What You Need to Know About Weight-Loss Supplements, Part 1

Well, my previous post touching on my own eating habits didn't go over so well. Deep breath, clear the decks. I'll take counsel whether to develop that thread as I'd intended. 
In this post, although I'm talking about weight loss, it's not my weight loss. I'm offering some background to Dr. Mercola's recent article about the allure, the myths, the dangers of weight-loss supplements, better known as "diet pills," as well as the important point that they risk contaminating important, effective supplements with their bad name.
As you can imagine, this is a subject I'm really knowledgeable about, and as a taker of supplements (vitamins and minerals, some amino acids, herbs) I also value consumers' free access to the full gamut of herbs, hormones, amino acids and other nutritive aids. Let me give you some useful information.
Foundations. So many important places to start. Let's start with this:
There's no such thing as a diet in a bottle. This should be obvious on the "if it sounds too good to be true, it's probably too good to be true" criterion. But people who resort to diet pills tend to feel emotionally desperate and as such are more likely to be swayed by hype.

from http://jamesdawsonmartin.com/blog/fat-burnerweight-loss-pills-scam-money/

Even the most unscrupulously hyperbolic bottles of weight loss have some very fine print somewhere saying, effectively, your mileage may vary, do not exceed the dose, and that this is not a substitute for a healthy diet and exercise plan.
In fact, I think some weight-loss supplements may have a sort of stealth placebo effect, either by providing an affirmation through their claims or by triggering the person taking them to adhere better to a diet plan because now they're taking action by taking the pill. Sometimes they trigger adherence to a diet plan less subtly. One supplement I've never tried is Alli, which blocks fat absorption, because I've read the horror stories about what can happen if you eat any fat while taking it. In other words, if you're taking this fat-blocking diet pill you can't eat any fat, so you might as well save your money and go on a fat-free diet!

Why do it? Before we go any further, it's important to say why someone might want to take a weight-loss supplement. Although "detox" is such a cliched and carelessly used term at the moment, the detox nuance here is crucially important.
Things may work differently if you're cutting non-excess weight, but if you have excess weight, both excess fat and excess fluid, it is protecting you. This may be true on an emotional level, and/or it is sequestering toxins. Fat binds toxins up away from your circulation; fluid holds soluble toxins in solution so that they don't concentrate to dangerous levels in the blood.
I can't emphasize enough how important it is to understand this, because when you start releasing the fat and the fluid, you're going to need some good hazardous-materials-collection strategies. Many diet pills, especially the loud and unsubtle ones, are basically laxatives and diuretics, often harsh ones. Mostly these will make you pee and poop a lot, with severe cramping, and with nothing to buffer your body from the toxins that were being held in solution. This can lead to dangerous electrolyte imbalances and dehydration.

from http://www.sullivanvitamins.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=5487

(Every grocery store carries some or several variations of this tea. In this case, the single ingredient is senna, about the harshest laxative in existence. Some other brands have a few other herbs, like mallow and wild rhubarb, to mellow it out a bit (pun not intended), but they all have senna, and some have cassia too.)

How do they work? Last point for this post--how do weight-loss supplements do what they claim to do?

from: http://www.123rf.com/stock-photo/fat_to_thin.html

Knowing the answer to this can help a person decide which kind of supplement might support them. In the right context, some of these supplements can support weight loss, but only in the right circumstances, correctly used, and with the right support.
I could think of eight basic categories/modalities of supplement. I'll line them out briefly here and give some examples in the next post.
(1) Laxatives and diuretics -- as discussed just above. Bad idea, may bring about transient fluid weight loss but usually with negative consequences. On the other hand, a really high-quality herbal cleanse, well supported by a good practitioner and accompanied by green juices, skin brushing, and perhaps colonics and saunas, can support weight loss as part of gentle and healthy removal of stored toxins.
(2) Stimulants. Yep -- a good many weight-loss supplements contain some or several forms of caffeine (straight-up caffeine, coffee or green or oolong tea extract, kola nut, cacao bean), often compounded with B vitamins, for quick stimulation. This may be helpful for a quick boost of focus, but it can also lead to an equal and opposite crash later. Ephedra (ma huang) and Bitter Orange Extract fall in the same category but, interestingly, green coffee bean extract is something different.
Laxatives and Stimulants are the sledgehammers; the other kinds of supplement work in subtler ways, and there are some overlaps between them.
(3) Supporters/activators of hormones, either stimulating the pancreas or the liver, or supporting the adrenals or thyroid, or affecting blood sugar balance. Many of these work by virtue of high antioxidant contents which are generally helpful in reducing inflammation.
(4) Creators of a sense of satiety, either by physically providing bulk or by working with leptin, the so-called satiety hormone.
(5) Binders that prevent absorption of nutrients in general (and also bind up toxins and escort them out), not the same as a laxative or a bulking agent.
(6) Blockers of absorption of a specific nutrient (carbohydrate or fat).
(7) Alternative sources of fuel for the brain for sustained energy and reduced cravings
(8) Neurotransmitter supporters to improve mood and reduce cravings.

f

from http://www.whats4eats.com/beverages/sorrel-punch-recipe

That's it for this post! To recap: trust your b.s. meter, beware of letting go of fat and fluid too fast, and understand that there's a bunch of dross out there, but there are also many different types of supplement that may be helpful. All of the best ones are holistic--they're beneficial for other things than just weight loss--and often they're adaptogenic, which means they provide the support needed in the given environment, weight loss here, perhaps weight gain there.

In the next post, I'll give some examples of the eight categories outlined above and address the question of whether it's better to take a pill with a combination of contents, a single-herb pill, or go direct to the powder/leaf/bark/flower. The answer isn't as straightforward as you might guess.

Interlude: Staying on Earth, A Room of One's Own

http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=719
I'm developing a conversation about who we are and how what we feed within us helps us be/become who we are; about the choice to eat or not to eat; about fasting and alternative sources of energy; about my own unique needs and how my explorations might pertain to others. And I'm talking about time vortices. All of it in the context of new to Tucson and new to having my own space.

But today I take a small interlude to mark the anniversary of the day I tried to end it all and ended up sticking around. That was a very, very different version of myself, in a dark place. This time last year I was waiting for a lot of blood, confused, liminal from a brief visit to the other side, probably somewhat relieved at bottom. 
It's not something I speak of very much at all, and I haven't yet written about it concertedly either except right after the event, but that, I sense, is coming.
For now, this hot, peaceful day, I focus on gratitude that I am this new form of my old self, and that I am here.
I wore my healer's gold, which is actually green, perfect for me...

 I welcomed the gift of affirmation cards by putting them up in the right places (I hope you ca read the affirmations on this mirror, itself a gift from Tom James).

I didn't return to life all changed and perfected--not in the least, to my disappointment at the time. We have to do our own work. My wise friend Janice, who's a mother, says "we all have to do our own push ups (and let our children do theirs)."
I'm now here to attest that a room of one's own can help with that. My bedroom isn't perfected yet, but here's how it looks now: 

 Yes, the bed is close enough to the ceiling that I hit my head sometimes. A good reminder that beds are for sleeping in, not living in! I'm going to get some glow in the dark strips for the lower beams. And some affirmations cards for the ceiling! You can see the rebounder, and the little desk where I have fun things like coloring pencils and mandalas, notebooks, pens, notecards to write to people, and a small selection of my favorite spiritual books to be rotated with those on the other shelves. There's also a walk-in closet and a huge bookshelf to the left of the photo.
There's a string of lights twined around the bed, and I got a red bulb for the lamp up in the bed area, since red light is supposed to be best for bedtime.

It's been almost part of my spirituality for so long to be able to lay my head down anywhere I was sent to. Creating an intentional space feels like a great affirmation of my continuing to choose life.

Time time time...what has become...

 http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=717
I talk about paradox a lot on here. And in fact, I experience and believe that STABILITY only exists as a result of INSTABILITY--

--I pick up one foot, push from the other, off balance, and set the foot down again before I fall over. And repeat. Running is thrilling (if your knees can handle it) because you're just constantly catching yourself.

But tonight I'm caught in the maze of paradoxes. If everything is so dynamic and mobile, how can we even apply a single word to a single object or person? (And of course, there was a Greek philosopher so perplexed by this very question that he gave up talking and would only wiggle his finger. Which is just avoiding the issue.)
This is somewhat provoked by my having spent the afternoon doing intake interviews getting healthcare stuff set up, and it reignited my whole puzzlement about that whole business of labeling people, how an set of symptoms can be identified in such different people, how the same medications can work for different people (how is any of it possible?) (although once you factor in different dosages and different combinations, that whole individualized chemistry lab can be pretty individualized!)
I joke often about the accidental homophony of "fasting" as in abstaining from food and "fast" as in rapid. (The "abstinence" fast comes from Old English and is related to the notion of holding firm and steadfast.) It's funny because fasting slows things down. Fasting, you notice time's passage in finer-grained detail, maybe because many physiological processes are slowed down, allowing keener, more detached focus. But in my own life right now, I'm finding that yes, I'm slowed down, but that I'm so attached to my bed in the mornings, I end up with much less day to enjoy the extra time. I am experimentation, and this is a useful finding. 
Something to consider: I've also been reestablishing a meditation practice (on which more soon), on which my Dad said that one of the reasons he values his meditation practice so highly is that there's always so much more time in the day when he meditates. So meditation by itself may be sufficient for time expansion should I choose to scale back the fasting.
"The days are getting shorter," they lament, now that we've passed the Solstice (moving into contraction), but actually we still have the same 24 hours in a day, which is just as unpredictable as ever in terms of how long it actually takes. Agreed?
I am from the future as well as present and past, so I struggle with which "now" I'm in at a given moment, which should mean I'm somewhat free of time. And yet washing all my water bottles at the end of the day, or taking a shower, sweeping the floor, putting msm, vitamin C, lysine and glutamine in a cup of water and chugging it back, putting tea leaves in a pouch and making tea on the stove...Back to the slow of fast, maybe, but all those things seem to take an  unbearable amount of time, to be extravagantly indulgent... And then I think of people who use a juicer every day, or who eat regularly... Where is all the time?
Okay--that's my plaint for the night. I'm locked out of time, and I don't know what I've done to attract that.
And this evening, my watch strap suddenly broke and my watch fell to the ground in the parking lot.

Starting to Talk Diet Again: Fruit

 http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=715

When I started this blog, it was pretty much a food blog, and pretty much a raw-vegan-oriented, gut-restoring/low sugar-oriented, permaculture/grow-your-own-food-oriented blog at that. I posted recipes more than once a week, I talked plants and herbs, I reviewed other bloggers' recipes.

That all stopped a couple years ago, and since then I've been almost afraid to talk about food because it's such a tricky topic tied in with my general health and wellbeing. It's true, I am somewhat of a freak around food, but through recent self experimentation I've come to realize that--in certain respects--my body isn't that different from anyone else's. And, since I do have a near-freakish amount of knowledge about diet and nutrition, it's time to share some of this experience.

Why else should you listen to me? My perversity and paradoxical nature, which leaves me tripping along both sides of any line in clay or sand (or macronutrient balance) and thus able to channel both sides. Consider this:

(1) When put under strong pressure to go inpatient this last winter, I drove across the country instead--and am loving my new environment!

(2) Having gotten myself out of an unprecedented and horrendous binge-purge cycle, I am now fasting (sundown to sundown) every other day (even though I know that fasting can drive eating if you're not careful)!

And that's enough for about five blog posts right there... 

Doorful of tinctures and potions--can't we just live on those?--but as you can see (bottom left) I still love carrots

...and I'll likely go on for at least five blog posts, as there is so much to talk about, so much to which many will relate, who wouldn't have expected me to be able to relate to them/you!

Today, though, I'm going to kick off with a renunciation of my ultimate redoubt of denial: fruit.
It's a funny cyclical serendipity that I was pretty much off fruit when I first started the blog, as it's the one food I've gravitated toward for much of my life and about which I've had almost magical beliefs. Renunciation doesn't always happen all at once. Fruit and its sugars have been controversial for as long as I've been studying nutrition, and as the voices grow ever more unanimous about the deleterious effects of sugar, fruit continues controversial. I've always so wanted it to be good and perfect...
I have believed:
(1) Fruit is humankind's most natural and ideal and perfect source of sustenance (cue Garden of Eden and fig leaves and happy bonobos).
(2) Fruit is easier to digest than anything else.
(3) (In my body at least): the sugar in fruit doesn't have the negative impact that other kinds of sugar have.

Myth (1) I really had to let go of this as soon as I studied any anthropology, but, more importantly, as soon as I became an arborist and tree carer. The truth:

Most fruit today is no more or less natural than any other man-made item, even as alive as it is. The peach tree whose fallen, bruised fruit were calling me and the clamoring craving colonies in my belly--none of its seeds could grow a fruit. The tree itself couldn't stand up by itself. Its fruit is so much sweeter than even drosophila can handle! It's analogous to those superbred turkeys that can't mate naturally anymore.

Note, by the way, "no more or less natural": two possibilities here: either (1) man-made = unnatural by definition or (2) anything man made is part of nature, as is man him/herself, so this peach is natural in the same way that a good quality home made bread might be.

Note, too--and this was the myth that I had to explode for myself: "natural" is not necessarily synonymous with "beneficial in your body" (am I really going to step on the "natural" rattlesnake?)

(2) Fruit seems to be easier to digest than anything else for me, and for the most part. I've gotten plenty sick from eating fruit too. How much of the ease is simply lifelong habit? And how much of the ease is because of the prevalence of simple sugar, in which case, is it feeding me or is it feeding a yeast colony? Some of the cravings I've dealt with recently suggest the latter, although I know that losing a lot of (non excess) weight last winter, moving across the country, and then doing a job that involved a lot of heavy lifting may have had something to do with that too. 

It's a great question to keep asking, literally, metaphorically, with every turn of the attention, every absorption: Who am I feeding? What part of me? Symbiote? Commensal? Parasite? (And the etymologies of those three words deserve a post of their own.)

(3) Dovetailing nicely with the "who am I feeding" question is the belief that fruit's sugar is somehow different (at least for me), that its packaging with vitamins and fiber meant it didn't impact blood sugar. I was a fruitarian for about six years, and it probably saved my life at the time, bringing me back from an almost fatal low. It's true that in practice, when I moved to Hawaii--fruit heaven--I found myself much better off with more avocados, coconuts, and greens... but fruit remained the ideal. I have fruitarian-oriented friends, and I sense a righteousness to their choice; it seems almost like a religion.

Especially with all the hard physical work, and all the fasting, I've had the opportunity to feel really hungry at times. And I started to notice that when I ate a whole bunch of fruit, I didn't feel any less hungry than when I started--sometimes more hungry.

So that's when I got a blood glucose meter and started obsessively tracking my blood sugar. And that's for the next post. I'll close with an openended question: which data are more useful: "how you feel after eating something" or "a readout on a meter (which has some margin of error)" (Obviously, the answer is "both," but how do you weight the two kinds of data?)

Speechless Solstice

http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=713

I lift up mine eyes unto the hills...

And my front door opens to big sky. 

Tohono O'odham poetry by the roadside... 

...and the birds fly up from the saguaro fruits and wait for me to pass. 

 My neighbors...

 ...see the aliens coming out?

 ...troglodytes, terracotta saguaro, detail within detail...

 My front stoop--welcome (two mints and an aloe vera).

My backyard. Rabbitville. Cottontails and jacks. Any garden will have to be several feet off the ground.

Grateful to be here.

If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em

And http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=711

Oh, I have so much to share here, and I'm dancing a long-form lesson in taking back the choice over my time and where it goes.

I spent five days last week with no refrigeration. I woke very early to an intense burning-rubber smell, which I finally tracked down to the defunct freezer. Fridge was okay but the smell was unbearable and I couldn't turn off one without the other. Anything like that happens anywhere near the weekend (Thursday--even Wednesday) and you're waiting until Monday. 

Daytime temperatures were around 105--great temperatures for bacteria to grow. So, a good opportunity to grow some bugs! It was also several days of hauling blocks of ice and sacks of ice cubes--small potatoes after the 50lb chicken feed sacks, but heavy lifting nonetheless.
I started with my kombucha cultures. Some got black tea, some got green tea. Good old culture that I brought with me from HI, to AK via Oregon, and now AZ! 

Then I grated up burdock, half a sweet potato, a bit of coconut, ginger, turmeric. I salted them and mashed them around with my hand--there's no water added to that mix, it's just the veggies' own juices. And yes, that's a kombucha bottle weighting it down! Friendly ferments... 

And of course, I'd just opened a brown coconut when the fridge failed. I could have tried sun-drying the pieces but then I'd have had an army of ants. Mold was threatening to form already. So I blended it all up in the Vitamix as fine as I could, together with Irish Moss gel. [Irish Moss is an alga with a gelling action due to the long-chain polysaccharides, just like agar but it gels without needing to be heated.]

And then I opened some high-quality probiotic capsules into the mix. Covered loosely, let sit for a day, and then added to the cooler full of ice cubes.
Honestly, I'm not certain that the bacteria I wanted are the ones I got. I'm a little afraid of the coconut cheese -- had a bit of it one evening and was sick as a dog, but it could have been something else (I'm also not sure that Irish Moss works in this body).

I'm enjoying the trial and error with the bugs in this new environment.
The fridge finally arrived at 11pm Monday night. Obnoxiously late, especially when I'd finished unloading the coolers, mopping the floor, etc. etc...

And of course, when something isn't an issue, you don't think about it anymore. I'm not constantly rotating food, draining coolers (and using the water to mop the floor or flush the toilet), going out for more ice)...and it just becomes a no brainer. But, especially not having had a decent refrigeration set-up at my former abode with the chicken folks, I am grateful grateful grateful every single day, whether I'm eating or not, that my food is being held from this weather, that I can choose whether or not I want to grow bugs! I wish the same for my own body.
I wish for everyone good, positive bugs--commensals rather than parasites.

Sacred Space, The Inner and the Outer, Crowdsourcing Selfcare

And at: http://ulteriorharmony.org/?p=709

I put my candles on my altar-windowsill, my north-facing bedroom window (my "spiritual growth" direction in Feng Shui), and left for the afternoon.
When I came home and entered the bedroom, I laughed out loud!

 Here's a closeup of the left one. Dying swan, anyone? Or maybe a snake.

I'm loving how I run into unexpected differences, although this was, of course, entirely predictable (even facing north).

Before I moved in here, it was very clear to me that I wanted this to be a sacred space. I envisioned a quiet, beautiful, well-ordered space, tidier than some of my spaces have been, from which I could move forth into the world, and into which I could receive and welcome other people while protecting my own energy. An outer space to reflect and co-create my inner space. 
That's what I'm creating. It's also an opportunity to learn things about myself. For example, that I don't necessarily want matching crockery!

There's somewhat of a theme to what I picked out, although the top right green-bordered white ones I bought because they are identical to some I bought in Homer, AK--in that case I got a kick out of matching. But the floral one on the right is an English china Wedgwood; I was channeling my mum when I picked it out. And the small squared glass saucer is something my English grandmother would have had.

The other side of sacred inward space, though, is going out into the world. Especially having been so busy recently, I realize I haven't done so much of that. Going out into the world requires some support, especially with some of the challenges I deal with. I've been resisting the urge to crowdsource my therapy by venting on my blog or bleating on Facebook. But I can see why my doctor was so concerned that I have care set up before I arrived here. I still don't. And in the recent stressful time my eating issues have driven me almost crazy. What I'm doing right now feels better to me but I know (because I told Phil about it, sorry Phil) that my friends would not think it's a good idea. That's all I'm going to say. I think I've talked inappropriately about such issues on this blog before, and I hope the fact that I'm consciously (and conscientiously) not doing so now, while admitting that there's an issue, will reassure people that things aren't so bad.

I am on my way to getting some care stuff set up. I'm excited to be part of a community (Facebook, virtual, actual, and all) where we all listen to and take care of each other, but not as a substitute for medical care. And I'm here to listen.