I can outrun a bad diet, right?

Calories in equals calories out is what I've understood to be the way to lose weight.  Seems simple enough, nope.  A calorie isn't just isn't a calorie and a bad diet will undo whatever amount of exercise I've done.  

I've been thinking a lot about this for a very very long time.  When I was younger I could eat anything and everything I wanted and in massive quantities.  I was growing, developing and I needed this amount of energy in my diet.  As I've aged my body has changed but my diet hasn't.  I've come to the realization that I've been poisoning my body for a very long time because a "calories in equals calories out" equation is flawed.  

Let me explain. It’s true that all calories have the same amount of energy. One dietary calorie contains 4,184 Joules of energy. In that respect, a calorie is a calorie. I could eat 1,000 calories worth of cotton candy and 1,000 calories of steak.  So if they produce the same amount of Joules energy my body should treat them the same, right?

Protein calories are less fattening than calories from carbs and fat, because protein takes more energy to metabolize. Whole foods also require more energy to digest than processed foods.  Increased protein can lead to drastically reduced appetite and cause automatic weight loss without the need for calorie counting or portion control.

So a calorie isn't just a calorie when for years I believed they were. I can't excessive my way to health if I'm eating a diet high in fructose and added sugar.  The sustainable changes to my diet with the addition of regular exercise is a much more potent formula to health and the traditional "calorie in equals calories out" one.  

It gets me to thinking about the why?  Why have we been taught that this is the answer to getting healthy Vs improving our diet with less processed foods and limiting the amount of sugar we eat?  

The only thing I can boil it to down to is corporate profits/greed.  Multinational food corporations have systematically changed our diets so they can make more profits. Sugar, salt and fat are extremely cheap ingredients to add to thier highly processed foods.  Not only this but they are extremely addicting to our human brains.  They re wire our brains so slowly that we don't even notice the detrimental effects they're having until we get to the point of obesity and type 2 diabetes.  

I've pulled back the curtains and I'm astonished with what's been hiding behind them.  Now that I can see clearly for the first time my focus is lazer sharp.  

Mr. Ian Repay

Green Smoothie Blog #2

I've been doing a lot reading and listening to doctors who've spent a lot of time and energy studying sugar.  It's quite fascinating to see how the sugar industry and food companies have radically changed our diets over the past 40 years.  And none of it for our benefit.

What's been most interesting to me is a hormone called Leptin. From what I've understood so far this hormone was recently discovered in the late 90's. What it does is trigger the brain to say that you've had enough to eat.  Pretty simple job that it performs inside the brain.  However what research has shown is that with a diet high in sugar it weakens or blocks this signal to my brain.  With a diet high in sugar and time, my body has become leptin resistant similiar to insulin resistance.  I couldn't understand why I was always feeling hungry?  I had just ate a full meal but yet shortly after I was feeling snacky and hungry.  

When I got into green smoothie's I started to notice that first of all I was feeling full longer.  But the biggest thing I noticed was that my body's blood sugar was starting to level out.  Green smoothies are packed full of insoluble fibre.  There's some sugar but the amount is diluted with way more fibre making my body take a lot longer to absorb it.  This in turn resulted in less high and low spikes and ultimately less of those snacky cravings.  

I feel that my body has started to balance it's self out and my leptin resistance is going away.  The test I gave myself to confirm this was drinking water when I felt hungry.  In the past it didn't do much for me.  Now when I drink water when I'm hungry I almost instantly don't feel hungry and as long as I stay hydrated with water filling my stomach the hungry goes away and stays away.  I can now easily maintain a fast from 8pm to almost noon. 

I've used the green smoothie as crutch to help get me where I wanted to go.  Now that I'm there I'm there I'm using it feed my body and to feed me mentaly.  I've developed this habit that's helped me feel better and I can actually feel it!  It's helped me apply lazer focus and I'm using this focus on other areas of my life.

Recipe #2

600 ml water

1/2 cup fresh cucumbers

2 cup's fresh spring salad greens

2 cup's fresh spinach

2 cup's fresh kale

1/4 cup frozen avocados 

1/4 cup frozen pineapple

1/4 cup frozen pears. 

Blend and enjoy.

Mr. Repay

Hard not to be motivated!

Tonight was the annual (first in person in three years) SRKF Chinese New Year's banquet.  Congratulations to our new five black belts, amazing job and your all an inspiration to me.  Congratulations to the Tiger I Ho Chuan team, amazing demo and the skill each of you demonstrated was off the charts!

In some ways it was tough not to be there in person due to illness but a big thank you to Sifu Brinker and my team for setting up the live stream through Zoom.  The positive energy was felt through my screen and that's why I titled this blog the way I did.  

I wish I could bottle this evening up and un cork it when I'm not feeling it this year.  The best way to do this is to blog for me. Writing about where I and and how I'm feeling is going to be the way that keep the posative energy in front of me.  

I'm inspired and motivated to kick off the year of the rabbit with a group of posative and like minded team mates.  

Mr. Repay

Green smoothie #1

This series is going to be all about my green smoothie journey. Almost two months ago I had my first one. I was looking to make a change in my health/diet and everything I read about green smoothies was I was looking for.  Low sugar, high insoullable fibre, raw vegetables.  I was reluctant to try them for a long time as I though they'd all taste like raw broccoli which I hate.  Wow was I in for a pleasant surprise, the one I chose didn't taste anything like raw broccoli.  It was high in raw kale, spinach with some pineapple, green apples and mango in it.  It was absolutely delicious!  

What I loved about these smoothies was what they started to do for my hunger.  First off they are almost devoid of sugar so this helped balance out my blood sugar.  They are packed full of fibre which helped me feel full longer.  One week of having one a day I started to feel mentally sharper and my inflammation was going away.  At the same time as I started my green smoothie journey, I stopped eating fast food and cut out add sugar.  These things had a massive posative impact on my mental and physical health.  Inflammation was the number one things that I noticed.  I would wake up in the morning with back pain, not anymore! My joints were constantly swollen, not anymore!  Gassiness was always a problem, not anymore!

I'm having a ton of fun playing with different recipes and I want share my OG.

1 cup of water

1 cup of fresh kale

1 cup of fresh or frozen spinach

1/2 cup of frozen green apples

1/2 cup of frozen avocados

1/4 cup of frozen mango

1/4 cup of frozen pineapple. 

Blend everything well and enjoy!

Mr. Repay

Sustainable progression with intent.

I've joined the Rabbit team and I'm cautiously excited. I've built some really good momentum in my personal life and I want that momentum to be sustainable for the rest of my life.  It gets me to thinking about intent.  My intent is to live a mentally, spiritually and physically healthy life.  If one is out of balance it will throw off the other two.  So if my intent is to be healthy and balanced for the rest of my life it also needs to be sustainable.

In my intent to be physically healthy, I'll feed my body the best quality food as I can afford. To continue to feed my body green smoothies daily, reduce or eliminate added refined sugar and eat nutrient dense foods.  If my intent is to be sustainably healthy I will do these daily.  For this to be sustainable I won't deny myself any foods.  To deny myself these things would rob me of some of life's greatest treats. It would also lead to guilt which is so destructive.  What I do know is that these are treats, not meals.  To do this sustainably it also have to be fun and accessible. It's not easy to eat right when I travel, it's much easier to hit a drive through.  I've found that it's easier when I feel the results of eating well.  Some of the things I've started to do is plan.  When I'm in a new city I google smoothie shops and I see what's out there.  I visit thier web sites to see the ingredients and I make note of them in Google maps to make routing easier when I get to that city.  I also like Save On Foods protein box of fresh veggies, hard boiled eggs and humus.  I pair that with fresh cut fruit and it's a great lunch.  It's take time and some planning but I've found the results are worth the effort and time. 

My intent is to live a spiritualy balanced life.  I'm not religious but I do believe in spirituality.  This is an area that has been neglected for a long time. Meditation, self reflection are two tools that I use to focus my intent on my spirituality.  More time is needed but since it was so out of balance in the past, the scales are tipping in the right direction.

Finally my intent is to live a mentally healthy life.  This is the area that has been out of balance the most.  I've carried a lot of baggage over the years.  I've chosen to be happy.  Seems simple enough but it wasn't that easy.  My intent is to choose happiness and doing so my mental well being has drastically improved.  It's going to be a battle for the rest of my life but with my intent focused on happiness everyday feels brighter.

Mr. Repay

Dietary Defense

_{Dietary Defense.}

 

_{It’s been about six weeks since I made voluntary changes to my diet. I’d been unhappy with how my health had been for a very long time. I’ve felt bloated, gassy, foggy mentally and just play awful. I decided to make a change by cutting sugar.  I  starting with implementing a green smoothie every day.  I started with picking them up at Jugo Juice as I didn’t really know if I’d like them or not.  I have a real aversion to raw broccoli so I put off trying them because of that. The smoothie I choose was mostly kale, spinach, mango and pineapple with coconut water instead of fruit juice. It was amazing and it kick started my transformation. After five days of drinking this smoothie for one meal replacement and cutting out added sugar and fast food I could feel the change. No more gassiness, brighter mentally and the inflammation in my joints was almost gone.  I now make them at home and I have a pitcher in the fridge at all times. My wife has also started to follow the same diet and she’s also very very happy with the results.}

_{Water. It has to be the elixir of life.  I’ve drank water fairly consistently for the past year but I’ve really upped my intake to between two and three litres a day.  What a huge difference this has also made in my life and how I feel.  Nothing feels better than to be properly hydrated.  Now I don’t drink anything other water, a couple of black espresso’s in the morning, sugar free green smoothies throughout the day and a cup of un sweetened tea in the evening.}

_{I was and still am intermittent fasting from 8pm to noon.  Not so much to lose weight but to give my digestive tract a break and cut back on snacking in the evening. Putting all these things together over the past six weeks has changed my physical and mental health dramatically. No longer am I waking up with a sore back, sore joints etc. I’m waking up with a renewed amount of energy and clarity.}

_{The improvements to my mental health has also been such an amazing feeling.  I now don’t feel like I’m in such as dark place, life is brighter than its ever been for a long time. I never new my poor diet had such an effect on me mentally. I always knew I needed to change my diet but I wasn’t ready. I needed to get to that point in my life where I had enough. I want to be here for my family and if I didn’t start making changes I knew wouldn’t.  I also needed to feel the results to help with the motivation.  I sure do feel them and I can connect the dots easily.}

_{The change in diet, increased water intake and intermittent fasting along with changing my attitude to accept happiness have made such a massive change in my life.  I’ve stepped back on a lot of things in order to take the time to fix the things that needed fixing. I feel confident that I can continue to move forward with these sustainable changes and add more things back into my life.}

 

_{Mr.  Ian Repay}