How to Release Stress

A postman with no knowledge of architecture build a ‘palace’

A postman with no knowledge of architecture collected stones on his 32km rounds for 33 years, and used them to build a ‘palace’ of astonishing proportions

Health Triggers to Avoid

1 Sodium Lauryl Sulfate


What it triggers: Canker sores

SLS is a common cleaning agent in many toothpastes, but it can alter the bacterial coating in your mouth, which could irritate the tissue and lead to a sore.

Solution: Switch to an SLS-free paste.Also, cut back on acidic fruits, such as pineapple, which can also irritate your mouth.

2 Slushies and Sugarless Gum


What they trigger: Diarrhea

Slushies can be full of fructose. Sugarless gum is sweetened with sorbitol and mannitol, both of which your body can't absorb easily. Consuming too much of either can draw more water into your intestines, producing soft stools.

Solution: Have fewer sugary foods (or at least eat them more slowly).

3 Too Much Coffee


What it triggers: Stomachaches

Caffeine boosts acid production and can irritate your stomach, causing a stomachache.

Solution: Eat food with your joe to absorb acid. Or switch to decaf (or a dark roast).

4 Cheese and Hot Dogs


What they trigger: Headaches

Cheese contains an amino acid called tyramine. Hot dogs have nitrites. Both can cause changes in cranial bloodflow, causing throbbing as the vessels in your brain narrow and then dilate.

Solution: Avoid foods that are high in tyramine--nuts, smoked meats, sauerkraut, pickles, overripe fruit, wine, and beer. And eat hot dogs that aren't chemically preserved.

5 Narrow Shoes


What they trigger: Foot cramps

Muscles are designed for contracting and relaxing. When they're trapped in narrow footwear for too long, they cramp up.

Solution: If you can't wear shoes that are less tight, roll a tennis ball under each sole to boost circulation and loosen the muscles. Repeat daily.

6 Hot Showers


What they trigger: Dry skin

Hot water and conventional soaps slough off skin cells that trap moisture. They also wash away skin oils. The result: dry skin.

Solution: Take quick, lukewarm showers and use an emollien-trich cleanser. Then pat yourself dry, leaving a few droplets for your skin to absorb, and apply a moisturizing ointment.

7 After-Dinner Mints


What they trigger: Heartburn

After a large meal, pressure builds in your stomach. Mint is a muscle relaxant and may induce acid reflux by flipping open the sphincter between your stomach and esophagus.

Solution: Slim down your portions, eat slowly, and avoid heartburn aggravators: fried foods, chocolate, high-fat meals, alcohol, caffeinated drinks, and acidic foods (citrus, tomatoes).

Fired-Up Foods that Burn Away Pounds

Milk, Whole Grain Cereal, Oats


Secret Ingredients: Calcium, complex carbohydrates, and fiber

How they work: Complex carbohydrates and fiber pump up metabolism by keeping insulin levels low after you eat. That's good, because spikes in the production of insulin send a signal to the body that it's time to start storing fat. And in order to stockpile fat, your body has to slow down your metabolism, causing you to burn fewer calories, says Margaret McNurlan, Ph.D., a professor of nutrition and medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Since oatmeal breaks down slowly in the stomach, it causes less of a spike in insulin levels than foods like bagels, she says.

Besides helping to keep insulin production down, eating breakfast can also help stoke your daily calorie burn. When the U.S. Navy studied the metabolisms and eating habits of a group of its personnel, it found that eating breakfast helped raise the men's metabolisms by as much as 10 percent. "By skipping meals, you slow down your metabolism and prime your body to store fat," says McNurlan.

The calcium in milk is a metabolic trigger as well. A University of Tennessee study found that dieters who consumed between 1,200 and 1,300 milligrams (mg) of calcium a day lost nearly twice as much weight as dieters getting less calcium.

Jalapenos, Habaneros, Cayennes


Secret Ingredient: Capsaicin—the chemical in peppers that gives them their bite

How it works: By speeding up your heart rate.

A study from the late '80s found that eating a single spicy meal can boost your metabolism by up to 25 percent, with the spike in calorie burning lasting for up to 3 hours after you finish eating. More recently, a study from Laval University in Quebec found that men who consumed coffee plus red pepper-packed snacks and meals were able to burn nearly 1,000 more calories a day than a control group.

Small snacks can also help keep your body from running out of fuel-preventing those 3 p.m. office blahs. "When you restrict the number of calories your body has for fuel, your metabolic rate can drop temporarily," says Susan Roberts, Ph.D., chief of the energy-metabolism laboratory at Tufts University in Boston. That makes it easier to pack on the pounds and harder to burn them off again.

Green Tea, Coffee


Secret Ingredients: Caffeine and a chemical in the tea called EGCG

How they work: Caffeine helps speed up your heart rate. The faster your heart beats, the more calories you burn. EGCG works in a similar way, but instead of revving up your heart, it causes your brain and nervous system to run more quickly-again helping you burn more calories.

In studies, researchers found that a combination of caffeine and a 90-mg dose of EGCG taken three times a day can help you burn an extra 80 calories a day. And that's just when your body's at rest. A study conducted by the Canadian government found that soldiers who consumed caffeine in the 12 hours prior to a physical-fitness test not only were able to work out longer before becoming exhausted, but also consumed more oxygen while working out. The body's oxygen requirements are directly related to the speed of-guess what-your metabolism, so the more oxygen you use, the more calories you burn during your workout.

Lean Beef, Pork, Chicken, Turkey


Secret Ingredient: Protein

How it works: It takes more energy for your body to digest the protein in meat than it does for it to digest carbohydrates or fat, according to Doug Kalman, R.D., director of nutrition at Miami Research Associates, a nationally recognized pharmaceutical-research facility. "That means that the more protein you eat, the harder your body has to work to digest it, and the more calories you'll burn in the process," he says.

When researchers at Arizona State University compared the benefits of a high-protein diet with those of a high-carbohydrate diet, they found that people who ate a high-protein diet burned more than twice as many calories in the hours following their meal as those eating carbs. Even better, researchers in Denmark found that men who substituted protein for 20 percent of the carbs in their diets were able to boost their metabolisms, increasing the number of calories they burned each day by up to 5 percent.

Salmon, Tuna, Sardines


Secret Ingredient: Omega-3 fatty acids

How they work: By altering levels of a hormone called leptin in your body. Several recent studies suggest that leptin directly influences your metabolism, determining whether you burn calories or store them as fat.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that mice with low leptin levels have faster metabolisms and are able to burn fat more quickly than animals with higher leptin levels. The best way to lower your leptin? Eat fish.

Mayo Clinic researchers studying the diets of two African tribes-one of which frequently ate fish and one of which didn't-found that fish eaters had leptin levels nearly five times lower than the levels found in tribes that primarily ate vegetables.

The good news, if you don't like fish: Fish-oil supplements may work just as well as the stuff with scales. French researchers found that men who replaced 6 grams of fat in their diets with 6 grams of fish oil were able to boost their metabolisms and lose an average of 2 pounds in just 12 weeks.

Ways to Cut Fat Without Realizing It

Slice Fat from Pizza

Always order your pizza with double tomato sauce and light cheese. Men who eat a lot of tomato products tend to have less prostate cancer—probably because tomatoes are a rich source of lycopene. Reducing the mozzarella by just one-third (you won't miss it) will save you 20 grams (g) of fat per pie. That's as much as in a McDonald's Quarter Pounder.

Order the Steak Fries


If you love french fries, always order the steak fries. Large-cut fries don't absorb as much oil as shoestring or curly fries, which lowers the fat count.

Juice a Stir-Fry


With a can of frozen orange-juice concentrate, you have a great way to add flavor to stir-fried chicken (or beef) and vegetables without adding fat. Just a few spoonfuls will do. (It's even better if you add some garlic.)

Soften Your Spread


Soften butter or margarine at room temperature or in a microwave. Chances are you'll spread your bread with one-quarter of the fat and calories you do when you put it on cold.

Cool Your Cans


Refrigerate canned meats, soups, gravies, and other canned foods containing fat. The fat will rise to the top and collect, so you can scrape it off.

Dilute Your Fruit Juice


Fruit juice is sneaky fattening—a 16-ounce bottle of cranberry-grape blend, for instance, contains about 275 calories. Dump half and store it, then refill the bottle with water. You'll barely notice the difference, and you'll be cutting half the calories.

Oil Your Potato


To save calories and fat, put a splash of olive oil on your baked potato instead of the usual butter or sour cream.

Say Goodbye to Rubbery Cheese


To prevent low-fat cheese from turning to rubber in the microwave, spritz your nachos with a quick blast of cooking spray, such as Pam, before nuking them. A similar trick involves spraying the inside of a grilled-cheese sandwich before you toss it in the frying pan. This adds just enough fat to make the cheese stay gooey and creamy as it slowly melts.

Balance Body Chemistry for Fat Loss & Health

We’ve all heard about the ravages of acid rain. Resulting from toxic emissions in the environment, acid rain damages the leaves and needles on trees, reduces a tree’s ability to withstand cold, drought, disease, and pests, and even inhibits or prevents plant reproduction. To combat the acidity, tree roots pull important alkalizing nutrients like calcium and magnesium from the soil.

An acid-forming diet and lifestyle is like acid rain in our bodies. We are essentially microcosms of the same problems our planet faces. The difference is that most of us are aware that we are polluting the planet, yet few of us realize that we are subjecting our bodies to similar acid waste.

But by making a few simple changes to your diet and lifestyle to balance your body’s pH you’ll experience incredible healing results like increased energy, resistance to colds and flu, the reduction or elimination of pain, and powerful potential to restore the health of your body. Many people who balance their body chemistry ward off heart disease, arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes, kidney disease, and cancer.

Imagine that acid and alkaline are two teams in a tug-of-war contest, each one holding the end of a long rope and trying to shift the balance to its side, and you’ll have a good sense of what happens every single second in your body. The pH spectrum ranges from 0 to 14, with 7 being neutral in the middle. Zero to 6.9 is acidic, while 7.1 to 14 is alkaline. When your pH balance tips toward either the acidic or the alkaline side of the spectrum, you are vulnerable to a variety of health problems.

In North America, because of our current eating habits, it is rare for anyone to become excessively alkaline on an ongoing basis; excessive acidity much more common, even among health conscious eaters. Your blood needs to stay at 7.365 and will deplete alkaline minerals from the bones and muscles, as well as tax the detoxification organs just to keep the balance, which can result in many harmful health effects.

The Impact of Acid

-The rate at which you age is determined by how acidic your body is. Graying hair, wrinkling and sagging skin are all worsened by acid-forming diet and lifestyle.

-Cholesterol levels soar to repair the damage caused by acidic blood, which scours your arterial walls like an S.O.S. pad.

-Research shows that cancer cells require acidity to survive. They thrive in an acid environment but are unable to survive in an alkaline one.

-Most people experience significantly less pain when their pH was balanced, including from: arthritis, migraines, and fibromyalgia.

Acid-forming Foods

One of the worst acidifying offenders is cola. At 2.5 to 2.6, depending on the brand, this so-called “beverage” is extremely acidic. It takes 32 cups of neutral water (most municipal drinking water is acidic) to neutralize a single cup of cola!

Other acid-forming foods include: anything sugary (natural or refined); white or wheat pastas, breads, and pastries; dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt, sour cream, etc.); chicken; eggs; fish; beef; lamb; and even most fruit. Yes, even fruit has an acidifying effect on the body. The myth that fruit becomes alkaline once you eat it has been floating around for decades. Unfortunately, due to its high sugar content, it creates an acidic environment in your body. That doesn’t mean you need to swear off all acid foods.

But, the bulk of your diet should be made up with alkalizing foods. Remember: it doesn’t matter whether a food itself is acidic or alkaline, but how it affects your body. Strive for at least 70% alkaline-forming foods.

Kick Acid Quick Tips

To help you get you started kicking acid:

-Drink water with the juice of half a fresh lemon (alkaline-forming in the body) squeezed into it to start your day.

-Drink “green drinks” throughout the day to help give you a boost of energy and balanced body chemistry. The highly alkalizing green food supplements are helpful in restoring pH levels quickly.

-Eat a large green salad with lunch and/or dinner.