MCVitamins News

Your Nutritional Education Site

1. Dieting To Lose Weight? What are the facts surrounding diet failure?
2. What is good health?  Ingredients for Good Health
3. Participants Motivated to Sit Less, Move More by Pedometer Program
4. Changes in the Knees & Hips

People often struggle with various diets in an attempt to bring there overweight problem under control. The results are usually a lot of effort and little long-term success. The following article will shed some light on why the usual approaches to dieting lead to failures:

"As a rule, diet books are based on two assumptions about dieting. The first is that diets do not affect the speed at which the body works - the metabolic rate. The second is that the weight lost on a diet is all or almost all fat. These are not true."

"Much of the weight lost on a diet is not fat; and any initial fast weight loss includes almost no loss of fat."

"Initial weight loss on a diet is no mystery. The loss consists principally of glycogen (a form of glucose in a water solution), as well as additional water."

"Diets slow down the metabolic rate."

"In our minds we know the difference between going on a diet and being subjected to famine or starvation. But our bodies do not know the difference. When we go on a diet we activate the mechanisms in the body that protect us and preserve us in times of famine. And what does the body need to keep it going between times of famine? Fat. The more people diet the more their bodies will protect the stores of fat."

excerpted from Dieting Makes You Fat
by Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Einzig

The solution to bringing one's weight under control is to adopt an eating program suited to your body's needs, a dietary program that more closely matches the food that our bodies evolved with, which is a high protein, low carbohydrate diet, which is high in vegetables and salads.

This type of diet is also diabetic-safe and you can find recipes that match these high protein and low carbohydrate requirements at www.Diabete-support.com. Recipes that are both tasty and easy to prepare.
and you don't have to be diabetic to follow this diet.

For more information on diets and health - go to

www.mcvitamins.com 

What is good health?  Ingredients for Health

Health is the optimum operation of all your organs and cells.    If you viewed your health on a scale: 

100% - Perfect Health
80%
60% 
40% 
20% 
O% - Death

100% would be perfect health.  Everything functioned just the way it should.  You would have lots of energy and would not have attention on your body.  It would just work.  On the bottom of your scale =  0% would be the non-functioning of all your cells and your body.  This would be Death.

Now what about all those ranges in between?   Well, around 20%, on your way down, you would go into the realm of Disease.   This is the Medical Doctor's area of expertise and where they save people from incapacity and death.    The Medical Doctors are experts in this area and their tests and protocols will handle these situations.   This is where their energies are placed. 

100% - Perfect Health
80%
60% 
40% 
20% - Disease  
O% - Death

But, have you ever felt really bad,  you're not functioning at you best, you've got aches and pains, maybe you're really tired all the time.  You go to see your medical doctor and he/she does all the standard tests and they are all normal.   You may even take some highly sophisticated tests and they still show within the normal range.   But, you feel bad......

Well, you're in that range somewhere below 100% and above 20%.   Here is where you aren't in the range of disease, but in something we like to call dis-ease.   It isn't life threatening, but it threatens your well being and ability to live happily.

Around 80%, things aren't bad, but not perfect,  Around 60% you start getting those aches and pains and other non-optimal feelings.   You start feeling bad.

100% - Perfect Health
80% - Less than perfect
60% - Dis - Ease 
40% - Dis - Ease
20% - Disease  
O% - Death

How do you stop the plummet down the scale?  Well, you pay attention to what you eat.   You pay attention to the poisons in the air and the poisons you put in your body.    You find out what foods you need, or what supplements you need and start up the ladder again.   You make sure you exercise your body.

The body given the right fuel will run optimally.    Each cell will run well and the DNA will make a new perfect cell when it is time to reproduce itself.  However, if you don't give it the right nutritional ingredients, it won't be able to make a perfect copy.  

How does that work?

As an example, let's say you hired a contractor and asked him to build you a perfect replica of the Taj Mahal.   He could do it, he is that good a contractor.  He knows the tools of his trade.    But,  the only materials you give him was plywood and nails.    He would do the best he could, but he wouldn't build that perfect replica.  And it wouldn't stand up the way the original has.

You get the picture?    Well, why would your body behave differently .   If you only give it sugar,  caffeine, and an imbalance of what it needs, it isn't going to build really good cells that are capable of doing their job.

You can read in our article on Health Tips, about getting good food and about the fact that you can't always get the best food.    As we say throughout this site, we know you can't always eat well.   The answer supplementation.

Let's get back up the scale

Lots of non-optimum conditions are the result of years and years of poor eating.  Giving the body "plywood" instead of what it really needs to survive well.  

What can you do about it?   Start giving your body the vital ingredients it  has been depleted of.   Continue to give your body all the ingredients it needs to build a healthy body.   Stop giving it that "plywood" and give it what it some "steel".  Or if there isn't a lot of good "steel" around, give it concentrated nutrients - supplementation.   

Now the body is a bit more complicated.  It needs a lot of ingredients to create good health. 

Ingredients for health

There are forty nutrients that cannot be made in the body. They are essential fatty acids, 15 vitamins, 14 minerals, and 10 amino acids. Collectively these forty nutrients are spoken of as the body's requirements. From these our bodies synthesize an estimated 10,000 different compounds essential to the maintenance of health.  All the forty nutrients work together, therefore, the lack of any one might result in the underproduction of hundreds of these essential compounds. Probably no one nutrient is ever totally lacking from an otherwise adequate diet, but partial simultaneous deficiencies of many nutrients is common.

Now, you have to remember that it took years and years of bad eating and living in a polluted environment to bring the body into the condition that will produce non-optimum health conditions, and thus, you can't take the correct vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and amino acids for a day or two and expect to handle the situation.   True sometimes just a day or two makes you feel much much better because you've given your body those things it most needs.

But. supplements aren't drugs, they don't create instant results. Nutrition, both food and supplements, supply the body with those things it needs to build the cells that will make the body function correctly.

So, maybe it might take a few months to start seeing real changes, but you will see those changes.   One rule of thumb is that it will take you one month for each year that you have had a non-optimum health condition to make a change.   But, then again,  the body is resilient and it can start re-building and changing things very quickly.     But, remember, your body needs these things every day to function.  Don't drop our your supplement regiment because you feel better.  Start paying attention to what you eat, and make sure you take those vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids that are missing in your diet.

Now that you know the basics of supplementation, we want to introduce you to our index on Health Conditions and what you can do about those non-optimum body problems. 

Health Conditions Index

Health Index

Participants Motivated to Sit Less, Move More by Pedometer Program

The more time you spend sitting, the greater your risk of heart disease, diabetes and other chronic disease becomes

Core-muscle exercises such as those taught in Foundation Training can also help you buffer the effects of prolonged sitting

Simple tech gadgets like pedometers and heart rate monitors can help you to take control of your health

Pedometer Program

Changes in the Knees & Hips and what to do

Between knees and hips, it's difficult to say which area is more prone to degenerative changes as we age, but in my experience, it's far easier to protect your hips than your knees.
 
Knees are relatively simple - they are hinge joints, meaning that they are designed to work in one major plane, and generally, they wear down in predictable fashion.  The more you grind them through daily life, the weaker your cartilage and ligaments become.  Your knees are not well vascularized compared to other major joints in your body, so there isn't
a lot you can do by way of stretching and massage to significantly improve blood flow to the cartilage within and the ligaments that wrap around your knee joints.  
 
Hips are ball-in-socket joints, and are far more complexthan knees. Your hips will also deteriorate according to how much weight-bearing activity you put them through over the years, but their rate of degeneration varies widely according to how healthy surrounding muscles and ligaments are.  When the dozens of muscles and ligaments that wrap around your hip joints are healthfully flexible and well perfused with blood, your hip joints are optimally protected against premature wear and tear.  Conversely, if you have chronically tight hip flexors, adductors, and rotators, as well as poor blood flow to the ligaments that stabilize your hip joints, the surfaces that make up your
hip joint articulations will experience more burden than they would with healthier surroundings. So to preserve your hips as you get older, it's vital that youtake care of surrounding muscles and ligaments through
regular stretching and massage.  This past week, I heard from yet another client who avoided complex hip surgery to repair a torn hip labrum by stretching and foam rolling both of his hips for half a year. As is typically the case, he went from being unable to rotate his left hip to doing the frog leg kick in the pool without any pain.
 
If you aren't yet stretching and rolling your hips and the rest of your major joints to preserve your physical health as you age, I encourage you to begin now, as it's a lot easier to stay limber than it is to get limber after your tissues have built up adhesions.
 
Two specific rolling exercises to begin with in your hip area can be found at the following pages:

http://drbenkim.com/how-to-stretch-inner-hip.htm
http://drbenkim.com/hip-flexor-stretch-pain-stiffness.htm

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To Your Health

MCVitamins
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