Pacific Fitness & Health, Inc.

Welcome to the first edition of our monthly newsletter! Our goal is very simple...to provide you with health and fitness related tips and clinical pearls that you can't find elsewhere. If there are particular topics that you'd like to see covered in future newsletters please let us know. Feel free to pass this newsletter around to friends, colleagues and family. The more people that receive this information the better!

CARDIOVASCULAR TRAINING TO HELP ADRENAL FUNCTION

Did you know that cardiovascular training can be good for your adrenal glands? Most of us have significant adrenal fatigue and the results of our saliva cortisol tests make for pretty grim reading. One of the best ways to gently elevate cortisol levels that are in the tank is to do small daily doses of cardiovascular training. The trick is to make sure that both volume (duration) and intensity are appropriate. If you are using cardiovascular training to improve your energy levels and gently stimulate your adrenal glands then you need to go EASY. If you are suffering from a lot of daily fatigue, 20mins daily of brisk walking (or cycling on flat roads) might be sufficient to encourage cortisol levels to rise. On the other hand, going out and running 800m intervals will probably just suck the life out of you. After 7 days on your new cardio regimen, re-assess your situation. If a daily dose of 20mins of cardio has not caused any improvement in energy levels then bump it up to 30mins but keep the intensity low i.e. SLOW and EASY. What does it mean if your fatigue gets worse even with just 20mins of easy daily walking? You probably need a major overhaul of your diet, sleep habits and stress levels...we can help with that!

GET MORE SLEEP TO LOSE BODY FAT

Everybody knows that if you want to lose body fat you need to pay attention to diet and exercise. However, there's another factor that hardly anybody talks about...sleep. As a culture, Westerners get much less sleep today than their ancestors did. You can blame a lot of that on the miracle of electricity. What happens when you go to bed too late and what is "too late"? Any competitive athlete will tell you that they can feel the difference between 8 hours of sleep that starts at 9pm compared with 10pm compared with 11pm. When you push your body hard, you recover much better if you get to bed early. Why is this? Eve Van Cauter PhD is a world authority on the endocrine system and circadian rhythms. Put her name into Google or PubMed and you'll find dozens of her studies clearly showing the unpleasant influences that sleep deprivation has on hormones and other physiological parameters. Chris spent over 3 years gathering information on this topic before writing a review of literature entitled "Sleep, Biological Rhythms and Electromagnetic Fields". His conclusion after spending all those months reviewing literature? Very simple...if you wish to get lean and feel physically recovered from day to day you need at least 8 hours sleep and you'd better be asleep by 10pm at the latest. This is partly because getting to bed later than this adversely affects your natural secretion of growth hormone. You only get one pulsed secretion of growth hormone every 24 hours....if you're not in bed early that pulse is significantly diminished in size.

WHY WHOLE GRAINS MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR YOU

You are probably aware that most people feel better and lose body fat when they cut gluten from their diet. What you might not realise is that all grains are problematic for most people...not just the classic gluten containing grains. Why is this? Partly it's because there is a lot of confusion over which grains contain gluten and which ones do not. Many "gluten free" people continue to eat oats and quinoa because they have been told these two are gluten free. There are two major problems with this logic. The first problem is that most people feel better, have more energy and less body fat, when they eliminate ALL grains INCLUDING oats and quinoa. We have seen many clients over the years who were unable to get rid of their symptoms (and body fat) until they cut oats and quinoa from their diet. This is partly because oats and quinoa do contain a form of gliadin which does cause significant health problem in many people. Gliadin is the relevant offending sub fraction of gluten.When someone says "I'm gluten intolerant" it's more accurate to say "I'm gliadin intolerant". The second problem is that all grains - even rice and corn, which are truly gluten/gliadin free - are simply delivery vehicles for huge amounts of carbohydrate. Most people do not do anything like enough exercise to burn off the carbohydrates that they get from their daily grain consumption. Unless you are doing at least 60mins of HARD exercise every day, you should cut ALL grains from your diet and get your carbohydrates from vegetables. Next month we'll explain how to use lab tests to track the improvements in your health once you cut grains completely from your diet.