Get Healthy with the Pagan Scientist!

I cannot stress how important it is that every human gets his or her daily allotment of vitamins. The Journal of the American Medical Association has published several articles on vitamin deficiency, and it is a clear fact that less than half of Americans are getting all the vitamins they need from their diet.

This is reason enough to add a multivitamin to your daily diet, but I have a few more convincing reasons that you might consider.

First of all, taking a multivitamin ensures that you’re getting a steady source of vitamins every day, so that you don’t have to rely on your diet to supply everything you need. Frankly, even those of us who eat healthy can’t be assured of a full vitamin load every single day. It’s also important to consider that many of the foods we eat daily–including fresh fruits and vegetables–are produced in such a way that many of the nutrient content is leeched away before they even hit the shelves.

Secondly, and more importantly, vitamins help us to maintain health by improving the efficiency of cellular processes that help us to keep up our energy, remove wastes, and fight disease.

Lastly, vitamins are relatively inexpensive. Getting a two or three month supply of vitamins, depending on brand, probably won’t set you back more than twenty dollars, and they often cost a lot less than that.

So why not add a multivitamin to your daily food intake? Your body will definitely thank you.

It’s a shame that so many of us read magazines.

I know, I know…you’re asking yourself right now, “What is this idiot talking about?”

All I’m saying is that every time we open magazines these days, we see beautiful people. Perfect people. There they are in our clothing ads, in our perfume ads, in those two-page television show promos, and even in technology ads. My God, don’t they look happy? Oh, but don’t they look disgustingly inhuman?

News flash, people: the people we see in magazines are an illusion. They are a heavily airbrushed, nipped-and-tucked, well-tailored, over-exercised, underfed, perfectly-coiffed fantasy. Beauty such as the conglomerates are trying to sell us doesn’t exist! If you’re feeling depressed because you can’t look like Suzie X in so-and-so jeans ad, stop it right now!

All of us has it within ourselves to be beautiful, but in our own way. Most of us don’t have the genes to look like the people in the magazines, nor do we have magical editing tools to remove all of our cellulite, wrinkles, moles, pimples, gray hairs, and whatever other kinds of blemishes that real people have.

Don’t aim to look like those stinky, filthy, stupid ads.

Aim to look like yourself, healthy and happy. Buy a new, smaller pair of jeans and aim to fit those. Aim to wear make-up that makes you look like you, and not some idealized version of a human being. Aim to look in the mirror every morning and say, “Damn I look good!”

Take it from someone who’s just now getting over self-esteem issues that have plagued him his whole life: it’s better being happy for what you are than regretting what you aren’t.

When you’re at the supermarket, the number of choices you have for grains is astounding, but would you be surprised to find out that a lot of these choices just aren’t good for you?

When you’re trying to lose weight and improve your health, it’s best to wear the hat of a “label detective”–a term you will hear from me again and again in future updates. What this means is that you should read the nutrition labels and make choices that are the best for your own well-being. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be giving up taste. Some of the best things for us are–surprise!–also delicious.

What this means in the case of grains is that you should be looking for two very specific words in the ingredients section of the nutrition label: Whole Grain. Ideally, this healthful little gem should be number 1 or 2 on the list. If the label mentions anything else before WHOLE GRAIN, such as white flour, wheat flour, or even enriched flour, put it back. White flours and enriched flours have been stripped of their beneficial nutrients, leaving only the carbohydrate-packed, unhealthful core of the grains from which they were processed.

Look also at the sugar and fiber content of the foods. You should try to find the product with the highest fiber content and the lowest sugar content.

For fiber, a good fiber content is anything over 6 grams of fiber per serving. You should be eating six servings of these products a day. If the fiber content is 16 grams per serving or more, you only need to eat 3 servings. Remember that fiber is your friend, aiding in digestion, holding water in the gut, and keeping your intestinal tract flowing smoothly.

For sugar, try to find products containing less that 2 grams per serving, or you’ll be packing in calories that don’t serve you in the long run.

Following these guidelines, you should be able to get all the fiber you need in a day, while enjoying the deliciousness of whole grain breads, pancakes, pastas, and cereals.

Let’s face it, people. It’s not only normal to gain weight over the holidays, it’s expected. According to a report from CNN.com, the normal weight gain over the holiday period (from Thanksgiving through Christmas) is about ten pounds! For those of us trying to watch our weight, that’s a considerable addition to our bellies, butts, and thighs.

Yet all is not lost, if you follow a few simple guidelines.

1. Drink LOTS of water–clear water. Not only is staying hydrated of immense importance to your internal biochemistry, it also flushes fats and helps your kidneys to filter out wastes.

2. Don’t stop exercising! If you don’t exercise regularly, get a jump start on it! Just because this is the holiday season doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to put off the treadmill until after the New Year. Even if you just decide to go for a brisk walk after having a piece of pie, you could burn a few calories that might otherwise be stored as unsightly belly jiggle. Not only that, keeping to an exercise routine helps to keep your metabolism ramped up so that you burn more calories while you’re doing nothing at all.

3. Tell yourself ahead of time what you want to eat, and stick to it. When you do eat, sit down, chew slowly, and enjoy every bite. It takes about 20 minutes for your stomach to tell your brain it’s full, and if you’re stuffing sugary or fatty snacks in your face like a certain famous comic cat, you might give yourself a belly ache. Plan ahead of time, and you’ll be saving yourself hundreds of calories that your body has no immediate use for. You know where those calories go.

3. If you must overeat, restrict overeating to just the holiday days, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. You’ll do a lot less damage to yourself if you don’t fill every day from now until January 1st with foods you wouldn’t otherwise eat the rest of the year. 

4. Don’t feel guilty! If you fall off the wagon, just climb right back on. You are worth the extra care you give yourself.

The holidays don’t have to be a time of deep depression, weight-wise. By making sensible choices, you can get through with hardly a dent to your feeling of self-worth. Let’s do this together!