High Desert Sun

By Al Sears, MD

With nearly 72 million Americans on a diet, it’s no wonder that diet options abound. But many of these so-called solutions won’t make a big difference in your fat-loss efforts. And some can have serious negative effects.

Fortunately, you can lose fat safely and easily. But first, you need to know just why you should avoid three of the most deceptive diet choices around.

The Cortisol Blame Game

Visit the website for the diet pill CortiSlim, and you’ll see a newly transformed woman claiming, “Stress was piling on the pounds!” The makers of this diet pill advertise that cortisol is to blame. Cortisol is a natural hormone that’s produced by your adrenal glands in response to stress - but does cortisol add weight? No.

Have you ever seen a caged animal at the zoo that appears to be stressed by living in captivity? When animals are under stress, increased cortisol will suppress their appetite. Over time, they become thin and start to waste away. The same is true of humans.

Cortisol gives your body the chance to pool all of its stress-fighting resources in order to deal with a crisis. Under those conditions, your appetite will disappear. Think back to the last time you were panicked or upset. Having lunch was probably the last thing on your mind.

Several weight-loss products try to link cortisol to weight gain by pointing to a single Yale University study published in 2000 that showed that women who respond poorly to stress tend to have a belly. True, excess cortisol can affect where your body stores extra calories as fat. But cortisol itself does not cause weight gain.

Fat Burners and Metabolism Boosters

Products in this category claim to help you lose weight by raising your metabolic rate. Contrary to the hype you may have read, the increase is very slight.

Even ephedra, one of the best, is only modestly successful at raising metabolism - perhaps by a fraction of a percent. This natural herb was banned by the FDA, but that ban was overturned by an appeals court in August 2006. Today, ephedra is starting to make a comeback, despite the fact that its metabolism-boosting properties are negligible.

One of the more popular fat burners claims that you can eat anything you want and still lose weight. This product uses a less-effective ephedra substitute, synephrine, which is supposed to increase your metabolism without the “harmful stimulants” used in other weight-loss products. Other ingredients in this product include caffeine, glucuronolactone, and taurine - the same ingredients found in Red Bull. If you feel any effect from it, it will be from the combination of synephrine and caffeine.

You should think of products like these as stimulants - not fat burners. They may help wake you up and give you a temporary jolt of energy, but so does a good cup of coffee.
 
Carb Blockers

To ease your guilt after splurging on bagels or pasta, carb blockers may seem like the answer. The term “carb blockers” sound magical… until you realize that what they’re actually blocking is an important digestive enzyme.

The idea of taking something that will interfere with your body’s ability to digest food is not a good one. In fact, it’s dangerous. Your body absorbs essential vitamins and nutrients in the form of carbohydrates. By blocking them, you are robbing your body of what it needs to survive.

The active ingredient in most carb blockers is a white kidney bean extract called phaseolus vulgaris. This substance prevents the enzymes in your stomach from digesting starches.

Dietrine, a well known carb blocker, states on its website: “One Dietrine capsule taken prior to a meal can block up to 1125 calories from fat and carbohydrate foods.”
There are no reliable clinical studies to support such a claim. In fact, the only respectable study, published in the Alternative Medicine Review, concluded that “no statistical significance was reached.”

Flip Your Body’s Fat-Burning Switch

Truth is, I have had more success with my patients by using a single exercise strategy than I’ve seen with all the dieting and supplement strategies combined. If you’re a regular ETR reader, you’ve heard me talk about this strategy before: Exercise in short bursts. By exercising this way, you can burn fat for up to 24 hours after you finish. Even while you sleep.

This type of exercise teaches your body that storing energy as fat is inefficient. Fat is a low-energy, slow-release fuel. It’s not good for providing you with quick high energy. So if you don’t exert yourself long enough to make good use of your stored fat during your actual exercise routine, your body gives it up afterward, during the recovery period.

You can use any number of exercises to turn your body into an automatic fat burner. The only rule is that the activity has to use enough muscle mass to challenge the rate at which you’re using energy. I like bicycling and swimming, because they’re low-impact and don’t have as much risk of injuries as high-impact exercises like jogging. What you choose will depend on your level of fitness.

Here’s how to get started:

• Perform a light warm-up and stretch before each exercise session.
• Begin with 20 minutes every other day. (This averages to only 10 minutes per day.)
• Exercise at an easy pace at first, and increase it gradually.
• As your fitness improves, increase the intensity of each session.
• After a few weeks, break each session into two short bursts of exercise - two six-minute sets separated by six minutes of focused recovery at a gentle easy pace.

Eventually, you can go with even briefer episodes of gradually increasing intensity.

The most common error people make is assuming you must work at a higher level of perceived exertion to get results. This is not true. The point is to start with what is a comfortable level of exertion for you. Then, as that level of activity gets easier, you focus on increasing the level or resistance of the activity rather than the duration.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

By Jon Herring 

I often advise readers to eat a diet of whole, organic, unprocessed foods. Not only are these foods healthier - without the added sugar, fats, and sodium prevalent in processed foods - but you also know exactly what you’re getting. An apple is an apple. A steak is a steak.

Not so with processed foods. For example: Did you know that a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget contains 38 ingredients? In fact, about 56 percent of a McNugget is derived from corn, not chicken. But that’s not all. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan points out that this “food” also contains several synthetic ingredients that come not from a plant or an animal but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant.

Two of them - dimethylpolysiloxene and tertiary butylhydroquinone - are known to be harmful. According to the Handbook of Food Additives, the former is an established carcinogen. And more than a gram of the latter is known to cause “nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse.” More than five grams can be fatal.

Doesn’t exactly sound like dinner, does it?

I’m not trying to pick on McDonald’s. Just about any processed food is bound to have a label full of incomprehensible ingredients. In his book Twinkie, Deconstructed, Steve Ettlinger decodes the ingredients in those little snacks. He also asks the question: “If we can bake a cake at home with as few as five ingredients, why does a Twinkie require 39?”

The answer, of course, is that most of those ingredients contribute to a Twinkie’s “shelf life.” Do you really want to eat something that can stay “fresh” on a shelf for a decade? Certainly not. Stick to whole, unprocessed foods.

This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, the Internet’s most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.

By Michael Masterson 

One of the most common recommendations that you will hear from business-opportunity “experts” is to “find something you love” and make a business out of it. In fact, I used to make that recommendation myself, arguing that turning your passion into a career is a good way to make a good living.

This is the kind of advice that feels right and inspires loyalty. But when I thought about the successes in my own business career, I didn’t see that pattern.

When I decided to get rich back in the early 1980s, I didn’t stop to ask myself “What do I love?” I set to work the very next day transforming myself from a sometimes-good, sometimes-disgruntled editorial director into a 24/7 marketing maven, and I boosted a marginally profitable, million-dollar business to a $135 million cash machine. I didn’t love the products we produced, but I loved the process.

I retired from that business - but didn’t stay retired for long. With my second career, I was determined to stay a little closer to my childhood dreams by selling publications instead of products, ideas instead of things. Because I partnered with someone who shared that mindset, I have been lucky. I’ve made as much money this time around, and without the emotional conflicts over selling products I was less than enthusiastic about.

But even as a publisher, I haven’t really “followed my dreams.” My true passion - in terms of publishing - would be fiction and poetry. I can say without any doubt that had I followed that road, I would be running a much smaller, much less profitable business. And it might not have given me any more pleasure than I get now.

As a recommendation, “turn your passion into a career” no longer rings true to me. As I said earlier, it’s the kind of advice you want to believe… but it doesn’t take reality into consideration.

Proceeding with a pragmatic purposefulness, it seems to me, is the best course of action.

By “pragmatic purposefulness,” I mean an ounce of passion and a pound of practicality. I mean facing the facts and making a realistic assessment of the business idea you love so much. Will it really work in the marketplace? Will it really live up to your dreams?

The usefulness of this approach was made clear to both me and the businesspeople who attended my Business-Building Retreat last month. Of the 30 people in attendance whose business plans were scrutinized, at least six realized that the financial expectations they had attached to their dream projects were totally unrealistic.

“You have to adjust your wealth expectations or change your business,” they were advised. It would be silly for them to push ahead, following their passion, when it was easy to see, by putting pen to paper, that the businesses they had imagined could not work.

That’s basically the same advice I have for LG, an ETR reader who recently wrote to me. LG has been advised by a well-known guru (who shall remain nameless) to “find something I love and make a business out of it.” He says he has found a business for sale that matches one of his favorite hobbies: golf. 

“It is a patent for a machine that uses sonar to clean golf clubs. Attached to the machine is an LCD screen that displays ads. The money to be made is not in the actual cleaning of the clubs but the selling of the ad space. It is an absolute novel idea, and the owner claims that he has patented it all over the world. My only problem is the cost for the patent in my country. He is selling it for what would be about five million in U.S. dollars. I’ve done a couple of sums, and I can see this business paying off itself after 3-4 yrs. My only problem is finding an investor that would possibly want to fund this. I know that the investor would make a very good ROI, but I somehow need to find that person.”

LG “really wants” to get this patent, and is hoping I can tell him how to go about looking for the five million bucks in start-up capital that he needs.

This is precisely the danger you face when you follow your passions into business. You make these kinds of mind-bogglingly foolish mistakes. Invest your time and someone else’s money into a machine that spits out advertising as it cleans golf clubs? Are you nuts?

If I had to list the top 10 stupid business ideas I’ve ever heard, this would make it onto that list. It is stupid not just because the idea itself is so idiotic, but because the person behind the idea - the person supposedly holding the patents - thinks he will find investors to buy into it.

Maybe that guy isn’t so dumb. He has found, in LG, somebody who is seriously considering it.

I don’t have space here to list all the reasons why this is a completely crazy business idea. But let me use LG as an example for any other ETR reader who may have bought into the “follow-your-passion” fancy.

Listen, I know that it IS possible to turn your passion (a hobby or lifelong dream) into a way to earn a good living - but ONLY if there’s a good business idea to support it.

How do you find out if your passion makes business sense? Start by asking friends and colleagues what they think of it. Tell them to be brutally frank. Then look around and see if there’s anything like your idea out there in the marketplace. If there isn’t, chances are it’s not going to work.

Unfortunately, because there are so many stories about entrepreneurs who succeeded against all odds, the idea of pursuing a screwball idea is often lauded. But following your passion when it makes no sense… makes no sense. And if you have a family to support, it’s irresponsible.

The first and most important rule of entrepreneurship is this: Never invest in anything unless you understand it extremely well - unless you have the kind of knowledge about the business and the industry that you can only get by working in it, on the inside, for several years.

Staples founder Thomas Stemberg said it this way: “I think following your passion is a really dumb idea. I follow a great market that provides an opportunity to satisfy customers and to make money.”

LG has a passion for golf, but what does he know about selling advertising? Does he have any idea of the kind of advertisers that might be interested in this kind of program? Does he have any idea what kind of numbers such advertisers would need before investing their money? Does he know anything about the size and volatility of his target market?

I don’t need to ask him to know that he doesn’t know these things. The way he talks about this business makes it clear to me that he is a total tyro.

The good news is that LG will not find the start-up capital he needs unless he hooks up with a Nigerian direct-mail scamster and steals it from some rich old lady in Pittsburgh. The bad news is that LG may continue to believe the foolish mantra his guru has been chanting and continue to follow his passion… instead of learning something about business before he jumps into it.

LG and others like him would be well advised to hold their passions in check until they’ve asked all the right questions and thoroughly researched their market.

If there are other people out there making good money doing more or less what you want to do (but your idea is better), by all means, go out and try it. But if no one is doing it - and people you trust give you that distant stare when you tell them about it - be smart and put your energies into a business that has been proven to make money.

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