Cambridge News

It's a cold and snowy morning here in Provo Utah. The first month of 2012 is already on the downhill slide. Unfortunately, so are a lot of resolutions made in good faith at the beginning of the month. We all hunkered down for the holiday season, making decision after decision about food as it was so much a part of it all. Well... That is done for another year and we should all be well in to our month of new beginnings. So how's it going so far?

It's a fact of life that at times, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. However, in this case it is more like the flesh is willing but the spirit is weak. Obesity begins and ends in the mind. If you can control your thoughts you can control your world. If you are stumbling or struggling right now to get on track, consider that this is not about the physical challenge of weight loss, but the emotional/mental challenge. Pretty much every pound you gain begins as a single thought. You have to think about eating the foods that put the weight on you before you follow through and eat them.

EFT is a wonderful tool to help you defuse the behaviors and thoughts that cause you to overeat or not stick to your diet. You can find some info about it at the top of this board. You can also use some simple techniques that have worked for me. An example: when watching TV and a big juicy burger ad or a glistening pizza is suddenly in front of you the first thing you probably do is consider going and getting some. It may be fleeting, but the thought is there. That's what advertising is all about. Planting an image and a desire to consume a product in your mind. Try this..CLOSE YOUR EYES! Believe me, if you don't see it you won't crave it. Hearing about food has no power, but seeing it or smelling it does.

When you drive by a fast food place that pumps the smell of the food out in to the street it immediately gets your gastric juices flowing and you want to eat! Pop a sugar free mint in your mouth or be chewing gum when you go out. The minty taste and smell does not compliment the smell of greasy food and it will dramatically decrease it's hold over you. Same when cooking for the family. Have some gum in your mouth and you will not be likely to taste as you go. Those calories can add up when it seems like you have had nothing at all.

The message is this.. set yourself up for success, not failure. It is the easiest thing in the world to find reasons to fail with your diet. If you don't put in place some techniques to counteract the marketing we are all subjected to then you will likely succumb. It will be a never ending cycle of starts and stops.

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Thought you might want to see what I made this morning for breakfast. I am on day 2 and wanted something solid and yummy so I decided to make a Cambridge Brownie. With the addition of 2 egg whites, 1/2 tsp vanilla, pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp baking powder, 2 T coconut oil, 1 or 2 T (depending on how dark you like it) cocoa powder, water and Xylitol sweetner to taste I made a delicious dark chocolate brownie! I used 2 scoops of Original 330 Dutch Chocolate and baked it in the microwave for about 4 minutes on power level 6. This will be 2 generous servings. Don't bake it too long. It should still look a little damp on top. You can of course bake it in a regular oven if you're not in a hurry. I usually make cake this way but this time I added less water for a thicker batter and it came out very dense like a brownie. I'm now eating it with my coffee and feeling very decadent. The additional calories are around 50. I don't count the coconut oil as this doesn't store in the body as fat, but gets used up as energy and increases the metabolism.

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I wanted to write a bit about how grain based foods and sugars, especially those in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which is found in just about everything, have caused the obesity problem we have here in the USA. Sadly, as other countries adopt our eating habits, their health declines as well. Society's that never had obesity problems with their traditional diets.. now do.

We have been told for many years by our government what we should eat and how much. We had the "Food Guide Pyramid" which our children were taught in school and physicians and nutritionists passed on to patients. We were taught that our diet should be based on grain...11 servings a day with lesser amounts of proteins, veg, fruits and very limited fats. We were told that natural foods like coconut oil, butter and animal fat which had always been a part of our diets were suddenly bad for us and they were replaced with vegetable oils and hydrogenated margarine and shortenings. During those years the health of this country has gone consistantly downhill. What were once rare diseases like diabetes, cancers and vascular disease are now common and even expected. If the counsel we have been subjected to was sound, why have we become so sick and fat? How could we still be so wrong?

The body has a very small need for sugar and once a person's intake exceeds that it gets stored as fat. Grain based foods get converted to sugar quickly and cause insulin spikes. Insulin is the body's fat storing hormone. It tells the body to store fat rather then use it for energy. Most of us have way too much insulin circulating due to our high sugar/grain diets. When you consider the fact that for decades the USRDA told everyone to eat low fat while eating 11 servings of grain a day it is no wonder why we are all struggling with our weight. They use grain to fatten livestock for slaughter. In a way, we have been too.

Grain has always been the biggest crop in the USA. So big in fact that we shipped it out to other countries just to get rid of it. Telling the US citizens that they NEED 11 servings went a long way to converting that abundance of grain in to cash.

I get asked all the time about what to eat to maintain once the weight is lost. It's simple really. Don't eat grain and don't eat sugar. You will never be fat again. Focus on healthy sources of fats and protein and vegetable with very limited fruits and grain. We humans were not designed to eat grain. If we were we would have the kind of teeth that could grind it up and we would be able to eat it as nature made it, whole..raw..and unprocessed, but we don't. Good way to lose a tooth! The teeth we do have tell us that we are designed to eat animal, vegetable, fruit, nuts and seeds. If you can chew it raw, it's food for you. Sugar was only meant to be eaten in season. Consider this.. in most parts of the world that have winter weather we see that the fruits ripen in the summer and late fall, natures way to fatten people up for when food is less available. Dietary sugar makes fat. Dietary fat makes energy.

Here is an excerpt from an article about this subject that explains it well. It's talking about the mistakes we make in diet and exercise and how the body responds:


Dr. Doug McGuff is an emergency room physician and an expert on exercise and diet. He explains:

"Your skeletal muscle – if you're lucky – can hold maybe 250 grams of glucose, and your liver holds about 70. If you take 320 grams of glucose as what your storage capacity is, you can kill that with a single trip to Starbucks. Once you go beyond that, your body is going to find some sort of way to deal with those excess carbohydrates.

If your glycogen storage is full, your body has nowhere else to put it. So instead of going all the way through this metabolic pathway, it… produces body fat. That's called the novel glycogenosis. We are in the midst of a very bizarre, evil-scientist type experiment in the Western world, because we are dumping into our bodies an amount of carbohydrate and, in particular, refined sugars, that are way above the capacity of our metabolism to handle normally."

The result of our modern diet, which is loaded with grains and sugars (especially fructose), is a large percentage of obesity, and people that are overweight. This can be turned around, however, using a wise combination-approach of a high-fat, low-carb diet and high-intensity interval training.

"Through an amplification cascade, when you're doing a high-intensity exercise, you very aggressively empty sugar out of your muscle cells. By doing that and combining over the low-carbohydrate diet, you start to heal the metabolism," Dr. McGuff explains. "They are able to access their energy source finally. That's how they can turn things around."

It's crucial to remember that you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet, and the first step toward improving your diet is to cut out as much sugar/fructose and grain-carbs as possible. Your diet actually accounts for about 80 percent of the health benefits derived from a healthy lifestyle, with the remaining 20 percent coming from exercise. That benefit ratio could lean even higher toward diet, according to Dr. McGuff:

"The standard American diet is highly inflammatory. It produces systemic inflammation of an order that is almost beyond belief. In that state, if you do exercise of any significant stress, you're just adding inflammation on top of the inflammation, and you're actually putting yourself at a bit of a risk. I advise people to get their diet straight and then exercise. "

If you are worried about maintenance, don't be. You can be very happy and satisfied on a no-grain eating plan. If you get back to how nature intended us to eat, which has been the path of evolution for us as well as all the other living things on earth that have not become extinct, then you can live a healthy life free of obesity and dieting. Cambridge is a jump start to get the weight off fast. The rate of weight loss accelerates the metabolism's ability to begin healing because body fat causes many negative effects to your overall health, far more then you can imagine. Body fat affects you hormonally, skeletaly, mentally, chemically and prevents full mobility of the body. I think it is safe to say that there isn't a single cell that isn't in some way affected by obesity. Having an overabundance of sugar in the system also encourages systemic yeast overgrowth, a whole other problem many people are now suffering from that has been discussed previously in other articles. We all want to be healthy, vital and active. Getting back to eating the way nature designed is the natural way to maintaining a slim body and a healthy life.

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This was my response to a post yesterday on my support board. The question was regarding advice given by a personal trainer and was about the common misconception on how weight loss, calorie restriction and metabolism work. You can visit the board here,

http://members5.boardhost.com/pam140/index.html?1325691851

Posted by Pam T on 1/3/2012, 6:18 pm, in reply to "Metabolism"

24.10.173.x

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I have been sole sourcing on Cambridge the past 8 days. I broke it last night. It was for a good cause though. My daughter Kim graduated College and I took us all out to dinner to celebrate. She and my 19 year old son will be leaving me in about 30 days to move to Oregon. I will finally be an empty nester for the first time in 32 years. Big chances happening in my house. My kids will be gone and I will be married after being single basically my whole life except for 2 brief marriages, the last one 20 years ago. Lots to get used to! I started this journey 10 years ago. I made the decision to change the course that my life had been on. It was a course of obesity, very bad health issues and a lot of pain and poverty. I knew there was going to be a time when I was no longer a full time mom. I wondered what my future could possibly hold for me in the condition I was in, or if I would even live long enough to have a future. Before I lost my weight my thoughts were that I only had to live long enough to get my kids raised and on their own and then I could just "stop". I figured that was all I had in me. The decision to change my ways began back when my daughter was turning 18. She was very overweight as I was also and the realization that I was greatly responsible for her condition crashed down on me. When she told me she was moving out of state I knew that her weight would hold her back from a full life. I had to do something to save us both. I found Cambridge again and we began the diet together. My ultimate personal goal was to finally find that one person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I knew that in the condition I was in I could not expect to attract or interest the kind of man I hoped to find. I was too sick and depressed and disabled. I needed to turn my financial situation around and I needed to get my life under control. I needed to become the kind of person I wanted to be with. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of personal reflexion, a lot of risk taking and a lot of tears, but I have met my goal. I lost the weight, regained my health, brought my family out of poverty and gave them a good life. Best of all, I found my man! I am amazed sometimes on how things turned out. Had I remained as I was I would likely be in a wheelchair, on disability, and living a very depressing life in a subsidized apartment...if I was still alive that is. My children would have suffered and love would have never found me. In my heart I desperately wanted more then that for me and my kids. Am I grateful? You bet! Not a day goes by that I don't think about it. I can honestly say that were it not for Cambridge, none of these wonderful things would have happened. Each day I wake up and the first thing I do is think about how great I feel...how free I feel. Just turning over in bed used to cause me extreme pain. I literally had to grab hold of my stomach and manually move it as I tried to roll without injuring myself. It was quit a process. Now I jump out ready to take on the day. I look in the mirror just to make sure it wasn't all a dream and I smile. I feel feminine, I feel strong, I feel alive.

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