January Newsletter 2016
January is the time for New Year’s resolutions… and they often involve weight loss and/or getting in shape. Since I was an overweight child, I’ve dieted since I was ten years old. Some of those diets included the grapefruit diet, the Air Force diet, and Atkins diet, and they were all successful short term. But I would gain the weight back within a couple of months. I went to Weight Watchers for a while, and they really taught ideas for how to eat to live and not gain the weight back as soon as the ‘diet’ was over. My favorite book of all time was, “A Woman Doctor’s Diet for Women.” The book’s author postulated that many people who easily gain weight have an inability to efficiently process carbohydrates. Similar to Atkins, she instructed women to eat the following: LOTS of vegetables with little or no sauce or dressing on them, a bit of fruit each day, limit protein servings to a size a little smaller than the palm of your hand, two tablespoons of oil/fat a day and almost no carbohydrates (breads, noodles, grains in general). This strategy helped me a great deal, and if I need to lose weight, I limit my carbohydrate intake.
For decades, doctors said to use the nonfat or low-fat diet strategy to cut calories. Theoretically it should have worked, but among other problems it left a person hungrier. Then businesses sold us on all the “fat free”,’ processed food products out there. The lack of flavor was addressed by adding more sugar (carbohydrates). There is substantive new research that says SUGAR is the evil, not fat. Also, by cutting down on sugary foods rapid health improvements often follow. From an article in “The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Journal”: low-carbohydrate diets “led to significantly greater weight loss than did low-fat ones”. Not only are low-fat diets ineffective, but the sugary jolt of fat-free foods may be doing more harm than you think. Here are links to the articles that are referenced: www.thelancet.com/journal/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(15)00367-8/fulltext), and
http://link.springer.com/article/a0,1007%2Fs00 394-012-0418. Instead of just counting calories, we need to understand that all calories are not created equal. Research done by pediatric endocrinologist, Dr. Robert Lustig maintained the same number of calories and reduced the sugar in children who were showing signs of pre-diabetes. Results of his study can be read at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/27/science-new-study-case-sugar-tax
In essence, get sugar out of your diet but allow yourself a little bit more oil, especially heathy oils like grapeseed, sesame, and olive oils. This can do your body a lot of good. My main diet advice is to get as many vegetables into your meal as often as possible. Make vegetables the main course, a small side of healthy protein (meat or eggs) and another side of vegetables. Limit fruit to 1-2 servings a day. Eat only until you feel nourished, not until you feel full. Drink 8–10 glasses of water (hot or cold) a day. Avoid juice, alcoholic beverages and soda. Liquid calories often sabotage a diet. Get 30 minutes of fresh air, sunshine and exercise each day. For dairy eaters, remember cheese is not really a protein it’s a fat. Only eat 1 ounce of cheese a day, which is a piece about the size of the first joint of your thumb. For pork eaters, remember bacon is not a protein it’s a fat too.
Some fun body ‘facts’… taken from the internet – true??
☺ Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.
☺ The human brain cell can hold five times as much information as an encyclopedia.
☺ The brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters the bloodstream and is itself made up of 80% water. ☺ The brain interprets pain signals from the rest of the body, but the brain itself cannot feel pain. ☺ The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
☺ Eyes are always the same size from birth but your nose and ears never stop growing.
☺ By 60 years of age, 60% of men and 40% of women will snore.
☺ We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening. During normal daily activities, the cartilage in the knees and spine slowly compress. This also explains why back pain is usually worse later in the day. It also is a great sales pitch for inversion tables that let you hang upside-down safely. ☺ The brain operates on the same amount of power as a ten watt light bulb, and is much more active during sleep than waking hours.
Why I was gone for a while last month… had everything to do with the winter of 2000, when I came down with a very bad cold. After the cold was gone, I found three swollen lymph nodes around my upper throat. It is normal to have swollen lymph nodes after having an infectious disease. Lymph nodes are fortresses where white blood cells take foreign microorganisms to die, before eliminating them from the body. I thought the swelling should be gone in a month or so. When these had not shrunk by April, I had blood work done, and it was perfect. I was told, “Sometimes as we age, we just get ‘lumpy’. If anything changes about them, see an M.D. immediately.” I checked them daily for two years, and in spring of 2002, they got hugely worse overnight. I woke up feeling lousy all over, went to see my doctor, and had blood work again. The blood work looked perfect, and the CT scan revealed no pathology. It was a biopsy that informed me that I had Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a very rare type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage four. . I was also told it was untreatable, and that regular chemotherapy (called CHOP) would actually kill me faster. It was an intermediate cancer with both aggressive and passive characteristics. I was forty-seven years old and told I had only 1-3 years to live. I tried natural treatments for about a year. I was feeling pretty good and could feel that the lumps were smaller. A PET scan revealed that new lumps were all over now; I could read my own scan and see them for myself. There was only one treatment with any success rate but it also had a 17% death rate: Hyper-CVAD with Retuxin. This treatment involved hyper-doses of drugs with the initials CVAD, followed by something called auto-stem-cell extraction, followed by industrial strength chemotherapy called BEAM, and finished with a stem cell transplant that gave me back my own, now healthy stem cells. It was experimental, with only one year of clinical trials behind it. I was able to qualify to be a participant because I had rejected two doctors’ advice to do ordinary chemo. These experiences taught me a lot about not always listening to the advice of MDs. When the experimental treatment began, I was told to think of a big trip I would go on when it was all over. I said, “I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.” They said I should think of getting well and going to Australia when things got rough. Over the following months, things got very, very rough.
So, after being put off for thirteen years, and receiving the financial incentive not to postpone further as a gift from our three children, we finally decided to go. It’s quite a long flight to Australia, about eighteen hours. Being that it is a very large country, a good portion of time is required in order to see and enjoy much of it. It has been a huge thing to plan and execute, and by the time you are reading this, I will have returned from this ‘trip of a lifetime’. I kept the reason for my absence quiet, so as not to have word get around that my house and office would be unoccupied for those weeks. I do apologize for the inconvenience to my wonderful patients. Now that you know, we can celebrate my victory together. I beat that lymphoma and I took that trip. Whew! **** Happy New Year to all! ***
