Great Healthy Living Quote #144-- Life is a Process of Becoming

At what state of Life are you?


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Top TEN Indicators You Have Become A Jock

Getting Ready for my 31 mile bike ride

Like many of us in this day and age, I started becoming a jock in my 50s. For the past 30 years I did a better job of watching my kids play sports than I did participating in them. Then I got the bug to live a healthier lifestyle and make the most of the life I have. It has and continues to be a fun journey…despite the aches and pains and occasional injury. I may not be able to keep up with those that are a lot younger and have a much lower BMI than I yet I can honestly say I look forward to working out in the morning, working on my running, going on long bike rides with my husband and exploring new hikes in the Rocky Mountains. Reflecting on this the other day I decide to make a light-hearted list of the Top Ten Indicators of When You Realize You Have Become a Jock—no matter your age. Here is my list:

1. You are willing to cycle in the rain and don't even give a thought to your hair or clinging clothes.
2. You walk around with a farmer's tan on your arms AND legs.
3. You have multiple scars and have a story for each one and the sport you were involved with at the time.
4. You can make cocktail conversation about your knee operation.
5. Your idea of a date with your spouse/significant other is going to work out.
6. You keep a pair of tennis shoes, a bottle of water and a protein bar in your car.
7. Your idea of a perfect birthday gift is another pair of bike shorts.
8. You have to make room on your shoe shelf for another pair of athletic shoes.
9. You have more apps on your phone for tracking your food, activity, steps and routes than anything else.
10. You have more event t-shirts than button down shirts in your closet.

Enjoy! And Live Vibrant!



Re-posted from Sheila's Blog on TheEpochTimes.com.  

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Great Healthy Living Quote #143-- Adopt the Pace of Nature

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Product Review--Zone PastaRX™--Protein Packed Pasta

Enjoying Meeting Dr. Sears at the Obesity Medicine Conference

My husband and I recently attended the American Society of Bariatric Physicians Obesity Medicine 2015 conference. It was our first time to attend this conference. One of our booth neighbors was Dr. Sears with his Zone Labs products. Every day during the conference he served up lunch from his booth. He graciously offered us lunch too. I was curious and thought I would try some.

The amazing thing about the Zone PastaRX™ is that it is packed full of protein. 20 grams of it per serving, to be precise.  Regular, store bought pasta has about 7 grams. This is an incredible difference. With that much protein in the product it keeps you fuller for longer. Zone Labs makes the claim that it will keep you full for 5 hours.

Zone PastaRX™ has an amazing amount of protein in it--20 grams!

What did I experience? I did feel full after I ate the pasta. Really full. And that was just with the pasta and some veggies in a marinara sauce. No meat added. The pasta was attractive fusilli and looked just like any other pasta. With so much protein in the pasta, it is easy to go vegetarian which I find an added benefit as we strive to eat more and more meatless meals.

My bowl of Zone PastaRX™ Fusilli with Vegetables in a light Marinara Sauce

The calories for the Zone Labs pasta are a little higher than the standard store bought pasta. For a ½ cup serving of a standard pasta there are 210 calories. The same sized serving of Zone PastaRX™ is 240. It is not much of a difference for a whole lot more protein. And if you do not add meat to the pasta sauce and choose a light version, you can have a meal under 300 calories. Add a few tasty veggies and you can still hit that mark or close to it.

On the surface of it, the pasta seems expensive. One bag of pasta is $12.76. If you buy 4 bags at once it is a little less expensive at $47.96. When you do the math, however, which I did, the cost per serving at the $47.96 price is only $1.50. Looked at in this way, it is an affordable food. I also saw on the website that they are currently offering a $10 discount with a promo code on the orzo which makes it an even better deal.

It may not be organic or gluten free but it meets the mark for a healthier food when you still want to enjoy a pasta meal that helps you live a healthier lifestyle. I consider it a new find worthy of sharing.

Enjoy! And Live Vibrant!

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Great Healthy Living Quote #142-- The Measure of Success

How do you measure your success?


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Indulge! Eggs are No Longer on the Forbidden Foods List

Go Ahead and Convert Your Hard Boiled Eggs to a Yummy and Healthy Egg Salad (photo by LivligaHome).

It is time to indulge in one of the favorite foods for decorating Easter Eggs–hard boiled eggs. As can happen, recent studies have reversed our opinion about eggs. The study shows eggs do not cause a rise in blood cholesterol levels. They are no longer considered a forbidden food. Let’s celebrate this news with some egg salad!

We are a family that loves decorating Easter eggs. Nothing terribly fancy, we just use colored crayons and Paas egg dyes. When the kids were much smaller we did dozens of eggs around Easter because we were the ones that had the family Easter gathering and annual egg hunt. We may not have the gathering or egg hunt anymore but we still love decorating those eggs!

But what to do with the leftover eggs? They are, of course, delicious as is. A hard boiled egg makes a great snack. But they are also delicious as an egg salad. I love egg salad. But I am picky about the dressing. Often there is too much mayonnaise so it is too “gloopy”. I like a dryer dressing. Here is the recipe I have developed and that can be scaled depending on how many people are going to be eating it.

Healthy Egg Salad

• 2 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
• ½ cup finely diced celery
• 1 tablespoon low-fat mayonnaise
• 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
• ⅛ teaspoon California garlic powder
• Freshly ground pepper, to taste

Place all ingredients in a bowl and mix.

Makes 1 serving. Calories per serving 232.

This is a great recipe as a salad on a bed of lettuce or made into a sandwich. A toasted English muffin adds an additional 100 calories.

Egg salad is easy and cheap to do. It can even become part of your Easter tradition, as it has become ours. And now with the good health news about eggs, you can whip up a batch of egg salad regularly to make for easy meal making anytime.

Enjoy! And Live Vibrant!




Re-posted from Sheila's Blog on TheEpochTimes.com.  

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Great Healthy Living Quote #141-- My Favorite Thing

What is your favorite thing that challenges you?


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A Doctor's Confession- The Truth Comes Out About Heart Disease

We wish it weren't true but we all know in our hearts that our health problems are triggered and exacerbated by what we eat and how much we eat. It is interesting now to see that many doctors are admitting to the failure of drugs and many operations intended to change the tide of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer. What some are now confessing is that until we change our diet we will not change the negative trend of these diseases.

As a former Executive Director of The American Heart Association in Denver, I know this hard truth. We would like an easier fix or to have some one else solve our problem of over eating. Having struggled with weight all my life I know the challenge. When it comes down to it, it is up to us...but we need to help each other while facing the truth and consciously looking at what we are doing. Easy? No. Possible? You bet. Here is the best article I have read that lays out the truth. It is good enough to save to your hard drive, print out to have on hand and share with your friends to make sure we all stay present in our journey about what really matters as we commit to living the healthiest life we possibly can. Take the time to read it and then let me know what you think.

January 21, 2015 - We physicians with all our training, knowledge and authority often acquire a rather large ego that tends to make it difficult to admit we are wrong. So, here it is. I freely admit to being wrong.. As a heart surgeon with 25 years experience, having performed over 5,000 open-heart surgeries,today is my day to right the wrong with medical and scientific fact. I trained for many years with other prominent physicians labelled “opinion makers.” 

Bombarded with scientific literature, continually attending education seminars, we opinion makers insisted heart disease resulted from the simple fact of elevated blood cholesterol. The only accepted therapy was prescribing medications to lower cholesterol and a diet that severely restricted fat intake. The latter of course we insisted would lower cholesterol and heart disease. Deviations from these recommendations were considered heresy and could quite possibly result in malpractice.

It Is Not Working!

These recommendations are no longer scientifically or morally defensible. The discovery a few years ago that inflammation in the artery wall is the real cause of heart disease is slowly leading to a paradigm shift in how heart disease and other chronic ailments will be treated.

The long-established dietary recommendations have created epidemics of obesity and diabetes, the consequences of which dwarf any historical plague in terms of mortality, human suffering and dire economic consequences.

Despite the fact that 25% of the population takes expensive statin medications and despite the fact we have reduced the fat content of our diets, more Americans will die this year of heart disease than ever before.

Statistics from the American Heart Association show that 75 million Americans currently suffer from heart disease, 20 million have diabetes and 57 million have pre-diabetes. These disorders are affecting younger and younger people in greater numbers every year.

Simply stated, without inflammation being present in the body, there is no way that cholesterol would accumulate in the wall of the blood vessel and cause heart disease and strokes. Without inflammation, cholesterol would move freely throughout the body as nature intended. It is inflammation that causes cholesterol to become trapped.

Inflammation is not complicated — it is quite simply your body’s natural defence to a foreign invader such as a bacteria, toxin or virus. The cycle of inflammation is perfect in how it protects your body from these bacterial and viral invaders. However, if we chronically expose the body to injury by toxins or foods the human body was never designed to process,a condition occurs called chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation is just as harmful as acute inflammation is beneficial.

What thoughtful person would willfully expose himself repeatedly to foods or other substances that are known to cause injury to the body?  Well,smokers perhaps, but at least they made that choice willfully.

The rest of us have simply followed the recommended mainstream diet that is low in fat and high in polyunsaturated fats and carbohydrates, not knowing we were causing repeated injury to our blood vessels. This repeated injury creates chronic inflammation leading to heart disease, stroke, diabetes and obesity.

Let me repeat that: The injury and inflammation in our blood vessels is caused by the low fat diet recommended for years by mainstream medicine.

What are the biggest culprits of chronic inflammation? Quite simply, they are the overload of simple, highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour and all the products made from them) and the excess consumption of omega-6 vegetable oils like soybean, corn and sunflower that are found in many processed foods.

Take a moment to visualize rubbing a stiff brush repeatedly over soft skin until it becomes quite red and nearly bleeding. you kept this up several times a day, every day for five years. If you could tolerate this painful brushing, you would have a bleeding, swollen infected area that became worse with each repeated injury. This is a good way to visualize the inflammatory process that could be going on in your body right now.

Regardless of where the inflammatory process occurs, externally or internally, it is the same. I have peered inside thousands upon thousands of arteries. A diseased artery looks as if someone took a brush and scrubbed repeatedly against its wall. Several times a day, every day, the foods we eat create small injuries compounding into more injuries, causing the body to respond continuously and appropriately with inflammation.

While we savor the tantalizing taste of a sweet roll, our bodies respond alarmingly as if a foreign invader arrived declaring war. Foods loaded with sugars and simple carbohydrates, or processed with omega-6 oils for long shelf life have been the mainstay of the American diet for six decades. These foods have been slowly poisoning everyone.

How does eating a simple sweet roll create a cascade of inflammation to make you sick?

Imagine spilling syrup on your keyboard and you have a visual of what occurs inside the cell. When we consume simple carbohydrates such as sugar, blood sugar rises rapidly. In response, your pancreas secretes insulin whose primary purpose is to drive sugar into each cell where it is stored for energy. If the cell is full and does not need glucose, it is rejected to avoid extra sugar gumming up the works.

When your full cells reject the extra glucose, blood sugar rises producing more insulin and the glucose converts to stored fat.

What does all this have to do with inflammation? Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels.

While you may not be able to see it, rest assured it is there. I saw it in over 5,000 surgical patients spanning 25 years who all shared one common denominator — inflammation in their arteries.

Let’s get back to the sweet roll. That innocent looking goody not only contains sugars, it is baked in one of many omega-6 oils such as soybean. Chips and fries are soaked in soybean oil; processed foods are manufactured with omega-6 oils for longer shelf life. While omega-6’s are essential -they are part of every cell membrane controlling what goes in and out of the cell — they must be in the correct balance with omega-3’s.

If the balance shifts by consuming excessive omega-6, the cell membrane produces chemicals called cytokines that directly cause inflammation.

Today’s mainstream American diet has produced an extreme imbalance of these two fats. The ratio of imbalance ranges from 15:1 to as high as 30:1 in favor of omega-6. That’s a tremendous amount of cytokines causing inflammation. In today’s food environment, a 3:1 ratio would be optimal and healthy.

To make matters worse, the excess weight you are carrying from eating these foods creates overloaded fat cells that pour out large quantities of pro-inflammatory chemicals that add to the injury caused by having high blood sugar. The process that began with a sweet roll turns into a vicious cycle over time that creates heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetesand finally, Alzheimer’s disease, as the inflammatory process continues unabated.

There is no escaping the fact that the more we consume prepared and processed foods, the more we trip the inflammation switch little by little each day. The human body cannot process, nor was it designed to consume, foods packed with sugars and soaked in omega-6 oils.

There is but one answer to quieting inflammation, and that is returning to foods closer to their natural state. To build muscle, eat more protein. Choose carbohydrates that are very complex such as colorful fruits and vegetables. Cut down on or eliminate inflammation- causing omega-6 fats like corn and soybean oil and the processed foods that are made from them.

One tablespoon of corn oil contains 7,280 mg of omega-6; soybean contains 6,940 mg. Instead, use olive oil or butter from grass-fed beef.

Animal fats contain less than 20% omega-6 and are much less likely to cause inflammation than the supposedly healthy oils labelled polyunsaturated. Forget the “science” that has been drummed into your head for decades. The science that saturated fat alone causes heart disease is non-existent. The science that saturated fat raises blood cholesterol is also very weak. Since we now know that cholesterol is not the cause of heart disease, the concern about saturated fat is even more absurd today.

The cholesterol theory led to the no-fat, low-fat recommendations that in turn created the very foods now causing an epidemic of inflammation. Mainstream medicine made a terrible mistake when it advised people to avoid saturated fat in favor of foods high in omega-6 fats. We now have an epidemic of arterial inflammation leading to heart disease and other silent killers.

What you can do is choose whole foods your grandmother served and not those your mom turned to as grocery store aisles filled with manufactured foods. By eliminating inflammatory foods and adding essential nutrients from fresh unprocessed food, you will reverse years of damage in your arteries and throughout your body from consuming the typical American diet.

Dr. Dwight Lundell is the past Chief of Staff and Chief of Surgery at Banner Heart Hospital, Mesa , AZ. His private practice, Cardiac Care Center was in Mesa, AZ. Recently Dr. Lundell left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease. He is the founder of Healthy Humans Foundation that promotes human health with a focus on helping large corporations promote wellness. He is also the author of The Cure for Heart Disease and The Great Cholesterol Lie.

Article found: http://www.disclose.tv/news/World_Renowned_Heart_Surgeon_Speaks_Out_On_What_Really_Causes_Heart_Disease/113103#.VRjUv4bS1vc.mailto

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