1. If you have sensitive skin that gets dry and itch really easily, nothing beats baby body wash.

Forget the overly-scented florescent blue ‘manly’ body washes, for me it’s Johnson’s Head-to-Toe or nothing.

(Great for sensitive skin)

2. If you have curly hair (and I mean REALLY curly hair), pretty much any shampoo is going to strip it and cause to frizz.

If I use the wrong shampoo I end up looking like Will Farrel from Semi Pro.

(NOT the author of Eat Stop Eat)

My hair relief comes from (once again) stealing from my one year old daughter. Nothing beats Baby Shampoo if you have curly hair. Seriously. Give it a try.

(Great for curls)

3. I’m sure any parent will agree that when you are shopping for baby food, you pay little attention to the exact ratio of protein to carbs in the food. You don’t examine foods and try to guess whether the protein is slow release or fast release, and I doubt you’d go looking for baby formula with extra added green tea extract.

Nope, the obsessive compulsive nutritionism approach to food goes out the window when you are dealing with little ones.

Instead, you fret over quality. You want food without anything ‘added’ that shouldn’t be added. You want food made from ingredients you recognize.

I go out of my way to avoid baby oatmeal with extra ‘stabilizers’, or yogurt with thickening agents. It is quality above everything else when dealing with very young children.

In fact, this is where I developed my theory of eating for quality (see the post HERE).

What I beleive to be the optimal way to approach eating, was actually developed during a rather stressful Daddy-anxiety attack while grocery shopping and trying to find yogurt made from whole milk as opposed to ‘modified milk ingredients’

(Check out how she goes for the really, really big piece)

So the nutrition advice for today is feed your self the way you would feed a baby..just without the mess

BP

(Are you kidding me!? I’ve got to shovel THAT just to get to the gym?)

The good news is I had a great vacation, and was able to spend a ton of time with the family. The other good news is that neither my wife nor I gained any weight, despite eating “vacation style” for 7 days.

We made a point of practicing the rare art of “fasting to avoid spending tons of cash at the airport” and made sure our fasts occurred during our flight to Florida, and during our flight home.

Worked like a charm.

So here’s my tip…If you are planning on going on vacation, keep up your Eat Stop Eat regimen, but make sure to spend the ‘travel days’ fasting, it will cut down on costs, and lots of calories that you don’t really need (I doubt any of us burn a lot of calories sitting on a plane).

Not only was it a great vacation, but last week was also full of some great reviews for Eat Stop Eat.

First, Craig Ballantyne shared some very positive reviews of Eat Stop Eat from his TTmembers site (you can read them here ==> Eat Stop Eat Feedback)

Then Eat Stop Eat was reviewed at Your New Body – You can read this review here ==> Eat Stop Eat Review

Finally, I read a great post at the Skwigg blog, where Skwigg stated that Eat Stop Eat has helped her become a “Happy Eater”. (You can read Skwigg’s post here ==> Happy Eater)

In an industry full of obsessive compulsive eating, nutritional scaremongering, and food confusion, nothing could make me happier than hearing someone describe themselves as a happy eater.

Really, this should be everyones goal.

BP

No more counting calories to lose weight

In all honesty this couldn’t have come at a better time. I have a major speaking engagement tomorrow I have to prepare for, and I have a number of emails I need to get written.

Naturally, since I have a crazy amount of work to do, I started the day off with the perfect procrastination tool – I decided to clean out my in-box.

This quickly became an eye opening expose into the origins of our Obsessive Compulsive Eating craze.

Ever wonder why so many people are so confused about what is good for them and what is bad for them? Well I think I may have found part of the answer. Take a look at the following e-mail subject lines I found in my In-box about caffeine, coffee and tea:

‘Coffee linked to lower ovarian cancer risk’, ‘Caffeine linked to risk of miscarriage’, ‘Black tea shows blood sugar benefits’, ‘Caffeine linked to higher blood glucose levels’.

Or, how about Carbs:

‘The carb rotation diet’, ‘eat all the carbs you want’, ‘carbs kill’, ‘whole grains may reduce pancreatic cancer risk’, ‘Good and bad carb definitions misleading says review’, ‘Carbs linked to obesity’, ‘Eat all the carbs you want and still lose weight’.

and sugar:

‘High Fructose drinks no different to sucrose, milk for satiety’, ‘mechanism proposed for fructose syrup-obesity link’, ‘Soft drinks not responsible for obesity – study’, ‘Fructose linked to fatty artery deposits, study says’, ‘Study finds no link between sugar drinks and kiddie obesity’, ‘Should you really avoid fruit juice?’

And these were all just from January!

By constantly reporting on small little snip-its of research, writers can definitely create great headlines, but they do it at the risk of confusing their readers.

In academics, you constantly have to make sure you are aware of the total body of research. Which is just a fancy way of saying you need to know all the research on a certain topic, and how all this research fits together, before you should comment on that issue.

I feel comfortable talking to you about fasting, because I have spent years studying it. However, if I started reporting on one single paper that I read on Cardiovascular disease, then I would be doing you a major disservice as I do not know the total body of research on that topic.

It is this quick “snip-it” approach to reporting on nutrition and health that I think plays a role in people’s obsessive compulsive eating. We only hear little tiny pieces of the story and very rarely do we hear about the nutrition “big picture”.

Always remember when you read anything about nutrition that you must consider how this one little article fits into the total big picture.

BP

Sounds like great news, especially if you are like me and fast 6 to 8 times per month.
Unfortunately, after looking over the study, I did a google search to see what the newswires were reporting and found some very disheartening news bytes.

According to an article I found on Yahoo News, when asked to comment on the study Dr. Raymond Gibbons of the MayoClinic (who was not involved in the study), stated “Fasting resets the metabolic rate”.

Now I’m not sure what Dr. Gibbons meant by “resets”, and he was probably speaking about long term chronic fasting,but the author of the article on Yahoo News added these words after Dr. Gibbons quote “slowing it down to adjust to less food and forcing the body to store calories as soon as people resume eating”.

These words cannot be Dr. Gibbons. They just can’t be. There is no way I can accept that a former heart association president would make such an incorrect statement, especially since it was in reference to a 24 hour fast.

This begs the question, why is the mainstream media so afraid to tell people to eat less? Why is it that when research on the benefit of brief periods of fasting comes out, people have to comment on the dangers of long term chronic fasting.

Instead of just explaining that as little as one 24 hour fast per month can reduce your chances of being diagnosed with clogged arteries, they have to start digging to find something,(completely unrelated to the study), so they can throw some negative comments into the fray.

If you’ve read Eat Stop Eat, you know that metabolism doesnot decrease during brief fasting. In fact, evidence suggests that it may even go UP!

I know it will be an up hill battle, but my goal is to make the use of brief periods of fasting a respected and established method of weight control…because it is easy and because it works.

Are you fasting today?

BP

EAT STOP EAT, its easy, its effective, and new research suggests it’s good for your ticker!

“The number of children and adolescents with type 2 diabetes is on the rise as more and more kids become obese. The National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention co-sponsored the latest efforts of the National Diabetes Education Program (NDEP) to provide parents and teens with the tools necessary to reduce their risks of complications related to type 2 diabetes and manage their disease.”

Considering the post I just wrote about snack foods and breakfast cereals, I thought this was very timely.

BP

There is a very good reason why you should include as much variety of thse foods into your diet as possible…

Back when I worked in the supplement industry I was always amused when ever I looked through the list of potential new ingredients that had strong supporting research behind their effects.

The list typically looked something like this: Green tea extract, cinnamon extract, raspberry extract, pine nut extract, curcumin, cayenne pepper extract, mint, basil, rosemary…

Notice anything about this list?

These are all ingredients that you could be adding to your diet, especially if you are following the principle of nutrition by addition. Many of these ingredients are currently being studied for their potential to have positive effects on some very important markers of health, such as helping to manage healthy insulin levels, cholesterol levels and some of the more complex areas of body weight regulation.

The funny thing is, I often wonder if these ingredients would still be considered potential “functional foods” if we ate them more often. I believe that nuts, herbs and spices are one of the missing links in North American Health. If we ate them more often, then we would be regularly reaping their health benefits, and wouldn’t need some fancy label like “functional foods” to describe them!

Take pinolenic acid for example. This compound is currently being studied for its potential beneficial effects on several ofthe ‘hunger hormones’ that regulate our feelings of hunger.
This ingredient has some big potential and, most likely will be available in a pill sometime in the very near future.

Of course, instead of buying the pill, you could always get it in its natural form by adding a handful of pine nuts to your salad.

A perfect example of Nutrition by Addition and the importance of eating a variety of nuts, herbs and spices.

BP

PS – Here is what Craig Ballantyne had to say after he read Eat Stop Eat:

“This book will question everything you’ve ever been told about eating for fat loss. Bodybuilder mags have hyped up their eating & created inhuman workout programs for one reason – to sell supplements. That’s right. Most nutrition programs are “designed” just to sell you stuff like protein powder and expensive post-workout sugar drinks. Brad’s book turns the industry upside down and shows you how to eat normally, while making one slight, easy change that could bethe missing link in your fat loss nutrition program.”


You can learn more about fasting for weight loss by going here

Take chocolate cake for example. I love chocolate cake (actually, I love anything chocolate). One single slice of chocolate cake can have as much as 300 Calories, 40 grams of sugar and almost no fiber. But, if you top that piece of cake with a whole cup of raspberries you add only 60 Calories, with over 8 grams of fiber, and over 30 mg of Vitamin C. A perfect example of nutrition by addition!

Yesterday, my wife picked up a cookbook that she heard about on Oprah. It’s called “Deceptively Delicious” and it is written by Jessica Seinfeld (Yes, she’s married to Jerry). As usual I was skeptical, but WOW this book is full of great ideas for nutrition by addition!

I highly recommend “Deceptively Delicious” to anyone with picky eaters in their household, or who are looking for creative and fun ways to practice nutrition by addition.

BP

• 1 cup of strawberries
• 1 cup of blueberries
• 1 cup of sliced pear
• 1 cup of sliced cucumber
• 1 cup of chopped peppers
• 1 whole banana
• 1 cup of cherry tomatoes
• 1 whole sweet onion
• 1 cup sliced mushrooms
• 1 third cup of sliced almonds (thrown in to add some protein and fat)

(A salad for four, with a massive fruit dessert, or one bacon double cheeseburger, hold the fries)

Now, lets say that you need to eat about 3,500 calories to start putting on fat. If you were to try and eat this amount of calories from only fruits and veggies, you would need to eat that fruit salad (which could easily serve two people) and that veggie salad (which served four people at my house) FIVE times per day! Trust me, I had a hard enough time trying to get through one serving by myself, doing five in a day is next to impossible!

And this is the miracle of fruits and vegetables, they taste great and they take up a lot of space.

Here is where it gets really fun…If you make a point to eat lots of fruits and vegetables you can also eat things like a bacon double cheeseburger. Take a look at the picture of the salads and burger again. The total calorie content in that picture is around 1,400 Calories. A number low enough that just about any one would LOSE weight eating this amount of calories! In fact, you could easily throw in a good breakfast and still be eating around 1,700 calories, and be very, very full.

In fact, I did just that. With one exception. I added 150 Calories in the form of icecream to the Fruit bowl.

(Looks great, but even this was a massive amount of food to eat)

So for the day, I had two hard boiled eggs for breakfast, a massive salad for lunch (which took a lot of effort to finish), a bacon double cheeseburger for dinner and a very large bowl of fruit and ice-cream for dessert, and still managed to eat under 2,000 Calories AND I was absolutely stuffed by the end of the day.

Bottom line is if you concentrate on eating lots of fruits and vegetables, you can have treats like icecream and burgers.

BP

Fasting Diet, Circuit Training