Tag Archives: pound

Ask and Answer

How do you keep yourself fit and healthy?

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Ask:

I was pretty active and thin when I first met my bf. Now, 5 years later and 25 pounds heavier I feel like a big fat jello ball. Nowadays I don’t even have the energy to drive to the gym. I want to get back to the way I was and I’m having a hard time. I need some advice and really want to know how some people do it. How do you get yourself to the gym everyday? How do you say no to the chips and ice cream?

How do you keep yourself fit and healthy? 

Thank you!

Answers:

Answer 1:

Almost same story here…I gained 15 pounds after getting married and I hated myself. I had no energy to exercise and it just kept getting worse!! I think my rock-bottom moment was trying on bathing suits for an upcoming trip to the beach and almost crying because of how I looked! Here is what I did and it has really worked for me so far.

Plan some sort of trip or goal you want to work towards. For me it was that beach trip, when I knew I would have to be in public in a bathing suit. That was enough for me to get off the couch and get moving. Continue reading How do you keep yourself fit and healthy? →

Ask and Answer

How good is swimming for an hour in the evenings, say three times a week?

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Ask:

Is it good for you? Is running better? Ie in trying to keep fit and shed pounds?

Answer:

Swimming is wonderful. The link below will give you estimates of calories burned for different types of swimming and taking your weight into account. You need to burn about 3500 calories for each pound lost.

Here are some ideas on weight loss and conditioning from my 360 Blog of September 10:

Don’t target more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into “starvation mode” and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat… the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn’t true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the “moderate” fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.  Continue reading How good is swimming for an hour in the evenings, say three times a week? →

Health Care

Your Hormones and Weight Loss: How to Find Balance

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Scientists are discovering there’s a hidden key to shedding pounds, and it’s got little to do with calories or willpower. Meet your hormones — and the surprising effect they have on weight.

Say you eat a doughnut. The doughnut you deserve because it’s a hellish day, and carbs are what will make this week — the one before your period — worth living through. Oh, the bliss when that powdered sugar hits your system! Until, inevitably, you crash, which leaves you exhausted and depressed… and sniffing around for another doughnut.

Because a doughnut is never just a doughnut. It’s a Molotov cocktail that you’re lobbing into your hormonal ecosystem.

Hormones are the chief executives of the body, governing everything: our sex lives, our stress lives, our immune response. Research has implicated hormonal imbalance in everything from breast cancer to short-term memory loss — as well as what we eat, why we eat it, and what happens to the body once the food is down our throats. Which means that when you picked up that doughnut, you weren’t just having a weak-willed moment. You were obeying your team of internal managers.

“There are at least 40 chemicals in our bodies that influence our appetite and what we eat,” says Robert Greene, M.D., medical director of the Sher Institute for Reproductive Medicine in Sacramento and the author of several books on optimizing hormones, most recently “Perfect Hormone Balance for Fertility.” “The good news is that we’re developing strategies to shift hormone signals to help people avoid weight gain as well as lose weight.”

It Starts with Good Balance
Three recent books claim that stabilizing our hormone levels is at least as important — if not more so — as the old equation of calories in, calories out. In “The Perfect 10 Diet,” Michael Aziz, M.D., founder and director of Midtown Integrative Medicine in New York City, claims any diet will fail unless it steadies the body’s level of insulin. “I know it sounds counterintuitive, but calorie counting is not everything,” Aziz says. “When insulin is secreted in higher amounts, you feel hungrier and you eat more. Willpower does not exist when insulin is high.”

Neuroscientist Daniel Amen’s diet plan in “Change Your Brain, Change Your Body” recommends optimizing hormone levels through daily interval training, balancing insulin, sleeping well, and lowering stress.  Continue reading Your Hormones and Weight Loss: How to Find Balance →

Health Care

How Overweight Pregnant Women Can Limit Weight Gain

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Overweight pregnant women who weighed themselves weekly and received text-message reminders about weight early in their pregnancy gained less weight than women who didn’t, a new study shows.

Gaining too much weight during pregnancy can bring on diabetes and may pose risks for babies.

“There is not a lot being done in early pregnancy to avoid weight gain and the complications,” said study author Catherine Lombard, of the Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine in Melbourne, Australia.

The preliminary results from the ongoing study will be presented Sunday (June 12) at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in Boston.

The women in the study were overweight, not obese, but were considered at high risk for gestational diabetes due to their weight, age and ethnic background. Further results from the study will determine whether the healthy lifestyle program in which the women participated also reduced gestational diabetes, a serious condition that can cause complications for both the mother and child during the pregnancy.

Overweight and pregnant

Among pregnant women in the United States, about half are overweight or obese, said Dr. Raul Artal, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics/Gynecology and Women’s Health at Saint Louis University. Artal conducts research on weight gain during pregnancy but was not involved in the study.

“I and many of my colleagues believe excessive weight gain in pregnancy is a major reason for the obesity epidemic in our country,” Artal said.

The Institute of Medicine guidelines on pregnancy weight gain, which were released in 2009, suggest a gain of 25 to 35 pounds for women of normal weight, 15 to 25 pounds for women who are overweight and 11 to 20 pounds for women who are obese.

Artal said the recommendations “have done a disservice to women.” “It is allowing too much weight gain” for women who are already obese or overweight, he said.

Complications from being overweight or obese during pregnancy include higher rates of birth defects and higher risk of gestational diabetes. Women with gestational diabetes are at seven times the risk of getting diabetes later in life than women who do not have the condition, Artal said.

Babies born to mothers with gestational diabetes have their own complications. “These babies have a tendency to be very large and therefore have traumatic deliveries, and more complications in delivery and in the first few days of life,” Artal said. These infants are at higher risk for obesity as children and adults.

Text messages and weekly weigh-in

Lombard’s study included 200 pregnant women who were at risk for gestational diabetes. The participants were divided into two groups, one that underwent the educational program and a control group. Continue reading How Overweight Pregnant Women Can Limit Weight Gain →