Lean and Hard

Not discussing unpleasant people here, although they should be given a wide berth. We're talking about creeping weight gain.

Things have a way of catching up to us when we stop paying attention. The cute little wildebeest foal kneels daintily to sip cool water from the Nile river. It's not focusing on its surroundings for the moment, the water is just too delicious not to enjoy the pleasure of slaking its thirst. Sadly, you know what happens. The ravenous, 20-foot crocodile has been creeping up, closer and closer until...the little foal is now afternoon tea.

If you stop paying attention to your fitness, guess what? The fat will get laid down, cell by cell, not calling attention to itself, as stealthily as a Predator drone seeking targets of opportunity
over Afghanistan. You don't really notice anything wrong for awhile. But eventually, when your clothes start feeling a bit tighter than usual, what happens? You blame the dry-cleaner.

Some of us don't start to really show weight gain until it gets to 30 or 40 pounds. When it gets to the point that we can't deny the truth any longer, we  feel discouraged and defeated. How am I going to lose this 40 pounds? Dieting is a waste of time! I'm OK the way I am! Etc.

The only way to avoid this unhappy outcome that I have found is to beware the creep. I have to stay on top of it or it will get so out of hand that the difficulty of fixing it seems overwhelming. It's so much easier to trim off 5 extra pounds than it is to confront and defeat 50 or more.

So take my advice and beware the creep!

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The Fight Against Cancer Includes Exercise - by Melanie Bowen

At the moment of receiving the initial diagnosis, cancer begins taking its toll on the body and the mind. The stress alone involved with hearing the news can be devastating. In addition, enduring subsequent treatments and medications all cause an emotional, physical and psychological strain. Numerous studies indicate that when cancer patients engage in some type of physical activity from the beginning they gain numerous benefits, aid in a quicker recovery, and improve the overall quality of life.

Light Exercise

When undergoing aggressive treatments for mesothelioma or other lung related cancers, even light exercise often makes a world of difference. Light exercise involves any repetitive physical movement that does not alter an individual’s breathing pattern. The activity does not cause shortness of breath and one may carry on a conversation while performing the exercise. The regimen is also not so strenuous that it causes perspiration.

Walking is a great example of a simple light exercise. The activity improves overall muscle strength, inhibits bone loss and helps combat the fatigue that patients commonly endure secondary to chemotherapy. Walking also offers emotional and psychosocial benefits, as individuals feel a sense of accomplishment. How often and how far patients walk depends on individual tolerance. Start by simply walking to and from the end of the block, and gradually increase the distance. Walk with a friend or a family member. This type of exercise proves especially beneficial for patients with cancers affecting the lungs.

Moderate Exercise

Patients finished with cancer treatment often begin some type of moderate activity, which helps regain strength faster. These activities typically produce perspiration after repetitive movement for 10 minutes. Respirations may become faster, but the exercise does not render the individual breathless. During the activity, one should have the ability to carry on a conversation without difficulty.

If patients are physically ready to take on a moderate level of exercise then water aerobics should be a consideration. Community swimming pools often offer this type of exercise class. The movements performed while in the buoyancy of an aquatic environment improve overall cardiovascular fitness, circulation and flexibility while increasing bone and muscle strength. Since water aerobics is considered as a low-impact exercise because being 90% lighter in the water, there is less stress placed on the joints. As a result, this exercise may be ideal for those with joint complications.

Advanced Exercise

After having regained strength and endurance from moderate activities, individuals typically progress to a more advanced level of exercise. These activities help tone the body and may aid in weight loss if needed. Aggressive exercise causes deep and rapid respirations. Perspiring begins after a few minutes.

Implementing a weight-training regimen further improves muscle and skeletal strength and enhances cardiovascular fitness when performed correctly. Although you may feel as if your body is ready to do more, when beginning a weight-training program it is important to not forget to start slowly and that healing is a gradual process. Get guidance from a physical therapist or seek advice from a trainer at a local gym. The type of training cancer survivors may attempt largely depends on the type of cancer and treatment individual patients endure. Coaches or therapists have the knowledge and expertise to create a program that targets specific areas of the body depending on a person’s strength and weaknesses.


Other positive aspects of continuing some type of physical routine throughout the treatment process include increased energy, a better appetite and a more restful sleep. Researchers also find that exercise often helps combat the discomfort and unpleasant side effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Before beginning any activity, always consult with your personal health care provider. Exercise and physical activity may not be a cure for cancer, however it should be considered as a crucial component in the road toward recovery.

Editor's Note: Melanie is currently a Master's student with a passion that stems from her grandmother's cancer diagnosis. She often highlights the great benefits of alternative nutritional, emotional, and physical treatments on those diagnosed with cancer or other serious illness.  To read more from Melanie, visit her blog for the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance. In her spare time, you can find Melanie trying new vegan recipes, on her yoga mat, or spending time with her family.

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Being overweight, not to mention morbidly obese, created a multitude of inconveniences and lifestyle restrictions for me, as it does for millions of Americans. One of these restrictions was the hassle of air travel.

Faced with the difficulties for an overweight person of walking through miles of airport corridors, as well as the discomfort of too-small airline seats, many simply give up on air travel altogether. It had been almost a decade since I last traveled by air. The thought of the challenges I would face was simply too overwhelming.

Now that I'm back to a healthy weight and level of fitness, I recently rejoined the air-traveling public, and the experience was a tremendous boost to my motivation to stay healthy and fit.

Walking through the airports was easy and comfortable. I fit comfortably in the economy-class seats. The seat belts had lots of extra length to cinch tight. And I wasn't embarrassed to be seen by the people at the other end.

You have to find motivation wherever you can, and for me, being able to travel comfortably is a biggie!

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Let's face facts: Gym music generally sucks.


I find myself wondering, when subjected to the indignity of having to hear what's coming over the hidden speakers, where do they find this music? There was one gym I worked out at years ago that had romantic soul music playing in the background. Talk about de-motivating. I felt like superman in the presence of a metric ton of kryptonite.

This is why you have to bring your own music to the gym. Good music takes my workouts to the highest levels and pushes my pace and intensity. I don't understand the neuroscience behind this phenomenon. but it's totally real.

So here's a new entry into the smartphone market that's specifically designed to motivate you: FIT Radio.

Check out the video to see it in action:




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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.

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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.

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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."



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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.”



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They say you should "Know thine enemy." The better to defeat him, right? This is true about the temptation to eat more than you need to maintain good health and an attractive, strong body. The more you know about the circumstances and conditions that make it difficult to eat right, the better you will be empowered to counter and successfully resist. Hence, this interesting article:

NPR - February 1. 2013 by SHANKAR VEDANTAM

Has the recession made you fat?

To the long and growing list of risk factors known to increase the risk of obesity, scientists recently added a new one: scarcity.

People given subtle cues that they may have to confront harsh conditions in the near future choose to eat higher-calorie food than they might do otherwise, a response that researchers believe is shaped by the long hand of evolution.

Evolutionary biologists have long speculated that in prehistoric times, when the blueprint of modern human behavior was created as our ancestors struggled for survival, gluttony may have been a useful response to scarcity: If you knew — or feared — a famine was coming, it made sense to tuck away as many calories as possible to prepare for it.


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Inkfish - 1.15.13 by Elizabeth Preston

BluePrintCleanse claims that the energy you save on digestion by not eating any real food gets diverted to "other metabolic processes." But Swoap says this is false. Your whole metabolism will slow at once, not just the tasks attached to digesting food. This will make it harder to lose weight.

Before I learned that it costs $65 to $90 to starve yourself for a day, I considered trying one day's worth of "juice cleansing" to put myself into the proper cranky fog for writing this piece. But if I'm going to eat no calories, I prefer to spend no dollars.

What did I give up by fueling myself on solid foods instead of liquefied produce? Really, one day would have been merely dipping a toe into the celery water. If I were a serious client of a juice cleanse company, I would pay for anywhere from three to ten days' worth of bottled juices, delivered to my doorstep in a cooler every morning.

The first few days of deprivation would, in theory, "cleanse the blood" and release toxins from my tissues that have been slowing me down and making me sick. I'd give my colon a break while "sweeping" it out. The latter days would boost my immune system and "fight off degenerative diseases." After all that detoxifying and boosting, I would feel energized and restored. I might even have lost a few pounds—but it's about health, not weight.



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