I browse through a lot of health and fitness related news every day in order to try and find things that can help our readers here improve their lives. In doing so I come across a fair number of unusual topics, but more often than not most of the things I read tend to get repetitive. That’s why, when I opened up my reader this morning, I darn near spewed a mouthful of coffee all over my dual monitor setup after I saw one of the headlines.
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Dieting is a touchy subject. We all have our own ideas as to what is the “best” way to lose weight, and with very little research we can often find studies that back up our claim. What’s more, we’re all pretty defensive of our choices. Getting together in a room full of low-carb and low-fat dieters and asking them which is the better way to diet is as fraught with danger as standing in the middle of the lobby of the Marriott at Dragon*Con with a bullhorn and asking what the best Science Fiction series is.
In the spirit of full disclosure I have to admit that I am a low-fat, calorie counting dieter. That’s what Weight Watchers® really is, when you get right down to it. They just wrap it up in a convenient system and assign food point values. I’ve been on Weight Watchers for over 9 years now and while the amount of weight I have lost has varied consistently I have managed to maintain the large majority of my loss following that program. As a result, I am obviously biased toward low-fat diets and a big proponent of them. I truly believe that portion control, exercise, and healthy food choices are the key factors in losing weight and keeping it off.
A study released in the Annals of Internal Medicine seems to back me up on that.
There is a communication barrier that exists between self-proclaimed geeks and your typical athlete. Someone who has never spent an entire weekend sitting around a table and rolling dice or who has actually injured something more than just their thumb playing football just doesn’t understand why anyone would want to “waste” their time playing games. In fact, more often than not, it seems like many fitness enthusiasts look upon “geeky” hobbies with nothing short of derision.
This lack of groking is one of the motivating reasons why we launched ShrinkGeek in the first place. We wanted to create a place where people who thought like us could seek out others who had the same kind of interests but who also wanted to improve their health. We firmly believe that it’s entirely possible to be geeky AND healthy, and we actively seek to promote activities that are conducive to both.
makelessnoise via Flickr
Healthy living doesn’t come easy for many people. In fact, for a large number of us I dare say it would qualify as “work.” You have to pay attention to what you eat and how much; make sure you take your vitamins; drink enough fluids; exercise; and get enough rest. If you aren’t consciously adjusting your lifestyle to fit your needs, you can be assured you’ll gain weight as you age. (Yes, even you whipper snappers who love to rub in the fact that you can eat “whatever you want” and not gain a pound). Modern living doesn’t include the kind of rigorous activity that kept many generations before us trim, and compensating for that can really start to feel like a full-time job. Which, as most people will agree, gets old.
Sometimes you just need to take a vacation from your job, and we all look forward to one day being able to retire altogether. Retirement from the weight loss and exercise job, though, would undoubtedly lead to weight gain. With obesity being the cause of any number of health problems, one would imagine that putting on the pounds during your golden years (when your health is already on the decline simply due to the aging process) would be a bad thing.
Well, maybe not so much.
About four months ago I got into a conversation with a friend of mine about the fact that I had taken up jogging. I was about three quarters of the way through the Cool Running “Couch to 5K” training program and I had signed up to participate in my first official race on Thanksgiving. Knowing that I still had a decent amount of weight to lose and that I had dealt with weight-related injuries in the past my friend asked whether or not I was worried about injuries and suggested that if I wanted to improve my cardiovascular fitness I might consider a lower impact exercise like swimming.
At the time I was a little put off by his statements, to be honest. There is nothing quite as discouraging as having someone cast doubts about the safety of an activity that you’re working very hard to master. The fact of the matter is, though, that he had a point. Running is a fantastic way to burn calories and improve your endurance, but it can cause some significant injuries if you aren’t careful (and sometimes even if you are). I’m still, by most standards, about fifty pounds overweight and I am frequently sore for a day or so after I complete a run. All of that extra weight is pretty hard on my joints to being with and jogging is a fairly high impact activity. Not only that, but some researchers now think that the fact that runners wear shoes at all makes them more likely to injure themselves.
steveb_ohio via flickr
It isn’t easy to achieve or maintain a healthy weight. If it was there would be no such thing as a multi-billion dollar weight loss industry. While we contend here at ShrinkGeek that the only tried and true method of losing weight is to eat less and exercise, we concede that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution on the best way to get there. The struggle to find the combination of diet and exercise that works best for your particular personality and physiology is probably the hardest part about losing weight, and frustration over finding out what you can and can not live with can be a potentially crippling road block to your progress.
Many people chose to rely on “natural” dietary supplements to aid in their weight-loss efforts, and with good reason. The ability to consume a product that can help you lose weight without introducing any man made chemicals into your system is pretty appealing! Unfortunately, it appears as though a lot of people who use these products are getting considerably more than they bargain for.
Image courtesy of m.a.r.c. on flickr
Ok, seriously…Sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and give in to the inevitable tide of “nothing you do is good for you anymore.” Seems like every time we get our heads around the right way towards healthy living someone has to come along and throw a monkey wrench in the works. It seems as though the list of food and drink you should or should not consume fluctuates wildly week to week, and sometimes the exercise du jour turns out to be more damaging to your body than beneficial. It’s maddening!
One thing we can all agree on, though, is that smoking is bad for you and that if you smoke quitting the habit is probably the best thing you can do for your health.
Right?
Not so fast, sparky.
Image courtesy of oddsock via Flickr
We here at ShrinkGeek walk a fine editorial tightrope when it comes to sermonizing about the “evils” of the sedentary activities we all share a common love for. Let’s face it, folks. The chips are stacked against us in the whole healthy lifestyle realm. You aren’t very likely to see an elevated heart rate for extended period as a result of playing games or watching movies. That being said, we also recognize that it’s perfectly acceptable to indulge in the things that we love if we do so sensibly and take the time to balance out other activities that aren’t quite so…passive.
The main problem with this issue is that it is hard to quantify just how “bad” for you sedentary activities are. We all should be able to recognize that someone who never exercises and spends all their time in front of a computer or television is not likely to be a healthy person, but it’s never been easy to put a finger on how much is “too much” when it comes to these activities. Is two hours of television or computer use a night too much? Three? What if you spend all day in front of a computer for your job? There are a lot of hard questions revolving around these scenarios and no easy answers to be found.
Advertising Fail courtesy of the Fail Blog
If you’ve watched television at all in the last 10 years or so you are most likely familiar with the name Jared Fogel, and if not you’d likely recognize him if you saw a picture. Jared is “the Subway guy.” For those of you who are not familiar with his admittedly impressive story, the Reader’s Digest version is that back in 1997 Jared lost an incredible amount of weight by following what he termed “The Subway Diet.” The diet program in and of itself was pretty simple. Jared, who had been consuming what he estimates as nearly 10,000 calories a day, replaced two of his meals with six inch sandwiches from Subway’s “7 under 6” menu (sandwiches with a total of less than six grams of fat). He also walked pretty much everywhere and added other types of exercise on top of that. In the end he managed to lose over 240 pounds, and when the advertising executives at Subway caught wind of his success they hired him as a spokesman. That move turned out to be a smashing success for the restaurant chain, and Jared has been associated with them ever since.
While many restaurants have tried to duplicate the success that Subway had marketing themselves as a diet-friendly fast food alternative there is little doubt that Subway has remained the uncontested king of the healthy lifestyle hill. So far they’ve managed to fight off all other pretenders to their throne, but it looks like they may be facing a new challenge from a fairly unlikely source.
Some of you may recall the somewhat unconventional tactics used by the New York City health commissioner in the war against obesity. Not only have they put laws into place that require chain restaurants to post calorie information on their menus, they have banned the use of trans fats in food production. Once they had those rules in place they started a fairly graphic advertising campaign against sugary drinks that showed a stream of fat being poured out of a bottle. 9DNZY6EMJZ6W
On the off chance that you Big Apple residents didn’t get the message the first time, though, the office of the health commissioner is back with a brand new ad.
And it’s worse.
It’s a video.