Dr. Jonny Bowden

Category: Weight-Loss

  • Is this common activity making you fat and sick?

              What if I told you that there was an activity that you probably spend seven or eight hours a day doing and that same activity was robbing you of your health, doubling your risk for diabetes and raising your levels of chronic inflammation?

    Well, there is such an activity, you do spend at least seven hours a day doing it, and it is robbing you of your health.. And guess what. It isn’t smoking. It isn’t drinking. It isn’t taking recreational drugs.

    Nope. It’s plain, old, garden-variety sitting.

    That’s right, sitting. And I’m not using “sitting” as a shorthand for “sedentary life”. Sitting for long periods of time is a health risk all its own. And even if you exercise every day you don’t get a free pass.

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    See, it’s not the one hour day you put in at the gym—it’s the eight hours a day you put in on your butt. We used to think that the problem with sitting around all day had to do with the fact that people who sit all day aren’t exercising and are generally leading sedentary lives. But it turns out it’s not just the absence of exercise, but the very act of sitting for extended periods of time that actually produces specific metabolic changes.

    When you sit in a chair all day, you start to feel lethargic. Why is that? Because red blood cells in your legs start clumping together, thickening inside your blood vessels and slowing your circulation. (This is why people on long airplane flights are advised to periodically get up and walk around.)

    Sitting around actually elevates your blood sugar, which as most of us know, is the beginning of a prescription for metabolic disaster. What’s more, there’s an enzyme responsible for fat breakdown called lipase that basically stops working when you sit around for long periods of time. Between the elevation of blood sugar and the impairment of lipase activity (fat burning) you’re basically a metabolic mess. And that may be why it’s so hard for people to lose weight, even when they exercise an hour a day and eat really well. Eight hours a day of doing something that creates a really bad metabolic situation can overpower even your best weight loss efforts.

    Let’s review—sitting doubles your risk for diabetes, lowers insulin sensitivity, and increases insulin and resistance. It lowers good HDL cholesterol by up to twenty percent. It slows blood flow, raises blood sugar and increases inflammation.

    What can you do?

    Number one: Plan your hours. Cornell’s Allen Hedges recommends twenty minutes of sitting, eight minutes of standing, two minutes of walking—repeat and rinse. Even if you can approximate this, it’ll be beneficial. Taking a five to ten minute break every hour just to walk around or even standing at your desk are ways around the metabolic mess that comes with prolonged sitting.

    Number two: Take a walk. When you’re drawing a blank, and Angry Birds is calling you, just take a five minute walk. Research actually suggests that you’ll improve your creativity by up to sixty percent after doing so.

    Number three: Stand when you’re tired. Standing up focuses your attention. It gives your circulation a boost. There’s a structure in your brain called the ascending reticular activating system—a network of neurons in your cerebral cortex that actually enhance alertness—and standing fires that structure up.

    Number four: Get a standing desk. Or try sitting on a stability ball. Either is going to be a big improvement over sitting on a conventional desk chair because you’re using stabilizing muscles that you wouldn’t normally use.

    The only goal of sitting should be to give your body a break from moving. So don’t make sitting your default activity.

    The more you can stand, stretch, and move around, the better off you will be.

     

     

  • Hormones and Weight Loss

    Hormones and Weight Loss

    The following is a guest article from my friend Glen Depke of Depke Wellness. Glen is a traditional naturopath, specializing in adrenal function.

     

    When we think about weight loss, we typically think about diet and exercise. Far too often the issue that is staring us back in the face is that the diet and exercise haven’t helped us achieve our weight loss goals.

    How can that be?

    After all, we’ve been told for years that if we are carrying too much weight and fat, we simply need to exercise more or eat less. Not so fast!

    Many of you reading this article have been watching your diet for years, and killing yourself at the gym, with what results? Perhaps minimal weight and fat loss if any.

    When I lived in the Chicago area, I used to work out at a specific gym and almost every time I went to the gym, regardless of the day, I saw this one particular young woman. We’ll call her Jane (obviously this was not her name.) Jane was actually going to college to become a dietician, so she was learning mainstream nutritional ideals, such as calories in/ calories out, cut back on sugar and eat more lean meat and less fat. Based on her studies she was also very aware that she had to burn more calories, so she simply had to work out harder. I would watch Jane every day go from the StairMaster, to the treadmill and sometimes back to the StairMaster for more. She would put a towel on the machines because she would simply be dripping with perspiration. Honestly, I have never seen somebody work so hard, yet never seem to budge with her weight and the same level of fat around her midsection and hips. Actually, it was disheartening to watch.

    So what was Jane’s problem?

    Was she not paying attention to her diet? Was she lazy with her workouts? Of course the answer to both of these questions was absolutely not!

    While I never had the pleasure of working with Jane to help her discover the core of her fat and weight loss challenges, I would bet the house that she had some significant hormonal imbalances.

    So that’s the simple answer, right? Hormone imbalance is the weight loss issue?

    Well, not so fast again. What hormones and from where? Are we talking about the thyroid and T3 and T4, are we talking about the ovaries and female hormones, perhaps for men the testes and testosterone, or maybe the pancreas and insulin. While all of these are of course playing a role, what we are really talking about here is adrenal function. Understand that your adrenal function will directly affect the pancreas, thyroid and ovaries. So while regulating thyroid hormones will assist your body’s metabolism and help with weight loss, the insulin produced in your pancreas will affect weight loss, and the female hormones produced in the ovaries will assist with weight loss. The common denominator affecting all of this is your adrenal function.

    And reason why is adrenal function the focal point when we have so many other glands in the endocrine system playing a role? The answer is simple. Your adrenal function will be a direct response to stress in your life, whether your stress is mental/emotional, inflammatory, infection, injury, chemical, environmental or even spiritual/vibrational. And who in our culture is not dealing with at least one if not many more of these stress levels? The adrenal gland function is most often the first to go, thus dragging down all the other glands and ultimately driving up your weight too!

    But that’s not all. Your adrenal function will actually play many roles in weight loss, beyond their affect on the above endocrine glands. Your adrenals will also affect your mucosal integrity and metabolism of fat and protein, thus hindering your body’s ability to regulate body weight and fat. The mucosal lining will impact digestion overall, as this lines the interior of your small intestines, which in turn will have a direct affect on your body’s ability to absorb and assimilate nutrients. In the end, this can leave you craving more food, and overweight. The poor metabolism of protein and fat will also have you sitting at the dinner table longer and more often because your body will be looking for more protein to convert to the amino acids, which are simply the building blocks of life, and more fat to fuel your body and enhance your brain function. After all, your brain is made up of fat and cholesterol. So please understand that poor adrenal function will simply lead to craving more food, more often.

    Another area of concern with weight loss as tied into your adrenal function is centered around inflammation. While most are under the impression that the weight you are carrying is fat, you might be surprised how much of your extra weight is actually due to inflammation. You may ask, what the heck does inflammation have to do with adrenal function? More than you may think! Actually, your adrenal function plays a direct role in both pro and anti-inflammatory states. So often I see clients that create inflammation as a part of a healthy immune response, only to be “stuck” in chronic inflammation because their adrenal function is so depleted that they cannot produce the needed cortisone, which is your body’s natural anti-inflammatory hormone.

    We can then take this one step further. The chronic inflammatory state leads to an increase in fat cell production, which leads to insulin resistance, which then creates insulin surges, and lastly creates more inflammation. Yikes! Right?

    This is an ugly cycle that so many people get into. But why can’t they get out? You guessed it, poor adrenal function.

    Beyond this, your adrenal function will also play a role in blood sugar balance, cellular energy (who doesn’t want more energy these days?), your quality of sleep and neural connectivity, all of which play a role in weight loss.

    So if you want to reach our fat and weight loss goals, do NOT forget your adrenal function. If you do, you are likely going to miss the weight loss boat. I wish I could have told Jane this years ago!

    If you question your adrenal function, you are welcome to take the Depke Wellness complimentary adrenal stress profile assessment.

     

    Glen Depke has made his Adrenal Assessment available to the  Jonny Bowden community for free. You can access it by clicking here.

     

  • Is Your Thyroid Holding You Back?

    The thyroid got a lot of attention in the media back in 2007 when Oprah Winfrey announced she had had a thyroid condition, and with good reason—the thyroid is your metabolic gatekeeper.

    This small, butterfly-shaped gland, located in your neck, is responsible for keeping your metabolism running smoothly. If it’s under-producing thyroid hormones—a condition known as hypothyroid—then your metabolic engine is idling really low, and fat gain is all but inevitable.

    “When the thyroid gland is releasing inadequate amounts of thyroid hormone to meet the body’s metabolic demands, the metabolic rate is therefore reduced,” writes David Brownstein, MD, one of the leading experts in the integrative treatment of thyroid disorders. In other words, your metabolism slows down. And that means fat-burning crawls to a standstill.

    “Thyroid hormone acts as the body’s metabolic regulator,” writes Brownstein, “every single muscle, organ and cell in the body depends on adequate thyroid hormone levels for achieving and maintaining optimal functioning.”4

    So what can slow the thyroid down?

    Glad you asked.

    The adrenal hormones- stress hormones like cortisol—can have a profound effect on thyroid function. If your adrenals are out of whack, it’s not surprising that your thyroid is as well. Diet also has a profound effect. “Constantly eating devitalized food will result in deficiencies of vitamins, minerals and other essential products and will inevitably lead to hormonal and immune system abnormalities,” writes Brownstein.

    Not surprisingly, he identifies sugar and refined carbohydrates among the major culprits.

    Brownstein also considers detoxification essential to a healthy, functioning thyroid (which, in turn, is essential for a healthy fat-burning metabolism).

    “One of the main reasons the thyroid gland can malfunction is from exposure to heavy metals, including mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic and nickel,” he writes. “These agents poison enzyme systems throughout the body and decrease the normal functioning of various organs and glands including the thyroid gland.

    Detoxifying the body and removing these harmful elements can vastly improve the overall picture of one’s health.”5 When you have a sugar-burning metabolism, it virtually guarantees that the thyroid won’t be working at optimal levels. What’s more, a sugar-burning metabolism is a fast track to leptin resistance, a condition where the brain simply doesn’t “hear” or listen to the signals from the appetite-regulating hormone, leptin.

    Leptin resistance is a fast track to being hungry all the time, since there’s a disconnect between the brain and the body—your fat cells and your tummy may be full, but your brain never gets the message. Since your brain thinks you’re starving—and no food is coming in—it makes an “executive decision” to conserve energy, which it does by slowing down the thyroid. Thus the vicious cycle continues.

    If all of this inter-connectedness is starting to make your head spin, it should—we’ve only just begun to understand how all of your fat burning hormones work together.

    But knowing every last detail of this isn’t important—what’s important is to understand that the hormones all work together and until, and unless, you take specific steps to get them all fixed, you’ll be stuck in sugar-burning, fat-gaining cycle.

    What to Do, What to Do?

    My most recent program, New You in 22, is specifically designed to trigger the hormones that burn fat, build or maintain muscle and keep you young and healthy while minimizing the hormones designed to pack fat on, eat away your muscle and age you faster. The promise of the program is to change your metabolism from that of a sugar-burner to that of a fat-burner. The idea is to correct your hormonal environment so that you can now access your fat stores and your body can burn fat for energy instead of sugar.

    If you’re interested, you can find out more about it here.

  • Weight Loss Tips That Work

    I’ve been talking about all the bad weight loss advice out there, but today, in this short video, I share with you some weight loss tips that actually work. And they work with almost any eating plan you might be following.

    Check it out. And, as always, let me know what you think!

  • The 5 Tastiest Snacks that Flatten Your Stomach

    Let’s start with the bad news. You can do 1,000 sit-ups every day and it won’t give you a six-pack. What it will do is give you abs of steel; but whether anyone will actually see those rock-hard abs, well that’s a completely different question.

    Whether anyone actually notices those new ab muscles of yours depends on one thing only- how much belly fat you’ve got in front of them. Sumo wrestlers have some of the hardest abs in the world but you’ll never see those abs cause they’re surrounded by fat.

    Losing Belly Fat: A Simple 2-step Process

    Losing belly fat is a simple two-step process. Step number one: Figure out what you’re doing to put the belly fat on in the first place. Step number two: stop doing that.

    What drives the accumulation of belly fat, for most people, is a hormone called insulin, which rises in direct response to your blood sugar. Shoot your blood sugar up with a nice million-calorie “low fat” bran muffin and a mocha latte, and your insulin will shoot up faster than the Challenger with a tailwind. And when insulin is high, fat storage is in overdrive. Not only that, but high levels of insulin prevent your fat-burning switch—a hormone called glucagon—from doing its job. On top of that, insulin locks the doors to the fat cells, making fat loss extremely difficult.

    Solution: Eat in a way that doesn’t drive blood sugar (and insulin) skyward.

    Five Belly-Flattening Snacks

    The following five snacks are favorites of mine not just because they’re tasty and convenient and easy to make, but because the combination of fiber, fat, and protein is unlikely to send your blood sugar on a trajectory that feels like the roller coaster at the New York, New York Hotel in Vegas.

    1. “With a Smear”. This is one of my favorite snacks, period. I take some hearts of celery and fill in the groove with some organic almond butter or peanut butter. This snack really travels well in Tupperware and makes a terrific pre-workout snack. Why? The celery has fiber and nutrients (including calcium and vitamin A) and a ridiculously low 6 calories per medium stalk. The nut butter has protein and fat. The overall calories are low and this really fills you up without slowing you down. Great for “slow-release” energy.
    2. “The Double-A”: An apple with almonds. The apple is the perfect food for a snack especially if coupled with some fat and or protein (i.e. string cheese). Its sugar load is very moderate, it contains valuable pectin fiber which slows the entrance of that sugar into the bloodstream, and it’s a nutritional powerhouse containing vitamins and minerals and antioxidants. Try combining it with about a dozen almonds, which adds some fat and protein, further slows the entrance of the sugar into the bloodstream for sustained energy, and keeps hunger away.
    3. “Whey to go”: Whey protein is my favorite kind of protein powder. Not only is it extremely high quality, bioavailable protein, but it supports the immune system by providing the body with the building blocks for glutathione, arguably the body’s most important antioxidant. And studies indicate that whey protein may boost weight-loss efforts. According to one French study, consuming whey before exercise supports fat burning and may help with gaining or maintaining lean body mass. I suggest a whey protein shake made with either water alone or with frozen berries. The berries add fiber, nutrients, some extra carbohydrates, and make for a more delicious drink.
    4. “Berry Cheesy”: Here’s a little tidbit of info for you that you might enjoy: In my book, “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” I asked 16 of the best-known experts in the country to contribute their personal “top ten” list of favorite healthy foods. Berries- especially blueberries- made the list of more experts than any other food. Berries are loaded with phytonutrients, antioxidants, and fiber, and are low in sugar. Mix a bowl of berries with a piece of string cheese for the perfect pre-workout snack. The string cheese has 8 grams of protein, some fat to keep hunger at bay, and only about 80 calories. Plus it’s an excellent source of calcium.
    5. “TG/ Too Good”: The initials of this snack stand for turkey and grapes. It’s a perfectly matched trifecta of protein, carbs, and low-calories to take the edge off your hunger. Four small slices of deli packaged turkey contain only 87 calories but give you more than 14 grams of protein, plus some of the cancer-fighting mineral selenium to boot. A cup of grapes adds some carbs to the mix together with all the health-giving phytochemicals grapes are known for. Suggestion: Go for fresh turkey whenever possible as the packaged kind is high in sodium and nitrates, and go for red or purple grapes as they have a higher antioxidant content.

    By keeping blood sugar even, and insulin levels in the ideal “zone”, you’ll be turning your body from a fat storage machine into one that eats fat for breakfast.

    Bellyfat, watch out!

     

     

    For a complete program to get you started and on the right track to reducing overall body fat and developing a healthier lifestyle, please check out my 22-day fat loss plan called, Metabolic Factor!!   This is the ultimate program that I have worked and myth-busted most of my life to create and be able to provide to you, and anyone looking to lose weight but has never been able to follow a traditional “diet.”  

                                     Link

    It’s a 22-day plan that:

    • Does NOT rely on “willpower” and iron-fisted self-control…
    • Does NOT require any exercise at all (although your welcome to if you want)…
    • Does NOT eliminate your favorite foods like pizza, nachos, and ice cream!

    It works – very simply – by activating your Metabolically Active Tissue, or M.A.T.

    M.A.T. is the most powerful calorie-burning tissue in the human body.

    Yet it’s almost completely ignored by most “weight loss specialists.” Why Because it’s such a tiny part of your body that nobody even thinks of it! It makes up only 5.2% of your body weight.

    Yet this tissue burns more than half of your daily calories.

    If you want more information and want to hear all the details of how this program works, click HERE to take the quiz first to find your fat burner type.   

                                                               OR

    If you already sure you will love Metabolic Factor, and prefer a direct purchase option, please click HERE or on the image above.

  • Things to Remember When Reading Your Next Diet Book

    To those of us who write books, January is synonymous with the phrase “New Year New You”. There’s a “New You” section at every brick and mortar bookstore still in existence, and you won’t have to surf online for more than a minute to find literally dozens of new diet and exercise books “guaranteed” to change your life in 2015.

    The two words you’re guaranteed to see the most on every book cover, DVD or infomercial program promising you quick results—besides, of course, the words “burn fat”—are the following.

    “Simple” and “Easy”.

    As I explain on a recent video blog,  that’s a lie. Weight loss may be “simple” (in the sense that stopping smoking is “simple”), but easy? Not so much.

    So here’s the thing to remember when you get tempted to double down on the next diet book that promises instant transformation. Whatever variations exist among diet plans, the following are truths that apply in all and every case, forever and always, and anyone who implies differently is, well, lying. Or, if you’d prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt, ignorant (of both science and of human beings).

    1. Everybody’s different. The basic nutritional principle on which my nutritional education was based is the concept of biochemical individuality. The term was first introduced by Dr. Roger Williams in the 1950’s and basically means that everybody’s different— and in a spectacular number of ways. Translated: No diet works for everyone.
    1. The ways in which people differ can have profound effects on weight loss. We’re all different metabolically, hormonally, culturally, psychologically, behaviorally, biochemically, neurologically, enzymatically, ad infinitum. All these differences mean that the likelihood that everyone will respond the same way to a food plan is utter nonsense. Honor- and understand—our differences, and adjust accordingly.
    1. Anyone who says we know all there is to know about obesity is either lying or deluded. The best researchers admit that we are just scratching the surface. We now know that what your grandmother ate influences your weight. And that there are many chemicals in the environment that mimic hormones which in turn lead to weight gain. (Many of those chemicals are known as “obesogens”, which means they make you fat, possibly regardless of what you eat.)
    1. The most insidious and destructive half-truth ever told in the field of weight loss is that it’s “all about calories”. The human body doesn’t behave like a calorimeter, it behaves like a chemistry set. Different foods and combinations of foods beget different metabolic reactions. All calories are not created equal and never have been, despite the American Dietetic Association’s decades-long battle to convince you that “a calorie is a calorie”.
    1. Weight gain is driven by hormones. Any food plan that doesn’t take that into account is doomed to failure. Some foods trigger your “fat storage” hormones (insulin), some don’t. Some trigger hormones that tear down muscle (cortisol). Some trigger hormones that release fat from cells (glucagon). Ignoring that is idiotic, yet most nutrition advice of the past few decades does exactly that.

    I’d add a few things to the above list. It’s probably a good idea to eat a lot of plant foods, that locally grown and organic will trump everything else for a myriad of reasons, that you have nothing to fear from saturated fat (particularly in the context of a low-carb diet), that we have no idea of the long-term consequences of GMO, that cholesterol doesn’t cause heart disease, that you’d be smart to supplement with fish oil, that sugar is one of the most addictive substances on the planet, that it’s a good idea to drink a lot of water and get a little sun, that you’re free to eat whole eggs. And that you don’t need grains in your diet (though you’re welcome to eat them if you’re not gluten sensitive, don’t have weight problems, and don’t mind the addictive gluteomorphins in wheat.)

    And as long as we’re talking about principles upon which to design a happy life, let’s not leave out the stuff that has nothing to do with what goes into your mouth but rather what comes out of it. Make kindness, encouragement, praise, gratitude, appreciation and warmth part of your daily “output”, just as you make the foods and supplements I talk about on this website part of your daily “input”.

    Now that’s a diet in the true sense of the original Greek word: A manner of life.

    A loving, happy, peaceful, healthy and prosperous 2015 to everyone!

    Warmly

    JB

  • Video – Bad Weight Loss Advice

    Video – Bad Weight Loss Advice

    Want to know the single biggest lie told by every diet book author on the planet? (Hint: it’s probably not what you think.)

    Watch this short video and I’ll explain!

     

  • Delicious Ways to Enjoy Vegetable Juicing for Weight Loss

    Delicious Ways to Enjoy Vegetable Juicing for Weight Loss

    The following is from Jonny Bowden’s New You In 22.

    Delicious Ways to Enjoy Vegetable Juicing for Weight Loss

     

    Many heath experts, myself included,  are advocates of vegetable juicing for weight loss, and will easily recommend vegetable juices as part of an effective weight loss plan.

    The thing is most people are not fond of vegetables. If you are one of these people, here are delicious ways to enjoy vegetable juices and benefit from their weight loss abilities.

    Gourmet Green Drink

    Contrary to common belief, green drinks are actually delicious. You can choose from any or a combination of the following for your green drink recipe:

    • Wheatgrass
    • Barley grass
    • Magma
    • Broccoli
    • Spinach
    • Kale
    • Parsley
    • Other green leafy vegetables

    Drinking your greens make vegetable consumption more palatable for fussy eaters or for those who are not fond of veggies. This is one delicious way to meet your recommended vegetable servings for weight loss.

    Some of the remarkable benefits you can get from your green drink are the following:

    1. Excellent source of nutrients that will allow you to stay healthy while dropping the pounds fast.
    2. Purifies your blood and removes the toxins from your body. Toxic substances interfere with the functions of your body systems resulting in poor health condition including excessive weight.
    3. Promotes overall health condition, and increases your energy levels to do all the activities you plan to do throughout the day.

    Smoothie Your Greens

    One of the more effective ways to lose weight healthily is to drink protein shakes for breakfast. You can create your own drink by juicing your green vegetables. For variety, you can create succulent green smoothies that will give you the following benefits:

    • Your body receives plant-based protein. In many ways, plant-based protein is healthier than animal-based protein. Veggies contain chlorophyll rich in alkaline.This will restore the good balance between alkaline-acid in your body, considering that the American diet today is highly acidic. The good balance of acid-alkaline is essential in weight management.
    • Vegetables are an excellent source of fiber. WebMD, in fact, recommends the consumption of fiber-rich food for weight loss. Health experts say that dietary fiber has that power to fill your stomach without the risks of storing unnecessary fats in the body.In a study that monitors the big weight losers, most of these individuals are habitual breakfast eaters with fiber-rich food as part of their staple meals.
    • Juicing your veggies makes it easier for your body to absorb the nutrients. As soon as the smoothie touches your mouth, digestion and abruption of nutrients begin.

    Vegetable juicing for weight loss will turn green veggies into an appetizing beverage that adults and kids will both love. According to Dr. Jonny Bowden, juicing is at its best when you use green vegetables as ingredients.

    Easy Recipes

    Here are three vegetable juice recipes that are easy to prepare and will deliver weight loss benefits to your body:

    Raw Chlorophyll Juice – Just combine all the ingredients below into your juicer:

    • Spinach
      Dandelion greens
      Parsley

    You may want to add the following fruits for flavor: apples and grapes.

    Easy Green Juice – extract the juice from the following ingredients:

    • 3 stalks of celery
    • About 10 pieces of lettuce leaves
    • 1 ½ green apple

    Kale Cool Aid Juice – juice the following ingredients and combine the extract together. Serve with ice.

    • About 5 pieces of kale leaves
    • 2 large cucumbers
    • 1 piece green apple
    • 1 piece of lemon, peeled
    • Thumb-sized ginger, peeled
    • 2 ribs of celery

    Tips for Juicing Your Veggies

    There is no doubt to the health power of vegetables. Using veggies as your ingredients to create weight loss juices can be as refreshing and as delicious as natural fruit juices by following these tips:

    1. Add apples or carrots to your recipes, as they are natural sweeteners. These two are also able to break the bitter taste of some vegetables.
    2. Prefer to juice fresh vegetables (also fruits), and as much as possible choose organic. Fresh organic veggies are superior in nutritional and health value.
    3. Your choice of juicer also matters. If you wish to maximize the weight loss and other health benefits of juicing your veggies, choose a good quality juicer.
    4. Mix and match your veggies, and include some fruits to your recipes. The trick is to create varied delicious-tasting recipes. The web has all the resources you need to help you.

    Start to benefit from your vegetable juice right now and enjoy the healthy results!

     

  • Study Finds Less Exercise Increases Metabolic Syndrome

    Study Finds Less Exercise Increases Metabolic Syndrome

    A study in the journal Preventive Medicine found women don’t get as much exercise as men, which increases their risk for metabolic syndrome.

    You’ve probably heard about metabolic syndrome, which includes conditions like high cholesterol, hypertension, and obesity. These disorders act like road signs that warn, “Danger ahead!” and give you a chance to turn back before you fall fate to diabetes, heart disease, or stroke.

    I always love studies where researchers start with one idea but evidence guides them in a different direction.

    In this case, researchers began looking at the correlation between physical activity, depression, and metabolic syndrome. They looked at over 1,000 people selected from a nationally represented sample.

    But their research gradually evolved into a gender study as researchers stumbled upon an interesting observation:  whereas men clocked in about 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise every day, women averaged 18 minutes.

    Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. If it’s any consolation, women performed better in other health measures here. For instance, they were less likely to smoke than men.

    Also worth noting: this was the first study to objectively measure physical activity. More specifically, participants here used accelerometers that measured physical activity. In other words, they weren’t just guessing how many minutes they exercised.

    The study concluded that less than 30 minutes a day of daily exercise increases your risk for insulin resistance, depression, and weight gain.

    Still, researchers remained optimistic. They recommended small physical efforts throughout your day to meet that quota. Take the stairs rather than the elevator, for instance, and park further away from the mall entrance.

    I get it: exercise requires time. And with your ever-expanding work hours and to-do list, finding even an hour at the gym can seem impossible. Heck, finding a parking place alone can take 15 minutes.

    The good news is that you don’t need to spend hours at spin classes to get exercise’s numerous benefits.

    You can burn fat, build muscle, and boost your metabolism in just minutes a day. And burst training is your ticket.

    If that sounds like a dubious infomercial, I’ve got studies to show just how effective it is.

    They show, for instance, that compared to treadmills and hour-long aerobics classes, burst training helps you more efficiently and quickly burn fat.

    Another study found moderately active women burned more fat burst training in just two weeks.

    Several studies show burst training also proves effective to reduce your risk for metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance and diabetes.

    My favorite way to burst train is with the Xiser »

    This well-built, portable machine provides a full-body workout in just four minutes, three times a week. No kidding.

    While the Xiser makes it easier to burst train, you really don’t need any equipment, and you can even do it outdoors.

    For instance, run at full pace up to one minute (you should be breathless), walk fast for a few minutes, and repeat.

    You can also do this run-walk-repeat routine on your treadmill. Ironically, you’ll get more benefits doing this for five minutes than the person next to you huffing away for an hour while watching The View.

    Or if you have a hill at your park, you can full-blast run up the hill, then walk steadily down, and repeat.

    Want to make burst training even more effective? Combine it with weight resistance.

    I know what you’re thinking: too much time.

    Guess again. My friend, fitness expert JJ Virgin, has a fabulous 15-minute workout, appropriately called the 4 x 4 Workout (four repetitions of four exercises) which effectively combines burst training and weight resistance in, yes, just 15 minutes a day »

    You might doubt right now you can get amazing results in that short a time period. But I promise you: it will kick your butt.

  • Four Minutes to Fitness? Seriously?

    Is squeezing even ten minutes for exercise out of your busy schedule too hard to manage? Well guess what. I’ve got just the program for you! With a mere four minutes a day, you can get a jolt of energy while helping to burn fat, increase endurance, improve balance, lower blood pressure, stabilize your core, and strengthen your muscles. Sound too good to be true?

    I sure thought it was. (Remember, I come from the “gym” culture, where guys the size of barn doors spent entire mornings just doing “lats”.) So convincing me you could get anything done at all in four minutes was, let’s say, a bit of a stretch.

    And then I tried Burst Training.

    Burst Training is one minute of high-intensity exercise, performed four times a day, three times a week—using an amazing multi-tasking piece of machinery invented by exercise physiologist Mark J. Smith, Ph.D. It’s called the X-iser, and it’s a hands-free step machine. Since Burst Training has no rest period, you perform what amounts to a series of one-legged squats, which means you’re simultaneously challenging your aerobic and anaerobic systems. I use the machine regularly and I can tell you it’s without question, one of the hardest and most effective workouts you can do. It gives a whole new meaning to energy efficiency.

    Now I know you’re probably skeptical. What can one minute of exercise, even if you do it four times a day, possibly accomplish? Well, think about it. You know that iconic scene in the first Rocky movie where Sylvester Stallone runs the steps of the stadium in Philly? Suppose you did that exhausting, mind-numbingly difficult run every single day. Think you’d get better at it? Think you’d improve your aerobic fitness? Your endurance? Your energy? Let me save you the thinking time: The answer is “yes”. In spades.

    In fact, running up stairs is one of the best ways to burn calories, improve cardio conditioning and coordination and increase energy. In the “olden” days when I was a musical director living in the famous Artists Complex in New York City called Manhattan Plaza (where my neighbors included Tennessee Williams, Larry David of Seinfeld fame and the “real” Kramer), I used to run the 45 flights of stairs from bottom to top floor a few times a week. It took less than a minute or two and it was one of the most intense, energizing exercises I ever did. Stair running is the bomb. Problem is, most of us don’t live in 45 flight buildings or near the Rocky stadium in Philly. The Xiser gives you the ability to essentially do the same thing in your living room.

    And it doesn’t stop there. Burst training- which is really just a series of short bursts of very high intensity exercise- is one of the most effective ways to exercise for weight loss, health, performance, endurance and energy. And the research backs me up on this. One study in the Feb 10 2005 Journal of Applied Physiology founded that a mere two weeks of as little as 8 minutes a week of burst training doubled the endurance and energy of participants. And a study at Colorado State showed that four minutes on the Xiser burned the same number of calories as twenty minutes of traditional aerobic exercise. Burst training also burns fat for 24 hours after exercise. It basically teaches the body to burn fat more efficiently.

    The Xiser allows you to do a number of other exercises besides the standard (and brutal) burst of one minute stair climbing. You can hold weights in your hands. You can do push ups on the steps. You can do all sorts of things, all of which basically come under the heading of “interval training” which I now believe is the most effective way to get in shape, lose fat and increase energy.

    The only down side? You’ll have to say goodbye to a lot of excuses that revolve around time.

    Find out more about the X-iser here.