How drinking water can help you reduce weight

Can water—that has sustained life on Earth like an elixir for millions of years—be effective in the fight against obesity that continues to spread like an epidemic, triggering a litany of lifestyle illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease? Going by several studies, the answer seems to be in the affirmative. In fact, drinking an extra volume of waterbefore meals as a dieting technique has been known for quite long—recent studies have only reinforced its effectiveness as a weight-loss strategy.

Firstly, staying hydrated by drinking enough water can help you avoid overeating. Limited intake of water can force you to mistake thirst for hunger; so you end up eating more when you body is actually craving for water. For example, if you feel like having a midday snack, it makes sense to first have a glass of water and wait for half an hour. If the craving for food is caused by limited intake of water, it will disappear within that time. In other words, if you keep staying hydrated, you are less likely to fall prey to the false sense of hunger.

In fact, your appetite is clearly reduced when you consume an extra dose ofwater just before meals. According to a study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17228036, drinking a couple of glasses of water before meal has led to a significant reduction in the food intake in the case of middle aged or older people who said they experienced a sense of ‘fullness’ and were less hungry than before drinking water. The study also showed that drinking water before each meal is likely to enhance weight loss by 2 kg over a 12-week period.

According to another study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18589036,water consumed before meals has resulted in a 13 per cent reduction in the amount of calories consumed during the meal among non-obese older adults. The reduction in the amount of calories consumed in turn has led to weight loss over a few weeks. Studies http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25928232 have also shown that drinking an extra amount of water is linked to a fall in the intake of calories consumed and a reduced risk of weight gain and that substitution of sugar-sweetened beverages with waterhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25746935 is associated with lower energy intake and lower weight gain in the long-term, especially in childrenhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19336356 as water is calorie–free compared with sugar-sweetened beverages that are high in sugar and calories.

A study among overweight women http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18787524 showed that increasing water intake to over 1 liter per day can lead to a 2 kg of weight loss in a 12-month period. Another studyhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25097411 has shown that drinking 1-1.5 liters of water daily for a few weeks can lead to reduction in fat, body waist circumference and body mass index (BMI).

Also, drinking cold water is found to be more effective in reducing weight since your body uses extra calories to warm the water to match your body temperature when you consume cold water.

How much water you should drink

It is commonly suggested that an adult should drink six-eight glasses of water(about 2 liters) per day. However, this is not supported by scientific studies. In fact, how much water you should drink is decided by your age, nature of work, amount of physical activity, whether you are sick or not and, in case of women, if you are pregnant or not.
The intake of water is also influenced by the prevailing climate—for example, you will feel more thirsty during summer than winter. During summer, your body tries to adjust the temperature by expanding sweat glands under skin which leads to excessive formation of sweat and more loss of water from the body. On the other hand, during winter, since the loss of water from the body through sweating is minimal, you don’t feel like drinking water too often. In other words, the water your body contains is extracted faster by the sun during summer and in winter extraction of water is less.

Also, there are differences in the way people sweat—while some sweat profusely, there are others who don’t sweat at all. Naturally, those who sweat more need to substitute the loss of water from their body by drinking watermore often. Besides, if you are doing tough exercises or engaged in vigorous activities, you require more water than normal.

In addition, water intake is decided by the amount of dehydration. For example, bad mood, headache and inability to concentrate on what you are doing can be symptoms of dehydration. Though these symptoms your body is alerting you to drink more water and you ought to listen to your body.

It should also be noted that the amount of water you drink is in addition to thewater absorbed by your body from food, especially fruits and vegetables, as well as beverages such as coffee and tea.

As a rule of thumb, it is better to drink water when you are thirsty and drink enough till thirst is quenched. As the second rule, your water intake should be regulated based on the color of your urine which should be ideally mild yellow. If your urine is deep yellow in color, that means you need to drink more water.

Drinking water also means you should not be drinking something else—such as sugar-laden, high-calorie and carbonated beverages, including soda and sports drinks. In fact, the rising risk of obesity among children is contributed by the fad of drinking high-calorie sugar-filled beverages or juice whenever they are thirsty instead of plain water. Since water is 100 per cent calorie-free, it helps you burn more calories. So when you replace sugary beverages withwater, you are actually cutting back on sugar and calories.

Drinking beverages that contain fructose can especially nullify your efforts to reduce weight. This is the reason why many people struggle to cut flag even after trying a mix of weight-lose strategies—avoiding fat and counting calories, among others.

Soda can also be harmful because when you drink soda you are unknowingly consuming a lot of sugar in the form of corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup, which is a main ingredient in soda. Fructose also contributes to formation of adipose fat that collects in the abdominal region and is linked to the risk of heart disease.

Bottled or canned commercial juices are bad because they liberate methanol, which is metabolized to formaldehyde—a neurotoxin that affects memory, learning and behavior—in your brain.

Fruit juice too can sabotage your efforts to cut eight. It contains high concentrations of fructose and can induce spikes in insulin in your body which in turn will lead to a sudden fall in sugar level in your bloodstream, prompting you to eat more.

It is yet to be clearly ascertained if water is simply filling your stomach, making you feel full or boosting metabolism by helping the body produce more heat or reducing the amount of extra calories you may otherwise have consumed by drinking sugary beverages. Bu recent studies show that while water does not have any peculiar property that burns fat and reduce weight, its consumption is directly correlated to weight loss.

According to physician Fereydoon Batmanghelidj who authored ‘Your Body’s Many Cries for Water’, the implication of not drinking enough water goes beyond weight loss. Limited water intake can lead to chronic fatigue syndrome and depression to hypertension, multiple sclerosis and asthma.

So, if you are seriously concerned about overweight and obesity that lead to increased risk of high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, water is perhaps the magic potion that can help you burn the extra flab around your waist and in the process make you healthier.  

Why consumption of excess protein is harmful to your body

While there is a wide-spread awareness as to why protein is needed for metabolism and health, only a few people realise that continuous and excess consumption of protein can actually harm your body. Before dwelling on why excess protein is harmful, let’s understand what protein is and why you body needs it.

Structurally, protein is a biopolymer. Polymer is any molecule that is made up of individual building blocks that are linked together in repeating units (examples include plastic). Biopolymer is a polymer produced by living organisms (in addition to proteins, examples include DNA). The individual units that form a protein are amino acids. When individual amino acids are linked together, they are called either a polypeptide or a protein. A polypeptide is a chain of three or more amino acids that are linked together. A protein is a polypeptide that has ‘folded’ itself (proteins are among the most complex organic compounds found in nature and ‘protein folding’ is an intricate process; simplistically, when a polypeptide folds, it assumes a three-dimensional shape unlike the polypeptide itself that is two-dimensional). Proteins can be made up of one folded polypeptide or multiple polypeptides. Metaphorically, if a polypeptide is considered a yarn, then protein is a knitted sweater.

Nutritionally, protein is a key macro-nutrient without which there is no life. In fact, amino acids that form proteins are called ‘building blocks of life’ because they are the fundamental structural element of cells in your body. You need protein for growth and maintenance of your body. Apart from water, proteins are the most abundant type of molecules in your body. Protein is the major structural component of your body cells, especially those in the muscles. For example, keratin, a family of fibrous structural proteins, makes up your skin, nails and hair and also gives them their structure. In addition to enhancing growth of your body and its maintenance as well as providing its definite shape, proteins help transport molecules in your body. For example, hemoglobin, the protein that makes up red blood cells in your bloodstream, carries oxygen from your lungs to your body's tissues and returns carbon dioxide from the tissues back to the lungs.

Proteins also facilitate communication between cells that is crucial for maintaining life by carrying a multitude of signals. For example, ‘signal proteins’ such as hormones and neurotransmitters send messages around the body to initiate activities like glucose production and voluntary movements such as walking and lifting things.

In addition, proteins play a key role in body movements, including that of muscles, and molecular transport among cells. For example, while myosin and actin, two motor proteins enable muscle contraction, kinesin, another motor protein, moves chromosomes during cell division.
Besides, proteins help you fight diseases—antibodies that are used by your body’s immune system to fight viruses and bacteria that invade your body are proteins.

Most importantly, proteins work as enzymes to speed up innumerable life-sustaining biochemical reactions in your cells. Some of the biochemical reactions that happen in milliseconds with the help of enzymes would take millions or even billions of years to complete if they are absent. This means without proteins that work as enzymes them essential biological reactions in your body will not happen fast enough for you to stay alive.

Over 500 amino acids have been discovered in nature. However, only 20 serve as constituents of proteins that form tissues in your body. Of these 20, nine are essential amino acids because they cannot be synthesised by your body and must be supplied through your diet. These are phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine, leucine, isoleucine, lysine and histidine.
Of the remaining 11 non-essential amino acids (in fact, they are essential for your body but since they are synthesised by your body or derived from essential amino acids, they need not be a part of your diet), six are conditionally essential in your diet—while your body can synthesise these amino acids in normal conditions, it may not be able to produce enough of these to meet your needs when you are sick or your body is under stress. These are arginine, cysteine, glycine, glutamine, proline and tyrosine. The remaining five are dispensable as they can be synthesised by your body. These are alanine, aspartic acid, asparagine, glutamic acid and serine.

Animal sources of protein include meat, fish, eggs and milk as well as milk products such as cheese and yogurt. Staple plant sources of protein include whole grains and cereals such as buckwheat, oats, rye, millet, maize (corn), rice, wheat, bulgar, sorghum, amaranth and quinoa as well as vegetables and leaves, especially legumes, nuts and seeds, beans and peas and fruits. Legumes, some of which are called pulses have higher. Vegetable (or plant) sources of protein with higher concentration of protein include soybeans, lentils, kidney beans, white beans, mung beans, chickpeas, cowpeas, lima beans, pigeon peas, lupines, wing beans, almonds, brazil nuts, cashews, pecans, walnuts, cotton seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds.

Among vegetation food staples toots and tubers such as yams, cassava and sweet potato contain lesser concentration of protein. Fruits, while rich in other essential nutrients, are another poor source of amino acids. Vegetation foods with lesser protein concentration can be complemented with those which are rich in protein to ensure that your meal is balanced. This is especially important for children as protein is essential for enhancing growth.  

During digestion, proteins are broken down in the stomach in to amino acids necessary for dietary needs with the help of hydrochloric acid and a group of enzymes called proteases. These amino acids are then absorbed through the intestinal wall (if proteins are not properly broken down before they are absorbed, various health consequences may occur).

Before being absorbed in small intestine, proteins are broken down into single amino acids or peptides of several amino acids in your stomach by hydrochloric acid and pepsin, a digestive enzyme, and in the small intestine by trypsin and chymotrypsin, two other digestive enzymes. Peptides that contain more than four amino acids are not typically absorbed (newborns of mammals have exceptional ability to digest and assimilate protein—they can absorb intact proteins at the small intestine).

The amount of protein required in your diet depends on various factors including your body weight and composition, energy intake, physical activity level and whether you are ill or injured. Physical activity and exertion as well as enhanced muscular mass enhance the need for protein.
While protein is essential for your body, consumption of excess protein can harm your body. If you eat more protein than your body requires, it will simply convert most of those calories to sugar and then fat. Increased blood sugar levels can also feed pathogenic bacteria and yeast, such as Candida albicans (candidiasis), as well as fuel cancer cell growth.

Also, when your protein consumption is excess, your liver removes the amino group from the amino acid and converts it to ammonia which is toxic (the remaining amino acid mostly contains carbon and hydrogen which is used for energy). Ammonia is toxic to the human system, and enzymes convert it to urea or uric acid by addition of carbon dioxide molecules (which is not considered a deamination process) in the urea cycle, which also takes place in the liver. Urea and uric acid can diffuse into the blood and then be excreted in urine.

In a nutshell, consumer of protein beyond a threshold can lead to increased levels of sugar in your body (which can lead to diabetes and a litany of lifestyle diseases) and increased production of ammonia which is toxic and therefore is harmful.
 

Understanding anger : The foolishness of being a puppet

What is the most important thing for survival? There are a few things without which you cannot survive. What is the most important among them. Food, water, breath? We can survive without food and water for a few days but we cannot survive without air or oxygen even for a second. Do we all agree that breath is the most important thing required for survival?

According to positive psychologists, for each of our emotional condition—sad, angry, etc—there is a corresponding breath pattern. Otherwise, as we change our mood, our breath pattern clearly changes. Is this clear? Do we all agree?

Now turning this fact outside down, can we control our moods or how we respond to situations by monitoring and regulating our breath?

Recent scientific studies in positive psychology says yes we can change and in control of our moods, emotional reactions by monitoring and changing our breath pattern. Which means, we can get rid of negative mental conditions and moods such as stress, fear, depression, etc simply by regulating our breath pattern.

But are we giving enough importance to breathe without which we cannot survive for a second and bother to understand how our body is trying to assimilate breath for our survival and growth?

Unfortunately the answer is no; caught up in the rat race called modern life, we—when I say we, I mean the whole human community, not all of us who are gathered here—tend to think work, weakened shopping, eating out, facebook, what’s app, etc are more important. And we end up doing passive breathing, instead of active 

breathing. 

Basically there are two breathing patterns—passive and active. Passive breathing is what most of us normally do. So what is active breathing? Active breathing is breathing deeply and rhythmically. Simple—breathing deeply and rhythmically.

What is the benefit of breathing deeply and rhythmically? Why should we do this? Well when we breathe deeply and rhythmically, we inhale almost 10 times more oxygen—10 times more oxygen. Which means our blood is awash with oxygen and our cells get abundant supply of oxygen which can revamp, rejuvenate us. Once we practice deep and rhythmic breathing, we transform from being lethargic to active; from being depressed to vibrant, being sad to joyful. Active breathing also reduce blood pressure, headache, stomach problems, depression, anxiety, fear, etc.  

So can a do a brief session of active breathing? There are various breathing techniques—there have been techniques developed in Indian tradition of yoga and modern therapists suggest diaphragmatic or abdominal or belly breathing—but the underlying principle is to breathe deeply and rhythmically.

So let’s begin; those among us who have breathing or asthmatic problems or are unwell may not do this.

I am doing to count four like this: one, two, three, four, one, two, four, three, two, one, one, two—when I count one to four in the ascending order, inhale; when I count one, two, hold the breath; when I count four to one in the descending order exhale; and when I count one, two again hold your breath; one to four inhale; one, two hold; four to one exhale and one, two hold; and repeat the cycle (repeat twice).

Now back to my friend. Who do you think he is? Teddy bear? He is a teddy bear, but for the time being let’s assume he is a puppet and his name is pappu; so he is pappu the puppet. He is a nice, cute guy; but the problem with him is he doesn’t have a clue as to how to respond to situations. If I tell him to stretch his arms, he will do so; if I tell him to turn on his head, he will do; I can punch, squeeze, kick or throw him. Which means how he responds to situations is not decided by him but by someone else.

Would you like someone else to decide how you should respond to different situations in life? Would you like to be a puppet? No?

But there is one specific situation or mood when we degrade ourselves to be a puppet. Can you tell me when or what that specific mood is? Anger, yes. When we are angry we let someone else—a person or a situation—decide how we react; or we become a puppet in the hands of a person or a situation. Is becoming a puppet and let a person or a situation decide how we react a good thing? Is being a puppet a wise thing to do? No; the first reason why we should not be carried away by the feeling of anger is it is the most foolish thing to do; because when we are angry we are a puppet in the hands of a person, persons or a situation; and that can be dangerous.

So the first reason why we should not let ourselves to be carried away by anger is that it is a most foolish thing to do; because when we are angry, we are a puppet and when we are a puppet anyone can do anything to us because what we are doing at that point in time or how we react is decided by someone else or by a given situation.  

This is important because scientific medical research says most modern day ailments are triggered by stress and anger and stress are interrelated. If we want to reduce stress and thus improve health and inner well being, we should understand anger.  Understanding anger is also important resentment and anger are the core of increasing instances of violence in human society. If we want to reduce violence we need to understand anger.

Stress is a big problem in work place. Some of our brothers and sisters are working in typical corporate ambience where stress can build up. Managing stress is a challenge especially to those who are in the IT, technology space, especially if you are doing a client facing role. Stress caused by angry reactions can be a problem in our personal relationships also.

The second reason not to be angry is when we are angry, we are causing more damage to ourselves than to the other person or persons. Physiologically when we are angry we are in a ‘fight or flight’ response mode (flight means run, ‘fight or run’ response mode). We humans have this inbuilt fight or flight response to protect ourselves in extremely dangerous situations. Suppose you are confronted by a tiger on the road; your entire physiology changes immediately; the glycogen is your liver is converted to glucose and sudden rush of ATP molecules that transports chemical energy to provide extra dose of energy required to handle a dangerous situation. In an actual danger situation, the extra energy is used either to fight or flight (run).

When we are angry, physiologically we are in a fight or flight response mode. But unlike a real danger situation, the glycogen that is converted to glucose is not used, thus raising the glucose levels your blood stream. So when we are angry we increase the chance of becoming a diabetic and diseased hence damaging our own health. 

In order to understand anger — the key thing is understand anger not to control it because the more we try to control the stronger it will become. But the moment we understand anger, it will vanish —we can classify or rate it scale of one to 10—one being the relaxed mode and 10 being the peak of anger where anything can happen. At points one, you are relaxed; at two you are unpleasant; from three to five you are annoyed and irritated; five to seven; you are very angry and will blurt out anything (the words we speak when we are hungry is like a bullet that is already released from a run; we cannot take it back) beyond seven means you are completely out of control and anything can happen—severe physical damage or even death.

You may ask being humane, how to completely eliminate anger. The key is not letting anger grow beyong the level of annoyance. We are humans and being annoyed is natural; there is nothing wrong in it. The key is to understand anger at the formative stages and never let it grow beyond point five or beyond the level of being annoyed.

There are a few things that can help us overcome the initial trigger:

(1) Drop the luggage—anger is often the result of accumulated resentment. Often we are like ragpickers—picking each negative word that is spoken about us and each negative experience that we come across and keep loading them onto the huge sack of memory and carrying that over our shoulders with great difficulty. Nobody is asking us to carry this luggage; we are doing it ourselves. As long as we carry this luggage, we will continue to be resentful and hence angry. But luckily we can drop that whole luggage in a second by just releasing our hand and be free of resentments.  

(2) Take a few deep breaths

(3) Take bath—if you are at home and if you are annoyed, take bath; it will wash away the bitterness and 

rejuvenate you

But the key to understand anger is to understand and practice forgiveness. I would want to suggest five easy steps that will help us practice forgiveness:

1) Forgive yourself: the practice of forgiveness should start with ourselves. Often we forgive others but not ourselves—I did this I did that; stop cursing yourself and forgive yourself.  

 2) Forgive others—if you can forgive yourself, we will find it easy to forgive others

 3) Allow others to forgive you—this is equally important as forgiving others. If the other person come to you for reconciliation, don’t resist; accept it gracefully—allow others to forgive you   

4) Forgive God—it may seem misleading or even blasphemous, but let me explain. There are a lot of things around us and on planet earth that we are not happy about and complain about—it rains at the wrong time, water supply is bad, road is not wide enough, traffic is horrible. As humans, we tend to think we are perfect and everything else is imperfect We tend to keep on complaining about things happening around us and tend to think it is because God created an imperfect world. Actually it is the other way around, the creator has created everything well. It is just that we are either hampering the Gods creation or fails to see it in the right perspective. Forgiving God means accepting things and people as they are; and not as you want them to be.  

5) Allow God to forgive you—often we tend to classify things as forgivable and unforgivable and think God will never forgive you for certain things that you did or said. That is wrong: God is
merciful enough to forgive all our lapses—big or small. 

So, deciding not to be a puppet as per changing situations and in the hands of others is the first step towards understanding anger. Once you understand anger and how it operates, it is easier to be aware when anger arises. If you can be aware of aware of anger the very moment it begin to manifest, it will vanish like mist under hot Sun.