Integrative Medicine

As We Get Older…

As we get older, we can't get away with some things we did when we were in our 20s and 30s.

Good nutrition and keeping our bodies active become more important than ever and it becomes a little harder to maintain our weight as our metabolism slows down.

If you're concerned with the effects of aging on your looks and health, you can pick up a copy of this free guide to healthy aging which focuses on keeping young in a natural way.

Why am I Always Hungry? (Part Three)

(See Part One: Always Hungry? and Part Two: Hungry All the Time if you missed these)

Another reason you may feel hungry all the time is because you are not eating enough food, not in terms of volume (as we saw in Part 2) but in terms of calories. You see, if volume of food was enough to keep you satisfied you could live on vegetables and salads with a tiny amount of protein and fat (just enough to stop you getting ill) and you'd never get hungry.

But the fact is that your body will soon tell you if you are not giving it enough calories by making you ravenously hungry. The problem is that when your blood sugar level drops, your body cries out for food to get the balance back. Yes, it will use up your fat stores (and your precious muscle) if you don't feed it but it will also let you know in no uncertain terms that you are starving it by giving you huge hunger pangs.

The danger is that if you have the willpower and you carry on like that you are behaving like someone who has a real eating problem and after a few days the feelings of hunger eventually disappear. But the damage you are doing to your body does not go away and if you take this starvation idea too far you can end up seriously ill.

I generally don't advocate counting calories as a weight loss strategy. Most people get it wrong and end up eating too much and NOT losing weight but if you are hungry all the time and think you may be eating too little then check out how many calories you are eating.

I like to see steady weight loss of a pound or two a week and no more (preferably a pound but I know you all want to see fast results).

With a pound a week that means a deficit of no more than 500 calories a day - and even with 2lbs a deficit of 1000 and no more.

That means eating about 500 or 1000 calories fewer than you are using in any 24 hour period. If you are also increasing your exercise levels remember to take that into account too when you calculate the minimum you should be eating.

Spread your calories out throughout the day so that you don't starve yourself all day and then splurge in the evening. It will keep your metabolism ticking over nicely and prevent hunger pangs during the day (and unwise choices at lunch and coffee time)

If you have a big night out on the cards where you know you will eat more calories than you want, I find the best way to deal with it is to eat a tiny bit less a couple of days running up to the night out and also a couple of days afterwards so that you can enjoy your event without guilt. And I'd also recommend you make it a 1lb weight loss target for the week instead of 2lb in advance so that you can still make it a successful week.

Free Choose to Move Exercise Motivation Tool

The American Heart Association has created a free tool - the Choose To Move Countdown timer - to help inspire us to set and achieve our New Year's resolutions to get more exercise this year.

This is a downloadable desktop tool that includes new daily exercise tips, words of encouragement and nutrition advice every day for 12 weeks. They aim to help you develop healthy habits that can produce positive lifestyle changes.

You can download it at this page

The Blueprint for Practice Growth through Giving

In support of our post last week on giving as the key to professional networking and referrals come two things. The first is scientific research revealing a link between charity and wealth. The second is a fantastic new book, The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea.

The Go-Giver is the story of Joe, an ambitious young man who yearns for success. Joe’s trouble, however, is that the harder he works, the further away his goals seem. That all changes when Joe meets an enigmatic man named Pindar who teaches him that changing his focus from getting to giving—putting others’ interests first and continually adding value to their lives —ultimately leads to unexpected returns.

I saw a many parallels with the CAM professions when I read this book. The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success, which Joe discovers in his journey (I’ll keep that journey a secret for now), seem so relevant to practice growth that I think this book could have been written with alternative medicine in mind.

For anyone in the healing professions, I can whole-heartedly recommend this one. The parable format makes it an easy, enjoyable read, and the content is pure gold. Tara and I both loved it. This one’s worth it—for your practice and your personal life.

You can pick up a copy of the The Go-Giverhere.

Always Hungry? (Part One)

Ann sent me a question the other day which is quite common among many of my newsletter subscribers so I thought I'd answer it here.

The question was "I'm always hungry. How can I stop hunger pangs?"

Though it's perfectly normal to have hunger pangs - you SHOULD be hungry before each meal, it's not helpful for your weight loss efforts to be hungry all the time. Your meals and snacks should keep you satisfied for at least 2 or 3 hours if you are eating to the point you are comfortable (and not until you are stuffed) as I advise.

If that's not the case with you, the main thing to work out is WHY - why are you always hungry? You see you can be hungry for either physical OR emotional reasons.

Physical reasons might be:-

• not eating enough volume of food leaving you with an empty tummy too soon after a meal
• not eating enough calories, leaving you with low blood sugar and a need to eat pretty quickly to correct it
• eating foods which are high in fast-release carbohydrate or sugar (high GI foods) which give a spike to your blood sugar and a (too) rapid decline as your body tries to correct it

or then there are all those emotional reasons

• delicious food all around you making it difficult to resist
• feeling down and eating for comfort
• eating to plug a gap inside (You literally feel "empty")
• eating because you are bored (which is the case with many people who are hungry all the time - eating literally passes the time)

You have to work out why you are hungry all the time before you can tackle the problem. It may be a combination of reasons or it may be only one.

I will tackle each of the reasons over the next few days so that you have something to work with once you know what the reason is.