Showing posts with label hormones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hormones. Show all posts

Monday, March 30, 2009

Hamilton Author to Speak on Weight, Longevity at Toronto Anti Aging Show

Monday, March 30, 2009 HAMILTON – Hamilton author and Keep Canada / Keep America Slim president Lee Fairbanks is the lead speaker joining some of North America’s top anti-aging specialists at the International Anti-Aging Show April 3-4-5 at Toronto's International Centre. He opens the seminar schedule at 1 pm, Friday.

Fairbanks completes a list of more than 15 experts that includes keynote speaker Dr. Pamela Smith, a women’s hormone expert from Michigan; Toronto TV host and homeopathic doctor Bryce Wylde; Bruce Krahn (The Fat Fighter Diet); Chelation Therapy expert Bill Allin; Florida TV Host Jackie Silver; and Colleen Hoffman Smith (The Inner Workout).

Fairbanks, an award winning journalist and resident weight loss expert for CHTV’s Live at 5:30 show with Mark Hebscher and Donna Skelly, will be discussing the hidden connection between losing weight and living longer.

“I will be looking at how we tend to ‘lower the bar’ as we age, so that we continue to think we are aging well, when in fact we are deteriorating at a faster than necessary rate,” explained Fairbanks. “We have been brought up in a pro-drug culture, with a misplaced belief that we are healthy when we control symptoms with pharmaceuticals. This rush to drug ourselves and our seniors instead of promoting wellness strategies is really misplaced.”

Fairbanks claims that people accept the side effects of drugs as being necessary to maintain health, when in fact they simply mask one problem while creating others. Eventually the new symptoms become health conditions of their own. The true path to a longer healthier life is to avoid drugs unless your condition is life threatening, and to use natural means such as better food choices to support health as we age.

“A long healthy life starts with how you shop, cook and eat,” he says. “Food is nature’s pharmacy, and we need to return to those roots if we want to avoid illness as we age.”

Fairbanks says the Keep Canada Slim program www.keepcanadaslim.com teaches the necessary choices to not only lose weight and keep it off, but to extend healthy lifespan as well.

“People usually separate weight loss from health, and this mistake backfires into increased degenerative disease risk. By embracing low-calorie diets people undermine their health as they lose weight. In addition, they lose muscle and bone density as part of their overall weight loss. This increases the risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis and diabetes,” he explains.

“We have discovered a way to combine the known strategies of a longer life with the goal of achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight and body composition. Our goal is not simply to ‘get’ people slim temporarily, as is the case with diets, but to ‘keep’ people slim now and throughout their life. And in the process, people will learn a way to shop, cook and eat that will give them a longer healthier life.”

Fairbanks is the opening speaker at the Anti-Aging show, going onstage Friday at 1 pm. He will also speak Saturday at 3 pm., and be available personally at the Keep Canada Slim booth all weekend.

The show hours are Friday, 12-7 pm; Sat, 10 am – 6 pm; Sun, 11 am – 6 pm. For details go to www.theantiagingshow.com

Friday, February 6, 2009

The Truth about Ghrelin

Advice: Eat before you shop for groceries

You may have read the article or seen a report on television recently about a so-called breakthrough in which Canadian researchers at McGill University have identified the fact that a hormone called ghrelin seems to cause people to overeat. Let me try to answer questions you may have on this issue.

Ghrelin as we mention in the Keep Canada / Keep America Slim materials is only one of a number of hormones that impact our appetite, satiety, and food metabolism. It is no more or no less important than any of the others. These other hormones include insulin, serotonin, leptin, cortisol, dopamine and others. Learn more about our program at http://www.keepamericaslim.com/.

Each one has a role to play in telling us when to eat and when to stop eating and also in helping us utilize food. When your body and your metabolism is in balance these hormones are in balance and do their job successfully. Alternatively if these hormones are out of balance your eating and fat-storing habits will be negatively affected.

In the case of ghrelin this hormone is created in our stomach and tells us that it's time to eat. Without ghrelin we might go days without food. This would not be healthy.

The articles about ghrelin, in the typical unbalanced media perspective, suggest that in the future we might have a drug that could control our ghrelin levels so that we don't want to eat. The concept would be that this drug would help us control ourselves while surrounded with all the food choices we have in the modern world. The underlying analysis is that overweight people have no self-control and are constantly gorging themselves on whatever foods pass their line of vision, apparently because of ghrelin gone wild.

All of this is wrong on several counts. First off as we know the vast majority of North Americans have tremendous willpower when they decide to go on a diet. They are not over-eating. The problem is quite the opposite - the common North American diet approach is to eat fewer calories than you need to maintain basic metabolic function and therefore put yourself into starvation metabolism. The result of this naturally is to initially stimulate ghrelin levels which then make us feel very hungry.

For more on our natural approach to weight control go to www.keepcanadaslim.com.

Since we are using our willpower to overcome this natural urge, we begin to create internal stress. This in turn generates cortisol, the stress hormone, which makes us want to eat more. We don’t, because we are on a diet, so next we don’t stimulate serotonin, which tells us when we have had enough. Low serotonin leads to depression and makes us feel that we are depriving ourselves when we choose not to eat. This negative association makes weight loss an unhappy prospect for most people.

If we maintain our caloric level above our basal metabolic rate level and below our maintenance level, as explained throughout the KCS - KAS materials we don't over-stimulate ghrelin and therefore don't have this issue to deal with.

I hope this explains to you how dieting and chronic under-eating causes hormones to be out of balance. When people continually live on a low-calorie diet as is the case today with many adults of all ages, especially postmenopausal women, they eventually disturb hormone levels and ghrelin and the other hormones become less effective. It could to be that over time by constant dieting ghrelin is not even created in sufficient quantities to stimulate appetite. Our biggest challenge as many of you know in the Keep Canada / Keep America Slim program is to actually get our clients to eat enough food every day. None of our clients are over eating and therefore none would require a drug to reduce ghrelin levels.

In actual fact the true breakthrough in this study is the discovery that possibly ghrelin levels could be used to stimulate appetite. The first target group for this would be anorexics and people recovering from surgery who have no appetite. The second target group would be people who have conditioned their metabolism to live on a low-calorie starvation diet and are now struggling to eat sufficient calories to release starvation metabolism and achieve success with long-term weight control, such as that presented in the KCS - KAS lifestyle.

And finally there is a way that you can utilize this new understanding in a positive way. One practical application of this discovery is in the explanation of why we tend to buy more food at the grocery store if we are hungry when we go shopping. The higher levels of ghrelin in our body make food more attractive and we therefore buy more than we intended, and perhaps more than we need.

So the successful application of this new discovery would be to have something to eat before you go grocery shopping. This will satisfy the ghrelin impulse and help you to have balanced hormones when you are grocery shopping, which will result in more rational purchases.

Contact Big Skinny at bigskinny@keepcanadaslim.com
www.keepamericaslim.com