Avoiding the Yo-Yo Effect

Pin It

They say consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Maybe so in some respects, but with fitness, it's the only way to succeed over the long term.

When I was getting my undergrad degree at the University of Florida, I'm proud to say, I never pulled an all-nighter. Not once. I hate the idea itself, but more than that, it's a bad way to study. It just isn't a good idea to take a test after staying up all night, essentially in a sleep-deprived condition. Instead, I preferred to prepare myself for tests over a period of weeks, a bit at a time. It's like they say, the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

How did I lose 130 pounds? By skipping a bite at a time, and working out consistently. And consistency is also the way to maintain your ideal weight. But I found myself getting away from that philosophy without realizing it.

Here's what happened. I indulged too often in my greatest temptation: pizza. So I found that I'd add a few pounds from the pizza pig-out, and have to cut way back during the rest of the week just to stay at my ideal weight over the course of the week. I'd starve, then be so hungry and feel so deprived that the end-of-the-week pizza became irresistible. Then back to deprivation, pizza, deprivation, pizza, and so on and so forth and what have you. Not good. I had to break the cycle.

I did it by eating more during the week so as not to feel so deprived, then doing without the pizza altogether. Which is not to say I won't ever have pizza again, but certainly I won't indulge in it very often. Consistency! It works for me.

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for free email updates.

Exercise Fixes You From the Inside Out

Pin It Motivation to exercise is sometimes hard to find, I know. That's why we need to store up in our minds and hearts all the great reasons to get out and just do it (sorry, Nike). Here's one that might get you over the hump on those kinds of days...

It helps to know that, when you exercise regularly, some pretty awesome changes take place in your body on a cellular level, and these changes can have profoundly desirable consequences. As it happens, one of the reasons we age and our bodies deteriorate is that our cells have a limited number of times they can effectively replicate themselves. After a certain number of duplications, the DNA bits that cap the end of our cells' chromosomes, called telomeres, run out and our cells die.

Exercise, it has been found, actually prevents the shortening or the telomeres, thus putting off the death of our cells. Hence, a longer, healthier life! This from an excellent Live Science article found here:

The researchers measured the length of telomeres in blood samples from two groups of professional athletes and two groups who were healthy nonsmokers, but not regular exercisers.

"The most significant finding of this study is that physical exercise of the professional athletes leads to activation of the important enzyme telomerase and stabilizes the telomere," said Ulrich Laufs, the study's lead author and professor of clinical and experimental medicine at Saarland University in Homburg, Germany.

"This is direct evidence of an anti-aging effect of physical exercise," Laufs said. "Physical exercise could prevent the aging of the cardiovascular system, reflecting this molecular principle."

This means younger skin, younger organs, a younger body. Thinking about this has gotten me to the gym more than once.


Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for free email updates.

Optimism is Healthier

Pin It

The Atlantic - 3.13.13 by Emily Esfahani Smith

Far from being delusional or faith-based, having a positive outlook in difficult circumstances is not only an important predictor of resilience -- how quickly people recover from adversity -- but it is the most important predictor of it.

One of the most memorable scenes of the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook revolves around Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, a novel that does not end well, to put it mildly.

Patrizio Solitano Jr. (Bradley Cooper) has come home after an eight-month stint being treated for bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital, where he was sentenced to go after he nearly beat his wife's lover to death. Home from the hospital, living under his parents' charge, Pat has lost his wife, his job, and his house. But he tries to put the pieces of his life back together. He exercises, maintains an upbeat lifestyle, and tries to better his mind by reading through the novels that his estranged wife Nikki, a high school English teacher, assigns her students.

Pat takes up a personal motto, excelsior -- Latin for "ever upward." He tells his state-appointed therapist, "I hate my illness and I want to control it. This is what I believe to be true: You have to do everything you can and if you stay positive you have a shot at a silver lining."

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for free email updates.

Fast Foods: Designed to be Addictive?

Pin It

New York Times - 2.20.13 by Michael Moss

What I found, over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive.

Grant Cornett for The New York Times

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends. Their stature was defined by their skill in fighting one another for what they called “stomach share” — the amount of digestive space that any one company’s brand can grab from the competition.

James Behnke, a 55-year-old executive at Pillsbury, greeted the men as they arrived. He was anxious but also hopeful about the plan that he and a few other food-company executives had devised to engage the C.E.O.’s on America’s growing weight problem. “We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.” Getting the company chiefs in the same room to talk about anything, much less a sensitive issue like this, was a tricky business, so Behnke and his fellow organizers had scripted the meeting carefully, honing the message to its barest essentials. “C.E.O.’s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they’re uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things,” Behnke said. “They don’t want to be embarrassed. They don’t want to make commitments. They want to maintain their aloofness and autonomy.”

Follow me on Twitter. Please subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for free email updates.