Detoxification? Is it time?

Ok, I know that you think that you have heard this before. How many of us have either had a friend tell us that they have done some sort of detoxification or have tried to sell us on the idea or product to do some sort of a cleansing? How many of us have spent money on doing a detoxification only to find ourselves no better off than we were before we started it? How many of us have thrown hundreds of dollars away thinking that “this one is the right one for me”?

Well I am not going to sell you anything. My goal is simple, it is to help us simplify our lives, give us healthier bodies and bring back the energy we may have lost.

The average adult today consumes way too much soda and alcohol. We consume way too much junk food and processed foods. We eat way too much and way too late. The average adult is at least 50 pounds overweight. We spend way too much time on our electronic devises and not enough time with face to face communication. Our lives are very noisy. We have noise all around us from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep and to make sure that we don’t go to sleep in quite we keep the television on. My hopes are that after reading this I can motivate those who have read it join me in the fight a get our health back.

The average adult spends way too much time on our cell phones and computers. We spend way too much time in our cars traveling from one place to another. Our cell phones have become our life and in some situations we feel as though we can do nothing without them. You don’t believe me? Ever leave your cell phone at home? How do you feel when you realize that you left it at home? Kind of naked hay? Like you’re missing something “important”? Then what is the first thing you do when you get home? Exactly, find your cell phone and check your messages. Or have you ever text someone and if they don’t respond right away you feel as though they don’t care about you? Think about it.

So what is a detoxification any way? Well I believe it is a way to rid the body of the poisons that consume us on a daily bases. I believe that we need to help our bodies fight off disease and infections and by detoxifying ourselves, in the en , we will have stronger immune systems and much more energy to do those things that are most meaningful in our lives and much more time to do the things we have always wanted to do.

I must say that this is not a game. This is meant to begin the process of healing our bodies and our lives. My ultimate goal is to make whatever we do a lifestyle change. My goals is for us to get to a point where we begin to realize that most of the stuff we do, we eat, or we think we need, we really don’t need. So here we go…

The best way for me to describe my detoxification plan is to tell you what I have done in the past and what I am doing for myself now. Ten years ago I had a huge problem. When I looked at my diet, it was clearly obvious that I was spending way too much time at fast food restaurants and especially one in particular, McDonalds. My breakfast and lunch would revolve around McDonalds. I was eating at McDonalds at least 14 times a week. When I looked at it monetarily I was spending almost $20 per day just on fast food. I knew that this had to stop, so I made a conscious decision to stop all McDonalds fast food eating and for the last 10 years, I have not eaten at a McDonalds nor have I had a desire to. Even when I go on road trips I have not and I pride myself in saying that I have not eaten at a McDonalds in 10 years. I have found that I don’t need to spend that money and that there are better alternatives and because of that I have saved loads of money.

Now I have another problem, I spend way too much time with my electronic devises. I am on mu cell phone constantly texting one person or another. In one month I can accumulate over 10,000 text messages. Then there is facebook, well let’s not go there. I need to lesson my time on these devises and spend more time with my family and friends face to face. So effective on September 1st I will be reducing my time on these devises. Will you join me?

What are you willing to give up to better your health and total wellbeing? Will you join me on September 1? Your detoxification does not have to be the same as mine nor do I expect it to be. But why not get healthier with me in some way.

#8 You don’t sleep enough

Now this is one of the most over looked problems we have here in the States. We are so worried about keeping up with the Jones, that we forget that our sleep is a very important time in our life. Why? Your sleep is where the body repairs itself. It cannot do it while you are awake because at that time it is working. While sleeping your brain surveys your whole body and send our friends the red blood cells there to help mend any issues. This is the only time healing truly happens.
During the 1950’s scientists got to do in depth studies on sleep and what they found out is that we have four stages of sleep and they are:
Stage 1: This is the beginning stage of the sleep cycle and lasts around 5 to 10 minutes. In this stage we are between being awake and sleeping. Ever have your eyes closed and still hear things around you like the television or radio? This is that first stage. If a person is awoke at this stage they might report that they were never sleeping to begin with.
Stage 2: This stage lasts for about 20 minutes and your brain begins to slow your system down. Your heart rate begins to slow down and you’re the temperature of your body begins to drop.
Stage 3: In this stage our brain waves begin to slow down. During this phase of sleep we become less responsive to our environment and exterior noises. This stages acts as a go between from your light sleep to your heavy sleep or fast REM sleep. There is no time limit on how long you can be in this stage.
Stage 4: This is also known as the dream state. This state is also known as fast REM (rapid eye movement). This is when you will have rapid eye movement, increased respiration and increased brain activity. This is also the time when the body repairs itself and gets ready for the next day. In this stated our muscles are none responsive (paralyzed) to voluntary motion.
Now here is the kicker, we do not progress thru each stage of sleep and end up in the REM sleep and then stay there for the rest of the night. No we actually cycle thru each stage several times during our whole period of sleep. It is not uncommon to go from stage 1 to stage 2 and 3 and then back to stage 2 before finally entering into stage 4. This cycle takes an average of 90 minutes to go thru.
Don’t take your sleep for granted, it is really the most important part of your whole day.

Travel travel travel

Here I am getting ready to go to New Jersey. It's 914 miles of road that, without thinking about Pennsylvania in the mix, it would be a pleasant ride. Pennsylvania is over 340 miles long and it doesn't matter how fast you drive it takes you 4 hours to get thru.

Have you ever driven a long way, over 400 miles in a day, and gotten out of your car and felt tight and tired? I know that happens to me a lot and the question I wanted to finally answer is, what can I do to stop that feeling. So I did my own study on the way out to New Jersey.

First, we decided to drive as we (my wife and I) would normally. The only stops we were going to make were for gas and food and because I was driving the Camry I knew that I would not be making many stops for gas (maybe one. The night before I got good sleep and hit the road right after church. I drove thru Illinois, Indiana and then stopped in Ohio to fuel up and get something to eat. After fueling up and eating we then hit the road and struggled thru Pennsylvania. Once we made it over the Delaware Water Gap we then continued on to my dads house where we finally parked the car and got out and staggered inside and fell asleep. Throughout that trip, especially at the end, my back and neck really hurt and my legs, well they weren't liking me at all. They were stiff and sore. It took that all of Monday to get back to normal. By Tuesday I was able to get back to my normal activities.

Well, not to make a long story longer. On my way home I decided to do something different. I decided to try and fit exercise into my travels home. Here is the catch, I did not want to use any additional time nor did I want to get sweaty and tired. So this is what I did...

After driving thru Pennsylvania we stopped in Ohio to get gas. While the pump was on I went for a walk, exactly 200 steps and then I did two deep knee bends and then got back into the car and went on. A few hours later I stopped to get some food. After ordering I knew that I was going to have a few minutes so I got up and walked around the building a few times. It took 10 minutes and when I came back I was not sweaty nor tired. I sat down and a few minutes later my food was ready. Then my final stop was in Indiana and I got out for 5 minutes and repeated the 200 steps as I had done before. By this time we were into the trip for over 11 hours and by then I would be feeling tired and sore. However something strange was happening, I was feeling really good. My bones weren't hurting, my back felt great and my knees were yelling at me. My neck felt great and I wasn't even a little tired.

Well we still had a few hours left so I got into the car and hammered thru the rest of the ride. When I got home to my shock I was not tired at all and my body felt really good. I now believe that there is something to that whole notion that even a little exercise makes the body feel good. Next time you go on long trips think about incorporating exercise into the trip. You will feel so much better for it.

#6 Your Partner is not on the same page as you

Oh boy this is an issue. Everyone that I have ever trained has had this issue.
For years Mary has been unhappy with her health. She understands that if she gets healthier she will feel better about herself on so many levels. She is sick and tired of going for her annual physical and having her doctor tell her that she needs to lose weight. She is tired of getting her medications increased every time she goes to him. She is tired of always feeling tired and not being able to climb a flight of stairs without taking a 10 minute break. She is sick and tired of not being able to do things with her kids. She doesn’t feel sexy and has no sex drive.
Mary’s husband is just as out of shape as she is but really doesn’t care. He knows that he could stand to lose “a little weight” but what is his incentive? He has a good job and provides for his family. He too has to take several medications in the morning for his diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol but once he takes those medications he’s fine right? His testosterone level is 250 and his doctor tells him that he needs to get that into the 450 range to be average. But what is his motivation? His sex drive is, well, Viagra which once worked no longer works. However, he doesn’t really care.
One day Mary decides to finally get her health back in order and runs to the local gym and signs up for personal training. Her trainer is known for taking a no-non-sense approach to getting results. He doesn’t believe in political correctness and holds people accountable. Most people don’t like that but Mary is desperate. She sees her children going down the same path and she knows that she needs to do something about it now.
At first her husband approves of her passion for getting healthier and “losing the weight” and she does really well. Within the first 6 months she losses 50 pounds and she just feels really good about herself. She is now able to do things that she thought she was never going to be able to ever do again. She is now running and workouts have become fun and she looks for new challenges. Her doctor is impressed with her results and begins to remove some of the medications she was taking daily. After one year all she is taking is a multi vitamin. She looks and feels great.
One day her husband, who hasn’t changed a bit, sits Mary down and tells her that he is beginning to have a problem with her going to that local gym. “Why do you have to go everyday and for hours at a time? You have responsibilities here and the membership fees are not cheap. I think you need to think about quitting the gym and besides you can probably do those things on your own now and it would save us money.” He says to her.
Now she has found a new freedom and finds a new happiness in her new life, but she is now beginning to feel her husband fight back by requesting that she quits. Why is he doing that, especially when she is taking care of her responsibilities and the $35 that comes out once a month from their checking account is really not a lot when you consider the hundreds of dollars he spends every month on beer and cigarettes? Well the answer is simple, he feels uneasy with his wife’s new life. He feels inferior to her on so many levels, whereas before he didn’t. She wants to go for walks and he physically cannot keep up. She wants to go on bike rides and he physically cannot ride. She is finding a new fire in her and wants intimacy and he cannot perform on any level. He is feeling the pressure to put an end to this so that he can “feel better” about himself.
For him to “feel better about himself” he either has to step out of his comfort zone and begin to change his life to match hers or he needs to stop her from pursuing things that frankly he doesn’t feel comfortable with. He likes his life the way it is and so what he is a little over weight, they have medications that make him better right?
This struggle goes on for months. She is improving everyday and his health is getting worse and worse. As much as many may not realize it, Mary too has a decision to make. She can make her husband happy and lower the stress in the family if she quits or she can continue down her path of better health and let the chips fall where they may. She knows that her old life brought her depression and misery and she doesn’t want to go back down that path. Life has gotten good to her in her new. She no longer shops in the big and tall stores but goes to regular department stores to shop. She has lost 14 sizes and now is wearing sizes that she only wore in her high school years. She feels and looks sexy and many have told her that. Now why does she want to go back to her old ways? A huge decision has to be made here, a life changing decision for both parties.
What Mary did is confidential and I won’t tell you but know this, the hardest thing for one to do when they are pursuing better health and fitness is have a spouse that is not on the same page as you.

#5 Exercise you do on an empty stomach…

Bad bad bad! Did I say bad? Have you ever worked out or done anything on an empty stomach and in the middle of what you were doing felt a sick feeling? There is this belief that if you work out on an empty stomach you will lose weight faster. That can’t be any further from the truth. It is quite the opposite, by eating regularly in right portions, your body will lose the excess weight faster than if you did not eat before a strenuous activity. Why is that?
In the many years of working with people I could always tell when someone had not eaten before a work out with me. How I could tell is that their body would literally shut down on them and they would feel sick to their stomach, dizzy or just plain ill. When you are doing any type of intense activity the body needs to be able to tap into the fuel source when needed. Without that source the body begins the shut down process because it thinks it needs to survive. You would think that it the body would just go to those extra storage units to get the fuel it needs but quit the opposite. The stomach finishes the breakdown process and the small intestine distributes the fuel to where it needs to go. If there is no fuel there, we will feel sick and weak
A few weeks ago I was working with a person and I noticed that they began to get really slow and the color was really leaving their face. I stopped them in the middle of the workout and asked them if they had eaten and they told me no. I immediately stopped the work out and gave them something to eat. After eating the pretzels I gave them they told me that they felt better and could finish the workout and they did with no problem. They asked me why they had that nauseous feeling and I told them that the body needed some fuel to get thru the intense activity and there was none to be had so it began to shut you down. By eating the pretzels I gave them, it gave the body the ability to tap into some fuel to continue and feel confident that it could finish the activity. Look at it this way. Even if you fill your car up and then fill the canisters and put those in the trunk of your car. If you drive your tank dry your car will still stop running, even if you have excess gas in the trunk of your car. Without it being in the tank (the stomach) the car really has no way to utilize it.
Always have something before your do any intense activity. You will get much better results than if you didn’t.

#4 You only do cardio work

Only doing cardio is not such a bad idea. The problem however is that most people don’t do enough cardio to make it stand for anything. People have a tendency to just go until it feels a little uncomfortable then they quit, when in essence the workout really doesn’t start until you reach that point of exhaustion.
At first when you are trying to lose weight, cardio is your best friend but what happens after a short while is that your body gets accustomed to the amount of cardio you are doing and the results you were once getting you are no longer able to achieve. Why is that?
Once you start a workout program, especially when you haven’t done one in a long time, your body goes into panic mode and puts every bit of resources it has to fend against the loss of energy it was experiencing. This excitement causes your body to us its reserves to “just stay alive”, when in essence your body isn’t dying but it is becoming more efficient at metabolizing the fuel that it has stored. As an example, take the person who is really over weight and they start just walking daily. For that first week the probability of them losing a lot of weight is great. Why was that? Because their body thought that it needed to throw that extra fuel into the mix to keep going. Now, if that person, in their second week, kept everything the same (activity and diet), they would still notice a weight loss but that weight loss would be much smaller than the week prior. Why? Because their body is beginning to learn the routine and beginning to understand that the extra fuel that it felt was necessary to stay live was now not as necessary as it thought it was. After a few weeks there may be no weight loss at all. Why? The body now understands your new routine and understands that it doesn’t need to release any extra fuel for you to complete your latest activity.
There needs to be a mixture of weight training (anaerobic) as well as cardio (aerobic) training to get the results that one may be looking for. This will strengthen your muscular and cardiovascular systems and cause the body to utilize more fuel than if you just did cardio.

My beliefs...

What do I believe?

1) Failure is not an option in any way shape or form
2) I always look at the end result never the present situation
3) There is no room for average in my life
4) I lead the crowd, I don’t follow it
5) I Treat others as I would want to be treated
6) I always go the extra mile for a true friend
7) “I can’t” is never thought of or uttered
8) The words “I quit” do not exist in my vocabulary
9) I don’t associate with negative people or situations
10) I believe that pain is truly weakens leaving the body
11) I believe that true success always comes at a price. The question is… what am I willing to pay?
12) I always hold my children to a very high standard
13) I always lead by example
14) I never consider myself any better than others
15) God is always first in my life
16) I am true to my friends
17) I love my friends unconditionally
18) Everything I do… I do unconditionally
19) I will let nothing come between the success of my family, nothing
20) I will protect my family at all costs
21) Age is only a number, only a number
22) Anything you put your mind to you can accomplish
23) Patients wins out over anxiety
24) Hard work, persistency and focus always wins out
25) I accept no one who says I can’t do something
26) Quitting is failing, go to number 1 again.
27) I will never stop pushing and trying to improve myself in all that I do