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Myths and Facts: Exercising While Pregnant
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2012 CommentI'm eight months pregnant with my first baby. I can't believe that my life is about to change forever. Overall, I'm excited about the transition to parenthood, and I'm ready to deal with the good, the bad, and the ugly. While I've received some fabulous advice from moms, I've also received some warnings that soon I will start putting myself last.
That news has been a tough pill to swallow because self-care is a major part of my identity. This includes making "me time" for eating well, exercising, and managing stress. I'm mentally committed to preserving that identity while I make room for baby. Throughout my pregnancy, I've followed this guiding principle: "Everything you do for you, you do for the baby inside you." This line of thinking has increased my motivation for self-care, not decreased it.
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How to Start (or Revive) a Faith-Based Garden
Tweet Share on Facebook October 29, 2012 Comment"For I was hungry and you gave me food." No, I'm not talking about those chocolate chip cookies in the company break room, although they certainly taste divine when you need them most (Monday afternoons, around 3 p.m., come to mind). I'm talking about the growing movement to create gardens for those in need at places of worship.
These gardens aren't only used to provide physical nourishment. It's important to remember the many ways that people today are hungry—they are hungry for human connections, for knowledge that has skipped generations, for communing with nature, and for feeling needed. Many, perhaps even you, are hungry to de-stress after a long week at work, and they find solace and satisfaction in creating something tangible and good like a faith-based garden. I've heard it said that planting a seed is the ultimate act of faith. With so many unknowns in today's business economy, why not take this leap of faith and dig in where you worship? Here's how:
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Diet, Diabetes, and Doubt: Is Preventive Medicine Lost in Space?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 26, 2012 CommentA large federal trial, looking at lifestyle—diet and exercise—for the treatment of diabetes was just terminated because, after 11 years, it wasn't working as intended. The Look AHEAD study was stopped early because it was not reducing the rate of heart attack and stroke in the intervention group relative to the control. The termination was reported in a press release by the National Institutes of Health, and picked up by mainstream media. The findings suggest that diet and exercise are not effective for reducing the cardiovascular complications of diabetes.
And so, AHEAD, or at least the media coverage of it, is inviting us to look back, and doubt what we thought we knew about diet as the best medicine we've got—for diabetes, at least. We thought we knew that lifestyle was among the most powerful determinants of health outcomes. We thought we knew that diet and exercise together could prevent heart attacks in high-risk people. Participants in the AHEAD intervention lost 8 percent of their body weight by the end of the first year of the trial and were still down 5 percent from their baseline weight at the four-year mark. We thought we knew that diet, exercise, and weight management like this exerted important influences on the course of diabetes. Now, the AHEAD findings suggest we were wrong. Right? Not so fast.
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The Fat Talk Free Pledge
Tweet Share on Facebook October 26, 2012 CommentI remember 9th grade dance class like it was yesterday: I would take my awkward, leotard-clad body into class and try to avoid my image in the wall-to-wall mirrors for the entire hour. I also remember one particular girl from that class who spent the hour watching herself—dreamily—in those mirrors. She loved her body. Her curvy, imperfect, slightly overweight body. While the rest of the class would bond over talk of fat thighs and diets, she would simply enjoy the movement of dance class and avoid the destructive conversations around her. To me, she was the epitome of comfortable in her own skin. Back then, I just assumed she was hard-wired that way—lucky girl! But I've since realized that she knew a secret most girls her age (not to mention, many grown women) hadn't figured out: She avoided fat talk.
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Do You Have Fat Clothes?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 25, 2012 CommentHow many of you have a closet filled with clothing of varying sizes? There may be a size 4 hanging in there from when you got married or those honeymoon shorts you hope to someday fit back into. Next to those might be the 6s and 8s that you wore for many years … before the kids came, that is. And next to those, the 10s, 12s, and 14s, just longing to be worn.
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How to Find Your Ohm...
Tweet Share on Facebook October 25, 2012 CommentMy love affair with yoga started about 13 years ago. At the time I was fiercely committed to cardio workouts and weight lifting—I loved spinning classes, boxing classes (in an actual ring), indoor rock climbing, and boot camp. My mother, who thought I needed to slow down a bit, wanted me to try yoga, which she'd been practicing since the 1970s. Since "mom always knows best," I decided to give it a try, gradually weaning myself off of my gym classes and weight lifting until yoga became my exclusive exercise routine. I've never looked back.
"Yoga is a union within ourselves and then with ourselves [and] the world around us. It is the joining of the breath, body, and mind," says Ashley Dorr, who teaches at the Shala, a Manhattan yoga studio that I frequent. Personally, I started yoga to try a different type of exercise. I wasn't really thinking about the mind, breath, and body connection. But as the years have passed, I have found this connection fascinating. During my practice, I think less about my busy schedule and more about what my body is capable of doing.
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Are You Trying Too Hard to Eat Healthfully?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 25, 2012 CommentI was always a very efficient student. What I mean is that whatever grade I needed to get me where I wanted to go, well, that was the grade that I got. In my early university years, that meant getting marks in and around the high 70s and low 80s, since my career plans at the time involved getting into graduate school and pursuing a career in medical genetics. But after what I found to be a deathly boring summer working in an actual genetics lab, I decided I wanted to go to medical school, and suddenly high 70s and low 80s weren't good enough. I needed 90s, and I needed them across the board. I learned quickly that the effort required to get in the 90s, for me anyway, was at least an order of magnitude more than what I'd been putting in. I truly had to spend at least twice as much time studying to get that measly extra 10 percent. But the fact was, without those 90s, I wouldn't be a physician today. There simply wasn't a choice.
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Does Exercise Distort Your Perception of Hunger?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 24, 2012 CommentShould you trust your hunger meter after a workout? Two studies published this year reported that contrary to popular belief, exercise doesn't make people hungrier. In fact, results showed that brisk exercise can decrease interest in food.
But other experiments have turned up evidence to the contrary. Some researchers have found that not only does exercise cause a perceived need to eat more, but that our pleasure response to food is heightened following a workout—and that even thinking about exercise can whet our appetites.
So does exercise make us hungry or doesn't it? And if it does, should it? The relationship between physical activity and calorie compensation seems to have proved complex, not just for the average person, but for scientists, as well.
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As Halloween Approaches, a Dietitian Asks: WWDKD?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 23, 2012 CommentEach year, Halloween poses a moral dilemma for most dietitians. Opt out of trick-or-treating, and at best, we're branded joyless buzz kills; at worst, our houses are assailed with shaving cream and toilet paper. Opt in, and we're fueling the national year-end sugar binge that undoes 10 months of talk about moderation and nutritional balance. It's a no-win situation.
In the past, I've put my inner conflict aside to participate in the spirit of the holiday, doling out "fun-sized" candies with relatively lower calorie counts that I did not find particularly tempting myself. This, I reasoned, would make them the lesser of many evils to the kids who received them, and less tempting to me as holiday leftovers.
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Understanding Childhood Obesity
Tweet Share on Facebook October 23, 2012 CommentChildhood obesity has become so epidemic in this country that kids today risk having shorter life spans than their parents. The American Heart Association reports that about one in three American kids is overweight or obese. Those statistics have nearly tripled in about 50 years. As a result, many young children today are plagued with risk factors for heart disease, including high cholesterol, elevated blood pressure, high triglycerides, raised insulin, physical inactivity, and obesity. Many also suffer from low self-esteem and depression. Is there a solution in sight?
