Part 17 - Diet Diary
James' Diet Diary and Some St Christopher's Supplements
This month the Edinburgh fitness fanatic is back with some top tips about staying in shape on the road. Check out James McDonald's latest feature and discover the healing power of Homeopathy with a succulent St Christopher's supplement.
Story Highlights
-Homeopathic Remedies
-Dear Diet Diary
Homeopathy
When you get ill on the road it can be tough to figure out just what you should pick up from the drug store and just how far your travel insurance will go. So if you've got an open mind and you're willing to spend your hard earned pennies on something a little alternative, then Homeopathy could be for you.
Homeopathy is a type of medicine that treats like with like. It identifies your ailments and treats them with the same thing. So if you have something specific like the common cold, the remedy a Homeopath will give you will be a highly diluted natural substance - that if given in stronger doses to a healthy person, would produce the symptoms the medicine is prescribed for. So disease is treated with a watered down version of the disease.
The Homeopath diagnosed me with parasites in my intestines and gave me magnets that have the same kind of signature as the parasites themselves.
To be blunt, putting more toxins into your body when it's already fighting something sounds a bit re-god-dam-diculous. In fact because of this Homeopathy is widely discredited in medical circles. However a little bit of faith can be a wonderful thing and giving this a try can produce some incredible results where main stream medicine fails.
Caroline had been suffering from some awful allergies and was in and out of hospital in anaphylactic shock. She'd been through the conventional doctors, was on and off antibiotics and was ingesting super high doses of anti histamines with no results.
She said: “I was at the end of my tether. Nothing was working and I was getting sicker by the day. I couldn't go to work or even leave the house.
“I tried Homeopathy as a last measure but I should have tried it from the start. The Homeopath diagnosed me with parasites in my intestines and gave me magnets that have the same kind of signature as the parasites themselves. I just put them below my stomach for a few minutes everyday and after a little while everything cleared up.”
So it can work but there's also evidence out there to suggest it can make things worse. For example in 2006 a survey by the UK charitable trust, Sense About Science, revealed some homeopathic practices were advising travellers against taking conventional anti-malarial drugs. Instead they were providing them with a homeopathic dilution of quinine. Even the Director of The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital condemned this practice.
He said: "I'm very angry about it because people are going to get malaria - there is absolutely no reason to think that homeopathy works to prevent malaria and you won't find that in any textbook or journal of homeopathy so people will get malaria, people may even die of malaria if they follow this advice."
Professor Geoffrey Pasvol, a tropical medicine expert at Imperial College in London reportedly said: "Medical practitioners would be sued, taken to court and found guilty for far less. What this investigation has unearthed is appalling.”
Which side of the fence do you come down on? Let us know if Homeopathy worked for you or whether it's a waste of time by sending an e-mail to the St Christopher's team at submission@st-christophers.co.uk
Some Personal Training with James
As a personal trainer one of the greatest challenges I face is ensuring all the hard work performed at the gym is not undone by poor habits outside of it. How we live our lives outside of the gym in terms of rest, sleep and eating, can be just as accountable for the success of positive fitness. Taking in the right vitamins and minerals can be difficult but it will eventually be rewarding when you lose those stubborn inches and feel more vibrant and energetic in your daily life.
The most effective tool I've found to help my clients modify their lifestyles and behaviour is a Diet Diary. Simply put, I make my clients write down everything they eat and drink, how much sleep they get, how they feel throughout the day and anything else that relates to how they live their lives. This information and the physical act of recording how they live can help clients modify bad habits, recognise triggers in their lives that allow unhealthy eating and allow them to reach a true understanding of their food intake as a whole and not simply what they've eaten in one day.
I usually ask clients to record at least 5 consecutive days, including work and weekends so that I can gain an understanding of their typical lifestyle. Often we only really connect how we feel with what we have just eaten or how the last day has been. However in reality how we feel can be connected with a day or two of food and a few days of living.
Our most unhealthy eating will tend to take place when we are not paying attention to what we take in
A client cannot deny the reality of what they've taken in and how they've felt during the recording process. This process allows us to examine patterns in how we eat and how we feel as well as any external factors that encourage us to eat better or worse. If we feel great after getting a certain amount of rest and eating a certain way and feel bad after a different type of day and a different type of food, then obviously we can see which way we ought to live.
Further than that the information in the diary can let us know if certain situations, people, locations and other lifestyle factors make us susceptible to unhealthy eating and living. All of these will be unique to each person. Our most unhealthy eating will tend to take place when we are not paying attention to what we take in or when we are unprepared for situations that are conducive to unhealthy eating.
Important questions that we should look to answer from this task are:
Do we eat in relation to our mood or stress?
Do we use certain foods to cheer us up or to celebrate?
Do we engage in distracting activities while we eat so that we take attention away from what we are putting into our bodies? (Think of the size of those buckets of popcorn at movie theatres and how you manage to munch through half of it before the movie even starts).
Do certain people like family or friends encourage us to eat more of the things we know we shouldn't have?
Above all else the diary should be honest and accurate as you will only cheat yourself if you have a distorted view of how you live your life. If you use it correctly it can be a rewarding process. The real goal of chronicling how we live is to increase our awareness of how we live and feel. It is also to properly acknowledge the factors that influence our food choices, turn automatic behaviour into conscious decisions and create awareness where before there was none.
If there are any topics on health, nutrition and fitness that you would like to see addressed or you have any questions please contact me at Healthy.Living@St-Christophers.co.uk.
James
James McDonald is a St. Christopher's Manager and fully certified personal trainer working in Edinburgh.
