FOHAC News Positive Stress II #244a

Published: Thu, 04/17/14

Fair Oaks Health News

Welcome

April 17, 2014

Positive Stress II

Hi ,

Your body is an amazing system of checks and balances designed to keep you healthy in the middle of an environment of constant change. In spite of libraries full of research data, we have just scratched the surface in understanding the complex wonder that is the human body.

One thing we have come to understand is that stress has profound effects on the body. When we usually think of stress, we think of something that shuts down or inflames the body to produce health issues. But not all stress is bad. Stress is vital feedback for the body so that it can adapt to its environment. For instance, without gravitational stress on our bones they get thin and weak. It is the stress of gravity on the bones that signals the body to grow more bone to keep the bones from bending and breaking under the weight of your body.

Generally our body gears up to meet the challenge of a short-lived acute stress. It is the chronic long lasting stresses that really tear us down. Because our body gears up and takes on the short lived stress, these are seen as positive stresses as they strengthen and build our body to greater levels of health.

Choosing variety over routine can help our bodies thrive. In fact, when our bodies face the same kinds of challenges day after day, it can cause them to break down. Why? Because the human body is intelligent: chronic stress tells the body it will need energy to deal with the stress for a long time, so it tries to conserve energy for later. Chronic stress leads the body to sacrifice tissues that are not absolutely necessary for survival, and store the energy they would use to deal with the chronic stressors the body

is facing. This means that our bodies will lose "expensive" muscle tissue, and store as much fat as possible instead. So when we fall into routine, especially when afflicted by chronic stress, our bodies' eliminate whatever is not being used for survival. Our bodies are telling us, "Use it, or lose it!"

Acute stress, on the other hand, that is constantly changing tells the body that it needs all its strength in all its muscles because it never knows what it will need from moment to moment. To really see this, look at the bodies of marathon runners compared to sprinters. Marathon runners get very lean and lanky as their bodies eliminate any muscles not necessary for running. Sprinters keep their muscles all over their bodies.

How does this relate to you today? Spring is officially here, so most people want to shape up in preparation for summer. This article is to give you some tips built from this understanding of positive stress to help you get in shape most effectively. (Hint: Hours of cardio are not a good idea.)

The first thing people tend to think about in the early spring is loosing weight. This is natural since the winter months of holidays and less sunlight tend to pack on a few pounds. The question I am looking at is do you need to lose weight for health reasons? Everyone seems to think they need to lose weight for social reasons - you know the "You can never be too thin or too rich" consciousness.

Health concerns about excess weight have to do with increased inflammation promoting diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. This is tied specifically to fat that accumulates around your liver and intestines. Fat on your arms or legs does not have much relationship to increased health issues. The simplest test for you to do to test if you need to lose weight has to do with your waist size. The International Diabetes Federation pegs dangerous weight levels for women at a waist size over 32 inches and men over 36 inches. The Heart association gives you another 3 inches for waist size relating to significant heart disease increases.

The other factor looked at is waist to hip size ratios. Everyone should have their waist smaller than their hips - 15% smaller for women and 10% smaller for men. If your waist is equal to or greater than your hip size, then you have a buildup of abdominal inflammatory fat that is slowly poisoning your body. Yes those fat cells constantly leak out metabolic inflammatory poisons 24/7.

Chronic stress is probably the biggest cause of this type of weight gain. Unfortunately typical calorie restriction dieting is a chronic stress and sets you up for long term inflammation. The trick to turning this around is to use the positive stress approach to weight loss. Short-term stresses build up the body by up-regulating metabolic pathways. What might that look like? How about only eating 500 calories 2 or 3 days a week and eating normally the rest of the time? This type of intermittent fasting works as well or better than cutting down to 1000 calories a day every day and does not produce the yo-yo weight regain bounce after the diet ends from the chronic stress. Another approach is eating all your food in an 8-hour window each day such as between 11am and 6 p.m. The 16 hours without food is a brief positive stress that stimulates poison removal from the body.

Another area to look at chronic versus positive short-term stress is with exercise. Folks that want to get in shape are always telling me that they need to hit the gym for an hour a day to get the weight off. Well the studies have shown that this does not actually work. Cardio and standard workouts do not help with weight loss. At best a constant moderate workout for an hour will only burn 400 calories - that is 1/9th of a pound of fat. The depletion of muscle and blood glucose caused by the workout will make you so hungry that you will eat as much or more than you burned over the course of the day after the exercise.

Exercising for an hour is a negative stress to your body. Negative stresses signal the body to gain weight in anticipation of more chronic stress in the future. Your body only has two ways to assess stress based on its ancient survival programs - is the stress immediate and short-term like running away from a wild boar, or is it chronic and long term like winter starvation coming on. Short term stress triggers the body to get stronger and lighter so that you can run faster and fight harder, while chronic stress tells the body to conserve energy by eliminating unnecessary muscle mass and storing food for the times of stress ahead.

How could we apply the principles of positive stress to exercise? The answer is all the rage now, but was totally unknown 20 years ago when I first started teaching it to patients. I learned about it as bear sprints. Pretend you are being chased by a bear. Basically you have 20 to 30 seconds to get to safety or be eaten. This is how our ancestors exercised. Nobody went to the gym and nobody wasted his or her valuable energy jogging for hours. They were hunters and would run very fast to chase down dinner in brief 20 to 30 second sprints or run away from becoming some other creature's dinner.

These days this type of exercise has been labeled HIIT - High Intensity Interval Training. In fact the latest issue of Prevention magazine, they promoted their idea of a great 8-minute HIIT workout. Basically the idea is to do 20 to 30 seconds of intense exercise followed by 10 to 90 seconds of rest and then repeat this cycle 5 to 8 times. Your whole exercise program lasts only 4 to 10 minutes and then you rest for 48 hours between exercises to allow the muscles recover. Over training is a serious chronic stress on the body so you must not stress the muscles between sessions by trying to sneak in extra sessions. More is not better. More is just unwanted negative stress.

Now the Internet is full if HIIT programs. Just type in HIIT exercise on youtube.com and see tons of videos. Most any exercise movement can be used and you can even use a different exercise with each 20 to 30 second cycle. Here is a low impact HIIT program to avoid injury.HIIT Youtube video

Personally I have been doing HIIT on the elliptical machine at my gym. I then like to do heavy weights - one set to exhaustion on each of the major muscle groups. It takes me about half an hour two times a week.

If you are just starting out, you can do just 5 to 10 seconds of something as fast as you can and then rest for a couple minutes before your next 5 to 10 second burst of activity. Do this five times and call it good. Gradually increase you hard exercise time to 20 to 30 seconds as you get stronger.

The big picture key here is the principle of positive stress - the use of brief focused stress based on breaking the normal flow of things to adapt to and overcome this short-term stressor. This builds and supports your system. Chronic long-term stress of any sort breaks down our system even if we think it should be good for us.

Enjoy

David

Ultrasound Physical Therapy

Now available in the office

Tuesday afternoons and Fridays

On the Wire

More muscle = living longer

Part of the results of a 20 year nutrition and health study are finding that the more muscle you have the less likely you are to die. The big medical focus for years has been obesity as a cause of early death, but these results say that body composition is just as important as fat level. It is not enough to be low in fat, but you need to have plenty of muscle instead of fat. So build up your muscle levels with body weight exercises like squats and pushups and lifting heavy things safely.

Muscles = lifespan

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"If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes."

~ John Wooden

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Zinc reduces aluminum brain poisoning

Aluminum has been linked to brain poisoning that causes diseases like Alzheimer's dementia. Recent research shows that zinc supplementation acts to decrease the effect aluminum has on brain cells. Zinc is necessary for over 300 different functions in the body. The most obvious is zinc is needed for you to be able to digest your protein meals properly. If you are curious we do a simple zinc taste test in the office - no charge for the month of April.

Zinc

"In times of great stress or adversity, it's always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive."

~ Lee Iacocca

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Pups Poop Along North-South Magnetic Lines

Bacon-Scented iPhone Alarm

Probably the most heavenly thing a guy can wake up to in the morning is the smell of freshly cooked bacon. Oscar Mayer knows this and has invented the world's first bacon smell alarm clock as an app for your iPhone. According to Oscar Mayer's website, its Wake Up & Smell The Bacon essence is inspired by "bacon of the highest caliber," which is "sliced with the cleaver of destiny, for your morning's finest aroma."

Bacon

"Adopting the right attitude can convert a negative stress into a positive one."

~ Hans Selye

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Our address is 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd.

Finding the new location is very easy. Coming from highway 50 up Sunrise Blvd, you turn left and go up a block. We are on the right hand side - the building just past the Subway Sandwich shop. If you are coming down Sunrise from the Mall area then just turn right on Fair Oaks Blvd and up a block on the right.

If you are coming from the Roseville area you could come down Sunrise Blvd, but that is a long trek. It is probably shorter time wise to come down Auburn Blvd - San Juan Ave like you have been for the Sunset office, but instead of turning left at Sunset, keep going straight 3 more lights to Fair Oaks Blvd and turn left. Go down 2 lights to New York Ave, go through the intersection, and immediately turn into the turn lane once the center divider ends. We are on the left.

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visit http://www.fairoakshealth.com"

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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.

Fair Oaks Healing
& Arts Center
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