The fact is that stress relief is not a luxury.  “Pampering”, taking time for oneself is absolutely essential to get yourself out of the “gogogo” style of living. We become disconnected from ourselves by constantly rushing around. Women are biologically driven to take care of others and not ourselves…but the fact is that if we don’t take care of ourselves we can’t take care of others.

Stress hormones are funny things. When the body is under stress, we produce a number of hormones, the most damaging of which is cortisol.  Thinking of it from an evolutionary standpoint, this hormone (with adrenaline and others) is produced when there is a threat.  Thousands of years ago, these hormones are the ones that allow us to run away from predators, run after our dinner (game), or lift a big log off of our child.  The physical exertion dissipates the hormones, and our system is returned to normal.

In our modern world, stress hormones build up. We sit at our desks, meeting deadlines, fuming over our bosses, worrying about our families….and continue sitting. The hormones build up and do not dissipate—one of the markers of high cortisol is the “belly fat” that has become the stuff of infomercials in the last few years.  This fat is particularly dangerous and has been linked to diabetes and cardiovascular problems, and it’s also particularly unattractive!

From the Mayo Clinic:

Cortisol, the primary stress hormone, increases sugars (glucose) in the bloodstream, enhances your brain’s use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissues.

Cortisol also curbs functions that would be nonessential or detrimental in a fight-or-flight situation. It alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system and growth processes. This complex natural alarm system also communicates with regions of your brain that control mood, motivation and fear.

Exercise is one way to dissipate hormones and regulate our systems, but it isn’t enough—regular “pampering” is absolutely necessary to allow our bodies to relax and to work properly.  That great feeling you have coming out of a massage is our bodies re-regulating.

Many cultures, particularly in the East, understand this idea and that’s why, in Chinese communities, massage is so prevalent. When I drive down some streets in San Gabriel, every other storefront offers $15 massages.  The Chinese understand that it’s therapy for the body, not some fluffy indulgence.

I advocate regular massages, enjoyable outdoor exercise, hot tubs, long baths, and stretching and foam rolling to all of my clients, but especially the very stressed.  I find these simple releases allow their bodies to become truly healthy.  Clients who fit these activities into their schedules progress twice as fast as those who don’t.

So take that bath, luxuriate in the hot tub, do your foam rolling and stretching. It is not pampering, it’s a necessity.

It’s funny, but also sad…that woman isn’t even particularly old. Probably, most people think it’s a genetic issue but it is in fact a collection of dysfunctions I like to call “cubicle syndrome”…an affliction of Western Civilization.

What’s happening? Most often, it’s simply being sedentary and sitting a lot. From an evolutionary standpoint, sitting is very unnatural. We used to squat, run, stand, sit cross-legged, climb… very seldom would early humans sit. It’s something that’s only occurred in the last few hundred years. But we sit all the time now.  In the car. At the desk. In front of the TV. Playing video games. Sitting, sitting, sitting… it’s not good for your body at all!

like father, like daughter

What happens is that the muscles in the front of the body, especially the shoulders and chest along with the hip flexors, become very short and tight.

The postural muscles in the back, including those between the shoulder blades, become very stretched out and lose tone.  As a result, the core becomes nonfunctional.  The abs become very weak, the glutes are no longer used, and then you get a cascade of dysfunction that results in not just extremely unattractive posture, but back pain, neck pain, and often headaches. There’s actually a technical name for that terrible flat butt look—“Gluteal Amnesia”.  My clients laugh when I say that but I swear it is a real term.

Me in 2006

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is reversible. Five years ago, I had that very posture (in part because my mom always told me to stand up straight and I was being contrary).  After a lot of intensive work, not only did I get rid of the terrible posture, but a friend who hadn’t seen me since I was a teenager told me that my body looks better now than it did then!

Five years later

A program of stretching, soft tissue work such as foam rolling or massage, plus competent strength training absolutely can reverse this malady.  I have seen it in my clients over and over, and my program has worked wonders not only to improve appearance but to remedy the back pain that too many people believe is simply old age.

Over the next few months,  I’ll continue the discussion with work that you can do at home, but as always, call me for a consultation today or, if you’re out of area, consult a local Functional Movement Specialist.  It’s never too late…I’ve worked with people in their 70′s and have yet to find anyone who can’t significantly improve.

Click on image for a directory of Functional Movment Specialists

What’s up with that?

The number one issue is FOOD.  A lot of people–myself included, years ago– think that if we exercise more we can eat more and lose weight.  In fact, often exercise will increase appetite–not necessarily a bad thing, but not great for fat loss unless one is very careful.

It’s absolutely necessary, if you want to lose fat, to change eating habits. It’s gotta happen. We need to develop the habits that work for us, and the common approaches to fat loss are downright confusing…lowfat? High protein? Low carb? No dairy? Low sodium? Food pyramids? It’s enough to make us tear out hair out. I know I did for decades!

The second big issue that I find with my client’s lack of fat loss is STRESS. It really doesn’t seem like a big deal, but modern life gives us few outlets for stress relief.  Think about it…in the “wild”, when we were under stress, it generally meant that a large predator was chasing us or something of that sort.  Our adrenalin would spike; cortisol, the stress hormone, would be produced, and it gave us the “fight or flight” energy to run like crazy, climb a tree, or fight to the death. (Fitness geeks: gross simplification, so shoot me.)

This physical activity allowed those hormones to be dispersed and released.  But today, our boss yells, traffic is terrible, the news is scary…and what’s the outlet? There isn’t one.  Added to the problem is the busy-ness of our lives–we give and give and give to  our jobs, our families,our kids….and never to ourselves. So that stress just overflows and creates a biochemical nightmare in our bodies; when that happens the message to our primitive brain is that there IS SOMETHING WRONG–(famine, war, winter) and that homeostasis must be maintained at all costs…therefore your body HOLDS ONTO FAT.

I don’t think Mastadons eat humans, but anyway, you get the point

Both of these important topics will be addressed at my upcoming Nutrition and Stress Relief Workshop on Sunday, September 25th at 10AM.  Galya Ivanova Talkington, NSCA CPT, who many of my clients are familiar with as my dear friend and mentor, and her husband, Roland Denzel, IKFF (also my dear friend of course!) will be presenting a 3 hour long workshop.

Roland’s story is similar to mine…he lost a total of 75 pounds!

The first hour will be a presentation on Nutrition; Galya has many years of experience coaching hundreds of people to lose weight; in fact she has been featured both in the Women’s Health Big Book of Exercises and New Rules of Lifting for Everyone as a featured expert, and wrote the e-book Fit Mommy Secrets. Roland is a certified Kettlebell instructor and is in the process of receiving his certification in the Precision Nutrition method.  The second hour will be a workout with stretching, foam rolling, and body alignment–the idea behind this fantastic workout is that you will have the tools to relieve your own stress and heal your own body at home, any time.

The third hour will be a delicious healthy lunch; you’ll have a chance to chat with all three of us and partake of a fabulous array of food.  Galya and Roland catered their own wedding; when I heard this I thought for sure Galya would be totally stressed out, but she, in her gorgeous gown, gracefully and beautifully laid out course after course of amazing dishes.  You’ll never again believe that healthy food is boring and tasteless.

The cost of this workshop is only $49 for clients; you can bring a non-client friend for only $25!  I am providing this workshop to my clients as a big thank you for your loyalty; but in addition I know that the tools that you come away with will allow you to make amazing progress toward your goals, and that’s the whole, point, isn’t it!

I’m so excited to be able to offer this workshop–make sure to give me a call or drop me a line if you have any questions at all! Register today as space is very limited. 626-375-5399

Please note: there are a multitude of links above, please click to get more information!

I’ve been reading their blogs, Little Dog Lost and Eat Love Train,  for years.  This Spring, I had a client who was having an awful time with weight loss and as a single person, just didn’t have the motivation to cook for herself. I proposed a blog that would feature prepared foods from stores like Trader Joe’s that are compatible with a healthy lifestyle; Galya and Roland ran with it, and now Meal Survivor is born.

Meal Survivor features prepared items from the frozen and fresh section of popular grocery stores, in addition the lovely chef Galya is including some simple, quick meal ideas made from common refrigerator items.  (See her gorgeous blog The Art of Real Food for some lovely pictures, but you’ll have to have it translated from Bulgarian if you want to read those recipes).  We are striving to give you a sense of not only the specific foods we’re reviewing, but the thought process that goes into making a healthy selection.

This week, I have had no kids in my house and I was confronted with the sheer inconvenience of cooking for myself. Rather than live on spoonfuls of peanut butter, I took the opportunity to “walk the talk” and have been pleasantly surprised by the variety of prepared foods that are tasty and compatible with a healthy way of eating. Check out Meal Survivor and let me know what you think. If you have any requests for us to highlight one of your favorite prepared foods, we would be delighted to consider it. Happy Eating!

I’ve seen this in my clients a lot, and I really think it’s the one reason why so many people fail in their goals of not just losing weight, but keeping it off.

Most fitness regimens are based on several days a week of exercise, strenuous dieting, massive lifestyle change all at once.  I began my serious work in 2006 with a six day a week program for 12 weeks, including a low calorie, low fat diet. Did the weight come off? Heck yes! But after I was done, I collapsed physically and was too sick to work out, and of course gained back some of the weight right away—and slipped back into many of my bad habits.

This approach is hard. Damned hard. Unsustainable. It’s the reason so many people fall into “yoyo” dieting; I did it myself for decades.  It took me several years to get rid of the “all or nothing” mentality—it took me realizing that these changes had to be for life and I wasn’t going to reach my goal and then go back to a “normal” diet. I became much gentler on myself and slowly developed my own program, which I use with my clients now.

My approach is based on small, measured goals. I was reminded of this when I read Mark Young’s series on his blog regarding obesity. Mark refers to progressive behavior change, the idea of changing just one small thing a week.  You might benefit from reading the original post here. http://markyoungtrainingsystems.com/2011/07/

I tell my new clients that all of our goals are separate. We have exercise goals, we have rest and recovery goals, water and/or supplement consumption goals.  Serious goals, like getting our cholesterol down or our blood sugar normalized. Personal goals, like fitting into an airline or rollercoaster seat. We have dietary goals, which can be further broken down—getting rid of processed foods. Cutting down on sugar.  Eating more vegetables. All of these goals put us closer to our goal of real health, and that’s the true issue, isn’t it? So, let’s look at each goal as a stand-alone.  Each week, each day we CAN fulfill one goal.  When we are sick, we can stretch and foam roll and nurture our bodies. Another day we might be perfect on food but not get around to exercise. On our best days, we might do most things right. On our worst, we know that tomorrow is another day.

Our goal is to change our lifestyle into a sustainable, enjoyable approach to life. Radically restricting calories, immense, sudden dietary changes, radical exercise routines are just a miserable way to live. That’s not to say that any of the above should be avoided by itself if one is motivated and has a clear goal.  The point is that the change has to be something that sticks. At the point I hear a comment like, “I didn’t even want that piece of cake, I knew it would make me feel like crap.” I know that person has learned to listen to her body, and when one of my clients expresses this, I know that I am doing my job.

Be gentle with yourself. Be patient, and just keep going….be like Dorie in Finding Nemo…just keep swimming, and soon you will look back with amazement at all the way you have come. And thank you, my dear client K.D., for reminding me of how important and powerful that little idea is.

We get attention. A lot of attention.  Some of it inappropriate–in my case, around 12 I started noticing just how much men acted differently toward me. At first, I enjoyed it.

But then, a little later, it got uncomfortable and the men driving by me and catcalling became no longer much fun. It became intimidating.

I gained a little weight. The pressure came off. A few years later, I worked one summer doing a lot of physical labor, and it started happening again. The cycle continued, and by the time I got a responsible job with a lot of intellectual demands, the attention pissed me off. It made me angry that I wasn’t being taken seriously; women also were less friendly when I was thin.

So, all through my 20′s and 30′s, I was overweight. Usually not really big, just enough to keep attention off of me.

A long term study by Kaiser Permanente found that a huge percentage of morbidly obese people had been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused. One woman, a rape victim, stated: “Overweight is overlooked and that’s what I need to be.”

Other teenage girls may not gain weight–they may wreck their posture from hunching over, protecting their breasts and minimizing them. Our culture of sitting constantly makes it worse, until our soft tissue deforms and we can’t straighten up, even if we want to.

Our insane popular culture of airbrushed, impossibly thin and perfect models doesn’t help…it makes us feel horribly insecure; I even remember wondering why men were looking when I was so clearly imperfect.

How to fix this? I don’ t know—cultural overhaul. Women owning their power, physically and mentally. Let us teach our daughters to own their beauty. To own their power, to love their bodies.

You are beautiful. Own it. Come into your power and the world will be a better place for it.

During my adulthood, the mantra of fat loss was eating lots of whole grain, carb loading, low fat diets. I just got fatter and fatter on that way of eating.

make it organic, though

My fat loss  took a lot of work, and tweaking; it took a little longer than it had to because I was in such poor health when I began. But near the end, I was stalled for months and months. I just couldn’t seem to lose a pound, no matter what I did. I still had about 10 or 15 pounds to go and I was incredibly frustrated.I was on a high-ish protein, lowfat diet, the kind common to bodybuilders.

I started doing research, tweaking, changing my diet. I began to read nondiet books such as Nourishing Traditions and The Omnivore’s Dilemma and thinking about human evolution in diets.  So I upped the fat content of my diet. I added eggs, organic butter, full fat salad dressing made with olive oil, and especially Fish Oil supplements.

The result? My weight started to go down. My cholesterol, always borderline, normalized (I attribute that to the Fish Oil/Omega 3 supplementation).

My favorite breakfast during that period was two eggs (from my chickens) and Ezekiel bread toast with butter. I started regularly eating peanut and almond butter. I stopped taking the skin off chicken (within reason–I don’t like flabby chicken skin, only crispy).

The main thing I noticed when I changed my macronutrient ratios to around 40/30/30 (carbs/protein/fat) is that I became much less hungry.  OK, when dieting you’re always a bit hungry, that’s normal. But it wasn’t chew-off-your-arm crazed hunger, it was tolerable.

I’ve continued on a similar diet since, and my weight has slowly come down to 135, most importantly my bodyfat percentage is well under 20%.

It’s a hard concept to wrap your head around, since lowfat diets have been pounded into our heads for years by the popular media. But the fact is that humans evolved eating and prizing animal fat and fat in general. Our bodies can’t assimilate certain vitamins without it.  My personal experience, and that of my clients, is that our bodies won’t release fat unless it has fat in the diet.

A diet high in carbohydrates, even healthy whole grains, is a diet that causes excess insulin production.  Insulin is the fat-storing hormone. Displacing carbs with fat and protein creates a hormonal balance that normalizes your body–it’s not in a crisis situation in which it thinks it needs to hold on to every bit of fat or starve.

I’m not going to delve into the science behind this because it will violate my rule of fuming and fussing over posts, but take a look at some of the research and let me know what you think. I listened to an interview with Gary Taubes recently that speaks to these issues,if you have the time to listen he goes through a lot of the research and approaches the issue from an evolutionary standpoint.

All I know is that I, and my clients, lose fat when we have it in the diet. And that ultimately is what matters to me.

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure to be able to talk to one of my mentors, Galya Denzel,  extensively and often, since she’s recently moved into my area from Bulgaria.  In one of our conversations she brought up a point which I’ve been thinking about ever since—the role of posture in stress on the body.

I’m a big stickler on posture, as my friends and clients know very well. When I fixed my posture, I had many people who insisted I must have lost 10 or 20 pounds. As a Functional Movement Specialist, I know the importance of correct alignment of the body, also. But I had never thought about the role of posture in fat storage and fat loss.

When the body is out of alignment, the message to the “lizard brain” is that there is something terribly wrong. Often, poor posture is associated with a sedentary lifestyle, which is another message to the primitive brain that there is a problem (this issue is discussed in a fascinating book, Younger Next Year, by Chris Crowley and Dr. Harry Lodge).  The human body was made to move, and if it doesn’t, there is a cascade of problems, which adds up to a stress response in the body.

Stress hormones tell the body that there is danger, and that means keeping things stable by any means necessary—and that includes hanging on to fat.  Added to our processed-carb heavy diets, it’s a prescription for fat to be stored—since in primitive times fat equals survival through famine and crisis.

So sit up straight!  Move your body! That spare tire around your waist is there for more reasons than simply overeating.  Work with your body and move it so that it knows that everything is OK, and it can function normally.

One of my recommendations for all of my desk-bound clients is to take a walk at lunch.  There is a certain amount of calorie burn, definitely–and every little bit helps when you’re in fat loss mode. Moving your body and changing patterns is always a good idea.

But the most important thing about a lunchtime walk is the stress relief. I’ve had countless clients who “just couldn’t” lose weight because the level of stress in their lives was so high. Through steady work on relaxation and destressing, they could finally bust a plateau.

It seems crazy, right? I have to force my clients to relax. It runs so contrary to American culture, rush rush rush and don’t take a break and accomplish as much as possible. But the fact is that working 12 or 15 hours without a break, which many of us do, wreaks havoc on our systems.  Humans were not made to be constantly under stress–a little stress is good, and that’s why our “fight or flight” mechanism is so important–but when we are constantly stressed, then the hormones that are produced to allow us to flee predators are constantly circulating in our systems.  Cortisol is the most well-known of these, and is notorious for causing the body to store belly fat, the most deadly form of fat because is encases the organs and is an indicator of potentially serious health problems, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Here’s an article from the Harvard Medical School for those who like details and research.

The funny thing about this client, though, was that she is a supervisor of a staff, and when I quizzed her on the work environment, she admitted that while she eats lunch at her desk  without a break, thus the lack of a lunchtime walk. However, this thoughtful boss insists that her employees not only take a break, but do it in the break room so they can get away from their desks.  In fact, the break room was created at her insistence so that her hard-working staff could have a place to relax and eat.

The irony was not lost on my client. She is a wonderful boss, but now she needs to be  wonderful caretaker of herself! I read somewhere once that you have to treat your own body as a beloved child. Would you force your sweet child to work 15 hours without a break? Feed it only junk food? Go long hours without eating, and then when it is starving, feed it fast food? NO! You would never do that to a child, so don’t do it to yourself!

Treat your body well, think kind thoughts and be grateful for it–no matter what it looks like at the moment–and you will find benefits that extend way beyond anything you can imagine.  Being gentle with yourself, just as you would with your child or someone you love, is an important step toward reclaiming your body and your fitness.