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The Benefits of Poo - How Many Times a Day Do You Go?

Let's have a bit of fun today and talk about something so rarely spoken of... Poo!

When I ask my clients to talk to me about their daily habits on the toilet, most get embarrassed and wonder why I'm asking.

Simply put... If you are not going to the toilet frequently, you are not releasing toxins.

Let's just say... today, you woke up and had your morning bacon and eggs. Then you go to work, sitting behind the wheel of your car in traffic. An hour later you show up and the food has just sat in your tummy.

Then you have your morning coffee on the way into work because you need that hit of caffeine to get your day started. You get to work and take the lift up to your floor and then sit behind your desk typing away at the keyboard.

You get a bit hungry and decide to have a pastry that the office has brought in for the staff. Then sit back down again.

Off to lunch where you have a sandwich that likely has more bread than fillings and remember the sugary sauce you add to it so that it tastes better.

Then back to the desk.

For your afternoon tea, if you remember to move away from your desk to eat it, is a piece of fruit.

Are you getting the picture? Eat... sit. Eat... sit.

Now, where in the day was the toilet stops? I am amazed at how many people think it's OK to spend even one day without going poo! Never mind the lack of water in people's diets, and consequently a lack of urination.

So why is it important to frequent ourselves at the toilet?

To EXPEL SH#T! Excuse my language but that's what you are doing! You take in all this food and please remember that food is not something we should eat just because it tastes nice and we are emotional beings, so we must eat to suit our cravings.

Food is a source of energy. Once the body has gotten what it needs out of the food, then the rest needs to be eliminated. When you don't eliminate it, then you get a build up of toxins in your body and your colon.

The toxic build up can actually cause decay in your body. This decay can attract viruses and bacteria and all sorts of yucky bugs to the area. When the yucky bugs are there many of the good bacteria that keep our system clean, gets killed off.

Imagine an animal killed on the street with bugs flying around it and eating it from the smell of the decay. That's what your insides can start to look like! YUCK! No Thanks!

All of the build up and bugs can lead to disease and sickness. The first symptoms may be fogginess, forgetfulness, restlessness, fatigue, and lack of endurance and energy.

So, in order to keep your insides healthy, you MUST POO! Going to the toilet a couple times a day is a GREAT thing! Also remember that you must drink water to flush out your system as well. If you don't have enough water in your body, then the fluids that move your food through get sticky and it makes it more difficult again for your body to flush out the toxins.

How can you keep your insides clean?

To start with, eating a diet high in fibre is part of a healthy lifestyle. This doesn't mean go out and buy some high fibre shake to get your bowels moving. Eat things with roughness that will clean you as they move through! Eating fruit and veggies is nature's way of cleaning you.

Exercise!

Get up and move and things inside of you move! You know you should do it. The question is, "Are you?"

To fast or not to fast?

The thought of not eating for some people sounds like the craziest, stupidest thing you can do. I know it did to me when I first heard about it. The more that I have learned about fasting, the more I understand it's wonderful benefits, if it's right for you.

The most common fasts that I have seen are...

Water fast, where you don't eat anything and only drink water and...

Juice fast, where you don't eat solid foods, but can juice anything and also drink water.

They can be done for different durations depending on the results you are after.

If a fast seems like too much for you, then you can do a cleanse.

There are multiple ways to cleanse. All of them should eliminate anything processed. That also means no added sugars to anything. All the ones that I have seen eliminate dairy as well. This leaves you with eating yummy fruits, vegetables and proteins.

The reason for doing your cleanse, will determine how far you take it.

For either a cleanse or a fast, please speak to a healthcare professional before you start to make sure that it is safe for you. Look for naturopaths or dieticians who specialize in this area or who have worked with these in the past.

The benefits to fasting or cleansing are amazing!

You will regain vitality, have glowing skin, can help with eczema, headaches, pains in the body, and respiratory and circulatory conditions, kick starts weight loss, increases your metabolism, boosts your energy and so much more.

I will give you fair warning from personal experience... Although these are the benefits and they do come eventually... The first few days can be horrible. Your body is releasing all the toxins and dead smelly stuff filled with bugs into the system to get it out. By doing so, it's likely you will feel worse before you feel better. Trust me though, it's worth it, so stick with it!

Colonics and Enemas... What the heck are they?

Okay, so this gets into messy territory. I know many of you don't want to imagine something being stuck up your bum filling with you with water so that you can have it all flow back out again. But you just did!

It took me a long time to get the courage up to actually try this. Since doing it, I'm a huge fan!

The difference between the two is simple. With a colonic, there is a tube gently placed up your bum and water is moved through so that it gets all the way through your colon. As it is happening, your faeces is happily moving through another tube and out of you, so you will not see or smell it. This is administered by a qualified practitioner.

You can do an enema at home with a kit that you can buy online or at some chemists. It only gets to the lower part of the colon. You allow the water to go up and let it sit for a while, then you go to the toilet and let it all come out. My husband and I did this together for the first time... Let me tell you it was a bonding experience.

At first it's a bit uncomfortable, having the pressure of water inside of you, but the results are wonderful!

My tummy is flatter, I feel clean, have more energy, my skin gets a glow back, I am more focused and my overall sense of well-being is lifted. It truly only takes 30 minutes at home, if you do an enema, and is well worth it!


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How Your Diet Can Make You Into A Better Athlete

With the exception of those certain mutants among us who eat candy, smoke cigarettes, and drink soda (sorry, DIET soda) and coffee all day and then go ahead and send 5.15, all of our climbing abilities are affected by what we eat and when. This is unfortunate, since many of us would just love to subsist on cookies and Nutella sandwiches because they taste oh, so delicious.

There's a lot that goes into using diet to affect athletic performance and overall health, and it can be really confusing sometimes with all of the conflicting research and opinions we see everywhere. My job as a nutrition therapist is to make sense of it myself and relay that coherence to others. The science of nutrition is still in its infancy really, but there are some guidelines you can follow to help you feel energetic, strong and clear-headed - the overarching qualities of a successful person - not just a successful climber. What I am about to tell you has nothing to do with supplements that will make you stronger or super foods that will give you more endurance. There are no magic bullets to make you send your project. There aren't even clear cut rules about what will make you flail all over it - if there were, we'd all be climbing 5.14. So, sit back and prepare yourself for some eye-opening, jaw-dropping... common sense (with a little science to back it up).

There is one mundane, obvious and absolutely imperative topic that just might drastically change your life, and more importantly your 8a.nu scorecard. Breakfast.

How many of you eat some sort of baked good or cereal or other variation of sugar with (insert grain here) for breakfast? How many of you also drink coffee in the morning because your breakfast just doesn't do the job of keeping you awake until lunch, or for that matter 10am? If this is you - this is also most people, so don't feel too ashamed... How many of you, along with around 40% of the rest of the U.S., don't eat breakfast at all? The number one reason we have so many stressed out, tired, overweight people in this country is because we're not eating a good breakfast. That is a bold statement and I just made it - confidently. So, what's a good breakfast? It is NOT sugary cereal with skim milk, instant oatmeal with orange juice, a bagel with jelly, or a doughnut and coffee. These things may taste good, but they will sadly do you no good throughout your day or your life.

The epic story of what happens when you eat these foods begins with blood sugar. All of us have heard about blood sugar. It's the level of sugar, or glucose, in your blood at any given time. The sugar fuels our daily metabolic and athletic activities and what you want is enough sugar in your blood at all times to keep your mood and energy level stable. You've also all heard of adrenaline, especially as climbers. It's the stuff that pumps through your body (or, at least my body) when you're pumped out of your skull and about to take a giant whip and you're not sure if your belayer is watching you or giving some guy beta on a different route 30 feet away. You get sweaty, light-headed, tunnel vision so you can't even see the jug in front of your face, your legs start to tremble, your heart starts audibly beating, and you may have the sudden urge to puke all over your belayer, and maybe for good reason. This is generally described by us as intense fear.

Cut to 11am on Monday morning after a breakfast of jelly-filled doughnuts. When you eat super sugary foods without any fat, fiber and protein (i.e. oil, veggies and meat) to make the meal last longer, your blood sugar plummets quickly because you use up those simple sugars so easily after you've been fasting for hours overnight. If you'd eaten 2 eggs, some sausage, spinach, avocado and salsa instead of the doughnuts, the fat and fiber and protein would mitigate the steep rise and fall of your blood sugar and keep you full and energized for longer, keeping your blood sugar less erratic. This is what your body was meant to eat - fat, protein and fibrous carbohydrates. Not sugar that's taken from corn, heated to hellish temperatures and chemically denatured enough to happily sit on a shelf for years. Cavemen would have had a hard time finding that on the prairie. Think meat (we'll get to the vegetarians next), nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables and that's what we evolutionarily grew up eating.

When you eat very sugary foods or skip meals instead of eating whole, nutrient dense foods, your body considers this a stressful event and gives you a small surge of adrenaline to get you through to your next meal. To a lesser degree your body experiences the same uncomfortable symptoms of adrenaline you felt on the climb you were about to pitch off of, but instead of intense fear it manifests as anxiety. You're also feeling the effects of low blood sugar - brain fog and muscle weakness. Weakness. I hope my point is surfacing.

There's more. Then imagine that once you finally get to lunch you're starving, so you eat a big, doughy sandwich, some cookies, a bag of chips and some sort of sparkly, sugary beverage. Even though this meal probably has ample protein, fat and maybe fiber in it, you're not in the clear. Your blood sugar is like a boat rocking back and forth in response to a big wave - the wave hits and the boat lurches to one side. It doesn't stop there - it pitches back the other way almost as forcefully as the first time. The swaying only subsides when the force of the wave dissipates. Or big waves keep hitting it and it continues to sway wildly. Your blood sugar's big wave is you eating a sugary breakfast or skipping it altogether. The violent swaying only subsides when you start your day with protein, fat and fiber and repeat every 3 to 5 hours. Every single day. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be on a boat in calm water than be capsized by a storm every day...

Coffee. You'll have to excuse the prolonged analogy, but imagine that coffee is a giant whale, hitting the side of your boat. Every cup of coffee is a blow to the boat's side. It's is called a stimulant because it stimulates your adrenals to spit out adrenaline, which is why you feel... er, shall we say, awake. Wouldn't we rather use our adrenaline stores for something important like an epic big wall rather than for dragging our asses through our morning every day?

Demanding so much of the adrenal glands for adrenaline takes its toll on the rest of the body - namely the thyroid gland. The thyroid is responsible for little things like body weight, temperature and metabolism. Part of its job is to make sure we have enough energy to get through our day, and if we don't, the pituitary gland sends a message to it telling it to get off its ass and make us more. Unfortunately, the pituitary is also responsible for sending the same kind of rallying messages to the adrenals. If the adrenals are overworked by our blood sugar and coffee "issues", not to mention our climbing addiction, the pituitary gets really tired and lags on its communication to the thyroid. This is why so many of us are constantly tired and depressed, not able to lose weight, cold all the time, and have poor digestion and sleep habits. It's also one big reason we get frequent headaches, muscle cramps, water retention, slow wound healing and why so many of us are sick much of the time. Read through all of those symptoms again and note how many of them you can assign to yourself or your significant other or the person sitting next to you.

So, how does a low functioning thyroid affect our climbing? Well, let's be honest - there's not one person who can climb their best when they're constipated all the time - oh yeah, that's another sign of thyroid dysfunction. No climber who is chronically depressed and anxious is going to be able to confidently lead climb at their limit - we've all witnessed that. And even if it's only 10 pounds that you are struggling to lose, those 10 pounds can make your project feel way harder than if you were at your optimal weight. And ladies, how many of you would like to have had better circulation in your numb fingers on a cold day outside? Yet another symptom of thyroid dysfunction. Water retention in our joints can lead to pain and inflammation - and just because your ankles aren't swollen like a pregnant woman, it doesn't mean you're not retaining water, guys. And finally, who can climb their best when they get sick all the time? We all know how drained and weak we get with the flu. What's the first thing I tell people who have thyroid dysfunction? Eat a good breakfast.

So, to you mutants out there climbing V15 fueled by sugar packets and sugar water - how hard do you think you could climb if you balanced your blood sugar?


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Does Coffee Speed Up Your Metabolism?

   

   
    Some people drink coffee religiously. They feel that they must have it every morning to get their day started. Does coffee speed up your metabolism? In a sense, this may be true.

Coffee contains a lot of caffeine. Caffeine is a stimulant, which wards off drowsiness and increases alertness. In this sense, caffeine does speed up metabolism, but not indefinitely.

What exactly does caffeine do? Caffeine increases the free fatty acids in blood plasma. Although this has no bearing on metabolism, it does reflect on diet. Caffeine also acts as an inhibitor for adenosine in the brain, which effects RNA synthesis in the body.

Caffeine also acts like adrenaline for the body. By imitating adrenaline it speeds up the heart-rate and this is how it affects metabolism. Does coffee speed up your metabolism? Yes. But for those who consume caffeine on a regular basis this effect is not as strong or noticeable.

Why does it not affect normal consumers? People who regularly drink coffee or other caffeinated products tend to build up a tolerance for caffeine. Caffeine is structurally similar to adenosine and binds to adenosine receptors in the brain. The more you drink these caffeinated beverages then the more receptors your brain will develop, making the effects of caffeine seem less apparent.

So in short, does coffee speed up your metabolism? Yes, it does, but not to the extent that one would like. To really get your metabolism going the best route to go is all natural methods. Methods such as exercising, eating the right foods, eating breakfast, and eating more times in the day while having small proportions.

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10 Reasons To Drink Coffee Every Day

Our consumption of coffee has been steadily growing over the last few decades and is showing no signs of slowing down. High Street coffee chains are finding ever more innovative ways to keep our interest, and therefore, to keep drinking coffee more than ever before.
Countless articles have been written about the health benefits (or otherwise) of drinking coffee, so we thought we'd pull all this information together and see whether there really are good reasons to drink coffee on a daily basis.
It's been shown that an amazing 54% of Americans drink coffee every day, usually as a way of kick-starting their day at breakfast times, and some countries (particularly in Scandinavia and Southern Europe) have even higher numbers than this. So here are our top 10 reasons for being a regular coffee drinker.

1. Coffee Could Lower The Chance of Developing Skin Cancer
A study conducted by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School followed 112,897 men and women over a 20-year period and their findings appear to indicate that women who drink three or more cups of coffee each day are less likely to develop skin cancer than women who drink no coffee at all. The study didn't mention any statistics for men though!
2. Consumption of Coffee May Lower Suicide Levels
A study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health discovered that drinking between two and four cups of coffee each day reduces the incidents of suicide among both men and women by nearly 50 percent. One of the reasons put forward to explain this is that coffee has been shown to act as an antidepressant by aiding in the production of the body's neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline and serotonin. A number of other studies appear to concur with these findings.

3. The Aroma of Coffee Can Reduce Stress
A group of researchers at Seoul University in South Korea looked at the brains of laboratory rats who were displaying signs of stress caused by deprivation and found that the rats exposed to the aroma of coffee displayed changes in the levels of brain proteins linked to stress. The study only covered stress caused by lack of sleep rather than more general stress, though other studies have shown similar finding when looking at other specific causes of stress in humans.
4. Coffee Could Reduce The Symptoms of Parkinson's Disease
It was reported in ScienceDaily that drinking coffee may help people with Parkinson's disease control their movement. The study author, Ronald Postuma MD said that studies have shown people who regularly drink appear to be at a lower risk of developing Parkinson's disease. However, an additional study also found that caffeine can also assist movement symptoms for people who already have Parkinson's.
5. Coffee Makes People Happy
Another study, this time carried out by the National Institute of Health concluded that people drinking a minimum of four cups of coffee each day were 10 percent less likely to show signs of depression than those who drink no coffee at all. This has been put down to the levels of antioxidants present in coffee rather than a caffeine high (cocaine consumption can also give a caffeine high but actually increases the chances of depression).
6. Coffee Can Increase Your Brainpower
Really? Well think about it, you normally go for a cup of coffee when you're short of sleep or need to stay alert. That jolt not only helps to keep you from falling asleep, it really does mentally sharpen you up and improve your reactions. CNN reported that drinking coffee can allow the brain to function more efficiently. No matter what measure is used - reaction times, observation, attention span, logic, reasoning skills - all show an improvement after consuming coffee. So if you're in need of something to keep you alert on a long journey, it really is true that there's little that can beat a good cup of coffee.
7. Coffee Keeps Your Liver Healthy (Especially If You Drink Alcohol)
A huge study involving over 120,000 people published in 2006 concluded that people drinking at least one cup of coffee daily were up to 20 percent less likely to develop cirrhosis of the liver - a serious disease caused by the excessive drinking of alcohol that can result in liver failure or the development of cancer. The head author of the study, Arthur Klatsky, reported that the consumption of coffee has a protective effect on the liver, particularly against alcoholic cirrhosis, and the higher the daily coffee consumption, the lower the risk appears to be of developing fatal cirrhosis of the liver.
Further studies carried out elsewhere have concluded that drinking coffee can assist in preventing people from developing NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). An international team of scientists discovered that drinking at least four cups of coffee a day can be beneficial in preventing the development of NAFLD.
8. Coffee Can Improve Your Sporting Performance.
An article in New York Times reported that "Scientists and athletes alike have known for years that a cup of coffee prior to a workout jolts athletic performance, especially in endurance sports like distance running and cycling." The caffeine present in coffee can increase the levels of fatty acids in the bloodstream, which in turn allows athletes' muscles to absorb and burn fats for fuel, and therefore saving small reserves of carbohydrates for later on in the exercise. This is particularly useful for endurance athletes such as marathon runners and long distance cyclists.

9. Coffee Can Lower The Risk of Type 2 Diabetes.
As we mentioned in one of our coffee articles a few weeks ago, coffee reduces the risk of Type 2 diabetes. A study carried out by researchers at the American Chemical Society concluded that cases of type 2 diabetes are around 50 percent lower among people drinking a minimum of four cups of coffee a day. Subsequently, the risk drops by a further 7 percent for every additional daily cup of coffee consumed, though of course there are other health implications in doing this.
10. Coffee Can Keep Your Brain Healthy.
Studies carried out by the University of South Florida concluded that both men and women over 65 years of age with higher blood levels of caffeine developed Alzheimer's disease between two and four years later than those with lower levels of caffeine in their blood. They pointed out that coffee consumption cannot be shown to completely protect people from Alzheimer's, but that moderate coffee consumption can appreciably reduce the risk of Alzheimer's or at least delay its onset.
We hope this article has been of interest, if you have anything to add to this, please let us know and we will include it in a future article.


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