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The Weight Is Gone. How to Keep It Off
Tweet Share on Facebook March 11, 2008 Comment (2)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.
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Unisex Replacement Knees Are Fine for Women
Tweet Share on Facebook March 6, 2008 Comment (5)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.)
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Calorie Counts by Text Message
Tweet Share on Facebook March 5, 2008 Comment (9)I've written before about the power of computer and mobile phone technology to remind you about workouts. Here's another nifty trick: Use your cellphone to get a quick nutritional snapshot of the restaurant food you're about to order.
DIET.com has set up a free service (except for whatever your provider charges for text messages) that gives you info on foods from chain restaurants. Just send a text to DIET1 (34381) with the name of the restaurant, menu item, and size (if appropriate). A few seconds later, you'll get a text back with the calorie count and number of grams of fat, carbs, and protein. You can even start your text with the word points to get the number of Weight Watchers points in a given food. (Get more information at diet.com/mobile.)
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Exercise Before Bed? Go for It
Tweet Share on Facebook March 3, 2008 Comment (23)A reader—OK, my friend Beth—wrote me with a question: Is exercising at night likely to make it more difficult to fall asleep afterwards?
I haven't had trouble falling asleep since the summer I saw Poltergeist, so I called Shawn Youngstedt, a researcher in the department of exercise science at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina, who has studied the question. He says it's a common assumption that working out too close to bedtime impairs sleep, but that the evidence suggests otherwise.
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Take the President's Fitness Challenge
Tweet Share on Facebook February 28, 2008 Comment (1)When I was in junior high, the annual Presidential Physical Fitness Award test chilled my little adolescent heart. The thought of struggling to perform even a single pull-up in front of that week's crush was enough to make me develop my own case of the blue (gym shorts) flu. So hearing that the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports is about to offer to all Americans the National President's Challenge—the very same program that spawned the awful test—didn't exactly thrill me.
Luckily, the expanded program, which will begin enrolling participants March 1 (though I was able to sign up today) and starts March 20, involves no actual test. Its goal is to promote general physical wellness by encouraging all Americans to be active for 30 minutes a day, five days a week (the generally accepted activity level for good cardiac health; weight loss will probably take more exercise). All you've got to do is go to PresidentsChallenge.org and sign up.
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A Vote Against Aerobic Exercise?
Tweet Share on Facebook February 25, 2008 Comment (11)My inbox has been filling up with PR pitches on the ineffectiveness and/or evils of steady aerobic exercise, which most academic fitness experts have preached as the best way to control weight and improve heart health. (I've written about one specific no-cardio plan before.)
I'm tempted to dismiss most of these pitches as gimmicks to sell more books, DVDs, vats of protein powder, or whatever, but there are enough studies cited as supporting evidence to make it a topic worth looking into. Some of the arguments offered up against lots of steady aerobic exercise: Working out for a long time can cause impact injuries and possibly promote harmful bodywide inflammation; people tend to overeat after cardio workouts because they overestimate how many calories they've burned; weightlifting may boost your metabolism more than aerobic exercise in the period after you've finished working out; and—the one that makes intuitively the most sense to me—it's more efficient to do interval training (alternating shorter periods of intense exertion followed by recovery), because you burn more calories in less time.
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Probiotics Aren't for Everyone
Tweet Share on Facebook February 21, 2008 Comment (2)If you think that your digestive system—and its regularity or lack thereof—have lately been the focus of an awful lot of TV commercials, you're right. Probiotics, live microbes that may bring health benefits, are clearly a hot topic in nutrition (U.S. News has written about them here and here). Predictable food industry marketing hype aside (the New York Times had a great take on this last year), the bulk of the evidence does suggest that for some conditions, especially digestive ailments, they can be helpful when taken in the proper amounts.
But two recent studies illustrate the point that very few things—OK, except maybe rainbows and puppies—are absolutely good for absolutely everyone. A study out of the Netherlands, published online by the Lancet last week, set out to find whether probiotics might prevent infections in a very sick group of people: those with acute pancreatitis. The hypothesis was that the probiotics, delivered via a feeding tube, might fend off some of the infectious complications that can make acute pancreatitis deadly. The result was surprising: The group of patients who took probiotics had more infections than those who received a placebo. And 16 percent of the patients in the probiotics group died, compared with 6 percent of the placebo group.
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Diet Soda, Metabolic Syndrome, and Weight Loss
Tweet Share on Facebook February 12, 2008 Comment (17)As I write this, I am nursing a glass of Diet Pepsi, one of the embarrassing number that I put away on a typical day (starting about five minutes after I wake up, to my boyfriend's abject horror). I've resolved to cut back on my consumption in the past, mostly because I'm cheap enough to resent paying for something with absolutely no nutritional value, but have always been defeated by the calorie factor. Besides, doesn't everyone deserve a vice? But because of my love-hate relationship with the stuff, two recent studies about artificial sweeteners caught my eye.
One, published in Circulation, came as quite a shock: Drinking diet soda, it suggested, puts me at higher risk of developing a group of risk factors like high blood pressure and unhealthy levels of "bad" cholesterol that are tied to heart disease and diabetes. Another paper, published in Behavioral Neuroscience, found that—in rats, at least—cutting the traditional link between sweet flavor and high calories seems to throw off the ability to judge the caloric content of food. That, no surprise, leads to overeating. So much for the calorie factor.
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8 Strength Training Tips for Women
Tweet Share on Facebook February 8, 2008 Comment (15)I know strength training builds muscle mass and keeps my bones strong. So I drag myself to the gym a few mornings a week, use a couple of the less-sweated-upon machines, and pat myself on the back. But that's about all the effort I've given it—until now.
One of my goals for the year is to actually try a strength-training program designed by someone smarter and more experienced about this stuff than I am. And my good friend Erle, who spends a lot of time mulling over the science behind his own exercise routine (and posts his thoughts about fitness at f-40.blogspot.com), has always spoken highly of Alwyn Cosgrove, a coach, gym owner, and writer (www.alwyncosgrove.com). So when I heard that Cosgrove, with coauthors Lou Schuler and Cassandra Forsythe, has a new book out, The New Rules of Lifting For Women (Avery/Penguin Group USA), I jumped at the chance to get him on the phone. Our chat centered on some of the misconceptions that everyone—but particularly women—have about weight training. Here's some of what I learned:
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Women: Get With the Heart Rehab Program
Tweet Share on Facebook February 5, 2008 Comment (5)Not that you could tell it from the gender makeup at my gym in the morning, but women don't exercise as much as men. According to a 2005 Gallup poll, in fact, only 42 percent of women engage in vigorous physical activities at least once a week, compared with 56 percent of men. That's an all-around-bad trend, but the consequences are especially bad when it comes to cardiac rehabilitation, the programs for heart patients incorporating exercise, nutritional advice, counseling, and other preventive steps. There, the disparity continues: Studies have shown that women are less likely to participate in cardiac rehab, and if they do start, are as much as 30 percent more inclined to drop out. Since rehab is believed to cut the risk of further heart problems and improves quality of life, that's a gap worth tackling.
