THE BULL MUST DIE …

In Spanish-style bull fights, or “corrida de toros” as they are called, there are three matadors (bullfighters) and each fights two out of a total of six fighting bulls with the use of thrusting capes.  These bulls each weight at least 1300 lbs and are at least four years old.  

Well, a few days ago, a friend, Tom, was describing this amazing ritual that is practiced in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Southern France. In Greece, we have a similar sacrifice with the killing of the Minotaur, which is actually symbolic of a bullfight. Anyway, Tom was in Venezuela and had attended a “corrida” and at the end of it all, he was so intrigued by this spectacular tradition, taking place in an arena that he had to go and talk to one of the matadors.  He asked him how he felt about killing the bull and the blood that is involved and the matador simply replied: “The bull must die…”

When Tom was describing his experience, I could see a spark in his eye, the spark that you see when people actually feel what they are talking about and you can sense their blood pressure going up … I was looking at him with fascination, but the anger and fury that was being emitted through his expressions and words made me think of the annoyance we feel about our selves when we are on a diet, we lose control and end up eating whatever is in front of us at the moment … and then we regret it but … it’s too late.  The calories are already consumed and being absorbed by the body, being turned into fat!

So how do we fight the bull?  How do we insert a barbed wooden decorated stick into the bull’s neck muscle to take his life away? How do we destroy the demon inside which causes the food cravings that make us want to kill for a piece of chocolate? 

Primarily, we need to start by understanding the demon and the many reasons that make us crave different foods. And here it is: sometimes we crave a particular food for comfort or a means of escape, other times we use food as a way to get quick energy or we have become addicted to a food for a number of reasons. However, we may also crave what our body most needs. Food cravings can be the body’s way of trying to correct a chemical imbalance or point to a lack of vitamins or minerals. Lastly craving certain foods may indicate a weakness in certain glands, such as the pancreas, the adrenals or the thyroid.

But here’s a bit more that you may find interesting and ... helpful:

Evolution predisposes the body to crave high fat, high sugar foods. When food was scarce, the body wanted food that was packed with calories or food that could be used quickly for energy. Pleasure chemicals, like dopamine, are released in your brain when you eat high fat, high sugar foods. This is why eating chocolate and ice cream actually “feel  good.” The body responds positively to this chemical release. 

Kicking a food habit can be more difficult than kicking cigarettes or drugs. Cutting a food from your diet is not easy—especially because you cannot give up eating. What do you do? Realize you may need to give up your food more than once. Let people know what you are doing to help yourself in avoiding temptation. Substitute other naturally sweet foods. Until refined foods became plentiful, most people satisfied sweet cravings with cooked carrots, a sweet potato, or fruit. Usually sugar cravings diminish in three to five days after elimination. Realize that food cravings do lessen over time. 

A craving for sweets may indicate a lack of minerals in the body. Are you craving sweets all the time? Your body may be looking for more minerals. If sweet cravings are especially difficult for you, try adding trace minerals to your diet and look at what happens! 

People with an overgrowth of yeast in their intestines often crave sugar. Yeast that lives in the intestines feed off simple sugars and an acid environment. Eliminating sugar and overripe fruit from the diet while eating more vegetables, makes the environment less hospitable for yeast and can decrease sugar cravings. 

Hidden ingredients may be the cause of your cravings. Read the ingredient list on the label of your favorite “healthy” snack. It may look as if you are getting more energy from all the B-vitamins in a product, when the real source is the caffeine listed as an inactive ingredient. Oftentimes sugar, caffeine, or other chemicals are added to foods to keep you coming back for more. 

Craving salty foods may indicate low adrenal gland function or low thyroid function. Salt regulates water retention in the body through the kidneys and adrenal glands. It is high in iodine, which is a mineral needed for thyroid function, therefore If you are craving salt, it may be your body asking for more iodine or potassium, or pointing to a fluid imbalance. 

You may crave a food to which you are allergic. Your body often develops sensitivity to food items you eat everyday for years. Food sensitivities can lead to symptoms similar to allergies.

              Part of optimal health is being free of food cravings and addictions. This does not mean you can never have another piece of chocolate, but it does mean asking yourself: What part of me is craving this food? Why am I craving it? When you eat a food you are craving for, ask if the craving goes away or gets stronger. Who is in control? The food or you?  And when you do answer these questions, and inevitably manage to control your cravings, then … you have successfully killed the bull!!!!

BIKINI TIME …

It's Sunday and time to write another article for the blog. I'm trying to think of what to write and everything and anything passes by my mind, in order to find something suitable. I try to think of something that will inspire me and I try to reminiscent on what happened last week … Then, I start looking around, it's partly cloudy and partly sunny. I am thinking about putting a bathing suit and sunbathing but … what do I wear?  

I skim through swimsuit websites to see what's trendy for this summer and realize that the look is becoming increasing more revealing and more skin is showing.  The bottoms are called "Brazilian" and the more I look at them the more I contemplate a possible move to Alaska …at least for the summer!  I do realize that the women presenting the swimsuits are models … but something happened to them … they seem to have not only bigger breasts but they also have bigger buttocks as well. 

And of course, my inquiring mind wants to know, thus I drop these websites and start researching the trends in plastic surgery!  Voila! Buttock augmentation or gluteal augmentation, buttock implants, or Brazilian butt lift.  Any way you name it, it boils down to one thing: the procedure intended for men and women who would like more curves which augments the shape of a person's buttocks providing a more shapely rear profile.  So now, not only do we have Brazilian bottoms in a bathing suit, but also we have Brazilian buttocks to go with them.  Nice!    

How is that possible?  Easy …  via the use of silicone or polymethyl-metacrylate (PMMA) implants which are placed either under or on top of the gluteus maximus muscle, through an incision in the midline between the buttocks or by an incision made underneath the buttocks, via hydrogel injections (which are not approved for use in the US) or via fat injections.  This requires that excess fat is removed from another part of the body, typically around the abdominal area, the hips, or the thighs, and once this fat is purified and liquified, it is re-injected into the buttocks.  Sounds easy, doesn't it? 

Unfortunately, even though it is generally speaking easy, inserting a foreign body (silicone implants) or other material injections comes with a plethora of complications making this a risky cosmetic surgery. Complication of foreign bodies other than the patient's own fat may include: the risk of infection, seromas, nerve and/or muscle damage, mal-positioning or slippage, and thus asymmetry or disfigurement, if you opt for the more permanent volumizing provided by the implants.

Fat transfers seem to be the safest way to increase volume.  Even with fat injections, the  fat injected that remains after a year varies. 

So … my question is: Is this really worth it?  In my mind, re-injecting the fat from a very precise liposculpting procedure, by a skilled Board Certified Plastic Surgeon, will do the trick!   

SUMMER, DIET AND … BODY ODOR!

This article touches on a subject that's quite sensitive to many people: body odor. Here, we explore the link between the foods we choose to consume and the odor produced by our body – yes, there is a direct correlation. With all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent each year on personal care products and deodorants, I'm amazed there's almost no discussion about reducing body odor by changing our diet. In fact, when I've mentioned this subject to some people, they looked at me in bewilderment. They ask questions like "What do you mean; our foods control our body odor? Body odor is genetic!" Thus, what we need is a crash course in the underlying causes of body odor. We'll call it “The Fundamentals of Offensive Personal Odors”, or just “Body Odor 101”, for short. 

Lesson number one in “Body Odor 101” is that what comes out of our body reflects what we put in. Body odor is something that's strongly affected by what's being emitted by our sweat glands. And remember, armpits are designed to sweat. I know that may sound insanely simple, because everybody knows that armpits sweat, but I'm saying that armpits are supposed to perspire. (Remember the saying: Horses sweat, men perspire, women glow!!!) Yet people go to great lengths to prevent their armpits from sweating using deodorant products. 

But there's more to it than just cooling your body temperature through perspiration - another function of the sweat glands in our armpits is to excrete toxins from our body. This is why sweating is an important part of maintaining optimum physical health. We have to give our body a chance to get rid of various toxins through a variety of metabolic processes. Those include urination, passing fecal matter, exhaling carbon dioxide and other toxins through the lungs, and, of course, eliminating toxins through the skin. The skin, remember, is the body's largest organ. 

Our armpits, then, actually have an important health function; getting rid of toxins. That's why we need to keep them open and unclogged by deodorant products. Sweating is good for you. 

But … what about the odor? Where does that really come from? The real cause of armpit odor is the intentional excretion of horrible toxins that our body is trying to get rid of. And by using deodorant products, we block the exit door and force these toxins to stay in our system! 

The way to eliminate body odor therefore is not to mask it with deodorant products, but rather to clean up our body from the inside out. In other words, if our armpits have a horrible raunchy smell that's an indication that our diet needs some adjusting.

Many deodorants and antiperspirants are made with aluminum, in order to halt the perspiration of our sweat glands, and this aluminum is suspected of accumulating in the nervous system and ultimately contributing to nervous system disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. When we give up red meat, junk foods, fast foods and other dietary “atrocities”, we will no longer need deodorants!

Foods that make us stink!

Let's take a closer look at the causes of body odor. Which foods really cause body odor in the first place? 

Red meat is the number one cause of body odor. It causes stagnation in the body. It actually putrefies in the digestive tract and releases all sorts of toxins into the bloodstream, through the large intestine. I've noticed that people who consume a large quantity of red meat on a regular basis tend to have much stronger body odor than those who avoid it.  Overall, if you find a healthful vegetarian and put them side by side with a heavy meat eater in a sniff test, I'm confident your nose will lead you to the conclusion that the meat eater is the most offensive of the two. It's weird science, yes, but we are talking about a strange subject to begin with!

As far as other foods go, that cause body odor, we have to talk about manufactured foods, those lacking fiber, made with refined white flour, added sugars, hydrogenated oils and other processed ingredients. These are the big culprits. When we eliminate these from our diet and shift to a more healthful diet, made of whole grains, massive quantities of leafy vegetables, fresh fruits, soy products, super greens, lots of sprouts, raw nuts and seeds, healthy oils and other similar healthful ingredients, our body odor will all but disappear in a matter of weeks.

That's because a plant-based diet is an internal deodorizer. It's true: the chlorophyll and other phytonutrients will cleanse us from the inside out. Some of the best foods for that include: parsley, cilantro, celery and all mint species. The aromatic herbs are also excellent; sage, rosemary, thyme, oregano, and so on.

As a sidebar to the body odor discussion, all the things that come out of our body are strong indicators of our current level of health, as well as what adjustments we need to make in order to be healthier. 

It's very easy to smell our own armpits and get a sense of what's going on. Try going 24 hours with no deodorant. If you can't stand the smell from the outside, just imagine what your body smells like on the inside! Maybe it's time for some changes in your diet, don’t you think?