Preliminary Health Care Podcast

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-sleep-affects-your-eating-behavior.html Poor sleep has powerful implications on eating behavior, generally favoring your seeking and consuming highly pleasurable junk foods. Watch the video to understand how/why this happens, then download the Sleep eBook to improve you own sleep. Link to story: http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/ways-lack-of-sleep-can-affect-your-diet/ss-BBh9T89#image=1 Link to Sleep eBook: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/sleep_31.html Link to Eating Behavior eBook: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/behavior.html Link to Weight Loss eBook: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/fat-loss-html.html

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/breathing-to-reduce-anxietystress.html Simple breathing techniques can powerfully reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. This article gives a brief overview "proper breathing." I hope to provide a bit of insight and encourage you to try it. Link to story: http://www.details.com/body-health/exercise/201404/how-to-breathe-right-vranich-breathing-exercise?mbid=synd_foxhealth Link to Stress eBook: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/stress.html Link to Sapolsky Stress Book: http://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Stress-Related-ebook/dp/B0037NX018/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419523795&sr=1-1&keywords=why+zebras+don%27t+get+ulcers

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/weight-lifting-reduces-belly-fat.html A recent study demonstrates that weight lifting is more effective than cardio exercise at reducing weight. This result, however, is not unexpected because of how each mode of exercise affects the functioning of fat cells. Watch the video to learn more. Link to story: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/287400.php Link to Exercise eBook: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/exercise.html Link to Weight Loss eBook: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/fat-loss-html.html

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/cholesterol-meds-on-rise.html The use of "statins," a type of cholesterol lowering medication, have been on the rise; 28% of people over the age of 40 have used these medications in the past month. Cholesterol has long been accused of causing cardiovascular disease. However, EVERYTHING WE'VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT CHOLESTEROL IS WRONG. (Watch the video to learn more.) Use of statins comes with several side effects, many of which exacerbate the potential for cardiovascular disease. Link to story: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/12/24/use-cholesterol-lowering-meds-on-rise/

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/ereaders-hurting-your-sleep.html Exposure to light (especially light of the blue spectrum) acts as a signal to your brain to keep you awake; conversely, dim light triggers the release of the sleep hormone called "melatonin." Electronic-screen devices are particularly rich in bright, blue-spectrum light. A recent study demonstrated the detrimental effects of these devices on sleep by asking participants to read either a book in either paper form or electronic-screen form. Those who used an electronic device demonstrated worse suppressed melatonin release, reduced quality of sleep, and decreased alertness the following day. To improve your sleep (link to eBook), it is best to eliminate electronic-screen viewing several hours before bed. If you read before bed, it is best to read from a paper book or a kindle eReader (which only reflects ambient light). You may also consider downloading a program called f.lux to your screen devices, which adjusts the spectrum of light your screen emits according to the time of day. Link to story: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/287377.php

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/good-carb-bad-carb-questioned.html The "Glycemic Index" was devised as a way of helping people control blood sugar levels. This would be most beneficial for people with diabetes, but has become simplified to "good carbs" and "bad carbs." The good/bad carbs concept has since been applied to related topics such as weight loss. While the Glycemic Index does seem to have a sound theoretical basis, the many nuances of everyday life severely limit it's usefulness.

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/supplement-lies.html It should come as no surprise that a supplement manufacturer would try to cheat you. The incentives behind drugs and medication are the same...to make you believe you are an inherently feeble creature in need of their synthetic product. When this drives decisions, you must expect those same entities to skirt ethicacy for profit. Ask yourself: do you believe you are inherently unhealthy? Then ask, "why am I buying these products?"

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/weight-loss-news-extravaganza.html We have a whole slew of weight loss news items today. First, a bit of biochemistry to explain the actual chemical processes which use fat as fuel. Then: Should obesity be considered a disability? We might find an answer to this, but first we need to set the scene with an accurate understanding of body-fat regulation; as is, we incorrectly think of being overweight as a choice...to realize it's NOT, though, negates all common arguments around this topic. The next story demonstrates another repercussion of this misunderstanding, linking acceptance to weight loss and "fat shaming" to weight gain. Lastly, a pair of stories highlighting some of the health risks associated with being overweight; these stories take on a different context and urgency when you understand that we've been told wrong about how to lose weight.

Hello Reader, I'm writing this post as it marks a change in direction for Preliminary Health Care, a change I hope is more perfectly aligned with my vision. It is of my sincerest beliefs, that Health is a birthright to all of us--a birthright that is being stripped from us by perverse financial incentives. For example: food producers are NOT necessarily incentivized to provide us with healthy food options, but rather to make us believe they offer something healthy regardless of the truth; drug companies are not incentivized to cure our most common health conditions (such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc.), but rather to convince us these conditions are incurable and must be managed with drugs--drugs which actually allow the condition to slowly progress and create new problems...all of which are further treated with more drugs; supplement manufacturers are not incentivized to offer effective products, but rather to make you believe they offer effective products; most health-information outlets are not incentivized to give you accurate and contextual information, but rather to get your eyes on their page. In other words, the entities from which we are made to choose for our well being are NOT motivated by us being well...then how do we trust? to whom do we listen? how do we spend our money among them? Companies tirelessly try to influence us through marketing. We are advertised to relentlessly--but marketing is far more than banners, commercials, and pop-ups; while we think we're watching these ads, we are actually being watched! Each ad is "feeler," testing you and measuring your reaction...that data is used to shape and mold the public image of the company in such a way to extract maximal money from you...that public image informs future marketing efforts...a machine with the explicit purpose of maximizing profit. This is not to say companies or marketing are inherently evil or malicious, but ask yourself "how many cycles of marketing are required before the public image of a company has completely detached itself from the product or service of the company?" We only think we're buying a product or service, but we're actually buying into the public image of the product or service. This is how everything is marketed, from alcohol to zit creams. I fear I may be naive, but I believe our Health should be treated differently; that mechanistic checks and balances should be implemented to ensure the product/service be inseparably coupled to the public image and marketing. So lastly, let me discuss the implications I envision for me and Preliminary Health Care. I truly believe I have something positive to contribute to the health and lives of others, and what alternative purpose or opportunity in life could rival that? I can think of none. It seems for now, the most effective means of doing so is by offering informational content that is accessible, complete, contextual, and thoughtful. With that content, it is my intention to empower and positively intervene in the health of as many people as I possibly can. To ensure and demonstrate my sincerity and the fidelity of this mission, I will implement the following practices: My blog posts will generally be created based on trending health-news topics. I will only comment on topics on which I believe I can offer context and insight--characteristics which are usually neglected for sensationalism by the outlets running these stories, driven by the financial incentives I mentioned earlier. Based on which topics receive the most attention from you, I will create eBooks dedicated to providing complete and contextual information you can use to improve your life. You can participate in deciding what eBooks are created by sharing, liking, or commenting on your favorite posts. All eBooks will be available on a voluntary-donation basis. In other words: you can decide to offer financial support when you download an eBook or not, or you can download and read the eBook without contributing at first, but do so afterwards if you choose (there are links within the eBooks, or you can go to the "Share" tab at the top of the page). In this way, you can be assured you are getting exactly what you expected without loss. Because I am not "selling" this content, I hope you will share it with others who may benefit. From the download page, you can easily share it to your social media accounts; on the bottom left of most pages within the eBooks is a "share" button which will also allow you to share to your social media; you can also email it directly to other people, or even print it off and give it away. I will neither sell non-informational products (such as supplements) or ad-space on my site, lest doing so would taint the trustworthiness of my content. If you have any suggestions for these, please share. While the precise methods may vary with time, I hope it is clear that my intention is to faithfully pursue my stated mission. Thank you for reading today and every day. Be well, Nicklaus Milican

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-5.html Because of the complex nature of this topic, I’ve broken it down into 5 parts, this being the final: the first installment was meant to raise your suspicions about traditional advice, after which were posts addressing the effects of eating frequency on fat loss, muscle mass, and aging & longevity. Here we’ll discuss how to create a metabolism capable of “Infrequent Eating.” If you’re reading this post, I’ll assume you’ve read at least one of the previous posts on eating frequency (and its effects on fat loss, muscle mass, and/or aging & longevity), and are now curious as to how you can implement “infrequent eating” (IE) into your own life. There are several possible variations of IE, but I advocate eating a single meal at the end of each day because doing so can synchronizes your circadian rhythm to allow for more productive days and restful nights (read post 1 if you need some explanation here). However, regardless of how you might decide to implement IE, it would likely be a mistake to jump headlong into this style of eating. Instead, there’s some preparation you likely need to take. Page Break If you’re like many people, you eat several times each day, often foods containing quite a bit of carbohydrate (fruits, starches, sweets, etc.); in doing so, you’re body has adapted itself to burning that carbohydrate as fuel. The problem you face, then, is that eating carbohydrate prevents you from burning fat—so as your body has engineered itself to burn carbohydrate, it has neglected the molecular machines necessary for burning fat. And there’s the problem. When you don’t eat, or don’t eat carbohydrate, your fat cells release fat to be used as fuel. But if you don’t have the ability to burn that fat very effectively, you can become tired and lethargic. Furthermore, carbohydrate tends to increase your blood pressure—refraining from carbohydrate, then, reduces blood pressure; low blood pressure can cause similar feelings of fatigue and dizziness. But do not fret! These effects are only temporary—think of them as a “transition phase.” Within 1-4 weeks, your ability to use (body) fat improves and blood pressure normalizes to leave you feeling just fine. In theory, you could just begin IE…but it might not be very easy and lead to quitting. Instead, I’ll lay out a step-by-step plan to get you on your way. Know that this plan may not completely alleviate discomfort, but will ease your transition. Easing the Transition Metabolically speaking, not eating (IE) and not eating carbohydrate are very similar—both causing your fat cells to release fat to be used as fuel. As stated above, though, you may not be able to use that fat right away. IE, then, requires you to develop a metabolism capable of adequately burning fat. In one sense, this is incredibly simple—just refrain from eating carbohydrate. But for the reasons mentioned above, doing so can be accompanied by short-term dizziness, fatigue, and lethargy. Easing the transition, then, means developing a fat-burning metabolism while minimizing the temporary discomfort. NOTE: The following steps are only temporary (1-4 weeks), as long as your transition into a fat-burning metabolism. NOTE: Especially if you are diabetic, or on medications for blood sugar, see your doctor before attempting IE so they may advise you on medication implications. Step 1: Reduce Other Demands in Your Life This seems almost like a no-brainer, but it’s so easy to overlook. During your transition, it’s a good idea either lay off of some of the other demands in your work/family/social life, or find a time when these demands are lessened. Otherwise, your performance in these areas will suffer and you’re less likely to get through the transition phase. Scale Back on the Exercise Similar to the point above, DON’T start any new exercise program during this 1-4 weeks. In fact, if you’re already exercising, go a little easier. If you’re completely sedentary, though, getting some light activity (like walking) is probably okay. Step 2: Decide on an Appropriate Carbohydrate Level Remember that carbohydrate prevents your body from burning fat…which thus prevents you from incorporating IE. To find an appropriately low level, there are 2 strategies: • Start high and work down • Start low By starting high and working down, you can simply figure how many grams of carbohydrate you’re currently eating and subtract 25-50 grams every 3-5 days until you get below this threshold. How do you know when you’re below this threshold? The most precise way is to buy some ketone urine test strips; ketones are produced when your body is burning a large amount of fat—when the test strip says that ketones are present in you urine, you’ve likely reached an acceptably low level. By “low,” you should aim for 0-60 grams of carbohydrate. This strategy will be the surest and quickest way of finding an appropriate level. After a week or so, you can choose to eat some more carbohydrate and use the ketone strips to assure you’re still below the necessary threshold. However, don’t assume that more carbohydrate is easier—you’ll likely find that eating more makes things harder. Eat More Fat So if you’re going to be eating less carbohydrate, you’ll need to increase your consumption of fat. If you’ve read other articles on this site, you’ll know not to worry about getting fatter or developing/exacerbating cardiovascular disease as a result. However, avoid the fats found in vegetable oils and processed foods. Keep Eating Frequently During your transition, frequent eating (as long as it’s not high in carbohydrate) can help ease discomfort. We’ll talk about moving towards IE in Step 4, after your fat-burning transition is complete. Step 3: Some Helpful Supplements Coconut Oil Coconut oil contains a special type of fat called “Medium Chain Triglyceride” (MCT). These are special because, even without a fully-formed fat-burning metabolism, they can be readily used to provide energy. Use it to cook with and consume it as part of your meals, but do NOT eat it without other food unless you want an immediate case of diarrhea! Bouillon Cubes One reason carbohydrate increases blood pressure is because it causes sodium retention…which increases blood volume (how much blood you have)—more blood volume tends to increase blood pressure. In time, your body will adjust—but you can remedy this problem in the meantime by increasing your consumption of sodium. You could salt your food heavily, but to get enough sodium this way would make most of your food pretty unpalatable. Instead, drink a broth made with a bouillon cube 2-3 times each day. B-Complex The B-vitamins are important in burning fat. During the transition, taking a B-complex may increase your body’s ability to burn fat. Carnitine Similarly, a nutrient called “carnitine” (found in meats and also in supplement form) helps your cells use fat. Supplementing with 1-2 grams each day may help ease your transition. Step 4: Push Back Your First Meal After you start feeling normal, consider your transition to a fat-burning metabolism complete. Now it’s time to work on IE. The most natural step is to simply postpone your first meal until later in the day. Some may be able to postpone this all the way until night, but not everybody. Push it Back Further With a focus on postponing your first meal, you’ll eventually find yourself quite content not eating until very late in the day, near bed time. Step 5: Get In Touch Finally, this isn’t an exact science. I’ve laid out a basic primer for completing this conversion, but you may have questions, comments, and/or concerns that I haven’t addressed. If so, please don’t be afraid to contact me. Posting to my Facebook page is a great way to let everybody else benefit from your interaction, but you can also email me at preliminaryhealthcare@gmail.com Thank you so much for reading. I really hope this series of articles is well received because IE can unlock a longer and healthier life for many of us. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/ Because of the complex nature of this topic, I’ve broken it down into 5 parts: the first installment is meant to raise your suspicions about traditional advice; here we’ll focus on the effect of eating frequency on aging, longevity, and age-related diseases. Previous posts dealt with fat loss and muscle mass. The final installment will discuss how to create a metabolism capable of “Infrequent Eating.” In the previous post on how eating frequency affects muscle mass, I made the case that muscle must undergo periods of both growth (anabolism) and breakdown (catabolism). In actuality, though, the same can be said for every cell in your body--if you want to achieve a long & healthy life. You may be familiar with protein as a nutrient in foods like meat and eggs; however, nearly everything you think of as your body (hair, skin, organs, muscles, etc.) is made from specific types of proteins; hair protein is different than skin protein is different than the types of protein in your muscles. Proteins are made from smaller building blocks called “amino acids” which are linked together; there are about 20 important amino acids—depending on the specific order in which they are linked, they create the various types of proteins which compose your body. When you eat protein, the digestion process breaks it down into amino acids. Once it’s absorbed into the cells of your body, they use the individual amino acids to create the types of proteins they need. As these cellular proteins wear out, they’re targeted for destruction and broken back down into amino acids; some are lost, but most of them are reused as that cell sees fit. Wearing-out is an inevitable process, but is accelerated by various forms of stress and inflammation. This is not to be confused with the destruction of these proteins; whereas wear-and-tear is a passive process over which the cell does not control, the destruction of those proteins requires active participation by the cell. Realize this destruction targets the most damaged and dysfunctional proteins, which is necessary to ensure the cell remains healthy by replacing the damaged proteins with fully-functional proteins. The primary stimuli for this destruction are: The presence of damaged proteins Inflammation Simple absence of “growth stimuli,” which are things which cause anabolism, mostly associated with eating. Therefore, the consequences of insufficient catabolism (destruction of damaged protein) are: An accumulation of damaged proteins—which itself triggers inflammation, cellular dysfunction, and excessive protein wear-out. An impeded anabolic phase, which is necessary to replace the damaged proteins. When you’re young, your body is primed for growth, and so favored by anabolism. For instance, it would be dangerous not to feed a baby every few hours, or children several times each day. But after puberty is complete, and one’s window for potential growth is closing, frequent anabolic stimuli can become detrimental while catabolism becomes more beneficial. Imagine how frequent anabolism could manifest over the course of several decades, after your age-of-growth has passed. Whereas your youthful body would tend to grow, your matured body is more susceptible to inflammation as a result of the same stimuli; that inflammation triggers a catabolic cascade, which thus works to reduce inflammation and repair the damage thereof. The frequent anabolic stimuli (eating frequently), though, induces wave after wave of inflammation, creating violent swings between anabolism and catabolism. You can think of most aging processes and age-related diseases as manifestations of chronic or excessive anabolism and/or catabolism; excessive catabolism leads to the physical deterioration and wasting of a body and health with age, while excessive anabolism (and the inflammation thereof) leads to nearly every age-related disease process! Conversely, using Infrequent Eating (which I define as 1 meal per day, generally at the end of the day) allows for reparative catabolic cascades to repair bodily damage, and robust anabolic cascades to replace damaged proteins without becoming excessive or harmful. But know this: if you are not currently using IE, an immediate transition may be difficult. The final installment of this series will walk you through the steps of instituting this practice. Thanks you so much for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-3-muscle.html Because of the complex nature of this topic, I’ve broken it down into 5 parts: the first installment is meant to raise your suspicions about traditional advice; here we’ll focus on the effect of eating frequency on muscle mass. The previous post dealt with fat loss, and later posts are on muscle mass and health & longevity. The final installment will discuss how to create a metabolism capable of “Infrequent Eating.” You may be familiar with protein as a nutrient in foods like meat and eggs. Besides that, nearly everything you think of as your body (hair, skin, organs, muscles, etc.) is made from specific types of proteins; hair protein is different than skin protein is different than the types of protein in your muscles. Proteins are made from smaller building blocks called “amino acids,” which are linked together; there are about 20 important amino acids—depending on the specific order in which they are linked, they create the various types of proteins which compose your body. When you eat protein, the digestion process breaks it down into amino acids. Once it’s absorbed into the cells of your body, they use the individual amino acids to create the types of proteins they need. As these cellular proteins wear out, they’re targeted for destruction and broken back down into amino acids; some are lost, but most of them are reused as that cell sees fit. Regarding muscle-cell proteins, wearing out is an inevitable process, but is accelerated by physical activity and inflammation. This is not to be confused with the destruction of these proteins; whereas wear-and-tear is a passive process over which the cell does not control, the destruction of those proteins requires active participation by the cell. Realize this destruction targets the most damaged and dysfunctional proteins, which is necessary to ensure the cell remains healthy and can become stronger by replacing the damaged proteins with (possibly more) fully-functional proteins. The primary stimuli for this destruction are the presence of damaged proteins, extended periods of muscular contraction, inflammation, and the simple absence of “growth stimuli”—growth stimuli are the things which cause your muscle cells to (re-)build proteins: Mechanical stimulation, as in exercise: Consider, for example, weight lifting. As your muscles work to move the weight, they experience a proportional amount of tension. That tension simultaneously accelerates the wear-down of the working muscle cells and signals them to rebuild. Nutrient stimulation: Here, we’ll only concern ourselves with the “macronutrients,” carbohydrate, fat, and protein. Though “nutrients” tend to make us think of the nutrients in food, realize it can also refer to nutrients we have stored within our bodies: carbohydrate can be stored as “glycogen” within your liver and muscle cells; fat as “triglyceride” within fat cells, muscle cells, and liver; some free amino acids are stored within your liver and muscle cells, though most amino acids within muscle are joined together as proteins. Muscle cells are prevented from rebuilding when they are depleted of nutrients; conversely, rebuilding is allowed when adequate nutrients are contained within a muscle cell. Further, amino acids (specifically, a single amino acid called “leucine”) stimulates the rebuilding process. During exercise, muscular stores of glycogen and triglycerides are expended as energy, thus inhibiting muscular rebuilding as long as exercise is occurring; at the same time, however, glycogen and fat stored elsewhere in your body (liver and fat cells) are broken down at the command of several exercise-induced hormones (we’ll discuss these hormones shortly), and shuttled into those working muscle cells. In this sense, depletion of these nutrients is disfavored and repletion favored. Similarly, amino acids (including leucine) can also be burned as energy in muscle cells; there are some “free” amino acids within the cell, which are increased by the breakdown of muscle proteins (as addressed above). Furthermore, your liver also releases amino acids (including leucine) in response to exercise. In order to absorb leucine, though, your muscle cells must exchange a different amino acid called “glutamine.” Glutamine is a byproduct of fuel burning within your cells; as such, its level increases with physical activity. Once created, much of it is removed from the muscle cell and shuttled to the liver (those familiar with this biochemistry will realize I’m presenting a simplified version of this process) where it can be converted into glucose—which can be released back into the blood to provide energy for working muscles. That glutamine which is not removed accumulates within the muscle cell, facilitating the entry of leucine…which is important for muscle building. Notice the function of leucine changes depending on the context of exercise. It is used as fuel during exercise (thus also contributing to glutamine production, which allows more leucine to be absorbed into the muscle cell), but is a growth signal after exercise is complete. Hormonal stimulation: So we’ve just seen that leucine has dual functions, providing fuel during exercise and a growth stimulus afterwards. There are several hormones which function similarly, initially providing fuel to working muscles (hormones are not burned as fuel, but rather make fuel available to muscle cells), then facilitating growth once the exercise has ended; these are the “exercise-induced hormones” mentioned earlier, and include adrenaline, growth hormone, and testosterone. There are also some exercise-induced hormones which only facilitate growth without previously assisting in making fuel available, such as IGF-1. (Don’t worry about the names of these hormones.) It should be noted that these hormones are NOT necessary for muscular growth, but rather assist. There is another “growth-promoting hormone” that is not induced, but rather prevented, with exercise called “insulin.” Insulin doesn’t increase until you eat something containing protein and/or carbohydrate. Understand that the “growth promoting” effects of insulin are not due to increased building, but rather decreased destruction of proteins. Frequent Eating and Muscle Mass The reason Frequent Eating (FE) is promoted for muscle mass is because each meal causes a seeming muscle-building stimulus—the effects of insulin and protein. On the surface, this does make sense. But let’s dig a little deeper. First of all, we must understand that muscle cells primarily adapt to the mechanical stimulus imposed on them from physical activity. Hormones, as mentioned already, are contributory and nutrients are permissive. Again, hormones are NOT necessary for muscular growth—and apparently neither is abundant nutrition as even food-deprived animals can exhibit unimpeded muscular growth with adequate mechanical stimuli. Next, let’s understand how these feeding studies are conducted; in a single phrase: “short term.” After the feeding, measurements are taken for protein building and protein breakdown. Indeed, building increases and breakdown decreases. However, it’s premature to assume that this temporary condition necessarily leads to bigger muscles. For example, consider the following contradictory observation: animals subjected to a lifetime of Infrequent Eating (IE), or eating less than their eat-as-much-as-and-whenever-you-want peers have more muscle mass! You see, if your were a muscle-building researcher, working with short-term experiments, you’d conclude eating more causes bigger muscles—but if you were a longevity researcher, you’d conclude eating less (frequency or amount) would lead to bigger muscles! How can that possibly be? One way to justify this disconnect would be if there is some compensatory mechanism which occurs after the growth-promoting effects of eating, that causes an equal increase in destruction of protein. Indeed, the building phase is self-limited (partly) because it also causes inflammation…which halts building and initiates wear-down and destruction. But further realize that the frequent insulin release of FE inhibits the vital destruction of damaged proteins, which is necessary for the (re-)building of functional proteins. Conversely, IE (eating once a day) allows this necessary destructive process to contribute to the next phase of building. It’s a mistake to assume that FE is necessary for muscular growth. While it is true that FE induces frequent increases in building and suppresses breakdown, it must be understood that the breakdown phase contributes to a healthy and robust building phase. Thanks so much for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

Because of the complex nature of this topic, I’ve broken it down into 5 parts: the first installment is meant to raise your suspicions about traditional advice; here we’ll focus on fat loss, and later posts are on muscle mass and health & longevity. The final installment will discuss how to create a metabolism capable of “Infrequent Eating.” Ever notice the paradox in fat-loss advice? On one hand, you’re supposed to eat less—but on the other, you’re supposed to eat often to “keep your metabolism up.” I’ve dispelled the call to eat less in other posts (read the free preview of my Fat Loss eBook for a thorough understanding of this point), but what about the second point—does eating frequently favor weight loss? This question needs to be approached from a few different angles: Does eating frequently accelerate your metabolism? Does eating infrequently slow your metabolism? How does a “fast” or “slow” metabolism affect fat loss? Does Eating Frequently Accelerate Your Metabolism? The term “metabolism” refers to any and all chemical reactions taking place within your body; to refer to a slow or fast metabolism, then, is not very meaningful. However, these latter terms are generally meant to refer to the rate at which your body expends fuel (be it carbohydrate, fat, or protein), with the assumption being that a ”fast metabolism” will favor a leaner body by 1) preventing fuel from being stored within fat cells, and 2) burning fuel that has been stored as body fat—conversely, that a “slow metabolism” will favor increased body fat for the opposite of these reasons. In Part 1 of this series, I answer this question of this section more thoroughly; the long and short of it, though, is: yes, eating temporarily increases metabolism. This is called the “thermic effect of food” because it is most easily measured as a slight increase in body heat after eating. This bump in energy expenditure is necessary for your body to digest that food and assimilate the nutrients therein. But hold on—that doesn’t necessarily mean it affects weight loss. We’ll look at that after the next section. Does Eating Infrequently Slow Your Metabolism? First, we need to clarify how infrequent we’re talking about here. If you’re not going to eat anything for a week, then yes, your metabolism will slow down. But if we’re talking about the Infrequent Eating (IE) as described in Part 1 (where you would eat once at the end of the day), then no, your metabolism will not be impeded in any way to hinder weight loss. Your metabolic rate is largely governed by various hormones, including: adrenaline, cortisol, estrogen, growth hormone, leptin, testosterone, thyroid hormone, and others—we’ll see these hormones again, so remember them. Indeed, the release of these hormones is affected by food intake, but you won’t see a significant drop in their levels as a result of IE. Furthermore, even with FE, these hormone levels will drop if you chronically eat less—in other words, eating less will cause your metabolism to slow down regardless of eating frequency! Now for the most pressing question. How Does Metabolic Rate Affect Fat Loss? So we’ve seen that eating frequency does (kinda) affect energy expenditure. But does that mean it’s relevant to weight loss? Since we know we can eat rather infrequently without a hindrance to weight loss, we must assume that, in order to cause weight loss, the thermic effect of food is necessarily fueled by body fat...right? And if not, then FE doesn’t facilitate weight loss. To find the answer, we need to explore how fat cells are regulated. I tackle this topic in depth in Fat-Cell Physiology, but briefly: There is no law of physiology which states either “excess” fuel must be deposited in fat cells, or “energy deficit” is necessarily compensated by depleting fat cells. Rather, it is the physiology of fat cells which determines if you get fatter or leaner. Fat cells are enlarged by the actions of an enzyme called “LPL” and decreased by another set of enzymes called “FCL”; the size of any particular fat cell can be understood as the combined total actions of these opposing enzymes. Their level of activity is independently regulated by, both, triglyceride and various hormones. Regarding regulation by triglyceride (a storage & transport form of fat), high levels outside of the fat cell (in the blood) activate LPL, and thus stimulate enlargement through uptake of fat. Conversely, high levels of triglyceride within a fat cell activate FCL and inhibit LPL, thus promoting reduction in the size of that fat cell. In this way, the size of a fat cell is regulated. However, hormonal regulation dominates the regulation of fat cells. In general, a hormone called “insulin” promotes the storage of fat by increasing the activity of LPL and decreasing FCL. Conversely, several hormones (which we’ll refer to collectively as “anti-insulin hormones”) favor the reduction of fat cells by inhibiting fat-cell LPL and activating FCL. Here, a distinction must be made: a type of LPL is also expressed on non-fat cells, which is hormonally regulated oppositely that of fat-cell LPL. Non-fat-cell LPL is activated by the anti-insulin hormones and inhibited by insulin. Further, the ability of non-fat cells to burn that fat is enhanced by the anti-insulin hormones. However, 2 of the anti-insulin hormones later favor the actions of insulin. Whereas insulin is generally released in response to eating, when fuel availability is presumably high, anti-insulin hormones are released when fuel availability is (at risk of) running low—such as periods of starvation or exercise. Realize how this system of regulation ensures a basal level of triglyceride availability while discouraging excessive accumulation within cells and circulation. It also provides non-fat cells with increased fuel during periods of increased metabolic demand, and refuels fat stores after depletion. In other words, there’s no reason the thermic effect of food should be fueled by body fat; FE, then, does not necessarily promote fat loss. However, let me tell you what happens when you chronically eat less. What Happens When You Eat Less Remember those hormones which determine your metabolic rate—adrenaline, cortisol, estrogen, growth hormone, leptin, testosterone, thyroid hormone? We’ve actually mentioned these twice—though I wasn’t explicit about it until now. These same hormones are the “anti-insulin hormones” which regulate fat cells. Can you guess why semi-starvation causes your metabolism to slow? That’s right, a decrease in these hormones. This helps explain many of the symptoms that accompany “caloric restriction,” including feeling cold, lethargy, weight plateaus, and total fat regain. What Happens When You Eat Frequently Now remember the other big hormone of fat-cell regulation, insulin. Remember, insulin is released when you eat (especially carbohydrate) and generally favors enlargement of fat cells. Every time you eat, then, you are favoring fat gain, NOT fat reduction! Further, chronically eating less actually causes your body to become MORE sensitive to insulin…while your anti-insulin hormones are being suppressed! Lastly, because insulin clears your blood of fuel (pushing it into cells and locking it there), it mimics starvation! In short, FE facilitates the experiences/events associated with eating less (feeling cold, lethargy, plateaus, and regain). Conclusion We’ve seen that, rather than facilitating weight loss, FE actually hinders it, favors enlarged fat cells, and facilitates the experiences we associate with eating less. Conversely, IE is preferable for weight loss, and can be done without any of the undesirable side effects caused by eating less. In the final post, we’ll discuss how this is possible; next, though, we’ll discuss the effects of eating frequency on muscle mass. Thanks for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-1-raising.html Because of the complex nature of this topic, I’ve broken it down into 5 parts: this installment is meant to raise your suspicions about traditional advice, followed by installments focused on fat loss, muscle mass, and health & longevity. The final installment will discuss how to create a metabolism capable of “Infrequent Eating.” How often do you eat? How often do you think you should eat? I don’t know the answer to the first, but I’ll bet the second answer is something like 5-6 small meals each day, or every 3 hours. Okay, next question: Why should you eat this often? Your answer is probably along the lines of to keep my metabolism up, or to make sure my body builds muscle rather than devours it. And why shouldn’t we believe these recommendations? They’re spouted by virtually all public health and fitness authorities. But like so many recommendations, these too are conceived in only a narrow perspective. In this post, we’ll look at how these recommendations came to be. Infrequent Eating Let’s call the traditional recommendations for eating frequency “Frequent Eating” (FE). But if, by the end of these posts, you come to believe that FE is not necessarily beneficial and potentially detrimental, we’ll need a new methodology to replace it—“Infrequent Eating” (IE). The principles of IE span back at least into the 1950’s, and more recently have become formalized as “Intermittent Fasting” (IF). I prefer the term Infrequent Eating over Intermittent Fasting because, whereas IF seems like a imposed burden, IE alludes to the fact that eating infrequently is a normal, natural, and easy expression of human eating behavior which requires no harsh imposition. In studies, animals who undergo these principles exhibit some striking characteristics: • They live longer. • They are healthier and have less incidence of disease. • They are more functional and have more muscle mass. • They are leaner. Intrigued? Then keep reading… PAGE BREAKS IF generally consists of fasting for 1-2 days once or twice each week. In my conception of IE, though, you simply refrain from food each day until evening. You may already be asking “how is that normal, natural, or easy?” To answer that, we’ll first have to look at the origins of the Eat Every 3 Hours rule. The Genesis of the 3-Hour Rule How do you think the 3-hour rule came about? Perhaps some scientists, curious about optimal meal frequency, made several groups of people consume food at different frequencies; a once-a-day group, twice-a-day group, 3-times-a-day group…all the way to a 12-times-a-day group—and then monitored them for their entire lives, periodically measuring various dimensions of health and how long they lived…or maybe not. Even though such a rigorous and lengthy experiment might give us some solid answers, it would be impractical and expensive. Instead, such recommendations are cobbled together from many experiments and assumptions. And therein lies the problem. The data which informs these recommendations are established in the context of a high-carbohydrate diet; why is this a problem? When you eat carbohydrate, your body releases a hormone called “insulin,” which stashes fuel away in your (often fat-) cells and prevents it from being burned until insulin levels drop some hours later. Carbohydrate also knocks out a special neurotransmitter in your brain called, “orexin,” which is important for allowing wakefulness and alertness. Imagine how this plays out in a typical day: you wake up, eat a breakfast of juice and cereal (both very high in carbohydrate) and head to work. From the moment you eat, insulin goes to work locking fuel away. At the same time, orexin is being whittled away to leave you feeling tired. If you don’t fall asleep, you’ll be compelled to eat by a brain sensing WARNING: Low Fuel and the experience of stress that accompanies fatigue. Notice, a few things: • Your compulsion to eat is NOT because you’re actually low on fuel, but rather because you have fuel which you cannot access due to prior carbohydrate ingestion. • Your feeling tired is not a result of needing to eat, but rather because you did eat. How backwards is that?! Think of it like this: eating tells your body to rest so that it can go to work using those nutrients to repair and rejuvenate your body. You’ll then likely eat something with carbohydrate, and the cycle repeats…and the cycle repeats…and the cycle repeats…5 or 6 time before you get into bed and allow your body to do what it was trying to do after every meal—rest and rejuvenate. You may experience a temporary increase in wakefulness after each meal, but realize this is NOT necessarily due to an increase in fuel-availability, but rather for a temporary spike in a few other neurotransmitters (dopamine and adrenaline), which are subdued with the latter effects to orexin. Here is a common point of misinterpretation. One might easily mistake the lethargy described above as evidence that their metabolism is slowing down, and the fact that they feel better after eating as evidence that their metabolism is speeding up. Hence, “frequent eating keeps your metabolism up.” Indeed, you can measure metabolism via body temperature—and eating does increase your body’s output of heat, thus increasing metabolism (this is called the “thermic effect of food”). But like fuel availability and wakefulness, these phenomena only seem directly related, but are actually disconnected. Your conscious experience of wakefulness and alertness are not increased by the metabolism-boost from eating…this “boost” is manifested as an increase in body heat! What would happen without carbohydrate/food? Now imagine a day without a high-carbohydrate breakfast (or not breakfast at all). Rather than sequestering your body’s access to fuel and triggering sleep (by knocking out orexin), your body starts and goes through the day more alert and with unimpeded access to body fat. You sail through the entire day without hunger or fatigue; then you finally eat dinner, which knocks out orexin and allows you to get a restful night of sleep while your body rejuvenates and improves itself. In the next post, we’ll look at the relevance of eating frequency to fat loss. Thank you for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

Read Full Post at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-2-fat-loss.html Because of the complex nature of this topic, I’ve broken it down into 5 parts: the first installment (http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-1-raising.html) is meant to raise your suspicions about traditional advice; here we’ll focus on fat loss, and later posts are on muscle mass and health & longevity. The final installment will discuss how to create a metabolism capable of “Infrequent Eating.” Ever notice the paradox in fat-loss advice? On one hand, you’re supposed to eat less—but on the other, you’re supposed to eat often to “keep your metabolism up.” I’ve dispelled the call to eat less in other posts (read the free preview of my Fat Loss eBook for a thorough understanding of this point (http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/p/fat-loss-html.html)), but what about the second point—does eating frequently favor weight loss? This question needs to be approached from at least a couple of different angles: Does eating frequency impact metabolic rate? How does a metabolic rate impact body-fat regulation? Does Eating Frequency Impact Metabolic Rate? The term “metabolism” refers to any and all chemical reactions taking place within your body; to refer to a slow or fast metabolism, then, is not very useful. However, these terms are generally meant to refer to the rate at which your body expends fuel ("metabolic rate"), with the assumption being that a ”fast metabolism” will favor a leaner body by 1) preventing fuel from being stored within fat cells, and 2) burning fuel that has been stored as body fat—and conversely, that a “slow metabolism” will favor increased body fat for the opposite of these reasons. In Part 1 of this series (http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-1-raising.html), I answer this question of this section more thoroughly; the long and short of it, though, is: yes, eating temporarily increases metabolism. This is called the “thermic effect of food” (TEF) because it is most easily measured as a slight increase in body heat after eating. This bump in energy expenditure is necessary for your body to digest that food and assimilate the nutrients therein, but this doesn't mean it will reduce body weight. How could it? The only possibility would be if TEF were greater than the energy content in the food...which clearly isn't the case or we would have all shriveled to death eons ago! Furthermore there is no physiological reason to assume that the TEF is fueled by body fat in the first place! Fat cells are not simple depositories for excess fuel. They are not regulated calorically, but rather rather chemically i.e. they do not necessarily get larger if you eat more/exercise less and they do not necessarily get smaller if you eat less/exercise more. I tackle this topic in depth in Fat-Cell Physiology, but briefly: Body-Fat Regulation (http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/11/fat-cell-physiology.html) Continue Reading at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/12/how-often-should-you-eat-part-2-fat-loss.html

More at http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-key-ingredient-for-bigger-muscles.html There is certainly no shortage of ready-made training programs promising you bigger muscles; the huge number of such programs, though, seems suspicious. Sure, you can compare any 2 programs and find all sorts of differences in “training variables” (weight, reps, sets, rest periods, frequency, exercise selection, exercise order, etc.), but let’s be honest—without understanding what causes muscles to grow, the only thing separating these programs is how they’re hyped and marketed. After all, if we know how these training variables make muscles bigger, shouldn’t most programs be more or less the same? Wait, do we know how these training variables make muscles grow? If you’ve tried to figure this out with information created for laymen, the answer is almost definitely “no.” But that’s not to say that experts in the field are much closer! As somebody who routinely digs through the scientific journals on this stuff, I’m continually bothered to find no unified and coherent model to explain what causes muscular growth. On small scales, you’ll find all sorts of things that can cause individual muscle cells (dissected and/or removed) to grow: hormones like testosterone and growth hormone, or nutrients like leucine, or cellular chemicals like arachidonic acid, or stimulation of certain cell receptors. However, growth can often be induced in the absence of many of these elements. Regardless, the question then becomes “how does this apply to 1) an entire muscle 2) of an intact human being 3) in a training situation.” Making this transition, from small scale to real life, is trickier than it may seem; whereas small-scale experiments allow you to test each potential growth-trigger substance individually, that isn’t possible when you’re experimenting with real humans in a training situation. For example: if you put a group of people through a training program and confirm that their muscles grew as a result of that training program, you’d likely observe increases in all (or at least most) of the small-scale growth triggers—so you would not be able to confirm that any of them caused muscular growth. Instead, researchers who operate on these larger scales use the training variables listed earlier because these can (nearly) be isolated from each other. For example, you could try different exercises while holding the other 6 variables constant, then use that data to conclude which exercise was most effective. But already you might start to see some potential problems. The most obvious is the discrepancy in focus between small and large scales. Whereas small-scale research speaks in terms like “signaling pathway” and “protein synthesis,” large-scale research uses terms like “volume” and “intensity.” Bridging this gap is something like unifying Newtonian physics with quantum mechanics—you can be sure there’s some connection, but you can’t say what it is. Readers with a background in exercise physiology will also recognize that strict isolation of these training variables isn’t so cut-and-dry. There are definite relationships between, for example, how much weight you use and how many repetitions your can do (heavier weight means less reps). Furthermore, each variable can be demonstrated to affect muscle growth, but none can be shown to be essential to growth in isolation; so in reality, both small-scale and large-scale experiments suffer from the same problem: they cannot definitively say what causes muscle growth in real-life training, because they don’t speak in the language of muscles. If you want to make your muscles grow, you should understand what tells them to grow. This brings the methodology every exercise program into question. The Language of Muscles So what is “the language of muscles?” To explain, it’ll help to first discuss what the language of muscles isn’t. Let’s begin with a completely irrefutable statement: “muscles can’t count.” So simple, you’re probably having a hard time justifying having read this article—but let me continue. In order for large-scale experiments to be conducted, communicated, measured, interpreted, reproduced, and used to develop a typical training protocol (i.e. sets X reps X weight etc.), the training variables must be quantified. But again, the problem is that your muscles can’t count. In other words, your muscles aren’t actually responding to how much weight, how many repetitions, or any of the other training variables. Each muscle cell is actually responding to the experiences of specific mechanical and chemical events as a result of that training. Indeed, certain training-variable parameters will tend to cause similar mechanical and chemical events—but not necessarily. (We’ll talk more about this soon). At best, then, using training variables to speak with your muscles is like speaking a foreign language with only a translation dictionary. You may be able to order in a restaurant, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting what you thought you asked for. Conversely, the small-scale growth triggers are like the basic letters and words of muscle language—but that doesn’t mean they necessarily are the (complete) language of muscles. Just like any other language, letters and words are meaningless without context: “Bird jalopy tinkle-dork mingled.” See my point? The small scale cannot really provide this type of necessary context for the exact reason that small-scale research is useful: isolation. You see, the small scale is great at pulling out and blowing up individual pieces of a puzzle—but these techniques also tend to preclude an understanding of that data in real life because nothing actually happens in isolation. Every event is caused by- and causes another, and occurs simultaneously with other related and unrelated events; furthermore, dissected muscle cells behave and respond differently than non-dissected muscle cells—which behave and respond differently than intact-but-removed whole muscles—which behave and respond differently than whole muscles that haven’t been removed. So we have something of a paradox: whereas thinking in terms of large-scale training variables provides some degree of context (though far from perfect), but cannot be clearly translated, the small scale is the actual infrastructure of muscle language, but lacks context. We can improve on this—to really learn a language, you must live among its speakers. Time (Energy) & Tension Imagine yourself as a muscle cell. Above all else, your primary concern is your own survival…and your survival depends on adapting. As a muscle cell, all of your existential threats are either mechanical or temporal/energetic. If you’re subjected to a great mechanical force, say from lifting a heavy weight, you’d be wise to reinforce your structural integrity by becoming bigger and stronger, lest a similar strain later tear you in half. But if you’re forced to work for an extended period of time, you’d better find ways of storing/accessing more fuel and using that fuel more efficiently, lest a future event kills you from depletion; part of this type of adaptation is to cause smaller muscles because they require less fuel. For you, then, a muscle cell constantly called upon to risk your life, your language is primarily based on time/energy status and tension. Let’s be more explicit about these terms. The first thing to note is that the standard training variable quasi-equivalents to these terms would be “volume” (which is generally sets X reps, and sometimes X weight) and “intensity” (otherwise known as “weight”). But the next thing to notice is that volume and intensity are NOT the same as time and tension; whereas the former pair refers to measurements of an external load, the latter refers to the actual experiences of muscle cells—and the 2 are NOT interchangeable. To explain that, we’ll conduct our own experiment. We’ll take groups of participants and have them perform bench presses [EMBED BENCH PRESS VIDEO HERE, START @ BENCH PRESS SECTION] under various parameters, then measure if/how much muscle they gain. This is the gist of how these studies are conducted—and like these other studies, our findings are quite fuzzy. There’s no clear evidence that any single variable was most important: some parameters produce more growth on average than others, but some participants from superior-responding groups respond worse than participants in inferior-responding groups and some participants from inferior-responding groups respond better than participants from superior-responding groups. It would be quite tempting to ascribe these anomalies to the fact that people respond differently to training based on genetic factors. But then we’d be overlooking a very big discrepancy. Even within the same group, each person is going have a different style of lifting. Some have their elbows out or in, some with straight wrists and some bent back, some with shoulder blades squeezed and other not so much. Even if they’re all instructed on “proper form,” these differences will persist to some degree. Think about how this affects the experience of the muscles: despite the parameters being the same for each person, their individual muscles cells can be experiencing completely different tensions based on the person’s style. Even if each persons’ form was acceptably identical, their unique dimensions would cause different tensions in different muscles and muscle cells. Similarly for energy, individual styles will affect how much energy that person expends during the execution of their lifts. Some techniques will use the elasticity of the Musculoskeletal System to help move the weight better than others—or more directly impart force on the bar, and harness that force more effectively. Any of these nuances will change the amount of energy expended by those muscle cells. So what does this mean for exercise programs written in the familiar notation (sets X reps X weight)? At the very least, we can say they leave a huge margin of error for users. Therefore, let’s now explore a new way of thinking about exercise programming using what we’ve learned about the language of your muscles. Tension, the Key- & Time, the Adversary- to Muscular Growth Here, let’s reiterate 2 major points so far: Muscle cells respond to tension with growth. Exhaustive energy expenditure (time) tells muscle cells to shrink. Generally, the tension experienced by a muscle cell is a function of muscular force; the more force a muscle generates, say to lift a weight, the more tension is applied to muscle cells. Muscular force shares a reciprocal relationship with time/energy expended: the more muscular force required for a given activity, the shorter duration that activity can be performed (thus less fuel expended) and vice versa. Think of lifting 25lbs versus 100lbs—you’ll obviously be able to lift 25lbs more times than 100lbs…expending more energy and applying less tension. So, like force and duration, we can say that time/energy expended and tension are also reciprocal…well, not quite. For example stretching and “eccentric contractions” (when you lower a weight slowly) can apply tension for quite some time, but don’t actually expend much energy. Then there’s another little hiccup: time/energy expenditure can increase tension; this might seem completely paradoxical, but it’ll make sense in a moment. When you move a muscle to lift a weight, not all of the muscle cells within that muscle work—only as many as are needed to overcome that weight are activated; as you might expect, heavier weights recruit more muscle fibers than lighter weights. However, as those active muscle cells expend energy, they can’t exert as much force; to compensate, more muscle cells are recruited. As you get closer to exhaustion, there are fewer active muscle cells—which means the same tension is now distributed over fewer muscle cells…which means more tension is experienced by those remaining active muscle cells. Cutting Through Confusion Stymied by reductionism and traditional notation, trending training protocols for muscle growth go through cycles. I could go through a brief, but this article is already approaching 2000 words so I’ll just bring us up to speed. Currently, the hot trend is centered on volume (again, volume is sets X reps and sometimes X weight); to be certain, this is not the only time volume-based programs have been in vogue, nor is it the last. Ironically, volume takes turns with intensity (remember, “intensity” generally refers to “weight used”) in sharing this throne. This is ironic because, as functions of duration and muscular force, volume and intensity are generally reciprocal; in other words, to do more of one necessitates less of the other. Do you see the confusion? The problem, as you’ve seen, is that muscles can’t count. Volume is effective NOT for it voluminousness, but because it allows for adequate tension! The logical extension, though, of volume-based programs is an amount of volume that ultimately causes smaller muscles. Conversely, creating adequate tension with intensity-based programs can be thwarted by your body’s natural protective reflexes against great external loads. Application So what are you supposed to do with this information? The answer: I don’t know. I mean, for You, I don’t know what’s appropriate. But I hope we can both agree that the answer isn’t sets X reps X weight. Rather, you need to reexamine whatever you’re doing right now through the scope of time & tension; understand the ways in which they interact and can be used to cause muscle growth—or misused to hinder growth. Regardless of how much volume you’re currently using, start paying attention to which muscles are actually working and feel how much tension is being applied to them; if you’re using a high-volume program without much recent progress, try decreasing the volume in favor of tension—if you’re using high-intensity principles, try reducing the weight while focusing on tension and perhaps increase volume slightly. Like I said, I really don’t know what’s best for You. I think the best way to figure this out, though, is with tinkering and conversation—get at me on Facebook or Twitter @nicklausPHC, or leave a comment below. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for reading. NICKLAUS MILLICAN

Why is Blood-Sugar Important? Your body is made of nearly 100 trillion cells! One thing that they all have in common is a constant demand for fuel, of which there are 4 major types: • Sugar • Fat • Ketones (made from fat when fat is being burned rapidly) • Protein (amino acids) Most cells of your body are able to use each and are not dependent on any particular fuel-type. Further, most cells of your body are able to store fuel, and replenish those stores with fuel circulating within your blood-stream. However, neither of these statements can be said for certain cells of your Nervous System or Red Blood Cells—which require at least some sugar and cannot store fuel. Thus, these cells require steady access to sugar from your blood i.e. “blood-sugar.” High Blood-Sugar is Harmful Even though your body must maintain some level of blood-sugar for your Nervous System, too much is very harmful. Diabetes is simply a state of chronically elevated blood-sugar; the health-problems associated with diabetes (like damage to blood-vessels, kidneys, nerves, eyes, etc.) are directly caused by this chronically high blood-sugar. You can think of blood-sugar as a sort of corrosive chemical coursing through your body, but which you can tolerate at low concentrations. How is Blood-Sugar Controlled? Normally, blood-sugar is controlled with opposing hormones. When it gets too high, your body releases “insulin,” which makes the cells of your body more apt to absorb some of that sugar. Conversely, a slew of “anti-insulin hormones” are released when blood-sugar is too low, which reach into sugar-stores from your liver to increase blood-sugar. What Can Go Wrong? Insulin Resistance Rather than a delivery-man, insulin is more of a door-to-door salesman. It can’t simply force sugar out of the blood-stream and into your cells, but instead knocks on the door of each cell and asks if they would like some sugar. The decision to absorb that sugar, though, is ultimately made by each individual cell. If a cell already has enough, it’ll be less likely to take anymore. When many of your cells already have enough, and aren’t buying what insulin is selling, blood-sugar will tend to stay higher longer. This is called “insulin-resistance,” and is a hallmark of diabetes. Another cause of insulin resistance is “inflammation.” If you’ve ever sprained your ankle, had an allergic reaction, or been stung by a bee, you’re already somewhat familiar with inflammation; it’s marked by the pain, swelling, and redness of these events. What you don’t notice, though, is that these signs of inflammation are caused by countless cells and chemicals of your Immune System. These same cells and chemicals react to all sorts of events, but the symptoms will be different if those cells and chemicals spread throughout the entire body (like when you catch a flu-germ) rather than collecting at a single area of injury. Besides becoming sick with a germ, this type of diffuse inflammation can be caused in various ways—3 of which are most relevant here are • Having too much body-fat • Having high blood-sugar • Not being physically active This diffuse inflammation can cause insulin-resistance by acting like a barrier between insulin and your cells, keeping insulin from even knocking on their doors. How Can Exercise Help? One of the most potent tools for managing blood-sugar is physical activity—at least at powerful as, and generally more than, medication—and without the side-effects. (NOTE: because exercise is so powerful, consult your physician before beginning any exercise program—especially if you’re taking medications to control blood-sugar). When your muscles become active, they burn some of their stored sugar; they also absorb blood-sugar during that activity without the prompting of insulin. Even after exercise, they’re more receptive to absorbing blood-sugar. In other words: rather than insulin-resistant, they become more insulin-sensitive. Further enhancing insulin-sensitivity, exercise causes your muscles and bones to secrete chemicals called “myokines” (from muscle) and “osteocalcin” (from bone). These chemicals have multiple functions, but among them is to increase insulin-sensitivity. Part of this effect is by reducing inflammation. In fact, many of the benefits of leading an active lifestyle are directly related to the ability of physical activity to reduce inflammation; conversely, a sedentary lifestyle is highly inflammatory. What to Do So how do you best use this information? One thing you could do, if you haven’t already, is to start an exercise program. But here’s the thing: an exercise program isn’t really necessary, or even the most effective way to use physical activity in controlling your blood-sugar. You see, the problem is that an exercise program usually consists of 20-90 minutes of continuous physical activity 2-5 days per week. That’s great, and there’s benefits to be had from this, but it can leave more than 95% of your life to possibly remain sedentary and accumulate inflammation and insulin-resistance. Instead, the first priority should be reducing the amount of time you’re sedentary. When you’re not physically active, inflammation rises and there’s less reason for cells to absorb sugar. Regardless of whether or not you’re currently using a formal exercise program, then, you should start trying to find ways to be not-sedentary every 1-3 hours. This doesn’t mean taking a 30 minute walk every other hour, though some extended episodes of physical activity should find their way into your life, but some much smaller things: • If you sit a lot, whether for work or leisure, try to find ways of doing those same things while standing. • Make it a point of at least standing up every hour. • In addition to standing, try 2-5 minutes of stretching or walking Regarding formalized exercise programs: the number 1 priority is safety, number 2 is enjoyment. Any program you decide to undertake must emphasis these, which means your program must be customized for you. Preliminary Health Care has a free eBook you can download which will take you through the steps of creating your own program including a safety Par-Q, understanding your goals and interests, how to use exercise to achieve those goals, and how your program should progress. Also, check out our list of exercise demos on the left sidebar. Thank you so much for reading. Be well, NICKLAUS MILLICAN

More at: http://preliminaryhealthcare.blogspot.com/2014/11/when-you-blame-calories-you-blame.htm We’ve heard it to the point that we accept it without questioning: “It’s all about calories-in v calories-out. If you wanna lose weight, you have to eat less and exercise more.” The first problem with these sentiments, though, are that they are absolutely FALSE! Of course, this should be concerning because it means we’re all using incorrect information to try improving ourselves. But there’s another big reason to be concerned. Namely: When you incorrectly make being overweight about calories, you unjustly blame victims of such terrible information. Think about it: we believe so strongly that becoming fatter is from “overeating” and “under-exercising,” but what do these terms even mean? We define them based solely on the body-composition of the person to which we’re referring: how ever much a fat person is eating we call “too much,” and how ever much they exercise is “too little.” Ask yourself, if a fatter person eats less and exercises more than a skinny person, are they undereating and over-exercising? In truth, this happens all the time…these terms, then, are absolutely meaningless. Also ask yourself why overeating wouldn’t make a person taller, or grow more fingers? Either would be an equally valid example of expending less calories than consuming. The only difference is in how a body distributes nutrients—and to understand that topic you must understand NOT calories, but human physiology. A Short Proof Against Calories I won’t here go into depth about the physiological regulation of body-fat, as that is not the point of this post, but let me just touch on a few relevant points to further dispel false notions about calories and body-fat. Your body is amazing at managing energy—it has to be; every essential bodily process relies on steadily adequate fuel-availability. No fuel, no life! Conversely, excess fuel-availability is harmful and must also be avoided. To walk this tight-rope, your body primarily relies on 3 tools: storage, expenditure, and intake. “Storage” may quickly bring to mind “fat-storage,” but storage really refers to converting nutrients into other types of tissue (like muscle, liver, brain, etc.) or a different form of fuel that is easily stored for later use (like body-fat, but also a storage form of sugar called “glycogen”). However, it’s not that case that storage is an automatic fate of nutrients once food-intake passes some arbitrary amount; every cell in your body (including fat-cells) must decide if they want to absorb nutrients or not, based on their current energy-situation—they cannot be forced to accept more. Therefore, it’s quite possible for fuel-availability to exceed a dangerous levels were it not for the other 2 mechanisms of control. Though you may not think of them as such, energy-expenditure and food-intake are intimately linked such that eating tends to increase energy-expenditure, and physical activity tends to increase motivation to eat. This relationship goes even deeper. Not eating decreases energy-expenditure and being sedentary decreases appetite. In other words, your brain and body will coordinately adjust both eating-behavior and energy-expenditure to ensure appropriate fuel-availability. So how can you “overeat” and/or “under-exercise” if your body simply matches these two? When I say these terms are “absolutely meaningless,” I mean it literally! Even if you try eating less and exercising more, you cannot compensate for these changes because they are controlled on a level beyond your consciousness. While you may be able to deny yourself food for a time (before the preoccupation with food over-comes you), you cannot compensate for the decreased energy-expenditure this causes, which thus makes-up for the imposed deficit; even if you try to increase exercise, energy is conserved: • Time spent not exercising is marked by lethargy and less spontaneous activity. • Your body becomes more efficient, so uses less energy to accomplish any activity. • A decreased body-temperature is instituted, allowing that energy to be used in other critical processes. Back to the Main Point Do you see the problem now? The incorrect belief in calories makes us assume a fatter person chooses to overeat and under-exercise—chooses to be lazy and gluttonous. Of course, some overweight people may be…but so are some thin people. But in no circumstance is a person’s fatness a result of how many calories they eat or burn with exercise! Even from those whom are compassionate, credence in the calorie-theory unjustly blames overweight people for a character flaw. Aside from an unquestioning faith it this dogma, I think it can be easy to place such blame because it’s difficult to accept that another person’s experience of the world is different than our own; even if a thin person identifies as a glutton or a sloth, belief in the calorie-theory would also require them to assume they are able to exert enough will-power and discipline to keep from getting fat—hence, as lax as I am about my weight, even I can manage it…what’s your excuse? But more upsetting, I suspect many overweight people believe this of themselves—equally unbelieving that a thin person’s physiological reality is different than their own…trapped also by the calorie theory. Thank you for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

More at: preliminaryhealthcare.com This article is not about clever means of being thrifty at the supermarket. No. Instead, I want to discuss a subject that few probably think about—how our natural eating-behaviors impact our grocery bill. Home-Ec 101: When buying groceries, you should find bargains. You normally prepare a few eggs for breakfas, but egg prices have been going up and your local grocery store has bulk breakfast cereal on sale; $3.74 would feed you an egg breakfast for four days, but you can get 7 days of cereal for only 2.75. This seems like a no-brainer. You buy the cereal instead of the eggs, and have a bowl the next morning before going to work. You hadn’t really noticed it until now, but you usually feel pretty good in the mornings—you probably wouldn’t notice you if it weren’t for the fact that now, at only 9:30 am, you’re sluggish and getting kind of hungry. Hungry? You’re never hungry this soon after breakfast. In fact, many days you even forget to eat lunch. How could you be hungry? Unprepared, you droop into the break-room and find a wrapped pastry from the vending machine. Ahhh… that did it. Back to normal. Or so you thought, but already before lunch you’re feeling like you did earlier. And again at 2:30 after your lunch. By the time you get home, it’s all you can do to drop the day inside the front door and find something to eat. But with nothing prepared—oh yes, you can have a bowl of the cereal you had for breakfast. Maybe another. The next morning, you eat a two bowls before getting to work to prevent the same thing from happening again. But it does happen again. In fact, it’s happening worse than yesterday. By Wednesday, you’ve trudged through 3 days of lethargy, gained 5 pounds, and eaten 1 box of cereal and 7 vending-machine snacks. You think, “Why have I been so tired lately? Where did this weight come from? Wasn’t that cereal supposed to last me the whole week?” Actually, these questions all have related answers. Eating to Maintain Fuel-Availability Your eating-behavior is influenced by many things—some are consciously controllable, but most are not. One of these controlling factors is “fuel-availability.” Fuel-availability refers to the amount of fuel (generally blood-sugar or free-floating fat) is in your blood stream. When this level begins to drop, your brain senses this and compels you to eat something, and may make you feel sluggish so you conserve what fuel you do have available. Insulin Sequesters Fuel Food has 3 types of fuel: • Carbohydrate (which becomes blood-sugar) • Fat • Protein When you eat carbohydrate (and protein to a certain extent), your body releases a hormone called “insulin,” which pulls fuel out of your blood-stream and pushes it into the cells of your body. This is important because, just as low fuel-availability is dangerous, so too is too much. However, insulin is a storage-hormone—cells are inhibited from using fuel as long as insulin is elevated. Also, because insulin clears your blood of fuel, it reduces fuel-availability…triggering the urge to eat a few hours later. If you satisfy that urge with carbohydrate, (which is likely because carbohydrate has an inherent degree of likeability, making your selection of it more likely) the cycle will repeat yet again and again. Lastly, though insulin can push fuel into many cells, fat-cells tend to take more than their fair share. You can see how your morning breakfast with carbohydrate, then, can set you on a cycle of eating all day long. You can also see where the fatigue and weight-gain came from. The fuel you should be using to provide energy is getting stuck in your fat-cells instead, leaving you tired and making you fatter. Without Carbohydrate… Without carbohydrate, though, your body can rely on a virtually unlimited supply of fuel—BODY-FAT! Think about how much different this is: by withholding carbohydrate from your breakfast, your body automatically begins chewing through body-fat—so much so, that the fuel-availability remains steadily adequate. Not only are you able to reduce body-fat, your energy-levels also remain steady. But back to the original topic. Even though carbohydrate foods tend to be cheaper, notice that they actually dig deeper into your budget because they encourage you to consume more food more often. Conversely, though high-quality meats and vegetables tend to be more expensive, you’ll end up eating far less. In other words, not only can weight-loss be healthy, but also financially responsible. Thank you for reading. Be well, NICKLAUS MILLICAN

Food, “Food,” & Drugs The following is adapted from our free Nutritional Basics eBook. We tend to think about food in simplistic terms, like “calories,” “good for you, bad for you,” or “how much (insert nutrient here) is in it.” In reality, though, food is a symphony of signals playing to your body more strikingly than any drug. You cannot understand nutrition in these simple terms, but must rather appreciate that each element of a food combines and interacts with your body as to be greater than its sum. Not that this is a, overly-complicated thought, but food is so fundamental to the human experience that it rarely evokes any thought that is not oversimplified. If we lived in a less synthesized world, oversimplification would be fine because we would be immersed in an environment to which our brains and bodies were perfectly suited. We wouldn’t have to worry about “is this good for me?” because our own instinctual and reflexive drives would only allow us to eat non-harmful and healthy items. But alas, we’ve engineered a synthetic world in which our organic bodies don’t well fit. Our instincts, which must trust in the wholesomeness of the environment…must assume that which is pleasurable is also healthy, are now deceived by man-made creations which have divorced health and pleasure. We might as well understand the process of “processed food” as a process in which the healthy portion of food has been cleared to make room for more pleasure…made to interact with our brains more like cocaine or heroin than actual food. Born into this world, is it any wonder we have lost faith in nutrition and instead trust medication to remedy the very ills sentenced us by “food?” Food no less artificial than that medication—both apt to betray our health. What are we to do when our human intellect has created an environment which deceives human instinct and erodes human health? We will never be fully rid of these scourges or their memory, and so they will continue act as a siren (each of a number of women or winged creatures whose singing lured unwary sailors onto rocks) to our instinctual selves. Therefore, we cannot default to simplification, as simplification has now been turned against us—but must personally embrace some degree of complexity with that same intellect. The degree to which we do this can adjust the market-forces behind these harbingers of human unhealth to create an environment conducive of health. Thank you for reading. Be well, NICKLAUS MILLICAN

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.html) but briefly: Sleep is the absolute foundation of your Health for several reasons, including its necessity in controlling Stress. Stress causes several changes to your body, including preventing productive sleep, and also drives Behavior. Too much Stress causes unhealthy Behaviors, especially regarding Nutrition and Exercise. If all other levels of the pyramid are not fulfilled, Exercise can actually be a negative Stressor, further damaging your chances of success. Let’s look at how this pyramid crumbles during turbulent times in our lives. Sleep & Stress Just the imposition of a new environment is stressful. Suddenly, being able to attain even the simplest things you need to live healthily becomes challenging—just finding a grocery store in a new location can turn into an hour long field-trip into new territory. Then factor in that certain emotional and social needs can become neglected or impoverished, and that creating new support systems can itself be a long-term difficulty. And we haven’t even mentioned the reason for which you have thrust yourself into this brand new world. A new job or beginning school necessarily imposes a largely novel set of expectations and responsibilities. You’ll also be facing more than your fair share of sleep deprivation, for several reasons: 1. For much deserved leisure, and establishing/nurturing a social structure 2. Having to push responsibilities later and later into the night 3. Because the experience of stress makes falling asleep, sleeping well, and staying asleep difficult This is very troubling because restful sleep is critical to managing stress. You can understand how poor sleep and high stress create a downward spiral. This is even more vexing because countless rejuvenatory processes rely on sleep, and chronic stress becomes systemically devastating to these same processes. Furthermore, high stress and poor sleep create a metabolic environment which strongly favors fat-gain. Lastly, stress plays a fundamental role in determining behavior. Stress, Behavior, and Nutrition Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll…and food—all can be a source of pleasure. We tend to think about pleasure as though it were, at best, non-essential to a healthy life—but this simply is not so. Pleasure resuscitates us from the rigors of stress. In fact, the drive to seek and attain pleasure is proportional to the amount of stress you experience. Maybe you can already intuit the problem: the stress of your new environment necessarily creates unhealthy behaviors to help cope with that stress. In fact, count yourself lucky if you find pleasure in food rather than hardcore drugs. But that doesn’t change the fact that the foods you crave in response to stress are the same foods which favor increased body-fat—sugary, floury, unhealthy junk-foods. In a very real way, getting fatter becomes the price of having to cope with a stressful life. Physical Activity & Exercise Another likely change which occurs is an increase in being sedentary. Notice, I didn’t say a reduction in physical activity/exercise; you can become more sedentary while still exercising as much or more than ever. What am I talking about? Understand that exercise definitely has health-bestowing effects, and not exercising denies you these effects…obviously. But being sedentary—sitting still in class, at work, doing homework, studying, etc.— has negative consequences that are different than simply being denied the benefits of exercise. Even if you exercise an hour or 2 each day, it doesn’t alleviate the consequences of being sedentary. One of these consequences are a few metabolic changes that favor body-fat gain. It’s important to take frequent (every hour or so) breaks from sitting. This may be just standing, stretching, or walking around for a few minutes. Don’t expect an exercise regimen to fix this. And speaking of exercise: exercise is great! But it’s only positive if you have taken care of the other levels of the pyramid. Exercise when you are already stress, sleep deprived, and not able to make healthful nutritional decisions only adds to the stress which is keeping you up at night and causing undesirable eating-behaviors. Conclusion When you’re making a drastic change to your life, it’s important to enter your new world as prepared as possible, and to find ways of reducing the burdens of that transition. This often includes relaxing the rigors of a current program (such as an exercise program), and postponing any unnecessary changes (such as dietary changes) until you feel more comfortable and can take on additional stressors. I sincerely encourage you to download our free Strong Start Tool Kit at the top of the page, where’ll you find self-assessments on these various topics to which you can continuously refer as you make your transition, and quick-tips to help improve. Thank you so much for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

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: asleep-awake, asleep-awake, asleep-awake; sun up-sun down-sun up-sun down; Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter. More unimaginable still, because each cycle…all cycles, are the same cycle. The Earth rotates about its crooked and wobbly axis at a steady speed, while circling the sun in an uneven ellipse, which varies the angle and intensity of the Sun's energy, predictable as a function of time measured in milliseconds or millennia. When the Earth leans and turns just right and gets just close enough to the Sun, solar energy strikes the leaf that synthesizes the nutrition that is eaten by the animal that is only awake because the same solar energy struck the eye that awakened the brain that fired the nerves that moved the body that was warmed by the same solar energy and so released the hormones that informed the brain that it was time to look for food... and when the Earth leans and turns just right again, the solar energy moves on like a wake over the rest of the Earth and the plant stops producing while the brain is no longer stimulated and the body cools and together we all rest—an environment forever true to the harmony of having grown out of unity. We are of this unity. We are coerced to harmony by the pain of deviation: to wake is to sleep, to starve is to hunt, to expend is to fatigue. We cannot escape this harmony of our environment for we are of our environment. Your Circadian Rhythm Have you ever wondered why you tend to wake-up, work more productively, get sleepy, and feel hungry at about the same times each day? This pattern is called the “Circadian Rhythm.” The “Circadian Rhythm” refers to the collection and summation of all biological events and processes which tend to occur and repeat in about a 24 hour cycle. Literally every bodily/cellular process is heavily influenced by your Circadian Rhythm—including things like eating-behavior, energy-expenditure, and metabolism. Of course, all of these events/processes are necessarily adjusted by several things. What use would such a rhythm serve if it had sole control over our bodies? If we fell asleep or had a bowel movement at the exact same time every day, regardless of circumstances? Instead, the Circadian Rhythm anticipates and prepares you for what is likely to occur, based on prior events. Things like eating, physical activity, stress, and exposure to light/dark directly and powerfully affect every cell in your body, thus synchronizing your Circadian Rhythm with your environment. The Sleep-Wake Cycle Your Circadian Rhythm can be divided into, that which occurs while you are awake, and that which occurs while you sleep. While awake, you’re motivated you to expend energy in order to attain the things which make life possible (food, love, money, etc.) by the stress inherent to being without. Once you attain those things, you are then compelled to rest/sleep so your body may repair and replenish what you expended in pursuit of those things with the nutrients from the food you ate...so that you are as fit or fitter to attain again tomorrow. Your brain controls all your wakeful activities with a system called the “Reticular Activating System (RAS).” Getting out of bed, drinking your coffee, checking Facebook, driving to work, etc. all require mental processes that rely on your RAS. The activation of your RAS largely depends on a single neurotransmitter called “orexin.” (Narcolepsy, a disorder of excessive daytime sleepiness, is caused by a defect of orexin.) The word “orexin” comes from the Greek root “orexia,” (opposite anorexia) for appetite. Unsurprisingly, orexin also triggers eating. The fact that a single neurotransmitter enables the wakeful-state AND triggers eating might suggest to you that expending energy in order to attain food is a primary function of your wakeful brain. Conversely, sleep becomes possible when orexin and the RAS shut-down. Several things can contribute to this, but the most pertinent here is the onset of dim light. A gland in your brain, called the “pineal gland” secretes a chemical called melatonin in response to dim light; melatonin inhibits orexin and the RAS while activating another part of your brain, called the “VentroLateral PreOptic nucleus (VLPO),” which also inhibits orexin and the RAS. In the natural environment, dim light onset occurs as the sun sets. Therefore, our entire Circadian Rhythm, and therefore eating-behavior and sleeping, is shaped by the Sun—gradually adjusted each day to align with the seasonal changes of daylight. Falling Victim to Shorter Days and Longer Nights You and I, we don’t fully live in the natural world. In the natural world, we’d get fatter during the summer cornucopia and leaner in the food-sparse winter as our bodies feasted on that stored body-fat. We’d stay up 16, 17, 18 hours in the longer warmer days, but sleep 12, 13, 14 hours as our section of the Earth was tilted away from the sun. Now, though, we can live in eternal sunshine; we’re bathed in the artificial light of our homes and offices, it’s injected straight into our eyeballs by computers, phones, tables, and televisions. Ancient organic bodies ill-fit for an evolving synthetic world. Rather than our behaviors being gently coaxed along by the sun, we’ve adopted technologies that smoothly hijack our brains—the consequences most severe and apparent in the winter. Just because the seasons change does NOT mean the demands of our lives do. Wake-up, work, eat, get home, go to sleep…do it again tomorrow. All the signals of the natural world—the cooler weather, the grey ambiance, the shorter light—are rivaled now…and our health caught in the cross-fire. We run our lives on a clock unaffected by change, but with bodies completely synched to an ever-changing, and synthetically incongruent, environment. It would bad enough if we’d only extended our summer daylight hours to all year long, but we’ve done so much worse. We cannot eliminate the effects of the sun on our Circadian Rhythm and eating-behaviors, those natural signals will forever urge us slumber—but the brightly lit worlds we’ve created incompletely thwart them. Whereas we’re naturally inclined to sleep, we are dually compelled to remain alert; we are fatigued but cannot sleep. In a word, we are stressed. Stress drives our desires for pleasure. For many of us, this pleasure is in the form of food—junk-food, the type of food that layers on our winter coat. It isn’t made any easier, nor is it likely a coincidence, that type of food is even more abundant this time of year—Halloween candy, Thanksgiving pies, Christmas cookies… Rather than shedding our summer supply of body-fat, we get fatter in the winter because we fail to heed the programming of our bodies. Taking Back Your Night The message seems clear: especially now, it’s important you understand the effects of winter hours on your brain, body, and behaviors. You probably can’t change many scheduled things in your life but most of can control the light in our houses, our use of electronic screen-devices, and when we go to bed. If you’re staying up late and looking at bright screens, you’re going to experience increasing sleep deprivation, fatigue, the blues, undesirable eating-behaviors, and the consequences thereof; conversely, by following the sun, you can emerge from your winter-den next spring happy, healthy, and even leaner. Please, download your free Strong Start Package at the top of the page. Besides the Sleep eBook, you’ll also get 4 other eBooks on other important topics, as well as an additional eBook full of self-assessments and quick-tips. Thank you for reading. Be well, Nicklaus Millican

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 of your body. Yet the fat they contain is a valuable fuel-source, especially during exercise. In order to access that fuel during exercise, your body coaxes fat-cells to release some of their fat by releasing certain hormones; these same hormones also increase the ability of non-fat-cells (like muscle) to absorb and use that released fat. These exercise-hormones are released in proportion to the intensity of physical activity. In other words, walking causes a smaller release of these hormones than jogging causes a smaller release of these hormones than sprinting. One caveat: lower-intensity physical activity can be done longer, and so the total amount of released exercise-hormones must factor in both duration and intensity; furthermore, low-intensity activities become harder (more intense) as they continue for a long time—so even low-intensity activity can start become higher-intensity with time. How Exercise Does NOT Affect Body-Fat Levels We’ve already dispelled the idea that calories control body-fat, and that these effects of exercise must be understood by understanding how fat-cells function—which we’ve done above. If we didn’t look any deeper, this would seem to be a plausible explanation as to how exercise might decrease body-fat…but it’s NOT. Yes—the hormonal responses to exercise will cause fat-cells to release fat into circulation, and facilitate the absorption and burning of that fat in other cells of the body. Then how could this not explain how exercise might affect fat-loss? Let’s talk some more about the exercise-hormones, of which there are several—but one specifically is critical to understanding this paradox. “Cortisol,” like other exercise-hormones, is released with the onset of exercise, and remains elevated throughout; but unlike the other exercise-hormones, i plays an opposite role after exercise is over. During exercise, cortisol is doing many things including facilitating the removal of fat from fat-cells; but afterwards, cortisol increases the ability of fat-cells to absorb fat. Therefore, fat-cells tend to replenish their fat-stores after exercise. Think about it, how many people do you know (maybe even yourself) who exercise diligently, but never seem to get any leaner? Yet we’re continually told ya gotta exercise to burn those calories to lose that fat. But in reality, this type of mentality leads to strategies that have little long-term impact on fat-cells, leads to confusion over what type of exercise program is best, and leads to frustration and stress. How Exercise DOES Affect Body-Fat Levels I’m sorry if that last section was disappointing—but here, I’ll explain why it’s truly liberating! If calories cannot be used to prescribe effective fat-loss strategies, and exercise is a wash in the short-term, then you can go ahead and forget all of the ineffective caloric-based exercise recommendations you’ve been told follow! This does NOT mean you can become completely sedentary and expect anything but deteriorating health, but it does mean you be feel comfortable that any type of frequent physical activity you enjoy is adequate to facilitate a healthy body-composition. To make this point clearer, let’s conclude by discussing how exercise does affect body-fat levels (in the long-term). Physical activity affects the health of every cell in your body. Healthy cells are more apt to absorb and utilize nutrients (like fat), thus competing against fat-cells. Muscle represents a major competitor to body-fat. Though different types of physical activity will lead to different types of muscle (high-intensity leads to bigger/stronger/faster muscles, low-intensity to smaller/efficient/endurable muscles), each type is made healthy by regularly engaging in physical activity.

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 redundant mechanisms which aim to maintain adequate fuel to your body; in essence, ELEM causes your body to expend less energy and compels you to eat. So even if you could be sure the energy-deficit imposed by ELEM was compensated by reducing fat-cells (which again, isn’t necessarily true), it wouldn’t matter because your body’s expenditure of energy plummet—and your motivation to eat would steadily increase until you began bingeing. And that’s the focal point off this article. A Brief Model of Eating Behavior In order to understand the rest of this article, you have to accept that eating-behavior is NOT a matter of choice. Sure, you can decide what/if to eat at any given moment—and this is a difficult idea to accept. But it might help to understand eating-behavior like blinking­-behavior; at any given moment, you can choose to/how to blink your eyes or not, yet you blink your eyes all day long without even noticing—furthermore, at a certain point, no matter how hard you try, you cannot help but blink. So if dry eyeballs is the insurmountable cause for blinking, what motivates you to eat? At this point, it might be helpful to mention the actual system in your brain which controls eating-behavior—called, the “Limbic System.” The Limbic System as well as the entire topic of eating-behavior, are covered in more depth in the full Fat-Loss eBook—here, it’s only important to understand the Limbic System integrates information from your mind, body, and environment to yield motivated behaviors, and the major signal to your Limbic System to motivate eating is stress. We generally associate “stress” with the emotional experience of enduring a challenge or hardship. However, your body experiences stress in many forms: emotional, physical, social, etc. It may not seem intuitive that stress would be the major motivator to eat—you would assume we would be motivated to eat based on some balance similar to the Calories-In, Calories-Out model…but we don’t! Rather, stress knocks the chemicals of your Limbic System out of whack in such a way that is uncomfortable, but which can be restored by eating; eating, then is “pleasurable,” because it relieves stress—the greater stress to which you’re exposed, the more pleasure you will seek to restore balance. Let’s consider this in the full context of ELEM, an unrelenting stressor of ever-increasing magnitude. ELEM Leads to Disordered Eating Many hormonal events occur during stress, one very important being the release of “cortisol.” When cortisol is initially released, it helps you to overcome a stressor by increasing your physical and mental capabilities. Once the stressor is resolved, cortisol remains elevated to initiate recovery from that stressor—which necessarily requires eating…which cortisol helps to motivate. In the short term, then, stress eventually causes you to seek food. This urge might be ignored for a while, but forever resisting and ever-strengthening urge is futile—especially when you consider that ELEM and stress leave you ever more fatigued and motivated to relieve your suffering (by eating to chemically rebalance). This is compounded with time because cortisol actually increases the neural pathways in your Limbic System which motivate you to eat. Eventually, when your ability to sustain the unsustainable inevitably falters, ELEM ends amid ravenous wanting and binge-behavior. Not only does ELEM subconsciously lead to disordered eating, through your suffering and bingeing, sense of failure and shame, an unhealthy relationship with food grows! Without understanding the basic physiology behind fat-cells, energy-expenditure, eating-behavior, etc., others as well as yourself generally blame you for some sort of failing. But you have not failed! You have been failed by those who made you believe ELEM was the solution.

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—he probably has more total muscle, fat, bone, organ-mass, etc. that must be fed. Without going into the details of Eating-Behavior here, you can understand that his body’s larger demand for fuel manifests as eating more than his smaller wife. Notice that I didn’t label either person as fat, lean, muscular, etc. The point is that it wouldn’t matter the composition of their bodies—every type of cell requires fuel, and so a larger body needs more fuel, period. Now consider how the day-to-day experience of a fatter person compares/contrasts to that of a thin person. Applying the same ideas above, you can see how a fatter person will likely eat more than a thinner person based on the difference in body-size. The ability of body-fat (as opposed to other types of tissue, like muscle) to affect increased food-consumption, though, is actually more devious. To understand why, you have to know about a hormone called “insulin.” Insulin is a hormone released by your pancreas, mostly in response to eating carbohydrate (fruit, starches, sweets, etc.). Insulin has several jobs, but perhaps its most important to is to shuttle fuel (from food, for example) from your blood into the different cells of your body—which can later use that fuel for energy. The here’s the thing—those cells have a difficult time using that fuel as long as insulin is high, and so it tends to build-up instead. Here’s the really devious part: especially for fatter people, fat-cells are more sensitive the effects of insulin than other parts of their body. Consequently, especially from eating insulin-releasing carbohydrate, more nutrients can be absorbed by fat-cells than non-fat cells in people with more fat. The most obvious problem here is fat-cell growth is favored and reduction hindered, but a little less obvious is that this simulates starvation because 1) fat-cells absorb an unfair amount of nutrients at the expense of other cells, and 2) all fuel is prevented from being burned by the storage-effects of insulin. Of course, the response of many is to again suggest fatter people should eat-less and exercise more. The next article I post will discuss how eating less causes disordered eating-behaviors, such as bingeing. You can see the problem for those struggling with obesity, then: they are truly hungrier than thin people because they are larger, but the long-term starvation of eating less is unsustainable; either way, they are literally starving! Throughout this site, you’ll find truly effective and sustainable fat-loss strategies that do not require ELEM. Here, though, I only want to point out how important it is to appreciate the fact that we all experience unique and un-shareable versions of life-events; we must remove our own conceptions of the world when trying to infer the experiences of others. To impose unrealistic (and ineffective) expectations of sustained starvation is misled at best, draconian and bigoted at worst. Please, practice the humility and sympathy necessary to accept others’ experiences are unknowable to you, before acting in a hurtful manner that suggests otherwise. Thank you for reading

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 be a featured topic of future posts (and of course, my book). The important points for this post, though, are: The regulation of body-composition has very little to do with the caloric quantities of diet and exercise. Rather, there are numerous environmental, genetic, and physiological factors which MUST BE, bur rarely are, considered. By inappropriately equating being overweight to overeating and/or under-exercising, being fat is treated as a choice made by weak-willed people; those who do not struggle with weight, then, are defined as being stronger than heavier people for no other (likely endowed) virtue than thinness. You might imagine, then, this type of ploy is rather upsetting to me--and I apparently cannot disguise that; some pre-readers of my book have commented that the tone of the book is rather prickly. By and large, those who struggle with weight have given the book rave reviews and appreciated this voice--but some (by no means all or even most) of those who do not struggle with weight say it sounds rather condescending and angry. Condescending? like telling people who struggle with weight that it's their fault? that they could completely change if they were a bit more like...well, you? Angry? Damn right! And you should be too! Not for no good reason, but because none of the information refuting these silly ideas of body-fat regulation are not new or secret—only ignored and disparaged so as to profit from an ever-failing paradigm of body-fat regulation. Assuming thin people have anything valuable to say about controlling body-composition is like assuming all tall people are expert basketball players. The major disconnect seems to arise because we have difficulty accepting that the experience of other people is different than our own; it's easy for a naturally-thin person to believe they have The Answer, no matter how ridiculous it actually is, because being thin is their natural state--almost nothing they do will permanently change that and almost anything they do correlates to them being thin. Conversely, it's easy for naturally-heavy people to believe naturally-thin people because they might assume that thin people likely struggle with the same experiences, but have found some way of overcoming them. The fact of the matter, though, is that we all have different proclivities and susceptibilities to storing body-fat based on the factors alluded to above. A naturally-thin person's experience is absolutely different than a person more like to gain body-fat. We must all commit to developing an accurate understanding of the topic...ending the misconceptions that have fostered prejudices against those whom struggle with weight. That's all I want to say here. I regret this story came up at a time that I have so little to offer on my blog. Shortly, physiological explanations will be made available. If you're inclined, subscribe at the top of the page to receive 6 free ebooks, as well as updates to this sites content--otherwise, check back soon. Thanks for reading.