A Recommendation for Tea

I've been trying out a tea for the last couple of weeks before I go to bed and I absolutely love it.

It's a hot tea that you take before you go to bed and I tell ya, I get a great night of sleep when I take this stuff.

I can really feel it the following day with a ton of energy from having such a good night's sleep.

The tea is made from Yogi Tea and it's the Bedtime type (imagine that).

A couple of things that I want to mention though.

1. There's a warning on the box that you should NOT drink this tea while pregnant or while nursing (not sure what will happen if you do but, in order to avoid the possibility of your kid turning out to look like a Klingon, don't drink it if you are going through either of these).

2. The box also states that if you are taking MAO inhibitors or other prescription drugs, talk to your doctor before drinking this.

3. I'm always concerned about my body adapting to what we put in our body so, I wouldn't recommend taking this every night. Use it 3-4 nights a week and that should suffice.

You can pretty much find this in any grocery store and it will more than likely be in the organic section. But, if you want to save some money, you can buy it from Amazon by following the link below:



Want to make it even better? Take some melatonin along with the Bedtime Tea and you'll sleep through a meteor storm. This stuff is really cheap too:




Sweet Dreams! Thanks to Chris Standish for introducing this tea to me.

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More Thoughts on Fat Report Cards

Last week I was in a meeting with some football coaches to talk about a program that I'm proposing to hold specifically for junior football players (ages 8-14) that are overweight and need to lose some weight before they can even think about putting on the pads for regular football drills.

The issue that I was dealing with the weeks before meeting when trying to determine how to present this, and get it across that the class was specifically for fat loss and not just "conditioning."

The obstacles of this are a bit steep.

1. You don't want to call the program "fat camp." The stigma involved in that would be too much for a kid that age.

2. You'd have parents that would say "So are you trying to say that my kid is fat? Are you saying that I'm a bad parent?"

3. It leads to the other extreme where people are going to think "If I put my kid on a diet at age 10, he might have a complex about eating food his entire life."

That third one was the one that bugged me because it came up in this post that I wrote last week about the fat report cards. Specifically, this comment:

A 6-year-old who learned she was at the top end of what is considered healthy for her age and height started eating significantly less, reported The New York Times.
"My 2-year-old eats more than she does,'' her mother told the newspaper.

I guess I don't understand why a parent is more concerned if a child UNDER-eats (when in reality it's more likely "normal" eating for the what the body is designed for) and not really all that concerned if a kid gorges himself. There's this idea that under eating is going to cause health problems but at the same time, there's no real thought that over eating is going to cause just as many health problems.

We all have seen pictures of people that are anorexic or bulimic. It's not pretty and maybe it conditions us to make sure that we don't undereat.

We might think the same thing when we see the complete opposite end of an extremely obese person and realize that we don't want to go that route either.

But then there's the "normal overweight" that still carries health risks. Those we don't worry about. When we see images of people eating, they're smiling, laughing, having a good time. People even make fun at themselves for being overweight and we don't give any thought to health issues that they are or will have.



I guess in a way I understand due to the fact two-thirds of people in the United States are overweight or obese and therefore, that is the norm and since health issues related to obesity tend to slowly creep into a person's life rather than become almost immediate, there's a little more sensitivity that needs to be taken when speaking of overweight children.

In the end I took the route of promoting the class to increase football performance with fat loss. It's not a lie. With less weight you'll be able to run faster, change directions quicker, etc. I'll see if marketing it like that works. I'll keep you posted.

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Importance of Health During Younger Years

Back a number of years ago when I turned 30, I told myself that I needed to start getting into some better and more consistent habits with my exercise and nutrition.

It wasn't horrible during my 20s but, I had a theory that your 30s were an important time of your life to get into those good habits or else things were going to start catching up to you after you hit the big 4-0.

Since that time, I've seen friends and acquaintances that have helped prove that theory (unfortunately).

People who didn't exercise, didn't watch what they ate really started putting on the pounds once they reached their 40s. People that I know that smoke seemed to start showing signs of aging quicker, with changes in their voice, skin starting to wrinkle, complaints of physical ailments and comments about more frequent doctor's visits. It's almost like in their mind, they lived not the best lifestyle through their 20s and 30s but didn't feel any effects of that then but now that they are in their 40s they can't comprehend why they are coming across health issues.

This article talks about a study that involved women over the age of 65 and how their overweight/obesity levels along with arthritis results in more disabilities and leads to a lower quality of life during their senior years.

"While women tend to live longer than men, this study shows that they are at greater risk of living with disability and much of the excess disability is attributable to higher rates of obesity and arthritis," Dr. Heather Whitson from Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina who presented the study, noted in a statement.

Among 5,888 men and women older than 65 years enrolled in the Cardiovascular Health Study, Whitson and her colleagues found that women suffered up to two and a half times more disabilities than men of the same age. Higher rates of obesity and arthritis among these women explained up to 48 percent of the gender gap in disability.

And here is where it gets to the point I was making:

"This is important because it suggests that women's tendency to pack on extra pounds in their child-bearing and peri-menopausal years translates into loss of independence in their old age," Whitson added. "Preventing weight gain in young to middle-aged women may decrease disability burden in later years."

And guys, don't think you're off the hook and can just eat the extra leftover pizza that your wife is now going to turned down and assume you're not going to have any additional health issues if you don't watch where your waistline is going:

Men, on the other hand, were more likely to have emphysema, heart disease, congestive heart failure, stroke, diabetes and hearing problems. They were also more likely to have trouble walking due to narrowed leg arteries.

I don't have a tattoo. If people want them, that's fine, it's just not my thing to put on my body. When I've asked a few people why they got one, they can't really answer the question too well but the normal response that I get when I ask them "Aren't you concerned how that's going to look when you get older?" I'm told "Well who cares what it looks like then!"

The point is that we really need to start looking at how are actions and treatment of our body today is going to affect what happens to us down the road. We tend to think in the "now" and the short term. I don't know about you but I'd really rather not have to take a million medications, walk with a cane, have to put a mask on to help myself breathe, etc., as long as I possibly can.

I'm not saying that I don't think you can make adjustments to how you treat your body later in life and not get results. I think you can. But I think it be a lot less painful (and less dramatic) if you give some thought to what you are doing to your body today and if it's not good, just make a few little changes and you'll see that over time, it's going to make a big difference in how you feel 20-30 years from now.

Have a good weekend.

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Fat Report Cards

If you are a parent, what would you think of this?

You get your child's report card, look it over and see how they are doing in Math, Reading, Art, and then at the bottom you see what your child's Body Mass Index (BMI) is.

That is what is going to happen the next school year in Boston according to this article.

Kids that are in first, fourth, seventh and 10th grade will be weighed and measured and the results sent home to the parents with some explanations as to what the number means and recommend where to go from there.

I'm kind of split on this. On one hand, with the child obesity epidemic getting worse I think it's a good idea to at least give parents a heads up that their child might be running into a problem.

On the other hand, is it really going to make a difference? Will the parents take is seriously, or be offended that you're calling their son or daughter "fat", or with they just look at the number and say "whatever"?

Will it cause a possible anxiety among very young kids that could possibly now view themselves as "fat" to where they might go the other way and stop eating all together as this part of the article points out:

A 6-year-old who learned she was at the top end of what is considered healthy for her age and height started eating significantly less, reported The New York Times.
"My 2-year-old eats more than she does,'' her mother told the newspaper.

Although at the same time, I think the schools are sending a mixed message by reporting concern about the child's BMI but at the same time, continue selling regular sugary soft drinks and fatty goods in the school cafeteria and barely teach physical education and nutrition in classes (as reported in this article in the New York Times).

I know I'm going back and forth on this but this quote from the New York Times article kind of irked me:

''I don't care how big I am,'' said Holly, 17, who is insulin resistant, a condition that often precedes Type 2 diabetes. ''It's not what you look like, it's who you are.''

She right but at the same time, I don't believe the school is doing this in order breed a bunch of skinny models, it's about reducing the number of kids from having health issues (and since she's 17 and already is insulin resistant, she's already headed in that direction).

Maybe this is headed in the right direction, but maybe not. There's a lot of misinformation out there on health and fitness and I guess my final thought is that if schools are going to do this, sending a "fat" report card home with a BMI number on it along with a briefing on what it means can probably cause more harm then good because it's only giving half the story.

Physical education and Nutrition classes need to be a staple of school curriculum starting at even the level of first grade to teach a healthy lifestyle rather than just reporting on unhealthy lifestyles.

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Lean Muscle and Birth Control

The joke I remember hearing a long time ago is that the side effects of a woman taking oral contraceptives were things like nausea, weight gain, and mood changes. So the pill itself isn't what prevents a woman from getting pregnant, it's the side effects that make her less likely to be desirable for a man to want to have sex with her.

But this study presented another side effect of oral contraceptives: Women putting on less muscle.

They found women who were not taking birth control pills gained 60 percent more muscle mass after a 10-week weight training program than those who were.

That's pretty significant. But this is the start of trying to figure out why that is:

And blood samples before and after the training period showed the women on the pill had lower levels of muscle-building hormones such as testosterone and far higher levels of muscle-breaking hormones such as cortisol.

But, I found a different article talking about this same study that goes a little deeper.

Essentially, the women that were on the pill had lower levels of androgen hormones that are there to build that muscle after a workout and a higher level of cortisol that is there to breakdown muscle.

Normally, it's not a bad thing to have cortisol breakdown muscle, because the androgen hormones will come along and re-build the muscle after an intense workout that triggers those hormones to spurt off (known as protein synthesis).

It seems that the contraceptive is putting a halt to the release of those androgen hormones.

But when they dug in a little deeper, they found that it even came down to the type of oral contraceptive that was being taken:

Women who took pills containing low-androgenicity progestins acquired muscle through exercise as effectively as did women not on the pill. But women whose oral contraceptives contained medium- or highly androgenic progestins attained less than a 0.5 percent gain in muscle mass over 10 weeks — a far cry from what the others achieved.

From a trainer's perspective, this is pretty interesting as it might be a question that is necessary if you're seeing your female clients not put on the muscle that you think they should be over a period of time. It could also be a reason why a female would have minimal or even fat gain over a period of time (assuming workouts are being followed and nutrition is in check). Ladies, if this is a concern for you, you might want to talk to your doctor about it but at the same time, I think more research needs to be done to give us the reasons why it's happening.

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Put Down That Baby Food

Just when we thought the child obesity epidemic couldn't get more bizarre, I found this article that talks about how some baby food sold in Britan have more saturated fat and sugar than junk like cookies and cheeseburgers that we're feeding out older kids.

Publishing results of a survey of more than 100 foods for babies and toddlers, the Children's Food Campaign said Farley's rusks were 29 percent sugar and some Cow & Gate toddler biscuits contained trans fats, which have been linked to heart disease.

I had to look up Farley's rusks and I'm not even sure they're available in the US. They look like animal crackers to me.



Anyway, as the article points out, be careful when buying baby food or snacks and be suspect even if it says it's "healthy." It's unfortunate that the definition of that word is up for debate nowadays.

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Friday 5 minute Ab Workout

It's impossible to find a health related news article this week that DOESN'T have to do with Swine Flu (and refuse to write on it but if the coverage of this gets anymore insane, you might be in for a huge rant next week..).

So here's a quick 5 minute workout you can do that I came up with that will really work those abs.

Do all three of these exercise with no rest in between. Then rest 30 seconds and complete the circuit 2 more times:

1) Side Plank - 20 seconds each side
2) Mountain Climbers - 10 on each side
3) Plank - 30 seconds

Have a good weekend.

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