The Seven Dwarfs of Menopause arrived at my door without warning: Itchy, Bitchy, Sweaty, Sleepy, Bloated, Forgetful and All-Dried-Up.
One by one they crept into my own private cottage in the woods and started to take over my life. The first to arrive was Itchy. I developed this itch on my right calf that was so irritating, I wanted to scratch the skin right off my body.
Then Bitchy came to my door. No longer was my PMS contained to one or two days a month-it felt like constant PMS. Then I would swing from Bitchy to Weepy for God's sake, what was wrong with me? Ding-dong......It's the middle of the night and Sweaty has crawled into bed with me.
Oh, yes, Sweaty brought embarrassing hot flashes and introduced me to night sweats where it seemed as if a faucet had been attached between my breasts.
Of course! Sweaty brought about Sleepy because I was tired all the time. I would wake up so many times in the night and not be able to get back to sleep.
Bloated crept in slowly, my once-svelte figure got thick through the middle section, even though I was following my weight-loss program that had worked so well for so many years!
I can't quite remember when Forgetful arrived, but one day my brain stopped working. I considered myself a pretty focused woman until Forgetful came and I could not keep a coherent thought in my brain. Am I getting Alzheimer's? I wondered.
Last, All-Dried-Up slowly encroached upon my happy marriage. This was probably the most unpleasant of the dwarf family. Sex was no longer on the top of my list...or on my list at all. My husband would give me that knowing look, and I would think, "Frankly, I'd rather have a smoothie."
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Friday, August 20, 2010
Estrogen and Progesterone Restore Life
What makes a women feel good? Loaded question! Today, I am talking about hormones. Specifically, estrogen and progesterone.
When a women is younger and having menstrual cycles, she is producing hormones that make her strong-to have babies. They make her desirable to attract a mate. Last, but not least, they make her feel good.
During the course of a menstrual cycle, the brain tells the ovaries to ripen eggs. As the eggs ripen, they produce estradiol. On or about day 12 of ones cycle, an egg is released, a women makes testosterone, and starts to produce progesterone. These events prepare the uterus for pregnancy but much much more.
A women is born with a finite number of eggs, and at some point she runs out. The ovaries are the only place that makes progesterone and so it goes away. The body tries to compensate with estrogen but it makes estrone, not a lot. Consequently a women then goes thru the change of life! Hot flashes, cannot sleep, brain fog, etc, etc, etc.
One hundred years ago, women only lived to be 50, on the average. They did not talk about sex and did not have to worry about menopause. Today, you might live to be 80 or 90! Why should you feel bad and not enjoy sex.?
The answer is the Wiley protocol of hormone replacement for women.
This protocol replaces hormones, bio-identically and in a manner in which the body produced them in a young menstruating female.
If something was good for you when you were 25, why should it be bad for your when your 55? The answer is its not!
Try the Wiley protocol-feel better, sleep better, think better and once again enjoy your sexuality. It keeps your bones stong, keeps your HDLs high and if you have the breast cancer gene may protect you from bad estrogen ( 16-oh-estrone).
My patients love it and so will you.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
When a women is younger and having menstrual cycles, she is producing hormones that make her strong-to have babies. They make her desirable to attract a mate. Last, but not least, they make her feel good.
During the course of a menstrual cycle, the brain tells the ovaries to ripen eggs. As the eggs ripen, they produce estradiol. On or about day 12 of ones cycle, an egg is released, a women makes testosterone, and starts to produce progesterone. These events prepare the uterus for pregnancy but much much more.
A women is born with a finite number of eggs, and at some point she runs out. The ovaries are the only place that makes progesterone and so it goes away. The body tries to compensate with estrogen but it makes estrone, not a lot. Consequently a women then goes thru the change of life! Hot flashes, cannot sleep, brain fog, etc, etc, etc.
One hundred years ago, women only lived to be 50, on the average. They did not talk about sex and did not have to worry about menopause. Today, you might live to be 80 or 90! Why should you feel bad and not enjoy sex.?
The answer is the Wiley protocol of hormone replacement for women.
This protocol replaces hormones, bio-identically and in a manner in which the body produced them in a young menstruating female.
If something was good for you when you were 25, why should it be bad for your when your 55? The answer is its not!
Try the Wiley protocol-feel better, sleep better, think better and once again enjoy your sexuality. It keeps your bones stong, keeps your HDLs high and if you have the breast cancer gene may protect you from bad estrogen ( 16-oh-estrone).
My patients love it and so will you.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Third phase of hCG Diet Protocol
I completed the 26 day hCG protocol with wonderful results! I was on Day 22 or 23 when my father-in-law passed away so it was a monkey wrench in the routine of things. Suddenly I was no longer able to follow a set schedule for cooking and eating. I had lost all the weight by that time but still needed to adhere to eating the 500 calorie diet for three more days in order to not gain back large amounts of fat post injections. The next phase is no starch or sugar for three weeks. I admit I have had a couple of "sweet" alcoholic type drinks which are definitely high in the sugar department after the funeral and at a pool party in memory of Jerry Jones. Doing well on the following the diet part of the plan. Starting a work out schedule with the plan called "Insanity" today July 19th was the first work out. It is a workout program designed to change your physical condition and get your body in tip top shape in 60 days. Today Jerome and I did the initial fitness test which is then repeated every 2 weeks to monitor progress and push yourself to beat your last results.
I admit, if you can carve out 26 days where you can concentrate on being diligent with planning your meals ahead of time and can get over any fears of using a 1-1/2 inch long needle to inject the medication intramuscular in the medial buttock muscle then this diet is something I highly recommend trying. I can guide you but I can't make you be faithful to it. My role is to encourage you, guide you through the obstacles and walk with you through the process. It works!
There are a couple ways you can contact me for more information on getting started. Call and schedule an appt in either of my office locations or visit my web page www.mylivit.com to get started.
Look forward to helping you transform your body into the one you aspire to obtain.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
I admit, if you can carve out 26 days where you can concentrate on being diligent with planning your meals ahead of time and can get over any fears of using a 1-1/2 inch long needle to inject the medication intramuscular in the medial buttock muscle then this diet is something I highly recommend trying. I can guide you but I can't make you be faithful to it. My role is to encourage you, guide you through the obstacles and walk with you through the process. It works!
There are a couple ways you can contact me for more information on getting started. Call and schedule an appt in either of my office locations or visit my web page www.mylivit.com to get started.
Look forward to helping you transform your body into the one you aspire to obtain.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Monday, July 19, 2010
Can Staying Up Late Cause Heart Disease? by TS Wiley
Can Staying Up Late Cause Heart Disease?
What happens to the biggest clock in your body when the light never sinks into the sunset (e.g., Schwartz 1996)? When the fuel that feeds your heart never varies and the panic perceived by sleep loss never ends?
So many things you can't even imagine.
And not one of them is good.
In order to understand the magnitude of damage that can be done by staying up after the sun goes down, we need to grasp the mechanisms of the cosmic clock we call a heart.
In a Heartbeat
Bump-bump, swish, lub-dub, lub-dub, bah-boom, bah-boom . . . however the act is interpreted verbally or on the written page, we all recognize a heartbeat or the lack of one. All the cells of our hearts, like little tuning forks, resonate together to set the beat (e.g., Lakatta 1993). That beat, provided by our "heartstrings," reverberates throughout the circulatory system (e.g., Attali 1996).
Tibetan, Chinese, and Ayurvedic medicine all consider pulse sounds the major key to diagnosis. Eastern physicians study the rhythms of pulse for many years in order to qualify to practice medicine. By studying at least six different pulse points, they are able to discern many different rhythmic patterns or "songs." These human EKG machines believe that there are as many different rhythms as there are diseases. Each illness has its own song. It's possible to hear the music and the discord (e.g., Holden 1998).
The scientists at the Santa Fe Institute for Biological Complexity, in their attempt to categorize scaling, or how the various characteristics of all living things, like pulse rate and life span, change according to body size, have decided we humans all get only a billion. That's the magic number--one billion lub-dubs (e.g., West 1997).
From the smallest tree shrew to a blue whale, nobody actually gets more than a billion. But size does matter when it comes to time on this earth. The mouse uses its billion up faster than the elephant because of their respective metabolic rate. These scientists have a formula--a cat, one hundred times more massive than a mouse, lives one hundred to the quarter power, or about three times, longer than a mouse (e.g., Mackenzie 1999). Therefore, a cat's heart beats one third as fast as a mouse's. The fluctuations on all time scales, the timing of a beat being fixed from the timings of the last few before it, really means your heart is not tuned to only one frequency.
The New England Journal of Medicine reported in an article in February of 1999 that the human heart shows an electrical response to a variety of "radio" frequencies. By responding to a range of frequencies, our heart protects the brain and itself from damage that could result from an overreaction to any one stimulus at any one frequency. This information makes cell phones all the more horrifying. The heart is made of what scientists call an excitable medium, that is, one that generates and conducts electricity (e.g., Lakatta 1993).
The Consciousness Interface
Your heart and your immune system, far more than the gray matter that we think of as constituting the mind, are sentient in their own right. Evidence of your heart's active intelligent participation in your existence is found in studies of beat rhythms (e.g., Levin 1998). Your brain's growth and development are, in fact, completely maintained by immune factors called cytokines originating in your heart.
Your heart clenches and unclenches like a fist about 60 times a minute on average. The image of a constant, unwavering, orderly "ticker" beating away like clockwork is given to us as schoolchildren. We're taught that the terms "health" and "order" are synonymous. In fact, we refer to almost all diseases as dis-orders. But the truth is just the opposite. An "ordered" heart is one of slow, steady, unvarying beats (e.g., Holden 1998; Shimizu 1993).
Every first-year med student knows that this is the tempo of a sick heart. If you look at recordings of long series of heartbeats and calculate the lengths of the beat-to-beat intervals, it looks like they are spaced at longer and shorter intervals in a completely random and erratic manner.
Not erratic in the fluctuating way in which your heart responds to your body's activity level, but genuinely wild, even during sleep. There are speed ups and slowdowns, not just hourly, but minute-to-minute, too. Researchers monitored 10 healthy volunteers and ten people with congestive heart failure (e.g., Holden 1998). On first look, the heart rhythms appeared much the same in both groups, but the beat-to-beat rhythms of the healthy hearts were, in fact, far different from those of the brokenhearted.
In the healthy hearts, a sequence of two hundred steps up tends to be followed by two hundred steps down. On an EKG, this means that the period in which the heart slows down will be followed by a period in which it speeds up, sort of like a built-in mechanism that sets the beat long-range, so it fluctuates to a predetermined mathematical landscape.
The healthy heart has long-term "memory."
The timing of the next beat depends on the "beat history" of the distant past. Disease, by contrast, is really heart amnesia (e.g., Lakatta 1993). In a broken heart, if a run of 200 beats gets progressively slower, the next 200 are just as likely to get slower as they are to get faster. By measuring longer and longer intervals, the scientists can find the extra information about the "average" hidden in the fluctuations (e.g., Holden 1998).
This information is enough to illuminate the rhythmic differences between healthy and sick hearts. Over the last 20 years, mathematicians and physicists have realized that what looks random is not random at all. It's chaotic, and unpredictability is a hallmark of a chaotic system. Chaos differs from randomness in that chaotic behavior always arises from simple underlying causes. Irregular rhythms like sunspots or the oscillations of El Nino are examples of chaotic rhythms rather than random single occurrences. Healthy heartbeats are highly chaotic, just like cosmic activity or the weather, because a chaotic system is more adaptable (e.g., Storey 1997; Wehr 1997). When you don't sleep or cut sleep short, patterns can't be adapted. A chaotic system is highly dynamic, always changing and fluctuating to maintain homeostasis. A chaotic system is always poised in a state that is incredibly sensitive to small influences.
How the Beat Goes On
The oppositely polarized inside and outside of your heart cells always have an unequal distribution of ions inside and outside of the cell. The systemic sympathetic nervous system communicates with the nerves all over your body and brain by initiating waves of change in the polarity inside and outside the membrane of neuronal cells like those in the heart. The pouring of positive and negative ions in and out through gates in your heart cells' membranes produces a "current" of electricity (e.g., Lakatta 1993).
The muscle cells of the heart are thrown into play by an electrical current that comes in polarized waves and contracts and squeezes blood through two adjacent pumping chambers called the left and right ventricles. There's a special colony of cells at the top of the right side. These cells electrically "keep the beat." This rush of electricity sweeps in a spiral around the entire heart, from the double-humped top to the pointy little bottom, making a complete circuit top to bottom -- bottom to top.
As this happens, your arteries actually "feel" the blood flowing through them. The sensors that read how hard your blood pushes and pulls as it rushes through you are called endothelial cells. These cells are alive in their own right (e.g., Shimizu 1993).
They change shape, move around, and switch a myriad of genes on or off in response to blood pressure and velocity, hormones and cytokines that they detect in the blood, and (here's the big problem with not sleeping) photons of light brought into the blood by cells called cryptochromes. Endothelial cells control through changing blood pressure the flow dynamics moment to moment.
Endothelial cells also control how fatty acids floating in your blood are metabolized. Fatty acids are what the doctor measures when he threatens you about your high cholesterol. The blood tests they take to measure your cholesterol look at different components of fatty acids in your blood, components with acronyms like VLDL, HDL, and LDL. Whether the LDLs (low density lipoproteins) are split from the VLDLs (very low density lipoproteins) that were made in your liver from the carbohydrates that you've eaten and become heavy, oxidized, smaller LDL particles is at the discretion of your endothelial cells (e.g., Pinkney 1997).
Doctors tell you to fast before the test, not because a high-fat meal will skew the results but because a high-carbohydrate one will. Carbohydrates turn into triglycerides (body fat) to insulate and nourish you when there's no sugar left to eat. Carbohydrates simultaneously turn into these fatty acids, too, to patch your heart cells against leaks if you freeze and as nourishment for your heart muscle cells as the planet turns in and out of the light of and spins around the sun. (e.g., Bjorntorp 1991; Hearse 1997; Yudkin 1988; Wiley 2001). Days are not all the same length all year long and your heart has evolved to "know" that.
Your heart has a seasonal metabolism.
Your summer heart runs on straight sugar (glucose) and your winter heart runs on free fatty acids. Because it's always summer (long light/high carbohydrates) in our hearts now thanks to temperature and light control, our arteries never get a chance to use up all the cholesterol (e.g., Howell 1997). In addition, your serotonin, which goes up with your insulin, keeps building, leading to ultimate serotonin resistance, which gives you high blood pressure on the way to blood clots, and--as long as the lights shine and you stay up--your cortisol (W) stays up. And chronic high anything means compensatory resistance (e.g., Bergendahl 1996).
Cortisol production is, in the first place, a coping mechanism in place to deal with episodic stress. Your heart lining loves cortisol, in small doses. The endothelial cells in your heart lining can't do all the jobs they do without small, usable measures of cortisol. Big hits, however, signal big danger to your endothelial cells. Big hits all day long, all week long, all year long for decades can mean cortisol resistance and a bad temper, and no patience, and skewed time perception, and pervasive panic (e.g., Bergendahl 1996; Fimognari 1996).
It doesn't matter if you eat saturated or unsaturated fat, good fats or bad fats; if the endothelial cells lining your heart are dead, so are you. Endothelial cells lining every blood vessel in your body is a player in the larger scheme of the sensory organ known as your heart. The rush of your blood, the push and the pull, is called "shear stress" on the walls of your arteries (e.g., Hademenos 1997).
Shear stress action over a smooth patch of endothelial cells activates three very important genes: one that produces nitric oxide, which controls the clamping down of your blood vessels, which, in turn, controls the speed and volume of your blood pressure, and two other genes that inhibit blood clotting and smooth any muscle overgrowth (lumpy bumps). Endothelial cells that read too much turbulence or, on the other hand, none at all, produce very little activation of these genes (e.g., Shimizu 1993).
This is a bad thing.
That means that while constant chronic running on a treadmill produces too much turbulence, never moving away from the television or computer screen at all from day to day is just as bad. A little stress, episodically, is a very good thing. Just like a little cortisol, episodically, keeps the rhythm and proves you're alive. A lot of chronic stress, of course, means you're a loser to nature and should go away permanently. Just a little cortisol bath makes endothelial cells very happy. A lot of cortisol will drown them. Since cortisol stays up as long as the lights are on, we're probably drowning. So just keeping the lights on late, year-round, can cause endothelial cell death (e.g., Hearse 1997; Miguez 1995; Pinkney 1997).
Any increase in blood pressure from your sympathetic nervous system or heavy carbohydrate intake in the wrong season can change blood pressure to create even more shear stress and hurt your endothelial cells two ways. The ten to fifteen pounds of water weight we carry on a high carbohydrate diet is enough of a volume increase to account for the chronic subclinical high blood pressure seen in the majority of men more than 35 years old (e.g., Hearse 1997; Yudkin 1988).
Any high blood pressure, no matter how slight, always means shear stress.
The other major killer of the endothelial cells in the lining of your heart is chronically high levels of endotoxin LPS. Endotoxin LPS is the bacterial "sweat" coming from the four pounds of symbiotic bacteria living in your gut. Endotoxin LPS, as it accumulates all day long from reproducing symbiotic bacteria, activates your immune system and interleukin-2. Interleukin 2 puts you to sleep and melatonin drops your temperature to lower the number of bacteria reproducing again. They get a chance, you get a chance. When you fight sleep instead of surrendering, those levels rise and stay high (Brugger 1995; Schwartz 1996; Sensi 1993; Storey 1997; Tamura 1997).
That can kill your heart. One of the most obscure ways to kill your endothelial cells by not sleeping is through high homocysteine.
A man named Kilmer McCully realized about thirty years ago that children with a genetic disease called homocysteinuria always died of heart attacks from clogged arteries by the age of ten or eleven (e.g., McCully 1996).
Children with homocysteinuria genetically fail to make an enzyme that metabolizes homocysteine to remove it from the bloodstream. McCully was smart enough to realize that high levels of building homocysteine must be associated with coronary artery disease in adults, too. He was right.
Of course, no one took him seriously until scientists found that an increase in folic acid supplements would compensate for the missing enzyme in the elimination pathway for homocysteine. Once there was a treatment, suddenly there was a disease--a genetic folic acid deficiency. A widespread genetic folic acid deficiency in the majority of the aging male population is a virtual impossibility, so the pathways of homocysteine manufacture and metabolism must be being affected by something in the environment (e.g., Clark 1998).
Sure enough, only a few feedback loops and cascades backward, a crucial enzyme for metabolizing methionine, the precursor to homocysteine, is knocked out by a cryptochrome carrying blue light (e.g., Hsu 1996). To get the right answer, you have to ask the right question.
The amount of daylight you are exposed to, compounded by the amount of artificial light, controls the production of a minuscule, seemingly esoteric, high-up-in-the-cascade-of-other-hormones-and-functions thing that can kill your endothelial cells--which line your heart--which control clotting, overgrowth, fat metabolism, and blood pressure.
The four most obvious ways that you can kill your endothelial cells are:
1. Chronic high cortisol (never-ending light and stress)
2. High levels chronic levels of endotoxin LPS (no sleep)
3. High homocysteine (too much light)
4. Shear stress created by what would be seasonal high blood pressure (carbohydrate "water-weight," and serotonin resistance and insulin resistance that have no natural end because winter, cold and darkness never come) (e.g., Wiley 2001).
Since numbers 1, 2, and 3 are all the result of modern life, and 4--the all-sugar, all-the-time diet--is the direct result of 1, 2, and 3 also, it's probably safe to say that heart disease, which is a state of endothelial cell demise, is caused by no sleep and too much light, right?
No Escape
Oh, and here's the heart attack mechanism... it's also the endothelial lining that controls the overgrowth of smooth muscle tissue. Those bumpy lumps are the major factor, along with cholesterol plaqueing, in arteriosclerosis (clogged arteries). A disturbed blood flow over bumpy terrain activates an altogether different set of genes in the endothelial cells. These other genes are set in motion to "correct" what the endothelial cells perceive to be a "flow" problem mimicked by the lumpy bumps.
Cholesterol plaque, in and of itself, does not make for bumpy terrain.
It's the immune "factors" released from the endothelial cells themselves, in a protective attempt to restore homeostasis and distribute the shear stress of the flow of blood, that cause the problem (e.g., Johnson 1997; King 1996).
A disturbed flow actually causes the shutdown of protective genes and provokes panic in the endothelial cells. After releasing the immune factors that clamp down, increasing your blood pressure by mistake, they begin to crawl around by extending pseudopodia (little feet) in an effort to escape from areas where shear stress has changed abruptly. The migration of these cells lining your arteries leads to thinning of the artery wall.
The gaps are filled by immune cells called leukocytes (white blood cell) that make a scab sticky enough to attract cholesterol floating in your bloodstream, which makes a fat-constructed Band-Aid to strengthen the thinning artery wall. Now you have cholesterol plaque and overgrown smooth muscle and immune cells making what's known in medicine as foam cells. Foam cells constitute a "lesion" (e.g., Woolf 1994; Wiley 2001).
This new mess creates an excessively bumpy terrain and a remarkably disturbed flow, which panics your poor endothelial cells further. They, literally, run away and the artery wall thins and then your immune system tries to repair it, and it gets bumpier and bumpier and then, of course, your endothelial cells run away again, and the whole shooting match starts all over again; and again and again (e.g., Brugger 1995; Wiley 2001).
But, because you're not dead yet, you probably just have the occasional chest pain or pressure when you exercise. No doubt you're also finding it harder and harder to fight off the depression caused by the chronic high serotonin from all of the carbohydrates you've eaten.
When you never turn off the lights, the serotonin has no way to metabolize into melatonin. In fact, exposure to blue and green light actually knocks out the enzyme that would convert serotonin to melatonin -n-acetyltransferase (e.g., Wehr 1997). So, in addition to making you blue, these sky-high serotonin levels create serotonin resistance in blood platelets (e.g., Modai 1992; Nakata 1999), which makes them even stickier than usual.
That's important, because it's hard to have a heart attack without a blood clot, and it's hard to have a blood clot without sticky platelets. Sleep loss makes most of us tired, freaked out, miserable, addicted to either sugar or alcohol, maybe living on anti-depressants, and walking around with a very damaged heart lining held together by cholesterol supports.
That's heart disease.
But we don't think about it very often unless a knocking comes from within--or worse, pain. Palpitations are absurdly alarming, pain is downright incapacitating emotionally and intellectually. Any physician reading the description above would tell you that you're going to have that heart attack and you're going to have it from the cholesterol plaque clogging your arteries, but no one ever tells you to get some sleep (e.g., Brugger 1995; Hademenos 1997; Hearse 1997; Schwartz 1996; Tamura 1997; Wiley 2001).
As if that's not tragic enough, modern medicine adds to the fear (e.g., Blumenthal 1995; Nilsson 1996), making it palpable. TV and print ads and the internet bombard us with news from the front about the "war on heart disease"--just in case you didn't realize your heart was trying to kill you. We are taught to hate our hearts. It's true that human beings have always been obsessed with their hearts in life, art, and literature. Now we are obsessed with the "health" of our hearts. We seem to be locked in codependent relationships with cardiologists, researchers, and exercise physiologists and in a food fight to the death against the whimsical independence of our hearts.
In a remarkable paper published more than forty years ago in American Anthropology Walter Bradford Cannon, a Harvard Medical School physiologist, described how, in many primitive cultures, a curse from an all-powerful wizard or medicine man was enough to kill a believer.
Their hearts stopped dead.
Thanks to the media in particular, and American paranoia in general, we are far more panicked, minute to minute, about our health than we've ever been before in history, that includes in that assessment the 1914 influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people worldwide. People are far more worried about heart disease now than they were worried about catching the flu then.
We live in truly strange times. Oh yeah, and add to that free-floating terror the twice yearly visit to the cardiologist, or a trip to the grocery store, for that matter, to buy "fat-free" juice, defatted turkey burgers, and low-fat freezer-burned pasta concoctions under overhead fluorescent lights that shine with the glare of ten thousand artificial suns. It's exhausting.
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Schwartz, William J., "Internal Timekeeping," Science & Medicine (May/June 1996), 44-53.
Semenkovich, Clay E, et al., "The Mystery of Diabetics and Atherosclerosis," Diabetes 46 (March 1997): 327-334.
Sensi, S., et al., "Chronobiology in Endocrinology," Annali dell Instituto Superiore di Sanita 29, no. 4 (1993): 613-631.
Shimizu, K., et al, "Sympathetic Dysfunction in Heart Failure," Bailieres Clinical
Endocrinology and Metabolism 7, no. 2 (April 1993): 439-463.
Storey, K. B., "Metabolic Regulation in Mammalian Hibernation: Enzyme and Protein Adaptations," Comp Biochem Physiol A Physiol 118, no. 4 (December 1997): 1115-1124.
Tamura, K., et al., "Chronotherapy for Coronary Heart Disease," Japanese Heart Journal 38, no. 5 (September 1997): 607-616.
Wehr, Thomas A., "Melatonin and Seasonal Rhythms," Journal of Biological Rhythms 12, no. 6 (December 1997): 518-527.
West, Geofy B., et al., "A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology," Science 276 no. 5309 (April 1997): 122-126.
Whitworth, J. A., et al., "Mechanisms of Cortisol-Induced Hypertension in Humans," Steroids 60, no. 1 (January 1995): 76-80.
Wiley, T. S., and Bent Formby. Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival. New York: Pocket, 2001. Print.
Woolf, Neville, et al., "Arterial Plaque and Thrombus Formation," Scientific American Science and Medicine (September/October 1994), 38-47.
Yudkin, John S., M.D., "Sucrose, Coronary Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Obesity: Do Hormones Provide a Link?" American Heart Journal 115 (February 1988): 493-498.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
What happens to the biggest clock in your body when the light never sinks into the sunset (e.g., Schwartz 1996)? When the fuel that feeds your heart never varies and the panic perceived by sleep loss never ends?
So many things you can't even imagine.
And not one of them is good.
In order to understand the magnitude of damage that can be done by staying up after the sun goes down, we need to grasp the mechanisms of the cosmic clock we call a heart.
In a Heartbeat
Bump-bump, swish, lub-dub, lub-dub, bah-boom, bah-boom . . . however the act is interpreted verbally or on the written page, we all recognize a heartbeat or the lack of one. All the cells of our hearts, like little tuning forks, resonate together to set the beat (e.g., Lakatta 1993). That beat, provided by our "heartstrings," reverberates throughout the circulatory system (e.g., Attali 1996).
Tibetan, Chinese, and Ayurvedic medicine all consider pulse sounds the major key to diagnosis. Eastern physicians study the rhythms of pulse for many years in order to qualify to practice medicine. By studying at least six different pulse points, they are able to discern many different rhythmic patterns or "songs." These human EKG machines believe that there are as many different rhythms as there are diseases. Each illness has its own song. It's possible to hear the music and the discord (e.g., Holden 1998).
The scientists at the Santa Fe Institute for Biological Complexity, in their attempt to categorize scaling, or how the various characteristics of all living things, like pulse rate and life span, change according to body size, have decided we humans all get only a billion. That's the magic number--one billion lub-dubs (e.g., West 1997).
From the smallest tree shrew to a blue whale, nobody actually gets more than a billion. But size does matter when it comes to time on this earth. The mouse uses its billion up faster than the elephant because of their respective metabolic rate. These scientists have a formula--a cat, one hundred times more massive than a mouse, lives one hundred to the quarter power, or about three times, longer than a mouse (e.g., Mackenzie 1999). Therefore, a cat's heart beats one third as fast as a mouse's. The fluctuations on all time scales, the timing of a beat being fixed from the timings of the last few before it, really means your heart is not tuned to only one frequency.
The New England Journal of Medicine reported in an article in February of 1999 that the human heart shows an electrical response to a variety of "radio" frequencies. By responding to a range of frequencies, our heart protects the brain and itself from damage that could result from an overreaction to any one stimulus at any one frequency. This information makes cell phones all the more horrifying. The heart is made of what scientists call an excitable medium, that is, one that generates and conducts electricity (e.g., Lakatta 1993).
The Consciousness Interface
Your heart and your immune system, far more than the gray matter that we think of as constituting the mind, are sentient in their own right. Evidence of your heart's active intelligent participation in your existence is found in studies of beat rhythms (e.g., Levin 1998). Your brain's growth and development are, in fact, completely maintained by immune factors called cytokines originating in your heart.
Your heart clenches and unclenches like a fist about 60 times a minute on average. The image of a constant, unwavering, orderly "ticker" beating away like clockwork is given to us as schoolchildren. We're taught that the terms "health" and "order" are synonymous. In fact, we refer to almost all diseases as dis-orders. But the truth is just the opposite. An "ordered" heart is one of slow, steady, unvarying beats (e.g., Holden 1998; Shimizu 1993).
Every first-year med student knows that this is the tempo of a sick heart. If you look at recordings of long series of heartbeats and calculate the lengths of the beat-to-beat intervals, it looks like they are spaced at longer and shorter intervals in a completely random and erratic manner.
Not erratic in the fluctuating way in which your heart responds to your body's activity level, but genuinely wild, even during sleep. There are speed ups and slowdowns, not just hourly, but minute-to-minute, too. Researchers monitored 10 healthy volunteers and ten people with congestive heart failure (e.g., Holden 1998). On first look, the heart rhythms appeared much the same in both groups, but the beat-to-beat rhythms of the healthy hearts were, in fact, far different from those of the brokenhearted.
In the healthy hearts, a sequence of two hundred steps up tends to be followed by two hundred steps down. On an EKG, this means that the period in which the heart slows down will be followed by a period in which it speeds up, sort of like a built-in mechanism that sets the beat long-range, so it fluctuates to a predetermined mathematical landscape.
The healthy heart has long-term "memory."
The timing of the next beat depends on the "beat history" of the distant past. Disease, by contrast, is really heart amnesia (e.g., Lakatta 1993). In a broken heart, if a run of 200 beats gets progressively slower, the next 200 are just as likely to get slower as they are to get faster. By measuring longer and longer intervals, the scientists can find the extra information about the "average" hidden in the fluctuations (e.g., Holden 1998).
This information is enough to illuminate the rhythmic differences between healthy and sick hearts. Over the last 20 years, mathematicians and physicists have realized that what looks random is not random at all. It's chaotic, and unpredictability is a hallmark of a chaotic system. Chaos differs from randomness in that chaotic behavior always arises from simple underlying causes. Irregular rhythms like sunspots or the oscillations of El Nino are examples of chaotic rhythms rather than random single occurrences. Healthy heartbeats are highly chaotic, just like cosmic activity or the weather, because a chaotic system is more adaptable (e.g., Storey 1997; Wehr 1997). When you don't sleep or cut sleep short, patterns can't be adapted. A chaotic system is highly dynamic, always changing and fluctuating to maintain homeostasis. A chaotic system is always poised in a state that is incredibly sensitive to small influences.
How the Beat Goes On
The oppositely polarized inside and outside of your heart cells always have an unequal distribution of ions inside and outside of the cell. The systemic sympathetic nervous system communicates with the nerves all over your body and brain by initiating waves of change in the polarity inside and outside the membrane of neuronal cells like those in the heart. The pouring of positive and negative ions in and out through gates in your heart cells' membranes produces a "current" of electricity (e.g., Lakatta 1993).
The muscle cells of the heart are thrown into play by an electrical current that comes in polarized waves and contracts and squeezes blood through two adjacent pumping chambers called the left and right ventricles. There's a special colony of cells at the top of the right side. These cells electrically "keep the beat." This rush of electricity sweeps in a spiral around the entire heart, from the double-humped top to the pointy little bottom, making a complete circuit top to bottom -- bottom to top.
As this happens, your arteries actually "feel" the blood flowing through them. The sensors that read how hard your blood pushes and pulls as it rushes through you are called endothelial cells. These cells are alive in their own right (e.g., Shimizu 1993).
They change shape, move around, and switch a myriad of genes on or off in response to blood pressure and velocity, hormones and cytokines that they detect in the blood, and (here's the big problem with not sleeping) photons of light brought into the blood by cells called cryptochromes. Endothelial cells control through changing blood pressure the flow dynamics moment to moment.
Endothelial cells also control how fatty acids floating in your blood are metabolized. Fatty acids are what the doctor measures when he threatens you about your high cholesterol. The blood tests they take to measure your cholesterol look at different components of fatty acids in your blood, components with acronyms like VLDL, HDL, and LDL. Whether the LDLs (low density lipoproteins) are split from the VLDLs (very low density lipoproteins) that were made in your liver from the carbohydrates that you've eaten and become heavy, oxidized, smaller LDL particles is at the discretion of your endothelial cells (e.g., Pinkney 1997).
Doctors tell you to fast before the test, not because a high-fat meal will skew the results but because a high-carbohydrate one will. Carbohydrates turn into triglycerides (body fat) to insulate and nourish you when there's no sugar left to eat. Carbohydrates simultaneously turn into these fatty acids, too, to patch your heart cells against leaks if you freeze and as nourishment for your heart muscle cells as the planet turns in and out of the light of and spins around the sun. (e.g., Bjorntorp 1991; Hearse 1997; Yudkin 1988; Wiley 2001). Days are not all the same length all year long and your heart has evolved to "know" that.
Your heart has a seasonal metabolism.
Your summer heart runs on straight sugar (glucose) and your winter heart runs on free fatty acids. Because it's always summer (long light/high carbohydrates) in our hearts now thanks to temperature and light control, our arteries never get a chance to use up all the cholesterol (e.g., Howell 1997). In addition, your serotonin, which goes up with your insulin, keeps building, leading to ultimate serotonin resistance, which gives you high blood pressure on the way to blood clots, and--as long as the lights shine and you stay up--your cortisol (W) stays up. And chronic high anything means compensatory resistance (e.g., Bergendahl 1996).
Cortisol production is, in the first place, a coping mechanism in place to deal with episodic stress. Your heart lining loves cortisol, in small doses. The endothelial cells in your heart lining can't do all the jobs they do without small, usable measures of cortisol. Big hits, however, signal big danger to your endothelial cells. Big hits all day long, all week long, all year long for decades can mean cortisol resistance and a bad temper, and no patience, and skewed time perception, and pervasive panic (e.g., Bergendahl 1996; Fimognari 1996).
It doesn't matter if you eat saturated or unsaturated fat, good fats or bad fats; if the endothelial cells lining your heart are dead, so are you. Endothelial cells lining every blood vessel in your body is a player in the larger scheme of the sensory organ known as your heart. The rush of your blood, the push and the pull, is called "shear stress" on the walls of your arteries (e.g., Hademenos 1997).
Shear stress action over a smooth patch of endothelial cells activates three very important genes: one that produces nitric oxide, which controls the clamping down of your blood vessels, which, in turn, controls the speed and volume of your blood pressure, and two other genes that inhibit blood clotting and smooth any muscle overgrowth (lumpy bumps). Endothelial cells that read too much turbulence or, on the other hand, none at all, produce very little activation of these genes (e.g., Shimizu 1993).
This is a bad thing.
That means that while constant chronic running on a treadmill produces too much turbulence, never moving away from the television or computer screen at all from day to day is just as bad. A little stress, episodically, is a very good thing. Just like a little cortisol, episodically, keeps the rhythm and proves you're alive. A lot of chronic stress, of course, means you're a loser to nature and should go away permanently. Just a little cortisol bath makes endothelial cells very happy. A lot of cortisol will drown them. Since cortisol stays up as long as the lights are on, we're probably drowning. So just keeping the lights on late, year-round, can cause endothelial cell death (e.g., Hearse 1997; Miguez 1995; Pinkney 1997).
Any increase in blood pressure from your sympathetic nervous system or heavy carbohydrate intake in the wrong season can change blood pressure to create even more shear stress and hurt your endothelial cells two ways. The ten to fifteen pounds of water weight we carry on a high carbohydrate diet is enough of a volume increase to account for the chronic subclinical high blood pressure seen in the majority of men more than 35 years old (e.g., Hearse 1997; Yudkin 1988).
Any high blood pressure, no matter how slight, always means shear stress.
The other major killer of the endothelial cells in the lining of your heart is chronically high levels of endotoxin LPS. Endotoxin LPS is the bacterial "sweat" coming from the four pounds of symbiotic bacteria living in your gut. Endotoxin LPS, as it accumulates all day long from reproducing symbiotic bacteria, activates your immune system and interleukin-2. Interleukin 2 puts you to sleep and melatonin drops your temperature to lower the number of bacteria reproducing again. They get a chance, you get a chance. When you fight sleep instead of surrendering, those levels rise and stay high (Brugger 1995; Schwartz 1996; Sensi 1993; Storey 1997; Tamura 1997).
That can kill your heart. One of the most obscure ways to kill your endothelial cells by not sleeping is through high homocysteine.
A man named Kilmer McCully realized about thirty years ago that children with a genetic disease called homocysteinuria always died of heart attacks from clogged arteries by the age of ten or eleven (e.g., McCully 1996).
Children with homocysteinuria genetically fail to make an enzyme that metabolizes homocysteine to remove it from the bloodstream. McCully was smart enough to realize that high levels of building homocysteine must be associated with coronary artery disease in adults, too. He was right.
Of course, no one took him seriously until scientists found that an increase in folic acid supplements would compensate for the missing enzyme in the elimination pathway for homocysteine. Once there was a treatment, suddenly there was a disease--a genetic folic acid deficiency. A widespread genetic folic acid deficiency in the majority of the aging male population is a virtual impossibility, so the pathways of homocysteine manufacture and metabolism must be being affected by something in the environment (e.g., Clark 1998).
Sure enough, only a few feedback loops and cascades backward, a crucial enzyme for metabolizing methionine, the precursor to homocysteine, is knocked out by a cryptochrome carrying blue light (e.g., Hsu 1996). To get the right answer, you have to ask the right question.
The amount of daylight you are exposed to, compounded by the amount of artificial light, controls the production of a minuscule, seemingly esoteric, high-up-in-the-cascade-of-other-hormones-and-functions thing that can kill your endothelial cells--which line your heart--which control clotting, overgrowth, fat metabolism, and blood pressure.
The four most obvious ways that you can kill your endothelial cells are:
1. Chronic high cortisol (never-ending light and stress)
2. High levels chronic levels of endotoxin LPS (no sleep)
3. High homocysteine (too much light)
4. Shear stress created by what would be seasonal high blood pressure (carbohydrate "water-weight," and serotonin resistance and insulin resistance that have no natural end because winter, cold and darkness never come) (e.g., Wiley 2001).
Since numbers 1, 2, and 3 are all the result of modern life, and 4--the all-sugar, all-the-time diet--is the direct result of 1, 2, and 3 also, it's probably safe to say that heart disease, which is a state of endothelial cell demise, is caused by no sleep and too much light, right?
No Escape
Oh, and here's the heart attack mechanism... it's also the endothelial lining that controls the overgrowth of smooth muscle tissue. Those bumpy lumps are the major factor, along with cholesterol plaqueing, in arteriosclerosis (clogged arteries). A disturbed blood flow over bumpy terrain activates an altogether different set of genes in the endothelial cells. These other genes are set in motion to "correct" what the endothelial cells perceive to be a "flow" problem mimicked by the lumpy bumps.
Cholesterol plaque, in and of itself, does not make for bumpy terrain.
It's the immune "factors" released from the endothelial cells themselves, in a protective attempt to restore homeostasis and distribute the shear stress of the flow of blood, that cause the problem (e.g., Johnson 1997; King 1996).
A disturbed flow actually causes the shutdown of protective genes and provokes panic in the endothelial cells. After releasing the immune factors that clamp down, increasing your blood pressure by mistake, they begin to crawl around by extending pseudopodia (little feet) in an effort to escape from areas where shear stress has changed abruptly. The migration of these cells lining your arteries leads to thinning of the artery wall.
The gaps are filled by immune cells called leukocytes (white blood cell) that make a scab sticky enough to attract cholesterol floating in your bloodstream, which makes a fat-constructed Band-Aid to strengthen the thinning artery wall. Now you have cholesterol plaque and overgrown smooth muscle and immune cells making what's known in medicine as foam cells. Foam cells constitute a "lesion" (e.g., Woolf 1994; Wiley 2001).
This new mess creates an excessively bumpy terrain and a remarkably disturbed flow, which panics your poor endothelial cells further. They, literally, run away and the artery wall thins and then your immune system tries to repair it, and it gets bumpier and bumpier and then, of course, your endothelial cells run away again, and the whole shooting match starts all over again; and again and again (e.g., Brugger 1995; Wiley 2001).
But, because you're not dead yet, you probably just have the occasional chest pain or pressure when you exercise. No doubt you're also finding it harder and harder to fight off the depression caused by the chronic high serotonin from all of the carbohydrates you've eaten.
When you never turn off the lights, the serotonin has no way to metabolize into melatonin. In fact, exposure to blue and green light actually knocks out the enzyme that would convert serotonin to melatonin -n-acetyltransferase (e.g., Wehr 1997). So, in addition to making you blue, these sky-high serotonin levels create serotonin resistance in blood platelets (e.g., Modai 1992; Nakata 1999), which makes them even stickier than usual.
That's important, because it's hard to have a heart attack without a blood clot, and it's hard to have a blood clot without sticky platelets. Sleep loss makes most of us tired, freaked out, miserable, addicted to either sugar or alcohol, maybe living on anti-depressants, and walking around with a very damaged heart lining held together by cholesterol supports.
That's heart disease.
But we don't think about it very often unless a knocking comes from within--or worse, pain. Palpitations are absurdly alarming, pain is downright incapacitating emotionally and intellectually. Any physician reading the description above would tell you that you're going to have that heart attack and you're going to have it from the cholesterol plaque clogging your arteries, but no one ever tells you to get some sleep (e.g., Brugger 1995; Hademenos 1997; Hearse 1997; Schwartz 1996; Tamura 1997; Wiley 2001).
As if that's not tragic enough, modern medicine adds to the fear (e.g., Blumenthal 1995; Nilsson 1996), making it palpable. TV and print ads and the internet bombard us with news from the front about the "war on heart disease"--just in case you didn't realize your heart was trying to kill you. We are taught to hate our hearts. It's true that human beings have always been obsessed with their hearts in life, art, and literature. Now we are obsessed with the "health" of our hearts. We seem to be locked in codependent relationships with cardiologists, researchers, and exercise physiologists and in a food fight to the death against the whimsical independence of our hearts.
In a remarkable paper published more than forty years ago in American Anthropology Walter Bradford Cannon, a Harvard Medical School physiologist, described how, in many primitive cultures, a curse from an all-powerful wizard or medicine man was enough to kill a believer.
Their hearts stopped dead.
Thanks to the media in particular, and American paranoia in general, we are far more panicked, minute to minute, about our health than we've ever been before in history, that includes in that assessment the 1914 influenza epidemic that killed twenty million people worldwide. People are far more worried about heart disease now than they were worried about catching the flu then.
We live in truly strange times. Oh yeah, and add to that free-floating terror the twice yearly visit to the cardiologist, or a trip to the grocery store, for that matter, to buy "fat-free" juice, defatted turkey burgers, and low-fat freezer-burned pasta concoctions under overhead fluorescent lights that shine with the glare of ten thousand artificial suns. It's exhausting.
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References
Attali, Bernard, "A New Wave for Heart Rhythms," Nature 384 (November 7,1996): 24-25.
Bergendahl, Matti, et al., "Fasting As a Metabolic Stress Paradigm Selectively Amplifies Cortisol Secretory Burst Mass and Delays the Time of Maximal Nyctohemeral Cortisol Concentrations in Healthy Men," Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 81, no. 2 (1996): 692-699.
Bjorntorp, P., "Visceral Fat Accumulation: The Missing Link between Psychosocial Factors and Cardiovascular Disease?" Journal of Internal Medicine 230, no. 3 (September 1991): 195-201.
Blumenthal, James A., et a l , "Mental Stress-Induced Ischemia in the Laboratory and Ambulatory Ischemia during Daily Life," Circulation 92 (1995): 2102-2108.
Brugger, P., et al., "Impaired Nocturnal Secretion of Melatonin in Coronary Heart Disease," The Lancet 345 (1995): 1408.
Clark, Robert, et al., "Lowering Blood Homocysteine with Folic Acid Based Supplements: Meta-Analysis of Randomised Trials," British Medical Journal 316 (March 21, 1998): 894-898.
Fimognari, F. L., et al., "Associated Daily Biosynthesis of Cortisol and Thromboxane A2: A Preliminary Report," J Lab Clin Med 128, no. 1 (July 1996): 115-121.
Fisher, W. E., et al., "Insulin Promotes Pancreatic Cancer: Evidence for Endocrine Influence on Exocrine Pancreatic Tumors," / Surg Res 63, no. 1 (June 1996): 310-313.
Gastel, J. A., et al., "Melatonin Production: Proteasomal Proteolysis in Serotonin N-acetyltransferase Regulation" Science 279, no. 5355 (February 27,1998): 1358-1360.
Hademenos, George J., "The Biophysics of Stroke," American Scientist 85 (May/June 1997): 226-235
Hearse, D. J., "Myocardial Hibernation: A Form of Endogenous Protection?" European Heart Journal 18, suppl. A (January 1997): A2-A7.
Holden, Arun V., "A Last Wave from the Dying Heart," Nature 392 (March 1998): 20-21.
Howell, Wanda H . , et al., "Plasma Lipid and Lipoprotein Responses to Dietary Fat and Cholesterol: A Meta-Analysis," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 65 (1997): 1747-1764.
Hsu, D. S., et al., "Putative Human Blue-Light Photoreceptors hCRYl and hCRY2 are Flavoproteins," Biochemistry 35, no. 44 (November 5,1996): 13871-13877.
Illnerova, Helena, et al., "The Circadian Rhythm in Plasma Melatonin Concentration of the Urbanized Man: The Effect of Summer and Winter Time," Brain Research 328 (1985): 186-189.
Johnson, R. W , et al., "Hormones, Lymphohemopoietic Cytokines and the Neuroimmune Axis," Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology 116A, no. 3 (1997): 183-201.
King, George L., et al., "Biochemical and Molecular Mechanisms in the Development of Diabetic Vascular Complications," Diabetes 45, suppl. 3 (July 1996): S105-S108.
Lakatta, E. G., et al., "Spontaneous Myocardial Calcium Oscillations: Are They Linked to Ventricular Fibrillation?" / Cardiovasc Electrophysiol 4, no. 4 (August 1993): 473-489.
Levin, Ellis R., M.D., et al., "Natriuretic Peptides," Mechanisms of Disease 339, no. 5 (July 30,1998): 321-328.
Mackenzie, Dana, "New Clues to Why Size Equals Destiny," Science 284 (June 4, 1999): 1607-1609.
McCully, Kilmer S. "Homocysteine and vascular disease," Nature Medicine 2 (1996): 386-389.
Miguez, J. M . , et a l , "Evidence for a Regulatory Role of Melatonin on Serotonin Release and Uptake in the Pineal Gland," Journal of Neuroendocrinology 7, no. 12 (December 1995): 949-956.
Modai, I., et al., "Blood Levels of Melatonin, Serotonin, Cortisol, and Prolactin in Relation to the Circadian Rhythm of Platelet Serotonin Uptake," Psychiatry Res 43, no. 2 (August 1992): 161-166.
Nakata, Masanori, et al., "Leptin Promotes Aggregation of Human Platelets via the Long Form of Its Receptor," Diabetes 48 (1999): 426-429.
Nilsson, P. M . , "Premature Ageing: The Link between Psychosocial Risk Factors and Disease," Medical Hypotheses 47, no. 1 (July 1996): 39-42.
Pinkney, Jonathan H . , et al., "Endothelial Dysfunction: Cause of the Insulin Resistance Syndrome," Diabetes 46, suppl. 2 (September 1997): S9-S13.
Schwartz, William J., "Internal Timekeeping," Science & Medicine (May/June 1996), 44-53.
Semenkovich, Clay E, et al., "The Mystery of Diabetics and Atherosclerosis," Diabetes 46 (March 1997): 327-334.
Sensi, S., et al., "Chronobiology in Endocrinology," Annali dell Instituto Superiore di Sanita 29, no. 4 (1993): 613-631.
Shimizu, K., et al, "Sympathetic Dysfunction in Heart Failure," Bailieres Clinical
Endocrinology and Metabolism 7, no. 2 (April 1993): 439-463.
Storey, K. B., "Metabolic Regulation in Mammalian Hibernation: Enzyme and Protein Adaptations," Comp Biochem Physiol A Physiol 118, no. 4 (December 1997): 1115-1124.
Tamura, K., et al., "Chronotherapy for Coronary Heart Disease," Japanese Heart Journal 38, no. 5 (September 1997): 607-616.
Wehr, Thomas A., "Melatonin and Seasonal Rhythms," Journal of Biological Rhythms 12, no. 6 (December 1997): 518-527.
West, Geofy B., et al., "A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology," Science 276 no. 5309 (April 1997): 122-126.
Whitworth, J. A., et al., "Mechanisms of Cortisol-Induced Hypertension in Humans," Steroids 60, no. 1 (January 1995): 76-80.
Wiley, T. S., and Bent Formby. Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival. New York: Pocket, 2001. Print.
Woolf, Neville, et al., "Arterial Plaque and Thrombus Formation," Scientific American Science and Medicine (September/October 1994), 38-47.
Yudkin, John S., M.D., "Sucrose, Coronary Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Obesity: Do Hormones Provide a Link?" American Heart Journal 115 (February 1988): 493-498.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Day 18 of hCG Protocol Diet and Going Strong!!!
Haven't written lately because life has gotten in my way (smiling). I am on Day 18 now of the 26 day Dr. Simeon hCG Protocol. I am down to 122.8 lbs. I have lost a total of 9 inches over my entire body. My body composition looks amazing! I feel really strong. Has it been a piece of cake? No! On the other hand, it hasn't been excruciatingly difficult either. I did have one glass of wine on July 4th (which is not on the protocol) but I am in the maintenance part of the protocol now while still using the hCG injections. Meaning I have had to increase my caloric intake from 500 calories to around 800-1000 since I really don't have much more fat to lose. I have 8 more days to go on the injections and then three days after that to remain on the low caloric intake until all the hCG is out of my system. This essentially "resets" the hypothalamus and your body will begin to burn and store fats differently as long as you maintain a caloric intake that your body burns on a daily basis.
I don't know if oral hCG or sublingual, or nasal spray hCG is as effective as the intramuscular injections. I do know that the IM has worked for me. Jerome did not last on the protocol and is really impressed with the results he has seen in my transformation in 18 days. I realize I wasn't obese or overweight before the diet. What I wanted to understand is when the fat came off WHERE did I lose it from? The answer is I lost it from my waist, thighs, and hips/buttocks. Those are the most resistant areas to lose fat from! Read Dr. Simeon's manual Pounds and Inches if you are really seriously interested in trying this protocol. It works if you can stick to it!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
I don't know if oral hCG or sublingual, or nasal spray hCG is as effective as the intramuscular injections. I do know that the IM has worked for me. Jerome did not last on the protocol and is really impressed with the results he has seen in my transformation in 18 days. I realize I wasn't obese or overweight before the diet. What I wanted to understand is when the fat came off WHERE did I lose it from? The answer is I lost it from my waist, thighs, and hips/buttocks. Those are the most resistant areas to lose fat from! Read Dr. Simeon's manual Pounds and Inches if you are really seriously interested in trying this protocol. It works if you can stick to it!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Day 14 of hCG Diet Protocol Blog
Day 14 of hCG Diet Protocol
So today it has been two weeks since I started using the bodybugg and I was able to enter my new measurements. I have gained 4 lbs of muscle and lost 4% body fat. My waist dropped a whole inch and a half. My hips dropped 5 inches and my thighs lost an inch and a half! Wow in 14 days! That’s amazing. And I have a nemesis who keeps tempting me with wine, red wine, that he knows I love! Okay so tonight I might give in and have one glass (if there is any left by the time I make a decision lol). Jerome loves red wine too (smile).
I didn’t lose any inches in my chest, upper arms, forearms or calves. I am a little hungry but really not minding not eating now like I was in the beginning. I really am motivated to continue with the protocol. Going to go read more about it. Tune in tomorrow!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
So today it has been two weeks since I started using the bodybugg and I was able to enter my new measurements. I have gained 4 lbs of muscle and lost 4% body fat. My waist dropped a whole inch and a half. My hips dropped 5 inches and my thighs lost an inch and a half! Wow in 14 days! That’s amazing. And I have a nemesis who keeps tempting me with wine, red wine, that he knows I love! Okay so tonight I might give in and have one glass (if there is any left by the time I make a decision lol). Jerome loves red wine too (smile).
I didn’t lose any inches in my chest, upper arms, forearms or calves. I am a little hungry but really not minding not eating now like I was in the beginning. I really am motivated to continue with the protocol. Going to go read more about it. Tune in tomorrow!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Day 13 of hCG Diet Protocol and the start of Day 14
I didn't have one second to write yesterday in my day, literally!!! So I'm going to just kind of give you a relay of the day. I woke up and weighed in at 125.8. Down again! What a great feeling and it makes me feel like I'm progressing because I wasn't feeling that way the day before. I am feeling really good. I actually feel better eating less. The mental part of the diet is getting easier too because it is becoming more habitual for me. I'm really not craving "snacking" as much anymore. If I were to snack it would be just to satisfy the need to put something in my mouth and that's about it. Very interesting to me the mental part of this exercise.
Ate my usual lunch of the protocol. Finally figured out the correct dosage for me to use to inject IM every morning. That's the part where you really need a doctor's guidance if you aren't familiar with doing this type of stuff. So I'm talking about laymen persons, not bodybuilders, etc. I ate lunch after I ran a bunch of errands at lunch and felt fine the whole day. Had meetings after work so I didn't even get to eat my 250 calorie dinner until 930 pm last night. Bedtime last night wasn't until midnight. It was a really busy busy day! Won't bore anyone with those details of why I'm so busy lol. No time to exercise today. "Life" took over, like it does for many of us in today's world.
Today is now Day 14 and I weighed in at 124.6. I fit into my "skinny" pants again. So now I weigh the same amount I did when I went to Arizona last August 2009 (and if anyone really cares, there is a bathing suit picture on facebook of me under my "Arizona trip" if you are a facebook fan of mine). I liked that size and weight. So I'm not sure how much more weight I want to lose, and the protocol says that it's recommended a full cycle for this to be successful and keep it off going forward but to increase your calories to 800-1000 a day if you reach your goal weight before the end of the cycle and there are specific instructions how to do that in the manual "Pounds and Inches" written by Dr. Simeons.
Since I've now reached the "halfway" mark I feel like I can make it to the end. Maybe this is similar to running a marathon, or when a woman is 20 weeks pregnant (well maybe 30 weeks lol) and you can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel so to speak. I just know the end is near. Yet, I really don't know how it all will turn out because I haven't reached it.
I'm wondering how many of my "patients" who want to try this diet will be able to adhere to the strictness of the protocol. One has to really have the right mindset to start this and complete it. Also the motivation. Then there is peer pressure. There are so many factors that go into the success of this diet, but what I'm experiencing is it is working. The fat is melting away from my body amazingly fast and I'm not losing a ton of lean body mass because my bodybugg is measuring my metabolic rate while I'm on this diet and it hasn't become less, if anything it has become a little higher. Because I have so much energy I'm moving all day long!!
Loving this!!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Ate my usual lunch of the protocol. Finally figured out the correct dosage for me to use to inject IM every morning. That's the part where you really need a doctor's guidance if you aren't familiar with doing this type of stuff. So I'm talking about laymen persons, not bodybuilders, etc. I ate lunch after I ran a bunch of errands at lunch and felt fine the whole day. Had meetings after work so I didn't even get to eat my 250 calorie dinner until 930 pm last night. Bedtime last night wasn't until midnight. It was a really busy busy day! Won't bore anyone with those details of why I'm so busy lol. No time to exercise today. "Life" took over, like it does for many of us in today's world.
Today is now Day 14 and I weighed in at 124.6. I fit into my "skinny" pants again. So now I weigh the same amount I did when I went to Arizona last August 2009 (and if anyone really cares, there is a bathing suit picture on facebook of me under my "Arizona trip" if you are a facebook fan of mine). I liked that size and weight. So I'm not sure how much more weight I want to lose, and the protocol says that it's recommended a full cycle for this to be successful and keep it off going forward but to increase your calories to 800-1000 a day if you reach your goal weight before the end of the cycle and there are specific instructions how to do that in the manual "Pounds and Inches" written by Dr. Simeons.
Since I've now reached the "halfway" mark I feel like I can make it to the end. Maybe this is similar to running a marathon, or when a woman is 20 weeks pregnant (well maybe 30 weeks lol) and you can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel so to speak. I just know the end is near. Yet, I really don't know how it all will turn out because I haven't reached it.
I'm wondering how many of my "patients" who want to try this diet will be able to adhere to the strictness of the protocol. One has to really have the right mindset to start this and complete it. Also the motivation. Then there is peer pressure. There are so many factors that go into the success of this diet, but what I'm experiencing is it is working. The fat is melting away from my body amazingly fast and I'm not losing a ton of lean body mass because my bodybugg is measuring my metabolic rate while I'm on this diet and it hasn't become less, if anything it has become a little higher. Because I have so much energy I'm moving all day long!!
Loving this!!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Day 12 of hCG Diet Protocol
Woke up today feeling really refreshed. My body feels tight. My abdomen flat. Colon is empty. No food will do that I guess. My first “snack” was a little after 11 and I had my allotted amount of breadsticks. I buy the mini ones so it feels like I get to eat more. It still seems like little to nothing to eat so I find if I eat them slooooowly it helps. I’m drinking water with a squeezed lemon in it and then I add a packet of Sun Crystals (which is an all natural sweetener that is a blend of stevia and pure cane sugar and has 5 calories per packet) to it and it seems to crave any sweet taste that I sometimes think I want.
At work today we were brought in amazing looking food from a restaurant in Lombard called Broosters. That was a tough lunch to get through. I’m looking at large chicken breasts that were in this barbecue sauce and two large salads with tons of croutons and a pasta salad and there I was eating my 100 grams of white fish and 3 celery sticks. I decided to save my apple for a little later since I knew the desire to eat something would kick in around 3 in the afternoon. The rep was so nice, he gave me his card and said go to this restaurant when you are off this diet protocol and have this meal on me. I think I will take his offer up!!
The rest of the day was busy busy which is why this is posted so late. Haven't cheated once yet. Doing awesome. Lost another 0.8 lbs.
Keep reading!!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
At work today we were brought in amazing looking food from a restaurant in Lombard called Broosters. That was a tough lunch to get through. I’m looking at large chicken breasts that were in this barbecue sauce and two large salads with tons of croutons and a pasta salad and there I was eating my 100 grams of white fish and 3 celery sticks. I decided to save my apple for a little later since I knew the desire to eat something would kick in around 3 in the afternoon. The rep was so nice, he gave me his card and said go to this restaurant when you are off this diet protocol and have this meal on me. I think I will take his offer up!!
The rest of the day was busy busy which is why this is posted so late. Haven't cheated once yet. Doing awesome. Lost another 0.8 lbs.
Keep reading!!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Day 11 of hCG Diet Protocol
Okay, so it was probably the wine last night, but I've been HUNGRY all day long today! Haven't swayed from the diet. I ate 100 grams of chicken at lunch with 4 strawberries, 1 cucumber, and a breadstick (not a buttery, soft one either, that really sounds amazingly good right now lol). For dinner I had 100 grams of sirloin steak, asparagus, 1 apple, and a breadstick. The breadsticks are like the thin ones you get in Italy that taste have no taste but they do crunch.
I've been trying to stay hydrated but find it hard to keep drinking water because I'm on the run all day. Energy level is great. I feel really good. My body is really losing body fat everywhere I want it to leave! On that end I have no complaints at all. I'm getting sort of tired of eating this diet. Wishing I had more to lose maybe and then it would be worth continuing, but the protocol says you must do atleast a 26 day cycle even if you lose all the weight you need to lose before the 26 day or you will gain it all back. I DON'T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN! YIKES! So if I reach my target weight before the 26th day I am to increase my calories to 800-1000 daily instead of 500. I have to read more about that. Do I just increase the same foods on the current menu by doubling it to 200 grams, 8 strawberries, etc. I'll read into that because I have a feeling I'm going to be reaching my goal weight in less than a week.
All of my skinny clothes are fitting again. When I met Jerome I weighed 124 lbs, so that is probably going to be my target weight. Unless I want to try for 120 lbs, which it has been a LONG TIME since I've weighed that. And I really don't know if I could maintain that size for very long. I work in an office that is always full of tempting foods and wonderful desserts!! Mmmmmm, can you tell I'm really hungry? lol
I'm looking forward to my injection tomorrow morning and really hope that it works better tomorrow than it did today. Another suggestion I have is to not eat all 4 items that you get to eat at lunch or dinner and save one of them for a mid meal snack. That seems to help the urge to want to eat dinner too early and to snack later at night.
Cheers!! Good night
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
I've been trying to stay hydrated but find it hard to keep drinking water because I'm on the run all day. Energy level is great. I feel really good. My body is really losing body fat everywhere I want it to leave! On that end I have no complaints at all. I'm getting sort of tired of eating this diet. Wishing I had more to lose maybe and then it would be worth continuing, but the protocol says you must do atleast a 26 day cycle even if you lose all the weight you need to lose before the 26 day or you will gain it all back. I DON'T WANT THAT TO HAPPEN! YIKES! So if I reach my target weight before the 26th day I am to increase my calories to 800-1000 daily instead of 500. I have to read more about that. Do I just increase the same foods on the current menu by doubling it to 200 grams, 8 strawberries, etc. I'll read into that because I have a feeling I'm going to be reaching my goal weight in less than a week.
All of my skinny clothes are fitting again. When I met Jerome I weighed 124 lbs, so that is probably going to be my target weight. Unless I want to try for 120 lbs, which it has been a LONG TIME since I've weighed that. And I really don't know if I could maintain that size for very long. I work in an office that is always full of tempting foods and wonderful desserts!! Mmmmmm, can you tell I'm really hungry? lol
I'm looking forward to my injection tomorrow morning and really hope that it works better tomorrow than it did today. Another suggestion I have is to not eat all 4 items that you get to eat at lunch or dinner and save one of them for a mid meal snack. That seems to help the urge to want to eat dinner too early and to snack later at night.
Cheers!! Good night
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Day 10 and start of Day 11 of hCG Diet Protocol
Yesterday was Day 10 of the hCG diet and all day went great! Not hungry hardly at all. The thought of food was there of course, but sticking to the protocol wasn't bad. I had five boys at home yesterday and was doing some cooking for them throughout the day and that is where temptation of snacking can sneak up on me if I'm not in the present moment with what I really want.
Come Saturday night, my partner, who is also trying the protocol, came over and, through peer pressure :) had a glass or two or three of wine with him. I justified this by thinking of all "real patients" who are going to have difficulty being strict with this protocol. Was a little nervous about getting on the scale this morning thinking I am not going to lose a pound but maybe even gain one!! Instead I lost another pound! My weight this morning was 126.6! I followed the food part of the diet strictly all day. I'm not saying that "cheating" every day is going to get you very far on this protocol. This is one day out of 26 days on this protocol. I have 15 days left to go after today! Wow! I'm going to post a picture on face book of me now fitting in my "skinny" pants that are not at all too tight and look pretty good. No bulging around the thighs!!
I'm actually looking forward to that injection every morning now. I feel like I can "feel" the fat melting away from the abnormal areas. Once I'm done with the 26 days of the 500 calorie part, I'm going to start adding in a weight lifting regimin for the three weeks that there still is no alcohol, starch, or sugar allowed.
Keep you posted. Write more later tonight about todays day!!
Have an awesome day!!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Come Saturday night, my partner, who is also trying the protocol, came over and, through peer pressure :) had a glass or two or three of wine with him. I justified this by thinking of all "real patients" who are going to have difficulty being strict with this protocol. Was a little nervous about getting on the scale this morning thinking I am not going to lose a pound but maybe even gain one!! Instead I lost another pound! My weight this morning was 126.6! I followed the food part of the diet strictly all day. I'm not saying that "cheating" every day is going to get you very far on this protocol. This is one day out of 26 days on this protocol. I have 15 days left to go after today! Wow! I'm going to post a picture on face book of me now fitting in my "skinny" pants that are not at all too tight and look pretty good. No bulging around the thighs!!
I'm actually looking forward to that injection every morning now. I feel like I can "feel" the fat melting away from the abnormal areas. Once I'm done with the 26 days of the 500 calorie part, I'm going to start adding in a weight lifting regimin for the three weeks that there still is no alcohol, starch, or sugar allowed.
Keep you posted. Write more later tonight about todays day!!
Have an awesome day!!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Friday, June 25, 2010
Day 9 of hCG Diet Protocol
This morning I woke up and weighed in at 128.4 today. A little disappointing seeing as I've been soooo faithful and didn't drink that sake I wanted really bad yesterday (smiling). So finally, I understand the conversion and dosed a little higher today and filled the too big syringe that I have for too little liquid extra so I got enough in to the muscle. Today I had NO hunger pains. Wow, it was awesome. There were so many temptations at work today with food. Desserts and food everywhere!! But, I'm being faithful to this for 26 days, and figure I've come this far I can't stop now. I've lost 11 lbs! I feel really good. I think that excess eating is habit and something to do and is a very social activity. On this diet, there isn't much eating so it feels different. Slightly unsocial even. Today, Jerome, my significant other, who is also doing this with me, slightly strayed from the diet. It was his friends birthday and he took him out for a drink. He says he really didn't even have the urge to drink, but did it to be social. That makes it very tempting to stray also so if he wasn't on it I can see how staying strict with myself would make it even more difficult.
Tonight we went to the movies and we brought our mini breadsticks to crunch on and water with us. No popcorn! So it takes a little planning. We weren't even craving the popcorn. The pattern was broken tonight. It wasn't even present, the urge just wasn't there. We saved about 450 calories from not eating popcorn and 200 calories in a coke and 280 calories for red rope licorice (that's a minimum of almost 1,000 calories)! Wow! That's amazing, that is a 1/3 of a lb. So our date night out at the movies cost a grand total of $20.00 vs $50.00 had we divulged in old patterns and we left feeling good although Jerome started to get a pretty bad headache, probably from the alcohol effects.
I will continue to post our progress. I'm not sure if you want to know what I am eating every day or not. I will write it in this one but won't write it in every post unless I get some comments to the effect they find it helpful. Today for lunch I had 100 grams of sirloin steak, 1 cucumber, and 12 mini hard italian breadsticks (total calories for the breadsticks is 50). I forgot all about eating my orange. When I got home from work around 6:30 pm I ate a green apple. Then for dinner I had 100 grams of chicken, 5 radishes, and 6 strawberries and 12 mini breadsticks at the movies. I am understanding this more and more by doing it and feeling it's effects and the psychological side of eating and dieting. It's pretty amazing.
What is also amazing is our kids are asking us to cook the same food for them. We cut up and measure 100 grams from a package of chicken and steak that we buy and put it in separate little baggies and store it in the fridge or freezer and it's all ready for us to cook. It makes it so easy. Not a whole lot of preparation. We can make dinner in about 10 minutes. It's really quick and you are in control of our intake. It's a good learning process about food and intake and how much we are really eating. And as I've been learning how many calories my body burns every day by wearing the body bugg which is about 2200 for me a day, I can see how I am losing this weight so quickly by eating only 500 calories a day, but it is also teaching me how much I can eat daily to maintain my weight. It's simple math. The difficult part is in all the different reasons why we eat so much.
So again, goodnight.
Cheers! Sweet Dreams.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Tonight we went to the movies and we brought our mini breadsticks to crunch on and water with us. No popcorn! So it takes a little planning. We weren't even craving the popcorn. The pattern was broken tonight. It wasn't even present, the urge just wasn't there. We saved about 450 calories from not eating popcorn and 200 calories in a coke and 280 calories for red rope licorice (that's a minimum of almost 1,000 calories)! Wow! That's amazing, that is a 1/3 of a lb. So our date night out at the movies cost a grand total of $20.00 vs $50.00 had we divulged in old patterns and we left feeling good although Jerome started to get a pretty bad headache, probably from the alcohol effects.
I will continue to post our progress. I'm not sure if you want to know what I am eating every day or not. I will write it in this one but won't write it in every post unless I get some comments to the effect they find it helpful. Today for lunch I had 100 grams of sirloin steak, 1 cucumber, and 12 mini hard italian breadsticks (total calories for the breadsticks is 50). I forgot all about eating my orange. When I got home from work around 6:30 pm I ate a green apple. Then for dinner I had 100 grams of chicken, 5 radishes, and 6 strawberries and 12 mini breadsticks at the movies. I am understanding this more and more by doing it and feeling it's effects and the psychological side of eating and dieting. It's pretty amazing.
What is also amazing is our kids are asking us to cook the same food for them. We cut up and measure 100 grams from a package of chicken and steak that we buy and put it in separate little baggies and store it in the fridge or freezer and it's all ready for us to cook. It makes it so easy. Not a whole lot of preparation. We can make dinner in about 10 minutes. It's really quick and you are in control of our intake. It's a good learning process about food and intake and how much we are really eating. And as I've been learning how many calories my body burns every day by wearing the body bugg which is about 2200 for me a day, I can see how I am losing this weight so quickly by eating only 500 calories a day, but it is also teaching me how much I can eat daily to maintain my weight. It's simple math. The difficult part is in all the different reasons why we eat so much.
So again, goodnight.
Cheers! Sweet Dreams.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Day 8 of hCG diet protocol - It's not getting easier yet
So, I feel like I'm still trying to work out the bugs learning the dosing of a 10,000 IU bottle of hCG. I was told to dilute it with 10 cc of solvent water, but then to get the right size syringe to inject enough 125 IU to 175 IU and converting cc to IU is NOT EASY!! First, off it is such a small amount when you dilute with that amount of water that it is hard to get it all out of the syringe so I end up sticking myself twice refilling the syringe to get the right amount out of the syringe. That isn't fun. So reading some blogs of hCG "pros" I am seeing that if I dilute with a different amount of solution (say 20 cc of solvent water) then you can use 0.25 cc for a 125 IU dose and 0.30 cc for a 175 IU dose. Anyway, I'll figure that out before I start prescribing it and make it easier to dose. I'll dilute it to make a 0.5 ml dosing because that is a good amount that you can easily get out of the syringe and NOT have to do it twice. lol.
Okay, I have to admit. I was hungry all day today. I had to get a solumedrol injection today though because I have terrible laryngitis that I get almost once a year if I end up with a sore throat. Hate the shot. Hurts a lot! But, hopefully by tomorrow I will have somewhat of a voice. So that probably really shot the hCG out of the water so to speak. I still stuck with the diet all day though. I ate the usual. Go to previous blogs. Same stuff haha.
Went car shopping. Found a car. That was a relief. Still have to deal with my junker car that needs a transmission and is stuck at the dealership though. My kids all wanted Chinese food, which was the same thing we had brought in for lunch today at work and the smells permeating the room were enough to drive me crazy with hunger :) So you can see today was a little hard! Then I had this craving for sake! I love sake, especially around japense type food and this place we went to makes awesome sushi. Talked about it but held out. Didn't do it. Feel good about that choice now that I'm finally ready to go to bed. Tomorrow will be really nice to weigh in knowing that I followed the protocol to the T. I didn't cheat. Lot of temptations today.
Keep reading. I'll keep posting. Any comments or questions are appreciated.
Cheers! Good night!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Okay, I have to admit. I was hungry all day today. I had to get a solumedrol injection today though because I have terrible laryngitis that I get almost once a year if I end up with a sore throat. Hate the shot. Hurts a lot! But, hopefully by tomorrow I will have somewhat of a voice. So that probably really shot the hCG out of the water so to speak. I still stuck with the diet all day though. I ate the usual. Go to previous blogs. Same stuff haha.
Went car shopping. Found a car. That was a relief. Still have to deal with my junker car that needs a transmission and is stuck at the dealership though. My kids all wanted Chinese food, which was the same thing we had brought in for lunch today at work and the smells permeating the room were enough to drive me crazy with hunger :) So you can see today was a little hard! Then I had this craving for sake! I love sake, especially around japense type food and this place we went to makes awesome sushi. Talked about it but held out. Didn't do it. Feel good about that choice now that I'm finally ready to go to bed. Tomorrow will be really nice to weigh in knowing that I followed the protocol to the T. I didn't cheat. Lot of temptations today.
Keep reading. I'll keep posting. Any comments or questions are appreciated.
Cheers! Good night!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Day 7 of hCG Diet
No joking, I got on the scale this morning and weighed in at 129 and 28% body fat. Just a week ago I was 138-140 and 30% body fat. A lot going on too with "life" and "stress" and I've still managed to stick to the program.
Today was my first day of intramuscular injection. I tried the subcutaneous injection yesterday in the abdomen and wasn't that impressed with how it "felt" physically all day. I was a little nervous about injecting myself in the medial glute with a 2 inch needle and I need to get the right size syringes because all I was sent by the pharmacy was insulin syringes that I can't change the needle on so I had to use what I had which was a 10 ml syringe (way to big!!) and because I am only injecting 0.125 ml I had to do it twice because the first time I couldn't even get the liquid out of the syringe!!! So this really is a learning experience for me. So learning lesson #1 for injecting IM I need to have the right size syringes and needles.
The injection itself was relatively painless. The medicine doesn't hurt at all - no burning or aching after injecting. I have not had a headache or felt nauseous all day. I actually have a bout of laryngitis so I stayed home from work and cleaned my house, did laundry, took care of little boys, and then had to do a bunch of driving to get a rental car returned and borrow a friends car and the weather here in Chicago was bad with a tornado watch and heavy rain during this entire episode.
Believe me, there were times during the day I thought about a glass of wine at the end of the evening. :)) But when evening came I really don't have any cravings for alcohol or food and can't wait to see what the scale says tomorrow morning!! My bodybugg says I walked over 10,307 steps today, I burned 2,186 calories and did 3.38 hours of heavy activity! If you don't know what a bodybugg is go to this link: http://www.bodybugg.com
So for lunch today I ate 100grams of chicken, 4 strawberries, a small persian cucumber and a italian plain breadstick. For dinner I ate 100grams of steak, 5 strawberries, 1 cup of spinach, and a plain breadstick,. Total calories just shy of 500. It's 9:26 pm and I do not feel hungry. My stomach feels flat and smooth. My energy level is really good. It actually is so good I have to make myself wind down. I could keep going!! I did the intramuscular injection today. This is a little bit confusing to get it down. There is a good website that helps break it down.
http://www.hcgfatloss.com/hcg-mixing-instructions.htm
I have had lots of questions asking me what I'm doing and how is this working so well for you? I want to stress that following the diet is a big part of this and using REAL hCG NOT homeopathic and not oral hCG is also key. My counterpart is using the nasal spray delivery and tomorrow I will start him on the intramuscular injections and report to you if there is a difference to him. He wants to lose about 30 lbs and so far on the diet has lost 6 lbs. He started at 233 and is now 228.
Keep reading!! Sweet Dreams.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Today was my first day of intramuscular injection. I tried the subcutaneous injection yesterday in the abdomen and wasn't that impressed with how it "felt" physically all day. I was a little nervous about injecting myself in the medial glute with a 2 inch needle and I need to get the right size syringes because all I was sent by the pharmacy was insulin syringes that I can't change the needle on so I had to use what I had which was a 10 ml syringe (way to big!!) and because I am only injecting 0.125 ml I had to do it twice because the first time I couldn't even get the liquid out of the syringe!!! So this really is a learning experience for me. So learning lesson #1 for injecting IM I need to have the right size syringes and needles.
The injection itself was relatively painless. The medicine doesn't hurt at all - no burning or aching after injecting. I have not had a headache or felt nauseous all day. I actually have a bout of laryngitis so I stayed home from work and cleaned my house, did laundry, took care of little boys, and then had to do a bunch of driving to get a rental car returned and borrow a friends car and the weather here in Chicago was bad with a tornado watch and heavy rain during this entire episode.
Believe me, there were times during the day I thought about a glass of wine at the end of the evening. :)) But when evening came I really don't have any cravings for alcohol or food and can't wait to see what the scale says tomorrow morning!! My bodybugg says I walked over 10,307 steps today, I burned 2,186 calories and did 3.38 hours of heavy activity! If you don't know what a bodybugg is go to this link: http://www.bodybugg.com
So for lunch today I ate 100grams of chicken, 4 strawberries, a small persian cucumber and a italian plain breadstick. For dinner I ate 100grams of steak, 5 strawberries, 1 cup of spinach, and a plain breadstick,. Total calories just shy of 500. It's 9:26 pm and I do not feel hungry. My stomach feels flat and smooth. My energy level is really good. It actually is so good I have to make myself wind down. I could keep going!! I did the intramuscular injection today. This is a little bit confusing to get it down. There is a good website that helps break it down.
http://www.hcgfatloss.com/hcg-mixing-instructions.htm
I have had lots of questions asking me what I'm doing and how is this working so well for you? I want to stress that following the diet is a big part of this and using REAL hCG NOT homeopathic and not oral hCG is also key. My counterpart is using the nasal spray delivery and tomorrow I will start him on the intramuscular injections and report to you if there is a difference to him. He wants to lose about 30 lbs and so far on the diet has lost 6 lbs. He started at 233 and is now 228.
Keep reading!! Sweet Dreams.
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Day 6 of hCG Diet Protocol
I was up until about 3 am last night studying about this hCG and how to dose it and what the studies have shown. I couldn't stop reading about it. I'm so fascinated by how my body is responding so quickly. I woke up at my usual time around 7 am. I'm not overly starving like I thought I was going to be. Had my usual busy day and energy level was great all day. I had to stop by the grocery store to get the right food so I am prepared for tomorrow because when the hunger does hit it is tempting to just EAT. I bought strawberries, cucucumbers, steak, chicken, unsweetened tea, sparkling water, oranges, apples, fresh spinach, and asparagus. Those seem to be my main staples. Then while I was cooking my 100 grams of steak for dinner I measured out 100 gram servings of the steak and chicken I got and put it into individual baggies. Then I just cook it up and it's ready to bring to work in the morning as I run out the door. My body is really shaping nicely. My waist is getting a nice hour glass shape to it and the fat is just melting off my buttocks (sorry Jerome, no more pillows to lay on :))) I weighed 130.8 pounds this morning. Just six days ago I was at a solid 137-138. I have to admit I have thoughts of just wanting to sit down and eat a bag of salty warm popcorn but my desire to learn how this hormone works overpowers that urge. I also have been trying different methods of the hCG from the nasal spray to SQ injections to IM injections. I'll keep you posted on my opinion which way is the most effective.
Cheers!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Cheers!
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Monday, June 21, 2010
Day 2 (Day 5 since starting) of hCG DIETING
So far going good. Woke up feeling really "light" this morning. Stomach flat. No bloating. Hungry yes!!! And only coffee with 1 tablespoon skim milk or water or tea is allowed until lunch time. By 11:00 am I was pretty hungry and getting a little nauseous feeling so I ate my allowed breadstick and waited another hour and a half before I ate lunch which today was grilled chicken (100 grams), 1 orange, and 1 small cucumber. Then I worked a full day. Was a busy day so that kept my mind off eating. Then tonight my transmission went out on my car just as I was pulling into my driveway and its 7:00 pm. I'm feeling hungry so I cooked up 100 grams of shrimp and put that on top of a bed of greens and then got the kids packed up and started to drive to the dealership to drop off my car and on the way my son gets a flat tire and I have to say my mood is good, I have lots of energy, and we changed the tire (my first tire that I have ever changed by myself!!) and we made it to the dealership 10 minutes before they closed (9:00 pm). What I am finding is that I have to be prepared with having the right food on hand and being prepared. So I came home and grilled 100 grams of chicken to bring with me to work tomorrow. I have oranges but I'm missing a vegie for tomorrow so that might end up being a snack I have to pick up at the grocery store somewhere in between meetings. I worked at finding a rental car for tomorrow and get my sons tire fixed and downloaded my bodybugg information, logged my food. My, this takes a lot of busy work to keep up with it all, but I feel so good. I have to say the shape of my buttocks is looking really good and it is only Day 5 (officially Day 2 of dieting) so I can only imagine in just 20 more days how I'm going to look and feel. It's 10:30 now so I have to get everyone to bed. But so far I'm liking the results of this and start the injections tomorrow. I have been doing the nasal sprays for the first five days because I didn't have the injections ordered in time. I'll see if there is a difference between the two forms and let you know. Sweet Dreams :)))
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
Call my office in Wilmington (815) 476-5210 or Lombard (630) 627-3700 to set up an appointment or email me at jones.gretchen@gmail.com
