Cinergee - Health

17/11/2024

Do you know someone who will be a good fit 🤔

Looking for two new team members!

1. Cert 4 Massage or Remedial Massage
Don't want to work full-time as a massage therapist - we understand this?
Mix your massage treatments with beautiful relaxing spa therapies and get the best of both worlds. Safer on your hands, safer on your back. In a relaxed environment.

2. Beauty Therapist - Cert 4 or preferably Diploma with experience
A passion for skin health and skin care and maybe even a little bit of a science nerd when it comes to biochemistry. This advanced position requires a very professional approach as you deal with many skin conditions. The flip side is you get to unwind in the treatment rooms doing amazing spa experiences for our clients.

Requirements for both:-
Passionate about health and wellbeing
Available one night a week and Saturdays
Have a high level of empathy and communication skills
Love to work in a team and advance your team skills

What We Offer:
A supportive and collaborative work environment.
Ongoing training and professional development.
For skin - be willing to travel to the mainland to upgrade skills
A chance to work in a serene and holistic setting dedicated to client wellness.
Unlimited use of the wellness deck (spa & sauna - after hours)
Particpate in weekend getaways
Above award wages with incentives
Wholesale product prices for any purchases
Half price on treatments
Family discounts

Best things about working at Cinergee?
100% our clients are awesome
We are a family

If you’re ready to take your career to the next level and be part of a team that values holistic wellness, we’d love to hear from you!

How to Apply:
Please send your resume and a cover letter outlining your experience and passion for the positions to Attention Manager - indulge@cinergee.com.au

Join us at Cinergee and make a difference in all the lives you touch!

16/11/2024

7 Tips to Help Prevent Stretch Marks by Healthline

1. Control your weight
One of the most helpful things you can do to prevent stretch marks, whether you’re pregnant or not, is to maintain a healthy weight. Stretch marks can happen when your skin pulls apart quickly due to rapid weight gain. You may also notice stretch marks after rapid weight loss. Some people develop stretch marks during growth spurts, such as during puberty. Other people, like bodybuilders, notice them after big gains from working out or using steroids.

Working to control body changes from happening too quickly may be your best bet. Eat a healthy diet and exercise to help you manage your weight. If you do notice rapid weight gain or weight loss, it may be a good idea to visit your doctor to find out why.

2. Stay hydrated
Drinking enough water may help keep your skin hydrated and soft. Soft skin doesn’t tend to develop stretch marks as much as dry skin does. An average is to drink around 2-3 litres of water daily.

Drinking caffeinated beverages, like coffee, may actually increase your risk of developing stretch marks. If you drink coffee, make sure you’re balancing out your fluid intake with plenty of water, herbal tea, and other caffeine-free fluids.

3. Eat a nutrient-rich diet
Stretch marks may also occur if you lack nutrition in certain areas. Eating foods that boost skin health may help. Make sure your diet includes foods rich in:

Vitamin B6
vitamin C
vitamin D
vitamin E
zinc
protein
One way to make sure you’re getting a variety of nutrients is to choose unprocessed foods in various colors. For example, a breakfast of eggs, whole wheat toast, and mixed berries adds many colors to your plate while packing in a variety of nutrients.

4. Include vitamin C in your diet
Collagen plays a role in keeping your skin strong and elastic. It helps reduce the appearance of wrinkles, but it may also be important for preventing stretch marks.

Vitamin C is an important nutrient for the development of collagen. Vitamin C can be found in many fruits and vegetables. Citrus fruits, such as oranges and lemons, are especially good sources of vitamin C. At Cinergee we also carry a good clean collagen powder to add to your smoothies.

5. Soak up some vitamin D
One study found a correlation between low levels of vitamin D and the incidence of stretch marks. More research is needed, but results suggest that maintaining healthy levels of vitamin D may reduce your risk of stretch marks.

The easiest way to get vitamin D is through exposure to the sun. The vitamin is also commonly added to bread, cereal, and dairy products like milk or yogurt. Or supplement.

6. Eat foods rich in zinc
Zinc is an important nutrient for skin health. It helps reduce inflammation and plays a role in the wound healing process. There is very little evidence to date of a connection between zinc and stretch marks, but including zinc-rich foods in your diet, such as nuts and fish, may help keep your skin healthy. (A lot of time with research if there is no money in it, they don't research it - so just because they say there is very little evidence - my previous notes show the reasons why it is so important to add this in - and they obviously thought it worthy of inclusion)

7. Treat fresh stretch marks when they appear
If you can’t totally prevent stretch marks on your skin, you can work to minimize their appearance so they aren’t as noticeable in the long run. Cinergee has a new treatment coming early next year which will work with scar tissue and stretchmarks so keep an eye out on our normal socials.

15/11/2024

As my notes are quite old now - I did some research and came up with the following: -

This is a blend of information from Healthline and WebMD's recent articles.

Striae distensae, striae gravidarum, and stretch marks all refer to streaks someone might have on their skin. You can prevent stretch marks by maintaining a healthy diet and weight.

Risk factors
Some people are more likely to develop stretch marks. Risk factors include:

- being female
- having a family history of stretch marks
- being overweight
- being pregnant
- gaining or losing weight quickly
- using corticosteroids
- having breast augmentation
- having certain genetic disorders, such as Cushing’s syndrome, Marfan syndrome or
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), a group of conditions that result from genetic
changes to collagen, a protein in your body
- children who are not yet teens (adolescents), most stretch marks occur in those who
are overweight.

In the United States, 70% of adolescent girls and 40% of adolescent boys have stretch marks. These are due to growth and stretching of the skin. (Funny how this relates to the overweight and obesity rates in the USA.)

Stretch marks are more common in females than males, and they occur equally in people of all races / ethnicities. This has been linked to the hormonal differences, which are affected by nutritional deficiencies.

I must say that having been in the beauty, health and wellbeing industry for over 40 years now - it was rare to see stretchmarks in my early days - now its rare to see someone without stretchmarks unless they are one of our senior clients.

What has changed in the last 40 + years?

Diet - its a biggie, everyone back in the day grew their own food in their backyard garden, no takeaway shops to be seen (at least not outside of the cities) - less packaged foods and no premade foods - everything was cooked from scratch with ingredients that you could pronounce, shorter lifespan meant less chemicals, no GMO foods. We ate many courses - soup and main, or soup, main and desert, or main and desert - but they were real food, and home grown.

Exercise - we moved so much more, played sport and didn't sit around so much. work/life balance was more prevalent as it was generally 9-5 - Monday to Friday. A night out didn't go until 2-3 in the morning. There were barn dances and community get-togethers combining laughter and fun - like 3 legged races and egg and spoon races. You would go to the beach and rarely see anyone overweight as we didn't lay around - we played beach cricket and tag in the water. We were active until bedtime - and outside until dark.

Anxiety - we were much more resilient and just got on with what life threw at us. Particularly since Covid the level of anxiety has gone through the roof because we no longer feel like we have any control. Anxiety is generally related to future fears - depression is related to the past and we need to live in the present moment. Our lifestyle 40 years ago was very moment by moment living.

14/11/2024

Do Your Kids a Favour

Prevent them getting stretchmarks by feeding them enough good quality, clean protein, zinc, copper, vitamin B6 and C from an early age. Zinc is particularly important. (Copper is not needed in supplementary form as it is adequately supplied in foods and drinking water.) Excess copper causes all sorts of problems, especially mental ones.

1. Take zinc during pregnancy - the developing foetus requires zinc.
2. Give zinc during the first year. Newborns have an excess of copper that needs zinc to balance it.
3. During rapid growth a child needs extra zinc
4. At puberty extra zinc is required and a lack of it can produce either a growth lag or teenage stretch marks.
5. Did you know that for boys - they require extra zinc during puberty because when they start to produce s***m, it takes all the zinc out of the body. One of the reasons young males get acne during this time
6. From the ages of 15 to 20 stress of any sort causes excessive zinc loss. Young athletes often feel their skin tearing when engaging in heavy sports. Extra zinc should be taken at this time to heal the tears and prevent further tearing.

By supplementing your children with zinc you will not only prevent stretch marks, you will allay the onset of acne, menstrual irregularities, and premenstrual tension. You will raise their resistance to stress, infections, diabetes, and many other chronic degenerative disease. Make sure they and yourselves follow and Optimal Diet. For adequate vitamins take B6, 200mg per day and 4,000 mg of vitamin C per ay. Spread them out and take with meals. Because more and more children are suffering form an underactive thyroid gland these days check their underarm temperature.

13/11/2024

If you have stretch marks - ask yourself

** Do I have white spots on my finger nails?
** Have I lost the ability to recall dreams?
** Do I have a sweetish breath odour?
** Do I have occasional abdominal pain in the upper left corner?
** Do I have constipation?
** Am I unable to tan?
** Am I sensitive to sunlight?

If you answer yes to three or more of these symptoms you are passing the chemical kryptopyrole in your urine. This chemical is carrying vitamin B6 and mineral zinc out of your body. 30 to 40 per cent of diagnosed schizophrenics have kryptopyrole in their urine. However, the condition is readily cured with adequate vitamin B6 and mineral zinc, particularly when the thyroid gland is functioning properly.

If kryptopyrole does exist in your urine, to improve your stretchmarks you will have to take 400mg of vitamin B6 and 400mg of zinc chelate per day. Break up the dosage and take with your meals. (I will add an aside here - the B vitamins ideally should not be taken on their own as they are synergistic with the rest of the B group. Vitamin B6, in particular, is known to enhance dream recall and intensity by affecting REM sleep, where most vivid dreaming occurs.)

12/11/2024

Stretch Marks

Everybody is familiar with the unsightly marks that can appear on the skin of the legs, thighs, abdomen, hips and breasts, as a result of rapid growth, overweight or pregnancy. Stretch marks are actually the scars of ruptured skin, and take place in its dermal layer. These breaks in the connective tissue of the skin also occur in diabetes and people who secrete excess cortisone. Prolonged stress and allergy can cause excess cortisone secretion.

To understand stretch marks we must understand connective tissue. The two major components of connective tissue are collagen ad elastin. These are manufactured by certain cells of the skin. The collagen gives structure and support to the skin, while elastin enables it to stretch and contract. During normal growth the elastin fibres are built rapidly and perfectly and each fibre lives as long as the body itself. However, normal growth can ONLY OCCUR when the diet is sound. Adequate protein, plus copper, zinc, and the vitamins B6 and C are needed to make perfect elastic tissue. If these nutrients are in poor supply the elastin is imperfectly made. And if it's subjected to overstretching, it will rip and stretchmarks will appear.

To Prevent Stretch Marks
1. Go on an Optimal Diet (more on this later)

2. Check yourself out for allergies - allergic people leak protein and zinc in the urine, predisposing them to deficiencies in both.

3. Lower your stress levels by reorganising your lifestyle, attitudes, thinking, priorities and the amount of work you do. People under stress leak zinc.

4. Check your digestion: Are you deficient in hydrochloric acid? Zinc can only be absorbed in the presence of adequate hydrochloric acid. Are you releasing enough pancreatic enzymes? Are you diluting the hydrochloric acid with too much fluid at meal times? Do you sit in a slumped posture and impair digestion? Flatulence, gas, burping, swelling and bloating of the abdomen are signs of hydrochloric acid and pancreatic enzyme deficiency.

5. Test to see that your thyroid gland is working properly. An underactive thyroid impairs digestion and absorption of nutrients and slow up the ability of the elastic fibres to use those nutrients to build and repair themselves

11/11/2024

Just to take a quick break before diving into tearing skin - stretchmarks, I want to let you know how I went on the final of my fasting/detoxing journey.

I mentioned previously the huge healing crisis I went through with the 4 day water fast, and that I didn't feel that my body was quite into a state of balance and it needed further cleansing so I followed with the Grape Cure.

10 days of grapes
7 days of fruit
7 days of salads
7 days of normal food - cooked

I kept everything in my "green" food list for Blood Type A. That is because I know the food is going to be "healing and repairing" during the detox. The process of the Grape Cure is explained in the posts dated in the pinned post. I kept the protein shake for breakfast all the way through to maintain my muscle mass due to my age and the fact that I was losing my muscle mass slowly. My goal was NOT to lose weight as I was happy with that, but I wanted to change my body composition. If you followed along the sarcopenia section - as we age we start to get "marbled muscles". That is, fat works its way through the muscles and you slowly lose strength and get more fatigued as time goes by.

Over the nearly 5 weeks - water fast and Grape Cure - I kept my weight loss at 2kgs. I was happy with that. What I lost was bloating and liquid weight initially in the first 3 weeks when I didn't exercise. And started to build a little muscle mass through exercise after this as my food increased. One of the team mentioned " My spark came back" and my energy picked up. This was following 9-10 months of a persistent cough (I feel was due to renovations of my bathroom and constant dust I was sleeping amongst) lots of stress over living amongst constant mess and frustration of it taking so long. Unfortunately I still don't have a bathroom - 12 months down the track - I ended up leaving home for over 4 months over winter and allowed me to be in an environment to detox.

After the initial healing crisis during the water fast - my body relaxed into the Grape Cure - as I have completed it a number of times before. So no further real issues cropped up - except some diarrhea around week 3 that lasted most of the day - very unusual for me - after the initial dump - it was mainly water. My clothes started to fall off me.

I started getting back into bushwalking - but when I did a 12 hour challenging day - I would pull up the next day totally exhausted. The second weekend this happened - I also lost a further 2 kgs - not a good thing for me as I was now down to 60kgs. The most recent weekend of walking - I realised I needed to up my protein a lot more so as well as a protein shake in the morning (a lot of stuff goes into my shakes) I also included a second protein shake when I made it back to camp at night followed with a chicken bone broth. Bingo! Full of energy the next morning and no more weight loss.

When you are looking at making changes to your usual routines, test and retest. Listen to your body, get in tune with it - it has all the answers ❤

Image taken heading up to The Thumbs - West Coast of Tasmania

08/11/2024

In today's society, old people have multiple pathologies, and since we don't do autopsies on each and every individual who dies, we rarely know the true cause of death. What we do know about ageing is that some time after we have attained a fixed adult size, and we have passed our reproductive years, the ability to maintain the fidelity of genes and cells starts to diminish. Yet, it is intriguing to look at certain species that do not reach a fixed adult size, such as some turtles, many sport and cold-water deep-sea fish, some amphibians and the American lobster, and recognise that these animals may not age at all. In our current understanding, infectious disease, predation and accidents seem to be the only causes that keep them from being immortal. Rather than focusing our efforts on the end point of disease, perhaps it would be more productive to spend our time and money studying these animals in order to determine why the don't seem to age in the first place.

Unfortunately, health care's fixation on Effect rather than Cause has resulted in a preponderance of research on age-related disease (the field of geriatric medicine) rather than on why or how we age (biogerontology). This, in turn, has had many socio-political and economic consequences. For instance, more than half the budget of the U.S. National Institute of Ageing is spent on research for Alzheimer's disease, even though the likelihood of drying from Alzheimer's disease is only 0.7%, and a cure would only increase the average life expectancy by perhaps 19 days.

That is to say, yes, I do agree that Alzheimer's disease is a tragic disease to live with. This common sentiment seems to justify the large proportion of funds that the U.S. National Institute of Ageing allocates towards finding a cure. But, the cure is so unlikely that this spending may not only be unwarranted, but also, perhaps, irrational. If on the other hand, that money were spent mostly on the prevention of Alzheimer's disease, then that would have the potential of increasing the quality of life for everyone. Now, I understand that if someone in your family were to suffer from Alzheimer's and eventually to pass away, you might be moved to request that donations to made to Alzheimer's research, in lieu of flowers. Yet, if we lived in a world where an autopsy were preformed, as a matter of course, on every person who died, you might be told that your loved one had also had a failing heart and a diseased liver. My point is that the very idea that we can ever diagnose a single disease or even a single cause of death may be a fallacy. We have a healthcare system based on the end point of disease, when that very end point can never be stated with absolute certainty.

Should we spend more time and money looking for that elusive end point? So far, the search hasn't significantly reduced human suffering. The problem stems from the fact that a plethora of lifestyle and environmental factors can damage our DNA, which in turn can cause enzymatic pathways to arbitrarily go astray, resulting in disease. Think of it this way: we get sick because our genes have somehow taken a wrong turn. Then we try to discover where and how that turn was made instead of trying to stay on the right path in the first place. As you can imagine, it's been a slow and tedious task to study disease from this end; and, ironically, even when scientists have succeeded in explaining the arbitrary disease pathway, it hasn't made it any easier to get things back on the right track. After so much time and so much money, we still haven't really found cures for the most prevalent diseases that plague us today - heart diseases, stroke and cancer. Evidence suggests that if we were to invest our time and money into prevention, it might yield higher dividends than the suggested 15 years extension.

this is the final on of the Default Health Program.

08/11/2024

Ageing is usually defined as "the progressive loss of function accompanied by decreasing fertility and increasing mortality with advancing age"

In other words, as we age, we lose our ability to reproduce, our senses diminish and our chances of dying go up. So what's the big deal? Who didn't know that? Well, the problem is that people are living longer today; and, as a result, we are experiencing firsthand all the many ways in which it's possible to lose facility and function. I will grant that modern medicine has been successful at trying to make this process less painful; but why should we expect that it has to be this way to begin with? Besides, less pain does not necessarily mean less suffering. There are many other costs to disease: worried family members, less productivity, less self-esteem and high medical bills. The real challenge is not just to live longer, but also to age gracefully. This means we have to change our focus from merely trying to ease the pain of degenerative disease; instead, we need to focus on all of the possible ways that we can stay well.

The alternative is to live a fairly long life - certainly longer than cave dwellers lived - but to become dependent on drugs, artificial machinery and other people for assisted living. Aside from the work being done in the area of infectious diseases, most of current research and medicine is aimed towards getting better and better at taking care of sick people as they age. I assert that this approach misses the mark. If we are to choose an ideal to strive for, should it be merely to ease the pain of those who are suffering from disease? Or should it be to prevent disease in the first place? It's not enough to assist people in living a longer life, without the promise of a quality of life - right to the very end. My wish for you is that when it is your time to go, you can die peacefully in your sleep - of old age.

When I finally realised this extremely important concept, it forever altered the way I wanted to participate in research. I could no longer justify writing research grant proposals to study various disease processes. As a biochemist, I realised that most of the research related to the disease is focused on what, in the final analysis, is an inevitable outcome of the body not having been taken good care of in the first place.

Think of it like this, the way to which society goes about trying to understand and cure a disease can be compared to the study of sociopathic behaviour. When we, as a society, spend all of our time and resources trying to determine what random childhood event or sequence of events might have caused a person to become a sociopath, we are ignoring the possibility of prevention. By spending adequate resources on trying to raise today's children with love, a sense of security, and proper nutrition, we have an opportunity to address the root cause, rather than commenting on the effect. While our current approach may provide some insight into what causes disease or what sets off a sociopath, that information doesn't serve us unless we utilise it to prevent such disasters. I assert that we have enough information about how to raise healthy, functioning members of society, but this information is not making a difference. We need to take action now. Just as we should focus more on how today's children are being raised if we want to build a better society for the future, we need also to focus on the prevention of diseases if we want a long and healthy life for every member of that society.

Image of myself (in 60's) and my Mum in her 90's