Posts tagged ‘Research’
Does this mean every instructor is going to start screaming at me?
The American College of Sports Medicine recently released its annual forecast of workout trends: Boot camps are big, Pilates is passé. Read more here.
In the piece, a Pilates studio owner says that money is a huge factor.
“Pilates is perceived as more expensive than bootcamp,” Lara Hudson, owner of the Mercury Fitness Pilates studio in San Francisco, California, told Reuters. “In this tough economy people look for less expensive workouts.”
Do you think she’s right? How much does cost affect your workout routine?
Weight Watchers = Church?
Heather, one of our Haulers, just sent me a link to the awesome blog that she edits, Science & Religion Today. What does that have to do with hauling and/or buns, you might ask? S&RT recently featured an article about the ways Weight Watchers meetings resonate with their members in some of the same ways that spiritual experiences do.It’s a pretty cool idea, and it makes a lot of sense: You arrive at the meeting, weigh in and then either THANK GOD that you’re down or do penance for being up!
Just kidding — the study that S&RT cites says that WW “transforms the support group into a greater, spiritual power that engenders therapeutic aid to members struggling with their diets. The support group gives meaning to members’ at times trauma-ridden overweight condition, grants forgiveness for members’ weight loss failures, offers valued oversight and overarching guidance needed to make it through the trials and tribulations of the week, as well as casting the occasional weight-loss successes in a veneer of much-needed glamour.” Damn straight. Now someone give me a little green Bravo star for drinking all of my water this week!
TIME To Throw In The Towel?
At first glance, Time magazine’s Aug.17 cover story, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin,” is enough to make you want to hurt an elliptical machine through a plate-glass window. Seriously?, you might think, I’m busting my buns at the gym or logging miles on the road or twisting myself into Gordian knots at yoga just for the heck of it?
But John Cloud’s piece isn’t actually advocating the abandonment of all workouts. Instead, he drives home a no-duh point… that 99.9 percent of us exercisers have ignored at some point: Those of us who move our bodies vigorously often eat more because of it. At best, we’re nullifying our workouts. At worst, we’re adding on hundreds of calories in addition to those we’ve burned.
And here we thought we were doing so well! Bummer, right? But don’t set fire to your Nikes just yet. “Public-health officials have been reluctant to downplay exercise,” Cloud writes, “because those who are more physically active are, overall, healthier.” What’s more, “In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability.”
What are your thoughts? Do you tend to eat more if you’ve worked out that day? I work really hard not to overeat my exercise, but it definitely happens from time to time. Do you reward yourself for energy expended? Tricks to avoid doing so? Leave a message and confess all!
“On second thought, I’ll have the side salad, thanks.”
The Center for Science in the Public Interest released this year’s Xtreme Eating Awards this week. The nutritional watchdog group rounds up the highest-calorie offenders at national chains and lets us know exactly what’s going on underneath their crispy exteriors and buttered buns. I don’t want to be a buzzkill, because I know I wouldn’t want to live in a world where nothing was ever batter-coated and then fried to deep golden perfection, but the nutritional info on some of these items is really gross. Take The Cheesecake Factory’s Fried Macaroni and Cheese, which clocks in at 1,570 calories and 69 grams of saturated fat or Chili’s Big Mouth bites, a four-burger plate that adds up to 2,350 calories, 38 grams of saturated fat and — start pouring that water now — 3,940 miligrams of sodium. Yeesh.
Want more of the grisly details? Go here.
Don’t I Look H-h-hot?
The good news: A few new studies show that adults may be able to reactivate the kind of fat that burns calories and could possibly reduce obesity. The bad news: You have to be really freaking cold in order for this “brown fat” to do its thing. “In addition to eating less and exercising more, people may one day be able to stimulate their bodies to get rid of stored energy — in the form of ordinary fat — purely as heat,” David Brown (no relation to the fat) writes in today’s Washington Post.
Before you run over to turn down your thermostat, you should know that “the only safe way to activate brown fat is to stay chilly, right at the verge of shivering, for prolonged periods. That reproduces the conditions that led to the evolution of brown fat — namely, life-threatening cold in babies and small furry animals that cannot put on clothes to keep themselves warm,” Brown writes.
So what’s it going to be, chicas? Thin or warm?
Haul Buns 