Probably the most common New Years resolution is about getting rid of those extra pounds that have somehow accumulated over the past few years.  It might be that 10 extra pounds that added on after that last baby was born, or it might be that 50+ pound beer belly.  Any way you look at it, it is a statement that your health is not optimal and your diet is not matching you body's needs.

Is that weight really such a big deal?  In a word, yes.  Every one of those fat cells is a little factory that pumps out inflammatory chemicals.  Those chemicals underlie most all of our modern diseases of affluence - heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer's, dementia, arthritis, and even cancer.  The actual list is pages long, but you get the idea.  Inflammation is the basis of modern disease.  In this country we are pretty much past the days when plague and pestilence were the main health concerns.  Modern sanitation has solved most of that.

Other cells generate inflammatory chemicals at times, but fat cells do it for a living.  It is a hard concept to wrap our heads around, but our body is a system of balances, and a little bit of inflammation is necessary for health.  For this reason a little fat is necessary for health - about 18% for men and 22% for women.  Now not all fat is equal.  The fat around our waist is far more dangerous than fat on the hips and legs.  So for women (on average) you want to keep the waist measurement under 31.5 inches and for men under 37 inches.  Obviously if you are very petite, those numbers would be smaller.  For you beer belly guys, that measurement is at your widest point.  The fact that you have a small butt and can slip a size 32 Levi's under the belly does not count.

Just as a side note, there is a growing awareness of something called  underweight obesity.  Yes you can have a nice slim figure and still be obese.  Obesity is about percentage of body fat and where it is hiding.  The current generation of high carb/low fat and protein diets is producing people with fat replacing their muscles and healthy organ tissue.  They might be even slightly underweight and yet still packing 40% body fat.

Is 2013 the year that we say goodbye to those unwanted pounds?

The science around weight loss is huge.  Massive amounts of dollars have been spent trying to find a way around the basic reality of IF YOU EAT TOO MUCH YOU WILL GAIN WEIGHT.  Everybody wants to ignore the obvious truth in this statement because it tells us that TO LOSE WEIGHT YOU HAVE TO EAT LESS.

Long ago food stopped being about nutrition in this country.  Food is a drug delivery system.  Those of us carrying too much weight are addicted to the drugs in the foods we are eating.  So the last thing we want to do is EAT LESS.  That is as useful as telling the alcoholic to just drink less.

We have become so enmeshed in our modern food culture that we don't even recognize the drugs when we see them.  We actually think they are food.  What am I talking about?  I am talking about the food like chemicals that we have introduced into the human diet in the last couple hundred years. Number one on that list is sugar.  Number two is seed oils (also called vegetable oils).  Number three is modern flour.  Number four is pasteurized homogenized dairy.  Number five is unfermented soy products in all their forms.  Number six is artificial flavors, preservatives, colors, texturing agents, and the like. Number seven is factory-farmed meats.  Number eight is genetically modified foods.  The list goes on.

Humans are designed to eat fresh foods the way nature provides them.  Cooking some foods actually improves their nutrition.  Combining foods with herbs and spices also increases the nutrition.  But what we have done to our food supply over the last couple hundred years has all but destroyed the nutrition and instead produced addictive food drugs that stimulate us to eat more than we need.  This is the basic reason our nation is obese, and we are all dying of diseases caused by too much inflammation from these food drugs.

Let us use sugar as a poster child for the modern diet.  Sugar was almost unknown in the average person's diet until a couple hundred years ago.  Numerous studies have demonstrated the highly addictive nature of sugar.  In fact some studies show sugar is more addictive than cocaine.  The rise of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and so on directly parallels the increase in the consumption of sugar in every country it is introduced into. 

New research I have been reading is showing how sugar produces these diseases.  The fructose in sugar creates increases in uric acid in the body which then induces insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and stimulates the brain to crave more sugar.  Fructose has the exact same effect on the liver as alcohol.  The liver can only process 15 grams of fructose a day without damage - that is one third of a can of soda.

I suggest that if you want to lose weight in 2013 you completely eliminate sugar from your diet.  It is so addictive, there is no safe level you can eat.

Much of the modern scientific research about weight gain is centered on inflammation.  Fat cells not only produce inflammation, but any other source of inflammation stimulates us to grow more fat - especially around the middle.  Many of our modern foods generate massive amounts of inflammation.  Seed oils high in omega-6 oils are especially good at this. Factory farmed animals, poultry, and fish that are fed these seeds and grains end up full of these inflammatory oils as well as all the antibiotics and growth hormones used on them. 

Other modern foods are simply poisonous or highly allergenic, like pasteurized homogenized dairy, soy, GMO foods, and artificial additives.  The same is true of the flours that have been chemically altered to make them work better in assembly line bakeries. 

Allergies are a major source of unwanted weight gain.  Food sensitivities are an even larger problem, as sensitivities don't show up on standard allergy testing but still kick up all kinds of immune inflammatory problems in the body.  Specialized blood tests are now available for food sensitivities, but because of the number of foods to be tested, they are costly - $3 to $5 per food item.

So what are we to do if we are serious about loosing the dangerous fat weight that produces inflammation and the host of modern disease?  The answer is really simple, and one no one wants to hear.
Only eat real, whole, fresh foods, freshly prepared to be healthy. 
To lose weight - do the same thing but eat less than you need. 
If you only have 5 to 10 pounds to lose then just switching to a fresh food diet may reduce your inflammation levels enough to let you drop the unwanted pounds.  But if you have a significant amount to lose, like it or not, calories do count.  You have to eat less than you need each day to get your body to burn some of its stored fat.

Completely avoid the foods I was describing above.  They are poisonous and they burn your body.  Inflammation is literally a slow chemical burning process.  This is important if you are fighting an infection or swelling to close a wound, but when it moves to your whole body it is bad news.  And a daily diet of these foods does just that.

Personally I follow a low carb paleo diet.  The idea is to eat the foods that our ancestors ate 10,000 years ago combined with putting my body into a maximum fat burning mode by keeping my carbohydrate consumption below 20 grams per day.  This combination provides the benefits of a steady energy supply with the increased liver detoxification typical of fasting states. 

I understand that very few of us have the time to prepare three fresh meals each day.  Ellen and I usually prepare most of our food for the week on Sunday in a couple of hours.  Eating fresh means buying fresh and cooking fresh. That means eating lots of vegetables - usually as soups because I am not really a raw veggie kind of guy.  We might cook up an organic chicken, or some organic beef.  I bake up almond flour bread and crackers.  And Ellen usually mixes up a big batch of wild caught salmon salad or fresh pastured egg salad to go on the crackers.  Throw in the occasional salad and that usually covers us for the week.  Every morning starts with a fresh almond milk smoothie with egg protein powder, chia seeds, raw cacao, and moringa leaf powder all sweetened with my Supersweet Powder.  Everything is packed in glass airtight containers for use as we need them.

The single biggest driving force behind the poisoning of our food supply (besides greed) is the desire to preserve our foods and make them convenient.  Healthy fresh food rots as it gets older.  So we have substituted healthy fresh food with unhealthy, chemically altered foods that don't go bad easily.  That makes for a nice presentation in the store, but not for a nice presentation in our gut.  Modern diseases are the price we pay for our desire for convenience.  To be healthy and to lose weight in a healthy manner you really have to prepare your own food or eat in restaurants that specialize in fresh food preparation. 

Basic ingredients for a healthy diet can be found at your grocer, but pre-made meals won't cut it.  Generally if it can sit on a shelf for more than a week, don't eat it.  If it is made with wheat, corn, soy, dairy, vegetable oils, or has chemicals in it, don't eat it.  And biggest of all, if it has sugar in it no matter what name they want to hide it under, don't eat it.  If you are not sure about the sugar, look at the nutrition label.  It will list how much sugar is in the product per serving.  How much is safe?  None.

So what is my number one New Years resolution?

Good luck and Happy New Year

David    

We will be closed  Jan. 7th & 8th while I continue to recover from hernia surgery.  Ellen will be out of the office Jan. 7th through the 10th.  Susan and Lorena will be working as usual.

 

Take care,

David            

Fructose triggers overeating

New brain imaging studies have shown that fructose does not turn off the areas of the brain for reward and desire for more food while glucose does.  Even though the fructose is twice as sweet as glucose, it does not satisfy us.  We just keep on eating.

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Brew Your Own...Clothes?!
 
I highly recommend Kombucha as a healthy probiotic beverage.  But I never thought of this one - brewing Kombucha to make clothing!  Those of you that have tried brewing kombucha at home know that on the surface of the big jar of sweetened tea is a slimy pancake known as the mother.  Well it seems that when dried it forms a vegetable leather that can be fashioned into clothes.  Here is a story of one woman that is doing exactly that.

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Cardboard Bikes

We take easy transportation for granted.  But much of the world still travels on foot everywhere.  But now an Israeli inventor has come up with a bicycle made from cardboard that is stronger than carbon fiber and can be made for only $9.  In fact, since it uses recycled materials, government funding for the recycling will likely make the bicycles able to be produced at no cost to impoverished countries.  Imagine bringing cheap or free transportation to populations that have been limited to foot traffic forever.    

 "Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well. "

~Josh Billings

About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years.  He began experimenting with  medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis.  In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education.  Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic.  He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice. 
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health. 
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities. 
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth.  The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework.  Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Dr David DeLapp DC
Chiropractor

Ellen Flowers FGM
Spiritual Life Coach

 

 

Catherine Cummings

 

 

Jin Shin Jitsu

 

 

Lorena Morales

 

 

Massage Practitioner

 

 

 

 

 Is there a sweet that is not poisonous?  Yes!


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