Death by Health – The Luke McGuire Incident

Posted November 29th, 2012 – 24 Comments

death-valley-health-center-sign-400x290-300x217

Over Thanksgiving I was asked “What do you do for a living?” After poorly trying to explain exactly what it is that I do, how my information differs from others, and so on – I managed to come up with a pretty decent summary. I told the guy, “I specialize in helping people who became extremely unhealthy trying to be really healthy get healthy again.” I felt good about this summary because it’s the tragedy of trying so hard to be healthy and failing so miserably that I find to be most moving. In my 20’s I was extremely inspired to live a life free of disease, conquer some of my own ailments, and have a level of health that I thought was only accessible to our primitive ancestors. And… Read more »

Overcoming Psychological and Emotional Stress

Posted November 19th, 2012 – 38 Comments

In reading more than 300 books on the subject of health, perusing thousands of articles, websites, and studies, and communicating with thousands of people all over the world for the last 6 years on the subject… I have been funneled increasingly in one universal direction. Like it has for many others, stress has emerged as a repetitive theme in the causation of all kinds of illnesses. Until now, I’ve stayed away from the psychological and emotional triggers of stress because the purely physiological side is greatly underappreciated. I mean, just say the word “stress” and people naturally think about work stress, divorces, family deaths, and other things that everyone considers stress. Very few think of lack of sleep, attempts at dietary purity, pregnancy, fatty acids, or inflammation as forms of… Read more »

Barbie… The Truth Behind the Beauty

Posted November 13th, 2012 – 51 Comments

I was perusing the kid aisles at Target today with a 7-year old. She loves Barbie. We strolled down the aisle, just the two of us. She mentioned her love of Barbie. I asked her if she wanted to know a little secret about Barbie. She said yes. I told her Barbie makes herself throw up after everything she eats and that her teeth fell out from all the barf acid. It went way over her head, like most things I say. I didn’t really say it for her amusement anyway. There was a decent looking girl within earshot. But the experience reminded me of all the inside information that I have about Barbie that few others possess. Today… I tell all. Yes it’s true. Barbie’s teeth were worn down… Read more »

Postpartum Hormonal Changes

Posted November 5th, 2012 – 74 Comments

I decided to take on this topic today for several reasons. One reason is that I am currently working with many women who are in the postpartum period, and I’m sure there are many more out there that will read this post – both now and in the future. Another reason is that changes in hormones are often brushed aside like some kind of “excuse” in the minds of your typical average Joe. But the postpartum period is a powerful reminder that the hormones are in charge of us, not the other way around. We need more than a good “pep talk” to overcome the power of hormonal influences upon our bodies and brains. Lastly, one postpartum mom I have been speaking with has lost 35 pounds in 12 weeks… Read more »

Seizures in Infants and Children

Posted November 1st, 2012 – 118 Comments

little baby drinking water from the tap during bathing

While I’m not the almighty authority on such a topic, nor is it my bread n’ butter specialty, I feel compelled to share some basic insights on seizures in infants and children. Plus man, November is Epilepsy Awareness month. I got your awareness right here! This will not be an exhaustive and comprehensive look into this problem. Rather, the intent of this post is to help parents of children with seizure problems eliminate one simple and frequent cause – what I believe to probably be the most prevalent and easy-to-correct of all causes… low sodium levels. This article will also highlight some important features of human physiology that can be useful in general health and well-being, and hopefully keep parents from doing dumb shit, like restrict sodium in their child’s diet (or their own diet, especially while… Read more »

Soy Sauce

Posted October 26th, 2012 – 110 Comments

Well I guess it’s meant to be. I did a long-winded post about soy sauce, pulling nerdy nutrition crap out of my rear end, and when I went to preview it the whole thing got lost into an internet black hole. Nothing remained. So be it. Instead I’ll leave that out and just say, simply, why I wanted to do a post on soy sauce specifically… After recently seeing the powerful importance of salt in increasing metabolic rate and keeping the nervous system calm, I bought some soy sauce for the first time in a long time. I was excited to have some because I know it’s super salty and super good. Imagine sushi without it. Eesh. In some parts of Japan and China salt consumption exceeds 20, and sometimes even 25… Read more »

Eating Disorder Recovery

Posted October 23rd, 2012 – 218 Comments

This is a quick follow-up post to my last article on the big fat loss secret. After a full year of doing a great deal of one-on-one phone conversations, I keep wanting to share some of the calls. I get some really interesting cases, and I often find myself wanting to start recording some of the really good calls and publish them for a general audience to listen to. They really are that interesting, and the lessons often strongly reiterate some of the basic messages of 180DegreeHealth. I haven’t recorded any calls yet, and I don’t know if that’s something I’ll actually do, but I thought I could at least share some of the things that I discussed with Coldmember – a 20-year old Dutch kid that ran into serious health trouble after pursuing extreme body composition… Read more »

How To Increase Your Metabolism And Weight Loss With Hypothyroidism

Posted October 18th, 2012 – 119 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Anyone you know have a thyroid condition like Hasimoto’s thyroiditis? Matt’s got a new post over at Outsmart Disease answering some questions about enhancing the metabolism and losing weight for folks with those conditions. As many of you know, though, functional hypothyroidism (or “Type 2 Hypothyroidism,” in the language of endocrinologist Mark Starr) is widely common, and even those without specific thyroid-related diagnoses can see benefit from raising their metabolism and enhancing their thyroid function. As he mentions in the interview, his recommendations and goals tend to be similar since the benefits of having a robust metabolism apply to all, and can be both therapeutic and preventative. So mosey on down to Marina’s site there, and check out Matt’s interview here.

Fat Loss Secret

Posted October 16th, 2012 – 175 Comments

Everybody wants to know the secret to fat loss. Today, I’m going to reveal it using one of the people I talk to via my Get Help program as an example. I will not show this young gentleman’s face or reveal his name. We will call him Coldmember. He’s Dutch. Age 20. On the left you can see his impressive and very inspiring before and multiple after shots. Now that’s what I call ripped! He attained much of this “physique improvement,” in a nutshell, by cycling up and down in bodyweight while doing lots of resistance training/weight training. He would bulk up and build as much mass and strength as possible, and then reduce calories as little as was required to get slowly and steadily leaner. It was a good strategy. Slow, steady, and smart. At one… Read more »

Persistence Is Better Than Perfection

Posted October 11th, 2012 – 96 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Last week the the Stoner and I caught up, and I mentioned the idea I’d been keeping close to heart recently, that “persistance is better than perfection.” I don’t know where I heard it first, but Google turns up plenty of hits for that or similar phrases. He liked it and suggested I share a few thoughts on that theme. Matt has this great expression: “The perfect diet is very unhealthy.” I think you can read that a few different ways: the belief in a perfect diet is itself unhealthy a diet that is ‘perfect’ is immune from revision or criticism and long term leads to imbalances that we don’t adjust for so long as we remain fixated on its “perfectness” a diet that… Read more »

Juicing Q & A with Matt Stone

Posted October 10th, 2012 – 18 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Ahoy, buckaroos- Rob here, emissary from the world wide web, letting you know about more happenings from Mattarino and 180D. Matt recently sat down (electronically) for a question and answer session with Rosie at the Natural Maven to talk about juicing. Is it good? Is it bad? If you know Matt, you know nothing gets so perfunctory and simplified a treatment. In the post, he talks about how and when juicing can be beneficial, the possible dangers, and how to go about incorporating it into your life if you’re inspired to. It’s a great primer, especially in light of the recent research and interest here about the role of fluids and their cellular concentration as it relates to the metabolism and feelings of well-being…. Read more »

How We Get Fat

Posted October 8th, 2012 – 181 Comments

No this is not a book review of Gary Taubes’s Why We Get Fat. Rather, this is a post about the reality of how people pack on extra weight minus Taubes’s incorrect and shortsighted assessment of biochemistry. A question I get as often, or more often than any other, is “Well then, what does cause people to become fat?” Believe it or not, this question involves more than just a one-word response, such as “carbs” or “fat” or “junk” or “stress” or “calories.” I’m finding it difficult to coax some people who really need a dense calorie supply in order to normalize their metabolic rate into eating common foods. It seems that many people who gravitate towards strange diets find a lot of comfort in the strangeness of their diet… Read more »

10 Inconveniences of a High Metabolism

Posted October 4th, 2012 – 148 Comments

By Matt Stone Having a high metabolism doesn’t come without consequences. Here are some of the common inconveniences one may notice with a significant rise in metabolic rate… 1) Menstruation Life was good with a low metabolism. No time of the month. But then you raise that metabolism and uh oh, not again. Freakin’ progesterone production goes up, LH and FSH regulate properly, and the next thing you know you’re bleeding, and once again dealing with the embarrassment and expense of buying “feminine products” and having to ask your boyfriend every time you get out of the car if there are any spots showing through your pants. Sucks. 2) Sweat Life was good with a low metabolism. You could go get in a workout and not even have to change… Read more »

Homegrown Health and Fitness Over Forty

Posted October 3rd, 2012 – 8 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Greetings 180D party people- Rob here, writing to give you a heads up about a couple of guest appearances Matt has going on. One of them is a radio interview with Joni Cox of Homegrown Health Radio, airing today from 3-4pm EST. Tune in to Natural News Radio to listen live or here anytime afterward for the downloadable archived show. Another is an article for Donovan Baldwin over at Fitness Over Forty. Piggybacking on the recent topic of metabolic decline as we age, Matt outlines why what we eat does not correspond so tightly to how healthy we are, or what our specific health biomarkers will be. It’s an always useful message for those would would oversimplify the complex relationship between what we eat… Read more »

Reducing Serotonin Levels

Posted October 1st, 2012 – 76 Comments

I’m not a fan of exhaustive lists that are meant to cover absolutely every possible way that some miscellaneous biochemical, of which there are a bajillion, are affected by our diet and lifestyle. Trying to simply research one of them recently, serotonin, has nearly turned my brain into scrambled eggs. Actually, that’s a terrible metaphor as my brains probably look, taste, and have some nutritional similarities to scrambled eggs regardless of my current research project (snoop du jour?). But you know what I mean. In the last post I discussed some of the dangers of serotonin. When looking at the big picture of aging, inflammation, mitochondrial respiration, metabolism – that stuff that is a recurring theme in almost all illnesses, serotonin is worthy of mention. It’s not worthy of mention… Read more »

The Sadder Side of Serotonin

Posted September 24th, 2012 – 127 Comments

Are you sad? Depressed? Tired? Crave them evil #$%#ohydrates? Well hell son you just need you some serotonin! Serotonin makes you happy! Whee!!! The research and cultural status quo on serotonin doesn’t make much sense, and is full of contradiction. Strangely, everyone seems to be madly in love with serotonin (people even have tattoos celebrating it – I hope they don’t read this post!) and is fully satisfied with the label of “happy juice.” Serotonin makes you happy, everyone seems to believe, and if you aren’t happy then well, let’s figure out how to get more serotonin in ya. Buck up little camper, we’ll beat that slump, together. When everyone in the media, in the health field, and beyond start to collectively believe in a very simple and narrow story about… Read more »

Sarcopenia

Posted September 17th, 2012 – 79 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging lately. My grandfather, age 87 and my last living grandparent, ain’t doin’ so hot. And yes, he’s old. He’s falling to pieces. He’s going to eventually die. I’m not fighting that, and tend to look at whether it happens now or several months or even years from now as pretty inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Sure, he’ll miss a few golf tournaments and football games on tv, but from this point forward it doesn’t really matter when the big day arrives. The world will go on whether he is alive to watch The O’Reilly Factor or not (Yeah I know that’s kinda mean, but he’s at the bedridden diaper stage – the stage where most people promise themselves and their loved… Read more »

Stalling the Aging Metabolism

Posted September 12th, 2012 – 146 Comments

My girlfriend’s daughter just turned 7. We were eating some food at a restaurant the other day and I watched her eat 2 cheeseburgers, half an order of French fries, a small milkshake, and a few good sips of a soft drink. I looked up all the nutrition data for her meal, and it totaled, by modest estimates, 1,200 calories. She weighs a whopping 49 pounds. That day she consumed over 2,500 calories. No I don’t meticulously count all her calories. But I did that day because her appetite was extraordinarily large, and well, you know, I’m a nerd. Metabolism has been the epicenter of my research for the last several years, and that’s just too impressive not to calculate and ponder. To put it into perspective, that single meal… Read more »

Managing Your Weight Set Point

Posted September 10th, 2012 – 29 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Quick heads up folks- Matt recently offered a guest article for Tom Corson-Knowles on the bodyweight set point. It’s a nice introduction to the concept and has some ideas about how to impact it. Plus, the cast of Willow, the Swedish Bikini Team and Alf- oh my! It just went live over on Tom’s site, so head on over and check it out here.

Why I Don’t Eat Pork

Posted September 7th, 2012 – 108 Comments

By Matt Stone In 2006, my natural contrarian tendencies getting the best of me, I decided that fat, not carbohydrates or protein, was the bestest thing ever. So I embarked on a diet with roughly 70% of my calories coming from fat. In all the world’s anti-fat hysteria, they must have missed what is truly the optimal human diet. Or so I led myself to believe as I watched my abs pop out, my moods stabilize, my cravings for all of those “poisonous” modern foods disappear, and so on. Pork was a huge centerpiece of my menu, especially in Hawaii where tasty pork bellies abound and you can go to a supermarket and pick up weird piggy stuff like the pig’s head shown left (that’s me holding it). But by… Read more »