Good morning!

1 day until US Shipping! The Online Shopping Cart will be activated Thursday at 9am EST. I will be providing a link from OSG and Glo Bakery websites at 9am sharp.

It’s funny because this week I have been swamped with Canadian orders!

I guess the Canadians want to beat the US rush! Smart thinking!

Be sure to check out the Shopping Cart + Shipping FAQ for the answers to all of your pressing questions!

• Please take special note of item 15 on the FAQ page. Keep in mind that quantities on the shopping cart will be limited to start off with. I am going to make available the amount of bars that I can make in a 2 week period. I want to ensure that I maintain excellent customer service which is why I have decided to control how many orders I will be getting all at once. Please don’t despair if you do not get an order in on Thursday! I will be updating the quantities on the shopping cart as I bake new batches.

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How Do You Sleep?

Speaking of losing sleep, I thought it would be timely to do a post on The Sleep Cycle from my book The Owner’s Manual For The Brain.

First, here are a few fun facts about sleep:

• The average person gets 7.5 hours sleep
• Infants get on average 14 hours sleep
• Seniors get on average 6 hours sleep
• Before the invention of electric lights, humans slept for 9 hours on average
• When all cues to time of day are removed (pitch black), humans sleep about 10.3 hours

How do you measure up to these stats?

Personally, when I don’t have my alarm set, I naturally wake up after 8-9 hours of sleep.

The Sleep Cycle is KEY!

• However, it is not the length of sleep that we get that causes us to be refreshed. It is actually the amount of complete sleep-wake cycles that we get!

Each sleep cycle has 5 phases:

[Image source]

The average cycle is 1 hour and 30 minutes, however cycle length can vary from 60-120 mins. depending on the person.

If we truly were to sleep without any disturbances and no alarm clocks, we would always wake up on a multiple of 90 minutes. For example after: 4.5 hours, 6 hours, or 9 hours of sleep.

E.g., 5 complete sleep cycles = 90 mins + 90 mins. + 90 mins. + 90 mins + 90 mins = 7.5 hours of sleep.

Non-REM sleep lasts about 70 minutes per cycle, while REM sleep lasts about 20 minutes per cycle. REM sleep is when we DREAM!

Here is the kicker:

A person who only gets 4 cycles of undisturbed sleep (6 hours) will actually be much more rested than a person who has slept for 8-10 hours but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed.

This is why many top sleep doctors advise people not to sleep with pets in the bed, because often pets disturb your sleep several times during the night and you feel very tired the next day and not know why.

I wish Eric and I could follow this advice! Sketchie happily sleeps at Eric’s feet every single night and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Want to wake up easier? Don’t wake up in REM sleep!

The time between our REM sleep (stage 5) and Stage 2 is called the Twilight Zone (Stage 1). The Twilight Zone is the brief period in between each 90 min. sleep cycle. If you are in Stage 1 of sleep, it is very easy to wake up. You will find that any light stimulus will wake you from a light noise to the sun rising.

Waking up in the second half of your sleep cycle (especially during REM sleep) is often very difficult. Many people report not being able to wake up.

Get this: When we are in REM sleep, our motor output system from the brain is completely shut down (this is why we dream that we are running but we don’t actually run) and also explains why we feel so lifeless when we wake up during REM sleep! Now of course, the motor output system doesn’t always turn off, and we see this especially with sleepwalkers. That is another topic though!

This morning, I woke up in the middle of a dream (REM sleep) and I felt like I was hit by a truck when my alarm went off (even though I had technically the proper ‘length’ of sleep!). I couldn’t wake up for a good hour and walked around like a zombie.

However, if you wake up in the beginning stages of sleep (especially the Twilight Zone), you will find that you wake up easier and feel so refreshed when you get up. I often wonder why some mornings it is so easy to wake up and others it is a battle. This explains a lot!

So fun things to try out:

1. Keep a Sleep Journal.

Record the beginning and waking times for each natural sleep episode that is uninterrupted by an alarm or other disturbance. Find the common multiple. For example, if your recorded sleep periods were 400, 500, 400, 200, and 700 minutes, you would conclude that your personal sleep cycle typically lasts 100 minutes, or 1.6 hours. If you don’t want to keep a journal, just assume it is 90 minutes in length.

2.    Plan your waking accordingly

For example, if my cycle is 90 minutes and I fall asleep at midnight every night, I should plan to wake at any of the following times: 6am, 7:30am, or 9am. All three of these times are multiples of 90 minutes. I would technically be waking up after a full sleep cycle, ideally. If I got up at 8:30am, I would be getting up in the later stages of sleep and would probably find it more difficult to wake up. Apparently there are devices that you can buy to simplify the process.

This morning, I naturally woke up in the Twilight Zone. I felt awake and ready to get up, but since it was earlier than I needed to get up I allowed myself to fall back to sleep for another 45 minutes. Well, when I woke up 45 minutes later it was almost impossible to wake up (I woke up in the middle of a dream). That’ll teach me!

3.   Visualize Waking Up 

In an interesting study published in Sleep in 1997, participants were asked to visualize their time of waking on an imaginary clock face. Results found that those who visualized what time they had to get up were naturally able to wake up at the desired time without any alarm (this is SO me!). The key techniques: Get the same amount of sleep nightly, visualize the time you want to wake up, and use a back up (a clock set 10 minutes later than your desired time).

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What are you sleep-wake patterns like? Do you think you get enough undisturbed sleep?

Good afternoon!

I hope you are having a good day so far.

I am trucking along on my To-Do list…

I use Gmail Calendar for my major tasks and then I also tend to write out a daily To-Do list so I have something tangible in front of me to check off. I find crossing off lists is so satisfying! I always think of things as the day goes by, so my list gets added to as I think of them. Any leftover tasks that are unchecked at the end of the day get transferred to tomorrow’s list!

How To Beat Negative Thinking: Part 2

Missed Part 1?

4. Play The Paper Clip Chain Game

I read about this trick for the first time last night and this morning I decided to try it out because it sounded really fun.

How it works: What you do is create a Paper Clip Chain by adding a paper clip for every negative thought that you have.

For example, if you think, ‘Oh my boss is going to think I did a bad job on this task’ that equals 1 paperclip.

Here is my Paper Clip Chain after this morning:

I was able to catch 12 negative thoughts in action!!!! I’m sure there were more too that I just missed.

It was quite surprising, especially considering that I consider myself to be quite positive!

It really helped me:

1) Recognize the negative thought, and

2) Help to counter it as I clipped on the paperclip.

The great thing about this game is that you can play it at school or work and no one will be the wiser!

5. Remember The Good Stuff

We all deal with negative people in our lives that try to bring us down. When you are faced with a negative comment or action, try to remember the good stuff.

For example, if your sister says to you, ‘Your jeans are looking a big snug today, did they shrink in the wash?’, immediately try to remind yourself of a positive time surrounding your jeans or legs.

Perhaps, your boyfriend told you that you have gorgeous legs or your best friend said she would die to have your athletic legs. Or maybe all you need to do is remind yourself of a kick-butt workout that you had and how proud you were that your legs were able to carry you through it.

Counter the negativity as soon as possible before you let it even register!

6. Start Thinking of Yourself as a Positive Person

When I started this blog, I was amazed at how many people said I had an infectious positivity about me. This was a bit surprising to hear because I still struggle with negative thoughts all the time! However, hearing these words made me start to think that maybe I could be a positive person! Once I started to believe that I was, it was contagious. When I pictured myself as a happy and positive person, I found that I started to act in a manner that was congruent with this schema. Positivity breeds positivity!

7. Pay someone a compliment

As you may have witnessed from Operation Beautiful, paying others compliments can really increase the positivity that you feel about yourself. If you are feeling negative about yourself, try saying something nice to the next person that crosses your path.

I know for myself, I often think nice things about people but I am too shy to tell them!!!! Sometimes, I decide to take the leap and say it out loud and I am often surprised at how good this makes me feel in return. It is especially fun to tell a complete stranger on the street a compliment.

I challenge you to pay a compliment to the very next person you see!!!!

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Have you ever received a compliment by a complete stranger? What was it and how did you feel? Do you ever tell strangers compliments or do nice things for people you don’t know?

Once I was was in a store picking up a few items and this older lady came up to me and said I had a beautiful smile. I was just floored and I couldn’t stop smiling whenever I thought of it.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Good morning!

I’m glad you liked my Ode To Donkeys last night. Oh my gosh that picture cracked me up so much!! I was dying laughing anytime I looked at it. I’m thinking new OSG Mascot??? She/he really does glow!

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Last week I dusted off a book that I hadn’t looked at for a while.

After taking a neuropsychology course in my second year of undergrad, I became completely captivated and smitten with mind-brain research and the mind-body connection. I saved up my pennies and bought this book for pleasure reading.

I remember a few of my friends teasing me for spending money on a book that looked like a textbook, but was not required for any of our classes.

Well, in fact, The Owner’s Manual For The Brain was one of the best books I have ever purchased. It is full of wonderful research about the mind-brain connection.

It answers questions like:

• How does stress affect our health?
• What can I do to keep my brain young as I age?
• How does working the night shift affect my sleep-wake cycle?
• What are the best strategies for studying and memory recall?
• How do odors affect relaxation?
• How does exercise affect moods and cravings?

You can see why I bought this book, right?! I knew my peeps would get me.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I buy strictly non-fiction books for my pleasure reading.

I wasn’t always this way as a child. Growing up, I loved reading books like the Choose Your Own Adventure series, The Babysitter’s Club, Anne of Green Gables, and Chronicles of Narnia. In my late teens, I became extremely interested in health and psychology and I found a passion in informative, research-based pleasure reading.

After dusting this book off, I got to work and started reading up on next workshop topic:

How To Beat Negative Thinking: Part 1

1. Negative –> Positive Lists

As I mentioned in a previous post, something I do every now and then is make a list in the morning writing down all of the negative thoughts that are in my mind. I cross out those thoughts and list a positive, counter thought beside it. For example:

Then at night time look at the list again. I find when I do this, often many of the things I was worrying about in the morning are no longer a concern. Before bed, make a new list of your negative thoughts and worries and cross them out by replacing them with a positive thought. You will also find that this helps you fall asleep faster as an added bonus.

2. Use the ABCDE model by Seligman

I first learned of the ABCDE model in one of my cognitive psychology courses. It is a very effective technique for banishing negative thinking patterns.

The ABCDE model works as follows:

A (adversity): Recognize when adversity hits.

B (beliefs): Be aware of what you believe about the adversity.

C (consequences): Be aware of the emotional and other consequences of your beliefs.

D (disputation): Counter it! Question whether your beliefs are the only explanation. For example, ask yourself: What is the evidence for my beliefs? What other possible explanations are there? Do I get any benefits from holding onto these beliefs?

E (energization): Be aware of the new consequences (feelings, behaviours, actions) that follow from a more optimistic explanation.

As an example, I will do the ABCDE method for the negative thoughts I was having about my half marathon race.

A = I didn’t run at all this week and as a result I am going to fail in my half marathon on Sunday.

B = I am not dedicated and disciplined enough to train for this race.

C = I might as well quit my race training and just go back to being an off and on runner. That way I won’t have to let myself down.

D = Wait a second here! I have been training really hard for the past 4 months. One week off running is not going to hurt me. In fact, it might make me even more rested for the big day. I am doing a very good thing by not over-training like I did in the past.

E = I will continue to listen to my body and honour what it is telling me. If it tells me to rest then I should consider why that is. It is likely that last week’s high mileage was a result of my tired legs this week. No big deal. Maybe next time, I can plan my training schedule so that I don’t have three major runs fall on 1 week.

The ABCDE method also helped me banish negative thoughts when I was in recovery from disordered eating. It was one of the first methods I tried, and I have been doing it on and off ever since.

Try it out! I promise you will feel better after doing your ABC’s (and D’s and E’s!).

3. Snap Yourself Back Into It!

You may have heard of the elastic band trick. This is especially helpful for ruminators. Ruminators are people who worry constantly and mull over how events could turn out horrible. You simply wear an elastic band around your wrist and whenever you start ruminating, simply snap the elastic band on your wrist. This easy trick gives a quick (and slightly painful!) reminder that your thoughts started to wander in a negative way.

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Reading Comfort Giveaway #2:

Would you like a chance at winning a beautiful bookmark and an elegant paper weight from Reading Comfort?

How to enter: Simply leave a comment below telling me one negative thought you have about something in your life and then counter it with one or more positive thoughts.

Contest closes Wednesday Sept. 30th at 2pm EST. Open to US and CAD residents.

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See you later for Part 2!

Good evening!

Check out some fun OSG and GMM things on the WWW:

1) Mmmm. Another Peanut Butter and Jam Glo Bites spotting! This time all the way in the Netherlands!! You can check it out here.

2) The Green Monster Movement website is updated with more green monster recipes. This time, featuring a delicious looking Caramel Apple Green Monster.

3) Oh She Glows was picked as one of the top beauty websites for boomer health. [Really??]

Evolutionary Psychology 101: Exercise Is Key 

In Part 1, I spoke about Why Diets Fail according to the Evolutionary perspective.

According to the evolutionary perspective, exercise is the key to losing weight and keeping it off.

Despite what many people believe, moderate amounts of exercise will actually reduce your caloric intake and curb your hunger.

Research shows that sedentary people eat more than active people!

People who are sedentary (very low activity/exercise levels) have actually been found to eat more and have higher hunger levels than people who are active.

I actually experienced this myself when I was injured in the Winter and was off exercise completely for 2 months. And by off exercise, I mean I didn’t even do stretching or light walking. Zip, nadda, zilch!

I thought to myself, “Oh it won’t be so bad, I am sure that I just won’t be as hungry as when I was working out for 1 hour a day. It will balance out!”

During this time without exercise, I expected that my hunger would decrease and I would be consuming fewer calories since I was not active.

Well, to my dismay I did not find this to be the case at all! I actually was just as hungry, if not more hungry, as I had been when I was getting 1 hour of moderate to heavy exercise each day. I couldn’t believe my body had betrayed me like that!

All along I thought that exercise had been making me more hungry, but I actually had direct proof that it hadn’t been.

If you think that you will start eating too much if you start working out, you are probably going to be pleasantly surprised when you find out that your hunger may be reduced up to a certain intensity of exercise.

Now, that is not to say that people will not use exercise as an excuse to eat way more calories than they burned. In this regard, exercise can actually be a dangerous ‘I deserve it’ trap that leads people to gain weight. That is always going to be a possibility. I think we have all fallen into this trap once and a while. For the most part though, I find that I actually have a much easier time at eating healthy on the days that I have worked out.

Keep in mind that the evolutionary perspective is referring to what our bodies are naturally programmed to do, should we choose listen to them.

It is true that heavy amounts of exercise will increase your hunger (I can attest to this when training for my half marathon!); however, research shows that it will only increase your hunger at most to make up for the calories that were burned during exercise.

If you are truly listening to your bodies hunger signals (and not simply using your activity as a reason to overeat), you should not be consuming more than your burned through exercise. I find that with intense exercise of a long duration, it is very hard for me to eat enough calories to make up for all that I burned. I just am not hungry enough to fully make up for the full caloric deficit that was obtained.

The moral of the story is that we need consistent and regular exercise to lose and maintain our weight. Unfortunately, only 50% of people report using both exercise and caloric reduction as a means to lose weight, while the other half simply cut back on food intake without exercise. We really need both methods to be successful for the long-term.

Now that I have maintained my weight for a couple years now, I strongly believe that exercise is the key to weight maintenance. For the past 3-4 years, I have been working out for 45-60 minutes 5-7 days a week. It seems like a lot, but it is the only way I have found that I can maintain my weight, eat reasonable amounts of food, and not feel that I need to deprive myself to stay at this weight.

Exercise will help reduce your hunger in moderate amounts, boost your metabolism, and will also give you more calories to ‘play around with’, allowing you to eat more without gaining unwanted pounds. Not to mention the fact that exercise has huge health benefits too.

It is really a win-win situation to introduce exercise as a regular part of your lifestyle. As long as you don’t use it as a reason to overeat, exercise will likely help you maintain or reduce your current weight.

Tonight’s questions:

How do you feel about exercise and hunger levels? Does exercise increase it, decrease it or does it depend on the intensity and how much you do?

Do you currently use exercise as a way to lose weight or maintain your weight?

I am often asked if there were any parts of my training in social psychology that were influential on the way that I now view my road to health.

I always think back to a course that I took during my 3rd year of my undergraduate program called Evolutionary Psychology. This course was in part responsible for the gradual shift in my disordered eating behaviours. It helped me view my body in a new light and to appreciate why certain frustrating behaviours (like binging and over-eating) were happening.

This is one of my favourite books of all time:

And trust me, I cannot say this about 99% of the textbooks I purchased during my undergrad and grad school careers. The book is short, clear, concise, and can be easily understood by someone without psychology training.

Given that the back-to-school season is upon us, I thought it would fun to host a series of educational workshops about our health, pulling from interesting topics that I have covered in some of my classes.

What is Evolutionary Psychology?

Evolutionary Psychology is a division of psychology that focuses on how our traits and behaviours evolve because of natural selection. Natural selection is the term coined by Darwin, to describe the process by which adaptive traits are ‘selected for’ (i.e., continue to reproduce in a species) while maladaptive traits (i.e., traits/behaviours that do not help a species survive) die out.

My Evolutionary Psychology course was one of my favourite courses that I have taken over the 7 years of my training.  

My instructor was everything you would dream an instructor of evolutionary psychology would be: Extremely quirky, tall, lanky, overgrown grey hair, and extremely off-beat yet highly intelligent and amusing. One class he even brought his pet Parokeet to teach a lecture with him! Not surprisingly, his Parokeet could speak many words and was very smart.

To start off, I would like to focus on Chapter 10: Health.

Not surprisingly, this was my favourite chapter in the entire book. I have read it many times over. It was also partly responsible for the slow and gradual change in my road to health. 

Why Diets Fail

Then + Now:

• Our ancestors were generally quite fit, lean, and were capable of remarkable feats of athleticism. Contrast this with our current society, and you will see that over half of men and women are either overweight or obese.
• Despite the fact that the diet industry is growing and growing each year, 95% of all diets fail, with most individuals either not loosing weight or gaining back the weight they lost within 1 year.

Why do diets fail?

Adult Human Body Weight Is Remarkably Stable.

• Generally speaking, adult human body weight is very stable! The body strives to maintain its’ current weight.
• Our weight tends to stay quite stable over a period of time, even despite the fact that what we eat daily tends to vary greatly from day to day.
• The mechanism that keeps our weight constant, despite these daily fluctuations, is also the same thing that makes it hard for people to lose weight.

Body Weight is maintained by a feedback system with a setpoint!

• A setpoint is what I like to call a body’s happy weight. It is the point where your weight naturally tends to fall when you aren’t giving a great deal of effort via exercise and diet to lose weight.
• For example, rats and humans who have been starved below their setpoint will eat more food once it is readily available until they regain to the setpoint weight.
• When someone is eating above their set point weight, it is common for the body to compensate by eating less food to return to the setpoint. You probably have experienced this over the holidays when you have a few days or weeks of over-indulging and you find that afterward all you crave are salads and fruit! This is your bodies way of returning you to its setpoint weight.
• This setpoint regulation system operates at a subconscious level. In other words, it will operate without us ever having to give it any thought. That is, unless we start to mess with the system by dieting and obsessing!
• The books authors, Gaulin & McBurney, say that our bodies regulation system is a very adaptive mechanism and we take it for granted. If we didn’t have this natural tendency to eat more when we need to gain weight or to eat less when we need to return to our setpoint, we would either waste away or eat until we are obese.

What happens when going on a diet:

• When people go on a diet, they often find that their weight drops at first, but then the weight loss plateaus.
• Our bodies respond to a diet by first dropping our metabolic rate. The result is that we now burn fewer calories than we did before = NOT GOOD!
• When our bodies drop the metabolic rate, this is a signal that our bodies are resisting weight loss. Our bodies do not want to be in a state of imbalance. All it wants to do is maintain its weight at the set point.
• It is very frustrating because even though we are eating much less than we did prior to the diet, we are still not losing weight.
• We are hungry all. the. time.
• If that wasn’t bad enough, when we do eat more, our weight will often climb higher than it was previously because of our now reduced metabolic rate.
• This is an evolutionary adaptation that permitted our ancestors to survive during long periods of famine. When our bodies think it is in a famine, the metabolic rate plummets and we function and maintain our weight even though we aren’t eating a fraction of what we used to. The result is an often irritable and unhappy dieter confused and desperate.

As a result of these evolutionary mechanisms to maintain our weight, it is very hard to go on a reduced-calorie diet and lose weight successfully for the long-term.

However, while the odds are stacked against individuals looking to lose weight, there is hope.

In the next post of this series, I will tell you one thing that you can do to overcome this frustrating setpoint system and be successful in healthy weight loss and maintenance.

Have you experienced this frustration when trying to lose weight?

Do you think your body has a setpoint weight? Why or why not?