I'm jumping way off topic on this one, I realize. But I think in this case it is forgivable. These were some of the best nine minutes and some seconds I have ever spent . . .
Sincerely,
Lora
Friday, December 24, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
12 Compelling Reasons to Ditch Stress from Your Life
Here is an excellent article the nutritional side of Stress I found on Mercola.com. Reproduced with permission.
In this interview, Marc David, an expert in the psychology of eating, talks about the important role stress plays in digestion.
I'm sure you received many valuable health tips from this small segment of the expert interview. To hear the full version of this and other interviews I do with world-renowned health experts is easy...
Simply sign up for the affordable Mercola Inner Circle and receive them monthly, with zero effort on your part. Take this small step -- and take control of your health – 2,250 other Mercola Inner Circle members can't be wrong!
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
This video clip of my Inner Circle expert interview with Marc David exposes the tremendous impact stress can have on your digestion, and in turn your weight and overall health.
Marc is the founder and director of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, and has written two excellent books on this topic: The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss, and Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being.
The fact is, you can't separate your wellness from your emotions. Every feeling you have affects some part of your body. And stress can wreak havoc even if you’re doing everything else “right.”
What is “Stress”?
The classic definition of stress is “any real or imagined threat, and your body’s response to it.” Celebrations and tragedies alike can cause a stress response in your body. Some stress is unavoidable. Some mild forms of stress can even be helpful in some situations.
But a stressor becomes a problem when:
* Your response to it is negative.
* Your feelings and emotions are inappropriate for the circumstances.
* Your response lasts an excessively long time.
* You’re feeling continuously overwhelmed, overpowered or overworked.
It’s important to realize that all your feelings create physiological changes. Your skin, heart rate, digestion, joints, muscle energy levels, the hair on your head, and countless cells and systems you don't even know about change with every emotion.
Marc notes that Americans, in general, tend to eat under a state of stress and anxiety. While under stress, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure rises, and blood is shunted away from your midsection, going to your arms, legs, and head for quick thinking, fighting, or fleeing.
All of these changes are referred to as the physiological stress response.
Under those circumstances, your digestion completely shuts down. So a major problem with eating while your body is under the stress response is that you could be eating the healthiest food in the world, yet you won’t be able to fully digest and assimilate that food, and your body will not be able to burn calories effectively.
How the Stress Response Affects Your Digestion and Health
The stress response causes a number of detrimental events in your body, including:
* Decreased nutrient absorption
* Decreased oxygenation to your gut
* As much as four times less blood flow to your digestive system, which leads to decreased
metabolism
* Decreased enzymatic output in your gut – as much as 20,000-fold!
Many nutrients are also excreted during stress, particularly:
* Water-soluble vitamins
* Macrominerals
* Microminerals
* Calcium (calcium excretion can increase as much as 60 to 75 mg within an hour of a stressful event)
As if that’s not enough, your cholesterol and triglycerides also go up, while gut flora populations decrease. You’re also more likely to experience increased sensitivity to food and gastroesophageal reflux, or heartburn.
But perhaps most importantly, when your body is under the stress response, your cortisol and insulin levels rise.
These two hormones tend to track each other, and when your cortisol is consistently elevated under a chronic low-level stress response, you’ll likely notice that you have difficulty losing weight or building muscle.
Additionally, if your cortisol is chronically elevated, you’ll tend to gain weight around your midsection. We’ve known for some time that body fat, and especially visceral fat (the fat that gathers around your internal organs, around your midsection) is a major contributing factor to developing diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
The bottom line?
When you eat under stress, your body is in the opposite state of where you need to be in order to digest, assimilate nutrients, and burn calories.
Everyday Stress Relief
There’s no doubt that finding ways to relieve your everyday stress is an important, if not essential, aspect of optimizing your health. All the organics in the world can’t help you if your body can’t assimilate the nutrients you put into it.
Stress is a serious factor in the illness of nearly all of the patients seen at my clinic. Because in addition to everything mentioned above, stress also plays a major role in your immune system, and can impact your:
* Blood pressure
* Cholesterol
* Brain chemistry
* Blood sugar levels
* Hormonal balance
You cannot eliminate stress entirely, but you can work to provide your body with tools to compensate for the bioelectrical shortcircuiting that can cause serious disruption in many of your body's important systems. By using techniques such as meridian tapping, you can reprogram your body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life.
But there are many other strategies you can employ to help you deal with stress and unwind each day, including:
* Exercise. Studies have shown that during exercise, tranquilizing chemicals (endorphins) are released in your brain. Exercise is a natural way to bring your body pleasurable relaxation and rejuvenation.
* Proper sleep
* Meditation (with or without the additional aid of brain wave synchronization technology)
I also highly recommend you read the book Feelings Buried Alive Never Die. If you’re experiencing any type of physical or emotional challenge in any aspect of your life, this book does a great job of explaining feelings: what they are, how you experience them, how they are integral to your physical health, and, most importantly, how to work with and overcome those that are pulling you down.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey, don't leave me in the dark! Leave a little comment here for me. Did you like it? Hate it? Do you have anything else in mind? Let me know, right here. It's very easy: just click on the "comments" link immediately below. I would love to hear from you. :)
In this interview, Marc David, an expert in the psychology of eating, talks about the important role stress plays in digestion.
I'm sure you received many valuable health tips from this small segment of the expert interview. To hear the full version of this and other interviews I do with world-renowned health experts is easy...
Simply sign up for the affordable Mercola Inner Circle and receive them monthly, with zero effort on your part. Take this small step -- and take control of your health – 2,250 other Mercola Inner Circle members can't be wrong!
Dr. Mercola's Comments:
This video clip of my Inner Circle expert interview with Marc David exposes the tremendous impact stress can have on your digestion, and in turn your weight and overall health.
Marc is the founder and director of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, and has written two excellent books on this topic: The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy, and Weight Loss, and Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being.
The fact is, you can't separate your wellness from your emotions. Every feeling you have affects some part of your body. And stress can wreak havoc even if you’re doing everything else “right.”
What is “Stress”?
The classic definition of stress is “any real or imagined threat, and your body’s response to it.” Celebrations and tragedies alike can cause a stress response in your body. Some stress is unavoidable. Some mild forms of stress can even be helpful in some situations.
But a stressor becomes a problem when:
* Your response to it is negative.
* Your feelings and emotions are inappropriate for the circumstances.
* Your response lasts an excessively long time.
* You’re feeling continuously overwhelmed, overpowered or overworked.
It’s important to realize that all your feelings create physiological changes. Your skin, heart rate, digestion, joints, muscle energy levels, the hair on your head, and countless cells and systems you don't even know about change with every emotion.
Marc notes that Americans, in general, tend to eat under a state of stress and anxiety. While under stress, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure rises, and blood is shunted away from your midsection, going to your arms, legs, and head for quick thinking, fighting, or fleeing.
All of these changes are referred to as the physiological stress response.
Under those circumstances, your digestion completely shuts down. So a major problem with eating while your body is under the stress response is that you could be eating the healthiest food in the world, yet you won’t be able to fully digest and assimilate that food, and your body will not be able to burn calories effectively.
How the Stress Response Affects Your Digestion and Health
The stress response causes a number of detrimental events in your body, including:
* Decreased nutrient absorption
* Decreased oxygenation to your gut
* As much as four times less blood flow to your digestive system, which leads to decreased
metabolism
* Decreased enzymatic output in your gut – as much as 20,000-fold!
Many nutrients are also excreted during stress, particularly:
* Water-soluble vitamins
* Macrominerals
* Microminerals
* Calcium (calcium excretion can increase as much as 60 to 75 mg within an hour of a stressful event)
As if that’s not enough, your cholesterol and triglycerides also go up, while gut flora populations decrease. You’re also more likely to experience increased sensitivity to food and gastroesophageal reflux, or heartburn.
But perhaps most importantly, when your body is under the stress response, your cortisol and insulin levels rise.
These two hormones tend to track each other, and when your cortisol is consistently elevated under a chronic low-level stress response, you’ll likely notice that you have difficulty losing weight or building muscle.
Additionally, if your cortisol is chronically elevated, you’ll tend to gain weight around your midsection. We’ve known for some time that body fat, and especially visceral fat (the fat that gathers around your internal organs, around your midsection) is a major contributing factor to developing diabetes and metabolic syndrome.
The bottom line?
When you eat under stress, your body is in the opposite state of where you need to be in order to digest, assimilate nutrients, and burn calories.
Everyday Stress Relief
There’s no doubt that finding ways to relieve your everyday stress is an important, if not essential, aspect of optimizing your health. All the organics in the world can’t help you if your body can’t assimilate the nutrients you put into it.
Stress is a serious factor in the illness of nearly all of the patients seen at my clinic. Because in addition to everything mentioned above, stress also plays a major role in your immune system, and can impact your:
* Blood pressure
* Cholesterol
* Brain chemistry
* Blood sugar levels
* Hormonal balance
You cannot eliminate stress entirely, but you can work to provide your body with tools to compensate for the bioelectrical shortcircuiting that can cause serious disruption in many of your body's important systems. By using techniques such as meridian tapping, you can reprogram your body’s reactions to the unavoidable stressors of everyday life.
But there are many other strategies you can employ to help you deal with stress and unwind each day, including:
* Exercise. Studies have shown that during exercise, tranquilizing chemicals (endorphins) are released in your brain. Exercise is a natural way to bring your body pleasurable relaxation and rejuvenation.
* Proper sleep
* Meditation (with or without the additional aid of brain wave synchronization technology)
I also highly recommend you read the book Feelings Buried Alive Never Die. If you’re experiencing any type of physical or emotional challenge in any aspect of your life, this book does a great job of explaining feelings: what they are, how you experience them, how they are integral to your physical health, and, most importantly, how to work with and overcome those that are pulling you down.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey, don't leave me in the dark! Leave a little comment here for me. Did you like it? Hate it? Do you have anything else in mind? Let me know, right here. It's very easy: just click on the "comments" link immediately below. I would love to hear from you. :)
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Emotions: Are We Responsible for Them?
The most basic feelings we experience include not only emotions, but motives such as hunger and sexual drive. The two phenomena (emotions and motives) are closely related. Emotions can activate and direct behavior much the same as do basic motives. Emotions may also accompany motivated behavior: Sex, for example, is not only a powerful motive, but also a potential source of joy.
Similar as they are, they need to be distinguished. The most common basis for distinguishng between them assumes that emotions are triggered from the outside, and motives from within. That is not to say that emotions are activated from without, but that emotions are usually aroused by external events and then are directed back toward those events. Motives, conversely, are often aroused by internal events, then directed toward objects in the environment. Another distinction between the two is that emotions invariably activate the autonomic nervous system, whereas motives typically do not. These distinctions, however, are not absolute. The sight of food, for instance, can trigger the motive of hunger, whereas severe hunger can arouse emotions. Nonetheless, for the reasons that they are so different and so similar, to discuss either intelligently, emotions and motives must be separated as issues.
Traditional arguments surrounding emotions should be irrelevant to any analysis of emotions; an emotion is neither a sensation nor a physiological occurrence. Nor is it an occurrence of any other kind; it does not simply “happen.” Emotions are rational and purposive. Emotions are actions. The individual chooses to emote, whether on a conscious or subconscious level, much as the individual chooses a course of action. It always makes sense to praise or blame a person for either contributing to a situation that incites an emotion or for having the emotion itself. A person can be blamed for unjustified anger, for instance, or praised for courage.
Human beings share a strong emotional commitment to the feeling of free will, and to feeling that they are free to act any way they choose. Choice or control, illusory or not, is crucial to human motivational systems and feelings of well-being.
(Taken from "Emotions by Choice" (2001) by Lora Morrow)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey, don't leave me in the dark! Leave a little comment here for me. Did you like it? Hate it? Do you have anything else in mind? Let me know, right here. It's very easy: just click on the "comments" link immediately below. I would love to hear from you. :)
Similar as they are, they need to be distinguished. The most common basis for distinguishng between them assumes that emotions are triggered from the outside, and motives from within. That is not to say that emotions are activated from without, but that emotions are usually aroused by external events and then are directed back toward those events. Motives, conversely, are often aroused by internal events, then directed toward objects in the environment. Another distinction between the two is that emotions invariably activate the autonomic nervous system, whereas motives typically do not. These distinctions, however, are not absolute. The sight of food, for instance, can trigger the motive of hunger, whereas severe hunger can arouse emotions. Nonetheless, for the reasons that they are so different and so similar, to discuss either intelligently, emotions and motives must be separated as issues.
Traditional arguments surrounding emotions should be irrelevant to any analysis of emotions; an emotion is neither a sensation nor a physiological occurrence. Nor is it an occurrence of any other kind; it does not simply “happen.” Emotions are rational and purposive. Emotions are actions. The individual chooses to emote, whether on a conscious or subconscious level, much as the individual chooses a course of action. It always makes sense to praise or blame a person for either contributing to a situation that incites an emotion or for having the emotion itself. A person can be blamed for unjustified anger, for instance, or praised for courage.
Human beings share a strong emotional commitment to the feeling of free will, and to feeling that they are free to act any way they choose. Choice or control, illusory or not, is crucial to human motivational systems and feelings of well-being.
(Taken from "Emotions by Choice" (2001) by Lora Morrow)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey, don't leave me in the dark! Leave a little comment here for me. Did you like it? Hate it? Do you have anything else in mind? Let me know, right here. It's very easy: just click on the "comments" link immediately below. I would love to hear from you. :)
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