Entries for March 2008

A reader E-mailed me with a complaint: Exercise, she says, makes her ravenous to the point that she overeats and gains weight whenever she starts an exercise program. That's discouraging, to say the least. But studies show that working out typically does the opposite.

Most, but not all, studies show that appetite is suppressed both during and immediately after a workout. (The exception would be if you're working out so hard that you really deplete your blood sugar and get weak, hungry, and lightheaded—though that's beyond what most people do.) Catia Martins, a researcher now at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, has studied the effects of an exercise program on appetite and energy intake over the longer term. One small study published last year in the British Journal of Nutrition suggests that a six-week exercise program can improve the body's ability to appropriately regulate appetite, at least in men. After working out an average of four days a week for about 45 minutes at a time, previously sedentary men (but not women) ate less at a buffet after they'd had a substantial snack. Before starting the exercise program, on the other hand, the men consumed the same number of calories at the buffet, whether it followed a calorie-rich snack or only a light one. That finding indicates that having an exercise program made their appetites more closely attuned to the amount of calories they were consuming.

My usual response to the question "How do I lose weight?" is "Eat less, exercise more, or do some combination of the two." That advice is short, sweet, and, my friends have told me, not particularly helpful. So from time to time I plan to pass on concrete tips or techniques that some people have found help them lose weight safely and intelligently (i.e., no cabbage soup diets). My current favorite comes from the totally excellent book Mindless Eating, by Cornell University's Brian Wansink, which looks at all the environmental cues you don't even realize are influencing how and what you eat.

In the book, he talks about a concept called "the power of three," which involves making three small changes in your eating patterns and keeping them up for a month, by which time they're far more likely to have become a habit. I'm expanding that to exercise, too. The beauty of the idea is that you can pick things that fit your lifestyle, needs and weaknesses.

I hit the gym on Saturday and lifted weights for 45 minutes. On Sunday my arms ached. By Monday I wondered if I'd be able to lift the spoon to my mouth to eat my morning oatmeal. You might say I was sore. But how do you tell if you're just achy from ramping up an exercise routine or if you've actually injured yourself?

There are two kinds of people who get sore: those who expect to and those who are surprised by it, says Chuck Kimmel, president of the National Athletic Trainers' Association. In the first category are people (like me) who are just getting back to heavy weights as well as those setting out to do a hard workout or race, like marathoners who plan their postrace week to avoid the quad pain that comes with going downstairs. In the back of my mind, I knew that lifting weights until my arms trembled was probably not going to do me any favors in the subsequent 48 hours.

Whether you're an omnivore, a vegan, a meat lover, vegetarian, or something else (I'm what I call a fake vegetarian, since I eat fish but no other meat), there are certain principles we can all probably agree on: It's wonderful to have a good, flavorful meal with friends or family. Animals used for food should be treated (and killed) humanely. And it's wise to keep an eye on the impact our food choices have on the ecosystem.

I heard those principles come together this week, when I went to New York University to hear the chef and restaurateur Dan Barber speak to the Experimental Cuisine Collective. Barber is the co-owner of Blue Hill restaurant in Manhattan as well as Blue Hill at Stone Barns, located about 30 minutes from the city in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. For all the background on Barber, check out this profile from Men's Vogue. (The short version is that Barber's for-profit Blue Hill at Stone Barns, sits on the grounds of what used to be the Rockefeller estate, which is also home to the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture, a separate nonprofit venture devoted to sustainable agriculture.)

I knew it was time to do something about my dog's weight when an obedience trainer who hadn't seen her in a year greeted us with, "Mindy! You've gotten so, um, fluffy!" Mindy may have taken it as a compliment, but I knew better. My vet says that because her short legs and long back (she's a dachshund mix) predispose her to disk problems, she really should pare about 1.5 pounds off her current 16.5-pound frame.

The doggie solution is (not surprisingly) a mirror of good weight management in owners: Eat less, exercise more, and—this is key—devise a plan that works with the animal's preferences, says Deirdre Chiaramonte, staff internist and director of the fitness and rehabilitation service at the Animal Medical Center in New York.

Yes, dear California Milk Processor Board, I am feeling witchy. But it has nothing to do with premenstrual syndrome. Instead, it's from watching your new Spanish-language commercial in which a bruja (Spanish for "witch") representing a woman with PMS flies through the forest, threatening children and even turning two men into pigs. That is, until she discovers milk, drinks it, and—symptoms eased—turns into a hot babe with a sweet temperament.

The ad is pretty lame—can't we discuss PMS in a serious way without reducing symptomatic women to terrorizing crones? But I was interested in the health claim that drinking milk can alleviate the symptoms associated with PMS, like headaches, water retention, and, of course, mood swings. The milk board cites a study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, saying that calcium in milk can ease PMS. I found the study, published in 1998, which evaluated 466 women between the ages of 18 and 45 with a history of moderate to severe PMS symptoms, namely pain, water retention, food cravings, and negative affect (medicalspeak for being in a bad mood). One group took a daily supplement containing 1,200 milligrams of calcium; the other got a placebo. And after three menstrual cycles, the calcium group reported greater relief of symptoms than the placebo group.

The strongest performance enhancement aid I've ever used was lukewarm chicken broth, gulped down during the last hours of an Ironman competition (I swear, it perked me right up). But as disillusioned fans of baseball, cycling, track and field, and a host of other sports now know, elite athletes are turning to much more powerful substances in their pursuit of more home runs, higher jumps, or faster times. Many are reportedly pinning their hopes on human growth hormone, for instance. A new study suggests that—even putting aside the fact that most sports leagues and bodies ban the drug, and it's illegal to distribute it for sports enhancement purposes—athletes might be better off sticking with chicken broth.

A team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who previously published a review of research that looked at the effects of human growth hormone in healthy seniors, have just published in the online version of Annals of Internal Medicine a similar analysis of the effects on athletic performance in healthy people. Their conclusion, after looking at 27 studies with a total of 303 participants: HGH may produce more lean body mass than a placebo, but that doesn't seem to translate to greater strength. In fact, some studies showed that those who took HGH also experienced more muscle fatigue.

I'm not a big fan of diet books. Research on dieting has shown that even popular diets that produce quick weight loss are tough to stick to over time. To really shed weight and maintain the loss, you've got to make practical changes in your own eating practices that you can keep up until they become a habit. But I am a big fan of tips that help people make those practical changes, and as much as I hate the book's title, The Wall Street Diet (Hyperion) is full of them.

The book is aimed at the busy, stressed-out professionals who constitute author and dietitian Heather Bauer's clients. (I'm busy and stressed out, but I'm no Wall Streeter—and I found plenty of tips for my own life.) Though there are a few menu plans in there, she readily admits that most of her clients don't follow them. Instead, she gives them strategies for dealing with meals in real-life settings: business meetings, airplane travel, commuting, office parties, and the like.

As a high school senior, I was convinced I needed to lose weight (note to my former self: I didn't). So I started drinking Slim-Fast shakes for breakfast and lunch and eating Lean Cuisine entrees for dinner. Unsurprisingly, I lost weight. Equally unsurprisingly, I gained it all back.

And I learned the lesson that every dieter already knows: It's pretty easy to lose weight on any calorie-restriction plan, but maintaining the loss is a whole other ball of wax. A new study out today underlines that point, and while its conclusions don't offer dieters any easy answers, I find it encouraging to see research focusing on the very tough issue of weight-loss maintenance. One key finding: Some sort of structured support may slightly improve the odds.

Knee replacement is a big business—more than half a million such operations were performed in 2005, according to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. The group is holding its annual meeting in San Francisco this week, and two knee-replacement-related studies that were released there caught my attention.

The first deals with one of the major controversies in joint replacement: whether women, because of their smaller stature and different physiology, do better with knee replacements tailored specifically to them. When I wrote about this last year, one of the arguments I heard was that women typically do worse after knee replacement surgery, perhaps because their unisex implants don't fit correctly. Alternatively, it may be because, compared with men, they often put off the surgery until they're in worse condition. (The New York Times had a nice summary of a recent study looking at women delaying surgery.)