Entries for March 2009

Too busy to catch all the week's fitness, diet, and workout news as it happened? Here's a quick wrap-up of what's been getting buzz.

Give Your Workout a Buzz
The New York Times reports on the (totally legal) performance-boosting ability of caffeine. If you’re like me and still feel mildly guilty about ingesting something with the intent of going faster, consider what one researcher told me when I wrote about caffeine use and athletics last summer. Because carbs also boost performance, “if you think they should ban caffeine, they should also ban the Gatorade,” he said. Works for me.

There’s the Beef
A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine associates eating red meat with a shorter life. For a great summary, see nutritionist Tara Gidus’s take on Healthline. Remember that diet studies are fraught with difficulties and that it’s really tough to actually prove a given food is good (or bad) for you. Following a traditional eating pattern that focuses on fruits and veggies, fish, “good” fats, and whole grains, however, has been associated with better health outcomes than the typical fat-, sugar-, and sodium-laden Western diet.

If you're unable—or simply unwilling—to pay thousands of dollars a year for membership in the new exercise studio started by Gwyneth Paltrow and her personal trainer, never fear. You don't need to be cashed up to get a good workout. In fact, you don't need to join a gym at all. We asked four fitness pros for their advice on putting together a home gym for $100 or less. Here's what they said.

1. Don't buy anything that's going to gather dust. "If you have $100 to spend, I'd probably tell you the same thing as if you had a million dollars to spend: Buy what you'll use," says Gene Schafer, athletic trainer and owner of Arc Athletics Sports Rehabilitation in New York. That means you shouldn't blow your budget in four payments of $24.99 each on that new whosamacallit you saw on late-night TV. Figure out what you want to accomplish (Lose fat? Tone up? Learn yoga?) and what will help you do that, says Michael Feigin, a trainer, nutritionist, and co-owner of the Fitness Guru facility in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Too busy to catch all the week's fitness, diet, and workout news as it happened? Here's a quick wrap-up of what was getting buzz.

Budgeting for Organics
Organic fruits and vegetables are more expensive than the conventional kind. If you've made the decision to go organic but are stuck on the cost, prioritize: To help you out, Fooducate has put together this handy guide, courtesy of the Environmental Working Group, to the produce most and least affected by pesticides. So you're avoiding lots of pesticides by purchasing organic peaches, apples, and bell peppers but may be able to buy conventional onions, avocados, and sweet corn.

Too busy to catch all the week's fitness, diet, and workout news as it happened? Here's a quick wrap-up of what was getting buzz.

Another tip: Avoid the Leaning Tower of Pizza

You may think of your vacations as fat traps, but in fact they are a primo opportunity to burn more calories than usual, reports the Washington Post's MisFits column. Simply moving around a lot as part of your holiday can add up to a lot more exercise than you get at home. The story quotes James Levine, a Mayo Clinic physician who espouses the idea that this kind of nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT, for short) can make the difference between being overweight and not. I wrote a few years ago about Levine's ideas and how you can incorporate little changes into your everyday life.

I've written about how running races and triathlons are increasingly "greening" their operations—making their practices more sustainable to reduce their environmental impact. But what can you, whether you're a gym rat or a racing veteran, do? Here's a list of suggestions, including ours and others offered by Athletes for a Fit Planet, the Council for Responsible Sport, and Runner's World magazine.

1. Don't drive to work out, if you can help it. Work out at home or nearby. If you're a gymgoer, join one within walking or biking distance of your home. Added bonus: You'll be more likely to go if it's closer. Or join one near work so you can make it part of your daily routine without adding more car miles. If you're racing, try to carpool or take public transportation.

2. At the gym, don't be a towel hog. Just because you aren't the one doing the laundry doesn't mean it's OK to use four towels per shower at the local Y. Better yet, bring your own, and wash it once a week.

Run a marathon or finish a triathlon, and your first thought may be "I can't believe I did it." Look back at the course behind you, and your second may be "Holy Nike, look at all the trash on the road!" Between the paper cups, plastic bottles, energy bar wrappers, and even those post-race foil blankets, these popular events produce a whole lot of waste. Not as visible, but equally or even more troublesome, is the impact of people traveling to the big events. The Council for Responsible Sport estimates that the athletes participating in the 2007 Ironman World Championship in Hawaii produced greenhouse gases equivalent to the yearly carbon footprint of 972 average U.S. homes.

There's now a growing movement seeking to "green" this kind of event by making it more sustainable. ReSport, as the Council for Responsible Sport is known, has developed a list of standards for races based on criteria such as waste handling, climate impact, and the materials used in finishers' awards and T-shirts. Depending on how much event organizers do, events can be certified at four different levels. ReSport executive director and cofounder Jeff Henderson says there is a "growing sensibility that races could do better." Events as large as the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco, with 20,000 participants, have been certified.

There's a lot of misinformation out there about exercise and nutrition. As an ongoing feature, I'll ask experts in those fields about their pet fitness peeves—commonly believed myths that are just plain wrong. This week, I asked Nicholas DiNubile, an orthopedic surgeon and author of FrameWork: Your 7-Step Program for Healthy Muscles, Bones , and Joints, about how to properly strengthen your legs. He offered the following explanation for a fitness myth he's heard all too often.

Myth: If I'm working on my feet all day, or am already on a walking program, I'm giving my quads and the rest of my leg muscles a sufficient workout.

Explanation: I'm a knee surgeon, and I talk to post-surgical patients about what they're doing for their thigh muscles. They say, "I'm fine; I'm on my feet all day," or "I walk a lot." I also see that misunderstanding in my patients who see me because they're into fitness, and in the aging population. People don't understand the specificity of exercise; when you are walking, you're strengthening the heart but not the thighs. It's almost like thinking your biceps will be worked by walking.

Too busy to catch all the week's fitness, diet, and workout news as it happened? Here's a quick wrap-up of what was getting buzz.

Hostile, Angry Men More Likely to Gain Weight
The angrier men get, the more likely they are to gain weight in the next two decades, reports Diet Blog. The study, conducted in the United Kingdom, was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology; you could simply watch the expanding waistline of your average screaming pro football coach, though, and come to this conclusion on your own. (Women didn't see the same results, but we certainly get angry too.) Hostility is associated with depression, poor diet, and lack of exercise, all of which can contribute to extra pounds.

There's been a lot of debate over how to improve children's and teens' eating habits while at school. Some have proposed getting rid of sodas and nutritionally poor snacks like chips and candy, but those efforts alone don't always make a difference and may have unintended consequences. (As a colleague explained in a piece on 10 things the food industry doesn't want you to know, when sugary sodas were removed from school vending machines, sugar-containing sports drinks and vitamin waters remained.)

A new website that launched this week, smarterlunchrooms.org, takes a new tack. Rather than advocating outright bans of certain foods, its goal is to "design sustainable lunchrooms that guide smarter choices." The key word there is "guide." Simply replacing pizza with whole-wheat flatbreads and fries with roasted sweet potatoes doesn't allow kids to learn how to make real-world choices, says David Just, codirector of the new effort and an associate professor at Cornell University's Department of Applied Economics and Management. "We set it up so that everything is available and the kids are enabled to see how to make decisions," he says. Making those decisions, he says, leads to good habits.

If you're anything like the average American, your meals are rarely a contemplative experience. (I eat breakfast while surfing the Web and checking E-mail, shovel in some lunch while catching snippets of Bravo reality shows, and then spend my dinner hour chatting away in between bites.) But being more mindful about your eating—in other words, paying close attention to what you are putting in your mouth and how it makes you feel—may be a method that can help with weight loss.

Mindfulness wasn't developed in a psych lab but instead traces its origins to Buddhism. In the medical and behavioral realm, it's been looked at as a way to promote better health in general, lower stress, decrease anxiety, and alter unwanted behaviors, like drinking too much—or overeating. Brian Shelley, wellness director for First Choice Community Healthcare in Albuquerque, N.M., noticed its potential application to eating behaviors while teaching workshops on mindfulness as a stress reduction technique. When it came time for a midday break, "people had a mindful lunch in silence for an hour. They enjoyed the food, didn't overeat, didn't rush, and were very aware and meditative when they sat down to start the meal."