Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
I get asked questions in the gym occasionally by guys who are looking for advice on training, diet, etc. One of the things I noticed over the years is that a lot of guys will ask for advice and then when it isn’t what they want to hear or is harder than they expected, they will argue with you. I used to try to reason with them and convince them that what I was telling them was really the best thing to do. But over the years, I’ve given up because most people won’t even take the advice of a doctor who tells them to lose weight, change their life style or exercise- OR DIE. They want a pill.
So, I will still help out anyone who asks, but I won’t argue with them any more. As the saying goes- “Never argue with idiots, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.” Well not exactly, but it is pointless to argue with someone who really doesn’t want to change. All you can do is try to make them want to change. Then you have a fighting chance.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Spiritual/Emotional, Supplements, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
With 120 million prescriptions written in the US last year for anti-depressants, they have become the most prescribed drug in America. Some estimates suggest that 50% of American adults are on anti-depressants. Probably true in a lot of other countries too. This is a truly frightening statistic. I have theories about why we are so unhappy and depressed and they focus on two main things- our inability to grasp the fact that prosperity and “stuff” (generally called “success” in our culture) cannot make us happy, and our woeful physical condition in general. One is a spiritual/emotional problem and the other is a physical problem- although it is hard to separate those two categories. When things are not right in our spiritual, emotional and physical lives, it is only natural that we will be unhappy and depressed. The answer of course is to do something about it. The great American answer to everything is to take a pill for it because it is easy and requires virtually no effort on our part. So when I read this article this morning, I was not surprised at all-
…
The researchers found that compared with placebo, these new-generation antidepressant medications did not yield clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially had moderate or even very severe depression. The study found that significant benefits occurred only in the most severely depressed patients.
“Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication,” the researchers wrote.
…
While I’m sure that anti-depressants are useful and helpful for some people, the best treatment for depression is to determine the cause and fix it. I don’t think brain chemistry is the cause for most people. What we are doing by putting all these people on drugs is trying to make them happy in their misery and apparently even the drugs can’t do that.
So try this- get at least 1/2 hour of good exercise every day. Quit eating fast food and eat fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, lean meats and cut out the fried stuff. Quit screwing up your metabolism by eating refined sugar products like candy, ice cream and pastries covered in frosting. Get enough sleep. And don’t neglect the spiritual element of you life. We all worship something whether it is the “American Dream”, money, fame or power. Just make sure that what you worship is worthy of your worship. Many people have found that church and a connection to a group of people in that context is a big help in life. So, live smart and as the old Nike commercial says “Just DO It”.
Even Slight Fitness Exercise Reduces Strokes
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
Research has shown that even slight fitness – like from walking 1/2 hour per day, has a significant effect on reducing the likelihood of stroke. The referenced article calls it “moderate” fitness but come on, walking 1/2 hour per day is barely above being totally sedentary- it is not fitness. Still, it is a major milestone for most people if you can get them to do it. So encourage your family members and friends to at least get out and take a walk. Better yet, go with them. It won’t hurt you either and it may be the push they need to actually get out and take that walk.
I see people out walking on my road most every day and they are usually in pairs, walking and talking. It is natural to want to exercise with other people so grab someone and go for a walk. It might just save their life.
…
…He said even those who were moderately fit had a lower risk of stroke. Most people can reach that fitness range by walking briskly for 30 minutes a day, five times a week, said Hooker, who presented the findings Thursday at the International Stroke Conference in New Orleans.
Stroke is the nation’s third-leading cause of death. It occurs when blood flow to the brain is stopped when a blood vessel is blocked by a clot or bursts. Hooker said physical activity can help prevent blood clots and the buildup of artery-clogging plaque.
…
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
I mentioned this in the last post, but wanted to give a little more time to it today. Sleep is really important to general health as well as training. Basically, sleep helps regulate all your other natural cycles and so it affects everything from mood to hunger. Guess what- mood affects hunger and appetite too! Most people who don’t get enough sleep find that they are hungrier than if they had gotten that extra hour (or 2) of sleep. Researchers have found a link between sleep and the hormones that increase/decrease hunger. With most Americans being sleep deprived this may be one (probably small) factor in the obesity problem.
…
Hormones are substances in the body that help to regulate body processes. Over recent years, researchers have been learning a lot about the hormones that help to regulate hunger. Two of these hormones are called leptin and ghrelin. Leptin decreases hunger, so people do not feel hungry when leptin levels are high. Ghrelin increases hunger, so people feel hungry when ghrelin levels are high. Sleep plays an important role in the body’s use and storage of energy from food.
…
This can be a more significant problem if you are training for a sport or weight lifting for size/strength because your body needs the rest to repair and rebuild muscle and connective tissue. So if you are like me, and you don’t get enough sleep, make the effort to get one more hour per night and see if you don’t feel better.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Sports, Supplements, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
After reading this Q&A over at MSNBC, I wanted to chime in on the whole supplement debate- especially for teenage athletes. The bottom line is that if you are eating a good diet with enough protein (about 1 gram for every 2 pounds of body weight), using protein powders and other supplements is a waste of money. Since most kids don’t eat a good balance diet, you might be tempted to tell them to go ahead and take the supplements, but really you need to educate and encourage them to eat properly instead. Instead of supplements, encourage the people you train or work out with to drink 3 glasses of lowfat milk and eat a couple of large eggs (cooked any way you like) everyday as a natural “supplement”. This is really good high quality protein and it is very, very cheap.
So what supplements do I approve of? First, I think everyone should be taking a high quality multi-vitamin every day and I also encourage people to take an extra 2 grams of vitamin C (in 4 500mg doses) every day.
Finally, don’t discount the sleep factor. You really need extra sleep if you are training hard for a sport or bodybuilding. This may well be the most neglected part of someone’s training routine. The body has to have time to repair and rebuild, so if you are burning the candle at both ends like most people are, you are going to limit your success and potential. All the protein powder in the world can’t make up for lack of rest. Most people need between 7 to 9 hours of sleep every day- and teenagers need it more than adults do. Eat, sleep, be happy!
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
The list of problems that obesity/lack of exercise cause is already long and disturbing. But new research from Harvard is showing that it will soon eclipse smoking as the #1 cause of cancer in the US. No doubt, many people will claim that you cannot blame obesity directly for cancers but the obvious fact is that obesity affects so many areas of health in so many negative ways that the obese person’s natural defenses against disease and cancer are severely compromised. As our culture continues to kill itself with a knife and fork, I suspect we will see more data like this.
…
Obesity is on its way to being deadlier than smoking as a cause of cancer in the U.S., a leading researcher said Friday.
Being obese is currently associated with about 14 percent of cancer deaths in men and 20 percent in women, compared with about 30 percent each for smoking, Dr. Walter C. Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“As smoking goes down and obesity goes up it won’t be long before obesity is the No. 1 cancer killer,” Willett said at a symposium on cancer prevention.
…Willett said research is producing increasing evidence associating obesity with a variety of cancers, including breast, colorectal, liver, pancreas and gallbladder. Alcohol is also associated with certain cancers, he said.
…Overall, Willett estimated 30 percent to 35 percent of cancers are due to nutritional factors, much of it to obesity.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
There have been a couple of recent studies that show that body fat, specifically belly fat, is a much better indicator than the traditional BMI (body mass index) at predicting weight related health problems like cardiovascular disease. The problem with body mass index is that it tries to fit everyone into the same mold. So, for instance, a tall person with a big belly might think he is OK while a short muscular stocky person would appear to need to lose weight. MSNBC has the article and it is worth reading and passing along-
…
“The use of BMI alone does not discriminate between fat mass and fat-free mass, nor reflect the fat mass distribution,” Colombo told Reuters Health.
Colombo and colleagues recruited 23 men and 40 women, aged 20 to 65 years, to undergo body composition analysis in the Human Nutrition and Eating Disorders Research Centre at the university. The volunteers were healthy, but led sedentary lives and were not following a low-calorie diet.
The researchers obtained each person’s BMI as well as body-fat measurements including waist circumference and total percent body fat. The also calculated a measurement similar to BMI that identifies fat mass called body fat mass index. The investigators then compared the percentage of the study group that would be told to lose weight according to each calculation.
BMI calculations, they found, identified 11 percent of the group as needing strong recommendations to lose weight and 41 percent as needing basic recommendations to lose weight. By contrast, waist circumference measurements indicated about 25 percent would need strong recommendations to shed pounds and 36 percent would need basic weight loss recommendations, Colombo said.
Moreover, 29 percent and 48 percent would have received similar weight loss recommendations according to total percent body fat measurements, while 21 percent and 54 percent would receive the same, according to body fat mass index.
…
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
After years of really heavy lifting and a few motorcycle wrecks, I suffer from chronic lower back pain. One of my doctors told me that the only thing people go to a doctor for more often is toothaches. So it is a very common problem but also very painful and limiting. But if you think that they have made real progress treating lower back pain in the past 10 years, think again. MSNBC has an article that explains how little progress has been made even though the cost of treating it has skyrocketed. This seem to the pattern in a lot of medical treatments now. With the advent of MRI’s and other high tech testing comes high prices that don’t necessarily translate into cures. With back pain, it seems that the high tech testing confirms what everyone already knows- that there is a problem. But it doesn’t seem to offer any real help in treatment.
…
CHICAGO – The total cost of treating back pain in the United States has risen 65 percent in the past decade, but after all the pricey treatments, many people are still left with an aching back and an increasingly empty wallet, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
They said treating spine problems in the United States costs $85.9 billion a year, rivaling the economic burden of treating cancer, which costs $89 billion.
Higher spending on prescription drugs, more advanced diagnostic tests and more frequent outpatient visits helped drive the increases, as well as greater patient demand for treatment and more use of spinal fusion surgery and instruments, they said.
Yet, for all of the spending, they found people with spine problems actually felt worse.
“Health care expenditures for people with spinal problems have increased substantially — 65 percent since 1997. Within that, we found pharmaceutical expenditures have increased 171 percent,” said Brook Martin of the University of Washington in Seattle, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“If we are spending that much money on spine problems, we would expect to see improvements in the health of the population,” Martin said in a telephone interview.
“What this study shows is we are not seeing commensurate improvements among people with spine problems.”
…
So, what is the answer? I think in many cases it comes down to people wanting a cure without having to do anything… The American “give me a pill” mentality. But in my case, the meds help some but not near as much as when coupled with exercise and stretching. Plus, with many of the people suffering from back pain also being overweight, it would help if doctors prescribed diets and well as pain killers and steroids. I think a good program of diet, exercise and physical tharepy is probably going to be key in helping many back pain sufferers. So if you are in this category, by all means take the anti-inflammatory drugs, but be diligent in stretching and losing the weight that you back has to carry around!
Artificial sweetener = weight gain?
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Seniors/fit, Supplements, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
Sounds crazy but researchers at Purdue have found that it is true in lab rats and may be true in humans. That may is a big one. But, instead of the sweetener industry saying “we really need to do some research and find out if this is affecting public health”, they immediately dismissed the research as being irrelevant. Just what you would expect from a multi billion dollar industry…
…
WASHINGTON – Using an artificial, no-calorie sweetener rather than sugar may make it tougher, not easier, to lose weight, U.S. researchers said Sunday.
Scientists at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, studied rats that were fed food with the artificial sweetener saccharin and rats fed food with glucose, a natural sugar.
In comparison to rats given yogurt sweetened with glucose, those that ate yogurt sweetened with saccharin went on to consume more calories and put on more weight and body fat.
”The data clearly indicate that consuming a food sweetened with no-calorie saccharin can lead to greater body-weight gain and adiposity than would consuming the same food sweetened with high-calorie sugar,” Purdue researchers Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson wrote in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, published by the American Psychological Association.
…”Such an outcome may seem counterintuitive, if not an anathema, to human clinical researchers and health care practitioners who have long recommended the use of low- and no-calorie sweeteners as a means of weight control.”
…
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
A few days ago, I wrote a post called “Train Hard”. Today, I want to look at the flip side of that coin and talk about training smart. You will never achieve your goals without both. So while training hard and pushing your self is critical to making significant gains, training smart is just as important because doing an exercise wrong or just plain doing the wrong exercises will not only hold you back, they could very easily injure you. I see guys doing exercises wrong really “hard” and know that they are eventually going to get hurt. This is really pretty common in gyms. Once again, look for the people in your gym who look good. They are the ones who are most likely to know what they are doing. Ask for help and learn. Read some of the good blogs and content out there and don’t be afraid to change your workout.
Finally, if you are battling an injury- say, a sore shoulder or elbow, be smart and don’t do the exercises that bother it. Usually, switching to a different exercise or even just changing the angle that you are pushing or pulling at will take the pressure off or the sore area. If not, give it a week to rest and do the standard things to speed healing like icing it after working out and taking some Ibuprofen or Aleve to reduce inflammation.
If you are going to train hard, you have to train smart as well.
