An Athlete’s experience.

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We have recently had the pleasure to get some workouts with a professional baseball player and Miami local George Barber. He had some great things to say about his experience, so we wanted to share with our friends.

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“Thanks for the workout!

Here’s a little testimony – Having been through high school, college, and professional strength and conditioning programs, none of them have provided the “experience” that V Art of Wellness has. Chris and Tracie have introduced a new level of fitness to me, a perfect blend of intense focus and “true strength” developing body movements. Chris’s workouts challenges you to get the most out of your body, training the body and mind to be efficient and perform at optimal levels.Tracie’s Aeroga pushes you past your mental and physical limitations, incorporating a mix of yoga and high intensity workouts that breeds balance, focus, and body strength. As an athlete and avid fitness follower, I can attest that both workouts are unlike anything I’ve experienced. Seeing how applicable they are to my craft and life is truly exciting. I genuinely believe that Chris and Tracie aren’t selling a product, but rather sharing a lifestyle that aids in a better quality of life mentally and physically, fit for any and everyone.”

Hit Your Farmacy for Abundant Health

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This is a great article that I stumbled upon that strongly supports fact that you can eat your way to health.

Skip the Pharmacy and Hit Your Farmacy for Abundant Health

by  – May 9th

The most powerful tool you have to change your brain and your health is your fork. Food is not just calories or energy. Food contains information that talks to your genes, turning them on or off and affecting their function moment to moment.

Food is the fastest acting and most powerful medicine you can take to change your life. We call this nutrigenomics. Think of your genes as the software that runs everything in your body. Just like your computer software, your genes only do what you instruct them to do with the stroke of your keyboard.

The foods you eat are the keystrokes that send messages to your genes telling them what to do—creating health or disease.

Imagine what messages you are sending with a double cheeseburger, large fries, and a 48-ounce cola. Then consider what messages you might send instead with deep red wild salmon, braised greens, and brown rice.

The science of nutrigenomics allows us to personalize medicine. Not everyone with the same problems needs the same prescription. Your individual genetic makeup determines what you need to be optimally healthy.

Consider that you only have about 30,000 genes, but those genes contain about three million tiny variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that make up who you are. These variations make your individual needs slightly different from my individual needs.

Put another way, we all have different needs for food, vitamins, rest, exercise, stress tolerance, or ability to handle toxins.

The key, then, becomes personalizing a program based on your strengths and vulnerabilities—your individual needs. By analyzing where you are out of balance and then applying the science of nutrigenomics to help reestablish balance, you can design a treatment matched to your individual needs.

 Personalization, Simplified

Personalizing doesn’t have to be complicated. The first step is to take out the bad stuff, or the things that create imbalance. Those imbalances include a nutrient-poor, processed diet, toxins, allergens, infections, and stress.

Think of it this way. If you have 10 tacks in your foot, you can’t take out one, pop an aspirin, and hope to feel better. You need to find and take out all the tacks; taking out just one of them won’t make you better.

The second step is to add the good stuff, including high-quality whole foods, nutrients, water, oxygen, light, movement, sleep, relaxation, community, connection, love, meaning, and purpose. When you add those good things, the body’s natural intelligence and healing system will take care of the rest.

Using this simple yet comprehensive method – removing the bad things and replacing them with good things – allows me to treat virtually all diseases, whether they are “in the brain” or “in the body.” This strategy works for one simple reason: the body and the brain are one system.

Upgrade Your Genes; Downsize Your Jeans

Allow me to explain how I use nutrigenomics to reverse diabesity, the continuum of abnormal biology that ranges from mild insulin resistance to full-blown diabetes.

As I mentioned before, food is information. If you want to turn off the genes that lead to diabesity and turn on the genes that lead to health, the key becomes the quality and type of food you eat, not necessarily the number of calories you consume or the ratio of protein to fat to carbohydrate in your diet. You need to put your genes on a diet.

As David Ludwig, one of the leading obesity researchers at Harvard Medical School, said, “Molecular pathways involved in hormone action [like insulin resistance] have been the target of a multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical research effort. However, many of these pathways may normally be under dietary regulation. The results of the present study [on nutrigenomics] emphasize the age-old wisdom to ‘use food as medicine’—in this case, for the targeted prevention and treatment of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.” (1)

Shifting from a nutrient-poor diet to a nutrient-rich diet abundant in plant foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, and whole grains improves the expression of hundreds of genes that control insulin function and obesity.

To use just one example, the vast array of colors in vegetables represents over 25,000 beneficial chemicals.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate over 800 varieties of plant foods. Today, we don’t even consume a fraction of that amount. We need to make an extra effort to eat many different foods to get the full range of benefits. Remember: eat the rainbow!

An optimal diet to prevent and treat diabesity also includes healthy fats such as olive oil, nuts, avocados, and omega-3 fats, along with modest amounts of lean animal protein. This is commonly known as a Mediterranean diet. (2) It is a diet of whole, real, fresh food that has been prepared in a kitchen, not a factory.

This way of eating has been shown to prevent and even reverse diabesity. It has broad-ranging benefits for our health, and beneficially affects our entire physiology, reducing inflammation, boosting detoxification, balancing hormones, and providing powerful antioxidant protection— all things that fix the underlying causes of disease.

Even with a perfect diet, the combination of our depleted soils, the storage and transportation of our food, genetic alterations of traditional heirloom species, and the increased stress and nutritional demands resulting from a toxic environment make it impossible for us to get the vitamins and minerals we need solely from the foods we eat.  (8) The evidence shows that we cannot get away from the need for nutritional supplements. (9)

That’s why you need a full complement of vitamins and minerals, and you may need to individually correct specific deficiencies, including deficiencies in chromium, biotin, vitamin D, (3) magnesium, (4) zinc, alpha lipoic acid, (5) and omega-3 fats. (6, 7)

You can find all these nutrients in individual supplements, but I recommend a blood sugar-balancing formulation as well as fish oil soft gels to simplify your nutrient intake.

Fiber is a great blood sugar stabilizer to reverse diabesity, but unfortunately most of us do not eat enough high-fiber plant foods. That’s why I also recommend glucomannan, a soluble fiber derived from an Asian potato-like tuber.

Also called Konjac fiber, glucomannan is much more viscous than usual fibers, retaining up to 17 times its weight in water. Expanding in the stomach, small and large intestine, it absorbs fat, accelerates elimination, reduces cholesterol, blunts sugar absorption, and facilitates weight loss, in part by increasing feelings of satiety.

Combine these foods and nutrients with quality sleep, controlling stress, and finding joy and meaning in life, and you have the perfect formula to stay lean, happy, and healthy.

9 Ways to Make Your Grocery Store a “Farmacy”

I hope I have demonstrated that what you put at the end of your fork is a more powerful medicine than anything you will find at the bottom of a pill bottle. Food is the most powerful medicine available to heal chronic disease, which will account for over 50 million deaths and cost the global economy $47 trillion by 2030. (10) That’s why we must change our perspective about food.

All you need to do is eat your medicine and think of your grocery store as your pharmacy. Here are 9 ways to do that. 

  1. Skip the labels. Whenever possible, do not buy foods with labels. Avoid foods in a box, package, or can.
  2. Keep it simple. If the food does have a label, it should have fewer than five ingredients. Beware of food with “health claims” on the label. Cola is “fat free.” That doesn’t make it healthy.
  3. Steer clear of the white menaces. Stay away from white sugar and white flour, which acts like sugar in your body. Learn the numerous disguises for sugar and get rid of any food that contains them.
  4. Dump this lethal sugar. Throw out any food with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) on the label. You already know it is not good for you, but just in case you need reminding, read this blog for the five reasons HFCS will kill you.
  5. Avoid this bad fat. Eliminate any food with the word “hydrogenated” on the label, which translates into trans fats.
  6. Stick to healthy oils. Throw out any highly refined cooking oils such as corn oil and soy oil. Choose olive oil and coconut oil instead.
  7. Recognize your ingredients. Throw out any food with ingredients you don’t recognize or can’t pronounce.
  8. Watch for these red flags. Toss foods with preservatives, additives, coloring, dyes, or “natural flavorings” like MSG.
  9. Ditch artificial sweeteners. Remember that food is information, not just calories. Diet sodas and other foods and drinks with artificial sweeteners are almost always calorie free, but they will still make you fat.

 When in Doubt, Stick with this One Rule

If it came from the earth or a farmer’s field and not a food chemist’s lab, then it is safe to eat. Like Michael Pollan, author of Food Rules says, “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.” It is really that simple.

 

For More: Visit: http://drhyman.com

 

 

10 Natural Tips To Beat Chronic Stress

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We are learning more and more that stress is a killer. Check out this great article by Dr Mark Hayman.

“If you really knew what was happening to you when you are stressed, you would freak out. It’s not pretty,” I said during the 2013 Third Metric women’s conference.

I wasn’t exaggerating. Chronic stress has become epidemic in our society, where faster seems better and we pack more obligations into our ever-expanding schedules.

Research has confirmed the havoc stress can wreak, with one meta-analysis involving 300 studies finding that chronic stress could damage immunity. Anotherstudy found stressed-out women had significantly higher waist circumference compared to non-stressed women.

Experts have connected stress with blood sugar and belly fat. Chronic stress raises insulin, driving relentless metabolic dysfunction that becomes weight gain, insulin resistance and ultimately diabetes.

Insulin isn’t the only hormone that becomes out of balance with stress. Your adrenal glands release hormones like adrenaline and cortisol that flood your system, raising your heart rate, increasing your blood pressure, making your blood more likely to clot, damaging your brain’s memory center, increasing belly fat storage, and generally doing damage to your body.

Want to reduce stress? Start with your diet.

The right diet can do wonders to reduce stress’s impact. When you eat whole, real foods, you restore balance to insulin, cortisol, and other hormones.

Eliminating mind-robbing molecules like caffeine, alcohol, and refined sugars and eating regularly can help you avoid the short-term stress of starvation on your body. You maintain an even-keeled mindset throughout the day, even when things get hectic.

You’ll replace those foods with clean protein, healthy fats, leafy and cruciferous vegetables, berries and non-gluten grains. Food is information that controls your gene expression, hormones and metabolism. When you eat the right foods, you balance blood sugar, restore hormonal balance and reduce stress’s damaging impact.

Reconsidering Stress

Stress is a thought, a perception of a threat, even if it isn’t real. That’s it. No more, no less. If that’s true, then we have complete control over stress, because it’s not something that happens to us but something that happens in us.

Here’s where it become interesting. Stressors can be real or perceived. You might imagine your spouse is angry with you. Whether or not they are, you raise stress levels. Real or imagined, when you perceive something as stressful, it creates the same response in the body.

Fortunately, a wide variety of techniques and tools can help effectively manage stress. Among them, these 10 are most beneficial:

1. Address the underlying biological causes of stress. 

Find the biological causes of problems with the mind including mercury toxicity, magnesium and vitamin B12 deficiencies, and gluten allergies. Changing your body can change your mind.

2. Begin actively relaxing. 

Humans remain primed to always do something. Even when we’re not working, our mind is on work. To engage the powerful forces of the mind on the body, you must do something relaxing. You can’t just sit there watching television or drinking beer. Whether that means deep breathing or a simple leisurely walk, find active relaxation that works for you and do it.

3. Learn new skills. 

Try learning new skills such as yoga, biofeedback, and progressive muscle relaxation or take a hot bath, make love, get a massage, watch a sunset, or walk in the woods or on the beach.

4. Make movement your drug. 

Exercise is a powerful, well-studied way to burn off stress chemicals and heal the mind. Studies show exercise works better than or equal to pharmaceutical drugs for treating depression. Try interval training if you’re short on time but want a powerful, intense workout.

5. Supplement. 

Take a multivitamin and nutrients to help balance the stress response, such as vitamin C; the B-complex vitamins, including B6 and B5 or pantothenic acid; zinc; and most important, magnesium, the relaxation mineral.

6. Reframe your point of view. 

Challenge your beliefs, attitudes, and responses to common situations and reframe your point of view to reduce stress.

7. Find a community. 

Consciously build your network of friends, family and community. They’re your most powerful allies in achieving long-term health.

8. Take care of your vagus nerve by using deep breaths. 

Most of us hold our breath often or breathe swallow, anxious breaths. Deep, slow, full breaths have a profound affect on resetting the stress response, because the relaxation nerve (or vagus nerve) goes through your diaphragm and is activated with every deep breath. Take five deep breaths now. See how differently you feel?

9. Meditate.

No matter how much or little time you have to commit, find a practice that works for you.

10. Sleep.

Lack of sleep increases stress hormones. Get your eight hours no matter what. Take a nap if you missed sleep. Prioritize it, and if you feel like you’re not getting high-quality shut-eye, find strategies to improve it.

For more visit http://drhyman.com/blog/2015/02/12/5-strategies-optimize-sex-drive/#lightbox/0/

Why Doing Nothing is the Key to Happiness

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This is a great post I stumbled across by Mark Hyman MD.

Clear the mind, clear the path to awakening

Enjoy.

Christopher Vlaun

Attention and focus are hard to come by. Starbucks built a $13 billion business because we need help paying attention. Psychiatrists increasingly diagnose “adult attention deficit disorder” and prescribe Ritalin for grownups who can’t focus or pay attention. But are coffee and prescription speed the answers to our modern distractions?

Our attention is derailed by email, iPhones, the bing of a new text message, by bad news on television and the stresses of work, relationships and family. It’s easy to be overwhelmed and miss the extraordinary gift of being alive. Our bodies break down under the onslaught – insomnia, anxiety, depression, obesity and all chronic diseases are made worse by this unrelenting stress.

The Buddha was walking down the road shortly after he was enlightened, and a traveler saw his remarkable energy. He asked him if he was an angel, a wizard or magician or some kind of god.

“No,” the Buddha said, “I am awake.”

What matters most in life is the quality of our experience, the ability to be awake to what is real and true in our lives, for the difficult and the happy times, to be awake to each person we touch, to our own experience, to this very moment, to the simple sweet and alive gifts of a smile, a kind deed, the breeze on our skin, the firefly flickering the early summer night.

But that’s harder than it sounds. Our monkey mind gets in the way, and in order to pay attention we need to be quiet, to be practiced at stillness, to know the habits of our mind and be skilled at dancing with them, not be controlled or dominated by them. We need to know how to witness the thoughts and feelings we have without having them overwhelm our lives.

My way into medicine was through Buddhism. I majored in Buddhist studies at Cornell. As a young man in college, I was deeply interested in the mind, in nature of our consciousness, of the ways our thoughts and perceptions control our lives and how we can work with them in a juicy, helpful way that brings more love, kindness, compassion and insight into every moment, rather than darkness, suffering, struggle and pain.

Pain is inevitable. Loss is inevitable. Death, illness, war, disaster have always been and will always be part of the human condition. Yet within it, I wondered as a young man, was there a way to understand suffering in a different light, to break the cycle of suffering. I realized there was a way to be more awake, to see things as they are, to notice life as it is and savor it, to love it, to wake up with gratitude and lightness and celebration for the magic of life. It is always there, and the trick is simply to notice.

But to notice requires a stillness of the mind. This is something not quite so easy to achieve for most of us. Being awake takes practice. Each of us can find our path to being awake. Ancient traditions provide many avenues. Belief in any particular religion or philosophy is not necessary, just a desire to show up and pay attention without judgment or criticism. To notice the ebb and flow of our breath and our thoughts without holding on to them, like waves washing over you on a summer day at the beach.

This is harder than it sounds, because it requires us to be patient with ourselves, to love ourselves, even all the ugly, petty, small thoughts. It requires us to create calm within the chaos through non-judgmental awareness. Most of us have no clue how to do this.

When I was 20 years old, I spent 10 days in silent meditation retreat. Sleeping, meditating, eating. That was it. As the turbulent oceans of my young mind settled each day, I began to feel more awake, more alive and happier than I ever had before. The happiness was not connected to any external event or person, but to the simple joy of being able to notice beauty and brilliance in the people and in the nature that surrounded me.

Over the course of my life I’ve come in and out of practicing stillness, but whenever I return to it, it feels like home. There are thousands of ways to meditate – traditional mindfulness meditation is the simplest and most accessible, but any form can work – yoga, nature, dance, breathing and prayer.

The point of meditation, of doing nothing, is not an end in itself but a way to calm the mind, to see the true nature of things, and reduce the impact of suffering – while increasing love, kindness, wisdom, fearlessness and sympathy. From that stillness, your life becomes more rich, your actions more clear, your words more direct and powerful and your capacity to be fully engaged in life enhanced. It is not a retreat from life, but a way to go fully into it and cultivate your own power and happiness.

The many benefits of meditation have been substantiated by science. Meditation reduces chronic pain, blood pressure, headaches, anxiety and depression. It helps you lose weight, lowers cholesterol, increase sports performance, boost immune function, relieves insomnia, increases serotonin, creativity, optimizes brain waves, helps learning, attention, productivity and memory and more.

But none of those reason are the reasons I meditate, nor why I practice yoga (which for me is meditation in motion). It is to be more awake to life, to myself, to cultivate loving kindness and compassion toward myself, toward others, and to the often challenging human condition in which we find ourselves.

The good news is that all you need is a few minutes, and place to sit and be quiet, and you can do this anywhere. This year, on New Years Day, my friend Elena Brower, a meditation and yoga teacher, came to visit with her family – and our families did yoga and meditation together – an amazing reminder and inspiration to show up to the party of your own precious life.

If you are new to meditation or an experienced meditator, I hope you will check out Elena’s new online audio meditation course, a sweet journey into a creative, consistent meditation practice. In four thoughtful installations, you’ll receive eight different meditations (5+ hours of meditation for you to explore), along with evocative journal pages for your contemplations, and gorgeous imagery for each week to complement and inspire your work.

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