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DEAR Program

Trouble Dieting

by drfortan on June 2, 2010

Why can’t we stay on our diet? The reasons are many, but two I want to bring in focus:

1. Loss of willpower

2. Addictive foods that cause carb craving

Loss of willpower is due to low serotonin and dopamine levels caused by inadequate sleep and uncontrolled stress.

Physicians, disciplined and dedicated all their lives are most susceptible as they are chronically stressed and get inadequate sleep. What does this do to those disciplined young doctors as they mature? The American Medical Association clearly has indicated that physicians are more often than not overweight or obese, have a high rate of addiction to alcohol and drugs, and have a higher than 65% divorce rate.

All diets will fail unless you control sleeplessness and stress.

Do you sleep adequately? For the next week I want you to log the time you get in bed and the time you get out of bed, and then the time you actually slept. If the time of sleep does not equal 7 hours you probably are having difficulty with serotonin and dopamine and the energy needed to keep your willpower up in times of temptation. (See the Anti-Alzheimer’s Prescription on sleep or CD and DVD series)

Are you taking care of your stress? It is not how busy you are, but how frustrated that causes you to have decreased levels of serotonin and dopamine and increased levels of cortisol that cause you to overeat and age. Understanding the difference between controlled and uncontrolled stress is essential. (See the CD or DVD program on stress)

How to be successful and prevent Alzheimer’s. First control your sentinel risk factors, that is stress and sleep problems. This will give you the willpower. Know what to eat. The harmonic diet and the golden dozen foods high in antioxidants. Know that all important order of eating. Eating a protein, Omega 3’s found in fish oil and other products will first decrease your appetite and convert sugar to protein by provoking the hormone glucagon. Just by eating a protein or a fat first, you can turn on your bodies chemistry to lose fat, increase lean muscle mass and keep on your diet. Yes, what we eat first determines what we eat next (a carbohydrate leaded dessert) or not. The CD or DVD on harmonic diet will pave the way to your success.

The Anti-Alzheimer’s Prescription and DEAR Program

Did you ever wonder why you cannot change your lifestyle, that is stay on a diet, exercise regularly, get enough sleep? Be the person you want to be? Many will tell you it is just a matter of motivation or willpower.

If that is true, then why are doctors and other professionals who attain their degrees in position only through persistence and determination and shear willpower, often overweight or obese, and out of control?

The reason is not a question of willpower, but neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. Without them it is like a Mercedes without fuel. Our intentions, “healthy life changes”, fail without willpower and a plan.

The DEAR Program and Anti-Alzheimer’s Prescription will show you how to maximize how to the hormones that in fact help us maintain willpower and motivation. “The fuel”. Learn about the sentinel risk factors that cause us to fail. Go to the DEAR Program.com to find more.

Wine: Friend or Foe

A recent European study shows why drinking 4-6oz of wine for women and double that for men is helpful for both brain and heart.

Drinking wine boosts Omega 3 fatty acids found in fish.

A study called the IMMIDET showed wine, more than beer, increases Omega 3 DHEA in blood plasma and EPA.

A UCLA study showed moderate wine drinkers were 25% less at risk for disability than tea tottlers.

Worried About Osteoporosis?

Recent studies from Tuff’s University in Boston showed in a four year osteoporosis study that foods high in anti-oxidants carotene inhibit bone breakdown and re-absorption. Such foods are:

1. Tomatoes

2. Guava

3. Watermelon

4. Sweet peppers

5. Grapefruit

6. Carrots

7. Strawberries and other dark berries.

So eat a colorful meal of vegetables at lunch and dinner.

Warning: if you are on statins (cholesterol lowering agents) grapefruit may interfere with its absorption.

Exercise or Not

Why don’t we exercise? The reasons I am given by my patients are:

1. I cannot find the time. I call this the time deficiency syndrome.

2. Going to a gym is too difficult and expensive. I call this the gymless syndrome.

3. I am just too tired after working all day. I call this the overworked syndrome.

The Anti-Alzheimer’s Prescription and DEAR Program show you how to overcome all three at home with no need for a gym or equipment. Go to DEARProgram.com

Exercise: Why you Fail

1. I cannot find the time. I call this the time deficiency syndrome.

2. Going to a gym is too difficult and expensive. I call this the gymless syndrome.

3. I am just too tired after working all day. I call this the overworked syndrome.

Let’s take number 3, I’m just too tired. I am just too tired after a full days work! I am too tired means your stress hormones are high (cortisol) and youthful hormones testosterone, estrogen, growth hormone, and thyroid are low. One of the assets and best ways to reverse that quotient is, in fact, exercise. Exercise decreases stress hormones and delays aging, heart disease, and carb craving, and consequently obesity that comes with being a couch potato. ( Potatoes by the way are high on the glycemic index) So, by resting in fact you make it worse.

Exercise just 10 minutes by the Fort Formula will raise growth hormone 14% for four hours, stimulate thyroid, testosterone production and the hormone Leptin that decreases appetite. Yes, 10 minutes will burn calories and decrease your appetite and make you lean.

In my experience the average person over 50 who exercises before dinner consumes 20% less calories while simulating the youthful hormone that make you look younger and increased energy for the next day and increase your endurance.

The additional bonus is that the increase is an increase in muscle mass and increase in calories burned just by being lean. In fact you look younger and you are younger.

Exercise done the Fort Formula way increases neogenesis and neoplasticity that is increase in brain cells and its connections.

Exercise just 10 minutes a day makes your body lean and healthy, resists aging and increases your mental abilities and prevents Alzheimer’s disease.

Time Deficiency Syndrome

Not enough time. Not enough time is rarely a valid reason in America not to exercise. The Nielsen Study shows that the average American watches 5.5 hours of TV per day. Clearly, there is time. However, the gymless syndrome often chimes in, I need a gym.

The Fort Formula home program can be done “on the couch or in front of a TV”. Wow. Now the only excuse left is I have no couch or no TV. Well, that is even better. The Fort Formula exercise program is fashioned to strengthen core, muscles where we lose up to 36% of our lean muscle mass as we age. It is the major cause for falls and injuries and the number one cause for falls and that is fear of falling in individuals 60 years of age or older, especially in those over 70. Injuries to the hips, knees, shoulders are very frequent as we age. In fact, it doubles every 10 years after 50. The Fort Formula exercise program without need for weights or assistive devises causes the excitation of a muscle hormone called IGF-1 that stimulates a brain derived hormone that sets off three genes that increase lean muscle mass (Increase muscle size) and increase bone density (so important to women over 50). Finally, these genes of CRG 1 and 3, stimulate brain growth. Exercise is essential to both our body and brain. It also is essential to our psyche, or attitude and sense of self-contentment.

Some say, “I look better, therefore I feel better, and therefore I am better”.

When you exercise the order changes to is, “I am better and that makes me feel better”, and when you feel better you become all you can be and as a consequence you look better, not just physically, but most important in your own eyes. People who like themselves are liked by others.

What about sleep and stress? Please go to DEARProgam.com for more.

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Who’s in Control?

by drfortan on April 7, 2009

Are you in control of your life? You or a pill? You or magical thinking? You or the doctor?

People do not do lifestyle changes because they do not believe in themselves. They don’t believe that they can be in control. I tell you, you are right unless you take care of your sentinel risk factors.

What are the sentinel risk factors? The sentinel risk factors simply are sleeplessness and uncontrolled stress.

After thirty years of practice I found many patients fidelity to me was not because of my store of knowledge and experience, but on the strength of my pen! My ability to give them a drug. A drug as an antihypertensive, an antibiotic, an antilipid agent, an anti-inflammant, all which would not be necessary if they only heeded my advise from my experience and knowledge.

I often pose this question to my patients:

“WHO WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE IN CONTROL? Yourself or me?” Your accountant or your wife or husband, or your parent?

Some people need a drug as an antiepileptic and so, therefore, need that pen of mine, but most do not need any medications, and, in fact, most of their worries would be avoided with a simple lifestyle change.

It is clear today that obesity, hyperlipidemia, much of heart disease and cancer, hypertension could all be avoided if one changed one’s lifestyle. The big question is:

“WHY DON’T YOU TAKE CONTROL?”

The reasons are several:

1. Some don’t want control

2. Some can’t take control

3. Some doubt they even know how to take control.

In a series of 100 patients, 98% said they would like to be in control. However, when confronted with the facts that they were not in control and asked why, 75% blamed it on their environment, stress; 10% said they were just too comfortable having someone else being in control, as a doctor, parent, etc.

“Oh”, I said, “like being in a car without brakes or one in which another one decides when to brake, but you control the gas pedal”.

Excuses for self-indulgence some don’t realize that their behavior, that is not caring for themselves, controls those around them. It maybe that is what they unconsciously want.

There is another group that seemed not able to take control, though they think they are in control. This is the majority; those who maybe executives, businessman, mothers and fathers, doctors, lawyers. People who are in places of responsibility have had an education that required dedication. Those enmeshed it a rat race. They can’t get off the treadmill. One would think, for instance, taking doctors out of all the professions these doctors should have more self-control than anyone else. By far they have the knowledge; they know the consequences of a bad lifestyle. However, the facts are that 67% of the doctors according to the American Medical Association are either overweight or obese; they have one of the highest divorce rates; they have one of the highest suicide rates; they have a high degree of drug dependency and alcoholism.

Well why when it is apparent that these were the young men and women who in their college and high school days were dedicated to their studies, showed incredible motivation and discipline. Why, now that they are out in practice are they unable to control their own passions, their appetite for food, alcohol, and other drugs? The reason is simple, just as a Ferrari or other high functioning car will not go unless there is gasoline in it; the same thing is true with our ability to follow through and to control our own lifestyle. If we do not have enough dopamine and serotonin or tank is on empty and we are unable to show self-control. An example is myself, some 10-15 years ago after having a week of working some 90 hours, being on call on the weekend, coming in at 3:230 in the morning from a night call and waking up at 8 only to look at myself in the mirror to realize how much I had aged and that I had gained over 60 pounds. At that moment, I had remembered the last patient I had seen and individual with a stroke two years younger than myself. That was motivation enough for me to say I was not going to have the same fate. I was then 50 and would make the change now. I marched down to the kitchen, opened up the cupboard only to find the oatmeal just behind a bag of chocolate donuts. I took the donuts and threw them out into the garbage. I then began cooking up the oatmeal at which time I also went over what I would be doing that day, planning out the rest of my meals, the exercise that I would be performing and all the the things to get me on a schedule of self discipline.

At that moment just as I was about to take my first bite of oatmeal my beeper went off. It was the time of the digital beeper, as I read the message it said, “Doctor your patient has been waiting in the emergency room since 4 o’clock”. I must have fallen asleep and gotten the message, but slept right through it. This had never happened to me before. My stress level and my emergency system went in overdrive. This, of course, caused a physiological phenomenon in myself. My adrenal surged, provoking my adrenals to pump out cortisol which rang for fuel, jet fuel, that is the type that comes from carbohydrates. As I ran out the door my arm lunged into the garbage and I took out one donut for my mouth and one for my fist as I drove to the emergency room. What happened to my resolve? What happened to my fear of having a stroke? What had happened to my motivation? Didn’t I as a physician know better? Wasn’t I just seconds before thinking of an entire plan to change my lifestyle. What happened?

What happened is simple. I had low serotonin and dopamine levels because of constant stress and lack of sleep. When one is on empty the car does not run. When dopamine and serotonin are low, we have no self-control.

I call these, that is control of our sleep, adequate sleep 7-8 hours at a minimum, and controlling our uncontrolled stress and that is trying to dismiss or place aside those things that we cannot so something about and do something about those things that are in our control. (If one does this, one can obtain sleep that will restore our dopamine and serotonin and minimize the expenditure of serotonin and dopamine that occurs with frustration and that is uncontrolled stress.

In the Anti-Alzheimer’s Prescription I discuss this. That is sleeplessness, the sentinel risk factors, stress and sleeplessness.

The following blogs will try to have you understand why you do not follow what you know is the right thing for you, what is obvious, what was obvious to me in order to make a lifestyle change. We will go over diet. We will go over the DEAR Program.

Diet

Exercise,

Accentuating the brains reserves (Neurobics), and

Rest and Recovery.

We will take each topic one at a time.

Diet. What are our pit falls? It is different for everyone.

Why don’t we exercise? Is it true that there is a time deficiency?

Neurobics. Why don’t we learn something new as a musical instrument?

Rest and Recovery. The most important of all. Why don’t we take advantage of meditation? Of an early night to bed? Listen to soothing music?

LIFESTYLE EXAM

Each one of these is different for each particular person. It is through examining what causes us to fail that is important. Stop right now and look at your life and take what I call the Lifestyle exam and that is on a scale from 1-10 how satisfied are you with your diet, with your appearance, with your work, with your sex life, with your sleep, with your spouse or children or other, with your spiritual life. A 5 would be okay, 10 excellent, and 0 extremely bad. Then when one is through, think at how much time a week do you spend in each one of these categories. Get the picture? Now you know where effort is needed.

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