https://images.app.goo.gl/Ub98fQpHMeYDgGmaA We all have heard that having high cholesterol is bad - but why? It’s because having high cholesterol leads to heart attacks, but do you know why? It’s because cholesterol is the plaque that clogs the arteries in your heart, right? And how does one get high cholesterol (barring genetics)? It’s because of the foods we eat, that contain high cholesterol, right? All these point and more will be addressed in this blog but

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I’m just going to say it: if you’re not targeting to sleep at least 7 hours every night, then you don’t know how to prioritize your health. Although, our main focus at Olive Branch is fitness, nutrition, and psychology; the over-arching theme has always been wellness performance; and you simply cannot talk about wellness if you don’t get enough sleep. If you have been following my blog, then you know the importance of exercise, nutrition,

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  If you’ve been following the last few blogs here on sugar, then you now have a pretty good understanding on the negative effects (ie. insulin resistance) as well as how sugar gets stored in your body as fat. In the last blog, we talked about how HIT exercise can help mitigate the negative forces of eating sugar. If we use the analogy that your bathtub filled with water is your body’s fat stores, then

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ACT is a tough 45-minute bodyweight-only high intensity (HIT) workout. I designed it to be hard not because I wanted it to be the toughest class in Shanghai, but because of all the physiological effects that I discussed about in my last blog and what needs to be done to reverse metabolic syndrome. If you recall from the last blog on sugar, one of the main issues we have in society is an over-consumption of

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  It depends. Sorry for the cop-out answer but sugar affects different people quite differently. This article will try to give you some insights so that you can better understand how sugar may affect you.  One of the main reasons why it affects people differently is because people have different metabolic health. What does that mean? Well, if Alan is a fat person who doesn’t exercise regularly, eats fast food everyday and drinks sweet milk

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Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final part of the 3-part trilogy on dietary fats! I do have to congratulate you for coming this far as the feedback from my first 2 blogs in this trilogy has been consistently centered on how difficult it was to follow the technical mumbo-jumbo! So I do have to apologize but if you did manage to understand the science, you have equipped yourself with the knowledge to choose how

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It’s time to talk about ‘fats’. I’m not talking about the stuff under your skin and jiggles when you jump, but the kind that you eat in food like drizzle on your salad or spread on your toast (actually, they are kinda the same thing). Everyone’s got an opinion about them and unfortunately, most people only know about the misconceptions of fats. There are many types of fat and so when you are talking about

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So you’ve been working out pretty consistently now for at least 6 weeks and you’ve seen some progress in your strength, fitness and maybe your body composition has even improved slightly - nice. But recently, you’ve shown little to no progress and so your motivation begins to wane. Your workout routine which you were so keen on before is getting bland and even boring. Time to change the workout routine and inject some new stimuli to

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You might have heard in the news recently that Starbucks coffee now causes cancer! Let’s take a closer look to see what’s going on and if we should stop drinking coffee. This blog is an attempt to try to explain what the media is saying and how their headlines may be misleading, and what the real situation is. What to expect in this blog: What is the media saying exactly What the main health risk

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There’s been a lot of emphasis on new exercise routines and functional training in the fitness industry - and there will always be some new shiny object that comes along.  The objective of this blog is to make a case for why the basics are, in my opinion, still supreme. The primary goal for any exercise program is to improve one’s health.  Although, there may be other positive side effects of exercise, such as enjoyment,

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