Category Archives: Op-Ed

Slow and steady wins the race

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Bugs Bunny and Cecil Turtle are registered trademarks of Warner Brothers

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.

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Too Fat To Fly?

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via @thatkevinsmith on Twitpic

There’s been a bit of news floating around recently that I have, frankly, been hesitant to comment on here despite the fact that is probably one of the more relevant topics in recent events when it comes to our target demographic. For those of you who are unaware of what, exactly, I’m talking about (and bless you for having the ability to somehow avoid every major news outlet for the last week) – Kevin Smith (director of the highly acclaimed independent film Clerks) recently caused quite a stir on Twitter when he posted about being removed from a flight on Southwest Airlines because he was, well…Too fat.

The story is, honestly, considerably more detailed than that. If you’re interested in all the details you can hear them directly from Mr. Smith himself on his Smodcast web site. You can also see the two official responses from Southwest over on their Nuts About Southwest blog.

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Snackwell’s skullduggery

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myguitarzz via flickrIn what can only be seen as complete universal injustice, we here at ShrinkGeek have to hold down regular old nine-to-five jobs in order to put our healthy food on the table. Fortunately, the job that I’ve got is a pretty decent one – especially when you factor in the benefits. In particular, the employee gym we have in our corporate headquarters is pretty nice. I’m down there at least once a day, and it has helped me considerably in my efforts to refocus on my weight loss in the last year.

One thing we do not have, however, is a cafeteria. We’re a decent-sized company, but we don’t really have enough staff in our main location to justify that kind of expense. The only access we have to food comes in the form of vending machines, and as someone who traditionally doesn’t carry cash, that has never been a viable option for me… up until last week, anyway. We recently switched vendors, and now all of the food dispensary units in our break room take debit cards.

Unfortunately, many of the options in those machines can’t really be slotted into the “healthy choices” category. In fact, some of the ones that seem obvious choices in that arena are far from it.

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Little changes

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Image courtesy of Silus Grok via flickr

I was chatting with a friend of recently when the subject of weight loss came up. He told me that he had managed to lose 10 pounds in the last month, and when I asked what he was doing he told me that he had stopped going to McDonalds for breakfast every morning and started drinking less soda at work.

That’s it.

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Truth in advertising

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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.

Taco Bell.

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“Caring, investing wimps” make great step-parents

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Mother NatureBack in the 1970’s actress Dena Dietrich became the face of Gaea personified when she warned us all that it wasn’t “nice to fool Mother Nature.” At the time she was doing so in an advertisement for margarine, but that phrase and the ominous warning lurking behind it has been a prevalent theme in our society as we have time and time again discovered scientific ways to disrupt the “natural order” of life. While it is undeniable that technology has improved the standard of living for mankind on our lovely planet, history has shown, again and again, how nature points out the folly of man. In the medical world, for example, our efforts to combat disease have in some cases resulted in viral strains that are immune to treatment and far more deadly than the original condition we were seeking to eliminate.

Drug resistant diseases may not be the only way in which Mother Nature is thumbing her nose at us for attempting to circumvent her rules, though. A new paper published by the University of Sheffield claims that the use of oral contraceptives could cause women to select “provider types” as mates, and that doing so may have a detrimental impact on the health of their children.

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New York continues to wage a battle against bulge

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poundsNew York is probably not the first place you think of when it comes to healthy living.  It might be the first place you think of when it comes to pizza, bagels with a shmear, restaurants that are open twenty-four hours a day, street vendors selling hot dogs, and deli sandwiches bigger than your head, but that pretty much proves my point.  California generally holds the reputation as the place where the “granola loving health freaks” live, but as is the case with most stereotypes California and New York are actually pretty similar when it comes to the percentage of the population that is considered obese.  In 2008 approximately 23.1% of the population of California residents fell under the obese classification, while 23.5% of New Yorkers were in the same category.  For those of you that are curious, Colorado actually came in as the leanest state with “only” 18% of their population falling into an obese weight range.

In spite of their reputation as being lovers of unhealthy foods (or, perhaps, because of it) the lawmakers in New York have taken it upon themselves to wage a war against obesity, and their primary targets seem to be soda and restaurant food.  In 2008 the Governor of New York proposed a 15% sales tax on sugary drinks, and a few months later the New York City health commissioner made the case for the same kind of tax to be imposed on a federal level.  New York also ordered all chain restaurants to begin posting calorie counts on their menus and banned the use of trans fats in food production.

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Shoop da whoop

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Lizzi MillerI’ve said on several occasions that I picked the folks who work for me here at ShrinkGeek because of the fact that they represented a fairly wide range of perspectives on health and fitness.  They also happen to be big geeks, but that’s beside the point.  While we can all pretty much agree that the best way to improve your life is to eat less and exercise when we wander beyond that particular point we start to diverge in our viewpoints on how, exactly, to go about doing so.  On some things we utterly and completely disagree.

Rafe wrote a piece yesterday that falls into that particular category for me.  So much so that I felt the need to address it in a separate post.

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Denny’s apparently has salty food

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HAMMYAs someone who has the great fortune of living in the Tampa Bay area of Florida I have ready access to what Ronan from VNV Nation refers to as one of the best goth clubs in the country – The Castle.  While I haven’t been in a while, I truly find that one of the greater pleasures in life is to head out there for a late night of dancing, drinking, and socializing with some of the finest people on the planet.

When 2:00 AM rolls around and they kick on the lights, though, I’m seldom in a mood to head home and call it a night.  Several hours of high energy booty shaking mixed with what is often an unwise combination of concoctions puts me in a mood for salty, greasy, goodness.  What better place to quench that desire than a 24 hour Denny’s?

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Washington Doctor writes a prescription for American obesity

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I'm Just A Bill - Schoolhouse RockWith all the talk coming out of Washington these days about health care, and specifically the impact that obesity has an our rising health care costs as a nation, it is not difficult to imagine a time when our elected officials may see fit to try and regulate our waist lines.  We’ve written here about several incidents where the government has seemed to do just that.  From taxing sugary soft drinks to removing a morbidly obese child from his Mothers care, several states have taken a very hands-on approach to dealing with obesity.  With those kind of precedents being set it is only a matter of time before slippery slope logic dictates we will have some kind of federal intervention into our daily caloric intake.

Contrary to popular belief, though, not everything that comes out of Washington, D.C. is going to be the equivalent of the next $400 hammer.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the federal government is taking a closer look at what can be done about the obesity epidemic in America, and one doctor has outlined a plan that could really make a significant difference without infringing on our personal freedoms.

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