Always Hungry? Your Fat Cells May Be to Blame

Great info if you want to lose weight or just eat better….

Always Hungry? Your Fat Cells May Be to Blame

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/always-hungry-your-fat-cells-may-be-to-blame/

Pop quiz: What raises your blood glucose and insulin the most, calorie for calorie? A baked potato, ice cream, or pure table sugar? Contrary to what you might think, it’s actually the baked potato. In his new book Always Hungry, Dr. David Ludwig writes his own guidelines on what to eat to satisfy your appetite without piling on pounds. His one-line mantra? “Forget calories. Focus on quality. Let your body do the rest.” Read an excerpt from the book here.

Segment Guests

David Ludwig

David Ludwig is author of Always Hungry (Grand Central, 2016). He’s a practicing endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts.

The following is an excerpt from Always Hungry? by David Ludwig.

In our weight-obsessed culture, it’s common to disparage the fat in our bodies. But body fat (scientifically termed “adipose tissue”) is a highly specialized organ, critically important for health and longevity.

Among its many functions, fat surrounds and cushions vital organs like the kidneys and insulates us against the cold. Body fat also signifies health, conferring beauty when distributed in the right amounts and locations. But critically, fat is our fuel tank—a strategic calorie reserve to protect against starvation.

RELATED SEGMENT

Always Hungry? Your Fat Cells May Be to Blame

Compared to other species our size, humans have an exceptionally large brain that requires an enormous amount of calories. The metabolic demands of the brain are so great that, under resting conditions, it uses about one of every three calories we consume. And this calorie requirement is absolute. Any interruption would cause immediate loss of consciousness, rapidly followed by seizure, coma, and death. That’s a problem, because until very recently in human history, access to calories had always been unpredictable. Our ancestors faced extended periods of deprivation when a hunt or a staple food crop failed, during harsh winters, or when venturing out across an ocean. The key to their survival was body fat.

If we go for more than a few hours without eating, the body must rely on stored fuels for energy, and these come in three basic types, familiar to anyone who reads a nutrition label: carbohydrate, protein, and fat. The body stores accessible carbohydrate in the liver and protein in muscle, but these are in dilute forms, surrounded by lots of water. In contrast, stored fat is highly concentrated, since fat tissue contains very little water. In addition, pure carbohydrate and protein have less than half the calories of pure fat, making them relatively weak sources of energy. For these reasons, liver and muscle contain only a small fraction of the calories in fat tissue (less than 600 compared to about 3,500 per pound). In the absence of body fat, even a muscular man would waste away in days without eating, whereas all but the leanest adults have enough body fat to survive many weeks.

And these fat cells aren’t just inert storage depots. Fat cells actively take up excess calories soon after meals and release them in a controlled fashion at other times, according to the body’s needs.

Fat tissue also responds to and emits a multitude of chemical signals and neural messages, helping fine-tune our metabolism and immune system. But when fat cells malfunction, big problems ensue.

HUNGRY FAT

We generally think that weight gain is the unavoidable consequence of consuming too many calories, with fat cells being the passive recipients of that excess. But fat cells do nothing of consequence without specific instructions—certainly not calorie storage and release, their most critical functions.

Insulin: The Fat Cell Fertilizer

Many substances produced in the body or contained in our diet directly affect fat cell behavior, chief among them the hormone insulin.

Insulin, made in the pancreas, is widely known for its ability to lower blood sugar. Problems with the production or action of insulin lead to the common forms of diabetes, specifically type 1 (previously called juvenile diabetes) and type 2 (a frequent complication of obesity).

But insulin’s actions extend well beyond blood sugar control, to how all calories flow throughout the body.

Soon after the start of a meal, insulin level rises, directing incoming calories—glucose from carbohydrate, amino acids from protein, and free fatty acids from the fat in our diet—into body tissues for utilization or storage. A few hours later, decreasing insulin level allows stored fuels to reenter the blood, for use by the brain and the rest of the body. Although other hormones and biological inputs play supporting roles in this choreography, insulin is the undisputed star.

Insulin’s effects on calorie storage are so potent that we can consider it the ultimate fat cell fertilizer. For example, rats given insulin infusions developed low blood glucose (hypoglycemia), ate more, and gained weight. Even when their food was restricted to that of the control animals, they still became fatter. Conversely, mice genetically engineered to produce less insulin had healthier fat cells, burned off more calories, and resisted weight gain, even when given a diet that makes normal mice fat.

In humans, high rates of insulin release from the pancreas due to genetic variants or other reasons cause weight gain. People with type 1 diabetes who receive excess insulin predictably gain weight, whereas those treated inadequately with too little insulin lose weight, no matter how much they eat. Furthermore, drugs that stimulate insulin release from the pancreas are also associated with weight gain, and those that block its release with weight loss.

If too much insulin drives fat cells to increase in size and number, what drives the pancreas to produce too much insulin? Carbohydrate, specifically sugar and the highly processed starches that quickly digest into sugar. Basically, any of those packaged “low-fat” foods made primarily from refined grains, potato products, or concentrated sugar that crept into our diet as we single-mindedly focused on eating less fat.

Our Fat Cells Make Us Overeat

All this is just Endocrinology 101, well-established information every first-year medical student should know. But it leads to a stunning possibility. The usual way of thinking about the obesity epidemic has it backward. Overeating hasn’t made our fat cells grow; our fat cells have been programmed to grow, and that has made us overeat.

Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently

Too much refined carbohydrate causes blood glucose to surge soon after a meal, which in turn makes the pancreas produce more insulin than would have ever been the case for humans in the past. High insulin levels trigger fat cells to hoard excessive amounts of glucose, fatty acids, and other calorie-rich substances that circulate in the blood. It’s like those floor‑to‑ceiling turnstiles you might see at a ballpark or in the subway.

People can pass freely in one direction, but horizontal crossbars prevent movement the other way. Insulin ushers calories into fat cells, but restricts their passage back out. Consequently, the body starts to run low on accessible fuel within a few hours, more quickly than normal.

When that happens, the brain registers a problem and transmits an unmistakable call for help—in the form of rapidly rising hunger. Eating is a sure and fast way to increase the supply of calories in the blood, and processed carbohydrates act the fastest. The brain exploits this fact, making us crave starchy, sugary foods, more so than anything else.

What would you rather have when your blood sugar is crashing: a bowl of fruit, a tall glass of full-fat milk, a large chicken breast, or a cinnamon sticky bun (each with the same number of calories)?

As usually happens, we give in to temptation and have the sticky bun, or the myriad other formulations of processed carbohydrate so readily available today. But this solves the “energy crisis” only temporarily, sets up the next surge-crash cycle, and, over time, accelerates weight gain.

 

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Excerpted from the book Always Hungry? by David Ludwig, MD, PhD. Copyright © 2015 by David Ludwig, MD, PhD. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Mindful Mantras For Weight Loss

The Joy Of Half A Cookie’ And Other Mindful Mantras For Weight Loss

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/30/461382451/the-joy-of-half-a-cookie-and-other-mindful-mantras-for-weight-loss 

December 30, 20155:55 PM ET

JEAN FAIN- NPR

Jean Kristeller’s 10-week program in The Joy of Half A Cookie is designed to curb overeating, help you feel your hunger and trust your taste buds.

iStockphoto

Every now and then, a Julia Child or Michael Pollan come along and changes the way we eat.

Could Jean Kristeller, America’s leading mindful eating researcher and the author of a new self-help book, The Joy of Half a Cookie, published Tuesday, be next? I’m of a mind to say maybe.

Back when Kristeller, now a professor of psychology emeritus at Indiana State University, was a grad student at Yale in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she had a compulsive overeating problem. She had been meditating for years, and decided to apply what she was studying about eating regulation and the mind-body connection toher overeating. As she writes, it was transformative. Once she got a handle on it, she developed a mindfulness training for a variety of eating issues called Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training, or MB-EAT, and set out to test its effectiveness.

The Joy of Half a Cookie

Using Mindfulness to Lose Weight and End the Struggle With Food

by Jean Kristeller and Alisa Bowman

Hardcover, 278 pages

In several studies, Kristeller has shown that the practice of mindfulness meditation and mindful eating effectively decrease binge eating and increase an inner sense of control overeating.

She’s also been exploring MB-EAT for weight loss in a study which began in 2004 and compared MB-EAT to a widely used meditation program (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) and a standardized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. She has yet to publish this study, but the preliminary data show that MB-EAT’s added calorie-cutting suggestions and healthy eating strategies dofacilitate significant weight loss in the short-term. (The study subjects — 225 obese men and women binge eaters — lost about a pound a week on average.) Whether or not the training facilitates significant long-term weight loss (at the 18-month follow up) is still to be determined.

The 10-week plan involves a combination of mindfulness meditations and mindful-eating practices, healthy eating and calorie-cutting strategies. More specifically, it’s designed to curb overeating, help you feel your hunger, trust your taste buds and become deeply satisfied with the quality, rather than quantity, of food.

If I hadn’t seen the transformative effect of Kristeller’s proven practices in my own practice as an eating disorder therapist, I probably wouldn’t bother reading yet another mindful eating book. (I’ve read many.) But I had, so I did, and I’m thrilled this research psychologist has transformed her group training into a do-it-yourself plan.

I put Joy of Half a Cookie up there with Mastering the Art of French Cooking and The Omnivore’s Dilemma because I’ve seen the measurable and pleasurable difference Kristeller’s plan has made to me and my clients. Although she and I have traversed the same territory for decades, the one time I heard the describe her training, it forever changed the way I work with the range of eating issues.

Still, I had some concerns and questions I wanted to run by Kristeller. What follows is an edited version of that recent exchange.

Before you discovered mindful eating, you describe being trapped in a vicious cycle of under-eating by day, overeating by night. How did you discover that mindfulness could break that cycle?

My first transformative eating experience was inspired by Susie Orbach’s Fat Is a Feminist Issue. For one week, I permitted myself to lunch on high-fat, high-sugary foods [as recommended by the book]. The first few days, I savored snack machine chips and cookies. They tasted pretty good, but I didn’t crave more after dinner. When the packaged snacks lost their appeal, I went for fresh croissants one day, a few pizza slices the next. By week’s end, I was starting to tune into my hunger, fullness and food enjoyment with what I would now call “mindfulness.”

You say MB-EAT isn’t a diet, but you recommend weighing and measuring portions and other dieting strategies. What’s the difference?

Diets prescribe certain foods and amounts of food for relatively rapid weight loss. They bear little relationship to a flexible, sustainable eating approach. Yet calories do “count.”

I don’t recommend aiming for a certain number of calories per day. Rather, I encourage a more exploratory approach to calorie content — noticing the amount of cereal in your bowl, butter on your toast, meat on your plate. Like a budget, you wouldn’t shop without looking at price tags. And, if your income dropped by 25 percent, you’d need to cut expenditures, but not watch every penny or always spend exactly the same amount.

Given that caloric restriction can be a recipe for overeating, if not disordered eating, for some people, why do you challenge readers to cut 500 calories per day, forever, from their diet?

Most diets drop caloric intake by at least 1,000 calories per day. The 500-calorie challenge is about finding sustainable ways to cut calories, which is neither overly restrictive nor, in our experience, does it trigger overeating. Rather, I encourage people to cut “mindless calories”: forego extra servings, refrain from cleaning your plate when full, swap higher calorie snacks for enjoyable lower calorie ones.

Nowhere do you mention how much weight study subjects lost. How muchdid they lose?

Average weight loss was relatively modest — about one pound per week or seven pounds. Some lost over 20 pounds, and some lost little, but, unlike our first NIH trial, which focused on binge eating, not weight loss, none gained weight. However, even in that study, a third of participants lost weight just eating mindfully.

According to a recent systematic review, mindfulness training decreases binge and emotional eating, but fails to facilitate significant weight loss. So why do you prescribe mindfulness for weight loss?

Mindfulness greatly decreases the struggle with food. Weight loss happens slowly, as is appropriate. Although some effects can and do happen quickly, learning to apply them in range of situations takes time and an ongoing sense of discovery.

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After some hemming and hawing, my conclusion is as follows: If you want to lose weight and end the struggle with food, by all means, dive into Kristeller’s practices for cultivating inner wisdom.

But can you achieve long-term weight loss with this? Only time and the results of her follow-up research will tell if, in fact, her approach works.

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Jean Fain is a Harvard Medical School-affiliated psychotherapist and the author ofThe Self-Compassion Diet.

Diet soda

i love diet soda but I know that it isn’t a good thing

I just saw this on msn.com

-© Nicholas Liby/ flickr

On a recent unseasonably warm day in New York City, I, like many of my fellow cube farmers, headed outside to eat lunch in the sun. The park’s tables were packed with slender, natty finance dudes digging into take-away salads, turkey sandwiches, and tortilla-less burrito bowls from Chipotle. What amazed me were all the Diet Coke cans studding this giant sea of otherwise healthy tabletops.

A quick and extremely unscientific survey of these gents revealed that these guys, like you, already knew regular and diet soda are packed with artificial crap, are bad for teeth, and lead to obesity and diabetes (yes, even the sugar-free stuff). So, WTF?

Not surprisingly, most were downing it for the caffeine to counteract post-lunch food coma. But after digging deeper, I learned that what most guys were really avoiding was an afternoon coffee, fearing the extra caffeine found in a cup of joe would do more harm than good.

So these guys chose Diet Coke because they thought it was healthier. [ Cue palm-to-forehead slap. ]

It isn’t. Still .

Yes, a tall iced coffee from Starbucks can pack twice the jump juice as a can of Diet Coke, but it won’t keep you up at night or increase your risk of hypertension or ulcers. (A single Illy espresso has about the same caffeine as 12 ounces of Diet Coke, FYI.)

With coffee you not only get the feel-good focus buzz—a 2004 study in the Journal of Nutrition argues the black stuff is one of the largest sources of life-extending antioxidants on the planet.

Soda, on the other hand, may provide a burst but only ups your risk for bad things. In fact, just this month, a 28-year study of 43,000 men found those who drank soda had a much higher risk of stroke than those who sipped coffee.

So be a (healthier) man and skip the soda. You know better.

Giving thanks: The benefits of gratitude

HERE IS A GREAT ARTICLE THAT CAN STAND ALONE AND SPEAK BY ITSELF. NOTHING MORE THAT I CAN REALLY ADD OTHER THAN PLEASE READ AND USE IT !

From Psychology Today Magazine………

Fulfillment at Any Age

    How to remain productive and healthy into your later years

    by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D.

      Why gratitude is good for your mental health

Published on May 25, 2010 by Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. in Fulfillment at Any Age

We all like being thanked. It’s a great feeling to have someone, especially someone who doesn’t stand to gain, tell us that we made a difference in their lives. In the past few weeks, I’ve had the good fortune of receiving some heartfelt thank you notes from students, pausing as they got ready to leave campus for the summer, or perhaps for good, to take a moment and let me know that something I said or did proved helpful to them. I’ve also had the good fortune of having favors done for me by people who went out of their way to help me solve a problem, fix something, or in fortunately only one case- return a lost cellphone. Being thanked and having reason to thank others are two sides of the same gratefulness coin. Both exemplify the positive in human behavior and provide us with a positive charge that boosts our emotional balance.

On the surface it seems like gratitude has everything to recommend it. There are a few gratitude traps, though. Some people feel uncomfortable about being thanked. They get truly embarrassed, dismissing the thanker by insisting that “it was nothing” (though clearly the thanker felt otherwise). There are also some uncomfortable aspects about thank-yous when it comes to thank-you presents that are overly generous or could be interpreted as bribes.

See All Stories In

The Impact of Gratitude

The health benefits of feeling grateful for your blessings.

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If you’re at the receiving end of a thank-you, you may feel unsure about how to reciprocate. Does a thank-you present require a thank-you note? What about thanking someone who’s helped you? Do you reward a person who returns a lost item with cash or just allow your relieved face to serve as its own reward? Then there’s the guilt factor: What if you let a few weeks slip by without sending a thank-you note for a birthday gift? Does it look worse to send a belated thank-you note or just to forget the whole thing and hope the gift-giver won’t notice? Thank-you notes inspire their own particular forms of angst, as was pointed out in one particularly insightful Social Q’s column of the New York Times (for the record: this column is a treasure trove of psychological insight on quirky behaviors).

It might be reassuring, then, to learn that the expression of thanks can be its own reward. Being the recipient of a favor can also make the favor-giver (if there is such a word) feel good too. Everyone benefits when thanks are freely given and just as freely acknowledged. 

There are always exceptional circumstances involving acts of extreme altruism. Heroes are known as the people who put the needs of others above our own. These cases put in bold relief the fact that a hero doesn’t expect thank-you notes or little gift baskets as acknowledgement of his or her sacrifice.

Many real-life heroes also do not expect thank-yous. Yet, when we benefit from the labors that others put out for our sake, we feel internally driven to and want to express our gratitude. And that’s a good thing, in more ways than one.

Psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough point out that gratitude is the “forgotten factor” in happiness research. They point out the benefits of expressing gratitude as ranging from better physical health to improved mental alertness. People who express gratitude also are more likely to offer emotional support to others.

Expressing gratitude in your daily life might even have a protective effect on staving off certain forms of psychological disorders. In a review article published this past March (see below), researchers found that habitually focusing on and appreciating the positive aspects of life is related to a generally higher level of psychological well-being and a lower risk of certain forms of psychopathology.

Now how can you apply these ideas to your own life? Here are some suggestions to boost your own, shall we say, GQ’s (“gratitude quotient”):

1. If someone thanks you, accept the thanks graciously. Let the person know you appreciate being thanked. That’s all you need to do. Really.

2. If you find that difficult, think about why gratitude makes you uncomfortable. Do you not feel worthy of being thanked? In my study of personal fulfillment in midlife, I identified a subgroup of people whose own fulfillment was hampered by their lack of faith in their own worth. Chronic feelings of inadequacy can make it difficult for people to benefit from any thanks that come their way.

3. Look for small things to be grateful for. Not all acts of kindness have a capital “K.” A driver who lets you ease into a busy highway deserves a wave just as much as someone who holds open a door when you’re loaded down with packages. A smile will boost your GQ and make both of you feel better.

4. Don’t fret about gratitude infractions. If you forget to send a thank you note don’t worry about it and certainly don’t use elapsed time as an excuse to avoid the task altogether. Send a quick email and then get to the real thing. If you’re a chronic forgetter, though, you might try to figure out why. By the same token, if someone forgets to thank you, don’t ruminate over it, thereby raising your BP if not your GQ.

5. Keep your thank you’s short, sweet, and easy to write. One reason people procrastinate about writing thank you’s is that they want them to be original and not seem hasty, insincere, or ill conceived. This doesn’t mean the thank you should be one that is short enough to tweet but if you don’t build it up in your mind as having to be a magnum opus you’ll be less inclined to put it off. Whatever you do, don’t make excuses or lie about having sent a thank you that you never did (for more on lying and excuse-making, check out my previous post).

I’ll close by saying thanks in advance to anyone who chooses to add their comments to the discussion or wishes to forward the blog link. It’s the least I can do!

Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily updates on psychology, health, and aging. Feel free to join my Facebook group, “Fulfillment at Any Age,” to discuss today’s blog, or to ask further questions about this posting. 

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 2010

From Detox To Elimination Diets, Skipping Sugar May Be The Best Bet

January 19, 2015 2:06 PM ET – Allison Aubrey –All Things Considered– npr.org

Oh, sugar! If this time of year has you rethinking your diet, there is one surefire change you can make to improve health: Cut back on sugar.

When it comes to detox diets, we totally get the appeal.

Who’s not drawn to the idea of flushing all the toxins out of our bodies — a sort of spring cleaning of our insides?

And yes, several years back, I even remember trying — if only for a day — the trendy cayenne-pepper liquid cleanse (as seen in this Mindy Kaling clip from The Office) as part of a cleansing/detox diet.

But it turns out, as we’ve reported, the whole idea that you need to go on a special, draconian diet to detox your body really has no scientific backing.

We spoke to Dr. Ranit Mishori, a faculty member in family medicine at Georgetown University Medical School who has reviewed the literature on colon cleanses. She told us that lots of her patients are asking about detox and cleansing diets, especially at this time of year. Her advice: Steer clear.

The way she explains it, our bodies have an excellent built-in system for getting rid of toxins. Our kidneys and livers, for instance, both play an important role in helping to filter out potentially harmful compounds.

“The human body has evolved over many years, and it has a very sophisticated [filtering] system through the liver, through the kidneys,” Mishori told us.

Can A Diet Clean Out Toxins In The Body?

“The liver has all kinds of different enzymes that break down the chemicals considered to be harmful, potentially, and then it excretes [them]. It does it very, very efficiently,” she says. “It does it 24 hours a day. And there are no supplements or super foods that can boost the liver and kidneys to do it better than they already do.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that healthful eating isn’t important. But the point is, you don’t need to live on liquids and cayenne — or any other crazy fad diets out there. Most of us would be better off making more straightforward changes to our diets that are known to be beneficial.

So what kind of simple, good-for-you changes should you consider? Mishori offered her top three tips: “Cutting on sugar is always a good idea. Cutting on processed foods is always a good idea. Being better hydrated is always a good idea,” she told us.

Diets don’t need to be all-or-nothing. When it comes to sugar, the idea is to reduce consumption and be more mindful.

Currently, as we’ve reported, the typical American consumes about 22 teaspoons a day of sugar, which is about three times more than what’s recommended. And the evidence is piling up that this is doing all kinds of damage to our bodies.

For instance, a recent paper in BMJ Open Heart described how consuming too much sugar can raise the risk of high blood pressure.

And, as we’ve reported, a study in JAMA Internal Medicine concluded that Americans who consumed the most sugar — about a quarter of their daily calories — were twice as likely to die from heart disease as those who limited their sugar intake to 7 percent of their total calories. Or, as I previously broke it down:

“To translate that into a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, the big sugar eaters were consuming 500 calories a day from sugar — that’s 31 teaspoons. Those who tamed their sweet tooth the most, by contrast, were taking in about 160 calories a day from sugar — or about 10 teaspoons per day.

“The American Heart Association advises that women consume no more than 6 teaspoons of added sugar daily. This is about 100 calories. And men, no more than 9 teaspoons, or about 150 calories from sugar. (This does not include foods such as fruits and vegetables that naturally contain sugar.)”

So the bottom line is, if you want to make one change this year, cutting back on added sugar is probably a good choice.

Caffeine: The Silent Killer of Success

BY Travis Bradberry, Ph.D.- posted on LinkedIn- September 08, 2014

This week’s tip for improving your performance is the most simple and straightforward method I’ve provided thus far. For many people, this tip has the potential to have a bigger impact than any other single action. The catch? You have to cut down on caffeine, and as any caffeine drinker can attest, this is easier said than done.

For those who aren’t aware, the ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90% of top performers are high in emotional intelligence. These individuals are skilled at managing their emotions (even in times of high stress) in order to remain calm and in control.

The Good: Isn’t Really Good

Most people start drinking caffeine because it makes them feel more alert and improves their mood. Many studies suggest that caffeine actually improves cognitive task performance (memory, attention span, etc.) in the short-term. Unfortunately, these studies fail to consider the participants’ caffeine habits. New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School shows that performance increases due to caffeine intake are the result of caffeine drinkers experiencing a short-term reversal of caffeine withdrawal. By controlling for caffeine use in study participants, John Hopkins researchers found that caffeine-related performance improvement is nonexistent without caffeine withdrawal. In essence, coming off caffeine reduces your cognitive performance and has a negative impact on your mood. The only way to get back to normal is to drink caffeine, and when you do drink it, you feel like it’s taking you to new heights. In reality, the caffeine is just taking your performance back to normal for a short period.

The Bad: Adrenaline

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight or flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyper-aroused state, your emotions overrun your behavior.

Irritability and anxiety are the most commonly seen emotional effects of caffeine, but caffeine enables all of your emotions to take charge.

The negative effects of a caffeine-generated adrenaline surge are not just behavioral. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that large doses of caffeine raise blood pressure, stimulate the heart, and produce rapid shallow breathing, which readers of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 know deprives the brain of the oxygen needed to keep your thinking calm and rational.

The Ugly: Sleep

When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, focus, memory, and information processing speed are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Your brain is very fickle when it comes to sleep. For you to wake up feeling rested, your brain needs to move through an elaborate series of cycles. You can help this process along and improve the quality of your sleep by reducing your caffeine intake.

Here’s why you’ll want to: caffeine has a six-hour half-life, which means it takes a full twenty-four hours to work its way out of your system. Have a cup of joe at eight a.m., and you’ll still have 25% of the caffeine in your body at eight p.m. Anything you drink after noon will still be at 50% strength at bedtime. Any caffeine in your bloodstream—with the negative effects increasing with the dose—makes it harder to fall asleep.

When you do finally fall asleep, the worst is yet to come. Caffeine disrupts the quality of your sleep by reducing rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the deep sleep when your body recuperates and processes emotions. When caffeine disrupts your sleep, you wake up the next day with an emotional handicap. You’re naturally going to be inclined to grab a cup of coffee or an energy drink to try to make yourself feel better. The caffeine produces surges of adrenaline, which further your emotional handicap. Caffeine and lack of sleep leave you feeling tired in the afternoon, so you drink more caffeine, which leaves even more of it in your bloodstream at bedtime. Caffeine very quickly creates a vicious cycle.

Withdrawal

Like any stimulant, caffeine is physiologically and psychologically addictive. If you do choose to lower your caffeine intake, you should do so slowly under the guidance of a qualified medical professional. The researchers at Johns Hopkins found that caffeine withdrawal causes headache, fatigue, sleepiness, and difficulty concentrating. Some people report feeling flu-like symptoms, depression, and anxiety after reducing intake by as little as one cup a day. Slowly tapering your caffeine dosage each day can greatly reduce these withdrawal symptoms.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Travis Bradberry, Ph.D.

Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world’s leading provider of emotional intelligence tests, emotional intelligence training, and emotional intelligence certification, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.

Food-Mood Connection: How You Eat Can Amp Up Or Tamp Down Stress

Food-Mood Connection: How You Eat Can Amp Up Or Tamp Down Stress

by Allison Aubrey -July 14, 2014

Eat more when you’re stressed? You’re not alone. More than a third of the participants in a national survey conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health said they change their diets during stressful times.

And many of us are quick to turn to either sugary foods or highly refined carbohydrates such as bagels or white pasta when the stress hits.

Stress-Busting Foods

Eggs
Dark, leafy greens like kale or Swiss chard
Pumpkin seeds
Fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, like sardines, salmon or canned tuna
Flaxseed
Dark chocolate
“There can be a bit of a vicious cycle,” says David Ludwig, a professor of pediatrics and nutrition at Harvard University and a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “When we feel stressed we seek foods that are going to comfort us immediately, but often times those foods lead to surges and crashes in hormones and blood sugar that increase our susceptibility to new stresses.”

Now, of course, we can’t control lots of the events and circumstances that lead to stress. But, Ludwig says, “our body chemistry can very much affect how that stress gets to us.”

He points to a study he and some colleagues published in the journal Pediatrics several years back.

They gave teenage boys different types of breakfast meals. One included protein-rich eggs, while another meal included high-fiber, steel-cut oats. A third meal of instant oatmeal was highest on the glycemic index, a measure of how quickly sugar is absorbed and how soon a food is likely to make you hungry again.

“After the highly refined instant oatmeal, blood sugar soared but then crashed a few hours later,” Ludwig says. “And when that happened the [stress] hormone adrenaline, or epinephrine, surged to very high levels.”

Ludwig says the links between food and mood are complex. And just as there are individual differences in susceptibility to diseases, there are differences in response to food, too. Not all of us are equally sensitive to foods like instant oatmeal, high on the glycemic index.

Given what we know about how different foods affect the risk of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes, “why should it be so surprising that the nature of the foods we eat can also affect our emotional and mental well-being?” Ludwig says.

So, if eating lots of refined carbs and sugar may exacerbate our responses to stress, are there other types of food that make us more resilient? Researcher Joe Hibbeln of the National Institutes of Health believes the answer is yes.

“I think there’s a very strong connection between what you eat and your mood,” Hibbeln says.

He has spent the past two decades investigating links between the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish and emotional health.

“One of the most basic ways that omega-3s help to regulate mood is by quieting down the [body’s] response to inflammation,” Hibbeln says.

When you get walloped by something, whether it’s a virus or an emotional stressor, you want to bounce back as quickly as possible, he notes.

“You can either be good at weathering stress or you can be brittle. And omega-3s make your stress system more flexible,” Hibbeln says. He points to studies showing that omega-3s can help protect neurons against the damage that can be done by chronic stress.

He also points to clinical trials that have found that omega-3s may help control depressive symptoms. And a study of schoolchildren in England linked omega-3s to more pro-social behavior.

Hibbeln knows that some people shy away from fish due to the cost, so he points to affordable options such as canned light tuna and sardines, which are good sources of omega-3s. There are also plant-based sources of omega-3s, such as flaxseed and chia seeds.

Now, clearly, omega-3s aren’t the only food that’s good for our emotional health.

Drew Ramsey, a psychiatrist at Columbia University and author of The Happiness Diet, says a nutrient-rich diet is best for beating stress.

He points to his favorite stress-busting breakfast: scrambled eggs mixed with kale (or other greens) and topped with pumpkin seeds.

With this meal, you’re covering all your bases, Ramsey says. The eggs are a good source of B vitamins and protein, which can be more satiating than a carb-based breakfast. The greens are incredibly nutrient-dense, and are a good source of vitamin A, vitamin K and potassium.

And the pumpkin seeds are a good source of magnesium — which is thought to play a role in fending off anxiety — and zinc, which may help boost the immune system.

For dessert, go for dark chocolate, which “has an acute affect on mood,” Ramsey says. He points to a study that found cocoa flavanols can help boost mood and sustain clear thinking among adults who are engaged in intense mental efforts — like students cramming, or journalists on deadline.

In addition, dark chocolate has been shown to improve vascular health by increasing blood flow and reducing inflammation.

The bottom line? The foods we choose can’t magic away stress. But Ramsey says he believes “there is a very, very strong connection between food and mood.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/07/14/329529110/food-mood-connection-how-you-eat-can-amp-up-or-tamp-down-stress

Words to live by: Celebration

This was the most-visited post that I’ve ever had on my blog– I posted it over a year ago. Let’s celebrate!

(This is one of a part of a series of WORDS TO LIVE BY. This series grew out of a workbook I first made for my young daughters and discussed at the dinner table. These Words include values, good ideas, and Words to aspire to….and learn from….enjoy!)

I know right away some people may question why or what I mean by celebration and why it is a Word To Live By.

I think we all need to celebrate more often.

Yes, I said we. As I’ve mentioned before, I am naturally a low-key guy. I think part of me tries to downplay things. I notice that especially with friends, with my sisters, and relatives – those with which I grew up – when something good happens or when I’m excited about something – I try to act cool, calm, and un-excited when I tell them about it.

The other day I was excited about a project at work. I was telling a relative and I noticed that right way, I downplayed the whole thing. It came off like I was actually down about it. He tried to give me some encouragement. I was actually excited. I needed and wanted to celebrate with him. We both would have enjoyed it and benefited, right?

In any case, celebrating is something I believe to be a key issue in life, here’s why:

• We need to celebrate things each day, even the little things – we paid the bills, we have good health, we took some kind of action and had some kind of success, we did something good for someone else, etc.
• So many times we actually did something good, accomplished something, took action and we don’t take a moment to celebrate.
• Celebrating in the present moment allows us and helps us to focus on the now, what is going on – whether it be with our family, friends, work, or fun things.
• We can benefit greatly from celebrating future events – here’s what I mean – if you act as if what you want in life is already a reality, celebrating “IT” as already being reality brings in all kinds of good emotions, eliminates thoughts of conditions, limitations. Your brain doesn’t know that the difference between the imagination and reality of it all – so Celebration for something as if it has already happened is very powerful.

Imagine that you already have “it” or that you’ve already accomplished “it” – then celebrate! Wayne Dyer says “Highly realized people learn to think from the end- that is, they experience what they wish to intend before it shows up in the material form.” Celebrate that car, that job, that improved relationship, that newly thinner, leaner body. Enjoy it.

I practice money coming in and I get the feeling like I’m winning the lottery. I hold my arms up like Rocky on the top of the Philly steps and I jump around. I visualize and celebrate. I enjoy it.

How would you react if you won the lottery? Got a perfect job? Had that perfect car/house/relationship/health? OK, now go ahead and practice celebrating it so that when it arrives, you’ll be ready. In the meantime, you’ll feel great.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know if it will always work, but EVERYTIME I feel really great afterwards! I’m smiling, happier, energized, and guess what? I’m now looking for good things to come, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Celebrate what you’ve accomplished in your life! Too many of us don’t give ourselves enough credit. Look into the past, briefly, get those good references and celebrate them. You endured hurdles and mistakes and you are now the person you are because you kept moving. Celebrate it!

Celebrate the present – your family, friends, work, life, health – even if it isn’t perfect. Sure you can want to improve something but hell, if you didn’t have your situation now, you wouldn’t have the perspective, wisdom, and knowledge to make it better, right? Guess what, you can help yourself now, you can even help others, you have choices, that’s great, celebrate! Celebrate your health and life – would you prefer the alternative?

I know that there are some days when you don’t feel like celebrating. Use Tony Robbins’ method “What could I celebrate today? (then even if you can’t think of something ask:) If I could think of something to celebrate, what would it be?”

“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.” — Oprah Winfrey

Celebrate the future as if it is already happened! Celebrate the person you want to be, the thing you want to have, the issue you want to resolve, the situation that you want to improve! Enjoy it! Feel the fun!

Celebrate what you want to see more of. – Tom Peters (author of In Search of Excellence and other books)

Feeling happy/celebratory/abundant/whatever surpasses the money in your bank account, the report from the doctor, the whatever – and transcends what others may think of you. Genuinely feeling a certain way is possible when you detach yourself from the things you desire and then celebrating it.

Dream on it. Let your mind take you to places you would like to go, and then think about it and plan it and celebrate the possibilities. And don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t know how to dream.
Liza Minnelli

Don’t you think that you’re more attractive to others when you’re thinking celebrating rather than the “ho-hum” you? Wouldn’t your career be a little different if you approached it in a ‘celebrating-way’ rather that complaining, whining and doing the minimum as so many people do? (not you of course)

Celebrating sends a message to others around you, even to the Universe (if you believe in such)

“Don’t forget to CELEBRATE!!! Anchor the experience of doing something truly extraordinary with an awesome celebration.”- Tony Robbins

Celebrating brings smiles and laughter. It brings joy and happiness. Enough said.

Sweet Tooth Gone Bad: Why 22 Teaspoons Of Sugar Per Day Is Risky

From NPR-by ALLISON AUBREY -February 04, 2014

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/02/03/271130613/sweet-tooth-gone-bad-why-22-teaspoons-of-sugar-per-day-is-deadly

We’ve written lots lately about the potentially addictive qualities of sugar and the public policy efforts to limit consumption.

Now comes a new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, which finds that Americans who consumed the most sugar — about a quarter of their daily calories — were twice as likely to die from heart disease as those who limited their sugar intake to 7 percent of their total calories.

To translate that into a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, the big sugar eaters were consuming 500 calories a day from sugar — that’s 31 teaspoons. Those who tamed their sweet tooth the most, by contrast, were taking in about 160 calories a day from sugar — or about 10 teaspoons per day.

Unfortunately, most Americans have a sugar habit that is pushing toward the danger zone.

“The average American is consuming 22 teaspoons a day. That’s about three times what’s recommended,” says Laura Schmidt of the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.

Now, we should point out, we’re not talking fruit here. Researchers did not include the sugar naturally occurring in fruit or milk. Instead, the study focused specifically on the risks of addedsugar — the refined sugars and corn syrups added to foods such as baked goods and sugary sodas.

So, how much added sugar is OK?

Well, the American Heart Association advises that women consume no more than 6 teaspoons of sugar daily. This is about 100 calories. And men, no more than 9 teaspoons, or about 150 calories from sugar.

The World Health Organization says people should get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from sugar.

And the last time the federal government weighed in on sugar was in the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, which make only a broad recommendation to reduce consumption of added sugar.

So how best to reduce sugar?

Some steps are fairly obvious. For example, eliminating one 12-ounce can of sugar-sweetened soda can cut about 9 teaspoons of sugar.

But other common sources of added sugar can take you by surprise. For example, this morning I ate a small, 4-ounce cup of low-fat organic peach yogurt. I chalked it up as a very healthful breakfast, but when I looked at the nutrition label, it had 17 grams of sugar.

“You just shot most of your wad” for the day, Schmidt points out.

So, yeah, swap those sweetened yogurts for plain yogurt. A typical 6-ounce serving of vanilla yogurt has about 6 teaspoons of sugar — which is about as much as a regular size Snickersbar.

Bottom line: Read the labels. Most nutrition labels list sugar in grams. Four grams of sugar is equivalent to about one teaspoon.

And, don’t get forgot to count sugar if you’re eating out. There can be lots of sugar added to breakfast foods.

For instance, stopping at Starbucks to pick up a blueberry muffin with your latte? That muffin, according to the Starbucks website, contains 29 grams of sugar, or roughly 7 teaspoons.

And an Apple Crumb doughnut at Dunkin Donuts will set you back 49 grams of sugar — that’s more than a day’s worth of added sugar.

There’s a lot of variability in baked goods. For instance, another option at Dunkin Donuts, theCocoa Glazed doughnut, has much less sugar, 13 grams.

http://www.npr.org/emailafriend?storyId=271130613

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Make THE decision in the right state of mind

Here is a great video that can help anyone with a tough decision, a tough situation, facing a situation or challenge that brings fear.

We all have to go outside a comfort level, we need to handle things without fear.

Our story can empower us or limit us.

http://getrmt.com/v1.php