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Obesity
Why Exercise Won't Help You Lose Weight . . . Sort Of
There have been a lot of reports in the last year confirming that contrary to popular belief, not all exercise leads to significant weight loss. If you want to shed pounds, it mostly comes down to diet. It’s no surprise that changing your diet can help you lose weight, but for decades, many people believed that exercise was the best pathway to a slimmer, fitter you.
Is America's Antifat Rhetoric Out of Hand?
Being obese is unhealthy for many reasons — most recently, we learned it could lead to brain degeneration — but does that mean we should demonize overweight people?
A recent story on Newsweek.com questions whether this antifat rhetoric is totally out of control. From the "real" sized model featured in Glamour to outrage over President Obama's nomination of a heavyset woman, Regina M.
Obesity Can Lead to Brain Degeneration
Not only can extreme obesity take 10 years off your life, it could also be prematurely aging your brain. According to a new study published in Human Brain Mapping, the brains of obese people look 16 years older than those of lean people, due to eight percent less brain tissue on average. The brains of individuals classified as "overweight" appear eight years older than those of normal-weight people.
Marriage Equals Happily Fatter After
Wedding season is in full swing. It's a commonly held belief that when we find that special someone, we're supposed to live happily ever after. We may be happy, but recent studies show we may also be overweight too.
Drinking Beer Doesn't Lead to a Beer Belly?
If you're kicking back and enjoying Summer by kicking back a few cold ones, and have noticed your waist is expanding, don't blame it on the brewskis. According to new research, a "beer belly" is purely genetic.
After an eight-year study of over 20,000 people, researchers found that heavy drinkers — those who drank at least two pints daily — did pile on the pounds overall, but it wasn't necessarily concentrated around their middle.
Has the Recession Caused You to Gain Weight?
This just in: America is expanding — not by miles, but by pounds. New data from Gallup-Healthways shows that in the past year, the number of Americans considered obese has jumped by 1.7 percent. That's almost 5.5 million more people who have a body mass index (BMI) over 30.
Does the US Pay More Attention to Obesity or Anorexia?
We refer to obesity as an epidemic and talk about anorexia as an eating disorder, but both illustrate our extreme relationships with food. Disordered eating is a regular topic in Lifetime movies and TV talk shows, and there are occasionally real-life documentaries of young women battling anorexia. When a fashion model suffers from an eating disorder, we hear about it in the news.
The (New) Deal With Calorie-Burning Fat
After decades of believing that humans lose energy-producing "brown" fat after infancy, when we develop the shivering response, three new studies have found that it still exists in all adults. According to the New York Times,"brown fat basically acts like a furnace, consuming calories and generating heat." All three accounts are summarized in today's New England Journal of Medicine and reach the identical conclusion that brown fat is a calorie-burning machine when triggered by chilly temperatures between 61 and 66 degrees.
Extreme Obesity As Bad As a Lifetime of Smoking
We typically think of smoking as the baddest of all bad habits, but a new study suggests that extreme obesity could be just as unhealthy. In fact, being extremely obese — that is, 100 or more pounds over your healthy weight — could take as many as 10 years off your life. These revelations come out of a new analysis based on studies of more than 900,000 people, mostly from the US and Western Europe, and will be published in an upcoming issue of The Lancet.
Rate of Obesity Higher For Women Because . . .
I thought it was just my personality that causes me to have a hard time saying no to yummy treats, but it looks like the reason is actually my gender. New research indicates that women are less able to suppress feelings of hunger than men.
In a recent study involving 13 women and 10 men, scientists taught the participants a technique called cognitive inhibition, to enable both genders to ignore feelings of hunger.
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