does consider Body Mass Index a B.I.M. and uses it in all childhood assessment of weight.

And, importantly, the article says it  seems that the vast majority of pediatricians are NOT willing to discuss or intervene in juvenile weight control — I just couldn’t believe what I was reading!

___   More than 20 years ago, the alarm bell rang on the childhood obesity epidemic. Now, 17% of American children and adolescents are officially “obese“, triple the rate in 1980.

And nearly 33% more children are also now considered “overweight“, according to the latest government data.

Importantly and shockingly, in a 2006 study surveying the parents of the obese children, one-half of those parents did NOT recognize that their child was even overweight (some studies show it as high as 90%).

Less than one-third of parents said they were “worried” about their child’s weight!

In another survey, only 38% of parents had taken steps, or were planning to take them, to help their obese child lose weight.

Parents should be concerned, because although some overweight kids do outgrow their baby fat, roughly two out of three are likely to grow up to be obese adults! And along with that sentence comes a slew of serious health problems, including: diabetes, asthma, heart disease and depression. Who would wish that on their child!

The failure of parents to accurately assess their child’s weight is also partly due to changing social norms — not only are kids heavier than ever before, but roughly 2/3 of adults are also overweight.

Parents who are overweight themselves are less likely to identify their children as overweight and similarly, some studies suggest that parents of various ethnicities and cultural backgrounds have different conceptions of body type and overweight.

___   BMI might be a better B.I.M. if it was looked at with a CRITICAL eye. Be aware that steadiness in the relationship between weight and height on the graph are crucial.

Dr. Samuel Gidding, MD says studies show that there is a serious concern when lots of weight comes on rapidly, at any time. If so, regard that as a possible problem showing up in metabolism or biochemistry.

Use Body Mass Index (BMI) as a signal to monitor your child, consult a pediatrician who is active and aware, and double your effort to give your child proper amounts of only healthy foods.

Monitor your children from birth. Use the charts below and the neck circumference charts already mentioned (link in Reference section below).

And, as children get older, parents should teach them about:
___ nutrition
___ appropriate portion sizes
___ healthy eating habits (such as sticking to regular meal times)
___ and the importance of being active.

Here’s your access to the scientific basis for a healthy child’s growth assessment and normal weight to height ratios — by gender.

Girl’s Height and Weight Charts

Boy’s Height and Weight Health Chart

Neck Size as a Diabetes Indicator

Diabetic Body Information Genes, Bellies and More – Part 1

Best to all — Em

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Diabetes – New Info 2

“Everyone Knows Someone Who Needs This Information!” (TM)

Here’s new information because New Year, is a good time to update so that all the choices you make in daily living utilize the best options! Read Part 1 of Diabetes – New Info. And, now here’s Part 2.

___ Save time looking for recipes in cookbooks which you already own. Or, search for recipes when you are away from your cookbook collection. This site also has a shopping list for each recipe in the cookbooks they’ve indexed online.

This is a new web engine in beta — see what’s offered if you go to Eat Your Books and click on the Community page (where there is a link to the already indexed books list). More cookbooks are added constantly. There’s a free 30 day trial; a limited time for a life-time membership, and otherwise, monthly membership.

___ And, another tip for Americans – check out Groupon.com for local “deals”. In this tough economy, only choose beneficial ones, and maybe that will help you save money for critical bills or purchases.

___ People with fat in their thighs and backsides may live longer because this type of fat actually traps harmful acid particles while it actively secretes helpful compounds, according to a report recently published in the International Journal of Obesity. “Pear-shaped” people also appear to have lower levels of inflammatory cytokines — signaling chemicals involved in the body’s response to infection — increased levels can play a role in heart disease and diabetes especially when they are inappropriately active.

Many studies have shown that people who accumulate deep, visceral fat around the abdomen and stomach are more likely to die of heart disease and other causes, than bottom-heavy people, but the reasons for this biochemistry are not clear. The author, Konstantinos Manolopoulos, of Britain’s University of Oxford, says “It is the protective role of lower body fat, (gluteofemoral fat), that is striking,” and this big-bottom body shape is most often found in females (think Jennifer Lopez).

Nature knows it must “protect” females for the preservation of the species (you only need about 10 males to re-populate the world with plenty of genetic diversity, if many more females survive, I read long ago)(and scientists already know very small groups are what all humans originally developed from).

So, “apple-shape” people, who hold fat around their middle, should be even more careful, I believe, to live a pH balanced life and to have gentle-to-moderate levels of exercise 3 to 4 times per week for at least 30 minutes – 45 minutes duration, if your doctor allows it. This group has less margin for error. More on exercise below.

___ About 70% of everyone’s diet should be from vegetables. These are pH balancing foods, and along with lots of pure water (work up to 1qt per 50 lb lean body mass weight, over at least a month to give your kidneys time to adapt to increased use — consult your doctor beforehand if you already have kidney disease), this is your diet’s foundation. Also, use about 1 1/2 Tablespoons of good fats daily (only hemp and flax – never cook these; olive, macadamia nut, canola [not for people on Coumadin or Warfarin], walnut, and organic butter or ghee or organic coconut oil [these 3 in small amounts] [MUST be organic] or the Omega-3s in cold-water fish like wild salmon, cod, herring, sardines (limit if you tend to have gout), arctic char, and mackerel [less use due to mercury]. You’ll get enough essential fatty acid Omega-6 in the EFA Omega-3 foods. Right now the western diet has way too many Omega-6s. Protein per meal should be as described in Part 1, and there’s more dietary information below, too.

___ America may laud thinness, but a new Japanese study shows being too thin is shortening people’s lives by around 5 years, and that too thin people live shorter lives than obese people do!

People who are just a little chubby live longest (their Body Mass Index was 25 – 30). People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people (BMI 18.5 or less) or obese people (BMI above 30). Normal BMI is 18.5 to 25 range.

“We found skinny people run the highest risk,” said Shinichi Kuriyama, an associate professor at Tohoku University’s Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people, which was conducted by a health ministry team led by professor Ichiro Tsuji. The team covered 50,000 people between the ages of 40 and 79, over 12 years in the northern Japanese prefecture of Miyagi. “There had been an argument that thin people’s lives are short because many of them are sick or smoke. But the difference was almost unchanged even when we eliminated these factors,” Kuriyama said.

___ For Americans, 2/3 of Americans are overweight or obese, but at least we’re leveling off (according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association) from the steep climb that started developing in the late 1980s, with the increased use of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) and larger portion fast-food meal marketing.

The study found that if obesity rates had continued to rise as rapidly as they’d been since the late 1980s, then an increase of 6 to 7 percentage points would have been expected for men and women between 1999 and 2009. But, instead, rates increased by less than 5 percent in men and did not appear to increase much at all in women.

So for women, the news seems somewhat hopeful, as our obesity rates remained virtually unchanged over the past decade. But this still leaves us at: 36% of women are obese (50% of black women are) and 30% are overweight (75% for black women). A woman who is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 175 pounds is clinically obese.

Now, we just need to start seeing the numbers returning to normal weight ranges! These tips in this series will help you accomplish that!

___ The weight issue for many Americans is economic. Poor food costs less and it is all that many people can afford with the choices they make as to how they spend what money they have (and some people are in such dire straits that they don’t have any choices).

___ We need to be lobbying Congress to provide farmers who grow vegetables the farm subsidies now spent on grain (used mostly for biofuel and exports) and soybeans (used mostly to feed cattle). That is what we HAVE to do. This will bring down the consumer prices of fresh foods.

Including fruit growers (for a lesser percentage) is important, too, as orchards are a huge investment and take up to a decade before they “bear fruit” and start to earn back an investment. But, as fresh food in our diet, fruit is less essential, yet it is also Nature’s food bank and will survive better than vegetable crops in a problematic climate or other disaster. Real estate developers routinely rip-out orchards which will take decades to add to our food supply if new ones are even planted elsewhere. There needs to be laws regarding whether orchards must instead be sold only to other farmers. Lobby Congress to make it so.

___ Continuing, now, with new exercise information. Dr. James Lyons, MD, author of “The Brown Fat Revolution” tells patients to get a maximum of 10 to 15 minutes of aerobic activity, and to then focus on doing resistance training exercises that work the abdominal core like: yoga or pilates and weightlifting to build arm and leg muscles.

This moderate aerobic approach prevents stimulating hunger and will help you retain muscle (normally shed with aging). Since your newly re-gained muscle requires more calories to maintain than fat tissue does, your metabolism will boosted throughout the day. Therefore, you’ll burn off belly fat (and without increasing your appetite like too much aerobics would), because you have stimulated your metabolically helpful brown fat to burn-off your life depleting white fat tissue.

You must do some moderate activity at least twice a week for 40 minutes (3 or 4 times weekly is better) — especially if you’ve recently lost weight. It’s well known that regular exercise is essential for maintaining weight loss.

University of Alabama researchers discovered in October 2009 that it takes 40 minutes a day, twice a week, (minimum) to keep the belly fat from creeping back on if you are trying to maintain newly-lost weight. The study participants were white and black women who had lost an average of 27 pounds on a lower-calorie diet.

Interestingly, this time it didn’t matter whether the women did aerobic activity or resistance training as long as they kept it up twice a week for a year. “While they did regain some weight, they gained it in their legs and arms, not their midsection,” says Hunter, who led the study.

He also stated that those participants who didn’t exercise, regained most of their lost weight, the bulk of it around their belly – the danger zone! Hunter theorizes that exercise helps to trigger beneficial hormonal changes which make it easier for the body to store excess fat in the arms, hips and thighs rather than near vital organs of the waist and belly region. This abdominal fat can squeeze, push-over and otherwise inhibit vital organs’ functionality.

Eat a healthy snack or light meal before and after a workout — each about 200 calories.

___ When it comes to shedding belly fat, think 6 mini-meals a day. As 85% of the success comes from proper diet management and timing, the rest is the proper stimulation of metabolism from the balance and length of an exercise program. The dietary approach you stick to is critical.

The before and after exercise meals mentioned above count for 2 mini-meals (regard it as two halves of your breakfast, eaten in stages; total 400 calories). Next comes 400 calories of a well-balanced lunch with 70% – 80% vegetables (at least 2 cups), 1 serving of oils (see above), 3 ozs. cooked meat protein (or 6 oz. fish, 1 cup beans, 2 Omega-3 fortified eggs, 1/2 cup cottage cheese or 1C yoghurt). Then an afternoon snack mini-meal — a piece of fruit and a few nuts (total 200 calories). Next, dinner mini-meal, like lunch and 400 calories. Lastly, a before-bed snack mini-meal, preferably some dairy to help give you tryptophan to make into serotonin, to aid sleep (200 calories).

Men are entitled to enlarge one meal or both meals for a total of 400 “extra” calories (total = 2000 for men for the day, 1600 calories per day for women).

___ get enough sleep. If you don’t sleep well, get this checked out, in a sleep-lab if necessary.

Too little sleep (meaning less than 6 hours) or too much (more than 8 hours) results in excess production of the stress hormone named cortisol, which is produced in your adrenal glands.

This hormone promotes the storage of fat in your belly. As your adrenals prepare you to respond to life-threatening stresses, these glands shuttle fat off to a storage place where it can be easily burned off for fuel in an emergency. That storage depot is abdominal fat! Whereas, fat on your hips and thighs isn’t released from cells as quickly, which is why it is much harder to “lose”.

___ Help to de-stress yourself by living in the present moment, only. You can handle the present moment. This is called Mindfulness. It will help bring your biochemistry in from overloaded adrenal stress. Of course, meditation is a more formal version of this practice, but this real-world adaptation will work. Don’t “worry” or have thoughts persistently in the future or past; stay in the NOW.

Treat every moment as the opportunity to learn, grow, and change.

That’s all for this post. See you next week. I wish you well.

Em

(c)2010 Em at http://diabetesdietdialogue.wordpress.com
If you desire to quote from my article, if using more than one paragraph, please write for permission, to the About Me page above on the Navigation Bar. Thanks!

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