HIGH TECH VS LOW TECH
Self Care is a topic that I want to discuss today and how the Master Cleanse brings about this awareness in us and in our health. That generally grows through the experience of the master cleanse. Master Cleanse itself is definitely a challenge it’s an experience that we usually end up wanting to share or at least get some support from people along the way which is why we have the Group Cleanse. And on the Group Cleanse we have a couple of different topics that we like to talk about and inevitably, those topics end up revolving around these six channels that I’ve identified which are the following:
- Weight Loss & Diets
- Cleanse & Detox
- Healthy Foods & Water
- Hollistic Healing
- Health Management
- Personal Development
Master Cleanse is about these things. But today I want to talk to you about health management or what I call self care. Because when we’re journaling our experiences, yeah we talk about our experiences, right? We talked about what happen on Lemonade Diet Day 1 and what happen on Ease-In Day 2 and the different experiences we’ve had on certain topics that everyone has seems to really want to find out about. But one of these in particular the Weight Loss – Physical Results is more statistical than the others. The other one‘s are more journaling like your opinion or experiences, documenting what’s happen. But when we’re doing Master Cleanse a lot of us are curious what we’re going to loss for weight. And so, we naturally measure our weight. Why not measure more? Of course if we have our height and even our hip measurements compare to our waist measurement. And we can start to calculate some really interesting things like body mass index. Those types of things are far more useful than just our weight. So, when we are starting to think about tracking how much weight we lose. What we really want to do is track how healthy we’re getting.
In this concept as Self Care is really pervasive in the world right now. In fact, there are multiple companies that are putting in place this Health Plan and Incentives for their employees, students and for any number of groups that can benefit from having their people healthy. So, they will create these Health Care Management Center where you can take Self Care tests which is not much more than measuring our health in a way that we do with the master cleanse starting with our weight. But in another ways, there’s an article I found in Yahoo.
There are a couple of ideas on how to measure our health. And I mention the following:
- Body Mass Index (BMI)
- Lean Body Mass (LBM)
- Weight
- Waist-to-Height Ratio – helps us sort of understanding our body composition. Here are a few intangible items which are very important too like: How you Clothes Fit; How you Feel; How you Look; Resting Heart Rate (RHR).
So, I encourage you to start thinking about measuring your success and health in the master cleanse in some of these ways.
We want to get to know how healthy we really are. There are a lot of companies offering these assessments. The Assessments are usually broken down into two types of tests.
Step 1: Fitness Assessment, Blood Test & Report –
We will measure your height, weight, BMI, heart rate and so on.
Step 2: Health and Lifestyle Assessment & Report –
We start to look at your personal/family medical history, fitness status, nutrition, stress levels, and so on.
One of the biggest components of this type of Health Management Health Monitoring is Dr. Oz. You guys probably seen Dr. Oz in some point where he came up with what he call then The Biological Age, and what he calls now the RealAge. Dr. Oz launched this website called RealAge where you can take this RealAge Test and see what the results are, and what types of things you should be tracking.
So, I’ve gone ahead and create a spreadsheet that lists the different types of statistical information that we could track daily. And I’m doing so for myself as you can see here I’ve got my first day of this recent cleanse listed. I have all these short acronyms for these different items.
Self Care – Biometrics
These different items that we could track are the following:
Basic Key Measures of Self Care Health Management
– Height
– Weight
– Waist, Hips and Abdominal Circumference
– Heart Rate – Resting
Advanced Key Measures of Self Care Health Management
– Body Mass index (BMI)
– BMI / Composition (Weight: Height)
– Scales – That’s why I want to focus on Omron monitor. This scale will track not only our weight of course, but also track our body fat %, visceral fat amount that surround your abdominal, skeletal muscle % (which is really important on the master cleanse because a lot of people detractors will say that you loose lean muscle), resting metabolism (which is also really important because a lot of people detractors will say that it affects our metabolism). It also measures our body age (calculates the age of our body), body weight, and body mass index (BMI) as well.
– BioElectrical Impedence (BIA) –
pubmed/9507912 – shots an electric wave through your body and it can measure almost like sonar, how that energy moves through our body, how much of our body, muscle, fat, water and so on.
We can get most of our statistics right from this scale. So, why not get one of those scales?
Self Care Details of Interest
There’s a couple of those statistics that I’m really interested in and that is PH – that’s the acidity or the alkalinity of our body and a very good predictor for the stay of our health. And the lemon has the direct impact on our alkalinity in fact, it’s an acidic food outside of our body but it tends to have an alkalizing effect on our body. We would rather have a slightly alkaline body state than acidic. Almost all of the foods we eat today are acidic foods. I also wanted to track my blood sugar (BS) because another detractor says, “hey! You guys are drinking sugar; it’s going to spike your insulin. You’re going to have this crazy effect on your insulin and it’s just going to cause you to crave more, want more food or something”. So, I’m going to track my blood sugar as well to see what happens with my blood sugar. Finally, I want to track my heart rate and my blood pressure (which is the diastolic and systolic). The reason why I want to track those is because Biometric Testing can help us increase our life span. High blood pressure is the #1 cause of stroke. So, let’s get our blood pressure under control. Diabetes is a pandemic proportion and 25% of diabetics are unaware of their condition. How do you become aware? Measure yourself. How do you measure yourself? You do the pin prick. You don’t have to have diabetes to do the pin prick. There is also a 2x greater risk of a heart attack if you have high cholesterol.
Now, we’re starting to get in to some advance measurements. Where we have blood tests done. The blood test will measure things like our LDL Cholesterol. There is also some very advance testing. I’m not gonna get in to it now but consider DNA screening. We can test our urine, lung function, ECG – measure how our heart’s function. Now, I’m not saying you should go out and start testing everything but maybe a handful of the big one’s like I’m doing: blood pressure, blood sugar, pH, and my measurements – waist, hip, chest, biceps and quad. And you might even want to photograph yourself. Photographic evidence is powerful. You can photograph your front, and your back. Not only as it can tell you how your shape is changing but it can tell how you’re looking. Where your eyes are looking sag and tire, or you’re looking healthy as your skin looking good or pale. Those types of images are important. We do want to notice how our clothes are fitting, and we do want to track how we’re feeling. So, the Group Cleanse is very good for that. But right now, all that exist is this Diary Journal Pages and a handful of Master Cleanse journals out there.
So, we do need some more devices to help us with this tracking. Everyone has a smart phones these days, right? So, why not look for an app that can help you with this. Master Cleanse has an app, and there’s a couple of app in the site like Master Cleanse Coach by Petter Glickman is a good start and there’s more. There are so many apps that we can search for, in the android as well, if you don’t have an iPhone. There are instant heart rate monitors that can pace your heart rate by putting your finger on your camera. And there’s this awesome tracking log apps that track your blood pressure over time. Also consider the simple testing devices like a pH strips. PH strips are pretty easy to find in drug stores as well and a pretty cheap on usually on the 10 bucks. Get a digital one’s too. Would that be great if we get somehow have add disposal or something that plugs into our iPhone, and tracks all everything we need to and would just be out of our way?
In the meantime, consider a couple of tools that you might get add your disposals which are:
- Blood Glucose Test Strips
– These devices that are usually 5-10 bucks and your whole investment can be able up to $30 for one of these.
- Blood Pressure Monitor
– Also measure your heart rate. You can usually get these in a $30 range for a manual pump and a $50 range for an automatic pump.
And of course there is a scale that we talked about earlier. Now, if you’re super low tech, you’ll be happy to know that I put together a Self Care kit that includes a journal and a tracking log so you can track your biometrics. Much like I’m doing on this spreadsheet here (see the video).
Again I want to remind you that don’t feel over whelmed by you got to track all this stuff. Maybe take a step up from just tracking your weight and if you can go from just tracking your weight. To track in a few things like the very key measures. It’ll go a long way to helping your Master Cleanse experience and understanding what’s happening to your body. But, also moving into a mindset of taking ownership of your health care. When you start documenting these things. You can start to engage your health care professional in a give and take manner.
So, that’s all the time I have for now on that topic of Self Care. I encourage you to grow in your understanding in your own health and I wish you the best of luck in your Master Cleanse experience. That’s all for now! I’m Mike Olaski and happy cleansing.