Douglas is Relieved, Focused on Recovery
Michael Douglas has likely beaten throat cancer—his tumor is gone and he's been "eating like a pig," he told Today show host Matt Lauer in a segment that aired Tuesday. The Oscar-winning actor—known best for his roles in Fatal Attraction, The American President, and most recently Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps—announced last August that he'd been diagnosed with a very advanced stage of the disease, Reuters reports. But less than a year later, he believes he's been cured. "I guess there's not a total euphoria. I'll probably take a couple of months of getting checked out. But it's been a wild six-month ride," the 66-year-old told Lauer. Douglas, who has two children with wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, is working to regain the 32 pounds he lost during radiation treatment and is preparing for an upcoming role as the flamboyant pianist Liberace. His full interview will air on January 23 on NBC's Dateline.
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How to Get a Cheap Workout: 8 Ideas for Building a $100 Home Gym
If you're unable—or simply unwilling—to pay thousands of dollars a year for membership in a fancy exercise studio, 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, U.S. News reported in 2009. 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. [Read more: How to Get a Cheap Workout: 8 Ideas for Building a $100 Home Gym]
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7 Mistaken Beliefs That Prevent Weight Loss
Nutritionists are often unimpressed by studies showing that a given diet works for weight loss. After all, if you stick to a diet that restricts calories, you're going to drop pounds in the short term. The hard part is keeping it off, and that's where diets fail, U.S. News reported in 2009.
Judith Beck, director of the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research, says that's not surprising, given that so many people haven't been taught the mental skills necessary to sustain changes in their eating and exercise habits. In The Complete Beck Diet for Life, she applies the tenets of cognitive therapy to weight loss. (She also offers an eating plan for the initial stages of the program because reader feedback after her previous book indicated that people need help in figuring out what they should be eating.)
Cognitive therapy focuses on solving the problem in the here and now rather than delving into the past to understand its roots. The premise is that people have incorrect thoughts and beliefs that need to be altered in order to eliminate the problem—be it depression, addiction, or in this case, overeating. Two smallish Swedish studies have suggested that cognitive therapy can help people lose weight and keep it off for at least a year and a half, Beck says. [Read more: 7 Mistaken Beliefs That Prevent Weight Loss]
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