Have you ever noticed those people who look super lean from head to toe, but have a weird little pot belly? You’ve been told in the past that it’s a beer gut right? So what if they don’t drink beer? Chances are it could be to do with their digestive health.

EVERY WEEK MORE and more magic pills are turning up on our shelves. There will be at least 25 new protein drinks out this year. What about the new vitamin waters? Will I be able to walk on water if I drink one of those a day?

People have forgotten about focusing on a healthy nutrition and lifestyle regime. Do you know what it’s like to feel 100 per cent healthy? For many of us the answer is ‘no’ because we probably haven’t been 100 per cent for years!These days, being healthy is misunderstood. People think it consists of splashing out on a truckload of vitamins and pills, trying the latest exercise tool that will come and go within six months and drinking protein shakes.

Health is all about taking responsibility for all areas of your life. So what does eating healthy mean to you? Here’s my opinion on what being healthy means:

1. If it is white, don’t eat it! The four white devils are white flour, white sugar, white salt and pasteurized and homogenized milk products. If dairy is a necessity and you can’t get hold of raw dairy, choose Certified Organic as your second choice. For those who are lactose sensitive, use full fat cream, which is very low in lactose and high in fat.
2. If you can’t pronounce a word on a label, do not eat it. Your liver will thank you for not doing so!
3. Fruit juice is sugar water! Don’t drink it. Small quantities of freshly squeezed juice may be ok as an occasional treat.
4. The longer the shelf life, the more harmful it is likely to be to your body!
5. Choose products and meats in this order:
   • Certified Organic produce and free range meats
   • Organic Produce and organic meat
   • Locally Farmed produce and locally farmed free range meat
   • Commercial produce and commercial hormone-free meat
   • Commercial meat.
6. Always season foods and water with 100 per cent unprocessed sea salt. The best is Celtic, followed by sea salt from New Zealand because there are less heavy metal toxicity there.
7. Use this formula to calculate the correct daily water consumption for you:
   Your body weight (in kilograms) x .033 = the amount of water (in liters) you should be drinking each day.
   For example an 80kg man should drink at least 2.64 liters per day (calculated: 80 x 0.033= 2.6). Keep in mind there are no substitutes for water; not tea, not juice, not beer, nothing! And always buy top selling brands such as Evian, Fiji, Trinity and Volvic because they sell the fastest and, therefore, have the least exposure to plastic bottles. The most health-giving waters will have a hardness factor of 170 mg/L or greater and a Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) of 300 or greater. Adding a pinch of sea salt to water is recommended to replace electrolytes. Additionally, it will harden otherwise good but soft waters, and will significantly increase the TDS.
8. Follow the 80/20 rule. If you live right 80 per cent of the time, you can absorb the other 20 per cent of not so perfect living.
9. Get to bed by 10pm and sleep until 6am minimum, every day. This is because:
   • the body (physical) repairs itself from 10pm to 2pm.
   • the mind (mental) repairs itself from 2am to 6am.

It may take a bit of time to repair the damage that has been done over the years, so you need to be patient and realize that this is a long term project, not something that will be fixed overnight.

Depending on how toxic your body is you might experience a number of reactions to changing your diet; this could include some weight gain, weight loss, enhanced mood, increased energy and /or greater vitality. The thing to remember is that even if we eat all the right foods and take high-end supplements, if we have a gut dysfunction (e.g., low SIgA, parasites, fungus, bacteria, Dysbiosis), then what we consume will not produce the benefits we seek.

HEAL YOUR GUT

For optimal gut health, heed the guidelines and follow a Gut Healing Program like the one below. This program should be followed for a minimum of four weeks.

• Eliminate caffeine, alcohol, refined sugars and processed foods and bad fats from your diet, as they all irritate and create inflammation in the gut.
• Remove foods that you know you are sensitive to; it’s worth getting a food intolerance test to find out for sure.
• Restore probiotics daily, by using a lactobacillus acidophilus/bifidus supplement.
• Repair your system with healthy fats, such as fish oils and nut oils.
• Eat whole foods that are unprocessed, lightly cooked and organic wherever possible.
• Avoid antibiotics and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, such as ibuprofen, aspirin and Tylenol.
• Be aware that many other medications affect the GI tract (i.e. osteoporosis  medications, anti-depressants, acid reduction medications).
• Repair your system with herbs such as garlic, aloe vera, oil of oregano, turmeric and fish oils.

You now have the healthy, natural tools to help rekindle your health.

Moving away from those allergies- By Luke Walsh

What are food allergies?

Food allergy occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks a food protein. Ingestion of the offending food may trigger the sudden release of chemicals, including histamine, resulting in symptoms of an allergic reaction. The symptoms may be mild (rashes, hives, itching, swelling, etc.) or severe (trouble breathing, wheezing, loss of consciousness, etc.). A food allergy can be potentially fatal.

Diagnosis:

A skin prick test or a blood test (such as the Immulite or ImmunoCap test) for IgE antibodies is commonly used to begin to determine if an allergy exists. A skin prick test is usually less expensive and can be done in the doctor’s office.
Positive skin prick tests or immunoassay test results will show that IgE is present in the body, but cannot alone predict that a reaction will occur if the patient were to eat a suspected allergy-causing food.

The results of the tests are combined with other information, such as a history of symptoms and the result of a food challenge to determine whether a food allergy exists.

Treatment:

Strict avoidance of the allergy-causing food is the only way to avoid a reaction. Reading ingredient labels for all foods is the key to avoiding a reaction. If a product doesn’t have a label, individuals with a food allergy should not eat that food. If you have any doubt whether a food is safe, call the manufacturer for more information. There is no cure for food allergies. Studies are inconclusive about whether food allergies can be prevented.

Epinephrine, also called adrenaline, is the medication of choice for controlling a severe reaction.

Symptoms:

Symptoms may include one or more of the following: a tingling sensation in the mouth, swelling of the tongue and the throat, difficulty breathing, hives, vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhoea, drop in blood pressure, loss of consciousness, and even death. Symptoms typically appear within minutes to two hours after the person has eaten the food to which he or she is allergic.

Prevention:

Studies are inconclusive about whether food allergies can be prevented. Parents should become familiar with the early signs of allergic disease such as eczema, hives, repeated diarrhea and/or vomiting in reaction to formulas, wheezing, and talk to a doctor about those symptoms.

At this time, no medication can be taken to prevent food allergies. Strict avoidance of the allergy-causing food is the only way to prevent a reaction. Medications are administered to control symptoms after a reaction occurs.

For most of us, the New Year signals a time to put our festive indulgence to rest and our fat loss resolution into action. While consistent training and a good diet will provide a solid base for your ‘War on Weight loss’, here is the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ behind why Afterburn is the perfect artillery.

Afterburn is otherwise known as Exercise Post Oxygen Consumption (EPOC), and to understand why it should be present in your fat loss year, we first need to look at resting metabolism. Resting metabolism is the rate at which your body burns energy at rest, or, how much energy your body requires to carry out every day activities. It should be responsible for the largest amount of calories that you burn each day. Afterburn is a disturbance which occurs post workout, and produces a dramatic increase in your resting metabolic rate. However, its employment and effectiveness will depend entirely on the type of workout that you have endured.

Your metabolism increases a lot during any workout, due to the high energy expenditure that occurs. When training for fat loss, the value of the different training methods should be judged by the time it takes for your metabolic rate to return to normal after your workout or, in other words, how long your ‘afterburn lasts’. It can take around 30 minutes for long aerobic training (e.g. using a piece of cardio equipment at a steady speed) or (according to studies in Alwyn Cosgrove’s ‘The Hierarchy of Fat Loss’) in excess of 30 hours for high intensity resistance training.

During resistance training, your muscle fibers tear, causing repair to take place over the next 24-48 hours. This is so that the body can over compensate, in order to perform exercise better in the future. This process of repair, requires your body to burn more energy, for a prolonged period of time, especially if you’ve managed to tear muscle fibers throughout the majority of your body. Considering this, it becomes evident that high intensity circuit resistance training that includes a squat, lunge, bend, upper body push and pull exercises will be most effective for fat loss.

Performing these movements in sequence at a high intensity, followed by a brief rest period, will get your heart rate high enough to produce a large metabolic disturbance during your workout. The break down of muscle fibers throughout the whole body are also guaranteed and the very process in which the body will require more energy to repair itself has been triggered, increasing the rate at which you burn energy while you rest, befriending your fight against fat!

Each and every one of us will no doubt have over indulged in recent weeks. This article is designed to highlight some of the traps we often fall into at this time of year; to underline in explicit detail the dangers but most importantly making some recommendations on how to get back on track.

Shielding the Six Pack!

It is a common misconception that a build up of body fat around the mid section is a direct cause of over eating or making poor dietary choices such as deep fried or fast food. These certainly could be contributory factors but this fatty build up is actually your body sending you a “cry for help”. The human body was not designed to consume artificial, chemically engineered products. Processed poor quality foods that are full of additives, chemical emulsifiers and colourings can be tolerated by the body for a finite time but there comes a point when your intestine becomes intolerant. Over time the frequency of “CRAP” (Caffeine, Refined processed foods, Alcohol and Pasteurized milk) we consume can cause irreparable damage to the digestive system and these waste chemicals that the body can no longer break down start to seep through the gut wall and get deposited around the waist as body fat.

Unwittingly consumers buy so called “healthy options” pre-packaged produce that is crammed full of additives and preservatives and loaded with poor quality ingredients that cannot be digested. Then they wonder why they can never get the six pack they have been striving for even though they exercise regularly, don’t over eat and think they are making healthy food choices. Over Christmas and New Year the volume of artificial foodstuffs we consume escalates well beyond manageable levels and at times this is out of our control with eating out and parties at a premium over the period.

Below are some changes you should think about:

• Consider the labels of the foods you are choosing to buy: the longer the shelf life the more artificial ingredients it is likely to contain.
• If the label comprises more chemical compounds, e-numbers and unpronounceable words than genuine ingredients, the chances are your digestive system will have the same trouble in processing them as your brain did in deciphering the contents.
• Wherever possible go natural and organic and if you have the time, aim to prepare and cook your own meals with wholesome natural ingredients.
• Be selective about where you get takeout food from; ask what kind of ingredients they use and whether they are fresh, wholesome or organic.

Breaking those bad habits and bringing back the balance

It’s very easy to continue with some of the unwanted eating habits developed during the period of festivities; especially when the cupboards are still brimming with leftover goodies. Consider the content of your fridge versus the content of your cupboards. This should indicate the ratio of short shelf life produce to packaged and processed CRAP. Most of the CRAP in your cupboards will be not only full of artificial chemicals and preservatives but also high GI (Glycemic Index).

High GI foodstuffs have a very ready usable energy source, the body converts such produce to glycogen (blood sugar) very quickly. The result is a powerful immediate impact on the metabolism in the form of a blood sugar spike – a massive surge into the blood stream; a “sugar rush”.

The sensation is an immediate high, an abundance of energy caused by the stimulant. Consider, however, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction: the crash is equally as pronounced as the high. As such the body is left in a state of craving for the next high (similar to drug addiction in many ways) and the eating and drinking of sugary snacks and drinks continues as the body is tricked into believing it needs another sugar hit.

This self perpetuating cycle will take on a snowball effect causing your metabolism to endure a sequence of peaks and troughs that in the end it simply cannot cope with. Ultimately it is precisely this type of eating behaviour that has directly influenced the massive upsurge in type ii diabetes and obesity in Australia and the rest of the developed world in recent years. Australia now lays claim to the unwanted label as the most obese country in the world per capita!

So what should we do?

• Opt for a balanced diet; every meal should consist of approx 40 – 45% protein (ideally meat, poultry or fish) 40 – 45% carbohydrate (preferably lower GI complex carbohydrate i.e. dark green veg such as spinach, broccoli or silver beet rather than high GI starchy potato, pasta or rice) and 10% fat (preferably unsaturated non trans fats – i.e. avocado, nuts and fish oil etc).
• A balanced diet has a combination of easy, medium and difficult to convert sources of usable energy and is therefore the perfect answer to delivering a constant steady release of energy throughout the day.
• Consuming up to 6 small well balanced meals and snacks a day allows you to keep energy levels at a constant and your body does not feel the need to store usable energy as fat. (Be careful in changing your meal plan from 3 – 6 daily – do not double your daily intake!)

Treat your body like a high performance car; provide it with a regular supply of good quality fuel and service it regularly for optimum results. I hope this provides some food for thought in your quest to regain your fitness in 2010!

Luke Walsh is an excellent role model for people aspiring to adopt the discipline of a fitter & healthier lifestyle. With a smile and warm personal manner Luke will guide you down the path through nutrition and exercise allowing you to achieve the goals set out. Luke gives 100% and expects the same from his clients. He is a qualified Master Trainer and Personal Trainer achieving Certificate III & IV at the Australia Institute of Fitness graduating at the top of his class.

Having spent many years involved with motor, snow & water sports he now specialises within these fields. Offering training to better your hand eye coordination, lateral awareness, endurance, core strength & stability. All of which help to make you stronger better faster.

Training under Luke’s guidance offers the prospect of written goals, nutrition plans, exercise progress reports and all to ensure clients stay on track to reach their goals. All with a smile and warm personal manner.

GOALS FOR 2010

How many of your friends and family came up to you on New Years Eve and gave you an insight into their plans for 2010 after they had knocked back one too many drinks? ‘Bobby, I’m going to lose 20 kilos!’ or ‘watch out, I’m going to run a marathon!’.

Did you congradulate them for the challenge they had set themselves? Or have a laugh and tell them its impossible? Whether you have the belief or not, anything you say and challenge yourself to in 2010 is possible but it won’t just happen (unfortunately). People tend to come up with brilliant goals on that one night of the year, but for most, by the time they come down from that massive high with a splitting head ache the thought of striving for that goal is well and truely forgotten with the memories from the nights celebrations.

If you work on your goals on a daily basis, no matter what goal you set, you can achieve it if you really want to!

Here are 7 steps to MAKE SURE you reach your goals for 2010:

1) Have your goals in writing. We are all very busy these days and for your goals to be at the forefront of your mind they need to be in sight, so write them down. My clients and I do monthly goal setting and each are asked to print out their goals for the month and post them somewhere visible to see each morning. Either in their bedroom, bathroom or on the fridge… You will NEVER achieve CHALLENGING goals if they aren’t at the forefront of your mind.

2) Be specific. There are goals…..and there are specific goals. Stating that you want to lose weight is a goal (in my eyes, a weak goal). A more specific goal is ‘I want to lose 10 kilos by the end of July’. Make it specific. Give it a due date and a benchmark.

3) Who knows. Tell your friends and family! Personally if I make a statement to friends or family I’m slightly embarrsed if I don’t achieve it. Share your goals with your friends and have them inform you of theirs. Maybe even put a wager on it to give it a little spice!

4) Break it down, down, down. When you prepare for a marathon you don’t think about the 42 painful kilometres you are about to run, you break it down and work on the first 5 kms. Once you’ve past that benchmark you address the next block of 5kms. One of my clients is going to lose 25 kilos this year which is a lot of weight, but her January goal is to lose 2 kilos, a target that is a lot easier for her to manage.

5) Who is pumping you up and who is deflating you. At one point or another every successful person would have had someone doubt their ability to succeed. If you’re going to let people tell you it cant be done, guess what….. it can’t be done. Don’t listen to them, your belief in chasing your dream is all that matters. If they say it cant be done, it can’t be done… by them… but you can.

6) Reward yourself along the way. If you have a long term goal that is broken down into smaller bite size goals make sure you reward yourself a long the way. If you’ve looking to lose 20 kilos this year and by the end of March you have lost 6 kilos treat yourself to a massage or a treatment… You’ve done well, you deserve it.

7) Identify habits that need to be created in order to achieve these goals. Creating habits is the single most important thing in helping you to reach these goals. Each habit that you create should be worked on for 21 days before it will be ingrained into your lifestyle. DON’T try to take on too many goals/habits at once because you won’t succeed! Depending on how busy you are will vary the amount of goals you should be able to work through. The busier you are the less habits your likely to be able to work on at any given time.

WHATS NEW!

Raw Solutions has two new trainers with a third (Luke Walsh) joining the team in the coming weeks.

ANTONY CUTRUPI

Anthony began in the fitness industry six years ago, training Rugby League players in strength and conditioning and muscle gain, and also friends and family in weight loss and weight management. His passion for sports has seen him represent Australia in Rugby League (2008) and have the privilege of spending some of his boxing time being trained by Olympic boxing coach, Geoff Peterson.

His fascination with the mind, and enjoyment that he gets from working with people led to further study, resulting in a powerful combination of these two interests and a force in assisting anybody with their health and fitness goals.

ALEX HINCHCLIFFE

Alex is a certified Master Trainer; qualifying 1^st in his class and winning the award for all round excellence at the AIF (Australian Institute of Fitness). The Master Trainer course comprises Certificate III (Fitness Essentials, Gym Instructor & First Aid) and Certificate IV (Personal Trainer). The AIF is the country’s most renowned and well respected independent Registered Training Organization (RTO) in the fitness field. Alex also has a first class honors degree in Public Relations.

Alex is more than a fitness trainer he is a health professional – adopting a holistic approach to health and wellbeing. Through a genuinely attentive and thorough approach Alex takes the time to fully understand an individual’s training requirements. He will devise a bespoke training program to accommodate the client’s needs and wants whilst also delivering fun training sessions that ensure the goals are achieved.