NEWLETTER JANUARY 2012
Happy New Year! Wishing you health, happiness and peace in this New Year!
The holidays have finally come to an end and the trail leading to the holiday sweets is slowly fading into the distance. How did you do this holiday season? Were you able to avoid the holiday 5, 10 or even 15 pounds that most Americans gain during this month starting with the Thanksgiving feast? Well, no worries if you let yourself overindulge, it is a new year and it is time to finally shed those extra pounds. This can be the year that you finally do it if you are ready to give up the gimmicks and except the fact that in order to lose weight PERMANENTLY, you need to make changes to the way you eat and think about food! But you don’t have to do it alone, there is help available through acupuncture and nutritional counseling.
Can acupuncture really help me to lose weight?
This is a common question that I receive from my clients and the answer is yes, but it cannot do it alone. Acupuncture can be used in conjunction with diet and exercise and can make it easier to lose weight and then to maintain the loss once the goal is achieved.
But what does acupuncture actually do?
According to Chinese medicine, of which acupuncture is a part, healthy weight is maintained through the proper functioning of the digestive system. Therefore, any imbalance in that system will cause excess weight. This imbalance can cause symptoms such as fatigue, loose stools, cravings, especially for sweet foods, sluggish metabolism, and an overall feeling of heaviness.
The Chinese also believe that there is another issue that often causes excess weight gain, especially around the middle, and that is stress. Stress can decrease your metabolism, increase cravings and binge eating and can decrease the overall functioning of the digestive system.
There are two main organs and meridians in Chinese Medicine that are in charge of metabolism and stress and they are the spleen and the liver respectively. When the spleen and the liver are not functioning optimally then the above symptoms may occur. Therefore, when someone is trying to lose weight, acupuncture helps to bring a balance back into the whole system by working on these two organ and meridian systems. This allows the digestive system to work properly, gives a person more energy, helps to reduce their stress levels and as a result, with proper nutrition and exercise, jump start weight loss.
From a Western perspective, acupuncture and Chinese Medicine have been shown to have an effect on the function of the nervous system, endocrine system, digestive system, food cravings, and metabolism. All of which can help to energize the body, maximize the absorption of nutrients, regulate elimination, control overeating, suppress the appetite, and reduce anxiety.
Backed by Research
A growing body of research supports the use of acupuncture and Asian medicine in weight loss:
A 2003 study published in The Journal of Medical Acupuncture found that participants receiving acupuncture lost more than three times more weight than the control group.
In a study conducted by the University of Adelaide in Australia in 1998, 95 percent of the participants receiving electro-stimulation on acupuncture points reported appetite suppression. The results showed that the acupuncture group was more likely to experience a reduced appetite and to lose more weight than the control group.
Acupuncture Points for Weight Loss
The beauty of acupuncture is that each treatment is catered to the needs of the individual patient. Each person may not have the same issues and so each treatment will be different. Acupuncture points on the body will be chosen to help bring an overall balance back into the body as well as concentrate on the organs and meridians that will affect the digestive system, stimulate the metabolism, and calm the nervous system.
Generally treatments are scheduled once a week for 8 to 12 weeks or until the goal weight has been reached. The treatments include a combination of auricular (ear) and body acupuncture, ear tacks or pellets to leave on in-between treatments, herbs and supplements, and food and lifestyle recommendations.
Nutritional Counseling
What do you think is the most common mistake that people make when they are dieting? No, it is not eating too much. In fact, most people I meet do not eat enough! You may be thinking that your eyes are deceiving you, but it is true. Your body needs to be fed in order to lose weight. So yes, if you decided that you were not going to eat at all, eventually your body would give in and the weight would start to come off. But if you eat only a little bit, your body thinks that it is starving and the weight doesn’t budge!
My new favorite analogy is to compare your metabolism to a furnace. If you feed the furnace, the fire inside burns brightly, but if you forget or ignore the furnace then the embers burn very low and very little heat is produced. This is what happens when you eat or don’t eat. If you wake up in the morning and have coffee at 6am and then go to work and have breakfast at 9am, you have wasted 3 hours where your fire is laying dormant, i.e. not burning calories. If you are one of those people who rarely eat breakfast and sometimes skip lunch as well, then you have wasted your metabolism during the whole day and have burned very few calories. This is when your body thinks that it is starving and shuts down even more.
Now imagine that you wake up in the morning and you immediately have a half of a banana or a dried prune at 6am. You now have stoked that fire, the metabolism can start working immediately, and you begin to burn calories. If you get to work now and have breakfast at 9am, you will continue to stoke the fire and burn even more calories. In order for the fire to stay bright and to burn the maximum number of calories, you need to feed that fire every 3 to 4 hours. If you start the fire at 9am and then eat lunch at 2pm, the fire has died down and you lost calorie burning time!
A common complaint that I hear from people is that I don’t like to eat early because if I eat breakfast than I am hungry all day. This is a cause for rejoicing, not bemoaning! If you are not hungry, your metabolism is not working! This will be a good indicator for most people as to whether or not their metabolism is working effectively. When you feel hungry, you’re burning calories. When you never feel hungry, your body has shut down, it thinks that it is starving and holds on to those calories causing weight gain instead of loss.
So, as long as I keep eating every few hours, the weight will magically come off?
Well, yes and no. The key to weight loss is still the calories ingested have to be less than calories expended. In order to lose a pound a week, you have to eat 500 fewer calories or burn 500 more calories every day! Eating more regularly is the first step to increasing the amount of calories you burn in a day. The next step is to make sure that you are not consuming too few or too many calories. Too few calories and your body thinks that it is starving, too many and you will not lose weight.
What should I eat?
This is a very individual question and something that could be worked out in a nutritional counseling session, but there are some easy guidelines that you can follow to get started.
- Always eat something first thing in the morning. If you are not hungry, just take a bite of something so that your body knows that it is time to start burning calories.
- Try to eat at least 2 or 3 pieces of fruit every day.
- Try to eat at least 3-5 servings of vegetables every day. A serving is ½ cup cooked or 1 cup raw.
- At every meal and every snack, eat some form of protein. Protein makes you feel full and it helps to keep your blood sugar stable so that you have even energy all day long. If you have an energy slump around 3 in the afternoon, check out what you are eating. Usually this slump has something to do with too little protein throughout the morning and early afternoon. Protein sources include: meat (beef, pork, chicken, lamb, turkey, bacon, etc), fish, cheese, legumes, nuts (peanut butter or other nut butters), seeds, eggs, tofu, and tempeh.
- Eat mini meals throughout the day so that you are eating something every 3-4 hours.
- After the evening meal, the kitchen is closed! Try to eat your last meal before 8 pm. This will allow your body some digestion time before going to bed. Nighttime is for repairing the day’s damage to the body, not digesting food.
Acupuncture, nutritional counseling and…
You knew that this was coming didn’t you? Exercise. After a certain age, weight loss becomes nearly impossible unless you do some form of exercise. I know, you can’t exercise because you have back pain, and knee pain and neck pain and arthritis and, and, and…. I have heard it all. I am not asking you to run a marathon. How about 10 minutes every day? Instead of looking for the closest parking spot at work or the grocery store, park in the furthest spot so that you have to walk further to the entrance. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take a lap at the office or in your house. Walk up and down the stairs in your house 2 or 3 times. While you watch TV, lift hand weights or cans of soup. Buy some bands and use them while watching TV.
Do you get the point? Something is better than nothing. If you start out slow, your body will have time to get used to the exercise. Over time, this should help decrease the pain instead of increase it. If you have pain all the time, consider asking your doctor for some physical therapy so that a professional can give your exercises you can actually do without harming yourself or increasing your pain.
Start slow! I find that when people decide they are going to exercise, they go all out exercising every day or every work day. If you haven’t exercised in years, this is a bad idea! When you start too fast, your burn out too quickly and then you are back to where you started. If you start very slow and then increase the time you exercise and then increase the number of days, it will give your body time to adjust to the exercise and in time will develop into a habit that you won’t want to miss.
Recap
Permanent weight loss is not about gimmicks, about eating this instead of that, or about deprivation. Permanent weight loss will and can happen when you take charge of your life, focus your attention on what and when you eat, and ask for help. Acupuncture, nutritional counseling and physical therapy/exercise are all key components to changing the number on the scale.