Category: Uncategorized

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Not So Fast & Time Restricted Eating

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There is a lot of popular talk about the benefits of fasting. 

There is science backing up calorie restriction being able to slow the aging process and help to reset of bodily functions. One of my new year plans was to do a fast or a cleanse.

There are many types of fasts. The most promising looked like something called 5:2, that is 5 days feeding paired with 2 days fasting. I also liked the 16:8 plan which is daily 16 hours fasting paired with 8 hours feeding. This 16 hour fast includes your night’s sleep to make it simpler. After doing some research, I decided on a 5 day program. 2 days fasting and 3 days of veggies only (a  5 day plan). 

This turned out to be easier than I anticipated. The 2 days of fasting were really a liquid diet. These liquid days were under 500 calories per day. I consumed 1 cup of coffee, veggie broth, v-8, green tea, water, and a veggie protein shake each day. On days 3, 4, & 5, I added stir fry veggies and ½ a butternut squash or a sweet potato. That is under 1000 total calories per day. I thought there would be a loss of energy or the usual brain fog from no meat and no complex carbohydrates. I had experienced that on the previous fasting or cleanse adventures, but none of this occurred. Breaking a fast properly is important so I eased into my regular 1800 calories and 4 oz. portion of meat. 2 weeks after the fast, I’m holding at 196 pounds (the lightest I’ve been in 30 plus years) and I am looking forward to additional plunges’ into fasting and weight loss. 

Post Fast Meal

Another week went by and I got an illness of some kind. I believe that it was from exposure from my students. I monitored my temperature and blood pressure. I ended up putting myself back on the blood pressure meds as a safeguard as my BP was a little elevated.

I’ll continue to monitor  my BP. The fasting felt great and I’m planning another in the near future.

The Blue Zone Information From The Book

The Blue Zones

9 Lessons For Living Longer

From the people who’ve lived the longest

by Dan Buettner

This is not meant to be a book review, but a chance to impart some great information that we all need to know.

“Life expectancy of an American born today averages 78.2 years. But this year, over 70,000 Americans have reached their 100 birthday.”

Dan Buettner teamed up with National Geographic to find the world’s longest-lived people and study them. They found pockets of people around the world with the highest life expectancy, or with the highest proportions of people to reach age 100.

The 5 places are:

Barbagia region of Sardinia-mountainous highlands

Ikaria, Greece-Aegean Island

Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica

Seventh Day Adventist-around Loma Linda, California

Okinawa, Japan-Island area.

They put together medical researchers, anthropologists, demographers, and epidemiologists to search for evidence-based common denominators. They found nine lifestyle and diet habits .

Here is the first one. Move Naturally.

“The world’s longest-lived people don’t pump iron, run marathons or join gyms. Instead, they live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it. They grow gardens and don’t have mechanical conveniences for house and yard work.”

How do I incorporate this into my life?

“Inconvenience Yourself”; By inconveniencing yourself you can add more activity to your day.

“Have fun, Keep moving”; Make a list of activities you enjoy, do those.

“Walk”; Blue Zone peoples are walking around 5 miles a day, every day.

Do you want to add years to your life and life to your years? Start now with the first lifestyle practice and tell me how it makes you feel.

Next blog will include Lifestyle habit #2. 

Be healthy,

Coach Brown

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Turn The Page on 2021

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Turn the Page on 2021

We begin a renewed year. I want to re-ignite the blog. In the past, I tried to encourage a healthy diet, exercise, and spiritual living by providing information about what to do with a few examples. I have avoided much talk about Covid, preaching strong immune system protection instead. I did not reach a big enough audience. My plan now is to chronicle what I am doing; more of a diary and adventure travelog with health, fitness and spiritual practice to see as it happens for me.

Update of my Personal Stats.

I am 74 years old, 201 pounds. I have lost 50 so far. I eat lots of vegetables and small amounts of meat. I hike most weekends. I work out regularly. I am regularly reading health literature and I am refining my diet and exercise program. Spiritually, I am still learning. I have had a few personal spiritual experiences which have strongly directed my spiritual activities. I am currently in 3 different spiritual communities. I have a pacemaker (originally installed in January of 1983). I wear hearing aids. I regularly monitor my BP at home as I have a history of high Blood pressure caused by the fact that I have only 1 functional kidney. It has been 38 years since I gave up alcohol.

Goals for Progress

I am planning to lose 40 more pounds, at least 5 or more this year. In order to help with my healthy lifestyle, there are a couple of Christmas gifts to note: 1. A Nutribullet 1200 pro to replace my aging unit and 2. A gift certificate to the Vegas Vegan Culinary Kitchen (Yes, I eat meat). I am planning on teaching for at least 2 more years. This year I want to spend some time with each of my four children and 2 granddaughters. I am going to read at least 4 new books. I will publish this blog monthly or more if my activities warrant that. I have seventy-four years of friends I’d like to reach.

2022 Begins

Windsor Lake, a 2mile brisk walk.

This year begins with me finishing up my winter break from school at my home away from home in Pierce, Colorado. I have had a beautiful break from the day-to-day life challenges of teaching. An interesting note is that I forgot my phone in the car at the Vegas transit terminal. Maybe that’s fortunate. I have enjoyed family and friends at my daughter’s home. The visit included my granddaughter who is a senior at Fort Collins High School and my son who flew in from Long Beach, California. I had long restorative walks, like around Windsor Lake, and plenty of activity, like a beginner yoga class in Fort Collins and the use of my daughters’ elliptical machine. My diet was a small challenge, but my daughter eats healthy, so she had healthy stuff to work with and her understanding of what I was trying to prepare. Processed food being avoided by me more than most other stuff, I turned in part to my emergence eating plan “S.S.S.” That is soup, salad, and shake. I turned to that when I couldn’t use the G-BOMBS theory from Dr. Joel Furman (greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries, and seeds).  I avoided any weight gain over the holidays.

Some of the things I regularly read:

Tufts University Health & Nutrition LetterMayo Clinic newsletter

Harvard Health Letter, Harvard Medical School

NEJM: the New England Journal of Medicine

Healthline: Nutrition Newsletter

Forks over Knives

LIFESTRONG.com

MyFitnessPal

Share your Goals

If you always see your health and fitness goals and resolutions fade into the “too much to do” schedule or if it is the same resolution as last year, try sharing them with me and our readers for a little added incentive. Send me your top resolutions and I’ll build blog topics to enhance your mental equivalent for success. Let’s be healthy together as a community.

Next time

I will be sharing Blue Zone information.

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IF YOUR LIFE MATTERS, THEN WHAT?

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Begin here.

Pray First

If your life matters, stop your toxic diet and get healthy. Do yourself a favor in this mess we seem to be in and pay attention to your “information diet” as well as to your “healthy diet”. Everything on commercial T.V. is propaganda and spin; news, ads, and programming. I wanted to write something current and trendy with social inequities as a topic. This turned out to be something I did not know enough about from the other man’s perspective. After doing a little research, the information could be and should be a semester college course or a 2-year course in a youth program just to provide everyone with an overview to have an educated opinion on what the real problem is. Pointing you in the right direction may be the best place to start. I recommend the Rich Roll podcast or YouTube #529. Rich interviews John Lewis and John Salley. Lewis is from “Bad Ass Vegan” among his projects and Salley, the former NBA SuperStar who is a well-known entrepreneur and vegetarian. The interviewees explain some of the problems with social inequities as well as diet and health issues in the black communities.

John and John explain the problem as they see it and a solution from their view. The BLM movement and the George Floyd death are discussed. They state clearly what the protests are about. They talk about a multitude of current problems that are facing America today. One social issue they discuss is Food Inequity or the Urban Nutrition Desert. They have a plan to improve the quality of what is being eaten in the Black community. Listen and learn from this podcast. link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6HdT84uWg

I believe that very little investigation is needed to illuminate the same issues in our Brown communities. Change in the diet in the brown communities is happening in the healthy promotion of Mexi-vegetarian cooking. You can check that out online or in select restaurants. The social inequities are another story in the Brown community are another problem to be addressed.

I repeat, if your life matters then take proper care of it. Eat healthy, get a fitness program, find a way to feed your spirit. If your life matters you need to be part of the change. Over 50% of the American population is sick (black, brown, red, blue, yellow, white). These are Lifestyle disorders; obesity, pre-diabetes, diabetes-2, high blood pressure, and coronary heart disease. It is time to change. No one likes to be told what to do, ie. wear a mask, wash your hands, stand back, but this is the time to step up and do the right thing.

There is a solution. Begin here and now.

#1. Stop poisoning ourselves and our children with toxic fast food. 

#2. Stop eating processed food. These are made by the companies that gave us cigarettes to addict and eventually kill us.

My Neighborhood
Sign on the door!!!

There is plenty of science to back up an eating change. If you want science, start with Doctor Michael Klaper M.D. Listen to him on Rich Roll podcast #507. Dr. Klaper at 72 has seen the result of the Western diet on the American population. He is giving lectures to medical students on nutrition and a healthy diet. link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rhs1BB7MbHo

I see the result of a poor diet and lifestyle every day at school. Many boys who come into the locker room are overweight from the government provided free breakfast and lunch and who knows what for dinner. These meals from the Government are supposed to be healthy and nutritious. The meal regulations are mandated by government appointees that are also on the corporate food company boards and therefore promote science for food. Chemistry should not be a food choice. Added to that problem are the student eating habits. The calamity is watching the boys throwing away the apple and eating the chips or doughnut. They are addicted to sugar and salt. The attraction to sugar and salt are natural. They are natural when in nature. This is not that.

Stop poisoning yourself and our children.

Here is another starting point. Dr. John Mcdougall has a free book. You can get it in 20 different languages and a child will understand it. This is not my diet of choice, but you will understand this one in minutes.

Dr. McDougall’s Color Picture Book “Food Poisoning” How to Cure It by Eating Beans, Corn, Pasta, Potatoes, Rice, etc.*

Click to access dr-mcdougalls-cpb-english.pdf

Nothing happens in God’s world by chance.

Be healthy,

Coach Brown

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DOING H.I.I.T. Workouts and 5 TIPS TO HEALTHY WEIGHT LOSS

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Where did H.I.I.T. come from?

High Intensity Interval Training is now an accepted and go to training tool. It is not a new concept. I will tell you how I incorporate it into any workout. 

The H.I.I.T. workout plan came from Paavo Naurmi, the Flying Finn. It is from a Swedish word for speed play, “Fartlek”. Naurmi won 9 Gold medals and 3 silver medals in the 1920, 1924, and 1928 Olympics. The training technique combines long run, short run, walking, and calisthenics. Fartlek or H.I.I.T. running is a paced run mixed with burst sprint runs at intervals during the workout. No stopping, just pace change during the run. This technique conditioned Paavo Naurmi so that he was able to set 26 world records, an amazing accomplishment in any era.

Incorporating H.I.I.T. into my workouts or yours is the same strategy. While swimming I will increase my pace to my best sprint for 2 minutes and then return to my regular pace. I repeat this pattern every 5 minutes during the entire swim. This of course increases my heart rate and changes oxygen flow and the metabolic functions which go along with these pace changes. This plan works with any cardio style workout including walking. I use the same pattern. The weight workout days are done in a similar way, alternating pace and workout routine to create the same effect of a variable heart rate increase and oxygen exchange. 

Here is a plan to try on your weight train days:

5 Tips to Healthy Weight Loss-Ornish Lifestyle Medicine

The following information came from an October 2018 post from The Dr. Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

1. Choose Plant-Based Low-fat, Nutrient Rich Foods instead of Calorie-dense foods.

An optimal diet for preventing disease and staying healthy is a whole foods, planted based diet naturally low in animal protein, low in harmful fats, and low in refined carbohydrates.

2. Eat small, Frequent, Balanced Meals and Snacks Throughout the Day, but Remember that the Total Calories Count the Most.

The evidence is mixed about whether eating small, frequent healthy meals and snacks affect weight loss. This approach has many advantages, especially for those with diabetes.

3.Stay Hydrated with water, not Liquid Calories.

Studies support the importance of staying well hydrated for weight management and health. Drinking a glass of water prior to eating can also curb our appetite which helps to limit excess calories.

4. Practice Mindful Eating.

Being mindful and aware of what, how, and when we are eating can make a significant impact on weight management, along with making healthy choices that affect our overall health and well being.

5. Practice the Four-Element Lifestyle Approach.

  • Fitness: Engage in regular and moderate exercise.
  • Stress management: Developing a daily practice and routine is important to reap the rewarding benefits of stress management. The link between our emotional state, weight and overall health is clearly connected.
  • Love and Support: Giving and receiving love and support makes us healthier and happier, When we feel better, it is easier to make healthy choices, including the food we choose to eat. Love and support provides us with the need for love and intimacy we long for and often seek out in a bowl of ice cream or a bag of chips in its absence.
  • Nutrition: Foods are neither good nor bad, but some are healthful than others. You have a spectrum of choices.

    More information on this program can be found at: http://www.ornish.com/ornishliving.

    Mindful Meditation Note:

Affirmation of God’s Presence from The Presence by Emmet Fox

God is Life, I understand that and I express it.

God is Truth, I understand that and I express it.

God is Divine Love, I understand that and express it.

BE HEALTHY,

Coach Brown