Posts Tagged: Cortisol

Why Am I Sleepy After I Eat?

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drowsy after meals

By Matt Stone There are three quick answers to this common question… Because you’re stressed. Because you didn’t sleep enough. Because you ate enough. Everyone in the health industry thinks that eating a meal should make you perk up and want to instantly break out into the Humpty Dance or other similar variant.  Maybe throw in a high-intensity interval while you’re at it.  Just for kicks.  If you do get sleepy after eating, your nutritionist or dietitian is ready to send you off to the lab for food allergy testing or start pulling out every delicious thing in the world from your diet.  No more sugar, dairy, or wheat for you.  Enjoy your brown rice and lean turkey breast.  Oh dear please don’t go swimming for at least an hour after a feast like that! Ironically,… Read more »

Earthing: Medical Discovery or Quack Scam?

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Earthing quackery

By Matt Stone “What do you think about that Mr. Blue Duck?  That’s Quacktastic ack ack ack ack.”  ~Billy Madison Earthing as a health idea is the practice of connecting oneself to the ground – via direct contact or a mat or sheets that are grounded (or shoes as I wrote about in THIS POST).  The objective, for lack of a better way to describe it, is to protect oneself from all the voltage that we are exposed to in the modern world.  Here is a good demonstration (albeit a shaky one with brain-damaged kids in it) using a voltmeter, showing the difference between being grounded or “earthed” and not being earthed… Clint Ober is the primary force behind this modern movement.  Personally, I think earthing holds a lot of potential and… Read more »

Earth Runners Earthing Shoes

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grounded symbiosis

The following, and everything published at 180DegreeHealth is NOT a paid promotion.  By Matt Stone I admit – I have dabbled in the world of peculiar health-oriented footwear – to some degree.  For a couple years I wore a pair of those fugly Vibram 5-Fingers shoes.  They were alright.  I used them mostly for hiking in mountains and desert – hard on the feet but good on the body, as you had to walk carefully and gingerly to an extent that a lot less shock was being sent up into the knees, hips, and back. But my feet never really adjusted to the lack of protection because I just couldn’t bring myself to wear them daily.  While the internet gives me electric courage (similar to the liquid courage of alcohol),… Read more »

The Peat Whisperer Whispers Paleo

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By: Danny Roddy; author of The Peat Whisperer Matt Stone and I have a lot in common: we both hate that sleepy-eyed bozo from Coldplay, we both had a crush on Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes from TLC, and we both agree that not since Wiene’s ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ has there been a film as important as Bay’s ‘Transformers II: Revenge of The Fallen.’ In addition to the above, we were both convinced early on that the metabolic rate (as defined by body temperature and pulse) was a compelling factor in health. Well, Matt was convinced before I was, and Dude probably saved my life by introducing me to the potato, but I digress. I credit Matt for turning me onto the relationship between the metabolic rate, the thyroid… Read more »

Sarcopenia

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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

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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 »

10 Health Reasons to Spend Time Outdoors

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great outdoors

This summer I toured around the Rocky Mountains with my girlfriend and her daughter, showing them many of the remarkable places and doing many of the remarkable things in the outdoors (like crapping in a hole) that I’ve been extremely privileged to experience.  In the past I have reaped many health rewards from spending a lot of time in the outdoors (I’ve experienced some health detriments as well, from overdoing it with physical exertion and underdoing it on food). I think the near-miraculous health benefits I have experienced from spending a lot of time outdoors in the past was one of the major catalysts for my interest in health.  The only problem was that the quantity of time spent outdoors to achieve that effect was extreme – not something any “normal” person… Read more »

Male Weight Gain During Pregnancy

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By Matt Stone Your average person, your doctor, your personal trainer, even many health researchers believe, foolishly, that weight is a simple matter of moving more and eating less.  Those that are ever-so-slightly higher on the intellectual totem pole (or lower, I’m not sure) believe that weight is a simple matter of eliminating one or several dietary villains.  It’s the wheat!  It’s the carbs!  It’s the fructose!  It’s the “bad” fat!  It’s the animal products!  It’s the hormones!  GM Freaking O’s!!! So it’s not surprising, with the religiosity people have about their dietary beliefs combined with their mental need to simple-mindedly pin it all on one Satanic dietary and lifestyle entity, that real conversations about the multifactorial, nebulous, and complex causes of excessive body fat storage get people all worked… Read more »

Cortisol and Weight Gain

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Cortisol is an adrenal hormone mimicked by Cortisone, the wonder drug used to battle inflammatory and allergic reaction.  Side effects of cortisone include “rapid weight gain,” among many other not-so-appealing impacts.  Think there might be a connection between cortisol and weight gain?  If you said “yes,” you’re right! But what are the causes of high cortisol levels? To figure that out, we must first identify what cortisol’s primary physiological purpose is.  Just as doctors use cortisone to fight inflammation and allergy, so too does the body to fight the very same things – with cortisol. Essentially, the causes of high cortisol levels are inflammation and allergy, and in some regard stress. Now we get into a trickier realm, as we are left needing to decipher what causes inflammation, allergy, and… Read more »

Cause of Type 2 Diabetes Info

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The cause of Type 2 Diabetes is obviously insulin related, but what causes abnormalities with insulin production? Typical Type 2 Diabetes info does not relay an accurate picture of the full story. It’s actually kinda stupid – as most diabetes sites equate corn and candy bars based strictly on a number on the Glycemic Index. 180DegreeHealth is committed to providing the real info on Type 2 Diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a long-term complication of a prolonged condition known as insulin resistance.  Insulin resistance is a term that describes the reduced ability for cells to store away blood sugar.  In essence, the hormone insulin, which activates the blood sugar storage process, becomes increasingly ineffective.  Instead of the pancreas needing to secrete a small amount of insulin to do its job, the amount required… Read more »

Marathon? More like Moron-athon. Smarter Ways to Exercise

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In the last post we discussed the “not so fast” exercise. Not so fast as in endurance exercise and not so fast as in be careful about believing that endurance exercise will enhance metabolism, help you lose weight, improve your health, improve your insulin sensitivity, and so on. For the vast majority of people, it won’t – particularly if taken to extremes of intensity and duration – like marathon running. Although, in marathon-running’s defense, it is a great way to achieve infertility, risk sudden heart attack, damage joints, suffer from chronic inflammation, raise cortisol, suppress your immune system, suffer from frequent colds and infections, develop arthritis, asthma, and autoimmune disease, lose sex drive, get rid of pesky muscle tissue, and age much more quickly including developing raisin skin. That’s of… Read more »

RRARF Addendum

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As many of you know, over the last couple of months we’ve been exploring a diet that displaces more fat with starch as opposed to eating more or less equal amounts of the two.  When it comes to lowering cortisol, improving leptin sensitivity, improving insulin sensitivity, impoving body composition, raising metaoblism, and keeping fat gain minimal while eating to appetite or slightly beyond appetite – which are basically the objectives of the eating and lifestyle program created in the eBook DIET RECOVERY, starch immediately stands out as being superior to fat in each and every one of those categories. And of course, the vast majority of the most metabolically-healthy people on earth eat what could be called a “starch-based diet” in which well over half of ingested calories come from some starchy… Read more »

Thin Lizzie’s Diet Bloopers

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I’m a busy boy this month, but wanted to give you guys a little something.  Lizzie here has spent nearly two decades dieting and was very eager to share her experiences with the 180 community.  She sounds like a typical case – gained weight due to some law school stress on top of a teenage alcohol, nicotine, and junk food diet.  This she met with more stressful overexercising, undereating, and restricted dieting… One thing led to another and, voila!  Hypothyroidism and a cluster of health problems relating to it!  And this has led to the typical dieter’s predicament… She desperately needs real food, but her long chain of diet bloopers has caused her to gain weight eating well.  Some encouragement please?  Guest post by Elizabeth “Lizzie” Jaeger I am a… Read more »

Is a Low-Carb Diet Counterproductive?

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I was asked to shed some light this morning on why I think low-carb diets are counterproductive for healing the metabolism.   Thought I would share an elaborated version of my response… Several things make me very leery of going low-carb, or at least make me feel that it is counterproductive: 1) Several authors, such as Diana Schwarzbein and Barry Sears talk about cortisol being raised on a low-carb diet as if it were common biochemistry knowledge. Knowing what I know about cortisol, a low-carb diet seems very undesirable. Diana Schwarzbein repeats the mantra that “going too low in carbohydrates raises cortisol and adrenaline” time and time again throughout her work. Keep in mind she observed this by tracking her patients’ hormone levels as a practicing endocrinologist. Barry Sears emphatically states: “…the longer… Read more »

Omega 6, Cytokines, and the Cortisol Loop

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As we continue to explore the potential role that omega 6 fatty acid overload plays in the creation of the most major modern disease epidemics – such as asthma, allergies, autoimmune disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes, it’s an appropriate time to closely examine one of Russ Farris’s Cortisol Schematics. Farris has been led to believe that the hormone cortisol, released in response to inflammation, is an important step in the chain of events leading to metabolic syndrome, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and other chronic disease states.  I am more or less in full agreement, having entitled a chapter in my latest eBook on reversing type 2 diabetes “Cortisol is All.”  The inflammation connection was strengthened even more yesterday after I googled “inflammation causes leptin resistance” yesterday only to discover that… Read more »

Omega 6 and Inflammation Podcast

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This week’s podcast is a little diddy on omega 6 fatty acids – continuing our conversation from yesterday’s post on the subject. It reinforces why accumulating a lot of omega 6 in our tissues may be a really, really big deal with all kinds of negative repurcussions. Complete with brief impersonation of Dr. Barry Sears for your entertainment. Enjoy!

New Stuff Everywhere

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I’ve been an even busier boy this week than ever. But I wanted to let all the blog-following faithful know what’s going on out there. First up are 3 brand new 180 Kitchen posts. Thai coconut soup, Thai Massaman curry, and Baby Back ribs all have their own posts and tutorial videos. To see the latest there, click HERE. I’ve also uploaded 8 new content pages to the main site at http://www.180degreehealth.com/.  Click on any pages that interest you: CortisolHigh-Fructose Corn SyrupHigh TriglyceridesGenetically Engineered FoodHigh Blood SugarLow-CarbAspartameSafe Weight Loss The low-carb one is probably my favorite :) I also began archiving my podcasts on a youtube channel, and they are now availabe for anyone to listen to. This week’s topic was a continuation of our discussion on leptin, fructose, and insulin… Read more »

Nutrient Bombardment

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I’ve had a little bit of a thing going lately with eating the most nutritious food that I can get my hands on.  This was one of the first attitudes that I ever developed while attempting to improve my health through diet long, long ago.  Only problem was that back then I was primarily a vegetarian.  I was missing out on some very important nutrients that put a nutritious diet to good use.  For three days last week I kept close track of everything that I ate just so I could share my numbers with you guys.  I plugged all my data into some very expensive software that I purchased a couple of years ago (ESHA).  As you will be able to see in a minute when you go to check out… Read more »

Carb Wars: Episode I

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The following was an e-mail sent to me by a low-carb struggler, confused by her miraculous first impressions of a low-carb diet that ended with her basically shatting her pants. My responses are in red… Hi Matt, I hope you don’t mind me writing directly to you but I’d really like to share my story since I see you’re wary of LC diets… and maybe while I’m at it I’ll ask for some advice as well! I found your blog some months ago and I have to say it really opened my eyes as far as nutrition is concerned. Before that I’ve been low-carbing for about 3 years since in the beginning it really seemed to do wonders. It was very similar to testimonials of other people – the diet… Read more »

Hulda vs. Aajonus (HVA)

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As I was sitting in my tent the other day, backpacking in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, I was reading the most appropriate possible book for my circumstances at the moment – Hulda Clark’s The Cure for All Diseases. It was the perfect book for the moment because it touts the many dangers of bacterial, viral, and parasitic infection and the vital need for absolute sanitary perfection. “Keep those fingernails trimmed short,” says Clark, as I looked down at my long, dirt-caked hands and fingernails while sipping on unfiltered creek water that was undeniably chock full of protozoa, fecal coliform bacteria from one of the dozens of mammal and bird species in the area, and many other such pathogens. I had not used toothpaste in days. I carried no… Read more »