Time to Start the Cleanse with our friends from the Global Healing Center

Time to Start the Cleanse with our friends 

from the Global Healing Center

Yesterday we talked about cleansing our bodies and keeping us fit and healthy. Today we will be specific and target the health of our colon.  FACT: Most all disease starts in the digestive system so simple logic tell us that keeping our digestive organs clean will help keep us healthier. Today is how we will truly learn to restore digestive health.
Dr. Edward Group and the Global Healing Center have worked with our own Dr. Harris for well over a decade helping people restore their health both mentally and physically. Both men fully agree that cleansing is vital to our health.
There is no need to re-invent the wheel when we have access to the worlds leading expert in digestive health Dr. Group and his cleansing protocols.  Dr. Group has written books on the digestive system and developed all natural health cleansing remedies and they have agreed to share them with us. Both men are nutritional experts and Dr. Harris is our hands-on expert in exercise. Combine the nutrition, the exercise programs and the cleansing programs we have available and you have the complete package for better health.
So rather than re-writing the article we will simply attach the link to Dr. Groups Colon Cleanse and it will also have detailed articles attached to will answer any questions you may have.
The Global Healing Center is by far the best place for knowledge, products and application to help you restore your health.

Cleansing Article:  SEE ATTACHMENT

http://www.globalhealingcenter.com/cleansing/7-day-oxygen-colon-cleanse

The Dangers of Drinking Soda Pop!

The Dangers of Drinking Soda Pop!

Some people drink soda pop as if it is water, some even instead of water. Sure, the primary ingredient is water, but, with all the other “stuff” it contains it can have a…toxic…poisonous…lethal…venomous… seriously harmful effect on your entire body. Drinking soda pop is a sure-fire way to age faster. Here’s why:

Soda Pop (or carbonated soft drinks) has an alarming amount of sugar, calories and harmful additives in it that have absolutely no nutritional value. Studies have linked soda to osteoporosis, obesity, tooth decay and heart disease. Despite this, soda accounts for more than one-quarter of all drinks consumed in the United States….and we wonder why we can’t lose weight and why we have health problems. So very often our health problems do not BEGIN on their own. WE encourage illness and disease little-by-little every day by NOT preventing their cause. We know better, we try to fool ourselves, but our bodies’ cells can’t be fooled about what we put in our mouths. I hope the next time you look at a can of soda pop you take note of the ingredients and smarten up for the good of your own healthy lifespan and that of your children and grandchildren. …What you are about to read should turn you away from sodas altogether.


Here’s what’s in Soda Pop:

Phosphoric Acid: May interfere with the body's ability to use calcium, which can lead to osteoporosis or softening of the teeth and bones. Phosphoric acid also neutralizes the hydrochloric acid in your stomach, which can interfere with digestion, making it difficult to utilize nutrients.

Sugar: Soft drink manufacturers are the largest single user of refined sugar in the United States. It is a proven fact that sugar increases insulin levels, which can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, weight gain, premature aging and many more negative side effects. Most sodas include over 100 percent of the RDA of sugar.

Aspartame: This chemical is used as a sugar substitute in diet soda. There are over 92 different health side effects associated with aspartame consumption including brain tumors, birth defects, diabetes, emotional disorders and epilepsy/seizures. Further, when aspartame is stored for long periods of time or kept in warm areas it changes to methanol, an alcohol that converts to formaldehyde and formic acid, which are known carcinogens.

Caffeine: Caffeinated drinks can cause jitters, insomnia, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, elevated blood cholesterol levels, vitamin and mineral depletion, breast lumps, birth defects, and perhaps some forms of cancer.

Soda is one of the main reasons, nutritionally speaking, why many people suffer health problems. Aside from the negative effects of the soda itself, drinking a lot of soda is likely to leave you with little appetite for vegetables, protein and other food that your body needs.

How many sodas have you had today? How about your kids? The average American drinks an estimated 56 gallons of soft drinks each year, but before you grab that next can of soda, consider this: one can of soda has about 10 teaspoons of sugar, 150 calories, 30 to 55 mg of caffeine, and is loaded with artificial food colors and sulphates.

Teenagers and children, who many soft drinks are marketed toward, are among the largest consumers. In the past 10 years, soft drink consumption among children has almost doubled in the United States. Teenage boys now drink, on average, three or more cans of soda per day, and 10 percent drink seven or more cans a day. The average for teenage girls is more than two cans a day, and 10 percent drink more than five cans a day.

It also raises the question of how one determines a product's caffeine content. Nutrition labels are not required to divulge that information. If a beverage contains caffeine, it must be included in the ingredient list, but there's no way to tell how much a beverage has, and there's little logic or predictability to the way caffeine is deployed throughout a product line.

Let’s take a look at some of the major components of a can of soda:

Okay, so most enlightened consumers already know that colas contain a fair amount of caffeine. It turns out to be 35 to 38 milligrams per 12-ounce can, or roughly 28 percent of the amount found in an 8-ounce cup of coffee. But few know that diet colas -- usually chosen by those who are trying to dodge calories and/or sugar -- often pack a lot more caffeine.

A 12-ounce can of Diet Coke, for example, has about 42 milligrams of caffeine -- seven more than the same amount of Coke Classic. A can of Pepsi One has about 56 milligrams of caffeine -- 18 milligrams more than both regular Pepsi and Diet Pepsi.

Even harder to figure out is the caffeine distribution in other flavors of soda pop. Many brands of root beer contain no caffeine. An exception is Barq's, made by the Coca-Cola Co., which has 23 milligrams per 12-ounce can. Sprite, 7-Up and ginger ale are caffeine-free. But Mountain Dew, the curiously named Mellow Yellow, Sun Drop Regular, Jolt and diet as well as regular Sunkist orange soda all pack caffeine.

Caffeine occurs naturally in kola nuts, an ingredient of cola soft drinks. But why is this drug, which is known to create physical dependence, added to other soft drinks?

The industry line is that small amounts are added for taste, not for the drug's power to sustain demand for the products that contain it. Caffeine's bitter taste, they say, enhances other flavors. "It has been a part of almost every cola -- and pepper-type beverage -- since they were first formulated more than 100 years ago," according to the National Soft Drink Association.

But recent blind taste tests conducted by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore found that only 8 percent of regular soft drink consumers could identify the difference between regular and caffeine-free soft drinks.

The study included only subjects who reported that they drank soft drinks mainly for their caffeine content. In other words, more than 90 percent of the self-diagnosed caffeine cravers in this small sample could not detect the presence of caffeine.

That's why the great popularity of caffeinated soft drinks is driven not so much by subtle taste effects as by the mood-altering and physical dependence of caffeine that drives the daily self-administration.

And the unknown could be especially troublesome for the developing brains of children and adolescents. Logic dictates that when you are dependent on a drug, you are really upsetting the normal balances of neuro-chemistry in the brain. The fact that kids have withdrawal signs and symptoms when the caffeine is stopped is a good indication that something has been profoundly disturbed in the brain.

Exactly where that leads is anybody's guess -- which is to say there is little good research on the effects of caffeine on kids' developing brains.

Bone Weakening
Animal studies demonstrate that phosphorus, a common ingredient in soda, can deplete bones of calcium.

And two recent human studies suggest that girls who drink more soda are more prone to broken bones. The industry denies that soda plays a role in bone weakening.

Animal studies -- mostly involving rats -- point to clear and consistent bone loss with the use of cola beverages. But as scientists like to point out, humans and rats are not exactly the same.

Even so, there's been concern among the research community, public health officials and government agencies over the high phosphorus content in the US diet. Phosphorus -- which occurs naturally in some foods and is used as an additive in many others -- appears to weaken bones by promoting the loss of calcium. With less calcium available, the bones become more porous and prone to fracture.

The soft drink industry argues that the phosphoric acid in soda pop contributes only about 2 percent of the phosphorus in the typical US diet, with a 12-ounce can of soda pop averaging about 30 milligrams.

There's growing concern that even a few cans of soda today can be damaging when they are consumed during the peak bone-building years of childhood and adolescence. A 1996 study published in the Journal of Nutrition by the FDA's Office of Special Nutritionals noted that a pattern of high phosphorus/low calcium consumption, common in the American diet, is not conducive to optimizing peak bone mass in young women.

A 1994 Harvard study of bone fractures in teenage athletes found a strong association between cola beverage consumption and bone fractures in 14-year-old girls. The girls who drank cola were about five times more likely to suffer bone fractures than girls who didn't consume soda pop.

Besides, to many researchers, the combination of rising obesity and bone weakening has the potential to synergistically undermine future health. Adolescents and kids don't think long-term. But what happens when these soft-drinking people become young or middle-aged adults and they have osteoporosis, sedentary living and obesity?

By that time, switching to water, milk or fruit juice may be too little, too late.

Research presented at an American Diabetes Association gathering this summer found that women who went from drinking less than one, non-diet soda a day to one or more daily sodas were nearly twice as likely to develop type 2 diabetes over a four-year period as women who drank less than one soft during a day. (The women who drank more soda also gained more weight over the same period.)

A study published in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism suggested that fructose, a sweetener found naturally in fruit juice and typically used in concentrated amounts in soft drinks, may induce a hormonal response in the body that promotes weight gain.

Soft Drinks, especially light-colored drinks, and canned iced tea appear to “aggressively” erode teeth enamel in laboratory tests—and it didn’t matter whether they were diet drinks or regular ones, according to a study published in General Dentistry.

Body fat loss stuck on hold? Can't seem to lose that last little bit of fat? This may be the problem......

Body fat loss stuck on hold? Can't seem to lose that last little bit of fat?

This may be the problem.......

Artificial Sweeteners will over stimulate the hormones that make you hungry and create a resistance too the hormones that suppress hunger...... IT'S A DOUBLE EDGED SWORD!!!

Contrary to popular belief, studies have found that artificial sweeteners such as aspartame can stimulate your appetite, increase carbohydrate cravings, and stimulate fat storage and weight gain. In one of the most recent of such studies, saccharin and aspartame were found to cause greater weight gain than sugar.

Aspartame is perhaps one of the most problematic. It is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. The phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group, which provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol.

You may have heard the claim that aspartame is harmless because methanol is also found in fruits and vegetables. However, in fruits and vegetables, the methanol is firmly bonded to pectin, allowing it to be safely passed through your digestive tract. Not so with the methanol created by aspartame; there it’s not bonded to anything that can help eliminate it from your body.

Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it's carried into susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone marrow, where the alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzyme converts it into formaldehyde, which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA. All animals EXCEPT HUMANS have a protective mechanism that allows methanol to be broken down into harmless formic acid. This is why toxicology testing on animals is a flawed model. It doesn't fully apply to people.

Now a little education on the two hormones that artificial sweeteners effect.

A lot is known about what causes obesity. The simplest explanation is that the genes that have protected us from famines for millions of years are at the core of the cause of obesity. These powerful biochemical systems are centered on a small area in the middle of the brain called the hypothalamus. A specialized area in the hypothalamus, called the arcuate nucleus, is where the signals that control metabolic rate, hunger and satiety are located.

In the arcuate nucleus are two cells types. One cell is the NPY/AGRP (Neuropeptide Y/Agouti Related Protein) cell. This is the hunger cell. If it is stimulated you feel hungry and your metabolic rate drops. The other cell is the POMC (Proopiomelanocortin) cell. This is the satiety cell. If it is stimulated you feel full and your metabolic rate increases.

The two major hormones that control the hunger and satiety cells are ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin is produced by the pancreas and travels to the brain where it turns on the hunger cell and turns off the satiety cell. Leptin is produced by the fat cells of the body and travels to the brain where it turns on the satiety cell and turns off the hunger cell. When you are obese you have lots of fat cells and thus your leptin levels are high. The high leptin levels in combination with high insulin levels turn off the stomach cells that make ghrelin so your ghrelin levels are low. Now if that seems backward, your right. The problem is that high leptin levels over time make the satiety cell insensitive to leptin and low ghrelin levels make the hunger cell hypersensitive to ghrelin. The result is that even though the leptin levels are high and the ghrelin levels are low, the hunger cells are turned on and the satiety cells are turned off.

This is exactly the situation that occurs in a famine, hunger cells on and satiety cells off. So if you are obese, even though you have plenty of fat stores, the brain behaves like you were starving. This has many consequences. First and foremost is a loss of the conscious signals that tell you when you are full and when you are hungry. A common sign of this is that most obese people don't feel hungry when they get up in the morning. As a result they often skip breakfast. The brain interprets this as more starvation signals and further shuts down the metabolism. In fact the number one risk factor for obesity was skipping breakfast.

Ghrelin is also important in many other functions of the body. One of the most important is sleep. In order to efficiently progress though the normal cycles of sleep you need adequate ghrelin levels. If you don't have them you will not sleep as efficiently, you will dream less and get less restorative sleep. This will make you more tired the next day and since dreaming promotes leptin production, you will be hungrier and have a lower metabolic rate.

The imbalance of leptin and ghrelin are at the heart of the cause and consequences of obesity.

Now I know your thinking to yourself this only effects obese people not someone like me that only needs to drop a few more pounds, right?

WRONG, I am especially talking you you folks that just need to drop a few pounds and in particular those of you getting ready for a competition.

You see the leaner your body becomes the more sensitive it becomes too. Drop the artificial sweeteners and see the difference for yourself. You will be amazed at how quickly your body will respond and those last few fat pockets will vanish.

Why Sugar is Toxic to the Body and in particular the BRAIN Part 4 of 5. CORRECT FOOD COMBINING

Why Sugar is Toxic to the Body and in particular the BRAIN

Part 4 of 5.

 
CORRECT FOOD COMBINING

Whether it's sugared cereal or pastry and black coffee for breakfast, whether it's hamburgers and Coca-Cola for lunch or the full "gourmet" dinner in the evening, chemically the average American diet is a formula that guarantees bubble, bubble, stomach trouble. unless you've taken too much insulin and, in a state of insulin shock, need sugar as an antidote, hardly anyone ever has cause to take sugar alone. Humans need sugar as much as they need the nicotine in tobacco. Crave it is one thing-need it is another. From the days of the Persian Empire to our own, sugar has usually been used to hop up the flavor of other food and drink, as an ingredient in the kitchen or as a condiment at the table. Let us leave aside for the moment the known effect of sugar (long-term and short-term) on the entire system and concentrate on the effect of sugar taken in combination with other daily foods.

When Grandma warned that sugared cookies before meals "will spoil your supper", she knew what she was talking about. Her explanation might not have satisfied a chemist but, as with many traditional axioms from the Mosaic law on kosher food and separation in the kitchen, such rules are based on years of trial and error and are apt to be right on the button. Most modern research in combining food is a labored discovery of the things Grandma took for granted. Any diet or regimen undertaken for the single purpose of losing weight is dangerous, by definition. Obesity is talked about and treated as a disease in 20th-century America. Obesity is not a disease. It is only a symptom, a sign, a warning that your body is out of order. Dieting to lose weight is as silly and dangerous as taking aspirin to relieve a headache before you know the reason for the headache.

Getting rid of a symptom is like turning off an alarm. It leaves the basic cause untouched. Any diet or regimen undertaken with any objective short of restoration of total health of your body is dangerous. Many overweight people are undernourished. (Dr. H. Curtis Wood stresses this point in his 1971 book, Overfed But undernourished.) Eating less can aggravate this condition, unless one is concerned with the quality of the food instead of just its quantity. Many people-doctors included-assume that if weight is lost, fat is lost. This is not necessarily so. Any diet which lumps all carbohydrates together is dangerous. Any diet which does not consider the quality of carbohydrates and makes the crucial life-and-death distinction between natural, unrefined carbohydrates like whole grains and vegetables and man-refined carbohydrates like sugar and white flour is dangerous. Any diet which includes refined sugar and white flour, no matter what "scientific" name is applied to them, is dangerous.

Kicking sugar and white flour and substituting whole grains, vegetables and natural fruits in season, is the core of any sensible natural regimen. Changing the quality of your carbohydrates can change the quality of your health and life. If you eat natural food of good quality, quantity tends to take care of itself. Nobody is going to eat a half-dozen sugar beets or a whole case of sugar cane. Even if they do, it will be less dangerous than a few ounces of sugar. Sugar of all kinds-natural sugars, such as those in honey and fruit (fructose), as well as the refined white stuff (sucrose)-tends to arrest the secretion of gastric juices and have an inhibiting effect on the stomach's natural ability to move. Sugars are not digested in the mouth, like cereals, or in the stomach, like animal flesh. When taken alone, they pass quickly through the stomach into the small intestine. When sugars are eaten with other foods-perhaps meat and bread in a sandwich-they are held up in the stomach for a while.

The sugar in the bread and the Coke sit there with the hamburger and the bun waiting for them to be digested. While the stomach is working on the animal protein and the refined starch in the bread, the addition of the sugar practically guarantees rapid acid fermentation under the conditions of warmth and moisture existing in the stomach. One lump of sugar in your coffee after a sandwich is enough to turn your stomach into a fermenter. One soda with a hamburger is enough to turn your stomach into a still. Sugar on cereal-whether you buy it already sugared in a box or add it yourself-almost guarantees acid fermentation.

Since the beginning of time, natural laws were observed, in both senses of that word, when it came to eating foods in combination. Birds have been observed eating insects at one period in the day and seeds at another. Other animals tend to eat one food at a time. Flesh-eating animals take their protein raw and straight. In the Orient, it is traditional to eat yang before yin. Miso soup (fermented soybean protein, yang) for breakfast; raw fish (more yang protein) at the beginning of the meal; afterwards comes the rice (which is less yang than the miso and fish); and then the vegetables which are yin. If you ever eat with a traditional Japanese family and you violate this order, the Orientals (if your friends) will correct you courteously but firmly. The law observed by Orthodox Jews prohibits many combinations at the same meal, especially flesh and dairy products. Special utensils for the dairy meal and different utensils for the flesh meal reinforce that taboo at the food's source in the kitchen.

Man learned very early in the game what improper combinations of food could do to the human system. When he got a stomach ache from combining raw fruit with grain, or honey with porridge, he didn't reach for an antacid tablet. He learned not to eat that way. When gluttony and excess became widespread, religious codes and commandments were invoked against it. Gluttony is a capital sin in most religions; but there are no specific religious warnings or commandments against refined sugar because sugar abuse-like drug abuse-did not appear on the world scene until centuries after holy books had gone to press.

"Why must we accept as normal what we find in a race of sick and weakened human beings?" Dr. Herbert M. Shelton asks. "Must we always take it for granted that the present eating practices of civilized men are normal?... Foul stools, loose stools, impacted stools, pebbly stools, much foul gas, colitis, hemorrhoids, bleeding with stools, the need for toilet paper are swept into the orbit of the normal."

When starches and complex sugars (like those in honey and fruits) are digested, they are broken down into simple sugars called "monosaccharides", which are usable substances-nutriments. When starches and sugars are taken together and undergo fermentation, they are broken down into carbon dioxide, acetic acid, alcohol and water. With the exception of the water, all these are unusable substances-poisons. When proteins are digested, they are broken down into amino acids, which are usable substances-nutriments. When proteins are taken with sugar, they putrefy; they are broken down into a variety of ptomaines and leucomaines, which are nonusable substances-poisons. Enzymic digestion of foods prepares them for use by our body. Bacterial decomposition makes them unfit for use by our body. The first process gives us nutriments; the second gives us poisons.

Much that passes for modern nutrition is obsessed with a mania for quantitative counting. The body is treated like a check account. Deposit calories (like dollars) and withdraw energy. Deposit proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals-balanced quantitatively-and the result, theoretically, is a healthy body. People qualify as healthy today if they can crawl out of bed, get to the office and sign in. If they can't make it, call the doctor to qualify for sick pay, hospitalization, rest cure-anything from a day's pay without working to an artificial kidney, courtesy of the taxpayers. But what does it profit someone if the theoretically required calories and nutrients are consumed daily, yet this random eat-on-the-run, snack-time collection of foods ferments and putrefies in the digestive tract? What good is it if the body is fed protein, only to have it putrefy in the gastrointestinal canal? Carbohydrates that ferment in the digestive tract are converted into alcohol and acetic acid, not digestible monosaccharides. "To derive sustenance from foods eaten, they must be digested," Shelton warned years ago. "They must not rot." Sure, the body can get rid of poisons through the urine and the pores; the amount of poisons in the urine is taken as an index to what's going on in the intestine. The body does establish a tolerance for these poisons, just as it adjusts gradually to an intake of heroin. But, says Shelton, "the discomfort from accumulation of gas, the bad breath, and foul and unpleasant odors are as undesirable as are the poisons".

Body fat loss stuck on hold?....This may be the problem!

Body fat loss stuck on hold? Can't seem to lose that last little bit of fat?

This may be the problem.......

Artificial Sweeteners will over stimulate the hormones that make you hungry and create a resistance too the hormones that suppress hunger...... IT'S A DOUBLE EDGED SWORD!!! 

Contrary to popular belief, studies have found that artificial sweeteners such as aspartame can stimulate your appetite, increase carbohydrate cravings, and stimulate fat storage and weight gain. In one of the most recent of such studies, saccharin and aspartame were found to cause greater weight gain than sugar.

Aspartame is perhaps one of the most problematic. It is primarily made up of aspartic acid and phenylalanine. The phenylalanine has been synthetically modified to carry a methyl group, which provides the majority of the sweetness. That phenylalanine methyl bond, called a methyl ester, is very weak, which allows the methyl group on the phenylalanine to easily break off and form methanol.

You may have heard the claim that aspartame is harmless because methanol is also found in fruits and vegetables. However, in fruits and vegetables, the methanol is firmly bonded to pectin, allowing it to be safely passed through your digestive tract. Not so with the methanol created by aspartame; there it’s not bonded to anything that can help eliminate it from your body.

Methanol acts as a Trojan horse; it's carried into susceptible tissues in your body, like your brain and bone marrow, where the alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzyme converts it into formaldehyde, which wreaks havoc with sensitive proteins and DNA. All animals EXCEPT HUMANS have a protective mechanism that allows methanol to be broken down into harmless formic acid. This is why toxicology testing on animals is a flawed model. It doesn't fully apply to people.

Now a little education on the two hormones that artificial sweeteners effect.

A lot is known about what causes obesity. The simplest explanation is that the genes that have protected us from famines for millions of years are at the core of the cause of obesity. These powerful biochemical systems are centered on a small area in the middle of the brain called the hypothalamus. A specialized area in the hypothalamus, called the arcuate nucleus, is where the signals that control metabolic rate, hunger and satiety are located.

In the arcuate nucleus are two cells types. One cell is the NPY/AGRP (Neuropeptide Y/Agouti Related Protein) cell. This is the hunger cell. If it is stimulated you feel hungry and your metabolic rate drops. The other cell is the POMC (Proopiomelanocortin) cell. This is the satiety cell. If it is stimulated you feel full and your metabolic rate increases.

The two major hormones that control the hunger and satiety cells are ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin is produced by the stomach and travels to the brain where it turns on the hunger cell and turns off the satiety cell. Leptin is produced by the fat cells of the body and travels to the brain where it turns on the satiety cell and turns off the hunger cell. When you are obese you have lots of fat cells and thus your leptin levels are high. The high leptin levels in combination with high insulin levels turn off the stomach cells that make ghrelin so your ghrelin levels are low. Now if that seems backward, your right. The problem is that high leptin levels over time make the satiety cell insensitive to leptin and low ghrelin levels make the hunger cell hypersensitive to ghrelin. The result is that even though the leptin levels are high and the ghrelin levels are low, the hunger cells are turned on and the satiety cells are turned off.

This is exactly the situation that occurs in a famine, hunger cells on and satiety cells off. So if you are obese, even though you have plenty of fat stores, the brain behaves like you were starving. This has many consequences. First and foremost is a loss of the conscious signals that tell you when you are full and when you are hungry. A common sign of this is that most obese people don't feel hungry when they get up in the morning. As a result they often skip breakfast. The brain interprets this as more starvation signals and further shuts down the metabolism. In fact the number one risk factor for obesity was skipping breakfast.

Ghrelin is also important in many other functions of the body. One of the most important is sleep. In order to efficiently progress though the normal cycles of sleep you need adequate ghrelin levels. If you don't have them you will not sleep as efficiently, you will dream less and get less restorative sleep. This will make you more tired the next day and since dreaming promotes leptin production, you will be hungrier and have a lower metabolic rate.

The imbalance of leptin and ghrelin are at the heart of the cause and consequences of obesity.

Now I know your thinking to yourself this only effects obese people not someone like me that only needs to drop a few more pounds, right?

WRONG, I am especially talking you you folks that just need to drop a few pounds and in particular those of you getting ready for a competition.

You see the leaner your body becomes the more sensitive it becomes too. Drop the artificial sweeteners and see the difference for yourself. You will be amazed at how quickly your body will respond and those last few fat pockets will vanish.

How Leptin Resistance Causes Obesity

In order for you to significantly gain weight, you must first become leptin resistant. Leptin is a hormone that helps you regulate your appetite. When your leptin levels rise, it signals your body that you’re full, so you’ll stop eating.

However, as you become increasingly resistant to the effects of leptin, you end up eating more. Many people who are overweight also have an impairment in their body’s ability to oxidize fat, which leads to a low-energy state.

What drives this basic process? Why do you become leptin resistant in the first place?

Refined sugar (in particular fructose) is exceptionally effective at causing leptin resistance in animals, and it’s very effective at blocking the burning of fat. When you give fructose to animals, they lose their ability to control their appetite, they eat more, and they exercise less.

Research also reveals that fructose has effects independent of this mechanism to induce this metabolic syndrome. Whereas fructose increases weight through the standard mechanism of stimulating more food intake and blocking the burning of fat, even when you control caloric intake, fructose can affect body composition.

This is because when you eat fructose, you actually generate more fat in your liver for the same amount of energy intake, compared to other types of sugar... For example, if you calorically restrict an animal but give it a high-fructose diet or a high-sugar diet, it will still produce fatty liver and will still become insulin resistant.

• It stimulates weight gain through its effects on your appetite and by blocking the burning of fat.
• It also changes your body composition to increase body fat even when you are on a caloric restriction.

The goal in maintaining a healthy body weight or to drop body fat is to limit your intake of fructose as much as possible and never exceed 15 grams of fructose in a 24 hour period.

It is important to understand that sugar and in particular fructose is addictive, in fact it effects the brain the exact same way as cocaine or heroine does.

Unfortunately the food industry has created the greatest epidemic of obesity and obesity related disease in the history of the world with a simple little product called, "SUGAR".

It is up to us to control our own cravings and avoid the addictive grasp of sugar. The FDA will never restrict it, there is far too much money being made from sugar and the diseases it creates.


Mark Harris, PhD
Exercise Physiologist/Nutritionist
TexasMetabolics@gmail.com
Texas Metabolics