Weight Watchers Approved Meals at McDonalds
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This is just crazy… From MSNBC
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WELLINGTON, New Zealand – Meals approved by Weight Watchers are going on sale at McDonald’s in New Zealand, the companies said Wednesday, in a deal trumpeted as an enjoyable way to lose weight but that nutritionists criticize as a marketing ploy that doesn’t promote healthy eating.
As part of the deal — which the company says is the first of its kind in the world — McDonald’s will use the Weight Watchers logo on its menu boards and Weight Watchers will promote McDonald’s to dieters.
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Some of the items that are approved are Chicken McNuggets and the Filet-O-Fish. Both are high fat and fried. I suppose if you are just trying to get people to eat by a point system like Weight Watchers does, you can allow them to eat stuff like this but it is not a good way to get people to adopt a healthy lifestyle. In fact, it is probably damaging since there are now people who will eat deep fried food from McDonalds that never would have before. I would like to see how much money Weight Watchers is going to make off of this…
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Ohno training
I don’t think I will get much work done for the next couple of weeks with the Olympics on all day and night. At any rate, I love watching the speed skating, downhill, luge and bobsledding- really anything where they are racing at high speed. Figure skating I can take or leave, but I usually end up watching it just for the amazing skill involved. There are tons of good videos on NBC’s Olympic site like this one about Apolo Ohno’s training routine. Check it out…
Training Secrets from Winter Olympic Stars
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Squats
MSNBC has a great article from Men’s Health on training techniques used by top Winter Olympic athletes. At the core of these exercises is core exercises! One of the exercises that comes up over and over in many top sports is good ‘ol fashion squats. They are great for strengthening quads, glutes, Hamstrings, hips, lower back and abs. Remember, start small and work your way up. There is virtually no sport that will not benefit from squats. Add in one leg squats for strength and balance and you have a great core workout. There are of course an almost infinite variety of core exercises that you can do, so read the article and build your own killer workout.
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“Take the legs,” he says. “Instead of monkeying around with six different exercises and five different machines, why not just focus on back squats? Do them right, and there’s not much more you need.”
…During the early stages of an exercise cycle, Jason Hartman likes high reps with a short rest between sets, believing that a standard of about 3 sets of 10 repetitions, performed two or three times a week, keeps his athletes from trying to bang too much weight. (Of course, reduce the number of reps if your form begins to suffer due to fatigue.) He also focuses on just a handful of old-school standbys: squats, dips, pullups, power cleans, deadlifts, lunges, and sprints. “That’s it,” he promises. “That’s the secret to becoming an alpha male.”
FDA may update serving size on labels
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Ice Cream
One of the things I constantly remind people about in their quest to lose weight is “serving size”. If you look at the label on any packaged food, the serving size will be listed, such as “2 cookies” or “about 14 crackers”. The problem is that virtually no one in America eats 1 serving of anything. Even bread lists 1 serving as 1 slice. But no one makes a sandwich with 1 slice of bread and most people would naturally assume that 1 serving is 2 slices. If I were to make an educated guess from watching people eat, I would estimate that most people eat at least 2 servings of everything- maybe 3. That would be great if it were vegetables and fruit, but it is usually junk food or high carb, high fat stuff like ice cream. So, this really is a good idea. Knowledge is a good thing and helping people to understand just how much they really eat is important.
But here is the application- if you want to surprise yourself, measure out you food for a few days and calculate the actual calories. Just carry a small notebook with you and write down everything you eat right down to the ketchup you put on your fries (which you should skip). Pretty much every restaurant chain lists nutrition info on their website. You will probably be surprised to find out that you eat about twice as many calories as you think. That is why you can’t lose weight! From MSNBC-
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“If people don’t understand the serving, whatever number they get for fat or calories is misleading,” said William K. Hubbard, a former F.D.A. official who consulted with the agency last year.
Consider the humble chip: most potato or corn chip bags today show a one-ounce serving size, containing a tolerable 150 calories, or thereabouts. But only the most disciplined snacker will stop at an ounce. For some brands, like Tostitos Hint of Lime, that can be just six chips.
In the real world, many people might eat two or three times that, or more. Munch half a bag of Tostitos while watching the Super Bowl and you could take in about half the 2,000 calories an average person needs in a day.
Weight Lifting Makes You Smarter- Really
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Hack Squats
There is an old stereotype out there of the dumb weightlifter who really can’t do anything else very well. I think that stereotype really came from people who just don’t want to workout. Actually, the reverse is true… people who lift weights become measurably smarter. Really. I’ve met many very brilliant people in the gym and they weren’t just treadmill rats, they were hard core weightlifters. In one gym I worked out in, the evening crowd included a bunch of high powered personalities. One guy was an eye surgeon, another was a lawyer, another a CPA, etc. Of course there were stupid people in the gym as well. But there are stupid people everywhere. Yet, the perception persists and I really don’t know why- maybe the high school jocks vs. geeks thing. But the fact is that even at the most basic level, people who exercise are smarter simply because they realize that exercise is important for good health.
But, that’s not even the point of the article I’m referring to. Andrew over at MPF linked an article which suggests that weightlifting actually increases your cognitive abilities.
…Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises.
A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration — 0.5 percent. The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.
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I’ve been lifting weights ever since college and I don’t think most people consider me all that smart. It’s scary to think what I would be like if I didn’t lift weights every day! Anyways, good article. Check it out.
Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | Add Comment
Ok, this is not really an endorsement even though I really do like cheddar cheese. By the way, sharp cheeses are a great way to add flavor without adding a lot of calories.
Correlation between depression and junk food found
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Skip this for better health!
Whenever you start looking for cause/effect relationships, you invariably run the risk of getting it wrong and possibly backwards. But in this study there is a pretty good case to be made for eliminating as much junk food from your diet as possible since the correlation is so strong. It is possible that depressed people just eat more junk food. But with what we know about how diet affects every area of our lives, it is very likely that whole, natural, healthy foods benefit our brain function. So with that in mind, check out this article over at MSNBC Health and pass it along to your friends and family who might be struggling with depression. My experience is that changing your diet and adding exercise to your daily regimen has a powerful effect on mood as well as physical well-being. For a good 6 meal per day diet, check out this page…
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British and French epidemiologists analyzed food and mood data from 3,486 men and women (average age 55) in the Whitehall II study on London-based office staff. Each participant answered a food frequency questionnaire in which they were asked how often they had eaten a designated portion size of a food during the previous year (set responses ranged from “never” to “six or more times per day”).
That data was then converted to a daily intake and two dietary patterns were identified: the “whole food pattern” (defined by a high daily intake of vegetables, fruits, and fish) and the “processed food pattern” (characterized by high consumption of sweetened desserts, chocolates, fried food, processed meat, pies, refined grains, high-fat dairy products, and condiments). Five years later, all the participants answered a short questionnaire designed to measure symptoms of depression in the general population.
10 Strange Long term Health Clues
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Some of these are pretty weird, but there is science behind them. MSNBC has the whole list, but here are a couple-
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Older adults who couldn’t identify the scent of bananas, lemons, cinnamon, or other items were five times more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease within 4 years, according to a 2008 study in the Annals of Neurology. The researchers believe that the area of the brain responsible for olfactory function may be one of the first impacted by Parkinson’s disease — somewhere between 2 and 7 years prior to diagnosis.
Prevent it: Take fish oil supplements. Omega-3 fatty acids can boost your brain’s resistance to MPTP, a toxic compound responsible for Parkinson’s.
Multiple studies show that linear wrinkles in one or both lobes may predict future cardiovascular events (heart attack, bypass surgery, or cardiac death.) A crease on one lobe raises the risk by 33%; a crease on both lobes increases it by 77%, even after adjusting for other known risk factors, found a study in The American Journal of Medicine. Though experts aren’t exactly sure, they suspect a loss of elastic fibers may cause both the crease and the hardening of arteries.
Prevent it: Keep your heart healthy in other ways: Slim down, and lower your cholesterol and blood pressure.
The Benefits of Exercise for the Mind and Spirit
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walking in the woods
We often think that when it comes to diet, exercise and health that the latest is the greatest. We also tend to think that no one before us could possibly have the insight and clarity that our current generation has. But that is of course a fallacy and falls under the category of “chronological snobbery” as CS Lewis calls it. So here is a quote from the famous 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon-
He who forgets the humming of the bees among the heather, the cooing of the wood-pigeons in the forest, the song of birds in the woods, the rippling of rills among the rushes, and the sighing of the wind among the pines, needs not wonder if his heart forgets to sing and his soul grows heavy. A day’s breathing of fresh air upon the hills, or a few hours, ramble in the beech woods’ umbrageous calm, would sweep the cobwebs out of the brain of scores of our toiling ministers who are now but half alive. A mouthful of sea air, or a stiff walk in the wind’s face, would not give grace to the soul, but it would yield oxygen to the body, which is next best.
So head out and get oxygen! It will be good for you body, mind and spirit.
A Guide for Healthy Food and Eating
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Grilled Fish
WebMD has an article about an address Michael Pollan gave to a gathering of scientists and doctors at the CDC back in March. In the talk he gives 7 words and 7 rules for food and eating. He also notes that there are some ironies about American eating habits that we should pay attention to. Although he makes little mention of the importance of exercise, I feel the need to remind you that exercise has huge benefits that diet alone cannot make up for. But, all in all, he has some really good advice. When guys in the gym asks me about supplements and protein powder, I always tell them to simply save their money and buy good real food.
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As part of an effort to bring new ideas to the national debate on food issues, the CDC invited Pollan — a harsh critic of U.S. food policies — to address CDC researchers and to meet with leaders of the federal agency.
“The French paradox is that they have better heart health than we do despite being a cheese-eating, wine-swilling, fois-gras-gobbling people,” Pollan said. “The American paradox is we are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst diet in the world.”
In various parts of the world, Pollan noted, necessity has forced human beings to adapt to all kinds of diets.
“The Masai subsist on cattle blood and meat and milk and little else. Native Americans subsist on beans and maize. And the Inuit in Greenland subsist on whale blubber and a little bit of lichen,” he said. “The irony is, the one diet we have invented for ourselves — the Western diet — is the one that makes us sick.”
Snowballing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease in the U.S. can be traced to our unhealthy diet. So how do we change? Read on here!
