Orexin - a hormone that controls waking up, staying awake, and lose weight

For anyone trying to figure out why it is hard to wake up and/or stay awake... the hormone orexin may be part of your answer.

Orexin - a wakefulness and weight control hormone
Orexin is a hormone which stimulates wakefulness, in fact it is deficient in people with narcolepsy. It also appears to be absolutely necessary to keep weight under control--without it, mice in a study automatically became obese. So what stimulates the production of orexin?

Turns out protein (amino acids) stimulates orexin. Conversely, high sugars block orexin. However, protein also prevents sugars from blocking orexin, so protein is doubly necessary to keep orexin secretion going.

So eating enough protein especially if and when you eat carbs/sugars is the key factor in producing enough orexin to stay awake and keep weight under control.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/10/05/hormone-orexin-may-help-control-weight-gain-study-finds/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/why-sugar-makes-us-sleepy-and-protein-wakes-us-up/

Road work for thighs and rear ends and the wrong advice for women and men

Some people have naturally big thighs and rear ends due to fat, muscle, or both. They want to slim their thighs, not bulk them up. This site addresses the issue.

http://www.laststopfatloss.com/how-to-lose-weight-in-your-thighs

For those with a lot of bulk in their thighs and rear end, the standard one-size-fits all fitness advice to start by building muscle in the legs does not apply--it will just increase the disproportionate bulk, even if it is muscle. Rather than squats, sprints, and bike riding, etc., for these people (including me!) "road work" i.e. long very slow running 45-60 minutes is a better approach to these areas.

Road Work
Boxers, especially the heavier weights, do road work to keep their weight under control and build endurance for long fights. It is just running really slow over 45-60 minutes. Forget distance, it doesn't matter, you may cover just a three laps on a track in 45 minutes. The motion is almost like bouncing/jumping rope/shuffling because you are going so slow.


Joe Frazier doing road work

Somewhere out there a fitness guru is saying "Wrong! You'll lose all your precious muscle this way! You have to build muscle to increase fat burning!" Again, this is for those with too much muscle mass in the thighs, not those at the other end of the spectrum struggling to hold on to muscle .

Adding Cardio Intensity Intervals to Road Work
Slow running can work together with short anaerobic exercises like pushups to amplify the intensity without bulking up.

To add a little cardio intensity spice to long slow running without bulking legs, sprinkle in short intervals of anaerobic exercise like pushups every so often  6-8 times over the 45-60 minutes. For example, if you're at a track just drop once every lap or two and do 1-5 pushups, pop up and go right back to running slow. It is not meant to be a full chest workout or to work to failure. What this does is forces the heart to work heart to send the blood from general circulation (running) to local muscle groups (chest, arms) and then quickly back out to general circulation as you go right back to running. You make feel a little kick of light headedness and adrenaline as you switch back to running, that tells you you need more blood in general circulation, which is good

Instead of pushups during the intervals, other upper body exercises work like tricep dips on a park/bleacher bench or a couple quick pullups if there is a bar around somewhere. Or bring some dumbells and leave them on the side to do curls, kickbacks, or military presses. Best thing I find is to mix several of these exercises so you're doing 4 of one and 4 of another rather than overworking the same muscles 8 sets. Whatever the exercise, go right back to running as soon as your done.


Frequent Mis-Advice for Women
Women naturally tend to have bigger thighs and rear ends than men so it is a key area that they focus on in exercise. One of the biggest mistakes told to women is that to "tone" their thighs they should do any exercise that works the muscles there--ride the stationary bike, do squats, sprints, etc. But this is counterproductive for women shaped like "spoons" and "hourglasses" i.e. who naturally have curves and bulk, and you see the results everywhere around you jumping out of the spandex: women who have done so much leg exercise trying to slim their thighs and yet their thighs have gotten bigger than when they started. This point is spelled out in the website above and also in the book Escape Your Shape. Road work (above) is a better way to slim and tone thighs and rear end.
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Your-Shape-Smarter-Harder/dp/0743211448

Frequent Mis-Advice for those with natural thigh muscle mass
There are others, men and women, who just have a lot of muscle (rather than soft curves) naturally on their thighs and rear end (and then there are people who have both). They are usually good sprinters. I am one of them; when I was going into 1st grade and looking for Catholic school uniform pants, we had to go to Sears to get "Husky" size because of my thighs, even though I wasn't particularly chunky anywhere else. (I always wondered what Alaskan Huskies had to do with pants?) And I still managed to split a few pairs during the primary grades. So the standard advice about muscle for guys (usually written solely from the perspective of gaining muscle rather than overall body shape and proportion) to focus on squats and sprints as the foundation of muscle building doesn't work for us, it just builds disproportionately-bulky muscle in this area. Pants sizes go through the roof; yes, there is such a thing as too much muscle. A better approach is to do road work for the lower body and focus on lifting in other areas like arms, shoulders, etc. which are usually naturally less bulky in those with naturally big thighs.

Good website for fat loss

This is a guy with very practical information.

http://www.laststopfatloss.com/

Workout and diet for endomorphs and endo-mesomorphs

Good discussion about approaches to workouts and diet for endomorphs and endo-mesomorphs (like me). forums.johnstonefitness.com/showthread.php?t=52054

Why our bodies are unnaturally full of acids

Weak Acids

Weak acids are found in fruits and vegetables as well as whey protein and yogurt, honey, and some other foods. They can make you tired, cranky, etc. and make your skin dry. This is not natural and is largely a result of the industrialized way that we harvest crops.

Crops lose their acids as they ripen on the vine, but if you pick them before they are ripe they won't lose those acids as they ripen off the vine. In industrialized farming, crops (like apples) are harvested before they are ripe, then ripen off the vine while in storage (refrigerated train cars, warehouses, etc.) waiting to be sold. So when you eat it, it looks ripe but still has all the acids it did when it was picked unripe.

Solution? Either search high and low for crops picked recently or for a farm where you can "pick your own", or eat the few fruits that are always low in acids like bananas, dates, and pears (there are many lists online of food acid content).

Strong Acids
Strong acids are created by our digestive systems. If you eat a steak or a bunch of fatty foods (keeping in mind that fats are not bad) your body creates acids to break the food down. Some people process this acid efficiently (especially when they drink plenty of water), but many people are slow in processing strong acids and get acidosis, which can make you really tired, give you an ulcer, etc. Just ask last year's NBA MVP Derrick Rose, who went to the hospital with 2 ulcers the same year due to a love of spicy food and candy.

From ESPN Chicago:
"'Everybody's got their poison, and mine is sugar... I'll be having binges where I'll just eat tons and tons of candy,' he said. 'I could go without eating candy for like two weeks, but right when I [have] the first taste of candy in a day, I'll go through like two pounds of candy. For real, like two pounds.'

A sugar high isn't a problem for a grizzled candy veteran like Rose.

'I'm so used to it,' he said. 'I could eat a whole bunch of candy and then go to sleep. Most people would be up, [saying] 'I can't go sleep.' I'd go right to sleep, man. That's how bad it is. I wish I could [stop].'

While Skittles and Gummy Bears are some of his favorites, Rose is an equal opportunity candy-a-holic. Everything but chocolate, that is."

Funny, chocolate is the only candy I do eat... anyway.

Weak vs. Strong Acids
These fruit and vegetable acids are weak acids, which the body must get rid of through oxidation (i.e. breathing). They are in the fruit itself, unlike strong acids (digestive acids) which are produced by us to break down foods and must be expelled through water i.e. sweat and urine.

Some people have difficulty expelling acids
The process of getting rid of acids is very fast for some people and very slow for others. So what happens for those who get rid of them slowly? The acids build up in the bloodstream and the are stored off in the tissues. Not good. As a countermeasure, the body releases alkaline minerals from the muscles to neutralize the acids--calcium and magnesium. So many people with acidosis end up with lowered minerals as well as losing muscle mass.

How to get rid of acids
Getting rid of acids is not hard once you know what to do; the bigger problem is to stop eating foods that bring/create them.

A quick way to get rid of acids is to neutralize them by taking common alkaline minerals. (Alkaline is the opposite of acidic.) The easiest are Calcium and Magnesium. You may actually feeler lighter in 20 minutes after a handful of magnesium tablets make their way into your bloodstream; they are neutralizing those acids (both strong and weak acids)in your tissues so that they literally disappear.

You can also speed up the process of getting rid of weak acids by doing aerobic exercise, the increase in respiration/oxygen intake will speed up the body's natural oxidation process.

For strong acids, you can help the body by drinking more water, which is needed for the kidneys to process these acids.

Christopher Vasey wrote one of the best books on Acids
The Acid-Alkaline Diet for Optimum Health: Restore Your Health by Creating pH Balance in Your Diet

Why Jeremy Lin is good

Jeremy Lin is good for a lot of reasons including natural explosiveness, coordination, and spatial ability, but in terms of skills he is good at the stuff they teach kids in camp. He has fundamental skills and abilities that, surprisingly, a lot of NBA players don't:

-court vision: he sees teammates, understands spacing, understands where he is relative to them on the court, understands how to draw and move the defense using the dribble and the pass

-jab step: with the jab step he keeps defenders off balance and can get off 3 pointers and/or get into the lane

-passing: he is a great passer, and all of a sudden the whole Knicks team is passing well

This is the stuff they teach you in basketball camp, the stuff they say to practice that 1 guy in 100 (including a guy named Jordan) actually follows through on and that is absent in many NBA players.

Incidentally, this is why the US national team lost so many games to foreign teams in the past few decades including the Olympics. Teams like Argentina, Spain, Italy stick to the basics. All they do is pick and roll, all they play is team basketball.

Whole Paycheck?

Maybe you've heard the joke "Whole Paycheck" referring to Whole Foods. It can be expensive. However, the truth is that in many ways Whole Foods is cheaper than a regular grocery store like Safeway.

In the Undercover Economist Tim Harford explains that Whole Foods costs more only when you buy higher-end and/or more unusual items that you simply would not find at Safeway. So it's not that Safeway is cheaper, it's that it sells mostly high-volume, mass-produced, and/or lower-quality stuff.

Harford points out that a bottle of mineral water costs less at Whole Foods than at Safeway. It's because at Whole Foods mineral water is part of "the basics" whereas at Safeway most customers would find mineral water a luxury.

Take the goat milk that I buy every week (sometimes every day). It costs $3.79 a quart. That's over $15 a gallon, which is a ton. But it's not that expensive because it's at Whole Foods, it's expensive because it's unusual. You can't find goat milk at Safeway at all.

Or take the salad bar. Safeway sells bare bones salad, none of it organic. Whole Foods salad bar sells much more variety including organic and it is better prepared. So the price per pound may be higher but you get something more.

It works the other way, too, however. Whole foods sometimes does not offer just plain old cheap stuff. They don't sell cheap paper towels, they are all recycled and specially made, etc. So if you don't really care about how eco-friendly your paper towels are and just want Bounty, you are going to pay more by going to Whole Foods.

So the bottom line is
-Whole foods is cheaper, not more expensive, than Safeway on identical items
-It is up to you to spend your money or not on individual higher-end or unusual items that Whole Foods carries that you cannot find elsewhere.