Blog: Nutrition and Exercise for Health and Weight Control

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Getting Stronger (like Rocky)

By this time, you’ve begun to make changes to your lifestyle. You’re eating better or exercising, or maybe both. Now, it’s time to add to your healthy strategies.

Take a look at your goals. Have you met some of them? Hopefully you’ve made at least a few small changes. Reevaluate your goals at regular intervals, every 2 or 3 months. Are they realistic? Are you capable of more than you thought you were? Seriously consider beginning strength training or stretching. Those are both important for optimal health and wellness. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I - Goal Setting and Rewards

It’s important to set goals and consider carefully why you are embarking on a weight-loss program. What are you looking to achieve? Do you have dreams of looking more attractive? Are you trying to improve your health? Do you desire to be a better role model for your children? Those are all excellent goals! But… how do you achieve them?

St. Francis of Assisi stated, “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” What he is basically saying is, start making small changes as you can, until you find that your small changes have added up to a rather surprising difference.

It’s crucial to have some goals written down at the beginning and re-evaluated at regular intervals throughout your journey. Besides overall long-term goals, you need short term goals to strive for on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It’s important that your goals don’t just tell you where you want to go, but how you are going to get there. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2005, U.S. Dietary Guidelines was revised and the 5-A-Day fruit and vegetable program was discarded as being inadequate. At that time the daily requirement for fruits and vegetables was increased to 7 to 13 servings for adults, based on age, gender, and level of physical activity.

Why the Change?

This was primarily due to the evidence from long-term nutritional studies such as the Framingham Study, the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Study. Those and other investigations consistently demonstrate that individuals who consume an average of 9 servings a day of fruits and vegetables have far more protection against common degenerative diseases such as cancer, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, arthritis, diverticulosis, and cataracts than those who consume only 5 servings. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an exercise that can help sort out the issues connected to weight control and aid you in your plan of attack. It’s from personal trainer Bob Greene’s website, www.TheBestLife.com.

He calls it the Circle of Life and with it you can identify what things are most important to you, what areas of your life need improvement, and how to work on the problem areas. It’s especially helpful for improvement in disconnected eating such as eating in response to habits, emotions, other people’s expectations, etc where satisfying hunger is not the central issue.

Slice up Your Life

To begin, draw a large circle on a sheet of paper. Divide it into pie shaped wedges. These sections represent the things you consider critical to a fulfilling life such as health, friends, career, romance, spiritual, financial, marriage, family and so on. Write one important factor in each slice. Read the rest of this entry »

The majority of people in our nation have unhealthy eating habits, which coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, are deadly. The typical American diet raises cholesterol and blood pressure, clogs arteries, reduces the body’s ability to process sugar, and promotes disease. The result is our steadily increasing rates of heart disease, type II diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and cancer, just to name a few.

But it’s not only what we eat that’s killing us; it is how much we eat as well. Portions sizes have grown tremendously while activity levels have declined. The obesity epidemic is a testimony of our soft choices. Here are some very doable changes for all of us to protect our health and increase our longevity. Read the rest of this entry »

Osteoporosis is a major cause of disability in older women and bone loss starts after menopause in response to loss of estrogen. Exercise can increase your muscle strength, improve balance, and reduce bone loss.

It’s important to find the safest, most enjoyable activities you can do, given your overall health and degree of bone loss. This varies widely for different people.

Three types of activities are usually recommended.

• Resistance training to increase the strength of your muscles and surrounding tissues
• Aerobic exercise that strengthens your heart and lungs
• Flexibility exercise that preserves and increases your ability to move with complete range-of-motion. Read the rest of this entry »

American food technology is filled with stories of how we attempt to cheat nature and get away with it. Examples include sugar that doesn’t have calories or a fat that doesn’t spoil (trans fat) and there’s always a price to pay. It’s usually much higher than we would have ever imagined.

Recent studies reveal that overweight risk increases by approximately 40% with each daily can of diet soda. Although studies don’t prove that diet drinks cause weight gain, the evidence indicates that something linked to artificial sweeteners facilitates fat deposition.

How it Happens

1. When you eat or drink something that tastes sugary, but has no Read the rest of this entry »

There is a growing body of evidence that cocoa and other forms of chocolate may keep blood pressure down, your blood flowing and your heart healthy.

This is mainly true for dark chocolate and in modest portions only. The recommended amounts range from 30 grams, the size of a Hershey’s kiss, to an ounce, which is about half of a normal size Hershey bar. You knew there was a catch, but half a bar is still a good treat.

Origin of Health Benefits Read the rest of this entry »

With the effort required to arrange your day to exercise and the energy required for strength training, you may be wondering, “Is this really worth it?” “If I run, do I need to lift weights too?” “What’s the minimum I need to do to get by?” Cheer up, a research team at Boston University Medical School used genetic engineering to develop MyoMouse who could be changed from an overweight weakling into a hunk of muscle at the flip of a biochemical switch.

They also studied how this affected the mouse’s overall health. They inserted a genetic switch to activate and deactivate a gene called akt1. This gene enables skeletal muscle to build type II muscle fibers, normally by weightlifting and other forms of strength training. Read the rest of this entry »