My firm was buzzing today about a very well known weight loss expert who said you should weigh yourself once….a month.

WRONG!

Get on the scale everyday. It’s the key long term success.

Jim

My firm in Chicago and New York has been running a ad campaign that features my staff. I was actually the person in the picture in March as that was my 50th birthday.

To get into optimal shape, many of my staff have been shedding the white carbs and by doing so, they are really shedding the fat.

Now, they were in good shape to begin with, but with the help of this eating plan and stepping up their strength training, you would not believe the difference. It’s truly amazing.

So, if you are serious about shedding the fat, keeping your muscle and maintaining your metabolism as you age, then I urge you to cut way back on the “white,” hit the weights hard and don’t forget to sleep 7-8 hours a night and weigh yourself everyday.

Good luck.

Scientists now believe that sugar may be to blame for many modern diseases, including obesity and cancer
The warning could not be more serious. A call to arms against sugar by the noted — and sometimes controversial — American science writer, Gary Taubes. As well as causing tooth decay and obesity, he claims, sugar may also be toxic.

In an article on the cover of the influential The New York Times Magazine last week, Taubes suggests that sugar is potentially poisonous. And he is not the first to say so. Because of its simple structure, which is easily and quickly turned into energy by the body, for many years it was thought that consuming large quantities of sugar was thought to trigger weight gain and diabetes. Yet extensive scientific research (sometimes funded by the powerful sugar lobby) turned that concept around. Now the American Dietetic Association (ADA), the world’s largest association of food and nutrition professionals, advises that eating a lot of sugary foods is not the only contributory factor in diabetes.

The pendulum has swung so far that many people now associate weight gain with excess consumption of fat rather than sugar and moderate their diets accordingly — not always successfully losing weight as a result. Yet a growing body of experts in nutrition, endocrinology, diabetes and cardiovascular disease are beginning to flag up sugar as the source of real concern. Even oncology researchers are looking at its effects on tumor growth.

Professor Robert Lustig, a leading expert in childhood obesity who works in the pediatric endocrinology division of the University of California San Francisco, believes that obesity can’t just be about our couch-potato lifestyle but has to be rooted in nutrition because pediatricians are seeing obese six-month-old babies. How can this happen, he asks, if weight gain is determined by how many calories you consume or how you spend them. Surely juvenile and infant obesity suggests that something else is at work: that sugar is particularly toxic and weight-forming.

The UK nutritionist Zoë Harcombe, author of The Obesity Epidemic: What Caused It? How Can We Stop It?, is just as emphatic, saying: “Sugar is an empty calorie, it doesn’t nourish us at all. I call it an anti-nutrient. It is one of the most evil things we can put in our mouths.”

If Lustig and Harcombe are right, excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason for the huge increase in obesity and diabetes worldwide in the past 30 years. But Lustig goes farther: sugar is also the likely dietary cause of heart disease, high blood pressure and many common cancers.

So why did we start eating it at all? Glucose (from the Greek glukus, meaning sweet) is a basic source of energy for cells in all life forms. It is formed by photosynthesis and initiates cell respiration. So all plant and animal life contains it and uses it; humans obtain glucose when the food they eat, from meat to potatoes and cabbage, is broken down in the digestive process.

Sugar itself, however, is the result of the bonding of glucose molecules and fructose (sometimes called fruit sugar) molecules in equal parts. The fructose is the natural sweetener (twice the intensity of glucose) that makes sugar so irresistible to our taste buds. What makes the calories that we obtain from sugar more dangerous than those obtained from a cheese sandwich, though, is the way that the human body deals with the fructose element, at least when consumed in sufficient quantities. So if we eat 100 calories of glucose derived from a meal or 100 calories of pure sugar, they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body.

Specifically, it seems that fructose is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body, so the liver has to work harder when you eat sugar than when you eat potato. And if you consume the sugar in a liquid form — white wine, smoothies or a carton of juice, say — the molecules reach the liver faster than they would if you were eating cake.

In fact, researchers from Quebec suggested last year that people who drink only one or two sugary beverages or more a day were 26 per cent more likely to develop diabetes or metabolic syndrome (also known as pre-diabetes, the stage when the body’s insulin levels are beginning to stop operating properly) than those who drink one or fewer portions a day.

Sovra Whitcroft, a consultant gynecologist at the Surrey Park Clinic, Guildford, who specializes in hormonal problems, says: “Foods that quickly break down lead to a repeated outpouring of insulin (the hormone that directs glucose to where it is needed for energy, and converts any spare into fat) from the pancreas.”

However, she warns that “our insulin levels are not meant to rise in sharp spikes like this. That should be an emergency response, not a daily one. If you keep forcing your body to release surges of insulin, it will become less able to respond to the insulin that it does produce. We call this insulin resistance. In the short term it will cause weight gain, especially around the waist; in the long term it leads to type 2 diabetes.” This is when the pancreas goes haywire, flooding the body with insulin and keeping sugar levels raised artificially high, or not responding with enough insulin. Too much insulin can age the body cells prematurely, leading to damaged and blocked arteries, which in turn can cause blindness, lead to gangrene and amputation in the limbs, heart disease and stroke. Too little can cause the body to slip into a coma and even result in death.

There are other consequences, too, Dr Whitcroft says. “Excess insulin production may affect hormone metabolism. Women who eat a lot of high-sugar foods (including drinking wine) are more likely to produce poor-quality eggs and cysts, so polycystic ovary syndrome is becoming increasingly common. These cysts produce more androgens (male hormones), which can upset the balance between estrogen and testosterone. The increase of androgens can lead to facial hair, spots and grumpiness. Lower estrogen production leads to exhaustion and depression.”

However, the dangers of eating sugar don’t end there: a connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. This trial claims that you are more likely to develop cancer if you are obese or have diabetes, and you’re more likely to develop cancer if you have metabolic syndrome. What is worrying is that research conducted by Craig Thompson, president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, indicates that the cells of many human cancers depend on insulin to provide the fuel (blood sugar) and materials they need to grow and multiply. Insulin and insulin-like growth factor also provide the signal, in effect, to do it. The more insulin, the better they do.

Lewis Cantley, director of the Cancer Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School, says that up to 80 per cent of all human cancers are driven by either mutations or environmental factors that enhance or mimic the effect of insulin on the incipient tumor cells. I asked Lustig by e-mail this week: “Do you consider sugar to be toxic and should its use be restricted by legislation, if necessary, within processed foods at least?” He replied: “In small doses, no. But no one consumes small doses any more. I think that fructose should be taken off the Food and Drug Administration’s generally regarded as safe list [in the United States]. That would force the food industry to re-examine its practices.”

He finishes, at least, on a positive note: “But there are two things that you can do to mitigate the negative effects of fructose: eat fiber and take more exercise.”

MUSCLE IS THE CENTERPIECE FOR BEING HEALTHY, VITAL AND INDEPENDENT AS WE GROW OLDER -

That’s a direct quote from Miriam Nelson, Director of the John Hancock Research Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition and Obesity at Tufts University.

Why would ANYONE not make maintaining muscle their first priority when it comes to exercise???

Jim

Just 15 minutes of weight training can help flatten your belly, says researchers from Southern Illinois University.

One set of 10 different exercises in a circuit boosted metabolism as much as 3 sets of the same routine.

The researchers say that the first set of an exercise turns on the hormones that control your metabolism.

For years, I have been saying “One set to failure get the job done.”

It appears that the research now agrees.

Jim

If you snore, you’d be an idiot not to schedule a sleep study.

Untreated sleep apnea may shrink your brain.

Researchers from the U.K. And Australia who analyzed MRIs from 60 people with sever sleep apnea found that they had lost about 8% of their gray matter in two brain areas, including one critical for motor function. Nighttime oxygen deprivation could be the cause.

The good news – people who used continuous positive airway pressure for 3 months regained the lost brain cells.

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I am AMAZED that people continue to buy these books that ignore strength training when we KNOW that you have to when losing weight.

If you don’t, you are doomed to fail, like 97% of all Americans.

Please stop buying into a gimmick. All you have to do is count calories, strength train and get to sleep. It’s really not that hard.

Jim

I’m here in Scottsdale and am watching the majority of the people at this hotel eat from the buffet.

it’s a disaster.

Buffets are meant for people who desperately need to GAIN weight, not for normal folk to eat.

Variety makes us eat more.

Eating more makes us gain weight.

Weight gain comes with serious health risks and, quite possibly, and early death.

is it really worth it?

Jim

I’m in Scottsdale giving a speech after finishing another one in New York City on Wednesday.

Both groups have been looking at the calorie counts on menus and say that seeing how MUCH is in some entrees and choices has made them change their decision.

I wish the government, which generally does NOT belong in many things, would mandate that ALL restaurant food have the calories listed.

That would be the smartest way to reverse this epidemic.

Jim