Preliminary Health Care Podcast

The Freshman Fifteen We’re closing in on the end of Fall Semester, and many college freshman will have been anxious or experienced the dreaded Freshman Fifteen (I’ll just refer to this as “F15” from now on). The F15 is usually blamed on things like cafeteria eating and no longer remaining in high-school athletics (eating more and exercising less). These surely have something to do with it, but not how you likely assume. Rather, the F15 is a manifestation of complete upheaval to a student’s life—not necessarily at all related to the amount they eat or exercise. Furthermore, the F15 is only a single example of what can happen to many of us during a sudden change in our lives: new baby, moving, new job, etc. With this post, I want to explore exactly what these disruptions, why they can cause sudden fat-gain, and how to prevent them. The Pyramid Model of Health For those unfamiliar with this concept, I’ll refer you to this article (http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-pyramid-model-of-health.ht

Don’t Let “Fall Back” Set YOU Back! The following consists of adapted material from the our free eBook on Sleep and the Circadian Rhythm, and Fat-Loss eBook (release: 12/1/14). Today is the first day of Standard Time, when we return from Daylight Saving Time by setting our clocks back an hour to find an earlier sunrise and sunset. Most of us don’t appreciate how BIG the impacts of changing daylight has on us—don’t appreciate how completely intertwined we are with our environment—and so will fall victim to depression, regretful eating-behaviors, and other consequences through the winter. To give an idea of this integration, let me begin with an excerpt from my free eBook, “Sleep and the Circadian Rhythm” (which you can download by clicking here). Unimaginable complexity yielding mindless simplicity—in all of nature, only we possess enough intelligence to appreciate complexity, but enough arrogance to believe we are removed from its implications. So many moving pieces just to produce a simple phasic cycle: a

How Exercise Does & Does NOT Affect Fat-Loss Exercise is undeniably vital to human health, including attaining/maintaining a healthily low level of body-fat. However, the way in which exercise does this is not as likely believe. We’ve always been told that exercise burns calories—but this isn’t what really happens…calories are not little packets of fuel to burned or stored; rather, nutrients can be converted to work (burned) or stored (perhaps as body-fat, but also as muscle, glycogen, bone, etc.), and we use a unit of measurement to describe that release of energy called “calories.” So if we want to understand the effects of exercise on body-fat, we need to understand NOT calories, but how fat-cells work. Fat-Cell Basics You can think of all the trillions of cells of your body as little individual creatures—each functioning for its own survival. As such, your fat-cells’ decisions to absorb or release fat is based on a selfish agenda…in other words, your fat-cells could care less about the needs of the rest

The most common weight-loss advice is to “eat less & exercise more” (ELEM). On a very playground toy sort of way, this can make sense: something must become of the food you eat, either it is expended or stored; if you don’t expend as much as you eat, then, it must be stored. The problem, though, is that your body’s management of energy is far too complex to be explained in this simple teeter-totter model. The actual physiology as to why/how is riddled throughout the site (check out the bottom of the page for related articles) as well as in our full Fat-Loss eBook (Dec 1, 2014), but briefly: It’s incorrect to assume that fat-cells are some passive dump-sites for excess fuel, or that physical activity is necessarily fueled by leaking fat-cells. Rather, fat-cells have a unique physiology which must be understood in order to determine why fat-cells are reduced and how you can affect that…and it has little to do with how much you eat/exercise! But even if fat-cells did work this way, your body has countless redu

More at www.preliminaryhealthcare.com The most common advice we hear for weight-loss is to “eat less and exercise more” (ELEM). By inference, eating more and exercising less makes you fatter. Further still, this mentality assumes and implies that being fat is a choice—a choice made by lazy weak-willed gluttons. You’ll be able to find why this is all wrong in other posts or in the full Fat-Loss eBook (coming Dec 1st, 2014), but here I want to explain how/why this paradigm is exactly backwards. In other words, we wrongly assume that fatter people are fatter because they eat more; in reality, though, fatter people may eat more because they are larger! Make no mistake, people get larger BEFORE they eat more. I understand if that sounds completely crazy at this point, but let’s apply this notion to a different scenario. Imagine we’re talking about a husband and a wife: the husband is 6 feet tall and 190 pounds; the wife is 5’ 4” 140 pounds. Who do you think will eat more? Of course, the man because he is larger—

More at www.preliminaryhealthcare.com This will be an incredibly brief post, but I couldn't contain my irritation. Let me post a link to what I'm talking about: Woman packs on 50 pounds to prove 'no excuses for being overweight. If you don't want to watch it, I don't blame you. I'll give a brief synopsis of the story. Essentially, this woman has voluntarily gained a lot of weight, and is now losing it, in order to prove a point. I can only assume that her point is those who struggle with their weight are some combination of lazy and gluttonous. This isn't the first time somebody has done this in order to gain some small degree of celebrity--and in the process, dehumanized those struggling with weight. It irks harder every time. Let me give a little context: I'm writing this post at the tail-end of completing a book on fat-loss. In it, I explain why eating less and exercising more is essentially worthless and doomed to failure. I won't explain the science of body-composition regulation here, though it will