An Interesting Article

posted by Stacy

I stumbled upon this article today.   Suddenly I felt a pang of guilt and put down my delicious FRIED onion rings...drat!


Exercise Alone May Not Fight Weight Gain
Katherine Hobson, USNews.com  US News Article Link

There's a lot of attention paid to what works when it comes to losing weight. But that's not really the hard part; anyone can diet or exercise in the short term, but maintaining a loss, avoiding age-related weight creep, and keeping up healthful habits over time is much more difficult. That's why the researchers behind a new study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, wanted to examine the habits of people who were eating what they considered a normal diet and were "living life as usual," says one of the authors, I-Min Lee, an associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston... And they made some interesting discoveries about the power of exercise.

When researchers followed more than 34,000 non-dieting women (average age 54.2) over many years, they found that regular physical activity was associated with gaining less weight over time—but only in women who weren't overweight or obese.  (That means a BMI of lower than 25, or less than 150 pounds for a 5'5" woman.) And those women had to exercise quite a bit: An average of an hour a day of moderately intense activity—such as a brisk walk—or the equivalent (if you exercise more strenuously, less time is required) during a week was the amount of activity recorded for the normal-weight women who gained less than 5 pounds during the 13-year study. (Just 13.3 percent of women studied fit that bill.)

That may sound like bad news for those people of normal weight who aren't exercising that much, not to mention everyone who is overweight or obese, says Lee. But it doesn't mean that physical activity of less than 420 minutes a week is worthless. Working out at a moderate intensity for 150 minutes a week, as the government recommends, is associated with a lower risk of many chronic diseases, no matter your weight.
But it does underline that exercise on its own, with no attention paid to calories, is unlikely to carve away excess weight or prevent gain. (Even people training for a marathon can gain weight; it's far easier to eat than to burn off what you eat.) Remember that none of these women were consciously dieting; the study can't say whether exercise is useless for overweight or obese women who are actively attempting to lose weight by also changing their eating habits. And that "usual diet" consumed by the women probably differs by their weight. It's likely that normal-weight women eat fewer calories as a matter of routine, without thinking of it as a diet.

Yet exercise also appears to be an important factor in maintaining a healthy weight, according to this and other studies. Research published in 2008 found that women who dieted and were then able to keep off 10 percent of their body weight for two years also exercised more than the government recommends, about 275 minutes a week. The amount of exercise needed to sustain a healthy weight may be in question, but the principle is consistent: Get out there and move.

Just Say NO To Samples

Posted by Steph

Today I had to run to the grocery store because we mysteriously run out of milk. I’m starting to think that the cereal fairy comes at night and pours our milk down the sink. On second thought, it may be Camden. That boy consumes more cereal than anyone I know (except for maybe Connor).

Anyway, I ran in the store to grab a few things and today happened to be SAMPLE day. You would have thought I was at Costco, but no, this was our little grocery store up the road.

As I approached the first sample lady she asked if I wanted a sample of some turkey sausage. I politely declined and continued on my way. The second sample lady came out from behind her cooking station and accosted me trying to get me to sample whatever was on her menu. I again declined, politely, and she literally scoffed at me like “who doesn’t want a free sample?” I immediately turned down the first isle that I came to, to get away from her. As I continued getting the items on my list, I realized I forgot one thing, which happened to be on the other side of the store by the two sample ladies. I almost went home without it, but I figured I would venture back over that way so I didn’t have to make an additional trip back.

I walked by the second lady first and made certain I DID NOT make any eye contact, but it just so happened that the first sample lady was right in front of what I was looking for. Again, she asked me if I would like a sample of some turkey sausage. Again I said no, and then… she asked me why. (They must have been slow that day, or maybe they get paid by the amount of sausage they give out, I’m not sure, but I’ve never been asked that before.) I simply told her that I watch what I eat very carefully. Her reply was this turkey sausage was weight watchers approved! I again told her no thank you and she LAUGHED AT ME!! Now forgive me for what I’m about to say, but this lady could stand to lose a few pounds herself (or maybe a job change, because it looked like she had sampled a few too many of her own items), so I told her that I had recently lost 30 pounds and it was due to the fact I counted EVERY calorie that I put in my mouth. She immediately stopped laughing and said: “Dang girl, you look good!”

So, just say NO to samples!

Hold that Donut!

Found an interesting article in TIME magazine called "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin" and thought it was interesting. Here's some excerpts...

…The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued…

Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home.

Church…has a theory. "I see this…amongst, like, my wife's friends," he says. "They're like, 'Ah, I'm running an hour a day, and I'm not losing any weight.'" He asks them, "What are you doing after you run?" It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward. Says Church: "…wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you're going to neutralize with just half that muffin."

All this helps explain why our herculean exercise over the past 30 years — all the personal trainers, StairMasters and VersaClimbers; all the Pilates classes and yoga retreats and fat camps — hasn't made us thinner. After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in "sports" drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you're hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it's easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting…It's likely that I am more sedentary during my non-exercise hours than I would be if I didn't exercise with such Puritan fury

…We all need to move more — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded.

In short, it's what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight.

NOW DON'T STOP RUNNING FOLKS, the article goes on to say…

People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases — those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses…

In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability…Another study, released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago, found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.