Kelly Frankson DOT COM

I recently read a really cool book called Lights out.  It talks about the affect that artificial light and lack of sleep has on your body and it is pretty crazy how serious of an issue that it is.  The book is over 300 pages long, but bellow I have attempted to highlight the main points to give you the gist of why adequate sleep needs to become a key part of your healthy lifestyle.

Your body translates long hrs of artificial light into summer time.  Because it instinctively knows that summer comes before winter and that winter means no available food, you begin to crave carbohydrates so you can store fat for a time when food is scarce & you should be hibernating.  This storage is accomplished by: 1. increasing carbohydrate consumption until your body responds to all the insulin by becoming insulin resistant in muscle tissue; 2. ensuring carbohydrates taken end up as fat pads; 3. prompting the liver to dump the extra sugar into cholesterol production which will keep cell membranes from freezing at low temperatures.

Sleep controls your appetite for carbohydrates, and the consumption of carbohydrates controls water retention (which changes your blood pressure and affects body weight) and insulin production (which facilitates cholesterol production).  But the biggest problem with short night year-round, beyond appetite derangement, is that insulin will stay higher during the dark, when it should be flat, and cortisol falls so late it wont come up normally in the morning.  This is a reversal of normal hormonal rhythms.  You should wake up with elevated cortisol to deal with stress during the day.  The reversal you’ve created by staying up late-making your insulin and cortisol stay high at night, when they should be low-continues into the daylight hours.  The first symptom of melatonin overflow is needing an alarm to wake you up.  When you have a melatonin “hangover” you’re still too sleepy to wake up even though morning light should suppress melatonin spontaneously.  The real problem is that without a rise in cortisol, you have no dopamine.  Your cortisol is not high enough to deal with stress during the day and even whack time perception.  Without cortisol to enhance dopamine, the day seems to go too fast and depression and heart disease can occur.  So if you have no sleep, you have no hormonal control which has damaging effects on your body.

The minute you cut your carbohydrate intake down to less than 45 gram a day, you signal your entire endocrine system that famine and winter are coming and you unwind the clock.  Reducing your carbohydrate consumption you will drop ten or so pounds of retained fluid, dropping your blood pressure and burning your fat base, a process that throws off ketones and reduce your serotonin too, so you’re not as paranoid and depressed.  The blood pressure drop is a respite for your kidney function.  But even if you stop eating carbohydrate, your cortisol, insulin, and your prolactin won’t drop to winter levels unless you sleep at least 9.5 hour a night, starting as close to dusk as possible.  This means that long hour of artificial light alone, without massive carbohydrate consumption, can raise your blood pressure somewhat, because cortisol, which is always up when the lights are on, is part of your sympathetic nervous system control of blood pressure.  So you’re really not out of the woods unless you increase your sleep.  When this ancient clocking system kicks in, you crave the foods that will spike your insulin to create “resistance” to insulin in your muscles, so that you send all the energy to store as fat for the long famine you would endure in the real world.  

So in the hormonal state brought on by long hours of light, the urge to consume carbohydrates or drink alcohol to put on a fat base for upcoming winter becomes metabolically and psychologically impossible to resist.  The sugars you crave send your insulin up to crate the insulin resistance you need to get fat.  On your way to tubby, you convert all the carbohydrates you’ve eaten into cholesterol as VLDL, and you retain water, which alters your blood pressure. In order to control our appetite for carbohydrates to loose weight, bring insulin levels down, and stay sane and fertile we must sleep more. 

Found a cool site:  projectfit.org.  Has a lot of interesting information on it in relation to weightloss and how it works.  Check thi out:

It seems everyone want to lose weight, but with all the information out there it just gets more and more confusing for the average person to know what to do? Let’s back it up a little and start from the basic understand of how fat loss happens in a simple and easy manner. Once you can master the basics, that is probably 90% of where all your results will come from!

Fat loss first and foremost is a hormonal event, the right hormones telling the body to release the stored “energy” in the fat cells to burn off. It is also important to know that there are also fat “storing” hormones that act in the opposite way, triggering the body to store “future energy” into the fat cells. The body triggers these hormones through many different stimulus like food, drink, exercise, stress and sleep. Fat cells are just the body’s emergency storage tanks afterall. If we didn’t have fat cells, we wouldn’t have survived the famines of the past. It’s a built-in survival mechanism that is getting all the wrong signals today. The body wasn’t designed around constant intake of food, especially the processed and high in sugar kind. (as that is not something that naturally grows on trees!)

So we know that fat loss is hormonal. Also fat loss occurs when oxygen is present, what is known as aerobic. (which means “with oxygen”…don’t get all happy yet all you daily joggers) The other stage is called anaerobic (which means “without oxygen”). Anaerobic training is also known more commonly as “strength training” (which you can tell by the lactic acid burn). Here’s where people get confused when it comes to exercise. Most people think that by doing aerobics you burn all the fat you want. Well if that was the case, obesity would of been taken care of in 1986 and your gym aerobic instructors wouldn’t have an average BF% over 25%. Who ever said you are guaranteed to burn fat? What about stored glycogen? Plus if you can burn fat in an aerobic state, well aren’t you in an aerobic state all day long (minus brief times of anaerobic activity) including sleeping?? So here’s the breakthrough, you have the ability to burn fat all day long! The only thing left is the hormones and whether they are saying “empty the storage tanks” or “here comes some more” to the fat cells.

The Fat loss hormones were are going to focus on briefly are insulin, glucagon, and growth hormone (GH). Insulin is a fat storing hormone, while glucagon and GH are fat burning hormones. If insulin is present and elevated, the other hormones go down (this is an important relationship to realize). Another hormone called cortisol (stress hormone) is a muscle breakdown hormone….and that is not something we want in our fat loss quest. Below are just quick and easy bullet point on how to maximize the fat burning hormones and minimize the muscle breakdown/fat storing hormones (don’t think all muscle breakdown is bad, you need to break down and rebuild the cells it’s when you have excessive breakdown and minimal rebuilding that is the issue as that will lead to a loss of muscle).

Your #1 enemy, sugar and all it’s hiding places (drinks, sauces, dressings, etc). If it has a label, read it and see what sugars you are really getting, as everything you put into your mouth counts! Why is sugar bad? Because sugar will be quickly absorbed into the blood which cause a spike in your blood sugar and with that spike the body releases insulin to take care of it (shuttle excessive blood sugar into the fat cells for storage!). So like I tell my clients, every time you put sugar into your mouth just tell youself “I don’t feel like burning fat for the next 3-4 hours” as that is exactly the hormonal signal you are giving it. Remember also, when insulin is high glucagon and GH go down (this is important to remember especially at night)

So let’s recap, for fat loss we want:

• Minimal insulin levels thoughout the day (no high levels/spikes except during the post workout window when the insulin sensitivity is maximum, it goes into muscle not fat)
• Maximum Glucagon (which is directly inversely proportional to insulin levels)
• Maximum GH (which is controlled by insulin, exercise response and sleep)
• Keep Cortisol in check (you will have some, but excessive will lead to muscle loss)

For Insulin control (and max Glucagon response):

• Keep levels low by not eating sugar or foods that quickly break down into the bloodstream
• Have protein with every meal (as that will slow down the digestion of any sugars). Also protein intake stimulates the release of glucagon.
• Improve insulin sensitivity with glycogen draining exercise (resistance training) which will in turn reduce your insulin resistance (which is one of the biggest reasons for obesity and a serious increase of risks for many other diseases including heart disease, cancers, diabetes, accelerated ageing and more!)

For max GH response:

• Most of your daily GH is released in the first couple hours of sleep at night (75%) . Keep your insulin levels low (which means no big meals or sugar 2-3 hours before bed) and get to bed by 10pm to get the maximum response
• Exercise with Intensity (for fast twitch muscle recruitement, not slow twitch), whether it is resistance training or doing interval training like sprints. Short burst of anaerobic intense exercise (lactic acid burn) will in turn signal the body to release GH. Long aerobic activities (jogging, etc) will NOT. (The old arguement of look at the body composition of a sprinter vs the marathon runner…the sprinter has more muscle and very low bf%, the marathon runner has little muscle and a higher bf% even if they look smaller) See the role of lactate in exercise induced GH response.
• Exercise in a fasted state has also shown to increase GH levels (again make sure you have enough energy to get through the workout, a small meal may be needed 1-2 hours prior if the activity it too intense)

Minimize excessive Cortisol:

• Keep all exercise under 45min (remember we want to increase the intensity in a short period, not the duration). Anything longer will just start wasting muscle as fuel.
• Practice relaxing throughout the day, don’t stress out over things that mean very little in the long run (ask yourself will this really be important in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year). Get perspective on things in your life, and detach from things that really don’t matter. Smile more, take deep breaths throughout the day, get out in nature, find your passions in life, etc. We are too stressed out and our body was only meant to use stress in short bursts (fight or flight response) not all day long events.

So if you can master these small steps, you will see tremendous changes. Now what if there was something else you could do to decrease insulin resistance and improve GH response to exercise and sleep? Hey how about something that also helps the health of the gut, improve digestive process and liver function (which is an important organ for fat burning). Hmmmmmm…..could that be Intermittent Fasting?? Wow….look how everything starts to nicely come full circle!

So after another trip to the organic food store on commercial drive, I attempted to make a new and improved batch of protein bars.  With half the amount of dates and some extra berries and nuts, they are rather tasty and not nearly as sweet as the last batch. Im rather pleased with them!

This time I diced up the dates before putting them in the food processor and blended all the berries together with some freshly squeezed lemon to help prevent them from sticking to the food processor blades.  Then I blended the almonds and walnuts and threw in the rest of the seeds and added the cacoa and protein powder.  To help everything stick together I then added the the coconut milk and got my hands nice and sticky rolling handfulls into balls.

 

-I also tried to make protein muffins last week, but they were the grossest thing ever.  Note to self don’t try baking with buckwheat.

Talking about inspirational people working through adversity, check out this video:

There are a lot of cool people out there!

A lot of people have been asking me about how to start/how it works/how much it costs so I figured I’d post it all here for anyone who is interested.

What it is:  CrossFit is a strength and conditioning system that re-introduces personal athletic achievement and performance to training.  The Crossfit Community has taken what works best from the most efficient sports and movements including:

• Gymnastics where you have the strongest pound for pound athletes,
• Olympic Weightlifting where you have the fastest and
• Sprinting and rowing

and eliminated what doesn’t to become a very effective fitness program. Through a code of fitness that develops 10 generally recognized physical skills with functional movements at a high intensity with constant variance, each workout is able to elicit a maximal Neuro Endocrine response. This “Code” addresses the fitness of the elderly as well as that of an elite athlete - the only difference being load and intensity need to be scaled for the individual.  Crossfit is also known as being the sport of fitness as it reintroduces a sense of personal achievement and accomplishment to working out.

How to start:  First step is to come in for an intro session.  The intro session is free and lasts 1 hr.  It starts off with a brief introduction of what crossfit is all about, how it works and what we are trying to accomplish.  Then we just do a basic fitness evaluation where we just look at your flexibility, stamina and strength and finally run you through a small 4 minute workout to give you a flavour of what crossfit is all about.  The whole purpose of this first day is for you to get a better idea of what crossfit is all about and for me to get a better idea of where you are at to be able to tailor future workouts (crossfit is all about using progressions to do more work in less time so this first day just helps find that starting point).

Then everyone needs to complete 10-15 personal training sessions to learn the functional movements, technique and develop your power, speed and stamina.  Nutrition and lifestyle information/advice is also provided within these sessions.  Once you are above a baseline level then you can either choose to continue with personal training or enter group classes.  

Times:  Personal training can be held anywhere from 6am to 9pm 7 days a week.  Group classes are 6am, 7am, 8am, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm Monday-Friday and 11am Saturday.

Cost:  The cost for 1 on 1 personal training is $65/session, 2 on 1 personal training $45/session, larger group/family rates can also be provided.  Group classes are $150/month for unlimited classes or $20/class drop in rate.

Benefits to be expected: In addition to becoming healthier and feeling more energised in your everyday life, benefits that can be expected include increased hip and shoulder mobility, coordination, agility, speed, strength and stamina.

Any other questions just let me know!