“Norwegian designer Daniel Rybakken has installed LED panels replicating daylight on a dark staircase in Stockholm. Called Daylight Entrance, the walls of the staircase are lined with solid surface material. Recesses were milled out from behind the material to accommodate panels of LED lights.” See more photos here.
If there’s an ecosystem where things are free (such as, say, the internet) your currency becomes enthusiasm. Quality is important because it gives people a legitimate reason to become excited. Sincerity is what creates the line between real enthusiasm and empty hype.
This sounds like a lame-brain observation, but things are better if creative people produce work that incites excitement in both the creative and the audience. Don’t be shocked if something fails because it lacks fervor and passion. Build those in, if you can. If you can’t, consider starting over.
Apparently, it is completely and 100% normal for a year-old MacBook air to get so hot that it can scorch your skin. It is also totally and completely normal for the fans to run all day, even after it was put to sleep, going at 6800 RPMs, all fucking day.
Yes, according to the Apple – who would not replace or fix this machine that burned me – there’s nothing wrong with this happening. Special thanks to the Genii at Woodfield who would neither apologize for this issue or offer to investigate this machine any more.
Apparently, it is completely 100% normal for a year-old MacBook Air to get so hot that it can scorch your skin. It is also totally and completely normal for the fans to run all day, even after it was put to sleep, going at 6800 RPMs, all fucking day.
Yes, according to the Apple – who would not replace or fix this machine that burned me – there’s nothing wrong with this happening. Special thanks to the Genii at Woodfield who would neither apologize for this issue or offer to investigate.
Decision making, 37signals style. If your company can’t make decisions this easily, here’s a shameless plug for REWORK.
Decision making, 37signals style.
Alton Brown is known for sharing his geeky wisdom on the Food Network show “Good Eats,” but over the years he’d enjoyed a bit too much of the good stuff and found himself wanting to lose 50 pounds.
He did it in nine months using a diet plan he explained on a recent episode of his show, which he called The Diet of Four Lists.
The lists have to do with the frequency of consumption of different foods, as outlined below.
Daily
At least three times a week
At most once a week
Never
The idea is to maximize nutrients in the food being consumed and eliminate stuff that isn’t at all healthy.
Another rule that doesn’t quite fit into the list concept is to eat breakfast daily, and Brown says he likes to eat (or rather drink) something purple in the morning. Purple indicates the presence of the antioxidant chemicals known as anthocyanins.
In particular he likes breakfast smoothies, which he makes with purple juice (such as pomegranate, Concord grape of a¸ai) as well as low-fat, enriched soy milk. For solids he uses blue or blackberries, strawberries, something orange or yellow and bananas, all frozen.
Because he’s such a geek, he wants a smoothie that weighs 24 ounces, so he uses four ounces by weight of each ingredient.
One food Brown is rarely without is canned, smoked sardines, which he says are both tasty and full of omega-3 fatty acids. He eats them straight out of the can, with a bit of the olive oil they’re packed in drained off, and he eats them with chopsticks, to encourage slower and more mindful eating.
If you don’t like the thought of eating the little fish straight out of the can (or at all) he also offers a recipe for sardine toasts, using marinated fish and mashed avocado.
Brown also notes that it’s actually a good idea to snack through the day, as that keeps the metabolism going. This is where he gets his daily supply of nuts, in the form of spicy ginger almonds oven roasted with ginger, sesame oil and dried chili, among other goodies.
He keeps his nuts in one-ounce portions and only eats a couple of servings a day.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Alton Brown shares slimming secrets
Now that Michelle Obama has said that childhood obesity is a grave threat to our national health and economy and has vowed to launch a public-private partnership to decrease the number of kids facing tons of future health problems because of their weight, it seems an appropriate time to take a look at the current state of school lunches.
That’s just what Ed Bruske, a D.C. blogger and parent, recently did when he spent a week in his daughter’s cafeteria and wrote about the experience.
On his first day at the newly renovated cafeteria of H.D. Cooke Elementary School, Bruske witnessed some impressive improv. The school hadn’t received the ingredients for that day’s meal — which was supposed to be chicken patties — so food service manager Tiffany Whittington scrounged together “baked ziti” from frozen meat product, egg noodles, tomato sauce and spices.
That’s at least somewhat better than the meals D.C. kids used to get, which were all prepared off-site and merely heated at their schools. But the company that runs food service in the D.C. schools, Chartwells-Thompson, recently moved away from preprepared meals in favor of what it calls “fresh cooked” options. These meals are either prepared on site or, in the case of elementary schools that don’t have cooking kitchens, at a nearby high school where they can then be transported to the school that needs them.
But their idea of fresh cooked isn’t what most of us would consider to fall under the term. H.D. Cooke doesn’t have a stove — though there is space for one — as most of the “cooking” is actually done in steamer trays or convection ovens.
Contrary to the label of fresh, Bruske says the food he saw being produced in the cafeteria was largely highly processed for maximum efficiency in preparation. This makes the food cheap, fast and easy to prepare, but that comes at a cost.
There are no fresh fruits and vegetables involved (the kids do get fresh fruit and vegetables for snacks), and the food doesn’t have a lot of flavor. Whittington says she likes to add cheese for flavor, and there’s a bunch of it in her “ziti.”
The food served in the lunchroom came from all over the country and included plenty of additives, preservatives and sugar. But of course the foods kids bring from home often aren’t any better, including things like Lunchables, canned fruit full of sugar and candy.
And though this series of stories looks at just one school, this sort of scenario is repeated across the country where the federal School Lunch Program provides subsidy foods and schools don’t have the budget, manpower or time to really cook for our kids. Here’s hoping Obama’s initiatives include a lot of support — and funding — for better, fresher, healthier and more local options for school lunches around the country.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Fighting obesity at the school level — what lunch looks like today
I don’t remember a whole lot about my childhood, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t eating all the time. These days it seems like all kids do is snack and parents are constantly being hit up to provide food for this soccer practice or that scout meeting.
When I was growing up, there were vending machines at my high school, and I think probably my junior high, too. There was easy access to junk food and it was pretty easy to make poor choices in the cafeteria as well (see my senior year, in which I subsisted, when I wasn’t eating bagels with peanut butter brought from home, on buttered rolls and chocolate milk for lunch), but these days there’s that along with the idea that just about every activity — even short ones — needs to come with a snack.
The United States Department of Agriculture and Health and Human Services have researched the issue of snacking and found that, between 1977 and 2002, the number of people snacking three or more times a day increased from 11 percent to 42 percent.
At the same time, the number of kids reporting they ate three meals a day went down, but the number of kids who’d had a snack the previous day increased more than 40 percent.
Parents and health experts alike say the availability of food everywhere, all the time has gotten out of hand and it’s difficult for parent to rein in their kids’ snacking tendencies. Some parents see the convenience of snacking as a great way to get their kids some food on the go, while others worry that the choices other parents make when they provide snacks for group events undermines their efforts to teach their own kids about healthy eating and the importance of getting three healthy meals a day.
The amount of money being spent on snacks has skyrocketed — from an already hefty $60 billion in 2004 to more than $68 billion in 2008. The biggest growth category in snacking? One hundred calorie packs, which are popular with parents both for their own on-the-go snacking and as a way to control portions their kids are eating of the less-healthy stuff.
And more fast food companies are selling smaller versions of their food to accommodate the snacking crowd and bring in more revenue as people are eating out less.
Lots of parents use snacking as a way to calm or stave off tantrums in their kids, giving them more calories than they need. And these calories are often consumed in the car on the way to another activity, meaning they don’t always have an opportunity to burn those calories off, either.
Still, Ellyn Satter, a dietitian and family therapist, told the New York Times that some snacking shouldn’t be seen as a big deal, as long as those snacks have at least a little nutritional value. Kids are pretty good at self-regulation on the quantity of foods they eat, she said; parents still need to regulate when, where and what their kids are eating.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that consuming a lot of omega-3 fatty acids seems to extend the life of cells and could, by extension extend the life of people.
The study, from the University of California at San Francisco, looked at people with heart disease and found that the more omega-3s a person consumed, the slower their cell telomeres shrank.
Telomeres are structures at the end of the chromosomes that have to do with the health and stability of the chromosome. The more the cells divide, the shorter the telomeres, so their length is linked to cell aging.
Participants in the study who consumed the largest amount of omega-3s — most commonly found in fatty fish, walnuts and flax seeds — showed a slowing in the rate at which their telomeres shortened over the course of the five-year study.
“To the extent that that is a marker of biological aging, the rate of biological aging went down,” Dr. Ramin Farzaneh-Far, an assistant professor of medicine at UCSF, told HealthDay.
Researchers say they don’t know how the fatty acid might affect telomeres, and the American Heart Association has no plans to change its recommendations on omega-3 consumption based on the study.
Right now, people with coronary heart disease are advised to consume about a gram of omega-3s daily, either through eating fatty fish like salmon or by taking a supplement.
Some health experts question the use of walnuts and flax as a good source of omegas because of the conversions that need to take place in the body. The best studies have shown a benefit from eating fish rather than from taking supplements, but new studies need to be done to determine if using supplements is just as good.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Omega-3s could help extend life of cells
We all know about anorexia and bulimia. Those are problems that have long been documented and that the health community — more or less — knows how to define and treat.
But untold people out there clearly have issues with food that aren’t so easily labeled. Take the case of Abby Ellin, author of Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat Kid Weighs in on Living Large, Losing Weight and How Parents Can (and Can’t) Help. As a young adult who’d spent years attending summer fat camps, she strictly monitored her calorie intake one day only to go crazy eating whatever she wanted the next.
People with problems like Ellin’s these days are usually diagnosed as having Ednos, an acronym for eating disorder not otherwise specified. Meaning there’s clearly something wrong but it doesn’t fit into the standard definitions of what an eating disorder looks like.
Ednos is so common it’s now diagnosed more often than anorexia or bulimia, with about 4 percent of American women been labeled with the disorder every year. Some of the disorders that fall under Ednos include:
As you can imagine, many in the medical community think that Ednos is much too big and vague a category. For one thing, there’s no way you’d treat a picky eater in the same way you’d treat someone who binges frequently. Labeling someone as Ednos doesn’t really help them understand the problem and doesn’t provide a certain solution to their particular issue.
The definition of Ednos is set to be revised in the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, perhaps with some of the subsets of the disorder given their own definitions.
The label of Ednos sometimes gets people thinking that they’re not good enough to have a “real” eating disorder and that they need to try harder to lose more weight to get a more definite diagnosis. Many people with Ednos are normal weight or even a little overweight, so they might not seek treatment as quickly as someone with a more easily recognizable disorder.
Another problem is that insurance often doesn’t pay for treatments related to Ednos, while it might pay for anorexia or bulimia treatments.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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How to help people with non-textbook eating disorders?
Here at the Lab we hear about a lot of different weight loss schemes, from cookie diets to injecting pregnancy hormones. That one, strangely enough, didn’t make a recent list of stupidest diets put out by AlterNet, but it’s still a great quick list of the current not-so-greatest hits in the weight loss world.
The first victim on the list is the cookie diet, which author Brad Reed says is problematic because of the low number of calories — about 800 — that a person is supposed to eat each day on the program. Such a low calorie consumption can lead to dizziness, weakened kidney function and heart palpitations.
And as someone who’s actually tried a couple of these diets, I can tell you that eating cookies all the time is not as fun as it sounds, and if you’re at all interested in healthy eating rather than just weight loss, you’ll be craving actual healthy food in no time.
Another big diet trend that far too many people buy into is the idea of special shoes that will help you burn more calories. These shoes are all over the place these days, and most experts call them both ugly and useless. The idea is that the contoured platform shape of the sole makes you burn more calories just by walking than you would otherwise, and that they help to tone the butt, hips and thighs.
But experts say don’t bet on it. Exercising in the shoes could easily result in injuries because they’re so unstable, and it’s unlikely any shoes would make your weight loss program more effective (unless they managed to actually get you walking more).
I actually didn’t know that ab belts, which were popular as a means of weight loss in the early 1900s, are making a comeback, but Reed names them as another stupid choice when it comes to weight loss products.
As in days of old, these devices use electricity to supposedly help tone muscles; the Federal Trade Commission isn’t happy with the claims many of the companies selling these devices make.
This last one is a new one but you’ve probably heard about it if you watch any television: the Taco Bell Drive-Through Diet. Taco Bell is running new commercials with a woman claiming that she lost 50 pounds by replacing her regular, unhealthy drive-through food with Taco Bell food.
The commercial illustrates that the chain offers seven items containing fewer than 9 grams of fat, but notes in the fine print that these are not low-calorie foods. More fine print says she consumed 1,500 calories a day and that you could lose that much weight by cutting 500 calories a day — for two years. A visit to the diet’s website can get you a coupon for a Fresco Taco. This one really raises Reed’s ire.
Hold on, back up right there. If Christine honestly considers eating exclusively at Taco Bell to be a “sensible choice,” you have to wonder what other “sensible choices” she made to help her lose weight. Did she go to a witch doctor for monthly leeching seminars? Did she inject herself with flesh-eating bacteria to vaporize the extra calories? The mind reels.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Strange diet ideas you should probably skip
It’s not news that diabetes is a huge problem across the United States. Cases have more than doubled since 1975 and are expected to do so again in the next decade.
Logan County, West Virginia, has more than its share of diabetes cases; in fact, it has the most cases of any county in America. And one family, the Blankeships, who were recently profiled on “Nightline,” has been hit particularly hard, as all 10 siblings and other relatives all have diabetes.
Randy says his diabetes doesn’t really affect his life. He’s somewhat active, regularly walking around four miles, but he doesn’t check his blood sugar often. He says he tests about once a month when he should be checking it three times a day.
Contrast that to the experience of his sister Tammy, who has the most pronounced case of diabetes in the family. She says the disease consumes her life. She can’t walk and is able to eat very little because she often throws up after eating.
She’s on 16 different medications, has vision problems, kidney failure that forces her to get dialysis three times a week, and nerve damage so pronounced she has gangrene on her foot and has been told she’ll lose it, and perhaps the leg all the way up to the knee.
She says if not for her 9-month-old grandson she would not consider her life as it is worth living.
“Diabetes is going the wrong way down a one-way street,” says Dan Hurley, author of Diabetes Rising, about the pandemic nature of disease that was once a rarity. He’s also a diabetic and wrote the book to learn why it’s become so widespread.
“It’s really a very, very serious disease,” he said, noting that it’s the underlying cause of the majority of cases of kidney failure and the leading cause of nontraumatic amputations, among other complications.
And while genetics certainly play a role, as the Blankenship family illustrates, so does an unhealthy diet, which is also seen in the family. Sister Susie says that in the small town where most of the family lives, the only restaurant options are pizza, Hardee’s and Wendy’s.
But some family members are trying to fight back, like Norville, who now lives in Ohio. He works out on an exercise bike and his wife tries to make him healthy food like oatmeal, though he’d rather be eating biscuits and gravy with a bunch of eggs.
“I do love it,” he said of the unhealthy choices. “I can’t help it. I’m an eater and I’ve always been one and I’ll still be one.”
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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How diabetes affects one family
A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that obesity rates have remained steady, but health experts say it’s not time to declare victory against the epidemic just yet.
According to the figures, nearly 34 percent of American adults are obese. That’s double the percentage who were obese 30 years ago, but it’s a number that’s held pretty steady for the last 10 years.
Among children, the rate has tripled, to 17 percent, but that figure also seems to be holding. In fact, the obesity rates among women and children have been on a plateau for nearly a decade, the figures say.
The numbers, reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came from two different studies among adults and kids. The adult study looked at a sample of 5,555 people and compared the obesity rate — which was 33.8 percent — to similar studies done from 1999 to 2006.
The study involving children included 3,281 kids ages 2 to 19 and 719 infants and toddlers. About 10 percent of infants and toddlers were found to be obese, as well as 17 percent of older kids.
The one exception to the holding steady of obesity rates is among the heaviest boys ages 6 to 19, whose weight is still growing. It’s thought that boys who were already heavy live in an environment full of unhealthy food and a lack of physical activity that is keeping them heavy and making them gain even more weight.
Beyond environmental differences, there are also racial disparities when it comes to the obesity rate. African Americans have the highest rates of obesity, at 37 percent of men and almost half of women. Forty-three percent of Hispanic women are obese.
Hispanic and black children both have higher obesity rates than white children.
And when obesity and overweight are looked at together, a staggering 68 percent of adults fit in one of those categories.
Experts say more people these days — particularly moms, who tend to control the food coming into their homes — are more aware of the problems associated with obesity and are doing more to help stem the tide, which could account for part of the stalling of obesity rates.
Dr. David Ludwig, director of the Optimal Weight for Life Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, suggested to the New York Times that we may have reached the biological limit of obesity, meaning that all the people who are susceptible — genetically or because of their behavior — may already be obese.
Not exactly something to celebrate.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Obesity rates level, but battle isn’t over
Dr. Mercola is known to be an advocate for organics and against highly processed foods and chemicals in the food supply, so it’s not too surprising that he would share — and then expand on — a list of seven foods to avoid that was originally published by Yahoo.
To quickly recap the deadly seven:
As if those seven foods weren’t enough to avoid, Mercola expanded on the list, saying that fresh foods are always better than canned, and if you can’t get produce fresh try for products in glass containers (or, I’d think, frozen).
He also says it’s a good idea to avoid eating any fish, because of recent reports that mercury was found in every sample of fish tested by the United States Geological Survey. He says there’s only a small part of water in Alaska that’s still pristine enough to eat the fish there safely; otherwise, big fish ought to be avoided entirely.
Adding to the list of food horrors, Mercola also notes people should skip unfermented soy because, for one thing, it’s impossible to judge whether organic soy is actually organic. He says unfermented soy has been linked to reproductive disorders, cancer, heart disease and thyroid problems and can lead to gastric distress when consumed in large quantities.
Mercola also distills the basics of healthy eating into a few general criteria you should always look for: grown without pesticides and other chemicals, not genetically modified, no added hormones, antibiotics or other drugs, and nothing artificial, including preservatives.
He further calls for food that is fresh, didn’t come from a factory farm, is grown in line with nature’s way (meaning animals are raised eating the sorts of food they’d eat in nature) and is sustainable.
No problem, right?
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Dr. Oz started the new year by advising viewers on his “seven deadly sins,” habits he says everyone needs to break because they can potentially take years off your life.
First thing in the morning he says people should stretch after getting out of bed. He does a seven-minute routine, which looks like a sun salutation. He says it’s good to start the day breathing and centered and reminding yourself that you’re in control.
The next big sin is skipping breakfast. Dr. Oz says his wife doesn’t eat breakfast and they fight about it “all the time.” He says it is important because you’ll eat more when you finally do start eating if you fast for too long while you’re awake.
Being late for appointments is another big problem because it’s a source of stress and makes us no longer in control of our days. Chronic stress leads to chronic inflammation, which can lead to heart attacks. Oz advises setting your watch five minutes early so you make sure you’re on time.
The biggest sin in the afternoon is mindless eating. Often visiting the vending machine at three in the afternoon, eating junk food in particular, can increase belly fat. Oz says pre-packaging healthy snacks in bags will make it easy to make better choices when you get hungry in the afternoon.
Sitting on the couch watching TV is another big sin, Oz says, because he should be getting at least half an hour of movement in the evening. Just doing squats while watching TV can help.
Ignoring calls from friends in the evening is another problem because you’re not paying attention to important social connections. He advises writing notes to important people in your life.
Finally, having a bedtime ritual is important. Think back seven and a half hours from when you get up to know when you need to go to bed. It’s important to have a nighttime routine, and to do it on the weekend as well as during the week.
During these seven things can help you take a decade off your Real Age, a calculation of how old your body feels.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Healthy living tips from Dr. Oz
New York City has long been a pioneer (for good or ill, depending on your perspective) in public health initiatives having to do with food. It was the first major city to work on banning artificial trans fats from restaurants and to require calorie counts on menus.
The city has also launched a campaign against soda consumption, and now the city is set to discourage salt consumption by encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains to cut the salt levels in their products.
The goal is to cut the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent in the next five years. Of course that food largely comes from places that aren’t in New York City, so such a campaign will require changes that will ultimately affect people who eat across the country.
The city says health officials from other cities and states support the plan, and health advocates predict such a drop in salt consumption would reduce the incidence of high blood pressure in America, probably also cutting some heart attack and stroke deaths.
It’s estimated that 80 percent of the salt we consume comes from prepared meals and processed foods.
The plan is voluntary and there is no legislation planned to force food companies and restaurants to curb their salt use. And that’s probably a good thing, because it would be incredibly difficult to legislate salt content, particularly since some foods — like bread and other baked goods — require a certain amount of salt to help with rising, browning, and, frankly, taste.
Because changing products for the New York City market would require changes nationwide, companies might not be excited to develop new recipes. But representatives of Subway and the A&P grocery store chain say they expect to comply with the proposed guidelines.
The city was expected to announce preliminary targets for sodium content in foods, to be followed up with final targets to be unveiled later in the spring. Reductions in salt content under the program range from 10 to 40 percent for 61 classes of grocery store items and 25 classes of restaurant food, according to the New York Times.
The city would look at sodium content over the range of a company’s offerings, which would allow them to keep some items saltier while cutting the salt in others.
Government guidelines suggest adults should consume between 1,500 and 2,300 milligrams a day of salt, depending on their risk factors for high blood pressure. Most Americans consume more like 3,400 milligrams daily.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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This time of year we’re all thinking a little bit more about our health and maybe even coming up with some healthy resolutions to start the new year.
We all know pretty much what we need to do: eat more fruits and vegetables, get more exercise, less stress and more sleep. But actually doing those things on a daily basis isn’t so easy for a lot of us.
Dr. Susan Love, one of the country’s most respected women’s health doctors, says it’s OK if we don’t follow all the healthy rules all the time. In her new book, Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health, she argues that there’s no such thing as perfect health, no matter how hard we try.
She also says that most of us are probably healthier than we realize, so we shouldn’t be stressing about trying to follow every health and fitness rule we hear to a T.
The whole point of being healthy, she argues, is to live as long as possible with a good quality of life, since no one has yet figured out how to live forever. And there are a lot of variations on diet, exercise and lifestyle that fall within the range of “healthy,” she says, with the real problems happening at the extremes, such as with people who never get any physical activity or only eat processed foods.
For instance, we’ve long been told that people need to get eight hours of sleep a night, but in reality some people can function just fine — and don’t seem to be negatively affecting their health — by sleeping more or less.
And while we might not all be hitting the gym for our 30 to 60 minutes of movement a day, we are often lugging kids or groceries around or doing household chores, and that movement counts (I can attest to that; carrying my 14-pound baby around has brought definition to my biceps I haven’t seen since before I was pregnant).
While it’s true that people can be healthy at a range of different sizes, some health experts argue that this message to not worry so much about your health will be translated as a reason not to worry at all. People might misinterpret it as saying you don’t have to try at all to eat healthier or exercise more, but being completely sedentary and consistently eating bad foods still sets you up for future health problems.
Others say the message is a good one because it makes the whole idea of health and fitness a little less overwhelming; once people understand they don’t have to be “perfect” they’ll be able to get started doing anything at all, which can only be a good thing.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Many people are now feeling that bloated, regretful feeling that comes with overindulging over the holidays. Rachael Ray wants to help, along with Liz Vacariello, author of the new diet book 400 Calorie Fix.
The diet plan is based on eating four, 400-calorie meals every day. There are no off-limit foods as long as you don’t eat more than 400 calories at a time, or make up for excesses by eating less later in the day. The book aims to help retrain readers’ eyes to understand what 400 calories of 400 different foods looks like.
To lose more weight more quickly, Vacariello says people can have three 400-calorie meals instead, and men and those with active lifestyles can have five meals a day. Dropping down to three meals a day can help a person lose about 11 pounds in two weeks, she said.
On this visit to the show, Vacariello dropped in on a viewer who was struggling with weight loss and revealed problem areas and items in the kitchen that can keep people from losing weight.
First, she suggested taking the computer out of the kitchen, because people who eat when engaged with electronics consume the equivalent of an extra meal a day in calories.
“You’re signaling to yourself and your family that this is an activity that doesn’t involve food,” Vacariello said of moving the computer.
Second, put junk food, if you have to have it in your house, on the kids’ eye level and healthier choices on the eye level of parents so you’ll be reminded the healthier food is there.
Using smaller plates is another good tip, she says, noting that using a two-inch smaller plate yields a 22 percent reduction in calorie consumption, providing a two-pound-a-month weight loss.
Bright lights stimulate appetites and make us eat more quickly, so eat by lamp light or a dimmed overhead light instead of under full illumination. And when the meal is done, turn off the lights in the kitchen to indicate that food time is over and the kitchen is closed.
Vacariello says when the kitchen is home base and people spend most of their time there, they end of snacking throughout the day. So rediscover the rest of your house and you’ll automatically eat less, she says.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Change your kitchen, lose the weight
Most people gain weight as they age, but a new study has found that women who live with a mate tend to put on more weight over time than do women who live alone, even if those women don’t have children.
Women who didn’t have partners or children gained an average of 11 pounds over 10 years, which corresponds pretty well with the general thinking that people gain about a pound a year in adulthood.
But women who lived with a partner and didn’t give birth gained an average of 15 pounds in the same time period, while women who had partners and children gained 20 pounds in 10 years.
There were not enough single mothers in the study, by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, to draw any conclusions about how much weight they gained.
Researchers followed more than 6,000 Australian women for a 10-year period that ended in 2006. The women were 18 to 23 when the study started and completed a lengthy questionnaire about their health and lifestyle habits periodically through the study period.
By the time the 10 years was up, half of the women had at least one child and three-quarters lived with a partner. Researchers said most of the extra weight gain seen in mothers came with the first child; subsequent pregnancies didn’t have as significant an impact.
Researchers said there’s no reason to think metabolic changes happen in people who live with partners to explain why those women would gain more weight than women who live alone, and that it’s likely they gained more weight simply because of behavioral changes. People with partners may go out to eat more often or have a more active social life, and keeping up eating habits that are similar to an often larger man could easily cause a woman to gain more weight.
For women who’d been pregnant, however, there probably were metabolism changes that came about with pregnancy that are difficult to reverse once the child is born, researchers said. And the fact that pretty much all women steadily gained weight as they aged could point to metabolic changes being a factor in some weight gain.
This study didn’t look at men, but previous research has shown higher rates of obesity among men who are fathers.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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