Hello and welcome to Reboot Radio. I'm your host, Sheila Keilty, the UN-Diet Coach.
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Today's topic is "5 Secrets to Beat Back Inflammation and Lose Weight."
Have you tried everything to lose weight, but you're stuck on the scale, and it just won't budge? What most dieters and health seekers don't know is it may actually be inflammation that's the culprit. Here are my 5 secrets to beat back inflammation and get the scale moving in the right direction and turn your body into a fat burning furnace.
Inflammation and excess body fat is a real chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. When you're carrying extra weight, no matter whether it's 10 pounds or 80 pounds, your body is irritated, inflamed, and stressed. However, if your body is experiencing stress, whether from life or your job or your diet, then your body will experience increased insulin and leptin resistance, and your body fat will increase.
It really doesn't matter which came first. Your job is to be able to reduce that chronic state of illness and damage from inflammation and assist the body's primary focus of survival and healing. When you're trying to lose weight, it's key to reduce inflammation and other potential irritants to help the body get back to more normal operating conditions. Then the weight will come down on its own.
So how do you reduce inflammation to lose weight? Well, here are the five secrets you can put into use today.
- Skip food groups that irritate such as grains, processed foods and sugars. Chemicals, additives, coloring, added sugars, and other compounds and processed foods are all potential sources of irritation.
Avoiding these ingredients by choosing more whole foods and minimally processed products is key to reducing inflammation to lose weight. Grains are in a small, hard dry seed that is processed and ground into something pliable and edible, like cereals, flours, etc. These are hard for the human gut to digest and are natural irritants.
Processed foods include the ever-poisonous industrial seed oils like canola, safflower, et cetera, and natural additives like Carrageenan. Sugars just isn't about that table Sugar. Sugar includes all carbs as these will chemically digest like glucose anyway, in your system.
Get to know your labels when you're purchasing a packaged product. Take a look at the ingredient list. Are the ingredients listed what you might see if making the food from a recipe at home? If the answer is yes, then this is likely minimally processed and is a good choice. If not, try to opt for something else.
- Incorporate anti-inflammatory produce and fats. While getting rid of irritants, it's also just as important to refuel with clean, well-sourced foods that contain properties that deliver anti-inflammatory benefits, such as antioxidants, phytochemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids. Good sources of these are leafy green vegetables, nuts and seeds in limited. Wild caught fish and healthy fats.
Healthy fats includes things like avocados and avocado oil, olives and olive oil, coconut oil, grass fed butter, grass fed meats, and pastured eggs.
Start being a stickler for sourcing. When shopping for densely nutritious foods like these, it's vital to check for sourcing. It's not just about getting the best quality or organic sources or even humanely raised animal products, although these are important.
When you're talking about inflammation in particular, it's vital to remember that it's not just what you eat, it's what your food eats that matters.
- Practice good sleep hygiene. Did you know that many health professionals now consider sleep just as important to weight loss as diet and exercise?
That's true. Adult bodies need approximately seven to eight hours of continuous sleep most nights to rest, repair and recharge, and to be able to metabolize the majority of our excess fat for the day, which occurs as it turns out in deep REM sleep cycles. In fact, routinely not getting enough sleep, which means six hours or less, leaves the body without the resources it needs to function properly, creating new inflammation and aggravating existing inflammation.
Turn off the blue light. Blue light, like other colors of visible light is all around you. The sun emits blue light, so do fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs. We consume and bathe ourselves constantly in blue light and it's off the charts. Since 2007, coincidentally the year that the iPhone was released, our consumption of blue light has increased over 600%. Nearly all of our screens we live with are inundating us with blue light, nearly 24/7. And this light robs us of our ability to achieve a proper REM state of restful, restorative sleep, creating a chronic state of sleep deprivation and resulting inflammation and weight gain.
Want to get better sleep? Turn off your smartphone at night, not just putting it on vibrate, not just flipping it over, but locked away in a drawer across the room from your bed. Try it just one night and see number one, how often you unconsciously reach for it, and number two, how much better you sleep with it off and unable to disturb your rest.
- Incorporate gut-friendly foods. The body's microbiome colony that lives in your gut, a digestive tract, and it goes all the way from your mouth to well, the other end, is a colony of billions and billions of tiny microbes- friendly bacteria that work together to assist your body with digesting your food, boosting your immune system, promoting mental health, helping you have healthy skin, and keeping us from being poisoned by toxins.
Strengthening the gut's microbiome colony is essential to reducing inflammation because it can prevent your gut from allowing irritants to slip through the intestinal wall and into your bloodstream. This is a very dangerous and unhealthy condition known as Leaky Gut Syndrome (Intestinal Hyperpermeability) and it affects approximately 40% of all Americans, according to the Harvard University 2016 study on the syndrome.
To do this, try to incorporate foods every day that are fermented or contain active life bacterial cultures such as sauerkraut, kombucha, miso, or kimchi.
- Chill out: mindfulness. As much as we want to focus strictly on food and exercise for weight loss, mental and emotional health is just as important because low grade inflammation won't go away if stress levels run continuously, high. Stress states increase cortisol production and greatly affects C-Reactive Protein, also known as CRP, and other inflammatory markers in your body.
Finding a way to escape that stress, such as yoga, meditating, or walking for 20 minutes provides quick relief. If stress is too much of a daily problem, learning how to manage and cope when it does occur is key for not triggering new inflammation or aggravating existing inflammation.
Do you need some help becoming more mindful ever wanted to take a deeper dive into mindfulness? Contact the Reboot at optimalhealthreboot@gmail.com to take advantage of a 30-day free subscription to the Reboot's Mindful Matters program.
Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you were able to find some wonderful ideas and resources to put into practice right away and help you to beat back inflammation and get control of your health and the bathroom scale.
So take care. This is Coach Sheila Keilty. Have a great day. Bye now. See you next time on Reboot Radio.