Happy Wednesday to you!
I hope you are all enjoying life. I’ve been very busy, but am excited to share a little something with you today.
In this blog:
1. MOVEMENT AS MEDICINE (Pt. 1) Body-Mind Health
2. Drug News: A great new documentary exposing the dangers of common medical drugs, and the comparatively “beneficial” psychedelics the public is constantly miss-informed about.
1. MOVEMENT AS MEDICINE (Pt. 1) Body-Mind Health: Movement is life.
Everything about life is moving, from the subatomic level of quantum particles and fields of action, to your blood, breath, organs, oceans, moons, planets and stars.
Movement is an inherent reality, without which we could not experience space-time. If all movement were to cease, there would be no thought (thoughts move too!); without thought, there could be no perception of “this or that”.
Life would cease, melting into an eternal void of nothingness.
About ten years ago, I did a radio interview with Don Bodenbach. We discussed the issue of movement as a social health concern.
Don quoted research by Michael Mogadam MD, who was had researched movement as a social activity. Mogadam’s research showed that only 8% of men, and 3% of women do any regular exercise, including walking a dog!
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As I say to my students, “when you drive to work in the mornings, or travel the roads on the weekend, it may seem like there are a lot of people out exercising. But what you don’t realize when driving through a city of millions of people is that you are probably looking at almost everyone that is doing any movement on any given day!”
This usually provides a reality check for those that are avid exercisers, for they are use to being in active social circles and loose track of the rest of the world.
Moving your body regularly throughout the day and acquiring at least thirty minutes of movement daily is an invaluable, in-fact, essential component of your health. A few of the beneficial functions of movement we all need are:
− Support for circulation; movement activates muscles, which pump blood toward the heart with each contraction, reducing heart stress.
− Movement creates energy that supports all body-mind functions.
− Movement increases metabolism, aiding in both keeping an optimal body-shape, and improving detoxification.
− Movement encourages deeper breathing, which brings more oxygen into the body, which offers many benefits from improved mental function, more energy, better metabolism, better wound healing, and much more!
− Movement on a daily basis guarantees more life experience. When we move, we are interacting with the elements around us, helping us learn more about ourselves, and the world.
− Regular movement enhances sex energy production, and encourages a healthier sex life.
In my diagram above (from my book, How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy! p. 210), you can see a breakdown of the metabolic costs of being alive. Notice that your resting metabolic rate (RMR) accounts for 50-70% of your daily caloric expenditure.
Research, and just plain observation shows us that if we become too inactive for our bodily needs, our RMR actually drops; this means we burn less and less calories, increasing the likelihood that we will gain weight.
The problem I see in this regard is that as people tend to move less and less, they also tend to keep meal/proportion sizes the same. The result is that as they become more and more sedentary and keep eating as though they weren’t, they get fat. A critical concept to keep in mind is that we get fat on the inside before we get fat on the outside.
This means that your organs and glands become very crowded and compressed.
If you watch overweight and obese people move, they look just like pregnant women moving; they can’t walk any more, they have to waddle. They get winded very easily and often give up on activities that were previously natural to them.
This exemplifies a dangerous downward spiral, which seems to have a death-grip on humanity at this time. Couple lack of movement and poor quality food, and you’ve got…well…you’ve got what you see everywhere you go each day!
An additional factor seldom considered is that research has clearly shown that while watching TV, our metabolic rate drops BELOW basal metabolic rate, or our RMR. With the national average for TV watching being 4.7 hours daily, you can easily begin to see why we have so many fat people, with fat children, not to mention what was unthinkable to me as a young man…fat doctors, nurses, flight attendants, firemen, policemen, paramedics, and soldiers!
Regular movement, particularly resistance exercise, significantly enhances your RMR. Weight lifting can increase your RMR significantly for as much as 72 hours from one workout alone!
Cardiovascular exercise helps initially, but the body becomes more efficient every time you use the same form of exercise; each time you ride that spin-bike, you become more and more efficient, therefore, getting less and less long-range benefits; you become more and more like a Honda Civic, and less and less like a “Hot Rod!”
Digestion and elimination alone consumes 5-15% of our daily calories. Without movement, the body is left to do much more internal work to move foodstuffs through the digestive-eliminative tract.
Because there are so many chemical in and on food that disrupt peristalsis (the wavelike contractions of the gut that move things from mouth to anus), constipation is much more likely. Constipation leads to autointoxication, which means “self poisoning”. About 90% of the world population is reported to be constipated in various studies.
Our “daily activities” are what calorie counters actually count, leading people to try and adjust caloric intake to match their calorie counter. This is a very dangerous, even foolish approach to losing weight, and only highlights the fact that the engineers that design such devices are so smart that they’ve become stupid with regard to how the body actually functions.
But, put “MD” or “Ph.D.” behind the name of anyone selling something, or writing a paper, and people actually believe it, even though they get fatter and sicker on their scientifically approved diets, exercise programs, pills, etc.
If you can snatch the pebble from the Master’s hand without even training, you need to find a new master…
Movement is a huge aid to optimal digestion and elimination and that alone should be enough to have everyone getting some exercise each day, but…they don’t have time, they are too busy watching others exercise (and act like retarded children) on TV!
The X Factor is something that can’t be accounted for, but can be significant in some people. Surely you’ve had a meal with someone whose leg was bounding away, or was rattling keys or tapping fingers, or some other ceaseless fidgeting.
These activities do burn calories and in some people, enough to be worth calculating. This kind of movement isn’t therapeutic from an exercise perspective, but it may well be an unconscious attempt to get some movement.
BREATHING
Here you can see me working with Natalia Mammadova (one of the worlds top ranked volleyball players) and her trainer, Boris. Most people would expect me to have her jumping on boxes, doing a variety of high intensity weight training, and all the things that athletes often do. NOT HERE.
The first “movement function” I assess with any client is their breathing. Breathing is the most essential function for human survival, making oxygen the primary nutrient that supports life!
If an athlete (or anyone) can’t breath properly, “working-out” becomes a potentially detrimental source of stress, often leading to anxiety, monkey-mindedness, poor digestion and elimination, slow recovery from training, decreased sex drive, increased adrenal stress, and much more toxicity in the body.
This form of exercise – gentle movements timed to the breathing cycle – is an essential first step. I call this “working-In”. Once we get her breathing optimized, and her muscles and joints balanced, we will begin “working-out”.
The sad fact is that most people that are “working-out”, should be working in far more than they work-out due to a wide variety of postural, orthopedic, and biochemical imbalances. Working-out drives faulty motor patterns deeper and deeper into the nervous system, making it harder and harder for even the most skilled therapists to achieve long-term corrections.
The simple message for the day then, is that you don’t need to worry so much about “working-out”. Movement need only be rhythmic, and enjoyable for fantastic results.
When we learn to breath and work-in properly, we cultivate an abundance of energy. That energy inspires us to work-out when it is a natural, authentic urge. Take it easy. Enjoy it.
In time, as your body heals and your mind vitalizes, you will find yourself giving it more gusto. The difference will be that you will continue to feel good, and look good too.
By starting your movement practice with simple activities, such as the zone exercises, or the “No Workout Workout” in my book, How To Eat, Move and Be Healthy!, you will develop a deeper awareness of your authentic needs. Soon, your TV will be dusty, and your mind will be clear.
2. Drug News: A great new documentary: Neurons 2 Nirvana exposing the dangers of common medical drugs, and the comparatively “beneficial” psychedelics the public is constantly miss-informed about is coming out soon.
The public has been seriously misinformed regarding psychedelics. A psychedelic substance is a psychoactive drug whose primary action is to alter cognition and perception. There are volumes written on the beneficial effects of properly used psychedelic plants and medicines.
The drug industry, which has a very strong financial foothold in most all governments, has gone a long way to keep you misinformed so that you will buy their drugs.
One of the challenges with psychedelic drug use in medicine is that they work too well! There’s not much continuity for drug manufactures if their medicines work too fast, or too well.
The medical and drug industries (two sides of the same coin) are not in the business of “curing disease”. They are in the business of maintaining diseases. That is their “business model”. They are some of the richest corporate interests in the world, running neck and neck with the military industrial complex, and…the Vatican!
Like any drug or substance, there can be problems if psychedelics are not used intelligently and in settings guided by skilled administrators or a shaman with a reliable track record.
Though I’ve seen my share of people have challenges with abuse of psychedelics, the number of people having such problems worldwide wouldn’t be but a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people having problems with, and dying from medical drugs.
Take a few minutes to look at this important trailer, announcing an exciting new documentary that could change the way we see medicine forever: Neurons 2 Nirvana
This film explores the promise of these brave new advances in psychopharmacology and cultural understanding guiding the viewer in a thought-provoking journey, as told by those determined to hold open the doors of perception.
I hope you make some time today for conscious breathing and movement – you’ll be energized and feel the benefits with increased happiness and wellbeing.
Love and chi,
Paul Chek
