Modern science proves the ancient fruit’s healthy benefits

The term “super food” gets thrown around a lot in popular health circles. Every day, it seems, there’s new talk of some berry from Asia that will help you become fitter and happier, fight off every disease and ailment known to man and make you smarter. As with many trending topics in the health and fitness world, the actual health benefits of many of these so-called superfoods are usually exaggerated or still under heated debate, and may not actually be much help as a supplement for your medical weight loss program.

But the pomegranate, one of the most talked about super foods, has a long history of benefiting human health as well as the scientific evidence to back it up. Full of antioxidants and nutrients, modern scientists have confirmed what many ancient cultures believed about the pomegranate: it really is quite good for you.

Ancient History

The pomegranate was one of the first fruits cultivated by man, with a history that goes back as far as 3500 B.C. A native of Persia, the pomegranate was buried with the dead in ancient Egypt, introduced to China during the Han dynasty and used by the ancient Romans to tan leather. The city of Granada, Spain is named after the pomegranate and the fruit appears on the Spanish coat of arms and flag. It is mentioned in both the Bible and the Quran and its merits were commended by literary figures from Homer to Shakespeare.

Time has disproven many ancient beliefs, and though it may not provide eternal life as the Egyptians believed, the pomegranate does have many real health benefits.

Antioxidants and Nutrients

Used by your body to neutralize destructive molecules called free radicals that come from the inhalation of smoke and pollution and exposure to pesticides and radiation, antioxidants are found in great abundance in the pomegranate. Antioxidants have also been shown to improve blood flow and prevent arteriosclerosis, the hardening of arteries. Though antioxidants can also be found in sources like green tea and wine, few foods match the pomegranate in antioxidant richness.

Pomegranates also contain high levels of folic acid, vitamin C, fiber and potassium, all nutrients that are essential to maintaining proper health. Recent studies have shown that the pomegranate can help lower your chances of developing cardiovascular disease by reducing your levels of LDL, a kind of bad cholesterol. Though more research is needed, there is also evidence that the pomegranate helps to prevent breast and prostate cancers.

The Earth may not be flat, or the center of the universe, but it seems our ancient ancestors really hit a bull’s-eye with the pomegranate. Be careful when preparing it, as its delicious red juice is capable of irreparably staining just about anything, but try adding a little pomegranate to your diet to get some great health benefits the old fashioned way.

For most people today, it’s common sense that smoking cigarettes is bad for their health. So, if you’re trying to live a healthier and more active lifestyle for longevity, it should be common sense that excess sugar is not only bad for your health but also for your medical weight loss. Rochester residents both male and female need to be aware of the effects excess sugar can have on their health and the aging process.

Over the past 200 years, the American diet has changed for the worse – United States sugar consumption has steadily been on the rise. The average American in 1822 consumed 6.3 pounds of sugar in a year; compare that to now with the average American consuming nearly 100 pounds of sugar per year.

Sugar’s effects on the body have become more than just a dietary issue—studies show that excess sugar can aggravate symptoms of menopause in women and even lower testosterone levels among other major hormones in the body for men. It’s hard to deny our sweet tooth sometimes, and sugar seems nearly impossible to avoid as it’s found in thousands of grocery store, gas station and movie theatre products. It is our responsibility to curb our sugar intake in order to obtain positive medical weight loss results and maintain them long-term.

Quitting cigarettes as an avid smoker is extremely hard to do—some even say it’s nearly impossible. But cutting back on your sugar is possible—it’s just going to take a little bit of hard work and will power on your behalf. To make quitting your sugar habit a little less demanding, keep these motivational reasons in mind:

Sugar can potentially:

1. Increase cancer risk
2. Contribute to obesity
3. Raise cholesterol levels
4. Trigger heart disease
5. Impact type-2 diabetes

This is only an abbreviated list of excess sugar’s harmful effects on your health, hormones and future. When you’re trying to lose weight, be healthier and live longer,being aware of how sugar can negatively impact your goals will help to keep you on track. Keeping your sugar intake to a minimum will help you stay on top of your medical weight loss and keep you motivated for long-term success.

Just say NO to sugar!

The locavore movement started out of environmental concerns, but can also play a beneficial role with weight loss efforts. A lot of people were upset by the fact that ten percent of all fossil fuels used are consumed in the transportation of foods. Whether it is coming from a farm or a factory, most food items spend an average of 14 days on a truck before even being offered to a consumer.

Locavores only eat food that is locally grown and produced. That means cutting out all of the excess foods that are shipped from all corners of the earth. Chances are you have seen a semi-truck driving down the highway with a fast-food restaurant name on its side, or you have gone to the food store only to see a massive truck unloading boxes into the back. Michigan is home to some of the country’s best Orchards, but apples at the local food store are often shipped in from South America. Good luck trying to put together a country of origin for the foods in your value meal.

Eating Local Can Help with Weight Loss

Making the decision to eat locally is a big step, but one that can really get you thinking more about what foods you are eating. If you are committed to only eat foods that are from Rochester, or even limit your food intake to those from around Michigan, you will cut out the possibility of grabbing take-out or picking up a bag of chips from the gas station.

Eating local puts a barrier between you and many of the poor choices in your diet, which can help you to lose weight, especially if you replace common snacks with fresh produce that was grown in your neighborhood. Visiting local farms to purchase food is a great way to add exercise to your routine, as well.

Here are a few local resources that you may want to check out as you transition to eating more locally grown foods:

• Picking your own fruit is a great way to connect with nature and get in a bit of exercise. Westview Orchards and Cider Mill is a u-pick farm located in Romeo. This farm features apples, pears, plums, sweet corn and pumpkins as well as breads, jams and maple syrup. The farm has a lot to offer outside of food as well, including an obstacle course, wagon rides, a corn maze and even a 3-acre wide playground.
• Millers Big Red Apple Orchard and Cider Mill is another u-pick farm that also features a produce store in Washington Township. Miller’s has u-pick raspberries available every weekday, and a wide selection of produce and other baked goods available inside. This farm also features a few fun activities, including a petting farm, rock wall and corn maze.
• Yates Cider Mill is located right here in Rochester Hills. This farm features a variety of treats including apple butter, jams and jellies, apple cider and roasted almonds. Take the kids with you, Yates also offers pony rides!

Even if you are not interested in transitioning to a 100% local diet, becoming more active in your community and purchasing food from the farms down the street provides a great opportunity to get more exercise and have a little bit of fun.

If this is something that you have experienced, then there is a chance that you are absorbing the stress of those around you. You have likely heard the expression before about feeling tension in a room. This same sensory awareness is often true in situations where the tension isn’t obvious between two quarrelling individuals. Instead, being around someone who is anxious, depressed or just generally negative may be affecting your own demeanor. What a downer.

Think about this example:

Jennifer woke up a few minutes early this morning. She enjoyed a fresh cup of coffee and read a few pages of her book before going to work, where she received several positive emails about her work this week. At lunch, Jennifer sat in the work lounge with a few co-workers who were upset with their boss and thought Jennifer’s good work made them look bad. Though they did not say anything to her, Jennifer could feel their negative thoughts and left the lunch lounge. She finished her lunch with another co-worker who is going through a divorce and is very anxious. Jennifer spent her afternoon at work feeling frazzled, and decided to have fast food for dinner because she had such a stressful day.

Jennifer let others impact the way that her day played out. Instead of remaining positive about the good morning that she had, she let the negative feelings of those around her interfere with her positive mood. Jennifer absorbed the anxiety of those around her. Does this sound familiar to you?

Putting Up Boundaries

Absorbing the negative energy of those around you can greatly impact the way that you are feeling and perceiving your own stress. In this situation, Jennifer may not have been able to explain why she felt so anxious after work. However, when you stop and think about all of the negativity that she absorbed during lunch, you’re left without wondering why!

When you find yourself in a stressful situation, instead of becoming absorbed byabsorbing the negative emotions of those around you, try putting up a barrier. This can be done by focusing on a happy place that you enjoy. Think of the activities that you like to do and where you go that always puts a smile on your face. Instead of engaging in the negativity of those around you, change the subject and start talking about where you walked your dog last night, how much fun you had on your last vacation, or where you would want to travel to most in the world.

You may be surprised, by changing the subject and becoming more positive, you may help those around you to overcome their negativity as well!

One of the reasons that yoga is losing the popularity contest is that it is hard work that offers gradual results. Yoga poses can help you to build strength in your arms, core and lower body—but it takes time. If you put a lot into yoga, then you are likely to walk away from an hour long yoga session just as sweaty as you would after Zumba. Bikram yoga can be especially intense, as the sessions are done in a room heated up to 95 degrees or above. If you give yoga enough time, then the weight loss benefits will begin to show.

However, a toned body is just an added benefit that yoga offers. Many people who do yoga everyday do so for the mental rejuvenation.

Mental benefits of yoga include:

• Improved concentration
• Increased management of depression and anxiety
• Reduced stress
• Improved mood

Finding a Yoga Routine

The vinyasa style of yoga features poses that are linked with one another to provide a smooth transition between positions. Each pose is designed to target certain areas of your body and nervous system, stimulating your senses and triggering a stress release.

Yoga routines are designed for a variety of reasons. Certain routines use twisting followed by opening poses to release tension from the body, while other routines will focus on rapid breathing or balancing for core strength development. There are a lot of sample yoga routines available online that are intended to help you wake up in the morning, and then there are others that are designed to help you calm down to go to sleep at night. When you are looking for a yoga routine, assess your own needs and find one that will help you set a positive intention to move forward with your day.

This doesn’t have to be the case–there are several workplace tricks you can use to make sure you’re involving your mind, body and spirit in the healthiest way possible at work. Here are four ways to make sure your space at the office is just as peaceful as a monk’s garden:

• Find your footing: Balance of the mind and body is an important aspect of maintaining harmony in the workplace. Next time you’re feeling overwhelmed at work, firmly place your feet flat against the ground. This will establish a firm physical foundation and help bring a sense of balance back to your body.
• Become a beginner: Avoiding arguments or small disagreements in the workplace is hard to do. Everyone is different and therefore has different opinions about how things should work. Before you start an argument with a co-worker, take a deep breath and begin asking questions instead. By asking questions instead of arguing, you might be able to uncover the other person’s way of seeing things and in return overcome roadblocks with more ease.
• Name your mood: It is easy to become quickly frazzled in the workplace. Even the smallest things seem to ruin the day—the copier breaking down, losing your favorite pen and your co-worker’s new habit of tapping the side of the desk. It is during these times you need to take a minute to put your feelings in perspective. Every hour, write down one word summarizing your current state of mind. At the end of the day, review your list of words—you’ll come to find even the worst moments seem to pass with time.
• Let it go:  Whether you mean to or not, sometimes a bad day at work is brought all the way back home. Stop—before you even leave the office, imagine a box and place all of the day’s events inside, then visualize the box floating away. Being able to release these thoughts before you leave work helps you to engage wholeheartedly once you get home.

Bad days are unavoidable, but don’t let these days get the best of you. Making sure you’re embodying your mind, body and spirit at work is great for stress management in Rochester. Use the four Zen workplace tricks to boost your well-being and end your day on a calm and stress-free note.

• Add variety to your diet by replacing your banana with a yellow plantain. A plantain is a fruit that is similar to both a banana and a yam, mixed together. Both yellow and green plantains can be cooked and used as a delicious replacement for potatoes. Bananas are a good source for potassiumas are kiwi fruit, which is great in salsa as an accompaniment to plantains.
• Change the apple to a papaya or a quince for a different taste. The papaya will offer more fiber than the apple, and the quince, which is similar than the apple, will offer a tarter taste.
• Instead of the watermelon try snacking on guava. The lycopene in the guava is beneficial for lowering the risk of cancer and heart disease. Another fruit that can take the place of the watermelon is the Asian pear. This moist fruit can be added to a spinach salad for a unique meal.
• Two unusual fruits to enjoy instead of the orange are the star fruit and the kumquat. The star fruit offers a sweet but acidic flavor but with the same healthy nutrients. The kumquat taste similar to the orange only with a bit more kick.

Eating the same fruits day after day can make it hard to stick to a healthy diet. These interesting fruits can be found at food stores and farmers markets, and can really change the pace of your afternoon snack from being dreadful to wishing you had more.

Everyone has habits—both good and bad. The trick to managing those habits is to be aware of what is triggering them. Those who are trying to lose weight may find that they are often indulging in desert before they even realized they had filled their ice cream bowl. Medical weight management such as the HCG diet in Rochester can help you to overcome the hunger associated with your temptation for desert. Use your medical weight loss assistance to your advantage to overcome your poor dietary habits.

How Habits Work

Habits, both good and bad ones, use the same psychological process, which consists of three distinct parts.

• First, there is a trigger that stimulates the brain to automatically follow a particular set of behaviors.
• Second, the behavior has a familiar routine to it. It usually follows a predictable pattern.
• Third, the behavior is rewarded by the brain with pleasant thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

An Example of a Bad Habit in Action

Suppose someone who is diabetic has the bad habit of eating ice cream. Although the habit causes all sorts of health problems, the desire to eat ice cream is stronger than the urge to avoid it.

• First, the diabetic may be watching a television show and sees a scene where children rush out to an ice cream truck and buy their favorite ice cream. This is the trigger.
• Second, the diabetic goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a tub of ice cream, sets out a bowl and a spoon, piles the ice cream into it, and goes back to watching the television show. This is the routine behavior.
• Third, the diabetic feels intense satisfaction and pleasure at the taste of ice cream. This is the reward.

How to Break a Bad Habit

Continuing with the example of the diabetic, how does he or she learn to break this habit?

It can be broken by interrupting one or more of the three processes.

The diabetic can choose to rethink what the stimulus means. So when an image of eating ice cream shows up, the focus can be on how sick he or she will feel afterwards rather than the pleasure of eating the ice cream. This reframes the trigger.

During the ritual of opening up the freezer door and setting up an ice cream bowl and spoon, the diabetic can interrupt this pattern by putting something else in the bowl, like a stick of celery instead of a dab of ice cream.

During the eating of the ice cream, the diabetic can focus on negative aspects of the taste of the ice cream—too cold, too sweet, too sticky, and so on.

By continually “scrambling” the three processes, overtime the diabetic will lose the urge to get ice cream, lose interest in the ritual of setting up the treat, and lose the sense of reward for it.

Heavy metal poisoning can cause a number of serious problems to your health. Lower energy levels, damage to blood composition, reduced mental function, decreased central nervous function and damage to the lungs, kidneys and liver are all potential side effects to this illness. Researchers have even found that chronic exposure to certain metals could increase an individual’s risk of developing cancer.

Heavy metal toxicity can interrupt with your quality of life, and unfortunately it is often a condition that goes undiagnosed for some time. There are two different types of metal poisoning that everyone should be aware of: acute toxicity and chronic toxicity.

Acute toxicity is often easy to recognize and diagnose because the symptoms will onset quickly, often as the result of environmental exposure or ingestion. Symptoms often include cramping, nausea, headaches and difficulty breathing. When an individual becomes ill from heavy metal poisoning as a result of long term exposure, the symptoms are similar to that of acute toxicity but they are not rapid in onset. Instead, it may be difficult to directly attribute the cause of the symptoms to heavy metal, as health conditions and symptoms could deteriorate over the course of months or even years.

It is important to consult a physician that is specialized to treat heavy metal poisoning with chelation in Rochester. Chelation therapy is used to bind toxic metals so that they can be removed from the body, helping to restore health.

How Chelation Therapy Works

Chelation therapy is often administered intravenously, but in some cases is also available as a pill. During chelation therapy, a man-made amino acid abbreviated as EDTA is released into the bloodstream. Once injected, the amino acid binds itself to heavy metals that are present in your bloodstream including iron, lead or mercury, thereby forcing the metals to exit the body through urination or a bowel movement. These metals could prompt severe health concerns if left unmanaged to circulate through your blood stream, as the body is unable to rid itself of these metals on its own.

You can picture the EDTA compound as a chain that binds itself around metals in the bloodstream as if it was a cage. This caging effect prevents the metals from interacting with anything else in the body. The EDTA amino acid binds with the metals in six different positions, making it an effective option for the removal of heavy metals from the body.

Simply put, stress is tension. When you think about stress, imagine a slack piece of string. Stress pulls the ends away from each other until there is no slack left. When you are under stress, your body secretes hormones that cause your muscles to tense, or contract, ensuring they are ready for action. Sometimes called the “fight or flight” response, when stressed your body is in a state of “bring it on!” When you are constantly under stress, your body has little time or energy for relaxation, which is when most of your cells’ healing and repairs occur.

When you laugh, you release chemicals that combat stress and depression. Studies show that just anticipating a humorous situation, such as a comedy or an evening out with friends, increases your levels of beta-endorphins and human growth hormone, two chemicals that counteract the stress hormones. Additionally, the act of laughing increases the amount of oxygen to your cells and muscles, helping to release tension and increasing blood flow.

There’s even a recent trend towards incorporating laughter into your daily routine. Called “laughter yoga,” simply making silly faces at each other and imitating laughter can benefit your mind, body and emotions. If stress is the toxin that sucks the life out of you, laughter is the medicine that restores health to your bones. If you are suffering from a stress disorder in Rochester, see how laughter can help. Maybe that’s why you have a funny bone instead of a bummer bone.