At 25, Jack could be the poster boy for today’s obesity epidemic.  Instead of enjoying young, single life he’s been living in his bedroom, addicted to computer games and sweets.

At 6ft 5in, Jack’s always been the biggest amongst his peers, at aged nine he already weighed nine stones. By puberty, he was heading towards morbid obesity.

With Jack’s weight topping twenty-eight and a half stones his family and friends felt that if he did not lose weight he could die young. To shock him into losing weight his mother even spoken about getting him a funeral fund, while his grandmother lavishes money on buying clothes at a regular size in the hope that this will convince him to slim into them.

Before the show, Jack hated his body, especially his man boobs, and could not understand how anyone could find him attractive.  Can he lose nearly half his bodyweight and embark on living a normal life?

Jack December 2010 - Weighing in at 28.8 Stones

Jack in April 2011 - continuing his weight and fat loss journey

Jack Gorny - Today - Living and Loving Life - Weighing in at a healthy 17.5 stones

This workout is for more advanced practitioners.

Grazing can lead to overeating: Without an eating routine, it’s easy to graze on whatever food you find. Many people keep picking at food without ever feeling satisfied.

Skipping meals can lead to overeating: Trying to eat less by skipping breakfast or lunch often backfires, and you end up eating more calories in snacks and dinner.

Getting over-hungry can lead to overeating: When you are really hungry, it is hard to make healthy choices. It’s also hard to eat slowly and to stop when you are satisfied.

Mindless eating can lead to overeating: It’s also hard to make healthy choices and to stop eating when you are doing other things, like driving, reading and watching TV.

Television can lead to overeating: TV advertisements and shows are full of food cues that make you want to eat whether you are hungry or not.

Routines help maintain a healthy weight: Establishing regular times and places to eat helps prevent overeating and helps you balance your eating with your activity level.

Routines help build healthy habits: Develop a routine of cutting up fruit after dinner for a naturally sweet dessert.

Routines help with planning and shopping: When you eat regular meals and snacks, it is easier to plan healthy choices and easier to make shopping lists.

Routines help save money: Buying food on impulse is usually more expensive. It’s much cheaper to plan ahead and have healthy choices around when you want to eat.

Children do better with a regular eating routine: Regular meals and snacks help children maintain the ability to eat when hungry and stop when satisfied.

Different routines work better for different people: Some people feel better with three meals and a snack; others prefer five smaller meals. Choose the best routine for you!

Conclusion
Choose wisely and plan ahead.

Still, you’re not sure exactly what yoga means, or exactly what it will require of you. If you’re are bloke then you’d rather stick to pumping weights incorrectly and of-course not forgetting the ladies spending endless hours on the sitting on abductor machine. Well, let’s see if we can help clear up some misconceptions and get you on the road to your first handstand.

Well you see it all started a long time ago. It only became fashionable in the last 40 years or so. Yoga first popped up more than 3,000 years ago in what we now call India. The word “yoga” comes from the Sanskrit word “yuj,” which means “to bind, join, attach, and yoke.” So now you’re thinking: “Am I going to relax, or am I going to start crochet?!” Calm down, dammit! This Yoga stuff is about relaaaaaaaaxing. See, “yuj” also means “union, to direct and concentrate one’s attention on, to use and apply.” In other words, yoga is about concentrating on your mind and body to bind yourself to God. It’s about disciplining yourself to balance your mind, soul, and emotions, so that you can connect with your individual spirit, which is in turn part of the Supreme Universal Spirit (“Paramatma,” a.k.a. God). It’s about focusing your energy into constructive channels. And the name of an individual who follows the teachings of yoga is known as a “yogi.” You probably have a newfound respect for the spirituality of our pic-i-nic basket-stealing friend.

As there are many styles of dance, so are there many forms of yoga. In fact, a new one might be developing right now, as a teacher puts his/her own stamp on a specific technique. Current popular styles include (but are not limited to):

Gentle yoga, which is sometimes also called by the generic name “hatha yoga”. In Gentle yoga, the focus is on long stretches and flexibility, with slow, deep breathing (yogic breathing is known as “Pranayama”). This can be very soothing for the mind — it is the kind of mellow style most people picture when they think of yoga.

Kundalini yoga, which works on the premise that the body has eight “chakras,” and through use of “breath of fire” (rapid breathing), one can heat up the body from the bottom up, eventually “raising kundalini” to achieve a feeling of high enlightenment.

Power yoga, which is also known by the Sanskrit term Vinyasa yoga (a “vinyasa” is a series of rapid movements which warm up the body all over). This is a very active form of yoga, in which a person moves quickly through the poses (called “Asanas”), not holding them as long as in other styles. It is virtually guaranteed that you will sweat a lot in this; it is not for the faint of heart and gives a real challenge to the muscles.

We recommend beginning your practice in a class and buying a book afterward for home study, reason being that you wouldn’t want to risk repeatedly doing something incorrectly and eventually getting hurt. Plus, a class is a great way to feel the yoga “vibe,” or to ask your teacher about any physical concerns or limitations you might have.

At first, you will want to shop around to find out what styles, schools and teachers are right for you. Many health clubs offer yoga, so do check if yours has a class you can try out. However, you may also like the quieter, pure-yoga feeling of a specific yoga school.

It would be impossible to list every single yoga class in the city. We simply recommend that you go to your local gym and ask where you can find a good one. And if you don’t belong to a gym (or even if you do), you should also ask your doctor to recommend a yoga class. Doctors, being slightly interested in health, will have plenty of recommendations for you.

Many teachers offer private lessons, so feel free to ask if you want one-on-one attention or if there’s some pose you feel you just can’t “get.” With the right amount of dedication, it is all within your reach. So, consider yourself having taken the first step toward flexibility, strength, inner peace, and we hope some kick-ass karma. Now get thee to a yoga class.

Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm………..

Watch out for your posture at work. Here is how:

Do take time to relax. Okay so you cannot be at the beach on a hammock, but do still take time out from the world. ME time. Go on you deserve it.

Every trip to the supermarket these days requires us to navigate what has become a truly treacherous food landscape. I mean, what are we to make of a wonder of food science like the new Splenda with fiber? (“The great sweet taste you want and a little boost of fiber.”) Should we call this progress? Is it even food? And then, at the far other end of the nutritional spectrum, how are we to process (much less digest) the new, exuberantly caloric Double Down sandwich that KFC has introduced? This shameless exaltation of dietary fat actually redefines the very concept of a sandwich by replacing the obligatory bread with two slabs of fried chicken kept some distance apart by strips of bacon, two kinds of cheese and a dollop of sauce.

Deciding what to eat, indeed deciding what qualifies as food, is not easy in such an environment. When Froot Loops can earn a Smart Choices check mark, a new industrywide label that indicates a product’s supposed healthfulness, we know we can’t rely on the marketers, with their dubious health claims, or for that matter on the academic nutritionists who collaborate on such labeling schemes. (One of them defended the inclusion of Froot Loops on the grounds that they are better for you than doughnuts. So why doesn’t the label simply say that?) Making matters worse, official government pronouncements about eating aren’t necessarily much more reliable, not when the food industry influences federal nutrition guidelines. But even when the “best science” prevails, that science can turn out to be misguided as when the official campaign against saturated fat got us to trade butter for stick margarine loaded with trans fats, a solution that turned out to be worse than the problem.

If we can’t rely on the marketers or the government or even the nutritionists to guide us through the supermarket woods, then who can we rely on? Well, ask yourself another question: How did humans manage to choose foods and stay healthy before there were nutrition experts and food pyramids or breakfast cereals promising to improve your child’s focus or restaurant portions bigger than your head? We relied on culture, which is another way of saying: on the accumulated wisdom of the tribe. (Which is itself another way of saying: on your mom and your friends.) All of us carry around rules of thumb about eating that have been passed down in our families or plucked from the cultural conversation. Think of this body of food knowledge as samizdat nutrition: an informal, unsanctioned way of negotiating our eating lives that becomes indispensable at a time when official modes of talking about food have suffered a serious loss of credibility.

Earlier this year I began gathering examples of these rules, or personal food policies, for a short book I’m publishing in January. My premise is that for all the authority we grant to science in matters of nutrition, culture still has a lot to teach us about how to choose, prepare and eat food, and that this popular wisdom is worth preserving — perhaps today more than ever, in this era of dazzling food science, supersize portions and widespread dietary confusion.

In March, I posted a request for readers’ rules about eating on Well, Tara Parker-Pope’s health blog on nytimes.com. Within days, I received more than 2,500 responses — more than any Well post had ever received. My aim was to collect genuinely useful, and nutritionally sound, examples of popular wisdom about eating. I found some for my book, but I also found something else — a banquet of food policies that even when they made little, if any, nutritional sense (and therefore didn’t belong in the book) nevertheless opened a window on our current thinking about food: the stories we tell ourselves, the games we play and the taboos we invoke to organize our eating lives. Some of the rules have stood the test of time and have been confirmed by science, but all of them have something to teach us about our continuing efforts to pick a healthful and happy path through the minefields of the modern-food marketplace or restaurant menu.

Read my favorites here:
www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/10/11/magazine/20091011-foodrules.html
The above article originally printed on The New York Times Magazine, October 11, 2009

Many of us eat the equivalent of 53 heaping teaspoons of white sugar every day!

Here are ten reasons to avoid refined (white) sugar:

1. Sugar contributes to tooth decay because it decreases the effectiveness of a particular type of white blood cell that “eats” bacteria.

2. Sugar causes the body to release more adreralin, which may explain hyperactivity in young children.

3. Calcium loss in urine occurs when a person consumes a soft drink containing sugar.

4. Ingesting sugar makes the pancreas work harder to produce insulin. Diabetes results when the overworked pancreas can no longer eliminate sugar from the blood stream.

5. Bleached with chlorine, when white refined sugar is exposed to certain organic compounds it converts to dioxin, a lethal compound.

6. Sugar can hinder weight loss because high insulin levels (see #4 above) cause the body to store excess carbohydrates as fat.

7. Sugar increases the likelihood of chronic fatigue.

8. Sugar increases mood swings, irritability and anxiety.

9. Sugar compromises the immune system because it lowers the efficiency of white blood cells for a minimum of five hours.

10. Eating sugar can decrease helpful high-density cholesterol (HDLs) and result in an increase in harmful cholesterol (LDLs).

Alternatives

Need to sweeten your food? Add raisins, dates or honey. Stevia is also a safer alternative. It’s available in several forms, has no calories and doesn’t raise blood sugar levels. Clearly, a better choice to satisfy any sweet tooth!

The human spirit can handle much more than we realize.

“I LOVE LIVING LIFE. I AM HAPPY.”
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Think you’ve got it bad?
Need some encouragement?
Fallen down?
Can’t find the STRENGTH to get back up?

Watch this video. It will help. Then share it with others.

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“If I fail, I try again, and again, and again…”
If YOU fail, are YOU going to try again?

It matters how you’re going to FINISH…
Are you going to finish STRONG?

We are put in situations to build our character… not destroy us.

The tensions in our life are there to strengthen our convictions… not to run over us.

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Nick is thankful for what he HAS.
He’s not bitter for what he does NOT have.

I have never met a bitter person who was thankful.
I have never met a thankful person who was bitter.

In life you have a choice: Bitter or BETTER?

www.lifewithoutlimbs.org