Posts Tagged: Stress

Bloating, Inflammation and Humidity

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Sweat and Bloating

By Julia Gumm Boy, things are heating up here in the northern hemisphere. In my neck of the woods, we recently saw heat indexes in the high 100′s, accomplished in part by relative humidity hovering around 90%. In keeping with the theme of high numbers, my weight scaled up as well. Going with the flow, I guess. Does this happen to any of you? Heat and humidity set in and suddenly you’re retaining so much water you look like you’re seven months pregnant? Because it happens to me. Along with the belly, I experience swelling in my fingers, knees and any place in my back that was giving me mild trouble prior to the change in weather suddenly becomes a debilitating injury of dramatic proportions. It seems there’s an uptick… Read more »

How to Recover from a Breakup or Divorce

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Recovering from Divorce

By Matt Stone It was the fall of 2010.  I came home limping from a men’s softball game – one of my rare appearances out of the house and wearing something besides my pajamas at the time, to a girl sniffling and wiping her eyes out on the patio.  “Matt, you are the funniest, smartest, best-looking son of a gun I ever met.  But I don’t think I’m in love with you anymore.” Okay, maybe I embellished a little bit on that quote. It was sudden, out of the blue, and stung.  The great Matt Stone, savior of the universe, king of the impossible… dumped?  This couldn’t be. I was completely heartbroken and devastated that this mediocre relationship had comed to a halt, and I did what any human does in a situation like this… 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 »

Adrenal Fatigue: Getting Back to Basics

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Adrenal Fatigue Sugar

By Julia Gumm Adrenal Fatigue is one of those shadowy - is it real or isn’t it, kind of dis-eases that sort of hangs around the periphery of medicine. Sure, it’s often an accessory to the crimes of high blood pressure, back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia and allergies- but for some reason, doctors are loathe to pin the patsy on these inconspicuous perps. Nope, they’re off the hook. Sweet deal the adrenals have, unless they’re all in on the crime, they get away scot free. Blame the pancreas, blame the heart, blame the immune system! Don’t blame us! Nothin’ to see here but us chickens! Or uh, glands! So that’s how come you can show up at your doctor’s office with a laundry list of symptoms- weak ankles and knees, muscle aches,… Read more »

What I Want to Be When I Grow Up

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Boxer abs

Ever since I can remember, I had a deep, burning desire to have a striking physique.  In Kindergarten we were asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to be presented at our graduation ceremony.  I had watched a lot of sports on television at that age, and loved boxing and greats like Marvin Hagler.  Marvin had deep, ebony skin tone and was very lean and defined.  Put some sweat on him during a hard boxing match and he looked like he was a man carved out of wood with a fresh coat of paint laid down on him.  I proudly announced to my Kindergarten teacher, precisely because I was so enamored with this look, “I want to be a black boxer.”  I’m not making this up. … Read more »

How to Burn Fat and Why You Shouldn’t

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low carb diet dangers

By Danny Roddy, author of The Peat Whisperer Traversing through the blogosphere reveals much text, but little art. This is, until you stumble upon the site of low-carb sage Petro Dobromylkyj. Similar to da Vinci’s “David” or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Petro’s exudes extraordinary vision. One doesn’t have to read past the header for the first glimpse of his contribution to The Great Work: “You need to get your calories from somewhere should it be from carbohydrate or fat?” — Petro Dobromylkyj If I was forced to interpret Petro’s poem, I would say that he’s trying to tell us that carbohydrates reassure men that they can be masters of their own reality—but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. Another interpretation, which sounds less plausible, could be that… Read more »

Healthy Stress? Health Benefits of Acute Stress

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female-deadlift

Inspired by Matthew Bowen, I wanted to briefly discuss the concept of acute stress’s POSITIVE role in good human functionality.  What is acute stress?  Acute stresses are things that are so damn cute it actually elicits a stress response in your body.  I mean, look at those freakin’ puppies.  So acute. Acute stress can also be stress that’s comes in at an angle less than 90 degrees.  Or if you go around a curve that’s tighter than 90 degrees really fast in a car while riding in the passenger side.  That’s an acute stress. Okay, I’m not funny.  Well, some people say I am, but I just assume they are the dorks that watch AFV and actually own post-Gilmore Adam Sandler movies.  People who don’t find me funny typically put… Read more »

Creativity vs. Consumption

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hanks

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer The other day, Matt wrote about the difference between expertise and credentials. Expertise, he points out, comes from the process of being engaged over long stretches in a particular pursuit, and it’s enhanced dramatically when that pursuit is self-directed and borne of one’s own inclinations and predispositions. It brought to mind an insight I’ve come to over the last couple of years: purpose and satisfaction comes more from creation than consumption. Relatedly, community and intimacy comes from co-creation more than co-consumption. If you’re not happy with your life, incorporating more creation relative to consumption can help you re-balance. I cribbed this idea from Charles Eisenstein, philosopher and author.  Some of you may know him from The Yoga of Eating or Transformational Weight Loss. I like him… Read more »

The Peat Whisperer Whispers Paleo

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dannyroddy

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 »

Overcoming Psychological and Emotional Stress

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STRESSED MOM

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 »

How We Get Fat

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chrisfarley

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 »