Diet Challenge Quotes

You cannot trade the courage needed to live every moment for immunity from life's sorrows. We may say we know this but ours is the culture of the deal-making mind. From infancy, we have breathed in the belief that there is always a deal to be made, a bargain to be struck. Eventually, we believe, if we do the right thing, if we are good enough, clever enough, sincere enough, work hard enough, we will be rewarded. There are different verses to this song - if you are sorry for your sins and try hard not to sin again, you will go to heaven; if you do your daily practise, clean up your diet, heal your inner child, ferret out all your emotional issue's, focus your intent, come into alignment with the world around you, hone your affirmations, find and listen to the voice of your higher self, you will be rewarded with vibrant health, abundant prosperity, loving relations and inner peace - in other words, heaven! We know that what we do and how we think affects the quality of our lives. Many things are clearly up to us. And many others are not. I can see no evidence that the universe works on a simple meritocratic system of cause and effect. Bad things happen to good people - all the time. Monetary success does come to some who do not do what they love, as well as to some who are unwilling or unable to see the harm they do to the planet or others. Illness and misfortune come to some who follow their soul's desire. Many great artist's have been poor. Great teachers have lived in obscurity. My invitation, my challenge to you here, is to journey into a deeper intimacy with the world and your life without any promise of safety or guarantee of reward beyond the intrinsic value of full participation.

The laboratory evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets can cause the body to reain water and so raise blood pressure, just as salt consumption is supposed to do, dates back well over a century

If you experience a health challenge, Life is inviting you to love yourself. In other words, no matter what your problem is, there is only one answer: loving yourself.

Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose if you are to act with coherence and integrity in the world. If you know your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distractions and detours.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

Those who advocate for a raw diet suggest that it is the healthiest, "most natural" way to eat. Cooking, they say, is a modern bastardization of the human diet. This is simply wrong.

[T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.

The Warrior Diet is the only diet today that challenges all common dietary concepts and offers a real alternative—guidelines that are not based on superficial restrictions, but rather on true principles of human nutrition.

YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.

Yet our ability to exercise free will and transcend the most extraordinary obstacles does not make the conditions of our life irrelevant. Most of us struggle and often fail to meet the biggest challenges of our lives. Even the smaller challenges—breaking a bad habit or sticking to a diet—often prove too difficult, even for those of us who are relatively privileged and comfortable in our daily lives. In fact, what is most remarkable about the hundreds of thousands of people who return from prison to their communities each year is not how many fail, but how many somehow manage to survive and stay out of prison against all odds.

One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, “keep your identity small.” The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. If you tie everything up in being the point guard or the partner at the firm or whatever else, then the loss of that facet of your life will wreck you. If you’re a vegan and then develop a health condition that forces you to change your diet, you’ll have an identity crisis on your hands. When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself.

The most challenging part of respecting our bodies and healing compulsive eating is the conscious decision to question what keeps us bound and silenced. Until we can sit in our own skin and fully occupy the physical space we’ve been given, we will be apologetic about our bodies. And even when we lose weight because we stuck to a diet, we will remain frightened of ourselves because we know that it’s the diet that’s keeping us thin, not our own capacity to stay true to what we know or want. On diets, we are still relying on the big powerful other to know what’s best and to save us. And whether it’s a good daddy or a good diet that rescues us, we remain victims and food our perpetrator.

We all know the secret of dieting...it's the application that's challenging. p 7

The scientific obligation is first to establish the cause of the disease beyond reasonable doubt.

Remember this: You are the benchmark of your success - you define it. Don't let anyone else define it because if you do, you will fail. Appreciate those who support you and challenge those who don't

Making LDL the “bad cholesterol” oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades’ worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients.

For women, it’s The Virgin Diet by JJ Virgin, which will challenge your rules about calories and exercise and show you that it’s not about how much you eat, but how you combine the right foods in the right order for your body’s “chemistry lab.” 6.

If you maintain a robust agenda of activities, if you nurture a rich network of relationships, if you intellectually challenge yourself, if you pay attention to your diet, if you exercise regularly and vigorously, if you latch on to a sense of purpose

This research supports the hypothesis that elevations of insulin and IGF will increase the risk of disease and shorten life, and so any diet or lifestyle that elevates insulin and makes IGF more available to the cells and tissues is likely to be detrimental.

I had to determine for myself what it means to be beautiful if I ever wanted to accept my own unique beauty. This is my challenge to you: Define beauty for yourself, and I promise, your outlook on the world around you, as well the world within you, will change forever.

I have found that if I tend to a person’s illness rather than to the person, I am going to treat that person as if they are their illness. In doing so, I run the risk of limiting them greatly and helping them to focus in on their illness as if that is all they are. It is so important to see and help a person and not just a condition. Everyone is different, with unique twists and challenges, so the same herbs are not applied for the same 'condition.' The herbs chosen are connected to the whole personincluding their illness, their constitution, their diet, their psychology, their history, their tastes, their lifestyle, and their joys and sorrows. I always try to set a person up to succeed, and take their preferences, abilities, stamina, and financial resources into account when helping choose their plant medicines.

Yudkin also fed high-sugar diets to college students and reported that it raised their cholesterol and particularly their triglycerides; their insulin levels rose, and their blood cells became stickier, which he believed could explain the blood clots that seemed to precipitate heart attacks.

the introduction of cereal and grains into the human diet was associated with a dramatic reduction in human height and the first appearance of bone diseases and dental caries. It is diets high in cereals and grains and low in fat-soluble vitamins, especially Vitamin D, which cause osteoporosis

The evidence suggests that nicotine induces weight loss by working on fat cells to increase their insulin resistance, while also decreasing the lipoprotein-lipase activity on these cells, both of which serve to inhibit the accumulation of fat and promote its mobilization over storage, as we discussed earlier

Ultimately, a job, no matter how much you love it, will never hit every note for you, and it shouldn't. We should all strive to find multiple steams of fulfillment, challenges, and income. The more we rely on one role as an all-encompassing definition, the unhealthier our relationship with that role becomes.

Yudkin blamed heart disease exclusively on sugar, and he was equally adamant that neither saturated fat nor cholesterol played a role. He explained how carbohydrates and specifically sugar in the diet could induce both diabetes and heart disease, through their effect on insulin secretion and the blood fats known as triglycerides.

The proliferation of news outlets and the democratization of information through the internet gives Americans the power to be more informed than ever, but it also makes it easier for us to feast on a diet of information that echoes and never challenges our biases and our beliefs. This deepens our divisions and makes them more difficult to overcome.

variety, don't overdo, always have a proper breakfast, have a good daily amount of antioxidants, don't omit or exaggerate with refined sugar and, most of all, don't forget to insert into your diet a good amount of foods containing phosphorous and B-complex vitamins, great substances to let your brain work at its best. Some examples of foods containing these nutritional substances? Cereals, fish, nuts.

If blood-sugar levels increase—say, after a meal containing carbohydrates—then more glucose is transported into the fat cells, which increases the use of this glucose for fuel, and so increases the production of glycerol phosphate. This is turn increases the conversion of fatty acids into triglycerides, so that they’re unable to escape into the bloodstream at a time when they’re not needed. Thus, elevating blood sugar serves to decrease the concentration of fatty acids in the blood, and to increase the accumulated fat in the fat cells.

The lesson I have learned is that a failure to cultivate the imagination leads to an unintended neglect of the imaginative literature of Scripture, and this in turn leads to some degree of spiritual atrophy. For Christians, the stories of Revelation are not optional reading. Nor are they child's play. Imaginative literature--the kind of literature that invites us to see in our imaginations what we cannot see with our eyes--is an important part of the Christian's literary diet. It challenges our idols. It challenges what is false and trivial in our lives.

The deposition of fat in men and women is distinctly different. Men tend to store fat above the waist—hence the beer belly—and women below it. Women put on fat in puberty, at least in the breasts and hips, and men lose it. Women gain weight (particularly fat) in pregnancy and after menopause. This suggests that sex hormones are involved, as much as or more than eating behavior and physical activity. “The energy conception can certainly not be applied to this realm,” as the German clinician Erich Grafe observed in 1933 about this anatomical distribution of fat deposits and how it differs by sex.

A central part of the problem is that our bodies evolved to deal with the challenge of dietary paucity, not overabundance. So leptin isn’t programmed to tell you to stop eating. Nothing chemical in your body is. That’s a big part of why you tend to just keep on consuming. We are habituated into devouring foods greedily whenever we are able on the assumption that abundance is an occasional condition. When leptin is completely absent, you just keep on eating and eating because your body thinks you are starving. But when it is added to the diet, in normal circumstances it makes no discernible difference to appetite. What leptin is there for essentially is to tell the brain whether you have enough energy reserves to undertake comparatively demanding challenges like getting pregnant or starting puberty. If your hormones think you are starving, those processes will not be allowed to begin. That’s why young people who are anorexic often have a very delayed start to puberty. “It’s also almost certainly why puberty starts years earlier now than it did in historic times,” says Wass. “In Henry VIII’s reign, puberty started at sixteen or seventeen. Now it is more commonly eleven. That’s almost certainly because of improved nutrition.

The evolution of the gluten-free diet illustrates how attempts to control consumption are swiftly countered by modern market forces, just one more example of the challenges inherent in our dopamine economy. There are many other modern examples of previously taboo drugs being transformed into socially acceptable commodities, often in the guise of medicines. Cigarettes became vape pens and ZYN pouches. Heroin became OxyContin. Cannabis became “medical marijuana.” No sooner have we committed to abstinence than our old drug reappears as a nicely packaged, affordable new product saying, Hey! This is okay. I’m good for you now.

It is difficult to ascertain what role these articles play in marginalizing the vegetarian experience when there are so many more pressing issues that confront individuals who might otherwise choose to try to become vegetarian or vegan, such as the lack of healthy affordable food in low-income neighborhoods, often largely inhabited by people of color, and a government that subsidizes and promotes animal and sugar-heavy diets over ones with vegetables and fruits. yet rather than focus on these series structural barriers, many articles on vegetarianism and veganism often present the challenge of avoiding meat and animal products as challenge to one's very own normalcy and acceptability.

Our brains, for instance, are 70 percent fat, mostly in the form of a substance known as myelin that insulates nerve cells and, for that matter, all nerve endings in the body. Fat is the primary component of all cell membranes. Changing the proportion of saturated to unsaturated fats in the diet, as proponents of Keys’s hypothesis recommended, might well change the composition of the fats in the cell membranes. This could alter the permeability of cell membranes, which determines how easily they transport, among other things, blood sugar, proteins, hormones, bacteria, viruses, and tumor-causing agents into and out of the cell. The relative saturation of these membrane fats could affect the aging of cells and the likelihood that blood cells will clot in vessels and cause heart attacks.

In retrospect, the influential figures in the clinical investigation of human obesity in the 1970s can be divided into two groups. There were those who believed carbohydrate-restricted diets were the only efficacious means of weight control—Denis Craddock, Robert Kemp, John Yudkin, Alan Howard, and Ian McLean Baird in England, and Bruce Bistrian and George Blackburn in the U.S.—and wrote books to that effect, or developed variations on these diets with which they could treat patients. These men invariably struggled to maintain credibility. Then there were those who refused to accept that carbohydrate restriction offered anything more than calorie restriction in disguise—Bray, Van Itallie, Cahill, Hirsch, and their fellow club members. These men rarely if ever treated obese patients themselves, and they repeatedly suggested that since no diet worked nothing was to be learned by studying diets.

In fact, several studies have shown that losing weight and exercising vigorously can sometimes actually reverse the disease, at least during its early stages. One extreme study placed eleven diabetics on a grueling ultra-low-calorie diet of just 600 calories per day for eight weeks. Six hundred calories is an extreme diet that would challenge most people (it’s about two tuna fish sandwiches a day). After two months, however, these seriously food-deprived diabetics had lost an average of 13 kilograms (27 pounds), mostly visceral fat, their pancreases doubled how much insulin they could produce, and they recovered nearly normal levels of insulin sensitivity.51 Vigorous physical activity also has potent reversal effects by causing your body to produce hormones (glucagon, cortisol, and others) that cause your liver, muscle, and fat cells to release energy. These hormones temporarily block the action of insulin while you exercise, and then they increase the sensitivity of these cells to insulin for up to sixteen hours following each bout of exercise.

There are promises of protection in the Word of Wisdom. The Lord’s word of wisdom commanding abstinence from a worldly “king’s portion” of tobacco, tea and coffee, and alcoholic beverages that are habit-forming, and which counsels the simple diet of fruits, grains, and vegetables in season, with meats used sparingly, has been given you as a revelation of God’s great law of health. It stands today as a challenge to a world surfeited with things condemned as unclean and unfit for the human body. If you have faith as the youthful Daniel and his brethren and purpose in your hearts that you will not defile yourselves with “king’s meat and wine,” even though you may be two thousand miles east of the Suez Canal, your faith will have the reward of hidden treasures of knowledge, of strong bodies that can “run and not be weary and walk and not faint.” If by faith in this great law, you refrain from the use of food and drink harmful to your bodies, you will not become a ready prey to scourges that shall sweep the land, as in the days of the people of Moses in Egypt, bringing death to every household that has not heeded the commandments of God.

The “remarkable sodium and water retaining effect of concentrated carbohydrate food,” as the University of Wisconsin endocrinologist Edward Gordon called it, was then explained physiologically in the mid-1960s by Walter Bloom, who was studying fasting as an obesity treatment at Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital, where he was director of research. As Bloom reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine and The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the water lost on carbohydrate-restricted diets is caused by a reversal of the sodium retention that takes place routinely when we eat carbohydrates. Eating carbohydrates prompts the kidneys to hold on to salt, rather than excrete it. The body then retains extra water to keep the sodium concentration of the blood constant. So, rather than having water retention caused by taking in more sodium, which is what theoretically happens when we eat more salt, carbohydrates cause us to retain water by inhibiting the excretion of the sodium that is already there. Removing carbohydrates from the diet works, in effect, just like the antihypertensive drugs known as diuretics, which cause the kidneys to excrete sodium, and water along with it. This

In the beginning, repeating a habit is essential to build up evidence of your desired identity. As you latch on to that new identity, however, those same beliefs can hold you back from the next level of growth. When working against you, your identity creates a kind of "pride" that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing. This is one of the greatest downsides of building habits... One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, "keep your identity small." The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. If you tie everything up in being the point guard or the partner at the firm or whatever else, then the loss of that facet of your life will wreck you. If you're a vegan and then develop a health condition that forces you to change your diet, you'll have an identity crisis on your hands. When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself... When chosen effectively, an identity can be flexible rather than brittle. Like water flowing around an obstacle, your identity works with the changing circumstances rather than against them. p247

A series of surprising experiments by the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues has shown conclusively that all variants of voluntary effort—cognitive, emotional, or physical—draw at least partly on a shared pool of mental energy. Their experiments involve successive rather than simultaneous tasks. Baumeister’s group has repeatedly found that an effort of will or self-control is tiring; if you have had to force yourself to do something, you are less willing or less able to exert self-control when the next challenge comes around. The phenomenon has been named ego depletion. In a typical demonstration, participants who are instructed to stifle their emotional reaction to an emotionally charged film will later perform poorly on a test of physical stamina—how long they can maintain a strong grip on a dynamometer in spite of increasing discomfort. The emotional effort in the first phase of the experiment reduces the ability to withstand the pain of sustained muscle contraction, and ego-depleted people therefore succumb more quickly to the urge to quit. In another experiment, people are first depleted by a task in which they eat virtuous foods such as radishes and celery while resisting the temptation to indulge in chocolate and rich cookies. Later, these people will give up earlier than normal when faced with a difficult cognitive task. The list of situations and tasks that are now known to deplete self-control is long and varied. All involve conflict and the need to suppress a natural tendency. They include: avoiding the thought of white bears inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film making a series of choices that involve conflict trying to impress others responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals) The list of indications of depletion is also highly diverse: deviating from one’s diet overspending on impulsive purchases reacting aggressively to provocation persisting less time in a handgrip task performing poorly in cognitive tasks and logical decision making The evidence is persuasive: activities that impose high demands on System 2 require self-control, and the exertion of self-control is depleting and unpleasant. Unlike cognitive load, ego depletion is at least in part a loss of motivation. After exerting self-control in one task, you do not feel like making an effort in another, although you could do it if you really had to.

For abolitionists, who advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, and free-soilers, who simply opposed the spread of slavery into the western territories, the existence of such a group proved the destructive effect of slavery on social morals and human industry and the inordinate economic power of the planter elite. It also served as an implicit warning of the disastrous consequences of the spread of slavery into nonslaveholding regions and its debilitating effect on the work ethic of otherwise stalwart white farmers. For slave-holders, particularly those at the apex of southern society, the idleness of rural working-class whites justified the “peculiar institution” and made clear the need for a planter-led economic and social hierarchy. Planter D. R. Hundley wrote, for example, that “poor whites” were “the laziest two-legged animals that walk erect on the face of the earth . . . [and exhibited] a natural stupidity or dullness of intellect that almost surpasses belief.” To abolitionists and proslavery ideologues alike, therefore, southern poor whites utterly lacked industry, intelligence, social propriety, and honor, the essential ingredients for political and social equality and thus should not be trusted with political decision-making.7 Northern and southern middle- to upper-class commentators perceived this class of people as so utterly degraded that they challenged their assertion of “whiteness,” the one claim southern working-class whites had to political equality, “normative” status, and social superiority to free and enslaved blacks. Like Byrd and the author of “The Carolina Sand-Hillers,” journalists and travel writers repeatedly compared “poor whites” unfavorably to other supposedly inferior people of color, be they enslaved blacks, Indians, or even Mexican peasants. Through a variety of arguments, including genetic inferiority, excessive interbreeding with “nonwhites,” and environmental factors, such as the destructive influences of the southern climate, rampant disease, and a woefully inadequate diet, these writers asserted that “poor whites” were neither truly “white” nor clearly “nonwhite” but instead, a separate “‘Cracker’ race” in all ways so debased that they had no capacity for social advancement. This attitude is clear in an 1866 article from the Boston Daily Advertiser that proclaimed that this social class had reached depths of “[s]uch filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility” that they could never be truly civilized. “[T]ime and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood,” the author concluded, “but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”8 Contempt for working-class whites was almost as strong among African Americans as among middle-class and elite whites. Enslaved African Americans invented derogatory terms containing explicit versions of “whiteness” such as “(poor) white trash” and “poor buckra” (a derivative form of the West African word for “white man”). Although relations between slaves and non-elite southern whites were complex, many slaves deeply resented the role of poor whites as overseers and patrol riders and adopted their owners’ view that elite southern planters were socially and morally superior. Many also believed that blacks, enslaved and free, formed a middle layer of social respectability between the planter aristocracy at the top of the social system and the “poor whites” at the bottom. The construction of a “poor white” and “white trash” social and cultural category thus allowed black slaves to carve out a space of social superiority, as well as permitted the white planter elite to justify enormous economic and social inequality among whites in a supposedly democratic society.9

in responding to challenging life events from the devastating (becoming handicapped, losing a loved one) to the difficult (a divorce, an illness), people do better than they anticipate. They believe that they’ll never laugh again, but they do. They think they’ll never love again, but they do. They go grocery shopping and see movies; they have sex and dance at weddings; they overeat on Thanksgiving and go on diets in the New Year—the day-to-day returns.

The Importance of Crunch in Keto Snacks When following a keto diet, finding snacks that are both delicious and compliant can be a challenge. Many traditional snacks are packed with carbs, making them off-limits for keto enthusiasts. However, the crunch factor should not be underestimated. The act of biting into a crunchy snack can provide a sensory satisfaction that is hard to replicate. It adds an extra layer of enjoyment to your snacking experience and can help curb cravings.

That’s the reasoning behind recommendations that people take a “50-food challenge,” eating at least fifty different plant foods a week to achieve a diet diverse enough to feed a vast spectrum of bacteria.7530

The end product of all that evolution is that we are big-brained, moderately fat bipeds who reproduce relatively rapidly but take a long time to mature. We are also adapted to be physically active endurance athletes who regularly walk and run long distances and who frequently climb, dig, and carry things. We evolved to eat a diverse diet that includes fruits, tubers, wild game, seeds, nuts, and other foods that tend to be low in sugar, simple carbohydrates, and salt but high in protein, complex carbohydrates, fiber, and vitamins. Humans are also marvelously adapted to make and use tools, to communicate effectively, to cooperate intensively, to innovate, and to use culture to cope with a wide range of challenges. These extraordinary cultural capacities enabled Homo sapiens to spread rapidly across the planet and then, paradoxically, cease being hunter-gatherers.

Milk is food for the beginning eater. A gulpable essence distilled by the mother from her own more variable and challenging diet. (from "On Food and Cooking")

Maintaining a haircare routine is one of the most challenging things we all experience on a daily basis. And, more significantly, despite recognizing that our hair care routine is substandard, we continue to dismiss it. However, being aware is not the solution; in order to achieve natural and healthy hair, we first identify the root cause of the problem, and only then will the proper interventions be found. organics products So, if you're concerned about more than whether you have damaged hair, you've come to the ideal setting. You shouldn't underestimate these signs of damaged hair. how to reduce hair fall Take a gander at these signs. YOU'VE GOT SPLIT ENDS Split ends are a frequent and easy-to-identify indicator of hair damage that can be detected at the tips of your hair growth which oil is best. All you have to do is look at a single strand of hair and see if it's split in two; if it is, your hair is damaged. Bhringraj Shampoo You can certainly cut them, but this issue should not persist; all you need is natural hair care to avoid it. They appear to be lifeless. When you look in the mirror or touch your hair, it appears lifeless, drab, and monotonous. The brightness and bounce of healthy hair are easy to notice and feel. Your hair may appear dull for obvious reasons: hair care product natural it isn't getting the attention it deserves, it isn't being nourished, and it isn't healthy. When you run your fingers through your hair, you'll be able to tell whether it's silky or dull. They are not extremely strong. It's a negative emotional state to wake up with a perfect pillow on your mattress, and it's worse when you comb your hair. Hair loss is a widespread problem among both men and women, that almost nobody wants. Because you're dealing with such situations, it's yet another piece of evidence that your hair is damaged. You can already see hair in between your fingers even if you pull them a little or run your fingers through them. Clumps of aloe vera face wash Cuticles must lie on the floor that hair must be invited to sit and slide against one another. Bhringraj Oil Take a brush to your hair, and if you run into a few hooks along the way, your hair is damaged and unhealthy. Cuticles can become elevated as a result of the absence of nourishment and training; they tangle easily and feel harsh. Follow these 3 important suggestions. Cuticles must lie on the floor that hair must be invited to sit and slide against one another. Take a brush to your hair, and if you run into a few hooks along the way, your hair is damaged and unhealthy the best hair growth oil. Cuticles can become elevated as a result of the absence of nourishment and training; they tangle easily and feel harsh. Follow these 3 important suggestions. Organic skincare products Straightening and curling your hair might improve your appearance, but if you use heated tools on a regular basis, you are inflicting harm to your hair. Drink plenty of water. Organics Products One of the most important components of hair maintenance is to eat a protein-rich diet and drink plenty of water in order to keep your hair hydrated and nourished.

General traditional theory asserts that when under stress, the body’s meridian system becomes imbalanced. Many factors cause stress, including physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual challenges, psychological issues, biochemical problems, and even electromagnetic difficulties such as geopathicstress. Even natural environmental factors such as excess cold, damp, wind, dryness, or heat can create imbalance. Under duress, the blood, chi, and fluid cannot flow normally, usually leading to congestion (excess or blockage) or depletion (deficiency or weakness). Symptoms of these imbalances can be found through the meridians even before they manifest physically. Once these problems appear physically, these underlying causes can impede the body’s healing ability. The meridian therapist essentially stimulates the acupuncture points to restore balance. Stagnant chi calls for stimulation. Cold chi needs warmth. As we will see in the section on meridian treatment modalities, diagnosis, and treatment, there are many paths open to a meridian specialist, including needling and non-needling techniques, massage, energy work, diet, herbs, and more. YIN/YANG Yin/yang is a synthesis of the other categories. Yin equals interior, empty, and cold. Yang equals exterior, full, and hot. It can also describe two kinds of emptiness: deficiency (not enough yin or yang) and collapse (critical “collapse” or recession of yin or yang).

Transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and yet incremental changes in diet and exercise can make dramatic differences when done consistently over a period of time. Health and satisfaction result. And hope.

But for the hedonists, these unpleasant acts are the costs that have to be paid to obtain greater benefits. We are fated to reenact the biblical punishment of Adam, condemned to survive only by the sweat of our brow. Challenging and difficult work is the ticket to status and money; boring exercise and unpleasant diets are what you have to go through for abs of steel and a vibrant old age. To use the slogan of the libertarians, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Suffering is the price we pay for greater pleasure.

Once You’re in Keto, How Can You Keep It Going Without Fasting? The short answer is: Eat a boatload of fat (~1.5 to 2.5 g per kilogram of body weight), next-to-no carbs, and moderate protein (1 to 1.5 g per kilogram of body weight) each day. We’ll look at Dom’s typical meals and day in a minute, but a few critical notes first: High protein and low fat doesn’t work. Your liver will convert excess amino acids into glucose and shut down ketogenesis. Fat as 70 to 85% of calories is required. This doesn’t mean you always have to eat rib eye steaks. A chicken breast by itself will kick you out of ketosis, but a chicken breast cut up into a green leafy salad with a lot of olive oil, feta cheese, and some Bulletproof Coffee (for example) can keep you in ketosis. One of the challenges of keto is the amount of fat one needs to consume to maintain it. Roughly 70 to 80% of your total calories need to come from fat. Rather than trying to incorporate fat bombs into all meals (one does get tired of fatty steak, eggs, and cheese over and over again), Dom will both drink fat between meals (e.g., coconut milk—not water—in coffee) and add in supplemental “ice cream,” detailed on page 29. Dom noticed that dairy can cause lipid profile issues (e.g., can spike LDL) and has started to minimize things like cream and cheese. I experienced the same. It’s easy to eat a disgusting amount of cheese to stay in keto. Consider coconut milk (Aroy-D Pure Coconut Milk) instead. Dom doesn’t worry about elevated LDL as long as other blood markers aren’t out of whack (high CRP, low HDL, etc.). From Dom: “The thing that I focus on most is triglycerides. If your triglycerides are elevated, that means your body is just not adapting to the ketogenic diet. Some people’s triglycerides are elevated even when their calories are restricted. That’s a sign that the ketogenic diet is not for you. . . . It’s not a one-size-fits-all diet.

Your abs are made in the kitchen, not the gym.” What that means is that almost 80% of your success at weight loss or getting lean is dependent on your diet.

people considerable freedom to avoid diversity. While British Christians are offered an almost unavoidable diet of programming that openly challenges or insidiously undermines their faith, US evangelicals have been able to create a system that allows them to avoid what they do not like and produce what they do like.

Your diet should include all aspects of the food groups including carbohydrates. In fact, your diet needs to be about 50-55% carbs. Carbs are a great source of energy. Those diets that prohibit carbohydrates are actually harming you and only making you crave them that much more.

Consume foods like oatmeal, oats, brown rice, whole grain bread and broccoli. Broccoli is so good for your body that you should make it a staple in your diet.

This chapter is loaded with multiple ways to introduce new adaptive challenges and break homeostasis. We recommend that you: Upgrade your macros (more protein, more fiber) Start lifting weights (if you’re not already) Change your weight training program Increase your weight training frequency each week Do an HIIT workout a week Progress to two HIIT workouts a week Do cold therapy Add walking Add rebounding Add yoga Add cardio Change the type of cardio Increase the intensity of cardio Increase anabolism Do sauna sessions Cut calories

What Stare called the “lead gift” of $1,026,000 came from the General Foods Corporation, the maker of the very carbohydrate-rich Post cereals, Kool-Aid, and Tang breakfast drink. Over the next decade, Stare became the most public defender of sugar

The funding of research projects, laboratories, and entire academic centers by the food and pharmaceutical industries is now a fact of life in modern medical research, which is why many journals require that their authors declare potential conflicts of interest. But it raises important questions, just the same.

A resolution of the very controversial question of the efficacy of low carbohydrate diets has great practical and theoretical significance,” wrote Donald Novin of UCLA in 1978. Because a generation of obesity authorities were determined to dismiss the practical significance of carbohydrate-restricted diets, they dismissed the potential theoretical significance at the same time. Obesity researchers today say they still have no hypothesis of weight regulation that can explain obesity and leanness, let alone account for a century of paradoxical observations. They insist that obesity is inevitably caused by overeating and thus consuming more calories than we expend, but when asked what causes someone to overeat, they have no answer. Yet the research on insulin and fat metabolism offers one, and it has for several decades.

weight stability is nothing more than an equilibrium between the fatty acids flowing into the energy buffer of the fat tissue and the fatty acids flowing out. What the body regulates, as Le Magnen suggested, is the fuel flow to the cells; the amount of body fat we accumulate is a secondary effect of the fuel partitioning that accomplishes this regulation. The implication of this hypothesis is that both weight gain and hunger will be promoted by factors that work to deposit fatty acids in the fat tissue and inhibit their mobilization—i.e., anything that elevates insulin.

we gain weight because our insulin remains elevated for longer than nature or evolution intended, and so we fail to balance the inevitable fat deposition with sufficient fat oxidation. Our periods of satiety are shortened, and we are driven to eat more often than we should.

If this hypothesis of hunger, satiety, and weight regulation is correct, it means that obesity is caused by a hormonal environment—increased insulin secretion or increased sensitivity to insulin—that tilts the balance of fat storage and fat burning. This hypothesis also implies that the only way to lose body fat successfully is to reverse the process; to create a hormonal environment in which fatty acids are mobilized and oxidized in excess of the amount stored. A further implication is that any therapy that succeeds at inducing long-term fat loss—not including toxic substances and disease—has to work through these local regulatory factors on the adipose tissue.

What’s been clear for almost forty years is that the levels of circulating insulin in animals and humans will be proportional to body fat. “The leaner an individual, the lower his basal insulin, and vice versa,” as Stephen Woods, now director of the Obesity Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, and his colleague Dan Porte observed in 1976. “This relationship has also been shown to occur in every commonly used model of altered body weight, including…genetically obese rodents and overfed humans. In fact, the relationship is sufficiently robust that it exists in the presence of widespread metabolic disorder, such as diabetes mellitus, i.e., obese diabetics have elevated basal insulin levels in proportion to their body weight.

Le Magnen’s research resulted in two fundamental observations, both confirming Adolph’s observation that eating behavior in animals, and thus hunger, is driven by those “quantitative deficiencies of currently metabolized materials.

Le Magnen had demonstrated that insulin is the driver of this diurnal cycle of hunger, satiety, and energy balance.

Both hunger, or the urge to eat, and satiety, or the inhibition of eating, are compensatory responses to these insulin-driven cycles of fat storage followed by fat mobilization. Insulin secretion is released in the morning upon waking and drives us to eat, Le Magnen concluded, and it ebbs after the last meal of the day to allow for prolonged sleep without hunger.

This hypothesis of eating behavior did away with set points and lipostats and relied instead on the physiological notion of hunger as a response to the availability of internal fuels and to the hormonal mechanisms of fuel partitioning. Hunger and satiety are manifestations of metabolic needs and physiological conditions at the cellular level, and so they’re driven by the body, no matter how much we like to think it’s our brains that are in control.

When researchers have measured seasonal variations in insulin levels in humans, they have invariably reported that insulin is highest in late fall and early winter—twice as high, according to one 1984 study—and lowest in late spring and early summer. Moreover, as the University of Colorado’s Robert Eckel has reported, lipoprotein-lipase activity in fat tissue elevates in late fall and decreases in spring and summer; its activity in skeletal muscle follows an opposite pattern. This would stimulate weight loss in the spring and weight gain in the fall, whether we consciously desire either or not, and would certainly make it easier to lose weight in the spring and gain it in the fall.

Palatability, by this logic, is a learned response, conditioned largely by hunger, which in turn is a response to the pattern of insulin secretion and the availability of fatty acids and/or glucose in the circulation.

the hypothesis simply failed to explain how the brain manages to monitor our fat stores, and then raise or lower food intake and energy expenditure in response. Saying that we’re all endowed with a lipostat that monitors our adiposity and then regulates hunger appropriately is just another way of saying that our weight remains remarkably stable, whether we’re lean or obese, and then assigning the cause to a mysterious mechanism in the brain whose function is to achieve this stability.

This “harmony of tissue metabolisms” is orchestrated by the hypothalamus, via the central nervous system and the endocrine system of hormones. These regulate the filling and emptying of the various storage depots in response to an environment that might require that we suddenly expend more or less energy, or store more or less fat, to accommodate seasonal variations.

will secrete insulin in response to the mere taste of a sweet substance, and it doesn’t matter whether it is sugar or a no-calorie sugar substitute. The perceived taste of sweetness is sufficient to stimulate insulin secretion.

Harry Potter books are generally passed off as great literature, since most adults are now only capable of reading children's books. Television programming targets the lowest common denominator in order to sell products to the largest number of people. The less informed the population, the easier they are to manipulate. Fed a constant diet of "entertainment" sans any intellectual challenge, the mind stops growing and starts to wither

In the Base period, when training volume is relatively high and intensity is low, eating a diet rich in “good” fats is beneficial to improving your ability to burn fat for fuel while conserving glycogen stores—a physiological goal of training at this time of the season.

This half century of research unequivocally supported the alternative hypothesis of obesity. It established that the relevant energy balance isn’t between the calories we consume and the calories we expend, but between the calories—in the form of free fatty acids, glucose, and glycerol—passing in and out of the fat cells. If more and more fatty acids are fixed in the fat tissue than are released from it, obesity will result.

as this research had now made clear, the critical molecules determining the balance of storage and mobilization of fatty acids, of lipogenesis and lipolysis, are glucose and insulin—i.e., carbohydrates and the insulin response to those carbohydrates.

the amount of glycerol phosphate available to the fat cells to accumulate fat—to bind the fatty acids together into triglycerides and lock them into the adipose tissue—also depends directly on the carbohydrates in the diet. Dietary glucose is the primary source of glycerol phosphate. The more carbohydrates consumed, the more glycerol phosphate available, and so the more fat can accumulate.

Insulin works to deposit calories as fat and to inhibit the use of that fat for fuel. Dietary carbohydrates are required to allow this fat storage to occur. Since glucose is the primary stimulator of insulin secretion, the more carbohydrates consumed—or the more refined the carbohydrates—the greater the insulin secretion, and thus the greater the accumulation of fat. “Carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat,” as the Harvard endocrinologist George Cahill recently summed it up.

it is important to keep in mind that fructose is converted more efficiently into glycerol phosphate than is glucose. This is another reason why fructose stimulates the liver so readily to convert it to triglycerides, and why fructose is considered the most lipogenic carbohydrate.

the combination of glucose and fructose—either the 50–50 mixture of table sugar (sucrose) or the 55–45 mixture of high-fructose corn syrup—stimulates fat synthesis and fixes fat in the fat tissue more than does glucose alone, which comes from the digestion of bread and starches.

even low levels of insulin, far below those considered the clinical symptom of hyperinsulinemia (chronically high levels of insulin), will shut down the flow of fatty acids from the fat cells. Elevating insulin even slightly will increase the accumulation of fat in the cells. The longer insulin remains elevated, the longer the fat cells will accumulate fat, and the longer they’ll go without releasing it.

four facts had been established beyond reasonable doubt: (1) carbohydrates are singularly responsible for prompting insulin secretion; (2) insulin is singularly responsible for inducing fat accumulation; (3) dietary carbohydrates are required for excess fat accumulation; and (4) both Type 2 diabetics and the obese have abnormally elevated levels of circulating insulin and a “greatly exaggerated” insulin response to carbohydrates in the diet,

The obvious implication is that obesity and Type 2 diabetes are two sides of the same physiological coin, two consequences, occasionally concurrent, of the same underlying defects—hyperinsulinemia and insulin resistance.

Instead of a savings account for unneeded surplus, as fat deposits have commonly been described, a coin purse would be a far closer analogy. Fat tissues contain the ready cash for all the expenditures of the organism. Only when the organism does not or cannot draw on the ready cash for its daily business is it put into depots, and excessive replenishment, through overeating, takes place.

Why is fat deposited in the adipose tissue to accumulate in excess of its mobilization for fuel use? Once again, this has little to do with calories consumed or expended, but addresses the questions of how the cells utilize these calories and how the body regulates its balance between fat deposition and mobilization, between lipogenesis (the creation of fat) and lipolysis (the breakdown of triglycerides into fatty acids, their escape from the fat tissue, and their subsequent use as fuel).

research finally established the dominant role of fatty acids in supplying energy for the body, and the fundamental role of insulin and adipose tissue as the regulators of energy supply.

Hormones modify this flow of fatty acids back and forth across the membranes of the fat cells, and they modify the expenditure of energy by the tissues and organs. Hormones, and particularly insulin—“even in trace amounts,” as Ernst Wertheimer explained—“have powerful direct effect on adipose tissue.

it quickly became clear that insulin was what Yalow and Berson called “the principal regulator of fat metabolism.” Insulin stimulates the transport of glucose into the fat cells, thereby effectively controlling the production of glycerol phosphate, the fixing of free fatty acids as triglycerides, and all that follows.

The one fundamental requirement to increase the flow of fatty acids out of adipose tissue—to increase lipolysis—and so decrease the amount of fat in our fat tissue, is to lower the concentration of insulin in the bloodstream.

When insulin is secreted, or the level of insulin in the circulation is abnormally elevated, fat accumulates in the fat tissue. When insulin levels are low, fat escapes from the fat tissue, and the fat deposits shrink.

All other hormones will work to release fatty acids from the fat tissue, but the ability of these hormones to accomplish this job is suppressed almost entirely by the effect of insulin and blood sugar.

In fact, virtually anything that increases the secretion of insulin will also suppress the secretion of hormones that release fat from the fat tissue.

Eating carbohydrates, for example, not only elevates insulin but inhibits growth-hormone secretion; both effects lead to greater fatty-acid storage in the fat tissue.

Adipose tissue is no longer considered a static tissue,” wrote the Swiss physiologist Albert Renold, who coedited the Handbook of Physiology; “it is recognized as what it is: the major site of active regulation of energy storage and mobilization, one of the primary control mechanisms responsible for the survival of any given organism.

anything that works to transport more glucose into the fat cells—insulin, for example, or rising blood sugar—will lead to the conversion of more fatty acids into triglycerides, and the storage of more calories as fat.

Cleave’s desire for simplicity led him to theorize that any cluster of diseases so intimately associated must have a single underlying cause. Darwin’s theory of evolution led Cleave to believe that endemic chronic disease must be caused by a relatively rapid change in our environment to which we had not yet adapted. He called this idea “The Law of Adaptation”: species require “an adequate period of time for adaptation to take place to any unnatural (i.e., new) feature in the environment,” he wrote, “so that any danger in the feature should be assessed by how long it has been there.” The refining of carbohydrates represented the most dramatic change in human nutrition since the introduction of agriculture. “Whereas cooking has been going on in the human race for probably 200,000 years,” Cleave said, “there is no question yet of our being adapted to the concentration of carbohydrates…. Such processes have been in existence little more than a century for the ordinary man and from an evolutionary point of view this counts as nothing at all.” Cleave

We all know the secret of dieting—eat better, eat less, exercise more—it’s the application that’s challenging. I had to create a scheme to put happiness ideas into practice in my life.

Accountability With Friends   In many areas of life there's a battle between doing the thing that will work very effectively to solve a specific problem in the short term versus doing that which will take longer to become effective but will solve many problems in the long term. For example, building up willpower is extremely slow, but once you have a high capacity for it, you can do a lot of difficult things outside your routine. If you have low or normal willpower, you will rely exclusively on habits to get a lot done.   Similarly, it's a good practice to build up the ability to be accountable entirely to yourself, but if you're unable to do that, or for habits that are very long term or very difficult, you can ask a friend to help you be accountable.   A good friend of mine, Leo Babauta, who is a master of habits and is excellent at being accountable to himself, asked me to help him stay accountable for his diet because he was trying to eat a perfect diet for a full six months. That's a very difficult challenge, but having someone to stay accountable to makes it slightly easier.   Earlier this year I wanted to completely eliminate all non-work web browsing for three months, so I asked a friend to hold me accountable. It worked, and I'm not sure I would have been able to do it without him.   When asking a friend to hold you accountable, make it concrete and easy for him. It must be concrete, because you don't want to impose on him to constantly evaluate your progress. Either Leo ate sugar or he didn't. Either I visited a web site or I didn't. You must also report your progress at regular intervals. Leo created a shared spreadsheet where I could see whether he ate properly each day.   Last, there must be consequences for failure. The primary purpose of having consequences is that they make the agreement official and definite. People remember bets, but forget offhand claims. My friend bet me $50 I couldn't stay off the web sites for three months. Without the bet, I doubt he would have kept track of it if he had just said, “I don't think you can do it”. Since your friend is doing you a favor, be willing to make a one-sided bet where he has no downside.   Reserve accountability for only the most difficult and important of your habits. It increases compliance, but at the cost of coordinating (albeit minimally) with someone else. It's also a missed opportunity to build the habit of self-reliance, so use it only when there's serious concern that you may not stick with the habit without it.   Habitualizing

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they also make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise an experiment, they can see, in its results, only a confirmation of their theory. In this way they distort observation and often neglect very important facts because they do not further their aim…. But it happens further quite naturally that men who believe too firmly in their theories, do not believe enough in the theories of others. So the dominant idea of these despisers of their fellows is to find others’ theories faulty and to try to contradict them. The difficulty, for science, is still the same. CLAUDE