Category: Weight Loss Exercise

I heard an interview late last week of Sanjiv Chopra on James Altucher’s podcast. Sanjiv is Deepak Chopra’s brother and is also a world renowned doctor that has written a couple of books. The latest being The Big Five

In the interview Dr Chopra was very open with what was important for better health and fitness and he went into detail on why certain things work well and why others do not to be fit and healthy.

And in case you are wondering what kind of Doctor Sanjiv Chopra is, he is a liver specialist and was Faculty Dean for Continuing Medical Education at Harvard Medical School, and Senior Consultant in Hepatology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is a really smart guy.

What are The Big Five Simple Things

The title of the book The Big Five: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life is a mouthful but the five simple things are not nearly as difficult to remember.

The five recommendations are Drink coffee, get some sun, get some exercise, eat nuts, and meditate.

These all seem very simple but in the book it is  bit more complex as Dr Chopra goes into detail using lots of studies and charts so that we can be sure that he is not just making things up.

Lets Look into Some Detail at The Five Simple Things

Drink four cups of coffee a day – Some people don’t like coffee, some people can be kept up late at night from coffee, and some people get very jittery from coffee. These are all the drawbacks that we know of.

Coffee though is a very good thing to have in your diet as it helps to stop liver damage, even in heavy drinkers, as well as helping the prostate and other major organs.

Coffee is also linked to longer health and lower incidences of suicide and skin cancer.

Funny enough, most people look at coffee as a great stimulant because of the caffeine but that can actually affect your sleep if you drink it to late in the day. Dr Chopra stops drinking it at 3 PM. The active healthy ingredient in coffee is not the caffeine but actually a host of compounds that is still being researched.

Get Some Sun – Actually the prescription is more than just the sun Dr Sanjiv Chopra points out that a huge number of people are Vitamin D deficient.

As we have all heard, Vitamin D is the sunshine vitamin. The trouble is that people are scared to go out without sunscreen, and the higher amount of pollution in many cities around the world is decreasing the amount of ultraviolet light that would activate Vitamin D.

I had not heard of the idea of not wearing sunscreen as we are always told to wear sunscreen when in the sun.

There are lots of reasons to get your Vitamin D up if you are deficient. Some of the help is by lowering the incidence of obesity and cancers, as well as preventing heart disease. Vitamin D also works closely with Calcium for strengthening bones and teeth.

Dr Chopra says that if deficient you should takes 4000 IUs a day and even if you are at a healthy level you should supplement with 2000 IUs daily.

Get some Exercise – Dr Chopra is a fan of easy exercise and says that walking for 30 to 45 minutes a day will do a lot to make you more healthy. This can also be used as the time that you get that Vitamin D in the section above.

When asked about running and weightlifting he was a little less excited. Running can be hard on the joints and weightlifting as well although it is great for helping balance.

The idea is to get any exercise that you like the most so that you will continue with it. There is no point in saying you will run every day if you hate running.

Dr Chopra mentions a large study that showed that walking for 150 minutes a week will increase life expectancy by 3-5 years. And most people enjoy walking anyway.

Eat More Nuts – Nuts are a great food that some people avoid because of indigestion and higher fat content. Dr Chopra says though that a single nut is only 4 calories.

The problem for most people is that they eat nuts quickly and sometimes when you put a few in your mouth you will not chew some of them at all before swallowing. He recommends just eating the nuts one at a time and research shows that any nut is a good nut.

So what are the advantages to eating nuts? There are antioxidants in nuts like Omega-3 fatty acids, phytonutrients, antioxidants like vitamins B and E, selenium and magnesium.

Plenty of benefits to having these nuts as well, lowering the risk of developing heart disease as well as being diagnosed with several types of cancers. Nuts also lower cholesterol and blood pressure.

Meditation – Dr Sanjiv Chopra says that he spends 30-40 minutes twice a day doing transcendental meditation. He recommends people to just get one or two sessions of 15 minutes a day in though, once first thing in the morning and maybe again around 4:00 or so.

Meditation lowers stress levels as well as increasing focus and concentration as well as increasing creativity, and studies have shown that people that meditate are happier.

Science has found that neurological changes really do happen if you practice meditating once a day. Dr Chopra has a great video about meditation here.

The Big Five: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life

This is a great book. Many of us know exactly why all five of these action benefit us but don’t know exactly why. In the book Dr Chopra has really laid out the science behind these five prescriptions for a better life and I think he hits the mark on all of them.

Whether you are interested in meditation, or thinking of starting a walking routine I really recommend you to get The Big Five: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life.

 

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I have been looking forward to writing this article for a long time now. I have so much to say about the Fitbit that I have been wearing for a year now and wanted to share it all with you today.

I have been wearing a Fitbit Charge HR for 1 year now. I am a true fit bitter (is that even a name?)

So over the last year I have been through a lot. In June I thought it would be a great idea to get the fitbit to challenge myself as well as tracking some vital stats.

As you are maybe, or maybe not aware the fitbit really is a glorified pedometer, plus a few more things

What Is Fitbit Great for?

My Fitbit will track steps, floors climbed, distance walked or run, calories burned, heart rate, and sleep schedule, all by itself. If you want to do a bit of tracking yourself you can also use it to track water drank, calories (from MyFitnessPal), and weight change

The really great thing about the tracker and the website that it stores the data to is that you can slice and dice that data up with Fitbit’s helps so that you can better track and access how you are doing.

Over the last year I have pulled off some mighty impressive stats. I have stepped 3,960,492 steps, climbed 10,354 floors, and walked 1,874.79 miles.

To me those are some interesting numbers. But even more interesting are these strange but fun stats that are tracked

Number of hours per day with 250+ steps

I really like this stat as it lets me know how well I am doing throughout the day. My goal of course is to get all the circles filled which means that I have been getting up and moving every hour.

As a computer guy I can be really bad for just digging into some code and forgetting about moving which is really critical for health

Resting heart rate trend per day, all the way to per month over a year

I have found over the last year that this number will really range depending on my fitness level, stress level, and amount of sleep. The lower this number is the better I know my health really is.

Even though I try my best to keep myself in great health I sometimes burn the candle at both ends, get stressed about family and work, and stop getting the things done that are important. It always comes back to my resting heart rate.

Number of floors climbed on a daily basis trended over months

I have had a very high variance in this stat. I sometimes get lazy and stop climbing stairs, stop getting harder exercise in and it really gets reflected here.

When I am working hard and not taking any shortcuts I find that over a day my number of floors climbed really increases and  converely when I am feeling lazy I will see a really low number of floors by the end of the day.

Number of miles per day walked over a months time

This number is usually directly related to my number of steps. The fantastic thing though is to see how many miles I have done over the year.

I have actually walked 1803 miles over the first year of owning the Fitbit which seems like a lot, but in counting back each of those days it makes sense to me.

Amount of sleep and quality per night trending over time

I am terrible for sleep. Some people only need about 5-6 hours a night sleep but I feel like I really need closer to 8 hours a back over night, and sadly I don’t tend to get it.

I find that when I am sleeping poorly my concentration really suffers as well as my motivation. This is really common and expected for anyone.

Also, the Fitbit Charge HR does not just measure my sleeping hours but also quality. I can see how well I slept as it will watch back over the last hour and calculate movement and heart rate changes to see if I m awake or restless and shows me on this cool sleep graph.

 

Calories Burned and Exercise Time

Another feature that I did not screenshot but would like to mention is the tracking of calories burned and exercise times. This is a way to track how much exercise I am really getting and will sync back to My Fitness Pal for calories burned.

What the FitBit Charge HR does is calculate the number of calories I would be burning based on my weight, age, heart rate and the movement. The Fitbit can tell certain exercises based on the type of movement and then tracks that down.

So far my Fitbit has been able to identify a bike, run, elliptical trainer, but had trouble with my Street hockey, in that case it just called it exercise.

As I exercise harder I will get better calories burned numbers. I know that the accuracy is at question here (see below), but I am only in competition with myself and my own health in the end so I love the tracking and numbers for me.

Friendly Competition

Another great feature of the Fitbit community is that you can become friends with others and have competitions with them. Daily Showdown, Workweek Hustle, and Weekend Warrior are just a few of them.

I am constantly amazed at how much some people can walk or run in a day. My 10,000 steps a day if good and is shown to improve health but I find quite a few people that will hit 30,000 steps in a day! Fantastic output, I can only guess they are mailmen.

I love the competition of these as not only are you following the rest of the group but also you can comment in a chat through the group urging the other guys on, questioning, and even a little trash talk – all a lot of fun and encouraging though.

Problems With Accuracy?

I know that there have been questions over the accuracy of the fitbit but this has not discouraged me at all.

The accuracy over the last 20 minutes or hour is not the critical time frame. The time frame I am looking at is over the week, month, and year to see how my heart rate, exercise output, and sleep habits are improving.

One Problem with Breakage

Apparently I am a bit tough on my fitbit and a week before my one year anniversary of having my Fitbit the worst possible thing happened, it broke and stopped counting anything.

I contacted the company through the website and they opened up a claim and within just a couple of days they sent me a new one that is sitting happily (for me) on my right arm as I type out this post.

I have hear of this being a problem with other people and in every case that I have tracked it seems that Fitbit is more than happy to take care of their customers and send them a new one within the first year.

Year One with My Fitbit Charge HR is Over

So I have to say that over the last year I have been really excited about my Fitbit. I have been through a lot, lots of work, lots of hospital visits for my daughter, a kidney donation and week in the hospital. But really I look back over the last year and I am excited and proud of how well I have done.

The fitbit has worked for me a bit like a diary, a health diary, I can tell when I was not well, when I was excited, and when work was overwhelming and I did not get enough sleep. Most of all though the Fitbit has really worked well as a way for me to push myself a bit. Everyday that I see that me steps are a bit low at lunch inspires me to push myself in the afternoon and evening.

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Last week I made bone broth. I keep hearing about the benefits of bone broth for connective tissues and for leaky gut and other gut issues so I thought I would jump on this bandwagon.

I was listening to a podcast by Daniel Vitalis called ReWild Yourself – This links to the episode, and on that show they were dissing chicken and saying that they would both rather throw out the white meat and just chew on the carcass instead. To me this seemed crazy but what they had to say next was really interesting.

It seems that for all the great nutrients that we get from chicken meat pale in comparison to what bone broth will give us to improve so many other parts of our bodies besides muscles and bones.

How To Make Bone Broth At Home

After doing a bit of searching it seemed that the easiest way to make a simple bone broth was to just buy a precooked chicken from the grocery store and boil the bones.

We buy one of the these chickens once every couple of weeks to make chicken salad and since my wife is horrified at the idea of throwing chicken carcasses in the freezer we have always just thrown them out.

Last week I got between the bones and the garbage.

How to Make Chicken Soup From Bone Broth

Boil Bones

What I did was make sure most of the chicken was off the bones and then I threw the chicken bones into the crock pot with about four or five cups of water. I then put the crockpot on low and let the bones cook away for 18 or 20 hours.

Clean Out the Bones

After 18 hours the bones are supposed to become soft and most of the marrow has come out as well as all the cartilage keeping the bones together.

I was able to just use a slotted ladle to take out all of the bones and then drained everything through a strainer to get rid of any little bones and other bits.

So now I was left with just chicken broth, chicken flavored water maybe. I made a soup out of this and it worked well.

Add Carrots, Celery and Spices

For the soup I just added carrots, celery, bay leaf, poultry seasoning, oregano, thyme, basil, salt, and pepper. and then after about 20 minutes.

Then I added some no yolk noodles – these are those wide, flat longish noodles that work great for soup and then let this simmer for another 12 minutes or so until the noodles were soft.

And then we ate chicken soup.

My kids thought the soup was a bit bland, but then I guess anything compared to those poisonous 3 minute noodles are going to be bland.

I loved it and had leftovers for a couple days of lunches.

Bone broth is full of all the nutrients needed for improving our connective tissues and sealing up our gut. If you want to know what bone broth has going for it, here is a list of all the great nutrients. Gelatin, collagen, glycine, hyaluronic acid, for connective tissues, as well as chondroitin sulphates, and glucosamine for inflammation.

So as you can see bone broth is a great addition to anyones diet. The really great thing is that it is mainly made from stuff that you already throw away and it can be eaten on it’s own or made into a soup instead.

This has to be one of the cheapest meals you can make. Bones that would usually be thrown away, carrots, celery, two of the cheapest veggies, and some spices.

I know that there are many recipes for making bone broth out on the YouTube and I probably watched most of them. This lady has a great recipe that I liked.

Actually a few call for a couple tablespoons of Apple Cider Vinegar but we were out. One of the recipes seemed a bit crazy in that the person made soup with the bone broth but didn’t take the bones out first so you would get spoonfuls of bones in your soup.

Another great video I loved was this video where the fellow makes a bone broth with all different kinds of bones and others

 

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