June 2022 Newsletter
Bergamot is an herbal approach to… lowering cholesterol numbers. It works in a similar way to red yeast rice bran. To simplify the process, the liver makes cholesterol by putting two separate molecules together. The rice bran and the bergamot interfere by being more able to bind with one of the two parts so that they cannot combine with the part that would have made cholesterol. My husband, Norm, conducted a personal experiment to give it a try. This week we got the lab results that his total cholesterol went down 50 points. That’s an experiment of ONE – but for us it was quite a thrill.
A much more important lifestyle change that must be made in order to be healthy is to maintain a healthy weight. People frequently come to me in some kind of pain that limits their ability to exercise. I tell them that exercise is only one part of weight control. Always remember, you can NOT ‘out run’ your fork. Here’s a fairly new idea in the battle for weight control for those who stress eat.
When you stress eat, do you reach for high calorie, overly processed foods? Then exercise might be your best ally. How is that? A brain region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) can help a person limit giving into those cravings for ultra-processed foods. How? By starting the thinking processes needed to gain conscious control over food choices. Those junk foods excite the brain activity in regions associated with reward.
That is what gives a person a drive to eat even when they’re not hungry. Using functional brain imaging to examine brain responses, neuroscientists have seen that increased activity in the dlPFC can control food cravings. How? By decreasing activity in the ‘rewards center’ of the brain a person is more able to have more conscious control over their food choices. Exercises are a way to decrease activity in that region of the brain.
Here's another way to describe this. When under stress the body releases a hormone called cortisol because the brain thinks it needs more fuel for “fight or flight”.
Stress can result in decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex and increased activity in the reward regions of the brain. Exercise boosts neuroplasticity and helps the brain adapt its functions based on new input. This boost to neuroplasticity helps a person to change habits and lifestyle. Even a twenty-minute walk at a moderate pace can reduce cravings for junk food. That’s a better way for the prefrontal cortex to recover from the cortisol rush.
Creativity also combats stress – and stress eating. I have had to diet and watch what I eat since I was ten years old. My first diet included amphetamines, that’s what they did in the 1960’s. Yes, that affected the brain, could be a repeated theme here. In the different group support meetings that I’ve participated in for weight control, they talk about getting a hobby that does not involve food. Creative things like knitting, sewing, gardening, bird watching, scrap booking, jewelry making, tie dying, any kind of non-food craft. People sometimes say they are “not creative”, but that depends on how one looks at what it means to be “creative”. If being the next Michelangelo is the standard, very few of us could stake a claim on creativity. Yet, any act of making something is a form of creativity. That includes designing an arrangement for a home’s dining table. Stacking up cans into a form before knocking them down. Setting up targets to knock down with the toss of a Frisbee. Simple problem solving is a form of creativity. “What else can we do with what we have and the time we have?” People call it thinking outside the box. What this means, is to come up with something different than one might usually come up with to solve a problem by using some creative thinking.
Conversation with another person can often help battle stress, but can also go both ways. A stressful conversation will not help at all. A visit to a coffee shop where they have lots of enticing goodies to buy also might end up making things worse. Joining a club, an organization, a place where your energy can be poured into some meaningful activity with other people can be helpful to get both
conversation and creativity with like-minded people and getting away from food.
Breathing. I often make jokes to people about not forgetting to breath, but it is a real reminder that we can use our breath to help ourselves. Take a deep breath. Take three in a row. Pull your shoulders back, and tip your head up a bit. Roll your shoulders up – back – and down. Reach both hands up over your head and stretch. This simple routine can relieve stress and clear the mind. There are studies that seem to indicate practicing conscious breathing on a daily basis reduces stress and anxiety and changes the electrical activity in the brain. However, maybe it is the reverse – the electrical activity in the brain changes as you consciously decide to breath, open up your rib cage by pulling your shoulders back and tipping your head up a bit. Make the conscious decision to breath often and deeply.
The hardest part of losing weight is sticking with it long enough to lose the weight. Anyone can go a few days eating restricted calories and feeling like a success on the scale, but a few days will never be enough. In reality, it’s the long-term, continued and consistent process of making healthy food choices and eating smaller portions each and every day that will reduce a person’s girth. Social gatherings for things like birthdays, holidays and weddings can present an additional challenge. The people in your life might help, or might subconsciously sabotage your decision to lose weight. How? By doing things like making food that they know you will find hard to resist, or pouting when you won’t eat something they wanted to see you gleefully consume. For this situation, you have to figure out ahead of time what might happen,
and make a plan for how to react and then stick to that plan.
Let me end with some words of encouragement for women in the weight control battle. I have an old book, purchased in 1978, called “A Woman Doctor’s Diet for Women”, by Dr. Barbara Edelstein, MD. In a beginning chapter, the weight loss battles of
women are compared to those of men. “Almost any man can lose all the weight he needs to by giving up desserts, cutting down on bread and potatoes and not eating between meals.” “Comparing male and female weight loss is like comparing apples and oranges; they are both fruit, but there the similarity ends… Men lose weight almost twice as fast, and burn calories twice as fast for the same amount of exertion. The reason is that a woman’s body is naturally composed of a higher proportion of fat to muscle tissue than a man’s body, and muscle mass burns five more calories per pound to maintain itself than fat or connective tissue.” “This is a fundamental truth of biology.” Women burn from 10-15 calories per pound of body weight where men burn from 17 to 20 doing the same thing, yet our appetites are identical.” [In fact, women’s stomachs are larger than men’s stomachs. Probably to help women eat more in the days when they were either pregnant or breast feeding a baby.]
One more difference mentioned in this book is that the same female hormones that give them beautiful skin, good bones, and protect against heart attacks are the same ones that make it easier to convert food into fat. Estrogens and progesterone are naturally fat-producing and fat-hoarding hormones. Androgen, the male hormone, is more able to convert food into energy and break down fat and make energy. “More calories are needed to sustain large muscle mass in a male than to sustain fat in a female. Men are usually heavier and taller than women, but even the smallest man has more muscle per unit of weight than the largest woman.”
I have dieted and watched what I eat since I was ten years old. Every day, every meal, every snack it’s on my mind. I might escape it on a vacation or at a party, but then I have to get right back on it to get it off as quickly as I can. It’s a lot easier to lose five pounds than ten, ten than twenty. I encourage you to find a way to stay at a healthy weight. Use your brain and your brawn!
Bergamot is an herbal approach to… lowering cholesterol numbers. It works in a similar way to red yeast rice bran. To simplify the process, the liver makes cholesterol by putting two separate molecules together. The rice bran and the bergamot interfere by being more able to bind with one of the two parts so that they cannot combine with the part that would have made cholesterol. My husband, Norm, conducted a personal experiment to give it a try. This week we got the lab results that his total cholesterol went down 50 points. That’s an experiment of ONE – but for us it was quite a thrill.
A much more important lifestyle change that must be made in order to be healthy is to maintain a healthy weight. People frequently come to me in some kind of pain that limits their ability to exercise. I tell them that exercise is only one part of weight control. Always remember, you can NOT ‘out run’ your fork. Here’s a fairly new idea in the battle for weight control for those who stress eat.
When you stress eat, do you reach for high calorie, overly processed foods? Then exercise might be your best ally. How is that? A brain region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) can help a person limit giving into those cravings for ultra-processed foods. How? By starting the thinking processes needed to gain conscious control over food choices. Those junk foods excite the brain activity in regions associated with reward.
That is what gives a person a drive to eat even when they’re not hungry. Using functional brain imaging to examine brain responses, neuroscientists have seen that increased activity in the dlPFC can control food cravings. How? By decreasing activity in the ‘rewards center’ of the brain a person is more able to have more conscious control over their food choices. Exercises are a way to decrease activity in that region of the brain.
Here's another way to describe this. When under stress the body releases a hormone called cortisol because the brain thinks it needs more fuel for “fight or flight”.
Stress can result in decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex and increased activity in the reward regions of the brain. Exercise boosts neuroplasticity and helps the brain adapt its functions based on new input. This boost to neuroplasticity helps a person to change habits and lifestyle. Even a twenty-minute walk at a moderate pace can reduce cravings for junk food. That’s a better way for the prefrontal cortex to recover from the cortisol rush.
Creativity also combats stress – and stress eating. I have had to diet and watch what I eat since I was ten years old. My first diet included amphetamines, that’s what they did in the 1960’s. Yes, that affected the brain, could be a repeated theme here. In the different group support meetings that I’ve participated in for weight control, they talk about getting a hobby that does not involve food. Creative things like knitting, sewing, gardening, bird watching, scrap booking, jewelry making, tie dying, any kind of non-food craft. People sometimes say they are “not creative”, but that depends on how one looks at what it means to be “creative”. If being the next Michelangelo is the standard, very few of us could stake a claim on creativity. Yet, any act of making something is a form of creativity. That includes designing an arrangement for a home’s dining table. Stacking up cans into a form before knocking them down. Setting up targets to knock down with the toss of a Frisbee. Simple problem solving is a form of creativity. “What else can we do with what we have and the time we have?” People call it thinking outside the box. What this means, is to come up with something different than one might usually come up with to solve a problem by using some creative thinking.
Conversation with another person can often help battle stress, but can also go both ways. A stressful conversation will not help at all. A visit to a coffee shop where they have lots of enticing goodies to buy also might end up making things worse. Joining a club, an organization, a place where your energy can be poured into some meaningful activity with other people can be helpful to get both
conversation and creativity with like-minded people and getting away from food.
Breathing. I often make jokes to people about not forgetting to breath, but it is a real reminder that we can use our breath to help ourselves. Take a deep breath. Take three in a row. Pull your shoulders back, and tip your head up a bit. Roll your shoulders up – back – and down. Reach both hands up over your head and stretch. This simple routine can relieve stress and clear the mind. There are studies that seem to indicate practicing conscious breathing on a daily basis reduces stress and anxiety and changes the electrical activity in the brain. However, maybe it is the reverse – the electrical activity in the brain changes as you consciously decide to breath, open up your rib cage by pulling your shoulders back and tipping your head up a bit. Make the conscious decision to breath often and deeply.
The hardest part of losing weight is sticking with it long enough to lose the weight. Anyone can go a few days eating restricted calories and feeling like a success on the scale, but a few days will never be enough. In reality, it’s the long-term, continued and consistent process of making healthy food choices and eating smaller portions each and every day that will reduce a person’s girth. Social gatherings for things like birthdays, holidays and weddings can present an additional challenge. The people in your life might help, or might subconsciously sabotage your decision to lose weight. How? By doing things like making food that they know you will find hard to resist, or pouting when you won’t eat something they wanted to see you gleefully consume. For this situation, you have to figure out ahead of time what might happen,
and make a plan for how to react and then stick to that plan.
Let me end with some words of encouragement for women in the weight control battle. I have an old book, purchased in 1978, called “A Woman Doctor’s Diet for Women”, by Dr. Barbara Edelstein, MD. In a beginning chapter, the weight loss battles of
women are compared to those of men. “Almost any man can lose all the weight he needs to by giving up desserts, cutting down on bread and potatoes and not eating between meals.” “Comparing male and female weight loss is like comparing apples and oranges; they are both fruit, but there the similarity ends… Men lose weight almost twice as fast, and burn calories twice as fast for the same amount of exertion. The reason is that a woman’s body is naturally composed of a higher proportion of fat to muscle tissue than a man’s body, and muscle mass burns five more calories per pound to maintain itself than fat or connective tissue.” “This is a fundamental truth of biology.” Women burn from 10-15 calories per pound of body weight where men burn from 17 to 20 doing the same thing, yet our appetites are identical.” [In fact, women’s stomachs are larger than men’s stomachs. Probably to help women eat more in the days when they were either pregnant or breast feeding a baby.]
One more difference mentioned in this book is that the same female hormones that give them beautiful skin, good bones, and protect against heart attacks are the same ones that make it easier to convert food into fat. Estrogens and progesterone are naturally fat-producing and fat-hoarding hormones. Androgen, the male hormone, is more able to convert food into energy and break down fat and make energy. “More calories are needed to sustain large muscle mass in a male than to sustain fat in a female. Men are usually heavier and taller than women, but even the smallest man has more muscle per unit of weight than the largest woman.”
I have dieted and watched what I eat since I was ten years old. Every day, every meal, every snack it’s on my mind. I might escape it on a vacation or at a party, but then I have to get right back on it to get it off as quickly as I can. It’s a lot easier to lose five pounds than ten, ten than twenty. I encourage you to find a way to stay at a healthy weight. Use your brain and your brawn!
