My deep interest in nutrition resulted from a simple birthday gift of a mountain bike.  When I first received it, I lamented the thought of biking around town breathing in car exhaust.  The fact that I live about two miles from the base of Mt Lemmon was a godsend.  I looked up at that mountain and I immediately new I would someday reach the summit.  At the end of this story is a recommendation on a book that teaches us that life's changes are obtainable one small step at a time.  The book is based on the theory of Kaizen (Kai-good and zen-change or small steps to reach desired results) Consequently, if you are trying to accomplish or improve something, your mind is given the ability to come up with the solutions needed to do so, by not overwhelming it (creates mental fear) but rather by taking tiny incremental steps which develops self actuating motivational habits.  The best thing I love about biking now is that it allows you to experience thought provoking revelations that occur while in a meditative state that one falls into while pedaling.  I've solved many a problem because of it.  The following is what transpired and greatly benefited me by setting a goal to reach the top of this beautiful mountain pictured above.

Before I rode my new mountain bike, I decided to dust off an old ten speed I had in my garage and put it in the back of my jeep and drove to the base of the mountain.  I hopped on my bike and quickly realized that this thing was in terrible shape and that it needed serious care that I never provided.  As I started up the mountain, I thought to myself, boy, this is hard!  (My bike wasn't the only thing out of shape)!  I managed to go about a 1/4 mile up and around the first bend and quickly turned around to go straight home.  In retrospect, what happened next was hilarious!  As I was cowardly coming back down and around that bend, a group of cyclists were coming up the mountain.  Once they saw me, they quickly smiled one by one and gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up as though I had been to the top and was about to coast down to the finish line!  If they only knew, he he...  This is when I unknowingly became determined to succeed by starting the Kaizen theory of taking small steps to what ended up being life lasting healthy habits.  On my 50th birthday, May 18th 2001, I knew that my physical conditioning needed improvement before I attempted to ride any bike.  I incorporated a bicycle training routine that quickly taught me that I needed a balance of mental will power, weight lifting, aerobic conditioning and proper nutrition in order to achieve a personal goal of bicycling to the top of Mt Lemmon.  I began by first visualizing myself doing it and then broke down the goal to tiny increments needed to succeed.  My mountain bike was better suited for climbing because of the comfort and ease of pedaling it provided (like stair stepping) so I began by biking a couple of miles then three and so on until I went as far as I could.  At the time, I could only bike up nine miles because of road construction, so by knowing that the summit was 29 miles, I prepared by biking up and down three times without stopping.  (The highway flag lady looked at me like I was nuts).  Finally the construction ended and the road opened up, so with exhaustive preparation, I initially attempted to climb the full 29 miles non-stop to the observatory but unlike my training routine that allowed me to coast downhill half the time, this was now a steady arduous climb.  Regrettably after 20 miles, I nearly passed out.  (It's called "bonking" or "hitting the wall") which means that I didn't have enough stored energy from needed carbohydrate.  (Your liver stores blood sugar or glucose made from food, especially carbohydrates in the form of glycogen that is converted to energy by a hormone produced by your pancreas called insulin, once this is depleted, it draws on the stored glycogen in your muscles) I quickly realized that it wasn't my mental will power or strength that failed me but a combination of sustained strength and endurance that could only be achieved through proper nutrition.  Your brain can only function with a constant supply of glucose (Blood sugar) from carbohydrate plus oxygen, (the brain is totally glucose dependant and is unable store it) once your glycogen (Stored Glucose) reserves are depleted and you continue to exercise you will get disoriented, confused and eventually, comatose.  (That's why I almost passed out) Once I learned this, I was better prepared (I took carbs for energy with me) and made it to the top laughing at how easy it was in comparison to my first attempt.  Developing these Kaizen style techniques in my life has made it possible for me to repeatedly bicycle non- stop to the Steward Observatory, which is as high as you can climb up Mt Lemmon (9,157 FT) and to do the 113 mile - El Tour De Tucson, with just a couple of months of training.  I entered the 113-mile long city tour and except for a mandatory river wash crossing by foot, managed to do it non-stop with relative ease and in excellent time.  These achievements would not have been possible without me acquiring the knowledge I needed on nutrition through proper diet.  This lesson demonstrated the incredible importance of carbohydrate and oxygen.  An interesting example is when we are at work all day, we unknowingly take shorter breaths in the afternoon, so by doing a simple breathing exercise (oxygenates the blood to your brain) and consuming a small amount of a proper simple or complex carbohydrate (providing needed glucose) that contains either a soluble type fiber, protein or an acid (acids like apple cider vinegar or lemon can and do slow sugar assimilation, just drink a tea or water with either of these mixed in before consuming most meals) which will temper the carbs, will fuel your intelligence by making you alert and ready to handle the rest of day.  (A great afternoon meal is to use a small container that measures about a cup and a half and place a combination of cooked oat groats, buckwheat, quinoa, basmati brown rice (Jay's Mix) add blue/rasberrie/marion berries and mixed nuts with little cinnamon/applesauce.  This will really give you a great source of protein, acid, complex carbs to fuel the rest of the day.  If, however, you decided to consume a hamburger/fries type meal (which has to be the #1 American curse for disease) containing artery clogging saturated fat and worse yet, the white bread and fries would create an extreme glucose or better known as a sugar rush that spikes your fat producing hormone insulin that will make you sleepy after you come down from it.  New research has shown that this meal creates 3 to 4 hours worth of inflammatory damage to your body.  In this busy world we live in, we don't manage our time well enough to eat nutritionally but the lessons I learned from biking taught me that you have to make the time!  Bad habits lead to more bad habits that drain your energy and cause you to lose self control over proper food choices.  In researching my nutritional needs, I soon discovered a practical program that maintains body weight, provides sustained energy, helps prevent adult onset type II diabetes and lowers your bad LDL cholesterol and triglycerides.  I lost 25 Lbs, dropped my cholesterol from 208 to 141 (raised my HDL to 60 and lowered my triglycerides to 37) and have never gained it back thanks to this rewarding knowledge.  Most people don't know that some of the worst foods we consume are staples of the American diet (wheat & dairy).  Celiac disease is when a person cannot tolerate a grain protein called "gluten" in grains like wheat, barley and rye.  The grasses (wheatgrass or barley grass) of these grains are closer to vegetables than grains and are good for you.  High gluten grains are utilized for bread making because it binds them like "glue" and that is why farmers have purposely grown higher and higher gluten rich grains so the bread won't tear.  (bread makers even add more gluten beyond what is in the grain!)  Casein is the dairy protein that is also used to make glues.  You may have seen a bottle of Elmers Glue with the picture of a cow on it, Yep, cow dairy is where they get that sticky stuff!   Goat milk/yogurt has an insignificant amount of this glue type protein, therefore it is much much easier to digest and consequently better for your health.  65% of the world utilizes goat milk products with good reason, it has 13% more calcium than cows milk and its fat globules are smaller so it's easier to digest.  Soy and corn have what are called glycoproteins and contain this glue like adhering problem as well.  They can make super glue out of soy!  Why is it important to avoid these glues?  Because our stomach acids can't and don't break them down sufficiently and they clog up what are known as villi, small filament type hairs that give you a large surface area to assimilate nutrients with in our small intestine called the duodenum.  Unfortunately, this happens to be where we absorb most of our food nutrients such as calcium.  When the Villi are plugged up by the glue that passes through, the coating prevents you from absorbing the minerals they're rich in! One of the reasons that Italians and Greeks don't suffer as bad as us by eating these glues is because they generally drink red wine and eat salads after meals that can clean the villi to some degree.  It is possible that as we age we can become deficient in nutrients becasue of this and so perhaps the best thing to do is to avoid these foods. Humans are the only living beings that continue to drink milk past childhood.  That is because we were never taught differently by our parents.  We are all consistantly mesmerized and brain washed by tv ads (especially kids) to consume these potentially harmful foods (Love that white smile)?  I can personally attest to the fact that when I ceased to consume these glue like proteins, I was amazed at the difference in the way I felt and my cravings for breads, bake goods, dairy etc all but disappeared even when I thought it would be really difficult around Christmas!  Is it that hard to live without these food items?  No, as I mentioned above, by experimenting I discovered a great substitute I call the "Jay's Mix"  It is something that is really beneficial and nutritious (especially the Buckwheat groats, man I'm so glad I discovered these).  You can still have bake goods if you really need to by buying Quinoa, buckwheat and oat flours which are readily available and you can still have some goat milk with them).  It's not hard to convert, plus you will find new foods that make you feel great and sleep well at night !  Check out the recipe link on the left and you will see how Jay's Mix is made.  Please go to a website (shown below) I use to store my nutritional files called Diinoweb, once there, left click on the nutritional mp3's folder then left click on the folder called "Doctor J8.mp3" and then right click on that file and select "Save link as" (I would suggest saving it to your desktop or where you can find it easily). You will be astonished on what you will learn, by the way, there is a wealth of info on my site, listen to all the files when possible.

So, how simple would it be to consume some olive oil and apple cider vinegar on a pre-meal salad? Of these three, protein, fiber or a good fat, fiber is the easiest to employ for stabilizing blood sugar, as an example, take the different ways one can consume an apple, there is apple juice, apple sauce and the whole apple, all three contain carbs, apple juice is the least desirable for weight control/health because it is almost pure sugar, (when consuming any type of fruit juice, it is better to mix it with water 3 parts to 1) it has no fiber so it gets converted to fat the easiest (unless your exercising) and is considered high glycemic, apple sauce has the pulp, so now we have added some fiber, so consequently it is slower to raise your blood sugar levels which requires a less insulin response,  but clearly the whole apple is the overall winner because it has the peel and the pulp so consequently your body really has to work hard to digest it which makes it a moderate glycemic food and is the least harmful in weight/health management.  The peel contains a strong antioxidant call quercetin found in abundance in red apples.  An added note is that applesauce has a great virtue of helping reduce blood glucose but when you add cinnamon, it becomes a dynamo duo.  You can add cinnamon to applesauce or buy it already mixed.  Check it out-

Nay sayers of the glycemic index theory claim that most meals have a combination of carbs, proteins and fats so the meal is balanced and the theory doesn't hold up but just the size of a meal, even a nutritional one, creates a glycemic load that can spike your insulin, so it is advisable to keep your meal sizes down and to have a preferable mixture of lean protein, low/moderate glycemic carbs, and healthy fats at every meal if at all possible, by doing this, you can focus on utilizing the Glycemic Index theory benefits on the snacking part of your diet.  Once you learn this concept, you will find that this diet is easy to implement and consequently, keep for life. A great book that can help you learn these low to high glycemic foods by color coding them for you, is the GI Diet by Rick Gallup.  Just left click on his book shown below to take you to his website for more info.  Another good book is "Eat, Drink and be Healthy" by Walter Willett (Available at your local library which you can reserve on my library link up top to the left) He is a master in long term human studies dealing with health related diseases and the nutrition that can help.  The most important thing I learned from his book was the need for multivitamin/mineral supplement.  I never bought the theory that overly cultivated soils were so nutrient depleted that they couldn't produce vitamin rich foods, because in reality, plants synthesize vitamins as they grow.  Minerals, however, are dependant on soil quality.  So, even if you ate a perfect diet and exercised as you should, this may not be enough because today's environment has introduced us to thousands of new chemicals, toxins and pesticides/herbicides which have found their way into our food, water and air.  Add this to today's tremendous amount of work related stress and you may just agree that a good diet is insufficient to combat all this.  He recommends a simple inexpensive multi as a safeguard. When looking at vitamins try to get something that has government assurances of quality and assimilation and are balanced in vitamin percentages across the board.  B-12, Folic Acid, and B6 are extremely important!  Click on the "Methyl Magic" link on the navigation bar up top to the left and you will see why.  B-12 is made in various qualities, be sure to buy the form "methylcobalamin" and not "Cyanocobalamin" if at all possible, your body assimilates it better.  Capsules are preferable but here is a suggestion for any tablet supplement you may take, soak it in water the night before.  You will get the most out of it this way.  In weight loss, assuring yourself of certain vitamin/minerals can curb your cravings (Check out the cravings exposed link up top to the left).  If you eat well, try taking half the dosage they recommend, supplements will last longer this way.  You can get a glimpse of his book on Amazon's site.  I found a 50-page excerpt that you can read, check it out! You need to left click on the link below and then left click on the book photo to get the sample pages