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Short, Stout, Has a Handle on Colds - New York Times
Originally part of a millennia-old Indian yogic tradition, the practice of nasal irrigation — jala neti — is performed with a small pot that looks like a cross between Aladdin’s lamp and your grandmother’s gravy boat. The neti pot made its way into this country in the early 1970s as a yoga meditation device, but even as yoga became mainstream, the neti pot remained on the fringes of alternative culture.
Short, Stout, Has a Handle on Colds - New York Times
Finally the Neti pot gets some mainstream coverage.
This has been a secret health tool of the yogis for centuries.
Now even Oprah is using it.
I like to use it every day. Steve does also.
Your nose will never be the same again.
Blogged with Flock
Four health changes can prolong life 14 years - Yahoo! News
People who drink moderately, exercise, quit smoking and eat five servings of fruit and vegetables each day live on average 14 years longer than people who adopt none of these behaviors, researchers said on Tuesday.
Four health changes can prolong life 14 years - Yahoo! News
Interesting research article from England.
What is important is that even SMALL CHANGES in your lifestyle now have profound effects for the longevity of your life.
This is principle of COMPOUNDING. We’re all familiar with this from debt or interest payments, i.e the more you invest the more money you make.
So what are the four changes you can make TODAY for a longer life?
1. Quit Smoking. The number one thing you can do to improve your health. Hey it ain’t easy. I smoked for close to ten years. (Bet you didn’t know THAT!). Get some help. Give me a call. Maybe I might even do a teleseminar on this one day. (Email me if you’re interested).
But this has me thinking that maybe the health of our lungs is the most important part of our body. Which means no pot smoking, no cigars, and minimizing exposure to air pollution (no easy task here in San Pedro or Long Beach).
2. Eat five servings of fruit and vegetables. At a MINIMUM! Gary Null suggests to eat 10-15 servings a day. Which is quite easy to do if you use a superfood green powder and JUICE.
This morning I already had a green juice of Kale, celery, radish, carrot, apple, onion, and ginger. And am eating a grapefruit right now. Will soon eat a pear.
3. Moderate drinking. That’s like 1-2 drinks a day. Preferably red wine. Hey Jack Lelane has one glass of the red vino day, and if Jack at 90 is drinking that, I reckon it’s okay.
There seems to be quite a bit of research that indicates moderate consumption of 1-2 drinks a day can actually be beneficial for your health…lowers cholesterol…relaxes the body…keeps you happy.
Personally I have now gone close to nine months without a drink of alcohol. And feel great.
So it’s clear…either no or light or moderate drinking is key for your health.
4. Exercise. For all of you that are part of the SoCalRunning community that is no problem. You run. You come join us in yoga. You’re keeping the body active.
Keep up these activities for the upcoming year everyone. You can do it!
Declutter your “stuff” and lose that holiday weight
Ms. Johnson says she often sees a link between her client’s efforts to get organized and weight loss. “I think someone decides, ‘I’m not going to live like this anymore. I’m not going to hold onto my stuff, I’m not going to hold onto my weight,’” she said. “I don’t know that one comes before the other. It’s part of that same life-change decision.
”On its Web site, www.nsgcd.org, the group offers a scale to help people gauge the seriousness of their clutter problem. It also includes a referral tool for finding a professional organizer. But since the hourly fees can range from $60 to $100 or more, it may be worth consulting a new book by Dr. Tolin, “Buried in Treasures” (Oxford, 2007), which offers self-assessments and advice for people with hoarding tendencies.Dr. Peeke says she often instructs patients trying to lose weight to at least create one clean and uncluttered place in their home. She also suggests keeping a gym bag with workout clothes and sneakers in an uncluttered area to make it easier to exercise. She recalls one patient whose garage was “a solid cube of clutter.” The woman cleaned up her home and also lost about 50 pounds.“It wasn’t, at the end of the day, about her weight,” Dr. Peeke said. “It was about uncluttering at multiple levels of her life.”
Health Effects of Clutter - Tara Parker-Pope - Medicine and Health - New York Times
Interesting article on the problems of clutter.
And some of the benefits of cleaning up your clutter.
This is one of my goals the next month. I have bookshelves, a basement, laundry room, two closets, and numerous bins filled with clutter that need to be cleaned up.
I will be giving the clothes away to Salvation Army unless someone knows of a church organization we could give clothes to.
And I have lots of books that I will painfully have to give away.
But the way I see it…as the ideas and books go…there is now room for new fresher ideas.
I urge you all to spend some time this January de-cluttering.
Last year I tried to get rid of fifty things. It’s a wonderfully simple exercise that will immediately feel lighter on this earth.
Get this, lighter means faster, faster means a happier runner.
Happy New Years
Gary
ps pics of me freezing my ass off on the polar bear swim coming soon!!!
America’s Fattest Cities
The average American had purchased fast food 16 days of the month between January and September of this year, according to Quick-Track research conducted by the consumer tracking group Sandelman & Associates. Thirteen cities on our list, including Memphis, Austin, Texas, and Indianapolis, met the national average or higher. Residents of San Antonio eat fast food 20 days of the month, and had the highest frequency of the cities on our list.
America’s Most Obese Cities - Yahoo! Real Estate
Interestingly enough, this study did not mention that fast food consumption is a major factor leading to obesity.
Wait a second…
You eat In and Out 16 times a month and it doesn’t make you fat?
If you want to see what Fast Food really does to your body just rent out the movie SuperSize This, where a guy eats nothing but McDonalds for a month.
In one week he gains like 10 pounds!!!!! In two weeks 17 pounds. By the third week, his doctor tells him his liver is turning to pate due to the excess sugar and fat in his diet. He loses his libido, has no energy, and skin problems pop up like teenage zits.
Well Long Beach and San Pedro skipped the fattest list.
But San Bernadino/Riverside did not. They are now the fourth fattest city in America with 30% obesity amongst adults. Interestingly enough 30% also said they do not exercise at all during the week. Simple correlation if you ask me.
Overall this obesity crisis is costing America $93 billion a year in medical costs. 112,000 people die from obesity every year.
Kids are starting to emulate their parents. If you saw the size of urban junior high school kids nowadays you’d freak out.
Yeah. I’m going to keep on writing on this topic. I’m not going to watch America kill itself through the sloth of a leather couch, HDTV, and fast food.
I’ll make a difference.
And each and every one of you that puts on some running shoes and gets out the house to walk, jog, run, chirun, do intervals, a tempo run, or even better…
train for a marathon or half marathon is setting an example for your whole community to notice.
God Bless you everyone for making running a part of your lives.
Gary
btw In and Out in Carson has now expanded their drive thru to two lanes.
That’ll help.
Yoga Keeps Weight Off in Middle Age
yoga helps keep people more in tune with their bodies and eating habits and aware of bad habits, such as eating because of stress, boredom or depression.”You become very sensitive to the feeling of being stuffed,” he added.The researchers collected data from 15,500 people between the ages of 53 and 57 who were asked about exercise, weight, health and diet histories. The findings, published in the July/August issue of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, showed that those who practiced yoga tended to avoid junk food and overeating because they wanted to respect their bodies.
USATODAY.com - Yoga helps keep weight off in middle age, study suggests
Interesting article.
Because the link between yoga and weight loss has more to do with increasing the awareness of your body from yoga practice.
When you get more aligned, when you get better balanced, when you learn to tune into what is happening in your body…
you will find that you just no longer want to eat junk like…
Potato Chips
Friend Food
Fast Food
And yes, even meat.
Keep on practicing your yoga.
Gary
Cellular Health Article by SoCalRunning.com Member Shelli Stein
Shelli running the Honolulu Marathon
Taken from the August JoyInMovement.com newsletter:
Hello friends, and welcome to this month’s JoyInMovement newsletter,
I thought this month we’d have a cellular conversation. Now for some cellular time together. The health of your body depends on the health of your cells. We have over 75 trillion cells in our body. Cells process the nourishment we need and get rid of our waste, keeping us energized and alive. Cells have different functions and need oxygen in order to perform them. They also use oxygen to convert glucose into ATP (adenosine triphosphate), our body’s fuel. If we want to maximize our overall health we need to ensure that we receive the optimum ingredients our cells require.
Much research has been done to decipher what cells need to live. Correlations have been found, for instance, between the level of oxygen in a person’s bloodstream and their level of health. A lack of oxygen will destroy cells, and if cells are given their basic needs and not poisoned by their own environment, they live on and on.
Dr. Stanley Robbins of Harvard Medical School suggests that there are 6 basic causes of cellular atrophy:
1. Decreased work load
2. Enervation
3. Diminished blood supply
4. Inadequate nutrition
5. Loss of endocrine stimulation
6. Aging
In leading a life full of health and vitality we must remember certain guiding principles:
* the key to a healthy body is healthy CELLS.
* the most important element of cellular health is OXYGEN.
* anything that disturbs the biochemical or electrical functioning of the cells or deprives them of oxygen is potentially disease producing.
* the build-up of toxins in our system is a result of unhealthy conditions. Think about the air we breathe, water we drink, foods we eat and the movement choices we make.
As I mentioned at the start of this letter, the key to health is energy and all our energy starts with our cells. Cells only have energy when they have enough OXYGEN, NUTRIENTS and ways to eliminate waste. Optimal oxygenation of your cells comes about through proper nutrition, fluid intake, exercise and stress management.
I don’t want to get overly technical or go deeper into each area of optimal oxygenation that I mentioned. I am, however, in a “back to basics” mode though, and when we who find “joy-in-movement” think about achieving our optimum balance between health and fitness, we must start with the basic building blocks—our cells! If your health is in a less than optimal state and you feel one or more of your systems be it nervous, muscular, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, lymphatic, hormonal or other isn’t up to snuff, then I’m suggesting you need to look at your cellular health.
Now for this month’s energy drain. How about our unfinished business? Anyone out there with decisions that need to be made or projects you have postponed that need doing? Don’t know about you, but when I tend to my unfinished business I feel so much better and energy for other things comes flooding back in. I think a big part of the dilemma is that we think we need to make perfect decisions. When I trust myself and decide to either do it or just let it go altogether–the do it or dump it theory–it seems to get done just fine!
A friend sent me my horoscope today—-it read, “You’ve conquered some demons lately. Celebrate with dance and song, flowing scarves and hot cider.” What can I say? I never miss an opportunity to dance, sing, let my scarves flow and drink hot cider, so I am signing off to do all four, though maybe not all at once. Wishing you all a fun, fanciful month.
Create some joy and move in ways that serve those cells of yours!
yours in cellular health,
Shelli
Shelli Stein, RYT, CPT
Movement Educator
JoyInMovement.com
shelli@joyinmovement.com
Tim VanOrden from RunningRaw.com Tonight @ 6 p.m
Dear Beach Runners,
Steve Mackel and Gary Smith will be interviewing a very special athlete this evening. Tim VanOrden started training for the U.S. Olympic team at the age of 38. His secret…raw foods. He claims that by eating only raw has given him the energy to instant success as a highly competitve runner. He is our kind of athlete…spiritual…holistic…conscious…and even videoblogs.
Check out his website at RunningRaw.com
Please send us any questions you have on training and especially raw foods.
Steve and Gary
EVENT: Steve and Gary’s RunCall 9 w/ Tim VanOrden
DATE & TIME: Monday, July 30th at 6:00pm Pacific
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=482232
Choose your friends wisely…
A new study finds that when the scale reads “obese” for one individual, the odds that their friends will become obese increase by more than 50 percent.
Study: Obesity is Socially Contagious - Yahoo! News
Unbelievable research study. Basically saying that if one of your friends becomes obese, there is a fifty percent or higher chance that you will become obese also.
In other words, the obesity crisis is a SOCIAL CRISIS. And is spreading like a virus because it is just becoming more and more acceptable to become obese.
Thats why joining a running community like SoCalRunning is so important…
you want your friends to be fit that will motivate you to stay on the road of fitness…
If you haven’t joined our new community please do so here…
SoCalRunning.com Members Website
Gary
Child Obesity Rates Rising
Childstats.gov - America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2007 - Health: Overweight
From a recent study on the wellbeing of America’s children.
Even sadder is the fact that only 20% of children get five or more servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Only one in five.
It doesn’t surprise me.
I went to market on Pacific Avenue two days ago, (lower income side of Pedro), and there was not one living fruit or vegetable to be bought.
There was lots of beer, chips, processed food, sodas, etc.
So remember when you’re eating 10 or more servings of fruit or vegetables a day, you are setting the appropriate example for your children.
It is noon as I write this and I have had 8 servings of fruit and vegetables already today.
Think that makes a difference in my running and weight loss?
You bet it does.
Gary
Vegetable-soy-fish diet lowers chance of breast cancer
Chinese women who ate a diet that included red meat, starches and sweets were twice as likely to develop breast cancer than those who ate the traditional vegetable-soy-fish diet, according to a study in the July issue of the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Meats, Sweets May Boost Breast Cancer Risk - Yahoo! News
All the more reason to increase your servings of vegetables and fruits to 10 or more servings a day as Steve and I recommend.
Let’s face facts, our society is terribly overweight because of its diet!!!!
So have a salad for lunch and a piece of fruit and know that you are prolonging your life.
Gary
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