How to save yourself after OVEREATING! :「食べ過ぎをなかったことに！」

And….it’s December! My favorite month of the year, after January 😛 When we think of December, we probably have a picture of feasts coming our way. It’s both a sweet and bitter experience we have to go through each year: as we indulge ourselves into Christmas cake, fresh baked goods, superb New Year feasts (many rounds for some of us), we spend time into the night thinking about what we have eaten and feel (quite) guilty about the pleasure. So…what else can we do apart from feeling so guilty?

Here are some of the ways you can save yourself and prepare for the next normal routine of eating!

1. Make your digestion process go smoothly.
After you eat, your intestines and stomach are still weak, hence, cannot digest well, To help it to work well even in the case of a lot of food, you should regularly take care of your lifestyle. Instead of drinking “cold” drinks, which would burden your intestines, opt for “hot” drinks such as green tea, which contains the slimming elements to say it simply. Also, eat something that is really soft and easy to digest. I usually went for boiled rice or congee, or just veggie soup. Avoid steak, grilled chicken, or anything that requires cutting and chewing extensively.

2. Stretch your intestines
This can be done very easily by placing one pillow on your back and lay on it. This position will put your stomach at the highest point of your body and you can feel your body stretched. Just don’t put it too high and put at least 30 minutes after your meal before doing this stretch. This would help activate your blood circulation and digestion, which would make it harder for fat to be accumulated.

3. Burn! within 48 hours after overeat with these 5 foods

Generally, it is said that it takes 2 weeks for the food you’ve eaten to turn into body fat. Hence, do something about it within the first 48 hours may help prevent your weight gain.
1. GINGER: contains enzyme that aids digestion and increases metabolism, hence you’ll burn more. Needless to say, ginger is one of the hottest ingredients in diet products in Japan right now.
2. BITTER MELON: contains Linoleic acid which helps break down the fat and burn energy. Also, it takes stored fat and uses it as energy as well as promotes the action of the recently known good “brown fat.” Eat it with eggs would ease its bitterness.
3. SEAWEEDS: (such as wakame, mekabu, konbu, or hijiki) contains Fucoidan, which prevents the absorption of fat into your body and disposes out. Seaweeds also contain Fucoxanthin, which reduces fat storage and uses excess fat as energy.
4. PINEAPPLE, KIWI, PAPAYA: contain an enzyme Protease, which breaks down protein and helps with digestive process. They also contain Potassium which helps dispose excess water, hence, prevents swelling/bloating.
5. LAMB, BEEF, OR RED PORK MEAT: contain…the famous “L-carnitine” which not only burns fat you recently take in but also the stored excess fat. It’s in red beef/pork meat, but even more so in lamb meat. Per 100 grams, lamb contains 2 times and mutton contains 6 times more L-carnitine than pork does. 

I hope now you have some backup plan and don’t be afraid to welcome the joy of feasts coming this year end!

Source: Gunosy news, July 17, 2014, written by 木土さや
Picture: http://www.sodahead.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Latest healthy drinks updates! (Review) : 新発売のヘルシー飲料のアップデート！

I know it’s been long since my last updates, so here I am, bringing you with two new healthy drinks I spotted during the past few weeks! I really want you guys to give them a try!

1. Calpis Oasis Sparkling water. Maybe you have seen the normal “Oasis” drink from Calpis, which is by the way MY FAVORITE DRINK ADDICTION OF ALL TIME. It’s ZERO CALORIE, sweet and refreshing and includes some good nutrients (though you can’t say it’s a nutrition drink). I’ve been in love with the normal version for a period of time every year. Calpis decides for some reason to keep changing its packaging every year and only sells this drink for about 3-4 months a year only. I enjoyed this drink from April til about last month and now it’s pulled out of most combini. You can kinda see it in only specific branches of specific supermarkets. (eg. Seijo-ishii of Roppongi Hills branch) The below drink is of the same Oasis drink but is made into the sparkling water version. I spotted it in a supermarket “Gourmet City” nearby my house. I didn’t hesitate and grabbed it in a second. Do you know that right now in Japan sparkling water is a BIG HIT. Almost all bottled water products have two versions: normal and sparkling. It’s like if you don’t launch the sparkling water version, your brand sucks kinda feeling. lol It’s really overwhelming. (I didn’t mind so much for the sparkling cuz it causes me gas.) Personally, I prefer the normal Oasis better than this sparkling one. Nonetheless, for those of you who can tolerate carbonated drinks, please give this a try if you see one!   2. Healthya’s “Walk” drink in Ume (Japanese plum) flavor. I think I introduced this in my past post. (Burn your body with Catechin) That time, this “Walk” drink was only launched in grapefruit flavor. Recently, however, I spotted this drink – now in ume flavor and green color – in a drugstore near my station (Takadanobaba). I tried it and I think it’s refreshing and easier to drink than the grapefruit one! It includes catechin, abundantly found in green tea, that helps activate your metabolism. If you know you’re gonna be doing a lot of walking (like a long shopping day) you might give your body some extra burning! (only 19 kcal per bottle so it’s safe!) This is it for my healthy drinks upates! Actually there are a lot more products that I want to show you guys. Will keep on posting!

Burn your body fat with “Catechin” drinks! : 「カテキン」が含む飲料で体脂肪を燃やす！

Following the introduction of Chitosan in my previous post, this time I wanna raise another popular health key term in Japan: Catechin (or pronounced as Kai-te-kin in Japanese). You can see catechin being included in so many tea drinks in the convenience stores, accompanied with a claim that they could help you burn your body fat. What is up with this health trend? And how does this catechin really work?

 

The brand you might probably see the most is called “Healthya” or pronounced as “he-ru-chia” in Japanese. (pictured above) The products that are quite popular right now among young working people (with quite high health awareness) is the green and blue drinks above. They include 540 mg of catechin in one bottle, to be consumed one bottle a day. If consumed consecutively for many months, it will help you create a body with high metabolism rate, thus, burning fat easily. check out its website for more details here: http://www.kao.co.jp/healthya/catechin/

You need to know here that drinking a bottle after an unhealthy meal doesn’t cancel that meal, make it healthier, or block the fat from entering your body. Drinking catechin should be seen as an accumulated effort in constructing a new inner body system that would be easier to burn fat. It’s actually a long-term effort. According to a research, you will start seeing result after at least 3 months of DAILY consumption. 

So what is catechin?
It is a type of natural phenol and antioxidant, a part of  the chemical family of flavonoids, a term that might be frequent with which can be found in soy products, cocoa, or red wine for example. (Wikipedia) Among its many types of catechins, only one of them is said to have this effect: Epicatechin gallate (ECg) (let’s call it “Gallete-type catechin”). How it helps reduce fat in your boday? To make it simple to understand: When fat is consumed through food, it would be absorbed in small intestine, where the digestive enzyme called Lipase breaks down the fat particles so they can be absorbed. Gallete-type catechin blocks the action of lipase, thus, lessens fat to be absorbed into the body. On the other hand, when cholesterol is consumed, it would be incorporated into small particles called micelles produced by bile that’s released from the gall bladder. These micelles would in turn be absorbed into the body in the small intestine. Gallete-type catechin would extract the cholesterol from these micelles, thus lessen the cholesterol level to be absorbed into the body.

(Find out more here: http://www.itoen.co.jp/catechin/gallate/)

I would suggest you try the blue healthya bottle above!! It includes 540 mg of catechins, which is approximately about 8 cups of green tea (because after comparing the products, this product seems to contain the highest amount of catechins). I know that it might not be possible for us to keep making green tea and drinking it the whole day. So for that, you can take this drink instead if you wanna try. It would taste quite bitter but that’s because it contains catechin. The down side of this is probable the cost: it’s sold at 194 yen per bottle. (which is, to be fair, the average price for all “healthy” tea drinks nowadays after tax increase T__T)

Chitosan: how it really works as diet pills? : 「キトサン」って本当にやせる効果があるの？

This post is for those of you who have tried out several diet pills that are highly popular in Japan. Many foreigners visit chain drug stores and buy loads of different diet pills back home. I would say I had my own experience as well until recently I started to get curious of how these pills are different from each other and do they really work?? One day I visited a Matsumoto Kiyoshi store in Harajuku and was examining this particular diet product called “After Diet” (アフターダイエット）that claims to work when you take it AFTER meal. (Normal pills require you to take BEFORE meal). (Picture below) And the counter guy told me that “actually there is a more effective product if you’re looking for this particular ingredient.” He referred to Chitosan. What he suggested me instead is another popular product in Japan from a brand called Livita; it’s called Chitosan Aojiru （キトサン青汁）, looking like green powder that you use to mix in water. (second picture below)

What I learned from talking to this guy is that the “Livita” product could guarantee more results. From the picture, you can see the circle logo with a stick-man inside. That is called “Tokuho” logo, which is given to products that are guaranteed to be effective and safe for general consumption. Anyway, that all brought my attention to what Chitosan really is and why is it used so much in different diet pills.

 So what is Chitosan?

From WedMD: Chitosan is a sugar that is obtained from the hard outer skeleton of shellfish, including crab, lobster, and shrimp. It is used to treat obesity, high cholesterol, Crohn’s disease, “tired blood” (anemia), loss of strength and appetite, and trouble sleeping (insomnia).

From Wikipedia: Chitosan is widely marketed as diet pills as a “fat binder” which is supposed to limit fat absorption in the body. In an experimental model of the digestive tract, chitosan was shown to interact with oil, which inhibited absorption and enhanced lipid excretion, but the interaction between chitosan and fat is still not well understood. It is also under research for several potential dietary applications. One of them being as a soluble dietary fiber, causing the movement in your digestive tract to slow down, hence slowing down your sense of hunger. It is relatively INSOLUBLE in water, but can be dissolved in acids, which would make it a highly-sticky dietary fiber to say in plain word. Such fibers might inhibit the uptake of fat by increasing the thickness of inner layer of the intestines (observed in animals).

Well, this is the origin of why chitosan is being advertised as capable to “slow down the absorption of fat” (脂肪の吸収を抑える). You can actually see this claim everywhere now. Go to combini and you will see so many brands of tea with the “Tokuho” logo, claiming that the tea could slow down the fat absorption and should be drunk together or after an oily meal. Another type would be the “body metabolism enhancer” (脂肪を燃やす) type, which I’m not gonna talk about today.

Basically, chitosan acts as a very cool type of fiber that interferes with the fat absorbing process after you eat. That is pretty much all there is to the claim in terms of weight loss and diet pills. Of course, it has many other useful applications in other fields.

Some considerations to think about when taking chitosan:

1. Fiber is good for you and can help with your constipation problem. But taking too much fiber can also be the CAUSE of it. Too much is never good.
2. If you have allergy to seafood like crab or shrimp, then you shouldn’t really risk.

Notes:

– You can’t really obtain chitosan even though you eat seafood. That is because chitosan is extracted from the shells and not the flesh that you eat.
– The claim that chitosan would attach itself to a fat particle, wrap itself around it, and together would be excreted from the body has not been sufficiently supported by evidence. It could do that in WATER, but not in acidic environment, which is basically that of your intestinal tract.

As is the case with other ingredients, diet pills make chitosan sound amazing and give us high expectation that it would really work. However, I think the best way is to incorporate it with a healthy lifestyle; not relying solely on the effect of pills that is going to vary depending on each person’s condition. Train yourself to choose good food is always better than indulging in oily food then taking 3-4 pills hoping that that would be all it takes to stop the fat from entering your body.

Source:
http://allabout.co.jp/gm/gc/252955/2/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitosan
http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-supplements/ingredientmono-625-CHITOSAN.aspx?activeIngredientId=625&activeIngredientName=CHITOSAN