AACK!!!

Toxins in the environment, in my food, in my shampoo. Mad Cow disease, e Coli, and Avian/swine/Spanish flu popping up in Africa and South America…

Panic time for my immune system. 

WHAT HAPPENS TO MY IMMUNE SYSTEM IF MY BODY IS OVERWHELMED WITH TOXINS?

If my body is overwhelmed with toxins, my immune system is compromised, and I’m more likely to get sick.  My body is naturally designed to capture and destroy bacteria and other invaders, but if it’s already fighting hords of poisons from food, environment, and personal care products how can it do its job of warding off disease? 

How often do you think about your liver?

Probably not very often. 

Yet it’s probably one of the most complicated organs in our body.  It works silently, below awareness, to break toxins into pieces that can be excreted through the skin, kidneys, and colon.

I drink a lot of water during the day.  Almost a quart in the morning as I take my morning herbal drink and shake and vitamins. Through the day my trusty water bottle goes with me to town and downstairs as I work on the computer.

Water is the most important thing you can do to support detoxification. I filter mine even though we have water with no chlorine at our house. I don’t feel good drinking chorine.  It makes water supply in the U.S. safe by killing bacteria, but I don’t want to deliberately put a poison into my body. So I filter.

John and I eat lots of vegetables and local free-range meat (lamb, beef, chicken) and eggs. Animals in the industrial agricultural system are routinely fed various antibiotics and hormones to prevent infection and increase weight gain.

We get those vegetables from a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm. That’s new for us this year. We love getting healthy produce every week. In the process we support a farmer who is small–not part of the military-industrial complex that is U.S. agriculture today.

40% OF AMERICA’S FOOD GROWN TODAY IS NOT INTENDED FOR PEOPLE

Next week I’ll send you the trailer for “Fresh,” the movie. It’s all about what’s happened in just the last 50 years or so to America’s food supply. We all need to be aware how vulnerable our food supply is today.  Our food supply is controlled by only 4 companies, and 40% of food grown in the U.S. is not grown for human consumption.  Many conventional farmers today, subsidized by our government, grow nothing on their farms that is intended for humans.

More in a couple of days. In the meantime, do you buy “organic” at the store? Why is it important to you? Why not?
 
 

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A Colon Cleanse doesn’t go far enough!

Your body needs to rest and cleanse, but is a colon cleanse the answer?

If you’re going through the day tired, headachy, sluggish, no energy, and every time the weather changes it’s another cold or the flu because your immune system is weak.  If sore throats, headaches, indigestion, facial acne, eczema, and break outs are part of your daily life your body may be overwhelmed by toxins.  Its natural cleansing functions are blocked.

Every cell, overloaded with toxins, needs cleansing, not just the colon.

If you decide to cleanse should you do a colon cleanse? There are many on the market.  If toxins are everywhere and your body is overwhelmed by poisons perhaps you need to cleanse your entire body, not just the colon.

From car exhaust, to pesticides and herbicides–toxins–in our food we’re surrounded by industrial pollutants.

Fruits and vegetables are sprayed in pesticides, and herbicides.  Soil is sprayed with pre-emergents before potato planting, fruit trees are sprayed 3-4 times before harvest, row crops of beans are blanketed by spray planes several times a season.

Much of our food is grown in depleted soil, packaged and shipped, robbed of what little nutrition it might have once had.

Every cell in your body needs cleansing

Our bodies have built-in cleansing mechanisms, but they need rest to activate natural cleansing actions. And every cell needs cleansing, not just the colon.

During a colon cleanse, herbs, sometimes quite powerful herbs, increase muscle contraction to eliminate impacted waste. The process can be harsh and require frequent visits to the bathroom.  Regular ellimination (some say daily) bowel movements is a good thing. It’s essential to your good health. Toxic waste that remains in the colon will be reabsorbed and can result in disease.   But after years of living with exhaust, industrial waste, and food additives, every cell in the body needs rejuvenation, not just the colon.

Spring herbs such as dandelion aid in cleansing

Our great grandparents, and perhaps even our grandparents, knew that when seasons changed their diets changed. These changes supported liver detoxification functions to keep the body healthy.

Spring brought dandelion greens, burdock, spinach, radishes, and herbs that support the body’s need to replace cells and the liver’s detoxification.

Summer turned to fall and the diet changed once again. That change supported bodily changes in preparation for winter.

Today when we eat strawberries and peaches in the dead of winter and winter squash in summer. It’s easy to ignore our body’s need for change and rest.  We don’t give the liver the support it needs to filter and disarm toxins.

Colon cleansing is good, but it’s not enough.  Organs (liver, kidneys, skin, and colon) that disarm and excrete poisons must be supported. Colon cleansing is good, but it’s not enough. Every cell in the body needs to be renewed.

 
Nutritional cleansing supports the body’s natural cleansing actions while it builds muscle

Nutritional cleansing supports cell renewal.  In the presence of high-quality protein during a cleanse your body builds lean muscle which supports organ health, gives you more energy, and keeps blood sugar stable.

Whole-body nutritional cleansing cooperates with the body’s innate wisdom, supporting each body system, including the immune system. 

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My husband and I are both over 50, and we’re not retired.  We work at home. 

No corporate boss any longer.  Who’s the boss?  We look in the mirror every morning.

We’re involved in many activities in our town; our lives are full.

I love to garden.  I’m on the Board of a Center in town for developmentally disabled adults.  I love to cook and fix most meals from scratch.  We have two grandchildren we visit whenever we can, and I have friends I keep in touch with by writing and email.  I also love to read, and I’m active with our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture program.) 

In other words, just like you, there are many details in my life.  That’s the hardest part about working at home.  There are so many really good activities that I want to work on.  If I’m building a business, though, it’s important I spend a consistent amount of time building that business.

Designing a plan for building the business and disciplining myself to stick to it.  Determine what needs to be done each day, the single daily action, and sticking with it until it’s finished.  How easy it is to get diverted from what I need to do.

I’m trying Dave Lakani, 45-minute focus  http://boldapproach.typepad.com/.  Here in a nutshell is the 45-minute focus:

• For 15 minutes: Check email, follow-up on personal or office details.  Use this 15 minutes to catch up on details, clean your desk, etc.  Work fast; it’s only 15 minutes. Allow yourself to check your email only twice a day; it can be a real time-waster! 
• For the remaining 45 minutes pick a task that must be completed today and focus completely on that job.  Phone rings, email signals, interruptions: ignore them all.  For 45 minutes focus on only one task and bring it to completion. 

I’m realizing that in the past I didn’t mean to, but I trained my mind to jump from one interesting idea to the next.  At the end of the day I’ve traveled all over the globe, in my mind figuratively, and not brought any one thing to completion. 

I’m building a business so I need to change that. I want to reeducate my mind to keep focus.  My demon mind jumps from one interesting topic to another.  I need to corral that mind and keep it where I want it to be.  Lakani’s  45-minute focus is good.  His webpage http://boldapproach.typepad.com/ is worth looking at, too.

What are your thoughts?  Want to share?

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Cleansing is the answer to almost every health problem.  I don’t mean cleansing will cure every health problem.  Only the body cures.  Cleansing is an aid to the body’s natural healing. 

Our bodies have built-in systems to deal with disease, bacteria and viral invaders, and toxins.  Under all circumstances the body seeks to remain in homeostasis. According to Websters dictionary homeostasis is “the tendency to maintain normal stability in an organism by coordinated responses of the organ systems that automatically compensate for environmental changes, maintaining equilibrium.”

The liver is the great filtering system of the body.  Everything we eat goes through this organ and is broken down into usable “pieces,” which are carried to feed cells.  Toxins broken down into smaller components are sent to elimination organs skin, colon, and kidneys. 

When the liver encounters toxic substances that cannot be broken down (heavy metals aluminum, and mercury, artificial fertilizers, pesticides, compounds in plastics, for example) it sequesters/stores these substances in fat tissue that it manufactures to keep harmful substances away from vital organs.  Fat is deposited around the liver, on the stomach, upper arms, and thighs. It’s a protective mechanism, but we notice with annoyance flabby arms, fat stomach, and heavy thighs.

When toxin levels are continual and high the body becomes overwhelmed.  As a culture we don’t routinely cleanse with natural herbs and potions as our grandparents did.  Many cultures worldwide still do a cleanse when the seasons change, but we’ve given that up as old-fashioned folk medicine.

The body isn’t given time to cleanse itself.  Many of us eat too much, and this too, overloads protective systems.  When this goes on for some time we become used to the signals of distress our body sends us, and we ignore those signals, or worse yet, we cover up signals with pain pills, many of which damage the liver the very organ assigned to police the bloodstream.

Just the other day I’d read again that the sweetner xylitol is quite good for teeth.  I bought some gum with xylitol and through the day chewed 2-3 sticks.  Later that day I noticed a headache that stayed with me the rest of the day.  I rarely have headaches so I assumed it was something I’d eaten recently.  I checked ingredients on the gum package and, sure enough, an artificial sweetner was listed. 

I’m hoping there are other gums with xylitol that don’t also contain artificial sweetners.  Artificial sweetners are chemicals that act directly on the brain to fool the brain into sweetness. This one was toxic and my body let me know.

What foods do you know are toxic to you?  Gluten? Milk? Monosodium glutamate?  Share your experiences with us below in the comment box.

Our bodies are sensitive They do let us know when something is out-of-whack.  Our job is to listen to our bodies, take those messages seriously, and get to the source of the problem. 

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The recesion might be worldwide, but it’s not on the Internet.  There’s more buying and selling going on now on the Internet than ever before.

Check out Internet social sites, Twitter, Facebook, Better Networker, Squidoo.  There’s not much talk of falling stock market, recession, doom and gloom.

People are checking the Internet for ideas. A new economy is surfacing, one not as dependent on corporate jobs. Folks are forging their own futures, working for themselves.

Dave Pollard says in his great book, Finding the Sweet Spot,

“That system has let us down badly. It is in the interest of those who control the current economic system, those with the established wealth and power, that we not knlow there is a better way to make a living than working for them doing meaningless work as wage slaves..”                  

 Folks are talking abut writing blog articles, sharing business ideas, giving value in their postings, having fun building their own jobs, working at home.

O.K.

How can YOU create your own Internet Empire using mostly free or low-cost socialnetworking sites, Squidoo, FaceBook, Better Networker, and Twitter?

You’ll be writing content, stories about your life.  Don’t  worry if you don’t know anything about Squidoo, FaceBook, Better Networker, Twitter.  If you’d like to talk, we’re here to help.

What are your thoughts?  What to share?

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Do you drink a meal replacement drink for breakfast?  A quick lunch?  A snack between meals?   

  WHAT KIND OF PROTEIN IS IN THERE… 

PROTEIN IS ESSENTIAL TO SUPPORT LEAN MUSCLE

One of the first ingredients in that drink should be the protein source.  Protein supports lean muscle–psst: your heart is lean muscle…

Do you want to loose a fat stomach?  How would it feel lying in bed, with your hands flat.  Wow.  That’s worth a lot.  To know your body is getting what it needs to build muscle in every organ, in your stomach, along your arms, down your legs, feeding your brain.

Give your body that every day. Don’t skimp on protein. Make it high-quality.

Protein builds muscle to support your immune system and every other bodily system.   Muscle does burn more calories than fat, by the way, so you’ll find with exercise your body will feel trimmer. Muscle supports internal organs and gives you energy to live your life.  

What you eat should mimic structure in nature.  Everything we eat in natural form contains a bit of the three components of food: carbohydrate, fat, and protein. With carbohydrate, fat, and protein at each meal or snack, digestion slows and blood sugar remains stable.

Carbohydrate alone and your blood sugar rises.  Insulin rushes to lower it.  More carbo, and it rises again, a recurring cycle which can cause the cells to become resistant to insulin, bringing further problems. 

When blood sugar rises too rapidly some extra fuel may be stored as fat, especially around the middle.  That can be one reason for a fat stomach.  Your body’s protective mechanism.

If you’re trying to loose fat and gain muscle make sure every snack or meal is balanced with protein, carbohydrate, and fat.  Whole foods do that naturally; you don’t need to check if all three are present.  Fruits and vegetables have all three components naturally.

Back to the meal replacement drink.

The most common protein used in meal replacement drinks is powdered denatured whey. 

WHAT IS DENATURED?

In the dictionary denatured is “a change the structure of a protein, change the nature of, to take natural qualities away from…”

When whey protein is denatured it is changed so it doesn’t go rancid, change color and flavor.  It stays on the shelf longer without degrading which makes for higher profit.

UNDENATURED WHEY IS A COMPLETE PROTEIN

Undenatured whey protein, however, is a whole food with complete protein. Complete protein means it contains all the essential amino acids.  Our bodies don’t make protein; we have to get protein in a complete form by combining various foods.  Meats are complete for the most part, but vegetables such as beans are incomplete and should be consumed with other proteins to include all the amino acids. 

Undenatured whey, though, is an excellent source for complete protein.  With undenatured whey you have a complete protein that your body can use right away to build muscle and organs and support body systems.  When science denatures whey protein the chemical structure of protein is changed from complete to incomplete.  It is a product different from the original.

TAKE IT EASY ON YOUR LIVER

Some meal replacement drinks use chemical derivatives of products rather than whole foods.  It may make the product less expensive to the consumer to include specific vitamins (C, D, A, for example) than to use whole herbs.  The product will also have a longer shelf life without whole foods because whole foods break down rapidly.

Everything you eat has to pass muster with your liver.  Toxic preservatives and chemicals are broken down by the liver and excreted from the body to protect important organs.  If a chemical cannot be broken down for excretion, it is taken out of circulation by the liver and stored in fat cells.

The real solution to permanent weight loss then is cleansing chemical toxins. Fat can then be released naturally.  As consumers and guardians of our health we want to avoid products with chemical additions and preservatives that tax the liver. 

FIND MEAL REPLCEMENTS WITH UNDENATURED WHEY PROTEIN AND NO PRESERVATIVES.

Your job, if you decide to take it, is to check labels, and read ingredients. 

You can find meal replacement drinks with undenatured whey protein and whole foods, without added preservatives and chemical vitamins.  They are on the market, but it may take time and persistence.  It’s worth the trouble if it means you’re building true health.

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How many Gen Y’ers can’t find a job even with a college degree?    

 How many baby boomers can’t retire and are thinking about workng at home?

Hw many real estate agents are sick of their jobs and are looking into starting a business at home?

How many banking professionals are sick of commuting to the city daily, only a face in the crowd?

Where are they going looking for answers?  Who are they asking for help?  Who or WHAT?

They’re asking Google. 

Googling the magic Search Engine in the sky!

What if they Googled and found YOUR articles and blog postings?

What if they liked what they read?  What if what you wrote answered their questions?

What if enough people contacted you that you didn’t have to call friends and family or buy opportunity leads and cold call them for your business?

How good would that be?

You could show them how you built a business using the Internet.  Talk with them about how you worked through the glitches of starting your business at home.  Provide support and help to others.  Show them an Internet training course.  Help them get started, and they’re going to want to know more about your business: What you do.  What products you sell.

They’ll ask you what you recommend, and you’ll become their expert, the one they go to for answers.

Service comes first to build friendships.  Build business relationships from the friendships.

What are your thoughts?  Want to share?

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