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The third leading cause of death in the United States is prescription drugs (only heart disease and cancer kill more people)! Adverse effects of medicine kill over 100,000 people per year according to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Nutrition and Exercise can remove the need for many, if not most, prescriptions!

The “Health Care System” within the United States should be more accurately called the “Disease Care System”.

The combination of Fitness, Nutrition and Mental Health is more appropriately called the Health Care System!

We can work on that here!

Good nutrition is the master key to human health; the problem is most people do not know what good nutrition is!

Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex than you imagine.

Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of these chemicals isn’t nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological consequences.

And that’s just from an apple.

Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the cusp of a revolution. The traditional “gold standard” of nutrition research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is “good” for us, but they provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health.

In The China Study, T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M. Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat. Now, in Whole, he explains the science behind that evidence, the ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven’t changed.

Whole is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with powerful implications for our health and for our world.

http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Rethinking-Nutrition-Colin-Campbell/dp/1939529840/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1441145092&sr=8-1&keywords=whole

This is a professional book that any health and fitness “expert” should know and study slowly; every time there’s a new edition, I buy it, and I read it carefully – ALL 900 pages!

ACSM’s Resource Manual for Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription was created as a complement to ACSM’s Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription  and elaborates on all major aspects of preventative rehabilitation and fitness programs and the major position stands of the ACSM.  The 7th edition provides information necessary to address the knowledge, skills, and abilities set forth in the new edition of Guidelines, and  explains the science behind the exercise testing and prescription. ACSM’s Resource Manual is a comprehensive resource for those working in the fitness and clinical exercise fields, as well as those in academic training.

http://www.amazon.com/Resource-Guidelines-Exercise-Prescription-Guidlies/dp/1609139569/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408934347&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=acsm+and+resource+manual+and+guideline

Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life’s work, The Denial of Death is Ernest Becker’s brilliant and impassioned answer to the “why” of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie — man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.

http://www.amazon.com/Denial-Death-Ernest-Becker/dp/0684832402/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1440346144&sr=8-1&keywords=denial+of+death

Being young is frequently filled with a bunch of wasted time and very little thought for others; with concerted effort, being older can be filled with “thoughtful” thoughts, knowledge and new skills, time better spent, not wasted, closer friends and more concern for others and things that matter. Decline and decay? Nop, perhaps just better!

Improvement is a slow and steady race in most cases, making a skill or behavior permanent, especially under stress, takes time and practice. Eventually our neurons wire together and fire together without our conscious thought, at this point we have learned a new skill or mastered a new behavior.

Slow to pick new things up? No problem. The “tortoise” tends to retain what they’ve learned long-term better and frequently to even know it better than the “hare” (sometimes the hare moves on too quickly or doesn’t learn it well enough to make it permanent).

Most aspects of our personality (thoughts and behavior) are modifiable; we can get worse or we can get better at something. Why not improve? If we have a personality trait or characteristic that is too weak, or too strong, we can improve it, or we can ignore it, allowing it to stay the same or even get worse. When things don’t improve that need improving, or even get worse, we suffer and so do those around us. If we tend to get angry too quick, or fail to listen well when someone else is speaking, we can certainly improve it. Don’t know enough about something, we can learn more about it and apply it. We are not a “fixed” and “permanent” personality, we are constantly changing, why not work to make these changes positive and constructive rather than negative and destructive?

Progress through personal improvement is certainly worth our time; and others will benefit as well!   

All fitness equipment was purchased new and customized by Fitness 4 Home Superstore.

We enjoyed family camping, trails and great temperatures in Flagstaff this last weekend.

Hiking Fat Man’s Loop (pictured below) is a quick and easy trail for the uninitiated.

Afterwards we hit the local Farmer’s Market.

An astonishing new science called “neuroplasticity” is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. In this revolutionary look at the brain, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., provides an introduction to both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed. From stroke patients learning to speak again to the remarkable case of a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, The Brain That Changes Itself will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Brain-That-Changes-Itself/dp/0143113100

Is your blood sugar elevated, but not yet high enough to be considered Type 2 Diabetes?

This is a common condition and quite reversible; appropriate exercise and food selection will role this condition back to normal levels.

Need a client reference who has had this condition and together we cured it? No problem, just ask.

The University of Penn and Professor Martin Seligman are considered pioneers in Positive Psychology and Happiness research. The following is a link to their extensive Questionnaire Center where you can take self-exams and learn more about your current disposition and aptitudes with suggestions on how and where to improve.

https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter

The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom; If you change your brain, you can change your life.

Amazon Book Review:

Great teachers like the Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, and Gandhi were all born with brains built essentially like anyone else’s—and then they changed their brains in ways that changed the world. Science is now revealing how the flow of thoughts actually sculpts the brain, and more and more, we are learning that it’s possible to strengthen positive brain states.

By combining breakthroughs in neuroscience with insights from thousands of years of mindfulness practice, you too can use your mind to shape your brain for greater happiness, love, and wisdom. Buddha’s Brain draws on the latest research to show how to stimulate your brain for more fulfilling relationships, a deeper spiritual life, and a greater sense of inner confidence and worth. Using guided meditations and mindfulness exercises, you’ll learn how to activate the brain states of calm, joy, and compassion instead of worry, sorrow, and anger. Most importantly, you will foster positive psychological growth that will literally change the way you live in your day-to-day life.

This book presents an unprecedented intersection of psychology, neurology, and contemplative practice, and is filled with practical tools and skills that you can use every day to tap the unused potential of your brain and rewire it over time for greater well-being and peace of mind.

What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It!

Scientists and academics have spent entire careers investigating what makes people happy. But hidden in obscure scholarly journals and reports, their research is all too often inaccessible to ordinary people. Now the bestselling author of the 100 Simple Secrets series distills the scientific findings of over a thousand of the most important studies on happiness into easy-to-digest nuggets of advice. Each of the hundred practices is illustrated with a clear example and illuminated by a straightforward explanation of the science behind it to show you how to transform a ho-hum existence into a full and happy life.

• Believe in yourself: Across all ages, and all groups, a solid belief in one’s own abilities increases life satisfaction by about 40 percent, and makes us happier both in our home lives and in our work lives.
• Turn off your TV: Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5 percent for every hour a day we watch.

This type of research and evidence continues to gain traction. Train smart after 40!

Are endurance athletes hurting their hearts by repeatedly pushing beyond what is normal?

http://velonews.competitor.com/cycling-extremes

An elevated tree top adventure course set in the tall Ponderosa Pines and securely suspended between the trees at 15 to 60 feet off the ground. Some of the features of the course include suspended bridges, swings, slides, nets, ziplines and even an aerial surf board. Take a journey and explore the outdoors like you never have before!

Home

With this unprecedented promise, internationally esteemed psychologist Martin Seligman begins Flourish, his first book in ten years—and the first to present his dynamic new concept of what well-being really is. Traditionally, the goal of psychology has been to relieve human suffering, but the goal of the Positive Psychology movement, which Dr. Seligman has led for fifteen years, is different—it’s about actually raising the bar for the human condition.

Flourish builds on Dr. Seligman’s game-changing work on optimism, motivation, and character to show how to get the most out of life, unveiling an electrifying new theory of what makes a good life—for individuals, for communities, and for nations. In a fascinating evolution of thought and practice, Flourish refines what Positive Psychology is all about.

While certainly a part of well-being, happiness alone doesn’t give life meaning. Seligman now asks, What is it that enables you to cultivate your talents, to build deep, lasting relationships with others, to feel pleasure, and to contribute meaningfully to the world? In a word, what is it that allows you to flourish? “Well-being” takes the stage front and center, and Happiness (or Positive Emotion) becomes one of the five pillars of Positive Psychology, along with Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment—or PERMA, the permanent building blocks for a life of profound fulfillment.

Thought-provoking in its implications for education, economics, therapy, medicine, and public policy—the very fabric of society—Flourish tells inspiring stories of Positive Psychology in action, including how the entire U.S. Army is now trained in emotional resilience; how innovative schools can educate for fulfillment in life and not just for workplace success; and how corporations can improve performance at the same time as they raise employee well-being.

With interactive exercises to help readers explore their own attitudes and aims, Flourish is a watershed in the understanding of happiness as well as a tool for getting the most out of life. On the cutting edge of a science that has changed millions of lives, Dr. Seligman now creates the ultimate extension and capstone of his bestselling classics, Authentic Happiness and Learned Optimism.

It’s a combination of things; being an optimist is a good start, pessimism simply leads to depression and loss of interest in life. Engagement in activities and relationships is an integral part as well, while defining and giving your life meaning is essential.

“Positive thinking” is frequently superficial and certainly doesn’t require any logic; we can have a positive state of mind right before we jump from a very tall building but that won’t keep the fall from doing damage upon impact. Positive psychology on the other hand uses logic and optimism to make sound decisions in our life that will increase our personal well being and make life worth living. We can work on that here.

Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

A national bestseller, Authentic Happiness launched the revolutionary new science of Positive Psychology—and sparked a coast-to-coast debate on the nature of real happiness.

According to esteemed psychologist and bestselling author Martin Seligman, happiness is not the result of good genes or luck. Real, lasting happiness comes from focusing on one’s personal strengths rather than weaknesses—and working with them to improve all aspects of one’s life. Using practical exercises, brief tests, and a dynamic website program, Seligman shows readers how to identify their highest virtues and use them in ways they haven’t yet considered. Accessible and proven, Authentic Happiness is the most powerful work of popular psychology in years.

Pessimist or Optimist? We can choose the way we think! It’s a personal choice that we make everyday. It’s not our genetics, the environment in which we are exposed or our past experiences (although all of these can have an affect); it’s simply the way we think about ourselves, others and the world. Choose to look for the bad and negative in things and others, we will find it. Choose to look for the good and positive in things and others, we will find it. Whatever we stay focused on, is what we will find! With some work pessimists can become optimists! We can work on that here.

Optimists are generally more successful in achieving greater well being, experience better physical and mental health and adapt better to life’s ups and downs. Pessimists can certainly learn to be more optimistic and benefit as well.

Important to note: pessimism frequently leads to depression; depressed people are frequently pessimists!

How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P. Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enhances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an “I—give-up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier.. With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound and practical–and valuable for every phase of life.

Taking prescription drugs for so called “brain chemistry imbalances” is wrong on myriad levels for most healthy people. Brain chemistry imbalances have never and still have not ever been proven. It was and continues to be a made up condition.

Moreover, prescription drugs don’t cure or fix these problems over the long term; they frequently make mental conditions they are supposedly treating worse, especially upon cessation of the prescriptions, forcing people back to them to feel “normal” again.

The prescriptions themselves frequently cause brain chemistry imbalances and mental disorders and lifelong users are born in this way. Consistent exercise and cognitive therapy (changing mal-adaptive thoughts) are far better remedies!

The majority of us can improve our lives, as well as our health, by improving the way in which we explain things to ourselves; a positive or optimistic explanation of things and others can make us stronger, a negative or pessimistic explanation of things and others can make us weaker, even leading to depression.

Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading most rapidly among our nation’s children. What is going on?
 
Anatomy of an Epidemic challenges readers to think through that question themselves. First, Whitaker investigates what is known today about the biological causes of mental disorders. Do psychiatric medications fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain, or do they, in fact, create them? Researchers spent decades studying that question, and by the late 1980s, they had their answer. Readers will be startled—and dismayed—to discover what was reported in the scientific journals.

Then comes the scientific query at the heart of this book: During the past fifty years, when investigators looked at how psychiatric drugs affected long–term outcomes, what did they find? Did they discover that the drugs help people stay well? Function better? Enjoy good physical health? Or did they find that these medications, for some paradoxical reason, increase the likelihood that people will become chronically ill, less able to function well, more prone to physical illness?

This is the first book to look at the merits of psychiatric medications through the prism of long-term results. Are long-term recovery rates higher for medicated or unmedicated schizophrenia patients? Does taking an antidepressant decrease or increase the risk that a depressed person will become disabled by the disorder? Do bipolar patients fare better today than they did forty years ago, or much worse? When the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) studied the long-term outcomes of children with ADHD, did they determine that stimulants provide any benefit?

By the end of this review of the outcomes literature, readers are certain to have a haunting question of their own: Why have the results from these long-term studies—all of which point to the same startling conclusion—been kept from the public?

In this compelling history, Whitaker also tells the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. Finally, he reports on innovative programs of psychiatric care in Europe and the United States that are producing good long-term outcomes. Our nation has been hit by an epidemic of disabling mental illness, and yet, as Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, the medical blueprints for curbing that epidemic have already been drawn up.

Contrary to popular believe success doesn’t make us happy… rather being happy brings us success!

Well performed studies have repeatedly found that strong social support and friendships have as much effect on our health and longevity as smoking, high-blood pressure and obesity do. In other words, strong social support and good friendships increase health and decrease disease. Those who have good social support are across the board happier as well. Bottom line? We need healthy social relationships to thrive; we are not as independent as we assume ourselves to be!

In order to be successful at weight-loss and eating well many of us need the path to least resistance. Healthy food and snacks need to be accessible when its time to eat, while junk food kept well out of reach. In addition, when, where and how we exercise needs to be as convenient as possible.

Reward yourself with compliments and feeling good about yourself.

The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.

In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies from his work with thousands of Fortune 500 executives in 42 countries, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.

Isolating seven practical, actionable principles that have been tried and tested everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, stretching from Argentina to Zimbabwe, he shows us how we can capitalize on the Happiness Advantage to improve our performance and maximize our potential. Among the principles he outlines:

• The Tetris Effect: how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunities wherever we look.
• The Zorro Circle: how to channel our efforts on small, manageable goals, to gain the leverage to gradually conquer bigger and bigger ones.
• Social Investment: how to reap the dividends of investing in one of the greatest predictors of success and happiness—our social support network

A must-read for everyone trying to excel in a world of increasing workloads, stress, and negativity, The Happiness Advantage isn’t only about how to become happier at work. It’s about how to reap the benefits of a happier and more positive mind-set to achieve the extraordinary in our work and in our lives.

Scientific American Special Edition: The Science of Healthy Aging

Volume 24 Issue 1

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t or won’t experience some level of anxiety from time to time, from general anxiety, to nerve rattling panic attacks, but there are positive actions and positive coping mechanisms available to you. We can work on that here.

Physical and mental strength, as well as intellect, logic and wisdom, require the right environment and the right choices within that environment; life is tough, unbroken is the goal. Expect that from me, I will expect that from you.

Although awareness level concerning our personal mortality fluctuates and varies, some of us certainly are more aware of it than others and some of us certainly give it more careful thought than others. Regardless, the topic of death has the power to elicit paralyzing fear and mental breakdown, or the power to illicit appreciation for the life we have and those who are in it.

Solid evidence stating that calorie restriction increases human lifespan is flimsy at this time, but restricting calories does appear to work well for fruit flies and nematodes. How’s that for motivation? However, and this is a big however, calorie restriction does appear to reduce the risk of disease as we age, as well as lengthen the period of our lives spent in good viable health. Now that should motivate you!

We spend the vast majority of our time regretting the past or fearing the future, and although both can have constructive value, in many cases they do not. It’s best to spend the majority of our time right here in the present; appreciating and feeling gratitude for the things we already have.

The dietary fiber that we consume, and frequently too little of, is exclusively found in plant-based food and it’s typically undigestable; although it can be added to low-quality processed foods to give the appearance of healthfulness. Fiber comes in countless variations within the cell-walls of plants (and the fruits and vegetables it may bear). Dietary fiber should not be consumed through man-made purchased supplements rather through whole foods designed by nature. Human engineering can’t rival the quality or the complexity of fiber found in it’s most natural state or it’s perfect delivery system. Moreover, whole foods (vegetables, fruit and grains) containing dietary fiber include numerous components that work to keep us healthy and their fiber content creates a sense of fullness that comes on us quicker and lasts longer compared to processed foods. Lastly, fiber works to clean the digestive system as it winds its way through the process, as well as absorbs unwanted products found within our digestive system as it speeds the process of digestion along.