Ingredients:
2 ripe avocados
1 jar artichoke hearts
1 can sliced black olives
2 garlic cloves, grated
¼ tsp onion powder or 1 tbsp. finely chopped onion
1/8 tsp cumin
2 tsp tarragon vinegar
½ tsp fresh lime juice
Sea salt to taste
Preparation:
In a medium mixing bowl, mash the avocados. Cut the artichoke hearts into pieces. Mix together all ingredients.
Ingredients:
12 oz. baked salmon, chopped
2 eggs or egg substitute
1 small onion, finely chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, minced or grated
2 tbsp. green onion, minced
1 tsp. spice blend of rosemary, sage, salt, garlic powder, onion powder
1-2 tsp. coconut flour
¼ cup coconut oil or butter
2 tsp. gluten-free mustard (optional)
Preparation:
Combine the salmon, eggs, garlic, green onions, spice blend, and mustard (optional) in a small mixing bowl. If the consistency is runny, sift the coconut flour over the mixture and combine well. Form the mixture into patties. Lightly fry both sides in a frying pan coated with coconut oil.
Ingredients:
1 4-6 oz can of water-packed tuna
1 green onion, sliced thinly
½ stalked of celery, chopped
1 tbsp. light mayonnaise (egg & soy free)
1 tsp. chopped olives
¼ avocado, mashed
2 butter lettuce leaves
Sea salt & pepper, if desired
Preparation:
Drain the tuna. In a medium bowl, add the tuna, onion, celery, olives & mayo. Mix to combine. Add salt & pepper, if desired. Cover and place in refrigerator to chill, or serve immediately. Serve on a butter lettuce leaf. Makes one serving.
Cannons and Canoes
One of my favorite quotes as it relates to power creation in the human body I read many years ago in Stuart McGill’s “Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance”. When speaking about how the body can generate the most power the book says, “You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe”. This image has stuck with me ever since I first read it and seems to simply explain how we need to address the athlete’s conditioning if we want to ultimately create maximum power. The absolute, crushing power of a cannon ball shot from a cannon is unmistakable. If you decided one day that you wanted to create a cannon with more power that could ultimately create more force, the first instinct would be to build a bigger cannon that used a bigger cannon ball. This is often the same instinct that we have as athletes when it relates to our sport. Getter faster on the bike means getting a better bike, a lighter shoe, a lighter wheel, or more aerodynamic frame. To get faster, runners want to get the best shoe and just run more miles. To get bigger muscles athletes think only to lift heavier weights and lift them more often. While all of these things do help to improve the performance of the athlete, the most important piece of equipment is often neglected: the body.
Let’s look back at our example of the cannon. What if all the focus was placed on building a bigger cannon and heavier cannon ball without paying much attention to the stability of the cannon. This is eloquently illustrated by thinking about firing a cannon from a canoe. If you put a powerful cannon on a canoe and fired it, the explosion would cause more energy displaced in the movement of the canoe rather than in the propulsion of the cannon ball. This same principle can be seen with athletes. Too often athletes are narrowly focused on big muscles and better gear, rather than focusing on the stability of their cannon. Remember that the more you stabilize the cannon, the more power you can create when shooting the cannon ball. Any loss in the stability of the cannon directly relates to loss of power in the firing of the ball. This is no different than the human body. If athletes lack proper stability then maximum power can never be created. This goes for every sport: golf, running, cycling, basketball, football, etc. Taking the cannon off of the canoe and putting it on the ground obviously yields better results. For the highly competitive athlete this needs to be taken one step further. Not only does the cannon need to be on solid ground, but it needs to be completely immobilized so that no energy is wasting moving the cannon when fired. This ultimate stability of the cannon allows for maximum force dispersed to the cannon ball.
For the athlete, this ultimate stability needs to be realized not only through the proper fitness training, but also through optimizing the stability of the internal health. Let’s briefly discuss these two:
Proper fitness training for the athlete needs to be very specific to what muscles and movements are involved in the sport. It also needs to build an athlete from the ground-up. This means making sure there is a proper base strength and muscular control from which power and strength can be built upon. It is far too common to see athletes who focus on power and strength, but have very poor stabilizing capacity and fine motor control.
Optimizing internal health is probably never even considered by the athlete as a way to ‘stabilize the cannon’. This is where I find true performance enhancement can really be achieved. Getting bigger, stronger, or faster is completely determined by an athletes ability to recover. This was discussed at length in a previous blog (read here: http://momentumsportstherapy.com/category/sports-and-fitness/) so we’ll keep it simple here. Just know that improving your overall health is the absolute best way to be able to train harder and recover faster. Using specified lab work, precise nutritional intervention, and high-quality supplementation can give athletes huge advantages in competition.
If you are a serious athlete that either wants to compete at a high level or stay in the sport for many years, start to consider that optimizing your health is the first priority to achieving those goals.
How to Make Bone Broth
Prep time: 10 mins. Cook time: 8 hrs.
Ingredients:
Instructions:
Pre-Diabetes Mostly Ignored by Medical Doctors
A new study recently published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine states that less than 25% of patients received and lifestyle or dietary advice when labs showed that they had pre-diabetes. Diabetes is one of the most serious and rapidly growing conditions affecting society today. It is quickly becoming out of control and the worst part is that the vast majority cases of Type 2 Diabetes are completely preventable and even reversible if action is taken early on in its development. That’s right, I said reversible! This disease progresses as sugar handling in the body and insulin sensitivity become dysfunctional. Both of these are things that can be changed and improved with the correct advice and lifestyle modifications. The other option, which seems to be the preferred course of action in modern medicine, is to wait until it progresses to full blown diabetes and then just prescribe medications for the rest of the patient’s life. Not only does diabetes cause problems with sugar control in the body, but it also affects almost every other system in the body. Hormone production and brain function are vastly affected by dysfunctions in the body’s ability to tightly regulate sugar. Not only that, but diabetes medications always lead to more medications. Inevitably, blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, and others to help with associated hormone and mental dysfunction are prescribed to help ‘alleviate’ future complications of a disease that could have easily been prevented.
To make this ‘hit home’ just a little bit more, the OC Register just reported that nearly 50% of Orange County adults have either unreported diabetes or are in the pre-diabetes stage. This is absolutely ridiculous! And studies show that up to 30% of these people will develop full blown diabetes with 5 years. This means that 15% of all Orange County residents will have diabetes within 5 years. Read the full OC Register story at http://www.ocregister.com/articles/diabetes-707589-prediabetes-percent.html
At some point we need to accept the fact that what we are doing is not working. Many disease processes are worsening and becoming more prevalent. Diabetes is just one of them. Autoimmune diseases are growing in number and becoming more common than diabetes. If all autoimmune subcategories are lumped all into one category, autoimmune disease is the most prevalent disease in the world. The BIG question needs to be completely changed! We need to stop looking so hard for new medications to treat the symptoms of worsening diseases. Instead, we need to start spending more research dollars on what is actually causing these diseases in the first place. Autoimmune diseases and diabetes, for instance, are many times created and worsened simply by the foods that we eat. All the new research already shows this, but only functional medicine doctors are applying it. More needs to be done to prevent misleading marketing and to start educating the public on what is really creating so many problems. People can and will make changes if they are actually armed with the correct information. The problem is that Big Pharma and Big Food don’t want you to know the truth. They are making serious money and have no intentions of stopping. However, all businesses are directed by consumer demand. As people start to demand healthier foods and alternative to drugs, big corporations will have to listen. So, start being your own advocate for health. Don’t simply take the advice of the guy in the white coat as truth. Do your own research, ask your own questions, and fight for your own health!
INGREDIENTS:
½ cup frozen blueberries
2-3 drops of organic vanilla essence
¼ cup chia seeds
1 cup almond milk
DIRECTIONS:
1. Soak chia in ¼ cup of water until they create a gel like form
2. Add all ingredients to blender & blend!
I feel strongly that everyone should be aware of the difference between pain care and functional care. By knowing the difference between these two, it will help you make more informed decisions about your healthcare.
First, let’s start with a basic understanding about these two approaches.
Pain care is pretty simple. If you are experiencing pain in your body, then something is wrong. If you aren’t experiencing pain, then everything must be fine. Because of this approach, the main goal is to stop the pain and if the pain is gone, then the patient is healthy.
The problem with this approach is it doesn’t address what underlying issue is actually causing the pain. That is where functional care comes in.
Functional care also addresses the pain, but then focuses on why there is pain to begin with and fixes the originating cause of the pain, not just the pain itself. This approach asks the question, “Why does it hurt and what is dysfunctional?” Functional care addresses the dysfunction causing the problem and focuses on overall health, beyond just addressing the pain.
For example, let’s say you are having pain in your knee. If you approach it from a pain care perspective, you should focus on the knee and massage it, or tape it, or even inject it with cortisone to make it feel better.
However, from a functional care approach, you want to try and figure out why the knee hurts. Knee pain is not usually caused primarily by the knee, but is caused by some kind of dysfunction in the hips. If you can address the dysfunction in the hips, then you can solve the knee pain long-term, while addressing the pain in the short-term.
If you don’t address that dysfunction, it doesn’t matter how much tape or cortisone you use, the pain will continue to come back.
Unfortunately, the traditional medical approach is geared towards the pain care model. Because of this, it’s important to understand that just because something doesn’t hurt doesn’t mean it is functioning properly.
If you would like to learn more about functional care and how we can help get rid of pain and fix the underlying dysfunction, please give us a call at 949-916-9742.
If you are looking for a way to quickly and easily get a bunch of nutrients into your body, then consider making yourself a shake. When I am referring to shakes, I am talking about putting things in a blender and mixing it up until it’s smooth. Doing this essentially allows you to get lots of good stuff into your body quickly. You can also throw lots of really healthy things into the shake, such as spinach, without tasting much of it at all.
Now, the healthiness of it depends on what kinds of nutrients are in your shake. If it’s a bunch of sugary powders or juice, then you are delivering sugar to your body in a way that might overload your system. However, if you have whole fruits, vegetables, berries and water in there, you are delivering good nutrients to your body.
Most people I talk to who are blending up shakes for breakfast or snacks throughout the day have really good intentions. They are doing it to be healthier. However, there are three ways that people usually sabotage their ‘healthy’ shake without knowing it.
Too Much Fruit – if your shake is all or mostly fruit, you are essentially creating a high density sugar drink, which can overload the system or have other adverse affects on your body. When you make your drink, the fruit shouldn’t be the bulk of it. A small amount of frozen berries is a really good option to add sweetness and to keep it cold. Spinach or kale should also be used to get additional nutrients into your shake.
Using Fruit Juices – most fruit juices are full of sugar. Even if there is no added sugar, fruit juices still contain a significantly high sugar load naturally. Again, this can overload your system and add to any problems you might be having. Instead, use almond milk, coconut milk, coconut water or just plain water.
Sugary Powders – a lot of the patients I see get a protein powder to add to their shake, but don’t realize that it’s full of sugar as well! In order to make protein taste really good, most powders have a large amount of sugar in them. We recommend using a clean, plant-based protein like Sun Warrior. It’s totally raw, mixes easily and tastes pretty good. Whey proteins are also not necessarily a bad option, but you must make sure that it is really high quality so that the whey is not derived from antibiotic and hormone-laden cows.
If you are looking for a really simple recipe that is easy to make and is good for you, I recommend using a 1⁄2 cup of frozen berries, 1-2 handfuls or spinach or kale, almond milk or coconut milk (as much as needed), and 1-2 scoops of protein powder. You may need to play with the ratios of almond milk and powder to make sure the density of the shake is not too thick. Adding more liquid will help reduce the thickness of the shake.
Having shakes is a really great way to get a lot of nutrients into your body and is also a quick way to make a meal. If you skip breakfast because you just ‘don’t have time’, there is no reason that you can’t spend 5 minutes to create a healthy breakfast shake. Try to avoid the common pitfalls to get the most out of the shakes by making them as healthy as possible.
If you’d like to learn more about proper nutrition and how shakes fit into that, please give us a call at 949-916-9742.