by gekko at 5:30 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I've just dumped my old blog, the Blob. I decided, since I haven't posted there in six months, and since I seem to be barely able to keep up over here, that it'd make sense to close that one down.

Weight-obsessed peeps, fear not! I have imported all of the Blob's archived entries to this blog and you can find them under the new category "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition."

Or you can find them using the Tags in the tag cloud.

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by gekko at 10:16 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"Bowling is over for the summer, and I have that babysitting job," she sighed, pinching the roll of extra, flabby flesh that has begun to accumulate in her middle. "I weigh the same as always, but everything has sagged down to my stomach and hips and I have no time for exercise!"

That's a familiar lament. I've used it. Everyone I talk to who hates the way they look but hasn't yet made any change to their life to fix what they think is wrong usually uses a variation of "I just don't have time for exercise!"

Leave aside for the moment that if you don't get much exercise you need to reduce what you eat. We'll focus only on exercise and activity in this post.

It's as simple as setting priorities in our lives. She bowls. What is she doing with that time slot now that the bowling, er, "season" is over? She replied that she busies herself, so much to do.
She babysits a toddler two days a week. What does she do in that time slot on the other five days a week? Oh, she busies herself. So much to do. She has a dog, a five year old lab with a LOT of energy and she complains about how much attention the dog needs, but she can't take the dog for walks because the dog always pulls so hard on the leash. She's older, and can't take that kind of strain on her arms.

Hmmm.

Has she considered taking training classes with the dog? And then setting aside 45 minutes or an hour a day walking the dog, energetically? Drain the dog, work the dog, get exercise herself, and add the "upper body" strength training that comes with correctly working a dog on a lead?

Oh, so much to do, when would she have time for that?

I don't know, to be honest. I know what my days are like, and how I set my schedule, and because I consider exercise to be important to me -- as important as eating, in fact -- I put exercise into my schedule. I give up things that are a little less important. I watch very little television, for example. I "TiVO" my few programs that I like, then spend maybe an hour or an hour and a half watching some of the shows just before bed time. I probably spend a little less time fussing about the house, scrubbing it. I don't know what all I am skipping or missing, really. Clearly, it is less important to me.

I don't think, I know this is a key to weight management. She hasn't changed weight, but she's lost muscle mass and discovered fat accumulating in the places it likes to accumulate because she's not using her muscles much. She's set her priorities to exclude obvious places to get exercise. Whatever she is doing instead of bowling, or on days when she's not babysitting, it's more important to her than dropping the fat.

Oh, and she eats massive, fat- and calorie-laden meals, too. ;-)

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by gekko at 5:55 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I've said it. This article, quoted below, has said it. Walkies are good for you.

These days, it's easy for people to get confused about exercise -- how many minutes a day should they spend working out, for how long and at what exertion level. Conflicting facts and opinions abound, but one Mayo Clinic physician says the bottom line is this: walking is good, whether the outcome measurement is blood pressure, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, joint problems or mental health.

"Getting out there and taking a walk is what it's all about," says James Levine, M.D., Ph.D., and a Mayo Clinic expert on obesity. "You don't have to join a gym, you don't have to check your pulse. You just have to switch off the TV, get off the sofa and go for a walk."
-- Walking Has Major Benefits, Whatever The Problem

Caveat: Walkies are not good for you if you're a bit scatter-brained and end up getting hit by a car. Also, probably not a good idea to walk far in the blinding heat and sun in a desert summer.

Try a treadmill, instead.

'k?

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by gekko at 2:36 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

This one seems dodgy, but who could resist?

Eat six cookies a day (plus a meal) and lose weight.

Linda Hoover said she tried numerous diets without results before stumbling upon the Cookie Diet. She's been eating six cookies a day for about a month and said she's lost 17 pounds. -- Lose Weight By Eating Cookies - Featured Stories News Story - KPHO Phoenix

The diet is 800 calories a day.

I don't care what you eat, if all you eat is 800 calories and you're not, like, 80 pounds to start with, then you're going to lose weight.

But here's the clincher: you spend $250 to get into the program, then buy your daily protein cookies at $7 a pop. Might be worth it to some, but as far as I'm concerned, if you're limiting your daily caloric intake to 800 calories, you're endangering yourself and probably setting yourself up to yo-yo right back into the plus sizes.

I'd love to see someone do a story on one of these diets a year after they stopped.

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by gekko at 2:53 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I guess you can look skinny to everyone, have the right BMI and all that, but really be fat on the inside -- that is, by the internal fat surrounding vital organs, according to Britsh researchers.

"Being thin doesn't automatically mean you're not fat," an AP report Thursday quoted Dr. Jimmy Bell, a professor of molecular imaging at Imperial College, London, as saying.

Bell's team has scanned nearly 800 people with MRI machines since 1994 to find out where fat is stored in their bodies.

Data show people who keep slim through diet rather than physical exercise are likely to have major deposits of internal fat.
-- Xinhua - English

The article doesn't tell us much. It does not tell us how we can tell if we're just thin on the outside and a diabetic in the making. It just kind of warns you to not rely on diet alone, but to add exercise to your daily practices.

I am an advocate of exercise, of course. It has so many benefits beyond just helping sculpt your body. The beauty of it is that it doesn't have to be all muscle-head weight lifting or hot sweaty aerobics to qualify as "exercise." In fact, to optimally burn fat, you're best off if you exercise moderately -- brisk walking f'rex -- for longer periods of time. As you burn the fatty deposits in your muscles, you'll also build lean muscle and that will help you keep weight off. Adding weight training doesn't hurt, of course, and can only improve your lean-meanness, but, again, you don't have to be one of those sweaty grunting thick-necked power lifters like Wayne. Add a few 5 lb dumbbells to your walk and swing your arms. Do some curls with 'em. Get a wee weighted exercise ball and swing it around a bit.

Have fun with activity, and do it often.

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by gekko at 12:13 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Or maybe it should say, "More Taste! Less Filling!"

Or maybe "Is it soup, yet?"

Pick yer advertising meme to fit the revelation that starting off your mealtime repast with a bowl of low-calorie soup may result in you consuming up to 20 percent fewer overall calories in that meal than if you did not add the soup.

"Consuming a first-course of low-calorie soup, in a variety of forms, can help with managing weight, as is shown in this research and earlier studies. Using this strategy allows people to get an extra course at the meal, while eating fewer total calories," says Flood. "But make sure to choose wisely, by picking low-calorie, broth-based soups that are about 100 to 150 calories per serving. Be careful of higher-calorie, cream-based soups that could actually increase the total calories consumed."

-- Medical News Today: Cut Calories At Meals With A Soup Starter

The soup they used in the study had chicken broth, broccoli, potato, cauliflower, carrots and butter. They tried thin and thick, soupy and chunky varieties but concluded it didn't matter what form, just that it was soup and low cal.

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by gekko at 3:32 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Paula located a good site that breaks down fat, um, so to speak, in easy to understand terms.

Thanks, P.

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by gekko at 9:55 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

With work, family, and other whiny-assed excuses -- I mean, responsibilities, I'm hearing too many peeps saying they can't manage to do the recommended 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity needed to maintain fitness or assist in a weight loss program. Tons (sorry) of folk imagine you have to change into your workout clothes, drive to the gym, and sweat on the stair climber for 30 minutes every day and that's what it takes.

Dude! You don't have to wear workout clothes (although there are some darling ones out there that you'll prolly want to buy just cuz they're too cute to pass up), you don't have to go to a stinky old gym, and you don't even have to do a 30-minute workout -- I mean, the way you may think of it.

So plan ahead and take three 10-minute walks during the day.
1. Get up a few minutes early, toss on yesterday's clothes and do a ten-minute walk outside before your morning shower. Be sure to take along a paper bag to cover up your bedhead and do NOT breathe on anyone you happen to meet. But, still. If you're early enough, the only other people you'll meet will look just like you so, like, who cares?
2. Next, take a walk break instead of a coffee break mid-day (specially if you're craving a package of vending machine cookies or one of those bear claws in the cafeteria).
3. Then in the evening, walk the perimeter of your daughter's la crosse field as she plays (or wotever).

Extra bonus points if you can make 40 minutes for your walk. Keep your stride fairly long and rapid to get your heart rate up so you can still talk easily. Just a little extra hard breathing. You can receive substantial health and fitness benefits from accumulating 30 minutes or more of moderate intensity physical activity most days of the week. If you're looking to kill two birds with one stone, get into the routine of combining family and fitness time. Okay, you're not actually going to try to kill the birdies. Unless, of course, you get pleasure out of that, but I digress.

Plan some activities that involve the entire family:

* Plan active vacations that involve hiking, skiing or water sports.
* Mopping floors! This is actually fun with littler kids. Dampen some rags, take off your shoes, and everyone take a pair of rags and step on them. Then slide around the floor, scooting from side to side, do the twist, etc. to some funky music. Change out the rags every now and then so you don't just swish the dirt around in mud swirls.
* Take regular walks. Walking is a great habit, and a good way to foster communication. Unless you can't stand each other -- I mean, then make sure you plan routes that do NOT take you through any secluded areas.
* Ice or roller-skating at a local rink. Yes, you, too can look like an idiot as you wobble around on blades or rollers!
* Play pickup games at a local field or playground. Call the neighbors to add to the fun.
* Plant a garden at home. Just don't use any hoes for implements, because if you call out to your son "Yo, get me the hoe" and Al Sharpton happens to be walking past, he'll have you fired.

The key is to try to make physical activity a fun diversion instead of another chore. Ya know?

Oh. And one more thing: I decided I want walking sticks. Those poles that you use like cross country skiiers use, only designed for walking. I hear they take the strain off of the back if you use them, and if you swing them correctly, then you get the added caloric burn benefit. Get me a pair for my birthday, please.

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by gekko at 12:52 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

In one of my earliest posts on this blog, I commented that the common use of the word "diet" is problematic. See, I never really believed in "diets" -- whether it's Atkins, South Beach, Grapefruit, Jenny Craig, or The Alternating Dog Food and Peanut Butter Weekly Drink Program. Too few of them are realistic. Too few of them, I felt, involved how humans were intended to eat, and so they were all doomed to fail at some point.

Sure enough, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), reviewed 31 long-term studies lasting between 2 to 5 years and pretty much concluded that not only does dieting in the conventional sense of the word not work, it actually leaves you worse off than had you never dieted.

Dr Mann and colleagues sought to determine the long term effects of dieting and address the question "Would they have been better off to not go on a diet at all?".

So they analyzed every study they could find that followed people on diets for 2 to 5 years. Studies that take less than 2 years are "too short to show whether dieters have regained the weight they lost," they said.

They discovered that it would have been better for most of them if they had not gone on a diet at all.

"Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back," explained Dr Mann.

Their findings show that:

-- People on diets typically lose 5 to 10 per cent of their weight in the first 6 months.
-- But 33 to 66 per cent regain more than what they lose within 4 to 5 years.
-- Scientists Say Dieting Does Not Work

I confess that I followed a program that is considered a "diet" program. I used Weight Watchers© to help guide me, and I used it to track my eating, exercise, and progress. I do not credit WW with my success, however. My success (so far) has come about because I chose a program that educated me and gave me tools to do it on my own, and because -- and this is important -- I stuck with it. I changed my eating habits. I changed my exercise habits. I changed my life.

I'm still within that four-to-five year window that the researchers have noted serves as an outer limit for the eventual weight gain, and I have noticed my weight creeping back up again as I stop following my life-changing habits and go back to the emotion-based stress eating that got me fat in the first place.

But I'm not going to diet. I'm simply going to go back to the sensible eating habits I had adopted when I lost the 60 pounds.

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by gekko at 11:36 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I am gleefully stealing this from another web site, one that they made me sign up for as part of a "wellness" program at work. I tried telling them I already do this stuff and I should just get the credit for it, but they never listen. Anyway, I've heard from a number of folk that they just can't get into exercising. See, a lotta peeps seem to equate "exercise" with visiting the gym or the track and exerting yourself heavily, sweating, having to wear gym clothes, pump iron, etc.

All of that is true -- I mean, going to a gym or running through your neighborhood or on a track, or some focused, purposeful strenuous activity is exercise and can be good for you to do and maybe is the bestest and quickest way to get fit and healthy and lose weight and all that stuff, but it isn't the only kind of exercise.

This article actually talks about what you're already doing that qualifies as exercise.

Does the thought of exercising make you wince and reach for the remote control? Then it may surprise you to learn that you're already working out aerobically every day. Whenever you walk or move about -- no matter how slowly -- your muscles immediately start working harder, boosting your heart rate and burning extra calories. "How can I be exercising, if I'm not out of breath?" you protest. Well, aerobic exercise includes any activity that works large muscle groups and increases your respiration and heart rate. While the benefits of rigorous exercise may be greater, you don't need to be panting for breath to improve your health.

Now that you know you've been exercising all along, it's time to start measuring exactly what your current activity level is:

Keeping Track
Start by keeping track of all the walking you do each day, including:

* Going to and from your car
* Strolling through stores and malls
* Walking around your office
* Heading from the office to lunch and back
* Walking the dog
* Rambling around your house

You can gauge this daily activity in minutes, using a wristwatch, or you can buy an electronic pedometer and record the number of steps you take. Also, you can note these activities in your Exercise Journal.

Around the House
Give yourself double credit for every flight of stairs you climb. This boosts your heart rate substantially more than walking on flat terrain. Include in your exercise total any chores that require you to be on your feet -- including housecleaning, yard work, and puttering around the garage or kitchen.

Fun Counts!
Finally, count all time spent moving about in recreational activities such as tennis, bike riding, swimming or golf (count only the time spent walking the course). When you add up all this activity, you might discover that you already have the foundation for an aerobic program in place!

Next Steps?
The ideal amount of exercise recommended for optimal health is 30 minutes or 10,000 steps per day. To do this, many people are able to reach these amounts by simply building on what they're already doing. Here are a few ways people can give their activity a boost:

* Walking around the block a few times going to and from lunch
* Parking the car a little further away from a destination
* Stretching out a bike ride or tennis game by a few minutes
* Getting off the elevator several flights early and walking the rest of the way
* Raking the yard or cleaning the house instead of hiring someone
* Walking over to a colleague's desk rather than calling or IMing

Exercise opportunities are everywhere — once you realize that every step counts.

So now you know.

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by gekko at 12:17 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Women friends of mine who've been impressed with my weight loss and maintenance of same (they haven't noticed the ten pound gain) also tell me that they feel bad about themselves.

"You look so good. Me? I'm just a lump and I can't get motivated. How did you do it?"

Well, I look at myself in the mirror and think I'm just a lump and I despair, too. I don't really look all that good. Not to me. As to how I did it, I wonder how to do it some more, so I can start really looking good.

It's a poison, this feeling. It truly is. And researchers are starting to demonstrate that my friends and I are so not alone.

The rail-thin blonde bombshell on the cover of a magazine makes all women feel badly about their own bodies despite the size, shape, height or age of the viewers. A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.

"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory."
-- Women Of All Sizes Feel Badly About Their Bodies After Seeing Models

Here's the deal: when I express my negative feelings about myself to men, they almost all of them say "Well, you look good to me!" As if that matters. Dude, while I am glad you like what you see (you think "sex", c'mon, admit you're not really looking), I don't care that you think your opinion trumps mine, gottit? I'm talking about how I feel, not you.
And I'm saying that those airbrushed impossibilities who starve and beat themselves to create that look are making it worse for me.

I have no advice. Simply ... sympathy.

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by gekko at 9:20 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It's a case where color does matter. The human body actually has two different types of fat tissue -- the normal "white" fat that we all complain about (and see drooping about beneath the skin of far too many people), and a brown or adipose fat tissue that we do NOT see.

It's long been understood that the brown fat actually generates a lot of energy and burns the white fat to create that energy. In a way, the brown fat acts a bit like muscles. It nestles deep in the muscles, in fact, near the mitochondria in order to feed the muscles. Babies generally have a lot of brown fat, and we lose it as we grow older.

Or, at least, most of us do.

You've seen those impossibly slender people, right? The ones who never seem to get fat? They have smooth lines, no lumps, and you never really even see them at the gym. There are many reasons that they are that way, including the fact that they probably do not overeat, that they do move around a lot ... but now maybe, just maybe, it can be shown that they have more of the brown fat tissue in their bodies than do we chubby mortals. That means they can and do eat a lot more, seemingly, than seems right for their size and they burn it. Their basal metabolism is higher than ours.

So those of us who are predisposed toward girth, no matter what we do, can lay the blame only in part -- a big part -- on our habits. There is a bit of body engineering that is making it more difficult for us.

Don't take this as an excuse that there is nothing you can do, however. Don't start saying "Oh, I don't have enough adipose fatty tissue so I'll just eat more muffins 'cuz it ain't gonna matter." Just, maybe, stop eyeballing those skinny peeps who chow down everything and never gain wait and plotting their murders. It's not entirely their faults, see.

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by gekko at 1:07 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

So I've always been a chocoholic. And most everyone knows about the chemical dependence one can form with chocolate -- theo-whatsit and endorphins, same stuff as when we fall in love, yadda.

But anyone who's dieted and already formed a close, um, relationship with chocolate knows this:

New research led by Professor Ben Fletcher and Dr Karen Pine at the University's School of Psychology, has revealed that dieting leads women into a vicious cycle of negative emotions which in turn provokes cravings for the very foods they are trying to avoid, chocolate being one of the most powerful. -- Cravings For Chocolate Increased By Dieting

So when're they going to invent a non-fat fat that tastes right and doesn't give you the squirts? Then just mix that ol' cocoa bean with Splenda© and the non-fat fat and, baby, I'll be your chocolate slave fer life.

OTOH, I incorporate chocolate into any weight-loss diet effort I undertake. It's all about calorie budgets, and you can budget in your sin food -- in moderation -- as well as any other food. That helps reduce the cravings and the depression as well.

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by gekko at 8:45 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It's just emotion. Just stress. Just boredom. Just habit.

I am not hungry, so I should not eat.

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by gekko at 1:38 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I really, really, really wish I'd gone into research, because, man, you get all kinds of money to study the most obvious of things.

People feeling sad tend to eat more of less-healthy comfort foods than when they feel happy, finds a new study co-authored by a Cornell food marketing expert. However, when nutritional information is available, those same sad people curb their hedonistic consumption. But happier people don't. -- Mood-Food Connection: We Eat More And Less-Healthy Comfort Foods When We Feel Down, Study Finds

All those who did not intuit this, raise your chubby right hands.

BTW, I have to report I've gained 10 lbs over the past couple of months. Because I've been undergoing some stress-filled, downer type months in which Awful Things have been happening. Layoffs, rumors of layoffs, job cuts, people leaving my team, and other, far more personal matters. So, yes, I've turned to piles of cookies and snacks, bowls full of ice cream and such like.

Now that the really bad stuff is past, I'm planning on turning it around and dropping the ten. Wish me luck!

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by gekko at 2:09 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Those are the words Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the New York Times, a Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the book "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," which was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006 has to say about diets and nutrition.

His words of wisdom are captured in a lengthy but worthwhile article at the New York Times site.

There are a few minor bones of contention within the article itself, but I'll pick on those at a later date. I find myself in agreement with most of it.

If you cannot see the article (you may need a subscription or it's been pulled from the site and archived for $$), then click the link following this paragraph. I feel this article is worth preserving for my own purposes, and am willing to share it with you, my faithful reader.

Unhappy Meals
By MICHAEL POLLAN

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat "food." Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing -- this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that "it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health" (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third -- a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

By now you’re probably registering the cognitive dissonance of the supermarket shopper or science-section reader, as well as some nostalgia for the simplicity and solidity of the first few sentences of this essay. Which I’m still prepared to defend against the shifting winds of nutritional science and food-industry marketing. But before I do that, it might be useful to figure out how we arrived at our present state of nutritional confusion and anxiety.

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and -- ahem -- journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help -- something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees -- is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, "Eat more fruits and vegetables"?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition -- much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

FROM FOODS TO NUTRIENTS

It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by "nutrients," which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles -- things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies -- claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like "fiber" and "cholesterol" and "saturated fat" rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things -- who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients -- those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health -- gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

Nutrients themselves had been around, as a concept, since the early 19th century, when the English doctor and chemist William Prout identified what came to be called the "macronutrients": protein, fat and carbohydrates. It was thought that that was pretty much all there was going on in food, until doctors noticed that an adequate supply of the big three did not necessarily keep people nourished. At the end of the 19th century, British doctors were puzzled by the fact that Chinese laborers in the Malay states were dying of a disease called beriberi, which didn’t seem to afflict Tamils or native Malays. The mystery was solved when someone pointed out that the Chinese ate "polished," or white, rice, while the others ate rice that hadn’t been mechanically milled. A few years later, Casimir Funk, a Polish chemist, discovered the "essential nutrient" in rice husks that protected against beriberi and called it a "vitamine," the first micronutrient. Vitamins brought a kind of glamour to the science of nutrition, and though certain sectors of the population began to eat by its expert lights, it really wasn’t until late in the 20th century that nutrients managed to push food aside in the popular imagination of what it means to eat.

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet -- including heart disease, cancer and diabetes -- a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called "Dietary Goals for the United States." The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food -- the committee had advised Americans to actually "reduce consumption of meat" -- was replaced by artful compromise: "Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake."

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to "eat less" of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless -- and politically unconnected -- substance that may or may not lurk in them called "saturated fat."

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

THE RISE OF NUTRITIONISM

The first thing to understand about nutritionism -- I first encountered the term in the work of an Australian sociologist of science named Gyorgy Scrinis -- is that it is not quite the same as nutrition. As the "ism" suggests, it is not a scientific subject but an ideology. Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it’s exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather, all pervasive and virtually inescapable. Still, we can try.

In the case of nutritionism, the widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

But expert help to do what, exactly? This brings us to another unexamined assumption: that the whole point of eating is to maintain and promote bodily health. Hippocrates’s famous injunction to "let food be thy medicine" is ritually invoked to support this notion. I’ll leave the premise alone for now, except to point out that it is not shared by all cultures and that the experience of these other cultures suggests that, paradoxically, viewing food as being about things other than bodily health -- like pleasure, say, or socializing -- makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe that it may make them more healthy. This is what we usually have in mind when we speak of the "French paradox" -- the fact that a population that eats all sorts of unhealthful nutrients is in many ways healthier than we Americans are. So there is at least a question as to whether nutritionism is actually any good for you.

Another potentially serious weakness of nutritionist ideology is that it has trouble discerning qualitative distinctions between foods. So fish, beef and chicken through the nutritionists’ lens become mere delivery systems for varying quantities of fats and proteins and whatever other nutrients are on their scope. Similarly, any qualitative distinctions between processed foods and whole foods disappear when your focus is on quantifying the nutrients they contain (or, more precisely, the known nutrients).

This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program. In the years following McGovern’s capitulation and the 1982 National Academy report, the food industry set about re-engineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and less of the bad, and by the late ’80s a golden era of food science was upon us. The Year of Eating Oat Bran -- also known as 1988 -- served as a kind of coming-out party for the food scientists, who succeeded in getting the material into nearly every processed food sold in America. Oat bran’s moment on the dietary stage didn’t last long, but the pattern had been established, and every few years since then a new oat bran has taken its turn under the marketing lights. (Here comes omega-3!)

By comparison, the typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER

So nutritionism is good for business. But is it good for us? You might think that a national fixation on nutrients would lead to measurable improvements in the public health. But for that to happen, the underlying nutritional science, as well as the policy recommendations (and the journalism) based on that science, would have to be sound. This has seldom been the case.

Consider what happened immediately after the 1977 "Dietary Goals" -- McGovern’s masterpiece of politico-nutritionist compromise. In the wake of the panel’s recommendation that we cut down on saturated fat, a recommendation seconded by the 1982 National Academy report on cancer, Americans did indeed change their diets, endeavoring for a quarter-century to do what they had been told. Well, kind of. The industrial food supply was promptly reformulated to reflect the official advice, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, America got really fat on its new low-fat diet -- indeed, many date the current obesity and diabetes epidemic to the late 1970s, when Americans began binging on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.

This story has been told before, notably in these pages ("What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?" by Gary Taubes, July 7, 2002), but it’s a little more complicated than the official version suggests. In that version, which inspired the most recent Atkins craze, we were told that America got fat when, responding to bad scientific advice, it shifted its diet from fats to carbs, suggesting that a re-evaluation of the two nutrients is in order: fat doesn’t make you fat; carbs do. (Why this should have come as news is a mystery: as long as people have been raising animals for food, they have fattened them on carbs.)

But there are a couple of problems with this revisionist picture. First, while it is true that Americans post-1977 did begin binging on carbs, and that fat as a percentage of total calories in the American diet declined, we never did in fact cut down on our consumption of fat. Meat consumption actually climbed. We just heaped a bunch more carbs onto our plates, obscuring perhaps, but not replacing, the expanding chunk of animal protein squatting in the center.

How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do -- that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It’s hard to imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did if McGovern’s original food-based recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another case of Snackwell’s is just what the doctor ordered?

BAD SCIENCE

But if nutritionism leads to a kind of false consciousness in the mind of the eater, the ideology can just as easily mislead the scientist. Most nutritional science involves studying one nutrient at a time, an approach that even nutritionists who do it will tell you is deeply flawed. "The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science," points out Marion Nestle, the New York University nutritionist, "is that it takes the nutrient out of the context of food, the food out of the context of diet and the diet out of the context of lifestyle."

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex as, on the one side, a food, and on the other, a human eater. It encourages us to take a mechanistic view of that transaction: put in this nutrient; get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others; depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same input of 100 calories may yield more or less energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes living in your gut. There is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and so to think of food as simply fuel is wrong.

Also, people don’t eat nutrients, they eat foods, and foods can behave very differently than the nutrients they contain. Researchers have long believed, based on epidemiological comparisons of different populations, that a diet high in fruits and vegetables confers some protection against cancer. So naturally they ask, What nutrients in those plant foods are responsible for that effect? One hypothesis is that the antioxidants in fresh produce -- compounds like beta carotene, lycopene, vitamin E, etc. -- are the X factor. It makes good sense: these molecules (which plants produce to protect themselves from the highly reactive oxygen atoms produced in photosynthesis) vanquish the free radicals in our bodies, which can damage DNA and initiate cancers. At least that’s how it seems to work in the test tube. Yet as soon as you remove these useful molecules from the context of the whole foods they’re found in, as we’ve done in creating antioxidant supplements, they don’t work at all. Indeed, in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers. Big oops.

What’s going on here? We don’t know. It could be the vagaries of human digestion. Maybe the fiber (or some other component) in a carrot protects the antioxidant molecules from destruction by stomach acids early in the digestive process. Or it could be that we isolated the wrong antioxidant. Beta is just one of a whole slew of carotenes found in common vegetables; maybe we focused on the wrong one. Or maybe beta carotene works as an antioxidant only in concert with some other plant chemical or process; under other circumstances, it may behave as a pro-oxidant.

Indeed, to look at the chemical composition of any common food plant is to realize just how much complexity lurks within it. Here’s a list of just the antioxidants that have been identified in garden-variety thyme:

4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.

This is what you’re ingesting when you eat food flavored with thyme. Some of these chemicals are broken down by your digestion, but others are going on to do undetermined things to your body: turning some gene’s expression on or off, perhaps, or heading off a free radical before it disturbs a strand of DNA deep in some cell. It would be great to know how this all works, but in the meantime we can enjoy thyme in the knowledge that it probably doesn’t do any harm (since people have been eating it forever) and that it may actually do some good (since people have been eating it forever) and that even if it does nothing, we like the way it tastes.

It’s also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?

The good news is that, to the carrot eater, it doesn’t matter. That’s the great thing about eating food as compared with nutrients: you don’t need to fathom a carrot’s complexity to reap its benefits.

The case of the antioxidants points up the dangers in taking a nutrient out of the context of food; as Nestle suggests, scientists make a second, related error when they study the food out of the context of the diet. We don’t eat just one thing, and when we are eating any one thing, we’re not eating another. We also eat foods in combinations and in orders that can affect how they’re absorbed. Drink coffee with your steak, and your body won’t be able to fully absorb the iron in the meat. The trace of limestone in the corn tortilla unlocks essential amino acids in the corn that would otherwise remain unavailable. Some of those compounds in that sprig of thyme may well affect my digestion of the dish I add it to, helping to break down one compound or possibly stimulate production of an enzyme to detoxify another. We have barely begun to understand the relationships among foods in a cuisine.

But we do understand some of the simplest relationships, like the zero-sum relationship: that if you eat a lot of meat you’re probably not eating a lot of vegetables. This simple fact may explain why populations that eat diets high in meat have higher rates of coronary heart disease and cancer than those that don’t. Yet nutritionism encourages us to look elsewhere for the explanation: deep within the meat itself, to the culpable nutrient, which scientists have long assumed to be the saturated fat. So they are baffled when large-population studies, like the Women’s Health Initiative, fail to find that reducing fat intake significantly reduces the incidence of heart disease or cancer.

Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon. So maybe the culprit nutrient in meat and dairy is the animal protein itself, as some researchers now hypothesize. (The Cornell nutritionist T. Colin Campbell argues as much in his recent book, "The China Study.") Or, as the Harvard epidemiologist Walter C. Willett suggests, it could be the steroid hormones typically present in the milk and meat; these hormones (which occur naturally in meat and milk but are often augmented in industrial production) are known to promote certain cancers.

But people worried about their health needn’t wait for scientists to settle this question before deciding that it might be wise to eat more plants and less meat. This is of course precisely what the McGovern committee was trying to tell us.

Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of the lifestyle. The Mediterranean diet is widely believed to be one of the most healthful ways to eat, yet much of what we know about it is based on studies of people living on the island of Crete in the 1950s, who in many respects lived lives very different from our own. Yes, they ate lots of olive oil and little meat. But they also did more physical labor. They fasted regularly. They ate a lot of wild greens -- weeds. And, perhaps most important, they consumed far fewer total calories than we do. Similarly, much of what we know about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet is based on studies of Seventh Day Adventists, who muddy the nutritional picture by drinking absolutely no alcohol and never smoking. These extraneous but unavoidable factors are called, aptly, "confounders." One last example: People who take supplements are healthier than the population at large, but their health probably has nothing whatsoever to do with the supplements they take -- which recent studies have suggested are worthless. Supplement-takers are better-educated, more-affluent people who, almost by definition, take a greater-than-normal interest in personal health -- confounding factors that probably account for their superior health.

But if confounding factors of lifestyle bedevil comparative studies of different populations, the supposedly more rigorous "prospective" studies of large American populations suffer from their own arguably even more disabling flaws. In these studies -- of which the Women’s Health Initiative is the best known -- a large population is divided into two groups. The intervention group changes its diet in some prescribed manner, while the control group does not. The two groups are then tracked over many years to learn whether the intervention affects relative rates of chronic disease.

When it comes to studying nutrition, this sort of extensive, long-term clinical trial is supposed to be the gold standard. It certainly sounds sound. In the case of the Women’s Health Initiative, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the eating habits and health outcomes of nearly 49,000 women (ages 50 to 79 at the beginning of the study) were tracked for eight years. One group of the women were told to reduce their consumption of fat to 20 percent of total calories. The results were announced early last year, producing front-page headlines of which the one in this newspaper was typical: "Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds." And the cloud of nutritional confusion over the country darkened.

But even a cursory analysis of the study’s methods makes you wonder why anyone would take such a finding seriously, let alone order a Quarter Pounder With Cheese to celebrate it, as many newspaper readers no doubt promptly went out and did. Even the beginner student of nutritionism will immediately spot several flaws: the focus was on "fat," rather than on any particular food, like meat or dairy. So women could comply simply by switching to lower-fat animal products. Also, no distinctions were made between types of fat: women getting their allowable portion of fat from olive oil or fish were lumped together with woman getting their fat from low-fat cheese or chicken breasts or margarine. Why? Because when the study was designed 16 years ago, the whole notion of "good fats" was not yet on the scientific scope. Scientists study what scientists can see.

But perhaps the biggest flaw in this study, and other studies like it, is that we have no idea what these women were really eating because, like most people when asked about their diet, they lied about it. How do we know this? Deduction. Consider: When the study began, the average participant weighed in at 170 pounds and claimed to be eating 1,800 calories a day. It would take an unusual metabolism to maintain that weight on so little food. And it would take an even freakier metabolism to drop only one or two pounds after getting down to a diet of 1,400 to 1,500 calories a day -- as the women on the "low-fat" regimen claimed to have done. Sorry, ladies, but I just don’t buy it.

In fact, nobody buys it. Even the scientists who conduct this sort of research conduct it in the knowledge that people lie about their food intake all the time. They even have scientific figures for the magnitude of the lie. Dietary trials like the Women’s Health Initiative rely on "food-frequency questionnaires," and studies suggest that people on average eat between a fifth and a third more than they claim to on the questionnaires. How do the researchers know that? By comparing what people report on questionnaires with interviews about their dietary intake over the previous 24 hours, thought to be somewhat more reliable. In fact, the magnitude of the lie could be much greater, judging by the huge disparity between the total number of food calories produced every day for each American (3,900 calories) and the average number of those calories Americans own up to chomping: 2,000. (Waste accounts for some of the disparity, but nowhere near all of it.) All we really know about how much people actually eat is that the real number lies somewhere between those two figures.

To try to fill out the food-frequency questionnaire used by the Women’s Health Initiative, as I recently did, is to realize just how shaky the data on which such trials rely really are. The survey, which took about 45 minutes to complete, started off with some relatively easy questions: "Did you eat chicken or turkey during the last three months?" Having answered yes, I was then asked, "When you ate chicken or turkey, how often did you eat the skin?" But the survey soon became harder, as when it asked me to think back over the past three months to recall whether when I ate okra, squash or yams, they were fried, and if so, were they fried in stick margarine, tub margarine, butter, "shortening" (in which category they inexplicably lump together hydrogenated vegetable oil and lard), olive or canola oil or nonstick spray? I honestly didn’t remember, and in the case of any okra eaten in a restaurant, even a hypnotist could not get out of me what sort of fat it was fried in. In the meat section, the portion sizes specified haven’t been seen in America since the Hoover administration. If a four-ounce portion of steak is considered "medium," was I really going to admit that the steak I enjoyed on an unrecallable number of occasions during the past three months was probably the equivalent of two or three (or, in the case of a steakhouse steak, no less than four) of these portions? I think not. In fact, most of the "medium serving sizes" to which I was asked to compare my own consumption made me feel piggish enough to want to shave a few ounces here, a few there. (I mean, I wasn’t under oath or anything, was I?)

This is the sort of data on which the largest questions of diet and health are being decided in America today.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the end, the biggest, most ambitious and widely reported studies of diet and health leave more or less undisturbed the main features of the Western diet: lots of meat and processed foods, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything -- except fruits, vegetables and whole grains. In keeping with the nutritionism paradigm and the limits of reductionist science, the researchers fiddle with single nutrients as best they can, but the populations they recruit and study are typical American eaters doing what typical American eaters do: trying to eat a little less of this nutrient, a little more of that, depending on the latest thinking. (One problem with the control groups in these studies is that they too are exposed to nutritional fads in the culture, so over time their eating habits come to more closely resemble the habits of the intervention group.) It should not surprise us that the findings of such research would be so equivocal and confusing.

But what about the elephant in the room -- the Western diet? It might be useful, in the midst of our deepening confusion about nutrition, to review what we do know about diet and health. What we know is that people who eat the way we do in America today suffer much higher rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity than people eating more traditional diets. (Four of the 10 leading killers in America are linked to diet.) Further, we know that simply by moving to America, people from nations with low rates of these "diseases of affluence" will quickly acquire them. Nutritionism by and large takes the Western diet as a given, seeking to moderate its most deleterious effects by isolating the bad nutrients in it -- things like fat, sugar, salt -- and encouraging the public and the food industry to limit them. But after several decades of nutrient-based health advice, rates of cancer and heart disease in the U.S. have declined only slightly (mortality from heart disease is down since the ’50s, but this is mainly because of improved treatment), and rates of obesity and diabetes have soared.

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil. Species co-evolve with the other species they eat, and very often a relationship of interdependence develops: I’ll feed you if you spread around my genes. A gradual process of mutual adaptation transforms something like an apple or a squash into a nutritious and tasty food for a hungry animal. Over time and through trial and error, the plant becomes tastier (and often more conspicuous) in order to gratify the animal’s needs and desires, while the animal gradually acquires whatever digestive tools (enzymes, etc.) are needed to make optimal use of the plant. Similarly, cow’s milk did not start out as a nutritious food for humans; in fact, it made them sick until humans who lived around cows evolved the ability to digest lactose as adults. This development proved much to the advantage of both the milk drinkers and the cows.

"Health" is, among other things, the byproduct of being involved in these sorts of relationships in a food chain -- involved in a great many of them, in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. Further, when the health of one link of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the creatures in it. When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk. Or, as the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 1945 in "The Soil and Health" (a founding text of organic agriculture), we would do well to regard "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject." Our personal health is inextricably bound up with the health of the entire food web.

In many cases, long familiarity between foods and their eaters leads to elaborate systems of communications up and down the food chain, so that a creature’s senses come to recognize foods as suitable by taste and smell and color, and our bodies learn what to do with these foods after they pass the test of the senses, producing in anticipation the chemicals necessary to break them down. Health depends on knowing how to read these biological signals: this smells spoiled; this looks ripe; that’s one good-looking cow. This is easier to do when a creature has long experience of a food, and much harder when a food has been designed expressly to deceive its senses -- with artificial flavors, say, or synthetic sweeteners.

Note that these ecological relationships are between eaters and whole foods, not nutrients. Even though the foods in question eventually get broken down in our bodies into simple nutrients, as corn is reduced to simple sugars, the qualities of the whole food are not unimportant -- they govern such things as the speed at which the sugars will be released and absorbed, which we’re coming to see as critical to insulin metabolism. Put another way, our bodies have a longstanding and sustainable relationship to corn that we do not have to high-fructose corn syrup. Such a relationship with corn syrup might develop someday (as people evolve superhuman insulin systems to cope with regular floods of fructose and glucose), but for now the relationship leads to ill health because our bodies don’t know how to handle these biological novelties. In much the same way, human bodies that can cope with chewing coca leaves -- a longstanding relationship between native people and the coca plant in South America -- cannot cope with cocaine or crack, even though the same "active ingredients" are present in all three. Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice can lead to problems.

Looking at eating through this ecological lens opens a whole new perspective on exactly what the Western diet is: a radical and rapid change not just in our foodstuffs over the course of the 20th century but also in our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal. The ideology of nutritionism is itself part of that change. To get a firmer grip on the nature of those changes is to begin to know how we might make our relationships to food healthier. These changes have been numerous and far-reaching, but consider as a start these four large-scale ones:

From Whole Foods to Refined. The case of corn points up one of the key features of the modern diet: a shift toward increasingly refined foods, especially carbohydrates. Call it applied reductionism. Humans have been refining grains since at least the Industrial Revolution, favoring white flour (and white rice) even at the price of lost nutrients. Refining grains extends their shelf life (precisely because it renders them less nutritious to pests) and makes them easier to digest, by removing the fiber that ordinarily slows the release of their sugars. Much industrial food production involves an extension and intensification of this practice, as food processors find ways to deliver glucose -- the brain’s preferred fuel -- ever more swiftly and efficiently. Sometimes this is precisely the point, as when corn is refined into corn syrup; other times it is an unfortunate byproduct of food processing, as when freezing food destroys the fiber that would slow sugar absorption.

So fast food is fast in this other sense too: it is to a considerable extent predigested, in effect, and therefore more readily absorbed by the body. But while the widespread acceleration of the Western diet offers us the instant gratification of sugar, in many people (and especially those newly exposed to it) the "speediness" of this food overwhelms the insulin response and leads to Type II diabetes. As one nutrition expert put it to me, we’re in the middle of "a national experiment in mainlining glucose." To encounter such a diet for the first time, as when people accustomed to a more traditional diet come to America, or when fast food comes to their countries, delivers a shock to the system. Public-health experts call it "the nutrition transition," and it can be deadly.

From Complexity to Simplicity. If there is one word that covers nearly all the changes industrialization has made to the food chain, it would be simplification. Chemical fertilizers simplify the chemistry of the soil, which in turn appears to simplify the chemistry of the food grown in that soil. Since the widespread adoption of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in the 1950s, the nutritional quality of produce in America has, according to U.S.D.A. figures, declined significantly. Some researchers blame the quality of the soil for the decline; others cite the tendency of modern plant breeding to select for industrial qualities like yield rather than nutritional quality. Whichever it is, the trend toward simplification of our food continues on up the chain. Processing foods depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in through "fortification": folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they overlooking?

Simplification has occurred at the level of species diversity, too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

From Leaves to Seeds. It’s no coincidence that most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains; these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight into macronutrients -- carbs, fats and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably transformed into animal protein (by feeding them to animals) and processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that grains are durable seeds that can be stored for long periods means they can function as commodities as well as food, making these plants particularly well suited to the needs of industrial capitalism.

The needs of the human eater are another matter. An oversupply of macronutrients, as we now have, itself represents a serious threat to our health, as evidenced by soaring rates of obesity and diabetes. But the undersupply of micronutrients may constitute a threat just as serious. Put in the simplest terms, we’re eating a lot more seeds and a lot fewer leaves, a tectonic dietary shift the full implications of which we are just beginning to glimpse. If I may borrow the nutritionist’s reductionist vocabulary for a moment, there are a host of critical micronutrients that are harder to get from a diet of refined seeds than from a diet of leaves. There are the antioxidants and all the other newly discovered phytochemicals (remember that sprig of thyme?); there is the fiber, and then there are the healthy omega-3 fats found in leafy green plants, which may turn out to be most important benefit of all.

Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with fish, but fish get them from green plants (specifically algae), which is where they all originate. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids ("essential" because our bodies can’t produce them on their own) as part of photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another essential fatty acid: omega-6. Without delving too deeply into the biochemistry, the two fats perform very different functions, in the plant as well as the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation. Omega-6s are involved in fat storage (which is what they do for the plant), the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. (Think of omega-3s as fleet and flexible, omega-6s as sturdy and slow.) Since the two lipids compete with each other for the attention of important enzymes, the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s may matter more than the absolute quantity of either fat. Thus too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as too little omega-3.

And that might well be a problem for people eating a Western diet. As we’ve shifted from leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s in our bodies has shifted, too. At the same time, modern food-production practices have further diminished the omega-3s in our diet. Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil more readily, so we have selected for plants that produce fewer of them; further, when we partly hydrogenate oils to render them more stable, omega-3s are eliminated. Industrial meat, raised on seeds rather than leaves, has fewer omega-3s and more omega-6s than preindustrial meat used to have. And official dietary advice since the 1970s has promoted the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, most of which are high in omega-6s (corn and soy, especially). Thus, without realizing what we were doing, we significantly altered the ratio of these two essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the result that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the typical American today stands at more than 10 to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed oils at the turn of the last century, it was closer to 1 to 1.

The role of these lipids is not completely understood, but many researchers say that these historically low levels of omega-3 (or, conversely, high levels of omega-6) bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, especially heart disease and diabetes. (Some researchers implicate omega-3 deficiency in rising rates of depression and learning disabilities as well.) To remedy this deficiency, nutritionism classically argues for taking omega-3 supplements or fortifying food products, but because of the complex, competitive relationship between omega-3 and omega-6, adding more omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless you also reduce your intake of omega-6.

From Food Culture to Food Science. The last important change wrought by the Western diet is not, strictly speaking, ecological. But the industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the modern food era -- and before nutritionism -- people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. We think of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate people’s relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat. Of course when it comes to food, culture is really just a fancy word for Mom, the figure who typically passes on the food ways of the group -- food ways that, although they were never "designed" to optimize health (we have many reasons to eat the way we do), would not have endured if they did not keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us "adapt." Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society -- estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs -- is unsustainable.

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM

To medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism. So what might a more ecological or cultural approach to the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet? In theory nothing could be simpler -- stop thinking and eating that way -- but this is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food environment we now inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is possible, to which end I can now revisit -- and elaborate on, but just a little -- the simple principles of healthy eating I proposed at the beginning of this essay, several thousand words ago. So try these few (flagrantly unscientific) rules of thumb, collected in the course of my nutritional odyssey, and see if they don’t at least point us in the right direction.

1. Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number -- or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food -- measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) -- costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils -- whether certified organic or not -- will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown.

"Eat less" is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. "Calorie restriction" has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called "Hara Hachi Bu": eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the "eat less" message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants -- the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? -- but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less "energy dense" than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians ("flexitarians") are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits: small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals -- and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of "health." Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer, is the Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book, "The Omnivore’s Dilemma," was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books of 2006.

©Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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by gekko at 6:39 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I could go on for pages and pages about corn, but I'll limit this blog entry to just a few paragraphs.

Corn is ubiquitous. Its reach goes far beyond those tasty husk enshrouded cobs of sweet white kernels you slather with butter, wrap tightly, and place on the grill next to your steak of a summer evening. Corn is in virtually any processed food we eat. It's in the food our food eats. It's in the food our pets eat -- and woe to the pet owner whose dog or cat is allergic to corn because finding a pet food that is NOT based on corn meal is difficult!

Corn is reasonably nutritious, once you manage to break down the indigestible husk so's your body has a chance of sucking out the little bit of protein, the few vitamins, and the fiber it contains rather than passing it through to amuse us in our stools.

The trouble is that it's well, pretty much the only food we get these days. Nutrients we used to get from our meat are gone because our meat eats predominantly corn.

Worse yet is high fructose corn syrup. It's sweet like sugar, liquid, and cheap, making it a no-brainer for the food industry to sweeten and stickify our sodas, cereals, breads -- even the "lite", fat free yogurt I eat that is presumably sweetened with sucralose (Splenda©) has high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) listed as one of its top three ingredients!

HFCS isn't like other sugars, though. Our body doesn't react to it as it does sucrose or straight glucose. Research suggests that fructose is absorbed differently than other sugars. Consumption of glucose kicks off a cascade of biochemical reactions including increasing the production of insulin (insulin enables sugar in the blood to be transported into cells to be used for energy), increasing the production of leptin (an appetite-regulating hormone), and suppressing the production of ghrelin.

Fructose works differently. It appears to behave more like fat so far as the weight-regulating hormones are concerned. Fructose does not stimulate insulin secretion, may inhibit leptin production or its ability to work on the brain. It would seem that consuming a lot of fructose, like consuming too much fat, may contribute to weight gain. Studies for that are under way.

I would not suggest running scared and avoiding all corn syrup. Everything in moderation, is what I'm thinking. If you can reduce the amount you consume, it's probably a good thing.

Given how pervasive corn is in life -- even going into our gasoline tanks! -- and how heavily subsidized and politicized corn is, I very much doubt we could mount a ... well, a grass-roots campaign to get it out of our diets.

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by gekko at 9:04 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

From grade school through high school, physical education was a mandatory part of my curriculum. PE classes were torture sessions for me, in part because I was very shy, in part because sports did not appeal to me, in part because I was inept at sports, and in part because my peers recognized all of that and I was either ridiculed or ignored. You know. Last girl to be chosen for a team. Whapped in the head by the tether ball deliberately. The hideous uniforms, the open showers, the giant paper towels to be used to dry off.

Yet, in spite of that, I am surprised that physical education is no longer a daily requirement for today's American public school students. To get any physical activity at all, elementary school students must enroll in extra curricular programs. Soccer and softball leagues, gymnastics, dance. Stuff that costs parents money. League sports are even more competitive, more psychically damaging than were the public school variations, at least for my kids, where they got to meet the uber competitive soccer moms and dads.

I am certain this lack of regular, regimented and enforced physical activity is at least in part responsible for the rise in childhood obesity. After all, if kids had forty minutes of some form of rigorous exercise each day, they'd at least be getting more fit. If they learned the rules of the sports, and were given the opportunity to form liaisons and social frameworks from the activity, some of them might be more likely to propose a game of street hockey rather than playing Tony Hawk video games.

Theoretically.

The problem, then, is to get the horrible parts of PE out of that class, and, of course, to actually mandate it as part of the curriculum.

Researchers in the UK have found programs that apparently have succeeded.

Dr Fiona Brooks and Josefine Magnusson at the University of Hertfordshire's Centre for Research in Primary & Community Care (CRIPACC) explored the experiences of 31 self-identified, formerly 'PE adverse'14-15 year old boys and girls who had made the transition from inactivity to active participation in PE.

The teenagers were students in a secondary school in an area of significant deprivation which had, in the previous 18 months, made alterations in the delivery of PE. The school had moved from a scenario of almost non-existent participation in PE across the year to a situation where only three to four students remained as non-participants.

The students were interviewed by the researchers to establish what measures had appealed to them most.

The researchers found that a programme which emphasised the importance of participation and the social aspects of sports rather than physical superiority and sporting excellent assisted students in making the transition from inactivity to activity.
-- Less Emphasis On The Body Could Be Key For More PE

I think the idea behind education ought to be to, well, educate, and not set up adverse scenarios that teach our young how to be aggressive bullies.

Get sodas and junk food out of the schools. Put smart PE classes back in.
That's where my tax money ought to go.

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by gekko at 1:49 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

This goes out to my friend who lamented, "I just want someone to tell me what to eat, and when to eat it."

Last I knew, she was the weight I had been when I first started my weight-loss program, three years ago now. She and I are the same height. I know the despair and self-loathing she feels.

Where she and I differ, however, is that I've always been the sort of person who wanted to know the wherefores and whys of things. I wasn't satisfied with someone telling me, "just go do this and it will work." I wanted to know why it would work. What are the mechanisms?

Medical News Today has an article about a group formed to promote programs, policies and research to advance public understanding about essential nutrition and activity. It talks about the the satisfaction rates regarding weight loss programs. Those most satisfied with the program they chose (i.e. they lost the weight and kept it off) followed the relatively simple method of reduced calories, increased activity, and a supportive atmosphere.

Weight-Loss Alert is the outgrowth of a new national survey of 1,014 U.S. adults conducted for the Partnership for Essential Nutrition by Opinion Research Corporation, which finds that 87.4 million Americans (45 percent) went on at least one diet during the last 5 years, including an estimated 79.6 million consumers -- 41 percent of the adult population -- who were actively trying to lose weight during the last year. However, the poll finds high dissatisfaction rates among many dieters, many of whom had dieted multiple times.

A major reason for this high dissatisfaction rate is the methods used by consumers to lose weight. Although the highest rates of satisfaction (89 percent) were documented among dieters adopting a comprehensive weight-loss program (combining a reduced calorie diet with physical activity and a supportive environment), the survey found that less than one-fourth of respondents (23 percent) used this method. Instead, the survey reveals that many dieters (33 percent) are opting for exercise alone to lose weight, which although a healthy thing to do, is not an effective stand-alone weight-loss solution.

Moreover, the survey reveals that more than one in ten dieters (14 percent) are adopting weight-loss methods that are directly linked with high dissatisfaction rates. This includes diet foods (60 percent), over-the-counter diet aids (49 percent), diet books (32 percent) and following a weight-loss plan that specifies exactly what foods to eat (25 percent).
-- Satisfaction Directly Related To Weight-Loss Methods And Public's Ability To Understand The Skinny Behind Dieting Claims

The Partnership for Essential Nutrition also lists the "Bogus 12" diet myths they've compiled as a result of their research. Read on to see what those are.

The "Bogus 12" : dieting myths that represent the most significant barriers to effective weight loss:

1. Dieting is only about willpower -- In truth, willpower must be combined with a behavior modification and a comprehensive approach to weight loss.

2. Extreme weight loss is safe -- Extreme dieting is unhealthy and is a recipe for weight-loss failure and disappointment.

3. Calories don't matter: avoiding carbs or fat is the key to weight loss -- In reality, a calorie is a calorie whether it comes from carbohydrates, fats or protein. Establishing a calorie deficit by cutting back on calories consumed plus burning more calories through activity produces sustained weight loss.

4. Certain foods can burn fat and make you lose weight -- Some foods with caffeine may speed up your metabolism in the short run but no foods burn fat.

5. Starches are fattening and should be avoided when dieting -- Actually, many foods high in starch -- such as bread, rice, pasta, cereals, beans and some vegetables -- are low in both fat and calories but like all foods, should only be consumed in smaller portions to lose weight.

6. Low-fat or no-fat means reduced calories -- Not always. If the manufacturer adds sugar, flour or starch thickeners to improve the flavor and texture of the food after the fat is removed, the product may contain the same number of calories as the full-fat product.

7. Skipping meals is a simple way to cut calories -- Although it may seem logical, studies shows that people who skip breakfast and eat fewer times during the day tend to be heavier.

8. Eating at night increases weight gain -- It doesn't matter what time of day a person eats. What makes a difference is what and how much they eat and how much physical activity they get during the day.

9. You can lose weight just by exercising -- Although physical activity is very healthy, research shows that exercise is not an effective stand-alone weight-loss solution and should be combined with smarter food choices and portion control.

10. Diet drugs are the only effective option -- The Food and Drug Administration has only approved the use of two prescription diet drugs for seriously obese people only and cautions consumers to beware of unproven claims that tout special ingredients in dietary supplements that can help overweight men and women lose weight and fat.

11. Natural or herbal weight-loss products are also effective -- Dietary supplements that claim to be "natural" or "herbal" are not required to go through rigorous scientific review to prove they are safe or that they work. Buyer beware.

12. It is possible to burn fat without dieting -- Diet patches, creams, wraps, belts and other devices don't work. There is nothing a person can put on their body or rub into their skin that will cause them to lose weight.

According to the coalition, the method for losing weight matters a great deal. While there is "no size fits all" approach to weight loss, weight management experts recommend setting realistic goals at the outset and obtaining responsible guidance from properly educated and trained professionals. Achieving a healthy weight loss also requires behavior modification, a supportive atmosphere and following a comprehensive weight- loss program that is sustainable -- meaning the method must address ways to keep weight off long term.

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by gekko at 12:41 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

There are a couple of articles relating to dieting -- dieting in the popular "I weigh too much and want to change the way I eat in order to lose weight" sense of the term, rather than the "I want to maintain a healthy and balanced method of eating so as to maintain optimal health" sense of the term.

This one suggests that restricted-calorie dieting alone, without exercise, increases the loss of bone density.

Dennis T. Villareal, M.D., Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and colleagues studied the effects of weight loss on bone loss in 48 adults (30 women and 18 men, with an average age of 57). Nineteen were assigned to follow a calorie-restricted diet (to decrease energy intake by 16 percent for three months, then by 20 percent for nine months), 19 to eat the same number of calories and begin an exercise program (to maintain energy intake, but increase energy expenditure by 16 percent for three months and 20 percent for nine months) and 10 to receive information on healthy lifestyles only when requested. [...] Bone mineral density was measured every three months using a technique known as dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry. [...]

Forty-six [out of 48] of the participants completed the study. After one year, those in the calorie restriction group lost an average of 8.2 kilograms or 18.1 pounds, those in the exercise intervention group lost 6.7 kilograms or 14.8 pounds and those in the healthy lifestyle group maintained their weight. Individuals in the calorie-restriction group also lost an average of 2.2 percent of their bone density in the lower spine, 2.2 percent at the hip and 2.1 percent at the top end of the femur-all high-risk fracture sites. There were no significant changes in bone mineral density in the exercise or healthy lifestyle groups.

The researchers offered opinions as to why the data turned out as it did:

"A common explanation given for the bone loss induced by weight loss is reduction in mechanical stress on the weight-bearing skeleton (i.e., hip and spine)," the authors write. "Accordingly, the preservation of bone mineral density in the exercise group could be mediated through exercise-induced bone loading."

Many people wonder why I exercise and this is one of the reasons. I know I am a woman and, as a woman, I am more likely to suffer from osteoporosis as I age (reduction of estrogen is correlated to loss of bone density), and so performing load-bearing exercises on a regular basis helps maintain or increase bone density.

There are other good reasons to exercise, including cardio-vascular benefits, and, when discussing weight loss or weight maintenance, the well-known fact that increasing your muscle density increases your metabolism, enabling you to eat more while maintaining your weight. As well, the increase in caloric burn from daily exercise permits you to eat more. I lurve eating more than I hate exercise.

Another article, though, makes me want to scream. Do Low-Fat Foods Make Us Fat?" is ridiculous in that it uses information to come to a mind-numbing and dangerous conclusion.

Recent Cornell studies in movie theatres, holiday receptions, and homes showed people eat an average of 28% more total calories when they eat low-fat snacks than regular ones. "Obese people can eat up to 45% more," reports lead researcher Brian Wansink (Ph.D.), in the book, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

"People don't realize that low-fat foods are not always low-calorie foods," says Wansink. Fat is often replaced with sugar. Low-fat snacks are an average of 11% lower in calories, but people wrongly believe they are around 40% lower.

Dur. People can be pretty stupid.

The conclusion that made me scream?

For dieters, there's also clear message. As Wansink advises in the book Mindless Eating, "Stick with the regular version, but eat a little bit less. It's better for both your diet and your taste buds."

Wrong message, morons. The regular version of most of today's foods is actually pretty fucking bad for you. They are loaded with unnecessary fats, salts, calories, highly refined food-related products and sugars that will sludge your body into fat-storing blobs. They will clog your arteries, and make you break out with the largest ugliest zits just before the company holiday party.

The correct message is "Don't be stupid, peeps. Read the frickin' labels, understand the stuff you're eating, and eat the correct amount!" Or, simply put: "Get educated!"

As for the taste buds, they're right. Food with some fat in it tastes better than food with no fat in it. Going "no fat" is also the wrong solution, although you can prepare foods with little or no fat that taste yummy, you also need fat. It's an essential macronutrient.

To re-use a corporate-spawned euphemism, low fat can often be "right sizing" in terms of fat content. But beware. There is some good information in that stupid article cited above. Manufacturers creating "low fat" versions of food will often compensate for the reduction in fat by loading the product with sugar. In the same way, the low-carb/low-sugar versions often compensate for that loss by loading up on the fats.

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by gekko at 4:12 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I have a few formerly chunky friends who did the stomach stapling thing -- excuse me "bariatric surgery."

They each lost an entire person's worth of weight. And when they're clothed in a hijab, they look great.

If they wear skirts, shorts, short-sleeved blouses, they ... um ... well ...

Anyway. Here's an article they ought to read.

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by gekko at 1:22 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Diet to lose it. Exercise to keep it off.

Do both for optimal health.

More here.

The article cited in the URL is reproduced entirely in the extended entry because I think it's worth preserving.

Sit-Ups And Sundaes Don't Mix: Diet With Exercise Works Best
23 Oct 2006

If you're overweight and hoping to shed pounds, but still regularly indulging in french fries - don't count on exercise to salvage your weight-loss efforts. To truly slim down, obese and overweight people need to watch what they eat and get moving, according to a new analysis of weight-loss trials dating back to 1985.

“Exercise by itself is not going to be an effective weight-loss strategy for an individual, you really need to combine exercise with better nutrition,” said lead study author Dr. Kelly Shaw.

Shaw is a public health physician with the Department of Health and Human Services in Tasmania, Australia. She was surprised by the amount of weight loss achievable through diet alone, compared to exercise. “I thought that exercise would result in greater weight loss than it did as a stand-alone intervention,” she said.

“If you are a reductionist and came to me and said, ‘Look I want to lose weight and I'm prepared to diet or exercise, but not both, what should I do?' My response would be, you need to look at your nutritional intake because there's a bigger bang for your buck from modifying nutrition than there is with physical activity,” Shaw said.

The review of 43 trials appears in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates research in all aspects of health care. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing trials on a topic.

“The literature is pretty clear that, in the short run, diet is way more important than activity for weight loss,” said John Jakicic, a health researcher who was not involved in the Cochrane review. “One candy bar can completely wipe out a bout of exercise,” Jakicic said.

“Within six months, with diet alone we can get about a 9 or 10 kilogram weight loss, which is over 20 pounds, versus with activity we get about a 2 kilogram weight loss in that same period of time,” said Jakicic, chair of the department of Health and Physical Activity at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education.

But don't discount the benefits of exercise. “Diet is very important to get weight off. But exercise seems to be one of those key factors for keeping the weight off when you lose it,” Jakicic said.

“From a population level, I think that means that our good nutrition programs and our healthy physical activity programs really have to be very well-integrated,” Shaw said.

But Jakicic said that integration is rare in the United States where gym-based programs often focus on exercise, while programs like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig focus mainly on food.

“Those folks who only focus on diet and don't worry about the activity are really short-changing themselves,” Jakicic said.

The Cochrane review uncovered independent benefits from exercise that boost heart health and lower the risks for cardiovascular disease. “If your main goal is health and well-being, then exercise offers you significant improvements in your blood pressure, lipids and your blood sugar,” Shaw said.

“The meta-analysis tells us what the individual needs to do to improve body weight, to improve cardiovascular disease risk,” Shaw said. The challenge now, she added, is for policy-makers and governments “to look at ways that we can encourage behaviors in our population that encourage people to get exercise back into their lives, and to eat a diet that is less energy-dense and more nutritionally sound.”

Shaw points to other successful public health campaigns - like the tobacco control effort - and believes communities can take a similar socio-environmental approach in the “eat right, get moving” campaign.

Shaw said past public health campaigns prove that legislative and legal levers work to change behavior. Other possible strategies include fiscal incentives, perhaps subsidies for fresh fruit and vegetables, or even smart urban planning that eschews fast-food restaurants and builds in walking trails and green spaces, she said.

Shaw K, et al. Exercise for overweight and obesity. The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2006, Issue 4.

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international nonprofit, independent organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of health care interventions and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of interventions. Visit http://www.cochrane.org for more information.

Health Behavior News Service
Center for the Advancement of Health 2000 Florida Ave. NW, Ste 210
Washington, DC 20009
United States
http://www.hbns.org

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by gekko at 11:27 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

One hundred and fifty out of 300 chefs surveyed said they felt calories don't matter in the dishes they prepare, according to a survey presented at a gathering of The Obesity Society.

Sure, huge fatty calorie-rich portions are making peeps fatter, but, the chefs feel, it's up to the consumer to decide how much they wanna eat.

They're right. Buyer beware and all that. Take responsibility, etc. I agree with that.

What I do not, however, agree with is chefs who hide the nutrition content of their dishes. If they're going to stuff it with simple carbs and mountains of saturated fats, I wanna know before I order it. I want to be able to make an informed decision. If you won't tell me, I won't eat at your establishment.

I recently sent a note to the folks at The Cheesecake Factory. The reason I did so was that I wanted to add that restaurant to my list of places to eat. They have a nice menu and a good atmosphere. It's nice to take people there. It's nice to treat my Peeps there as a reward for hard work well done.

I cannot, however, add them to my list because I cannot learn what eating there is going to cost me in terms of my nutrition. They refuse to post or publish any information.

In my e-mail to them, I noted that most restaurants these days do this. I told them why they would find it to their advantage -- people like me who watch this and track it will be better informed. They will want to eat there because they know just how much of which item to get.

They responded saying that they will not be posting this information, because they consider their dishes proprietary.

Yah. I'm gonna figure out how to make one of their portabello sandwiches by knowing how much cholesterol and vitamin A they have in that particular menu item.

They did, however, give me a list of "lower calorie" items I could choose from, all of which were things like "lettuce, without the peanut sauce."

In other words, take any item, strip it of anything flavorful or filling, and you, too, can diet.

I replied that it's easy for me to go to any place in the US and order something off of a menu that is purported to be "lower calorie." Big whoop, I can order something that's merely 1000 calories instead of the usual 1500. I told them that the point was not to believe their enormous fat-laden portions were "lower" and therefore a dieter's item, but that I wanted to be able to order one of their lovely fatty things and know HOW MUCH of what I was going to get, and therefore how much I would want to consume there, and how much I would be taking home with me to enjoy later.

If it's "buyer beware", then it is encumbent upon the buyer to know as much as possible.

I will not be gracing the doorway of any Cheesecake Factory.

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by gekko at 9:57 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It's not saying anything new. Hell, I knew back in the day, when I was a young slip of a thing, that obsession with dieting is what can lead to eating disorders such as bulimia, or anorexia.

The trouble with the statement below is this: it is incomplete, and contradicts a lot of other wise advice on proper nutrition and weight management:

"The key is not to diet. Instead, listen to your body, eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full," adds Zuercher. "We don't believe in putting labels on food. All food is fine when you keep in mind balance, moderation and variety." -- Dieting Can Lead To Eating Disorders

They are right: the key is not to "diet" in the well-known sense of the word. Don't go doing grapefruit or Pritikin or Atkins. Don't do "binge and purge." Don't do the things that you "think" make perfect common sense.

On the other hand, listening only to what is stated above means you will not be successful in attaining and maintaining a sensible weight. If you eat "only" when you are hungry, you're going to think you're hungry a whole lot more often than you actually are hungry. If you don't think "diet" in the correct, real sense of the word, you'll fall into patterns of eating. If you don't put labels on food, and regard all food as being pretty much equal, just watch your portion sizes, then a steak-sized hunk a chocolate is the same as a steak-sized pile of broccoli.

What has worked for me is to modify my lifestyle. To say to myself "I will not gain the weight back, and I will be responsible about what I eat, when I eat."

I didn't set out to lose weight as much as I set out to reclaim my health and my body. It's a mindset thing. I didn't want to fit into a swim suit in time for the season: I wanted to be the right size and shape for who I am. Forever.

I knew that to do that, I had to watch the foods I took in -- I had to put a label on them so that I knew when I was eating the stuff that would satisfy me for a longer term, and when I was permitting myself the luxury of one of those quick-satisfaction goodies.

No, I did not "go on a diet." I modified my diet.

That's the key, as far as I'm concerned.

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by gekko at 12:02 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Go to a party, and you usually have hors d'oevres to nosh on before the main course. Some may think they get to save money by serving less main food, but they may need to think again:

"The drive to eat is massively stimulated by the start of eating," said Gareth Leng of the University of Edinburgh, who co-led the new study with Louise Johnstone. "This shows the appetizing effect of food itself as hunger circuits are acutely switched on."

I'm thinking, too, that this is one reason snacking is so bad. You grab a quick candy bar, and -- zing! -- your brain switches on the hunger thingies and you want more, more, more.

Seems like just thinking about food gets it going, too.

The imminent expectation of food also activated certain brain cells involved in stimulating hunger in the animals, they found. The rats' optimal window for consumption was brief, however, as brain centers responsible for registering satiety--the feeling of being full or satisfied--switched on almost as soon as food hit their stomachs, Leng said.

The new study is the first to chart the sequence of changes in brain activity over the course of a meal, according to the researchers.
-- Food Or Its Expectation Sparks Brain's Hunger Centers

Is it lunchtime yet?

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by gekko at 7:41 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Or so this group hopes to establish and promote.

A campaigning weight-control charity has declared the inaugural World Beyond Dieting Week to focus attention on what it says are the often-ignored real reasons underlying eating, overweight and self-image crises.
-- The World Beyond Dieting Week To Focus On Often-ignored Real Reasons Underlying Eating, Overweight And Self-image Crises

The article says it all, so I'll not bother to recap it other than note that "The Weight Foundation" has a theory that dieting actually exacerbates the obesity situation.

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by gekko at 12:13 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A study involving some obese peeps who eat a lot, some implants, some radioactive sugar, and a coupla PET scans ...

[S]cientists saw a similarity in these people's brain activity and that of drug addicts when they are craving for their drug. Identical parts of the brain became active in similar ways. This indicates, say the researchers, that is going on in the brain of an obese person who wants to eat is virtually identical to what goes on in a drug addict's brain when he/she wants his/her fix.

So the first step is to acknowledge we are powerless over food--that our feeding lives have become unmanageable ...

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by gekko at 3:25 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Perhaps we need to do something a bit more strenuous than walking if we want to get fit, say researchers from the University of Alberta, Canada. Their scientists compared a program which included taking 10,000 steps to more traditional exercise programs and found those on the 10,000 steps a day were less fit.

That's the lead-in for an article in Medical News Today concerning a study in which 128 normally sedentary people were asked to walk.

Sixty-four just walked, at whatever pace pleased them. The other half were required to do a vigorous routine involving getting just about out of breath without having to gasp. Other than intensity, the exercise was the same -- both burned the same number of calories and persisted in their routine for six months.

The less vigorous group improved their blood oxygen uptake by 4%. The vigorous group improved theirs by 11%.

And the conclusion, inexplicably enough, is that people need to exercise more vigorously to get fit.

Hrnh?

First of all, who the hell funded this study? There are plenty of studies regarding the benefits of aerobic exercise and intensity levels. I have no idea why yet another one was needed.

Secondly, and more importantly, I'm at a loss to understand how an improvement of 4% is somehow not an improvement. How the less vigorous group did not get more fit than they were before starting. I really am.

The message this "study" gives is dangerous. It says "just getting off your ass and walking isn't good enough." It says "you have no choice but to go sweat and strain."

That's the biggest turn off to people who need to get fit in the whole wide world. You create an insurmountable wall and tell people who are barely motivated to start climbing. Most of 'em will lay down and take a nap, instead. What's the use? They can't do it. They won't do it. That's the mind set that needs to be overcome.

You do not teach a child to swim by entering her into an Olympic race. And you do not motivate people to start on a path toward fitness by telling them that they're not doing it right, not being good enough.

Get them started. Let them walk down the block and back again and feel success in that. As they become more fit, over time, they may find that small success feeding them and prompting them to reach for larger success. THEN you may have a chance at convincing them to strain a little, sweat a little.

The people who did this study are morons.

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by gekko at 11:11 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The USA has the highest percentage of obese people in the world, followed by Mexico 6.4% behind. The top seven countries include the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - all English-speaking countries. -- 30.6% Of Americans Are Obese, Compared To 3.6% Of Japanese And Koreans

The cure, then, is to stop speaking English. Let's all take Japanese language lessons! Hurry, before the global pandemic sweeps even the Asians into it's smothering embrace!

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by gekko at 11:39 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A study reports that the size of people estimating the caloric content of food doesn't matter -- it's the size of the food. When looking at smaller meals, fat, normal, skinny peeps estimated correctly. When looking at large meals, they tended to underestimate.

Here's the funky thing, though. Overweight people tend to go for the large meals. And restaurants tend to serve way large meals -- one "serving" at a typical restaurant is really about three meals for a normal-weight, normal activity female.

Underestimating those supersize portions obviously contributes to blimpness. You'll eat the whole thing, thinking you're doing okay.

The authors [of the study] suggest that people trying to lose weight might better estimate their calorie intake by:

* doubling their initial estimate of calories in a large meal

* estimating calories item by item (small amounts) instead of estimating for the meal as a whole

* considering portion-size benchmarks when estimating calorie content, e.g. a portion of meat should be about the size of a deck of cards)

-- Underestimation Of Calorie Content Is Related To Meal Size Not Body Size

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by gekko at 11:20 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The headline reads:
"Computer Automated E-Counseling Improves Weight Loss Success"

The article quotes some researcher type who burbles about how everybody's using computers and using the web to find useful resources, and how a bunch of researchers have determined that a computer animation, auto-response type of program might help us tubbos get all motivated to lose weight.

Older computer geek peeps like me might remember an old psychoanalysis program called "Eliza" -- this was programmed to take what you typed in and kind of feed it back to you in the form of a question, a la Freud.

You: "I hate my mother."
Eliza: "What makes you think you hate your mother?"
You: "Because she's a beyotch."
Eliza: "How long have you considered your mother is a beyotch?"
You: "You suck too."
Eliza: "Do you dream about sucking?"

So I'm thinking this weight-loss motivational bot might not be too different than that. As an expert in computer programming, and as someone who has lost some weight and is constantly looking for ways to keep it off, I would like to recommend it work like this:

You: "I am fat. What do I do?"
Fatbot: "You're fat. Get up off of the friggin' chair, shove aside the friggin' keyboard, and get your ass out to the gym."
You: "But what about diet? What should I eat?"
Fatbot: "You're fat. Get up off of the friggin' chair, shove aside the friggin' keyboard, and get your ass out to the gym."
You: "You really suck, you know?"
Fatbot: "You're fat. Get up off of the friggin' chair, shove aside the friggin' keyboard, and get your ass out to the gym."

It'll work like a charm. Trust me.

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by gekko at 6:36 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Reportedly, 85% of women have cellulite.
Which goes against my observations of women at the gym (where I see more women in shorts, since I don't hang out at beaches, pools, or malls). But I digress.

You have it. Or you don't. If you have it, you can't get rid of it. It's the way your fat is structured, relative to the thickness of your skin. Men do not typically have it because their fat is structured differently AND because their skin is apparently thicker. Or so I read.

But for those who have it -- and that's apparently a vast majority of women -- the appearance of it can be changed. If you're overweight, losing a significant amount of weight, especially body fat in the thigh region, will reduce it. If you're younger and have more elastic skin, it will be a more pronounced change.

But, caveat:

"There is no answer for completely eliminating cellulite, however, it appears the more weight one loses, the better its appearance," said Dr. Kitzmiller. "Although the appearance of cellulite diminished for the majority of patients, weight loss did not totally eradicate the condition. The dimples appear to be permanent features that lessen in depth as the pounds come off.
-- Cellulite Found To Be Reduced By Weight Loss In Some Overweight Women

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by gekko at 10:01 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A woman on a newsgroup wondered about how to help control her weight. She posted:

Let's say I walk a mile on Monday, and it takes me 20 minutes. On Tuesday I walk a mile also, but it's a very hot day and it takes me 40 minutes because I have to go slowly and make a rest stop in the middle. Did I burn the same number of calories each day? Or did I waste my time going out on Tuesday? I'm not walking for "fitness," strictly to try and keep my weight under control.

Using the Activity Calorie Counter, and plugging in my weight for an example:

Monday: walking rate 3 mph (4 per minute) 4*20 = 80
Tuesday: walking rate 1.5 mph (2.5 per minute) 2.5*40 = 100

She burned a few more with the slightly slower pace, for the longer duration. Depends, too, on how long of a rest she took, and if her heart rate fell below the "zone" rate for fat loss. There's a reason her caloric burn was higher at a slower pace that I'll go into later. But one poster responded this way:

I know for sure that you are burning at least as many calories on a long, slow walk as on a short, fast one. It's distance that matters, not time.

That last sentence is a fallacy. Caloric burn is a factor of how much fuel your cells need. When you move your muscles harder or for a longer period, they require more fuel. Time, not distance.

The poster continued:

If you run a mile in, say, 8 minutes, or walk it in 20, you're still burning the same calories. Except that running gives you the advantage of inertia, whereas the slower pace doesn't do that. So you're probably burning more calories at the slower pace, provided the distance is the same.

There's a bit more to it. It depends on heart rate, although that is not a linear determinant, and intensity of muscle movement.

Let me repeat myself here: Caloric burn, metabolism, is the rate at which you burn fuel. The fuel burning is dominated by some parts of your body, but ALL parts of your body use the fuel. Every organ. Every cell. Cell division burns calories. Even thinking burns calories. Sitting in a meeting, where you're not only participating (listening to see if they're going to need input from you, absorbing what's being said, thinking ahead to what might be required of you, and maybe even multi-tasking by filling in a spreadsheet on the computer while you half-listen to the meeting, you burn calories. Breathing: calorie burn. Fidgeting. Calories. Sleeping? Calories. Digesting food -- yup. Calories.

It's just that the major muscles tend to demand more of it when you move, especially your heart, so that is what is most noticeable and how the standard measurements are taken, and how the calculations are based.

When you walk, you're doing more than just letting your heart beat, though. You're also using your muscles to transport weight. When you walk quickly, your stride tends to be a bit shorter, which is a bit less of a load on the leg muscles. When you walk slowly, you lengthen your stride a bit. You're making your muscles work a little bit harder. Even though your heart rate is not as high, the leg and arm muscles are working just a bit more than during the faster walk.

BOTH account for the caloric burn.

Another respondant piped up with this opinion:

Sorry, this is a myth perpetrated by the fitness industry to get folks off their butts and out moving, and not be discouraged at their lack of progress.

What, scientifically observed and measured fact is a myth perpetuated by the fitness industry? For what purpose? So that they get people moving? Walking in their neighborhoods? The fitness industry would go to all the trouble of creating fake research so as to get people to go out into their neighborhoods?

Goodness. That's pretty darned altruistic of them. I would think that the "fitness industry," consists of, well, fitness centers, manufacturers of exercise equipment, maybe manufacturers of sports clothing. Of all those, the only ones that might have something definite to gain by you going out on walkies would be the sports clothing manufacturers.

Myth indeed.

She continues in her authoritative way:

You *will* burn more calories the faster you walk or run, given the same distance.

Depends on the rate differential, and it is limited by your peak heart rate. But, generally, yes.

Continuing, then:

If you walk slower, you have to walk further, and longer, to burn the same amount of calories.

Just longer. The only bearing distance has is its direct relation to duration. That may be non-existant, if you're walking on a treadmill. Geddit? The terrain has some impact. Walking longer uphill or on uneven terrain would burn more calories than walking a shorter period of time on level ground.

I can see this every day when I work out, and track my calories expended when I walk or run.

Yes, when you exert yourself more to the point of running, rather than walking, you will burn more calories. You're making your heart and your muscles work harder and they require more fuel. Running uses a longer stride than walking does. More energy needed.

You have to burn 3500 calories to lose 1 lb of weight. All this stuff about *fat burning zone* has been shown to be crap.

No. The writer here is conflating the notion of "weight" and "calories" with "fat."

Fat is a component of the fuel you burn when you burn calories. You also burn carbs and protein. Of those, you store fat -- food you eat gets converted into fat when you don't use it. Carbohydrates and protein are present in your body, however. You burn more of the stored fat when your heart rate is between 50% and 60% of your peak heart rate than at higher rates.

In that lower heart rate range, or zone, about 70%-85% of the calories you burn come from fat. Another 10-25% from carbs, and finally, from protein.

A little higher heart rate, and the fat percentage drops to 50-70%. But since you're burning more calories at that rate, the total amount of fat burned is higher. As you increase your heart rate, the rate at which fat is used as fuel drops significantly, so that you end up burning more carbs than fat, in total. Your best bet, to burn fat, is to exercise mildly, at about 60-70% of your peak heart rate, for a much longer duration. Then you burn loads of calories, and a high percentage of that comes from the fat in your body.

If you adopt a low-fat diet, then the fat has to come from stored fat, rather than consumed but not yet stored fat.

The amount of these three macronutrients (fat, carbs, protein) varies depending on these primary constraints:

Along with other, lesser factors.

The opinionated poster goes on:

For example, my friends who are *much* better runners than me do training runs of 9 to 11 miles at an average 7:00 pace. I put my former BF's training data into FitDay, a web-based calorie and exercise program, and calculated that he burns around 1400 calories for an workout like this. I would have to run a half-marathon (13.1 miles) or more to burn the same amount of calories, because I run *much* slower!

As a male, he undoubtedly has more muscle density. He has less fat. It has more to do with that than how slow you run. Running slower, but for a longer period, given the same muscle/fat ratio and overall body weight would result in roughly the same caloric burn. But, yes, your heart rate does figure into it as well, to a point, as discussed.

Most of these folks (like the East African long distance runners) eat like horses, but are very thin and fit.

They have less stored energy to burn, so yes. They must eat a lot to replenish the fuel they expend. They have dense, lean muscle mass. Muscle mass factors into your metabolism.

So. BUSTED!

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by gekko at 11:46 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

This is one of my pet peeves: the folks who want to blame the food for their fatness.

"Oh, it's all McDonalds' fault! They offer that supersize stuff, and their fries are just pure animal fat!"

Yeah, and they're holding guns to your heads forcing you to snarf those pounds of oily potatoes, right?

"It's the sugary drinks in the vending machines! Waaaah!"

Same deal. I mean, a masked gunman wearing a Coca Cola© Company uniform made you punch the Coke Extra Sugar button after you slipped your money into the slot. Hell, he probably even made you grab your money, walk over to the machine in the first place!

Dang ol' Coke marketers.

Today, the Center for Consumer Freedom questioned the findings of a report published Tuesday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which "discovered" that an extra can of non-diet soda a day can cause 15 pounds of weight gain in a year. The review, conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, entirely misses the commonsense point that 150 extra calories of anything will cause people to gain weight.

"It doesn't take a Harvard Ph.D., let alone a high school diploma to realize that the more calories we eat, the more weight we'll gain," said senior research analyst J. Justin Wilson. "It's a basic law of nutrition. Whether it's an extra bowl of lima beans, shredded wheat or can of soda, eating more calories than you burn will always lead to weight gain." Wilson continued, "This report completely ignores the other side of the obesity equation: energy expenditure. From moving sidewalks in airports to electric staplers, Americans have engineered exercise out of their lives. This study does a disservice by providing a feel-good distraction that places the blame on a single food, but does little to address the fundamental changes in how we live."

-- Harvard Study Wrongly Blames Soda For Obesity, Says Center For Consumer Freedom

A woman at the gym was unhappy because the gym had a vending machine. It was stocked with those "Power" ade drinks of varying flavors, some sugary sodas, some sugar free sodas, and one entire row of bottled water.

"There should be TWO rows of bottled water! How can they call themselves a fitness center if they're selling all that sugar?"

Well, people who work out actually need to restock their carbs after a heavy workout. Not everyone who uses the gym is an overweight person looking to lose weight. In fact, looking around me, I see more people who are fit in the place. Darned few are fat or obese.

And the fit folk like the power ades and the quick energy from the sugary sodas.

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by gekko at 11:39 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

My friend tried Weight Watchers© and quit it when it didn't work for her.

"I kept myself to the Points, and lost a few pounds, but it didn't come off quickly enough. And I'm still as fat as ever!"

Turned out, after querying her, she made sure she ate up to her regular Points allocation, and included the "Flex Points" -- a sort of weekly allowance of extra calories that you can use to avoid feeling guilty when you go to a party, or go out to eat, or whatever. Every week. She maxed out what she ate.

But, more importantly, she did not exercise at all. In fact, she exercised less

But exercise isn't just for losing weight so you fit into last year's dress.

Studies are showing that it's also pretty important when it comes to abdominal fat:

Reducing the size of abdominal fat cells - which are a risk factor for diabetes and heart disease - takes more than cutting calories, according to new research from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Early results from a five-year study show that exercise should be added to the equation.

"The message is very clear," said Tongjian You, Ph.D., instructor in geriatric medicine at Wake Forest Baptist and lead author. "Exercise is important to reducing the size of these cells, and may one day be part of a prescription for treating the health complications associated with abdominal fat."
-- Exercise Important In Reducing Size Of Abdominal Fat Cells

So we know it's important for heart health. We know it's good to help us lose weight. We know it's important when it comes to tummy fat cells. We know it keeps us energetic. We know it helps create endorphins that make us feel good. Exercise is good.

So why are we always finding reasons to NOT move around a hell of a lot more?

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by gekko at 7:56 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"I should just be happy with being fat. I'm never gonna get thin like you."

"I'll never look like those models. Why should I bother trying?"

"I dieted, lost weight, and gained it all back again. It doesn't work for me. Maybe for you, but not for me. Okay?"

So a new study is suggesting that our society's emphasis on weight loss, on obesity, on looking like Kate Moss or Keira Knightly is contributing to our obesity.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=48595&nfid=crss

If you are fat, or even if you think you're fat, chances are you're probably also thinking there's no use in changing things. At least, the study showed a correlation between those who were either overweight or thought they were, and a sedentary lifestyle. The quotes above, things friends have told me over the past couple of years, suggest that correlation might be an important one.

So what's my advice?

I knew you'd ask that.

Maybe stop focusing on a weight goal. Maybe start focusing on just getting healthy. Strive to exercise because it makes you feel better once you do it. Strive to eat healthily and less because you'll feel more sated, and have more energy. Forget about what you weigh and think about how crappy you feel -- and how you can feel better.

Maybe.

You and I aren't going to look like Keira Knightly. Quite frankly, Keira Knightly should not look like Keira Knightly. That's just plain unhealthy.

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by gekko at 8:55 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I quit Weight Watchers© because I wasn't using the on-line tools and didn't want to shell out the $14/mo. After all, I knew pretty much what the food I was eating "cost" me, in terms of Points values.

And, of course, I knew that I was exceeding my alotted Points values each day, as I found myself reverting back to stress snacking. I have trained the peeps at work to hand me chocolate. I do something nice for them, a lovely bag of Lindt choccies shows up at my desk. My boss's boss keeps a jar filled with chocolates, and apologizes to me when it gets empty. I had a hissy fit a week or so ago, and a few hours later the guys upon whom I melted down handed me THREE packages of chocolates.

So.

I may have ... <kof> gained a few pounds I did not want to gain.

Okay, truth time: I am up 5 pounds. I feel fat. I know I don't look fat, but that doesn't matter. I know if I walk up to someone and say "Gawd, I'm fat!!!" they'll look at me like I'm crazy. Or they'll kill me because they hate me. But they may do that regardless.

It doesn't matter. I feel fat. I put my jeans on, and my heart sinks because I recognize that tight, uncomfortable feeling and know I probably should be up a size. I look in the mirror and see the start of a roll over my belt-line. The same little roll of flesh I would 'tsk' over when I see it on a high school girl wearing crop top and low-riders.

And I also know that the secret, for me, was to track what I ate. Because when I track it, I am less inclined to go grab it and inhale it into my stomach. When I track it, I can see the numbers I'm stuffing into myself and I can know that I am overdoing it.

A while back, my friend Lily pointed out FitDay as an online tracking tool. It's free. I signed up for it. It's useful, but one of my beefs with it was that the database was full of general stuff. It took me time to figure out the sizes and portions I was actually getting and get the right data entered. With WW, I had all my usual food stuffs already entered and it was simple to click and enter my day's food intake.

But I decided to bite the (non-caloric) bullet and start using it again. I can put the foods I eat in. I had an Einstein Bros. bagel this morning. Asiago cheese. Einstein Bros bagels are bigger than, say, Lenders. And more fatty. More salt. I know this. Eager to not cheat, I decided to use DietFacts to look up the info for the bagel, "low fat" cream cheese, and coffee with 2% I had just eaten. I would enter the data by hand.

But wait!

There, at the bottom of the nutritional label info for the bagel was a button saying "Add Custom to FitDay"!

Click!

And it popped me into a FitDay window (I was already logged in, which you must be to use this feature), had the bagel entered, and ready to save. I popped back over and grabbed the data for the cream cheese, and then searched FitDay's database for the milk.

I have consumed 450 calories today. 16 grams of that were protein. FitDay shows me a pie ... mmm, pie .... a pie chart of the nutritional content so I can presumably keep my macronutrients balanced.

Talk about easy!

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by gekko at 12:01 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I loved the Pooh series as a child, and read them to my kids. We also got to watch the Disney version and my daughter, when she was 2, was intrigued by the scene where Pooh, after having had all the honey Rabbit had to offer, discovered he could not leave Rabbit's hole.

Turns out that scenario is no longer a Milne fiction.

More and more obese people are unable to get full medical care because they are either too big to fit into scanners, or their fat is too dense for X-rays or sound waves to penetrate, radiologists reported Tuesday.

With 64 percent of the U.S. population either overweight or obese, the problem is worsening, but it represents a business opportunity for equipment makers and hospitals, said Dr. Raul Uppot, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

-- CNN.com - Study: More Americans too fat for X-rays, scans - Jul 26, 2006

In the Disney version of Milne's beloved story, Pooh eventually got just thin enough that he could be pulled out. Of course, he went flying away over the land, only to end up plugged into a bee hive.

<sigh>

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by gekko at 10:21 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"The obesity epidemic in children has reached crisis point."
-- Obesity Experts Back Abbott Initiative

That quote comes from an Australian, concerning legislation in Australia for battling the obesity epidemic in, well, Australia.

I'm reading reports of an obesity epidemic in Great Britain, too.

Is this a keeping-up-with-the-Merkins thing, or wot?

Can we export obesity, and, if we can, shouldn't we ought to maybe target Ethiopia, Nigeria, or one of the other myriad nations that are suffering epidemics of starvation and malnutrition?

A new twist on "if you don't eat your green bean pudding, we'll send it to the starving children in Africa" thinger.

Are chubby peeps kind of the next step in evolution, I wonder ...

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by gekko at 6:24 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A coupla months ago in an issue of my "Women's Health" magazine, they talked about some study on maintaining weight loss.

"Hey," I thought. "I lost a pretty decent chunk of weight. I could participate in the study."

So I signed up.

Yesterday I got a packet in the mail, and they want me to fill out all kinds of questionaires (that makes sense), send before/after pics (dur) and some other stuff.

Then I come upon this article posted to Medical News Today:

In the first study of its kind, researchers from The Miriam Hospital and Brown Medical School look to shed some light on this question by comparing the diet and exercise behaviors of individuals who have lost weight and kept it off, to those who have never been overweight.

That's the same group!

Given the prevailing belief that few individuals succeed at long-term weight loss, the Registry was developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss. The research, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is currently tracking over 5,000 members.

Over 5000 and one, now.

"We have seen that individuals who were once overweight and maintain a low-calorie diet with moderate fat intake, limit their fast food consumption, and sustain high levels of physical activity, report continued success in weight loss maintenance," says co-investigator Suzanne Phelan, PhD, staff psychologist at The Miriam Hospital and Brown Medical School. "Although these behaviors may vary within each individual - it will be interesting to determine whether normal weight individuals without a history of obesity maintain their body weight in a similar fashion."

Well, quite a few of my co-workers are skinny-assed peeps, and they eat very little, when compared to the food intake of the rather large peeps. They also jitter and jiggle a lot, but they do not necessarily exercise a lot. They are "high energy" peeps. Since they never really got fat to begin with, what muscle they developed has remained lean, and comprises most of their body weight, so the movements they make burn calories fairly efficiently.

So, yeah. It will be interesting for them to validate my unscientific observations.

Researchers state that people who have not been successful at maintaining their weight loss have not found a pattern of consistency that works in their life. Therefore, any strategies to maintaining a normal weight - be it from successful losers or those who have never been overweight - could prove helpful to many.

Think I should aim them at the Blob?

Two groups of participants are being recruited nationwide for the LITE study - those who are normal weight and have never been overweight; and those who are normal weight now, but have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least five years. All participants will wear a small device that measures physical activity, while food consumption information will be collected through telephone interviews with research staff.

Eligibility:

* All participants must be over the age of 18, normal weight, and maintained weight stability ( /- 10 pounds) over the past two years.

* Participants receive free, personalized feedback about your eating patterns, the nutrients in your diet, and the amount of calories you burn each day with exercise.

* Monetary compensation will be provided to all participants.

-- What Does It Take To Maintain A Normal Body Weight?

Ooh! The magazine article never said anything about money!

Kewl!

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by gekko at 9:49 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I am even leery of the prescription stuff they're experimenting with. I mean, here's the thing: we are all just so obsessed with our appearance and weight. We get depressed when we're obese. And drug companies know about this. Reputable ones. Disreputable ones. Get-rich-quick ones.

They know we want the quick solution. Give 'em a pill, they'll drop the weight.

Drop like flies, more like.

Here's one reason you want to stay away from the crap you find in the "health food" aisles:

Date of alert
July 6, 2006

Product Name
Fat Rapid Loss Capsules (Xin Yan Zi Pai Mei Zi Jiao Nang)

Manufacturer / Place of Origin
Shangxi Fei-Te Biotechnology Inc., China

Product Description
Fat Rapid Loss Capsules are marketed as a weight loss product. The capsules are dark blue in colour and contained in silver and blue blister packs.

Reason for Warning
On June 8, 2006 the Hong Kong Department of Health advised the public not to use this weight loss product because it is adulterated with sibutramine.
Sibutramine is a prescription medication used to suppress appetite, and should only be taken under the guidance of a health care professional.

Possible Side Effects
Use of sibutramine may cause serious side effects, including vision problems and increased heart rate and blood pressure. Sibutramine should not be taken with medications that can affect the level of serotonin in the brain, such as antidepressants.

-- Fat Rapid Loss Capsules (Xin Yan Zi Pai Mei Zi Jiao Nang), Canada

Curb your eating. Increase your activity. Eat the foods that satisfy. Change your lifestyle.

Those are the solutions.

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by gekko at 10:02 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

There are all manner of scientists studying supplements and their impact on weight management. No wonder, given how much money is to be made on the next kick-ass weight loss thinger. Americans love to spend money on looking better -- cosmetics, weight loss, fitness, diet, books, foods, supplements. I'm right there with 'em, babe, as this Blob demonstrates.

Here's yet another in a long line of studies on calcium and weight:

Increased total calcium intake in the form of supplements can help middle-aged adults maintain their weight over a number of years, with particular benefits to women, according to researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.  [...] The study examined people's intakes of dietary calcium, supplemental calcium and total calcium (supplements plus diet) to discover which forms of calcium were associated with weight change. The researchers found "dietary calcium alone had no significant effect on 10-year weight change," but that women who took calcium supplements saw some improvement.

-- Effects Of Calcium On Weight Maintenance Among Middle-Aged Adults

Caveat Blobbers: Calcium blocks your body's ability to absorb iron. Iron is also good for weight management, because when your womanly bodies are depleted, you tend to drag and lose steam. Iron is needed to make red blood cells -- hemoblobin, in particular, which transports oxygen to the cells. A low iron intake results in blood carrying insufficient oxygen to the cells. Fatigue. Tiredness. Unwillingness to move. Of course you're more at risk to gain weight.

Women lose iron monthly. People in the US tend to not eat foods rich in iron and women compound the deficiency by increasing calcium intake. The absorption of iron is also reduced by the presence of tannins in tea and phytates in unrefined cereals such as raw bran.

So, before you head out to buy extra bottles of Tums© or coral shell calcium tablets in the hopes that the pounds will peel off of you, please wait.

Talk to your doc. Have a blood workup, if you haven't recently, or if you're cheap, go donate blood and when they test it for anemia, let them tell you what your hemoglobin count is.

Take iron supplements carefully, and eat iron-rich foods during the day. Bear in mind that the iron in animal foods such as red meat and oily fish is more easily absorbed and used by the body than the iron in plant foods. Vitamin C also helps the body absorb iron from food, so get your C's while you're getting your Fe's ... OJ with the iron-rich cereal, or tomato on an egg sandwich. Don't drink tea with your iron-rich foods.

If you take a calcium supplement -- and you might want to consider it for avoiding osteoporosis -- then take it at night.

It will have the added benefit of aiding your sleep and it will be less likely to interfere with the absorption of the iron you'd consumed during the day.

But. Talk to your doc. And read up on it.

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by gekko at 8:48 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

They all say, "Drink plenty of water."

The why of it is manyfold.

Sipping 17 oz of ice water can raise metabolism by 30 percent for 90 minutes. (Boschmann, M., "Water Induce Thermogenesis" Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism).

Water, of whatever temperature, helps to regulate body temperature and to maintain regular bowel movements.

Builds resistance to infection by keeping us all mucousy.

Keeps muscles toned.

Keeps your brain functioning properly.

Helps stave off feelings of hunger by both filling your stomach and countering the feelings you might be confusing with hunger, but which are actually created by thirst.

Some reports (Hues, M. Low-Fat for Life) indicate dehydration may cause a build-up of fat deposits. Fluids enhance the biochemical process that releases the fatty acids into the bloodstream for use as fuel in the mitochondria.

And, of course, if you do not drink water, you signal your body to start storing what it has. That is, every bit of fluid you do take in your body holds onto.

Bloat city.

Chances are you get about 3 and a half cups of water through meals and snacks -- food with water content. But you still need another 32 to 48 ounces each day to rev up your fat burning and help you boost your energy.

If you're following a strict low-carb diet, chances are you're getting less water than you should, so boost your water drinking by a couple of cups.

Throughout the day, you lose water from your body thus:

Breathing: 2 cups
light "invisible" perspiration: 2 cups
Urine/bowel movements: 6 cups !!

If you exercise, you'll lose even more through "visible" perspiration and increased respiration.

Are you tired? Got headaches? Do you lack concentration? Feel dizzy?

You're dehyrdrated.

Drink water. Drink 'til you pee clear, as they say.

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by gekko at 9:49 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Meat 'n eggs 'n dairy are "complete" protein sources in that they contain large amounts of all 9 amino acids needed by humans.

Soy, and quinoa (KEEN-wah) are also complete protein sources, but are wholly vegetable and are lower in fat and cholesterol.

I am very excited. I just got my (used) copy of "Vegan Planet" cookbook.

I do not intend to become a vegan nor even a vegetarian but I reason thus:

Veggies are good for you.
Veggies that supply all you need to live and grow strong are really good for you.

Meat is good, and can be good for you, but often contains things that aren't good for you.

You can eat lots and lots of most veggies and not get a lot of fat or calories. You can only eat so much meat or risk consuming more calories and fat than is good for you.

Who better than vegans or vegetarians to provide very tasty dishes based on veggies, hmmm?

So when I get to the Key Lime "Cheese"cake (made without cheese, so this has got to be interesting), I'll let you know if this was a good idea or not.

Meanwhile, I just tried a gourmet recipe involving chicken, almonds, raisins, olives, marsala, shallots and other stuff that was totally yum.

Oh, and I made a quinoa salad that was also pretty darn good.

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by gekko at 12:22 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

When people talk about obesity, weight loss, etc. they tend to focus on just two things: diet (in both senses of the word -- the food you tend to eat, and the "plan" you want to follow to reduce caloric intake), and exercise.

But there are other aspects, apparently, of weight loss and weight management that bear discussing, and they, too, fold into lifestyle.

These are things we could be doing to help keep our metabolisms and "thermogenic" levels high, which, in turn, help program our bodies to burn rather than store fat.

Coupla things that switch flipping book mentions seem to make sense to me, and he does cite some studies or other.

1. Keep yourself chilled. Your caloric burn rate won't be phenominal, in that you can work off that box of Krispie Kremes you just ate, but it will be higher, and more sustained, if your body has to burn calories to keep you warm. If you bundle up, or sit in a very cozy warm place, you'll relax, your heart rate will slow. If you are TOO cold you'll start to go into a hibernation mode and shut down. If you are chilled, however -- and so many office buildings are kept on freezer mode -- then your body will work for you.

Drink ice water to help keep that chilled feeling going. Or an iced sugar-free low-sodium flavored beverage if you're not a fan of water.

2. Get up and move. Every half hour, just get up and stretch and walk a bit and move. Do some exercise, if you can. If you're in a meeting, get up from the table and pace around near your chair. That has the added benefit of irritating the fuck out of the other people in the meeting, so you get twice what you pay for. When we sit still, our metabolism starts to slow. So keep it guessing.

3. Relax. Stop stressing. Stop being tense. Stress and tension tends to cause our bodies to release the wrong chemicals that put our bodies into fat-storage mode. So take deep breaths and learn relaxation techniques to just chill out (no reference to item #1 here).

4. Breathe. We need more oxygen than we typically get because studies are showing that, for whatever reason, we engage in shallow, light breathing. Take some time to fill up your lungs, expanding your abdomen out to get even more air in, and let it out, slowly, enabling a full exchange of oxygen. You'll feel more invigorated after taking about 15 really slow deep breaths every 15-30 minutes than you can believe. Incorporate that into your stretching and moving around. Bringing in the extra oxygen apparently sets off signals to our various glands to release the right kinds of hormones to burn fat, not store it.

5. Wake up the right way. Don't languish in bed, never moving. Don't burst out in a tension-filled anxiety-laden OH MY GOD I'M LATE manner, either. Tell yourself you're going to have a terrific and energetic day (pep talks do help our brains send the right signals to the glands), get your ass up out of bed, turn on the lights to signal your body that it's daylight and to rev up the metabolism, and get some exercise. Then eat. See the next point.

6. Eat. Eat often. Figure out the calories you need for the day, and eat them from morning through evening. Eat sensibly -- the right amount of protein, good fat, and good carbs -- but eat. Why?

Well, you do burn calories in processing the food. You also make your body release the right kinds of hormones and chemicals to deal with that food if you eat the right kinds of foods -- protein tends to trigger a fat-burn. Easily-digested simple carbs tend to trigger a fat-storage so you'll want to avoid that. You also signal your body that you're not starving it, and so it's not going to go into a fat-storing preservation mode. It will use what you give it, and send the signals to use up the stores, too, as you keep moving, keep needing to heat yourself, etc.

Start in the morning because you want to start your body off in high metabolism and keep it high throughout the day.

make the earlier meals your heavier ones because in the evening you'll be wanting to start shutting down to get a good night's sleep and you don't want your body to store your dinner for you.

Put more protein into the morning meals, because protein makes you feel more satisfied, and you'll be less inclined to want to snack on sugary crap later.

Make your meals and snacks satisfying ones -- tasty, but not necessarily fatty sugary ones (as a rule).

And, finally,

7. Sleep. Good, solid, deep, restful amazing sleep. 7 or more solid hours of sleep. Oodles of studies going about now regarding getting good sleep. The switch flippy book mentioned what that does for you, and maybe I'll get around to finding that passage and updating this with that info, later.

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by gekko at 7:43 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Haven't forgotten about this, but I also have not gotten very far in the book, yet. Other things have conspired to attract my attention.

What I have read, so far, isn't offering anything startlingly new to me. What it is doing, though, is providing a one-stop, fairly top-level resource for explaining and describing ALL of the stuff I've been getting piecemeal from a variety of medical news sources.

Recall, the goal for this "Flip the Switch" book is to naturally and permanently increase your metabolism so that you burn fat. It's not so much for you to lose weight, as maintain it -- although, if you follow what this guy is saying you'll lose the weight, and if you continue to practice what he preaches, presumably you'll keep it off.

Billo and others are correct: pretty much any plan you follow and stay on will get you to lose weight and keep it off.

What this may do for people is provide a reasonable method to make it easier to actually stick to a plan for the rest of your life.

Maybe.

I do like the handy quick-reference to all the hormones that affect your body's fat-production and fat-storage tendencies.

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by gekko at 8:04 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A woman I shall call "Zoe" was very pleased that, after snarfing most of three different orders of fried hors d'oevres (cheese, garlic bread, fried zukes), and gulping a glass of wine, she ate only half of her humongous platter of crab cakes.

"I'm starting to put on a few pounds, so I need to cut back. I can make TWO meals out of this! Isn't that a great idea?"

Yah. 'course the portion she was served was closer to three or even four meals worth.

Those heaping portions at restaurants - and doggie bags for the leftovers - may be a thing of the past, if health officials get their way.

The government is trying to enlist the help of the nation's eateries in fighting obesity. One of the first things on their list: cutting portion sizes.
-- AP Wire | 06/02/2006 | Report: Restaurants should shrink portions

Kinda a good idea, but only if they cut the price tag along with it. Which they aren't going to like doing, and peeps being served won't like it much because they'll think they're getting cheated.

"I paid $10 for this leaf? Where's the salad, man?"

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by gekko at 9:35 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I shall be an experiment.

I got some spam the other day. Not the icky kind you don't ask for, but spam I kind of opted in for when I subscribed to a health mag. The publishing company put me on its e-mail list, and I haven't yet bothered to get out of it yet, because I think maybe it might send me some useful tips.

So this spam was for a book called "Flip The Switch" by Robert K. Cooper, PhD.

Fuel your metabolism and burn fat 24 hours a day. Use your "metabolism thermostat" or what Cooper cutely calls your "Meta-Stat" (insert your own tm thingie here).

Yeah. Whatever.

I was bored, so I researched the guy's name, and found out he's got a BS in health, and a PhD in neuroscience, has written a coupla feel-good books for corporate types and has an incredibly healthy looking bod.

I googled some more, found a copy of the book for $10 and bought it.

Because I love you all.

I want to be the experiment. I want to fuel my meta-whatsit and see if I can do what this guy claims.

I gotta say, I distrusted the ad and after reading the prologue, I distrust any PhD that peppers his prose with exclamation points, you betcha.

But I'll see if it makes sense, bounce his stuff off of other resources, try it and let you know if my meta thingie is flipped.

Wish me luck.

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by gekko at 8:50 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Excerpts from an article citing a study on sleep and obesity:

Women who sleep five hours a night or less are more likely to pack on extra pounds, a recent American study shows. [...]Dr. Sanjay Patel, professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland [...] tracked more than 68,000 middle-aged women from 1986 to 2002. [...] At the start of the study, the women who slept five hours or less already weighed 5.4 pounds more than those who slept longer.

Although all the women gained weight over the 16 years, the women who slept five hours or less gained more, an average of 1.5 pounds[... and] the women's risk of developing obesity went up considerably.

Okay. All of that makes sense. Less sleep means you have less energy. Less energy (i.e. lower metabolism) means you're not using your consumed or stored energy (food or fat) efficiently.

The article goes on:

Some of the data also puzzled researchers: Women who slept less took in fewer calories than women who slept more. That means how many calories the women ate did not dictate how much they weighed. Similarly, the women's exercise patterns did not explain why the women who slept less weighed more.

It could be the data was imperfectly measured, as it's hard to pinpoint exactly what people eat and exactly how many calories they expend, explained Dr. Emmanuel Mignot, Stanford's Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator on sleep research.
-- Xinhua - English

Why on earth would that puzzle them? They take in fewer calories presumably because they need fewer and the exertion of actually fixing a meal or getting a snack is more than they care to undergo. And many, many other studies indicate that exercise is only a part of our metabolic equation.

We burn calories just staying alive. So if we're breathing more heavily or rapidly, and our hearts are beating more quickly, we'll burn more calories. If we eat more, we burn more calories in processing that food. Yes, we'll replace the calories, potentially, with the food we eat, but the point remains that our bodies burn more or fewer calories depending on our general, day-to-day activity levels.

We burn calories when we twitch or jiggle or wriggle or pace.

I don't know about you, but when I'm exhausted, I sit very perfectly still. I sleep like I'm dead, in one position most of the night. No movement means fewer calories burned.

I am less likely to get up and do something, like housework, or walking to the store, or even walking to the car to go shopping.

I just sit, and veg.

So I would gain 1.5 pounds more, over 16 years, than a woman who gets more sleep than me, and this is a mystery to the researchers?

Do these guys even talk to one another?

[UPDATE AND RETRACTION]
Since writing the above, I encountered another, more complete, more correct article concerning the same study.

Women who don't get much sleep, up to five hours each night, are much more likely to have put on 33lbs (15 kilos) over a 16 year period[...]

The Xinhua article said 1.5 lb gain, and did not specify that was a per year average increase.

Dr. S Patel, lead researcher, said that hormones which regulate appetite are affected after just a few nights of sleep restriction. What surprised the researchers was that those who sleep less actually eat less than those who get adequate sleep. This shows that sleep is a much greater contributor to your long term weight than diet.

Dr Patel said he believes that people who sleep well fidget more during their waking hours - this helps them consume more calories. It is also most likely that hormones are tweaked in such a way as a result of how much we sleep - and this has a bearing on how many calories we burn off each day.

In order to stay/get slim, people have to focus on three factors:

-- Adequate sleep
-- Nutrition
-- Physical activity
-- Medical News Today

So. I guess they do have some smarts there, after all!

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by gekko at 11:03 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

An article in "Medical News Today" has a very nicely written explanation of the physiology of weight management:

Under normal circumstances, says Wolfgang, body weight is maintained by a combination of food intake and energy expenditure, how hungry the body is, and how much energy cells need. Many cells in the body use a sugar called glucose as a source of energy. When the body is starved, the body literally feeds on itself, breaking down fat to form fatty acids that fuel energy needs. When the cells of the body are well fed and energy is in ample supply, molecular signals from the brain tell cells in the body to store the excess energy by converting it to fat. Weight gain results when food intake greatly exceeds energy expenditure. But when the brain's appetite/energy regulator is out of whack, so are the rules for gaining and losing weight.

"How do you know when to stop eating?" asks M. Daniel Lane, Ph.D., senior author of the study and a professor of biological chemistry in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences at Hopkins. "The liver sure isn't going to tell you, it just keeps storing fat as long as the body is well fed." Instead, he notes, it is the control regions of the brain, namely the hypothalamus, that governs eating behavior.

This bit is part of a larger article that talks about the discovery of a protein and its probable interaction with a gene as evidenced by studies with genetically engineered mice. One of the key things to note is that the mice who lacked the protein or the gene ate less and weighed less than their normal mouse counterparts when they stuck to a low fat diet. When given a high fat diet, they still ate less (i.e. like, they dieted, 'k?), they weighed more than the normal mice. They were little piggy mice.

The take-away I'm getting is that if you're one of those that can't seem to lose weight when you diet, until scientists can figure cool ways to manipulate our genes so we can fit into our jeans, we ought to play it safe and limit our fat intake along with keeping the calories the same.

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by gekko at 10:41 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Former President Bill Clinton was a fat boy. He suffered for it in his early years by not getting the girls, although we all know he overcame that issue, but he suffered for his weight problems in his later years when he had to undergo a quadruple bypass.

It's an issue that dogs him, so he's spearheading some drives to try to combat childhood obesity.

The Clinton Foundation, the American Heart Association and the nation's three biggest beverage manufacturers—Coke, Pepsi and Cadbury Schweppes—last week announced an agreement to begin rolling back America's growing obesity epidemic in the place they can do the most good: the schools. Beginning now and progressing through the 2009-10 school year, the manufacturers will kick high-calorie, sugary drinks out of school vending machines and replace them with bottled water, unsweetened fruit juices, low-fat milk and sugar-free sodas—all served in smaller portions. And that's only the first move in Clinton's campaign to fight fat. His foundation is planning to turn its attention next to vending-machine snack foods and cafeteria lunches and is even in negotiations with fast-food companies to reduce the fat in their restaurant fare. -- TIME.com: How Bill Sealed the Soda Deal

And that, in my opinion, is a good thing. I know I hated the fact that schools were managing budgets by removing cafeterias and replacing them with vending machines and deals with fast food companies, by putting soda machines in and collecting the profits, and so forth. I know I hated it because I wasn't sending my child and his lunch money to school in order to glut out on food I wouldn't serve him at home, but to get an education and to interact with peers. Oh, and because it's the law to send him to school, dur.

I'm fortunate that my kids inherited their father's family genes and have been slender and hyperactive their whole lives, but the same is not true of all.

What I hope to see is not just the replacement of fatty, high-calorie, high-sugar foods with healthier ones at the schools, but the reinstitution of exercise. Organized, fast-moving play times. Calisthenics. Putting physical fitness in its proper role in kids' lives -- as important as book time.

After all, studies have shown, time and again, that a person who gets regular exercise thinks more clearly.

Go Bill! Make it happen. I hated you as Pres, but I'm with you all the way where childhood fitness and health are concerned.

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by gekko at 8:14 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

These boots are made for walkin' ...

... although I find sneaks better. Anyhoo, Paula has a bit of testimony for the advantages of just getting on with it and doing it.

If you don't play, you can't win.

If you don't exercise at all, you won't get any of the benefits of exercise, which includes getting more fit and helping to lose or maintain weight.

A little is better than none.

So.

Get with it, you.

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by gekko at 4:41 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I've been on a smoothie kick.

And in my "I can't get no" article, I gave a recipe for one in the comment section after giraffelady mentioned smoothies. I'm pulling that up out of the comments and into a poastie.

giraffelady wrote:
Oatmeal in the morning lasts longer than a fruit smoothy for me. I can't seem to get enough fruit to satisfy my need to continue eating. Any suggestions?

Yeah. In fact, I mention my smoothie in a later article, but here's what I do:

1 C fat free vanilla-flavored yogurt
1/2 C crushed ice
1/2 C cranberry juice
1/2 C fruit (I like berries, blue, black, or rasp)
1/4 C rolled oats (yup!)
3 T vanilla or plain protein powder
1 T water-soluble powdered fiber

Blend that goop up, top with a handful of low-fat whole-grain granola.

Adding the protein powder, fiber, oatmeal and granola increases the satiety. The fruit and juices give it flavor and the quick-kick simple carb for instant energy. The yogurt gives it body, and gives you the calcium/protein mix you need to help burn fat.

When I get home, I'll look up the brand names of some of this stuff. '

Protein Powder: MLO Sports Nutrition. Comes in a red cannister. 22 grams of protein per serving (3 T is a serving). Has a vaguely vanilla taste to it, not gritty, not horribly yucky, as far as I am concerned.

Fiber: BeneFiber. Tall white bottle dominated by a green shrinkwrap wrapper, kind of milk-bottle shaped. It's a water-soluble fiber supplement with no taste, no chalkiness. Mixes well in any liquid. Very tolerable.

Yogurt: Any fat-free vanilla yogurt will do, although I also go for sugar-free. Adding enough sugars with the fruits, yah? Could use fruit-flavored yogurt if you like, of course.

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by gekko at 12:40 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Rosabelle has a good article on her Hugging & Chalking blog.

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by gekko at 12:25 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A comment left on a previous entry got me to researching, and my research turned up a cool thing.

I have a link to NutritionData already in my sidebar, but I never explored the Fullness Factor<tm> tab before finding a link to it while looking up the Satiety Factor information.

The NutritionData peeps do a good job of explaining it, so I won't repeat all that here. The Satiety study had given boiled potatoes a very high satiation value, however, and my long-necked friend had commented that that was interesting.

I'm thinking "Boiled 'taters, Ew." and, sure 'nuf, the ND folk think that might be a bit off, too.

Note, however, that the methodology of this particular study may have contributed to an artificially high satiety value for potatoes. Per the study's design, the participants were separately fed 220-Calorie servings of each food. A 220-Calorie serving of plain potatoes is larger and much less palatable than the other foods studied. The size of this serving may have influenced a repulsion to this test food that goes beyond the normal satiating response.

I sincerely nope there are more, scientifically based studies regarding satiety and foods, using the usual standards of controls and large scale groups. The more we understand, the better we'll be, is what I say.

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by gekko at 9:02 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The woman showed me how tight her pants were on her. They were. Her hips and belly pulled at the pockets and the zipper. She was bulgy. They had fit her perfectly last fall, but over the winter, decreased activity while continuing the same eating habits lead to the inevitable.

And she was unhappy with herself.

"So what diet should I go on?" The church service was going to start soon so I really didn't have time to go into details. I said, "Eat less. Exercise more."

I don't think she was happy with that answer.

I think she wanted me to say "Oh the Atwell South Park Orange Soda Diet is the diet of diets! Follow it for one week, you'll lose thirty pounds, your skin will tighten, you'll lose all the age spots and wrinkles, and you'll have increased orgasms! Oh, and it makes a terrific center piece for your family Easter dinner table!"

Or something like that.

Eat less. We've had meals together and she piles her plate high, then goes for seconds. She's an energetic woman who does a lot, usually, so the extra plates full didn't really mount up on her until recently.

We had lunch that day. She filled her plate with salad -- good, and a slice of ham. Good. She finished that off and got up to get fruit and another slice of ham. Not so good. She finished that off and came back with a slice of cheesecake. A rather large slice. Then some more fruit, because it was sooo good.

Exercise more.
"Whoa, I'm tired. I'll probably nap today. Phew!" She had that comment to make following lunch.

I was surprised. With all the calories and sugar she just consumed, she should be a bundle of energy, ready to go scrub her house and the entire street that runs along in front of it.

I suggested we take a walk, but she was "too tired."

'k.

We'll do walkies at the mall when she goes to shop for the next size up in pants.

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by gekko at 9:50 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

"There is evidence that a vegan diet causes an increased calorie burn after meals, meaning plant-based foods are being used more efficiently as fuel for the body, as opposed to being stored as fat," says Dr. Barnard. Insulin sensitivity is increased by a vegan diet, allowing nutrients to more rapidly enter the cells of the body to be converted to heat rather than to fat.

Vegetarian Diets Cause Major Weight Loss, New Scientific Review Shows

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by gekko at 12:22 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Satisfaction. Satiation. Being satisfied. Giving in to your cravings. Can all of that possibly be part of a weight loss plan? A diet???

The answer, my friend, is, well, yes.

"But," you'll argue. "But I just pounded away two bags of potato chips and I'm obese and I'm still not satisfied. Are you saying I gotta go grab that carton of Mocha Java Chip ice cream and start chowing down?"

Before I go much further, let me say, Put down the junk food, and step away from the fridge, and nobody gets hurt. 'k? And while you're here, practice jiggling your leg while you read this. May as well burn off some of those oily potato calories you just snarfed.

Remember, the secret to any weight loss plan is to take in fewer calories than you expend. When I talk about satisfying your craving, I am not talking about increasing your calories.

It's called "satiety." Not exactly a word that rolls off your tongue (pronounced "sa-TIE-atee"). It's a diet and nutrition buzzword for the state of feeling full, one word in a new vocabulary that includes terms such as "energy density," "sensory-specific satiety" and "volumetrics."

If you've ever wondered why you fill up on a bowl of oatmeal but can eat three doughnuts before feeling satisfied, the reason is the comparative satiety levels of these foods.

Susanna Holt, PhD, developed a satiety index, reported in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Taking 240-calorie portions of popular foods, she ranks them according to how they compare with a slice of white bread, which carries a rank of 100. Oatmeal has a high satiety level at 209, while a doughnut's rank is 68. Interestingly, a 240-calorie serving of boiled potatoes ranks highest at 323, but French fries score just 116.
-- FoxNews Health News - Satiety: The New Diet Weapon

Flavors affect us when it comes to satisfaction. The volume of food we eat for the same calorie cost, affects us as well. And, sometimes, those cravings for a bit of something specific is what we need to go for -- in small doses.

"The fact is that anyone who loves chocolate can tell you that in some cases a sweet fruit just won't fill the void of that wonderful taste of chocolate," said Cathy Nonas, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association who works with obese patients.

But that doesn't mean that it's OK to pound down an entire bag of potato chips, a king-size Baby Ruth or a big piece of chocolate cake (or all three).
-- CNN.com: Dieting war strategy: Give in to win Mar 24, 2006

When I was in the midst of my weight loss activities, I rewarded myself with an occasional Starbucks© Double Shot™. It had a low "satiety" factor in terms of the calories it packed per volume, but I savored it, made it last, and so the flavor need was satisfied. And, really, I know I'm in trouble when I find myself mindlessly snacking, without even being aware of the food I'm snarfing. If I buy a Hershey's Take Five™, go back to my desk, and reach for the next bite only do discover I actually ate the whole thing already, and have no memory of having done so, not only do I feel disappointed that there isn't more, I feel cheated.

Many of us would go right back to that vending machine, because we haven't satisfied our craving.

We have to slow ourselves down. We have to consider what it is we're really after, and what will make us feel happiest.

Is it shovelling sugar into our systems?

Not likely. There's a reason for that sugar craving, and it's rooted in your psychological makeup, and the stresses you're undergoing. But there's no excuse for letting yourself be enslaved to your emotions.

Take charge of yourself, and start by filling yourself with small amounts of filling foods that satisfy your palate, that satisfy your body, that satisfy your cravings. Go visit the articles I've referenced to learn more about which foods will do that for you best. Then take a nice long, fast-paced walk to help you reduce your stress, take your mind off of your problems, and burn off that pound of Frito's you just ate.

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by gekko at 6:57 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Go to Wendy's. The fast-food place.

You're watching your weight, and you look at the menu and see, well, burgers, and ... oh! Salad! With low fat honey mustard dressing! Yes. Get the salad, because peeps who're dieting need to avoid meat and eat the green stuff, right?

Well. Before you head out to Wendy's, or any fast food place, check out their nutrition data before hand.

You'll find that a Classic Single Hamburger, sans mayo, is 390 calories, with 16 g of fat and 25 g of protein. That salad? A Chicken BLT Salad with the low-fat dressing and croutons is 520 calories. 23 g of fat! At least you're getting 37 g of protein with all that.

Of course, you could just stay home, or make your lunch before you head out, but what's the fun in that?

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by gekko at 6:48 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It ain't just the wrinkles and sags. No, it's not the thinning hair, spots, and creaky joints -- those are bad enough. The really bad thing about aging is the reduction in metabolism, making it more difficult to maintain or lose weight.

So why is it that way? I mean, besides the fact that your joints ache making moving around more adventurous than you really want? There are two main reasons, according to a variety of health- and fitness articles I've been reading.

Metabolism, as I've written elsewhere, is the rate at which you burn energy. You can increase that rate by increasing your muscle density. You increase your muscle density by exercise -- most efficiently through load-bearing and resistance exercises like weight training.

As we age, we typically do less load-bearing/resistance activities, partly as a result of our sedentary lifestyles, and partly because it's harder to exercise -- those aches and pains, the hard breathing. So our muscles lose density, and, because we don't necessarily decrease our calorie consumption, we pork up.

And that is the second reason. Another factor in metabolism boosting is increasing your heart rate for an extended period of time -- aka "exercise". If you spend an hour walking at a rapid pace, getting your heart up to about 50-60% of its peak rate, you increase your metabolism and burn fat most efficiently.

But our lifestyles typically involve less activity, not more -- more time behind a desk, more time behind the wheel, less time playing football or racing around like a madman, the way you did as a youth. And as we age in this sedentary lifestyle, our ability to use oxygen efficiently declines. That becomes a vicious cycle, then, because it makes it harder to exercise when we do manage to push our chubby arses out onto the handball court once a month.

It just plain hurts, and is tiring, to get out there!

So what is the cure?

I hate to say this, but, um, exercise is the cure. According to a study cited in Medical News Today, "A relatively low level of aerobic training for six months was able to improve exercise efficiency, reduce oxygen debt and an increased exercise capacity in older men and women. In addition after training the older individuals showed a lower oxygen debt, lower oxygen consumption during recovery, and better exercise efficiency than the untrained young individuals!" Dr. Lakatta said."

So what are you waiting for? At least, when you die, you'll leave behind a buff cadaver.

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by gekko at 6:00 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It just ain't fair. Men have all the advantages. Turns out being soft in the middle (we're talking gut, not, um, you know), if you're a guy, can be an advantage, too:

Moderately overweight males are more likely to survive serious car accidents than either the thin or the very fat. Apparently, a bit of extra padding -- but not too much -- provides extra protection, according to the study. -- 'Spare Tire' Might Protect Men During Car Accident - Forbes.com

The same correlation does not exist for the well-padded woman. So, babes, you're still on the hook for slimming down to a healthy size, and you've got to be EXTRA careful when you're out in traffic.

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by gekko at 12:10 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The March issue of the magazine I told you about, Women's Health Magazine has an article titled "one-click weight loss" that talks about using web-based tools to help you lose weight. As you all know, I lost my weight by leveraging my sedentary habit of camping in front of my computer. I logged on to Weight Watchers© and started tracking using their tools, their food databases, and also using their recipes and meal plans, for the most part. It was pretty darned easy. It has a monthly fee, of course.

My friend Lily has seen success using another on-line tool, this one free for nothin', called FitDay.

This site's rather cool because, like Weight Watchers©, it has a pretty good database of foods that makes it easy for you to track what you've eaten, but unlike Weight Watchers©, this site will help you track your percentage of fats, carbs, and proteins consumed, let you set goals for a variety of things such as weight (dur), caloric intake, caloric expenditure, levels of various vitamins and minerals (if your doc has said you need more potassium, for example), types of fats, and so forth. You can journal, you can access various reports and guidelines.

It lacks an on-line forum and good low-fat/low-cal recipe database, but you can find those easily enough. FitDay also has the annoying feature of logging you out after time has passed, so you have to click to get back in all the time. Aside from those quirks, I'm giving it a try. Since I'm in maintenance mode, I've not really made that much use of the WW forums and recipe database. I do like the WW articles, but the Women's Health magazine I now subscribe to will give me that kind of information, so I may find myself saving the $15 per month.

Which is good. I can save it up to buy myself a set of dumbbells and some new athletic shooz.

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by gekko at 8:07 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

This will not be a shock to anyone, but I am a woman.

My opinions, my knowledge, my experiences are all shaped by that fact.

If you're a guy reading this, keep that in mind, but also keep in mind that what applies to me as a woman just MIGHT help inform you, even though you suffer from the defect of not being a woman.

In December the publishers of "Men's Health Magazine", Rodell, sent a teaser in the mail for a new magazine, they cleverly call "Women's Health Magazine." I was interested by the snippets of sample articles they put into the pamphlet, so I subscribed. I was hoping to get the very first issue, but by the time they processed my subscription they'd already sent out the Jan/Feb issue and I ended up getting the March issue. I'm pestering them to see if they'll send me a freebie Jan/Feb copy anyway, just to thank me.

They have a website, of course, with helpful articles and tips geared toward women, dieting, fitness, and health.

I'd like to draw your attention to this article on eating for weight loss.

I've hammered home, time and again, how weight loss is as simple as the math of eat less than you burn. But going hand in hand with that is the understanding that what you eat affects your psychology, your ability to sustain the mental and emotional effort of eating fewer calories than you burn in order to lose, and just the right amount of calories to sustain your weight. Along with that is the understanding that what you eat affects your physiology, and can enhance your ability to burn fat, build lean muscle mass, and thus eventually enable you to actually consume more calories and yet not gain weight.

That's my dream, my goal. To be able to eat all the really tasty stuff, without fear that I'll bloat back up to my previous obese self.

And, since it is my dream, my goal, then of course it should be yours.

So go read the article. It's got some good ideas.

The photo, by the way, is not me. But my abs do look like that -- a little bit of extra skin from the weight reduction, is the only difference.

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by gekko at 7:25 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The headline reads:

Overweight, Obese Pregnant Women In Australia Causing Strain On Some Hospitals, Staffs

Um. Maybe they shouldn't be trying to lift them?

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by gekko at 12:26 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Don't reach for it. That cookie. That bag of sugary flavored rice cakes. The next piece of Dove chocolate candy. The ice cream bar.

Stop, first. Think.

Why are you reaching for it?

Are you hungry? I mean, is your stomach empty and did you skip lunch or breakfast, maybe?

If so, then reach for food your body actually needs, like a sandwich made on tasty whole grain bread, with a little turkey and a zot of fat-free cream cheese, some lettuce. Or a bowl of slivered sweet bell peppers, some carrots. Or even grab something a little more fattening, but still nutritious.

If it isn't hunger, then what is making you reach for that snack food?

Think.

Is it just boredom? Is it stress? Is it habit?

Then do something to relieve the boredom -- go to a movie, head to the mall and look at stuff you'd like to buy some day, pick up a book or magazine and read it, call some friends and yatter with them, dig in your garden and get it ready for Spring.

Or, for stress eating, get up and walk away from whatever is stressing you out. Take 30 minutes to walk somewhere like around the pond in the park, or down the street a ways, or around and around at the mall. Someplace to clear you head.

Or, if it's habit, then change the habit. It takes, they say, 28 days of repetition to form a habit or form a new one. Don't grab the candy bar when you're accustomed to grabbing it. Instead, each time, grab something else. A book. The remote control. The laptop. The dog and the dog brush. Your kid. Something NOT related to food and eating.

Just stop. Think. Try something else.

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by gekko at 3:15 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Well, nearly. And no, I'm not talking about grapefruit. <wince>

The technology to produce low sugar fruits with up to half the calories of the natural variety has been developed by US scientists, writes Jennifer Rohn in Chemistry & Industry magazine.

Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have developed apples with high levels of the natural sweetener sorbitol. Sorbitol has only 2.6 calories per gram, 45% less than sucrose and fructose. Sorbitol, fructose and sucrose are all found naturally in fruit.
-- Producing Low Sugar Fruit With Fewer Calories

Well, dang. Sorbitol. Why can't they engineer food that has naturally occurring sucralose (the ingredient in Splenda<tm>)? I find that to be more like sugar with respect to its sweetness intensity and the aftertaste than sorbitol.

Will the fruit come in different colors, I wonder? Pink fruit has saccharrine, blue fruit has aspartame, and, when they perfect sucralose-laden fruit, they can make it yellow. This new sorbitol fruit should be, I dunno. lavendar?

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by gekko at 8:07 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Live longer! Make love!

According to Great Britain's NHS, a workout between the sheets can lower the risk of heart attacks. The article notes that endorphins released during orgasm stimulate immune system cells, among other things. As well,

Sex with a little energy and imagination provides a workout worthy of an athlete, the article says. -- 'Sexercise' yourself into shape

"Sex uses every muscle group, gets the heart and lungs working hard, and burns about 300 calories an hour," they say.

Hear that, guys? You up for an hour?

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by gekko at 9:11 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

It's Superbowl Sunday, and you're about to go snacking, is my guess.

Here are the facts: 11.2 million pounds of potato chips; 8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips; 4.3 million pounds of pretzels; 3.8 million pounds of popcorn, and 2.5 million pounds of nuts.

That adds up to 30 million pounds of snacks that Americans will wolf down Super Bowl Sunday, according to research by the Calorie Control Council and the Snack Food Association.

That means the average armchair quarterback will consume 1,200 calories and 50 grams of fat just from snacking -- not counting any meals.
-- The Super Bowl of Snacking - Forbes.com

Yowza!

And yet ... if you're fit and active, 1200 calories of junk is meaningless. It's the basal metabolic rate for the 120 pound woman. It's far less than that for the average man. Normal peeps will be burning that off just breathing and pooping in one day. Add the enormous quantities of meal food that may ALSO be consumed -- the 20 foot long sub sandwiches, the vat-sized chafing dishes of ziti, the mountaints of chili 'n cheese polskies, the kegs of beer will cause that number to increase, of course.

Even so, the fit, active person will be able to absorb a day like this. The fit, active person will have a higher heart rate and so burn more calories just by jumping up and screaming "Yeah!" when the Bud Lite commercials come on than will the obese, couch-potato type.

It's a drop in the bucket for the active, fit person.

If you're not active, if you're not fit? Then plan on either gaining even more weight, or plan on increasing your exercise and going light on food for the next coupla days.

Here's a thought: plan now. Don't eat the chips, the pretzels, the cheese dogs. Head for the veggie trays (go easy on the dip, hello), and maybe the baked chicken wings instead of the fried ones. Have a half a sausage. Put down that cookie.

It's just a friggin' football game, and usually not a very good one at that, hello. Enjoy socializing with yer buddies more than shovelling food into your maw.

It's just a thought.

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by gekko at 8:16 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I really don't understand what goes on in the minds of drugmakers, the doctors that do their research for them, and perpetual dieters.

First, read UV's blog article about Orlistat. She talks about the fat-blocking pill, how it works, how well it works, and what to expect when you take it.

If you start taking these pills, you may lose around one pound a month more than if you didn't take it. One pound a month more because you're not processing some of the caloric content of the food you're shovelling into your maw.

Note: taking this pill isn't gonna get you skinny if you keep snarfing down gobs of high-caloric food and not burning it off. Calories are calories, whether they're from fat, carbs, or protein, and while each one plays a role in your body's nutritional needs. Read this past article on macronutrients, if you want a primer on nutrients, especially fats.

Fat is an essential nutrient. You need it. Blocking it is not a good thing -- not just because of stained undies, but because you really do need some fat in your diet.

I'm gonna harp on it again:

The way to lose weight, and keep it off, is to reduce the number of calories you eat relative to the number of calories you burn. If you eat 10 Twinkies in one day, that'll be all you need that day, calorie wise. Eat more than that, even a lick of an ice cream, and fail to take an extra walk to the mail box and back, and you'll start packing on the pounds. 'course your nutritional needs will NOT be met, you'll feel lousy, eventually, and probably start doing some major damage to your insides, but calorically speaking, you will not be adding to your obesity.

Basically: there is no magic pill. Taking a pill isn't gonna make you not fat. You have to change the way you eat, or you have to start exercising a HELL of a lot more.

Got that?

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by gekko at 5:06 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Funny thing about the butt - it is at the same time the source of more derisive jokes and more interest and admiration than any other part of the human anatomy. The butt invariably comes out on top in favorite body-part polls taken among both men and women. Studies have shown that magazine covers featuring a photograph of an attractive derriere always outsell other issues of that same magazine.

Because we care about you (you know that we do), and because we understand you, we intend to present here some sure-fire methods of shaping your own posterior to the best of your genetic potential. These exercises and methods can be incorporated into your aerobic exercise programs and into your strength-training programs.

First, some fundamentals. We'll start with a general overview of the muscular system of the posterior to give us a better understanding of the movements required to build those muscles:

The muscles of the butt and posterior thigh (hamstrings) serve a dual purpose - they function both as flexors of the knee joint (bending the knee, or raising your heel behind you) and extensors of the hip joint (extending the leg back behind you). Bending the knee is accomplished by a number of muscles crossing the knee joint behind the line of gravity, including one of the adductors, a muscle of the anterior thigh, and the hamstrings. The hip extensors are generally inactive when standing and relaxed. When bending the body forward the hamstrings contract strongly. Gluteus Maximus contracts only against strong resistance (as in climbing).

As with other muscle systems the interactions of the muscles of the butt and posterior thigh are complex and thus require a number of angles of attack in order to achieve shapley behind. As with all other strength training routines, if you are starting out with weak muscles you would do well to concentrate on compound exercises. These are designed to bring all of the muscles of a given muscle group into play and to stimulate growth of muscle tissue. With that in mind, we'll present the exercises in the following order:

Basic Considerations:

As we said above, the glutes require strong resistance in order to contract. Generally you will be performing climbing, bending and squatting motions with emphasis on the glutes. A word about diet and cardiovascular exercise: We won't go into details about diet, aerobics and fat-loss here because those subjects are covered extensively elsewhere on this blob blog. Be aware, however, that you can have the strongest butt muscles on the block and it will do you little good in terms of appearance if those muscles are covered by thick layers of fat. For many people the areas of the butt and hips are the most troublesome for losing fat - in most cases that simply means that the fat that you acquired was deposited first in those areas, and the fat that came first will also be the last to leave. Be patient, be consistent with your weight loss programs and you will be successful.

Also, the same basic principals of strength-training (progressive resistance, overload, range of motion, warmup, frequency, intensity, etc.) that apply to other exercises also apply here.

Put together a routine using one of the compound exercises below and at least two of the incidental exercises and perform that routine two to three times per week.

Compound Exercises

The Squat

Thoughs of squats create unnecessary fear in some folk - fear arising generally from misconceptions about the proper performance of the exercise and about injuries. But the squat is a very important exercise in general and for the lower body in particular. Proper performance of this exercise improves overall fitness and actually reduces your potential for injuries.

Here's how to do it:

Starting position - Using barbell: Place the barbell on a squat rack at about chest height. Space your hands eqidistant from the center of the bar a little more than shoulder width apart. Get underneath the bar and rest it behind your neck. Keep your upper body erect while extending the hips and legs and lift the bar out of the rack. Set your feet shoulder width or a little wider apart, toes pointed slightly outward. Keep your head aligned with your spine and your eyes straight ahead.

Movement - Take a deep breath and squat in a controlled manner until the tops of your thighs are parallel to the floor. As you squat, focus on not allowing your knees to come out over your toes. At the bottom of the movement begin to ascend, doing so powerfully while not allowing the knees to come forward or the hips to move backward. Contract your abdomen during the ascent and concentrate on feeling the gluteals contract. Exhale at the top of the movement - don't lock out the knees, and repeat. Do 6 to 12 repetitions, depending on the weight being used.

When starting out with this exercise begin with light weights until you have a good feel for the coordination and balance required, then increase weight until you can do no less than 6 and no more than 12 repetitions.

Variations: This exercise can be performed holding dumbbells at your sides, holding one dumbbell at your neck, or as a body-weight exercise with hands on hips.

Glute Ham Raise

This exercise requires the use of a glute-ham bench - where your front hips rest on a padded bench and your lets are held in place at the ankles. It's worth it to seek one of these benches out - this is a highly effective exercise for the butt.

Starting postion: Get on the bench with your pelvis on the support pad so that your upper body has a full range of motion. Put the back of your legs under the support pad so that the resistance is just below your calves. Extend your torso so that it is parallel to the ground, with your hands at your ears or crossed in front of your chest.

Movement: Lower your upper body toward the floor until you are all the way down. Return to the starting position, raising your upper body until parallel to the floor, but no further. Finish by bending the knees to almost a 90 degree angle - this will cause your hamnstrings to contract and bring your butt and ankles toward each other. It will also raise your upper body above parallel, but it will still be in alignment with your upper legs and your lower back will not be hyper-extended. Return to starting position by relaxing hamstrings and repeat.

Keep the downward movement of this exercise under control. On the upward movement, contract your butt and squeeze the cheeks together.

The Lunge

The Lunge is another important compound exercise that requires some getting used to if you haven't done them before. Balance and control are key here.

Starting position: Using a squat rack, place a barbell across your shoulders in the same manner as with the squat, above. Your feet should be spaced hip-width apart with your toes pointed straight ahead. Make sure your upper body is erect - head in alignment with your spine, eyes straight ahead.

Movement: Step forward with one foot a little farther than the length of a normal stride. Land your foot heel-to-toe and come to a stop. Keeping your upper body erect, drop down to a three-count by bending the knees and dropping your hips in a straight line toward the ground. Stop just before the rear knee touches the ground. Your lower front leg will be perpendicular to the ground. Hold for a second, then return to the starting position by pushing back with your front leg. Step out with the other leg and repeat.

These can also be performed with hands on hips or holding dumbbells at your sides.

Step-Ups

This is a good one to perform at home, either with body weight alone or holding a pair of dumbbells at your sides. You will need a bench, a stable stool or wooden box, about 18 - 24 inches high.

Starting position: Place hands on hips or hold dumbbells with arms fully extended at your sides. Stand erect, 12 to 18 inches from the bench. Your feet should be about hip-width apart with your toes pointing straight ahead.

Movement: Step up onto the bench with one foot. Put your foot firmly on the bench - your shin should be perpendicular to the ground. Pull yourself up onto the bench with the working leg and lightly tap the toe of the opposite leg on the bench, then lower that opposite foot back to the ground and bring the other foot to the starting position. Swithch legs and repeat.

You should concentrate on the pulling motion of the front leg and keeping your descent to the starting positon under control.

Good Mornings:

This is an excellent exercise for the lower back and glutes, but it carries a high risk for lower back injury. Proceed with caution.

Starting postion: This can be performed with a light barbell across your shoulders or with hands behind the head. Stand with feet a little more than shoulder-width apart, toes turned slightly out. Your head and upperbody should be in alignment. With knees slightly bent, bend your upper body until it is parallel to the floor, keeping the upper body in a straight line. Raise back up to the starting position.

Concentrate on your manstrings and butt during this movement, especially as you rise to the upright position.

Machine leg curls:

This exercise, of course, requires the use of a leg-curl machine. There are different makes of these - the most common will have you lie on your stomach on the bench with your heels under a pad, although there are also seated and standing leg-curl machines.

In any case, raise the weight forcefully, then take about twice that amount of time to lower it to the starting position, feeling the contraction in your butt and hamstrings. Repeat for the prescribed number of sets and repetitions.

Incidental Exercises:

These focus a little more on isolating the muscle in question than do the compound exercises.

Standing Kickbacks

One of my favorites. This requires the use of a cable machine, although it can also be done with ankle weights while bracing yourself against a wall.

Starting postion: Stand facing the weight stack (or wall) using your hands to hold on for balance. Your whole body should be straight, leaning forward just slightly. One ankle should be attached to the lower cable with an ankle strap.

Movement: Pull the working leg backward, keeping the knee slightly bent and fixed, just untill you feel the glute on that side contract. Return, under control, to the starting positon and repeat. After performing the prescribed number of sets, switch the attachment to the opposite leg and repeat.

Be sure to squeeze the butt hard as you perform eht movement and keep it contracted during the return to the starting position.

Prone single-leg raise:

Starting positon: Lie on your stomach with your legs extended and your arms overhead. You can also place your hands, palms up, under your hips.

Movement: Raise one leg, keeping the knee slightly bent, until you feel the glute on that side contract. Return slowly to the starting position and repeat with the opposite leg.

As with cable cickbacks, do not over extend the leg and cause the lower back to arch.

Pelvis Lifts

Starting positon: On your back on the floor, knees bent, feet flat, hands at your sides with palms down.

Movement: Lift your hips straight up, squeezing your butt until your back is in a straight line. Do not arch your back. Return to starting position slowly and reqeat.

This can also be done with a weight held on your hips.

Bent Leg kickbacks:

Starting position: On hands and knees on the floor.

Movement: Keeping the working leg bent at a 90 degree angle, raise that leg back and up until yuou feel the butt contract. You are trying to raise the sole of the foot toward the ceiling. Return to a position slightly forward of the starting position and repeat for the prescribed numnber of repetitions, then switch to the other leg.

Other things to do:

There are things that you can do throughout the course of your day to keep the gluteals working hard. If you are required to be seated at a desk for long periods of time, occasionally squeeze the butt hard, hold for several beats, and relax. Repeat this several times.

Take the stairs rather than the elevator or escalator, and take them two at a time for a full contraction of the glutes.

In a swimming pool, hold on to the side of the pool and use the resistance of the water to perform standing straight-leg kickbacks.

When walking for exercise, turn around and walk backward (assuming you are not walking near a cliff or ravine) and use the glutes to push youself along. When walking normally, lengthen your stride and concentrate on using the glutes to pull your body forward with each stride.

Follow these steps, do the exercises, and it won't be long before you are feeling all eyes boring into... um, no, that's not a good way to put it. It won't be long before your bottom is the envy of the neighborhood.

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by gekko at 8:15 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Just for you.

If you're going to eat, wouldn't it make sense to get as much bang, nutrition-wise, for your calorie as possible?

I mean, if all you allow yourself is a sensible 1500 calories a day, (and g'ahead and set aside about 200 of them in the form of cake if you want), then doesn't it make sense for you to pack the remaining 1300 with rilly rilly good stuff? The kind of stuff that helps your body use up the stored fats, provide you with energy, build your muscle tissue, make you feel good, and, if prepared correctly, tastes great?

Well.

Here you go:

Read up, then eat up:

The World's Healthiest Foods

Special thanks to Wayne for sending me this link.

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by gekko at 8:09 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I took a trip to Las Vegas recently. En route, we stopped at a small cozy cafe in a small cozy highway town. The cafe sold "Indian" jewelry, artwork, trinkets, and two products from a snake oil company.

I will decline to state the name of the company.

The two products claimed to be miraculous. One of them claimed to be a weight loss aid. The other consisted of the "perfect food" and contained energizers and youth-ful-izers, all combined into an easy-to-take pill.

The one was a pill form of unfiltered apple cider vinegar with some other stuff mixed in. Google up the claims for what cider vinegar's supposed to be about, then read this article.

The other product was a pill form of a combination of "bee" products, from "bee pollen" (which differs from plant pollen, how?) to "Royal Jelly" (bee spit), to "bee glue" (the gunk they use to make their hives stick together) to ... I don't remember what all else they had. Probably bee testicles.

So we're going to find the fountain of youth and the cure for cancer from the bees, right?

Here ya go.

Peeps, quacking ought to be left to the ducks.

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by gekko at 7:10 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A blogger writes about diets:

Is anyone else here tired of dieting? Tired of Scarsdale and cabbage and low-carb and good carbs and no-white-food, just to name a few of the "disciplines" I've tried. [...]The point of [the book Fat Is A Feminist Issue is that we won't overeat once we give ourselves permission to have what we really, truly want. Is it better to eat ten rice cakes and still feel hollow, or to eat double-chocolate breading pudding and push the bowl away halfway through? Last week, I opted for the latter, and I hope you did, too.
-- excerpted from Laura Lippman's The Memory Project

I've never heard of the book Ms. Lippman is talking about, but I have to say that what she talks about makes sense. Understanding "hunger" and "satiety" is important, and giving your body what it needs and wants makes more sense, and becomes more firmly rooted in your lifestyle, than starving yourself or eating things you really don't like but which the latest "diet" tells you you need.

There's a caveat with that, though. You can't just, like, think really hard and announce to whoever's listening "My body tells me it wants big gobs of chocolate cake!" and then proceed to stuff yourself with big gobs of chocolate cake if you expect to get or stay thin. Or, if you do just that, you'd better also "hear" your body tell you to get your by now expanding butt out there and exercise.

My advice? Don't follow fad diets. Eat balanced, nutritious meals, starting with breakfast when you arise, and know your limits. Know how many calories you need, choose foods that provide healthful balances of those calories AND which you enjoy, which satisfy you, and you'll be fine.

Make these part of your life. No one should have to "diet."

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by gekko at 7:31 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Third and final in a series of three, this one covers the macronutrient known as "Fats".

The fat we're all most familiar with is the fat on our butts and thighs, or, if you're a guy, belly and head.

Of course we're also familiar with the fats in foods, because so many food packagers, manufacturers, and designers harp on it.

97% Fat Free! No Trans Fats! Two grams of Fat per Serving!

You also probably know about the three kinds of fat, and I am not talking about "smooth, cellulite, and none." I'm talking about saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat, and monounsaturated fat. Which fat is the bad fat?

Saturated. You don't want to become "saturated" with this fat. It's the type of fat that is associated with (note, I did not say "causes". nyah!) heart disease and high cholesterol levels and googleplectal bipass operations. This is the fat you find mostly in animal products. Meats. Some vegetable oils get turned into saturated fats when they are processed (the term to watch out for is "hydrogenated", which is the type of oil you find in packaged foods. They are associated with insulin resistance, clogged arteries, and obesity.

There are other oils, the so-called "tropical" oils that are also saturated fats: coconut, palm, and palm kernel oils. Non-dairy creamers are high in saturated fats. You're better off with fat-free creamers or skim milk.

The poly version of these do not have an effect on cholesterol levels. Canola, corn, safflower, sunflower oils are polyunsaturated. Flaxseed and fish oils, too (the much-trumpeted "Omega3" fats).

It is believed that the Omega3 types, are very good for you and should be your main source of polyunsaturated fat. They are also considered as having antioxident properties.

Corn oil, while polyunsaturated and therefore not known to affect cholesterol levels, has been shown to contribute to an increase in the size of your fat cells.

The third type of fat is monounsaturated. These are the ones that doctors like because they lower the "bad" cholesterol (LDL) and increase the "good" cholesterol (HDL). You'll find monos in extra virgin olive oil and nuts.

Some nutrition experts recommend that 20% of the calories you ingest should come from good fats -- the Omega3 and monounsaturated fats.

The rest of your caloric intake should then be evenly split between the other two macronutrients.

[Read the first entry on Carbs]
[Read the second entry on Protein]

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by gekko at 8:51 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Second in a series of three, this one covers the macronutrient known as protein.

Protein, baby. Get it from dead animals, from cheese, from nuts and eggs, expensive powders, capsules. Every tissue in your body, excepting maybe that bit of napkin you ingested 'cuz it was stuck to your morning bagel, is made from protein. Your skin, your hair, your, well, yes, your muscles. All protein. As you doubtless recall from your grade school health and science classes, proteins are the "building blocks" of your body, your muscle tissues. Your meat.

Here's an interesting fact: every time you eat protein, you increase your metabolism by about 20%. It is protein that enables the carbs you also ingest to be "time released".

You need protein. That would be a "dur" kind of thing for us. I'm not aware of any diet that suggests otherwise.

Some training programs suggest you consume between 1 to 1 and a half grams of protein for every pound of lean body mass you possess. If you know how much you weigh, and you know about what percentage of that weight is attributed to fat, you can calculate your lean body mass and thus your grams of protein needed to sustain that.

That is, if I weigh 120 pounds, and have 22% body fat, then about 94 of my pounds is "lean body mass". I need 94 to 140 grams of protein a day.

Best to get lean protein because the types of fats that typically come packaged up with natural sources of protein are not considered "good" fats. Get it from egg whites, skinless chicken or turkey breast, 97% lean red meats, shrimp, white water-packed or fresh tuna.

If you're a vegetarian or Vegan, you can find protein in various vegetable sources, but the quantity of protein per ounce of these food sources is less than with the meat sources:

• Cereals and grains - wheat, rye, corn, rice, pasta...


• Leafy green vegetables, including spinach


• Legumes - beans, lentils, peas, peanuts


• Nuts - almonds, walnuts, cashews...


• Seaweed - kelp, spirulina...


• Seeds - sesame, sunflower...


• Soy products - tofu, tempeh, soy milk...


• Vegetables - Brussel sprouts, potatoes, yucca

[Read the first entry on Carbs]
[Read the third entry on Fats]

by gekko at 7:56 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

You're like me, I'll bet. Assuming you do work out at a gym and use those aerobic machine thingies, you probably see those heart rate charts that show the "zones" for various age and heart rate ranges and they call one of 'em "Fat Burning Zone." And it's, like, at the low end of the heart rate scale, so you're probably like me and going "huh?"

I mean, if you burn more calories with a higher heart rate, then wouldn't you be burning, like, oodles of fat with those high heart rates?

Well.

No. Not exactly. Kind of, but not really.

Are you confused?

Yeah. I was, too, until I read up on it.

When you exercise, you use different types of the stored fuel in different percentages. The Macronutrients series is talking about the fuel types, so you can go read those entries for more information on them. You'll burn a small percentage of stored protein. You'll burn a fairly large percentage of stored fat, and you'll burn a percentage of the carbohydrates present in your system. As you increase your heart rate, the percentages shift. The fat burn increases slightly until it reaches a maximum, the protein burn decreases slightly, and the carb burn increases dramatically.

There is, in other words, a ceiling on how much fat as a percentage of total calories you'll burn.

You reach that ceiling when you're in the "temperate zone", or when your heart is beating at about 60-70% of its maximum rate. When you're in the "temperate zone", then the fuel you burn is composed of about 5% protein, 85% fat, and 10% carbohydrates.

Your max heart rate is the, well, maximum rate at which your heart will beat, ever. There's a rough calculation you can do to determine it, or you can see your doc and ask for a series of heart rate measurements and stress tests. My max rate is about 190 bpm. The temperate zone for me is from 114 to 133 bpm.

That's a fast walk, or a slow jog, Peeps. Anyone can do that for a sustained period of time and not really work up much of a sweat. To really be effective, though, you'll need to stay in this zone for a at least 20-30 minutes a day. Peeps, you can do this instead of watching The Apprentice. Or do it while watching tee-vee -- get a stationary exercise bike or a treadmill cheap on e-Bay or something, and just pedal during your favorite soap.

Why is it that we max out on fat-burning after a particular heart rate is reached? Well, for the details, read on.

Fat is stored in the ol' fat cells as large molecules called triglycerides. These molecules cannot pass through the cell wall and into the bloodstream. When you exercise, your muscles demand energy, so the body will release enzymes that break the triglycerides down into smaller bits called fatty acids. These are small enough to get out of the fat cells. Yay!

But if you work too hard, you produce a lot of lactic acid (the residue of which is what causes that "burn" in your muscles later on). Lactic acid blocks those enzymes, so you're not going to be breaking the fat down. If the fat can't get out, it can't be used.

Once the fatty acids are created, they still have to get into the bloodstream to get to your muscles. When you exercise at a moderate or aerobic rate, blood is circulating inside those fat cells and can pick up the fatty acids and carry 'em out to the muscles where they'll be used. If you increase beyond the aerobic range, the blood is restricted from the fat cells. So you may have some fatty acids floating inside the fat cells, but it can't go anywhere useful, so, no burn.

Once you get the fatty acids into the muscle fibers, more enzymes will work on them to break them down even further so they can be used. The muscles use the fat in specialized cells known as mitochondria. The mitochonds require oxygen to "burn" the broken down fatty acids. If you work out beyond the aerobic range, you are not getting sufficient amounts of oxygen into the mitochondria. So even if the fatty acids have been delivered and broken down, if you don't have oxygen there to burn 'em, they're useless.

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by gekko at 7:37 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

First of a series of three, this article deals with carbohydrates: you need 'em, but why and how much?

Carbs are your body's main source of energy. It is the carbohydrate, when eaten, which causes your pancreas (some ucky sack of goo inside your body, 'k?) to release insulin. Most of you hear the word "insulin" and think of diabetics taking insulin shots and all. Same stuff, but in the case of a non-diabetic, your ucky inner body goo sack creates it instead of you having to, like, inject it. But, I digress.

Insulin takes the carbs you just et and either stores them in them in your muscles, or stores them in your fat cells. More on that later.

Insulin also takes any protein you may have also eaten and puts that into your muscle cells where that gets used to repair and help muscles recover. If you do weight training ... which you should be doing, hello! ... then that's especially important.

The trouble with carbs is that most of us fat peeps eat far too many of 'em. People on typical low-fat/hi-carb diets eat too many of them. If you eat to many carbs, then you get a big-ass dose of insulin. There is a limit to how much energy your muscles can store, so the rest of the carbs get stored as fat, with the insulin giving it all a big fat helping hand. That is the underlying basis of all those no-carb and low-carb diets.

There are two types of carbs. Anyone who's read up on the low-carb diet fads of late already know this: simple and complex. Think of complex carbs as sort of time-release carb capsules -- providing sustained energy, over time. Simple carbs are the quick-burst energy makers. Hyper-atomic energy pills. If you do hard work-outs (and you SHOULD be doing lots of good hard workouts, hello), then you do your body good by giving it some quick bursty energy to replenish your glycogen levels, which help the muscles recover and rebuild more quickly.

Complex carbs include oatmeal, sweet potatoes, grits (starchy complex carbs) as well as broccoli (ick!), cauliflower (ew!), and zucchini (yum!) which are known as fibrous complex carbohydrates.

The simple carbs are found in, well, candy bars, yes, but also fruits: apples, 'nanners, and oranges.

So, after you've spent a nice hour doing your weight training, help your muscles by grabbing a tasty apple. Eat some asparagus at lunch. Have a lovely whole-grain piece of bread with your skinless chicken breast for dinner.

Enjoy your carbs!

[Read the next entry on Proteins]
[Read the third entry on Fats]

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by gekko at 12:33 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Whether your New Year's resolution is to lose weight, or to get healthier, or to eat healthy, or to maintain your weight ... or you don't have a New Year's resolution at all but still want to know more about nutrition and weight and health, then you're in the right place.

If you're not interested in nutrition, health, or weight, then what on EARTH are you doing in a Blob, hmmm? I'll wait while you click in your browser to find something else. Maybe Dilbert is a good place to go.

For the rest of you, I'm going to discuss macronutrients in a several-part series.

You already know what macronutrients are, although you may not be familiar with the word itself. You've been hearing about them unceasingly for the past several years, at least -- if not your entire life.

There are three of them. The human body was designed/has evolved (depending on your ideology) to require these. The three macronutrients that the body needs in order to function properly are carbohydrates (yes! you need carbs.), proteins, and fats (yes! you need fats.).

I'll take each one in turn in the next three articles.
1. Carbohydrates
2. Protein
[3. Fats]

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by gekko at 5:43 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

News articles tend to disappear from the web over time. The advice contained in this column in the Malaysian "Star" is so good, I'm excerpting a large amount of it here.

The topic is "Myths and truths behind weight loss" and is advice presented by a Dr. YLM, who is presented as having a medical doctorate. Regardless of the doctor's credentials, the advice is corroborated by many other medical doctors, studies, and researchers, so I have no qualms in presenting it to the Blob readership:

All that follows is excerpted from the column, which is presented in the form of a Q&A:

[...]
If you want to lose weight, there is actually no way out other than diet and exercise.

Dieting doesn't mean starving yourself. Rather, it is choosing the type of food you eat that counts. In fact, diet alone or crash diets are the worst possible things to do if you want to lose weight, and keep it off.

A serving size is equivalent to a slice of bread or a 1/2 cup of rice or pasta.
And there is no easy way out of exercise. Your body weight comes in a simple equation. INPUT versus OUTPUT. If you put in more calories (food and drink) than you put out (exercise), then you will gain weight.

Beware of rapid weight loss. You should only be losing 0.5kg a week or 10kg in six months.

I was told that I would gain weight as I age because my metabolism slows down. I’ve found that this is true. I used to be able to eat everything and not gain weight. But once I hit 30, I gained weight very easily.

Actually, that is a myth! It is not true that a slowing metabolism is the main cause of creeping obesity as we age. [...] The major reasons why we put on weight as we age are:

We are less active -- in our youth, we tend to go for more activities in school and university. But once we work, unless we hit the gym or have an active hobby, we tend to be more sedentary. We also have cars (as opposed to taking the bus) and spend a lot less time walking.

We don't do strength training as much, and thus we don’t maintain muscle. It’s a proven scientific fact that lean people burn fat more efficiently than overweight people, especially those with a lean muscle tone.

We tend to eat more even as our metabolism slows down. In our older age, we tend to earn more and spend more on food.

As we age, there is a gradual loss of body cells. This leads to us burning fewer calories while we rest.

[...]
There are plenty of weight loss products in the market that claim to be "natural" or "herbal", and therefore have no side effects. They are also said to "detoxify". These are safe, right?

Not necessarily. Some of these weight loss products cause you to lose water rapidly or increases your bowel movement in the aim of "detoxification". But this is not necessarily good or safe for you. Consult your doctor if you need to know more.

I have to skip breakfast in order to lose weight. I have no time to eat breakfast anyway.

This is the worst thing you can do if you're trying to lose weight. Studies have shown that people who skip breakfast or eat fewer meals a day tend to be heavier than those who eat breakfast and four or five meals a day.

You have to aim for eating a healthy breakfast and to spread your meals out into smaller portions, rather than binging at one go.

Always remember, the key to weight loss is:

by gekko at 12:41 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I am not a fan of the high protein diet plans. In fact, I'm not a fan of any "diet plan" other than a sensible one involving a nutritious balance of the correct number of calories for your metabolic rate.

Recently, an Australian group created a diet plan (and book) called "The Total Wellbeing Diet." It's similar to Atkins in that it promotes high protein -- more than twice the protein per day than is usual in Western diets. It differs from Atkins in that it permits small amounts of carbohydrates and eating lots of veggies/fruits.

The problem with this diet isn't so much that it's dangerous, or doesn't work. The problem is that it will work as intended for only a small subset of people: overweight people with metabolic problems.

The authors of the diet plan based their diet on the results of studies, one of which involved 100 overweight women. Half of the women were put on a high protein diet. The other half on a high carbohydrate diet. Both groups consumed the same number of calories. Both groups lost the same amount of weight.

However, overweight women who had high triglyceride levels -- that being a marker of insulin resistance -- lost substantially more weight on the high protein diet than did the high-triglyceride women who followed a high carbohydrate diet.

It's true that your body does process different foods differently from other people. It's also true that different foods will make you feel more "satisfied" than others.

Women who do have problems handling insulin produced by their bodies will fare better on a high protein diet -- so long as that diet consists of the correct amount of calories for the energy they use during the day. If you eat 2500 calories of meat each day, and sit on your ass all day long, you're not going to lose any more weight than if you eat 2500 calories consisting of nothing but pie and cheesecake and chocolate ... mmmmm ... chocolate mint truffles and ... oh yes! Brownies with chocolate chunks in them and oooooo blueberry muffins dripping in butter and ...

is it getting hot in here?

What was this post about, anyway?

by gekko at 8:42 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Losing Weight Is One Of The Most Popular New Year's Resolutions

Losing weight is a popular New Year's Resolution for 2006. According to a new survey commissioned by Weight Watchers and conducted by Harris Interactive(R) about half (45%) of U.S. women say losing weight will be one of their New Year's resolutions for the upcoming year. Among those who will resolve to lose weight in the New Year, almost all (97%) say they think they will need some assistance to keep their resolution.

It may be a popular resolution, but ...

... has anyone, anywhere, ever kept any New Year's resolution for more than even a month?

See, I'd make a resolution to do something easy, like, "This Year I Resolve To Clean My Bathroom on January 2!"

Then on January 3, start the tough resolutions because the pressure's off, then.

by gekko at 5:57 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Work out extra hard after the holidays are over. For now, just relax, enjoy, and have a great holiday season!

2 comments make for a lot of heat

by gekko at 7:16 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Fellow blogger and diet maven extraordinaire Paula posted about her weird eating habits, but also gave out a weight-loss/weight-maintenance tip in the process:

As some of you may know, I went on a "diet" last January 1. I put the air-quotes cuz it isn't exactly Weight Watchers or Atkins or the Beverly Hills Blueberry Thing or whatever--it's basically only keeping a diet journal. You'd be amazed at how well that works. Oh, sure, peeps go, that's dumb, I'd still eat just as much and write it down, etc. But you don't. Believe it or not. Anyway. If you saw this thing (which you won't), you'd larf cuz it's filled with cookie meals and days without vegetables [title alert!] and all sorts of junk, basically proving the theory I've held since I was twelve that it's only calories that matter--yeah, I wrote down how many times I exercised, too...*snort*! I've lost 20 pounds (and, no, it's not too much).

Read the whole thing.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 8:15 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

So the December issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine reports a study:

Teenagers are more likely to think about wanting to be thin, and to be frequent dieters, if they accurately perceive that being thin is important to their mothers, according to a study in the December issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

I suppose it shows significance in their study, but my own data point fails, there. Mom was and is always dieting and exercising. Always thinking being thin was important. That, however, did not stop me from eating wrong, and failing to exercise properly.

My Mom tells the story of how, as a girl, she never really ate much. Her parents made fun of her, at the table, calling her names like "Stick" and saying she'd never attract a man. Interestingly enough, she attracted plenty of boyfriends as she grew up.

Later in life, however she began to put on weight, and could never really control it adequately.

So maybe, in some cases, the inverse is true?

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 7:23 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I have a heart rate monitor. I wear it when I work out, and with it I keep motivated to work such that I don't over exert myself, but still get maximum benefit.

It keeps track of the calories I burn while exercising. When my heart rate is over 100 bpm, it starts counting a caloric burn based on the weight, age, and sex I programmed into the monitor. I decided to wear it all day today, just to see.

This morning, one hour of workout used up around 400 calories.

I reset it prior to heading to work.

Eight hours of work, which included two 15 minute walks and three trips up stairs burned 270 calories.

No wonder I got fat.

by gekko at 8:23 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Depending on whether you want to get your meds delivered via your fanny, there may be yet another reason to try to reduce your size:

The expanding size of people's bottoms is presenting doctors with a new medical challenge: how to get injectable drugs to where they are needed.

[...] For drugs to be effective, injections must be delivered into muscle which is supplied with microscopic blood vessels, to maximise absorption of the medicine. But the larger size of the average backside means the muscle is now covered with a layer of fat and the standard needles fitted to syringes are not long enough to penetrate it.
-- Independent Online Edition > Health Medical

So will health care costs rise because of the increasing sizes of needles needed to deliver the goods?

Whatever happened, by the way, to the whole Star Trek method of injecting via molecular mist through the sleeve of your uniform? What's with this nineteenth century sharp pointy objects in the butt, thing, anyway?

It's cold in here ... somebody warm me up, please!

by gekko at 4:49 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Grandpa can probably remember when round, soft, juicy women were considered hotties.

Are you gonna take me home tonight
Ah down beside that red firelight
Are you gonna let it all hang out
Fat bottomed girls
You make the rockin' world go round
-- From "Fat Bottom Girls" by Queen

Those of us with more lush figures should pay heed: you don't need to conform to a Kate Moss shape.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 1:14 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The guy below. He's a doctor, right? Lookit what he says:

"Obesity is directly related to getting too little physical activity and consuming too many calories," Dr. Frieden continued. "Nearly 75% of New York City adults report no regular physical activity and nine out of 10 do not eat the recommended servings of fruits and/or vegetables per day."

Okay, so far. Not enough physical activity (which does not HAVE to be "exercise", btw), and consuming "too many" calories, where "too many" constitutes eating more than you use up.

But here's where the dude shows he's a bonehead:

" Obesity causes heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke and worsens asthma, arthritis and other conditions."

Um, no. Obesity does not cause those illnesses.

Repeat after me, folks: "Obesity is related to heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke and the worsening of asthma, arthritis and other conditions. Related.

The journalist penning this wrapped up the doc's sound bite with this:

"Just 30 minutes of moderate physical activity most days of the week can literally save your life." -- from 3.2 Million New Yorkers are Overweight or Obese, Many Think They Are not Overweight

Yes. As well as reducing the amount of calories you consume. Just say "no" to a full quart of egg nog, the entire plate of Santa-shaped cookies, extra helpings of apple pie, and that half gallon of ice cream.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 2:03 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Overheard at the dinner table on Thanksgiving, after I'd mentioned that most of the dishes I prepared were low-fat, or no-sugar.

"Couldn't tell! Tastes like real food!"

I was pleased by the compliment, but then I had to wonder. Why does food have to be full of fat or sugar in order to qualify as "real"?

by gekko at 8:45 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

So has the media and the government been misleading us about an obesity epidemic?

"It is our panic over our weight gain rather than the weight itself that is probably causing the most harm," -- Eric Oliver, Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Chicago in his book Fat Politics; the Real Story behind America's Obesity Epidemic.

I can agree with this -- because when people obsess over their weight they turn to the first fad remedy available. Pills, lipo, staples, raw meat diets: you name it.

The article goes on to discuss Oliver's theories, including this:

[...] the current standards of what is "overweight" and "obese" are defined at very low levels - George Bush is technically overweight while Arnold Schwarznegger is "obese." But it is also because most people confuse body weight with the real sources of health and well-being, such as diet and exercise.

And, irrespective of what other things Oliver has to say, I say "amen" to that. In general, it isn't what you weigh. It's how you feel. If you don't like how you look, if you don't like the fact that you have to pause to catch your breath after slowly climbing a fairly small set of stairs, if you don't like having to squeeze into airline seats, if you don't like getting your clothes from the 3x rack at Lane Bryant, and if you suffer from physical ailments that are often associated with obesity, then by all means, eat right, and exercise.

Watch what you put into your body, reduce the amount of crap (you don't have to cut the crap; just reduce it), and get fit.

Your health will improve from that alone, as will your self-image.

On the other hand: if what it takes to get you on the road to health and fitness is paying for a weight-loss plan, or special meals, or books that'll give you eight-minute thighs, then go for it, babe.

Your goal, though, should be good health.

Read more about it in US obesity epidemic is a myth promoted by diet doctors and the weight loss industry.

by gekko at 1:49 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

To me. Two years ago today, I got disgusted enough with myself that I resolved to really really work to get the weight off. I enrolled in Weight Watchers©, weighed myself at a whopping 180 lbs, and started losing weight.

Dropping roughly a pound a week (sometimes more, sometimes weeks without losing, sometimes gaining, eek!), my life, health, and self-image improved.

I stopped at 120 pounds and have maintained that, give or take a few pounds here and there, ever since.

Yay me!

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 1:22 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

In the "bet you never would've guess this" department ...

The results of two studies involving rats, conducted by M. Flavia Barbano, PhD, and Martine Cador, PhD from the University of Bordeaux 2 in France, may be more fully explored in the article Mix stress, deprivation and tempting foods and you get overeating, but this is the gist of it:

Two studies in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience show that when animals are stressed, deprived and exposed to tempting food, they overeat, with different degrees of interaction. The powerful interplay between internal and external factors helps explain why dieters rebound and even one cookie can trigger a binge if someone's predisposed to binge.

'k. So did they stress the rats by giving them stale croissants and hardened brie? Then deprived them of their wine? Then gave them eclairs?

Man, I'd overeat too, given those circumstances. But then, I'm easy. I'd overeat if you just made me sit in ten bazillion back-to-back conference calls including one over lunch, then drop off a box of chocolates at my desk.

by gekko at 10:10 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

BBC NEWS | Health | Hunger control hormone discovered

Obestatin joins a raft of other hormones which can boost or suppress a person's appetite.

The team at Stanford University, US, carried out a computer search of genetic information which led to obestatin, Science magazine reports.

A UK expert said that the research would help enable scientists to fully control appetite within the next five to 10 years.

Which is nice. Except that I think obesity stems more from people who eat out of habit, nervousness, boredom, for comfort, and so forth, and it stems from people who eat foods that tend to make the body store fat without increasing metabolism, and it stems from people who don't burn off the calories they consume, more than it stems from people who feel hungry.

I could be wrong.

OTOH, I guess any little thing helps.

2 comments make for a lot of heat

by gekko at 8:21 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Medical News Today has an article on ways to help overcome the pitfalls of the "Season of Overindulgence."

A few of them are things I found have worked for me, in general, in both losing weight and maintaining my weight.

This one is NOT one I follow, but may help those of you who feel you should be exercising but don't exercise:

Don't set unrealistic exercise goals. Aim to exercise 30 minutes a day instead of an hour; it's okay to divide it up into eight to 10 minute intervals throughout the day. You'll be much more likely to achieve such a reasonable goal and avoid unnecessary guilt.

I, um. I exercise an hour a day, five days a week, and walk at least 6000 steps every day.

But I'm not obsessed. 'k?

This is one I love to do -- when at work, I'll grab one of my cow-orkers for a 15 minute walk. At home, the Spousal Unit and I love to take evening walks.

Enlist the support of a friend or family member. Walking and talking with a friend can be a great way to socialize, burn extra calories and reduce your stress level. Working out with a partner has been consistently shown to help individuals stick with their workout.

That kind of thing works on many levels. You get extra calorie burning going, true, and help shake off "Desk Butt" during the day, which is good. But having someone around and spending the time venting about the crap that goes on during your day, or just plain having a good time yattering and exchanging views is terrific for stress reduction, building up relationships, putting an extra bit of perk into your life. And finally, when I go for "walkies," I'm not sitting there feeling sorry for myself or bored and cramming chocolate into my face.

Here's one that's important -- too many times I've created too much stress worrying about not eating, when all I needed to think about was this:

Don't try to stick to an overly restrictive diet this holiday season. If you enjoy your favorite foods in small portions, you'll feel more satisfied. Trying to stay away from certain foods may leave you feeling deprived, which may cause you to eat more than you intended to

And always, always always (can't stress it enough) always:

Drink plenty of water. Although the cold weather may make you less inclined to grab a glass of water, it is just as important in the winter as it is during the summer. Water helps counter the dehydrating effects of travel or drinking alcoholic beverages, and it may also help satiate your appetite since thirst is often mistaken for hunger.

Not everyone's up for this, but I have found it to be possibly the most important part of my success, mainly because I hate hard sweaty exercise. Getting it out of the way makes it easier to force myself to do it:

Make your workouts a priority. Try to exercise first thing in the morning before other demands sidetrack you. Individuals with an early-morning exercise routine tend to be more consistent when pressed for time

There are other suggestions at the Medical News site, or you can go to the American Council on Exercise website for more information and tips.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 4:30 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

The weather is getting a bit chilly. I wanted to wear a skirt to church this morning, but decided against wearing my sandals with it -- partly because they're starting to look a bit frumpy with age, and partly because it was so gosh darned below 70 and that, to a lizard, is fucking freezing. So I rooted around in my closet and found my good old comfortable but still stylish black pumps. The ones with the low sensible heels. The ones I walked around in all winter last year. Comfy.

I discovered that I've dropped a half a size, shoe-wise. My feet were sliding all over in those shooz.

Luckily Naturalizer was having a sale and sent me a coupon, so I went shoo shopping today. They're not as spiffy as Paula's bloo shooz, but they're downright comfy, and, well, I like 'em.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 9:34 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Paula wisely advised, "People, look up the count before you eat the six dollar portobello mushroom burger is my advice. Nine hundred and sixty. Oh. My. Gawd."

None of us really think to do this. Look up calorie counts before we chomp on our food. In Paula's sitch, she'd spent a lot of time out doing stuff, was hungry, tired, pressed for time, and walked into a fast food joint, wanting something healthy. The burger she chose wasn't the low-cal vegetarian thingie she'd expected.

If you're not dieting, or not concerned about your weight, though, you won't bother to look up the calorie counts of foods before you purchase them or eat them.

If you ARE concerned about your weight, then it's a sin NOT to look it up. Plan your meals, is what I say. Figure out what you're going to eat, and what those foods will cost you. Budget your food and activity as though it's your money. Actually, if you're like me, do better at that than you do with your money.

When you end up having to do something last minute, and you didn't figure you'd be walking into a Carl's Jr., feel free to ask the manager of the joint for the nutrition information on the food.

Mickey D's is going to be putting the nutrition info on their packages. Yay them! Let's put the pressure on ALL the fast food joints to at least have that info on hand, so we can make smart choices.

Here is at least one site where you can find nutrition info on fast food joints.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 11:57 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

An article entitled Have a taste for fat? Yes! A sensor in the mouth promotes preference for fatty foods found on Medical News Today is of interest.

I'll, um. I'll provide the translation. 'k?

The sense of taste informs the organism about the quality of ingested food.

We think food is good based on its taste. That'd be "dur" material, btw.

[The sense of taste] comprises five sub-modalities that perceive sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami stimuli.

We taste things using our taste buds, which are divided into five types.

The possibility for an additional taste modality directed to lipid has often been suggested because many animals exhibit a spontaneous attraction for fats, but the existence of an actual sensor remained a matter of debate.

We always thought there'd be a sixth taste bud, because peeps 'n critters like fat, but we never could find the sucker.

In a paper appearing online on October 20 in advance of print publication of the November issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Phillipe Besnard and colleagues [...]

A bunch of eggheads who study this stuff ...

[...] identify the first candidate for lipid detection in the oral cavity.

... think they've found that sixth taste bud thingie.

The authors combine genetic, morphological, behavioral and physiological approaches to pinpoint the multifunctional glycoprotein CD36 (also termed fatty acid transporter, FAT) as the sensor for fat.

The eggheads studied a bunch of stuff and think that something cutesily named "FAT" is the tastebud thingie they've always been looking for. It does not appear to be an actual bud, though.

They show that lingual stimulation of CD36 by fatty acids influences behavioral and digestive physiology.

When people lick things this ... tongue coating or whatever ... sends "nummy" signals to the brain.

CD36 gene inactivation fully abolishes both the spontaneous preference for fat and the changes in gastrointenstinal secretions mediated by oral delivery of lipids.

If you get rid of the coating, you no longer crave fat and your stomach stops making gurgling noises.

These findings unveil one potential pathway mediating fat taste.

There may be more things that the eggheads have overlooked.

I hope I have provided illumination and eludication regarding one's taste for fats on this day.

I'm off, now, in search of, well, some Dulce de Leche ice cream would taste right yummy right about now.

by gekko at 8:06 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Telling you you'll feel better, have more energy, be able to buy more cute clothes, sleep better, be better at work or school ... none of that seems to work to motivate people to lose weight, more often than not.

Well this just might be the ticket:

Losing a little weight can do wonders for your sex life. So says Duke University psychologist Martin Binks, who presented a study Monday at a meeting of The Obesity Society showing that shedding a few pounds can improve things in the bedroom by making people feel better about their bodies. -- Study: Losing Weight Can Help Sex Life: South Florida Sun-Sentinel

by gekko at 3:32 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

And a little bit of that irritating, smarmy crowing, to boot.

I was out of town last week. Away from my workouts. Away from my low-fat, low-cal foods. Hip-deep in lolling and fatty meals.

When I returned, it was with fear that I stepped on the scale ...

... to discover I did not gain anything!

And, in the next two days, I lost two pounds!!!

This is the level I wanted to reach -- the ability to enjoy myself without bloating back up to hippo-size. I attribute it to being careful MOST of the time, and with increasing my activity levels in general without unduly increasing my food intake.

Then when I do go out to enjoy myself, I can get compliments like the one the neighbor guy at the party delivered ("Oh, man, is SHE a hot mama!") and still have that piece of cake.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 9:33 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Does anyone actually use the silly food pyramid? I mean, other than public school teachers, who have to.

Does anyone here actually believe that this kind of thing will help people to eat right?

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 8:49 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Grace of Tuesday's Child has been hard at work. Twenty one pounds down! Go, girl!

by gekko at 11:22 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

A healthy refrigerator is, apparently, not a refrigerator that is running properly, but it is a refrigerator that is stocked with, well, healthy foods. The focus of the information in the link below is on "heart healthy", but weight and heart health are linked, so what's good for your heart is probably good for weight loss or weight maintenance.

The Healthy Refrigerator - The Healthy Fridge - 10 Tips for a Heart Healthy Refrigerator

Good luck with this. I get stuck on the first step: clean the fridge out?

Yeah, right.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 7:05 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Yet another reason to not overeat.

A four-metre python exploded when it tried to swallow a two-metre alligator whole in Florida.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 6:31 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Overweight children benefit from fitness-oriented gym classes

Overweight children who took part in lifestyle-focused, fitness-oriented gym classes showed significant improvement in body composition, fitness, and insulin levels, according to a study in the October issue of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Um. Well. Dur.

There were fat kids when I went to school, but, y'know? They were exceptions. Most of us were skinny little shits and we had regular PE classes where they made us play kickball and other tortures. We played after school, too. TV was for after dinner.

The authors emphasize that it is important to develop and evaluate interventions designed to start in childhood, because childhood obesity is predictive of adult obesity. They suggest partnering with school districts should be part of a public health approach to improving the health of overweight children.

Now there's an idea. Get schools to go back to breaking up the kids' days with focused, healthy exercise/activity. The kids'll do better in school, too, grade-average-wise, if you believe the studies concerning exercise and brain-cognition improvements.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 4:39 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Speaking of Cheap Meat, as the blob goddess was below, there is another way in which, if one is interested in incorporating strength training into one's fitness regemine, one can save a buck.

I see a lot of folks in the gym paying a Personal Trainer to tell them things that they could look up for themselves. If you have the disposable income then by all means hire a cute little fitness trainer to tell you what to do. With a pony tail. Blonde. And a nice...

...what? Oh. Sorry.

Anyhow, there exists a single website that can help you to design and understand almost any fitness routine on your own. This site is the most complete, informative fitness site I've ever encountered. It's amazing to me that someone went to this much work to present free material to the masses, but there it is.

Using this information you can design your own workout based on templates. Each template is broken down into type, bodypart, individual exercise, etc. Over 600 exercises are illustrated with animations, described, analyzed, and cross referenced by joint articulation and muscle movement.

If you were a working trainer, you could get everything you needed to serve your clients from this site - forms, calculators, diagrams, illustrations, complete routines, you name it it's there. I almost feel I'm giving away a trade secret.

It ain't fancy in terms of layout and graphics - and it doesn't need to be. Go See ExRx.net for yourself.

Ooh, got me one hot comment!

by gekko at 8:52 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

You don't have a gym membership, and you don't want one, thankyouverymuch. I mean, who wants to drive somewhere to get all sweated up in front of a bunch of other people anyway?

But you know you need to be getting more exercise. You're doing the walking, and that's nice, but it's not sufficient. You're not a jogger. You fell off the last bike you owned. Pool's green and you think there might be something large and scaley living in it these days.

Not only that, but you're more interested in building muscle, not doing yet another set of aerobic exercises, but who can afford weight sets and, besides, you really don't know how to press a bench or whatever those things are called.

Enter the "multi-muscle move."

"Multi-muscle moves are a very efficient training tool since they utilize many muscle groups at the same time," says New York City fitness professional Christopher Warden, CSCS. Well, yeah. I guess that's why they call them "multi-muscle" moves. Hello.

Ol' Chris goes on to say, "The deadlift is a great example. With that one exercise alone, you can work about 75% of the muscles in your body."

Cool. One exercise and I'm done.

You remember those calisthenics your gym teacher made you do in PE? No, not the jumping jacks. The pushups. Squats. Those kinds of things. Multi-muscle moves are specialized versions of those things. They're things you can do at home, although it helps if you have a small set of dumbbells or things that are easily held that weigh from five to 20 pounds. It helps to have one of those step platforms, too, although any sturdy stool that's about yea high (18" or so) will do.

They work a variety of the large muscle groups -- helping build that muscle tissue that will later help you burn that fat -- as well as the "core stabilizers" -- interior muscles used for stability and agility.

So read the extended entry to get the exercises. Follow them carefully to get the full benefit -- using your abs, holding your body position straight where indicated, pulling with the appropriate muscle group.

The Exercises

Depending on your fitness level, complete from one to three sets of 15 repetitions for each exercise. If you're new to this, start slowly, and work your way up.

1. Modified Push-ups (works chest, front of shoulders, core stabilizers)
   

   Get on your hands and knees, lower your hips, walking your hands forward until your arms are directly under your shoulders. Your body should be a diagonal line from the pointy part of your head to knees -- do not sway your back! Keep your abs tight, suck in your breath, then bend your elbows elbows to lower your body -- keeping that straight line -- towards the floor. Stop when your upper arm is parallel to floor to keep from stressing the shoulder joint. Then let your breath out slowly while straightening your arms to push up (geddit?) to your original diagonal position. Do this in front of a mirror to ensure your back is straight the whole trip.

2. Bent Over Rows (works upper and lower back, back of shoulders, core stabilizers)
   
   

   Holding a 5-10 pound dumbbell (your spouse weighs more than ten pounds, so don't use him or her) in each hand, palms facing in towards body, stand with feet hip-width apart, knees slightly bent, shoulders over hips and chin neutral. With abs tight and back flat, hinge forward from your hips until your torso is nearly parallel to the floor, letting your arms hang down naturally from shoulders. Don't dangle! Keeping those arms tight to your body, simultaneously retract (this is the tricky part) the shoulder blades and bend your elbows while pulling the dumbbells up towards the bottom of your ribcage.
   
   
   Got that?
   
   Pause while squeezing the shoulder blades and the elbows towards each other. Then lower your arms. Complete all repetitions before returning to upright standing position.
   

   Step-Ups (works the butt-muscles, quads, hamstrings, and those good ol' core stabilizers)
   

   Stand in front of a sturdy step or stool or box or something that won't cave in or topple over. If you try something that caves or topples, and you get hurt, do NOT come crying to me. The height of the box or step should be such that when you place your foot on it, your thigh is parallel to the floor. Put your hands on hips. Focus in front of you, because you're going to need some balance and looking down or to the side will unbalance you. Keep your tummy tight (okay, keep your abdominal muscles tight). Then you put your right foot on the box, you take your right foot off. You put your right foot on the box and shake it all ...
   
   ... sorry. Got carried away.
   
   You place your right foot flat on step or box or stool with the right knee bent (as opposed to the left knee, now), and make your left knee soft. What this means is you relax your left knee, rather than locking it into place. Don't make it all wobbly. Just ... relax.
   
   Then push off with your right foot (the one on the stool), and using that right butt muscle, bring your left foot up to meet your right foot until your entire body reaches an upright standing position on top of box thing. That's right. You're stepping up! See why they call it a "step-up"? You think they just made up any old term for it, on a whim? Don't pause to contemplate this, though. Step back down (with the left foot. 'k? Keep your right foot on the box the whole 15 repetitions, and step up with the left. If you are a Democrat and you object to starting with the right foot, then feel free to start with the left. Just so's you do all your step ups on the same side for the entire set of repetitions. Up, down, up, down. Fifteen times. THEN you switch legs and repeat step-ups with the OTHER foot remaining on top of step/box throughout. That would be one set. If you're fit, then you get to do all that two more times. Thirty steps per set.

   
   

   Dumbbell Deadlifts (These are the ones that got that fitness guy all excited) (works butt, quads, hamstrings, core stabilizers)
   
   

   Place a 10-20 pound dumbbell on floor, standing on its end. Stand over the dumbbell with your feet along either side of the weight, just a tad wider than shoulder-width apart, and with your toes slightly turned out. Pretend it's ballet class, right? Keeping abs tight and keeping the back flat, bend your knees and drop your hips towards floor -- not TO the floor -- as if squatting. In this position, your torso tilts naturally forward. Grasp the weight, keeping your arms extended. Straighten your legs while picking up dumbbell -- do not use your back muscles, use those glutes, thighs, and hamstrings -- and resume an upright standing position. At the top of move is where it gets a little kinky, so if your significant other likes watching you, here's where he or she will get a little thrill. At the top of the move, contract your butt and push your pelvis slightly forward. Say "Yeah, baby!" and then bend your knees once again, following the same path to return the weight to the floor. Immediately start next repetition from this bent-knee position. Note that even though these are called deadlifts, no dead person or thing was harmed in the working of this exercise.

   
   

   Plank-Cobra Combo (works abdominals, lower back, glutes, core stabilizers)
   

   Lie on your stomach like you're a kid, going to watch Saturday morning cartoons. That is, put your weight on your forearms with your hands clasped out in front of you, elbows directly beneath your shoulder joints, and your head aligned with your spine. Can you see it in your mind? Just try it. Then once you have that figured out, tuck your toes under (flex your feet), engage your stomach muscles, and lift your entire body up off of the floor (pushing your shoulders down) so that your body is in a straight line from head to toe. Like a plank. See?
   
   Don't let your back sway or your hips pike. Hold this for 10 seconds; release.
   
   You're not done yet. Unclasp your hands and rest your torso and forehead on the floor -- do NOT take a nap -- then open your arms out to 90-degree angles by the shoulders, with your palms down. Keeping the hipbones pressing into ground, simultaneously extend and lift your head, shoulders, arms and legs a few inches from floor. Like a little saucer, you are. Don't "crunch" your neck by tilting your head too far back, and don't bend your back too far. Pause, feeling a squeeze in the ol' glutes and in the lower back. A gentle squeeze. Don't look around to see who might be squeezing you. Lower yourself slowly. Re-clasp hands to return to plank position and repeat.

by gekko at 9:55 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

An expanding waistline may have less to with what a person eats than what’s already inside, say microbiologists Jeffrey Gordon and Fredrik Backhed at the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis. Variations in the population of bacteria living in the gut may explain why some people pack on extra pounds while others stay slim.

  -- Discover Magazine

So these guys had some mice. One bunch of mice had normal microbes, and the others were "bubble mice" -- they were in a germ-free bubble.
The bubble mice had less body fat than the free-range mice. When they started putting intestinal microbes into the bubble mice, the bubble mice porked up.

I'm thinking that if they can get a Listerine© that kills mouth bacteria, can they get one to kill the fat-enhancing intestinal bacteria?

by gekko at 9:39 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

I remember reading an article that suggested that a regular, daily dose of calcium helped people burn stored fat more readily. Of course I ran right out and bought up tons of bottles of Tums© Super Strength in a variety of flavors.

Yeah, I'm a sucker for a quick fix, sometimes.

I recently subscribed to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association because it may contain articles of interest regarding nutrition as it relates to weight maintenance and overall health. One of the abstracts posted there grabbed my interest, because it dealt with calcium intake and obesity.

The conclusion of the abstract (the full text of the abstract is in the extended portion of this article) was that the researchers could find no association between calcium intake and body size.

The study involved people with extremely, extremely high intake of high fat foods. They did not mention if these people (men, women, and children) were active or sedentary. They just fed 'em calcium and measured them.

My conclusion? Skinny peeps cannot lose weight by calcium alone.

So. Anyone wanna buy a bunch of as-yet-unopened bottles of Tums©?

Objective

Dietary calcium intake, especially from dairy products, may have a protective effect against obesity. This study aimed to determine if calcium intake is associated with body weight and adiposity in Pima Indians, an obesity-prone population.

Research Methods and Procedures

Subjects were 65 Pima Indian adults (35 men/30 women, age 33±8 years [mean±standard deviation]) participating in a study of eating behavior and 78 Pima Indian children (36 boys/42 girls, age 10.4±0.3 years) participating in a study of childhood obesity. Height and weight were measured, and body composition was determined by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry. Food intake in adults was assessed using the Block 1998 Food Questionnaire; food intake in children was assessed using a 24-hour recall with parental assistance.

Results

In adults, mean energy intake was 3,163±1,037 kcal/day, mean percentage of energy from fat was 41%±7%, and calcium intake was 914±333 mg/day. In children, mean energy intake was 1,988±733 kcal/day, mean percentage of energy from fat was 36%±9%, and calcium intake was 637±352 mg/day, half the recommended daily intake for this age group. There were no significant associations between calcium intake and body weight (r=0.05, P=.71; r=0.04, P=.73), body fat (r=0.16, P=.19; r=0.12, P=.42), or body mass index (r=0.01, P=.97; r=0.04, P=.77) in either adults or children, respectively.

Discussion

One explanation for the lack of association between reported calcium intake and body size in Pima Indians may be that the high-fat, high-energy diet consumed by the population overwhelmed the “anti-obesigenic” effect of calcium.

Conclusions

We were unable to find an association between calcium intake and body size or adiposity in Pima Indian adults and children. Although the essentiality of calcium to bone health is well established, the role of calcium and dairy product intake in obesity and weight management remains uncertain.

by gekko at 10:36 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

This is a repeat from an old blog article I wrote in April, 2004.

A number of years ago I went on a low-carb diet. SUGAR BUSTERS!©, it was called. Spelt that way, too, in excitable all-caps, complete with exclamation point. It was a modified version of what Dr. Atkins had proposed many years ago. It was supposed to be "smarter" than Atkins' version. Or something.

Anyway, when I went on that diet, I tried to restrict myself to high protein, low carb foods. Trouble was, in those days, the only high protein, low carb foods available at the grocery store were, well, meat. And eggs. Cheese. Fish. Lard. Pure butter. Whole milk. That was it. I could not have potatoes. No carrots. If I had to have fruit, it had to be sour, awful stuff like grapefruit. No bread, unless it was made of wheat husks and raw meat. I looked at labels and discovered that here in America, everything had sugar added to it. Wheat-husk-meat bread had 20 lbs of brown sugar and molasses added per loaf. The "dietetic" stuff was made with "maltodextrin", a non-sugar sugar that gave me a bad case of the yips.

The plain fact was, you just could not find "low carb" anything to save your life. It's no wonder the number of diabetics in our country were on the increase!

Of course, all that has changed. Now everyone is touting "low carb" goodies. My favorite bagel shop has a "low carb" bagel -- only 200 carbs, instead of their customary 1000. The cafeteria where I work has placed a new sign near their salad bar. The old one read "Low fat, Vegetarian's Delight!" The veggies offered were things like green peppers, lettuce, squash, tomatoes, and garbanzo beans. The new sign reads "Great for Low Carb Lifestyle!" Now they offer green peppers, lettuce, squash, tomatoes, and grated cheese.

I saw a sign on my way home from work today, though, that got me to thinking. The sign, which was emblazoned in an advertisement on the side of a bus, said "Low Carb Diets: Now you can eat bread!"

I scratched my head. I had to wonder. What is so "natural" and great about a diet that makes people give up stuff they apparently crave? Why, when I was doing SUGAR BUSTERS! did I find myself longing for mashed potatoes -- and I really detest mashed potatoes, normally?

Something's wrong, here.

Rice. I love steaming bowls of sticky oriental white rice. I missed it when I was doing the low carb thing. I walked into an Asian restaurant and saw signs touting "New! Low Carb Husky Brown Rice!"

I don't know about you, but I don't think there's really ever been a problem with obesity and diabetes in Japan or Korea. They live on rice and fish and vegetables. Not a slice of bacon to be found, I'm sure. And it's only the Sumo Wrestlers who are fat -- you can bet they get plenty of food.

Could it be that it isn't what you eat that makes you fat? It isn't whether it's high carb or high fat, but it's how much you eat, when compared to how much activity you get?

gasp!

What a concept!

For the record, [as of April, 2004] I've been eating pretty much whatever I please for the past 6 months, and have lost nearly 30 pounds. My secret is simple: limit my intake, keep it healthy, and get more exercise. Track what I do, so I know how much I've eaten and won't "psyche" myself into thinking I deserve that bowl of ice cream.

by gekko at 8:06 PM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

Ghrelin is a recently discovered hormone that acts as the opposite of leptin.

Yeah. That helps. So leptin is a hormone that acts as an appetite suppressant -- it seems to be naturally triggered when the fat cells are "full."

Ghrelin, then, is an appetite stimulant. People have an upsurge in ghrelin levels just prior to waking, and just before mealtime. The levels drop again right after eating. People on diets have unusually high levels of the hormone -- it tends to be released in the body especially when we diet. It's undoubtedly a mechanism that developed as a way to help us survive famine. When you're not getting food, it increases the drive to go find food.

Gastric bypass patients, though, have significantly lower levels of ghrelin than do other people , even though they're eating significantly less than other people. It's as though the brain signals the body to cut back on the ghrelin production. You don't need as much food. Smaller stomach.

You'd think the solution, then, is to find a magic pill that increases your leptin (suppressant) and decreases your ghrelin (stimulant). Or maybe the answer is to just undergo the bypass surgery. The surgical solution may be the right one for the extremely morbidly obese patient -- that's up to the doctor to say for sure -- but it is NOT the right solution, in my opinion, for most people.

Quite frankly, I don't think taking pills is the right solution, either. If we muck about with these chemicals by adding some, or suppressing others through external means, what other things are we going to upfuck? We just don't know. These two alone are relatively recently discovered.

Here's the article that explains it in better detail.

I like the sensible conclusion the author comes to. Don't do anything drastic. Don't starve yourself, so your body doesn't increase the ghrelin. Find foods that promote satiety, so your body naturally releases leptin.

I mean, hello?

2 comments make for a lot of heat

by gekko at 10:49 AM as a "Blob - Fitness, Weight, and Nutrition" poast

On Friday, September 9th, Paula did my work for me. Scroll down to the September 9th entry titled "Morons" and read it. (Paula, I wish I knew how to link to just that article).

In it, Paula links to a Yahoo news item about a Study: Breakfast Helps Girls Stay Slim. What Paula has to say makes perfect, logical sense. Her focus is on the way the author of the article, and a few of the peeps quoted, misused the language of science, especially with respect to "cause" versus "correlation." The article sez that the study concludes that not eating breakfast is the worst thing a young girl could do with respect to being overweight, and that that is the "take home message." Paula correctly notes that the take-home message is more centered on having a structured eating plan for your days when it comes to weight management, and that it's likely the study's results point more toward the fact that girls who eat a breakfast that includes cereal in the morning have, in general, a better approach to eating throughout the day.

She also notes that different things work for different peeps.

So what is my take on this?

Simple: figure out what works for you, then stick with it.

For each person, find out how many calories you, the individual, needs, and how foods work within your own body. You may need a doctor's assistance for that, or you may just use trial-and-error. If you eat a bag of potato chips first thing in the morning, are you more or less likely to feel energetic throughout the day, and are you more or less likely to snack and eat more through-out the day?

Figure out a sensible eating plan that gives you the energy you need and sustains you throughout your day without taking in more calories than you expend through the day.

Are you sedentary? Is your resting heart rate low? Well, honey, if that's the case then you will NOT need to eat a lot, and what you do eat probably should not include a lot of carbohydrates and refined sugars. Are you active? Do you have a lot of "nervous energy" and do you twitch and move around a lot? Are you an athlete? Then you'll probably need the carbs to help you keep up with yourself. But don't neglect the protein because if you have stronger, leaner muscles then you're more likely to use the energy you take in, rather than store it.