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Have you ever struggled to wake up to your morning alarm clock. I certainly have. Waking up in the dark is not something I do well. Not at all well. It makes me cranky and I feel groggy and I really, really, really want to hit the snooze button on my alarm clock. And in fact very often I did.
Enter the Wake Up Light with Sunrise Simulation. A better invention there could not possibly have been. Ever. This lamp is designed to set your room aglow with the natural lighting effects of sunlight. So whether you need to wake up at 6 am or 4 am, you body will believe that it’s waking up a reasonable hour.
Kiss tired groggy early mornings good bye! This beauty will gradually wake you up with sound and light and have you feeling more refreshed and ready to greet your day!
You can read all the product specs here and see for yourself the science behind this concept.
Have you tried a wake-up light? What do you think?
This interview is a great reminder of why we seek to eat to thrive not just to survive.
Hear Mark Sisson speak about his philosophy and his daily routine. Inspiring!
What is making us fat? If nothing happens “every American will be obese or overweight by 2048.” The Swedes think they have a solution for us. Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt is a leading proponent and researcher in this subject. Check out his blog The Diet Doctor, and watch his video:
For a while, I thought that people were exaggerating when they compared sugar to a drug. But then came the studies which compare the similarities in brain stimulation between drug users and people who had eaten foods containing refined sugar. These are quite remarkable, and they do make a good case for the similarity.
Recently I’ve gained a new appreciation for the similarity between sugar and drugs. It came from this quote from William Dufty’s 1975 book Sugar Blues:
“In about fortyeight hours, I was in total agony, overcome with nausea, with a crashing migraine. If pain was a message, this was a long one, very involved, intense but in code. It took hours to break the code. I knew enough about junkies to recognize reluctantly my kinship with them. I was kicking cold turkey, the thing they talked about with such terror. After all, heroin is nothing but a chemical. They take the juice of the poppy and they refine it into opium and then they refine it to morphine and finally to heroin. Sugar is nothing but a chemical. They take the juice of the cane or the beet and they refine it to molasses and then they refine it to brown sugar and finally to strange white crystals. It’s no wonder dope pushers dilute pure heroin with milk sugar —lactose—in order to make their glassine packages a treat to the eye. I was kicking all kinds of chemicals cold turkey—sugar , aspirin, cocaine, caffeine, chlorine, fluorine, sodium, monosodium glutamate, and all those other multisyllabic horrors listed in fine print on the tins and boxes I had just thrown in the trash. I had it very rough for about twenty-four hours, but the morning after was a revelation. I went to sleep with exhaustion, sweating and tremors. I woke up feeling reborn.”
—–Sugar Blues, William Dufty, 1975, Warner Books, Inc, p. 22–3
Right, heroin and sugar. Cousins.
I don’t use heroine. Why should I ‘use’ sugar? The problem is that it’s very hard to kick the sugar habit. It’s found in almost every processed food, and is so easily obtainable. And it’s highly addictive. The best solution is to work hard, stop consuming it and never look back.
Have you ever wondered why it’s so difficult to establish a healthy eating plan? Despite knowing rationally that eating well is the right option, many of us struggle to establish it as our lifestyle.
CBC News investigates how dopamine plays a role in making us dependent on the feeling we get from these highly addictive, processed foods.
The CBC News video, The Pleasure Principle explains that people who are more susceptible to rewards find a greater challenge in kicking the habit of high-sugar, high-fat, salty foods. These same people would have been highly successful in an ancient primal world where reward triggering foods found in nature would have given them a leg-up on survival. Today, however, the chemical advancement of the Food Industry has modified the level of reward easily found in everyday food by creating super-charged, highly-processed food-like substances which trump the dopamine response of any naturally occurring food. This makes these foods addictive. And this addiction is just as real as any other drug addiction.
Dopamine response causes you to seek out the things that give you pleasure. It creates a drive for more of the things that make us feel good. In today’s cornucopia we are driven to consume unhealthy amounts of sugar, salt and fat by our taste buds and their interaction with our dopamine response system. The video is interesting and worth the 9 minutes it takes to watch.
I’m pretty sure that the reason that my appetite drops when I assume a primal diet is that my dopamine triggers related to food are reduced, and so I seek it out less.
