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9/25/2010

The Top 10 Healthiest Foods to Heal your Body With

Trading is hard enough — whether daytrading or swing trading.

You need good rest and good nutrition.

Foods were always meant to be consumed in their original natural state – not refined and certainly not stripped of their peel and their freshness. Whole foods somehow have this reputation for being kind of highbrow today – they are more expensive, they sell them at certain specialty markets, and they can be rare. The thing is, whole foods are not a luxury – our bodies actually need them – to thrive, and often, to even heal. Let’s look at the 10 healthiest foods that not only pack a nutritional punch, but also have all kinds of healing effects right from helping your cholesterol to keeping cancer at bay.

The last major breakthrough scientists ever made towards discovering the secret to eternal youth was an understanding of the contribution of antioxidants. Kale is a vegetable that you will recognize for its similarity to its other cruciferous family members, the cabbage and broccoli. Kale contains high concentrations of an antioxidant nutrient called sulforaphane – a powerful material that helps you fight all kinds of cancer – of the prostate, the skin, the intestines and the breast. Another compound in Kale, Indole, helps in the fight against colon and cervical cancer too. As for antioxidants, Kale has boatloads more than spinach, or broccoli. A little bit of Kale in your diet every day would be a great idea. A serving of this in your salad will give you about 13 times the amount of Vitamin K you need, and nearly twice the amount of vitamin A.

There is something about the whole cruciferous family; not only is Kale a hidden treasure, so is cabbage and broccoli. In ancient Chinese medicine, cabbage and broccoli were used to help with depression, ulcers, all manner of digestive problems. It has very high levels of the same antioxidants that make Kale so precious, though in slightly lower levels. The more of these vegetables you have in your diet, the less chance you have of cancer any kind. And make sure that you never throw away the outer leaves of the cabbage -they have the most nutrients.

Next on the list of the top 10 healthiest foods to heal the body with, comes kiwi. This cute little fuzzy fruit doesn’t get enough press – it has twice as much Vitamin C as any orange, and oodles of other vitamins and phytonutrients; it can help you protect yourself from heart disease, cancer, stroke and lung disease. If you have a hypertension situation, kiwi is a natural blood thinner. You don’t have to worry about despoiling your body with chemical blood thinners.

It’s just astounding the kind of contribution that fruits can make to your health. In ancient Chinese medicine, cherry juice is a great way to battle anemia, gout and arthritis. The great thing about cherries is that the anthocyanins in them help you fight colon cancer, and they’re a natural anti-inflammatory – they heal the body wherever there is inflammation.

The guava is a fruit that is pretty exotic to these parts; it’s a tropical fruit that has more of the antioxidant lycopene than almost any other source – tomato is a distant second. The problem is, our bodies find it difficult to digest the antioxidants that tomato contains. Guava though, is naturally accessible to our intestines. To people with a slight case of liver damage, guava juice can be great for liver healing.

Beans get a bad rep for their relation to a certain embarrassing bodily function. It’s kind of unfair, seeing as how beans are known to help heal the digestive tract, protect against diabetes, and to have more antioxidants than meat, fruit or grain. And to people who have a family history of cancer, this is one vegetable that actually stops cancerous cells from spreading.

If you ever wanted to hear about food that contributed no calories at all to your diet, did you ever consider watercress? Ounce for ounce, it has more vitamins and calcium than anything else on the face of the earth – more than milk, spinach, or any fruit. Watercress in your daily salad will actually help heal cancer – it will kill cancerous cells, and it will keep the carcinogens in your food from infecting the good cells.

Does this list of the top 10 healthiest foods seem to include a disproportionate number of salad ingredients? Well, that just happens to be true. Consider Popeye fuel, ahem, spinach. Sure you know from watching those cartoons that spinach is good for you; but it doesn’t do you as much good when you don’t really know how. Of course, it has high levels of every kind of vitamin you need; but spinach is able to actually kill cancerous cells when you have colon cancer. And dementia and Alzheimer’s that just  seem to run rife these days, is kept away or healed with spinach.

And finally, let’s hear it for the reason you have to always carry breath freshener in your pocket – onions. These flavorful (if intense) bulbs pack quite a punch when it comes to fighting cancer of the prostate and the esophagus. The sulfides in onions (the materials that bring the breath problem about) actually help with your cholesterol and blood pressure. And in women, onions are great as a way to prevent osteoporosis.

9/24/2010

A 1200 Calorie Diet Can Provide Quick Results

One of the hardest things to have when committing to a diet and workout program is patience. We have to remember that we did not gain all of the extra weight we are carrying in two weeks and we are not going to lose it that quickly either. You need some patience and persistence to lose weight, especially if you are older than 40. A 1200 calorie diet may sound like a great idea but in reality it could end up giving you health problems in the long run.

One of the worst things about dieting in general is that people don’t keep the weight off and they end up with the yo-yo effect, rapidly regaining the weight and then some. Medical studies have shown that this repeated gaining and losing of weight is even more dangerous to a person’s health than remaining heavy. People who experience this yo-yo effect repeatedly lose muscle tissue and may even get organ damage. A 1200 calorie diet might get you quick results but you need to be aware of the overall cost to your health.

You also need to remember that a 1200 calorie diet means not only the caloric content of the food that you ingest but also the calories that you burn doing exercise. If you lead the typical sedentary life of the average American but you go to the gym or work out some way, you need to count those as negative calories or calories burned. For example, if you take in 1200 calories each day, but burn 300 calories while walking for thirty minutes you are actually on a 900 calorie diet not a 1200 calorie diet. 900 calories is nowhere near enough for an adult.

This is why most medical and fitness experts recommend a diet of 2000 calories for men, and 1600 for women. It is further not recommended that you lose more than one pound per week. Most of us want to lose at least five pounds per week and we are encouraged by watching shows like “The Biggest Loser” on NBC. But those are really extreme cases with the men weighing as much as 400 pounds in some cases and the women reaching weights of 250 pounds or more. Of course they are going to lose weight faster than someone who is only 20 or 30 pounds overweight.

That is why when they do the weigh-in results on that show they don’t go by pounds lost but by percentage of body weight lost. That is the only real fair way to play the game. In the first week of a 1200 calorie diet you will lose a lot of weight, perhaps as much as five to ten pounds. A lot of this weight will be water weight, especially if you are doing a lot of aerobic exercise where you are sweating a lot. This can be misleading weight loss and many people find that they will hit a plateau around the second or third week and this can be very frustrating. You work out and eat very little and yet you see very low results on the scale. That is another reason that you should not weigh yourself each day, but rather once a week.

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