Why Reprogram Your Mind?

Don't get to the point where you wish you had taken better care of yourself. You must be proactive and take personal ownership of your health. Recall the precautionary lyrics, courtesy of The Main Ingredient: everybody plays the fool, some time. Sometimes our view of the truth can be too narrow. Sometimes our view of truth can be too broad. Not all that glitters is gold. In the pursuit of truth, we must keep open minds - but not ever so open our brains flop out! So that, too, is part of the truth: just because we wish something were true (eg, bacon is good for you now! Preference does not equal truth. We can all too readily believe what isn't true, and play the fool. In our fervor, we can pass along that misguided conviction, playing the knave, and making fools of others. We are all inclined to perceive truth amidst our native preferences, however misguided they might be. Not 9 weeks old. Nine weeks after conception. It is a stunning feat. By 5 months of gestation, we have made upward of 7 million oocytes, the immature eggs. The vast majority are dead by birth. They committed suicide (doctors call it apoptosis). No one knows why. We are left with a million that continue to die after birth.

From their grand beginnings, a virtual empire's worth of oocytes, a woman ovulates a mere 400 to 500 in her lifetime. I hate to keep comparing us to men, but our entire supply is less than the average number of sperm per ejaculate. It's easy to do, and ultimately, very physically and mentally rewarding. Now, let's talk more about some of the specific medical and fitness benefits of HIIT. Nowhere are the benefits of HIIT more notable than on the healthy functioning of the heart. According to the American Heart Association, approximately one of every three deaths in the US is caused by cardiovascular disease. That's nearly 2,200 deaths a day, or about one death every 40 seconds. The average age for a first heart attack is 65 for males and 72 for females. Unfortunately, these statistics are projected to get worse in the coming years. Fortunately, by altering your lifestyle, you can drastically reduce the odds of suffering from cardiovascular disease. There's likely nothing that will have more of an impact on the healthy functioning of the cardiovascular system than exercise because of its impacts on resting heart rate, insulin sensitivity, blood pressure, cholesterol, and body fat. In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, previously sedentary men were randomly placed into HIIT or MICT exercise groups for a total of 24 weeks. Lies can look like truth, and may be more appealing than truth. Such perils make it necessary to know the nature of lies, as well as truth, to avoid mistaking the one for the other. We will explore the prevailing lies - both specific examples, and their general attributes - so you recognize the many others sure to follow. If you know the truth and the alternatives seeking to wrest it from your grasp, your grip will be firm and true. You will hold the truth reliably. I write in the service of that because it matters so much. It matters to me and my family. It matters to you and your family.

It matters to the human condition, and the fate of the planet. The truth about food can add years to lives, and life to years. To my way of thinking, that makes each egg a precious commodity. One human egg sells for thousands of dollars more than a sperm. A human egg is 100 micrometers in diameter, the width of a strand of hair. That doesn't sound like much, but it is the biggest cell in the body, filled with fluid and delicate paraphernalia, ten times bigger than a sperm, which is basically a little head with DNA. Every egg is housed within a follicle that is lined with electrically charged cells, ready to release the egg into the ovary's version of the outside world. Unlike any other cell in the body, oocytes remain in a sort of oocyte adolescence until the moment of ovulation. Dormant oocytes are particularly vulnerable to damage. For one thing, they do not have repair mechanisms that other cells have. Moreover, they reside in a highly excitable state. When you are that ready, even the slightest push in the wrong direction or a slight temperature change, or a little electrical shock can release a cascade of events, explains Jason Barritt, an embryologist and scientific director of Reproductive Medicine Associates in New York City. At the end of that time, tests revealed that in addition to a greater improvement in participants' fitness levels, only the HIIT group achieved significant improvement in total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and non-HDL cholesterol. The changes in cholesterol were deemed sufficient to decrease coronary heart disease (CHD) incidence by 54 percent, prompting the authors to conclude that . The present study also suggests that changes in CHD risk factors are influenced by exercise intensity. As reported in a 2017 British Journal of Sports Medicine, a systematic review of 65 studies demonstrated that short-term HIIT, defined as less than 12 weeks of exercise, significantly improves diastolic blood pressure and fasting blood sugar levels in overweight populations. Meanwhile, long-term HIIT, defined as more than 12 weeks of exercise, significantly improved resting heart rate, as well as systolic and diastolic blood pressure, in overweight populations. Additionally, it has been established that poor cardiorespiratory fitness is the result of people's lifestyle choices, resulting in coronary artery disease, heart failure, hypertension, metabolic syndrome, and obesity. The conclusion of a 2014 review and analysis of data from 10 qualifying studies was: HIIT significantly increases cardiorespiratory fitness by almost double that of MICT in patients with lifestyle-induced chronic diseases. Whether you'd like to decrease your heart disease incidence by 54 percent, improve your blood pressure and blood sugar levels in less than 12 weeks, or almost double your fitness benefit in half the time, HIIT is the vehicle.

Impressive, I'd say! While it's clear that HIIT provides significant benefits to your cardiovascular system, it's natural to wonder if an exercise that's more intense might be too risky to your heart. Fortuitously, the same truth about food can protect our aquifers, our air, our land, our climate, and this planet's greatest native treasure: its biodiversity. The truth matters. And I don't want you to spend the rest of your life seeking it but not finding it, or finding it and losing it, holding it and dropping it. I want you to own it, irrevocably. For that, you need to be somewhat expert in the pretense of the pretenders. What preposterous nonsense. We have known SOMETHING about food - what's good for our kind of animal to eat - since long before we ever thought to question what kind of animal we are. We have always known SOMETHING about food, maybe even a lot - certainly enough - and have only learned more over time. Somehow, learning more has talked us into believing we know nothing, because we recognize we don't know everything . But we don't know everything about anything! On average, the percentage of healthy eggs drops from 90 percent among 21-year-olds to 10 percent among 41-year-olds. As Barritt puts it, They are always in an `oh my God, I'm ready, I'm ready' state. The moment the channel opens, the cells are like `Woo Hoo! We are on our way! Nowadays, fertility drugs that put the system into overdrive send dozens of eggs shooting out of the ovary. Immediately before escaping the ovary and bursting forth into the outside world (relatively speaking), they do their final dance into maturity. Two strands of DNA separate so that each cell has only one strip of 23 chromosomes ready to meet its mate. The other one is a clump of DNA that disintegrates.

Woodruff is one of a handful of scientists trying to decipher the follicular signals telling a particular egg to finish maturing and ovulate. You can have two follicles right next to each other, she says, and one gets a signal to ovulate when the woman is 19 and the other waits 20 years. And while it's true that exercising in the upper limits of your maximal heart rate will cause the heart to work harder, the science seems to say it's as safe as engaging in moderate forms of exercise, and safer than not exercising at all. A 2012 study reported in the journal Circulation examined the risk of cardiovascular events during high-intensity interval exercise versus moderate-intensity exercise among almost 5,000 patients with coronary artery disease who were staying in cardiac rehabilitation centers. They concluded that . Considering the significant cardiovascular adaptations associated with high-intensity exercise, such exercise should be considered among the patients with coronary heart disease. Keep in mind that the above study took place in a cardiac rehab setting, so make sure that, if you have a history of cardiovascular disease or high blood pressure, you get clearance from your cardiologist since you'll likely be exercising in an unsupervised setting. It's also vital for your heart health that you not jump into any exercise program too fast. As we'll discuss more in article Two, it's important that you begin slowly and build up to a comfortable level of exercise. Too much of any type of exercise (also known as overtraining) can have diminishing, and even negative, returns. It's nice to report that while the program is more intense, people have generally found HIIT to be well-tolerated. The 2005 study from the Journal of Applied Physiology, referenced on article 15, had this to say: . Not gravity, or chemistry, or botany. Without knowing everything, we know enough to jump up, fall down, fly, and grow flowers. We don't know everything about nutrition - far from it. But EVERY species of wild creature knows enough to feed itself correctly. How do we, with our rarefied intelligence, manage to become the one exception? We did not. We do not know everything, but we know enough. It derives from both casual observation and sedulous study.