Clear for Life

I was listening to an interesting podcast about the effect of strength training on glucose control and insulin resistance. As you probably know maintaining steady blood sugar levels and reversing insulin resistance are crucial for curing acne.

Here’s the link to the podcast. It’s a direct link to the mp3-file.

Fat, Muscle, and the Benefits of Exercise for People With Diabetes

Though this discussion and the research they referred to was done with obese diabetic I think we all can learn something from there.

One of the discussed studies concluded that combined aerobic and resistance training program gives the best results for diabetics.

"Although aerobic exercise is what is typically recommended for treating people with diabetes, this study shows that adding a high-force strength training component has significant advantages," says APTA spokesperson Robin L Marcus, PT, PhD, OCS, assistant professor at the University’s Department of Physical Therapy and the study’s lead researcher.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081031161255.htm

It didn’t take long to find other studies done on a wide variety of individual that support this conclusion.

They also said few interesting things about fat. Among other things they said that fat cells produce this retinol-binding protein that attaches to the insulin receptors. Since there are less insulin receptor sites available for insulin it creates insulin resistance. They also said that fat cells produce inflammatory cells that, when in excess, create both localized and body-wide inflammation.

So there’s a direct link to how carrying too much fat can lead to acne.

What’s even more interesting is that this discussion was not limited to what people normally perceive as extra fat. They talked a lot about the fat around and within muscles. Many of us carry a lot of fat within and around our muscles. It gives an illusion that our muscles are bigger than they actually are, and so we don’t perceive it as an extra fat.

They concluded this in the study quite explicitly. This is a quite from the podcast:

Patients with diabetes are much, much weaker, even though they have large muscles.

This issue comes up with many of my customers when they email me telling about all the muscle they’ve ‘lost’. In most cases it’s just this extra fat and water within and around the muscles that’s melting away (just one of the complications of the healing process).

The main benefit of resistance training was changes in muscle composition. Leans muscle tissue increased whereas the amount of fat in and around the muscle decreased. So the muscles actually turned muscles!

This is the main reason why the soon to be updated version of Clear for Life recommends a combination of aerobic and resistance training.

Brief side note. The researchers said that diabetes really was never meant to be a disease because it was never meant to be a permanent state. Diabetes was meant as a protective mechanism to store energy when food is abundant and thus help us to survive through lean times. Just one more example of how all diseases are protective mechanisms.

Of course strength training has other benefits also. It makes you look better and so improves your self-esteem. It makes you look more attractive (unless you take it over the top). I usually do my strength training in the morning. And I just love how my body feels like steel for the whole day. Nice feeling.

One issue with resistance training is that it can be a hassle. You gotta buy a gym membership and spend time driving to and from the gym. So many people just drop it.

If you enjoy going to the gym, good for you, but if you don’t nobody said you have to do it the hard way.

I do my resistance training in the morning and it usually takes me less than 15 minutes to complete. In many days not even that long. I don’t even touch the weights at gym anymore. They just don’t serve my purpose anymore.

The secret? Bodyweight exercises. You know, pushups and the like. You can get an incredibly effective whole body workout in as little as 10 minutes. Plus using your own body as a gym is much more fun than hauling weights at gym – at least for me. And it teaches your muscles to work together instead of one or few muscles at a time like most gym machines do.

If you are interested of starting or learning more about bodyweight exercises I can’t recommend Roger Haeske’s Lightning Speed Fitness Program highly enough.

Lightning Speed Fitness Program simply eliminates time as an excuse. It shows how you can workout your entire body with just two simple exercises. That’s why in many days it only takes me 10 to 15 minutes to do my strength training routine. Lightning Speed Fitness Program also showed me how working out little bit through out the day can be as effective, or even more so, than one longer exercise. Some days I just take five minutes here and there to do my bodyweight exercises. So time is no excuse anymore.

Some days I like to vary my routine and I learned a bunch of other bodyweight exercises from Lightning Speed Fitness Program to do that. Roger also shows how to vary these exercises to make them easier or more challenging. Nice thing is that I also got a bunch of videos where Roger shows how to do these exercises. So it’s easy to get started.

Roger is also a raw food author and educator. He’s one of those guys who really get health and practice what they preach. And he’s a motivating fellow to listen to also.

So I really recommend you get Lightning Speed Fitness Program and check out his other products also.

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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

This is weird.

For the last couple of days I’ve been sticking to a 100% low fat, raw vegan diet. And what does my body reward me with?

Cold!

I have a sore throat and my nose is blocked.

Moral of the story? Eating healthy doesn’t pay?

That’s what it looks like at the first glance, but there’s a logical explanation for why I got ‘sick’. And I hope that by sharing my own experience and take on it, I can help you to ride through your own trials and tribulations.

My body decided to start detoxing a bit heavier and that triggered this ‘cold’. I’ve also been extremely tired during the past few days. I have trouble concentrating. So in this stage it’s a bit hard to work. And that’s why I’m struggling even with this simple blog post.

Last week the laundry service didn’t do such a good job with my pillow cases. They had residues of laundry detergent (and I’m sure here in Thailand they don’t use 100% natural stuff). So the skin on my throat got horribly irritated. It got flaming red and I managed to develop a good set of pimples there. Initially I didn’t bother about it since I knew it’s going to pass as I changed my pillow cases. But shaving everyday irritated it even further, so it didn’t budge at all.

That’s why I decided to get rid of it with this 100% raw diet. My throat starts to look normal again, but now I’m down with cold.

For me this is a normal detox reaction. It happens to me almost every time my body decides to kick up the detox process.

So don’t freak out if something like this happens to you when you change your diet. Different people react to this different. So you may get different symptoms.

Just understand that these are a normal part of the healing process, and a sign of progress. In the natural health field this is called ‘healing crisis’.

The best way to deal with this is just to take it easy and give your body time to heal. Rest as much as possible and eat lightly. It’ll be over in a few days.

With that, I’m going to hit the bed and hope to get a good 12 hours of sleep.

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Clear for Life – The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

Is phototherapy an effective treatment for acne? In other words can you treat acne with light?

That’s what Angelo asked me few days back.

Here’s a link to a video Angelo was talking about (sorry but it doesn’t allow me to embed it here).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ6B1QM6AHA

And here’s video of another acne treatment product that uses light.

 

As far as acne treatments go light therapy seems like a promising option. It seems that specific wave length of light kill bacteria (blue light area) while other wave length (red light area) reduces inflammation and hence makes pimples and red marks disappear faster.

Of course this is nothing more than an old trick dressed in new clothes. Simply another form of slaying bacteria.

As you know, killing bacteria is not the long term answer for acne. To permanently cure acne you have to fix the lifestyle issues that created acne in the first place.

But light therapy could be an interesting option to support you during the time it takes for your body to heal itself. Light therapy for acne is an interesting for two reasons. First, besides the initial investment, it’s free to use (as far as I understand). Second, you don’t have to poison your skin or your body with chemicals. Light waves kill the bacteria without introducing anything foreign to your body.

So if you are on the market for a support treatment, phototherapy might be a good option for you.

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Clear for Life – The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

One of my customers, Eric, emailed an interesting comment to me.

He recently met a girl and said that just hanging out with her feels incredibly healthy.

This is of course nothing new to anyone who’s been in love. Being in love can do wonders for your mental health. Still it got me thinking.

When a person asks he what they should do to get clear they are often looking for a formula, or step by step instructions. Sort of do this, that and those and you’ll get clear.

There’s nothing wrong with such an approach. It can get you a long way towards clear skin. But we have to be careful not to let the formulas and step by step instructions limit us. There’s more to health and clear skin those formulas can capture.

We are integrated beings of body, mind and spirit. Harmony between all three creates the perfect environment for health and curing acne.

There’s still place for formulas and step by step instructions also. Health and clear skin just cannot exist without certain things (good nutrition and exercise for example). Because by making wrong diet and lifestyle choices we set obstacles to health and sabotage the body’s efforts to cure acne. Following these formulas can make sure you don’t shoot yourself on the foot by making choices that don’t serve you. And Clear for Life does a particularly good job at showing not just these formulas, but how to apply them to your life also (because each of us faces different challenges and needs a different approach).

That’s the value of formulas and step by step instructions. They show you how to remove the obstacles to good health and clear skin. And that’s enough to get cure your acne.

But I think you can do much better by going beyond those formulas.

Here’s where things like these come into play.

• Love and relationships
• Friends and social circle
• Creative expression
• Spiritual practice and growth (for those inclined)
• Taking time to do the things you love
• Personal growth
• Discipline
• Traveling and experiencing things. My motto here is: "Make the most of your time on earth".
• Being passionate about something
• Setting and achieving goals. So you feel you are making progress on the important areas of your life.
• Having a meaningful work.
• Making a positive contribution to the world

That’s just out of the top of my head. I’m sure you can think few of your own also.

What common with all these things?

They put that extra spark on your life. Make you feel like you are alive. Make your life worth living.

I hope I managed to open up your thinking a bit.

So what could you do to create peace, happiness and well being in your life today?

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Clear for Life – The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

Warning. This can be a mind bender.

Most people don’t really get holistic health. Many people trying to cure acne with natural methods think they do. But as you discover there’s nothing holistic (or natural) about flushing your liver, cleansing your colon or any other natural health fantasies (treatments).

They are all based on the same idea as Western medicine is.

Because, whether we like it or not, human body is a holistic system and you have to treat it as such if you want to permanently get rid of your acne.

I just learned a good example to illustrate this.

Think of a flower.

Where does this thing we have agreed to call flower end? Or what does it include? Most people would say it includes roots, stem and leaves. Because that’s what we’ve all agreed. Probably because that’s what comes out when you pull it out of the soil.

So we’ve defined flower as its physical limits. But that’s entirely arbitrary definition. We do it with most ‘things’. The sun for example. We’ve defined the sun by the extent of its visible flames. But it would be equally ‘correct’ to define it by the extent of its heat or its light. Keep this in mind as we get back to our flower example.

Flower interacts with the soil and the microorganisms that live there. They all depend on ‘each other’ for existence (dead plant matter turns into soil). So it’s really like a flower-soil-micro organism system. But the flower also interacts with air and sunlight. So you should add those into the system also.

What about bees? Flower and bees depend on each other. So it should really be a flower-soil-micro organism-air-sun light-bees system.

I hope you see that we could go on forever with this.

Nature is really one big system, and each part of the system affect and depend on each other for existence. And that system is always in perfect balance. For example let’s say something brings down the number of bees. Soon the number of flowers goes down also and the system reaches a new balance.

For some reason we’ve just agreed to chop that system into different parts based on their physical limits. Then we agreed that those parts are separate. But then we noticed that those different parts interact and even depend on each other. That’s why we came up with symbiosis to compensate for the limits of this physical-based definition.

But wouldn’t it have been just as logical to define it all as one system?

We’ve gone even further. We’ve taken a snapshot of the system in equilibrium (balance state) and defined that this is how the system should be. If the system moves from this one balanced state we say something is wrong. Then we compare it against our idea of how it should be (our snapshot) and look for differences. When we find one, we say this is the problem. Then we try to frantically fix that part that doesn’t match our snapshot.

It would have been just as logical (in fact even more so) to say that the system moved into a new balance state. Something affected the system and it reached a new balance.

Now think of your body and you’ll notice that we’ve done the same thing with it.

We’ve defined it as a collection of different organs based on their physical limits. Well actually, all the organs are physically connected to one other with blood and lymph ducts. To get over this ‘problem’ we chopped the ducts off and pretended that they don’t count.

As you can see we’ve made quite a few leaps of faith with our idea of the human body.

Then we took a snapshot of the body and defined it as healthy. Different deviations from our snapshot are different diseases, and must be ‘fixed’. And we fix things by manipulating the ‘parts’ that don’t match our snapshot of health.

Here’s where we get really confused.

Based on our genes we are all little bit different. We have different strengths and weaknesses. So the same conditions or inputs cause different balance states (diseases) in different people.

Acne victims in their drive to exactly define what’s causing their problem fall for this trap. Look around at acne forums. They are full of threads where someone claims on having zeroed on the real cause of acne. Of course as soon as the thread goes live someone bunks the theory by saying that doesn’t cause acne for me, therefore it can’t be the cause of acne. If they ever discover perpetual motion, it’s going to be based on this debate.

No wonder many acne victims are confused.

My friend, acne and all diseases, as we understand them, are illusions. They are different balance states the system called your body is in. And the state of your body depends on the inputs or conditions it faces (such as diet, lifestyle, mental state and the environment).

So save yourself a big bundle of headaches by trying to figure out what caused your acne, because nothing did. And more importantly stop trying to fix what you think caused your acne.

Fix the conditions and your body moves to a state where acne doesn’t exist. And it won’t go there until you do your part.

This is the reason why following Clear for Life works so well for most people. Clear for Life takes you out of that fixing mentality and shows the easiest way to give your body the ideal conditions for getting rid of acne.

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Clear for Life – The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

Stacy emailed me with another jewel of misinformation about Candida and acne.

She said that she just discovered that she "suffers" from severe Candida infection. I put the word suffer on quotes because Candida is not something you suffer from. In all likelihood it’s saving your life. Anyway, she said that after her "research" she discovered that she shouldn’t eat fruits. The reasoning goes that fruit has sugar and sugar feed Candida. Hence fruit is bad.

I covered this in Candida and acne page on natural-acne-solution.com. Anyway, here it is again in a nutshell.

First, Candida is not caused by eating sugar. It’s caused by problems with blood sugar metabolism. There’s a world of difference there.

In a recent blood sugar post I mentioned that blood sugar metabolism problems are an issue of output. Meaning the glucose can’t get out of the blood stream. That means insulin resistance.

Here’s how the blood sugar thing and Candida works. You eat and the food is converted to glucose. Glucose goes into the bloodstream, and from there insulin escorts it into your cells. Insulin resistance weakens the action of insulin and glucose stays in the bloodstream.

Your body cannot allow too much glucose to remain in the bloodstream. It can cause some serious health problems, and even death.

That’s where Candida comes in. It multiplies and eats away the excess blood sugar and hence saves your live. So instead of cursing Candida, bless it.

Now that you understand Candida let’s see what you can do about it.

The culprit behind insulin resistance and blood sugar problems is excess fat – not carbs.

When you eat too much fat, your blood gets ‘fatty’. All the fat you are is now floating in your blood. Now your red blood cells, sugar molecules, insulin and insulin receptors at cells are all covered in fat. This layer of fat prevents insulin from working effectively; hence causing insulin resistance.

And after a high-fat meal your blood can remain fatty up to 24 hours.

Clear out the fat from your bloodstream and you can go willy-nilly on fruits without any problems. And soon you’ll discover that your Candida infection is gone.

I know that practically all Candida sites tell you the exact opposite thing. They also say that you have to stick to the diet for months. Some people have been on these high-fat, low-carb diets for years without making any progress.

Candida, like all yeasts, is a short-lived organism. It’s life span is measured in hours. If you don’t constantly feed it with glucose it cannot survive in your bloodstream in large numbers. Candida overgrowth dies-off very quickly.

Just to nail the point home I’m going to quote Steve Pavlina. Steve writes one of the most popular self-development blogs in the web. A while ago he did a 30-day trial on low-fat, raw vegan diet. He kept a detailed diary during the whole time.

Here’s his comment about blood sugar levels during the trial:

I monitored my blood sugar using a blood sugar testing device, the same kind diabetics may use. It showed no discernible spikes in blood sugar throughout the trial whatsoever — absolutely none. In fact, my blood sugar remained incredibly steady throughout the trial. My highest blood sugar reading of the trial was 94, which is still medium-low. All that sweet fruit in my diet simply did not have any adverse effect on my blood sugar.

Eating this way gave my blood sugar more consistency than ever. I couldn’t spike my blood sugar on this diet if I tried. Even eating 19 bananas in one day made no difference.

Raw Food Diet

Isn’t that just weird that all that ‘evil sugar’ did nothing to spike his blood sugar levels? Not even 19 bananas.

I recommend you read Steve’s post. It details out what happened to him during 100% raw food diet. It’s going to blow your mind, especially the tidbit about athletic performance and muscle development.

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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Edgar recently asked me about athlete’s diet that would also help him to cure his acne.

So my question is can you give me an example nutrition plan for me as an athlete. Like what should I be eating for breakfast/lunch/dinner. Or like what type of meat I should eat or foods that will give me enough energy as an athlete while still helping my health, building muscle, and avoiding triggering my acne. I mean like foods that give me energy and help me recover, but the foods that arent bad for triggering my acne.

I have to go by what I’ve learned from Dr. Graham here. If anyone, he should know the subject. Lifetime athlete, coach to many Olympic and world-class athletes and at age of 60+ fitter than most people half his age.

Plus what he says makes a heck of a lot sense.

As an athlete you don’t have any special nutritional requirements. You just need to eat more.

Athletes and active people have somewhat higher protein requirements than sedentary people do, but you’ll get the extra protein from the extra calories you eat.

The same healthy low-fat, raw-vegan diet that gets you clear also helps you as an athlete. In a nutshell, get plenty of fruits and greens.

No need to unnecessarily complicate the matter.

Contrary to commonly held wisdom this diet suits also bodybuilders. Because all the bodybuilding magazines and books tout the need for high-protein diet you won’t find too many examples of bodybuilders eating this diet, but Charlie Abel is one.

Though I have to say that a diet in animal protein probably gives better ‘results’ for bodybuilders. That’s because it exposes you to extra growth hormones. So it could get you bigger but that’s really just artificial ballooning. It’s a bit like blowing more air into a balloon.

Gaining size that way does nothing to your athletic performance. It won’t make you any stronger or faster. You just balloon up, and once you stop eating that way you’ll shrink back to more normal size. And in the process you’ll wreck your health and make it more difficult to get over acne.

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Clear for Life – The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

When I look around acne forums I see one type of thread popping again and again.

“What can I do to lower my blood sugar?”

Sometimes they talk about foods that should lower blood sugar levels, sometimes it’s about herbs, and lately even about salt.

Most time the discussion on these threads is so far off the base that it’s almost painful to read. Btw, one reason I don’t recommend these forums is the amount of misinformation being passed around there. Interaction is good, but without solid understanding of health most people get horribly confused there.

Back to the point, and let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this issue.

There’s no need to make blood sugar control more complicated than it is. Your blood sugar levels are affected by two things: input and output. Input is the amount of glucose that goes into your bloodstream and output is the amount that leaves. Quite simple.

For keeping blood sugar levels steady output is far more important than input. I know you’ve probably heard otherwise, but that’s just one more jewel of misinformation.

As long as the output is working well your blood sugar levels remain stable – even if you screw the input with lots of refined sugar.

Output is all about your lifestyle. Burn more calories than you eat (or don’t overeat), exercise, sleep well and keep the fat off your plate.

Do that and your blood sugar levels remain just fine.

For some reason people don’t get this. Confusion about diet is probably one reason. People don’t understand how diet affects insulin resistance. And maybe some people just don’t want to accept the responsibility. It’s always easier to look for herbs and other easy solutions rather than change the way you life your life.

Whatever the reason be, it shows up as confusion in acne forums and keeps acne victims from finding real solutions.

Let’s finish by looking at few examples of the kinds of threads I’ve seen recently.

Which foods lower blood sugar levels?

This question is fundamentally flawed. No food lowers blood sugar levels. Food is all about input, and all foods increase blood sugar levels. But I guess that person meant to ask what he/she could eat to keep blood sugar levels stable. Again, that’s more about output. Just make sure you don’t mess up the output with your diet.

If you are quite not sure how to do that, pick up a copy of Clear for Life and I’ll explain it in detail. It’s something most people wouldn’t figure out on their own. Thanks to the diet ‘advice’ we’ve received from out parents, school and the media.

Cinnamon lowers blood sugar levels!!!

You could just as well replace cinnamon with some other herb. Many herbs mimic the effect of insulin or stimulate the pancreas to produce more insulin. So the give the illusion that they lower blood sugar levels.

At the outset it might seem like a good idea to take these herbs to lower your blood sugar levels. But it really isn’t.

See, insulin resistance is again one of those protective mechanisms I talked about in Acne 101. If you have insulin resistance, it’s there for a reason. Cells develop insulin resistance for example when you eat more than you need. It’s a result of over-nutrition, or I should say over-calories.

So when you take these herbs you force the cells to take in more glucose they can use. And perhaps that’s not very smart.

Pancreas also has its limits. If you stimulate it with herbs or drugs at some point it will collapse, and you’ll get type 1 diabetes.

Please remember that herbs are drugs, only made by nature. They medicate but never deal with the real problem.

Salt lowers blood sugar

This was the one theory that got me shaking my head the most.

So some scientists made a study that showed that salt intake lowers blood sugar levels. As this amazing discovery is in the form or scientific study people take this nonsense seriously. And to think of this shows how badly people misunderstand the function of blood sugar.

It’s like the fuel tank in your car. When your cells need fuel they take glucose from the bloodstream. When they don’t need it, they don’t take it. It’s really that simple. And to think that salt somehow makes the cells more ‘hungry’ is just absurd.

But what about the study? It showed that salt lowers blood sugar levels. That’s a scientific fact.

Yes, it’s possible that the study showed that. But blood sugar level is measured as concentration of glucose in a particular volume of blood. You can lower blood sugar levels two ways: by reducing the amount of glucose or increasing the volume of blood.

What happens when you eat salt? You get thirsty.

Salt is extremely poisonous to life. It kills all life – and that includes you also (I’ll get to your objection soon, just hold on). For the body to cope with the salt you eat, it must dilute it. The solution to pollution is dilution. That’s why you get thirsty. And if you don’t drink water it’s going to pull it out of your cells and cause dehydration.

So, if after eating salt your blood volume increases by 1 liter because of the water your drink and gets pulled from your cells, of course your blood sugar levels will be ‘lower’. But it’s just an illusion. You still have the same amount of glucose in the blood. So no real progress was made. In fact you wrecked your health by eating poison.

I know that by this time someone is just dying to object. Saying that salt is essential to us. That it’s only harmful in large quantities. The flawed reasoning goes that everything is dangerous in excessive quantities – even water.

Of course the difference is that no matter how little salt you take it’s going to cause an adverse reaction. But the body can deal with it in small quantities. Water causes no adverse reaction in normal quantities. And the lethal dose of salt is not very much. The average American eat 1/8th of it every day. So it’s not very difficult to eat a lethal dose of salt almost by accident. But for you to kill yourself by drinking too much water?

I trust that you understand the difference.

Again, I have to stress that there are no secrets of shortcuts to clear skin and happiness. Every such shortcut you take is just going to make the matters worse in the long run.

Just eat healthy, respect the way your body works and be merry. That’s the ‘secret’.

And of course buy Clear for Life, and all your problems will be magically solved for this and all your future lives to come : )

Do you believe you can’t get over acne because ‘it’s in your genes’?

Well take a look at the study Dr. Dean Ornish did at University of California in San Francisco.

Dr. Ornish and his team studied 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer. The men opted out of the conventional medical treatment such as radiation, surgery and hormone therapy. Instead, for three months, they made changes in their diet and lifestyle. They ate more fruits and vegetables, less animal products, less fat, less processed foods and more whole foods in their natural state. They also exercised moderately.

As expected their health improved. The risk markers for prostate cancer came down, they lost weight and lowered their blood pressure.

But what’s really interesting is that also their genes changed.

The researchers took biopsies before and after the lifestyle changes.

After only 3 months of eating living in a healthier way 48 genes that promote disease were turned off and a whopping 453 genes that protect against disease were turned on. Turning genes on and off is also called gene expression.

Dr. Ornish commented in an interview with Reuters

It’s an exciting finding because so often people say, ‘Oh, it’s all in my genes, what can I do?’ Well, it turns out you may be able to do a lot. ‘In just three months, I can change hundreds of my genes simply by changing what I eat and how I live?’

Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study

Dr. Ornish further continued by saying that the implications of the study are not limited to men with prostate cancer.

I can bet that among those 501 genes were also genes that regulate a host of other diseases as well.

In Acne 101 I talk about how the cells in your body react to their environment. If the environment is healthy the cells thrive, and if it’s not the cells suffer. Gene expression is one way that process works.

From Dr. Bruce Lipton I learned that genes are wrapped in sort of a protective sleeve. When the sleeve is on the gene cannot be read, in other words the gene is turned off. When the sleeve comes off the gene can be read, it’s turned on.

Dr. Lipton explained that gene expression (sleeve on or off) is determined by the signals a cell receives from its environment. Some of those signals are hormones and other chemical messengers; nutrition; emotions; and toxins and bacteria. We know that your emotions, how you feel and what you think affects your genes. Though there is some dispute of the exact mechanism. Some people say it happens via hormones, while others say the medium is energy and vibration.

Regardless of how it happens Dr. Lipton proves that your emotions and thoughts do affect your genes.

It’s really exciting to see scientific evidence that people are not victims of their genes. That anyone that is willing to pay the price (change their diet, lifestyle and mental poise) can take charge of their health and get over pretty much all health problems.

Are you ready to do that?

If so, Clear for Life shows how to do it.

Do you like the environment?

I sure as hell do. I love scuba diving (in fact I’m studying to become instructor), and I really hate to see the world’s most beautiful diving sites turn into marine deserts.

So I do whatever I can to live as sustainable way as I can. That’s also one reason I love helping people get over acne. Because the more people I get ‘sold’ on this lifestyle, the better it is for the environment.

Bet you didn’t know that.

As it happens what’s good for health is usually good for the environment also.

On the top of my head here are few ways living the clear skin lifestyle described in Clear for Life helps the environment also. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Less land dedicated for farming.

Fruits and vegetables yield far more calories per acre than grains. According to some sources you need 10 times more land to feed the same population with grains than you would with fruits and vegetables, (see: Can My County Feed Itself? Part 2. The Land Requirements, scroll down to about halfway down the page where it says ‘Area required for population’).

And the figures are far worse for meats; red meat yields about 48 pounds per acre where as you can get 30’000 lbs of bananas or 40’000 lbs of oranges from the same acre. We could probably cut our land use in half if we would just stop or drastically reduce our meat consumption.

Less farming land of course means more land for humans and the wildlife.

Regenerates the soil.

Our industrial farming, along with excessive livestock farming, is the main reason our once lush farming lands are turning into deserts. Single crop farming and extensive use of pesticides destroys the microbes in the soil.

These microbes are vital for our health and the health of our planet. For example they produce many of the vitamins and nutrients that plants then pick up from the soil. The reason plant foods have so little vitamin B12 is that we have killed these microbes that produce it with fertilizers and pesticides.

These microbes also turn biomass back into nutritious topsoil. Growing only single crop (such as wheat or corn) doesn’t return much biomass back to the soil. And to make matters worse the land is left barren for large part of the year. Without vegetation to protect it wind and erosion strip away the topsoil. Without topsoil you cannot grow anything on the land. In many parts we only have few inches of topsoil left, where there earlier used to be 6 to 8 feet.

When you grow fruits on the land the exact opposite happens. The trees and bushes protect the land from the wind and their roots bind the topsoil into the earth. Plus trees generate large quantities of biomass for the microbes to turn into fertile topsoil.

Here I have to say that livestock, when grown and grazed correctly, can also benefit the land.

Encourages biodiversity

Single crop farming doesn’t encourage much biodiversity. And the use of pesticides pretty much makes the land hostile for wildlife.

When there’s nothing growing on the farmland it pretty much looks like a desert.

Quite the opposite with fruit trees and bushes. They provide shelter and nesting grounds for a wide variety of animals. Ever seen a forest of a garden that looks like a desert?

Less fertilizers and pesticides

Grains are some of the most heavily sprayed on crops.

This is one big reason why meat eating is so bad for the environment, and I mean eating commercially grown meat. Most of our grains are fed to livestock. Cutting or drastically reducing meat eating we wouldn’t need to grow so much grain, hence we could probably cut fertilizer and pesticide usage by half.

We could go even further by taking simple steps to regenerate and remineralize the soil. Combine that with growing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and we could practically eliminate fertilizers and pesticides.

Bring back the fish

Because of intensive fishing methods nearly all major fish stocks in the world are in decline. Some are in the verge of extinction.

Less we eat fish, the better it is for our health, and less we need to fish them.

So go get Clear for Life and put in your two pennies for the environment.

Let’s end with a bit of humor. Mike Adams at Natural News just solved our energy crisis.

Cartoon courtesy of Natural News. Reprinted with permission.
Original source: http://www.naturalnews.com/023863.html

Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

(NaturalNews) When it comes to the energy problem facing Western civilization today, there’s a lot of talk in Washington about doing something. But that’s all it is: Talk. Senate talk. Congress talk. Presidential talk. Yabbing, jabbing, jawing poppycock and jibberish… none of it adds up to any useful solutions that would actually end our dependence on oil or embrace revolutionary ideas on renewable energy.

In fact, in observing all this, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only sure way to generate enough renewable energy to power the Western world is to install wind farms in front of the Senate podium, then focus those giant propellers on the constant stream of hot air spewing forth from the mouths of over-enthusiastic, under-informed politicians who insist on talking about eco-friendly ideas they have no intention of ever voting into law.

This strategy would at least turn the Senate floor into something useful: A hot air renewable energy machine powered by otherwise useless politicians.

Thinking outside the box on renewable energy

There are other valuable for renewable energy, however, such as capturing all the greasy farts of Taco Bell customers and funneling them into a methane bioreactor that generates unlimited electricity. You could install them right next to the drive-through windows at fast food restaurants, so you’d have the drive-through, followed by the fart-through, and as long as people keep eating greasy burritos, it’s all renewable!

For other fast food restaurants, when all the frying grease in the kitchen is too contaminated with acrylamides to use for human consumption, even that can be poured into the diesel engines of cop cars, so every time a cop chases some speeder down the highway, it smells like extra crispy KFC.

Of course, let’s not forget the idea of taking all the waste paper created by the U.S. tax code and fermenting it with cellulose-cracking microalgae that produce hydrogen gas as a byproduct of eating paper. Using this new technology, every April 15th could produce enough excess paper to power the entire planet three times over. This is also why we must keep the tax code intact, because any "reasonable" reforms would eliminate so much paper that there wouldn’t be enough left to digest into fuel! (See, the tax code really does have a silver lining!)

There’s also some merit to the idea of harvesting the extra hair oil from all the people who eat cheese and butter and somehow manage to choke down snack foods fried at high temperatures in dirt-cheap corn grease. When all those extra oils aren’t clogging their pores and producing runaway facial acne, they could be drained into large barrels, collected by horse-drawn buggies and turned into biodiesel fuel using secret military petrochemical technologies that are currently only limited to the production of baby shampoo.

Real energy solutions are well within our reach

You see, America’s energy problem (if you can even call it that) can be solved right now by simple ingenuity. We don’t need to fight wars over oil, all we need to do is engage a bit of clever thinking and our energy problems are solved!

For example, instead of trying to prevent illegal aliens from crossing our borders, we could require that they each bring a gallon of gas with them as a cost of entry. And since a lot of them eat at Taco Bell, we also get the farting biofuel benefit from them as well! (Double benefits. Brilliant, huh?)

We could also require all television sets to be bicycle powered, so that couch potatoes who watch a lot of TV have to pedal their way through the Home Shopping Network and other quality programming. These pedals can be wired to generators that turn physical movement into enough electricity to electrify refrigerator door handles, providing a gentle, Taser-like reminder for people to stop eating so often, or shocking them into a coma if they open the door too frequently.

There’s also the rather shocking idea of rounding up all the people with silver fillings and forcing them to stroll beside commercial microwave ovens, capturing the electrical arcs shooting across their teeth with lightning harnessing devices resembling Tesla coils. This could turn silver fillings into free energy devices and finally bring to light one possible benefit of filling people’s mouths with mercury!

So you see, we really don’t have an energy crisis in America today; we only have a lack of imagination. From strapping tiny generators to the thumbs of Xbox addicts, to harnessing melting glaciers to drive paddle-wheel processed food grinders, we have lots of energy solutions at our fingertips! We only have to be open to these simple, but ingenious ideas, like training crows to pull tiny ripcords that generate electricity to light street lights. Or using solar power to heat frozen bank accounts, freeing up new capital for economic abundance! There’s no limit to what we can do if we all simply agree to ignore the laws of physics!

And why not? We’ve already agreed to ignore the laws of economics, and that created a generation of apparent abundance, did it not?

I just hope we solve this energy crisis before we run out of the energy that’s keeping the Earth spinning, because if the Earth stops spinning, we’ll all fall off the bottom of the planet and find ourselves floating hopelessly towards the sun. More massive people will be pulled by the sun’s gravity more quickly, of course, meaning the only folks left near Earth will be the raw food vegans, bulimic teenage girls and whacky scientists trying to extend their lifespan through extreme calorie restriction.