Love Biggest Loser? Read this!

Just in case you DO know who Jillian Michaels is but DON'T know Yoni Freedhoff and in case you dream of what it would be like to be on The Biggest Loser (and note I said dream not have nightmares about...), read this: 

(Bolding is mine for emphasis)

The Real Biggest Losers? The Show's Audience

Dear American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP),

Last week, reinvigorated by some fresh young blood, season 14 of the prime-time weight loss extravaganza known as The Biggest Loser enjoyed its most watched premiere in its nine-year history. And when I say young blood I mean it, as this season marks the first time that The Biggest Loser has included children in the mix -- two 13-year-olds and one 16-year-old round out the cast.
While I personally find the show to be an emotionally and physically abusive, misinformative, horror show, it's clearly beloved and trusted by many -- that record premiere was reported to have been viewed by over 7-million people. And while my personal opinions shouldn't concern you, the peer-reviewed medical literature stemming from The Biggest Loser, as well as the AAP's implicit endorsement of the show, should.

Perhaps not surprisingly given what appears to be the overarching theme of the show -- that obesity is the individually controlled consequence of gluttony and laziness -- a study published in the journal Obesity this past May demonstrated that watching even a single episode of The Biggest Loser dramatically increased hateful weight bias among viewers -- an effect that was heightened among non-overweight viewers.

Given this season's causal billing as a "big, bold mission: to tackle the childhood obesity epidemic head-on," no doubt viewers are going to be looking to the teachings of The Biggest Loser to help with their children's struggles. Therefore along with being taught that obesity is treatable by means of incredible amounts of vomit-inducing exercise, severe dietary restriction, and never-ending servings of guilt and shame, the medical literature suggests viewers will also be taught that failure is an obese child's personal choice -- something that their bullies have been saying forever. Indeed increasing hateful weight bias is the last thing America's already over-bullied overweight children need as a recent study on bullying published in the journal Pediatrics found that the odds for being bullied for an overweight child were 63 per cent higher than their lighter peers.

The metabolic impact of The Biggest Loser's weight loss formula of exercising a minimum of 4 hours a day while enduring a highly restrictive diet has also been studied. Using indirect calorimetry and doubly labelled water researchers determined that by week 30 participants' metabolisms were decimated -- they had slowed by 504 more calories per day than would have been expected simply as a consequence of their losses. This led the study's authors to conclude (emphasis mine):

"Unfortunately, fat free mass preservation did not prevent the slowing of metabolic rate during active weight loss, which may predispose to weight regain unless the participants maintain high levels of physical activity or significant caloric restriction."

This finding may help to explain why according to the three Biggest Loser alumni I recently interviewed, 85-90 per cent of participants regain their weight, and where more often than not those who do sustain their losses have translated those losses into careers as personal trainers or motivational speakers.

The fact that The Biggest Loser trainers have gone on record this year and formally reported that they won't yell at the show's children is a testament to the ugliness of the show as a whole. And regardless of how the children are treated, it doesn't change what seems to be the show's ultimate message: that happiness, self worth, success, and pride are wholly determined by the numbers on a scale and that people, now including children, who remain obese are lazy gluttons who just don't want it badly enough. As horrifying as that message is, more horrifying that it's being promoted under the AAP's own banner as the show has recruited Dr. Joanna Dolgoff as their pediatrician and new on-screen character. Reading her biography on NBC's The Biggest Loser page reveals just six words in that she's also an, "official spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics."

The biggest losers each and every season aren't in fact the contestants, they're the viewers. By watching The Biggest Loser and basing their devoted adoration only on the proverbial "after" pictures, but not the "after-after" pictures, viewers are being taught non-sustainable approaches to weight management that in turn the medical literature suggests promote hatred of those who struggle with their weight, and potentially of themselves.

That children are involved in the show this year will likely increase the number of children watching and in so doing increase already rampant school-based weight-related child bullying. It may well also lead young overweight or obese viewers to feel even more guilt, shame and self-loathing than they already feel which in turn might heighten their risks of developing body image and eating disorders. Truly, if guilt, shame or self-loathing were sufficient for weight loss the world would be skinny as those who struggle with their weight, especially children, have no shortage of those particularly painful emotions.

Please do the right thing. Speak up about The Biggest Loser. I would argue that it's poisoning an already sick nation and right now it would appear that you're in fact fully and officially on board.

Sincerely,
Yoni Freedhoff, MD
Assistant Professor, University of Ottawa
Faculty of Medicine
Medical Director, Bariatric Medical Institute

How cool is this?!

Keep a Snake Plant in Your Bedroom to Improve the Air Quality While You Sleep

Melanie Pinola (From LifeHacker)

 

 

The Snake Plant, or Mother-in-Law's Tongue, is one of the most recommended plants for improving air quality. The optimal place to keep this relatively inexpensive and low-maintenance plant is the bedroom, because it converts CO2 into oxygen at night.

In its roundup of the best cheap plants for improving indoor air quality, Wisebread notes that Mother-in-Law's Tongue is recommended by a NASA study (which lists at least a dozen air-improving plants) and researcher Kamal Meattle, who has shown us that just three common houseplants can improve indoor air.

Meattle says Mother-in-Law's Tongue is known as "the bedroom plant." While most plants take away oxygen at night, this one gives off oxygen at night. The plant also filters formaldehyde, trichloroethylene, xylene, toluene, and benzene from the air. Meattle recommends 6-8 waist-high plants per person for optimal output from this oxygen factory.

Check out Wise Bread's post for other inexpensive houseplants to improve the air in other areas of your home.

Love this quote!!

The winds of grace are blowing all the time. All you have to do is raise your sails. --Buddha

Love this thought!  Hope it speaks to you, too!

Walking

We may be getting smarter (jury's still out on that).  Getting back to the basics is probably the best way to make our bodies work optimally.  The other day I read a post by Michael Moore about walking.  I'm not really any kind of Michael Moore fan but I have to say I agree with most of what he said this time.

Essentially, this Facebook post talks about the walking he started last March.  He, according to the post, has walk everyday since he started.  And unlike many of us, he's not doing it to be healthier or to lose weight -- he's just walking to walk because he's actually enjoying it.  He asserts that health and weight loss may be a byproduct but the real benefits come from doing something we are designed to do....just walk.

And now for another endorsement for walking, author Wayne Curtis has authored this (it's not really a "quick read" but it may just change how you think about walking):

The Walking Tour Skipping StepsExploring the lost art of the in-depth walk.

By Wayne Curtis

Dumaine Street is one of the narrow, old streets lined with spalled buildings in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It’s rather beautiful. And I absolutely loathe it. Mostly, I loathe it for its obstinate refusal to arrange itself in proper chronological order.

When I walk down Dumaine, I’m often trailed by a half-dozen or so tourists, and I’m trying to tell them the story of the city. I volunteer for a nonprofit group, and once a month or so I lead architectural walking tours of the French Quarter. The tour lasts about two hours. Along the way, I try to offer up some small insights into the French Quarter and how it got that way. That Dumaine Street won’t cooperate with my narrative is an affront each and every time.

First we pass lovely Creole cottages from the 1820s, and then a proud 1788 raised wood-sided structure built in the French colonial style. Next door is a townhouse with an entrance characteristic of the mid-19th century. Just up the block is a house with flat roof that was typical of the 18th century Spanish period, showing up like a friend late for a party. Then next door is a pair of shotgun-style houses with millwork frippery dating to the second half of the 19th century. It’s as if the city had carted out houses for a yard sale, and just left them along the curb without any plot or plan.

I talk a minute or two about each, but I always feel that I’ve failed in my job. We’re all hardwired for a story with beginning, a middle, and an end, and here I’ve just spouted random, unconnected anecdotes about a grab-bag of different styles. For someone who grew up reading novels and book-length non-fiction, I feel like I’ve been reduced to tweeting the history of the French Quarter.

Modern life, of course, keeps getting more chopped, diced and disjointed. Nonfiction seems to be getting shorter and shorter (magazine editors no longer even apologize to writers for assigning “listicles” or “charticles”). And the long walk has gradually become disaggregated into a series of miniature marches, each now with its own purpose. Anything more than 140 characters or a few dozen steps begins to feel burdensome; we grow restless. The walking tour I lead clocks in at just under mile, and for some visitors that qualifies as adventure travel.

How much do Americans typically walk in a day? A study published in 2010 rigged up 1,136 Americans with pedometers, and concluded that we walk an average of 5,117 steps every day. (No surprise: that was significantly less than in other countries studied — both Australians and the Swiss walked around 9,600 steps daily, and the Japanese 7,100.)

It’s also widely assumed that we walk far less than our forebears, but that’s tough to prove — you won’t find much in the way of pedometer studies from the 19th century. But we can draw some conclusions from other information — like how many kids walk to school today versus the past. In the 19th century, of course, everyone walked to school, since buses didn’t exist and districts were designed to accommodate walking. By 1969 more than half of all school kids still walked to school. Today, it’s about 13 percent.

Another: A study of Old Order Amish in southern Canada in 2004 recruited nearly a hundred adults to wear pedometers for a week. This is a little like using pedometers in the 19th century; the Amish don’t have cars or tractors, and still get around in large part by foot and horse-drawn carriage. The average number of steps per day for Amish men, it turned out, came in at 18,425. For women it was 14,196 steps.

America was once the land of the long walk, at least if you didn’t have the means to ride a horse, or, starting around 1900, to drive a car. We walked and walked, and the process both learned and told our own stories and that of the land around us. Walking stitched together our nation with tight, durable seams, not like high-speed highways that render stitching that’s sloppy, loose, and easily undone. Undertaking a 10- or 15-mile mile walk was once something Americans might do routinely in an afternoon. No special note was made of it. In 1906, just as cars were coming into vogue, the nation was afflicted by a small outbreak of long-distance walking — multi-day walking races and long-distance walkers seemed to be tromping everywhere. A splenetic editorial in American Gymnasia magazine took a dim view of the attention being lavished on the long-distance walks. “It is simply another mark of the degree of physical degeneracy (is that too strong a term?) of the present day that long walks are uncommon enough to excite special attention — not 1,200 mile walks but even 50-mile trips. And for most of us ten miles is a distance to cover which we must use much effort, and having made it are quite sure to indulge in self-praise.”

That 5,000 steps we take each day translates into about two and a half miles every day, or 900 miles per year. That’s not insubstantial. But I’m pretty sure the quality of our walks has also changed — when we move by foot today — at least in my experience and what I hear from others — it always seem to involve brief, intense tromps motivated by a single purpose. We walk to the garage to get to the car. We walk from the mall parking lot to Best Buy. We walk from Gate 4 to Gate 22 in Terminal B.

Essentially, we tweet with our feet.

What do we lose by walking less, and breaking up our walks into Halloween-candy sized missions? We lose that opportunity to tightly stitch together our world. A long walk — it takes about three hours to walk 10 miles, and without breaking a sweat — gives us time with our thoughts, and establishes the right speed to appreciate the complexity of the world around us. It gives us time to plait the warp of random observations and the woof of random thought. We create a narrative and a place. Americans drive an average of 13,400 miles each year, or about 36 miles a day. The one time people spend long periods alone with their thoughts tends to be in a car — on long drives or stuck in traffic. But it’s not the same. In a car, we’re cocooned, isolated from a complex environment that can engage us.

And as traffic historian Tom Vanderbilt has noted, our highway system today essentially mimics “a toddler’s view of the world, a landscape of outsized, brightly colored objects and flashing lights” as we speed along “smooth, wide roads marked by enormous signs.” Heading down an on-ramp to merge onto a highway, it’s as if we’re entering a day care center for adults. We push on pedals and turn a big wheel. We communicate with others by blaring a horn that plays a single note, or by employing a hand signal that involves a single finger.

“‘The pedestrian mind doesn’t get very far in a day, but it has the opportunity to see where it is going,” noted a writer in the Saturday Review of Books. That was written in 1928, and even then — when the gulf between walking and driving was scarcely a gully — he could see the outlines of two differing ways of thinking: The walking mind and the driving mind. (“Vehicular minds move under some other power than themselves and hence grow flabby and become crowd minds, standardized and imitative.”)

On our tweet-length, mission-driven walks we remain cloistered in the sanctuary of our minds, focused on our immediate goal. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I’ve never an interesting thought walking from the outer edge of a parking lot to the entrance of a big box store. I’m too wrapped up in plotting my mission, figuring out how to get in and out as efficiently as possible.

Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book, The Shallows, suggested, essentially, that Google was making us stupid. He cited one researcher who noted, “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level.” Carr went on to add, “skimming is becoming our predominant mode of reading,” and we are adept at “non-linear reading.” We lose our capacity for “in-depth reading.”

We also seem to be losing our capacity for in-depth walking. Walking is now short-term scanning. Thoreau liked to spend four hours every day rambling, free of tasks and immediate goals. He lamented that his fellow townsmen would recall pleasant walks they’d taken a decade ago, but had “confined themselves to the highway ever since.” “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of his friend. “If shut up in the house, he did not write at all."

On the French Quarter walking tours, I always hope to build connections to a complex, fascinating past, sometimes ennobling, often troubling. I tell visitors on my walking tours to make sure they look down so they don’t stumble on the notoriously uneven walks, and look up so they don’t miss the notoriously elaborate ironwork, which is essentially 19th century architectural bling.

But I also urge them to linger at hidden, gated walkways that run between or beneath many French Quarter homes. These often lead to courtyards that are alive with banana trees and bougainvillea and traces of lives once lived. These are worlds invisible by car, and just as invisible to those on a project-driven mission.

“Walking… validates the reality of the past in the present,” wrote Allice Legat, a Canadian anthropologist, “and in doing so, continually re-establishes the relations between place, story and all the beings who use the locale.”

I’m gradually coming to terms with the chronological chaos of Dumaine Street. I’m letting go of the narrative I want to impose on the city. I’m now just hoping to slow things down, and let those walking with me build their own narrative and chronology from the small details along the way. • 21 December 2012

---

Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and the author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails. He's currently working on a book about the history of walking in America. Find him at his website or follow him @waynecurtis.

I'm back

Hmmmm....so it's been a long while (actually, a little over a year) since I've posted anything here.  Just to catch you up, I've put my Eating Coach blog on hiatus.  After 1000 posts focusing almost exclusively on mindful eating, I started feeling like it was time to round out my offerings a little bit.

There is so much good and interesting information out there to help us all become healthier (my personal and professional goal!) that it started to feel just too confining to spend all that time focusing on just one ingredient in the recipe for better health.  I hope you enjoy  what you read here!  I am happy to be back with all of you :)

--Kristi

Doctors should inspire.

One of the best things I've read lately!

From Jay Parkinson's blog: the FutureWell

"As doctors, we have pills to treat infections and high cholesterol. We have scalpels to replace hips and open clogged arteries. But beyond pills and scalpels, what tools do we have? Walking out of the doctor’s office without a prescription is a rare occurrence these days. And the famous surgeon tagline has always been “a chance to cut is a chance to cure.” We see people when they’re sick and we’re trained and expected to do something. But do we want more than one of every five kids and nine of ten older Americans taking prescription drugs? Do we really think that more heart stents are the secret to longevity? Of course they are if we believe our job as physicians is to treat the symptoms rather than the cause.

I’m trained in Preventive Medicine, one of the twenty four specialties recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. Out of the nearly 16,000 medical students that graduate every year, only about 120 choose Preventive Medicine. Does that really mean that less than one percent of doctors think preventing disease is more important than treating it? I’m afraid so. Maybe it’s because our medical culture hasn’t figured out how to profit off health, rather than sickness? Or maybe it’s because our doctors simply aren’t creative enough to think beyond pills and scalpels? Of course it’s a mixture of both and many more, but I think the main reason is we’re absolutely clueless how to treat bad lifestyle from the confines of the 8 minute office visit. It’s a horribly outdated tool for the problem at hand.

Health happens in your home and in your neighborhood, not in the exam room. Health is all the little routines you have in your life, some of them good and some of them bad. But in order to lead a wonderfully fulfilling life, we have to look at health as being the optimal mix of good food; fun movement; real relationships with people you love; financial success; a job that leverages your best skills; a neighborhood that makes health easy; and the wild card– sex, drugs, and rock & roll. I threw that last one in because health has traditionally been so burdensome and black and white. But in real life, health is grey and life is fun. And being a good doctor is much more than writing prescriptions and doing procedures, it’s about knowing your patients and inspiring them.

My first practice was strictly a house call practice where I’d see patients in their apartments here in Brooklyn and follow up with them via email or Skype. It was lean and cost $1500 to launch. I was profitable in the first month because my overhead was only about 10%. My patients paid me via PayPal and my visits were typically less than $100. I couldn’t have done any of this without my iPhone and my MacBook. I used today’s technology to practice yesteryear’s medicine. It enabled me to be real-time traveling somewhere in my neighborhood awaiting my iPhone to alert me of my next appointment. Granted, I couldn’t see 40 patients a day like other doctors. But I wanted quality, not quantity. I wanted a real relationship with good, respectful communication. And 6 to 8 house calls a day in your neighborhood gives you way more information about people than 40 harried visits in some faraway institution. But that’s just the business side of things.

Most importantly, I saw how people lived. I could see the chubby person’s potato chips on the counter, the mice droppings in the asthmatic’s ultra-cool Williamsburg loft, or the depressed person’s evidence they spent a lot of lonely time by themselves staring at glowing rectangles. My neighbors were my patients and I couldn’t walk more than two blocks without someone saying “Hey Doc!” I liked to think that every time someone said that, they were reminded about living healthier. They saw me at the farmer’s market on Saturdays, going to the gym, having barbecues in the backyard with friends, and drinking at the corner bar. I became a regular fixture in their neighborhood. Hopefully, I was this occasional little familiar nudge that inspired them to chase the good life. And if you ask me, that’s what we as doctors need to be asking ourselves the next time we write a prescription– am I inspiring or am I perpetuating a broken system?"

How biking can save $3.8 BILLION per year in avoided mortality and health care costs!

Here's an interesting article reported by Scope blog:

"Convincing Americans to ride their bikes instead of driving when traveling short distances during the warmest six months of the year could yield significant health and economic benefits, according to findings published today in Environmental Health Perspectives.


In the study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined the largest 11 metropolitan areas in the upper Midwest and calculated the effects on air pollution and health costs if short car trips, five miles or less round-trip, were replaced with bicycle trips. According to a university release:

The biggest health benefit was due to replacing half of the short trips with bicycle trips during the warmest six months of the year, saving about $3.8 billion per year from avoided mortality and reduced health care costs for conditions like obesity and heart disease.

[Additionally, the] report calculated that these measures would save an estimated $7 billion, including 1,100 lives each year from improved air quality and increased physical fitness.

Researchers say they hope the study serves as motivation for city planners to make communities more bike friendly and invest in separate paths or lanes for cyclists, storage racks and public transit."