Can a virus make you fat?

It seems an unlikely idea but research in the USA indicates that there is a link between a virus that causes 'cold' style symptoms and being overweight.

Dr Dhurandhar and his team at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre have now documented more than 1,000 patients whose obesity appears to be linked to infection with the virus.

Dr Dhurandhar's team took blood samples from people at an obesity clinic.

They tested it for antibodies to Adenovirus-36 and found that 20% of the patients had encountered the virus at some point and were significantly heavier than their antibody negative counterparts.

The theory seems to be that the virus causes an increase in the number of fat cells rather than the size of the cells. This has the effect of permanently making the person more likely to gain weight when overeating occurs.

This is not the only cause of being overweight but may be a significant factor in why some people find it more difficult shift excess weight.

The virus is spread by the cold like symptoms it causes, coughs and sneezes. It's not worth trying to avoid larger people as a way of avoiding the virus, as it is infectious for a relatively short length of time.

Does any of this mean that someone with antibodies to Adenovirus-36 can't lose weight?
No.
It simply means that a weight loss program will need to include both sensible eating and exercise.

Follow this link to see the article on the BBC web and the related Horizon program.

Sleep, are you getting enough?

I read a report recently that said that vast majority of people in the Western world are sleep deprived. I'm not sure if that is correct but I do know that many people have problems with lack of sleep from time to time.

I spoke to one person recently whose quality of sleep had become much worse recently; the reason? Money. They had invested in a holiday home in the sun, they paid a deposit and then took on a mortgage in Euros. Whilst £1 bought about 1.5Euro things were ok, but as Sterling fell in value the mortgage payments went up and up. Soon the holiday home payments became more expensive than their main home mortgage. Result? Worry, fear, anxiety and lack of sleep.

In this particular case nothing but direct and positive action will change the situation but for many people a few simple techniques can help.

Struggling to get to sleep?
Write your worries down on a piece of paper before going to bed. It's like letting someone else do the worrying for you whilst you get to sleep.

Grandma had it right, a warm drink as you go to bed will sooth you to sleep. Make sure that it is not tea or coffee though, the caffeine will stop you dropping off.

Some gentle exercise before going to bed, taking the dog for a walk for example will both reduce the stress chemicals adrenaline and cortisol as well as relaxing the muscles.

Waking up in the night with worries?
Staying in bed whilst worrying about your situation is almost always counterproductive. Get up and do something useful for 30 minutes or so. An element of physical work will help you to relax and then go back to bed; you'll be much more likely to drop off.

Using the technique of listing your concerns on a piece of paper can help stop the endless mental chatter that keeps you awake. Make your list and then give yourself permission to go back to sleep.

Listen to some music with a relatively slow beat, Mozart is often cited as ideal to help you get to sleep.

Still a struggle?
If none of these techniques delivers what you need you may find that a recording designed to help you get to sleep is helpful. Try the Sleep Easy recording that I created specifically for those struggling to get to sleep. I've had some great feedback on this MP3, people love the way it allows you to let go of your present problems.

Have you tried the 21 day rule?

Sometimes we decide on doing something and then, after several days, come up with a million reasons/excuses why not to do it now or even at all. Perhaps we simply just forget why we wanted to do it so much in the first place.

If that sounds familiar, you might want to give the "21 days rule" a trial.

For the first 21 days you do exactly what you decided to do without asking questions, or thinking about the reasons why. You even remind yourself that you will be able to decide to stop doing it after a month.

But after that month you're already used to the new habit and so now that habit seems completely reasonable.

It may just help you save those New Year resolutions that slipped by.

Cannabis reclassified as a Class B drug in the UK

In the one to one work I have done over the last few years, there have been occasions when the techniques I use have been tested to the limit.

Cannabis use or misuse has been responsible for two of those challenging situations.

Those who grew up through the 1960s saw cannabis use as less dangerous than alcohol and as little more than a pleasant social recreation that helped a person to relax. That relaxation is brought about by the chemical compound THC and the amount in cannabis varies widely from as little as 1% to as much as 20%.

According to Wikipedia:

The average levels of THC in marijuana sold in United States rose from 3.5% in 1988 to 7% in 2003 and 8.5% in 2006.

"Skunk" cannabis is a potent strain of cannabis, grown through selective breeding and usually hydroponics, that is a cross-breed of Cannabis sativa and C. indica. Skunk cannabis potency ranges usually from 6% to 15% and rarely as high as 20%. The average THC level in the 'coffeehouses' in the Netherlands is about 18–19%.

So here is the root of the issue, if Cannabis is used in moderation it can, in some circumstances be a very effective form of pain control that has few if any side effects. Alternatively it can be the route into more addictive forms of cannabis, the so called skunk, that can cause paranoia, even potentially being cited as a cause of schizophrenia.

Taking a middle path through this quagmire of facts and cultural baggage is impossible. So ignoring the legal point for now what is it useful to say?

1) Mild forms of cannabis with lower values of THC can be useful form of pain control and smoking it is about as dangerous as smoking a cigarette.

2) Teenagers often start smoking mild forms of cannabis before progressing to skunk style weed.

3) Teenagers who smoke skunk are most at risk from the psychoactive ingredients that can lead to permanent changes in the functioning of the brain. These effects can include psychosis, schizophrenia, paranoia and simple anxiety.

4) Smoking cannabis lowers inhibitions that can lead a user to start experimenting with other drugs, the so called 'Gateway theory'.

My personal take awy from this is, if you're a teenager don't touch cannabis, it will alter your brain function permamently and not for the better.

If you have a chronic pain condition see if your family Doctor can get you onto a medication that includes THC.

The reality is that since it has been used by mankind for around 4000 years it is not likely to go away no matter how a Government classifies it.

Decision making tree

When you are planning what to do next with your life, I think it is useful to pull together a list of the goals that you would like to achieve.

I call this the list of 100 things. This exercise may take a few hours to do in an evening or at the weekend but it is worth doing.

Grab yourself a large pad of paper or even better a few stacks of post-it notes and on each post-it or new line on the paper write out one thing you would like to do, see, obtain or learn etc. These things can be trivial or immense, they all count. Make these items things that you would like to do within the next 10 years.

Most people get to 30 or so things quite quickly and then falter. Having someone with you to remind of all those ambitions you used to talk about is helpful. Nothing is off limits, you may have no money to spend today but in 10 years who knows what you will have achieved.

Getting to 80 is the next challenge, now you'll begin to see why a friend is useful; go for the final push though and get all 100 things down.

Wow! Time to take a break.

Now it's time to sort these wishes into 4 individual piles.

Things to achieve within 1 year
Things to achieve within 3 years
Things to achieve within 5 years
Things to achieve within 10 years

Well we're nearly there now, is this begining to look like an action plan for life? I hope so!

It's time to decide on the priority of which things to do first, concentrate your efforts on year 1 because that is where you'll take immediate action. It might be that you can see a simple pattern to the order in which to do these things or you may feel like you need a helping hand.

One way to get a real handle on what to do first is to employ a knock-out contest. The picture on the left will give you the idea. Load up the boxes on the left hand side with your tasks/ideas/desires and pit one against another through a few rounds until you emerge with a winner.

The sheet is an aid to decision making that helps the user define what tasks are most appropriate to do next.

Click on the picture to download a printable PDF version of this picture.

In the 16 pink boxes on the left enter the list of tasks that have been generated through previous work. One task per box, the order of entry is not really that important but obvious competitive options should be grouped together.

Using a knockout system, two pink boxes feed into one yellow decision making box. Only one task can be carried forward to the next round (the orange boxes). Choose which task seems most appropriate to be carried forward and continue until you finish with your most important or pressing task.

Try different combinations of tasks and different orderings to test the outcome. In the end you have to comfortable with the results!

When you have completed the decision tree, work from the right back towards the left in terms of pursuing the actions and goals.

Re-evaluate the situation often!

Take your time and have fun with this, keep a note of your results too.

EFT part 2

For this posting I wanted to tell you a bit more about how EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) can be used.

I often make use of the method in conjunction with hypnotherapy, I find that teaching the client how to empower themself to deal with an immediate fear or anxiety often leads to fast and effective change.

As I explain the EFT method to a client, they are often incredulous, sceptical sometimes even mocking that something like this can work. Generally however they have sufficient trust in me to give it a go.

Gary Craig likens the emotional difficulties we have to interference on a TV set. We know the transmitted signal is ok, we know the TV is working perfectly but every now and again the picture will be disrupted by a glitch somewhere in the communications channel.

His view is that a thought or a memory leads not directly to a feeling but it is communicated through the body system and where there is a "glitch" we sometime interpret the thought or memory as a negative emotion, physical pain or psychological blockage.

The idea of the method is to free that 'blockage' so that the mind/body communications flow without interruption and without the negative emotions.

When I first learned about the method I too was sceptical. I trained as an engineer as some of the notions ablout body meridian energy lines just seemed plain weird.

However, EFT does not rely on belief to be sucessful, indeed many of my most sceptical clients have made hugely significant and positive changes in their live.

I have stopped trying to understand at a deep level how the method works; I just know that for many, many people it works very well. If you have been struggling to make changes in your life and have found it a challenge it would be well worth given EFT a try.

EFT is a constant surprise

I first heard about EFT or the Emotional Freedom Technique about three years ago.

It is, as the name suggests, a way of dealing with negative emotions both from past events and present day circumstances. The method is based on techniques developed first by Roger Callahan a clinical psychologist who started studying Applied Kinesiology (AK), which involves the body's energy meridians.

In 1980, Dr Callahan was treating Mary, a patient who had a phobia of water. After 18 months of treatment and trying various therapies, including hypnosis and behaviour therapy, Mary had barely improved. Callahan had a moment of inspiration.

Mary said she could feel the anxiety in the pit of her stomach. Callahan knew that the stomach meridian passed beneath both eyes.

As Mary imagined her fear, he tapped beneath one of Mary's eyes. Her fear of water instantly vanished and she has remained phobia-free to this day, more than 20 years later. This story is recounted in his book "Tapping The Healer Within".

I read the book and was intrigued by the method (which he called Thought Field Therapy) but thought that the complicated tapping "algorithms" were something that would be too difficult to apply in a clinical setting.

It seems I was not alone in thinking this, Gary Craig was an engineer (not a Psychologist!) who was investigating psychological techniques. He wanted to know why many changes techniques did not deliver the promised results. Having heard about Callahan's work he learned the method and developed it further into a comprehensive and easy to use system.

The EFT method involves a mix of tapping acupressure points, affirmations, eye rolls and humming. At first pass it sounds nuts and most unlikely to do anything except make you feel silly. But it turns out that this technique used in conjunction with hypnosis is a powerful and effective method that can change a person's life in just a few clinical sessions.

I'll explore this method more in my next blog entry.

Obama and change

It's impossible to miss the inauguration of the new US President Barack Obama in the news. His campaign mantra was "change" although what changes he is planning to make are less clear.

The one million people lining the streets of Washington however, felt the need and desire for that change. It is in situations like these where we see how clearly, that emotions are more powerful than logic.

In any contest between logic and emotion, logic will lose. For much of the time, when the emotion is anxiety or fear this stops us being all we can be. Logic may tell us that we have skills and resources that we can use to achieve our goals, but if fear gets in the way we will often feel paralysed and unable to make a step forward.

Today however the emotions are positive; hope is filling the USA in a situation where many people are struggling to keep their jobs or pay their bills. This time, that ability of the emotion to overwhelm logic is a wonderful thing. Just possibly this hope will enable people to look past the difficulties of the immediate situation and use all their resources to achieve a brighter future.

Travelling somewhere?

Driving today can be an exercise in frustration with delays and slow journey times draining the productive time from your day.

So why not use that time to catch up on the latest information?

Download podcasts and MP3s to a CD or your MP3 player and listen to the latest business and personal development whilst you travel.

Use freecorder or a similar program to record live audio feeds. If you need to convert MP3s to a WAV file (for burning to a CD) then the Open Source program, Audacity is superb.

I use Nero to burn CDs but there are plenty of other choice out there. Each CD will give you about 60 minutes of listening time.

Now you're ready to tackle that long journey and if there are delays your time will not be wasted.

Blue Monday?

According to reports on the UK broadcaster the BBC, today is the most depressing day of the year. Dubbed Blue Monday by some, the combination of the poor weather, credit card bills arriving in the post and the general economic gloom come together to create the most mood sapping day in the year.

You may have your own way of combating the low mood but if not. try these methods to improve your outlook:

1) Get outside in the daylight.

Low light levels are linked to depression, go outside and spend time in daylight, even if the sun is not shining.

2) Check your diet

Without daylight our vitamin levels can be lower in winter than in summer so you may find it helpful to insure against this by taking a multi-vitamin suppliment. (Watch for too much Vitamin A if you ar pregnant though)

3) Count your blessings

It's not very fashionable but the old church teaching of counting your blessings can serve to remind you that not everything is dull and gloomy.

4) Do something that makes you laugh

Laughing releases all kinds of feel good chemicals into the body. As the old saying goes (with apologies to Readers Digest) Laughter is the best medecine.

Or try visiting the web site of the Optimist Society. That should cheer you up!