If you'd like to gain huge quantities of weight, here's a number of helpful tips:
1) Follow the advice of food manufacturers and eat the products they label "healthy", or "heart healthy", or "part of a nutritious breakfast" etc., like Shredded Wheat cereal, pretzels ("a low-fat snack"!), low- or non-fat salad dressings.
2) Cut your morning calorie intake by skipping breakfast.
3) Hang around with other heavy people. They will confirm that it's okay to be overweight.
4) Call walking your dog "exercise".
5) Get a sedentary desk job. Use your swivel desk chair to scoot about whenever possible, rather than getting up to do things.
6) Say "I've worked hard all week long. Weekends are for relaxing, not for physical activities. I deserve a rest."
7) Eat foods without thinking about it: Eat chips while watching football, eat while on the phone, daydream over the sink.
8) Eat to provide comfort when stressed.
9) Eat foods that have sentimental value, whether or not they're good for you: Freshly-baked cakes that remind you of Mom, Pop Tarts that you used to carry in your lunchbox when you were a kid, hot dogs just like Dad would buy at the baseball stadium.
10) Cut back on sleep and generate insatiable starch cravings.
11) Stack your shelves at home with great variety. That way, you'll always have something to suit your mood.
12) Say to your spouse: "It's none of your damn business what I eat! I'm a grown man/woman!" Prove it by over-indulging in obviously unhealthy foods.
13) Tell yourself that you're just too busy to pay attention to food choices. Just grab whatever you can out of a convenience store or vending machine.
See, it's easy! And that just a start.
Of course, I don't really want you to do any of these things. But if you see yourself in any of the above, and you're struggling with weight, you should seriously rethink your approach.
/>The dose is best tailored to your age and blood levels. People less than 40 years old should not take DHEA. The older you are, the higher the dose, though we rarely ever have to exceed 50 mg per day. If you've never had a blood level and your doctor refuses to obtain one, 25 mg per day is a reasonable dose (10-15 mg in women 40-50 years old). It's always best to discuss your supplement use, particularly agents like DHEA, with your doctor.
Track Your Plaque Members: Stay tuned to the www.cureality.com website for a Special Report more completely detailing the hows and whys behind DHEA.
At a social gathering this weekend, as we humans like to do, someone asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a cardiologist.
"What hospital do you work at?" he asked.
This is invariably the response I get whenever I tell people what I do. I wouldn't make much of it except that it happens just about every time.
This indicates to me just how successful hospitals, my colleagues, cardiac device manufacturers, and others supporting the status quo in heart care, have been in persuading us that the place for heart disease is the hospital--period.
Tense families, drama, high-tech...It all takes place in the hospital.
Yet the people destined to be the fodder for hospital heart care are presently well, mostly unaware of what the future holds. Also unaware that heart disease is readily, easily, inexpensively, and accurately identifiable. Ask anyone in the Track Your Plaque program who's had a CT heart scan.
We all need to rid ourselves of the idea that the hospital is the place for heart disease. If the coronary plaque behind heart attack is easy to detect and controllable, there's little or no need for the hospital for the vast majority of us.
In the majority of instances of coronary disease, the hospital should be the place for the non-compliant and the ill-informed, and not for those of us sufficiently motivated to know and do better. The formula is simple: 1) Quantify plaque with a CT heart scan, 2) Identify the causes, then 3) Correct the causes.
I came across this Blog authored by a nutritionist when it was highlighted on Blogger as an interesting site:
The Fanatic Cook at http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/
I was thoroughly impressed with the insightful and entertaining commentary. I'd highly recommend this site to you for reading on nutrition. In particular, her coenzyme Q10 column was exceptionally well written and clear.(http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2005/02/statins-and-not-well-publicized-side.html)
Also read her column, Super NonFoods at http://fanaticcook.blogspot.com/2005/07/super-nonfoods.html.
There's also oodles of recipes, all for the taking.
Eggs have been in the center of the cholesterol controversy almost from the very start.
The traditional argument against eggs went that eggs, high in cholesterol (210-275 mg per egg)and with some saturated fat (1.5-2.5 grams per egg), raised blood cholesterol (and LDL). Out went the daily fried, scrambled, poached eggs that many Americans indulged in most mornings. (We replaced it with more breakfast cereals and other carbohydrate conveniences, then got enormously overweight.)
A large Harvard epidemiologic study in 1999 called this observation into question. They tracked the fate of 117,000 thousand people and then compared the rate of heart attack, death, and other cardiovascular events among various people correlated to the "dose" of eggs they ate. Egg intake varied from none to 7 or more per week. Lo and behold, people who ate more eggs appeared to not suffer more events.
This study, large and well-conducted by an internationally respected group of investigators, seem to reopen the gates for more egg consumption, though most Americans still consume eggs cautiously.
Deeper down in this study, however, was another observation: People with diabetes who ate 1 egg per day had double the risk of heart attack. Because this study was observational, no specific conclusion as to why could be drawn.
A new study conducted by a Brazilian group may shed some light. Healthy (non-diabetic) men were fed an emulsion of several eggs. Inclusion of plentiful yolks caused a dramatic slowing of fat clearance from the blood. Specifically, "chylomicron remnants" were abnormally persistent in the blood. Chylomicron remnants are potent causes of coronary plaque. (Chylomicron remnants can be measured fairly well by intermediate-density lipoprotein and VLDL by NMR, or IDL by VAP.)
Diabetics are know to have substantial disorders of after-meal fat clearance, including an excess of chylomicron remnants. Could the Brazilian observation be the explanation for the increased event rate in diabetics in the Harvard study? Interesting to speculate.
We continue to tell our patients that eating eggs in moderation is probably safe. After all, there are good things in eggs: the high protein in the egg white, lecithin in the yolk. It is the yolk's contents that are in question, not the white. Thus, you and I can eat all the egg whites (e.g., Egg Beaters) we want. It's the safety of yolks that are uncertain.
The abnormal after-eating effect suggested by the Brazilians opens up some very interesting questions and confirms that we should still be cautious in our intake of egg yolks. One yolk per day is clearly too much. What is safe? The exisitng information would suggest that, if you have diabetes, pre-diabetes, or a postprandial disorder (IDL, VLDL), you should minimize your egg yolk use, perhaps no more than 3 or so per week, preferably not all at one but spaced out to avoid the after-eating effect.
Others without postprandial disorders may safely eat more, perhaps 5 per week, but also not all at one but spaced out.
Track Your Plaque Members: Be sure to read our upcoming Special Report on Postprandial Disorders. It contains lots of info on what this important pattern is all about. Postprandial disorders are largely unexplored territory that hold great promise for tools to inhibit coronary plaque growth and drop your heart scan score. The Brazilian study is just one of many future studies that are likely to be released in future about this very fascinating area.
Hu FB, Stampfer MJ, Rimm EB, Manson JE, Ascherio A, Colditz GA, Rosner BA, Spiegelman D, Speizer FE, Sacks FM, Hennekens CH, Willett WC.A prospective study of egg consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease in men and women. JAMA 1999 Apr 21;281(15):1387-94.
Cesar TB, Oliveira MR, Mesquita CH, Maranhao RC. High cholesterol intake modifies chylomicron metabolism in normolipidemic young men. J Nutr. 2006 Apr;136(4):971-6.
If there's one thing I truly fear from a heart scan score reduction/coronary plaque regression standpoint, it's diabetes.
I saw a graphic illustration of this today. Roy came into the office after his 2nd heart scan. His first scan 14 months ago showed a score of 162. Roy started out weighing well over 300 lbs and with newly-diagnosed adult diabetes.
Roy put extraordinary effort into his program. He lost nearly 70 lbs by walking; cutting processed carbohydrates, greasy foods, and slashing overall calories. His lipoproteins, disastrous in the beginning, were falling into line, though HDL was still lagging in the low 40s, as Roy remains around 60 lbs overweight, even after the initial 70 lb loss.
Unfortunately, despite the huge loss in weight, Roy remains diabetic. On a drug called Actos, which enhances sensitivity to insulin, along with vitamin D to also enhance insulin response, his blood sugars remained in the overtly diabetic range.
Roy's repeat heart scan showed a score of 482--a tripling of his original score.
Obviously, major changes in Roy's program are going to be required to keep this rate of growth from continuing. But I tell Roy's story to illustrate the frightening power of diabetes to trigger coronary plaque growth.
Like Kryptonite to Superman (remember George Reeves crumbling and falling to his knees when the bad guys got a hold of some?), diabetes is the one thing I fear greatly when it comes to reducing your heart scan score. As you see with Roy's case, diabetes can be responsible for explosive plaque growth, more than anything else I know.
The best protection from diabetes is to never get it in the first place. (See my earlier Blog, "Diabetes is a choice you make".)